The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] “When released from the body you ascend to the free aether, you will become an immortal god, escaping death.” In these words Empedocles epitomizes what the ancient Egyptians thought about the eternal in man and its connection with the divine. Evidence of this is provided by the so-called Book of The Dead which has been deciphered by the diligence of nineteenth century research workers. (See Lepsius, Das Totenbuch der alen Ägypter, Berlin, 1842.) It is “the greatest coherent literary work of the Egyptians which has been preserved to us.” It contains all kinds of teachings and prayers, which were put in the grave with each dead person to guide him when he was released from his mortal frame. The Egyptians' most intimate conceptions about the eternal and the genesis of the world are contained in this literary work. These conceptions indeed indicate ideas of the gods similar to those of Greek mysticism. Of the various deities worshiped in different parts of Egypt, Osiris gradually became the favorite and most universally acknowledged. In him the ideas about the other divinities were summarized. Whatever the Egyptian populace may have thought about Osiris, the Book of the Dead indicates that according to the ideas of priestly wisdom he was a being which could be found in the human soul itself. This is expressed clearly in everything they thought about death and the dead. When the body is given up to the earth, preserved within the earthly element, then the eternal part of man sets out upon the path to the primordial eternal. It is called to judgment before Osiris, who is surrounded by forty-two judges of the dead. The fate of the eternal in man depends upon the verdict of these judges. If the soul has confessed its sins and is found to be reconciled with eternal righteousness, invisible powers approach it, saying, “The Osiris N. has been purified in the pool which is south of the field of Hotep and north of the field of Locusts, where the gods of verdure purify themselves at the fourth hour of the night and the eighth hour of the day with the image of the heart of the gods, passing from night to day.” Thus within the eternal cosmic order the eternal part of man is addressed as an Osiris. After the title Osiris, the individual name of the person concerned is mentioned. The person who is uniting himself with the eternal cosmic order also calls himself “Osiris.” “I am Osiris N. Growing under the blossoms of the fig tree is the name of Osiris N.”⁶⁰ Thus man becomes an Osiris. The Osiris-existence is only a perfect stage of development of human existence. It seems obvious that even the Osiris who judges within the eternal cosmic order is none other than a perfect man. Between human existence and divine existence is a difference in degree and number. At the root of this lies the conception of the Mysteries concerning the mystery of “number.” The cosmic being Osiris is One; nevertheless he exists undivided in every human soul. Each man is an Osiris, yet the one Osiris must be represented as a special being. Man is engaged in development; at the end of his evolutionary course lies his existence as a god. Within this conception one must speak of divinity rather than of a perfected, completed divine being.

[ 2 ] There is no doubt that according to such a conception only one who has already reached the gate of the eternal cosmic order as an Osiris can really enter upon Osiris-existence. So the highest life man can lead must consist in changing himself into an Osiris. In the true man an Osiris must already live as perfectly as possible during mortal life. Man becomes perfect when he lives as an Osiris, when he experiences what Osiris has experienced. In this way the Osiris myth receives its deeper significance. It becomes the example of a man who wishes to awaken the eternal within him. Osiris had been torn to pieces, killed by Typhon. The fragments of his body were cherished and cared for by his consort Isis. After his death he let a ray of his light fall upon her, and she bore him Horus. Horus took over the earthly tasks of Osiris. He is the second Osiris, still imperfect but progressing toward the true Osiris.—The true Osiris is in the human soul. The latter is of a transitory nature at first. However, its transitory nature is destined to give birth to the eternal. Therefore man may consider himself to be the tomb of Osiris. The lower nature (Typhon) has killed the higher nature in him. Love in his soul (Isis) must cherish and care for the dead fragments; then will be born the higher nature, the eternal soul (Horus), which can progress to Osiris-existence. Whoever strives toward the highest existence must repeat in himself, as a microcosm, the macrocosmic, universal process of Osiris. This is the meaning of the Egyptian “initiation.” The process Plato describes as cosmic,—i.e., that the Creator has stretched the soul of the world upon the body of the world in the form of a cross, and that the cosmic process is a redemption of this crucified soul—on a small scale this process had to happen to man if he was to be capable of Osiris-existence. The neophyte had to develop himself in such a way that his soul-experience, his development as an Osiris, became identified with the cosmic Osiris process. If we could look into the temples of initiation where people were subjected to the transformation into Osiris, we would see that what happened there represented microcosmically the creation of the world. Man, who is descended from the “Father,” was to give birth in himself to the Son. The spellbound god, whom he actually bore within him, was to be revealed in him. The power of earthly nature suppressed this god within him. First this lower nature had to be buried in order that the higher nature might rise again. From this it becomes possible to interpret what is told of the processes of initiation. The candidate was subjected to secret procedures. By means of the latter his earthly nature was killed and his higher nature awakened. It is not necessary to study these procedures in detail. One must only understand their meaning. And this meaning is contained in the acknowledgment which everyone who has been through initiation could make. He could say: Before me floated the endless perspective, at the end of which lies the perfection of the divine. I felt the power of the divine within me. I buried what holds down this power within me. I died to earthly things. I was dead. As a lower man I had died; I was in the netherworld. I communicated with the dead, that is, with those who already have become part of the circle of the eternal cosmic order. After my sojourn in the nether world I arose from the dead. I overcame death, but now I have become different. I have nothing more to do with transitory nature. My transitory nature has become permeated by the Logos. I now belong to those who live eternally, and who will sit at the right hand of Osiris. I myself shall be a true Osiris, united with the eternal cosmic order, and judgment over death and life shall be placed in my hand. The neophyte had to undergo the experience which could lead him to such an acknowledgment. The experience which thus approached man was of the highest kind.

[ 3 ] Let us now imagine that a non-initiate hears that someone has undergone such experiences. He cannot know what has really taken place in the soul of the initiate. In his eyes, the initiate has died physically, has laid in the grave and has risen. When expressed in terms of material reality an occurrence which has spiritual reality at a higher stage of existence appears to break through the order of nature. It is a “miracle.” Such a “miracle” was initiation. Whoever wished really to understand it must have awakened within himself powers which would enable him to reach a higher stage of existence. He had to prepare the whole course of his life in order to approach these higher experiences. However they might take place in individual lives, these prepared experiences always had a quite definite, typical form. So the life of an initiate is a typical one. It may be described apart from the individual personality. Or rather, an individual personality could be characterized only as being on the way toward the divine if he had gone through these definite, typical experiences. As such a personality the Buddha lived with his followers; as such a personality Jesus at first appeared to his community. Today we know of the parallels which exist between the biographies of Buddha and of Jesus. Rudolf Seydel has pointed out these parallels strikingly in his book, Buddha and Christ. We need only follow up the details to see that all objections to these parallels are futile.

[ 4 ] The birth of Buddha is announced by a white elephant who descends to Maya, the queen. He declares that she will bring forth a divine man who “attunes all people to love and friendship and unites them in an intimate company.” In Luke's Gospel is written: “... to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David: and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her and said, ‘Hail thou that art highly favored ... Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great and shall be called the Son of the Highest.’” Maya's dream is interpreted by the Brahmins, the Indian priests, who know that it signifies the birth of a Buddha. They have a definite, typical idea of a Buddha. The life of the individual personality will have to correspond to this idea. Correspondingly we read in Matthew 2:1, et seq., that when Herod “had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.”—The Brahmin Asita says of Buddha, “This is the child which will become Buddha, the redeemer, the leader to immortality, freedom and light.” Compare this with Luke 2:5: “And behold there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him ... And when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him after the custom of the law, then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.” It is related of Buddha that at the age of twelve he was lost, and was found again under a tree, surrounded by minstrels and sages of ancient times, whom he was teaching. This corresponds to Luke 2:41–47: “Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem, and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. But they, supposing him to have been in the company, went a day's journey; and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance. And when they found him not, they turned back again to Jerusalem, seeking him. And it came to pass that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.”—After Buddha had lived in solitude and had returned, he was received by the benediction of a virgin: “Blessed is the mother, blessed is the father, blessed is the wife to whom thou belongest.” But he replied, “Only they are blessed who are in Nirvana,” i.e., those who have entered the eternal cosmic order. In Luke 11:2–28 is written: “And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice and said unto him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.’ But he said, ‘Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.’” In the course of Buddha's life the tempter approaches him, promising him all the kingdoms of the earth. Buddha will have nothing to do with this, answering, “I know well that a kingdom is appointed to me, but I do not desire an earthly one; I shall become Buddha and make all the world exult for joy.” The tempter has to admit, “My reign is over.” Jesus answers the same temptation in the words: “Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him.” (Matthew 4:10,11)—This description of parallelism might be extended to many other points: the results would be the same. The life of Buddha ended sublimely. During a journey he felt ill. He came to the river Hiranja, near Kuschinagara. There he lay down on a carpet spread for him by his favorite disciple, Ananda. His body began to shine from within. He died transfigured, a body of light, saying, “Nothing endures.” The death of Buddha corresponds with the transfiguration of Jesus: “And it came to pass about eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistening.” At this point Buddha's earthly life ends, but the most important part of the life of Jesus begins here: Passion, Death and Resurrection. The difference between Buddha and Christ lies in what necessitated the continuation of the life of Christ Jesus beyond that of Buddha. Buddha and Christ are not understood by simply throwing them together. (This will become evident in the subsequent chapters of this book.) Other accounts of the death of Buddha need not be considered here, although they also reveal profound aspects of the subject.

[ 5 ] The conformity in the lives of these two redeemers leads to an unequivocal conclusion. What this conclusion must be, the narratives themselves indicate. When the priest sages hear about the manner of the birth they know what is involved. They know that they are dealing with a divine man. They know beforehand what conditions will exist for the personality who is appearing. Therefore his career can only correspond with what they know about the career of a divine man. Such a career appears in their Mystery wisdom, marked out for all eternity. It can be only as it must be. Such a career appears as an eternal law of nature. Just as a chemical substance can behave only in a quite definite way, so a Buddha or a Christ can live only in a quite definite way. His career cannot be described as one would write his incidental biography; rather, it is described by giving the typical features contained for all time in the wisdom of the Mysteries. The legend of Buddha is no more a biography in the ordinary sense, than the Gospels are intended to be an ordinary biography of the Christ Jesus. Neither describes an incidental career; both describe a career marked out for a world-redeemer. The patterns for both must be sought in the traditions of the Mysteries, not in outward physical history. To those who have perceived their divine nature, Buddha and Jesus are initiates in the most eminent sense. (Jesus is an initiate because the Christ Being incarnates in him.) Thus everything transitory is removed from their lives. What is known about initiates can be applied to them. The incidental events of their lives are no longer described. It is said of them, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:1,14)

[ 6 ] The life of Jesus, however, contains more than the life of Buddha. Buddha's life ends with the transfiguration. The most significant part of the life of Jesus begins after the transfiguration. In the language of the initiates, Buddha reaches the point where divine light begins to shine in man. He stands before the death of the physical. He becomes the cosmic light. Jesus goes further. He does not die physically at the moment the cosmic light transfigures him. At that moment he is a Buddha. But at the same moment he enters upon a stage which finds expression in a higher degree of initiation. He suffers and dies. The physical part of him disappears. But the spiritual, the cosmic light does not vanish. His resurrection follows. He reveals himself to his community as Christ. At the moment of his transfiguration, Buddha dissolves into the hallowed life of the universal Spirit. Christ Jesus awakens this universal Spirit once more to present existence in a human form. Such an event had formerly taken place in a pictorial sense at the higher stages of initiation. Those initiated according to the Osiris myth attained to such a resurrection in their consciousness as a pictorial experience. In the life of Jesus this “great” initiation was added to the Buddha initiation, not as a pictorial experience, but as reality. Buddha demonstrated by his life that man is the Logos and that he returns to this Logos, to the light, when his physical part dies. In Jesus the Logos itself became a person. In him the Word became flesh.

[ 7 ] What was enacted for the ancient cults of the Mysteries within the Mystery-temples, through Christianity has been grasped as a world-historical fact. His community acknowledged the Christ Jesus, the initiate, initiated in a uniquely great way. He proved to them that the world is divine. For the community of Christ, the wisdom of the Mysteries was indissolubly bound up with the personality of Christ Jesus. The belief that he lived and that those who acknowledge him, belong to him, replaced what would have been attained previously through the Mysteries. Henceforth for those in the community of Christ a part of what previously was only to be attained by the methods of the mystics, could be replaced by the conviction that the divine is given in the Word which had been present. The determining factor was no longer only that for which each individual spirit had to undergo a long preparation, but also the account of what they had heard and seen, handed down by those who were with Jesus. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we ourselves have beheld, which our hands have touched, concerning the Word of life ... that which we have seen and heard, we proclaim to you, that you may have fellowship with us.” Thus it is written in the first Epistle of John. This immediate reality is to embrace all future generations in a living bond; as a Church it is to extend mystically from generation to generation. In this way we may understand the words of Augustine, “I should not believe the Gospel except as moved by the authority of the Church.”⁶¹ The Gospels, therefore, contain in themselves no evidence of their truth, but they are to be believed because they are founded on the personality of Jesus, and because in a mysterious way the Church draws from this personality the power to make them appear as truth. The Mysteries handed down through tradition the means of coming to the truth; the Christian community propagates this truth itself. Faith in the One, the primordial Initiator was to be added to faith in the mystical forces which light up in man's inner being during initiation. The mystics sought apotheosis; they wished to experience it. Jesus was made divine; we must cling to him; then we are participants in his apotheosis within the community established by him:—This became Christian conviction. What was made divine in Jesus, is made divine for his whole community. “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” (Matthew 28:20) The one born in Bethlehem has an eternal character. Thus the Christmas antiphon is able to speak of the birth of Jesus as if it took place every Christmas: “Today Christ is born; today the Saviour has come into the world; today the angels are singing on earth.”⁶²

In the Christ-experience a quite definite stage of initiation is to be seen. When the mystic of pre-Christian times went through this Christ-experience, then, through his initiation, he was in a condition enabling him to perceive something spiritual—in higher worlds—for which the material world had no corresponding fact. He experienced what comprises the Mystery of Golgotha in the higher world. Now when the Christian mystic goes through this experience, through initiation, at the same time he beholds the historical event on Golgotha and knows that in this event, which took place in the world of the senses, is the same content as formerly existed only in the supersensible facts of the Mysteries. What had descended upon the mystics within the Mystery temples in earlier times thus descended upon the community of Christ through the “Mystery of Golgotha.” And initiation gives the Christian mystic the possibility of becoming conscious of this content of the “Mystery of Golgotha,” while faith causes mankind to participate unconsciously in the mystical current which flowed from the events depicted in the New Testament and has been permeating the spiritual life of humanity ever since.

• 60. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Chapter 125, 19–22. Papyrus of NU.
• 61. Augustine, St., one of the four great Fathers of the Latin Church, born 354 in Tagaste, Numidia, and died as Bishop of Hippo during the siege of that city by the Vandals in 430. Steiner's reference is to Augustine's work, Against the Epistle of Manichaeus called Fundamental, par. 6.
• 62. The Christmas Antiphon to which Steiner refers is found in the Breviarium Romanum, and appears just before the end of the Christmas section, In Nativitate Domini, headed Ad Magnificat Antiphona:
  
  Hodie Christus natus est;
  hodie Salvator apparuit:
  hodie in terra canunt Angeli,
  laetantur Archangeli:
  hodie exultant justi,
  dicentes: Gloria in excelsis
  Deo, alleluia.

On last Wednesday I had the opportunity to explain to you how a super-sensible knowledge may come into existence out of the further development of those capacities of the human soul which belong to our every-day life, and which are recognized also in science when methodically applied. I undertook to show how a systematic further development of these capacities of the soul actually brings about for the human being a form of perception whereby he can become aware of a super-sensible world just as he becomes aware of the physical sensible world environing him by means of his physical senses. Through such vision we penetrate upward not only to an abstract sort of conviction that, in addition to the world of the senses, there exists also a world of the spirit, but to acquisition of real knowledge, to a real experience, of spiritual beings, which constitute the environment of man himself to the extent that he lifts himself up into a condition of spirituality, just as plants and animals constitute his environment in the physical world.

Such a super-sensible knowledge is something different in its entire nature from that which we designate as knowledge in ordinary life and for our every-day consciousness, as well as in ordinary science.

In this ordinary knowledge we come into possession, in a certain sense, of ideas—for example such ideas as embrace the laws of nature. But this possession of ideas does not really penetrate into the soul in such a way as to become an immediate power of the soul, comparable as a spiritual power to muscular force as this passes over into activity. Thoughts remain rather shadowy, and every one knows through immediate experiences how indifferent, in a certain sense, is the reaction of the human heart to thoughts when we are dealing with matters which affect the human heart in the profoundest degree.

Now, I think I have shown already in the first lecture that, when a human being actually penetrates into the spiritual world by means of such a perception as we have in mind here, he then becomes aware of his super-sensible being as it was before it descended to the earthly existence. And the fact that he achieves for himself something of this kind as regards his own self in its relationship to the spiritual world, does not leave his heart, the needs of his profoundest sensibilities, to the same extent unaffected, as in the case of abstract forms of knowledge. It is certainly true that one who has himself led a life devoted to the acquisition of knowledge does not undervalue all the inner drama of the soul associated with the struggle for knowledge even in the ordinarily recognized sense, yet the knowledge that we thus acquire remains, nevertheless, mere pictures of the external world. Indeed, if we are scientifically educated at the present time, we are generally proud of the fact that these pictures merely reflect, in a certain sense, quite objectively the external world and do not dart with such inner force through the life of the soul as, in the case of the physical body, the circulating blood drives its pulsing waves through man's being. The fact is that what is here meant by super-sensible knowledge is something which acts upon the human being in a manner entirely unlike that of ordinary knowledge. And, in order that I may make myself perfectly clear precisely in reference to this point, I should like to begin with a comparison—which is, however, something more than a comparison, something that fits the matter completely in its reality.

I should like to begin with the fact that the human being, even in ordinary life, lives in two states of consciousness—we might say three states, but let us consider sleeping and dreaming as constituting a single state of consciousness—that he is separated completely from the external world during sleep, and that a world existent only within him, reveals its effects in dreams in a grotesque and often chaotic manner. Even though we are in the same space with many other persons, our dream world belongs to us alone; we do not share it with the other persons. And a profounder reflection upon the world of dreams is the very thing that may show us that what we have to consider as our own inner human nature is connected with this dream world. Even the corporeal nature of man is reflected in a remarkable way in dreams: it is mirrored in fantastic pictures. One condition or another affecting an organ, a condition of illness or of excitation, may emerge in a special symbol during a dream; or some noise occurring near us may appear in a dream in a very dramatic symbolism. The dream creates pictures out of our own inner nature and out of the external world. But all of this is intimately connected, in turn, with the whole course of our life upon earth. From the most remote epochs of this life the dream draws the shadows of experiences into its chaotic but always dramatic course. And, the more deeply we penetrate into all this, the more are we led to the conclusion that the innermost being of man is connected, even though in an instinctive and unconscious manner, with that which flows and weaves in dreams.

One who has the capacity, for example, for observing the moment of waking and, from this point on, fixing the eye of the mind upon the ordinary daily life, not in the superficial way in which this usually occurs, but in a deeper fashion, will come to see that this waking life of day is characterized by the fact that what we experience in a wholly isolated manner during sleep and during dreams, in a manner that we can share with other persons at most only in special instances,—that this soul-spiritual element sinks down into our corporeal being, inserts itself in a way into the will, and thereby also into the forces of thought and the sense forces permeated by the will, and thus enters indirectly, through the body, into a relationship with the external world. Thus does the act of waking constitute a transition to an entirely different state of consciousness from that which we have in dreams. We are inserted into the external course of events through the fact that we participate, with our soul element, in the occurrences of our own organisms, which are connected, in turn, with external occurrences. Evidences of the fact that I am really describing the process in a wholly objective way can, naturally, not be obtained by the manner of abstract calculation, nor in an experimental way; but they are revealed to one who is able to observe in this field—particularly one who is able to observe how there is something like a “dreaming while awake,” a subconscious imagining, a living in pictures, which is always in process at the bottom of the dry, matter-of-fact life of the soul, of the intellect. The situation is such that, just as we may dive down from the surface of a stream of water into its profounder depths, so may we penetrate from our intellectual life into the deeper regions of the soul. There we enter into something which concerns us more intimately than the intellectual life, even though its connection with the external world is less exact. There we come also upon everything which stimulates the intellectual life to its independent, inventive power, which stimulates this life of the intellect when it passes over into artistic creation, which stimulates this intellectual life even—as I shall have to show later—when the human heart turns away from the ordinary reflections about the universe and surrenders itself to a reverent and religious veneration for the spiritual essence of the world.

In the act of waking in the ordinary life the situation is really such that, through the insertion of our soul being into the organs of our body, we enter into such a connection with the external world that we can entrust, not to the dream, but only to the waking life of day, responsibility for the judgment which is to be passed upon the nature of the dream, upon its rightness and wrongness, its truth and untruth. It would be psychopathic for any one to suppose that, in the chaotic, though dramatic, processes of the dream something “higher” is to be seen than that which his waking experience defines as the significance of this life of dreams.

In this waking experience do we remain also—at about the same level of experience—when we devote ourselves to the intellectual life, to the ordinary life of science, to every-day knowledge. By means of that absorption, immersion, and I might say strengthening of the soul about which I spoke on the previous occasion, the human being exercises consciously at a higher level for the life of his soul something similar to what he exercises unconsciously through his bodily organization for the ordinary act of waking. And the immersion in a super-sensible form of knowledge is a higher awaking. Just as we relate any sort of dream picture to our waking life of day, through the help of our memory and other forces of our soul, in order to connect this dream picture, let us say, with some bodily excitation or external experience, and thus to fit it into the course of reality, so do we arrive by means of such a super-sensible cognition as I have described at the point where we may rightly fit what we have in our ordinary sensible environment, what we fix by means of observation and experiment, into a higher world, into a spiritual world in which we ourselves are made participants by means of those exercises of which I spoke, just as we have been made participants in the corporeal world in the ordinary waking by means of our own organism. Thus super-sensible knowledge really constitutes the dawn of a new world, a real awaking to a new world, an awaking at a higher level. And this awaking compels him who has awaked to judge the whole sensible-physical world, in turn, from the point of view of this experience, just as he judges the dream life from the point of view of the waking life. What I do here during my earthly life, what appears to me by means of my physical knowledge, I then learn to relate to the processes through which I have passed as a spirit-soul being in a purely spiritual world before my descent into the earthly world, just as I connect the dream with the waking life. I learn to relate everything that exists in physical nature, not “in general” to a fantastic world of spirit, but to a concrete spiritual world, to a spiritual world which is complete in its content, which becomes a visible environment of the human being by reason of the powers of knowledge I have described as Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

But, just as a person feels himself in ordinary life to be in different states of soul when awake and when dreaming, so does the whole state of soul become different when one arrives at this higher awaking. For this reason, in describing super-sensible knowledge in the manner that I have employed here, we do not describe merely the formal taking of pictures of the super-sensible world, but the transition of a person from one state of consciousness into another, from one condition of soul into another. In this process, however, even those contents of the soul in which one is absorbed in ordinary life become something entirely different. Just as one becomes a different person in ordinary life through awaking, so does one become, in a certain sense, a different human being through this super-sensible knowledge. The concepts and ideas that we have had in ordinary consciousness are transformed. There occurs not only a conceptual revolution in a person consisting in the fact that he understands more, but also a revolution in his life. This penetrates into the profoundest human conceptions. It is precisely in the profoundest human conceptions, I wish to say, in the very roots of the soul being, that a person is transformed through the fact that he is able to enter into the sphere of this super-sensible knowledge—something which happens, of course, only for momentary periods in one's life.

Here I must call your attention to two conceptions that play the greatest imaginable role in every-day life. These are conceptions completely and profoundly valid in ordinary life which take on an utterly different form the moment one ascends into the super-sensible world. These are the two concepts on the basis of which we form our judgments in the world: the concepts true and false, right and wrong. I beg you not to imagine that in this explanation I intend, through a frivolous handling of the problem of knowledge, to undermine the validity of the concepts true and false, right and wrong. To undermine something which is wholesome in ordinary life is by no means in keeping with a genuine super-sensible knowledge. This higher knowledge enables us to acquire something in addition for ordinary life, but never subtracts from it. Those persons who—whether really or in sentimentality—become untrue in their ordinary lives, unpractically mystical for this aspect of life, are also unsuited for a genuine super-sensible knowledge. A genuine super-sensible knowledge is not born out of fantastic persons, dreamers, but out of those very persons who are able to take their places in their full humanity in the earthly existence, as persons capable in real life. In other words, it is not our purpose to undermine what we experience in our every-day lives, and what is bound up in its very depths with the concepts true and false, right and wrong; on the contrary, truthfulness in this sphere, I should like to emphasize, is strengthened in one's feelings by that very thing which now comes about in connection with a higher knowledge by reason of a metamorphosis, a transformation of the concepts true and false, right and wrong.

When we have really entered into this higher, super-sensible world, we do not any longer say in such an abstract way that a thing is true or false, that it is right or wrong, but the concept of the true and the right passes over into a concept with which we are familiar in ordinary life, though in a more instinctive way; only, this concept belonging to the ordinary life is transmuted into a spiritual form. True and right pass over into the concept healthy; false and wrong pass over into the concept diseased. In other words, when we reflect about something in ordinary life—feel, sense, or will something—we say: “This is right, that is wrong.” But, when we are in the realm of super-sensible knowledge, we do not arrive at this impression of right or wrong but we actually reach the impression that something is healthy, something else is diseased.

You will say that healthy and ill are concepts to which a certain indefiniteness is attached. But this is attached to them only in the ordinary life or the ordinary state of consciousness.

The indefiniteness ceases when the higher knowledge is sought for in so exact a manner as I have explained in the first lecture. Precision then enters also into what we experience in this realm of higher knowledge. Healthy and ill,—these are the terms we apply to what we experience in association with the beings of the super-sensible world of whom we become aware through such a form of knowledge.

Just think how deeply that which becomes an object of super-sensible knowledge may affect us: it affects us as intimately as health and illness of the body. In regard to one thing that is experienced in the super-sensible, we may say: “I enter livingly into it. It benefits and stimulates my life; it elevates my life. I become through it in a certain way more ‘real.’ It is healthful.” In regard to something else I say: “It paralyzes—indeed, it kills—my own life. Thereby do I recognize that it is something diseased.” And just as we help ourselves onward in the ordinary world through right and wrong, just as we place our own human nature in the moral and the social life, so do we place ourselves rightly in the super-sensible world through healthy and ill. But we are thus fitted into this super-sensible world with our whole being in a manner far more real than that in which we are fitted into the sense world. In the sense world we separate ourselves from things in this element of the right or the wrong. I mean to say that right does not benefit us very intensely and wrong does not cause us much distress—especially in the case of many persons. In the super-sensible world it is by no means possible that experiences shall touch us in this way. There our whole existence, our whole reality, enters into the manner in which we experience this super-sensible world. For this realm, therefore, all conflict of opinion ceases as to whether things are reality or mere phenomena; whether they manifest to us merely the effects produced upon our own sense organs; and the like—questions about which I do not wish to speak here because the time would not suffice. But everything about which people can argue in this way in relation to the physical reality,—to carry on such discussion with reference to the spiritual world really has no significance whatever for the spiritual, super-sensible world. For we test its reality or unreality through the fact that we can say: “One thing affects me wholesomely, another thing in an ill way—causing injury,” I mean to say, taking the word in its full meaning and weight. The moment a person ascends to the super-sensible world, he observes at once that what was previously knowledge void of power becomes an inner power of the human soul itself. We permeate the soul with this super-sensible knowledge as we permeate our bodies with blood. Thus we learn also in such knowledge the whole relationship of the soul and the spirit to the human body; we learn to see how the spirit-soul being of man descends out of a super-sensible prenatal existence and unites with the inherited body. In order to see into this, it is necessary first to learn to know the spirit-soul element so truly that through this reality, as healthy or diseased, we experience the actuality in our own—I cannot say body here, but in our own soul.

Supersensible knowledge, therefore—although we make such a statement reluctantly, because one seems at once to fall into sentimentality—is really not a mere understanding but an ensouling of the human being. It is soul itself, soul content, which enters into us when we penetrate to this super-sensible knowledge. We become aware of our eternity, our immortality, by no means through the solution of a philosophical problem; we become aware of them through immediate experience, just as we become aware of external things in immediate experience through our senses.

What I have thus described is exposed, of course, to the objection: “To be sure, one may speak in this way, perhaps, who participates in such super-sensible knowledge; but what shall any one say to these things who is himself not as yet a participant in this super-sensible knowledge?” Now, one of the most beautiful ways in which human beings can live together is that in which one person develops through contact with the other, when one goes through the process of becoming, in his soul nature, through the help of the other. This is precisely the way in which the human community is most wonderfully established. Thus we may say that, just as it is not possible for all persons to become astronomers or botanists and yet the results of astronomy and botany may possess importance and significance for all persons—at least, their primary results—and can be taken in by means of the insight possessed by a sound human intellect, it is likewise possible that a sound human mind and heart can directly grasp and assimilate what is presented by a spiritual-scientist who is able to penetrate into the super-sensible world. For the human being is born, not for untruth, but for truth! And what the spiritual-scientist has to say will always be clothed, of course, in such words and combinations of words that it diverges, even in its formulation, from what we are accustomed to receive as pictures out of the sensible-physical world. Therefore, as the spiritual-scientist lays open what he has beheld, this may work in such a way upon the whole human being, upon the simple, wholesome human mind, that this wholesome human mind is awakened—so awakened that it actually discovers itself to be in that state of waking of which I have spoken today. I must repeat again and again, therefore, that, although I have certainly undertaken to explain in such books as Occult Science—an Outline, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and in other volumes, how it is possible to arrive through systematic exercises at what I must designate as “looking into the spiritual world,” so that every one possesses the possibility today, up to a certain degree, of becoming a spiritual-scientist, yet it is not necessary to do this. For a sound human constitution of soul is such that what the spiritual-scientist has to say can be received when it comes into contact with the human soul—provided only that the soul is sufficiently unprejudiced—as something long known. For this is precisely the peculiar characteristic of this spiritual research, this super-sensible knowledge to which we are referring: that it brings nothing which is not subconsciously present already in every human being. Thus every one can feel: “I already knew that; it is within me. If only I had not permitted myself to be rendered unreceptive through the authoritarian and other preconceptions of natural science, I should already have grasped, through one experience or another, some part of what this spiritual research is able to present as a connected whole.”

But the fact of such a thing as this transformation of the concepts true and false into the healthy and the diseased renders the inner experience of the soul more and more intense. At a higher level man places himself more intensely within a reality than he places himself in the physical reality through the ordinary waking of the daily life. In this way, feelings, sentiments, experiences of the soul are generated in relationship to these items of knowledge, which are altogether exact, just as they are generated through our being confronted by external things. That which the super-sensible knowledge can bestow lays hold upon the whole human being whereas it is really only the head that is laid hold of by what the knowledge of the senses can bestow. I trust you will permit me to visualize this relationship of super-sensible knowledge to the complete human being by referring to something personal, although the personal in this realm is also factual, for the facts are intensely bound up with the personal.

In order to render it clear that super-sensible knowledge cannot really be a mere head-knowledge, but lays hold upon the human being in a vastly more living and intense way than head-knowledge, I should like to mention the following. Whoever is accustomed to a living participation in ordinary knowledge—as every true super-sensible knower should really be—knows that the head participates in this ordinary knowledge. If he then ascends, especially if he has been active through his entire life in the ordinary knowledge, to super-sensible knowledge, the situation becomes such that he must exert all his powers in order to keep firm hold upon this super-sensible knowledge which comes upon him, which manifests itself to him. He observes that the power by means of which one holds fast to an idea about nature, to a law of nature, to the course of an experiment or of a clinical observation, is very slight in comparison with the inner force of soul which must be unfolded in order to hold fast to the perception of a super-sensible being. And here I have always found it necessary not only, so to speak, to employ the head in order to hold firmly to these items of super-sensible knowledge, but to support the force which the head can employ by means of other organs—for example by means of the hand. If we sketch in a few strokes something that we have reached through super-sensible research, if we fix it in brief characteristic sentences or even in mere words, then this thing—which we have brought into existence not merely by means of a force evoked through the nerve system applied in ordinary cognition, but have brought into existence by means of a force drawing upon a wide expanse of the organism as a support for our cognition,—this thing becomes something which produces the result that we possess these items of super-sensible knowledge not as something momentary, that they do not fall away from us like dreams, but that we are able to retain them. I may disclose to you, therefore, that I really find it necessary to work in general always in this way, and that I have thus produced wagon-loads of notebooks in my lifetime which I have never again looked into. For the necessary thing here lies in the activity; and the result of the activity is that one retains in spirit what has sought to manifest itself, not that one must read these notes again. Obviously, this writing or sketching is nothing automatic, mediumistic, but just as conscious as that which one employs in connection with scientific work or any other kind of work. And its only reason for existence lies in the fact that what presses upon us in the form of super-sensible knowledge must be grasped with one's whole being. But the result of this is that it affects, in turn, the whole human being, grasps the whole person, is not limited to an impression upon the head, goes further to produce impressions upon the whole human life in heart and mind. What we experience otherwise while the earthly life passes by us, the joy we have experienced in connection with one thing or another, joy in all its inner living quality, the pain we have experienced in lesser or deeper measure, what we have experienced through the external world of the senses, through association with other persons, in connection with the falling and rising tides of life,—all this appears again at a higher level, at a soul-spiritual level, when we ascend into those regions of the super-sensible where we can no longer speak of the true and the false but must speak of the healthy and the diseased.

Especially when we have passed through all that I described the last time, especially that feeling of intense pain at a certain level on the way to the super-sensible, do we then progress to a level of experience where we pass through this inner living dramatic crisis as super-sensible experiences and items of knowledge confront us: where knowledge can bestow upon us joy and pleasure as these are possible otherwise only in the physical life; or where knowledge may cause the profoundest pain; where we have the whole life of the soul renewed, as it were, at a higher level with all the inner coloring, with all the inner nuances of color, with all the intimate inwardness of the life of the soul and the mind that one enjoys through being rooted together with the corporeal organization in every-day existence. And it is here that the higher knowledge, the super-sensible experience comes into contact with that which plays its role in the ordinary life as the moral existence of the human being; this moral existence of the human being with everything connected with it, with the religious sentiment, with the consciousness of freedom.

At the moment when we ascend to a direct experience of the health-giving or the disease-bringing spiritual life, we come into contact with the very roots of the moral life of man, the roots of the whole moral existence. We come into contact with these roots of the moral existence only when we have reached the perception that the physical life of the senses and that which flows out of the human being is really, from the point of view of a higher life, a kind of dream, related to this higher life as the dream is related to the ordinary life. And that which we sense out of the indefinite depths of our human nature as conscience, which enables us to conduct our ordinary life, which determines whether we are helpful or harmful for our fellow men, that which shines upward from the very bottom of our human nature, stimulating us morally or immorally, becomes luminous; it is linked up in a reality just as the dream is linked up in a reality when we wake. We learn to recognize the conscience as something existing in man as a dimly mirrored gleam of the sense and significance of the spiritual world—of that super-sensible world to which we human beings belong, after all, in the depths of our nature. We now understand why it is necessary to take what the knowledge of the sense world can offer us as a point of departure and to proceed from this to a super-sensible knowledge, when we are considering the moral order of the world and desire to arrive at the reality of this moral world order.

This is what I endeavored to set forth thirty years ago as an ethical problem, merely as a moral world riddle, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Without taking into account super-sensible knowledge, I sought by simply following out the moral impulses of the human being to establish the fact that the ethical arises in every instance, not out of the kind of thinking which simply absorbs external things, external occurrences or the occurrences of one's own body, but out of that thinking life of the soul which lays hold upon the heart and the will and yet in its very foundation is, none the less, a thinking soul life, resting upon its own foundations, rooted in the spiritual nature of the world. I was compelled to seek at that time in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for a life of the soul independent of the corporeal being of man, a life that seems, indeed, a shadowy unreality in comparison with the solid reality of the external world of the senses, but which is rooted in its true nature in the very spiritual foundations of the universe. And the fact that the ethical impulses proceed from this kind of thinking, purified from the external world of the senses but wholly alive within man, gives to the human being his ethical character. When we learn to see now through super-sensible knowledge that what is rooted in us as our conscience is, in its essence, the mirroring within our inner being of the real spiritual world which weaves and breathes throughout the world of the senses, we then learn to recognize the moral nature of man as that which forever unites us without our knowing this, even when we sense it only as a still small voice within us, with that spiritual world which can be laid open to us through super-sensible knowledge.

But let no one say that this super-sensible knowledge is meaningless, therefore, for our moral life for the very reason that we have the voice of conscience, for the reason that we possess the practical intentions of life for its individual situations. Especially will one who sees that the ancient spiritual traditions, super-sensible knowledge handed down from primeval times and continuing until now, have faded away and continue their existence today as pale religious creeds, will be able to see that man stands in need of a new stimulus in this very sphere. Indeed, many persons are the victims of a great delusion in this field. We can see that scientific knowledge, which is considered by many today as the only valid knowledge—that the form which this scientific knowledge has taken on, with its Ignorabimus, “We cannot know”—has caused many persons to doubt all knowledge, in that they say that moral impulses, religious intentions, cannot be gained out of any knowledge whatever, but that these ethical-religious impulses in the conduct of life must be developed out of special endowments belonging to man, independent of all knowledge. This has gone so far, indeed, that knowledge is declared not to possess any capacity for setting in motion in the human being such impulses as to enrich him in his moral-religious existence through the fact that he takes in his own spiritual being—for this is really what he does take in with super-sensible knowledge. It has gone so far that people doubt this possibility! On the other hand, however, especially if one is not such a practical person as the so-called practical persons of our present-day life, who merely follow a routine, if one takes the whole world into account, on the contrary, as a genuinely practical person—the world consisting of body, soul, and spirit—one will certainly see that, in the individual life situations for which we may be permeated in actual existence with moral-religious content, more is needed than the faded traditions, which cannot really any longer inspire the human being in a completely moral sense. One recognizes something of this sort.

Permit me to introduce here a special example.

Out of everything that fails to satisfy us in that which confronts us today also in the educational life, what concerned us when the Waldorf School was to be founded in Stuttgart on the initiative of Emil Molt was to answer the question how a human being ought really to be educated. In approaching this task, we addressed this question to the super-sensible world of which I am here speaking. I will mention only briefly what sort of purposes had then to be made basic.

First of all, the question had to be raised: “How is a child educated so that he becomes a real human being, bearing his whole being within himself but also manifesting his whole being in the ethical-religious conduct of life?” A genuine knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit was necessary for this. But such a knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit is entirely impossible today on the basis of what is considered valid—most of all such a knowledge as may become actually practical so that it enables one to lay hold upon the manifold duties of life. In connection with this let me discuss the question by pointing out to you very briefly that what we so generally feel today to be a just ground for our pride—external science, dealing through observation and experimentation with material substance—is not qualified to penetrate into the secrets of the material itself. What I shall introduce here now will be stated very briefly, but we can find it set forth with all necessary proofs in my writings, especially in the volume Riddles of the Soul [Von Seelenratseln—not yet translated.] When we pay attention nowadays to ordinary science, we receive the conception, for example, that the human heart is a kind of pump, which drives the blood through the organs like a pumping machine. Spirit-science, such as we have in mind, which introduces us to a view of what constitutes not only the physical body of the human being, but his spirit-soul nature, shows us how this spirit-soul nature permeates the corporeal nature, how the blood is driven through the human being, not as if by the action of the “heart pumping machine,” but through the direct action of the spirit-soul nature itself; how this spirit-soul nature so lays hold upon the circulation of the blood that it is this spirit-soul element which constitutes the force that causes the blood to pulse through our organism. But the heart is then looked upon as something like a sense organ. As I consciously perceive the external world with my eyes, and through my concepts make this something of my own, thus do I likewise perceive through this inner sense organ of the heart—again, in an unconscious way—that which I develop unconsciously through my spirit-soul forces as the pulsation in my blood. The heart is no pump; the heart is the inner sense organ through which we perceive what the spirit-soul nature develops inwardly in connection with our blood, just as we perceive through the external senses the external world. The moment that we pass over from an intellectual analysis of the human organism to a vision of the whole human being, the heart reveals itself in its true essence, in its true significance—as an inner sense organ. In the heart the effects of the circulation of human blood, with its life impulses, are manifest; the heart is not the instrument causing this pulsation.

This is an example of the tragic fact that the very science bearing a materialistic coloring is not able to penetrate into the secrets of the material life; an example of the fact that we do not penetrate into the secrets of the material life until we do this by observing the spirit in its true work, in its creative work upon matter.

When we become aware through such super-sensible knowledge, on the one hand, of the creative spirit in the very course of material occurrences, we become aware on the other hand of the power-filled spirit—not merely of the abstractly thinking spirit—of the real spirit in its essence. Then only does there result a genuine knowledge of man, such a knowledge as is needed if we wish to develop in the growing child that which can live and breathe in the human being until death, full of power, suited to life, corresponding with reality. Such an intensive vitalizing of the knowledge of man causes the educator to see the child as something fundamentally different from what he is to the merely external observer. In a fundamental sense, from the very first moment of the earthly life, the growing child is the most wonderful earthly phenomenon. The emergence out of the profoundest inner nature, at first mysteriously indeterminate, of something that renders the indeterminate features more and more determinate, changing the countenance, at first so expressionless, into an expressive physiognomy, the manner in which the vague, unskillful movements of the limbs come to correspond to purpose and objective,—all this is something wonderful to behold. And a great sense of responsibility is necessary in bringing this to development. If we stand in the presence of the developing human being in such a way that we say, with all the inner fervor associated with super-sensible knowledge: “In this child there is manifest that which lived as spirit and soul in the pre-earthly existence in super-sensible beauty, that which has left behind, in a certain sense, its super-sensible beauty, has submerged itself in the particular body that could be given to it in the course of physical heredity; but you, as a teacher, must release that which rests in the human body as a gift of the gods, in order that it may lay hold year by year, month by month, week by week upon the physical body, may permeate this, may be able to mold it plastically into a likeness of the soul, you have to awaken still further in the human being that which is manifest in him,”—if we stand thus before the child, we then confront the task of educating the child, not with intellectual principles, but with our whole human nature, with the fullness of our human heart and mind, with a comprehensive sense of human responsibility in confronting the problem of education. We then gradually come to know that we do not have to observe only the child if we wish to know what we must do with him at any particular time, but that we must survey the whole human being. This observation is not convenient. But it is true that what is manifest in a person under certain circumstances in the period of tenderest childhood, let us say, first becomes manifest in a special form as either health-giving or disease-bringing only in high old age after it has long remained hidden in the inner being. As educators, we hold in our hands not only the immediate age of childhood but the whole earthly life of the human being. Persons who frequently say from a superficial pedagogical point of view that we must present to the child only what it can already understand make a very serious mistake. Such persons live in the moment, and not in the observation of the whole human life. For there is a period of childhood, from the change of teeth until adolescence, when it is exceedingly beneficial to a child to receive something that it does not yet understand, something that cannot yet be made clear to it, on the authority of a beloved teacher—to the greatest blessing for this human life, because, when the child sees in the self-evident authority of a teacher and educator the embodiment of truth, beauty, and goodness, in a certain sense, when it sees the world embodied in the teacher, the effect of this is the awaking of the forces of life. This is not something which contradicts human freedom; it is something which appeals to self-evident authority, which in its further development becomes a fountainhead of strength for the whole life. If, at the age of 35 years, we bring something into our heart and mind which is suited by its nature only now to be understood by us as mature persons, but which we took into our hearts upon the authority of a beloved teacher personality even in our eighth year,—if we bring that up into consciousness which we have already possessed, which lived in us because of love and now for the first time at a mature age is understood by us, this understanding of what was present in us in germ is the fountain for an inner enrichment of life. This inner enrichment of life is taken away from the human being when, in a manner reducing things to trivialities, only that is introduced to the child which it can already understand. We view the mode of a child's experience in the right way only when we are able to enter into the whole human being and, most of all, into that which enters as yet primarily into the human heart.

For example, we become acquainted with persons who radiate a blessing when they enter the company of other persons. Their influence is quieting, bestowing peace even upon excited persons whose tempers clash with one another. When we are really able to look back—as I said, this is not convenient—and see how such persons, apart from their innate qualities, have developed such a quality also through education, we often go back into a very tender age of the life where certain teacher personalities have stood very close to these children in their inner heart life, so that they learned to look up with reverence to these personalities. This looking up, this capacity for reverence, is like a mountain brook which flows into a crevice in the rock and only later appears again on the surface. What the soul acquired then in childhood exerts its influence below in its depths, manifesting itself only in high old age, when it becomes a power that radiates blessing.

What I have just introduced to you might be indicated in a picture if we say that, in relationship to the universe as well, the human being may be so educated that he may transmute into forces of blessing in high old age the forces of reverence of his tender childhood. Permit me to indicate in a picture what I mean. No one will be able to open his hands in blessing in old age who has not learned in tender childhood to fold his hands in reverent prayer.

This may indicate to us that in such a special case a life task, education, may lead to an ethical-religious attitude of mind; may indicate how that which our hearts and minds, and our wills, become as a result of entering livingly into spirit-knowledge may enter with vital reality into our conduct of life, so that what we develop otherwise, perhaps, only in an external and technical way shall become a component part of our moral-religious conduct of life. The fact, however, that instruction and education in the Stuttgart Waldorf School, and in the other schools which have arisen as its offshoots, have been brought into such an atmosphere does not by any means result in a lack of attention to the factual, the purely pedagogical; on the contrary, these are given full consideration. But the task of education has really become something here which, together with all its technique of teaching, its practice of instruction and everything methodical, at the same time radiates an ethical-religious atmosphere over the child. Educational acts become ethical-religious acts, because what is done springs from the profoundest moral impulses. Since the practice of teaching flows from a teacher-conscience, since the God-given soul nature is seen in the developing human being, educational action becomes religious in its nature. And this does not necessarily have any sentimental meaning but the meaning may be precisely what is especially necessary for our life, which has become so prosaic: that life may become in a wholly unsentimental sense a form of divine service to the world, as in the single example we have given of education, by reason of the fact that spiritual science becomes a light illuminating the actions of our life, the whole conduct of life. Since super-sensible knowledge leads us, not to abstractions, but to human powers, when these forms of knowledge gained through super-sensible cognition simply become immediate forces of life, they can flow over, therefore, into our whole conduct of life, permeating this with that which lifts the human being above his own level—out of the sensible into the super-sensible—elevating him to the level of a moral being. They may bring him to the stage where he becomes in consecrated love one with the Spirit of the World, thus arriving at truly religious piety.

Indeed, this is especially manifest also in education. If we observe the child up to his seventh year, we see that he is wholly given over, in a physical sense, to his environment. He is an imitator, an imitative being even in his speech. And when we observe this physical devotion, when we observe what constitutes a natural environment of the child, and remains such a natural environment because the soul is not yet awake, then we feel inclined to say that what confronts us in a natural way in the child is the natural form of the state of religious consecration to the world. The reason why the child learns so much is that it is consecrated to the world in a natural-religious way. Then the human being separates himself from the world; and, from the seventh year on, it is his educational environment which gives a different, dimly sensed guidance to his soul. At the period of adolescence he arrives at the stage of independent judgment; then does he become a being who determines his own direction and goal from within himself. Blessed is he if now, when freed from his sensuous organism, he can follow the guidance of thought, of the spirit, and grow into the spiritual just as he lived in a natural way while a child in the world,—if he can return as an adult in relationship to the spirit to the naturalness of the child's feeling for the world! If our spirit can live in the spirit of the world at the period of adolescence as the body of a child lives in the world of nature, then do we enter into the spirit of the world in true religious devotion to the innermost depths of our human nature: we become religious human beings.

We must willingly accept the necessity of transforming ordinary concepts into living forces if we wish to grasp the real nature, the central nerve, of super-sensible knowledge. So is it, likewise, when we view the human being by means of what I described the last time as super-sensible knowledge in Imagination. When we become aware that what lives in him is not only this physical body which we study in physiology, which we dissect in the medical laboratory and thereby develop the science of physiology, when we see that a super-sensible being lives in him which is beheld in the manner I have described, we then come to know that this super-sensible being is a sculptor that works upon the physical body itself. But it is necessary then to possess the capacity of going over from the ordinary abstract concepts which afford us only the laws of nature to an artistic conception of the human being. The system of laws under which we ordinarily conceive the human physical form must be changed into molded contents; science must pass over into art. The super-sensible human being can not be grasped by means of abstract science. We gain a knowledge of the super-sensible being only by means of a perception which leads scientific knowledge wholly over into an artistic experience. It must not be said that science must remain something logical, experimental. Of course, such a demand can be set up; but what does the world care about what we set up as “demands!” If we wish to gain a grasp of the world, our process must be determined in accordance with the world, not in accordance with our demands or even with our logical thoughts; for the world might itself pass over from mere logical thoughts into that which is artistic. And it actually does this. For this reason, only he arrives at a true conception of life who—by means of “perceptive power of thought” to use the expression so beautifully coined by Goethe—can guide that which confronts us in the form of logically conceived laws of nature into plastically molded laws of nature. We then ascend through art—in Schiller's expression “through the morning glow of the beautiful”—upwards into the land of knowledge, but also the land of reverent devotion, the land of the religious.

We then learn to know—permit me to say this in conclusion—what a state of things we really have with all the doubts that come over a human being when he says that knowledge can never bestow upon us religious and ethical impulses, but that these require special forces far removed from those of knowledge. I, likewise, shall never maintain, on the basis of super-sensible knowledge, that any kind of knowledge as such can guide a human being into a moral and religious conduct of life. But that which really brings the human being into a moral and religious conduct of life does not belong in the realm of the senses: it can be investigated only in the realm of the super-sensible. For this reason a true knowledge of human freedom can be gained only when we penetrate into the super-sensible. So likewise do we gain real knowledge of the human conscience only when we advance to the sphere of the super-sensible. For we arrive in this way at that spiritual element which does not compel the human being as he is compelled by natural laws, but permits him to work as a free being, and yet at the same time permeates him and streams through him with those impulses which are manifest in the conscience. Thus, however, is manifested to man that which he vaguely senses as the divine element in the world, in his innocent faith as a naive human being imbued with religious piety.

It is certainly true that one does not stand in immediate need of knowledge such as I have described in order to be a religious and pious person; it is possible to be such a person in complete naiveté. But that is not the state of the case, as history proves. One who asserts that the religious and ethical life of man must come to flower out of a different root from that of knowledge does not realize on the basis of historical evolution that all religious movements of liberation—naturally, the religious aptitudes always exist in the human being—have had their source in the sphere of knowledge as super-sensible sources of knowledge existed in the prehistorical epochs. There is no such thing as a content of morality or religion that has not grown out of the roots of knowledge. At the present time the roots of knowledge have given birth to scientific thinking, which is incapable, however, of reaching to the spirit. As regards the religious conduct of life, many people cling instead to traditions, believing that what exists in traditions is a revelation coming out of something like a “religious genius.” As a matter of fact, these are the atavistic, inherited traditions. But they are at the present time so faded out that we need a new impulse of knowledge, not working abstractly, but constituting a force for knowledge, in order that what exists in knowledge may give to the human being the impulse to enter even into the conduct of the practical life with ethical-religious motives in all their primal quality.

This we need. And, if it is maintained on the one hand—assuredly, with a certain measure of justification—that the human being does not need knowledge as such in order to develop an ethical-religious conduct of life, yet it must be maintained, on the other hand, as history teaches in this respect also, that knowledge need not confuse the human being in his religious and his ethical thinking. It must be possible for him to gain the loftiest stages of knowledge, and with this knowledge—such, naturally, as it is possible for him to attain, for there will always remain very much beyond this—to arrive at the home in which he dwelt by the will of God and under the guidance of God before he had attained to knowledge. That which existed as a dim premonition, and which had its justification as premonition, must be found again even when our striving is toward the loftiest light of knowledge. It will be possible then for knowledge to be something whose influence does not work destructively upon the moral conduct of life; it may be only the influence which kindles and permeates the whole moral-religious conduct of life. Through such knowledge, however, the human being will become aware of the profounder meaning of life—about which it is permissible, after all, to speak: he will become aware that, through the dispensation of the mysteries of the universe, of the whole cosmic guidance, he is a being willed by the Spirit, as he deeply senses; that he can develop further as a being willed by the Spirit; that, whereas external knowledge brings him only to what is indefinite, where he is led into doubt and where the unity which lived within him while he possessed only naive intimations is torn apart, he returns to what is God-given and permeated of spirit within himself if he awakens out of the ordinary knowledge to super-sensible knowledge.

Only thus can that which is so greatly needed by our sorely tested time really be furthered—a new impulse in the ethical-religious conduct of life: in that, just as knowledge has advanced up to the present time from the knowledge of vague premonition and dream to the wakeful clarity of our times, we shall advance from this wakeful clarity to a higher form of waking, to a state of union with the super-sensible world. Thus, likewise, will that impulse be bestowed upon the human being which he so imperatively requires especially for the renewal of his social existence at this time of bitter testing for humanity in all parts of the world—indeed, we may say, for all social thinking of the present time. As the very root of an ethical-religious conduct of life understanding must awaken for the fact that the human being must pass from the ordinary knowledge to an artistic and super-sensible awaking and enter into a religious-ethical conduct of life, into a true piety, free from all sentimentality, in which service to life becomes, so to speak, service to the spirit. He must enter there in that his knowledge strives for the light of the super-sensible, so that this light of the super-sensible causes him to awaken in a super-sensible world wherein alone he may feel himself to be a free soul in relationship to the laws of nature, wherein alone he may dwell in a true piety and a genuine inwardness and true religiousness as a spirit man in the spirit world.

To get even closer to the problems we have opened up in these lectures, I want to make some incidental comments today. You probably know the amusing experiment so often done by conjurers: they show the audience some heavy weights and the effort required to lift them. To make the thing more credible, the pretend weights usually have figures written on them—so and so many hundredweight, or kilogram or whatever. Having made enormous efforts and slowly lifted the weights, so that the audience can admire his muscular strength, the conjurer then suddenly lifts them up high, or may even bring on a small boy who'll trot off swinging the weights—for the whole is made of cardboard. It is merely that the shape and the figures have been imitated to give the impression that those are real weights.

This experiment will frequently come to mind for anyone who has a little bit of spiritual science and who learns what people, even the more intelligent ones, are saying or writing about historical events or historical figures. This applies even to biographers and historians who, according to current opinion, are doing their work extremely well. If you have training in spiritual science, you may be entirely satisfied with the descriptions which are given—for a time. But when you go over it all in your mind again, it does seems as if a child might as well come and run off swinging all this stuff.

Perhaps there are not very many people who feel like this, though I have found something like it, at an instinctive level, with quite a number of people when it comes to the historical writings one gets today. The whole of Roman history, and particularly also Greek history, which is written today comes under this heading. And I am forced to say that historians dealing with one particular field, people whom I respect highly, nevertheless leave me with this impression. I have enormous respect for the historian Herman Grimm,¹ as will be evident from several of my lectures. But when I take up his books on Goethe, Michelangelo or Raphael, these figures seem as if they had no real weight—comparatively speaking—as if they were but darting shadows. The whole of Grimm's Goethe, the whole of his Michelangelo, are merely figures from a magic lantern, for these, too, have no weight.

What is the reason for this? It is that people who are merely equipped with the education, the intellectual content, of our present time do not have a real idea of the true reality, even though they generally think they are describing such a reality. People are infinitely far away from the true reality today because they do not know the element which is always around us and gives spiritual, if not exactly physical, weight to the figures.

Luther is being presented in hundreds, if not thousands, of ways during these weeks.² All very erudite, of course, for today's writers generally are most erudite; I am quite serious about this. But the Martin Luther described by our contemporaries is like the image we have of the weight made of cardboard, for the element which lends weight to a figure is missing. You may say: If one is sitting on a chair and watching the man lifting weights, it looks exactly the same whether the weights are made of cardboard or are real weights. You could even paint the scene; it would look the same. The painting could be perfectly true, even if the weights lifted by the model were made of cardboard. The descriptions given of historical figures like Luther may be eminently true, and the individuals who are so proud of their realism may have succeeded extremely well in using numerous details, numerous characteristic and significant things to create a sophisticated image, but the image does not necessarily correspond to reality, because the spiritual weight is lacking.

If we really want to understand Luther today we must know the inner quality of his true nature, quite independent of our own point of view; we must know he lived a short time after the dawn of the fifth post-Atlantean age, but that all the impulses of the fourth post-Atlantean age were alive in his heart and mind. He was out of place in the fifth post-Atlantean age, for he felt, thought and reacted like someone from the fourth post-Atlantean age; the task facing him belonged to the fifth postAtlantean age which then was just beginning. And so the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age, the horizon of that age, sees an individual whose inner impulses really came from all the qualities of the fourth post-Atlantean age. The prospect of what was to come in the fifth post-Atlantean age lived in Luther's soul at an unconscious, instinctive level.

That age was to bring all the materialism which could only arise for humanity in post-Atlantean times and would gradually penetrate every human sphere. To put it as a paradox—paradoxes never represent the actual facts, of course, but we are able to deduce the facts from them—we might say: Luther was entirely rooted in the fourth post-Atlantean age when it came to the impulses in his heart and mind and feelings, and this meant that he did not really understand the innermost nature of the materialistic human beings of the fifth post-Atlantean age. He certainly had an instinctive, more or less unconscious, inner grasp of the conflicts which would arise between the people of the fifth post-Atlantean age and the outside world, of how they would act in that world and be caught up in its works. Yet all this was really of no concern to him, because his feelings were those of the people who had lived in the fourth postAtlantean age. Hence his insistence that no good would come of being connected with the works of the world and being involved in the world. You must distance yourselves from these works and from everything which exists in the outside world, and find the way to the world of the spirit solely in your heart and mind. You must build your bridge between the spiritual and the earthly world not on the basis of what you are able to know, but what you are able to believe; it must grow from your inner mind and soul. Because he was not connected with the outside world, Luther emphasized that the relationship with the spiritual world was a purely inward one based on faith.

Or consider this: In some respects the world of the spirit lay open before Luther's inner eye. His visions of the devil do not need to be explained in the way Ricarda Huch³ explains them in her book, which otherwise has considerable merit. There is no need to make excuses for his visions of the devil by saying that he did not believe in a devil with horns and tail walking around in the street. Luther really had the devil appear to him; he knew full well the nature of this ahrimanic spirit. To some extent the spiritual world still lay open before his mind's eye as it had done for the people of the fourth post-Atlantean age, and it lay open specifically for the phenomena which were, in fact, to be of the essence in the fifth post-Atlantean age. The ahrimanic powers were pre-eminent in the fifth post-Atlantean age, and Luther saw them. People of the fifth post-Atlantean age are characteristically under the influence of these powers but not able to see them. Luther, however, was an individual of the fourth post-Atlantean age displaced into the fifth, and he saw those powers and therefore gave them such emphasis. This is the concrete situation as regards the spiritual world, and Luther cannot be understood unless this is taken into account.

If you go back to the fifteenth, fourteenth, thirteenth and, ultimately, the twelfth century, you will always find that people understood the conversion of matter. Anything written about this at a later date was largely fraudulent, because the real secrets were lost with the end of the fourth post-Atlantean age. But not everything written is fraudulent, and some of the things which were said were true, though they are difficult to find. What has been written is not exactly outstanding, however, especially anything printed at a later time. Yet at the time when the secrets of alchemy were known, which was during the fourth post-Atlantean age, church people were well able to speak of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and the blood, for there were definite ideas connected with these words. Luther was caught up in the thinking and inner responses of the fourth post-Atlantean age; yet he lived in the fifth post-Atlantean age. He had to separate transubstantiation from the process of physical conversion of matter. So what did the sacrament of the transubstantiation become for him?—It became a process which occurs entirely in the realm of the spirit. Nothing is transformed, he said; but when the faithful receive the bread and the wine the Body and blood of Christ enter into them. Everything Luther said, thought and felt was said, thought and felt by someone whose heart and mind belonged to the fourth post-Atlantean age. He clung to the spiritual connection between man and the gods which belonged to the fourth post-Atlantean age, taking this with him into the godless fifth age, an age of materialism, empty of spirit, without faith and without understanding.

Now Luther has weight, and we understand why he said the things he said—we know it quite apart from the impression he makes on us today. We see him standing in the outside world and he is like the real weight, not the cardboard one. Hundreds or thousands of modern theologians or historians may now come and give their impressions—these will not give us the man, someone with real weight; they will only give us the kind of thing produced by someone who is not holding up a real weight but one made of cardboard.

You see now what really matters at the present time. We must labour to gain awareness of the factors which give the world around us spiritual weight, and be aware of the fact that the spirit is alive in everything, and that this spirit can only be found with the help of anthroposophy. You can collect all the documents you want and scribble endless notes on Luther, you can present an accurate picture as far as the outer aspects are concerned—but, to stay with our analogy, you will always have a cardboard figure, unless you are truly able to look for the things that give the figure real weight. Now you may well say it seems hard to say to compare the work of some of the most erudite people to cardboard weights. And even if this were so, their work was really beautiful and satisfying in many ways. Is all this to be changed? Could we not go on enjoying their work?

You see, two questions arise for people in the present-day state of consciousness, questions which may well touch us deeply. Why did the spiritual world demand that these people should have the instincts which have led to such works? Well, these things really point to something which is very widespread today and closely bound up with human nature. As I have already mentioned, we are living at a time when certain truths have to become known which are not welcome truths. Yet anyone who can read the signs of the times knows that they have to become known.

In the first part of my essay on The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, written for the next issue of the journal Das Reich,⁴ I have touched lightly on some of these truths. Just a short while ago it was still taboo for those in the know to speak of these things in public. Today one must speak of them, even if this may cause problems. A short passage in my essay relates specifically to what I am going to say now.

Is it not true that as we move about in this world we do not have full and real knowledge of the things which are immediately around us, at least not to begin with? I think this is something anyone can quite easily establish for himself. We mainly use our sense of sight as we move through the world; but if we did not have other kinds of experiences as well, we would never know with complete certainty if something we see weighs a great deal or only little. We would have to pick it up to check the weight. Think of how many things there are where you cannot know if they are heavy or light as air until you pick them up. And finally, when you know that something is not as light as air, this knowledge has not come from looking at it but from having lifted something like it before. You do not even think about it, but unconsciously, instinctively come to the conclusion: If it looks the way such things always look, it will also weigh the same. Just looking at objects therefore provides you with nothing at all.

What does looking at objects provide? Illusion! If you regard the world with just one of the senses, you are deceived wherever you go. You only escape the illusion because you are unconsciously and instinctively drawing on experience. The whole world is really trying to deceive us, even in the world we perceive around us with the senses. The illusion may be very naturalistic nowadays. Painters and sculptors, who aim to present something to just one of the senses, fail to realize that they are merely presenting maya, illusion; for the more you try and present something realistically for just one of the senses, the more you are presenting maya. This is necessary, however, for if it were not for this illusion we would not be able to progress in conscious awareness. We owe our progress in consciousness to this illusion. To stay with my original analogy: If all objects appeared in their true weight, even when they were just perceived by the eye, if I were to feel the burden of their weight as I looked around me, I would quite obviously be unable to develop conscious awareness of the outside world. We owe our consciousness to this illusion. It lies at the root of all things which make up our consciousness. We have to be deceived in order to progress in consciousness, for our consciousness is the child of illusion. To begin with, however, the illusion must not enter into human beings or they will become unsure. The illusion remains beyond the threshold of conscious awareness. The Guardian makes sure that we do not realize how the world around us is deceiving us at every step. We fight our way upwards because the world does not reveal its weight to us and in this way lets us rise above it and be conscious. Consciousness also depends on many other things, but it mainly depends on the fact that the world around us is full of illusion.

Yet, necessary as it may be for illusion to be there for a time so that consciousness may arise, it is also necessary that when consciousness has developed we rise above the illusion, particularly in certain areas. Because it is based on maya, on illusion, our consciousness cannot gain access to true reality. Over and over again it would have to be subject to the kind of confusion I have mentioned. And so there must be alternating periods, periods when weightless situations and people are presented, and periods when the weight, the spiritual weight, is perceived. We are now facing the latter kind of period with regard to major world events as well as everyday events. We have to see through the things which seriously come into consideration in this respect.

One thing is particularly important: When the world looks to the East now, to what really lives in the east of Europe today, the people of Central Europe and America see the east of Europe exactly like someone who is looking at weights made of cardboard. They do not see the true spiritual weight of it. And indeed, neither do the people who actually live in eastern Europe have a real idea of the spirit which lives there. We can see Luther as an individual whose inner life belonged to the fourth post-Atlantean age, but who himself lived in the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age. In the same way the world must come to see the true nature of the spirit in eastern Europe, for this is how we should actively consider these things in the fifth post-Atlantean age. If you take everything I have said about eastern Europe in lectures and lecture cycles—how the spirit-self is actively seeking to develop and how it must unite with the consciousness soul⁵ of the West—and if you add the fact that impulses for the sixth post-Atlantean age are in preparation in the east of Europe, then you have something which will lend weight to the east of Europe. If on the other hand you take all the statements people make today, however erudite, then you have weights which may just as well be made of cardboard.

However, we cannot buy or sell maya, illusion; we can only buy and sell real objects. You would say ‘thank you very much' if your grocer were to put cardboard weights rather than real ones on the scales. You would certainly demand real weights, not just some which look as if they were real. All political principles and impulses discussed with reference to Russia will be nothing, they will be null and void, unless they come from the awareness gained by knowing what gives spiritual weight. The way people talk today you would really think they are putting cardboard weights on the scales of world history. However, once awareness has come, it must not be used in the old lackadaisical and slovenly way, but must address itself to reality, not just to outer illusion. A transition will have to be made from the familiar, comfortable way of looking at things to one which is much more alive in its concepts—these will, of course, be less comfortable, for they also Shake us awake. Life will be less comfortable with the views which have to be taken in future. Why is this so? Let me give you an analogy which will probably also take you aback. I am not going to flinch, however, and I will say these things, irrespective of what individual people may feel about them.

As I have mentioned, in earlier ages, including the fourth post-Atlantean age, powers were available to humans which have been transformed into something else today. As I said, clairvoyance has become something different today, it is based on different things. Certain things can no longer be as they were even as late as the fourth post-Atlantean age, and one of these is the following.

In the fourth post-Atlantean age—people only know tales about it today and of course they do not believe them—there was an ordeal by fire. To prove guilt or innocence, people were made to walk a red hot grid. If they got burned, they were considered to be guilty, if not, if they walked across without being harmed, they were considered to be innocent. People consider this to be an old superstition today, but it is true. It is one of the abilities people had in the past and are no longer able to have today. In those days, human nature had this quality: Innocents who were utterly convinced of their innocence and knew themselves to be in the protection of the divine spirits at such a solemn moment, people who were so firmly connected with the spiritual world in their consciousness that the astral body would be taken out of the physical body, could walk across the embers with their physical bodies. It really was so in the past. This is the truth. It is really a good thing for you to be fully and completely clear in your minds that this old superstition is based on truth—though of course it is not a good idea for you to go and tell the vicar all about it.

These things have undergone a transformation. In the past, individuals who had to prove their innocence in a particular way, could be made to walk the embers on occasion. You can, however, be quite certain, that, generally speaking, people were afraid of fire even then; they did not enjoy walking over red hot grids. Even in those days it would generally make them shudder—except for those who were able to prove their innocence in this way. But some of the power which carried people through the embers in those days has now become more inward in the sense I spoke of in my last lecture. The clairvoyance of the fifth post-Atlantean age, the connection with the world of the spirit, is based on the same powers, except that the powers which formerly enabled people to walk through fire have been transformed and become more inward.

If one wants to be in touch with certain factors which belong to the world of the spirit, one has to overcome much the same reluctance as had to be overcome when people went through fire. That is the reason why many people fear the spiritual world today as much as they fear fire. We cannot really say people are just speaking figuratively when they say they are afraid of getting burned; they really are afraid. This is the reason for the opposition to anthroposophy: people are afraid of getting burned. Yet the progress of time demands that we gradually approach the fire and do not shy away from reality. The new inwardness of life of which I have spoken has many factors which demand that we gently draw closer to the world of the spirit—gently for the time being; later it will be stronger and stronger—in all spheres, but especially in the field of education.

In the sphere of education people will have to realize that quite different factors need to be considered than those which arise from the great climax now reached in the age of materialism. The realization must come that many of the things which from the materialistic point of view are eminently right—though the point of view is based on the senses and hence on maya, illusion—must be set aside and the opposite put in their place. Today it is considered important, especially in the field of education, to train teachers by teaching them as much method as possible. All the time it is said: This must be done like this, and that must be done like that. The aim is to develop well-regulated ideas of how one should educate. People love the idea of the regulative ideal. They would like to have the image of the ideal teacher and then always have such a teacher. But they only have to think a little bit about themselves and the issue will be clear. Ask yourself with as much self-knowledge as you are able to muster what has become of you—up to a certain point we can all see what has become of us—and then ask yourself who the teachers, the educators were who influenced you when you were young. Or, if this is a problem, try and think of a well-known and reasonably important person and then consider the teachers of that individual to see if you can somehow connect the significance of those teachers with the achievements of the individual.

It would be interesting if biographies told us more about the teachers; some interesting things would then emerge. But we would not be able to find out much about what those teachers did to make the individuals in question what they were. In most cases we would have the situation we have in the case of Herder, who achieved much;⁶ one of his best-known teachers was headmaster Herman Grimm.⁷ He was in the habit of tanning the boys' backsides as hard as he could. Herder's achievements did not come from having his backside tanned; he was a good boy and had few beatings. The teacher's general inclinations therefore did not have any effect on him! A nice story is told of this teacher, and it is really true. On one occasion he gave a terrible beating to a boy in Herder's class. Later, the boy was walking in the street when a man who had brought calfskins and sheepskins from the country asked him: ‘Tell me, boy, where can I find someone who'll bark tan these skins for me?’ ‘Ah,’ said the boy, ‘go to Mr Grimm, he is good at it.’ And the man actually went and rang Mr Grimm's doorbell—that taught the headmaster a lesson. But, you see, Herder did not become a great man because his teacher had this inclination. You will find many such things if you look into the education of individuals who later became great people.

Something else, however, which relates to something much more subtle, will be important. It will be important that the question of karma, or destiny, is taken into account, especially with regard to education and teaching methods. The people with whom my karma brought me together in childhood and youth certainly are important. And a tremendous amount depends on it that in our teaching we are aware that we and our pupils have been brought together. You see, much depends on a particular quality of mind and attitude.

Take the things we are already able to say about education today from the point of view of anthroposophy and you will find this to be wholly in accord with what I have said. It really has to be emphasized today that for the first seven years, up to the changing of the teeth, children want to imitate everything, and during the next seven years, until they reach puberty, they must submit to authority. We therefore have to do things which the children can imitate in the right way. Children will of course imitate everybody, but they do so especially with their teachers. They also believe everybody from their seventh to fourteenth year, but they should do so especially when it comes to their teachers and educators. We will know how to behave if we are constantly aware of the idea of karma; but we must have a real inner connection with this. Whether we are particularly good at teaching something, or perhaps less good, is not really so important. Even completely inept teachers may on occasion have a tremendous influence. Now, in the age of inwardness of which I have spoken, the question as to whether we are the right teacher or educator depends on the way in which we were connected with the child's soul before either of us—teacher and child—were born. The difference is merely that we teachers have come into the world a few years earlier than the children. Before that we were together with them in the world of the spirit.

Where does the desire to imitate come from, this tendency to imitate after we are born? We are imitators in our early years because we bring the tendency to Imitate with us from the world of the spirit. And whom do we like best to imitate? The individual who gave us our qualities in the world of the spirit, from whom we took something when we were in that world, be it in one particular field or another. The child's soul was connected with the soul of the teacher before birth. The connection was a close one; later, the outer physical being who lives in the physical world merely has to follow this line.

If you do not merely take what I am saying as an abstract truth but let it enter fully into your soul, you will find it has tremendous significance. Just think of the truly serious mood, the profundity of feeling which would come if, in the field of education, people lived with the idea: You are now showing the child something which it accepted from you in the world of the spirit before it was born. Just think, if this were to be the real impulse! It is much more important that such a mood, such a feeling, is brought to the task, rather than teaching people how to do this and how to do that. This will follow if the atmosphere is right between teacher and pupil, and if teachers are truly conscious of the great task life has given them. Above all there has to be this truly serious mood. It is poison to demand that children should understand everything, as it is often demanded today. I have frequently pointed out that children cannot understand everything. From their first to their seventh year they cannot understand at all; they imitate everything. And if they do not imitate sufficiently they will not have enough in them later which they can use. From their seventh to the fourteenth year they must believe, they must be under the influence of authority, if they are to develop in a healthy way. These things have to be made part of human life.

It is generally considered most important today to understand everything. We are not even supposed to teach the children their tables without their understanding it. But they do not understand anyway! Such an approach makes children into calculating machines rather than sensible people. They are supposed to accept the intellect which is in the elemental environment of which I have spoken,⁸ rather than develop their own understanding. This happens a great deal nowadays. Instead of helping the mind of the individual to develop, efforts are actually in progress to make it the ideal to inculcate the elemental intellect which is outside the human being, so that children are caught up in the elemental world. Many instances can be seen today where we can actually say: These people are not thinking for themselves, they are thinking in the general thinking atmosphere, as it were. And if something of an individual nature should come up, its origins are not in the divine element which can be perceived in human nature.

Human beings must enter into truly living ways again, even in their understanding of the world. As I have said, this is more difficult than working with mere corpses of ideas. Humanity must once again find a living approach, and people must realize that dead truths cannot govern life, only living truths can do so. The following is a dead truth.

We are supposed to train human beings to be intelligent human beings. Therefore—as dead truth says—we must cultivate the intellect as early as possible, for this will produce intelligent people. This is arrant nonsense, however. It is as much nonsense as it would be to train a one-year-old to be a shoemaker. People will, in fact, be intelligent only if they are not given intellectual training too early. It is often necessary to do the opposite of what we want to achieve in life. We cannot eat our food raw, but have to cook it first. And if this cooking process were to include the processes which are involved in eating, we might perhaps save ourselves the effort of eating! You cannot make people intelligent by cultivating the intellect as early as possible, but only by cultivating in them when very young the faculties which will later have them prepared to be intelligent. The abstract truth is: the intellect is cultivated via the intellect. The living truth is: the intellect is cultivated by healthy belief in rightful authority. Both parts of the statement have quite a different content in the living truth compared to the dead, abstract truth. This is something humanity will have to come to realize more and more as time goes on.

It is awkward. Consider how comfortable it is to have a goal and to believe this can be achieved by doing exactly what the goal says. But in life one has to do the opposite. This is certainly awkward. It is the challenge of our time that we must find our way to reality and life; this is what we must eminently make our own. There is need for this in both the great and the small things in life. You will not understand this age, you will be doing things as wrong as they can possibly be done, unless you consider this. People have no idea today of how immensely abstract they are, with everything forced always into the same mould. But the reality is not produced in the same mould, for it is in constant metamorphosis. The modified vertebrae which form part of the human head look very different from the vertebrae which make up the spine. Let me give you an example taken from everyday life. Imagine someone on the teaching staff of a university who teaches something which I, or someone else, must go against. I would of course make every effort to show that the things this person teaches are wrong; wanting to do my duty, I would go to any length to show that he is wrong and everything he says—well, to put it bluntly—is balderdash. This is one side of the matter.

Now let us assume the individual concerned found himself in a situation where the authorities wanted to dismiss him from his post or discipline him in some way. Well, of course, I would stand up for him in every possible way, against his dismissal or disciplining; for this would not be a question of the content of his teaching, but of ensuring academic freedom. For as long as we are dealing with people's theories, we have to fight; when it comes to an external institution, the fight ends and may even be transformed into coming to the individual's defence. It has to be realized that it is abominable if someone lets his opposition to someone induce him to take an active part in disciplining such a person. Let us assume, however, the individual concerned was a lecturer or professor of economics or politics and were appointed to hold a government office. What would our attitude be then? It would have to be such that one got him out of that office as quickly as possible, for there his theories would cause real damage.

In anything we do, we must relate to the immediate, living reality and not let ourselves be ruled by concepts. In the sphere of concepts, on the other hand, it is important to take a good hard look at the concepts we use. I have given this example to demonstrate the difference between dealing with reality and dealing with concepts. People who do not make this distinction will find it quite impossible to live with the tasks of the immediate future; they will at best be Wilsonians. What matters is to consider carefully what lives in reality and what one has to have by way of convictions in the sphere of concepts.

This is particularly important in the education of the young. Teachers in training are weighed down today with all kinds of principles as to how they should teach, how they should educate. In the immediate future this will become much less important. The important thing will be for them to get to know human nature and the different ways in which it comes to expression; they have to become psychologists in a most subtle way and really know the human soul. The relationship of the teacher to the pupil must in future be something analogous to clairvoyance. Teachers may not be fully conscious of this, and it may only live instinctively in their souls, but they must instinctively, at a level close to prophecy, have a picture of what wants to emerge from the individual who is to be educated. Then a strange thing will happen, peculiar as it may sound today. The teachers of the future will dream a great deal of their pupils, for the prophecies will be wearing the garment of dreams. The pictures we see in our dreams arise only because we are not used to connecting our dreams with the future; we dress them in elements remembered from the past, as in a garment. In reality dreams always point to the future. Yes, it is indeed true that the inner life will have to be changed, especially in those who educate the young. This is the most important aspect. Of course, everybody is more or less involved in educating the young, with just a very few exceptions, and it must therefore also hold true in a more general sense that we must have understanding for the karmic connections, as I have mentioned. Tremendously much will depend on this becoming general knowledge.

The present generation is mainly educated to think in abstract terms, and keeps confusing abstract and living ways of thinking. This is why it is so rare for anyone to support someone with glowing enthusiasm, for, having his own concepts, he dislikes those of the other person, and it suits him rather well if others come and put the other person out of action. These, however, are the very things which can teach us. And there can be no better education for people but to find ways in which they can stand up for their opponents with ever-increasing enthusiasm. This should not be forced, of course. People are friends or enemies today on a purely abstract basis. There is no point to this, however. Only the realities of life have a point to them, and they are given by life, not by our sympathies and antipathies. We should still have those sympathies and antipathies, but the pendulum should not merely swing up in one direction but also go down and in the opposite direction. Humanity must learn to live on two levels at once, in dualism—to enter into profound thought and, where reality demands this, to pour ourselves out over reality. Today, people want to take their thought-forms into everything connected with real life; and they are only prepared to put up with reality if it fits in with their own thought-forms. Uniformity is what they are after. But uniformity cannot be justified in the light of the spirit; this is impossible. The world cannot be easy and comfortable the way it is in reality. Not everyone will have the kind of face we like and find sympathetic. But it is wrong to let our actions towards others be determined by our personal sympathies and antipathies. Other impulses must come into play. People find it difficult to manage today because they look at the world, and if they do not find it in accord with their sympathies and antipathies then, in their view, everything is crooked and awry and quite wrong, and they are governed by just one impulse—that the world ought to be different.

This is one thing which has to be said. On the other hand we must not allow this to take us to the opposite, equally lackadaisical extreme, where we say that one should not be too fussy and just take the world as it is. This would be equally wrong. There are situations in life when serious objections must be raised, and this is what should be done. It means that due recognition must be given to reality. What really matters is the pendulum swing between a clear-minded inner life in well-defined concepts and loving care extended to the phenomena of the world.

Anthroposophy can show the way if we have the right attitude to it. But this, too, is something which has to be learned. The truths which are won from the world of the spirit are like communications, even for clairvoyant individuals. If we treat these truths in the same way we treat the facts of the outside world which are accessible to our unrefined senses, we are being unfair to spiritual science. The whole of spiritual science is open to our understanding. But it is wrong to ask the spiritual scientist ‘Yes, but why?’ each time he says anything, for these are communications he has received from the spiritual world. And if I say: ‘Jack Miller has told me this or that,’ it is pointless to say: And why did he tell you this?' He simply told me; the question as to why has little relevance. The things which come from the spiritual world must be considered as communications of this kind. It is important to understand this.

We shall continue with this tomorrow.

• 1. Herman Grimm (1828–1901), German cultural historian.
• 2. Reference to the 400th Anniversary of the Reformation, which started on 31 October 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg.
• 3. See Note 3 of lecture 4.
• 4. See Note 2 of lecture 2.
• 5. To understand Steiner's concept of the consciousness soul (another translation would be ‘awareness soul’), see his Theosophy and Occult Science.
• 6. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), German critic and poet who was a major influence on Goethe.
• 7. Herman Grimm: see Note 1 above. The story told by Rudolf Steiner is in a biography of Gottfried Herder which was published by his son (Gottfried Herders Lebensbild, 1. Band, S. 39). This also gives a more detailed description of Grimm's educational method.
• 8. See Lecture 4.

I shall now continue, in a certain direction, the more elementary considerations recently begun. In the first lecture of this series I drew your attention to the heart's real, inner need of finding, or at least seeking, the paths of the soul to the spiritual world. I spoke of this need meeting man from two directions: from the side of Nature, and from the side of inner experience.

Today we will again place these two aspects of human life before us in a quite elementary way. We shall then see that impulses from the subconscious are really active in all man's striving for knowledge in response to the needs of life, in his artistic aims and religious aspirations.

You can quite easily study the opposition, to which I here refer, in yourselves at any moment.

Take one quite simple fact. You are looking, let us say, at some part of your body—your hand, for example. In so far as the act of cognition itself is concerned you look at your hand exactly as at a crystal, or plant, or any other natural object. But when you look at this part of your body and go through life with this perception, you encounter that seriously disturbing fact which intrudes on all human experience and of which I spoke. You find that what you see will one day be a corpse; external Nature, on receiving it, has not the power to do anything else than destroy it. The moment man has become a corpse within the physical world and has been handed over to the elements in any form, there is no longer any possibility that the human form, which has been impressed on all the substances visible in his body, will be able to maintain itself.

All the forces of Nature which you can make the subject of any scientific study are only able to destroy man, never to build him up. Every unprejudiced study that is not guided by theory but controlled by life itself, leads us to say: We look at Nature around us in so far it is intelligible. (We will not speak, for the present, of what external cognition cannot grasp.) As civilised people of today we feel we have advanced very far indeed, for we have discovered so many laws of Nature. This talk of progress is, indeed, perfectly justified. Nevertheless, it is a fact that all these laws of Nature are, by their mode of operation, only able to destroy man, never to build him up. Human insight is unable, at first, to discover anything in the external world except laws of Nature which destroy man.

Let us now look at our inner life. We experience what we call our psychical life, i.e. our thinking, which can confront us fairly clearly, our feeling, which is less clearly experienced, and our willing, which is quite hidden from us. For, with ordinary consciousness, no one can claim insight into the way an intention—to pick up an object, let us say—works down into this very complicated organism of muscle and nerve in order to move, at length, arms and legs. What it is that here works down into the organism, between the formation of the thought and the perception of the lifted object, is hidden in complete darkness. But an indefinite impulse takes place in us, saying: I will this. So we ascribe will to ourselves and, on surveying our inner life, speak of thinking, feeling and willing.

But there is another side, and this introduces us again—in a certain sense—to what is deeply disturbing. We see that all this soul life of man is submerged whenever he sleeps and arises anew when he wakes. If we want to use a comparison we may well say: The soul life is like a flame which I kindle and extinguish again. But we see more. We see this soul life destroyed when certain organs are destroyed. Moreover, it is dependent on bodily development; being dreamlike in a little child and becoming gradually clearer and clearer, more and more awake. This increase in clarity and awareness goes hand in hand with the development of the body; and when we grow old our soul life becomes weaker again. The life of the soul thus keeps step with the growth and decay of the body. We see it light up and die away.

But, however sure we may be that our soul, though dependent in its manifestations on the physical organism, has its own life, its own existence, this is not all we can say about it. It contains an element man must value above all else in life, for his whole manhood—his human dignity—depends on this. I refer to the moral element.

We cannot deduce moral laws from Nature however far we may explore it. They have to be experienced entirely within the soul; there, too, we must be able to obey them. The conflict and settlement must therefore take place entirely within the soul. And we must regard it as a kind of ideal for the moral life to be able, as human beings, to obey moral principles which are not forced upon us. Yet man cannot become an ‘abstract being’ only obeying laws. The moral life does not begin until emotions, impulses, instincts, passions, outbursts of temperament, etc., are subordinated to the settlement, reached entirely within the soul, between moral laws grasped in a purely spiritual way and the soul itself.

The moment we become truly conscious of our human dignity and feel we cannot be like beings driven by necessity, we rise to a world quite different from the world of Nature.

Now the disturbing element that, as long as there has been human evolution at all, has led men to strive beyond the life immediately visible, really springs from these two laws—however many subconscious and unconscious factors may be involved: We see, on the one hand, man's bodily being, but it belongs to Nature that can only destroy it; and, on the other hand, we are inwardly aware of ourselves as soul beings who light up and fade away, yet are bound up with what is most valuable in us—the moral element.

It can only be ascribed to a fundamental insincerity of our civilisation that people deceive themselves so terribly, turning a blind eye to this direct opposition between outer perception and inner experience. If we understand ourselves, if we refuse to be confined and constricted by the shackles which our education, with a definite aim in view, imposes upon us, if we free ourselves a little from these constraints we say at once: Man! you bear within you your soul life—your thinking, feeling and willing. All this is connected with the moral world which you must value above all else—perhaps with the religious source of all existence on which this moral world itself depends. But where is this inner life of moral adjustments when you sleep?

Of course, one can spin philosophic fantasies or fantastic philosophies about these things. One may then say: Man has a secure basis in his ego (i.e. in his ordinary ego-consciousness). The ego begins to think in St. Augustine, continues through Descartes, and attains a somewhat coquettish expression in Bergsonism today. But every sleep refutes this. For, from the moment we fall asleep to the moment of waking, a certain time elapses; and when, in the waking state, we look back on this interval of time, we do not find the ego qua experience. It was extinguished. And yet it is connected with what is most valuable in our lives—the moral element!

Thus we must say: Our body, whose existence we are rudely forced to admit, is certainly not a product of Nature, which has only the power to destroy and disintegrate it. On the other hand, our own soul life eludes us when we sleep, and is dependent on every rising and falling tide of our bodily life. As soon as we free ourselves a little from the constraints imposed on civilised man by his education today, we see at once that every religious or artistic aspiration—in fact, any higher striving—no matter how many subconscious and unconscious elements be involved, depends, throughout all human evolution, on these antitheses.

Of course, millions and millions of people do not realise this clearly. But is it necessary that what becomes a riddle of life for a man be clearly recognised as such? If people had to live by what they are clear about they would soon die. It is really the contributions to the general mood from unclear, subconscious depths that compose the main stream of our life. We should not say that he alone feels the riddles of life who can formulate them in an intellectually clear way and lay them before us: first riddle, second riddle, etc. Indeed, such people are the shallowest.

Someone may come who has this or that to talk over with us. Perhaps it is some quite ordinary matter. He speaks with a definite aim in view, but is not quite happy about it. He wants something, and yet does not want it; he cannot come to a decision. He is not quite happy about his own thoughts. To what is this due? It comes from the feeling of uncertainty, in the subconscious depths of his being, about the real basis of man's true being and worth. He feels life's riddles because of the polar antithesis I have described.

Thus we can find support neither in the corporeal, nor in the spiritual as we experience it. For the spiritual always reveals itself as something that lights up and dies down, and the body is recognised as coming from Nature which can, however, only destroy it.

So man stands between two riddles. He looks outwards and perceives his physical body, but this is a perpetual riddle to him. He is aware of his psycho-spiritual life, but this, too, is a perpetual riddle. But the greatest riddle is this: If I really experience a moral impulse and have to set my legs in motion to do something towards its realisation, it means—of course—I must move my body. Let us say the impulse is one of goodwill. At first this is really experienced entirely within the soul, i.e. purely psychically. How, now, does this impulse of goodwill shoot down into the body? How does a moral impulse come to move bones by muscles? Ordinary consciousness cannot comprehend this. One may regard such a discussion as theoretical, and say: We leave that to philosophers; they will think about it. Our civilisation usually leaves this question to its thinkers, and then despises—or, at least, values but little—what they say. Well; this satisfies the head only, not the heart. The human heart feels a nervous unrest and finds no joy in life, no firm foundation, no security. With the form man's thinking has taken since the first third of the fifteenth century magnificent results in the domain of external science have been achieved, but nothing has or can be contributed towards a solution of these two riddles—that of man's physical body and that of his psychical life. It is just from a clear insight into these things that Anthroposophy comes forward, saying: True; man's thinking, in the form it has so far actually taken, is powerless in the face of Reality. However much we think, we cannot in the very least influence an external process of nature by our thinking.

Moreover, we cannot, by mere thinking, influence our own ‘will-organism’. To feel deeply the powerlessness of this thinking is to receive the impulse to transcend it.

But one cannot transcend it by spinning fantasies. There is no starting point but thought; you cannot begin to think about the world except by thinking. Our thinking, however, is not fitted for this. So we are unavoidably led by life itself to find—from this starting point in thought—a way by which our thinking may penetrate more deeply into existence—into Reality. This way is only to be found in what is described as meditation—for example, in my book: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.

Today we will only describe this path in bare outline, for we intend to give the skeleton of a whole anthroposophical structure. We will begin again where we began twenty years ago.

Meditation, we may say, consists in experiencing thinking in another way than usual. Today one allows oneself to be stimulated from without; one surrenders to external reality. And in seeing, hearing, grasping, etc., one notices that the reception of external impressions is continued—to a certain extent—in thoughts. One's attitude is passive—one surrenders to the world and the thoughts come. We never get further in this way. We must begin to experience thinking. One does this by taking a thought that is easily comprehended, letting it stay in one's consciousness, and concentrating one's whole consciousness upon it.

Now it does not matter at all what the thought may signify for the external world. The point is simply that we concentrate our consciousness on this one thought, ignoring every other experience. I say it must be a comprehensible thought—a simple thought, that can be ‘seen’ from all sides [überschaubar]. A very, very learned man once asked me how one meditates. I gave him an exceedingly simple thought. I told him it did not matter whether the thought referred to any external reality. I told him to think: Wisdom is in the light. He was to apply the whole force of his soul again and again to the thought: Wisdom is in the light. Whether this be true or false is not the point. It matters just as little whether an object that I set in motion, again and again, by exerting my arm, be of far-reaching importance or a game; I strengthen the muscles of my arm thereby. So, too, we strengthen our thinking when we exert ourselves, again and again, to per-form the above activity, irrespective of what the thought may signify. If we strenuously endeavour, again and again, to make it present in our consciousness and concentrate our whole soul life upon it, we strengthen our soul life just as we strengthen the muscular force of our arm if we apply it again and again to the same action. But we must choose a thought that is easily surveyed; otherwise we are exposed to all possible tricks of our own organisation. People do not believe how strong is the suggestive power of unconscious echoes of past experiences and the like. The moment we entertain a more complicated thought demonic powers approach from all sides, suggesting this or that to our consciousness. One can only be sure that one is living in one's meditation in the full awareness of normal, conscious life, if one really takes a completely surveyable thought that can contain nothing but what one is actually thinking.

If we contrive to meditate in this way, all manner of people may say we are succumbing to auto-suggestion or the like, but they will be talking nonsense. It all turns on our success in holding a ‘transparent’ thought—not one that works in us through sub-conscious impulses in some way or other. By such concentration one strengthens and intensifies his soul life—in so far as this is a life in thought. Of course, it will depend on a man's capacities, as I have often said; in the case of one man it will take a long time, in the case of another it will happen quickly. But, after a certain time, the result will be that he no longer experiences his thinking as in ordinary consciousness. In ordinary consciousness our thoughts stand there powerless; they are ‘just thoughts’. But through such concentration one really comes to experience thoughts as inner being [Sein], just as one experiences the tension of a muscle—the act of reaching out to grasp an object. Thinking becomes a reality in us; we experience, on developing ourselves further and further, a second man within us of whom we knew nothing before.

The moment now arrives when you say to yourself: True, I am this human being who, to begin with, can look at himself externally as one looks at the things of nature; I feel inwardly, but very dimly, the tensions of my muscles, but I do not really know how my thoughts shoot down into them. But after strengthening your thinking in the way described, you feel your strengthened thinking flowing, streaming, pulsating within you; you feel the second man. This is, to begin with, an abstract characterisation. The main thing is that the moment you feel this second man within you, supra-terrestrial things begin to concern you in the way only terrestrial things did before. In this moment, when you feel your thought take on inner life—when you feel its flow as you feel the flow of your breath when you pay heed to it—you become aware of something new in your whole being. Formerly you felt for example: I am standing on my legs. The ground is below and supports me. If it were not there, if the earth did not offer me this support, I would sink into bottomless space. I am standing on something. After you have intensified your thinking and come to feel the second man within, your earthly environment begins to interest you less than before. This only holds, however, for the moments in which you give special attention to the second man. One does not become a dreamer if one advances to these stages of knowledge in a sincere and fully conscious way. One can quite easily return, with all one's wonted skill, to the world of ordinary life. One does not become a visionary and say: Oh! I have learnt to know the spiritual world; the earthly is unreal and of less value. From now on I shall only concern myself with the spiritual world. On a true, spiritual path one does not become like that, but learns to value external life more than ever when one returns to it. Apart from this, the moments in which one transcends external life in the way described and fixes attention on the second man one has discovered cannot be maintained for long. To fix one's attention in this way and with inner sincerity demands great effort, and this can only be sustained for a certain time which is usually not very long.

Now, in turning our attention to the second man, we find at the same time, that we begin to value the spatial environment of the earth as much as what is on the earth itself. We know that the crust of the earth supports us, and the various kingdoms of Nature provide the substances we must eat if our body is to receive through food the repeated stimulus it needs. We know that we are connected with terrestrial Nature in this way. We must go into the garden to pick cabbages, cook and eat them; and we know that we need what is out there in the garden and that it is connected with our ‘first’ or physical man. In just the same way we learn to know what the rays of the sun, the light of the moon and the twinkling of the stars around the earth are to us. Gradually we attain one possible way of thinking of the spatial environment of the earth in relation to our ‘second man’, as we formerly thought of our first (physical) body in relation to its physical environment.

And now we say to ourselves: What you bear within you as muscles, bones, lung, liver, etc., is connected with the cabbage, the pheasant, etc., out there in the world. But the ‘second man’ of whom you have become conscious through strengthening your thinking, is connected with the sun and the moon and all the twinkling stars—with the spatial environment of the earth. We become more familiar with this environment than we usually are with our terrestrial environment—unless we happen to be food-specialists. We really gain a second world which, to begin with, is spatial.

We learn to esteem ourselves inhabitants of the world of stars as we formerly considered ourselves inhabitants of the earth. Hitherto we did not realise that we dwell in the world of stars; for a science which does not go as far to strengthen man's thinking cannot make him conscious of his connection, through a second man, with the spatial environment of the earth—a connection similar to that between his physical body and the physical earth. Such a science does not know this. It engages in calculations; but even the calculations of Astrophysics, etc., only reveal things which do not really concern man at all, or—at most—only satisfy his curiosity. After all, what does it mean to a man, or his inner life, to know how the spiral nebular in Canes venatici may be thought of as having originated, or as still evolving? Moreover, it is not even true! Such things do not really concern us. Man's attitude towards the world of stars is like that of some disembodied spirit towards the earth—if such a spirit be thought of as coming from some region or other to visit the earth, requiring neither ground to stand on, nor nourishment, etc. But, in actual fact, from a mere citizen of the earth man becomes a citizen of the universe when he strengthens his thinking in the above way.

We now become conscious of something quite definite, which can be described in the following way. We say to ourselves: It is good that there are cabbages, corn, etc., out there; they build up our physical body (if I may use this somewhat incorrect expression in accordance with the general, but very superficial, view). I am able to discover a certain connection between my physical body and what is there outside in the various kingdoms of Nature. But with strengthened thinking I begin to discover a similar connection between the ‘second man’ who lives in me and what surrounds me in supra-terrestrial space. At length one comes to say: If I go out at night and only use my ordinary eyes, I see nothing; by day the sunlight from beyond the earth makes all objects visible. To begin with, I know nothing. If I restrict myself to the earth alone, I know: there is a cabbage, there a quartz crystal. I see both by the light of the sun, but on earth I am only interested in the difference between them.

But now I begin to know that I myself, as the second man, am made of that which makes cabbage and crystal visible. It is a most significant leap in consciousness that one takes here—a complete metamorphosis. From this point one says to oneself: If you stand on the earth you see what is physical and connected with your physical man. If you strengthen your thinking the supra-terrestrial spatial world begins to concern you and the second man you have discovered just as the earthly, physical world concerned you before. And, as you ascribe the origin of your physical body to the physical earth, you now ascribe your ‘second existence’ to the cosmic ether through whose activities earthly things become visible. From your own experience you can now speak of having a physical body and an etheric body. You see, merely to systematise and think of man as composed of various members gives no real knowledge. We only attain real insight into these things by regarding the complete metamorphosis of consciousness that results from really discovering such a second man within.

I stretch out my physical arm and my physical hand takes hold of an object. I feel, in a sense, the flowing force in this action. Through strengthening my thought I come to feel that it is inwardly mobile and now induces a kind of ‘touching’ within me—a touching that also takes place in an organism; this is the etheric organism; that finer, super-sensible organism which exists no less than the physical organism, though it is connected with the supra-terrestrial, not the terrestrial.

The moment now arrives when one is obliged to descend another step, if I may put it so. Through such ‘imaginative’ thinking as I have described we come, at first, to feel this inward touching of the second man within us; we come, too, to see this in connection with the far spaces of the universal ether. By this term you are to understand nothing but what I have just spoken of; do not read into it a meaning from some other quarter. Now, however, we must return again to ordinary consciousness if we are to get further.

You see, if we are thinking of man's physical body in the way described, we readily ask how it is really related to its environment. It is doubtless related to our physical, terrestrial environment; but how?

If we take a corpse, which is, indeed, a faithful representation of physical man—even of the living physical man—we see, in sharp contours, liver, spleen, kidney, heart, lung, bones, muscles and nerve strands. These can be drawn; they have sharp contours and resemble in this everything that occurs in solid forms. Yet there is a curious thing about this sharply outlined part of the human organism. Strictly speaking, there is nothing more deceptive than our handbooks of anatomy or physiology, for they lead people to think: there is a liver, there a heart, etc. They see all this in sharp contours and imagine this sharpness to be essential. The human organism is looked upon as a conglomeration of solid things. But it is not so at all. Ten per cent., at most, is solid; the other ninety per cent. is fluid or even gaseous. At least ninety per cent. of man, while he lives, is a column of water.

Thus we can say: In his physical body man belongs, it is true, to the solid earth—to what the ancient thinkers in particular called the ‘earth’. Then we come to what is fluid in man; and even in external science one will never gain a reasonable idea of man until one learns to distinguish the solid man from the fluid man this inner surging and weaving element which really resembles a small ocean.

But what is terrestrial can only really affect man through the solid part of him. For even in external Nature you can see, where the fluid element begins, an inner formative force working with very great uniformity. Take the whole fluid element of our earth—its water; it is a great drop. Wherever water is free to take its own form, it takes that of a drop. The fluid element tends everywhere to be drop-like.

What is earthly—or solid, as we say today—occurs in definite, individual forms, which we can recognise. What is fluid, however, tends always to take on spherical form.

Why is this? Well, if you study a drop, be it small or as large as the earth itself, you find it is an image of the whole universe. Of course, this is wrong according to the ordinary conceptions of today; nevertheless it appears so, to begin with, and we shall soon see that this appearance is justified. The universe really appears to us as a hollow sphere into which we look.

Every drop, whether small or large, appears as a reflection of the universe itself. Whether you take a drop of rain, or the waters of the earth as a whole, the surface gives you a picture of the universe. Thus, as soon as you come to what is fluid, you cannot explain it by earthly forces. If you study closely the enormous efforts that have been made to explain the spherical form of the oceans by terrestrial forces, you will realise how vain such efforts are. The spherical form of the oceans cannot be explained by terrestrial gravitational attraction and the like, but by pressure from without. Here, even in external Nature, we find we must look beyond the terrestrial. And, in doing this, we come to grasp how it is with man himself.

As long as you restrict yourself to the solid part of man, you need not look beyond the terrestrial in understanding his form. The moment you come to his fluid part, you require the second man discovered by strengthened thinking. He works in what is fluid.

We are now back again at what is terrestrial. We find in man a solid constituent; this we can explain with our ordinary thoughts. But we cannot understand the form of his fluid components unless we think of the second man as active within him—the second man whom we contact within ourselves in our strengthened thinking as the human etheric body.

Thus we can say: The physical man works in what is solid, the etheric man in what is fluid. Of course, the etheric man still remains an independent entity, but he works through the fluid medium.

We must now proceed further. Imagine we have actually got so far as to experience inwardly this strengthened thinking and, therefore, the etheric—the second—man. This means, that we are developing great inner force. Now, as you know, one can—with a little effort—not only let oneself be stimulated to think, but can even refrain from all thinking. One can stop thinking; and our physical organisation does this for us when we are tired and fall asleep. But it becomes more difficult to extinguish again, of our own accord, the strengthened thinking which results from meditation and which we have acquired by great effort. It is comparatively easy to extinguish an ordinary, powerless thought; to put away—or ‘suggest away’—the strengthened thinking one has developed demands a stronger force, for one cleaves in a more inward way to what one has thus acquired. If we succeed, however, something special occurs.

You see, our ordinary thinking is stimulated by our environment, or memories of our environment. When you follow a train of thought the world is still there; when you fall asleep the world is still there. But it is out of this very world of visible things that you have raised yourself in your strengthened thinking. You have contacted the supra-terrestrial spatial environment, and now study your relationship to the stars as you formerly studied the relation between the natural objects around you. You have now brought yourself into relation with all this, but can suppress it again. In suppressing it, however, the external world, too, is no longer there—for you have just directed all your interest to this strengthened consciousness. The outer world is not there; and you come to what one can call ‘empty consciousness’. Ordinary consciousness only knows emptiness in sleep, and then in the form of unconsciousness.

What one now attains is just this: one remains fully awake, receiving no outer sense impressions, yet not sleeping—merely ‘waking’. Yet one does not remain merely awake. For now, on exposing one's empty consciousness to the indefinite on all sides, the spiritual world proper enters. One says: the spiritual world approaches me. Whereas previously one only looked out into the supra-terrestrial physical environment—which is really an etheric environment—and saw what is spatial, something new, the actual spiritual world, now approaches through this cosmic space from all sides as from indefinite distances. At first the spiritual approaches you from the outermost part of the cosmos when you traverse the path I have described.

A third thing is now added to the former metamorphosis of consciousness. One now says: I bear with me my physical body (inner circle), my etheric body (blue) which I apprehended in my strengthened thinking, and something more that comes from the undefined—from beyond space. I ask you to notice that I am talking of the world of appearance; we shall see in the course of the next few days how far one is justified in speaking of the etheric as coming from the spatial world, and of what lies beyond us (red) coming from the Undefined. We are no longer conscious of this third component as coming from the spatial world. It streams to us through the cosmic ether and permeates us as a ‘third man’. We have now a right to speak, from our own experience, of a first or physical man, a second or etheric man, and a third or ‘astral man’. (You realise, of course, that you must not be put off by words.) We bear within us an astral or third man, who comes from the spiritual, not merely from the etheric. We can speak of the astral body or astral man.

Now we can go further. I will only indicate this in conclusion so that I can elaborate it tomorrow. We now say to ourselves: I breathe in, use my breath for my inner organisation and breathe out. But is it really true that what people think of as a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen enters and leaves us in breathing?

Well, according to the views of present day civilisation, what enters and leaves is composed of oxygen and nitrogen and some other things. But one who attains ‘empty consciousness’ and then experiences this onrush—as I might call it—of the spiritual through the ether, experiences in the breath he draws something not formed out of the ether alone, but out of the spiritual beyond it. He gradually learns to know the spiritual that plays into man in respiration. He learns to say to himself: You have a physical body; this works into what is solid—that is its medium. You have your etheric body; this works into what is fluid. But, in being a man—not merely a solid man or fluid man, but a man who bears his ‘air man’ within him—your third or astral man can work into what is airy or gaseous. It is through this material substance on the earth that your astral man operates.

Man's fluid organisation with its regular but ever changing life will never be grasped by ordinary thinking. It can only be grasped by strengthened thinking. With ordinary thinking we can only apprehend the definite contours of the physical man. And, since our anatomy and physiology merely take account of the body, they only describe ten per cent of man. But the ‘fluid man’ is in constant movement and never presents a fixed contour. At one moment it is like this, at another, like that—now long, now short. What is in constant movement cannot be grasped with the closed concepts suitable for calculations; you require concepts mobile in themselves—‘pictures’. The etheric man within the fluid man is apprehended in pictures.

The third or astral man who works in the ‘airy’ man, is apprehended not merely in pictures but in yet another way. If you advance further and further in meditation—I am here describing the Western process—you notice, after reaching a certain stage in your exercises, that your breath has become something palpably musical. You experience it as inner music; you feel as if inner music were weaving and surging through you. The third man—who is physically the airy man, spiritually the astral man—is experienced as an inner musical element. In this way you take hold of your breathing.

The oriental meditator did this directly by concentrating on his breathing, making it irregular in order to experience how it lives and weaves in man. He strove to take hold of this third man directly.

Thus we discover the nature of the third man, and are now at the stage when we can say: By deepening and strengthening our insight we learn, at first, to distinguish in man:

the physical body which lives in solid forms on the earth and is also connected with the terrestrial kingdoms,

the fluid man in whom an ever mobile, etheric element lives and which can only be apprehended in images (Bilder)—in moving, plastic images,

the astral man who has his physical copy or image (Abbild) in all that constitutes the stream of inspired air.

This stream enters and takes hold of our inner organisation, expands, works, is transformed and streams out again. That is a wonderful process of becoming. We cannot draw it; we might do so symbolically, at most, but not as it really is. You could no more draw this process than you could draw the tones of a violin. You might do this symbolically; nevertheless you must direct your musical sense to hearing inwardly—i.e. you must attend with your inner, musical ear and not merely listen to the external tones. In this inward way you must hear the weaving of your breath—must hear the human astral body. This is the third man. We apprehend him when we attain to ‘empty consciousness’ and allow this to be filled with ‘inspirations’ from without.

Now language is really cleverer than men, for it comes to us from primeval worlds. There is a deep reason why breathing was once called inspiration. In general, the words of our language say much more than we, in our abstract consciousness, feel them to contain.

These are the considerations that can lead us to the three members of man—the physical, the etheric and the astral bodies—which find expression in the solid, fluid and airy ‘men’ and have their physical counterparts in the forms of the solid man, in the changing shapes of the fluid man and in that which permeates man as an inner music, experienced through feeling. The nervous system is indeed the most beautiful representation of this inner music. It is built from out of the astral body—from out of this inner music; and for this reason it has, at a definite part, the wonderful configuration of the spinal cord with its attached nerve-strands. All this together is a wonderful, musical structure that is continually working upwards into man's head.

A primeval wisdom that was still alive in Ancient Greece, felt the presence of this wonderful instrument in man. For the air assimilated through breathing ascends through the whole spinal cord. The air we breathe in ‘enters’ the cerebro-spinal canal and pulsates upwards towards the brain. This music is actually per-formed, but it remains unconscious; only the upper rebound is in consciousness. This is the lyre of Apollo, the inner musical instrument that the instinctive, primeval wisdom still recognised in man. I have referred to these things before, but it is my present intention to give a resume of what has been developed within our society in the course of twenty-one years.

Tomorrow I shall go further and consider the fourth member of man, the ego organisation proper. I shall then show the connection between these various members of man and his life on earth and beyond it—i.e. his so-called eternal life.

Dr. Steiner: Today, we have come together to discuss the results of the official school inspection. From what you told me over the telephone, I have formed a picture. Before I take any position, though, I think it would be a good idea to hear what each of you who participated in the inspection has to report, so that we all have a complete picture. I have repeatedly said that I am willing to meet with the man, but that has not occurred as yet.

We need to discuss all this to attain a perspective from which we can ward off any blows that may come from the public. It is unnecessary, and it would be fruitless, to make objections to the officials. If such things could be successful, we would not need a Waldorf School. The reason the Waldorf School exists is because the official bureaucracy does not understand our methods and our direction.

Let us go through the classes, then each of you can say what occurred in your class.

The teachers report about the inspection in each of the classes. The inspector had asked only very superficial questions..

Dr. Steiner: A boy in Zurich told me that he does not want to go to the school any more because the teaching through illustrative material was too dumb. When I gave the course in Berlin, I spoke about learning to read.1 Such things are very current and should be put into the Threefold newspaper and be used. For instance, how children learn to read, or the fact that our children—this is something I say everywhere—thank God, learn to read only at the age of eight or nine. We need to put such things right under people’s noses. They are certainly more important than some essay about a convention in Honolulu. We should also criticize the practice of failing children. We should mention that, too.

A teacher: He wanted to have quick answers in arithmetic.

Dr. Steiner: If children cannot do arithmetic quickly, their body is still slow.

A teacher: My perception is that what we teach children about grammar is something still foreign to them. Do we have to do that in the second grade?

Dr. Steiner: It depends upon how you do it. You do not always need to teach them the terminology, nouns and verbs, but use them only for yourself to form an objective polarity. A child of seven and a half can certainly differentiate between an activity and a thing. You do not need to emphasize the terminology. You could begin with stories and make the difference between a thing and an activity clear. That is something a child at that age can grasp. They should be able to grasp the difference between running or jumping and a human being or something of that sort. We do not need to follow the form of a pedantic grammar. In particular, with children in the lower grades, you should completely avoid using definitions.

There are further reports.

Dr. Steiner: (Laughingly, to a teacher who was happy about a positive remark made by the school inspector) Yes, you will certainly need to improve there.

The subject teachers report also.

Dr. Steiner: He will come to handwork class only with some old lady.

It is clear that this sort of inspection is an example of something that could never lead to an understanding of what actually happens in a school. When you think of the goodwill this man could have brought to understand at least a little about the Waldorf School, you will see that he had none whatsoever. He simply tried to determine to what extent the children meet the requirements of a regular school. He would need to know that he could learn something about what is actually going on only if he asks himself questions. He would have needed to ask himself how to question the children about what he wanted to know. His primary task should have been to find out from the children what they have learned, and the children would have needed to provide him with the possibility of asking the proper questions.

No one can learn very much if they simply ask the teachers questions, listen to the answers, but lack a firm foundation for forming a judgment about them. I make no assumption about that. There are a large number of psychological reasons why children answer their own teacher well or not. You need only recall how it is at the university for people who do their major examinations with the same professor they had for their seminars. It is easy for them. For the students who have not worked with the same professor, it is more difficult. Those who know the professor have an easy time. Having simply heard the professor’s lectures is not sufficient, since you could not discover his method of asking questions.

It is quite important to make the public aware of the things we consciously had to forego. We should use the space available to us in the “Threefold Social Organism” to present such things to the public. The different anthroposophical organizations here should work together, otherwise everything will dissipate. Everything is already falling apart, becoming unglued. We must work together. We need to publish articles, but of course, we should not obviously direct them at this particular point. That would be quite false. Nevertheless, the official inspection of the school could play a role. We should publish an article presenting, from various perspectives, how important it is for a child to learn to read only around the age of eight or nine. We could give examples like Goethe, who could not read and write until the age of nine, or Helmholtz, who learned to read and write only much later. We could, in contrast, give examples of people who learned to read and write at the age of four or five, then became complete idiots.

This is what we must do. If we do this properly, so that when we see ourselves in danger, and people everywhere are talking about these things, then we will have an effect. Then people could also not say that our intent is aimed at a very limited group. In this way, we can bring many of the weird judgments of the present into line. The actions of a person like the school inspector are simply an extract of the general perspective. If you turn to the entire civilized world using someone like that as an example, what you do will be good. The school inspection shows us what should not be done. Now we can turn to the world and try to make clear what should have been done.

A teacher: I have written an article for “Die Drei.”

Dr. Steiner: Make it short and sweet, don’t write ten pages about it. There is nothing to prevent something that appears in “Die Drei” from also appearing in “The Threefold.”

We’ve already talked about these things. A careful presentation of the impossibility of determining what a school is like by using such inspection methods could be one topic for discussion. Then we would have to defend against all the objections to teaching according to historical periods. When the inspector made his judgment, he said something very characteristic of our times, namely, that life requires people to do arithmetic quickly, and, therefore, we should teach that to the children.

Nearly everything you have said today offers wonderful examples of the way things should not be and how we can improve them. For instance, flunking children. The fact that he referred to the children as bright and dumb in front of the children is absolutely impossible.

He will probably also do what bad teachers always do. He will ask questions that require an exact answer and ignore everything else. He will have no sense of the way children express things. It is really very nice to receive a response from the children in their own way. It would be interesting to know what part of the poem he misunderstood.

You reported his remark that our method of teaching foreign language leads to a mechanical understanding.

These are the things we need to put out in public: Learning to read and write at a not-to-early age; a defense of teaching foreign language at an early age; flunking children; the manner of asking children questions; and, assuming that children will answer in exactly the way you expect them to. We should also mention superficial questions, senseless questions.

This is all connected to modern culture. These methods are decades old, and modern people have developed a spirituality, an attitude within their souls, that shows how they were mistreated as children. Today, only those who are more or less healthy, who have a counterforce within them, can hold up against that. The physical and psychological condition of modern people is often quite sad. That comes from such incorrect forming of questions. You can even see that in the physical body, that is, whether the forces of the soul have become incoherent. Many people take leave of their senses later. Many who still have their senses notice through their heart or lungs that they were mistreated by such things.

We need to be clear that if we did things to satisfy the education authorities, we would have to close. We could then simply put the children in any other school. They see the Waldorf School as an attack.

It is not so important to develop the letters the way they historically developed, since they developed differently in different regions. What is important is a renewal of the artistic path of work. We do not need to use historical forms. We must make that point very clear. From such events, we should learn what we must make clear.

A teacher: I asked the children in my seventh-grade class why they went along and behaved so well. They replied that they did not want to get me into trouble.

Dr. Steiner: That is wonderful behavior on the part of the children.

We should make notes of all of this so we can publicize it. There is so much interesting material that we could fill our publications with it. External activities and specific questions. We need to see that people pay more attention to us and learn more about our way of thinking if we want the Waldorf School movement to spread.

During the course I gave in Berlin, there was something that could also have been published. (Speaking to Dr. von Heydebrand) You remember you had said some things and then someone with an education background said that you had overemphasized the dark side. We should have stepped in then. We should have shown that you were not too extreme, that, in reality, things are very much worse. Experimental pedagogy is reasonable only in its basic ideas, but regarding other things, it is quite unreasonable. It is something only for professors who have to do as many experiments as possible.

The situation in Berlin was impossible. A discussion of barely an hour. There was sufficient time for many people to say really dumb things, but not enough time to defend yourself. In such cases, it would be better not even to speak. We should not leave our people out on a limb. It would be best not to give such presentations. We cannot allow only our opponents to be heard. The situation there was the best possible for those who want to hurt anthroposophy.

Our outside activities are, of course, connected with the outside, but they also belong here in the faculty.

A teacher asks whether they should start teaching Greek and Latin at the same time.

Dr. Steiner: The best, the ideal, would be to begin Greek earlier and then begin Latin after two years. However, that is difficult to do in practice. Then, we would have to drop something else for Greek, and that would be difficult. Our plans are designed to correspond to the individual and to development, so that doesn’t work out. Latin is required for external reasons. It is helpful to do things the way I described in my lecture in Berlin in order to slowly understand the language.

I based the entire development of language upon an imagination, but K. spoke of inspiration and intuition. People today have no sensibility for exact listening, and we need to take such things into account. The things I discussed need to be felt. That is something that can be taught through Greek. Latin is not as important because it does not teach feeling in the same way as Greek.

A teacher: How can we determine which children should attend that class?

Dr. Steiner: As long as we are only a single school, we cannot do much. Only when there are more schools could we make a decision of that sort according to their characteristics, that is, when we can influence the further course of the child’s life. That we have thirty percent who participate in this class is still too few to justify changing our plans for them. We need everything we have.

A teacher requests help with students in the upper grades, N.G. and F.S.

Dr. Steiner: With such difficult cases as N.G., we can approach him with understanding if he still has some belief in a person who can be completely objective about the life he has experienced. He grew up as an extremely lively little spirit from the very beginning. He gave many insightful answers. Now he is growing up with a mother who is the personification of a lie. She is one of those people who falls down with a heart attack, but on the soft carpet, not next to it. She is completely untrue. She is a woman who always wanted to bring Anthroposophy to her husband, a very superficial and trivial person. The children knew about this at an early age. This is one of the comedies in life that have such a tragic effect upon children that they lose all trust in life.

Now, the boy knows all this. He needs only the fulfillment he so much desires. He needs to be able to believe in a person. That is an opportunity he should have, namely to have people in his surroundings who are interested in telling the truth about even the most mundane of things.

A teacher: He says that he smells anthroposophy everywhere.

Dr. Steiner: In such cases, you can help him form a sound judgment if you take everything into account. The beliefs of such boys as N.G. are based upon the idea that everyone lies, but that can be cured. It could be difficult for him because he knows he was forced into the Waldorf School. For that reason, he now asks what is right. That is one thing.

Now that he is here in the Waldorf School, he must be able to find something that he can believe in anthroposophy. This is a truly Herculean task. It would have been quite normal for him to attend a school where life approached him from outside. The worst thing for such a boy is to place him in the Waldorf School. A child does not have to be in the Waldorf School. A school that pleases the school board could be a good school in which to spend your time from the age of six until fourteen. The Waldorf School is not necessarily the right school for everyone, but one day, there he was.

I am not sure it is pedagogically proper that F.S. is here. In 1908 I held a course about the Apocalypse. He occupied himself by digging deep holes in the garden soil. If you came close to him, he stood up and kicked you in the stomach. He never gave an answer. Once, an older lady wanted to do something nice for him, but he took some sand and threw it in her eyes. He broke nearly all of the coffee cups. He called himself “you” because people told him, “You did it.” If he is still behaving the same way, but at a higher level, then things have not improved. Now he would call himself, “I,” but for a different reason.

Somehow, we will have to come to grips with F.S. and N.G. Someone who has never been involved with his situation and in whom he can trust, will need to take over N.G. In the case of “you,” only someone who impresses him can help. He never knew his father very well. He needs someone who would impress him. (Speaking to a teacher) Can’t you do that? You have impressed many people. You certainly gave X.Y. the idea that you are impressive.

While I was in Berlin, someone approached me and told me about this boy. From that, I had an impression that the real reason for these things lies in his living conditions. We should try to avoid having anyone lodge there. X. does not like the Waldorf School. I promised the woman to ask you if he could live with one of you. He posed some questions concerning Schopenhauer, and that is quite positive. He also greets me very warmly.

A teacher asks about a child with curvature of the spine.

Dr. Steiner: He should be in the remedial class for a time. Let him do only what he wants, and discover what he does not want to do.

A language teacher complains about difficulties in the 7b English class.

Dr. Steiner: That is not at all surprising when you consider how their class teacher keeps them under control. That certainly calls forth a comparison. He knows what he wants. If she did not have him, but someone else instead, then (speaking to the language teacher) it would be much easier for you. You have a rather uncertain nature, and your own thoughts sit within the form of the children’s thoughts. These are things that would not occur to such an extent if you had a colleague more like yourself. The class teacher impresses the entire class because he is so much a part of things. You will have to break your terrible, vaguely lyrical, sentimental attitude when you go into the class.

The language teacher says something about boxing children’s ears.

Dr. Steiner: If you give them a slap, you should do it the way Dr. Schubert does.

Dr. Schubert: Did somebody complain?

Dr. Steiner: No, you are always slapping them.

Dr. Schubert: When did I do that?

Dr. Steiner: Well, I mean astral slapping. There are physical slaps and astral slaps. It doesn’t matter which one you give, but you cannot slap a child sentimentally.

The class reflects our thoughts. You need to be firmer in your own thoughts. If I were in your class, I would do the same. I would certainly behave terribly. I wouldn’t understand what is happening. I wouldn’t know what you want. You must be firmer in your thinking. The battle of a whole class against the teacher is not actually real, it is not something you can touch. We can talk about individual children, but not about a whole class. Look at the things Baravalle has written. Keep them until Whitsun. We cannot hold some lyrical discourses about a class. You seem to me today to be like one of those books from Husserl. Break your habit of thinking like that. It is a picture of your own inner nature.

We have to strongly integrate the art of teaching with the subject, but at the same time selflessly integrate it with the subject. Those are not common characteristics.

The 7a class has become quite good, and you can work well with them. The effectiveness of teaching depends upon the overall impression the teacher makes upon the children and not upon some small misdeeds or acts against authority. It is easy for a teacher to become laughable through some piece of clothing, but that will recede after a time. Perhaps you have a hole in your boot, but that is not very important. You cannot change those things. What is important is the humanity of the teacher.

The context of the following is unclear.

Dr. Steiner: They had the audience in their control. In the Vienna hall, Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony was presented in 1887. I attended a concert by Schalk. That was the first performance of Bruckner’s symphony.

A question is asked about four students in the 7a class.

Dr. Steiner: Will the children go into an apprenticeship? They are all nearly the same type. I would hope that things would become better if, with these children, you were to introduce a reading of a speech by Buddha objectively and formally, with all the repetitions, and then had them memorize short passages. You could also use The Bhagavad Gita. You could do that with the whole class. Go through it with the whole class and have those children copy it, then do it a second time and they should be able to present it. You should particularly aim at those children. This could also be done in teaching history and language. You could do that every day.

A teacher asks about a girl whose parents do not want her to participate in eurythmy.

Dr. Steiner: Convince the parents. She should not interrupt the eurythmy lessons.

A teacher asks about P.R., a student with a crippled hand.

Dr. Steiner: We should think about what profession we should direct him toward. He is not very dexterous with that hand. He writes poorly. He should become something like a bookkeeper, or some other job where that is not important. He certainly cannot become an actor. The best would be if we could bring such children so far along that they could then participate in the normal morning instruction, and then have some continuation of their education following elementary school. We need to try to bring him along so that he overcomes his self-consciousness and participates in handwork. He should certainly learn bookkeeping. We need to find a teacher for him.

A teacher: The elementary schools here have more periods of handwork.

Dr. Steiner: So much handwork is unnecessary.

A teacher: R.L. in the fourth grade is not coming to school.

Dr. Steiner: We cannot force the children if parents don’t want it.

We need to work practically with the things you mentioned today. There is no doubt that we have to take over a greater responsibility toward extending the movement so that the movement is not torn apart by some small thing one day. The whole world is looking at the Waldorf School, the whole civilized world. We must do a number of things well in the school that the movement is not doing very well in other areas. The main thing is that everyone in Stuttgart work together, that all the different groups connected with the movement, that is, really connected, find some way of working with one another.

When you are active in the anthroposophical movement on a broader scale, you will find that elsewhere people do not know how to relate to Stuttgart and what is happening here. It is important that the Waldorf School movement keep its promises. In particular, even though we may fail in other areas, the cultural areas need to be particularly strong in the world. The Waldorf School and its faculty need to always be careful to spread an understanding of themselves. Lectures like those given by Schwebsch, Stein, and Heydebrand are particularly effective. Answers to specific questions are often misunderstood.

The Waldorf teachers should not slide into that mistaken behavior so common today, that is, to write articles like the one X. wrote about the article from S.G. We will slowly die if we engage in normal journalism and a non-objective treatment of our work. It, the lecture from S.G., was certainly unbelievable, wasn’t it? I like S.G. quite a lot, but he needs to gradually learn what is important. For now, he is simply in his baby shoes. It makes our movement laughable. It is a hymn sung out of tune with the worst journalistic attitude. I would prefer to have said that when X. was here. It is a sad day, a very sad experience. We must remain above all that. There is not one uplifting thought in the entire article aside from those dealing with declamation and recitation. If we do such things that show so little goodwill to remain with the subject, if such habits enter our work, we will soon have a complete demise.

Concerning the education conference.

Dr. Steiner: It should be in a broader context that would enable us to work not from compromises, but toward the real perspective of our pedagogy. We do not want to do what was done at previous conferences and simply talk about things. We should discuss things in such a way that people genuinely understand them. We must create a feeling that our people already know what others want to say. Our people should not simply stand there while someone else says something we do not know. We must know which of the questions could arise in the conference. We cannot allow people to say we are poking our noses into everything, but when experts come along, you can see how little we know. We need to arrange things so that someone cannot come along and say something and there not be enough time for us to reply.

That must not happen. It was a real problem in Berlin since people went away thinking that we spoke about Einstein, but knew nothing about him. Aside from that, the discussion leader thought that idiot was right. The others who put on the symposium also thought the same thing. In any event, it happened—something that had a detrimental effect upon the whole scientific mood from the very beginning. The first problem was that Rittelmeyer came along and said we had done poorly. Such things simply must not happen. If that were to happen here with pedagogy, it would be terrible. The listeners should perceive that our work and each speaker is of a high level.

We have put enormous effort into setting something up. The conferences have had an enormous success, but no one lets the results of the conferences be truly effective. If we could only find a way to let what we accomplish have a practical effect. What you have to say does not actually affect people. Afterward, no one actually knows what you have to say. Our work needs to be used more. We need to affect opinions. However, I am convinced that this thing with X. will be forgotten. For example, we have long had the problem that we have an economic movement, but we cannot get any economists to speak about it. The economic perspective is important. Leinhas’s lecture was good, and people will not forget it. The same is true for Dr. Unger’s essay about valuation. That is the beginning of something we should further develop in economics. Now, however, we must talk about the existence of three pillars that should in some way be comprehensive.

Everywhere I went in my long series of lectures, I mentioned the lectures given by you, Dr. von Heydebrand, and Leinhas. I spoke of them everywhere. We must create opinion. Our work must speak to people. Pedagogy needs an opinion connected with the substance of our movement. We can ignore negative opinions. We must do what is good.

That is something that is painful for me, but I want you to know it because the Waldorf School has developed that good spirit. This does not need to be said to the Waldorf School itself. The Waldorf School has a great task because there is no leadership in other areas. The school is moving along well, but it has a responsibility to take up some things that have an even larger responsibility associated with them. When something negative occurs now, with the increasing number of followers, then it is a negative event that is actually gigantic. That would, of course, not happen with the Waldorf School. Such things can tear a spiritual or cultural movement apart. For that reason, those working in the Waldorf School need to be the primary support for the whole movement. That is how things are today. The Waldorf School has a broad basis because it has kept all its promises. It can, therefore, be the primary support for the entire anthroposophical movement. We need such a support today. Your responsibility is quickly growing. That is something each of you needs to take to heart. We haven’t the least reason to be happy when the number of followers increases. We should be aware that every increase in interest is also an increase in our own responsibility.

A teacher asks about a pedagogical conference in Kaiserslautern.

Dr. Steiner: We have already decided against the proposal for Bremen. I looked at the big picture. We cannot accomplish much by systematically discussing pedagogy before there is any possibility of seeing some movement in regard to pedagogical questions in modern times. The seventy or so people who would come there would come only out of politeness. They would not know what is needed. We would first have to tell them that something is happening in the world. We would first have to hold a cultural and historical lecture on pedagogy. That would be necessary. Giving a three-day course for people whom you cannot help any further would mean too much wasted strength.

We saw that here. The teachers were the least interested. They all said they could not attend. I am uncertain if that has gotten better, but what else could happen?

We must awaken people’s awareness of what needs to be done. I’m afraid people believe we should begin the threefold. I think that if two or three of you want to give a lecture there on the return trip from Holland, that would be good. People need to be aware. God, there was a conference in Stuttgart and then one in Berlin. Now things need to be made more well known, otherwise we will be running to every village giving lectures. It is enough when we do that in some of the central areas. It is not efficient if we are running everywhere. We must improve the efficiency of our work.

A teacher: Is there something concrete we could do in Berlin?

Dr. Steiner: Quite a lot. We could discuss a large number of questions there and essentially nowhere else in the world today, but theology is too strong there. There were a large number of questions that could be treated nowhere else in the world. We need to make the lectures more well known. The question is, how? Steffen printed the “Christmas Conference” in Das Goetheanum in such a way that I would almost prefer to print his report than my lectures. He did a wonderful job there.

When such dry reports are published, the kind people are used to seeing in academic journals, then people have difficulty getting through them. Not just my own lectures, but also those of others, were written in an indescribably pedantic way. In that case, I can only say there is not much goodwill behind them. R. could do it better. When he gives a lecture, it is really very good, but when he writes something, it would drive you up the walls. Here, we see no goodwill. Such things wash the ground away from under our feet.

The subject of our lecture today may at first seem surprising. But Theosophy does not just want to bring messages of supersensory research, but wants to let them flow into human life, bringing strength and the joy of working for life. It wants to be a kind of art of living, albeit under certain conditions. It is not something that wants to be quickly established, but rather, Theosophy draws from sources of deep knowledge. Therefore, it cannot seek to win over many people; it is not a doctrine that wants to be promoted with fanaticism to broad circles. [A movement of this kind must keep its distance from fanaticism.] The theosophist must make the opposite of fanaticism his most important quality – [understanding of people should be the theosophist's hallmark.] He must be able to penetrate [into the souls of others], into the souls of opponents [and gain understanding for the justified refutations].

And who would want to deny that there is much to be said against Theosophy in a deeply justified way? After all, Theosophy or spiritual science speaks of the most sacred and dignified matters, and does so more to the heart than to reason. And the heart is easily inclined to surrender to things that might speak of an increase in vitality. To penetrate into the depths of what Theosophy means, a long journey is necessary, which by no means all those who agree with the Theosophical life out of the heart take.

If someone approaches Theosophy in our time, it must be admitted that this is very difficult. One concern after another piles up. Therefore, a scientifically educated person in particular cannot easily find his way around – with a genuine sense of truth. In addition, there are many things today that are called Theosophy, but which are not very useful. Therefore, the elementary principles of what we would like to call Theosophy should be described first, [before moving on to the concerns].

First of all, we must be clear about the structure of the human being. Man does not consist only of the physical body, not only of what we can perceive with our brain-bound mind, but it must be asserted that the physical body is integrated with a sum of higher, supersensible , namely, first of all, the etheric or life body, by which the physical body is permeated throughout. The etheric body ensures that the physical body does not follow the forces of the external physical world. It only follows these forces when it is abandoned by the etheric body at death. Then the physical forces act on the components of the human body and cause them to disintegrate and dissolve. The existence of this etheric body can be determined through clairvoyant research. But it can also be seen that it is necessary, that we need a fighter against the otherwise inevitable physical decay. Other living beings are also endowed with an etheric body as long as they are living beings. Plants also have it.

In addition to this, human beings also have a consciousness soul or an astral body. This we have in common with the animal world. It is the carrier of all the drives, passions and desires we have in our lives. What we no longer have in common with animals is what we call our human sense of self. The fact that we can say “I” to ourselves makes us human beings the pinnacle of creation. From the moment when the child becomes capable of saying “I” to itself, our human consciousness, our memory begins. We therefore distinguish between a physical body, etheric body, astral body and the I.

But that is not the only way in which Theosophy differs from the generally held view. It also considers the inner core of a person's being, the I, to be more than just an earthly existence between birth and death. Theosophy seeks to show that not everything that is expressed through the I in a person has been determined in just one lifetime. Rather, this central core of the human being comes from earlier stages of existence. In a sense, the human being forms his own body before he fully enters it with his sense of self. Then there is the further claim of Theosophy: After death, the human being only discards his physical shell, but the core of his being also lives on after physical death, only to enter into a renewed physical life later on.

The changing fortunes of human beings can only be understood by grasping the repeated lives of the same human being on earth. We see one person living a miserable and unhappy life, while another is happy. Science must ask about the causes of this tremendous inequality of life's destinies. Spiritual science claims that a person has built his own destiny in his previous life; depending on how he lives now, his following destiny in the future life will be shaped.

That it can be so is already evident to a certain degree from the course of his present life. If someone emigrates to America, for example, his fate will essentially be shaped by what he was in Europe. What he has learned here will be very important for his progress and the way he lives over there. Whether he was a shoemaker or a banker here, for example, will have a very significant influence on the way he lives his life over there. But after he has been in America for a while, he will have learned new things and will have become a different person. In order for a person to mature, different destinies are necessary; this cannot possibly all happen in a single life between birth and death. The fruits of our previous lives ripen for us in the present life, and what we learn now will benefit our later life.

Theosophy thus teaches the immortality of the central core of the human being. Between death and a new birth, the soul goes through very different, purely spiritual states of longer duration.

Regarding the state of sleep, Theosophy says that in this state, the physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed; the astral body and the ego, that is, that which is the carrier of consciousness, emerges and lives during sleep in supersensible worlds.

The whole appears as a closed system. We will see in what way theosophy draws its knowledge of this system. This happens through clairvoyant research. How do you acquire this ability? It can be said that these clairvoyant powers can be awakened in man through meditation. In this way, the soul can be made into an instrument of spiritual research, and indeed into a research that is just as exact and methodical as the research that chemists and physicists use physical means for to study matter. In this way, dormant powers are brought to the surface within the human being. We recall Goethe's words about the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears that can be opened in man.

Having said this, we turn to the objections to Theosophy. Of course, we cannot exhaust all the objections to Theosophy. We will only consider a few that may present serious and significant difficulties for an honest conviction. If you are completely under the spell of modern science, you may come to the following conclusion when you first study Theosophy; you can [rightly] say: Yes, I believe that women who are not critically minded [who do not critically examine science but follow the urge of the heart] and have not learned to think logically, can have their world puzzles solved by this spiritual science. And, as far as I am concerned, the same applies to men who do not know science. Just note this: you believe that you need an etheric body as the carrier of the life forces in the body. Do you not know that you are thereby amateurishly reaching back into the time when it was assumed that organically formed substances could not be produced in the laboratory, but only in the living organism? Therefore, in those days, it had to be assumed that special vital forces were at work in all living things. But progressive research [in the nineteenth century] has shown that the simplest of these substances can be produced in the laboratory by purely chemical means, just as they can in a living organism. This dealt a fatal blow to the old doctrine of the life force – vis vitalis – or life ether, because it proved, albeit initially only in the simplest of organisms, that the organic structure of nature is built in the same way as the non-living, inorganic. It is a very serious and worthy thought that once the beginning of the chemical production of the organic has been made, it will continue, even if few substances can be produced in this way at present. This is experimental proof that the same laws apply to the inanimate as to the animate. It is therefore ignorance when Theosophy still speaks of the fact that life in a body can only be explained by a life body. Such a researcher can say: What subtle research had to gradually strive to elucidate, you theosophists simply want to make easy with your fantastic life body. You claim that it is visible to the supersensible faculty of cognition, but the above proves that it is not needed at all, it is not necessary. But it must be a serious first requirement for serious knowledge that it makes no unnecessary assumptions. He who weighs things as theosophists should do, should feel that there is much earnestness and dignity in such an objection.

But let us look further. Theosophy claims that an astral body and an ego are needed to explain the phenomena of consciousness. We can indeed concede what even strict researchers such as Du Bois-Reymond say, that what we experience in us as inner life is not possible from purely material processes within the brain. So let us assume that we have to do without an explanation for the time being and write the famous “Ignorabimus” below it. But is it justified to say that when something different, something supersensory, emerges from matter, that this is an independent entity? An opponent of Theosophy could say this with some justification. He could point to magnetic forces, which do indeed emanate from an inorganic substance, the magnet, and are bound to it. So after all, a supersensible power such as magnetism is produced out of material substance. Furthermore, it is no different with the development of the other forces, for example, with the force of gravity that is bound to the planets. Why should it not be the same with what we scientifically know as states of excitation of the brain, and what takes place in the consciousness and inner life of man? There is absolutely no compulsion to explain the phenomena of consciousness differently. Even what has not yet been researched can be explained in this way. In any case, the hasty assumption of an astral body to explain these processes is amateurish. Even where we are still forced to remain ignorant, we must wait patiently for serious research to say something about it.

What used to be the horror of horrors in science, the so-called theory of potentialities [in psychology], lies behind us. There, a system was built on the premise that if the soul can think, then it has the potential to think. It can feel, so it has the potential to feel. According to this, the soul was a system of nothing but nested concepts of capacity, without realizing that they had not explained anything, but had only put words in the place of something. Now the opponent can say: Isn't your astral and etheric body just as much something nested and unrecognized as the old doctrine of capacity was? Such a thing can rightly be objected.

So Theosophy is not for someone who stands on the ground of in-depth modern scientific knowledge. To such a person, Theosophy appears to be somewhat dilettantish compared to the demands of rigorous research. Furthermore, Theosophy says: During sleep, the astral body and the ego leave the human body with the consciousness. Since they are not present with what remains in bed, they must still be found somewhere. Where else should they be present than in a spiritual world? On the other hand, serious science asks: Is it necessary to invoke a special, supernatural explanation for this state of sleep when the scientifically given explanations are sufficient? It is perfectly possible to explain sleep quite simply. The scientifically applied method views the matter quite differently. It says: When we are awake, the organism wears out. Toxins are formed as a result of the activity carried out by the excited brain during the waking state. When so many toxins have accumulated, they kill consciousness through mechanical or chemical action, which means that sleep sets in. Now it is not the organs that otherwise generate consciousness that are at work, but other organs that continue to work in the human being, which in turn destroy the poisons in the body that the activity of the organs of consciousness has produced, and so on. Such a self-regulatory hypothesis is entirely possible. But if it is possible to explain the alternation of sleep and waking with it, then it is not permissible to say anything else about it. The theosophical theory is at least a daring assumption. The true facts will only be able to be explained gradually, and until then one must stick to the obvious and simplest explanation of these phenomena.

What about the theosophical assertion of the repetition of earthly lives? Theosophy shows how man develops from childhood; this cannot possibly be explained by mere inheritance. Children of the same parents are fundamentally different, and so on. Therefore, something must be added that is not inherited, that is already present in the life germ of the newborn human being, and that can only be explained by repeated lives on earth. For example, twins can be different despite simultaneous inheritance.

The scientific objection to this is as follows: What constitutes the essence of a person is not something that is inherited from a single father or mother, but from a long chain of ancestors. If Theosophy now says: If you attribute everything to heredity, why is there any individuality at all in the development of each person? The objection is as follows: People must therefore be different because so many different influences flow into each individual's life, [which has a transforming effect on people from early childhood on]. Genius is a particularly good example of this. It emerges, endowed with special qualities, which we can, however, already find in the various ancestors. In the case of genius, they are then combined as a grand total. Brentano explains the soul work in geniuses as being able to quickly piece thoughts together, and thus only in a certain increase over ordinary human thought activity. This easier mobility in the brain molecules can only be inherited. The spiritual researcher says, however, This is actually not very logical. The genius is at the end of an inheritance line; it should be at the beginning of the same if it is to be inherited by the descendants. The objection [against this] of the easier excitability in the brain of the genius must apply, and it can therefore be concluded on the part of science: this increased excitability causes the brain to wear down more quickly. Is it any wonder that the reproductive process is affected in a genius, because his brain wears down more quickly? This is a legitimate objection. However, modern science is particularly suspicious of what is referred to as clairvoyant talent. We have to admit that extrasensory experiences do exist. Such perceptions are different from natural perception. This also occurs pathologically in what we usually call hallucinations, for example. It is therefore not surprising when the scientist says: Where is the possibility to recognize the truth and establish objective facts? How do we know that these are not simply subjective experiences? The strict scientist is careful to only call scientifically that which can be objectively verified. But the strict scientific epistemological methods are not applicable to the results of training in the humanities. What supposedly presents itself to the clairvoyant is only a world of images. Even in pathological conditions, it is only reminiscences of reality. It turns out, for example, that clairvoyants have only been able to see a train since trains have existed. In books about clairvoyant experiences, we only ever find what was actually present at the time, combined just a little differently. After all, it is combined from the warmth and cold, light and shade of real life. For example, it is said that the astral body is blue, red, yellow and so on, just like the known physical paints. These are the colors of the physical as they are seen, so nothing new. Such appearances have a pathological background, are only hallucinations and really add nothing new to our knowledge. The mere ability to combine external properties is quite sufficient to explain them.

Theosophists must understand that such objections arise from the deepest, most earnest deliberation of precisely the most serious contemporaries. Those who have grown old in scientific ideas are not easily convinced by theosophical objections.

But Theosophy also comes with religious, moral and ethical ideas and impulses. Can that be right?

The first objection that comes to mind is this: if Theosophy views life in such a way that the present life is seen as the result of past experiences, then interest in life itself wanes. Such a view thus amounts to an education in fatalism. It is a paralysis of life when you can think, “I have time; there are many lives ahead of me.” The objection is actually trivial to take, but it is practically correct, because people are indeed casual by nature.

And the prospect of a supersensible world, how does it express itself ethically? Necessarily in such a way that interest in practical life diminishes. You can see this, for example, in the artist who does not want to devote himself to the practical. Such a view of life makes one ascetic, hostile to life, and paralyzing instead of stimulating. One often sees wonderful people among the Theosophists who live in a kind of cloud-cuckoo-land. Women in particular are easily found to have become self-indulgent and out of touch with reality. This cannot be logically refuted, but only through life itself.

Furthermore, one could say: You have made ethics a result of selfishness. Whoever does good, according to your view, expects a reward in karmic compensation. Whoever does evil, or wants to do evil, refrains from it out of fear of the corresponding evil in the next life. So the doctrine of karma is actually a doctrine of education? A higher form of selfishness! What a person sows, he must reap - [this] is ultimately a selfish principle of life. Thus, Theosophy is also ethically and morally life-threatening.

Furthermore, you transfer divine world justice into the human being himself by letting him work out his destiny in various earthly lives. You thereby transfer that which otherwise lives in the Godhead outside of us as a punishing or rewarding God into the human being himself. Man is thereby deified. Where is the free love of God when the divine is transferred into one's own inner being? Into the inner being of man? - The opponent can say: It is in contradiction to a truly religious world view when one transfers the self-sacrifice of God, the redemption of man out of divine grace, into the inner being of man himself.

Such objections could be multiplied many times over. Devotion to an external God is a fundamental condition of ethics and religion, and this finds no justification in Theosophy. This is how it can be expressed; and we must learn to understand this fully as Theosophists, only then can we keep ourselves free from fanaticism. Only the most important guidelines could be given here. They should also teach us tolerance towards our opponents. We should not try to beat them out of the field, but above all strive to learn to understand them.

Let us now show by way of example how this is to be understood. In 1868, the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann wrote a book called “The Philosophy of the Unconscious”. Although some of it is unmethodical and flawed and not useful to us, it is based on certain spiritual principles and touches on deep existential issues. This book caused quite a stir when it was published. It was, after all, the time of the reign of the most blatant materialism. This book strangely touched the fanatical materialists such as Haeckel and other Darwinists. They found the book extremely amateurish. Many counter-writings against the book were published. But one anonymous refutation caused a particularly great stir. It presented everything that could be objected to Eduard von Hartmann's book in such a methodical and complete way, and with such keen insight, that Oscar Schmidt, for example, said: “It's a shame that the unknown author didn't identify himself.” Haeckel himself said, “He should identify himself, and we will consider him one of our own.” Soon the second edition of this writing was necessary. This time the anonymous author named himself: it was Eduard von Hartmann! This second edition did not have the same success with Hartmann's opponents – [their praise soon died down.]

This is a good example of how one can see beyond one's opponent and judge more correctly in the opponent's interest than the opponent himself.

Much more could be said, but for now we must be satisfied with what has been said. It does not take the worst to be seen sprouting from Theosophy. We must therefore endeavor to learn to understand our opponents.

I have tried to show how Theosophy can be refuted. The day after tomorrow it should become clear whether the refutation is final or whether, nevertheless, reasons can be put forward that will be valid against this fight - which, as we have seen, can be waged with a certain justification.

When we consider how Karma works,¹ we always have to bear in mind that the human Ego, which is the essential being, the inmost being, of man, has as it were three instruments through which it is able to live and express itself in the world. These are the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. Man really carries the physical, etheric and astral bodies with him through the world, but he himself is not in any one of these bodies. In the truest sense he is the Ego; and it is the Ego which both suffers and creates Karma.

Now the point is to gain an understanding of the relationship between man as the Ego-being and these three instrumental forms—if I may call them so—the physical, etheric and astral bodies. This will give us the foundation for an understanding of the essence of Karma. We shall gain a fruitful point of view for the study of the physical, the etheric and the astral in man in relation to Karma, if we consider the following.

The physical as we behold it in the mineral kingdom, the etheric as we find it working in the plant kingdom, and the astral as we find it working in the animal kingdom—all these are to be found in the environment of man here on Earth. In the Cosmos surrounding the Earth we have that Universe into which, if I may so describe it, the Earth extends on all sides. Man can feel a certain relationship between what takes place on the Earth and what takes place in the cosmic environment. But when we come to Spiritual Science we have to ask: Is this relationship really so commonplace as the present-day scientific conception of the world imagines? This modern scientific conception of the world examines the physical qualities of everything on the Earth, living and lifeless. It also investigates the stars, the sun, the moon, etc.; and it discovers—indeed it is particularly proud of the discovery—that these heavenly bodies are fundamentally of the same nature as the Earth.

Such a conception can only result from a form of knowledge which at no point comes to a real grasp of man himself—a knowledge which takes hold only of what is external to man. The moment, however, we really take hold of Man as he stands within the Universe, we become able to discover the relationships between the several instrumental members of man's nature, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body and the corresponding entities, the corresponding realities of Being, in the Cosmos.

In regard to the etheric body of man, we find spread out in the Cosmos the universal Ether. The etheric body of man has a definite human shape, definite forms of movement within it, and so on. These, it is true, are different in the cosmic Ether. Nevertheless the cosmic Ether is fundamentally of like nature with what we find in the human etheric body. In the same way we can speak of a similarity between what is found in the human astral body and a certain astral principle that works through all things and all beings out in the far-spread Universe.

Here we come to something of extraordinary importance, something which in its true nature is quite foreign to the human being of to-day. Let us take our start from this. (A drawing is made on the blackboard). We have, first, the Earth; and on the Earth we have Man, with his etheric body. Then in the Earth's environment we have the cosmic Ether—the cosmic Ether which is of the same nature as the etheric in man. In man we also have the astral body. In the cosmic environment too there is Astrality. Where are we to find this cosmic Astrality? Where is it? It is indeed to be found, but we must first discover—what it is in the Cosmos that betrays the presence of cosmic Astrality; what it is that reveals it. Somewhere or other is the Astrality. Is this Astrality in the Cosmos quite invisible and imperceptible, or is it, after all, in some way perceptible to us?

In itself, of course, the Ether too is imperceptible for our physical senses. If I may put it so, when you are looking at a small fragment of Ether, you see nothing with your physical senses, you simply see through it. The Ether is like an empty nothingness to you. But when you regard the etheric environment as a totality, you behold the blue sky, of which we also say that it is not really there but that you are gazing into empty space. Now the reason why you see the blue of the sky is that you are actually perceiving the end of the Ether. Thus you behold the Ether as the blue of the heavens. The perception of the blue sky is really and truly a perception of the Ether. We may therefore say: In that we perceive the blue of the sky we are perceiving the universal Ether that surrounds us.

At first contact, we see through the Ether. It allows us to do so; and yet, it makes itself perceptible in the blue heavens. Hence the existence for human perception of the blue of the sky is expressed in that we say: The Ether itself, though imperceptible, yet rises to the level of perceptibility by reason of the great majesty with which it stands there in the Universe, revealing its presence, making itself known in the blue of the vast expanse.

Physical science theorises materialistically about the blue of the sky; and for physical science it is indeed very difficult to reach any intelligent conclusion on this point, for the simple reason that it is bound to admit that where we see the blue of the sky there is nothing physical. Nevertheless men spin out the most elaborate theories to explain how the rays of light are reflected and refracted in a peculiar way so as to call forth this blue of the sky. In reality, it is here that the super-sensible world begins already to hold sway. In the Cosmos the Supersensible does indeed become visible to us. We have only to discover where and how it becomes visible. The Ether becomes perceptible to us through the blue of the sky.

But now, somewhere there is also present the astral element of the Cosmos. In the blue sky the Ether peers through, as it were, into the realms of sense. Where then does the Astrality in the Cosmos peer through into the realms of perceptibility? The answer, my dear friends, is this.

Every star that we see glittering in the heavens is in reality a gate of entry for the Astral. Wherever the stars are twinkling and glittering in towards us, there glitters and shines the Astral. Look at the starry heavens in their manifold variety; in one part the stars are gathered into heaps and clusters, or in another they are scattered far apart. In all this wonderful configuration of radiant light, the invisible and super-sensible astral body of the Cosmos makes itself visible to us.

For this reason we must not consider the world of stars unspiritually. To look up to the world of stars and speak of worlds of burning gases is just as though—forgive the apparent absurdity of the comparison, but it is precisely true—it is just as though someone who loves you were gently stroking you, holding the fingers a little apart, and you were then to say that it feels like so many little ribbons being drawn across your cheek. It is no more untrue that little ribbons are laid across your cheek when someone strokes you, than that there exist up there in the heavens those material entities of which modern physics tells. It is the astral body of the Universe which is perpetually wielding its influences—like the gently stroking fingers—on the etheric organism of the Cosmos. The etheric Cosmos is organised for very long duration; it is for this reason that a star has its quality of fixity, representing a perpetual influence on the cosmic Ether by the astral Universe. It lasts far longer than the stroking of your cheek. But in the Cosmos things do last longer, for there we are dealing with gigantic measures. Thus in the starry heavens that we perceive, we actually behold an expression of the soul-life of the cosmic astral world.

In this way, an immense, unfathomable life, yet, at the same time, a soul-life, a real and actual life of the soul, is brought into the Cosmos. Think how dead the Cosmos appears to us when we look into the far spaces and see nothing but burning gaseous bodies. Think how living it all becomes when we know that the stars are an expression of the love with which the astral Cosmos works upon the etheric Cosmos—for this is to express it with perfect truth. Think then of those mysterious processes when certain stars suddenly light up at certain times,—processes which have only been explained to us by means of physical hypotheses that do not lead to any real understanding. Stars that were not there before, light up for a time, and disappear again. Thus in the Cosmos too there is a “stroking” of shorter duration. For it is true indeed that in epochs when divine Beings desire to work in an especial way from the astral world into the etheric, we behold new stars light up and fade away again.

We ourselves in our own astral body have feelings of delight and comfort in the most varied ways. In like manner in the Cosmos, through the cosmic astral body, we have the varied configuration of the starry heavens. No wonder that an ancient science, instinctively clairvoyant, describes this third member of our human organism as the “astral” or “starry” body, seeing that it is of like nature with that which reveals itself to us in the stars.

It is only the Ego that we do not find revealed in the cosmic environment. Why is this? We shall find the reason if we consider how this human Ego manifests here on the Earth, in a world that is in reality threefold,—physical, etheric and astral. The Ego of man, as it appears within the Universe, is ever and again a repetition of former lives on Earth; and again and again it finds itself in the life between death and a new birth. But when we observe the Ego in its life between death and a new birth, we perceive that the Etheric which we have here in the cosmic environment of the Earth has no significance for the human Ego. The etheric body is laid aside soon after death. It is only the astral world, that shines in towards us through the stars that has significance for the Ego in the life between death and a new birth. And in that world which glistens in towards us through the stars, in that world there live the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies with whom man forms his Karma between death and a new birth.

Indeed, when we follow this Ego in its successive evolutions through lives between birth and death and between death and a new birth, we cannot remain within the world of Space at all. For two successive earthly lives cannot be within the same space. They cannot be within that Universe which is dependent on spatial co-existence. Here therefore we go right out of Space and enter into Time. This is actually so. We go out of Space and come into the pure flow of Time when we contemplate the Ego in its successive lives on Earth.

Now consider this, my dear friends. In Space, Time is still present, of course, but within this world of Space we have no means of experiencing Time in itself. We always have to experience Time through Space and spatial processes. For example, if you wish to experience Time, you look at the clock, or, if you will, at the course of the sun. What do you see? You see the various positions of the hands of the clock or of the sun. You see something that is spatial. Through the fact that the positions of the hand or of the sun are changed, through the fact that spatial things are present to you as changing, you gain some idea of Time. But of Time itself there is really nothing in this spatial perception. There are only varied spatial configurations, varied positions of the hands of the clock, varied positions of the sun. You only experience Time itself when you come into the sphere of the soul's experience. There you do really experience Time, but there you also go out of Space. There, Time is a reality, but within the earthly world of Space, Time is no reality. What, then, must happen to us, if we would go out of the Space in which we live between birth and death and enter into the spacelessness in which we live between death and a new birth? What must we do? The answer is this: We must die!

We must take these words in their exact and deep meaning. On Earth we experience Time only through Space—through points in Space, through the positions of spatial things. On Earth we do not experience Time in its reality at all. Once you grasp this, you will say: “Really to enter into Time we must go out of Space, we must put away all things spatial.” You can also express it in other words, for it is really nothing else than—to die. It means, in very deed and truth: to die.

Let us now turn our eyes to this cosmic world that encircles the Earth—this cosmic world to which we are akin both through our etheric body, and also through our astral body—and let us look at the spiritual in this cosmic world. There have indeed been nations and human societies who have had regard only to the spiritual that is to be found within our earthly world of Space. Such peoples were unable to have any thoughts about repeated lives on Earth. Thoughts about repeated lives on Earth were possessed only by those human beings and groups that were able to conceive Time in its pure essence, Time in its spaceless character. But if we consider this earthly world together with its cosmic environment, or, to put it briefly, all that we speak of as the Cosmos, the Universe; and if we behold the spiritual manifest in it, we are then apprehending something of which it can be said that it had to be present in order that we might enter into our existence as earthly human beings; it had to be there.

Unfathomable depths are really contained in this simple conception,—that all that to which I have just referred, had to exist in order that we as earthly human beings might enter this earthly life. Infinite depths are revealed when we really grasp the spiritual aspect of all that is thus put before us. If we conceive this Spiritual in its completeness as a self-contained whole, if we consider it in its own purity and essence, then we have a conception of what was called “God” by those peoples who limited their outlook to the world of space alone.

These peoples—at any rate in their Wisdom-teachings—had come to feel: The Cosmos is woven through and through by a Divine element that is at work in it, and we can distinguish from this Divine element in the Cosmos that which is present, on the Earth in our immediate environment, as the physical world. We can also distinguish that which, in this cosmic, divine-spiritual world reveals itself as the Etheric, namely that which gazes down upon us in the blue of the sky. We can distinguish as the Astral in this divine world, that which gazes down upon us in the configuration of the starry heavens.

If we enter as fully as possible into the situation as we stand here, within the Universe, as human beings on this Earth, we shall say to ourselves: “We as human beings have a physical body: where, then, is the Physical in the Universe?” Here I am returning to something which I have already pointed out. The physical science of to-day expects to find everything which is on the Earth existing also in the Universe. But the physical organisation itself is not to be found in the Universe at all. Man has in the first place his physical organisation: then in addition he has the etheric and the astral. The Universe on the other hand begins with the Etheric. Out there in the Cosmos the Physical is nowhere to be found. The Physical exists only on the Earth, and it is but empty fancy and imagination to speak of anything physical in the far Universe. In the Universe there is the Etheric and the Astral. There is also a third element within the Universe which we have yet to speak about in this present lecture, for the Cosmos too is threefold. But the threefoldness of the Cosmos, apart from the Earth, is different from the threefoldness of the Cosmos in which we include the Earth.

Let these feelings enter into our earthly consciousness, the perceiving of the Physical in our immediate earthly dwelling-place; the feeling of the Etheric, which is both on the Earth and in the Universe; the beholding of the Astral, glistening down to the Earth from the stars, and most intensely of all from the Sun-star. Then, when we consider all these things and place before our souls the majesty of this world-conception, we can well understand how in ancient times, when with the old instinctive clairvoyance men did not think so abstractly, but were still able to feel the majesty of a great conception, they were led to realise: “A thought so majestic as this cannot be conceived perpetually in all its fullness. We must take hold of it at one special time, allowing it to work on the soul in its full, unfathomable glory. It will then work on in the inner depths of our human being, without being spoilt and corrupted by our surface consciousness.”—If we consider by what means the old instinctive clairvoyance gave expression to such a feeling, then out of all that combined to give truth to this thought in mankind in olden time, there remains to us to-day the institution of the Christmas Festival.

On Christmas Night, man, as he stands here upon the Earth with his physical, his etheric and his astral bodies, feels himself to be related to the threefold Cosmos, which appears to him in its Etheric nature, shining so majestically, and with the magic wonder of the night in the blue of the heavens; while face to face with him is the Astral of the Universe, in the stars that glitter in towards the Earth. As he realises how the holiness of this cosmic environment is related to that which is on the Earth itself, he feels that he himself with his own Ego has been transplanted from the Cosmos into this world of Space. And now he may gaze upon the Christmas Mystery—the new-born Child, the Representative of Humanity on Earth, who, inasmuch as he is entering into childhood, is born into this world of Space. In the fullness and majesty of this Christmas thought, as he gazes on the Child that is born on Christmas Night, he exclaims: “Ex Deo Nascimur—I am born out of the Divine, the Divine that weaves and surges through the world of Space.”

When a man has felt this, when he has permeated himself through and through with it, then he may also recall what Anthroposophy has revealed to us about the meaning of the Earth. The Child on whom we are gazing is the outer sheath of That which is now born into Space. But whence is He born, that He might be brought to birth in the world of Space? According to what we have explained to-day, it can only be from Time. From out of Time the Child is born.

If we then follow out the life of this Child and His permeation by the Spirit of the Christ-Being, we come to realise that this Being, this Christ-Being, comes from the Sun. Then we shall look up to the Sun, and say to ourselves: “As I look up to the Sun, I must behold in the sunshine that Time, which in the world of Space is hidden. Within the Sun is Time, and from out of the Time that weaves and works within the Sun, Christ came forth, came out into Space, on to the Earth.”

What have we then in Christ on Earth? In Christ on Earth we have That, which coming from beyond Space, from outside of Space, unites with the Earth.

I want you to realise how our conception of the Universe changes, in comparison with the ordinary present-day conception, when we really enter into all that has come before our souls this evening. There in the Universe we have the Sun, with all that there appears to us to be immediately connected with it—all that is contained in the blue of the heavens, in the world of the stars. At another point in the Universe we have the Earth with humanity. When we look up from the Earth to the Sun, we are at the same time looking into the flow of Time.

Now from this there follows something of great significance. Man only looks up to the Sun in the right way (even if it be but in his mind) when, as he gazes upwards, he forgets Space and considers Time alone. For in truth, the Sun does not only radiate light, it radiates Space itself, and when we are looking into the Sun we are looking out of Space into the world of Time. The Sun is the unique star that it is because when we gaze into the Sun we are looking out of Space. And from that world, outside of Space, Christ came to men. At the time when Christianity was founded by Christ on Earth, man had been all too long restricted to the mere Ex Deo Nascimur, he had become altogether bound up in it, he had become a Space-being pure and simple. The reason why it is so hard for us to understand the traditions of primeval epochs, when we go back to them with the consciousness of present-day civilisation, is that they always had in mind [Space], and not the world of [Time]. They regarded the world of [Time] only as an appendage of the world of [Space].²

Christ came to bring the element of Time again to men, and when the human heart, the human soul, the human spirit, unite themselves with Christ, then man receives once more the stream of Time that flows from Eternity to Eternity. What else can we human beings do when we die, i.e. when we go out of the world of Space, than hold fast to Him who gives Time back to us again? At the Mystery of Golgotha man had become to so great an extent a being of Space that Time was lost to him. Christ brought Time back again to men.

If, then, in going forth from the world of Space, men would not die in their souls as well as in their bodies, they must die in Christ, We can still be human beings of Space, and say: Ex Deo Nascimur, and we can look to the Child who comes forth from Time into Space, that he may unite Christ with humanity. But since the Mystery of Golgotha we cannot conceive of death, the bound of our earthly life, without this thought: “We must die in Christ.” Otherwise we shall pay for our loss of Time with the loss of Christ Himself, and, banished from Him, remain held spell-bound. We must fill ourselves with the Mystery of Golgotha. In addition to the Ex Deo Nascimur, we must find the In Christo Morimur. We must bring forth the Easter thought in addition to the Christmas thought. Thus the Ex Deo Nascimur lets the Christmas thought appear before our souls, and in the In Christo Morimur the Easter thought.

We can now say: On the Earth man has his three bodies, the physical, the etheric and the astral. The Etheric and Astral are also out there in the Cosmos, but the Physical is only to be found on the Earth. Out in the Cosmos there is no Physical. Thus we must say: On the Earth—physical, etheric, astral. In the Cosmos—no physical, but only the etheric and the astral.

Yet the Cosmos too is threefold, for what the Cosmos lacks at the lowest level, it adds above. In the Cosmos the Etheric is the lowest: on the Earth the Physical is the lowest. On Earth the Astral is the highest; in the Cosmos the highest is that of which man has to-day only the beginnings—that out of which his Spirit-Self will one day be woven. We may therefore say: In the Cosmos there is, as the third, the highest element, the Spirit-Selfhood.

Now we see the stars as expressions of something real. I compared their action to a gentle stroking. The Spirit-Selfhood that is behind them is indeed the Being that lovingly strokes,—only in this case it is not a single Being but the whole world of the Hierarchies. I gaze upon a man and see his form; I look at his eyes and see them shining towards me; I hear his voice; it is the utterance of the human being. In the same way I gaze up into the far Spaces of the world, I look upon the stars. They are the utterance of the Hierarchies,—the living utterance of the Hierarchies, kindling astral feeling. I gaze into the blue depths of the firmament and, perceive in it the outward revelation of the etheric body which is the lowest member of the whole world of the Hierarchies.

Now we may draw near to a still further realisation. We look out into the far Cosmos which goes out beyond earthly reality, even as the Earth with its physical substance and forces goes down beneath cosmic reality. As in the Physical the Earth has a sub-cosmic element, so in Spirit-Selfhood the Cosmos has a super-earthly element.

Physical science speaks of a movement of the Sun; and it can do so, for within the spatial picture of the Cosmos which surrounds us, we perceive by certain phenomena that the Sun is in movement. But that is only an image of the true Sun-movement—an image cast into Space. If we are speaking of the real Sun it is nonsense to say that the Sun moves in Space; for Space itself is being radiated out by the Sun. The Sun not only radiates the light; the Sun creates the Space itself. And the movement of the Sun is only a spatial movement within this created Space. Outside of Space it is a movement in Time. What seems apparent to us—namely, that the Sun is speeding on towards the constellation of Hercules—is only a spatial image of the Time-evolution of the Sun-Being.

To His intimate disciples Christ spoke these words: “Behold the life of the Earth; it is related to the life of the Cosmos. When you look out on the Earth and the surrounding Cosmos, it is the Father whose life permeates this Universe.³ The Father-God is the God of Space. But I make known to you that I have come to you from the Sun, from Time—Time that receives man only when he dies. I have brought you myself from out of Time.⁴ If you receive me, you receive Time, and you will not be held spell-bound in Space. But you find the transition from the one trinity—Physical, Etheric and Astral—to the other trinity, which leads from the Etheric and Astral to Spirit-Selfhood. Spirit-Selfhood is not to be found in the earthly world, just as the Earthly-Physical is not to be found in the Cosmos. But I bring you the message of it, for I am from the Sun.”

The Sun has indeed a threefold aspect. If one lives within the Sun and looks down from the Sun to the Earth, one beholds the Physical, Etheric and Astral. One may also gaze on that which is within the Sun itself. Then one still sees the Physical so long as one remembers the Earth or gazes down towards the Earth. But if one looks away from the Earth one beholds on the other side the Spirit-Selfhood. Thus one swings backwards and forwards between the Physical and the nature of the Spirit-Self. Only the Etheric and Astral in between are permanent. As you look out into the great Universe, the Earthly vanishes away, and you have the Etheric, the Astral and the Spirit-Selfhood. This is what you behold when you come into the Sun-Time between death and a new birth.

Let us now imagine first of all the inner mood of a man's soul to be such that he shuts himself up entirely within this Earth-existence. He can still feel the Divine, for out of the Divine he is born: Ex Deo Nascimur. Then let us imagine him no longer shutting himself up within the mere world of Space, but receiving the Christ who came from the world of Time into the world of Space, who brought Time itself into the earthly Space. If a man does this, then in Death he will overcome Death. Ex Deo Nascimur. In Christo Morimur. But Christ Himself brings the message that when Space is overcome and one has learned to recognise the Sun as the creator of Space, when one feels oneself transplanted through Christ into the Sun, into the living Sun, then the earthly Physical vanishes and only the Etheric and the Astral are there. Now the Etheric comes to life, not as the blue of the sky, but as the lilac-red gleaming radiance of the Cosmos, and forth from the reddish light the stars no longer twinkle down upon us but gently touch us with their loving effluence.

If a man really enters into all this, he can have the experience of himself, standing here upon the Earth, the Physical put aside, but the Etheric still with him, streaming through and out of him in the lilac-reddish light. No longer now are the stars glimmering points of light; they are radiations of love like the caressing hand of a human being. As we feel all this—the divine within ourselves, the divine cosmic fire flaming forth from within us as the very being of man; ourselves within the Etheric world and experiencing the living expression of the Spirit in the Astral cosmic radiance, there bursts forth within us the inner awakening of the creative radiance of Spirit, which is man's high calling in the Universe.

When those to whom Christ revealed these things had let the revelation sink deep into their being, then the moment came when they experienced the working of this mighty concept, in the fiery tongues of Pentecost. At first they felt the falling away, the discarding of the earthly-Physical as death. But then the feeling came; This is not death, but in place of the physical of the Earth, there now dawns upon us the Spirit-Selfhood of the Universe. “Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.”

Thus may we regard the threefold nature of the one half of the year. We have the Christmas thought—Ex Deo Nascimur; the Easter thought—In Christo Morimur; and the Whitsun thought—Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

There remains the other half of the year. If we understand that too, there dawns on us the other aspect of our human life. If we understand the relationship of the physical to the soul of man and to the superphysical—which contains the true freedom of which man is to become a partaker on the Earth,—then in the interconnection of the Christmas, Easter and Whitsun festivals we understand the human freedom on Earth. As we understand man from out of these three thoughts, the Christmas thought, the Easter thought and the Whitsun thought, and as we let this kindle in us the desire to understand the remaining portions of the year, there arises the other half of human life which I indicated when I said: “Gaze upon this human destiny; the Hierarchies appear behind it—the working and weaving of the Hierarchies.” It is wonderful to look truly into the destiny of a human being, for behind it stands the whole world of the Hierarchies.

It is indeed the language of the stars which sounds towards us from the thoughts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide; from the Christmas thought, inasmuch as the Earth is a star within the Universe; from the Easter thought inasmuch as the most radiant of stars, the Sun, gives us his gifts of grace; and from the Whitsun thought inasmuch as that which lies hidden beyond the stars lights into the soul, and lights forth again from the soul in the fiery tongues of Pentecost.

Enter into all this, my dear friends! I have told you of the Father, the Bearer of the Christmas thought, who sends the Son that through him the Easter thought may be fulfilled; I have told you further how the Son brings the message of the Spirit, so that in the thought of Whitsun man's life on Earth may be completed in its threefold being. Meditate this through, ponder it well; then for all the descriptive foundations I have already given you for an understanding of Karma, you will gain a right foundation of inner feeling.

Try to let the Christmas, Easter and Whitsun thoughts, in the way I have expressed them to you to-day, work deeply and truly into your human feeling, and when we meet again after the journey which I must undertake this Whitsun-tide for the Course on Agriculture—when we come together again, bring this feeling with you, my dear friends. For this feeling should live on in you as the warm and fiery thought of Pentecost. Then we shall be able to go further in our study of Karma; your power of understanding will be fertilised by what the Whitsun thought contains.

Just as once upon a time at the first Whitsun Festival something shone forth from each one of the disciples, so the thought of Pentecost should now become alive again for our anthroposophical understanding. Something must light up and shine forth from our souls. Therefore it is as a Whitsun feeling, to prepare you for the further continuation of our thoughts on Karma, which are related to the other half of the year, that I have given you what I have said to-day about the inner connections of Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide.

• 1. From February until September, 1924, with intervals of visits to other towns and countries, Rudolf Steiner was giving at Dornach the great series of 49 lectures on Karma, subsequently produced in four volumes now available in English translation. The present lecture was given very shortly before the Whitsun Festival and deals with its specific significance for the problem of human destiny with which the Karma lectures deal.
  
  Lecturing as he was to Anthroposophists, Dr. Steiner begins at once with the fundamental fact of the three ‘bodies’ at work in the human organism. A full exposition of this is to be found in the book Theosophy, chapter I.
• 2. The bracketed words were transposed in the translation. Error brought to our attention by to Lucas Dreier
• 3. Cp. Paul: “God that made the world and all things therein, being Lord of heaven and earth, giveth to all life and breath and all things, and is not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.” Acts XVII, 24–28.
• 4. “Time,” as here used, is what we usually designate as “Eternity”, i.e. a continuous, unbroken time-experience. What we usually call “Time” is our spatialised concept of real Time, separate successional events, measured by spatial changes.

Today we intend adding something to round off the many facts and views we have been studying here this winter. We have often emphasised the way in which spiritual science should take hold of human life, and how it can become life, action and deed. Today, however, we want to give a few concluding aspects on the subject of the great evolutionary processes of the cosmos, as these are expressed in man. And to start with I should like to draw your attention to a fact that can tell you a great deal about the nature of cosmic evolution, if only you are prepared to look at it in the right way.

Consider, in a purely external way to begin with, the difference between the evolution of the animal and that of man. You need only say one word and hold one idea before you, and you will soon notice the difference between the concept of animal and human evolution. Think of the word ‘education’. Actual education is impossible in the animal world. To a certain extent you can train the animal to do things that are foreign to its natural instincts and inborn way of life. But only an extremely enthusiastic dog-lover would want to deny that there is a radical difference between the education of a human being and what can be undertaken with animals. We need merely bear one particular anthroposophical insight in mind, and we shall understand the basis for this apparently superficial fact.

We know that man's development is a gradual and very complicated process. We have repeatedly emphasised that in the first seven years of his life, up to the change of teeth, man develops in quite a different way from the later period up to fourteen, and again from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year. We will only touch on this today, for you already know it. According to spiritual science man passes through several births. The human being is born into the physical world when he leaves his mother's body and frees himself of the physical maternal sheath. But we know that when this has happened he is still enclosed in a second maternal sheath, an etheric one. During the first seven years of his life the child's etheric body is completely enveloped in external etheric currents that come from the outer world, just as the physical body is enveloped until birth in a physical maternal sheath. At the change of teeth this etheric sheath is stripped off, and not until now, at the age of seven, is the etheric body born. Then the astral body is still enclosed in the astral maternal sheath that is stripped off at puberty. After this the astral body develops freely until the twenty-first or twenty-second year, which is the time when strictly speaking the actual ego of man is born. Not until then does the human being awaken to his full inner intensity and the ego that has evolved through the course of his earlier incarnations work its way free.

To clairvoyant consciousness a very special fact becomes apparent here. If you watch a very young child for several weeks or months, you will see the child's head surrounded by etheric and astral currents and forces. However, these currents and forces gradually become less distinct and vanish after a while. What is really taking place there? You can actually discover what is happening, even without clairvoyant vision, although clairvoyant vision confirms what we are about to say. Immediately after the birth of a human being his brain is not the same as it will be a few weeks or months later. The child already perceives the outer world, of course, but its brain is not yet an instrument capable of connecting external impressions in a definite way. By means of connecting-nerves running from one part of the brain to another, the human being learns by degrees to link together in thought what he perceives in the external world, but these connecting nerve-strands develop only after birth. A child will hear and see a bell, for instance, but the impression of the sound and the sight of the bell do not immediately combine to form the thought that the bell is ringing. The child learns this only gradually, because the part of the brain that is the instrument for the perception of sound and the part that is the instrument for visual perception become connected only in the course of life. And not until this has happened is it possible for the child to reach the conclusion: ‘What I see is the same thing that is making the sound’. Connecting-cords like this are developed in the brain, and the forces that develop these connecting-cords can be seen by the clairvoyant in the first weeks of the child's development as an extra covering round the brain. But this covering passes into the brain and subsequently lives within it, no longer working from outside but from within. What works from outside during the first weeks of the child's development could not go on working at the whole development of the growing human being were it not protected by the various sheaths. For when that which has been working from outside passes into the brain, it develops under the protecting sheath first of the etheric body then of the astral body and only when the twenty-second year has been reached does that which first worked from outside become active from within. What was outside the human being during the first months of his existence and then slipped inside, is active for the first time independently of sheaths in the twentieth to the twenty-second year; then it becomes free and awakens into intense activity.

Now let us consider the gradual development of the human being and compare it with that of the plant. We know that the plant only has its physical and etheric body here in the physical world, whereas its astral body is outside it; but only the physical and etheric body within it. The plant emerges from the seed, forms its physical body, and then the etheric body gradually develops. And this etheric body is all that the plant has in addition. Now we have seen that man's etheric body is still enveloped in the astral body until puberty, and that man's astral body is not actually born until then. But the plant, after reaching its puberty, cannot give birth to an astral body, for it has none. Therefore the plant has nothing further to develop after puberty. It has accomplished its task in the physical world when puberty occurs, and after it has been fertilised, it withers. You can even observe something similar in certain lower animals. In these lower animals the astral body has quite evidently not penetrated into the physical body to the same extent as in the higher animals. Lower animals are characterised by the very fact that their astral body is not yet entirely within their physical body. Take the may-fly; it comes into being, lives until it is fertilised, and then dies. Why? Because it is a creature which, like a plant, has its astral body for the most part outside it, and therefore it has nothing further to develop when puberty has occurred. In a certain respect man, animal and plant develop in a similar way until puberty. Then the plant has nothing else to develop in the physical world, and so it dies. The animal still has an astral body, but no ego. Therefore after puberty certain possibilities of development remain in the animal. The astral body becomes free, and as long as it develops freely and possibilities of development remain, further development continues in the higher animal after puberty. But the astral body of the animal has no ego within it in the physical world. The animal's ego is a group ego; it embraces a whole group and exists as group ego in the astral world, where its possibilities of development are quite different from those of the single animal here in the physical world. What the animal possesses as astral body has a limited possibility of development, and the animal already has this possibility within it as a natural tendency when it comes into the world. The lion has something in his astral body that expresses itself as a sum of impulses, instincts and passions. And this tendency continues to live itself out to the full until an ego might be born; but the ego is not there, it is on the astral plane. Therefore when the animal has just reached the stage when man attains his twenty-first year, its possibilities of development are all used up. The length of life varies according to circumstances, of course, for animals do not all live to be twenty-one. But up to the age of twenty-one, when the ego is born in man, his development is comparable to that of the animal. This must not lead to the conclusion that human development up to the age of twenty-one is identical to that of an animal, for that is not the case. The ego is already within the human being from the beginning, right from conception, and it now becomes free. Hence, because there is something within man from the beginning that becomes free at the age of twenty-one, he is from the outset no animal being, for the ego, although not free, is nevertheless working in him from the start. And it is essentially this ego that can be educated. For it is this ego, together with what it has accomplished in the astral, etheric and physical bodies, that passes from one incarnation to another. If this ego received nothing new in a further incarnation, man would not be able to take anything with him at his physical death, from his last life between birth and death. And if he were not able to take anything with him, he would be at exactly the same stage in the following life as he was in the previous one. Through the fact that you see man going through a development in life, and acquiring what the animal cannot acquire, because the animal's possibilities of development do not go beyond its inborn capacities, man is constantly enriching his ego, and reaches higher levels from one incarnation to another. It is because man bears within him an ego that has already been at work, although it only becomes free at his twenty-first year, that education is practicable, and something further can be done with him beyond his original possibilities. The lion brings its lion nature with it and lives it out. Man not only brings with him his nature as a member of the general human species, but also what he has attained as an ego in his Previous incarnation. This can be transformed more and more by education and life, and it will have acquired new impetus by the time man passes through the portal of death and has to prepare for a new incarnation. The point is that man acquires new factors of development and is constantly adding to his store.

Now let us ask what actually happens when man adds to his store from outside? To answer this we must reach three very important, rather difficult concepts. But as we have been working for some years in this group, we ought to be able to understand them. Let us start by taking a fully developed plant, for instance a lily of the valley. Here you have the plant before you in another form, as a small seed. Imagine holding the seed; there you have a minute structure. When you lay it in front of you, you can say: Everything that I shall see later on as root, stalk, leaves and blossom is in this seed. So here I have the plant in front of me as a seed and there as a fully grown plant. But I could not have the seed in front of me if it had not been produced by a previous lily of the valley. The case is different for clairvoyant consciousness. When clairvoyant consciousness observes the fully grown lily of the valley, it sees the physical plant filled with an etheric body, a body consisting of streams of light permeating it from top to bottom. In the lily of the valley, however, the etheric body does not extend very far beyond the physical body of the plant and does not differ from it very much. But if you take the small seed of the lily of the valley you will find that although the physical seed is small it is permeated by a wonderfully beautiful etheric body raying out all round in such a way that the seed is situated at one end of the etheric body like a comet with a tail. The physical seed is really only a denser point in the light or etheric body of the lily of the valley. When a spiritual scientist has the fully grown lily of the valley in front of him then, for him, the being that was hidden to begin with is developed. When he has the seed in front of him where the physical part is very small and only the spiritual part is large, he says: the actual being of the lily of the valley is rolled up in the physical seed. So when we look at the lily of the valley we have to distinguish two different states. One state is where the whole being of the lily of the valley is in involution: the seed contains the being rolled up, involved. When it comes forth it passes over to evolution, and then the whole being of the lily of the valley slips more into the newly developing seed. Thus evolution and involution alternate in the successive states of a plant. During evolution the spiritual disappears further and further and the physical grows great, whilst in involution the physical will disappear further and further and the spiritual become greater and greater.

In a certain respect we can speak of evolution and involution alternating in man to an even greater extent. In the human being between birth and death a physical body and an etheric body interpenetrate to form the physical, and the spiritual interpenetrates them too in a certain way, as an earthly being man is in evolution. But when man is seen clairvoyantly passing through the portal of death, he does not leave behind in physical life as much as the lily of the valley leaves in the seed; the physical disappears so completely that you no longer see it, it is all rolled up in the spiritual. Then man passes through Devachan, where he is in involution as regards his earthly being. For this earthly being of man, evolution is between birth and death, involution between death and a new birth. Yet there is a tremendous difference between man and the plant. In the plant we can speak of involution and evolution, but in the case of man we have to speak of yet a third factor. If we were not to speak of a third factor, we should not comprise the whole of human development. Because the plant always passes through involution and evolution, every new plant is an exact repetition of the last one. The being of the lily of the valley is perpetually going into the seed and out again. But what is happening in the case of man?

We have just realised that man receives new possibilities of development during his life between birth and death. He adds to his store. Hence it is not the same with man as it is with the plant. Each evolution of man on the earth is not a mere repetition of the previous one, but a raising of his existence on to a higher level. What he takes into himself between birth and death is added to what was there previously. That is why no mere repetition occurs, for what is evolving appears at a higher stage. Where does this new element actually come from? In what way are we to understand the fact that man receives and takes in something new? I beg you to follow very closely now, for we are coming to a most important and most difficult concept. And not without reason do I say this in one of the last sessions, for you will have the whole summer to ponder over it. We should ponder over such concepts for months if not years, then we gradually begin to realise their depth. Where does all that is constantly being added to man come from? We will make this comprehensible by taking a simple example.

Suppose you see a man standing opposite two other people. Let us take into consideration everything that belongs to evolution. Let us take the one who is observing the other two, and say to ourselves that he has passed through earlier incarnations and has developed what has been planted in him in these previous incarnations. The same applies to the other two people. Then let us suppose that the first man thinks to himself: The one person looks splendid beside the other. He is pleased to see just these two particular people standing together. Another person might not feel this satisfaction. The satisfaction the man feels in seeing the two standing side by side has nothing whatever to do with the possibilities of development in the other two, for they have done nothing that deserves the pleasure their standing together gives him. It is something quite different, and it depends entirely on the fact that it is he in particular that is standing opposite the two people. The point is that the man develops a feeling of joy over the two men in front of him standing together. This feeling is not caused by anything to do with development. There are things like this in the world that arise simply through coincidence. It is not a question of the two men being karmically connected. Our concern is the joy the man feels because he likes seeing the two people standing together.

Let us take a further example. Imagine a man standing here at a certain spot on the earth and looking up at the sky. He sees a particular constellation of stars. If he were to stand five paces away he would see something else. This looking at the sky creates in him a feeling of joy that is something quite new. Man experiences a number of totally new things that have nothing to do with his previous development. Everything that comes forth in the lily of the valley is determined by its previous development; but this is not the case with what works on the human soul from the environment. Man is concerned with a lot of affairs that have nothing to do with any previous development, but which are there because various circumstances bring him into contact with the outer world. Because he feels this joy, however, it has become for him an experience. Something has arisen in the human soul that is not determined by anything preceding it but which has arisen out of nothingness. Such creations out of nothingness are constantly arising in the human soul. These are experiences of the soul not experienced through given circumstances but through the relationships we ourselves create connecting the circumstances one with another. I want you to distinguish between the experiences produced by given circumstances and those produced by the relationships between the various circumstances.

Life really falls into two parts, with no distinguishing line between them: those experiences strictly determined by previous causes, by karma, and those not determined by karma but appearing on our horizon for the first time. There are whole areas in human life that come under these headings. Suppose you hear that somewhere someone has stolen something. What has happened is, of course determined by something karmic. But suppose you only know something about the theft and not the thief—therefore there is a particular person in the objective world who has done the stealing, but you know nothing about him. The thief is not going to come to you, though, and say: ‘Lock me up, I have committed a theft’, on the contrary, it is up to you to line up the facts so as to produce the evidence as to who is the thief. The ideas you put together have nothing to do with the objective facts. They depend on quite different things, even on whether you are clever or not. Your train of argument does not make the person a thief, it is a process taking place entirely within you that gets associated with what is there outside. Strictly speaking, any kind of logic is something added to things from outside. And all opinions of taste, as well as judgments we make about beauty, are additions. Thus man is constantly enriching his life with things that are not determined by previous causes, but which he experiences by bringing himself into a relationship with things.

If we make a rapid survey of human life and visualise man's development through ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon as far as our Earth evolution, we find that on Saturn there could be no question of man being able to relate to things in this way. Everything was pure necessity then. It was the same on old Sun and also on old Moon, and the animals are still in the situation today that man was in on the Moon. The animal experiences only what is determined by preceding causes. Man alone has entirely new experiences, independent of previous causes. Therefore in the truest sense of the word man alone is capable of education; man alone can continually add something new to what is determined by karma. Only on Earth did man attain the possibility of adding something new. On the Moon his development had not reached the point where he would have been capable of adding anything new to his innate capacities. Although not an animal, he was then at the stage of animal development. His actions were determined by external causes. To a certain extent this is still so today, for those experiences that are free experiences are only slowly making their way into man. And they appear to a greater and greater extent the higher the level at which man is. Imagine a dog standing in front of a Raphael painting. It would see what is there in the picture itself, in so far as it is a sense object. But if a man were to stand in front of the picture, he would see something quite different in it; he would see what he is capable of creating through the fact that he has already developed further in previous incarnations. And now imagine a genius like Goethe; he would see even more, and he would know the significance of why one thing is painted like this and the other like that. The more highly developed a man is the more he sees. And the more he has enriched his soul the greater his capacity to add to it the soul experiences from soul relationships. These become the property of his soul and are stored up within it. All this, however, has only been possible for humanity since Earth evolution began. But now the following will take place.

Man will develop in his own way through the subsequent ages. We know that the Earth will be succeeded by Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. During this evolution the sum of man's experiences over and above those resulting from previous causes will become greater and greater, and his inner being become richer and richer. What he has brought with him from ancient causes, from the Saturn, Sun and Moon stages, will have less and less significance. He is developing his way out of previous causes and casting them off. And when, together with the Earth, man will have reached Vulcan, he will have stripped off all he received during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. He will have cast it all off

Now we come to a difficult concept which shall be made clear by an analogy. Imagine you are sitting in a carriage that has been given or bequeathed to you. You are taking a ride in this carriage when a wheel becomes faulty, so you replace it with a new one. Now you have the old carriage but a new wheel. Suppose that after a while a second wheel becomes faulty. You replace that, and you now have the old carriage and two new wheels. Similarly you replace the third and fourth wheels, and so on, until you can easily imagine that one day you will actually have nothing left of the old carriage, but will have replaced it all with new parts. You will have nothing left of what you received as a gift or inheritance; you will still drive about in it, but strictly speaking it will be an entirely new vehicle. And now transfer this idea to human evolution. During the Saturn period man received the rudiments of his physical body, on the Sun his etheric body, on the Moon his astral body and on the Earth his ego, and he has been gradually developing these principles. But within the ego he is increasingly bringing experiences of a new kind into being and stripping off what he inherited, what he was given on Saturn, Sun and Moon. And a time will come—the Venus evolution—when man will have cast off all that the gods gave him during the Moon, Sun and Saturn evolution and the first half of the Earth evolution. He will have discarded all this, Just as in our analogy the single parts of the carriage were discarded. And he will have gradually replaced all this by something he has taken into himself from relationships, something previously nonexistent. Thus on reaching Venus, man will not be able to say: Everything from Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution is still in me—for by then he will have cast it all off. And at the end of his evolution he will bear within him only what he has gained through his own efforts, not what he was given, but what he has created out of nothingness. Here you have the third thing in addition to evolution and involution: creation out of nothingness. Evolution, Involution and creation out of nothingness are what we must have in mind if we are to picture the whole magnitude and majesty of human evolution. Thus we can understand how the gods have first of all given us our three bodies as vehicles, and how they built up these vehicles stage by stage, and then endowed us with the capacity to surmount them again stage by stage. We can understand how we may throw away the parts, piece by piece, because the gods wish to make us member by member into their image, so that we may say: The rudiments of what I am to become were given me, and out of them I have created for myself a new being.

Thus what man sees before him as a great and wonderful ideal in the far distant future, of having not only a consciousness of himself but a consciousness of having created himself, was already developed in earlier times by mighty spirits on a higher level than man. And certain spirits already engaged in the past in our evolution are developing at the present time what man will experience only in a distant future. We have said that during the Saturn evolution the thrones poured forth what we call the substance of mankind, and that into this human substance the spirits of personality poured what we call the forces of personality. But the spirits of personality, who at that time were sufficiently powerful to let the character of their personality flow into this substance poured out by the thrones, have since then ascended higher and higher. Today they have reached the point where they no longer need any physical substance for their further development. On Saturn, in order to be able to live at all, they needed the physical substance of Saturn which was at the same time the rudiment of human substance; on the Sun they needed the etheric substance that poured forth for man's etheric body; on the Moon they needed the astral substance, and here on Earth they need our ego. Henceforth, however, they will need what is formed by the ego itself, man s new creation out of pure relations, which is no longer physical, etheric or astral body or even ego as such, but that which the ego produces out of itself. This the spirits of personality will use, and they are already using it to live in today. On Saturn they lived in what is now our physical body, on the Sun in what is now our etheric body, on the Moon in what is now our astral body. Since the middle of Atlantean times they have begun living in the higher elements that man can bring forth out of his ego.

What are these higher elements man produces from out of his ego? They are of three kinds. First, what we call thinking in accordance with law, our logical thinking. This is something that man adds to things. If man does not merely look at the external world or merely observe it, or merely chase after the thief to find him, but observes in such a way that he sees the law inherent in the observation, availing himself of thoughts that have nothing to do with the thief and yet they catch him, then man is living in logic, pure logic. This logic is something that is added to things by man. When man devotes himself to this pure logic, the ego creates something beyond itself.

Secondly, the ego creates beyond itself when it develops pleasure or displeasure in the beautiful, the exalted, the humorous, the comic; in short, in everything that man himself produces. Let us say you see something in the world that strikes you as silly, and you laugh at it. This laughter has nothing whatever to do with your karma. A stupid person might come along, and the very thing you are laughing at could strike him as clever. That is something that arises out of yourself in that particular situation. Or, let us say, you see people attacking a brave man who for a time holds his own but eventually comes to a tragic end. What you witness was determined by karma, but the feeling of tragedy you have about it is something new.

Though necessity is the first thing, pleasure and displeasure are the second, and the third is the way you feel the urge to act under the influences of relationships. Even the way you feel compelled to act is not determined solely by karma, but by your relationship to the matter. Supposing two people are on the one hand so situated with regard to their relationship with one another that they are karmically destined to pay off something together, but at the same time one is further advanced in his development than the other. The more advanced one will pay up, the other will hold it back for later payment. The one will develop kindness of heart, the other's feelings will not be touched. That is something new coming into evolution. You must not look on everything as determined, rather it depends on whether or not we allow our actions to be guided by the laws of justice and fairness. New things are constantly being added to our morality, to the way we do our duty and to our moral judgment. Particularly in our moral judgment there lies the third element by means of which man goes beyond himself and then advances further and further. The ego puts this into our world, and what is thus put into the world does not perish. What men have introduced into the world from epoch to epoch, from age to age, as the result of logical thought, aesthetic judgment or the fulfillment of duty, forms a continuous stream, and provides the substance in which, in their phase of evolution, the spirits of personality take up their abode.

That is the way you live and evolve. And whilst you are evolving, the spirits of personality look down upon you, asking continually: Will you give me something, too, that I can use for my development? And the more man develops his thought content, his treasures of thought, the more he tries to refine his aesthetic judgment, and carry out his duty beyond the requirements of karma, the more nourishment there is for the spirits of personality; the more we offer up to them, the more substantial these spirits of personality become. What do these spirits of personality represent? Something which from the point of view of our human world conception we call an abstraction: the spirit of the age, the spirit of the various epochs. To anthroposophists this spirit of the age is a real being. The spirits of the age, who are actually the spirits of personality, move through the ages. When we look back into ancient times, the Indian, Persian, Chaldean-Babylonian, Greco-Latin times and right into our own time, we find that apart from the nations and apart from all the other differences among men, what we call the spirit of the age is always changing. People thought and felt quite differently five thousand years ago than they did three thousand years ago and from the way they do today. And it is the spirits of the age or, according to spiritual science, the spirits of personality who change. These spirits of personality are going through their evolution in the super-sensible world just as the human race is going through its evolution in the sense world. But all that the human race develops of a super-sensible nature is food and drink for these spirits of personality, and they benefit from it. If there were an age in which men were to spend their lives without developing any treasures of thought, without pleasure or displeasure, nor any feeling for duty beyond the limits of karma—in such an age the spirits of personality would have no nourishment and they would become emaciated. Such is our connection with the beings who are invisibly interwoven with our life.

As I told you, man adds something new to development, creates as it were something out of nothingness in addition to involution and evolution. He could not create anything out of nothingness, however, had he not previously received the causes into which he has placed himself as in a vehicle. This vehicle was given him during the Saturn evolution, and bit by bit he is discarding it and developing on into the future. He had to receive the foundation for this, however, and if the gods had not provided this foundation for him in the first place, he would not have been able to perform any action that can be created out of nothingness. That relationships in the surrounding world affect us in such a way that they really help our further development is due to this laying of a good foundation.

For what has become possible through the fact that man can create something new out of relationships, and that he can make use of the connections into which he is placed so as to form the foundation for something new that he himself creates? And what does it mean that man has become capable of extending his thoughts beyond the things he experiences in the surrounding world, and feeling more than what is objectively there in front of him? What has come about as a result of man being able to work beyond the dictates of karma, and live in duty towards truth, fairness and kindness of heart?

By becoming capable of logical thinking, of developing thought in accordance with its necessity, the possibility of error has been created. Because of the pleasure man can take in what is beautiful, the possibility has also been created for him to introduce the element of ugliness and impurity into world evolution. Because man is capable of both setting himself the concept of duty and of fulfilling it beyond the extent of karma, the possibility of evil and of resistance to duty has been created. So it is this very possibility of being able to create solely out of relationships that has placed man in a world in which he can also work on his own spiritual part, so that it becomes full of error, ugliness and evil. And not only had the possibility to be provided for man altogether to create out of these relationships, but the possibility had to be given for him by dint of struggle and striving gradually to create out of these relationships what is right, what is beautiful and those virtues that really further his evolution.

Creating out of relationships is called in Christian esotericism ‘creating out of the spirit’. And creating out of right, beautiful and virtuous relationships is called in Christian esotericism ‘The Holy Spirit’. When a man is able to create out of nothingness the right or true, the beautiful and the good, the Holy Spirit fills him with bliss. But for a man to be able to create in the sense of the Holy Spirit, he had first to be given the foundation, as is the case for all creation out of nothingness. This foundation was given him through the coming of Christ into our evolution. Through experiencing the Christ Event on earth, man was able to ascend to creating in the Holy Spirit. Thus it is Christ Himself Who creates the greatest, most profound foundation. If man becomes such that he stands firmly on the basis of the Christ experience, and the Christ experience is the carriage he joins for his evolutionary progress, then the Christ sends him the Holy Spirit, and man becomes capable of creating the right, beautiful and good in the course of his further evolution.

So we see the coming of the Christ to the Earth as a fulfillment as it were of all that had been put into man through Saturn, Sun and Moon. And the Christ Event has given man the greatest thing possible, the power that makes him capable of living on into the perspectives of the future and of increasingly creating out of relationships, out of all that is not predetermined, but depends on how man relates to the facts of the world around him, which is in the widest sense the Holy Spirit. This again is an aspect of Christian esotericism. Christian esotericism is connected with the profoundest thought in the whole of our evolution, the thought of creation out of nothingness.

Therefore no true theory of evolution will ever be able to leave out the thought of creation out of nothingness. Supposing there were only evolution and involution, there would be eternal repetition like there is with the plant, and on Vulcan there would be only what originated on Saturn. But in the middle of our development creation out of nothingness was added to evolution and involution. After Saturn, Sun and Moon had passed away, Christ came to Earth as the enriching leaven which ensures that something quite new will be there on Vulcan, something not yet present on Saturn. Whoever speaks of evolution and involution only, will speak of development as though everything were merely to repeat itself in circles. But such circles can never really explain world evolution. Only when we add to evolution and involution this creation out of nothingness, that adds something new to existing relationships, do we arrive at a real understanding of the world.

Beings of a lower order show no more than a trace of what we called creation out of nothingness. A lily of the valley will always be a lily of the valley; at most the gardener could add something to it from outside to which the lily of the valley would never have attained of itself. Then there would be something which with regard to the nature of the lily of the valley would be a creation out of nothingness. Man, however, is himself capable of including in his being this creation out of nothingness. Yet man only becomes capable of doing so, and advancing to the freedom of individual creativity through the greatest of all free deeds, and one which can serve him as an example. What is this greatest deed of freedom? It is that the creative and wise Word of our solar system Himself resolved to enter into a human body and to take part in Earth evolution through a deed unconnected with any previous karma. There was no preceding karma forcing the Christ to His resolution to enter a human body; He undertook to do it as a free deed entirely based upon foreseeing mankind's future evolution. This deed had no precedent, having its origin in Him as a thought out of nothingness, out of His pre-vision. This is a difficult concept, but it will always be included in Christian esotericism, and everything depends on our being able to add the thought of creation out of nothingness to those of evolution and involution.

When we are able to do this we shall acquire great ideals which, although they may not extend to what may be called cosmic dimensions, are essentially connected with the question: Why, for instance, do we join an anthroposophical society? To understand the purpose of an anthroposophical society we must return to the thought that we are working for the spirits of personality, for the spirits of the age. When a human being comes into the world at birth, to start with he is educated by all manner of circumstances; these influence him and form the first step of his own creative activity. If only it could be clearly understood that the place where a man is born is only the first step, and that the prevailing circumstances work upon him with overwhelming suggestive power. Let us try to imagine how different a man's circumstances would be were he to be born in Rome or Frankfurt instead of in Constantinople. Through his birth he would be placed in different circumstances, into different religious affiliations. Under these influences a certain fanaticism could develop in him for Catholicism or Protestantism. If, through a slight turn of the wheel in karmic connections, he had been born in Constantinople, might he not also have turned out to be quite a good Turk? Here you have an illustration of the suggestive force with which environmental conditions affect man. But man is able to extricate himself from the purely suggestive nature of conditions and unite with other people in accordance with principles he himself chooses and acknowledges. Then he can say: “Now I know why I am working with other people”. In this way there arise out of human consciousness those social groups in which material is created for the spirits of the age, the spirits of personality. And the anthroposophical society is a group of this kind in which this connection is created on a basis of brotherhood. This means nothing else than that each individual is active in the group in such a way that he acquires in himself all the good qualities that make him an image of the whole society. Thus all the thoughts, wealth of feeling and virtues he develops through the society he bestows as nourishment upon the spirits of personality. Hence in a society like this all that creates communal life is inseparable from the principle of individuality. Each single member becomes capable through such a society of offering what he himself produces as a sacrifice to the spirits of personality. And each individual prepares himself to reach the level of those who are the most advanced, and who, as the result of spiritual training have progressed to the point where they have the following ideal: “When I think, I do not do so for my own satisfaction, but in order to create nourishment for the spirits of personality. I lay upon the altar of the spirits of personality my highest and most beautiful thoughts; and what I feel is not prompted by egoism, I feel it because it is to be nourishment for the spirits of personality. And what I can practise in the way of virtue, I do not practise for the sake of gaining influence for myself, but in order to bring it as a sacrifice to provide food for the spirits of personality.” Here we have placed before us as our ideal those whom we call the masters of wisdom and the masters of harmony and feeling. For thus do they think and prepare for the development which will bring man nearer and nearer to the point where he will always be creating what is new until he will finally develop a world from which the workings of the old causes will have disappeared, and out of which new light will stream forth into the future. The world is not subject to perpetual metamorphosis into different forms, but the old is perfected and becomes the vehicle of the new. Then even this will be thrown off and will disappear into nothingness, so that out of this nothingness something new may arise. This is the tremendous idea of progress, that new things can perpetually arise.

But the worlds are complete in themselves, and you will have seen in the example given that we cannot speak of anything actually coming to an end. It has been shown how on the one hand the spirits of personality lose their influence over man, but on the other hand how they again pursue their own evolution. Thus ours is a world that is constantly being rejuvenated by new creations, yet it is also true that what is stripped off would hinder progress, and it is passed on so that others for their part can progress. Nobody should believe that he must allow something to sink into nothingness, for we have been given the possibility of creating out of nothingness. What on Vulcan will prove itself to be something new, will continually build new forms and discard the old, and what is thrown off will seek its own path.

Evolution, involution and creation out of nothingness are the three concepts we have to apply in order to understand the evolution of world phenomena as it really is. Only by this means shall we arrive at accurate concepts that both enlighten man about the world and engender in him inner warmth of feeling. If man had to admit his incapacity to do anything except create in accordance with impulses implanted into him, this would not steel his will nor kindle his hopes to the same extent as being able to say: “I can create my own life values and constantly add something new to what has been given me as a foundation. My ancient heritage will in no way hinder me from creating new blossoms and fruits which will live on into the future.” This, however, is part of what we can describe by saying that the anthroposophical conception of the world gives man strength, hope and confidence in life, for it shows him that he can, in the future, have a share in working at creations which, today, not only lie in the womb of causality but in nothingness. It shows him the prospect that, through his own efforts, he is working his way in the true sense of the word from being a ‘creature’ to being a ‘creator’.

The human being is distinguished from the other beings on earth because he does not arrange his life only according to vague, instinctive impulses, but to clear ideas and thoughts to get strength, power and certainty for his work if he is able to look not only at the present, but to determine his future out of ideas or ideals independently. The human being attains that only if he is able to survey life in its entirety. We learn from the past; we work for the future best of all if we anticipate in our ideas and ideals what we want to do in the future.

It could seem now that the today's topic Outset and End of the Earth extends too far to the past and to the future, as if we wanted to deal with ideas that hover high over our everyday existence. However, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte already said a right word against those people who turn against ideas and ideals out of their ostensible life praxis because they think that the practitioners of life have no use for ideals and ideas. Speaking about the great ideals and about the determination of the human being to his Jena students, he coined the nice words against those people: we, as idealists, know as well as the practitioners, maybe better, that the ideals are not directly applicable in the real life. However, if they want to state that life—if it should be practical—must not be arranged according to ideas and ideals, they show only that one does not count on them in the further evolution. Hence, a benevolent god may give them rain and sunshine at the right time, the necessary food and, as far as I am concerned, clever thoughts, too.

If we look back at the becoming of our earth, then the present human being thinks of the miraculous, immense achievements of the scientific thinking at first, of course. As well as already at other opportunities I want to emphasise also here that it can never be the task of spiritual science—if it understands itself correctly—to argue anything against the justified findings and results of the modern natural sciences. Therefore, allow me to say first something, before we tackle this enclosing issue from the spiritual-scientific point of view, also here again as with other considerations.

What has the modern science to say about our today's issue? I want to answer to the question only briefly and sketchily.—The natural sciences reveal the earthly past with great, enclosing astuteness. They conclude from that what the earth is now, from that what we have as remains of extinct worlds and beings how it has looked once on our earth maybe millions of years ago, and which beings walked on it. You know, history, the historical documents lead us only a short time back in the evolution, some millennia only. Then it becomes dark, so to speak, if one wants to count only on the historical documents. A second time leads us back to that what could not be committed to the written documents, also not to other documents, what our ancestors gave their dead to their graves as burial objects of their culture that they manufactured and that stayed behind as remains. Then, however, the natural sciences go back even further.

They show which beings lived successively on our earth based on the skeletons and other remains of primeval plants and animals that are included in the layers of our earth. One can easily realise that that what lies in the upper layers of our earth has found its grave at last, that that what lies in the deeper layers which were covered by later ones must contain the documentary remains of older, former times. Admittedly, it is not so easy to do research scientifically in this way. Geology has some difficulties. For that, what has been stacked within the earth surface has not so remained, as it has been stacked originally. Overburdens, faults, any possible mixture of the whole have taken place, so that sometimes that what lay originally at the bottom have come with the faults at the top. A great astuteness is necessary to get an idea of the earthly evolution from that what the layers of our earth enclose.

We do not want to go more into details than the spiritual researcher can justify in this respect; we also do not want to explain in detail what we would have to say from the spiritual-scientific point of view. There is still something to be corrected. However, we do not want to get ourselves into it. On the contrary, we prefer to accept thankfully as a great achievement for humanity what the industrious natural sciences have observed and the scientific astuteness has performed in this field. We would like to think ourselves back to a former state of the earth with the physical research where our earth looked very different for the most part from today, where the simplest living beings must have lived no remains of which were preserved. We pursue the development of our earth of the layers and remains that lie at the bottom and at the top. We find there simple animals, which are subordinate to the vertebrates, to those which have a skeleton.

We go on and see how the various animal classes and plant classes develop gradually, as well as they seem to appear on the changing earth gradually. We go back with the naturalist to the time when in our earth evolution fish appear. Many of them have quite different forms than the today's ones. If we go back further, we come to a strange developmental phase of our earth when those monstrous, miraculous animals that belong partly to the amphibians and reptiles inhabited it. These animals were gigantic, whose eyes were maybe as big as a child head, they were provided with huge teeth, animals that one calls ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs etc. and whose remains are excavated in the most different regions of the earth from the Cretaceous layer, the Jurassic layer. There we come to the time when more perfect plants have originated, in a relatively young time, although it comprises millennia. We arrive at that time when in scientific view the human being appeared, when he appears for the first time on our earth, so to speak, according to the documents that the concerning layers contain, after the higher mammals, related to him, had preceded him. Briefly, we use that picture again which we already used recently when I talked about sun, moon, and earth, and imagine anyone could observe the evolution from a seat in space for millions of years. He would see the surface of the earth forming, the distribution of water and earth, conditions of cold and heat changing, the various classes and forms of plants and animals appearing, and the physical picture would be the same for such a hypothetical observer as natural sciences describe it.

But again I emphasise that one cannot go on from spiritual science farther than, so to speak, up to the point where the natural sciences themselves will be obliged to correct the things in the future. Where does a conflict exist between the natural sciences and spiritual science now? One says repeatedly from the natural sciences, spiritual science does not stand on scientific ground. Can one stand more on scientific ground than to admit that everything that the natural sciences knows and can recognise also finds recognition with us?

However, there are people who say, they firmly stand on the ground of the scientific facts. They demand from the spiritual scientist that he should know nothing else than what they themselves know. They do not demand only that one concedes to them what they themselves say, but they also demand that one subjects to the dogma that one cannot say more than they say. These people do not notice at all that such inner intolerance was never there in the entire human development, also not in the times when the outer intolerance went far. Indeed, as we said already last time considering the sun, moon and stars: the outer sensuous picture gives no cause for quarrel between spiritual science and the natural sciences.—However, does result from this outer sensuous sight that behind the sensuous, behind the physical no extrasensory, supraphysical forces are effective? We could bring in the Plateau experiment already last time where one shows how a world system originates in microcosm in a liquid from an oil drop by rotation with a crank. However, the good man did completely forget that he himself turned the crank! He did not consider at all that this is quite impossible without the thoughts of that who turns the crank.

What one sees with the physical eyes is the outer expression, the outer process of that which happens internal-spiritually and what the human being can never get to know looking at the world only with his eyes and their ancillary tools, only with the outer physical tools. However, if we want to look back, to the physical beginning of the world and do not look at the physical only, then we have to imagine the true nature of the human being first. Someone who looks from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint at this true nature of the human being to whom the human being disintegrates, as I have often stressed, in a number of members. Above all the spiritual science shows us that the true reason of those varying states, which the human being experiences every day within 24 hours between wakening and sleeping, that a part of the human members separates from the other part in sleep. We see every night when the human being falls asleep sinking down in dreamless sleep, in an uncertain darkness what surged up and down as most manifold pictures and impressions in the soul during the day. We see everything sinking down that lives in the human being as instincts, desires, and passions, as joy, sorrow and pain. For somebody who stands on the ground of spiritual science, of course, also for everybody with common sense it would be a big folly if one wanted to assert that with falling asleep the bearer of joy and sorrow, of desires and passions would disappear and would rise again in the morning. Spiritual science shows that—when the human being lies in the dreamless sleep in his bed—only the physical body lies there connected with the etheric body. He has the physical body in common with the lifeless beings around him and the etheric body in common with the plants.

Two other members are lifted out from the human being in the dreamless sleep. Joy and sorrow, desires and passions, all sensations surging up and down, all that is quiet at night. The astral body is their bearer, and this is lifted out in the dreamless sleep from the physical and etheric bodies that stay behind in the bed. The astral body and the ego are lifted out.

By which does the existence of the astral body differ at night from its existence during the day? We can understand this remembering that the astral body has its reality outdoors in another world that is round it. I have explained that in other series of these talks. What does it depend on that one perceives anything? There can be countless worlds round you, the world of the tones, the world of the light, the world of the smells, the world of the tastes etc., if you had no senses for them, these worlds would not be there for you. It is the most illogical what one can do—however, the majority of the present human beings does it—to assert that a world which one does not perceive is not there. Spiritual science shows that the human astral body is lifted out at night in the dreamless sleep from the physical and etheric bodies and lives in another world; not in a transcendent, somewhere concealed world, but in a world that penetrates us, as light and air penetrate the space. For the spiritual-scientific observation that world differs from the physical-sensuous one only by the fact that it requires other organs with which one can perceive it.

This astral body is in a spiritual world that is in our environment as the air is round us. Who still has no idea of the fact that air is round him, says, it is nothing round him. Someone says this who has no idea of the fact that he lives perpetually in spirit, and means that there is no spirit in our surroundings, that no spiritual facts, no spiritual beings are there. The astral body, the bearer of desire and pain, is in this spiritual world at night. It does not perceive it because it does not yet have organs in the present evolution, no cognitive ability for this world in which it is.

It could appear like a hypothesis if one says that there is an astral body and the human being is in the dreamless sleep in a spiritual world except his physical and etheric bodies. But apart from the fact that somebody whose spiritual eyes are opened by initiation knows the astral body separated from the physical body by own observation and own experience, one can show, so to speak, experimentally that such an astral body exists, even if not with usual instruments. For the only instrument, which makes clear the secrets of the higher, supersensible world to the human being, which really leads him in the spiritual world, is the human being himself. This instrument, the human being, is capable of an infinite perfection, an infinitely subtle development, and just the initiation perfects the human being. It delivers to that who wants to apply it to himself, so to speak, the experimental evidence of an astral body that can become independent of the physical body.

Let us recall some of the viewpoints that we have discussed in the talk on the initiation. We have said there that the human being can do certain exercises of meditation, of contemplation according to particular methodical instructions by which he makes his worlds of thought, feeling and will-impulses stronger and stronger than feelings and will-impulses can be strengthened by any outer sensory observation. There are just such instructions as we have heard in the talk on initiation by which the human being can gain more than he gains by the mere outer observation of the reality. Something particular appears in a human soul which applies the instructions to itself. It appears that really the astral body receives spiritual eyes and ears by the subtle inner work of the human being. We can show that meditation of thoughts, feelings, and will-impulses make the feelings and the will-impulses more powerful. We can show how they work on this astral body: the astral body shows after some time, if the human being has patience and perseverance, that it has acquired the spiritual eyes and ears returning in the early morning in the physical and etheric bodies and it can experience now what one calls enlightenment. The human being is able to work on his astral body—working here in the awake consciousness by meditation of certain feelings and will-impulses according to certain methodical regulations—in such a way that it is able to react on us. Thereby one shows the reality of the astral body. We work on it and it works on us. It shows its existence by the fact of the initiation.

Just as the astral body is separated from the physical body at night, the bearer of the ego, of the human self-consciousness is also separated from him. This also disappears at the present developmental state of the human being still in an uncertain darkness. With the sleeping human being, we have the physical body in the bed that he has in common with all minerals, as well as the etheric body that he has in common with all plants. From the physical body and the etheric body the astral body is lifted out which he has in common only with the animals, and the ego that the human being, as a crown of the creation on earth, does not have in common with any other realm of nature. In the present developmental stage where no higher senses, no “spirit eyes” and no “spirit ears”, to speak with Goethe, are developed the impressions of the day disappear falling asleep, and other do not appear in the world for which he has no senses. Hence, darkness, lightlessness, and muteness surround him at night. In the morning while waking, the human being dives in the physical and etheric bodies. These are equipped with the physical eyes and ears. The spiritual human being dives in the physical-sensuous human being, uses the instruments for the physical-sensuous world, and has this world around himself. One should understand what Fichte said: one shall not believe that the eye sees, but that the human being sees by the eye; one shall not believe that the ear hears, but the human being hears by the ear. The same applies to the sense of smell and the sense of taste. They are tools for the inner human being.

Spiritual science recognises and must recognise this spiritual, inner human as the original, the first of the human being. The physical and the etheric bodies do not exist as the first, but the astral body and the ego existed before them. Indeed, some people who are influenced deeper suggestively by the very effective present ideas sticking to the material will argue: do you imagine in your fantastic spiritual science that this spiritual, this bearer of joy and sorrow, of desires, passions, and self-consciousness hovered once freely somewhere without being tied to a physical body?—Spiritual science answers: certainly, this is the case! Before anything physical, even before anything etheric existed, this astral body existed. The inner life was before the appearance.

With it, we are placed immediately at the earth's beginning.—Can you imagine that anybody can deny completely, even under the strong materialistic suggestions that something underlies like a spiritual state that condenses only afterward and comes into being? I have often emphasised here that spiritual science regards the matter as compressed spirit. We use a comparison that we have often applied to show how the spiritual researcher thinks about spirit and matter. Imagine once, somebody has transparent air before himself, and clouds form in this transparent air, as the effect of cooling. What was transparent before is clouded; what was vapour and was not visible once becomes water. Maybe it goes on: the water freezes to ice. The ice falls down in pieces. Let us assume that anybody comes and says, it is nonsense, stupidity that the water was distributed before in the air. I have seen nothing of it! The first I saw were the clouds. Then someone comes who can also not yet see the clouds, he sees something only if the water freezes if ice originates. If one says to him: what is there as ice today was there already sooner than water, then he answers: I have seen nothing, ice is there and nothing else.

From such thoughts, the answer must be taken if anybody wants to accuse a spiritual researcher of speculative fiction who says that the human being did not exist materially at first, also not as an etheric body, but his astral body and ego existed first. In the beginning of our earth existence, the astral body and the ego existed. Yes, there was even, as we see soon, the human being as a spiritual being on the earth, before animals, before plants, before minerals existed. At first, the earth existed as an agglomeration of nothing but such spiritual human beings who consisted of the ego and the astral body. This is the outset of the earth. The spiritual researcher goes on describing: as the water was distributed invisibly in the air, is condensed to clouds, the astral was condensed once to the etheric condition. Then human beings existed who had an ego, an astral body, and an etheric body. At last, the physical body originated, as the ice from the water, the water from the water vapour forms, as the densest part of the human being. Thus, we have the course of the earthly development: the human being is there as a spiritual being at first, then as an etheric being, and last the spiritual crystallises the human physical body.

We capture the picture of the condensing water vapour on camera. Assume that you have a lump of water. You would treat this lump of water artificially so that a part freezes in the middle. Imagine, you have many such lumps with which a part freezes in the middle; there originate many ice granules. Something very peculiar happens now: from some of these lumps of water the ice lumps fall out and remain only with little water coated for themselves, while the mother substance, the water withdraws, from which the ice has formed. With the other lumps of water, the ice granules remain in the water lumps and keep on freezing. More water changes into ice, bigger ice cores originate there. With a number of the resulting formations such bigger ice cores precipitate and keep some water, while the mother substance withdraws. This goes on that way. Such ice lumps rise to a higher stage, they develop more ice from the water. Always ice stages form back on earth, while other lumps transform more and more of the water into ice, until they have such ice lumps at last which have transformed all water into ice and whose mother substance is included, so to speak, only between the pores of the ice.

Let this picture of the earth's evolution arise in you from the outset until our time. Imagine the human being as a spiritual being at the beginning of our earth's existence and only existing as a spiritual being. He begins first to densify a small, unimportant part, which becomes denser. There are certain beings that stop like the ice granules on an early stage, while they separate from their spiritual mother substance. These are the most imperfect animals that originated once from the human mother substance; from the astral human being only a part became material and densified. These are the lowest animals. The other human beings developed to higher stages. Higher animals precipitated again from the spiritual mother substance. Thus, in the course of the earth development more and more differentiated and perfect creatures developed, up to the today's human being who is in his external physical expression an image of the spiritual arrangements and possibilities that were included originally at the earth's beginning in spirit, in the astral body of the human being. As the ice lumps, which precipitated, represent the stages of the becoming of the big ice lump, all beings that are more imperfect than the human being is constitute the entire animal realm and plant realm, the backward stages of the human evolution on earth.

The human being is the first-born of the earth as a spiritual being, and he has densified as a spiritual being if I may use the expression the material gradually from himself. On every stage subordinated beings stopped, so that we have to see in the whole range of the more imperfect earthly beings not ancestors of the human being, but on the contrary descendants of the spiritual human being who did not come along. These are the backward brothers, backward beings on the preliminary stages, which continued their life until our time and that is why they became decadent.

Thus, considering the evolution we see members falling out. If anybody could put a chair in the space and watch the Hyperborean human being, he would see if the premises of spiritual science were right the external-physical picture that the spiritual researcher shows: how the human being first left behind the imperfect animals and then the more and more perfect ones. Really the human being originated externally latest in his today's figure, as the latest one of the creatures; spiritually he is the first-born; spiritually he leads the way of all beings. From the human being all the other beings have developed who fall out on an imperfect stage of the human being as it were, which represent the repelled ones of the human evolution. Thus, in the earth's evolution everything imperfect goes back to the higher. The higher, the original is not in our physical figure, but in the spirit. The modern natural sciences suffer almost from the question, which they put repeatedly and which is so intimately connected with our topic of the outset of our earth: how can anything living develop from the lifeless? If on our earth only lifeless material is, how could life develop from it? The only answer is that one puts the question wrongly. Life has never developed from the lifeless; however, everything lifeless has originated from life.

You can easily realise how the lifeless arises from the living if you look at the hard coal, which is dug out like a rock even today. Once the coal was plants, ferns and horsetails which have stood on certain regions of the earth, and sank in the ground and which you can dig out now after millions of years, after they have become stone. For the spiritual researcher not only the coal originated from plants, but everything mineral leads back to an original plant, even if the materialistic researcher cannot imagine a plant realm without mineral basis. Such a researcher cannot imagine that the denser, coarser processes arise from the subtler processes.

There is an example how such a materialistic view strikes in the face of any common sense how materialism haunts in some European scholars. There is, for example, the materialistic theory of soul phenomena by William James (1842–1910, American philosopher and psychologist) which even wants to be idealistic with which the materialistic ideas mingle in the entire thinking. I have already quoted the symptom that is contained in the sentence: “The human being does not cry because he is sad, but he is sad because he cries.” There the person concerned supposes that the existence works materially on the human being: it works on the lachrymal glands, and then the human being feels the process and becomes sad. This is in our present this way: the inventor of this theory is consequent in his materialism, also if it strikes in the face of common sense. In truth, the processes are in the mental-spiritual world, and the material processes are the results of them. The mental-spiritual processes are the original ones. Everything solid, everything material-mineral around us has originated from the spiritual. The question is not how life has originated from lifeless but how the lifeless has originated from the living. However, as something lifeless originates from the living the living was there before the lifeless, the spiritual was there before the living. Thus, we come back to the outset of our earth and see that our earth was a spiritual being even at its starting point. It was a spiritual being, the material developed successively from itself that from the spiritual the living, and from the living the dead has originated. The dead is the latest product.

Thus, we look back to the outset of our earth and feel as human beings as the first-born of the earth, spiritual at the starting point of the earth evolution. Now we let the spirit look from here at the future. We can understand the easiest how the spiritual researcher achieves a picture of the future perspective if we realise what has also already arisen briefly from other indications in this series of talks that in the today's human being the single organs are of quite different value. It is not in such a way as it appears to the materialistic anatomy with the investigation of the human being. For the materialistic anatomist everything is there only in such a way as it presents itself after its physical peculiarity. However, for that who pursues the human organs with spiritual sight there are those which are in decadence, in withering, as the tree forms the bark, as well as others, which are at the beginning of their development as they look today. Certain lower organs that today serve the reproduction of humanity are dying away. However, we have an organ which is in the beginning of its development, and which attains a much higher stage in the future. This organ is the human heart. Not only the spiritual part, but also the physical organ, the heart, is a wonderful perspective for our future. The heart is a crux for the anatomist because, otherwise, every voluntary organ has fasciated muscles. The heart is an organ, which is a voluntary muscle according to its structure, although it is used as an involuntary organ. Where from does this come?

No physical anatomy can explain this! The reason is that the heart is intended to be a much higher organ in the future. It is fasciated because it is a voluntary muscle in the future. We correspond voluntarily with a movement of the heart in the future to that what the soul feels as an impulse. The human being will perform his work not only by the tools of the hand, but the heart will be the tool of the soul in a way, as the human being does not at all anticipate it even today.

Take another organ, the human vocal organ. What is it capable of today? If I speak to you what happens there? My words that I speak to you live in my soul at first. If I did not pronounce them, they would not penetrate into your soul. I pronounce them, set the tools of my larynx in motion. The air here in this room is set in vibration, and there are the oscillations of each of my words in this hall that penetrate you. What is language? It is an aerial embodiment of the thoughts. If I have pronounced anything, the thought sounds there, it is embodied in the air, and someone who could see the aerial waves in this room would see the physical creation of my thoughts bustling about in the room. Spiritual science shows that the future human being gets around to producing not only aerial-shaped figures by his words, but also denser matter as image of that what lives in his soul. He will learn to shape denser and denser this way, and he will produce his equals by his transformed vocal organ, by his word. If the human being keeps on developing, important changes of his corporeality take place. Certain organs decline, other organs keep on developing. The heart becomes an important tool of the soul. The vocal organ becomes the reproductive organ of the future human being who will produce his equals from his thoughts.

As he embodies his thoughts in the air today, he will embody himself by the organ that is becoming the future reproductive organ. Like a shade of that what our head will be is that what he is today. The coherence between the human vocal organ and the reproductive organ is indicated by the fact that with the male individual the voice changes with the sexual maturity.

May the human beings better consider such changes which spiritual science imparts! What the spiritual research says points to that what humanity will have later to the creation of its equals: it is the word. A human being speaks the word, and the word will be a human being. This happens when the human being has spiritualised himself more and more. For he spiritualises himself and returns to the spirit at the end of the earth because he puts his physical tools at the disposal of the spirit, as we have seen it with the heart and with the larynx. With the predecessors of the human being, the creators who started their earth's existence at that time who stood at the earth's beginning where the human being will stand at the earth's end one recognises that it was with them the same way. The human being will originate by the word at the end, he will speak the word at the primeval end, and the word will be a human being. Of those beings, the divine-spiritual beings which already stood at the earth's beginning at the height to which the human beings will develop once it is said to us in one of the deepest religious documents, in the John's Gospel, properly and appropriately: in the primeval beginning the word was, and the word was a God.—As the word was in the primeval beginning, and the word was a God, the word will be a human being at the primeval end, and the human being will be the word.

If we look at the beginning that way and see how the human being has originated from the spirit and has become the today's human being in the sense of the earth's evolution, and look at the changes of our earthly human being, the perspective of the spiritualisation of the earth presents itself to us. There we have spirit at the beginning and spirit at the end. Spirit was the origin and spirit is the goal. This is the secret of the earth's evolution. If we see the more and more condensing matter in the middle, we know that this matter is a converted and transformed spirit if we regard it not as an outer vision, but go into its being. It is nothing else than that what has developed from the spirit and what becomes spirit again. If we look forward, everywhere we look at spirit. According to Jacob Boehme, we originate in the spirit, and we strive for the spirit. The activity of the spirit is that knowledge of the spirit that raises the human being really which makes him a useful being because he will be a hopeful, spiritually and physically healthy being. It is the knowledge that everything is rooted in spirit and that that what we perceive and see in the world evolution is the actions of the divine spirit.

When we try to advance along the path of supersensible knowledge to a perception of man's real being, the opposing nature of the activities of thinking and willing becomes more and more apparent. This contrast cannot escape an adequate introspection of even ordinary consciousness, but what is merely indicated in such observation, becomes clearly evident to spiritual-scientific observation. The thinking that is active in ordinary life and is usually applied in scientific research, shows itself to be closely bound up with the processes of the bodily organisation; while all that is of the nature of will reveals ever more strikingly its independence of the body the further its essential nature is penetrated by supersensible cognition.

Since introspection never finds the activities of thinking and willing separated in the everyday course of the soul's life, it is impossible for ordinary consciousness to learn to know them in their real, essential nature. It is always confronted by a thinking in which the will also is active, and a willing, shot through with the activity of thought. Hence it can never decide the shares of thought and will in a state of soul. A consciousness that has been prepared for the supersensible can be so focussed that thinking and willing enter its field of view separately. Only then do we know how closely bound to the bodily organisation is the thinking that is active in the world of sense.

One cannot investigate this connection without directing one's attention to the changing characteristics of man's life in successive periods. When our observation has been sharpened by spiritual-scientific training we perceive the constitution of a child's soul from birth to the change of teeth to be quite different from that between the change of teeth and puberty. And the period from puberty to the early twenties shows again other characteristics. The subsequent course of life also resolves itself into clearly distinguishable periods. The fourth closes with the end of the twenties, the fifth at the middle of the thirties, the sixth at the beginning, and the seventh at the end, of the forties. At the beginning of the fifties that period of life commences in which a division into sections can no longer be carried out in a completely definite way.

The whole range of the soul's constitution in its transformation through the various life periods is revealed with special clearness to the observer of the supersensible, when he directs his attention to the close dependence of thinking on the bodily organisation. To perceive here correctly he must keep strictly to the activity of thought, and separate from it everything that arises through the influence of the will. He then finds that in the first four periods of life the activity of thought, in so far as it develops out of man's own being and is dependent on his bodily organisation, is completely incapable of apprehending the real being of man. In the first three decades of life man could attain to no consciousness of himself that he could grasp by thought if, in his soul life, he were solely dependent on those powers of thought which develop on the basis of the bodily organisation. At the end of the twenties, thinking takes on a totally different character. It becomes capable of placing those thoughts which have been developed in dependence on his bodily organisation in the service of human self-knowledge. This self-knowledge, however, can only have reference to inner experiences falling within this period of life, not to those of earlier periods. Not till the middle of the thirties does man develop an understanding for his inner life by means of the activity of thought which he unfolds on the basis of his bodily organisation. This takes place in a definitely regular way. In the middle of the fourth decade there appears a power of thought capable of grasping the fourth period; at the beginning of the forties one which can grasp the third; at the end of the forties one which can grasp the second, and not till the middle of the forties one that can penetrate the experience of childhood from birth till the change of teeth. This evolution of thought throughout the course of a man's life remains quite unknown to ordinary consciousness. It runs its course quite beneath the threshold of this consciousness, and only with those who have tuned their inner life to a finer self-knowledge does it emerge out of the so-called subconscious into the daily experiences of the soul. The supersensible mode of cognition however raises the subconscious into the field of consciousness. It thus perceives that the self-knowledge acquired by man before the second half of life is not mediated by the activity of thinking, which develops out of his own bodily organisation, but by spiritual forces which enter thinking by way of the will, and which are independent of the human physical organisation. Not before the second half of life can the human organism become the basis for a thought activity which comprehends its own being.

The transformation and maturing of thought here described remain hidden from the ordinary life of the soul. Nevertheless the innermost being of man undergoes such a development. In the second half of life there arises from the bodily organisation a consciousness of the inner experiences of the first half of life. These remain unconscious during the first three decades, unless a force for self-perception, independent of the body, is given to thinking by way of the will.

To one who has attained by supersensible knowledge the insight here described there is also revealed in the course of his investigation a perception of the processes which are independent of the body, and by means of which self-perception by way of the will is made possible in the first half of life. His spiritual gaze is directed to the experiences of the soul in a supersensible world before birth (or conception). These experiences result from a totally different co-operation of thought and will from that existing in the life of the senses. This co-operation develops on the basis of a totally different constitution of the activities of thinking and of willing from that existing in sense life. These thoughts are active in themselves and partake of the nature of will, and will is, by its own nature, permeated by thought. In life pertaining to the senses, thoughts are only as shadows of what they reveal themselves to be in the supersensible; and the will activity in the sense world is like a radiating force deprived of light, compared with its true nature as it can be known in the supersensible. The co-operation of thought endowed with will, and will laden with thought, cannot take place on the basis of the bodily organisation. Now what takes place in the soul through the co-operation of thought and will before her entrance into the sense life, does not cease to work on her entrance. It continues to work. Beside the stream of soul life which runs its course in dependence on the bodily organisation there flows another, which is a continuation of soul and spiritual experiences free from the body. This stream gives to man in the first half of sense life the power of self-perception. It dries up in middle life. In its stead there develops for self-perception a power of thought on the basis of the bodily organisation.

An essentially different view presents itself to the consciousness trained in supersensible knowledge when it is directed, not to thought activity, but to will activity in the course of sense life. For such perception everything dependent on will is seen more and more free of the bodily organisation. To supersensible consciousness it becomes clear that the true nature of will cannot become apparent in the sense world. That man, even when he has not consciously developed supersensible insight, experiences will, rests on the fact that in everything pertaining to will something supersensible is woven into ordinary consciousness. Into every human consciousness the will intrudes as an immediately perceptible element, even when this consciousness, by its own constitution of soul, darkens insight into the supersensible world. Man would never even form a word for will, if he had not in his soul-life a perceptible supersensible element. For the powers which develop in the sense world, and for the sense world, the will would be something completely unknown. One who speaks of the development of super-sensible cognition maintains in truth nothing else than that those soul capacities which are already active in the perception of will experiences, can be expanded, concentrated and heightened, so that they are capable of attaining to a perception of another world-content in the same way as they perceive will.

Every science of the soul that seeks to investigate only by the means of cognition of ordinary consciousness must confront perceptions which, it must confess if it understands itself—are impenetrable for ordinary consciousness. For the life of the soul may be compared to a knot which is entangled with various threads at the point where they meet. Its essential nature can only be understood when one is willing to follow the threads outside the knot to their origin and destination. The above exposition speaks of an experience within the soul communicated by the bodily organisation, and of one interwoven with it, which is only to be apprehended by supersensible means of cognition. If this latter experience is, on account of its essential nature, hidden from ordinary consciousness, the other remains still more unknowable, because, in order to become known, it must be disentangled from that part which can only be grasped supersensibly.

Viewed in their detachment, these two elements of the soul life show that this is no steady forward flow; rather it is a striving for equilibrium between two movements. An activity more of the nature of thought and bound to the body would force it into the one, while an activity more of the nature of will and purely supersensible would force it into the other. If one perceives how the soul stands in the struggle between these two streams, then, through this observation, one gains a deeper insight into something else working into the life of the soul.

This observation shows that in the middle of sense life a minimum of that force is present which does not develop on a bodily basis, but which is given to man out of the supersensible world by way of the will. In this period of life the soul develops a strong subconscious inclination towards identification with the physical organisation. This inclination, though subconscious, works instinctively into consciousness. The soul then strives through the forces of her own being to turn away, to a certain extent, from the spiritual world in which she lived before her entrance into sense existence. Now against this striving there works another force which is not originally related in its own being to the forces of man's soul, but which, during the course of the world, attains an influence over the soul. This force is not only active in the middle period of man's life but through his whole life. Only in middle life it makes itself especially noticeable by hindering the turning away from the spiritual world. In general this force comes to expression in the constitution of the soul in a certain tendency toward what may be described as unjustified pride. It is active when a man considers himself more highly endowed than corresponds to his stage of evolution. And it is also active when, for example, man is impelled to an action that is, in its moral aspect, contrary to his nature as man. It may seem strange that a force which prevents man from turning away from the spiritual world can at the same time be a source of deviation from the good. But supersensible knowledge shows, just as sense knowledge does, that there are forces in the world whose effect, in one direction necessary and beneficial, can in another direction turn into the contrary. According to the use of the word in earlier views of the world the force here described can be called the “Luciferic.” But one must not attach to this idea only those feelings of antipathy which have been rightly linked to it on account of one aspect of the Luciferic nature. In a certain sense the justification for the appearance in the course of the world of such a force, whose activity has also evil consequences, must be sought in its necessity for the evolution of man.

In contrast to this force there stands another, which though not originally inherent in man's nature, is likewise active in it in the course of the world. If the Luciferic element were fully active without such opposition, it would, on the entrance of the soul into sense life, overcome the attraction of man's being for this life, and man would not enter it at all. In that moment when this turning away of the human soul from sense life is possible, the Luciferic is overcome by another force which draws the soul towards sense life more strongly than its own being would. For the same reason that we give the opposing force the name “Luciferic” we can call this other the “Ahrimanic.” And, like the Luciferic, the Ahrimanic has also its dark side. In it lies the origin of the aberrations of thought, as in the Luciferic the erring of will. For the Ahrimanic, too, is active in man's soul not only in the beginning but through the whole course of life.

An idea of the relation in which man as a cognitive and active being stands to the world, can only be gained if it is sought for on the basis of insight into the above forces working within his life. Knowledge of the world of nature is mediated entirely by the bodily organisation. The processes of nature are extended through the activity of the senses and the contiguous nervous system, into the interior of the body. The behaviour of the body as a whole towards the natural processes running into it may be compared to a mirroring. The body produces images of the events and the soul confronts these images as one who stands before a mirror and observes the image he produces. A science of the soul which rejects supersensible knowledge must always encounter an epistemological difficulty when it tries to comprehend how bodily processes produced by nerve and sense stimulation are transposed into soul experiences. This difficulty cannot be overcome by philosophic considerations which only take account of the manifestations of ordinary consciousness. For it arises from this: between the bodily processes perceptible to ordinary consciousness and the soul-being of which this consciousness can gain a knowledge, there exists no connection. Neither can anything in the bodily processes reveal itself to ordinary consciousness which would render these processes capable of producing mirror-images which could be grasped spiritually; nor can it perceive how the soul cognises such images. To supersensible perception, however, it is revealed that these same Ahrimanic forces which draw the soul towards the bodily organisation, are also active spiritually in the world of nature outside man. They are active as spiritual forces in the bodily organisation in the mirroring process described above, which is therefore a spiritual process within the material of the body; and they, through their activity in the soul, make her capable of experiencing images. All knowledge of Nature is mediated by Ahrimanic activity.

In his actions man experiences free will. This is a fact of consciousness. It can only be repudiated by one who closes his eyes to a patent fact. It cannot be understood by one who desires to comprehend everything according to the pattern of scientific ideas, for free will does not belong to the realm of Nature. Thinkers who would only admit the laws of Nature in the world decide against the acceptance of free will, not because they do not perceive it, but because they do not comprehend it. The essence of free will—like all that partakes of the nature of will—can only be grasped by supersensible perception. In relation to the sense world the human soul can only receive free will and make it part of her own being by being held back in the spiritual sphere by the Luciferic forces, even while she sojourns in the sense world with a part of her being. The same force which in the middle period of man's life saves him from becoming identified with the bodily organisation, fashions his free will. Through this force his life is lifted out of the realms of purely natural connections in which his bodily organisation places him. Supersensible perceptions of what is Ahrimanic and Luciferic show us clearly that man, according to his supersensible being, belongs to a different realm of the spiritual world from these two forces. It is further apparent that each of these two forces is opposed to the direction man's being should take in the world order; that, however, the pursuit of this direction through the state of equilibrium possible between these two kinds of forces, is the condition of man's evolution to ever higher stages of existence. From the foregoing exposition it may be seen that assimilating natural knowledge and making it one's own, and the development of free will, are results of the passage through this state of equilibrium.

A spiritual-scientific survey of the historical life of man shows that this life is also influenced in two opposing directions by both these forces, and is a striving for equilibrium between them. But in successive epochs there is an alternating preponderance of the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic impulses. After a period in which humanity is exposed predominantly to the Luciferic force, and in which it strives out of its own soul life to withstand this force, there always follows an epoch in which the working of the Ahrimanic has to be striven against. Such an Ahrimanic epoch holds sway in recent times. We owe to it a considerable extension of natural knowledge, and a mode of life by which man attains an especial perfection in the control of natural forces. But through a one-sided leaning in that direction he has withdrawn himself from the forces which accord with his own true being. And if he made no opposition to his inclination towards the Ahrimanic, the Luciferic impulses would take the place of man's own essential forces and cause a deviation of the historical stream in their direction. In the earlier ages in the evolution of mankind, the balance between the two impulses was kept by a kind of spiritual instinct. In modern times the place of this instinct must be taken by a conscious seizing hold of the forces which work on the soul. Progress in the historical development of mankind can be perceived in just this: the older instinctive spiritual life becomes transformed into a constitution of soul ever more ruled by consciousness. This transformation of the unconscious—half conscious—into conscious soul-life proceeds according to laws inherent in historical evolution. To prevent the result of this transformation from being deviated in an Ahrimanic direction the supersensible world must be grasped by man in a free act of will. For while outside man's soul the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic are forces opposing one another, within the soul a too strong influence of the conscious life by the Ahrimanic, prepares the ground for the attacks of the Luciferic. And if man is permeated by the Luciferic he develops a special tendency to allow his conscious soul-life to be pervaded by the Ahrimanic also. At the commencement of the fully conscious soul life of modern times man was in an epoch in which the Ahrimanic impulses were powerful. In consequence of this, it is necessary by the cultivation of a proper attitude of soul to withdraw oneself from the Luciferic tendencies thus introduced. This can only take place when a striving for supersensible cognition prevents the soul forces, which can serve this striving, from being gripped by Luciferic forces.

It is insight into all these relations which causes one who fully grasps them to regard supersensible cognition in the present time as a necessity in the course of human evolution. But one with this insight also understands that misunderstanding and opposition can arise in face of this knowledge. These arise directly from the duality of the human personality which becomes very evident through this insight. The Ahrimanic impulse of modern times seizes the conscious soul-life. Then, through this, in the unconscious part of soul-life, certain impulses stir which resist the inclination to supersensible knowledge. An unconscious fear of the supersensible arises. It is none the less active because it is unconscious. But for the conscious soul life it disguises itself in all sorts of self-deceptions which it produces in man. In this soul-life thoughts appear purporting to be logical reasons against the possibility—even against the blessings—of supersensible knowledge, thoughts to which man only gives his consent on account of his unconscious fear of this knowledge. He sees reasons which are in truth no reasons, and knows nothing of the fear which in reality governs him. Moreover, through the Ahrimanic impulse which forces man to sense existence, a certain want of interest in the supersensible as well as fear, makes itself felt. This prevents man from following up the deeper spiritual connections in the realm of Nature which, through their own being, lead away from mere sense perception towards the supersensible. Man would limit himself to the purely material and external side of natural facts. He would order his life according to this outer side. He does not notice that it is only his want of interest that drives him away from the perception of spirit in nature. He surrenders himself to the belief, caused by this want of interest, that the supersensible is either to be denied altogether or must only be thought of as beyond the bounds of human cognition. To counteract this unconscious fear and lack of interest, he who applies himself to supersensible knowledge has to develop the forces of his soul, while his opponents believe that they are fighting on the side of logical reason and that man should remain modestly within the bounds of cognition.

In addition to this there is the misunderstanding which arises because, owing to the contradictory nature of the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, wrong inferences are drawn concerning the behaviour of these impulses towards the nature of man. People think—many only pretend to think—that by consciously opposing by supersensible cognition the Ahrimanic character of a mere natural knowledge, man must be led into the Luciferic. Whoever maintains this, lacks the understanding that the super-sensible knowledge which man develops out of his own innermost being cannot only never lead into the Luciferic element, but directly prevents such a downfall, which would inevitably take place if a one-sided Ahrimanic impulse usurped the place of consciousness. For this would deliver over to the Luciferic the strivings after the supersensible which are not seized by man's own being. With these indications we have pointed out the obstacles which oppose man's turning towards supersensible cognition. These arise from a certain self-deception and intentional, or half-intentional, misunderstanding of human nature. If attention is directed to these obstacles by a calm and collected soul life, the possibility of such cognition will easily be found, for this knowledge reveals its truth through itself when its revelations are not opposed by the human soul in the way indicated.