The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear Friends,

We will now pass on to certain things that have arisen out of the fundamental nature of eurhythmy, things that are, up to a point at least, known to you already; and we will then establish a connecting link between what I have been speaking about and what you already know.

The first thing I wish to speak about is this: We have seen how what might be described as certain moral impulses, which we have brought before our souls in the numbers twelve and seven, find their expression in human gesture, in gesture which is either static or permeated with movement; and we have seen how thought, in the sense of eurhythmy, is altogether possible on the strength of experiences and judgments of the human soul, which shed themselves into the sounds of speech.

That which thus streams out from the human soul in gesture and movement can, however, also work back upon the human being as a whole. And this is the basis of the curative action of eurhythmy, which may be effective, not only in the sphere of the moral and psychic life, but also in the physiological, physical life.

The curative action of eurhythmy upon the meal and psychic life will be especially apparent when certain eurhythmic principles and facts are applied during the years of childhood.

Now starting from this standpoint—from the way in which on the one hand form and movement arise from a certain mood or attitude of soul and then react back once more—I should like to speak further of certain things which have already been dealt with, so that in these next days we may gain a somewhat wider outlook and make another step forward in the development of speech eurhythmy.

You will all know the exercise that is specially adapted to bring one person into contact with another; the so-called I and You exercise. You stand in a square; on account of the audience, however, the two at the back must be a little closer together. And now you can do this exercise in the following way: I and you, you and I, I and you, you and I—are we. Here you have a real ‘we’, the final joining together in the ‘we’ (circle). The two who face each other in a diagonal direction are intended as the ‘I’ and ‘you’. As you approach each other you must clearly express the fact that you wish to belong one to the other and that the others also wish to belong to the circle; the diagonal line expresses the transition from the ‘I’ to the ‘you’, you and I... then retrace the line (this can be done many times in succession)... then the whole is consciously brought together: are we. If the exercise is to be repeated one can return to the starting places with you and I, you and I.

Such an exercise can be worked out in the most varied ways, taking as one’s basis such aspects of the soul life as we have learned to know during the last few days.

Let us now suppose, Frl. V… that you are the Eagle, you Frl. St... Aquarius, you Frl. S... Taurus, and you Frl. H... Leo. Now make the gestures. You take these gestures as the starting point and return to them when the whole exercise is completed.

You must realize what you have thus expressed. You have, by means of this exercise, expressed the fact that the human being contains these four animals within himself in their aspect of moral qualities, and that when he becomes conscious of his true self, he understands that the whole human race is contained within his own being—thus, as man he really comprises the ‘we’. Begin with these gestures... follow with the exercise... then pass with a certain grace back to the first gestures. Here we have an example of how these things which we have just learned may be applied.

In this way the whole exercise is brought to a right conclusion. Preliminary gestures; I and you, you and I, I and you, you and I, are we; concluding gestures. You then have the right intro-duction and the right conclusion, and the whole thing stands, as it were, enclosed in a frame.

Now this exercise is most excellent in the teaching of eurhythmy from an educational point of view. Indeed, when one has observed in a child the tendency towards jealousy and ambition—qualities which one wishes to eliminate—one must persuade such a child to do this exercise with special warmth and ardour. In the art of education it is, of course, obvious that one must never apply anything having the least trace of what might be called magic; for anything of the nature of magic would work with a powerful suggestive element. It would react on the unconscious life of the child. Such means can only be used in the case of children of weak mentality, of deficient children; it is only permissible in such cases. When, however, abnormal characteristics are present in the soul life of the child it is absolutely necessary to work directly into the psychic life—though here, too, of course, one must avoid anything in the nature of actual suggestion or magic. Now what really happens when four children do this exercise? They hear the constant repetition: ‘I and you ’. This brings to their consciousness the element of belonging together, of comradeship, the element of relationship to other human beings, and this is further impressed upon them in the: ‘are we’. The gestures accompanying the exercise simply express the fact that the child is learning to pay attention to what is being done, to what is inwardly working upon him. Thus there is not the least trace of suggestion. It can really be said that this dance is a remedy against jealousy and false ambition. It can only be used in the case of healthy children when it is carried out with full consciousness, quite without anything in the nature of suggestion or magic.

But now you will ask: How does the case stand with pathological children? With pathological children one has to reckon with a consciousness that is already dimmed and clouded. Then, to a certain extent, suggestion does come into play. For this reason, the moment one enters the sphere of the pathological in children, one must clearly realize that although this exercise may be applied with excellent results to children whose consciousness is dulled, it should never be used with children whose minds are over active.

It is such things as these, which prove that everything in the domain of curative eurhythmy must only be applied in close co-operation with a doctor and when working under constant medical supervision; for as soon as we enter the domain of the pathological, only a doctor is qualified to form an opinion.

Let us pass to another exercise or dance, which has arisen out of a definite attitude of soul. In order to give this exercise a name, we have called it the Peace Dance. And this Peace Dance serves the purpose of teaching one individual in conjunction with others how certain nuances of the soul life may find their expression in eurhythmic forms.

Let us suppose that you make some sort of a triangle. Make it so that the form looks something like this:

Now one person can walk the lines of the triangle in this direction (arrow); or we can have three people, of whom the first takes this line, the second this line and the third this line (see diagram).

When you look at this type of triangle and compare it with one of the following type:

you have a considerable difference. In the first case one line is conspicuous on account of its length in comparison to the two other lines, and in the other case it is conspicuous because it is comparatively so short. Even when the exercise is carried out in precisely the same way, we receive a quite different impression.

In the first case we have the impression of peace; in the second case, when we do the exercise according to diagram II, the form gives the impression of energy. So that we may say: In the first place we have a Peace Dance and in the second place an Energy Dance.

The essential thing in such a eurhythmic exercise is that we should carry it out rhythmically. And when we now ask ourselves: How should such an exercise be carried out? We must bear in mind that in a descending rhythm we have what might be described as something ordered and under control, while in an ascending rhythm we have an element of striving, of will.

Now when we enter either into the mood of peace or into the mood of energy we have something of the nature of striving, of working towards some goal—something quite different from what we should have to employ when it is a question, for instance, of expressing a military command. This expression may sound worse than I intend; a military command may, however, be employed simply to train the children, by means of certain movements, to be attentive. But nothing in the nature of a command or order can be expressed in this exercise, which demands a particular attitude of soul. It must have a feeling of ascent, of intensification; it needs the Anapaest rhythm.

Now I will ask Frl. S... to show us the first triangle as I have described it; the lines of the triangle must be stepped in Anapaest rhythm while I say the following words:

Strebe mach Frieden, (Strive for Peace,)
Lebe in Frieden, (Live in Peace,)
Liebe den Frieden. (Love Peace.)

Do it in such a way that the long line faces the audience and that you show the intensification in the long line—thus you must take your start from this point (1); you only move backwards in order that you may be seen by the audience. Now when practising this you will find the fact that the sentences are not built up according to the Anapaest rhythm somewhat disagreeable to the ear. But this does not matter; you must feel the movement, even if this rhythm does not actually lie in the words. It is just in this way that the language of eurhythmy may express something which cannot be fully expressed by language itself—for there is no German word for peace which ends with an emphasized syllable. Let us try it once more:

Strebe nach Frieden,
Lebe in Frieden,
Liebe den Frieden.
(see previous diagram).

Show the Anapaest very distinctly. The words are in the Dactyl rhythm, but in spite of this they must be stepped to the Anapaest; the rhythm does not go with the words, nevertheless the dance, must be done in the Anapaest, without allowing oneself to be disturbed by the words. It would be better to use a text written in Anapaest rhythm, otherwise there must be a certain disharmony, which is naturally disturbing to the ear.

Will you now do the next exercise? Here one must move, in Anapaest rhythm, the triangle that has the short main line. Start once more from this point (1); try also to emphasize the form of the triangle by stepping the long side lines quickly, the, short main line with a quite slow Anapaest. This exercise may, be called the Energy Dance.

These two exercises may, however, be carried out by a group. Let us now choose three people, who will first do the Peace Dance, taking their places in a triangle and each one moving one line only. This can naturally be done to a suitable text, which must be in the rhythm of the Anapaest.

But this exercise can be done in yet another way. Triangles of similar shape, but small, may be formed in the four corners. Indeed this exercise may be carried out with any number of variations; but each variation must have some special note of its own. The best way perhaps, is for those standing at the point marked 1 to begin the form; they begin, and each one carries out a complete triangle—but simultaneously. Eurhythmy depends to a certain extent upon presence of mind. Each separate triangle must do a form similar to the triangle that previously took up the whole of the stage. Now all those standing at the back of the triangle, thus those whom I have placed in the corners, must do the I and you as the second part of the exercise: I and you, you and I, I and you, you and I: are we. Those who stand in the middle simply turn round. The triangle is thus built up in a different way. Those who now form the square must once more carry out the Peace Dance from their present places—the movement three times. When this is done smoothly and well it forms an exercise complete in itself.

From an educational point of view, as also from the point of view of curative education, this exercise, as we have just done it, is of special value. One can make the group smaller using two or three triangles, but one can still carry the exercise out in a similar way. It is especially good to practise this exercise when one has, for instance, a class containing children of choleric temperament, children who will not be kept in order.

Such children must be made to practise these exercises; and if this is done every day, or as often as there is a eurhythmy class, for a period of two or three weeks, one will find that they have become more manageable. Thus children who are always hitting each other and rampaging about should be made to practise this exercise, and you will see that it has a remarkable power of soothing and quieting them.

Now we can do the Energy Dance in a similar way. Here again we must form our four triangles, but pointed triangles this time. Let us move the form of the triangles three times. Four eurhythmists will now be standing in the corners (see diagram), and they must do the following exercise: Begin with the u, ‘You and I’; with the ‘I’ you are in the centre; now you have not the same gesture as you had for the ‘you’ but you have a gesture which looks, as you stand together, as if you were going to attack one another. Go back once more from the ‘I’ into the ‘you’, and do this three times. Now you have reached a position from which we must go further. In the first place we do, as it were, the I and you exercise reversed, thus a you and I exercise: You and I, I and you, you and I, I and you, you and I, I and you—now you are standing at the back, and to continue the exercise you must run past each other crossing on the way (the four at the outer points changing places). Thus we go towards the centre; You and I, I and you; you and I, I and you; you and I, I and you, struggle fiercely with each other, struggle fiercely with each other (streiten heftig miteinander)! And now again the original exercise in the triangle three times repeated.

Do the whole exercise once more: the triangle three times, then the separating movement, then the triangle again.

In order to show you how such exercises may be multiplied and varied, we will do it as follows: move the triangle for the first time, for the second time, for the third time; now you must regard all those standing in the triangle as involved in the struggle. Thus do the form: You and I, I and you, you and I, I and you, struggle fiercely with each other, (thus everybody who is taking part); then make the triangles once more, repeating the form of the triangle three times.

It is, of course, comparatively easy to find poems of three verses built up in such a way that they may be practised to this form.

I should like to point out once more that it is quite possible to apply what you have just seen to education and also to curative education. This exercise has an especially beneficial effect upon children who are phlegmatic and sleepy. They will be stimulated by it; it will give them more inner vitality. That is what I had to say in this connection.

Today we will take still another exercise, which is based more directly on the actual form. Out of the form itself you will feel what is intended. Frau B... will you try to run a spiral form winding from within outwards.

The way you did this was perfectly right. You began with quite noticeable movement, that is to say, with the hands laid against the heart... and you ended with the arms held in a backward direction. When you observe the movement of this form you will find that it is well suited to express the going out of oneself, the gaining of interest in the outer world, and finally the yielding of oneself up to the world, which is expressed in the backwards movement of the arms. Do it once more, bearing in mind what I have said. You will feel that there is first a seeking in oneself, afterwards a becoming aware of the world outside, and then a yielding of oneself up to this world. Now run the reversed spiral; take the line from without inwards, in the first half of the form holding the hands more in a backward direction, and in the second half laid against the heart. You see this is just the reverse of the former line; it is a gathering together of one’s forces; it is a coming back from the outer world into one’s own being.

In curative education, this first spiral exercise is especially applicable to children who are the reverse of anaemic, and it can be applied to combat undue egoism; the second exercise may be applied where the ego-force is weak, and it is also an excellent remedy in the case of children who are anaemic.

I would like today to try as it were to round off our introductory studies, so that we may be able, from tomorrow onwards, to pass on to the practical consideration of particular cases; for it is indeed so, that a faithful study of the nature of so-called illnesses of the soul will of itself afford clues for the discovery of their right treatment.

The treatment of adult patients by our methods still presents difficulties. As I explained yesterday, the treatment would require certain conditions for the patients which, so long as things are in the world as they are today, cannot be realised within the work of our Society. For children, on the other hand, a very great deal can be achieved—by education.

It will already be clear to you, dear friends, that in illnesses of the soul we have to do with karmic connections which come to manifestation in the illness. This is, of course, true of other illnesses too, but it is true in a much deeper sense, and more specifically, of illnesses of the soul. We are therefore perfectly justified in asking the question—we do not formulate it in so many words, but it is bound to arise in the unconscious, and we must have a feeling for what lies behind it—the question, namely: how far can we expect to bring about an improvement? Any degree of improvement that we are able to bring about is so much gain for the patient. We must never take refuge in the thought that, owing to the patient's karma, things are bound to take their course in such and such a way. We can say this about the external events; that a person encounters on the path of destiny; but it is never possible to speak so in regard to the free flow within him of his thoughts and feelings and deeds. For here karma can take different roads; karma can even be turned aside, so that the fulfilment comes in some quite other way. Not that it ever fails to come, but karma can be fulfilled in many ways. I have frequently said, when people have raised the question of pre-natal education—meaning education in the embryonic time—that so long as the child does not yet breathe, it is the education and whole manner of life of the mother that is of importance. For the rest, we should not intervene in the work of God. In the embryonic period, it is entirely a matter of how things are with the mother.

We can now usefully carry further the study we began yesterday when we were considering the epileptic disorder—the study, that is, in regard to physical body, ether body, astral body and ego organisation. What conclusion did we come to as regards all those forms of illness in children, that are of an epileptic nature? We found that in these illnesses we have to do with a congestion of astral body and ego organisation in some organ. The surface of the organ does not allow the astral body and ego organisation to make their way out, and they become congested. They are, as it were, jammed in the organ. An astral and ego atmosphere of high pressure arises there. This causes fits. For what is really taking place, when a fit occurs?

Suppose you have an organ with its ether body within it. For each single organ there is a definite relationship that should obtain between physical body and ether body on the one hand and astral body and ego on the other hand. Now I assume of course that all of you are familiar with the fact that in inorganic external Nature, substances combine with one another in certain definite relationships. The descriptions of this that you find in the chemistry books are not correct; nevertheless there are these well-defined relationships. I purposely do not say relationships of weight, nor do I say atomic relationships for there we would come into the realm of theory; nevertheless it is a fact that hydrogen and oxygen, for example, combine in a certain definite relationship. If we have sulphuric acid (H₂S0₄), we have in it hydrogen, sulphur and oxygen in a particular relation to one another. If this relation were to change, then the combination might under certain circumstances give rise to an altogether different substance. We can, for example, if we have a certain relation of hydrogen, sulphur and oxygen that is different from the relation in sulphuric acid, obtain sulphurous acid (H₂S0₃)—obtain, that is to say, a different substance, although composed of the same three original substances.

In a similar way, physical body and ether body stand in a certain definite relation to astral body and ego in the so-called normal human being. (I say “so-called”, because the expression “normal human being” is a purely conventional one, founded on the belief that there is a fixed boundary dividing human beings into normal and abnormal.) This relationship is, within limits, a variable one. But if it exceeds a certain limit of variability—and this again can be individual for the particular human being—we have abnormality, a state of illness; in some organ astral body and ego organisation will be present, but in such a way that they cannot fill it in a right relationship. This will mean, that they are unable to come forth from it, they cannot get out. You will remember, we recognised yesterday the necessity for astral body and ego organisation to come forth again out of an organ, out of the physical body. When the astral body and ego are jammed and squeezed in this way in some organ, then there is too much astral body, too much ego in that organ; there is not the proper amount, there is a surplus—with the result that the organ cannot help feeling the astrality. If the organ has in it the right and proper amount, it does not perceive or feel the astrality, it does not sense the presence of astrality within it. But if there is in an organ an activity of astral body and ego organisation that does not belong there, then the organ is bound to feel it. If something is there in the organ that does not pass over into consciousness, if there is congestion, so that a great amount of astrality and ego organisation is present which does not go over into consciousness, then a fit takes place. The very description I have given you contains an indication of the accompanying phenomenon—namely, disturbance of consciousness. Disturbance of consciousness is bound to occur whenever this congestion happens in an organ that is in any way connected with consciousness.

When such congestion of astral body and ego organisation takes place in an organ that has not direct positive connection with consciousness—for there are organs that are not directly but inversely connected with consciousness, organs that in fact hinder or arrest consciousness—then we have, not loss of consciousness, but pain. Pain is heightened—not lessened—consciousness. A fit as such is not painful, as you know; that is simply a fact. Pain occurs when the congestion takes place, not in an organ that promotes consciousness, but in an organ that retards or arrests consciousness. Here the congestion will lead to enhanced consciousness—to pain. That is the real nature of pain.

We have now arrived at some understanding of all those forms of disorder which, occurring in childhood, lead to epileptic and related illnesses; we shall afterwards have to speak more specifically of these illnesses, but that we can do better when we have individual cases before us.

But now you will easily see that we may also have a quite different state of affairs. Instead of an organ whose surface holds back within the organ the ego organisation and the astral body, we could have an organ whose surface lets too much through, an organ that does not, as it were, keep back sufficient for its own use. Here the astrality, with which is associated also the ego organisation, is not dammed up, but tends, on the contrary, to overflow the organ. The surface becomes, as it were, porous for the astrality and the ego organisation; they “leak” out of the organ. With imaginative consciousness we do actually see rays streaming forth from the organ. In an organ that “leaks” in this way you will always find also the physical correlate of secretion; even where the secretion is not strikingly present, you will find that it can occur and can be detected. We shall have more to say about this later. When a human being is affected with this condition in childhood, the condition can be healed only if we are able to hold fast the astral body and ego organisation—bring them back, as it were, into the organ.

To what forms of illness, to what outwardly perceptible complexes of symptoms does such an inner condition lead? Here we come to a chapter in our study, where the phenomena that show themselves differ according as we are dealing with children or adults. For we come to illnesses that are bound to assume quite special forms for the period in human development between birth and puberty. We come, in effect, to the various kinds of hysteria. Now it is just in the realm where we are concerned with the forms of hysterical disorder, that the deplorable lack of clarity in modern science proclaims itself. Words are coined to name the various forms without any regard for reality. This shows itself at once in the first picture people begin to make of the matter; for in conformity with the modern way of looking at such things they are, of course, bound to bring this hysterical condition into connection somehow or other with the sexual life, and more so in the case of the woman than of the man; and then the forms of illness are named accordingly. The words by which the various forms are designated are of no importance. What is important for us is to make sure whether all the cases that are today reckoned under these names really deserve to be called hysteria, in the way the word is understood, or whether we do not rather need to have recourse to a much wider classification.

Now, as a matter of fact, the child who has not yet attained puberty cannot possibly have the form of disorder from which he is frequently said to suffer. He cannot have hysteria—if it is assumed that hysteria is associated with sex. The child can, however, certainly have in his earliest childhood what I have described as a protrusion of astral body and ego organisation beyond an organ. That he can have, but only that. We must turn a deaf ear to the various descriptions that have been given for the better comprehension of hysterical disorder. All these descriptions are made with reference to one ruling idea; and when an idea is set up in this way and all descriptions are made with reference to it, then these descriptions cannot but be false. Countless descriptions in psychiatry today are false just on this account. You cannot do things that way.

Let us see what it is we really have before us in a young child who is said to be suffering from hysteria. He has difficulty in making contact with the external world. I explained yesterday what this means. He has difficulty in taking hold rightly of the equilibrium that belongs to the fluid element, of the equilibrium that is associated with air, of the differentiations in warmth, in light, in chemical action, and in the universal cosmic life. But instead of grasping all these too weakly, as is the case with the epileptic, the child takes hold too strongly, he puts his astral body and Ego into his whole environment—into weight, into warmth; he seizes hold of all the elements more intensely than is really possible for a so-called normal person. And what is the result?

You have only to remind yourself how it is with you when you have grazed your skin at some spot. Suppose you then grasp hold of some object with the sore surface, where the skin has been rubbed away. You know how it hurts! The reason for your being so sensitive is that at that spot (where the surface is raw) you come up against the external world too vigorously with your inner astral body. Only in moderation are we able to contact the external world with our astral body (and ego organisation). The child who from the first brings his astral body right out—such a child will touch and take hold of things delicately, just as though he had been wounded. Nor shall we be surprised to find in him this hyper-sensitiveness, this hyper-sensitive response to the world around him. A human being in this condition is bound to feel his environment much more keenly, much more intensely; and he will moreover have within him a much more powerful reflection of his environment.

And now ideas will begin also to arise in the child which are painful in themselves. It comes about in the following way. The moment he begins to develop will in any direction, the child has to reach out into something in regard to which he is hyper-sensitive. And then as soon as the will begins to develop, a strange condition arises in the conscious part of him. He becomes super-conscious of the unfolding of the will; in other words, the unfolding of the will causes him pain. Pain is present in nascent state as soon as the will begins to appear, and the child tries to hold back the pain. This happens with great intensity. He makes restless, struggling movements, because he is trying to hold back the pain. Here, you see, I have given you descriptions of inner conditions which find their outlet in life in a clearly recognisable manner. A child wants to do something but feels a pain and cannot do it; instead of the soul-life flowing out into action, he has a terribly powerful inward experience before which he shudders—he shudders at himself. But now it may equally well be a question, not of an outward action, but of a concealed or disguised action in the sphere of thought—for the will lives also in the sphere of thought. When it is a question of an action in the life of thought, when it is ideas that should unfold, it may be that in certain forms of illness these ideas, at the moment they should develop, evoke fear, evoke anxiety and fear and are unable to arise in the mind. Every such idea which, at the moment when it should come to consciousness, evokes fear—every such idea simultaneously causes the life of feeling to develop below it; feelings surge up, and depression invariably sets in. Feelings which are not comprehended, not taken hold of by ideas, give rise to depression; only those feelings are not of a depressing nature, which, as soon as they arise, are immediately apprehended by the life of thought and ideation.

The condition that has been described as arising out of the nature of the case can be seen in the patient; it is there before us as a complex of symptoms. If we have learned to know an abnormality for what it really is, then we shall find that this true and essential nature of the abnormality shows itself to us quite plainly in the patient. And that is how it should be, when we take with us into the practical spheres of life perceptions that have been arrived at in Spiritual Science. When speaking to those who will have to intervene in illnesses of this kind with practical help, descriptions must leave the realm of the abstract entirely and enter right into the realm of living reality, so that the person who listens to the description can see it taking place in the patient before him. And in such a case as we are considering, you do actually see what is happening; in some organ, or nexus of organs, you perceive an outflowing of the astrality or ego organisation.

A phenomenon in a child, which brings the complex of symptoms to expression with somewhat rude plainness, is nocturnal enuresis. It happens quite naturally; but only in the light of what has been explained will you see the phenomenon of bed-wetting in a child in its right perspective. For it has its origin in the condition we have been describing. Whenever you have a case of bed-wetting, you can assume that the astral body is running out, is overflowing. As a matter of fact, secretions and excretions of every kind are always connected with the activity of the astral body and ego organisation. These must therefore be in order, if we want the secretions and excretions to be in order.

Now it is through the physical body that the ego organisation and astral body are connected with the four elements (as they are called), whilst in the etheric body, the ego organisation and astral body are connected more with the higher elements, with a part of the warmth, with the light, with the chemical ether and with the universal life-ether. If now we may borrow from the physical realm a word which can be most expressive when we extend its application to the spiritual (as was continually done in earlier times, when men had instinctive clairvoyance and made no such sharp distinction as we do between physical and spiritual), let us take the word “soreness” and speak of a child having soreness of soul. The child is sore in his soul, and this soreness of soul becomes a dominant idea in him, overriding everything else. If it cannot be made better by means of curative education, then, when the child attains puberty, either the feminine or the masculine form of this soreness will appear. The feminine form will have the character of hysteria, as it was called when there was still a true perception of it. The masculine form will have a different character. We shall be able to speak about that also; we shall find that it assumes quite other forms.

Whenever therefore you have a case where the conditions are the opposite of what are found in epileptic or epileptoid trouble, you will always have to give your attention to the excretions. And you will find you need to observe particularly how the child sweats. Whenever you want to bring something home to the child, to call up ideas in him, then watch carefully to see whether the inner soreness of soul, that is experienced at the origination of an idea, does not express itself in conditions of sweating. There is a certain difficulty here. In the ordinary way, one might imagine that when something like sweating had been stimulated by an inner condition of soul, the sweating would be noticeable immediately afterwards. It may be so in some circumstances but it is not necessarily so. For, the peculiar thing is that the inner anxiety or shrinking, the feeling of tenderness and soreness, does not work as does an outer feeling of soreness; but what arises as the result of it is first of all “digested” in the human being, and will sometimes take then the strangest paths in the interior of the human being, making its appearance not at all quickly but, curiously enough, only after some time, in the course of the next three to three and a half days.

Now, everything that is caused by expansion of astral body and ego organisation, is connected with what meets us in the normal expansion of astral body and ego organisation at death. When it is a question of congestion, the opposite condition from dying sets in. In epileptic phenomena there is the attempt to damn up life within the organism, to imitate, under abnormal circumstances, the process of creeping into the physical organism when the descent to earth takes place. But in the condition of which we are speaking now, we have to do with an imitation of what happens at death. After death the astral body and ego expand at the same time as life flows away; and it is with an imitation of this condition that we are here concerned. When once we are able to feel this, we come to acquire, little by little, something that is important in the observation of such cases. We acquire, namely, an organ of smell for what is present in the child; we smell this outflow. For it can really be smelled, and it belongs to the esoteric side of our work to acquire this perception and to experience how the aura of these children smells differently from the aura of normal children. There is actually something faintly corpse-like in the auric sweatings of these children. Such a fact can help to bring it home to you that we do indeed have here a kind of imitation of death; the accompanying phenomena of “dying” appear, in the sweatings that occur in consequence of this or that symptom. Such phenomena can make their appearance in the course of the next three days, approximating to the period during which the backward review after death takes place, when the astral body and ego organisation are expanding.

Working with this knowledge, you will have to accustom yourselves to imprint in your memory something you have noticed in the connections of mind or will of such a child, and then go on observing him for the next three or four days. This will enable you to discover whether you have before you the form of abnormal soul-life of which I have been speaking. And now we are at last rightly equipped for tackling the question: How am I to treat such a child?

The soul of the child lies open to my view in his every action. His soul flows into everything I see him doing around me. In such a case, where the soul of the child comes streaming towards you, you will realise that the education must more than ever depend upon what the teacher, on his part, is able to bring to the child in his own attitude of soul—in his whole mood, when he is dealing with something in his own surroundings, when he is himself doing something. Suppose you are a very nervy teacher, a person who is continually doing things in such a way as to give a shock to other people. This quality of character or temperament is much more widespread than one imagines; it is exceedingly frequent among teachers. If I may use a frivolous expression—are not most teachers today inclined to be “jumpy”? This state of nerves, where people are so easily put out or upset, simply cannot be avoided, so long as the training of teachers continues to be as it is today, where the student is overloaded with an enormous amount of undigested knowledge. Those who take teachers' training courses (we are concerned here with the training of teachers, so I say nothing about other courses of training!) ought never on any account to have to go in for an examination. The examination in front of them puts them into the frame of mind which leads to this nervy condition.

You will see at once in what a difficult position we are placed when we have to develop our work on the background of present-day conditions! We are at this moment faced with the question of organising the Lauenstein Home for backward children. In view of the government regulations, those who are to take charge would be well advised to take the examination. One of them, at any rate, will have to do so. And yet there is no sense in it; because it is, of course, only another opportunity of becoming nervy. This is a situation which we must face quite dispassionately—unless we want to go through the world blindfold! There is nothing to be done but to take the examination, and after it gradually get rid of the nervous tendencies. That is, however, what most people do not succeed in doing.

Anything in the environment that may cause even a slight shock to the child—if it originates in the unconscious, in the temperament, of the teacher—must be avoided. And do you know why? Because the teacher must also be capable of inducing shock, consciously and deliberately; shocks are often the very best remedy for these conditions! They take effect, however, only if they do not proceed from unconscious habit, but are given consciously and deliberately, the teacher watching intently all the time to observe the effect on the child.

Suppose you have observed this complex of symptoms in a child. You must take the child and get him to write, or read, or paint. Well, and what then? Having first tried to bring him to do as much as he with his particular constitution is capable of doing, then, at a certain point, try to bring the work into a quicker tempo. This will mean that the child is then obliged to let, not the feeling of soreness, but the anxiety connected with the soreness, retire, because you are there in front of him and he cannot help getting into a fresh state of anxiety on that account. The fact that the child is at this moment compelled to come into a new state of anxiety, compelled to enter into an experience that has been artificially promoted and is different from the previous one, brings it about that he strengthens within him, consolidates within him, the ego and astral that are trying to flow out. If you repeat such things systematically with a child, over and over again, a consolidation of ego and astral body will take place. But you must not grow tired! You must do the thing over and over again, preparing your whole teaching in such a way that, as it proceeds, at certain moments it suddenly takes a new turn.

For this, it is, of course, essential that you have the arranging of the teaching in your own hands. If, let us say, every three-quarters of an hour you are obliged to take a different subject, then all your plans will be frustrated. A form of teaching for abnormal children can be built up on the basis of what we have introduced in the Waldorf School—period lessons where, during the main teaching hours, one subject is continued for weeks at a time. For we have, as you know, no set curriculum for the early morning hours between 8 and l0 a.m.; the teacher can take what he chooses, what he sees to be right, in accordance with the principles on which he works. On this basis you can also work out what you must do for abnormal children. You will be able, for instance, to introduce such a method as I was describing, where you are continually changing the teaching, altering the tempo. By such means you will find you can work very strongly indeed upon glandular secretion, and therewith on the consolidation of the astral body in the child. But you will have to practise a certain resignation, for where this kind of treatment has been given and healing has begun, people will not notice that the children have begun to grow healthy. They will notice only that in a particular case there has been in their view no healing, since “becoming normal” is regarded by them as the right and natural thing to expect. What the world calls “becoming normal” is however not at all a thing to be so taken for granted.

So you see, whereas in cases of epileptic or epileptoid trouble it was a question (as I explained yesterday) of adopting rather methods that call for bodily activity, or else methods that work purely in the moral sphere, it is mainly didactic methods that will be needed for combating this other trouble of which I have been speaking today. To give these “shocks”—that is one thing you must do. And the other is as follows.

Observe carefully how the condition alternates between depression on the one hand, and on the other hand a kind of excitement or mania, outbursts of mirth and cheerfulness. What is the cause, when they occur in these forms of illness, of such alternation between states of depression and mania? Owing to the inward soreness, there is a perpetual longing not to let the will come to expression. If the will fails to unfold in the life of ideas, then conditions of depression arise. But when this has been happening for a long time and the child can no longer restrain himself but must give vent, there arises—because the inner soreness is repressed and the child can now flow right out, together with the astral outflow—an enhanced feeling of well-being. So we have in this way alternating conditions of sadness and hilarity, which, when they occur in a child who has also the other symptoms of sweating and bed-wetting, should be carefully watched. For this is where we must intervene as teachers.

Suppose we are faced with depression in the child. The first step will have been taken, the moment the child feels that we are strongly united with him inwardly, that we understand him. But because we are dealing here with a kind of hypertrophy of the life of thought and will, what the child needs is more than that we simply share his sorrow. If we are merely dejected and sorrowful with the child—that is no good to him! We can help him only if we are ourselves competent to cope with the depression we are experiencing with him, and able therefore to give him effective consolation, so that he feels comfort and relief.

A teacher who can understand these things will learn to find for himself the methods he can use. He will know, for example, that a constant idea in such children is that they think they ought to do something, and yet they cannot do it. It is a complicated idea, but one must be able to study it and understand it. They ought to do something and cannot do it; but they have to do it notwithstanding, and then it turns out differently from how they would have liked. Examine the soul-life of such children and try to get hold of the idea in their soul. One could express it in the following words: “I want to do it. I cannot do it. And yet I must do it ... And then it turns out differently from what it ought to be.”

In this complex of ideas the whole of the child's illness is really contained. The child detects in himself the peculiar constitution which consists in the out-flowing of astral body and ego organisation. It manifests as a kind of working outwards-into-the-world of the astral body—“I will do it.” But the child knows that then he comes immediately up against the external world and its reagents. Here is the soreness, here it hurts. The child is forced to perceive: “I cannot do it!” Then he knows that it has to be done, nevertheless. He feels: “I have to reach out with my astral body into the agents of the world. But I have no control over what I take in hand, I am so unskilful with my out-flowing astral body. The thing turns out different, because I am not in full control; the astral body flows out too strongly.”

It is precisely in such children that we can observe, in the most wonderful way, what the sub-consciousness, which reaches up into the life of feeling, is really doing. The sub-conscious is so terribly clever! It stamps into the clearest concepts what is going on in the inner constitution of the child, and in his relationship with others as well as with his environment. All this is, so to speak, disentangled in the child's sub-consciousness. But it does not rise up into consciousness. We have to go in search of it. We have to put forth all our efforts to discover these inner, unconscious complexes of ideas in the child. And now suppose the moment comes when such a complex shows itself to you. You notice it. As a matter of fact, it is there almost every time the child is about to begin something in the way of outer action or even also in the way of thought; it is nearly always there. If you intervene at this moment by gently helping in what the child has to do—doing it with him, feeling, as it were, every movement of his hand in your hand, then the child will have the feeling that the second stage is being corrected for him by what you are doing. Naturally the child is not helped at all if you simply do for him the things he has to do. You must intervene only fictitiously. Say, you get the child to paint. You do not paint yourself; but you sit down by him and move your paint brush, accompanying with your brush each movement he makes with his. The child will have the idea that you are gently guiding him, while thus, with love in your heart, you do with him what he has to do; the fact that you are there beside him in this way—he will feel it like a gentle caress in his soul. Even down to intimate details of this nature, we shall be able to find, if we practise a really careful observation, the right thing to do.

In everything Spiritual Science can give, you will always find that there is at last this summons to the individual human being; he must do his part. People are for ever wanting prescriptions: Do this in this way, do that in that way! But the fact is, anyone who sets out to educate abnormal children will never have finished learning. Each single child will be for him a new problem, a new riddle. And the only way he can succeed in finding what he must do in the individual case, is to let himself be guided by the being in the child. It is not easy, but it is the only real way to work. And this is the reason why it is of such paramount importance that, as teachers, we should take in hand our own self-education.

The best kind of self-education will be found to consist in following the symptoms of illness with interest, so that ever and anon we have the feeling: there is something quite wonderful about that symptom! Not that we should go about the world, proclaiming with a flourish of trumpets that it is the insane who are the really divine human beings. One must not do that—not in our time! We should however be fully awake to the fact that when an abnormal symptom makes its appearance, something is there which, seen spiritually, stands nearer to the Spiritual than the things that are done by man in his healthy organism. Only, this standing-nearer-to-the-Spiritual cannot become active in the healthy organism in the corresponding way. If we have once grasped this, then many intimate truths will reveal themselves to us.

It is, as you see, indeed the case that in every domain diagnosis and pathology lead—of themselves—to a real therapy, provided the diagnosis can succeed in penetrating to the essence of the trouble.

This winter we have given a whole series of talks on spiritual science with the specific purpose of coming more closely in touch with the whole nature of man's being. We have looked at the great riddle of man from as many aspects as possible. Today we will make it our task to speak of something that is absolutely a part of everyday life. And perhaps, for the very reason that we start from something really commonplace, we shall see that life's riddles really encounter us on all sides, and that we ought to take hold of them, so that in understanding them we see into the depths of the world. For the things of the spirit, and altogether that which is greatest, is not to be sought in unknown distances, for it reveals itself in the most ordinary things of life. In the smallest most insignificant things of life we can find the greatest wisdom, if we can only understand this. Therefore let us include in this cycle of lectures this winter a study of the everyday theme of laughing and weeping from the spiritual scientific point of view.

Laughing and weeping are certainly very common things in human life. But only spiritual science can bring a deeper understanding of these phenomena, because spiritual science is the only thing that can penetrate into the deepest parts of man's being where he is distinctly different from the other kingdoms with whom he shares this globe. By virtue of the fact that man has acquired on this globe the greatest and most powerful share of divinity, he towers above his fellow creatures. Therefore only a knowledge and understanding that reaches the spirit will really fathom man's real nature. Laughing and weeping deserve to be properly observed and appreciated, for they alone can remove the preconception that would rank man's nature too close to that of animals. The way of thinking that would so dearly like to reduce man as near as possible to animal level, emphasises as strongly as it can that a high level of intelligence is to be found in the various accomplishments of animals, an intelligence often far superior to that of man. But this does not particularly surprise the spiritual scientist, for he knows that when the animal does something intelligent it does not arise out of an individual element in the animal but out of the group soul. It is very difficult, of course, to make the concept of the group soul convincing for external observation, even though it is not absolutely impossible. But one thing should be noticed, for it is accessible to any kind of external observation if it is extensive enough: the animal, neither weeps nor laughs. Certainly there will be people who maintain that animals also laugh and weep. But you cannot help such people if they do not want to know what laughing and weeping really imply, and therefore ascribe it to animals as well. A person who really observes the soul knows that the animal cannot weep but at the most howl, nor can it laugh but only grin. We must be alive to the difference between howling and weeping, grinning and laughing. We must go back to some very significant events if we want to throw light on the real nature of laughing and weeping.

From lectures given in various places, including Berlin, and particularly the one about the nature of the temperaments, you will remember that there are two streams in human life. One stream includes all the human capacities and characteristics we inherit from our parents and other ancestors, and which can be passed on to our descendants, and the other stream consists of the qualities and characteristics we have by virtue of being born an individuality. This stream takes on the inherited characteristics like a sheath, its own qualities and characteristics originating from past lives in previous incarnations.

Man is essentially a twofold being: one part of his nature he inherits from his forefathers, the other part he brings with him from earlier incarnations. Thus we differentiate between the actual kernel of man's being which passes from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation, and the sheaths surrounding it, comprising the inherited characteristics. Now it is true that the actual individual kernel of a man's being, that passes from incarnation to incarnation, is already united with his physical bodily nature before birth, so you should not imagine that when a man is born it is possible under normal conditions for his individuality to be exchanged. The individuality is already united with the human body before birth.

But at what moment this kernel of individuality can start its formative work on man is a different matter. The individual kernel is already in the child, as we said, when the child is born. But before birth as such it cannot bring to effect the capacities it has acquired in past lives. It must wait until after birth. So we can say that before birth there are active in man the causes of all those characteristics and qualities we can inherit from parents and ancestors. Although the kernel of man's being is there, as we said, it cannot take control until the child has come into the world.

When the child has entered the world this kernel of individuality begins to transform man's organism, assuming that circumstances are normal, of course, as it is different in exceptional cases. It changes the brain and the other organs so that they may become its instruments. Thus it is chiefly the inherited qualities that are visible in the child at birth, and little by little the individual qualities work their way into the general organism. If we wanted to speak of the individuality's work on the organism before birth, that is quite another chapter. We can for instance also say that the individuality is actively engaged in choosing his parents. But this, too, is basically done from without. All the work that is done before birth by the individuality takes place from without, for example through the mother. But the actual work of the individuality on the organism itself does not begin until the child has come into the world. And because this is so, the really human part can only start, little by little, to come to expression in the human being after birth.

To start with, therefore, the child has certain qualities in common with animal nature, and these are just those qualities that find their expression in today's subject, laughing and weeping. In the first weeks after birth the child really cannot either laugh or weep in the proper sense of the words. As a rule it is forty days after birth when the child cries its first tears and also smiles, because that is the moment when the kernel from previous lives first enters the body and works on it to make it a vehicle of expression. It is just this which gives man his superiority over the animal, that in the case of animals we cannot say that an individual soul passes from incarnation to incarnation. The basis of animal nature is the group soul, and we cannot say that what is individual in the animal is reincarnated. It returns to the group soul and becomes something that only lives on in the animal group soul. It is only in man that the fruits of his efforts in one incarnation survive and, after he has gone through Devachan, pass into a new incarnation. In this new incarnation it gradually transforms the organism, so that it becomes not only the expression of the characteristics of his physical ancestors but also of his individual abilities, talents, and so on.

Now it is just the activity of the ego in the organism that calls forth laughing and weeping in a being such as man. Laughing and weeping are only possible in a being that has his ego within his own organism and whose ego is not a group ego as it is with the animals. For laughing and weeping are nothing less than a delicate, intimate expression of the ego-hood within the bodily nature. What happens when a person weeps? Weeping can only come about when the ego feels weak in relation to what faces it in the environment. If the ego is not in the organism, that is, if it is not individual, the feeling of weakness in relation to the outer world cannot occur. Being in possession of ego-hood, man feels a certain disharmony in his relationship to the environment. And this feeling of disharmony is expressed in the desire to defend himself and restore the balance. How does he restore the balance? He does so in that his ego contracts the astral body. In the case of sorrow that leads to weeping, we can say that the ego feels itself to be in a certain disharmony with the environment, and it tries to restore the balance by contracting the astral body within itself, squeezing together its forces, as it were. That is the spiritual process underlying weeping. Take weeping as an expression of sorrow, for example. You would have to examine sorrow carefully in every single case, if you wanted to see what was causing it. For example, sorrow can be the expression of being forsaken by something you previously had. There would be a harmonious relationship of the ego to the environment if what we have lost were still there. Disharmony occurs when we have lost something and the ego feels forsaken. So the ego contracts the forces of its astral body, compresses it as it were, to defend itself against being forsaken. This is the expression of sorrow leading to tears, that the ego, the fourth member of man's being, contracts the forces of the astral body, the third member.

What is laughter? Laughter is something that is based on the opposite process. The ego tries as it were to loosen the astral body, to expand and stretch it. Whilst weeping is brought about by contraction, laughing is produced through the relaxing and expanding of the astral body. That is the spiritual state of affairs. Every time someone weeps, the clairvoyant consciousness can confirm that the ego is contracting the astral body. Every time someone laughs, the ego is expanding and making a bulge in the astral body. Only because the ego is active within man's being and not working as a group ego from outside can laughing and weeping arise. Now because the ego only gradually begins to be active in the child, and at birth it is not yet actually active, and has as it were not yet taken hold of the strings which direct the organism from within, the child can neither laugh nor weep in its earliest days but only learns to do so to the extent that the ego becomes master of the inner strings that are, in the first place, active in the astral body. And because everything spiritual in man finds expression in the body, and the body is the physiognomy of the spirit—condensed spirit—these qualities we have been describing are expressed in bodily processes. And we can learn to understand these bodily processes from the spiritual point of view if we become clear about the following:

The animal has a group soul, or we could say a group ego. Its form is imprinted upon it by this group ego. Then why has the animal such a definite form, a form that is complete in itself? This is because this form is imprinted upon it out of the astral world, and essentially it has to keep it. Man has a form, which, as we have stressed many a time, contains as it were all the other animal forms within it as a harmonious whole. But this harmonious human form, the human physical body, has to be more mobile within itself than an animal body. It must not have such a rigid form as an animal body. We can see that this is so in man's changing facial expressions. Look at the fundamentally immobile face of the animal, how rigid it is, and compare that with the mobile human form, with its change of gesture, physiognomy, and so on. You will admit that within certain limits, of course, man has a certain mobility, and that in a way it is left to him to imprint his own form on himself because his ego dwells within him. Nobody is likely to say that a dog or a parrot has as individual an expression of intelligence on its face as a human being, unless he were just making comparisons. Speaking of them in general it could certainly be so, but not individually, because with dogs, parrots, lions or elephants the general character predominates.

With man we find his individual character written in his face.

And we can see the way his particular individual soul forms itself more and more in his physiognomy, especially in its mobile parts. Man still has this mobility because man can give himself his own form from within. It is this fact of being able to work creatively on himself that raises man above the other kingdoms.

As soon as man changes the general balance of forces in his astral body from out of his ego this also appears physically in the expression of his face. The normal facial expression and muscular tension that a man has all day is bound to change when the ego makes a change in the forces of the astral body. When, instead of holding the astral body in its normal tension, the ego lets it go slack and expands it, it will work with less force on the etheric and physical bodies, resulting in certain muscles changing their position. So when in the case of a certain display of feeling the ego makes the astral body slack, certain muscles are bound to have a different tension from normal. Laughter, therefore, is nothing else than the physical or physiognomical expression of that slackening of the astral body that the ego brings about. It is the astral body, from within, under the ego's influence, that brings man's muscles into those positions that give him his normal expression. When the astral body relaxes its tension the muscles expand and laughter occurs. Laughter is a direct expression of the ego's inner work on the astral body. When the astral body is compressed by the ego in the grip of sorrow, this compression continues into the body, resulting in the secretion of tears which in a certain respect is like a flow of blood brought about by the compression of the astral body. This is what these processes really are. And that is why only a being that is capable of taking an individual ego into himself and working from out of it on himself can laugh and weep. The individuality of the ego begins at the point where the person is capable of tensing or relaxing the forces of the astral body from within.

Every time we see someone smiling or weeping we are confronting the proof of man's superiority over the animals. For in the astral body of the animal the ego works from outside. Therefore all the conditions of tension in the animal's astral body can only be produced from outside, and the inner quality of such an existence cannot express itself in an external form like laughter and weeping.

Now we shall see much more in the phenomena of laughing and weeping if we observe the breathing process when people laugh or cry. This enables us to see deeply into what is happening. If you watch the breathing of someone who is weeping, you will notice that it consists essentially of a long out-breath and a short in-breath. It is the opposite with laughing: a short out-breath and a long in-breath. Thus the breathing process changes when the human being is under the influence of the phenomena we have been describing. And you only need a little imagination to find the reasons why this must be so.

In the phenomena of weeping the astral body is compressed by the ego. This is like a squeezing out of the breath: a long out-breath. In the phenomenon of laughing there is a slackening of the astral body. That is just as though you were to pump the air out of a certain space, rarefy the air, and the air whistles in. It is like this with the long in-breath when you laugh. Here, so to say, in the change in the breathing process we see the ego at work within the astral body. That which is outside in the case of the animal, the group ego, can actually be glimpsed at work in man, for this particular activity is even accompanied by a change of breathing. Therefore let us show the universal significance of this phenomenon.

Animals have a breathing process that is so to speak strictly governed from outside and is not subject to the inner individual ego in the way it has been described today. That which sustains the breathing process and actually regulates it was called in the occult teaching of the Old Testament ‘Nephesh’. This is really what we call the ‘animal soul’. The group ego of the animal is the nephesh. And in the Bible it is stated quite correctly: And God breathed into man the nephesh—the animal soul—and man became a living soul. This is often wrongly understood, of course, because people cannot read such profound writings today, they are too biased. For instance when it says: And God breathed nephesh, the animal soul, into man, it does not mean He created it at that moment, for it already existed. It does not say that it was not previously in existence. It was there, outside. And what God did was to take what had previously been in existence outside as group soul and put it into man's inner being. The essential thing is to understand the reality of an expression like this. One can ask what came about through the fact that the nephesh was put into man? It made it possible for man to rise above the animals and to develop his ego with inner activity, so that he can laugh and cry and experience joy and pain in such a way that they work creatively in him.

And that brings us to the significant effect that pain and joy have in life. If man did not have his ego within him he could not experience pain and joy inwardly and these would have to pass him by meaninglessly. However, as he has his ego within him and can work from within on his astral body and consequently on his whole bodily nature, pain and joy become forces that can work creatively in him. All the joy and pain we experience in one incarnation become part of us, to carry over into the next incarnation; they work creatively in our being. Thus you could say that pain and joy became creative world forces at the same time as man learnt to weep and laugh, that is, at the same time as man's ego was put into his inner being. Weeping and laughter are everyday occurrences, but we do not understand them unless we know what is actually happening in the spiritual part of man, what actually goes on between the ego and the astral body when a man laughs or cries.

Now all that forms man is in continuous development. That man has the ability to laugh or cry is due to the fact that he can work on his astral body from out of his ego. This is certainly correct. But on the other hand man's physical body and also his etheric body were already predestined to have an ego working within them when man entered his first earthly incarnation. Man was capable of it. If we could squeeze an individual ego into a horse, it would feel highly uncomfortable in there, because it would not be able to do a thing; it could find no outlet for the individual work of the ego. Imagine an individual ego in a horse. The individual ego would want to work on the astral body of the horse by compressing or expanding it, and so on. But if an astral body is joined to a physical and etheric body that cannot adapt themselves to the forms of the astral body, then the physical and etheric bodies create a tremendous hindrance. It would be like trying to fight a wall. The ego inside the being of the horse would want to compress the astral body but the physical and etheric bodies would not follow suit, and this would drive the horse mad. Man had to be predestined for such an activity. For that to be so he had right at the beginning to receive the kind of physical body that could really become an instrument for an ego and could gradually be mastered by the ego. Therefore the following can also occur: The physical and the etheric body can be mobile within themselves, proper vehicles of the ego, so to speak, but the ego can be very undeveloped and not yet exercise proper mastery over the physical and etheric body. We can see this in the fact that the physical and etheric bodies act as sheaths for the ego but not so that they are a complete expression of the ego. This is the case with the kind of people who laugh and cry involuntarily, giggle on every occasion and have no control over the laughter muscles. This shows that they have a higher human nature in their physical and etheric bodies but have at the same time not yet brought their humanity under the control of the ego. This is why giggling makes such an unpleasant impression. It shows that man is at a higher level with regard to that which he can do nothing about than he is with regard to that which he can already do something about. It always makes such an unpleasant impression when there is a being who does not prove to be at the level to which external conditions have brought him. Thus laughing and weeping are in a certain respect absolutely the expression of the ego nature of man, because they can only arise through the fact that the ego dwells in the being of man. Weeping can be an expression of the most terrible egoism, for in a certain way weeping is only too often a kind of wallowing in sensual pleasure. The person who feels forsaken compresses his astral body with his ego. He tries to make himself inwardly strong because he feels outwardly weak. And he feels this inner strength through being able to do something, namely shedding tears. A certain feeling of satisfaction—whether it is admitted or not—is always connected with the shedding of tears. Just as in different circumstances a kind of satisfaction is obtained from smashing a chair, tears are often shed for no further reason than the sensual pleasure of inner activity; pleasure wearing the mask of tears, even if the person is not conscious of it.

Laughter can be seen to be a kind of expression of ego nature because if you really enquire into it you will find that laughter can always be attributed to the fact that the person feels superior to the people and happenings around him. Why does a person laugh? Someone invariably laughs when he fancies himself to be above what he sees. You can always find this statement verified. Whether you are laughing at yourself or at someone else your ego is always feeling superior to something. And out of this feeling of superiority it expands the forces of its astral body, broadens and puffs them up. Strictly speaking this is what is really at the root of laughter. And this is why laughter can be such a healthy thing. And this pluming oneself should not be condemned in the abstract as egoistic, for laughter can be very healthy when it strengthens man's feeling of selfhood, especially if it is warranted and leads him beyond himself. If you see something in your surroundings or in yourself or others that is absurd, a feeling of being above such absurdity is sparked off and makes you laugh. It is bound to happen that man feels superior to something or other in the environment, and the ego brings this to expression by expanding the astral body.

If in the breathing process you understand what we tried to explain with the statement: And God breathed nephesh into man, and man became a living soul, you will also sense the connection this has with laughing and weeping, for you know that whilst laughing and weeping even man's breathing process itself changes. By means of this example we have shown that really the most everyday things can be understood only when we take spirit as the starting point. We can understand laughing and weeping only when we understand the connection between the four members of man's being. In the days when people still to some degree possessed clairvoyant traditions and had at the same time the ability to portray the gods with real imagination, they portrayed them as happy beings, whose chief quality was a kind of happy laughter. And not for nothing did people ascribe howling and gnashing of teeth to those regions of world existence in which primarily something resembling exaggerated egoism holds sway. Why was this? It was because laughter on the one hand signifies a raising of oneself, a setting up of the ego above its environment; that is, the victory of the higher over the lower. Whereas weeping signifies a knuckling under, a withdrawal from what is outside, a becoming smaller, the ego feeling forsaken, a withdrawal into itself. Sadness in life is so moving, because we know that it will and must be overcome, but how very different, hopeless and not at all moving is the appearance of sorrow and tears in that world where they can no longer be overcome. There they appear as the expression of damnation, of being cast into darkness.

We must pay good attention to these feelings that can come over us when we make a broad survey of what comes to expression in man as the work of the ego upon itself, and follow them up in their subtlest details. Then we shall have understood a great deal of things that meet us in the course of time. We must be conscious of the fact that there is a spiritual world behind the physical, and that what appears in human life as the alternations between laughing and weeping, when we meet them apart from man, appear on the one hand as the happy light of Heaven and on the other hand as the dark, bitter misery of Hell. These two aspects are absolutely there at the root of our world, and we must understand our middle world as deriving its forces from these two realms.

We shall get to know many more things about the being of man. But I would like to say that one of the deepest chapters on the being of man is that of laughing and weeping, despite the fact that laughing and weeping are such everyday occurrences. The animal does not laugh or cry because it does not have the drop of divinity within it that man bears in his ego-hood. And we can say that when in the course of his life the human being begins to smile and to weep, this proves to anyone who can read the great script of nature that a divine spark is really living within man, and when a man laughs this spark of God is active in him seeking to raise him above all that is base. For smiling and laughing are elevating. On the other hand when a man weeps it is again the spark of God warning him that his ego could lose itself if it did not strengthen itself inwardly against all feelings of weakness and of being forsaken. It is the God in man admonishing the soul, in laughing and weeping. This accounts for the wrath that comes over anyone who understands life when he sees unnecessary weeping. For unnecessary weeping betrays the fact that instead of living and feeling with the environment, the pleasure of being within ones own ego is too great. But bitter feelings also arise in anyone who understands the world when the elevating of the ego above its surroundings, which otherwise expresses itself in healthy laughter, is found in someone as an end in itself, as indiscriminate laughter, or as malicious criticism. For he realises that if the ego does not draw into itself all it can from its environment, and does not want to live with its environment, but raises its ego nature above it without cause, then this ego nature will not have the necessary depth or necessary upward thrust that we can only acquire by taking from the environment everything we possibly can for the development of the ego. Then the ego will move backwards instead of forwards. The right balance between sorrow and joy makes a tremendous important contribution to human development. When sorrow and joy are not just within a man's own self but have their justification in the environment, and when the ego wants to establish the correct relationship between sorrow and joy and the surrounding world all the time, then sorrow and joy will be real evolutionary factors for man.

Great poets often find such beautiful words for the kind of sorrow and joy that are in no way rooted in arrogance nor in a contraction of the ego but originate out of the relationship between the ego and the environment, where their balance has been disturbed from outside, and which alone explains why a man laughs and weeps. We can understand it because we can see that it is in and through the outer world that the relationship between ego and outer world has been disturbed. That is why man must laugh or weep; whereas if it only lies within man, we cannot understand why he is laughing or crying because then it is always unfounded egoism. That is why it is so moving when Homer says of Andromache, when she is under the twofold grip of concern for her husband and concern for her baby: ‘She could laugh while she cried!’ This is a wonderful way of describing something normal in weeping. She is neither laughing nor weeping on her own account. The right relationship is there with the outside world, when she has to be concerned about her husband on the one hand and on the other about her child. And here we have the true relationship of laughing and weeping, that they balance one another: smiling while crying—crying while laughing. A natural child often expresses itself this way too, for its ego has not become so hardened in itself as later on in adulthood, and it can still cry while it laughs and laugh while it cries. And the one who understands these things can again ascertain the fact that whoever has overcome his ego to the point of no longer seeking the causes of laughter and weeping in himself but finding them in the outer world, can also laugh while he cries and cry while he laughs. Indeed, in what goes on around us every day, we have, if we understand it, the real expression of the spiritual. Laughing and weeping are something which can in the highest sense be called the physiognomy of the divine in man.

Through the meditative exercises that are to lead to imaginative cognition man's whole inner soul life becomes transformed. Likewise, the relations of the human soul to the surrounding world change. Meditation, as meant in the previous lectures here, consists in concentrating all the soul's powers upon a definite, easily grasped complex of ideas. It is important to keep this clearly in mind: it should be an easily envisioned complex of ideas to which the soul-spiritual part of man can give its immediate, undivided attention, in such a way that while the soul rests on this complex of ideas nothing flows into it of soul-impressions that well up from the subconscious or unconscious, or from our memories.

To bring about imaginative knowledge in the right way, it is necessary to confront the whole idea-complex, on which all one's powers of soul in meditating are centered, and view it as one would a mathematical problem, in order that neither emotion-filled thoughts nor impulses of the will play into the meditation. When we concentrate on a mathematical problem we know at every moment that our soul activity remains concentrated on what our mind is focused. We know that nothing emotional, no feelings, no reminiscences of past experiences may be allowed to enter the process of bringing about a solution of the problem. The same soul condition is also necessary for rightly carrying out a meditation.

It is best then if we concentrate on an idea-complex that is completely new, something we are certain we have never thought about before. For if we were simply to choose an idea from our store of memories, we could never be sure what would be playing into the meditation from unconscious impulses or feelings. Therefore, it is especially good to be given advice by an experienced spiritual scientist, because he can see to it that the conceptual content will not have been previously thought of by the person meditating. In this way, the subject of meditation enters his consciousness for the first time, nothing out of memory or instinct plays into it; only the purely soul-spiritual is engaged in meditating.

When such a meditation, which requires only a short time each day, is repeated over and over again, a state of soul is finally brought about that lets man have the definite feeling, “Now I live in an inner activity that is free of the physical body; a different activity from that of thinking, feeling, or exercising my will within the physical body.” What one encounters especially is the definite feeling that one lives in a world separated from one's physical corporeality. Man gradually finds his way into the etheric world. He feels this because the nature of his own physical organism takes on a relative objectivity. Man looks upon it as if from outside, just as he looks ordinarily from within his physical body out upon external objects. But what appears in inward experience if the meditation is successful, is that the thoughts become, as it were, more compact. They not only bear their usual character of abstraction, but in them one experiences something akin to the forces of growth that turned one from a small child to a grown man, or the forces daily active in us when metabolism nourishes our body.

Thinking certainly takes on the character of reality. Just for this reason—that man now feels himself in his thinking the same way he felt himself previously in his processes of growth, or his life processes—this imaginative thinking must be acquired in the manner just described. For if unconscious, or perhaps physical elements had played into meditation, those forces, those realities now experienced in supersensible thinking would also reflect back into man's physical and etheric organisms. There, they would unite with the forces of growth and nutrition; and by persisting with such super-sensible thinking man would alter his physical and etheric organisms. But this cannot in any circumstances be allowed to happen! All activity engaged in for the purpose of achieving imaginative knowledge, all the forces used in this task, must be applied exclusively to man's relationship with his surrounding world, and in no way may they be allowed to interfere with his physical or etheric organism. Both of these must remain wholly unchanged, so that when man achieves the faculty of hovering, as it were, with his thinking in the etheric world, he can look back in this thinking upon his unaltered physical body. It has remained as it was; this etheric thinking has not interfered with it.

With this etheric thinking you feel quite outside your physical body. But you must always be able freely to alternate at will between remaining outside and being completely within your physical organism. A person who has correctly brought about imaginative perception through meditation must be able to be in this etheric thinking one moment—which is experienced inwardly like a growth and nutritional process and felt to be entirely real—and in the next moment, as this thinking disappears, to be able to return into the physical body and see with his eyes as usual, hear with his ears and touch as he did before. At his absolutely free discretion he must always be able to bring about this passing back and forth between being in the physical body and being outside it in the etheric realm. Then a true imaginative thinking is achieved. I shall demonstrate in the second part of the lecture how this imaginative thinking works.

For one who wants to become a spiritual scientist it is necessary that he carry out the most diverse exercises, systematically, for a long time. Through what I have just indicated in principle, one will experience etheric thinking to such a degree that one can test what the spiritual scientist asserts, even though this testing is also possible by the usual healthy human understanding if it is sufficiently impartial and free of prejudice.

If meditation is to bring results in the right way one must support it by certain other soul exercises. Above all, soul qualities such as strength of character, inner truthfulness, a certain equanimity of soul, and especially complete presence of mind must be increasingly developed. It must always be repeated: a presence of mind that permits us to carry out, with the same attitude and disposition of soul as are required in mathematics, the meditative exercises and the exact clairvoyant research that is then undertaken. If such qualities as strength of character, integrity, presence of mind and a certain tranquility of soul have become habitual, then the meditative process, if continually repeated—perhaps for some requiring a few weeks, for others many years, depending on their predisposition—will come to the point of impressing its results into the whole physical and etheric organisms. Then man will really attain an inner activity in imaginative cognition comparable with that called forth in his physical organism when he uses it for perceiving the world through his senses and for thinking.

When man has achieved such imaginative cognition, he is in a position first to view the course of his own life from childhood up to the present moment as a unity, as a tableau in time. It reveals itself as a continuous, inwardly mobile, flow of development. This, however, is not the same as what usually comes into our mind as our store of personal memories. What man has gained through imaginative cognition that now confronts him, is as real as those forces of life and growth that bring forth from the small child's body the whole configuration of his soul, and then, in the further course of development, thinking, and so on. Man now surveys everything that evolves inwardly and represents the development of the etheric organism in the course of life. From what is thus surveyed—and it is much more concrete than the tableau of memories—the recollections that enter ordinary consciousness appear only as a kind of reflection, a surface ripple cast up from processes in the depths of our life. We now penetrate these etheric processes in the depths of our being, which otherwise do not enter consciousness at all, but have in fact formed and shaped out life from birth to the present moment.

These facts, these processes, confront imaginative consciousness. This gives man a true self-knowledge concerning, at the outset, his earthly life. How we can acquire knowledge of life beyond the earth will be shown during the following days. The first step in supersensible perception consists in confronting our own etheric life—the way it was spent from childhood to the present—in its supersensible character. Thereby we learn to understand ourselves rightly for the first time. What is experienced in this way is mirrored in our physical and etheric organisms in such a way that, in what is thus experienced as our own etheric processes, we have something that shows us how the entire etheric cosmos lives in the individual human being—how the outer etheric world, I might call it, reverberates and resounds in man's etheric organism.

Now, one can say that what is thus experienced can be put into verbal, conceptual forms, and out of the imaginative experience of the world in etheric man, a true philosophy can arise. But what is thus experienced remains completely unconscious for ordinary consciousness. Only the small child, in the time before it has learned to speak, lives wholly within this activity into which man enters through imaginative perception. For in learning to speak, as language develops in the soul's life, those forces that then are experienced as abstract thinking separate from the general forces of growth and other life processes. A child does not yet have this faculty of abstract thinking. The metamorphosis of a part of its forces of life and growth into the forces of thinking has not yet occurred. Therefore, in relation to the cosmos, a child is caught up in an activity into which an adult feels himself carried back through imaginative perception; only, a child experiences it unconsciously. The imaginative thinker experiences it fully consciously with clear presence of mind.

For the person who does not achieve imaginative thinking it is impossible to survey what it is that plays between man's etheric organism and the etheric realm in the cosmos. A child cannot perceive it even though it experiences it directly, because it does not yet possess abstract thinking. A person with ordinary consciousness cannot perceive it because he has not deepened his abstract thinking through meditation. When he does this he actually looks consciously upon that interplay of the human etheric organism with the etheric in the cosmos in which the infant still dwells undividedly.

So I should like to make this paradoxical statement: Only he is a true philosopher who, as a mature adult, can become again like a little child in the disposition of his soul, but who has now acquired the faculty of experiencing this soul condition of the small child in a more wakeful state than that of ordinary consciousness; who can lift again into his whole soul life what he was as a small child before he advanced to abstract thinking through speech. What one thus experiences, surveyed in full consciousness, turns one into a philosopher of the modern age. A present-day philosopher lives, fully conscious, in the condition of a little child before it has learned to speak. This is the paradox which, I think, makes it especially clear how the human soul within modern spiritual life will actually lift itself to a real, genuine philosophical disposition of soul.

For complete supersensible perception, it is necessary to widen the meditative exercises so that they can lead to inspiration. For this purpose, the soul must not only practice resting upon a complex of ideas as previously described, but also—in principle, this has also been mentioned already—it must become capable of obliterating the pictures that enter one's consciousness because of or following meditation. As one has brought about the pictures of imaginative perception quite freely and arbitrarily, one now has to be able to eliminate these pictures from consciousness, from the soul life. It requires greater energy to do this than to eliminate from consciousness ideas that have entered either from memory or from ordinary sense perception. One needs more strength to eliminate meditative ideas and imaginative pictures from consciousness than one needs for such ordinary ideas. But this increased power that the soul must bring to bear is necessary for advancing in supersensible perception.

Man attains this power by striving more and more to free his consciousness from these imaginative pictures when they have appeared, and to permit nothing else to enter in. Then there occurs what one may call mere wakefulness, without any content of soul. This condition then leads to inspiration. For when the soul has achieved empty consciousness in this way by means of the powerful force released by the act of freeing itself from the imaginative pictures, the spiritual contents of the cosmos stream into the emptied but awake soul. Then man gradually has before and around him a spiritual cosmos, as in ordinary consciousness he is surrounded by a physical sense cosmos.

What man now experiences in the spiritual cosmos represents itself to him in a manner that points back to what he has experienced in the sense world. There, he has experienced the sun, moon, planets, fixed stars, and the other facts of the physical sense world. Now that he is able to comprehend the spiritual cosmos by means of the emptied consciousness in which he experiences inspiration, the spiritual being of the sun, the moon, the planets and stars is revealed to him. Again, it is necessary that by his free will man should be able to relate what he experiences spiritually as the cosmos to what he experienced through his physical body as physical sense cosmos. He must be able to say, “I now experience something like a spiritual being that manifests itself. I must relate it as `sun-spirit' to what I experience in the physical sense world as physical sun. Similarly, I experience the manifestation of the soul-spirit being of the moon and must be able to relate it to what I experience in the physical sense world as moon; and so on.”

Again, man must be able to move freely to and fro while he is simultaneously in both the spiritual and the physical sense worlds. In his soul life he must be able to move freely between the spiritual revelation of the cosmos and what he is accustomed to experience as physical sense manifestations within earth life. When one thus relates the spiritual element of the sun to its physical counterpart, the spiritual moon element to the physical moon element, and so on, it is a soul process similar to having a new perception and being reminded of what one experienced earlier. Just as one combines what meets one in a new perception with what one has already experienced in order to throw light on both, so, in the truly free, inspired life, one brings together what one experiences as revelations of spiritual beings with what one has experienced in the physical sense world. It is as if the experiences in the spirit brought new inklings of what has been experienced earlier in the sense world through the physical body. One must have absolute presence of mind in order to experience this higher degree of supersensible knowledge, which is something overpowering, in the same quiet state of soul as when a new perception is linked with an old recollection.

Experiencing something through inspiration differs greatly from any imaginative experience a person could have had earlier. With imagination he lives in the etheric world. He feels himself as alive in the etheric world as otherwise he has felt in his physical body. But he feels the etheric world more as a sum of rhythmic processes, a vibrating in the world ether, which, however, he is certainly in a position to interpret in ideas and concepts. Man senses events of a universal nature in the etheric-imaginative experience; he feels supersensible, etheric phenomena. In inspiration he feels not only such supersensible, etheric facts merging into each other, metamorphosing and taking on all manner of possible forms, but now, through inspiration, he senses how in this etheric, billowing world, in this rhythmically undulating world, as if on waves of an etheric world-ocean, real beings are weaving and working. In this way one feels something reminiscent of the sun, moon, planets and the fixed stars, and also of things on the physical earth, for example, the minerals and plants, and all this is bathed in the cosmic ether.

This is the way we experience the astral cosmos. While here in the physical sense world we perceive only the exterior of everything, there we recognize it in its essential, spiritual existence. We also attain a view of the inner nature and form of the human organism, as well as the form of the separate organs, lungs, heart, liver and so on. For we see now that everything that gives form and life to the human organism originates not only in what surrounds us and is active in the physical cosmos, but also proceeds from the spiritual beings within this physical cosmos—as sun-being, moon-being, animal and plant being—permeating with soul and spirit the physical and etheric activity, and working so as to give man's organism life and form. We only comprehend the form and life of the physical organism when we have risen to inspiration.

What is experienced there remains for ordinary consciousness completely concealed. We should be able to perceive it with ordinary consciousness only if we saw not merely with our eyes, heard with our ears and tasted with the organs for tasting, but if the process of breathing in and out were a kind of process of perception—if one could experience the in- and out-streaming of the breath inwardly throughout the whole organism. Because this is so, a certain Oriental school, the school of Yoga, transformed breathing into a process of knowledge, metamorphosed it into a process of perception. By converting the breathing into a conscious, even if half dreamlike way to knowledge, so as to experience in it something like what we experience in seeing and hearing, the Yoga philosophy actually develops a cosmology, an insight into how spiritual beings in the cosmos work into man, and the way he experiences himself as a member of the spiritual cosmos. But such Yoga instructions are not in accord with the form of man's organization which Western humanity of the present time has acquired. Yoga exercises like these were only possible for the human organization in past ages, and what Yogis practice today is fundamentally already decadent.

For a particular 'middle epoch' of earth-humanity's evolution, as I should like to call it, it was appropriate, so to say, for man's organization to make the breathing process into a process of consciousness, of knowledge, through such yoga exercises, and in this way to develop a dreamlike but nevertheless valid cosmology. This knowledge, which led in that epoch to a correct cosmology for the education, in their sense “scientific,” humanity of that age, must be re-attained on a higher level by today's human being with his present composition of body and soul—not in the half dreamlike, half unconscious condition of that time, but with full consciousness as I have explained in speaking about inspiration. If Western man were to carry out yoga exercises he would not leave his physical and etheric organisms undisturbed under any circumstances; he would alter them precisely because he now has a quite different constitution. Elements out of his physical and etheric organisms would enter into his process of cognition, and something non-objective would interfere into the cosmology. Just as one must recapture, as a philosopher, the soul condition of one's earliest childhood, but now in full consciousness, so, in regard to cosmology, one must call up in one's soul life that soul state which was formerly valid for mankind, when it was possible to make use of the yoga system. But one must experience it with a total presence of mind, in full consciousness, in a wakefulness higher than the ordinary one.

So we can say that in this fully awakened state of mind the modern philosopher must again bring about in his soul the childlike soul condition belonging to the single human being, while the modern cosmologist must again bring about that condition of soul which belonged to humanity in a middle epoch of human evolution—and now again in full consciousness. The modern philosopher must bring an individual soul condition, that of the child, into full consciousness, while the modern cosmologist must restore in a fully conscious manner that soul condition present in the cosmologists of an earlier humanity. Consciously to become a child means to be a philosopher. The restoration of the condition of the soul, in which a Yogi lived during a middle period of earth evolution, and its transformation into full consciousness means becoming a cosmologist in the modern sense. In the last portion of this lecture, I would like to describe what it means to be a religious person.

Yesterday, I described how the third level of supersensible knowledge, true intuition, is reached through exercises of the will. You can read about them more specifically in the writings I have mentioned, and they will be further described in more detail in the coming days. Here man is brought into a soul disposition such as existed in a dreamlike soul condition in the humanity that lived as the first, primeval humanity on our earth in the beginning of human evolution. What existed, however, among this primordial humanity was a dreamlike, half unconscious, instinctive intuition.

This intuition must be brought again into full consciousness by a modern person with cognitive faculties for the religious life. The more instinctive intuition of primeval mankind still appears, to be sure, like an echo in some people of the present age, who express what they instinctively perceive in their environment as spiritual forces, with which they live as if in their outer world. These intuitions, which are echoes of the dreamlike intuitions of primeval humanity, can be made use of by such people when they write poetry or create works of art. Original scientific ideas may also stem from such intuitions, and they play a major role in mankind's life of fantasy.

What I am now describing as true, fully conscious intuition, and what is attained in the manner I described yesterday, are two entirely different things. Primitive man had a completely different soul disposition from that of modern man. He lived, as it were, in the whole outer world, in cloud and mist, in stars, sun and moon, in the plant as well as animal kingdoms. He lived in all of it with almost the same intensity as he felt himself living in his own body. It is extremely difficult to make this soul condition of primeval man clear for ordinary consciousness today. But everything that can be recognized by external history points back to such a soul disposition in primeval humanity. It was rooted in the fact that primeval man's bodily conditions were not submerged in the unconscious to the extent they are today. We modern men no longer live with our processes of nutrition and growth, with the processes in our physical organism. Spread out over this experience, which remains entirely in the subconscious, is the more or less conscious soul life of our feeling and willing and the fully conscious soul life of our thinking. But below our direct experiences of thinking, feeling and willing are to be found the actual processes of our human physical organism, and these remain wholly unconscious as far as our ordinary awareness is concerned.

This was fundamentally different in primitive man. As a child he did not experience definite conceptions such as we do. His conceptual life was often almost dreamlike, while his emotional life, although vehement, was even less distinct. The soul's life of feeling resembled bodily pain and pleasure much more than is the case with modern man. By contrast, primitive man felt how he grew in childhood. These processes of growth were felt by him as the life of body and soul. Even as an adult he sensed how food and drink course through the digestive system; how the blood circulates and bears the nutritive juices through the organism. Someone endowed with an organization like that whose development I described yesterday, can still gain an idea today, even though on a lower level, of this bodily experience of primitive man, when he observes how cows, after grazing, lie down, digest and are absorbed in the specific activity of digesting. It is an experience of both body and soul in these creatures that appears simply like the instreaming and inward lighting-up of cosmic processes. The animals experience an inner sense of well-being in digesting, in feeding, in the coursing of nutritive substances through the blood's circulation. You need not be a clairvoyant to be able to tell by the whole external condition and behavior of these animals how they follow their digestion with their animal consciousness.

This is how primitive man, when he entered the development on earth, followed his physical processes that were directly united and formed a unity with his soul processes. Because he could experience his own physical inner being in this way, primeval man could also experience the physical and soul elements of the outer world nearly as intensely as, if I may put it this way, he experienced himself in his lungs, his heart, the processes in his stomach, liver, and so on. In the same way, he felt himself in the flashes of lightning, the rolling thunder, in the ever-changing clouds and in the waning and waxing moon. He lived with the seasons, the phases of the moon, in the same way that he experienced the processes of his digestion. His environment was almost as much an inner world to him as his own inner being. What was experienced inwardly was to him the same as what he experienced in a flowing stream, and so on. The surging waves of the river were to him an inner process in which he participated, in which he immersed himself as he did in his own blood circulation.

Primitive man lived in the outer world in such a way that it appeared to him like his own inner being—as, indeed it actually is. Today this is called animism. But the use of this word gives rise to a complete misunderstanding of the essential nature of his experience, for it supposes that he projected his inner experiences into the outer world. What he actually experienced in the external world was to him an elementary fact of his consciousness, as much a matter of fact as the meaning we ourselves attribute to the phenomena of color and tone. We ought not to assume that primitive man dreamily projected fantasies into the outer world, and that these have been handed down to us as the content of his consciousness. He actually observed these things and to him they were as self-evident as the things we observe today. Sense observation is only a transformed product of primitive man's original way of observing. He actually perceived in the outer world what those beings were accomplishing in the etheric and astral cosmos, who, in creating, maintain the activity of the cosmos. This he perceived, even as though in dreams, in quite a dull way. But he did perceive it, and this perceiving was at the same time the content of his religious consciousness. Primeval man possessed a certain soul disposition in regard to the surrounding world, but this disposition intensified so much that, in the cosmos surrounding him, he beheld simultaneously the spiritual beings with whom he himself as a human being felt related. In his cognition man acquired the relationship to the spiritual beings that came down to us in derivative forms in the content of our religions. For a man of that early time his religious consciousness was only the higher stage of his primitive cognition.

If we wish to establish a new religious consciousness based on true knowledge, we could not do better than return to the soul disposition of primitive mankind, with the difference that it must now be neither dreamlike nor half-conscious. Our soul must be more awake than in ordinary consciousness, as awakened as it must be for the purpose of attaining genuine intuition, as I have already described. To reach genuine intuition we must acquire the ability to emerge consciously with our ego out of our body and immerse our own being within the other spiritual beings of the cosmos, living with them as we live in our physical organism during our life on earth in a physical body. In earth life we are submerged in our physical organism; in true intuitive knowledge we immerse ourselves with our ego in the spiritual beings of the cosmos. We live with them, and thereby bring about a link between our ego and the world to which it truly belongs. For this ego is a spirit being like those others to whom I have just alluded; and through a religious consciousness we acquire a direct relationship to those spirits, among whom we ourselves are counted. Primitive man was endowed only with a dull, instinctive religious consciousness. We must through our own activity bring back that ancient soul disposition and experience it now in full consciousness. Then we shall attain a religious perception, a religion firmly based on knowledge and suitable for modern man.

As we have to recover the soul condition of childhood and immerse ourselves in it in full consciousness if we want to become modern philosophers; as we must recover in our own age the soul condition of humanity of an intermediate epoch—men who were able to make the breathing process into a perceptual process of knowledge in dreamlike fashion—and permeate it with full consciousness if we are able to become cosmologists in the modern sense; so we must also revive in ourselves the soul condition of primeval man as it was in its relation to the outer world, and permeate it with our full consciousness in order to attain a religion based on knowledge in the modern sense of the word.

To experience once again the soul disposition of childhood in full consciousness, is the prerequisite for genuine, modern philosophy. To relive, in full consciousness, in our soul life an earlier intermediate epoch of humanity's evolution, in which the process of breathing could become a process of perception, is the prerequisite for modern cosmology. To revive the soul condition of primeval man—the earliest on this earth, who still lived in direct connection with the gods—to activate it in the present soul mood of modern man and to pervade it with full consciousness, is for modern man the prerequisite for a religion based on knowledge.

Just now, when I am giving public lectures on the social question here in Zürich, it is perhaps appropriate that in our study-group we should occupy ourselves with the inner aspect of the social problem, so exceptionally important at the present time.

We know that in every human being whom we encounter in the outer world, who stands before our bodily faculties of perception, we must recognise beneath the surface the real inner man. We first become aware of this inner man when we appreciate that fundamentally he is connected with everything relevant to human life and knowledge that weaves and surges through the world.

Just think, my dear friends, how different, with regard particularly to the human being, our anthroposophical conception of the world is from the ordinary conception! Remember my attempt to give an outline of the anthroposophical view; recall all you have read in my Occult Science, and you will realise the following: the evolution of the Earth is not only bound up with man, but is conceived as having emerged from the earlier incarnations, so to speak, of our Earth planet. Our present Earth-evolution emerged from the Old Moon evolution, this from the Old Sun, the Old Sun from Old Saturn. Then consider everything which had to be brought together to carry this planetary evolution forward to the Earth stage, and you will say: throughout the whole cosmic process man is never absent. He is involved in all of it. All the forces and happenings of the cosmos are focused on man—that is how we must conceive it.

In a conversation between Capesius and the Initiate, in one of my Mystery Plays, I have specially tried to show what an impression it must make on anyone if he realises that all the generations of the gods, all the power of the universe, are summoned to the task of placing man in the centre of their creative activity.

I have pointed out, in connection particularly with this entirely valid conception, how essential it is to emphasise the need for human modesty—how essential it is to say again and again: “Yes, if we could consciously experience our whole being in its relation to the cosmos, and bring our whole being truly to expression, it would be revealed as a microcosmos! But in fact, how much can we know or experience or bring to expression of all that we are as man, in the highest sense?” Whenever we bring clearly before us what we are, we waver always between pride and modesty. We must certainly not give way to pride, but neither must we surrender to modesty. It would be a surrender if, after taking account of our place in the world from a cosmic standpoint, we were to fail to reckon our human task in the highest possible terms. We can never think highly enough of what we ought to be. We can never take seriously enough the deep sense of cosmic responsibility which must overcome man if he holds in view the relationship of the whole universe to his human existence.

In the light of Spiritual Science this should certainly remain no mere idea, no mere fact of knowledge: it should become an experience—an experience of holy awe in the face of what man ought to be and yet only in the rarest cases can be. Whenever, too, we encounter another person, we should be impelled by this experience to feel: “Standing there, you bring a great deal to expression in this present incarnation. But you journey from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation: the succession of your lives bears the imprint of eternity.” And in many other directions also we can widen and deepen this experience. From this experience we are led through Spiritual Science to a true appraisal of human worth, to an appreciation of human dignity in the context of the world. This experience can permeate the soul through and through; it can, if it inspires the entire inner life, bring us into the right mood for regulating our relationships with other human beings.

All this, which I have just explained, we can regard as a primary gift of modern Spiritual Science: we learn to appraise rightly all that is human in the world. That is one point.

Something else will arise in us out of a deeply-felt and not merely theoretical Spiritual Science. It is this. If we take into account all the happenings of the world, all the elemental life in earth, water and air—if we take account also of all that shines down to us from the stars and breathes from the wind, all that speaks to us from the several kingdoms of Nature—if we contemplate all this in the light of Spiritual Science, then we find it connected through and through with man! Everything will have value for us because we are able to bring it into connection with the human. Supersensible perception makes us feel, in very truth, that man is related to everything in the universe. Christian Morgenstern, the poet, has crystalised in beautiful verses (which I have often spoken of to our friends in connection with a certain chapter in St. John's Gospel) the experience which comes over us when we allow the ranking of the kingdoms of Nature to work on our minds. Then we can say: “The plant gazes on the lifeless realm of the minerals. ... Certainly it must feel itself to stand higher in the order of Nature than the mere lifeless minerals.” But then the plant, gazing on the mineral which prepares the ground for it, will be impelled also to say: “I certainly stand higher than you in the ranks of beings, but it is to you, since I grow out of you, that I am indebted for my existence. In thankfulness I bow before the ground which lies beneath me.” And so, again, must we conceive the experience of the animals in relation to the plants, and again in the human realm, where man in the course of his evolution is raised to a higher level. He must gaze down with awe and reverence at that which in a certain sense stands beneath him—not merely formulating all this intellectually, but so that the weaving pulse of life in all things becomes for him a real cosmic soul-experience. [Christian Morgenstern: We Found a Path. The Washing of the Feet.] This is how a genuine Spiritual Science should lead us on. Thus it enables us to establish a living relationship between humanity and all other existences.

Now a third point. Spiritual Science does not talk endlessly, in a pantheistic way, about “spirit” underlying everything. No, Spiritual Science does not only talk about spiritual reality; its aim is to let the reality of the spirit flow directly into all it says. It strives to speak in such a way that everyone for whom Spiritual Science is a living experience knows that, whenever his thinking touches the spirit, the spirit itself lives and weaves in his thought. Whoever is breathed upon by the impulse of Spiritual Science—if I may put it so—will not merely think about the spirit: he will allow the spirit itself to speak through his thoughts. The immediate presence of the spirit, the active power of the spirit—these are what Spiritual Science leads us to seek.

And now take the feelings which Spiritual Science calls to life in the depth of the human soul and compare them with the social demand of which I spoke yesterday—the social demand which in a certain sense lives in the proletarian consciousness of the present time. Consider: all that lives to-day in the consciousness of the workers, as the foundation of their knowledge, is an ideology, nothing but a web of abstract thoughts! Yes, this is said to be the essential characteristic of spiritual experience, that it is merely an ideology: economic happenings are the only reality. From these happenings, as they run their course, the conflicts of human life derive; everything that man thinks and learns and creates artistically arises from them like a smoke, a mist. Everything that he regards as custom, morality, law and so on—all merely an ideological shadow-show! And now compare this shadow-show with the spiritual life which penetrates the soul from the impulse of Spiritual Science. The aim of our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is to carry spirit out as living reality into the world through the soul of man. This living spirit is banished from that contemporary outlook which originated with the middle class, and which the workers, to their misfortune, have taken over. Banished ... and that which ought to live in men's consciousness, the “spirit in me”—that exists now merely as ideology.

Consider, again: how much can be understood about humanity, in this earthly life, through the ordinary senses! Why, in order to gain a comprehensive view of humanity we have to bring in not only the evolution of the Earth, but the Moon, Sun, and Saturn evolutions! How lacking from the modern outlook is that fine feeling for human dignity which enables us, once we have acquired it from Spiritual Science, to establish a right relationship when as human beings we encounter other human beings! Can you suppose for a moment that in the chaos of social life to-day will be found that right relationship between man and man which is essential to any real solution of the social problem? How can such a right relationship possibly emerge unless it rests on that evaluation of mankind in cosmic terms which springs only from spiritual knowledge and spiritual experience?

A third point. No true relation to the realm of law and human rights can be found to-day through the abstract conceptions loved by economists and political theorists. The only way is to seek for direct personal contact with the facts and events of the surrounding world. This third point recalls what I have already indicated: through Spiritual Science, taken into the soul-life, we must experience our relationship to all the beings that stand above and below us in the hierarchical order of the divine and natural worlds.

Now consider this contrast. On the one hand, take that which fills the consciousness of the proletariat—think how far removed it is from any experience of the living reality of the spirit in man, how it has reduced everything spiritual to an ideology! Think how far removed a truly spirit-permeated valuation of man is from the way of thinking which the proletarian of to-day applies to man and embodies in his general outlook! Think, finally, how far removed the almost universal standards of judgment to-day—the reckoning of everything in economic terms—are from that appreciation of extra-human phenomena to which we come when we learn to experience all that may be drawn from Spiritual Science as to the relationship of men to these other realms of existence.

Consider a further contrast. Think what mankind has come to as a result of the intensive invasion of human souls by the materialism of the past century. On the other hand, think of the hopes that can be kindled by the knowledge that true Spiritual Science is now able to find its way into the hearts of men. Put these two facts side by side and ask yourselves whether a true apprehension of the social problem will not depend on the grasping by human souls of all that Spiritual Science has to give.

If you experience rightly these two prospects, the hopeless and the hopeful, then, my dear friends, anthroposophical activity will become for you what indeed it should be to-day for all men: a necessity of life—a necessity which should penetrate all other preoccupations.

You may say to yourselves: Nothing seems clearer to me in the whole context of man's recent development than that the social problem has come to a head; but nothing, also, seems clearer than that men stand tragically at a loss in face of this social problem. For in this epoch, when the social problem thrusts itself so forcibly on to the scene, men are going through one of their hardest ordeals—the ordeal of having to find their way to the spirit through their own inner strength. Today we can look for no revelations unless we seek them freely; for since the middle of the fifteenth century we have been living in the age of the Consciousness Soul—the age in which everything is destined to be brought into the light of consciousness. Let us not be led to complain vainly: “A fearful catastrophe has fallen on mankind ... why have the gods thrust mankind into such an appalling disaster! Why did the gods not lead men clear of it, for it is surely piteous that men should have been brought to such a pass?” Let us not forget that we are living in the age when the free spiritual activity of man is due to reach expression—when the gods, in accordance with their primary purpose, may not reveal themselves unless the human being, by free resolve, opens the innermost sanctuary of his soul to receive them.

With regard to the most important aspects of human evolution, and with regard particularly to Christianity, we stand at a turning-point. Certainly many people, who are active in social affairs, have indicated a willingness to accept Christianity—but only as much of Christianity as serves to remind us of our own social ideals. But this most important of all impulses, which alone gives earthly existence its true meaning and purpose, cannot be dealt with in that way. We must be clear about this: all that has been generally understood about Christianity, so far, is only a beginning. It amounts to little more than an acknowledgment of the fact that the Christ was once present in the man Jesus and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. All that Christianity has been able to teach men in nearly 2,000 years is the simple fact that the Christ descended to Earth and established a connection with the Earth. Human understanding was not ripe for more. Only now, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, is humanity becoming ripe to understand, not merely the fact that the Christ passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, but the real significance of this event. Mankind will be able to understand the content of the Mystery of Golgotha only out of the spiritual foundations which can be built in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

In this study-group I have often remarked how extraordinarily banal it is to say: “We live in a time of transition.” All times are times of transition! The point is not to call this or that period a time of transition; the point is to see what is involved in a particular change or transition. That is the essential thing: to perceive what is changing!

I have also remarked here, from many points of view, on the particular changes which human consciousness and human soul-development, in the broadest sense, are undergoing in our time. To-day I should like to draw attention once more to a particular aspect of man's earthly evolution.

I said just now: Through Spiritual Science we seek not merely to entertain thoughts about the Spiritual, but to let the living reality of the spirit reveal itself in our thinking. Similarly, we can recall the words of Christ Jesus: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” The right way to grasp Spiritual Science is not to believe that the entire substance of Christianity is contained once for all in the Gospels, but to recognise that the Christ is in truth present at all times, even unto the end of the world. And present not as a dead force, calling merely for belief, but as a living power which increasingly reveals itself. And in our epoch what is this revelation? The content of modern anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science is concerned not merely to talk about the Christ, but to utter what the Christ wishes to say to men in our time, through the medium of human thoughts.

So we can say: In those ancient times, when the life of men was still largely instinctive, when in their souls something of the old, atavistic clairvoyance survived, then the Spiritual found utterance in the human soul. It was active still in human thoughts and in the human will. Truly, the gods dwelt in men. To-day, however, they dwell in human beings after a different fashion. One might put it in the following way. In ancient times the gods had a certain task with regard to the Earth's evolution: they had set its fulfilment before themselves as a goal. They accomplished their purpose by inspiring men with their own powers, and breathing imaginations into the human soul. But—strange as it may seem—these primal aims for the Earth's development are now fulfilled. They were fulfilled, fundamentally, by the end of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Since then the spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies (whom in our sense we may call the gods) stand in a different relationship to human souls.

Once, the gods came in search of men in order to realize their purpose for the Earth with men's help. To-day it is men who must seek out the gods; by their own inner activity they must raise themselves to the gods. The human being must reach such a relationship to the gods as to achieve his aims, his consciously conceived aims, with the help of divine powers. That is the right thing in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul. In earlier times the aims of men were unconscious, instinctive, just because the conscious purpose of the gods was working in them. Human aims must now become ever more conscious: then they will be infused with powers capable of raising them into the sphere of the gods, so that human aims may be inspired with divine energies.

My dear friends, give thorough thought to these words. Much lies in them. They point to the necessity which from our time onwards should draw forth an elemental striving from the depths of human nature. We can cultivate this in various realms of the soul. Above all we must seek to deepen social life by bringing Spiritual Science to bear on human relationships. Because in earlier times the gods were directly concerned with the evolution of mankind, and sought through men to realize their aims—for this very reason men were much more closely related to one another than they are to-day. It had to be so. To-day human beings are in a certain sense driven apart, and they have to seek quite a different relationship to one another. But first they have to learn about this. From a purely external point of view you can see everywhere that one human being knows very little about another. Spiritual Science is only beginning to show how human nature and human worth stand in their cosmic setting. In daily life one man knows little about another; he does not penetrate into the depths of his fellow man's soul. That is the general rule. Through a deepening of social life a new understanding of man must be found, and must permeate human development.

Instead of having eyes only for the man of flesh, apprehending him in a naturalistic way, devoid of the spirit, we must reach the stage of a spirit-filled social organism, wherein the activity of the gods in other men can be recognised.

But we shall not attain to this unless we do something about it. One thing we can do is to strive to deepen our own life of soul. There are many paths to that. I will mention only one, a meditative path. From various points of view, and with various aims, we can cast a backward glance over our own lives. We can ask ourselves: How has this life of mine unfolded since childhood? But we can do this also in a special way. Instead of bringing before our gaze what we ourselves have enjoyed or experienced, we can turn out attention to the persons who have figured in our lives as parents, brothers and sisters, friends, teachers and so on, and we can summon before our soul the inner nature of each of these persons, in place of our own. After a time we shall find ourselves reflecting how little we really owe to ourselves, and how much to all that has flowed into us from others. If we honestly build up this kind of self-scrutiny into an inner picture, we shall arrive at quite a new relationship to the outer world. From such a backward survey we retain certain feelings and impressions. And these are like fertile seeds planted in us—seeds for the growth of a true knowledge of man. Whoever undertakes again and again this inward contemplation, so that he recognises the contribution which other persons, perhaps long dead or far distant, have made to his own life, then when he meets another man, and establishes a personal relationship with him, an imagination of the other man's true being will rise before him.

This is something which must emerge as an inward and truly heartfelt social demand, bound up with this present time and necessary to the future development of mankind. So must Spiritual Science reveal its practical power to kindle and enrich human life.

This subject has a further aspect. In earlier times all self-knowledge, all introspection, was a much simpler affair, for a deeply inward social impulse is now emerging—and not only because of the enhanced awareness of some people concerning property or poverty. This impulse shows itself, for example, in the following way. Nowadays we pay very little attention to the fact that throughout life a constant process of ripening goes on. Inwardly honest men, such as Goethe, feel this. Even in his latest years Goethe was still eager to learn. His inward growth continued; he felt he had not finished with the task of becoming a man. And in looking back on his youth and prime he saw in all that had come to him then a preparation for the experiences brought by old age. Nowadays people very seldom think in that way—least of all when taking account of man as a social being. Everyone, as soon as he is twenty, wants to belong to some corporate body and—in the favourite phrase—to exercise his democratic judgment! It never occurs to anyone that there are things in life worth waiting for, because increasing ripeness comes with the years. Men to-day have no idea of that!

That is one thing we must learn, my dear friends—that all stages of life—and not only the first two or three decades of youth—bring gifts to man.

And there is something else we must learn. We are not concerned only with ourselves, but with people at other stages of life; and particularly with children, as they are born and grow up. A consequence of human evolution is that much which used to unfold of itself in the soul now has to be attained by extraordinary exertion—by a striving for super-sensible knowledge, or at least for a real knowledge of life. It is the same with the child as with people in general—a great deal in his own being remains hidden from him. And this applies not only to the experiences that will come in later life. A great deal that was formerly revealed through atavistic clairvoyance now remains hidden from a person who pays attention only to himself, who seeks for knowledge only within himself. It remains hidden from the cradle to the grave. This is also a consequence of the state of consciousness belonging to our age. We can strive for clear insight, yet much remains hidden—and precisely in the realm where we need to see clearly. This is a special characteristic of our time: we enter the world as children, bearing some quality which is important for the world, for the social life of humanity, for the understanding of history. But we cannot reach a knowledge of this, not in childhood, or in maturity, or in old age, if we remain shut up in ourselves. Knowledge of it, however, can be reached in a different way. We can reach it if we look at the child with finely-tuned spiritual perception, and realise that in the child is revealed something which the child does not and cannot ever know, but which can be understood by the soul of another person who in old age gazes on the child. It is something revealed through the child—not to the child himself and not to the man or woman whom the child becomes—but to the other person who from a later age looks with real love on his youngest contemporaries.

I draw special attention to this, my dear friends, so that from this characteristic of our age you may see how a social impulse, in the broadest sense, weaves and surges through our time. Is there not something profoundly social in this necessity: the necessity which ordains that life becomes fruitful only when age seeks its highest goal through fellowship with youth—the fellowship not merely of this or that man with another, but of the old with the very young?

This social fellowship is called for by the innermost spirit and sense of our time. And in this way Spiritual Science, by speaking to people who are already prepared to some extent through acquaintance with its other branches, can lead to a deeper grasp of the social problem. As persons marked out by knowledge of Spiritual Science, you have before you all a great social task if you take the force of feeling which social questions stir in you and make it a means of working for mankind to-day. Carry your enthusiasm into the social and socialistic discussions of the present time, kindle and deepen in yourselves the social feeling and understanding which should prevail between man and man—then you will be discharging a truly anthroposophical task in the social realm.

We will speak further of this next week, when we shall again have a group lecture in between the two public lectures.

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

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

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

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

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

This evening I intend to consider some of the things that are known about the way our physical world relates to the spiritual world, starting from certain events that concern us more closely within our own movement. This is such a closed and intimate circle that such a thing is possible. Above all, I know that I can justify what I am going to say also to those who were fellow-members during their physical life and will remain such during their further life. Some of the facts I intend to speak of today will relate to them.

Just in recent weeks, dear friends, karma brought it about that I was able to speak at the cremations of dear friends because I happened to be in the places where the cremations took place. No doubt something else also played a role, for at the time I was particularly concerned to obtain certain remarkable impressions arising from the presence of these individualities in the spiritual world by making contact with them when they had gone through the gate of death just a few days before.

As I have said a number of times, it depends on various circumstances whether one is able to gain impressions of one fact or another in the spiritual world. It depends above all on the degree to which it is possible to develop a strong inner bond with the souls concerned. One may sometimes believe one has a very special relationship with a particular soul only to find that it is not entirely so. On the other hand, there are souls where one does not realize that it is fairly easy to establish such a bond until actual contact is established after their death.

In the three cases I wish to speak of first of all, dear friends, an intense desire arose to receive impressions immediately after their death, impressions connected with the whole nature of those souls. I would say this came of itself in these particular cases. You know it is of course possible to pick up all kinds of threads when making a funeral oration, but in these cases something of an inner necessity arose to make really intense contact with the essence of those souls and put it into words at the cremation. I did not specifically intend to characterize the nature of the souls concerned at those ceremonies, but it arose like an illuminating necessity that this had to be. I am not saying that it would have to be the same in other cases. This illuminating necessity arose in the case of one of those souls because—and I am presenting this not as a law but as something I have gone through, an experience—after death the impulses arose for me from the spiritual world to define the essence of that soul. I did not have to find the words; the words arose of their own accord. They came. We shall see later on, dear friends, why that was so, for certain indications can already be given as to that soul's life after death.

First of all let me say a few things about the particular nature of such experiences so that the whole thing can be understood. If we Warn to gain an impression in the physical world we confront the object. We form ideas depending on the way we see or hear something or feel it by touch. We know that it is we ourselves who form the ideas. If one is dealing with a soul that has gone through the gate of death one will immediately notice that everything we produce Ourselves by way of thoughts, of words, really takes us away from the soul in question and that it is necessary to give ourselves up entirely to what is taking shape within us. If the impressions are then to be put into words it will indeed be necessary for us to have the potential within us for these words to form, being unable to do anything ourselves to make the words form in that particular way. We need to able to listen inwardly for those words. If we do listen for them Inwardly we also know with certainty: These words are not spoken by myself but by the soul which has gone through the gate of death.

That is what happened in recent weeks when an older member departed from us and from the physical plane.³⁸ This was an older member who had really entered into our movement with all her heart over a considerable number of years, bringing to life in her feelings, In her heart and mind, the idea and concepts spiritual science is able to give. With tremendous devotion she had identified in her soul with all that is alive and astir in spiritual science. It was now a matter of giving oneself over, as it were, to the impression that arose from this soul. And, strangely enough, it was the case—it has been possible to show this—that just a few hours after physical death had occurred Impressions arose that took the form not merely of verbal impressions but of audible, real words; like a characterization of that soul. Nothing could be done in relation to these words but as far as possible attempt to receive in its pure form what that soul was speaking through my own soul. One certainly must call it speaking in such a case. And those then were the words I spoke at the cremation. They were not my words, as I said, but words—and please consider the Words I shall now use carefully—that came from the soul which had gone through death:

Far into cosmic space I'll carry
My feeling heart; warm it shall grow
In fires wrought by sacred powers;

In cosmic thoughts I'll weave
My own thinking; clear it shall grow
In light of life that ever is renewed;

To depths of soul I'll guide
Devoted contemplation; strong it shall grow
For mankind's true and real goals;

In God's tranquility I thus will strive
Through life's hard struggles and all cares
Prepare my self to be a higher self.

Seeking the peace of joyful labours,
And sensing cosmic truth within my own,
I work towards fulfillment of man's task;

Then may I live in hope,
Going towards my soul's own star
Who in the spirit realm appoints my place.

When I spoke these words again at the end of the funeral oration I had to change the last verse as follows, though I had not known of this beforehand:

Then may I live in hope,
Going towards my star of destiny
Who in the spirit realm appoints my place.

It was clear what this was about. The individual concerned was endeavouring to impress into her very being that now had gone through death—the thoughts, ideas, feelings and experiences she had received through spiritual science over the years—impress them in such a way that these ideas and experiences became forces that would mould this individual after death, leaving their imprint. This individual had therefore used the ideas and concepts of spiritual science to put their mark, their imprint, on her own essential nature, shaping the way this essential nature would then continue on the soul's path in the spiritual world.

Soon after this we lost another friend, another member of our movement.³⁹ Again an intense need arose to define the essential nature of this member. This could not happen the way it had happened in the Previous case, however. In the previous case it really was true to say of the way the words were chosen that a soul that had gone through the gate of death was expressing itself, saying what it felt itself to be and what it wished to become; it expressed itself. In this second case the situation was that one had to put one's own soul in confrontation, as it were, and consider this soul in the spirit. Then this soul, too, expressed itself, but in words that this time took the material needed for self-characterization out of the soul of the observer. What the soul which had gone through the gate of death was doing therefore merely provided the stimulus to express what one had to feel about its essential nature now that it had gone through the gate of death. And so the following words arose and had to be sent out after the soul at the cremation:

You came among us,
And a living, innate sweetness
Spoke from the quiet power of your eyes—
Calmness full of life and soul Flowed in the waves
That from your eyes
Would let your inward weaving
Go out to things and human beings.
This inner nature was the soul
within your voice, with eloquence—
More by the nature of the word
Than in the word itself—
Revealing what lay hidden
within the beauty of your soul.
To the devoted love
Of hearts in sympathy
It would without words be revealed.
Sublimest beauty, silent, calm.
Of world-soul creation
This being could reveal to the perceptive heart.

These words were spoken at the beginning and the end of the funeral oration, after which the cremation began. And it was possible to observe, dear friends, that this moment—please note, not the moment when the words were spoken but the moment when the heat of the furnace took hold of the body—was the time when something of a first conscious moment after death occurred. I shall go into this in more detail later on. What I mean by ‘conscious moment’ is this immediately after death a review of life presents itself in the fain of a tableau in the ether body. This goes away after a few days. Now' at the time it proved necessary to have a fairly long interval between death and cremation. Death had occurred at 6 p.m. on the Wednesday; the cremation took place the following Monday at 11 am. At that point the time had already been reached when the life tableau was disappearing. The first moment when there was some degree of consciousness after the life tableau therefore came when the heat of the furnace took hold of the body. It then became clearly apparent that such a nature become spirit has a different way of seeing things' a different way of regarding the world, from a human soul that still remains in its physical body.

When we are in our physical bodies our perception of things in space is that they remain where they are when we move away from them. So if there is a chair standing here and I see it, and I then go a bit further away and look back, the chair is still there. I look back at it. As I continue on my way the chair is still there, it stays where it is. It is not the same for events taking place in time whilst we are within our physical bodies. The events we have let go past us in time do not remain stationary. An event that has passed has passed and we are only able to look back on it in memory. The only thing that links us to the event is our past. It is not like this for a spiritual entity, for this sees events as stationary, the way we see objects remain stationary in space here on earth. And the first impression received by the soul I spoke of was of the funeral and everything that was done and said at the ceremony. This had happened five or ten minutes earlier but for the dead person it was still there, still stood there the way objects stand in space for physical man. The first impression was one of looking back on the words that had been spoken, that is, above all, the words now sounding for her, the words I have just read to You. It really is the way Richard Wagner once put it out of a profound Intuition: ‘Time turns into space’⁴⁰ What has passed has not in fact passed where spiritual experience is concerned. It stands there the way objects stand in space for physical man.

So that was the first impression gained after death—the funeral and the words spoken at it. In this case the situation was such that this look back in time and the vision, as it were, of what had happened at the funeral cannot be said to mean that consciousness lit up and then remained. The twilight state I shall discuss later returned and it was some time before consciousness lit up again. Once more, slowly and gradually, consciousness comes to shine forth again. It takes months until it is so complete that we can say the dead individual has the whole of the spiritual world all around him. But at a later time, exactly through consciousness lighting up at a later time, this particular individual showed a tremendous need to look to this moment again and again, to this particular moment, and to get a clear picture of this moment. This fully agrees with what we are able to know about the whole behaviour of the human being after death, as I intend to show presently.

There is a third case, one that will also deeply concern our Berlin members. It is the case of our dear friend and member Fritz Mitscher⁴¹ who died recently. Fritz Mitscher went through the gate of death just before be had completed his thirtieth year. He would have been thirty on 26 February which lies just ahead.

In the case of Fritz Mitscher, when my thoughts were directed towards him after his death, it was above all the impulses arising from his intense devotion to our spiritual movement that entered into my own soul, the soul of the observer. He had been a truly exemplary Personality in this respect. An exemplary personality in that he—being by nature inclined towards erudition—more and more felt the inner necessity, a deep inner need, to move in a direction where he placed the whole of his erudition, all the knowledge he might acquit!' at the service of the spiritual scientific movement. This made ill one of the people who are so essential to the progress of our philosophy based on spiritual science. What is needed in the present time is that external science, external scientific endeavour, is used in such a way by the soul that this external scientific endeavour joins into the stream of knowledge obtained out of the spiritual world towards which we wish to direct our efforts. And that was the inspiration in the young soul of Fritz Mitscher. One could not help feeling, even in looking upon him in physical life, that he was very much on the right path as far as our movement was concerned.

Our friends will recall something I said when another death had occurred many years ago: Individuals who have taken in, as it were, what physical science has to offer to the present time are the very individuals who make important contributions to our movement after an early death. Our movement depends not only on souls that are incarnated on earth. If we did not have the energies of souls that have gone through the gate of death with earthly knowledge and there remain connected with the will that must flow through our movement, we certainly would not be able in our materialistic age to maintain the hope which we must maintain so strongly to enable us to progress.

Something therefore came to me from Fritz Mitscher's soul that may be epitomized in words I found I could only bring to expression in the way I shall now read to you. These are also the words spoken at his cremation.

Happy prospect come before us,
You appeared upon the plane
Where the earth-grown flowers of spirit
May revealed be to the seeker
Through the power of soul reality.

At the root of all your striving
Lay the purest love of truth;
And to work in light of spirit
Was your life's profound intent,
Never would your efforts cease.

Splendid gifts you had and nurtured,
Faithful, to the truth adhering,
Undeterred by worldly opposition,
Firm of step the bright path you pursued
That to knowledge of the spirit leads.

And you used the organs of the spirit
With persistence and great courage;
They would push away all error
To the edges of your path,
For the truth a space creating.

Your own self you were transforming
To reveal the purest light;
Letting sun force of the soul
Shine with might within your heart—
Here your cares lay and your joy in life.

Other cares and other joys
Scarcely ever touched your soul;
Recognition of the truth
Seemed to you to give life meaning
And a value that was real.

Happy prospect come before us,
You appeared upon the plane
Where the earth-grown flowers of spirit
May revealed be to the seeker
Through the power of soul reality.

Painful loss, most deeply felt,
You now vanish from the plane
Where the earth seeds of the spirit
Ripened in the womb of soul reality
To become awareness for the spheres.

Feel our loving gaze directed
To the heights where you are facing
Now a new and different task;
From those lofty spirit regions
Lend your strength to those you left behind.

Hear the prayer of our souls;
In it speaks our truth and faith:
To fulfil our task on earth we need
Powers great from lands where spirits dwell,
Strength that comes from friends who have died.

Happy prospect come before us,
Painful loss, most deeply felt—
Let us hope that in far nearness
Never lost to us, our lives you'll guide
As a soul star in the spirit realm.

Words like these, dear friends, have been shaped in such a way that they must be considered to have arisen through identification with the soul that has passed through death. They arise from necessity though not spoken by that soul itself, for that soul only provided the stimulus. They arise from necessity, through the energies coming from that soul, to be spoken exactly the way they have been spoken down to every detail. There really was nothing else in my mind where these words are concerned but those words in the form I have just read them to you. It therefore was extremely moving for me when during the night following the funeral the soul of our Fritz Mitscher replied, in a way, to what had been spoken at his funeral—not out of conscious awareness as yet, but out of his essential nature. His soul replied the effect that the following words came from it, that is, now from the soul which had gone through death:

My own self I was transforming
To reveal the purest light;
Letting Sun-force of the soul
Shine with might within my heart
Here my cares lay and my joy in life.

Others cares and other joys
Scarcely ever touched my soul;
Recognition of the truth
Seemed to me to give life meaning
And a value that was real.

It had never occurred to me when I had to write down those verses that they could also be said in such a way that every ‘you’ would become a ‘me’, every ‘your’ a ‘my’. What had come to life for me had merely been:

Your own self you were transforming
To reveal the purest light;
Letting sun force of the soul
Shine with might within your heart—
Here your cares lay and your joy in life.

Other cares and other joys
Scarcely ever touched your soul;
Recognition of the truth
Seemed to you to give life meaning
And a value that was real.

Now those words had been transposed in that way, and they could be transposed without changing the grammatical structure, merely changing ‘your own self’ to ‘my own self’, ‘Shine with might within your heart’ to ‘Shine with might within my heart’, and so on.

So there you have a strange connection between the words spoken here and the soul that had gone through the gate of death, a connection showing that the words spoken here truly did not merely return as an echo out of that soul but had undergone a meaningful change on their return. Let me merely mention that a certain feeling really and truly went through my soul when those words were shaped, as of necessity, providing the following nuance: It appeared to me to be necessary to give a specific mission to this particular soul as it went through the gate of death. We know how much resistance there is to our spiritual movement in the present materialistic age; how far from ready the world is for our spiritual movement. And if we a clear picture of what man is capable of achieving when in his earthly body we can indeed say that he needs assistance. This feeling found expression in the words:

Hear the prayer of our souls:
In it speaks our truth and faith:
To fulfil our task here on this earth
We need powers great from lands where spirits dwell,
Strength that comes from friends who have died.

Asking this soul, as it were, to make further use of the seeds acquired here, using them specifically to further our spiritual movement. That seemed to me to be a feeling that had to arise of necessity especially in the case of this soul.

You will have noted that these three cases of people so close to us have something in common, however much they may differ. What they have in common is that thoughts as to its essential nature were prompted to come up before the soul contemplating these things, a soul specifically stimulated to such contemplation by karma, because a funeral oration had to be given. There was necessity to give expression to its essential nature.

In the case of the first individual I spoke of—you known the spirit in which I am saying these things; only to provide insight, not to show off in any way—the situation was that I had also got to know that individual on the physical plane when she had joined the Society. You get to know a few things that happen when people are within our Society; but our friends will know that it is not my way to make special inquiries into the circumstances and so on of anyone, nor ask about one thing or another these persons have lived through here in their physical life, and so on. So it was not personal satisfaction I gained but rather the satisfaction arising from insight when also characterized this individual according to the nature of her soul the way it had lived through this life on earth. The only thing I had before me was the soul after death. It was not that it spoke the words I read to you first, but I had the soul before me the way it was now after death, in its peculiar nature after death. I really knew practically nothing of what had happened to her before she had joined our Society, nor of her life in so far as it did not have to do with meetings and so on, or the kind of occasions where one meets our members now and then. Yet it was specifically in this case that I found myself Induced, as though of necessity, to speak of certain aspects of her life, aspects relating to her whole life. of the relationship of the individual who had died—and she .had reached a great age—to her children and the work she did in her life. And as I said, it was not a matter of personal satisfaction but rather of satisfaction in having gained insight when the family then told me the0y really were able to recognize the person in question on the basis of what was said there. with every word intensely characteristic of her. The right picture had therefore also been presented of her personal life during her time on earth and the only possibility of this had been in perceiving the fruits of this life now that it had concentrated in the soul. The specific insight we gain from this is that in the case of this particular soul we perceive an intense need after death to direct the eye of the spirit to her own life. It definitely was through no merit of my own that I was able to characterize the personal life of this individual. What happened was that this individuality, though not conscious at the time, directed her soul essence to her own life, preparing for the conscious life after death that was to come. She directed powers that later were to become conscious to her own life, to what she herself had experienced. The Wings I was made to say could then be seen in thought pictures that arose as her soul was directed towards her own experiences. What I had to describe, therefore, was what this individual was unconsciously thinking of herself after death. And the important thing, the thing to be emphasized, is the fact that after death this individual felt an intense need unconsciously to direct her gaze to her own essential nature.

In the case of the second person, who woke, as it were, when the flames took hold of her body, it later showed itself—in a further spontaneous awakening of this kind—from her attitude to the very characteristic of her essential nature, that she had need to reach back as it were, to go back to this essential nature, to the words that characterized her essential nature. And, indeed, in the language—if you can call language what finds expression in the relationship between souls, whether they are incarnated or else not incarnated and already spiritual entities, already dead—in the way one is able to speak of such intercourse it really had to be said: when at a later point I was able to perceive a further awakening in the case of this individual, I was conscious of a deep joy because I had been able to find those particular words. For it became apparent that there had really been good collaboration with the dead person. It could be concluded that the soul of this person—you know I am speaking in analogies—expressed itself more or less as follows: it is good that it is there ‘It is good that it is there in that place.’ Such a feeling was revealed on the second awakening, as though the dead woman were showing that something had been enhanced, as it were, in the spiritual world because it has also been put in human words here on the physical earth and that this was something she needed, and it was good that it had become more fixed through the physical words on earth than she herself had been able to fix it. There was a need there for her to fix this. And it was a help to her that it had been reinforced in this way.

In the case of our dear friend Fritz Mitscher you can of course see quite clearly that the night following the cremation he picked up the thread immediately and made use of the words spoken here, to get a clear picture of his own essential nature, to be clear about himself.

In all three cases, therefore, there has been a looking towards one's own essential nature. These, of course, are the things that first of all touch our souls, our hearts, because of their purely human quality, their purely human aspect. But spiritual insights can only be gained from the world that is at hand if they are ready to come to us as a boon. You cannot force it; such insights must be waited for. And it is particularly in this context that we can perceive the strange ways of karma.

The day after the second of the people I have mentioned had died in Zurich I was in Zurich myself. We were walking past a bookshop and in that bookshop I saw a book I had read years before. The way it is with the life I lead, I would not have found it easy to lay hands on that book in what is supposed to be my library, for that is in a peculiar state due to my living in many places. Years ago, as I said, I had read a book by the Viennese philosopher Dr Ernst Mach,⁴² and this bookshop was offering it secondhand. I felt I wanted to read it again, or at least look at it again. When I reached the third page something presented itself to my eyes that I had long since lost sight of, an interesting comment Ernst Mach had made about man acquiring self-knowledge, about the difficulty man had in getting to know himself. I am quoting almost word for word what it says on page 3 in the book written by Ernst Mach, a university professor, on Analyzing One's Feelings:

As a young man I was walking along a street one day and there encountered a person who aroused the feeling in me that he had a most unpleasant, disagreeable face. And it gave me quite a fright to discover that it was my own face I had encountered, my own face meeting me in a mirror.

So he was walking in the streets, and mirrors inclined towards each other reflected his own mirror image to him. And when he saw himself he said: That is someone with an unpleasant, disagreeable face I am coming up against there. Immediately afterwards the author adds another such comment concerning lack of self-knowledge. He says:

One day I returned home tired from a journey and got on a bus. I saw another man getting on from the opposite side and thought to myself: What kind of down-at-heel schoolmaster is that getting on there! And lo and behold, it was I myself. The mirror on the bus had shown me my own reflection.

Professor Mach adds: ‘I therefore knew the style and bearing of my profession better than I did my own.’

Here we have something of a pointer to show how difficult it is for man to recognise himself even when it comes to his purely external appearance. We do not even know what we look like in three dimensional space, not even if we are university professors. You can see that from this very candid confession.

It is interesting that such an example can be quoted in the context of the case I have referred to, for I think you'll agree that it shows how here, in the physical body, self-knowledge need not be all that much of an obstacle to whatever we need to achieve on earth. You can be a renowned professor and know as little about yourself as this man has told in his book. I have mentioned this example because it is strange that it presented itself to the mind's eye when the soul was, directed to take fresh note of how someone who has died feels a need to grasp his own essential nature, to perceive it. Here in the physical world it is perfectly possible to manage without self-knowledge, I'd say, with regard to anything concerning the purely material aspects of our lives. It is not, however, possible to gain knowledge of the spiritual worlds without self-knowledge. We shall discuss this in a week's time. For external, material concerns, however, we can manage without self-knowledge. Yet as soon as the soul has gone through the gate of death, self-knowledge will be the first thing it needs. This is particularly evident from the experience I have described. Self-knowledge has to be the starting point.

You see, a materialist tends to stick at the question as to whether consciousness persists after death. Spiritual science has shown that when the soul had gone though the gate of death it does not in fact suffer from lack of consciousness but rather has too much of it. A kind of awakening will come at a later stage, not because it is necessary to acquire a new consciousness after death but because there is dazzling consciousness, too much consciousness, and this needs to be gradually subdued in the early stages. You will find more about this in the Viennese cycle⁴³ which has also appeared in print. After death, man has too much conscious awareness, an overpowering awareness, and he needs to get his bearings first in this world of over- powering awareness. Gradually he will achieve this and as he does so his awareness will be less in degree than before. Conscious awareness must first be subdued, just as over-powerful sunlight has to be subdued. A gradual subduing of consciousness has to be achieved. So we cannot speak of an 'awakening' in the terms that apply in the physical world, but of recovering from a superabundance of conscious awareness to the point where it becomes bearable, depending on what we have experienced in the physical world. This requires the following: to get our bearings in this flood of light that is our awareness after death, we need knowledge of our own essential nature as a starting point. We have to be able to look back upon our own essential nature to find the guidelines, as it were, for an orientation in the spiritual world. Lack of self-knowledge is what hinders conscious awareness after death. We have to find ourselves in the flood of light. And so you see why a need arises to characterize the person who has died, to assist them to find themselves.

This is something we gain as a kind of general insight from such Personal experiences that concern us closely. After death, when the etheric life-tableau has disappeared. there is a gradual development. It is based on our getting to know our life, our own life here on earth, as it gradually dawns out of the spiritual worlds. Once the tableau has passed this is our only aim after death. Everything that is part of the spiritual world will be around us. What we have to get to know above all else, however, is our own essential nature. The concepts and ideas familiar to us from spiritual science will then help us, providing the means of orientation. As you can see in the first case, the self-criticism which showed itself had been possible only through the spiritual science she had taken in, so that it was possible to look at her own essential nature and the words could come: ‘To depths of soul I'll guide devoted contemplation; strong it shall grow for mankind's true and real goals’.

The real intention with all this is to lift our spiritual scientific movement out of mere theory and gradually make it into something that the soul is able to take hold of in a living way, into a stream within which we are truly alive, active and present. We shall then know what goes on in the spiritual world around us, just as in the physical world We know that around us is the air we breathe, however much the ignorant may, and indeed will, deny this. That is the future destiny of man: to know something of the fact that just as the air is there for and around the physical body, so the spiritual world is present all around and can be experienced by the soul. This spiritual world relates more to the soul, as it were, the way the air does to the body: it shapes and fashions the soul, filling it with its essence.

We are also able to give certain details of the fate of the soul after death in individual cases. The reason why such things are discussed in more intimate detail at the present time is that in the momentous, but also painful, events of our time, death is letting its breath pass through the world and our age is demanding countless deaths in sacrifice. We are specially challenged therefore to concern ourselves with the occurrence of death in the present age.

We know, dear friends, that when the human being goes through the gate of death he has handed over his physical body to the earth, to the elements of the earth; the ego and astral body have then departed from the physical body. Now, in the second case today we saw that the ether body had already been cast off when cremation took place; the ether body goes away within a few days. There is one particular question that really comes to the fore in the present time. So many people are going through the gate of death in the very flower of their youth these days. Transferring a purely physical concept to the spiritual sphere—where it has even greater validity than in physical life—we may ask the question: ‘What happens with the ether bodies of these people who have gone through the gate of death; the ether bodies that separate off after a number of days? What happens with such a youthful ether body?’ Such a person who goes through the gate of death in his twentieth, twenty-fifth, thirtieth, thirty-fifth Year' or even earlier, puts his ether body aside. This, however, is an ether body that could still have done work here in physical life, would have had energies still for many years. It was karma that this ether body could not use it energies, yet those energies are still within it. They could have continued to be effective here in physical life for Many years to come. Physicists are right in saying that energies are never lost; here on earth they are transformed. This applies even more so in the spiritual world. These energies relating to someone fallen in battle when still young, energies that could still have supported physical life for many years, do not convert to anything else. They are just there. And we are already able to say, particularly in view of the events of our time, that these energies become part of the essential being of the folk soul of the people concerned. This receives those energies so that they are then active everywhere within the folk soul. Those are true spiritual energies, energies from the human being which are present in addition to his ego and his astral body, his individual personality which he carries through the period between death and rebirth. For the future it will be important to understand as far as possible that these energies are also present in the folk soul, that they are present within it in the general activity this folk soul is going to unfold; present as energies, not entities. There they will be the most fruitful, I should say the most sun-like. radiant energies.

There is another instance I would like to refer to. one that is very close to our hearts. It has no direct bearing on present events, but the way it happened and what has become of it can all the same cast some light for us on all the cases where an unspent ether body is put aside when death has occurred at an early age. In the autumn we experienced the death of a member's child, a child seven years of age.⁴⁴ The death of this child occurred in a strange way. He was a good boy, mentally very much alive already within the limits set for a seven-year-old; a good, well-behaved and mentally very active child. He came to die because he happened to be on the very spot where a furniture van overturned, crushing the boy so that he died of suffocation. This was a spot where probably no van went past before nor will go past again, but one did pass just that moment. It is also Possible to show in an outer way that all kinds of circumstances caused the child to be in that place at the time the van overturned, circumstances considered chance if the materialistic view is taken. He was getting some food supplies for his mother and left a bit later that particular evening, having been held up. If he had gone five minutes earlier he would have been well past the place where the van overturned. He had also left by another door than usual; just on this one occasion by another door! Leaving by the other door he would have passed to the right of the van. The van overturned to the left. Studying the case in the light of spiritual science and of karma it will be seen to demonstrate very clearly that external logic, quite properly used in external life, proves flimsy in this case and does not apply.

One example I have quoted a number of times is that of a person who was walking by a river and fell into the water at a point where a stone was lying. Superficially it may indeed appear that the man stumbled over the stone, fell into the water and thus came to his death. The obvious conclusion will be that he drowned. A post mortem examination would however have shown that he suffered a stroke and therefore died and fell into the water. Thus he fell into the water because he was dead and did not die because he fell into the water. Cause and effect have been confused. Things that seem perfectly logical in external life may be completely wrong.

Superficially, the death of young Theodor Faiss could also be described as a most unfortunate accident. In reality, however, the karma of this child was such that the ego, to put it bluntly, had ordered the van and the van overturned to fulfil the child's karma. So there we have a particularly young ether body. The child could have grown up and reached the age of seventy. The energies in the ether body would have been enough for seventy years but they went through the gate of death after seven years. The whole event took place in Dornach as you know. The father had been drafted into the German army and was not there at the time: he died quite soon after, having been wounded at the front. The whole thing happened in the immediate neighbourhood of the building and from that time the aura of the building at Dornach contains the energies from the ether body of this child. A person working for this building and able to perceive the spiritual energies involved in the project will find within them the energies of this child. Quite apart, therefore, from the ego and astral body which have entered the spiritual world, to be active there between death and rebirth, the unspent ether body has now united with the whole of the spiritual aura of the building at Dornach. Deep and significant feelings attach to such insights for they do not represent knowledge of the dry numerical kind we take into our minds, but insights received into the soul with deep gratitude. Mindful of this, I shall never even for a moment fail to remember, in anything I have to do for that building at Dornach, that these energies are contributing to the project, helping me in the project. Here theoretical insight merges into life itself.

Being aware of this, dear friends, you will understand that it is possible to get some idea now, at a time when countless ether bodies pass through the gate of death without having achieved fulfillment on earth, as to what will happen when the sun of peace returns again, after the twilight of war. Then the energies, the ether forces of those who have passed through the gate of death, the gate of suffering, will want to unite with the souls that are active here on earth, unite with than for the good of the earth and for progress on earth. This means, however, that there will have to be people on earth who appreciate these things, who will be aware of the fact that the people who have made their sacrifice to the age are up there in the spiritual world in their residual ether bodies. They want to join in the work of this world. Their work will only be wholly fruitful if there are receptive souls here that are Prepare{ to unite their thoughts with what comes to them from the spiritual world. These are momentous times, but also difficult and painful times. For their fruits it is immensely important that thoughts are created out of a science that acknowledges the spirit, thoughts that are then able to unite with the thoughts coming down from the ether bodies of those who have died in sacrifice. Thus we have an indication that even in the midst of these difficult times, under the sign of suffering also and of death, we are under the sign of greatness, that the difficult things which are happening also remind us that they are intended to give rise to an age that is more open to the spirit than the past age has been. What must not happen is that those who have made the sacrifice will have to look down on an earth world for which they have given themselves, to contribute to its progress and salvation, and find themselves unable to take action because there are no souls sending receptive thoughts out towards them. We therefore must see spiritual science as something that is alive, a living element that will be needed in the time that is to come. particularly with regard to the events of the present day. It is this which I have been summing up again and again in the words I shall now speak, in the spirit of and in accord with what we have been considering:

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

• 38. Lina Grosheintz-Rohrer. See Rudolf Steiner: Unsere Toten (GA 261), address given in Basle on 10 January 1915.
• 39. Sybil Colazza. See Unsere Toten (GA 261), address given in Basle on 10 January 1915.
• 40. ‘Time here turns into space.’—Gurnemanz in Parcifal, Act 1.
• 41. See Rudolf Steiner: Unsere Toten (GA 261), address given in Basle on 5 February 1915.
• 42. Mach, Ernst (1838 –1916): Analyse der Empfindtuigen und das Verhaltnis des Physischen vim Psychischen Jena 1900, p 3.
• 43. Rudolf Steiner: Inneres Wesen des Menschen und Leben zwischen Tod und newer Geburt (GA 153), 1914. English translation of some of the lectures in The Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and a New Birth (tr. D.S. Osmond and C. Davy) (London) Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1959.
• 44. The child in question was Theo Faiss. See Rudolf Steiner: Unsere Toten (GA 261), address given in Dornach on 10 October 1914.

In the last lecture I spoke to you of the way in which man is subject during his life to that which, from the natural scientific point of view, we are accustomed to call heredity. I spoke further of how man is subject to the influences of the outer world, to adaptation to environment; how everything which is bound up with heredity is connected with the Ahrimanic sphere, while that which, in the widest sense, is comprised in adaptation to the external world is connected with the Luciferic realm. I told you also how in the cosmos, i.e., within the spiritual substance which lies at the foundation of the cosmos care has been taken that the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences should play their part in the right way in human life. We shall add certain things today to what has been said, keeping in mind, at the same time what was explained in the first of these lectures.

We have seen how memory, everything in the nature of memory, fashions man within as regards the soul. In reality, far more than we think we are fashioned as soul-beings by our memories. The way in which our experiences have become memories has really fashioned our souls; we are a result of our memory-life more than we think, and he who can exercise even a little self-observation, so far as to enter into the life of memory will see what a great part the impressions of childhood play throughout the entire earthly life. The manner in which our childhood was spent, which indeed plays no great part in conscious life, the time, for instance, during which we learned to speak and walk, during which we received our first, the inherited teeth, the impressions received during all these periods of development play a great part in the human soul-life throughout the entire life on earth. Many things which rise up inwardly as thoughts which are connected with memories—and everything we grasp in thought that is not caused by external impressions is connected with memories—everything which arises in this way making us inwardly joyful or causing us inner pain (these are generally delicate shades of pleasure and pain which accompany our thoughts when they arise freely) all the life of memory within us is carried out by our astral body when we pass over into the condition of sleep. If now with Imaginative vision we can behold man in sleep as a psychic spiritual being the matter presents itself in the following way. Picture to yourselves during sleep the etheric and physical bodies remaining within the human skin while the astral body is outside (the ego we will consider later). We can then observe the astral body, really consisting in memories. We can also see how these memories which live in the astral body outside of man whirl around in and out of each other. Experiences which lie far asunder in time and in regard to space also are brought together, while some things are left out of certain experiences altogether. In this way the whole memory-life is transformed during sleep. If man dreams it is just because this transformed life of memory appears before his consciousness, and in the constitution of the dream he can inwardly perceive that whirling in and out, inwardly perceive that which, observed from outside can be seen by Imaginative clairvoyance.

But something else presents itself; that which from falling asleep until waking up figures in this way as memories, that which forms the chief content of the human astral soul-life unites during sleep with the forces which lie behind the phenomena of nature. We can therefore say: All that lives as astral body in these memories forms a union with the forces that lie behind the minerals, actually in the inner being of the minerals, in the inner being of the plant forces, and the forces which lie behind the clouds, and so on.

To one who can perceive this truth it is really terrible, I must say, when people say that behind the phenomena of nature there are only material atoms. Not with material atoms do our memories unite during sleep, but with that which really lies behind the phenomena of nature, with the spiritually active forces. It is with these that our memories unite during sleep. Our memories rest in them during sleep.

Thus we can really say: During sleep our soul with its memories dives down into the inner being of nature, and you are saying nothing untrue, nothing unreal if you utter the following: “When I fall asleep I consign my memories to the powers which rule spiritually in the crystal, in plants, in all the phenomena of nature.” You may go for a walk and see by the wayside yellow flowers, blue flowers, green grass and shining promising ears of corn and you can say: “When I pass you by in the daytime I see you from outside, but when I sleep I sink my memories into your spiritual being. You take up what I have transformed during life from experiences into memories. You take up these memories of mine when I go to sleep.” It is perhaps the most beautiful of all feeling for nature to have with the rose-bush not only an external relationship but to be able also to say: “I love the rose-bush especially because the rose-bush has this peculiarity (bear in mind that space plays no part in these things; no matter how far the rose may be removed from us in space we find our way to it in sleep)—the rose-bush has this peculiarity, that it receives the earliest memories of our childhood.” That is the reason why people love roses so much, only they are not aware of it; but they love roses because they are the recipients of the very first memories of childhood.

When we were children other people loved us and often made us smile. We have forgotten it but it forms part of our life of feeling; and the rose-bush absorbs into its own being while we are asleep at night the memories which we have ourselves forgotten. Man is far more united than he realizes with the outer world of nature, that is, with the spirit which rules in the external world. These memories of the first years of childhood are especially remarkable with reference to human sleep, because in reality, during those years and during the years extending to the change of teeth—that means to about the seventh year of life—the soul-element alone is taken up during sleep. As regards human beings it is the case that the spiritual inner part of nature takes into itself of our childhood only the soul part. Other things also of course hold good. The soul-element which we develop during our early childhood (for instance if we were childishly cruel) remains also in us but this is taken up by the thistle. This is said by way of comparison, but nevertheless it actually points to a significant reality. That which is not taken up from the child into the inner part of nature will be immediately evident from what follows.

In the first seven years of life everything has been inherited that is of a bodily nature. The first teeth are entirely inherited; everything of a material nature which we have within us in the first seven years of life is essentially inherited. But after about seven years all the material substance is thrown off; it falls away and is formed anew. Man remains as a form, as a spiritual form, his material part he gradually throws off. After seven or eight years everything that was in his body seven or eight years before has gone. It is a fact that when we have reached the age of nine years our whole human being has been renewed. We then build it in accordance with our external impressions.

As a matter of fact it is extremely important, especially for the child in the first periods of life, that it should be in a position to build its new body—now no longer the inherited body but a body developed out of its inner being—according to good impressions from its environment, and in a healthy adaptation to its environment. Whereas the body which a child has when it comes into the world depends on whether the inherited impulses it has received are good or bad, the later body which it bears from the seventh to fourteenth year depends very much on the impressions it receives from its environment.

Every seven years we build our body anew, but it is our ego that builds it anew. Although the ego is not yet born as regards the outer world in a child of seven years (as you know it is only born later), yet it is working already, for naturally it is bound up with the body, and it is the ego which is building therein. It develops those things of which we have already spoken; it builds up that which appears as the physiognomy, the gestures, the external material revelation of the soul and spirit in man. It is a fact that a human being who has an active interest in the world, who is interested in many things, and because of his active interest in them ponders over them and inwardly digests them, reveals in a material way in the external expression of his countenance and in his gestures what he has been interested in and absorbed. On the face of the human being who has an intensely active interest in the outer world, who inwardly works upon the fruits of this interest in external things one will see in each wrinkle later in life how he formed these himself, and one will be able to read much in his countenance, for the ego is expressed in the gestures and in the physiognomy. A man who goes through the world bored or without interest in the outer world remains throughout his whole life with an unchanged countenance; finer experiences are not imprinted in the physiognomy and gestures. In many a face we may read a whole biography; in many others we cannot read much more than the fact that he was once a child—which is nothing very special.

The fact that man in this way through the changing of his substance every seven or eight years shapes his own outer appearance signifies a great deal. This work of man on his own external appearance, in physiognomy and gesture, is also something which he carries in sleep into the inner being of nature. If one then looks at a man with imaginative clairvoyance and observes the ego outside him as it is during sleep one sees that it really consists in physiognomy and gesture. With those human beings who express much of their inner being in their countenance we find a radiating and shining ego. Now this resulting gesture and physiognomy unites itself also with forces in the inner being of nature. If we have been friendly and kind nature is inclined, as soon as this kindliness has become a facial expression, shown in the countenance, to take this up during our sleep into its own being. Nature takes up our memories into her forces and our gesture-formation into her very essence, into the nature-beings.

Man is so intimately connected with external nature that what he experiences in his inner being as memories is of enormous significance to external nature, as is also the way in which he expresses his inner soul-life in his physiognomy and gestures, for that lives on further in the inner being of nature.

I have often mentioned a saying of Goethe, which was really a criticism of a remark by Haller. Haller said: “Into the inner being of nature no created spirit can enter. Fortunate is the man to whom she reveals even her external husk.” To this, Goethe replied: “You pedant! We are everywhere in the inner being of nature. Nothing is within her, nothing is outside her; that which is within is without, and that which is without is within. Only ask yourself which you are, whether the kernel or the husk.” Goethe says that he heard this remark in the sixties and secretly cursed it; for he felt (naturally he did not then know Spiritual Science) that when one whom he could only regard as a pedant said: “Into the inner being of nature no created spirit can enter,” he knows nothing of the fact that man, simply because he is a being of memories, and a being of physiognomy and gesture is continually entering into the inner being of nature. We are not beings who only stand at the door of nature and knock in vain. Just through that which is our innermost being do we stand in most intimate communion with the inner being of nature.

Because the young child, up to his seventh year, has a body which is entirely inherited, nothing of his ego, of his physiognomy and gesture pass over into the inner being of nature. Only at the change of teeth do we begin to develop our real being. Therefore only after the change of teeth do we gradually become ripe to think about nature. Before that time more important thoughts arise in the child, thoughts which have not much to do with nature, and are so full of charm just for that reason.

The best way to approach a child is to make poetry in its presence, to represent the stars as the eyes of heaven, for example, when things we speak of to the child are as far as possible from external physical reality.

Only from the change of teeth onwards does the child grow in such a way that his thoughts can coincide with the thoughts of nature; fundamentally the whole life from the age of seven to fourteen is such that the child grows in an inward direction, and he then carries his memories outside his soul into nature, as also his gestures and physiognomy, and this then continues throughout his whole life. As regards any relationship with the inner being of nature we, as single human individuals, are only born at the change of teeth. For this reason those beings whom I have designated as elementary spirits, the gnomes and undines, listen so eagerly when man relates something of his child life up to the seventh year, because, as far as these spirits of nature are concerned man is only born at the change of teeth. The change of teeth to them is an extremely interesting phenomenon. Previous to this age man is to the gnomes and undines a being “on the other side,” and it is for them something of an enigma that man appears at this age having already reached a certain perfection! It would be extraordinarily inspiring for pedagogical or educational phantasy if a man, having imbibed spiritual knowledge, could really transpose himself into these dialogues with the nature-spirits, and enter into the soul of the spirits of nature in order to obtain their views concerning what he is able to tell them about children; for in this very way the most beautiful fairy-tales arise. When, in ancient times fairy-tales were so wonderfully apt and rich in content, this is because the poets who composed them could converse with gnomes and undines, could tell them something and not merely hear something from them.

These nature-spirits are often very egoistic, they become silent also if one does not tell them something of that concerning which they are curious. Their favourite stories are about the deeds of babies. In return, one may hear many things from them which can then be woven into the form of fairy-tales.

Thus, for the practical spiritual life that which today appears highly fantastic to us may become extremely important. It is the case that these dialogues with the spirits of nature, on account of the conditions I have mentioned, may be extremely instructive to both sides.

On the other hand, what I have said may in a sense naturally cause anxiety, because while he is asleep man continually creates pictures of his innermost being. Behind the phenomena of nature, behind the flowers of the field, and extending right up into the etheric world there exist reproductions of our memories, both good and useless memories; for the earth is simply teeming with what lives in human souls, and in reality human life is very intimately connected with such things.

We find therefore first of all the spirits of nature, those beings into whom we penetrate with our world of gesture; but we also find the world of the Angels, Archangels and Archai, and grow also into these Beings. We enter into them. We plunge into the deeds of the Angels through our memories. We enter into the living beings of the angelic world through what we have imprinted in ourselves as physiognomy and gesture. This penetration which takes place in sleep is such that we can say: When we pass over livingly into nature the process is that the further we go out in a direct line the more do we come into the regions of the Angels and Archangels and the Archai. We come into the sphere of the third Hierarchy. And when in sleep we dive down with our memories and our gestures as into a flowing sea of weaving beings of Angels, Archangels and Archai, then from one side there comes another stream of spiritual beings, the second Hierarchy, Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis. If we wish to express in the outer world that which we have just described, we must say: This stream flows in such a way that the course of the sun by day from east to west marks the way the second Hierarchy crosses the third Hierarchy. The third Hierarchy, the Angels, Archangels and Archai, are as if floating up and down “offering one another the golden buckets.” In this presentation we have the second Hierarchy going with the sun, as it were, from east to west. This is not apparent, because here the Copernican world-conception does not hold good, but this stream actually does go from east to west, following the course of the sun during the day.

Thus we see—i.e., if we have the ability to see—how man during sleep grows into the third Hierarchy; but this third Hierarchy is continually being graciously permeated from one side by the second Hierarchy. Thus this second Hierarchy also makes itself felt in the life of our soul.

I pointed out in the last lecture but one the significance of transposing oneself vividly again into the experiences of one's youth. In this connection you can get a very impressive feeling if you take up the Mystery Plays, and there read, perhaps now with greater understanding than was formerly the case, what is represented there in regard to the appearance of the Youth of Johannes. It is indeed the case that man can vivify his own inner nature and make it intensely perceptible to himself if he goes back actively over his youth. I told you how he might take up old school-books from which he might perhaps have learned something (or perhaps not!). He immerses himself in what he learnt, or did not learn. It makes no difference whether one learned anything or not; the point is that one should immerse oneself intensely in what one formerly went through with it. For in this way one may have personal experiences. For instance, it was of immense significance to me personally, a few years ago, to transpose myself into such a situation belonging to my own youth. I then needed to intensify the forces of spiritual understanding. The following events occurred to me quite accidentally when I was just eleven years of age. I was given a school-book. The first thing that happened to it was that I carelessly upset the ink-pot on it and thereby damaged two pages, so that I could no longer read them. That was an event of many years ago, but I have often lived through this event again, this school-book with the damaged pages, with all that I experienced thereby; for this book had to be replaced by a poor family. It was something dreadful, all that one could experience through this school-book, with its gigantic ink smudges. As I said, it is not a question of having behaved well in connection with the circumstance which one recalls; it is rather a question of having experienced them with intensity. If you attempt this with all inner intensity you will also experience something else. You will experience in a true vision a scene which you have inwardly lived through and evoked in the soul. When night has come and everything is dark around you and you are by yourself you will experience the situation as if spread out in space, which you had previously experienced in time. Suppose, for instance, that you evoke before your soul a scene which you once experienced, let us say, at 11 o'clock. Afterwards you went to a place where you sat with and amongst other human beings. You sat down and other people sat around you. Here you have recalled something which you experienced inwardly. What was then around you externally now meets you entirely as a spatial vision. One only needs to look for such connections and then quite important discoveries can be made. Let us say for instance, that when you are seventeen years of age you had your midday meal in a pension where the guests were continually changing. Call up inwardly in your soul one such scene which you experienced. Recall it vividly. Then in the night you find yourself sitting down at the table. Around you people are sitting, people whom you did not often see, because in this pension they continually came and went. In one face you recognize, “That is something I experienced at that time.” External space is added to the soul-experience, when you make your memories active in this way.

This means in reality that you are living with this stream which flows from east to west; because gradually you feel more and more strongly: There in the spiritual world which you enter in sleep your life does not merely consist in being merged with the spiritual, but in this spiritual there transpires something which was reflected externally at the time you sat around the pension table with these human beings. You have forgotten it long ago but it is still there. You behold, it as you can behold those things which can often be seen inscribed in the Akashic Record. The moment you have this before you, you have identified yourself with this stream flowing from east to west, the stream of the second Hierarchy. In this stream of the second Hierarchy something lives which is outwardly reflected by day.

Now days vary in the course of the whole year. In Spring a day is longer, in Autumn shorter; in summer it is longest, in winter shortest. The day is subject to change throughout the year. That is caused by a stream which flows from west to east, counter to the stream from east to west; and that is the stream of the first Hierarchy, of the Seraphim, the Cherubim and the Thrones. Observe therefore how the day changes in the course of the year. If you pass on from the day to the year then you come in contact with what meets you during sleep as the opposite stream. As a matter of fact it is the case that we go forth in sleep into the spiritual world in a direct line, not in the direction which goes from west to east, nor in the direction which goes from east to west.

If we realize this, then, as I have told you, when we vividly recall some memory we must place spatial winter before our souls.

This is also the case when we become conscious of our will. When we become conscious of our will, that is what enters into our gestures and our physiognomy.

That which I am now saying should have a certain significance especially for eurhythmists, although, naturally there is not any intention in Eurhythmy of bringing to expression what I am now about to say. It is a fact that when a man really fashions his external appearance more and more from out of his inner being, when his ego is expressed more and more in his physiognomy and gestures, he not only receives an impression from the day to pass over from vivid inner experiences of memory to the vision of spatial external things. He experiences over again what he learnt, let us say at the age of seventeen, and sees the people with whom he sat in that pension. He sees them in picture-form, as in the Akashic Record. That is Day experience. But one can also experience the year. This is done by paying attention to the way in which the will works in us, and observing that it is relatively easy to bring the will to expression when we are really warm, whereas it is difficult to let the will stream through the body if we are very cold. Anyone who can experience in this way the relation between the will and the fact of being warm or cold will gradually be able to speak of a winter-will and a summer-will.

We find that the best expression of this will comes from the seasons. Let us observe, for example, the will that carries our thoughts out into the cosmos. They escape, as it were, out of the finger-tips, and we feel that it is easy to develop the will.

If we stand before a tree, something at the top of the tree may give us particular pleasure; and if the will becomes warm in us our thoughts are carried to the top of the tree. Indeed they often go even to the stars, if in summer nights we feel endowed with this warm will.

On the other hand, if the will has cooled within us it is as though all our thoughts were carried in our heads, as if they could not penetrate into the arms or legs; everything goes into the head. The head carries this coldness of the will, and if the coldness does not become so severe as to produce a frosty feeling the head becomes warm through its own inner reaction and then develops thoughts.

Thus we can say: summer-will leads us out into the expanses of the universe. Summer-will, warm will carries our thoughts in all directions. Winter-will carries them into our head. We can thus learn to differentiate our will, and then we shall feel that the will which carries us out everywhere into the cosmos is related to the course of summer; while the will which carries the thoughts into our head we feel to be related to the winter. Through the will we come to experience the year in the same way as we formerly did the day.

There is a possibility of feeling as a reality the words which I am now going to write on the board. If a man experiences winter in his human will he can perceive it in such a way that he says:—

O, Cosmic Pictures!
Ye float down to me
From cosmic distances,
Ye strive to reach me,
Ye penetrate into
The thinking forces
Of my head.

These words are not a mere abstraction; for if a man feels his own will united with nature, he can, at the approach of winter feel as if from out of space his own experiences are borne towards him, experiences which he himself had first given to nature. He can perceive on the waves of these words his own experiences which have already passed over into nature.

That is the feeling of the winter-will; but man can also feel the summer-will which expands our thoughts out into the universe:—

Ye creative Soul-forces of my head
Ye fill out mine own being.
Ye press out of my being
Into universal space,
And unite me
With world-creative powers.

That means, the thoughts which are first experienced in the head pass over into the whole body. They first fill the body and then press out of the body again. These words express the nature of the summer-will, the will in us which is related to the summer. We may also say: “I have called up from my inner being the active memory of something experienced long ago; the day with its night confronts me with it in supplementing it with the external perception of space; and that corresponds to the stream from east to west.” We may also say: “In us winter-will changes into summer-will, and summer-will into winter-will.” We are no longer related to the day with its interchange of light and darkness. We are related to the year through our will, and thereby are identified with the stream flowing from west to east, the stream of the first Hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and the Thrones.

As we go on we shall see how man is hindered or helped through heredity or external adaptation to environment with reference to this relationship with the inner being of nature; for what I have explained to you today relates to the way in which man, if he is hindered as little as possible by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, can grow in this way with his thought and will into the inner being of nature, and is received by the time-forces, the day-forces and the year-forces,—the third Hierarchy, the second Hierarchy and the first Hierarchy. But the Ahrimanic forces as they appear in heredity and the Luciferic forces as they appear in adaptation to environment have an essential influence on all this. This great question shall occupy us in the next lecture.

The Gospel of John differs in many respects from the others. Thus, nothing is presented there [in direct] narrative. It always says that one or the other has seen something, that one or the other has been seen. How are we to understand this?

A large part of what is described in the Gospel of John is to be regarded as abstract, inner experiences, as instances of spiritual clairvoyance. When it says, for example, that Nicodemus “came to Jesus by night, this should not be taken literally. It is trivial to interpret it as if he came at night because he was ashamed to come during the day. We are dealing here with an astral experience. Nicodemus went to Jesus in his astral body at night, while his physical body slept, to receive instruction. This event took place not as a physical personality, not with physical steps, but in the astral world; Nicodemus experienced it as a sleeper. He had the conversation that is described to us in the night in the astral. Nicodemus was exceptionally clairvoyant. He was able to travel astrally to Christ Jesus and have that conversation. That which Christ was could therefore take place in a special experience for those who were meant to perceive it.

In this way, through strange experiences, it became clear to many who Jesus actually was. Thus, John the Baptist had also clairvoyantly seen Jesus as the Lamb of God - as the sacrificial animal of God - that is, the ego in man. This ego in the symbol of the lamb had been sacrificed unceasingly in pre-Christian times; in other words, man had to sacrifice his ego in order to do God's will. This I or Lamb of God was now to be transformed through Christ into the Son of Man.

[Using the Nicodemus narrative as a model, we need to understand why, upon the testimony of John the Baptist, it is revealed that Jesus is the Christ, the God of our cosmos. Therefore, the Gospel of John does not tell us that the Spirit descended upon Jesus, nor does it vividly describe the baptism, but rather says that John the Baptist describes his experience in such a way that he saw clairvoyantly how the dove descended. - Otherwise one would not understand why the Gospels seemingly contradict each other if they are not understood to mean that seers describe their spiritual experiences here.]

The gospel of John does not describe the baptism, but only the astral experience of the Baptist, when he, as a seer, saw Jesus inspired by the spirit in the form of a dove. This must be particularly taken into account if one wants to understand the spiritual meaning of this gospel. The Baptist was only clairvoyant at times, he could not look back on his previous incarnations. His mission was to show people that they should now acquire their clear sense of self, because now was the time to do so. But John the Baptist had to pay for this mission by having his own sense of self limited to the time between birth and death. Hence his strange answers to the questions of the Jews. When they asked if he was the Christ, he replied, “I am not.” And when they asked if he was Elijah, he said, “No.” Contrary to these words of his, Jesus solemnly testifies that John the Baptist was the reincarnated Elijah.

What is the source of this contradiction? John did not know people by their past lives, he did not know that he was Elijah returned. To fulfill his mission in the world, he had to sacrifice that dark, half-dreaming clairvoyance through which people in former times were directly connected to the spiritual world and could look back on their past forms of existence. Therefore, true to his mission, he pointed to Jesus as a human being in whom a higher consciousness was already developed and who therefore carried the Heavenly Kingdom within himself and could help people to regain the consciousness they had had before.

In order for the ego to develop, it was necessary for people to concentrate their energies and learn to make the most of their lives on earth and understand its great significance. Therefore, a veil had to fall over the past so that people could no longer see their earthly lives as a small link in a long chain. By the time of the Baptist, however, self-awareness had been fully developed and was now to be developed into an even higher consciousness.

In the Gospel of John, we can follow step by step how Jesus himself rises from direct self-awareness to God-awareness by uniting with and merging into all other living beings. The power of his insight and will comes across to us here as in no other gospel. Significant in this regard are Jesus' words to Nathanael when he is first led to him. Jesus calls him a “true Israelite.” What did he mean by that? To understand this expression, we have to go back to the ancient mysteries for a moment.

For example, if we examine the Persian Mithraic mysteries, we find that the three great stages of initiation were divided into seven degrees. The initiates of the first degree were called the “messengers of the raven” – “raven” corresponds to “messenger”;

- the initiates of the second degree, the 'occult man';
- the initiates of the third degree, the 'soldier';
- the initiates of the fourth degree, the 'lion';
- the initiate of the fifth degree, a 'true Persian';
- the initiate of the sixth degree, the 'solar hero';
- the initiate of the seventh degree, 'father, magician'.

The initiate of the first degree had to learn everything there was to learn; he still had one foot in the outer world. Through his studies in the spiritual world, he could be a messenger between this world and the outer world. That is why it is said of Wotan that he was always accompanied by his ravens.

The initiate of the second degree, the <«occult man», had experiences in the spiritual world through imaginations, but he did not have the right to share his occult experiences with others. In general, the various degrees and the legitimacy of the students were strictly observed. Thus, for example, the occult man had to mature before he was given the opportunity to share with others what he had learned through occult means. Only after he had matured spiritually could he enter the third degree and become a “warrior,” an enunciator, an apostle of the spiritual world.

The initiate of the fourth degree - or of the “Lion” - had to be completely free of all self-assertion; in relation to the truth, he was not allowed to have his own point of view or his own opinion. This view is in complete conflict with what is considered correct in our days, since everyone has to have their point of view and their opinion. Mathematics is currently the only field in which individuals no longer believe that they can assert their own opinions. The initiate of the fourth degree, on the other hand, was never allowed to let his own thoughts and feelings interfere when it came to spiritual truths; because only those who do not have their own opinions can penetrate to the truth, as an old sage says. Considering himself as the instrument of the truth, as the vessel of the truth, he should not speak his own thoughts, but only what he had been taught. His standard should be: What does the truth think about it?

Then he was ready to ascend to a higher degree, the fifth degree. Until then, he had only been an expression of the feelings and thoughts of individual people. The initiate of the fifth degree should embody the spirit and soul of the people. The astral, the etheric and the ego in the individual human being are, so to speak, embedded in the national spirit, which is a concrete individuality, although without an outer physical body. The national spirit gives expression to everything that happens in a single nation, to all its feelings and characteristics – just as Buddha's Nirmanakaya gives its etheric body to various individualities and lives in them. In the Mithras Mysteries, such an initiate was called a “true Persian”. He was, so to speak, a mouthpiece for the entire nation, and those who heard him knew that the national spirit was speaking through him. But when such a high individuality has had all the experiences that he can have through a particular nation, he withdraws from that nation, which then falls into degeneration and decline. The spirit of a nation actually lives a more real life than the individual human being, but it usually speaks only through the whole nation. But if it ever speaks through an individual human being, it is always through someone who is not expressing his or her own individual opinion. The initiate in Palestine was called a “true Israelite” in the fifth degree, like Nathanael.

The initiate of the sixth degree was called a “solar hero” because not only the spirit of a people, but the spirit of an entire solar system spoke through him. He could not deviate from his path any more than the sun itself could, and he was subject to the solar system, to the laws of the solar spirit, just as the initiate of the fifth degree was subject to the laws of the spirit of the people.

Those who had penetrated the farthest came to the father of the solar system. Through them spoke the Father Spirit - the Spirit of the All-Father and they were an expression of his will and his law. There were places where these initiation methods were strictly followed, but even in the time of Jesus much of it had degenerated into empty ceremonies. Therefore, when Jesus said to Nathanael that he was a true “Israelite”, we learn not only that Jesus knew that Nathanael was a fifth-degree initiate, but also that at the time of Jesus there was a temple of initiation in Israel. But to know that Nathanael was an initiate, Jesus himself had to be an even higher initiate, which he also confirms when he says that he had met Nathanael under the fig tree.

What is meant by this statement? The fig tree or buddhi tree is a symbol of the family tree of humanity, whose branches, twigs and leaves are symbols of the individual ethnic groups, families and human souls. To sit under the fig tree means to identify with one's tribe, to feel at one with one's people, and indicates the initiate's position in relation to his people.

On the astral plane, that is, by clairvoyant means, Jesus had seen Nathanael as a fifth-degree initiate, and that is why he said he had seen him under the fig tree. Nathaniel immediately understands that no one other than a high initiate could have known this about him, and that is why he calls Jesus “the Son of God” and “the King of Israel.” But not only was Nathaniel allowed to see the souls of the people afterward, but he also saw angels ascending and descending from heaven. This means that his eyes were opened to the spiritual reasons and all the secrets of the cosmos.

This story thus suggests that there was indeed spiritual knowledge in Israel at the time of Jesus, and that this people had their mysteries, but also that Jesus knew about them and had this spiritual knowledge himself.

But the Gospel of John not only shows us that Jesus knows everything, but also that his will is strong enough to merge with others and work in them. Basically, every human being is a limited and isolated being. It was Christ who gave humanity the first impulse towards spiritual brotherhood. Through this impulse, people were to be brought closer together, and a bond was to be formed between souls that would gradually awaken a sense of belonging between different peoples over the centuries. Before Christ, nothing like this had been possible. Love did exist, but it was in the blood and never extended beyond the family and tribe within which all marital ties were formed. But if self-awareness was to be developed, this point of view had to be abandoned.

The blood ties that had so strongly bound people to tribes and peoples gradually began to dissolve as people increasingly entered into “distant relationships” outside of their tribe and people. As a result of the fragmentation that arose from this, people increasingly fell into unkindness and selfishness. In this case, the history of Rome gives us a typical picture of the prevailing situation. If the Christ had not come at that time and given the world a mighty impulse of spiritual brotherly love, people would have become more and more separated from each other and ultimately quite estranged from each other. With the Christ, however, the world received a new impulse. The blood tie was not to be dissolved, but love for father, mother and brother was no longer to be the only tie between people. Something new had been added, something much higher and more powerful than the old, namely, universal love for one's fellow man, the kinship of souls that unites souls with each other. “He who cannot value spiritual love more than love for father and mother cannot be my disciple.”

But in order for this new impulse of love to flow into and permeate people, it was necessary for Jesus to have the greatest willpower. At the wedding at Cana, he gave proof for the first time of this willpower, which was so strong and so pure that it could, as it were, pass into other people and determine the impressions [of those] who received it. How should we understand this? Let us assume that two people are standing next to each other and one of them drinks a glass of water. If the other person is capable of a strong volitional impulse, he can influence the taste organ of the other person in such a way that the water in his mouth tastes like something completely different, like wine, for example. For our experiences do not depend so much on the material that conveys the impressions, but rather on our way of reacting to the impressions we receive. Thus, wine or water becomes something completely different for us, depending on whether we look at it from a materialistic or a spiritual point of view.

In my book Grundlage einer Erkenntnistheorie (The Foundation of an Epistemology), I thoroughly discuss my thoughts on this question. Behind matter stands the spiritual.

Therefore, if a powerful will imbued with love were to make people taste wine in the water of a well, they would drink this water as willingly as wine. Matter is only a maya – an illusion. The spiritual content that we give to matter is the main thing. In everything that surrounds us, we therefore find not only coarse matter, but also the spirit that is the content of the world. (Changing sensations, that is the content of our world.)

This cannot only be stated by anyone who is clairvoyant, but can also be proven completely logically through theosophy. In the Gospel of John, this spirituality is particularly emphasized. The spirit that works in the God-man Christ Jesus is so strong that it can not only influence other people, but also command their feelings. That is why it is said that Jesus, through his willpower, influenced the water that was poured into the jugs in such a way that it had the same effect on the guests as wine. The guests really felt it – they drank wine. This story shows us what a powerful will, transformed into love, is at work in Christ, for only such a will can shine in others in this way.

It may be said, in a way, that the Gospel of John is full of mystery and can only be fully understood with the help of occult research. For example, it is never mentioned who wrote it, it only speaks of him as a “disciple of the Lord”. Nor does one learn the name of Jesus' mother.

In the story of the wedding at Cana, it is stated that Jesus' mother was there; and she is also mentioned in other places by the name of “Mother of Jesus”. She is never called Mary. If we read the passage about the crucifixion carefully, we see that three women were standing under the cross: Jesus' mother, the sister of his mother, Mary, the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. So the sister of Jesus' mother was called Mary, and it is hardly credible that two sisters would have the same name.

If we then turn to the Christian mysteries, we do not find 'Mary' as the name of Jesus' mother there either. There she was always called 'Sophia', which means 'wisdom'. There is a mystery behind this fact. At the wedding at Cana, Jesus makes a strange comment to his mother: “Woman,” he says, “what is this that you have brought me?” The usual translation, “Woman, what have I to do with you?” is wrong and directly offensive to the Christian sensibility.

Jesus' words point to a mysterious bond that existed between him and his mother and that he felt strongly at that moment. His mother's words, “Do whatever he tells you,” also suggest a mutual understanding. Just as it takes only a half-hint for two friends to understand each other when there is a secret between them that no one else knows, so it was in Jesus' relationship with his mother.

We have already heard how a change took place in Jesus of Nazareth through baptism. The words that were spoken then, “This is my beloved and faithful Son; in him I am well pleased,” mean in the occult language, which is probably the only language that gives a reasonable explanation of this passage, that the individuality of Christ emerged at that moment in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

At the same time, however, a change also took place in the stepmother of Jesus, the mother of the child Solomon. The father of this child had died early. When the ego of Zarathustra passed into the child Nathan and the child Solomon died, the mother of the child Nathan died shortly afterwards. The mother of the Solomonic child then moved with her children to the father of the Nathanic child and thus became the stepmother of Jesus. At the moment when the individuality of Christ took possession of the body of Jesus, a transformation also occurred in his mother. She was enlightened and radiant through the deceased, spiritualized mother, who entered the Solomonic mother as a spiritual individuality. Thereby she regained her virginity. This mother, who lives without birth, is Sophia.” The

Virgin Mary - is the Sophia of the mysteries, the divine wisdom or the Virgin Mary - Madonna.

This is the mystery of the mother of Jesus. It was this Mother Sophia, the divine wisdom, who was in Cana. Between her and Jesus there was a bond of love, a power of love that could be transferred to others and could influence them. At the basis of this bond between Jesus and his spiritualized mother, his own power of life and will could be transmitted to other people. Consequently, the Madonna is the union of the ego of the Solomon-like mother with the pure and spiritualized etheric and astral body of the Nathan-like mother. The old masters were right when they depicted the Madonna as childlike and absolutely pure, for example, in Michelangelo's Pietà.

When trying to understand the world through a natural scientific interpretation of its phenomena, whether through cognition or through everyday life, people tend to consider conditions only as they meet them in the moment. Such a statement might seem incorrect to those who merely look at the surface of things, but as we proceed, it will become evident that this is indeed true. We have grown accustomed to investigate the human physical organism with the accepted methods of biology, physics, and anatomy, but (though this may appear wrong at first) in the results we find only what the present moment reveals to us.

For example, we might observe the lungs of a child, of an adult, and of an older person, in their stages from the beginning to the end of life, and we reach certain conclusions. But we do not really penetrate the element of time at all in this way, because we limit ourselves to spatial observations, which we then invest with qualities of time. We are doing the same thing, to use a simile, when we read the time by looking at a clock. We note the position of the hands in the morning, for example, and positions in space indicate the time for us. We may look at the clock again at noon and deduce the passage of time from the spatial changes of its hands. We take our bearing in the course of time from the movements of the clock’s hands from point to point in space. This has become our way of judging time in everyday life. But through this method we cannot experience the true nature of time. Yet only by penetrating time with the same awareness we use to experience space can we correctly assess human life between birth and death. I would like to illustrate these theoretical remarks with examples to show the importance of living into the dimension of time, especially if you want to practice the art of education.

Let us take as our example a child who is full of reverence toward adults. Anyone with a healthy instinct would consider such an attitude in a child as something wholesome, especially if such reverence is justified, as indeed it should be on the part of the adult. However, people usually think no further, but merely attribute a feeling of reverence toward adults to certain aspects of childhood and leave it at that. But we cannot recognize the importance of such reverence unless we include the entire course of a human life in our considerations.

As we grows older, we may have the opportunity to observe old people. We may discover that some of them have the gift of bringing soul comfort to those who need it. Often it is not what they have to say that acts as balm on a suffering soul, but just the tone of voice or the way they speak. If now you follow this old person’s life back to childhood, you find that, as a child, that individual was full of reverence and respect for adults. Naturally, this attitude of reverence will disappear in later life, but only on the surface. Deep down, it will gradually transform, only to reemerge later as the gift of bringing solace and elevation to suffering and troubled minds.

One could also say it this way: If a young child has learned to pray and has learned to develop an inner mood of prayer, this mood will enter the subconscious and transform into the capacity of blessing in the ripeness of old age. When we meet old people whose mere presence radiates blessing upon those around them, you find that in their childhood they experienced and developed this inner mood of prayer. Such a transformation can be discovered only if one has learned to experience time as concretely as we generally experience space. We must learn to recognize the time element with the same awareness with which we experience space. Time must not be experienced only in spatial terms, as when we look at a clock. What I have been trying to illustrate regarding the moral aspects of life needs to become very much a part of our concept of the human being—certainly if we are going to develop a true art of education. I would like to elaborate this in greater detail.

If we compare human beings with the animals, we find that from the moment of birth, animals (especially the higher species) are equipped with all the faculties needed for living. A chick leaving its shell does not need to learn to walk and is immediately adapted to its surroundings. Each animal’s organs are firmly adapted to the specific needs of its species. This is not at all true, however, of human beings, who come into this world completely helpless. Only gradually do we develop the capacities and skills needed for life. This is because the most important period in our earthly life is between the end of childhood and the beginning of old age. This central period of maturity is the most important feature of human life on earth. During that time, we adapt our organism to external life by gaining aptitudes and skills. We develop a reciprocal relationship to the outer world, based on our range of experience. This central period, when human organs maintain the ability to evolve and adapt, is completely missing in the life of animals. The animal is born in a state that is fundamentally comparable to an old person, whose organic forms have become rigid. If you want to understand the nature of an animal’s relationship to its surroundings, look at it in terms of our human time of old age.

Now we can ask whether an animal shows the characteristics of old age in its soul qualities. This is not the case, because in an animal there is also the opposite pole, which counteracts this falling into old age, and this is the animal’s capacity of reproduction. The ability to reproduce, whether in the human or animal kingdom, always engenders forces of rejuvenation. While animal fall prey to the influences of aging too quickly on the one hand, on the other they are saved from premature aging because of the influx of reproductive forces until maturity.

If you can observe an animal or an animal species without preconceived ideas, you will conclude that, when the animal is capable of reproduction, it has reached a stage equivalent to that of old age in a human being. The typical difference in the human being is the fact that both old age and childhood (when the child’s reproductive system is slowly maturing) are placed on either end of the human central period, and during this period the human organism remains flexible, enabling human beings to relate and adapt individually to the environment. Through this arrangement, a human being will be a child at the right time, then leave childhood at the right time to enter maturity. And a person leaves maturity when it is time to enter old age.

If you look at human life from this aspect of time, you also understand certain abnormalities. You may encounter people who (if I may put it this way) slip prematurely into old age. I am not thinking so much of the obvious features typically associated with old age, such as grey hair or baldness; even a bald-headed person may still be childish. I am thinking of the more subtle indications, detectable only by more intimate observations. One could call such features the signs of a senile soul life, manifesting in people who should still be in the central period of flexibility and adaptability. But the opposite may also happen; a person may be unable to leave the stage of childhood at the right time and carry infantile features into the central stage of life. In this case, strange things may happen in the life of that person—the symptoms of which we can only touch on today. When we include the time element in our picture of the human being, we can diagnose aberrations in human behavior.

We know that, as we approach old age, we lose flexibility especially in the head. Consequently, all the capacities that we have acquired during life attain more of a soul and spiritual quality. But this is possible only at the expense of the head as a whole assuming certain animal-like qualities. From a physical point of view, an old person goes through conditions similar to those of a newborn animal. To a certain extent one becomes “animalized.” Thus old people gain something that they may preserve for the rest of their lives, provided their education was right. Their spiritual, soul experiences of the outer world no longer enter fully into the human organization. The cranium becomes ossified and fixed. Old people thus depend more on soul and spiritual links with the surrounding world. They are no longer able to transform outer events into inward qualities as well as they once did. Thus, a kind of animalization of the upper regions takes place.

It is possible for this animalization of the head structure to occur prematurely—during the middle period of life—but because we remain human despite such a tendency, we do not encounter external symptoms. Rather, we must look for certain changes in the soul realm. If the characteristic relationship of the older person to the outer world manifests prematurely—and this can happen even during childhood—a person’s experiences is drawn too much into the physical system, since the general flexibility of the rest of the human organization, typical of the younger age, naturally retains the upper hand. In this case, a person will experience inwardly, and too early, a relationship to the outer world typical of old age. Interaction between inner and outer world would thus be linked too much to the physical organization, bringing about soul properties more like that in the animal world than in normal human beings.

One can say (if you want to express it in this way) that animals have the advantage of a certain instinct over human beings, an instinct that links them more directly and intimately to the environment than is true of the normal human being. It is not simply a myth, but completely reflects the peculiarities of animal life, that certain animals will leave a place that is in danger of a natural catastrophe. Animals are gifted with certain prophetic instincts of self-preservation. It is also true that animals experience far more intensely the changing seasons than do human beings. They can sense the approaching time for migration, because they have an intimate and instinctive relationship with the environment. If we could look into an animal’s soul, we would find—although entirely unconsciously—an instinctive wisdom of life that manifests as the animal’s ability to live entirely within the manifold processes and forces of nature.

Now, if a person falls victim to encroaching age too early, this animal-like instinctive experience of the surroundings begins to develop, though in a sublimated form because it is lifted into the human sphere. Lower forms of clairvoyance, such as telepathy, telekinesis and so on—described correctly or wrongly—occur abnormally in human life and are simply the result of this premature aging in the central period of life. When this process of aging occurs at the proper time, people experience it in a healthy way, whereas if it appears in the twenties, a person gains clairvoyance of a low order. The symptoms of premature aging represent an abnormality in life that does not manifest outwardly but in a more hidden way. If these forms of lower clairvoyance were studied from the aspect of premature aging, a people would gain far deeper insight into these phenomena. This is possible, however, only when people observe life in a more realistic way. It is not good enough to investigate what we see with our eyes at the present moment. People must learn to recognize indications in these symptoms of a time shift from later to earlier stages of life.

We will see in the next few days how healing processes can occur through exact insight into human nature. It is possible that a kind of animalization could manifest not as an outwardly visible aging process but as a close, instinctive relationship to the environment encroaching on the lower regions of the human being and otherwise characteristic of an animal. The resulting phenomena of telepathy, telekinesis, and so on do not become less interesting because they are recognized for what they really are—the intrusion of a later stage of life upon an earlier, not manifestations of the spirit world. By developing time consciousness, we can fathom the very depths of human nature. To live in the dimension of time is to survey the course of time until we can see into both the past and future from the present moment.

You can get a sense of how present-day observation (though externally it may appear otherwise) is very remote from this more inward means of observation, which is more concurrent with time and its flow. Inadequate interpretation of what we encounter in life is the result of modern methods of observation. Contemporary scientific explanations and their effects on life are full of anemic interpretations.

Looking at the course of human life, we discover that the opposite of what we just described can also happen when childishness is carried into maturity. It is characteristic of children that they not only experience the external world less consciously than adults, but their experiences are also much more intimately connected with metabolic changes. When children see colors, their impressions strongly affect the metabolic processes; a child takes in outer sensory impressions all the way into the metabolism. It is not a mere metaphor to say that children digest their sensory impressions, because their digestion responds to all of their outer experiences. An old person develops certain animal characteristics within the physical, but a child’s entire life is filled with a sensitivity toward the vegetative organic processes that also affect the child’s soul life. Unless we are aware of this, we cannot understand a child’s nature.

In later years, human beings leave the digestive and metabolic processes more or less on their own; experiences of the external world are more independent of those processes. They do not allow their soul and spiritual reactions toward the outer world to affect the metabolism to the extent that a child does. The response of adults to their surroundings is not accompanied by the same liveliness of glandular secretion as in children.

Children take in outer impressions as if they were edible substances, but adults leave their digestion to itself, and this alone makes them adults under normal circumstances. But there are cases where certain vegetative and organic forces, which are properly at work during childhood, continue to work in an adult, affecting the psyche as well. In this case, other abnormal symptoms are also liable to occur. An example will make this clear. Imagine, for example, a girl who comes to love a dog that has made a deep impression on her nature. If she has carried childishness into later life, this tenderness will work right into the metabolism. Organic processes that correspond to her feelings of affection will be established. In this situation, digestive processes occur not only after eating or as the result of normal physical activities, but certain areas within the digestive system will develop a habit of secreting and regenerating substances in response to the strong emotions evoked by the love for the animal. The dog will become indispensable to the well-being of her vegetative system. And what happens if the dog dies? The connection in outer life is broken; the organic processes continue by force of inertia, but they are no longer satisfied. Her feelings miss something they had gotten used to, and inner troubles and strange disturbances may follow. A friend may suggest getting a new dog to restore the previous state of health, since the inner organic processes would again find satisfaction through external experiences. We will see later, however, that there are better ways to cure such an abnormality, but anyone may reasonably try to solve the problem this way.

There are of course many other examples, less drastic than a deep affection for a dog. If an adult has not outgrown certain childhood forces that absorb external impressions into the digestive system, and if that adult can no longer satisfy this abnormal habit, certain cravings within the vegetative organism will result. But there are other things that may have been loved and lost that cannot be replaced; then a person remains dissatisfied, morose, and psychosomatic. One must try to find the true causes of the seemingly inexplicable symptoms that arise from the depths of the unconscious. There are people who can sense what needs to be done to alleviate suffering caused by unsatisfied emotions that affect inner organic processes. They manage to coax and to bring to consciousness what the patient wants to recall, and in this way they can help a great deal.

Because of the present condition of our civilization, there are many who have not progressed from childhood to adulthood in the normal way, and the ensuing symptoms, both light and serious, have been widely noted. Whereas this led naturally to conversations in ordinary life among helpful, interested people, the situation has stimulated—in many respects rightly so—psychological research, and a new scientific terminology has sprung up. The patient’s psyche is examined through investigation of dreams or by freely or involuntarily giving oneself away. In this way, unfulfilled urges arise from the subconscious into consciousness. This new branch of science is called psychology or psychoanalysis, the science of probing the hidden regions of the soul. However, we are not dealing with “hidden regions of the soul,” but with the remains of vegetative organic processes left behind and craving satisfaction. When thwarted desires have been diagnosed, one can help patients readapt, and here lies the value of psychoanalysis.

When judging these things, anthroposophy, or spiritual science, finds itself in a difficult position. It has no quarrel with the findings of natural science; on the contrary, spiritual science is quite prepared to recognize and accept whatever remains properly within its realm. Similarly, spiritual science accepts psychoanalysis within its proper limits. But spiritual science tries to see all problems and questions within the widest context, encompassing the entire universe and the whole human being. It feels it is necessary to broaden the arbitrary restrictions laid down by natural science, which even today often investigates in an unprofessional and superficial way. Anthroposophy has no wish and no intention to quarrel and only puts what is stated in a lopsided way into a wider perspective. Yet this approach is distasteful and unacceptable to those who prefer to wear blinders, and, consequently, furious attacks are made against anthroposophy. Spiritual science must defend itself against an imbalanced attitude, but it will never be aggressive. This has to be said regarding the present currents of thought, as we find in psychoanalysis.

A person may draw the last period of life too much into middle age and, with it, experience abnormal relationships with the external world, manifesting as lower forms of clairvoyance, such as telepathy. In this case, one’s horizon extends beyond the normal human scope in an animal-like fashion. It is important to distinguish the two opposing situations, since a person may also move in the other direction by pushing what properly belongs to childhood into later periods of life. As a result, one becomes enmeshed too strongly with the physical organism, with the result that organic surges swamp the psyche, causing disturbances and inner abnormalities. Such a person suffers from a relationship that is too close to one’s own organic system. This relationship has been diagnosed by psychoanalysis, which should nevertheless direct its attention toward the human organs to understand the roots of this problem.

If we desire a comprehensive knowledge of the human being, it is absolutely necessary to include the entire human life between birth and death in our considerations. It is essential to focus on the effects of passing time and to inwardly live with and experience those effects. Spiritual science pursues knowledge of the whole human being by penetrating the suprasensory, using its own specific methods and fully considering the time element, which is generally ignored completely in our present stage of civilization. Imagination, inspiration and intuition, which are the specific methods of spiritual scientific work, must be built on an experience of time.

Imagination, inspiration and intuition, the ways leading to suprasensory cognition, should not be seen as faculties beyond ordinary human life but as a continuation, or extension, of ordinary human capacities. Spiritual science dismisses the bias that maintains we can attain this sort of cognition only through some special grace; spiritual science holds that we can become conscious of certain faculties lying deep within us and that we have the power to train them. The usual kind of knowledge gotten through modern scientific training and in ordinary practical life must certainly be transcended.

What happens when we try to comprehend the world around us—not as scientifically trained specialists but as ordinary people? We are surrounded by colors, sounds, varying degrees of warmth, and so on, all of which I would like to call the tapestry of the sensory world. We surrender to these sensory impressions and weave them without thoughts. If you think about the nature of memories rising in your soul, you will find that they are the result of sensory impressions woven into our thoughts. Our whole life depends on imparting this texture of sensory impressions and thoughts to our soul life. But what really happens? Look at the diagram. Let the line a to b represent the tapestry of the sensory world around us, consisting of colors, sounds, smells, and so on. We give ourselves up to our observation, this tapestry of the senses, and weave its impressions with our thinking (indicated here by the wavy line).

When living in our senses, we unite all our experiences with our thoughts. We interpret the sensory stimuli through thinking. But when we project our thoughts into our surroundings, this tapestry becomes a barrier for us, a metaphorical canvas upon which we draw and paint all our thoughts, but which we cannot penetrate. We cannot break through this incorporeal wall with ordinary consciousness. As the thoughts are stopped by this canvas, they are inscribed upon it.

The only possibility of penetrating this wall is gained by raising one’s consciousness to the state of imagination through systematic and regular meditation exercises. It is equally possible to undergo an inner training in meditation as a method of research in an outwardly directed study of chemistry or astronomy. If you read my book How to Know Higher Worlds and the second part of An Outline of Esoteric Science, you can convince yourselves that, if you want to reach the final goal, the methods for such meditative exercises are certainly not simple and less time-consuming than those needed to study astronomy or chemistry. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to read books giving information about such exercises and, using one’s common sense, examine the truths of spiritual scientific research. You do not have to take these on authority. Even if you cannot investigate the spiritual world yourself, it is possible to test given results by studying the specific methods employed.

Meditative practice is based on freeing ourselves from outer sensory impressions. In meditation, we do not surrender to sensory impressions, but to the life of thinking. However, by dwelling again and again in meditation on a given thought or mental image—one that is easily and fully comprehensible—we gradually bring our life of thought to such a strength and inner substance that we learn to move in it with the same certainty we have in our sensory impressions. You have all experienced the difference between the striking effects of outer sensory impressions and the rather limp and pale world of our thoughts during ordinary consciousness. Sensory impressions are intense and alive. We give ourselves up to them. Thoughts, on the other hand, turn pale and become abstract and cold. But the very core of meditating is learning, through regular practice, to imbue thoughts with the same intensity and life that normally fills our sensory experiences. If we succeed in grasping a meditation with the same inner intensity that we experience through the stimulus of a color, for example, then we have enlivened, in the right way, the underlying thoughts of a meditation. But all this must happen with the same inner freedom employed in the normal weaving of thoughts or ordinary sense perceptions. Just as we do not allow ourselves to be taken over by nebulous moods or mystical dreaming, or become fatuous visionaries when observing the external world, we must not lose our firm ground when meditating in the right way. The same sane mood with which we perceive the world around us must also take hold when we meditate.

This attitude of taking outer sensory perceptions as an example for one’s conduct when meditating is characteristic of the anthroposophic method. There are plenty of vague mystics who disparage sensory perceptions as inferior and advise leaving them behind. They claim that, when you meditate, you should reach a state of mystic dreaming. The result, of course, is a condition of half sleep, certainly not meditation. Spiritual science pursues the opposite goal, considering the quality, intensity, and liveliness of sensory perception as an example to be followed until the meditator moves inwardly with the same freedom with which one encounters sensory perceptions. We need not fear we will become dried up bores. The meditative content (which we experience objectively in meditative practice) saves us from that. Because of the inner content that we experience while freeing ourselves from ordinary life, there is no need to enter a vague, trance-like state while meditating.

Correct meditation allows us to gain the ability to move freely in our life of thinking. This in turn redeems the thoughts from their previous abstract nature; they become image-like. This happens in full consciousness, just as all healthy thinking takes place. It is essential that we do not lose full consciousness, and this distinguishes meditation from a hallucinatory state. Those who give themselves up to hallucinations, becoming futile enthusiasts or visionaries, relinquish common sense; on the other hand, those who wish to follow the methods advocated here must make sure common sense accompanies all their weaving thought imagery. And what does this lead to? Though fully awake, we experience the pictorial quality of the dream world. The significant difference between imagination and dream images is that we are completely passive when experiencing the imagery of dreams. If they arise from the subconscious and enter our waking state, we can observe them only after they have occurred. When practicing imagination, on the other hand, we initiate them ourselves; we create images that are not mere fantasy, but differ in intensity and strength from the fantasy as do dream images. The main point is that we initiate the images ourselves, and this frees us from the illusion that they are a manifestation of the external world. Those given up to hallucinations, however, always believe that what comes to them represents reality, because they know that they did not create what they see. This is the cause of the deception. Those who practice imagination through meditation cannot possibly believe that the images they create represent external reality. The first step toward suprasensory cognition depends on freeing ourselves from the illusion that the images we have created—having the same intensity as those of the dream world—are real. This, however, is obvious, because the meditator remains fully aware of having initiated them in complete freedom. Only the insane would mistake them for outer reality.

Now, in the next step in meditation we acquire the ability to allow these images to vanish without a trace. This is not as easy as one might expect, because, unless the one meditating has created them in full freedom, the images become quite fascinating and fix themselves on the mind like parasites. One has to become strong enough to let such pictures disappear at will. This second step is equally important as the first. In ordinary life, we need the ability to forget; otherwise we would have to go through life with the total of all our memories. Similarly, the complete extinction of meditative images is as important as their initial creation.

When we have thoroughly practiced these exercises, we have done something to our soul life that might be compared to the strengthening of muscles through repeated bending and stretching. By learning to weave and form images and then to obliterate them—and all this is done in complete freedom of the will—we have performed an important training of the soul. We will have developed the faculty of consciously forming images that, under normal circumstances, appear only in dreams, during a state that escapes ordinary consciousness and is confined to the time between falling asleep and awaking. Now, however, this condition has been induced in full consciousness and freedom. Training in imagination means training the will to consciously create images and to consciously remove them from the mind. And through this, we acquire yet another faculty.

Everyone has this faculty automatically—not during sleep, but at the moments of awaking and falling asleep. It is possible that what was experienced between these two points in time comes to us as remnants of dreams, often experienced as though they come from the beyond. Naturally, it is equally possible that what we encounter on awaking surprises us so much that all memories of dreams sink below the threshold of consciousness. In general, we can say that, because dream imaginations are experienced involuntarily, something chaotic and erratic that normally lies beyond consciousness finds its way to us. If, while fully awake, we develop the ability of creating and of obliterating imaginations, we may reach a condition of emptied consciousness. This is like a new awakening, then, from beyond the tapestry of the sensory world; spiritual entities pass through the tapestry to reach us on paths smoothed by the meditation content (see the circle in the diagram). While thus persevering in emptied consciousness, we push through the barrier of the senses, and images come to us from beyond the sensory world, carried by inspiration. We enter the world beyond the sensory world. Through imagination, we prepare for inspiration, which involves the ability to experience consciously something that happens unconsciously at the moment of awaking. Right at the moment of awaking, something from beyond our waking soul life enters consciousness, so that something beyond the conscious sensory world enters us if, through imagination, we have trained our soul as described.

In this way, we experience the spiritual world beyond the world of the senses. The faculties of suprasensory cognition are extensions of those naturally given to us in ordinary life. It is one of the main tasks of spiritual science to train and foster the development of these higher faculties. And grasping the time element in human life is fundamental to such development.

If you look at the preparatory exercises for imagination, inspiration, and intuition as given in How to Know Higher Worlds or An Outline of Esoteric Science, you find that everything said there aims at one thing: learning to experience the flow of time. The human being goes through the various stages of experience in the world, first as a child, then as a mature person, and finally as an old person; otherwise, one may suffer from an abnormal overlap of one stage into the other. It is not imagination itself, but the meditative preparation, that should give the possibility of developing the full potential and of learning how to give ourselves to the world out of the fullness of life. To this end harmony must be brought about between the specific contributions to the world of childhood, middle age, and old age. These must flow together harmoniously into a worldview capable of reaching the spiritual world. Human beings in their wholeness, which includes the domain of time, must be actively engaged in work in the world. To achieve a worldview that reaches beyond the barriers of the sensory world, human beings must preserve the freshness of experience proper to youth; the clarity of thought and the freedom of judgment proper to the central period of life; and the power of loving devotion toward life that can reach perfection in old age. All these qualities are a necessary preparation for the proper development of imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

If you yourselves have a well developed knowledge of the growing child, permeated by your own will and feeling, then you will be able to teach and educate well. Through an educational instinct which will awaken within you, you will be able to apply the results of this will-knowledge in the different departments of your work. But this knowledge must be truly real, which means it must rest upon a true understanding of the world of facts. Now in order to come to a real knowledge of the human being we have sought to place him before our minds from the standpoint first of the soul, and then of the spirit. We must be clear that a spiritual conception of man makes it necessary for us to consider the different conditions of consciousness, and to know that, primarily, our life spiritually takes its course in waking, dreaming and sleeping; and that all the different manifestations of human life can be characterised as fully awake, dreaming or sleeping conditions. We will try once more to descend gradually from the spirit through the soul to the body, so that we have the whole human being before us and also may be able to sum these observations at the end into a kind of hygiene of the growing child.

Now, as you know, the period of life which concerns us in teaching and education is that which includes the first two decades; and this time, as we know, is further divided into three periods. Up to the change of teeth the child bears a very distinct character, shown in his wanting to be an imitative being; he wants to imitate everything he sees in his environment. From the seventh year to puberty we have to do with a child who wants to take on authority what he has to know, to feel and will. And only with puberty comes the longing in man to gain a relationship to the world through his own individual judgment. Therefore in dealing with children of primary school age we must remember that at this age they long for the sway of authority from the innermost depths of their beings. We shall educate badly if we are not in a position to hold our authority in this age.

Now what we have to do is to survey the whole life activity of the human being in a spiritual description. This activity as we have already shown from varied points of view, includes thinking-cognition on the one hand, and willing on the other; feeling lies between. Now with regard to thinking-cognition it is man's task between birth and death gradually to permeate it with logic, with all that enables him to think logically. But what you yourselves, as teachers, have to know about logic must be kept in the background. For logic is, of course, something pre-eminently scientific; it must be brought to the children only through your whole general attitude. But as teachers you will have to have a mastery of logic.

Our exercise of logic, that is, of thinking-cognition, is an activity of three members. Firstly, in our thinking-cognition we always have what is called conclusions. In ordinary life thinking is expressed in speech. If you examine the structure of speech you will find that in speaking you are continually forming conclusions. This activity of forming conclusions is the most conscious of all human activities. Man could not express himself in speech unless he were continually uttering conclusions nor could he understand what another person said to him unless he were continuously receiving conclusions. Academic logic usually dismembers conclusions, thus falsifying them at the outset, in so far as conclusions appear in ordinary life. Academic logic takes no account of the fact that we form conclusions every time we look at any one single thing. Suppose that you go to a menagerie and see a lion. What do you do first of all when you perceive the lion? First you bring what you see in the lion to your consciousness; and only by this bringing to consciousness do you gain an understanding of your perceptions of the lion. Before you went to the menagerie, in your ordinary life, you learned that beings that have the form and habits of the lion you are now looking at are “animals.” This knowledge acquired in ordinary life you bring with you into the menagerie. Then you look at the lion and find: the lion is doing just what you have learned that animals do. You connect this with what you have brought with you out of your knowledge of life and then you form the judgment: the lion is an animal. It is not until you have formed this judgment that you can understand the particular concept “lion.” The first thing you form is a conclusion; the second is a judgment; the last thing you come to in life is a concept. Of course you are not aware that you are continuously carrying out this activity; but it is only by means of this activity that you can lead a conscious life which enables you to communicate with other human beings through speech. It is commonly thought that one comes to concepts first of all. This is not true. The first thing in life is conclusions. And in reality, if when we go into the menagerie we do not exclude our perception of the lion from the rest of our experience, but bring it into line with the whole of our previous experience, then what we accomplish first in the menagerie is the drawing of a conclusion. We must be clear on this point; going into the menagerie and seeing the lion is merely a single act and it belongs to the whole of life. We did not begin living when we entered the menagerie and turned our attention to the lion. This action is linked on to our previous life, and our previous life plays into it too, and what we take out with us when we leave the menagerie will again be carried over into the rest of life. If now we consider the whole process, what is the lion first of all? He is first of all a conclusion. That is absolutely true: the lion is a conclusion. A little later, the lion is a, judgment. And a little later still, the lion is a concept.

If you open a book on logic, that is, one of the older sort, you usually find amongst the conclusions the following famous one: “All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal.” Caius is indeed the most famous logical personality. Now actually this splitting up of the three judgments: “All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal,” is only to be found in the teaching of logic. In real life these three judgments weave into one another, forming a unity, for the life in thinking-knowing is in continual flux. You make all three judgments simultaneously when you approach the man Caius. What you are thinking of him already contains these three judgments within it. That is to say: first comes the conclusion. And only after that do you form the judgment, which is here put as the conclusion: “Therefore Caius is mortal.” And the last thing you get is the individualised concept: “The mortal Caius.”

Now these three things, conclusion, judgment and concept, exist in the knowing process, that is, in the living spirit of man. What is their relation to each other in the living spirit of man?

The conclusion can only live in the living spirit of man: only there can it have a healthy life; that means: the conclusion is only completely healthy when it occurs in fully waking life. This is very important, as we shall see later.

Therefore you ruin the soul of the child if you make him commit to memory ready-made conclusions. What I am now saying—and shall work out in detail with you later—is of the most fundamental importance for your teaching. In the Waldorf School you will get children of all ages who bear the result of former teaching. The children will have been taught in conclusions, judgments and concepts, and you will soon experience the result of this. You will have to build on the knowledge that the children have already acquired, for you cannot begin at the beginning with each child. We are so placed that we cannot build our school up from the bottom but have to begin with classes of all ages. You will thus find that the children's souls have already been prepared, and in your method of teaching in the early days you will have to be very careful not to worry the children to draw ready-made conclusions out of their sum of knowledge. If these conclusions are too firmly fixed in the children's souls it is better to leave them dormant and try to appeal to the child's present life in the making of conclusions.

Judgment, also, will make its appearance, and this of course in the full waking life. But judgment can also sink into the depths of the human soul, to where the soul is dreaming. The conclusion should not sink into the dreaming soul; only the judgment can do this. Thus every judgment that we form about the world sinks down into the dreaming soul.

Now what does this really mean? What is this dreaming soul? It is more of the nature of feeling, as we have already learned. When in life we form judgments and then pass on from them and continue on our way, we carry these judgments with us through the world. But we carry them through the world in feeling. This has also the further implication that forming judgments brings about a kind of habit of soul. You will be forming the soul habits of the child by the way you teach the children to form judgments. You must be absolutely aware of this fact. For it is the sentence which expresses judgment, and with every sentence you say to a child you are contributing a further atom to the habits of that child's soul. Hence the teacher, who possesses authority, must always be conscious that what he says will become part of the habits of soul of the child.

Now, to come from judgment to concept: we must realise that when we form a concept it goes down into the profoundest depths of man's being; regarding the matter spiritually, it goes down into the sleeping soul. The concept makes its way right down into the sleeping soul, and this is that part of the soul that is constantly at work upon the body. The waking soul does not work upon the body. The dreaming soul works upon it a little; it produces what lies in its habitual gestures. But the sleeping soul works right into the very forms of the body. In forming concepts, that is in formulating the results of judgments in men, you are working right into the sleeping soul, or in other words, right into the body of the human being. Now when the human being is born, he has reached a high degree of completion as far as his body is concerned; and the soul can only develop in a finer way what has been given to the human being by the stream of inheritance. But the soul does carry out this refining work. We go about the world and we look at people. These people we meet with have quite distinct faces. What is the content of these physiognomies? They contain, amongst other things, the result of all the concepts which teachers and educators inculcated in these people during their childhood. From the face of the mature man streams out to us the content of the many concepts poured into the soul of the child; for, in forming the man's physiognomy it is with fixed concepts—among other things—that the sleeping soul has wrought. Here we see what power educational work has upon the human being. He receives his stamp right down into his very body through the forming of concepts.

The most striking phenomenon in the world to-day is that we find men with such unpronounced features. Herman Bahr in the course of a lecture in Berlin once described an experience of his in a very spirited manner. He said that even as far back as the 1890's, if you were to go to the Rhine in the neighbourhood of Essen, and walking down the street were to meet people coming out of the factories, you would have the feeling: no one of these people is different from another; I am really looking at one single person who is coming out like a picture in a duplicating machine; it is impossible to distinguish these people from one another. A very significant observation! And Herman Bahr made another observation which is also very significant. He said: when in the '90s you were invited out to dinner in Berlin you had a lady on your right and on your left hand, but you really could not distinguish them from each other, except that you knew one was on your right hand and the other on your left. Then another day you were perhaps invited somewhere else, and it might easily happen that you could not be sure: is this yesterday's lady, or the lady of the day before?

In short, a certain uniformity has come over humanity, and this is a proof that there has been no true education in the preceding years. We must learn from these things what is really necessary in the transformation of our educational life, for education has a deep and far-reaching influence on the whole cultural life of the times. Therefore we can say: at those times in life when man is not confronted with any one particular fact, his concepts are living in the unconscious.

Concepts can live in the unconscious. Judgments can only live as habits of judgment in the semi-conscious, in the dreaming life. And conclusions should really only hold sway in the fully conscious waking life. That is to say, you must take great care to talk over with the children beforehand anything that is related to conclusions, and not let them store up ready-made conclusions. They should only store up what can develop and ripen into a concept. Now how can we bring this about?

Suppose you are forming concepts, and they are dead concepts. Then you graft the corpses of concepts into the human being. You graft dead concepts right into the bodily nature of man when you implant dead concepts on him. What kind of a concept should we then give the children? It must be a living concept if man has to live with it. Man is alive, thus the concept must also be alive. If in the child's ninth or tenth year you graft into him concepts which are meant to retain their same form in him until he is thirty or forty years of age, then you will be imputing him with the corpses of concepts, for the concept will not follow the life of the human being as he grows and develops. You must give the child such concepts as are capable of change in his later life. The educator must aim at giving the child concepts which will not remain the same throughout his life, but will change as the child grows older. If you do this you will be implanting live concepts in the child. And when is it that you give him dead concepts? When you continually give the child definitions, when you say: “A lion is ...” this or that, and make him learn it by heart, then you are grafting dead concepts into him; and you are expecting that at the age of thirty he will retain these concepts in the precise form in which you are now say: the making of many definitions is death to living teaching. What then must we do? In teaching we must not make definitions but rather must endeavour to make characterisations. We characterise things when we view them from as many standpoints as possible. If in Natural History we give the children simply what is to be found, for example, in the Natural History books of the present day, then we are really only defining the animal for him. We must try in all branches of our teaching to characterise the animal from different sides showing for example how men have gradually come to know about this animal, how they have come to make use of its work, and so on. But in a reasonable curriculum this characterisation will arise of itself, if, for instance, the teacher does not merely describe consecutively, say: first the cuttlefish, and then the mouse, and finally man, each in turn, in natural-historical order—but rather places cuttlefish, mouse and man side by side and relates them with one another. The interrelationships will prove so manifold that there will result, not a definition, but a characterisation. A right kind of teaching will aim, from the outset, at characterisation rather than definition.

It is of very great importance to make it your constant and conscious aim not to destroy anything in the growing human being, but to teach and educate him in such a way that he continues to be full of life, and does not dry up and become hard and rigid. You must therefore distinguish carefully between mobile concepts which you give the child and such concepts as need undergo no change.

These concepts will give the child a kind of skeleton in his soul. Therefore you must realise that you have to give the child things which can remain with him throughout his life. You must not give him dead concepts of all the details of life—concepts which must not remain with him—rather must you give him living concepts of the details of life and of the world, concepts which will develop with him organically. But you must connect everything with man. In the child's comprehension of the world everything must finally flow together into the idea of man. This idea of man should endure. All that you give a child when you tell him a fable and apply it to man, when in natural history you connect cuttlefish and mouse with man, or when in teaching the children Morse telegraphy you arouse a feeling of the wonder of the earth as a conductor—all these are things which unite the whole world in all its details with the human being. This is something that can remain with him. But the concept “man” is only built up gradually; you cannot give the child a ready-made concept of man. But when you have built it up then it can remain. In fact it is the most beautiful thing you can give a child in school for his later life: the idea, which is as many-sided and comprehensive as possible, of man.

What is living in the human being tends to transform itself in life in a really living way. If you succeed in giving the child concepts of reverence and devotion, living concepts of all that we call the mood of prayer in the widest sense, such a conception, permeated by the mood of prayer, is then a living conception and it lasts right on into old age; and in old age it transforms itself into the capacity of blessing, of being able to impart to others what comes from a mood of prayer. I once expressed this in a public lecture in the following way: a man or woman will only be able to impart blessing in old age if he or she has learned to pray rightly as a child. If as a child one learned to pray rightly then as an old man or old woman one can bless rightly and with greatest power.

Thus to give children concepts of this kind, which have to do with the most intimate nature of man, is to equip them with living concepts; and this living element is open to change, it transforms itself, changing with the very life of man. Let us once more consider this threefold division of childhood and youth from a rather different point of view. Up to the change of teeth man has a desire to imitate; up to puberty he longs for an authority to look up to; after this time he wants to apply his own judgment to the world.

This can be expressed in another way. When the human being comes forth from the world of soul and spirit and receives the garment of his body, what is it that he really wants to do? He wants to make actual in the physical world what he has lived through in the past in the spiritual world. In certain respects the human being before the change of teeth is entirely involved in the past. He is still filled with the devotion that one develops in the spiritual world. It is for this reason that he gives himself up to his environment by imitating the people around him. What then is the fundamental impulse, the completely unconscious mood of the child before the change of teeth? This fundamental mood is a very beautiful one, and it must be fostered in the child. It proceeds from the assumption, from the unconscious assumption that the whole world is of a moral nature. This is not exclusively the case in souls of the present day (I have already drawn attention to this in a lecture here) but by the very fact of becoming a physical being man has the tendency at birth to proceed from the unconscious assumption that the world is moral. It is good therefore for the whole education up to the change of teeth and even beyond this age, that one should bear in mind this unconscious assumption that the world is moral. I drew your attention to this by reading you two extracts, for which I had first shown you the preparation; this preparation rested entirely on the assumption that one describes things from a moral aspect. (In the lectures Discussions with Teachers.) I tried to show in the first piece about the sheep-dog, the butcher's dog and the lap-dog how human morals can be reflected in the animal world. And in the poem about the violet, by Hoffman von Fallersleben, I aimed at giving a moral without pedantry for children up to seven or beyond; thereby working in harmony with this assumption that the world is moral. This is the greatness and sublimity in the outlook of childhood, that children are a race who believe in the morality of the world, and therefore believe that the world may be imitated. Thus the child lives in the past and is to a great extent a revealer of the pre-natal past—not of the physical past, but of the past of soul and spirit.

From the change of teeth up to the time of adolescence the child really lives continually in the present, and is interested in what is going on in the world around him. When educating we must constantly keep in mind that children of primary school age want always to live in the present. How does one live in the present? One lives in the present when one enjoys the world around one, not in an animal way, but in a human way. And indeed the child of this age wants also to enjoy the world in the lessons he receives. Therefore from the outset we must make our teaching a thing of enjoyment for the children—not animal enjoyment, but enjoyment of a higher, human kind—not something that calls forth in them antipathy and repulsion.

There have of course been various good educational experiments on these lines. But here we are faced with a certain danger, namely that this principle of making teaching a source of pleasure and enjoyment can easily deteriorate into something paltry and commonplace. This must not happen. But the only sure preventive is for the teacher and educator to be ever willing to raise himself above what is commonplace, pedantic and philistine. This he can only do if he never neglects to make a really living contact with art. For in seeking to enjoy the world in a human, and not in an animal way one proceeds from a definite assumption: namely that the world is beautiful. And from the time he changes his teeth until puberty the child really proceeds on the unconscious assumption that he shall find the world beautiful. This unconscious assumption of the child that the world is beautiful is not met by the regulations laid down for “object lessons,” regulations which are often very crude and are drawn up purely from a utilitarian point of view. But this assumption is met if one will try and immerse oneself in artistic experience so that the teaching in this period may be artistic through and through. It sometimes makes one extremely sad to read present-day books on education and to see how the good principle that education should be made into a source of joy does not come into its own because what the teacher discourses on with his pupils is inartistic and commonplace. To-day it is much in favour to conduct object lessons on the Socratic method. But the nature of the questions asked is utilitarian in the extreme instead of partaking of the beautiful. And here no demonstrations or showing of set examples will be of any help. It is not a question of instructing the teacher that he shall adopt this method or that when choosing set pieces for his object lesson. What is essential is that the teacher himself by living in art should see to it that the things he talks about to his children are artistic.

The first part of a child's life, up to the change of teeth, is spent with the unconscious assumption: the world is moral. The second period, from the change of teeth to adolescence, is spent with the unconscious assumption: the world is beautiful. And only with adolescence dawns the possibility of discovering: the world is true. Thus it is not until then that education should begin to assume a “scientific” character. Before adolescence it is not good to give a purely systematising or scientific character to education, for not until adolescence does man attain a right and inward concept of truth.

In this way you will come to see that as the child descends into this physical world out of higher worlds the Past descends with him; that when he has accomplished the change of teeth the Present plays itself out in the boy or girl of school age, and that after fourteen the human being enters a time of life when impulses of the future assert themselves in his soul. Past, present and future, and life in the midst of them, this too is planted in the growing child.