The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It might perhaps appear as if the art of education described in these lectures would lead away from practical life into some remote, purely spiritual region: as though this art of education laid too much stress on the purely spiritual domain. From what I have said so far in describing the spiritual foundation of the education, this might appear to be the case. But this is only in appearance. For in reality the art of education which arises from this philosophy has the most practical objects in view. Thus it should be realised that the main object of speaking of spiritual facts here is to answer the educational question: how can we best develop the physical organism in childhood and youth?

That a spiritual philosophy should consider firstly the development of the physical organism may seem to be a fundamental contradiction. The treatment of my theme in the next few days, however, will do more towards dispelling this contradiction than any abstract statements I could make at the outset. To-day, I would merely like to say that when one speaks on educational questions at the present day one finds oneself in a peculiar situation. For if one sees much that needs reforming in education, it is as much as to say that one is not satisfied with one's own education. One implies that one's own education has been exceedingly bad. And yet, as a product of this very bad education, of this education in which one finds so much to criticise—for other-wise why be a reformer?—one sets up to know the right way to educate! This is the first thing that involves a contradiction. The second thing is one which gives one a slight feeling of shame in face of the audience when speaking on education,—for one realises that one is speaking of what education ought to be and how it must be different from present day practice. So that it amounts to saying: you are all badly educated. And yet one is appealing to those who are badly educated to bring about a better education. One assumes that both the speaker and the audience know very well what good education should be in spite of the fact that they have been exceedingly badly educated.

Now this is a contradiction, but it is one which life itself presents us, and it can really only be solved by the view of education which is here being described. For one can perfectly well know what is the matter with education and in what respects it should be improved, just as one can know that a picture is well painted without possessing the faintest capacity for painting a picture oneself. You can consider yourself capable of appreciating the merits of a picture by Raphael without thinking yourself capable of painting a Raphael picture. In fact it would be a good thing to-day if people would think like this. But they are not content with merely knowing, where education is concerned, they claim straightaway to know how to educate; as though someone who is no painter and could not possibly become a painter, should set up to show how a badly painted picture should be painted well.

Now it is here contended that it is not enough to know what good education is but that one must have a grasp of the technique and detail of educational art, one must acquire practical skill. And for this, knowledge and understanding are necessary. Hence yesterday I tried to explain the elementary principles of guidance in this ability, and I will now continue this review.

It is easy to say man undergoes development during his lifetime, and that he develops in successive stages. But this is not enough. Yesterday we saw that man is a three-fold being: that his thinking is entirely bound up physically with the nerve-senses-system of his organism, his feeling is bound up with the rhythmic system, particularly the breathing and circulation system, and that his will is bound up with the system of movement and metabolism.

The development of these three systems in man is not alike. Throughout the different epochs of life they develop in different ways. During the first epoch which extends to the change of teeth—as I have repeatedly stated—the child is entirely sense organ, entirely head, and all its development proceeds from the nerve-senses system. The nerve-senses system permeates the whole organism; and all impressions of the outside world affect the whole organism, work right through it, just as, later in life, light acts upon the eye,

In other words, in an adult light comes to a standstill in the eye, and only sends the idea of itself, the concept of light, into the organism. In a child it is as if every little blood corpuscle were inwardly illumined, were transfused with light—to express it in a somewhat exaggerated and pictorial way. The child is as yet entirely exposed to those etheric essences, (effluvia), which in later life we arrest at the surface of our bodies, in the sense organs,—while we develop inwardly something of an entirely different nature. Thus a child is exposed to sense impressions in a far greater degree than is the adult.

Observe a concrete instance of this: take a person who has charge of the nurture of a very young child, perhaps a tiny baby; a person with his own world of inner experience. Let us suppose the person m charge of the child is a heavy hearted being, one to whom life has brought sorrow. In the mature man the physical consequences of the experiences he has been through will not be obvious, but will leave only faint traces. When we are sad our mouth is always a little dry. And when sadness becomes a habitual and continuous state, the sorrowful person goes about with dry mouth, with parched tongue, with a bitter taste in the mouth and even a chronic catarrh. In the adult these physical conditions are merely faint undertones of life.

The child who is growing up in the company of the adult is an imitator; he models himself entirely on the physiognomy of the adult, on what he perceives:—on the adult's sad manner of speaking, his sad feelings. For there is a subtle interplay betwixt child and adult, an interplay of imponderables. When we have an inner sadness and all its physical consequences, the child being an imitator, takes up these physical effects through inward gestures: through an inward mimicry he takes up the parched tongue, the bitter taste in the mouth; and this—as I pointed out yesterday—flows through the whole organism. He absorbs the paleness of the long sad face of the adult. The child cannot imitate the soul content of the sorrow, but it imitates the physical effects of the sorrow. And the result is that, since the spirit is still working into the child's whole organism, his whole organism will be permeated in such a manner as to build up his organs in accordance with the physical effects which he has taken up into himself. Thus the very condition of the child's organism will make a sad being of him. In later life he will have a particular aptitude for perceiving everything that is sad or sorrowful. Such is the fine and delicate knowledge that one must have in order to educate in a proper way.

This is the manner of a child's life up to the changing of the teeth. It is entirely given up to what its organism has absorbed from the adults around it. And the inner conflict taking place here is only perceptible to spiritual science; this struggle which goes on can only be described as the fight between inherited characteristics and adaptation to environment.

We are born with certain inherited characteristics.—This can be seen by anybody who has the opportunity of observing a child during its first weeks or years. Science has produced an extensive teaching on this subject.—But the child has more and more to adapt itself to the world. Little by little he must transform his inherited characteristics until he is not merely the bearer of a heredity from his parents and ancestors, but is open in his senses and soul and spirit to receive what goes on at large in his environment. Otherwise he would become an egotistic man, a man who only wants what accords with his inherited characteristics.

Now we have to educate men to be susceptible to all that goes on in the world: men who each time they see a new thing can bring their judgment and their feelings to meet this new thing. We must not educate men to be selfishly shut up within themselves, we must educate men to meet the world with a free and open mind, and to act in accordance with the demands of the world.

This attitude is the natural outcome of such a position as I described yesterday.

Thus we must observe in all its details the inner struggle which takes place during the child's early years between heredity and adaptation to environment. Try to study with the utmost human devotion the wonderful process that goes on where the first teeth are replaced by the second. The first teeth are an inherited thing. They seem almost unsuitable for the outer world. They are inherited. Gradually above each inherited tooth another tooth is formed. In the modelling of this tooth the form of the first tooth is made use of, but the form of the second tooth, which is permanent, is a thing adapted to the world.

I always refer to this process of the teeth as characteristic of this particular period of life, up to the seventh year. But it is only one symptom. For what takes place in the case of the teeth conspicuously, because the teeth are hard organs, is taking place throughout the organism. When we are born into the world we bear within us an inherited organism. In the course of the first seven years of our life we model a new organism over it. The whole process is physical. But while it is physical it is the deed of the spirit and soul within the child. And we who stand at the child's side must endeavour so to guide this soul and spirit that it goes with and not against the health of the organism. We must therefore know what spiritual and psychic processes have to take place for the child to be able to model a healthy organism in the stead of the inherited organism. We must know and do a spiritual thing in order to promote a physical thing.

And now, if we follow up what I said to you to-day in the introduction we come to something else. Suppose that as a teacher or educator we enter a classroom. Now we must never think that we are the most intelligent of human beings, men at the summit of human intelligence—that, indeed, would mean that we were very bad teachers. We really should think ourselves only comparatively intelligent. This is a sounder state of mind than the other. Now with this state of consciousness we enter the classroom. But as we go in we must say to ourselves: there may be among the children a very intelligent being, one who in later life will be far more intelligent than we. Now if we, who are only comparatively intelligent, should bring him up to be only as intelligent as ourselves, we should be making him a copy of ourselves. That would be quite wrong. For the right thing would be so to educate this very intelligent individual that he may grow up to be far more intelligent than we are ourselves or ever could be. Now this means that there is something in a man which we may not touch, something we must regard with sensitive reverence if we are to exercise the art of education rightly. And this is part of the answer to the question I asked.

Often, in earlier life, we know exceedingly well what we ought to do—only we cannot carry it out. We feel unequal to it. What it is that prevents us from doing what we ought to do is generally very obscure. It is always some condition of the physical organism,—for example, an imitated disposition to sadness such as I spoke of. The organism has incorporated this, it has become habitual. We want to do some-thing which does not suit an organism with a bent to sadness. Yet such is our organism. In us we have the effects of the parched tongue and bitter taste from our childhood, now we want to do something quite different and we feel difficulty.

If we realise the full import of this we shall say to our-selves: the main task of the teacher or educator is to bring up the body to be as healthy as it possibly can be; this means, to use every spiritual measure to ensure that in later life a man's body shall give the least possible hindrance to the will of his spirit. If we make this our purpose in school we can develop the powers which lead to an education for freedom.

The extent to which spiritual education works healthily upon the physical organism, and thus upon man as a whole, can be seen particularly well when the great range of facts provided by our magnificent modern natural science is brought together and co-ordinated in a manner only possible to spiritual science. It then becomes apparent how one can work in the spirit for the healing of man. To take a single instance. The English doctor, Dr. Clifford Albert, has said a very significant thing about the influence of grieving and sadness in human beings upon the development of their digestive organs, and—in particular—upon the kidneys. People who have a lot of trouble and grief in life show signs after a time of malformation of the kidneys, deformed kidneys. This has been very finely demonstrated by the physician Dr. Clifford Albert. That is a finding of natural science.

The important thing is that one should know how to use a scientific discovery like this in educational practice. One must know, as a teacher or educator, that if one lets the child imitate one's own sorrow and grief, then through one's sorrowful bearing one is damaging the child's digestive system to the utmost degree. In so far as we let our sorrow overflow into the child we damage its digestive system. You see, this is the tragedy of this materialistic age, that it discovers many physical facts,—if you take the external aspect, but it lacks the connections between them;—it is this very materialistic science which fails to perceive the significance of the physical and material. What spiritual science can do is to show, on all hands, how spirit and what is spiritual work within the physical realm. Then instead of yearning in dreamy mysticism for castles in the clouds, one will be able to follow up the spirit in all its details and singular workings. For one is a spiritual being only when one recognises spirit as that which creates, as that which everywhere works upon and shapes the material:—not when one worships some abstract spirit in the clouds like a mystic, and for the rest, holds matter to be merely the concern of the material world.

Hence it is actually a matter of coming to realise how in a young child, up to the seventh year, nerve-senses activity, rhythmic breathing and circulation activity, and the activity of movement and metabolism are everywhere interplaying:—only the nerve-senses activity predominates, it has the upper hand; and thus the nerve-senses activity in a child always affects his breathing. If a child has to look at a face that is furrowed with grief, this affects his senses to begin with; but it reacts upon the manner of his breathing, and hence in turn, upon his whole movement and metabolic system.

If we take a child after the change of teeth, that is after about the seventh year, we find the nerve-senses system no longer preponderating; this has now become more separate, more turned towards the outer world. In a child between the change of teeth and puberty it is the rhythmic system which preponderates, which has the upper hand. And it is most important that this should be borne in mind in the primary school. For in the primary school we have children between the change of teeth and puberty. Hence we must know here: the essential thing is to work with the child's rhythmic system, and everything which works upon some-thing other than the rhythmic system is wrong. But now what is it that works upon the rhythmic system? It is art that works upon the rhythmic system, everything that is conveyed in artistic form.

Consider how much everything to do with music is connected with the rhythmic system. Music is nothing else but rhythm carried over into the rhythmic system of the human being himself. The inner man himself becomes a lyre, the inner man becomes a violin. His whole rhythmic system reproduces what the violin has played, what has sounded from the piano. And as in the case of music, so it is also, in a finer, more delicate way, in the case of plastic art, and of painting. Colour harmonies and colour melodies also are reproduced and revived as inner rhythmic processes in the inner man. If our instruction is to be truly educational we must know that throughout this period everything that the child is taught must be conveyed in an artistic form. According to Waldorf School principles the first consideration in the elementary school period is to compose all lessons in a way that appeals to the child's rhythmic system.

How little this is regarded to-day can be seen from the number of excellent scientific observations which are continuously being accumulated and which sin directly against this appeal to the rhythmic system. Research is carried on in experimental psychology to find out how soon a child will tire in one activity or another; and the instruction must take account of this fatigue. This is all very fine, splendid, as long as one does not think spiritually. But if one thinks spiritually the matter appears in a very different light. The experiments can still be made. They are very good. Nothing is said here against the excellence of natural science. But one says: if the child shows a certain degree of fatigue in the period between its change of teeth and puberty, you have not been appealing, as you should do, to the rhythmic system, but to some other system. For throughout life the rhythmic system never tires. Throughout the whole of life the heart beats night and day. It is in his intellectual system and in his metabolic system that a man becomes tired. When we know that we have to appeal to his rhythmic system we know that what we have to do is to work artistically (Manuscript defective.); and the experiments on fatigue show where we have gone wrong, where we have paid too little attention to the rhythmic system. When we find a child has got overtired we must say to ourselves: How can you contrive to plan your lesson so that the child shall not get tired? It is not that one sets up to condemn the modern age and says: natural science is bad, we must oppose it. The spiritual man has no such intention. He says rather: we need the higher outlook because it is just this that makes it possible to apply the results of natural science to life.

If we now turn to the moral aspect, the question is how we can best get the child to develop moral impulses. And here we are dealing with the most important of all educational questions. Now we do not endow a child with moral impulses by giving him commands, by saying: you must do this, this has to be done, this is good,—by wanting to prove to him that a thing is good, and must be done. Or by saying: That is bad, that is wicked, you must not do that,—and by wanting to prove that a certain thing is bad. A child has not as yet the intellectual attitude of an adult towards good and evil, towards the whole world of morality,—he has to grow up to it. And this he will only do on reaching puberty, when the rhythmic system has accomplished its essential task and the intellectual powers are ripe for complete development. Then the human being may experience the satisfaction of forming moral judgment in contact with life itself. We must not engraft moral judgment onto the child. We must so lay the foundation for moral judgment that when the child awakens at puberty he can form his own moral judgment from observation of life.

The last way to attain this is to give finite commands to a child. We can achieve it however if we work by examples, or by presenting pictures to the child's imagination: for instance through biographies or descriptions of good men or bad men; or by inventing circumstances which present a picture, an imagination of goodness to the child's mind. For, since the rhythmic system is particularly active in the child during this period, pleasure and displeasure can arise in him, not judgment as to good and evil,—but sympathy with the good which the child beholds presented in an image,—or antipathy to the evil which he beholds so presented. It is not a case of appealing to the child's intellect, of saying ‘Thou shalt’ or ‘Thou shalt not,’ but of fostering aesthetic judgment, so that the child shall begin to take pleasure in goodness, shall feel sympathy when he sees goodness, and feel dislike and antipathy when he beholds evil. This is a very different thing from working on the intellect, by way of precepts formulated by the intellect. For the child will only be awake for such precepts when it is no longer our business to educate him, namely, when he is a man and learns from life itself. And we should not rob the child of the satis-faction of awakening to morality of his own accord. And we shall not do this if we give him the right preparation during the rhythmic period of his life; if we train him to take an aesthetic pleasure in goodness, an aesthetic dislike of evil; that is, if also here, we work through imagery.

Otherwise, when the child awakens after puberty he will feel an inward bondage, He will not perhaps realise this bondage consciously, but throughout his subsequent life he will lack the important experience: morality has awakened within me, moral judgment has developed. We cannot attain this inner satisfaction by means of abstract moral instruction, it must be rightly prepared by working in this manner for the child's morality.

Thus it is everywhere a case of ‘how’ a thing is done. And we can see this both in that part of life which is concerned with the external world and that part of life concerned with morality: both when we study the realm of nature in the best way, and when we know how best morals can be laid down in, the rhythmic system—in the system of breathing and blood circulation. If we know how to enter with the spirit into what is physical, and if we can come to observe how spirit weaves continuously in the physical, we shall be able to educate in the right way.

While a knowledge of man is sought in the erst instance for the art of education and instruction, yet in practice the effect of such a spiritual outlook on the teacher's or educator's state of mind is of the greatest importance. And what this is can best be shown in relation to the attitude of many of our contemporaries.

Every age has its shadow side, no doubt, and there is much in past ages we have no wish to revive; nevertheless anyone who can look upon the historical life of man with certain intuitive sense will perceive that in this our own age many men have very little inner joy, on the contrary they are beset by heavy doubts and questions as to destiny. This age has less capacity than any other for deriving answers to its problems from out of the universe, the world at large. Though I may be very unhappy in myself, and with good reason, yet there is always a possibility of finding something in the universe which can counterbalance my unhappiness. But modern man has not the strength to find consolation in a view of the universe when his personal situation makes him downcast. Why is this? Because in his education and development modern man has little opportunity to acquire a feeling of gratitude: gratitude namely that we should be alive at all as human beings within this universe. Rightly speaking all our feelings should take their rise from a fundamental feeling of gratitude that the cosmic world has given us birth and given us a place within itself. A philosophy which concludes with abstract observations and does not flow out in gratitude towards the universe is no complete philosophy. The final chapter of every philosophy, in its effect on human feeling at all events, should be gratitude towards the cosmic powers. This feeling is essential in a teacher and educator, and it should be instinctive in every person who has the nurture of a child entrusted to him. Therefore the first thing of importance to be striven for in spiritual knowledge is the acquiring of thankfulness that a child has been given into our keeping by the universe.

In this respect reverence for the child, reverence and thankfulness, are not to be sundered. There is only one attitude towards a child which can give us the right impulse in education and nurture and that is the religious attitude, neither more nor less. We feel religious in regard to many things. A flower in the meadow can make us feel religious when we can take it as the creation of the divine spiritual order of the world. In face of lightning lashes in the clouds we feel religious if we see them in relation to the divine spiritual order of the world. And above all we must feel religious towards the child, for it comes to us from the depths of the universe as the highest manifestation of the nature of the universe, a bringer of tidings as to what the world is. In this mood lies one of the most important impulses of educational technique. Educational technique is of a different nature from the technique devoted to un-spiritual things. Educational technique essentially involves a religious moral impulse in the teacher or educator.

Now you will perhaps say: nowadays, although people are so terribly objective in regard to many things—things possibly of less vital importance—nowadays we shall yet find some who will think it a tragic thing that they should have a religious feeling for a child who may turn out to be a ne'er-do-well. But why must I regard it as a tragedy to have a child who turns out a ne'er-do-well?—To-day, as we said before, there are many parents, even in this terribly objective age, who will own that their children are ne'er-do-wells whereas this was not the case in former times; then every child was good in its parents' eyes. At all events this was a better attitude than the modern one.—Nevertheless we do get a feeling of tragedy if we receive as a gift from spiritual worlds, and as a manifestation of the highest, a difficult child. But we must live through this feeling of tragedy. For this very feeling of tragedy will help us over the rocks and crags of education. If we can feel thankfulness even for a naughty child, and feel the tragedy of it, and can rouse ourselves to overcome this feeling of tragedy we shall then be in a position to feel a right gratitude to the divine world; for we must learn to perceive how what is bad can also be a divine thing,—though this is a very complicated matter. Gratitude must permeate teachers and educators of children throughout the period up to the change of teeth, it must be their fundamental mood.

Then we come to that part of a child's development which is based principally on the rhythmic system, in which, as we have seen, we must work artistically in education. This we shall never achieve unless we can join to the religious attitude we have towards the child a love of our educational activity; we must saturate our educational practice with love. Between the Change of Teeth and Puberty nothing that is not born of Love for the Educational Deed itself has any effect on the child. We must say to ourselves with regard to the child: clever a teacher or educator may be, the child reveals to us in his life infinitely significant spiritual and divine things. But we, on our part, must surround with love the spiritual deed we do for the child in education. Hence there must be no pedagogy and didactics of a purely intellectual kind, but only such guidance as can help the teacher to carry out his education with loving enthusiasm.

In the Waldorf School what a teacher is is far more important than any technical ability he may have acquired in an intellectual way. The important thing is that the teacher should not only be able to love the child but to love the method he uses, to love his whole procedure. Only to love the children does not suffice for a teacher. To love teaching, to love educating, and love it with objectivity—this constitutes the spiritual foundation of spiritual, moral and physical education. And if we can acquire this right love for education, for teaching, we shall be able so to develop the child up to the age of puberty that by that time we can really hand him over to freedom, to the free use of his own intelligence.

If we have received the child in religious reverence, if we have educated him in love up to the time of puberty, then our proper course after this will be to leave the youth's spirit free, and to hold intercourse with him on terms of equality. We aim,—that is not to touch the spirit but to let it be awakened. When the child reaches puberty we shall best attain our aim of giving the child over to free use of his intellectual and spiritual powers if we respect the spirit and say to ourselves: you can remove hindrances from the spirit, physical hindrances and also, up to a point, hindrances of the soul. What the spirit has to learn it learns because you have removed the impediments. If we remove impediments the spirit will develop in contact with life itself even in very early youth. Our rightful place as educators is to be removers of hindrances.

Hence we must see to it that we do not make the children into copies of ourselves, that we do not seek forcibly and tyrannically to perpetuate what was in ourselves in those who in the natural course of things develop beyond us. Each child in every age brings something new into the world from divine regions, and it is our task as educators to remove bodily and psychical obstacles out of its way; to remove hindrances so that his spirit may enter in full freedom into life. These then must be regarded as the three golden rules of the art of education, rules which must imbue the teacher's whole attitude and all the impulse of his work. The golden rules which must be embraced by the teacher's whole being, not held as theory, are: reverent gratitude to the world in the person of the child which we contemplate every day, for the child presents a problem set us by divine worlds: Thankfulness to the universe. Love for what we have to do with the child. Respect for the freedom of the child—a freedom we must not endanger; for it is to this freedom we educate the child, that he may stand in freedom in the world at our side.

Yesterday I tried to show how, by developing the ability to form imaginative vision, it is possible to gain a different kind of insight into human sense perception than can be gained when we approach it with the logic of the mind. I emphasized especially that this imaginative picturing that lives in the soul—as I said, I will describe its development in due course—has to be built up the way mathematical imagery is built up, the way mathematical constructs are developed, analyzed, and so on.

From this, the rest of what I said will also be clear: how we apply the results of our inner mathematical activity to the outer mineral-physical realm; and how in a similar way we apply our imaginative activity to the human senses. In this way we may know what takes place in those "gulfs"—as I called them yesterday—which the physical sense world sends into the human organism. The fact is that with the development of such an imaginative faculty and of knowledge of the real nature of the senses—of what is mainly the head organization—we also gain something else. We become able, for example, to form mental pictures of the plant kingdom. I indicated this yesterday. When we use only spatial and algebraic mathematics to approach plant growth and plant formation, we do not find that this mathematical form of consciousness is able to penetrate into the plant kingdom as it can penetrate into the mineral kingdom.

When on the other hand we have developed imaginative cognition, at first just inwardly, then we become able to form mental images applicable to the plant kingdom just as we found it possible with the mineral kingdom.

At this point, however, something peculiar appears: we now approach the plant world in such a way that the individual plant appears to us as only part of a great whole. In this way, for the first time we have a clear picture of what the plant nature in the earthly world really is. The picture we receive allows us to see the entire plant kingdom of the earth forming a complete unity with the earth-world. This is given purely empirically to the imaginative view. Of course, with our physical make-up we cannot possibly hold more than part of the earth's plant life in our consciousness. We observe only the plant world of a particular territory. Even if we are botanists, our practical knowledge of the plant world will always remain incomplete in the face of the entire plant world of the earth. This we know by the most simple thought. We know we do not have a whole, we have only part of the whole, something that belongs together with the rest. The impression we have in looking at the partial plant world is very much like being confronted by someone who is completely hidden from view except for a single arm and hand. We know that what is before us is not a complete whole, but just part of a whole, and that this part can only exist by virtue of being connected with the whole. At the same time we arrive at a concept that is completely unlike that of the physicist, mineralogist, or geologist: we see that the forces in the plant world are just as integral a part of the earth as those in the geological realm. Not in the sense of a vague analogy but as a directly perceived truth, the earth becomes a kind of organic being for us—an organic being that has cast off the mineral kingdom in the course of its various stages of development, and has in turn differentiated the plant kingdom.

The thoughts I am developing here for you can, of course, be arrived at very easily by mere analogy, as we see happening in the case of Gustav Theodor Fechner. Such conclusions arrived at by analogy have no value for the spiritual science intended here—what we value is direct perception. For this reason it must always be emphasized that in order to speak of the earth as an organism, for example, one must first speak of imaginative mental pictures. For the earth as an integral being reveals itself only to the imaginative faculty, not to the logical intellect with its analogies.

There is something else that one acquires in this process, and I wish especially to mention it because it would be most useful to students as regards methodology. In present-day discussions on the subject of thinking and also on how we apprehend the world in general, there is a great lack of clarity. Let us take an example. A crystal is held up to view—a cubic salt crystal, for instance—with the idea of illustrating something or other: perhaps something about its relation to human knowledge, its position in nature as a whole, or something similar. Now it could happen that in the same way that the salt cube is used, a single rose is held up for illustration. The person who holds up the rose feels it is acceptable to ascribe objective life to the rose in the same way as to the salt cube. To someone who does not strive for just a kind of formal knowledge, but who aspires to an experience of reality, it is clear that there is a difference. It is clear that the salt cube has an existence within its own limits. The plucked rose, on the other hand, even on its stem is not living its life as a rose. For it cannot develop independently to the same degree (please note the word) as the salt does. It must develop on the rosebush. The whole bush belongs to the development of the rose; separated from the bush, the rose is not quite real. An isolated rose only appears to have life.

I say all this in an effort to be clear. In all observations that we make, we must take care not to theorize about the observations before we have grasped them in their totality. It is only to the entire rosebush that we can attribute an independent existence in the same sense as to the salt cube. When we rise to imaginative mental Images, we acquire the ability to experience reality in a certain completeness.Then what I have just said about the plant world can be accepted. We see it as a whole only if our consciousness is able to apprehend it as a whole, if we can regard everything confronting us separately—all the different families and species—as part of the entire plant organism which covers the earth, or better said, which grows out of the earth.

Thus through imaginative mental images one not only gains understanding of the sense world, one also has important inner experiences of knowledge. I would like to speak of these inner experiences of knowledge in purely empirical terms.

As human beings we are in a position to look back with our ordinary memory to what took place in our waking life, back to a certain year in our childhood; with our power of memory we can call up one or another event in pictorial form out of the stream of our experiences. Still, we are clearly aware that to do this we must exert a distinct effort to raise individual pictures out of the past stream of time. As this imaginative vision develops further, however, we arrive gradually at a point where time takes on the quality of space. This comes about very gradually. It should not be imagined that the results of something like imaginative vision come all at once. It is pointless to think that the acquisition of the imaginative method is easier than the methods employed in the clinic, the observatory, and so on. Both require years of work: one, mental work; the other, inner work in the soul. The result of this inner work is that the individual pictorial experiences join one another. At this point, time—which we usually experience as “running” when we look over the course of our experiences and draw up one or another memory experience—now time, at least to some extent, becomes spatial to us. All that we have lived through in life—almost from birth—comes together in a meaningful memory picture. Through this exertion of imaginative life, of “looking back,” of remembering back, individual moments appear before the soul. These moments are more than a mere remembering. We have a subjective experience of viewing our life lived here on earth. This, as I said, is a practical result of imaginative mental imaging.

What kind of inner experience arises parallel to this inner viewing, this panorama of our experiences? We are quite clear that the strength of our soul which brings these memory pictures to consciousness is related to our ordinary bright, clear power of understanding. It is not itself the power of understanding, but it is related to it.

One can say: What we have been striving to attain—that our consciousness will be illuminated by this imaginative cognition in all our activities as it is in mathematical activity—happens for us when we come to these memory pictures. We have images and we hold them as tightly as we hold the content of our intellect. Thereby we come to a definite kind of self-knowledge, a knowledge of how the power of understanding works. For we do not merely look back at our life: our life presents itself to us in mirror images. It shows itself in such a way that this comparison with a mirror really holds true. We can extend the comparison and speak of understanding reflected images in a mirror by applying optical laws. Similarly, when we come to inner imaginative perceptions, we can recognize the power of the soul that we usually think of as our mental capacity becoming enhanced, so that we experience our intellect creating not only abstract pictures but concrete pictures of our experiences.

At first a kind of subjective difficulty arises, but once we understand it we can proceed. We experience clarity as in mathematics when we experience these pictures. But the feeling of being free—not in a behavioral sense, but in one's intellectual activity—is not present in this kind of imagining. Please do not misunderstand me. The entire imaginative activity is just as voluntary as our ordinary intellectual activity. The difference is that in intellectual activity one always has a subjective experience (I say "experience" because it is more than a mere sensation), one is really in a realm of imagery, a realm that means nothing from the point of view of the outer world. We do not have this feeling in relation to the content of the imaginative world. We have the very definite experience that what we are producing in the form of imaginations is at the same time really there. We find ourselves living and weaving in a reality. To be sure, at first this is a reality which does not have an especially strong grip on us and yet we can really feel it.

What we can gather from this reality, what we become aware of as we think back from our life panorama to the inner activity that created it, acquaints us inwardly, "mathematically," with something that is similar to the formative force of the human being. Just as mathematical mental images match and explain outer physical-mineral reality, so this something coincides with what is contained in the human formative force or growth force. (It also coincides with the formative force of other living beings, but I will not speak of that now.) We begin to see a certain inner relation between something that lives purely in the soul—namely, imagination—and something that weaves through the human being as the force of growth, the force that makes a child grow into an adult, that makes limbs grow larger, that permeates the human being as an organizing power. In short, we experience what is really active in the growth principle of the human being. This insight appears first in one definite area: namely, the nerves. The life panorama and the experiences described in connection with it give us insight at first into the growth principle in the human nerve organism—that is, the creative principle which continues inward in the nerve-sense organism. We receive a mental picture of an imaginative kind that enables us to begin to understand what our sense organs actually represent. This also gives us the possibility of seeing the entire nervous system as a synthetic sense organ that is in the process of becoming, and as embracing the present sense organs. We learn to realize that at birth, though our sense organs are not fully mature, they are complete with regard to their inner forces; this may be evident from the way I spoke about the relation of imagination to the sense world. At the same time we can see that what lives in our nerve organism is permeated by the same force as are the sense organs, but that it is in the process of becoming. It is really one large sense organ in the process of becoming. This image comes to us as a real perception. The different senses as they open outward and continue inward in the nerve organism—during our whole life up to a certain age—are organized by the power we have come to know in imagination.

You see what we are striving to accomplish. We wish to make transparent the forces that work in the human being which would otherwise remain spiritually opaque. For what does the human being know of the way in which these forces are active within him? Something that cannot be mastered by ordinary knowledge, something that can be characterized as ordinarily opaque to the soul and spirit, now begins to be clear. One has the possibility, through a higher kind of qualitative mathematics—if I may use such a phrase—of penetrating the world of the senses and the world of our nerve organism. One might think that when we reach this point we would become arrogant or immodest, but just the contrary, we learn true modesty through knowledge of the human being. For what I have described to you in a very few words is really acquired over a long period of time. For one, the knowledge comes quickly; for another, much more slowly. And often someone who applies the methods of spiritual research with patient inner work is surprised by the extraordinary results. The results that such inner work brings to light, if they are properly described, can be grasped by a healthy human understanding. But to draw these results forth from the recesses of the soul requires persistent and energetic soul work. And what especially teaches us modesty is the recognition that after much hard work, the results of imaginative cognition acquaint us only with our nerve-sense organism. We can realize how shrouded in darkness is the rest of the human organism.

Then, however, to reach beyond mere self-knowledge regarding the nerve-sense system, we must attain a higher level of knowledge. (The word "higher" is of course just a term.) Above all I must emphasize (I will go into it in more detail later) that the attainment of imaginative knowledge is based on meditation—not a confused, but a clear methodically-exercised meditation (to repeat the phrase I used in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment), in which over and over again we set before our soul easily surveyable images. What is essential is that they shall be easy to view as a well-defined whole, not some vague memories, reminiscences or the like. Vague memories would lead us away from a clear mathematical type of experience. Easily pictured mental images are required, and preferably symbolic images, for these are most easily viewed as a whole. The important thing is what we experience in our soul through these images. We seek to bring them into clear consciousness in such a manner that they are like a clear memory image. Thus through voluntary activity mental images we have evoked are taken into our soul in the same way that we take memory images into the soul. In a way, we imitate what happens in our activity of remembering. In remembering, certain experiences are continually being made into pictures. Our aim is to get behind this activity of the human soul; how we do this, I will describe in due course. In our effort to get behind the way remembering takes place, we gain the ability to hold easily-surveyable images in our consciousness (just as we hold memory images) for a certain length of time. As we become used to this activity, we are able to extend the time from a few seconds to minutes. The particular images themselves are of no importance. What is important is that through the effort of holding these self-chosen images, we develop a certain inner power of soul. We can compare the development of the muscles of the arm through exertion to the way certain soul forces are strengthened when mental images (of the kind I have described) are repeatedly held in our consciousness by voluntary effort. The soul must really exert itself to bring this about, and it is this exertion of soul that is crucial. As we practice on the mental images we ourselves have made, something begins to appear in us that is the power of imagination. This power is developed similarly to the power of memory, but it is not to be confused with the power of memory. We will come to see that what we conceive of as imaginations (we have already partly described this) are in fact outer realities, and not just our own experiences as is the case with memory images. That is the basic difference between imaginations and memory images. Memory images reproduce our own experiences in pictorial form, while imaginations, although they arise in the same way as memory images, show through their content that they do not refer merely to our own experiences but can refer to phenomena in the world that are completely objective. So you see, through the further development of the memory capacity, we form the imaginative power of the soul.

And now, just as the power of remembering can be further developed, so it is also possible to develop another capacity. It will seem almost comical to you when I name it—but the further development of this capacity is more difficult than that of memory. In ordinary life there are certain powers by which we remember, but also by which we forget. It seems sometimes that we do not need to exert ourselves in order to forget. But the situation changes when we have developed the power of memory in meditation. For oddly enough, this power to hold onto certain imaginations brings it about that the imaginations want to remain in our consciousness. Once there, they are not so easily got rid of—they assert themselves. This fact is connected with what I said earlier, that in this situation we have to deal with actually dwelling in a reality. The reality makes itself felt; it asserts itself and wishes to remain. We succeeded in forming the power of imagination (in a manner modeled on mathematical thought); now through further exertion we must be able voluntarily to throw these imaginative pictures out of our consciousness. This capacity of the voluntarily developed "enhanced forgetting" must be especially cultivated.

In the forming of these inner cognitive powers—enhanced memory and enhanced forgetting—we must be careful to avoid causing actual harm to the soul. However, just to point out the dangers involved would be like forbidding certain experiments in a laboratory for the reason that something might explode someday. I myself once had a professor of chemistry at the university who had lost an eye while conducting an experiment. Happenings of this nature are of course not a valid reason for preventing the development of certain methods. I think I can correctly say that if all the precautionary measures are applied which I have described in my books regarding the inner development of soul forces, then dangers cannot arise for the soul life. To continue—if we do not develop the capacity to obliterate the imaginative pictures again, then there is a real danger that we could be tethered to what we have given rise to in our meditations. If this happened, we would not be able to go further. The development of enhanced forgetting is really necessary for the next stage.

There is a certain way in which we can help ourselves achieve this enhanced power of forgetting. Perhaps those who are involved in any of the present-day epistemological studies will find this discussion quite dilettante and I am fully aware of all the objections, but I am obliged to present the facts as they happen to be. So—to continue—one can gain help in enhancing the power of forgetting if we further develop, through self-discipline, a quality which appears in ordinary life as the ability to love. Naturally it can be said: love is not a cognitive power, it does not concern knowledge. Perhaps this is true today because of the way cognition is understood. But here it is not a matter of keeping the power of love just as it appears in ordinary life. Here the power to love is to be developed further through work an oneself. We can achieve this by keeping the following in mind.

Is it not so?—living our lives as human beings, we must admit that with each passing year we have actually become a slightly different person. When we compare ourselves at a certain age with what we were, say, ten years earlier—if we are honest—we are sure to find that certain things have changed in the course of time. The content of our soul life has changed—not just the particular form of our thoughts, feelings, or life of will, but the whole make-up of our soul life. We have become a different person “inside.” And if we search for the factors through which we have changed inwardly, we will find the following: We may notice first of all what has happened to our physical organism—for this is always changing. In the first half of life it changes progressively through growth; in the second half it is changing through regression. Then we must look at our outer experiences: what confronts us as our own mental world; all those things that leave pain, suffering, pleasure, and joy in the soul; the forces we have tried to develop in our will life. These are the things that make us a different person again and again in the course of life. If we want to be honest about what is really taking place, we have to say we are just swimming along in the current of life. But whoever wishes to become a spiritual scientist must take his development in hand through a certain self-discipline. He might, for instance, take a habit—little habits are sometimes of tremendous importance—and within a certain time transform it through conscious work. In this way we can transform ourselves in the course of our life. We are transformed through being in the current of life, as well as through the work we do on ourselves with full consciousness. Then when we observe our life panorama, we can see what has changed in our life as a result of this self-discipline. This works back in a remarkable way on our soul life. It does not have the effect of enhancing our egotism, rather it enhances our power to love. We become more and more able to embrace the outer world with love, to enter deeply into the outer world. Only someone who has made efforts in such self-discipline can judge what this means. If one has made such efforts, one can appreciate what it means to have the thoughts we form about some process or some thing accompanied by the results of such self-discipline. We enter with a much stronger personal involvement into whatever our thoughts penetrate. We even enter into the physical-mineral world with a certain power of love—that world which if approached only mathematically leaves us indifferent. We feel clearly the difference between penetrating the world with just our weak power of mental imaging, and penetrating it with a developed power of love.

You may take offense at what I am saying about the developed power of love: you may want to assert that the power of love has no place in a quest for knowledge of the outer world, that the only correct objective knowledge is that which is obtained by logical intellectual activity. Certainly there is need for a faculty that can penetrate the phenomena of the outer world by means of the bare sober intellect alone, excluding all other powers of the soul. But the outer world will not give us its all if we try to get it in this manner. The world will only give us its all if we approach it with a power of love that strengthens the mind's mental activity. After all, it is not a matter of commanding and expecting that nature will unveil herself to us through certain theories of knowledge. What is really important is to ask: How will nature reveal herself to us? How will she yield her secrets to us? Nature will reveal herself only if we permeate our mental powers with the forces of love.

Let me return to the enhancement of forgetting: with the power of love the exercises in forgetting can be practiced with greater force, and the results will be more sure, than without it. By practicing self-discipline, which gives us a greater capacity for love, we are able to experience an enhanced faculty of forgetting, just as surely a part of our volition as the enhanced faculty of remembering. We gain the ability to put something definite, something of positive soul content, in the place of what is normally the end of an experience. Normally when we forget something, this marks the end of some sequence of experiences. Thus in place of what would normally be nothing, we are able to put something positive. In the enhanced power of forgetting, we develop actively what otherwise runs its course passively.

When we have come this far, it is as if we had crossed an abyss within ourselves and reached a region of experience through which a new existence flows toward us. And it is really so. Up to this point we have had our imaginations. If in these imaginations we remain human beings equipped with a mathematical attitude of soul, and are not fools, we will see quite clearly that in this imaginative world we have pictures. The physiologists may argue whether or not what our senses give us are pictures or reality. (I have dealt with this question in my Riddles of Philosophy.) The fact is, we are well aware that these are pictures, pictures that point to a reality, but still they are just pictures. Indeed, to achieve a healthy experience in this region we must know that they are pictures—images—confronting us. However, at the moment when we experience something of the enhanced power of forgetting, these images fill with something coming from the other side of life, so to say. They fill with spiritual reality. And we go to meet this reality. We begin, as it were, to have perceptions of the other side of life. Just as through our senses we perceive one side of life, the physical-sensible side, so we learn to look toward the other side and become aware of a spiritual reality flowing into the images of imaginative life. This flowing of spiritual reality into the depth of our soul this is what in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment I have called “inspiration.” Please do not take exception to the name—just listen to how the word is being used. Do not try to remember instances where you have met the word before. We have to find words for what we want to say, and often we must use words that already have older meanings. So for the phenomenon just described, I have chosen the word inspiration.

Through developing inspiration we finally gain insight into the human rhythmic system, which is bound up in a certain way with the realm of feeling. This leads us to something I must emphasize: the method leading to inspiration which I have just described can actually be followed only by modern man. In earlier periods of human evolution, this faculty was developed more instinctively—for example, in the Indian yoga system. This, however, is not renewable in our age. It goes against the stream of history. And in the spiritual-scientific sense, one could be called a dilettante if one wanted to renew the yoga system in these modern times. Yoga set into motion certain human forces that were appropriate only for an earlier stage of human evolution. It had to do with the development of certain rhythmic processes, with conscious respiratory processes. By breathing in a certain manner, the yogi worked to develop in a physical way what modern man must develop in a soul-spiritual way—as I have described. Nevertheless, there is something similar in the instinctive inspiration we find running through the Vedanta philosophy and what we achieve through fully conscious inspiration. The way we choose to achieve this, leads us through what I have described.

As modern human beings, we approach this from above downwards, so to say. Purely through soul-spiritual exercises we work to develop the power within us that then finds its way in to the rhythmic system as inspiration. The Indian worked to find his way into the rhythmic system directly through yoga breathing. He took the physical organism as his starting-point; we take the soul-spiritual being as ours. Both ways aim to affect the human being in his middle system, the rhythmic system. We shall see how what we are given in imaginative cognition (which combines the sense system and nervous system) is in fact enhanced when we penetrate the rhythmic system through inspiration. We shall also see how the ancient, more childlike, instinctive forms of higher knowledge (for example, yoga) come to new life in the present day in the consciously free human being.

Next time I will speak further on the relation of the earlier yoga development of the rhythmic system and the modern approach which leads through inner soul-spiritual work to inspiration.

Theosophy or spiritual science approaches man primarily by giving him messages about a transcendent world, certain knowledge of what has existed in the invisible world since primeval times, since the first beginnings of being, hidden behind our world of the senses.

At first, Theosophy seems to be just a theory, like many others. But if we immerse ourselves in it, even if only for a short time, it is no longer just a theory; it becomes an act, a reality for those who deal with it, it becomes truth, wisdom and wealth through life.

It becomes all this not only because it brings great ideals of the future development of man before the soul, but also because it is possible right from the beginning, before the great ideals have been realized, to mean something for the soul, to give our whole life a turn.

A great, all-encompassing ideal that Theosophy develops before man is that everyone is able to develop the powers and abilities that lie dormant in them, so that - even if only in the distant future - it will be possible for them to see into the spiritual world that Theosophy speaks of, just as they look into our sensual world today. Yes, the moment will come, perhaps in the distant future, when the spiritual world will no longer be something hidden, unknown, mysterious to man, but will shine and radiate before his soul's gaze like the world of color and light for someone who was blind from birth and suddenly sees after an operation.

This awakening to spiritual life, the inclusion of the spiritual world in the field of human experience, that lofty ideal of which Theosophy speaks, gives man hope, indeed certainty, that he will achieve it one day. There is already something in it that is of great wealth for the human soul, something that gives man strength and certainty for his whole life. For many, however, for most people, it is still a distant ideal.

Nevertheless, regardless of this distant ideal, Theosophy can offer people something else, even if they feel far from this ideal.

The great truths about the supersensible worlds, which are offered to humanity by advanced individuals to whom these worlds are already open today, are different from other theories in that they show man the way to understand everyday phenomena and experiences in our lives. These are messages that explain the most important manifestations of life and give us the solution to the darkest secrets of nature and man.

To acquire such knowledge is to gain strength for life. For not understanding what is mysterious in human life means restlessness, weakness, inability to live; on the other hand, every understanding of the essence and purpose of life gives man strength, confidence and hope that will not leave him even in the most difficult moments, when he needs them most.

This eminently practical significance of Theosophy appears most clearly to us when we turn to the question that today's lecture is specifically about, namely the mystery of man and woman and their connection with the child. Indeed, this is a vital topic because we cannot take a step in our lives without encountering this question.

It is true that modern science, which is worthy of all admiration, provides a large number of answers to this question. However, this science, based on the observation of what the physical eye sees, what the physical apparatus shows and what reason combines into a logical whole, relies only on external observation and the conclusions derived from it – science inevitably fails precisely where we encounter such questions and mysteries of daily life.

It is enough to look at contemporary literature: we find here that today's literature, which knows nothing of spiritual science, takes a twofold view of such an important problem as today's.

On the one hand, we see a materialistic view flashing through some of these remarks, expressing a wide range of assumptions about the nature of man and woman. On the other hand, however, we see a whole series of serious and thinking people who are not at all satisfied with the vague assumptions, who sense a deeper nature of the contradiction between man and woman; these people find nothing but a one-sided and chaotic view in modern science and literature; but they are not yet able to penetrate to spiritual science and there to the right enlightenment of this mystery. Let us take a look at some of the views on this subject. How confused human knowledge is precisely here!

The writer Rosa Mayreder, who dealt with this question but did not yet penetrate into spiritual science, has collected some opinions that are common today in all cultural countries, especially about women.

An overview of these different opinions casts a sharp light on the utter confusion of the present day. Let's look at how the writer compares different views. The book by the aforementioned author, “On the Problem of Women”, also deserves to be read for other reasons, because it leads to theosophy, as it were, and to the gate of theosophy, although she herself has not yet entered it. Here we can see how a great naturalist, who is often mentioned, tries to grasp and summarize the nature of women in that he ascribes tenderness to them. Another scientist – his name is not important – summarizes all of a woman's qualities in the concept of devotion. Elsewhere, we see again the human being who has grown out of the present day, who hopes to express the essence of a woman best with the word 'temperance in the face of anger'.

So one person comes up with the idea of tenderness, another just as sincerely and honestly with the concept of devotion, and yet another, based on his observations, with the term “anger-bearing”. Another judgment, again based on a man who often dealt with psychopathology, calls woman “embodied conservatism”. A conservative element in social life, that is what woman is supposed to be. We don't have to go far to find the opposite view: “The real revolutionary element lies in the nature of woman”.

We have a whole range of such views. Their enormous diversity, indeed their contradictions, are proof of how little people understand these things if they stick to superficial observation.

A profound philosophical thinker, on the other hand, tries to divide humanity into, on the one hand, analytically thinking people who analyze, break down, classify and penetrate into the details of everything they see, and, on the other hand, people who, in turn, understand the whole universe synthetically – and then calls the woman an analytical being and man a synthetic being; but immediately we come across the statement of another philosopher who explains that woman is always ready for synthesis, but only man is supposedly capable of the strict analytical knowledge that leads to science.

All these thinkers, whose views have been cited here, simply stopped at superficial, superficial observation; hence the confusion and contradictions in these various statements.

Nevertheless, it can be said that there is something in the way this question is approached that drives modern science along the path that it must follow in the course of time to the recognition of spiritual life, to the recognition of that which lies beyond the visible world of modern science.

In a particularly remarkable way, the young, unhappy doctor Dr. Otto Weininger summarized his views in his book “Sex and Character”, a book that shows on one hand how modern materialistic science is driven by inner necessity to higher knowledge, but on the other hand how this science is not able to find a final solution to this question because of its prejudices and the nature of its methods.

Weininger builds on the ground of serious and exact science, on the methods of modern research, that there is a kind of polarity in the male and female sex, a kind of ideal male and female type, but that we never encounter it in practice, because in fact one always finds in the individual, both in the man a hidden female and in the woman a hidden male part. Weininger, however, puts this whole thing on a materialistic basis. He almost gives the impression that a part of male substance is mixed into the female organic substance and vice versa.

In other cases, too, we find in Weininger, alongside ideas that lead to true knowledge, a wide range of completely false ideas and conclusions. In general, this book shows a wondrous mixture of deep ideas and, again, the most extreme prejudices against the nature of women. This can be seen best in the conclusions, where Weininger comes to the final view that a woman has neither freedom nor individuality nor intellect nor reason.

These different views about women, full of contradictions, are able to evoke a sympathetic response in the human heart, in the sense that one recognizes the need to look not only at the observation of life through the external senses , but also on the inner, spiritual events; only if we see man and woman not only as they appear to our eyes, but if we delve into the inner being of man, can we recognize the true nature, origin and laws of the two sexes of man.

Other lectures have shown that we can become aware of the invisible parts of the human being on the basis of the great problems of waking and sleeping, life and death.

It was shown how the whole world accessible to our senses, which extends around us during the daytime while we are awake, and all of our waking consciousness sinks into an indeterminate darkness in the evening as we fall asleep; and that then, in the morning when we wake up, everything that was spread out before our consciousness the previous evening emerges again from the darkness of the unconscious. It is a common phenomenon, and yet – perhaps for that very reason – this principle has not been sufficiently investigated, although it is one of the deepest, most enigmatic questions of life, one that, when seriously confronted with it, can lead a person to a deep realization.

According to the experiences of those who have developed higher abilities, it can be observed that, in the evening, when falling asleep, a person leaves part of their being in bed, while the other part leaves the physical body and then lives with it during the time of sleep in the other, transcendent world.

But why can't the person, with that part that is drawn out of the physical body at night, perceive the phenomena of this higher, transcendental world with full consciousness?

Because it is only possible to perceive where there are sensory organs. Only the world for which there are senses can be perceived. In this soul-spiritual part of the human being, which emerges from the physical body during sleep, no organs have yet developed in the ordinary person today.

For this reason, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, man is [deaf and] blind to everything that happens in this higher world, in which he would live if he were not relegated today to the purely sensual world, in which alone he has a developed perceptual apparatus and to which his soul-spiritual part always returns in the morning when he is reintegrated into his physical body.

We can go further and point out another circumstance that leads us to a real observation of spiritual science. In what lies on the bed during sleep, we can observe two things; the one part, the physical body, can be perceived through the sense of touch in the sleeping person; it consists of the same forces as a stone, and is therefore of a mineral nature.

This physical body would disintegrate into its own forces and substances if it were not permeated by a principle that saturates it with life force, the so-called life body or etheric body.

Everything that is alive must constantly conquer life. The stone is sustained by its mineral forces; only from outside can the disturbing forces come that destroy it. But the living body only persists if it is maintained by the power of life; left to itself, it decomposes under the influence of mineral forces into the individual substances of which it is composed, and becomes a corpse.

Between birth and death, the physical body of man is intertwined with the etheric body. At death, however, this etheric body emerges with the astral body, leaving the physical body dead. This is the difference between sleep and death. In sleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain together, but at death, the etheric body also withdraws with the astral body and the higher principles of the human being, while the physical body, left to itself, becomes a corpse. What interests us most about this matter today is that at night, when a person is in the spiritual world, they are almost purely spiritual, or, to put it another way, a soul-spiritual being that consists of the astral body and the human “I”.

The organs that a person uses during the day when they are awake, when they are in their physical shell, are in the physical and etheric body for the purpose of contact with the outside world. Thus, we only understand the essence of a person correctly if we observe their changing states during the day and night.

The human being is in a similar situation with regard to gender. The conditions that we summarize under the concept of man and woman are only found in the part of the human being that remains on the bed at night as a physical and etheric body. That which withdraws from them during sleep – the astral body and the human being's “I” – and returns to them in the morning, has no gender. What flows out of the body at night is the human being elevated beyond gender.

So when the human being leaves the body, they leave the entire realm of gender; then in the morning, when they awaken, they return and enter gender again.

Only the physical and etheric bodies appear to be sexual to us and show us this in a wonderful way.

Theosophy gives us this special knowledge, wonderful and incredible, but true! Only on the outside is a person a member of the sex that can be observed through the senses. But if we observe the supersensible part of what remains on the bed during sleep, namely the life body or etheric body, this body shows us something surprising compared to the physical body. The etheric body is actually endowed with the opposite sex as the physical body; the etheric body of a man is of the female sex and the etheric body of a woman is of the male sex.

Here is the key to the mystery of sex! The human being consists of a physical, etheric and astral body and the I (ego); the ego and the astral body are trans-sexual and therefore do not participate in the sexual, except that they surround themselves with the etheric and physical body.

Of the physical and etheric body, we see with the ordinary senses alone the physical body; but if we turn our attention inwards to the supersensible side, the etheric body, we find the opposite sex. When a person observes life from the perspective of the sexes, when a man or a woman experiences life and tries to understand it from that point of view, but spiritual science then provides him with such insights as the opposite natures of the sexes of the physical and etheric bodies, then the scales fall from the eyes of man; only then does it become clear to him when he looks at life as a man, that although external nature stimulates him to male deeds, he harmonizes these male qualities, balances them with other, almost female qualities. Likewise, women show us a whole range of male traits. We then find that there is nothing that we could ascribe to only the man or only the woman, whether as a virtue or a defect, that is tied only to one sex.

If we look at Weininger's opinion from this point of view, we see a certain similarity, but it is certainly not material things in men and women of the opposite sex, but this has its seat in the etheric body.

Why are those people who rely on external impressions so wrong in their opinions about women and men? Precisely because they judge spiritual life by external signs of gender and forget that there is something feminine in every man and something masculine in every woman and therefore there is always something of the opposite sex in each sex that complements it.

In all the above characterizations of woman, where the concept of “tenderness”, “fidelity”, “poisonousness”, “conservatism” or “the revolutionary element in man” was attributed to woman, we see everywhere that only what was found from the outer senses was judged.

Let us look deeper! Theosophy sheds light on these things, teaching us to understand the sphere in which masculinity and femininity meet. There, where man is elevated above material life, as for example in sleep, there is no gender in its meaning. But it would be wrong to judge that the contradiction that arises in both sexes has only a meaning for the physical world. On the contrary, we must become fully and earnestly aware of the nature of the physical world, according to Goethe's saying: “Everything transitory is only a parable”: everything physical is only a parable of the spiritual!

When we reflect on this sexual difference, we shall understand the true nature of it. We know this difference only in the physical world, as the polarity between man and woman. However, the difference is only the expression of a much deeper antagonism in the spiritual world. Two manifestations go hand in hand with life, two extremes that we commonly call life and death.

In outer life, the picture of this contradiction can be beautifully observed in the growing tree. On the surface, we see the bark that has imprisoned the inner life, which has stepped back from the surface. Inside, however, we see abundant life, streams of sap rising from the trunk to all the branches, strengthening them and nourishing the leaves, flowers and fruits. Inside, a tree is full of life, but it is covered by a solid shell. And yet this tree needs to be trapped in the solid bark, for how could a tree that was deprived of the bark that seemingly imprisons its life survive the winter, survive storms and tempests? A tree whose trunk is wounded, whose bark is stripped, dies.

Similarly, all of life is permeated by the opposition between life and form.

What is inside the tree wants to grow and flourish, but it is held back by the fact that it is enclosed in the form, which constantly opposes life as something oppressive and life-threatening; life itself would overflow and rush if it were not for death. Only form, which restrains and binds, creates the harmony and balance that life, progressing rapidly, strives for. The bark of a tree is precisely the image of that which limits, restrains, and kills.

Death and life, as the two opposites, intervene in all of life, in all events. We find life everywhere – and the form that life simultaneously retains and holds back, so that it does not rush, but also does not immediately disappear.

We can observe this phenomenon in artistic creation: in the beautiful products of Greek sculpture, where the knowing artist shows us the hidden secrets of the spiritual world in the image of the statue.

This is particularly evident in two works of Greek sculpture: the Head of Zeus, which shows us in a typical way how Zeus was viewed (original in the National Museum in Rome), and that of Juno (the so-called Juno Ludovisi). Two wonderful works of human creativity; anyone who looks at them, not thoughtlessly but more deeply, will notice the broad and flat forehead of Juno, which then suddenly falls back, and in contrast to it the narrow forehead of Zeus, rounded at the sides, whose arch slowly recedes at the temples.

If you look at the entire face of Zeus and Juno, and if you compare them, you will find that the face of Zeus awakens in you a feeling that if there were life in this statue, would change its entire expression in a short time, transform itself; in this face, an enormous life force develops, strong and abundant, which would be able to reshape the whole face within a short time.

It is different with Juno. The soul that resides in this being, captured by the artist in the expression of this statue, has embodied itself entirely in the form, becoming a beautiful and complete form. Here we feel the calm after creation, and we cannot imagine this face any differently; on the contrary, we feel that if this face lived before us for all eternity, it would not change its expression. In Zeus, only a moment of what is happening in this soul is captured in the face, while in Juno we feel the calm of the soul, which has fully achieved its expression in the finished, completed form.

Here we see the complete contrast again: the life that would have brought death with it if it had been left to itself, because it would constantly have wiped out one form after another, it would not have tolerated a moment of consolidation in the form; this life on the one hand, on the other hand, the encapsulation of life, the crystallization, the preservation of the same in the frame, in the form.

As soon as you ascend from the physical world into the spiritual world, the difference between the sexes disappears, but we find there the contrast between the flowing, swirling life and that power that wants to hold back, crystallize the rushing life. And the manifestation of these two opposites of the spiritual world and their correspondence in physical life is precisely masculinity and femininity.

However, it should be noted here that the male and female cannot be determined by the external characteristics by which gender is determined in ordinary life, since part of the feminine is also contained in man, and vice versa.

The male pole is a manifestation of that which rushes forward and would soon develop too quickly; the manifestation of that abundant life which, left to itself, would not cease for a moment. By contrast, the female manifestation is that force in nature which holds back life, forcing it to pause, thus enabling its manifestation by allowing form to arise. Thus masculinity and femininity work together in nature, complementing each other.

The woman – the principle of form, the man – the principle of life.

If we can also bring what has been said here into our feelings, if it is not just a lifeless presentation of the dry intellect, then we will also understand the task of the sexes in nature and thus find the way to mutual understanding and to the understanding of the two sexes in human life.

This is precisely the great advantage of Theosophy: it provides practical solutions to the great questions of the human mind, and it points the way to a deeper understanding of these questions.

In a similar way, we also arrive at a solution to the relationship between man, woman and child...

It will not be difficult for us to understand the child's relationship to man and woman if we remember that even in sleep, what emerges from the physical principle as a spiritual part of the human being is sexless.

If we compare death to sleep, we come to understand the nature of the child.

What happens at death? — The etheric and astral bodies and the ego emerge from the physical body, which is handed over to the forces of the physical world.

The I is connected to the etheric body only for a short time, a few days at most; then the etheric body, especially that part of it that is the carrier of gender, is also separated, and a second, ethereal corpse is formed.

However, what is not sexual in the ethereal body continues with the other principles as an independent principle.

When the human being then enters into a new existence, the human germ descends from the supersensible worlds and leans down again in order to be reborn through man and woman.

Three are necessary if man is to enter physical life again: man and woman in the physical world and the human germ that leans towards them, which spent some time in the purely spiritual world, matured there and prepared for a new incarnation for a long time.

How does a person enter physical life?

Much thought has been given to what we in ordinary life call the love between man and woman. What a master of life one would have to be to fully understand the meaning of this word, which contains so many secrets! From the highest bliss to the most miserable humiliation, from the highest exaltation to the most terrible destruction of all life, all this is contained in the word 'love'.

All the profound thinkers who have reflected on love and its essence agree that there is something very intimate and delicate about it that lies beyond direct observation; in Schopenhauer we come across the direct statement that every action, every ignition of love between man and woman, has a special, individual character, so that a married couple can be together for many years, and yet every act of love, every conjugal approach is something special, new, individual.

Schopenhauer is right. What does this act of love mean, what happens in the love between man and woman? It is not only what lives in the “physical life” between the male and female individuals that plays a role, but something third also comes into play. There is always a human being in the higher world who enters into physical incarnation, and for this purpose love flares up between the two beings.

What we call love between hearts and hearts, this glowing feeling that connects two souls, is a reflection of that spiritual glowing cloud of love with which the ego, descending to birth, surrounds two beings, is this call to the man and the woman who can make it possible for this human being to enter into physical life.

The love itself that brings the sexes together does not come only from them, it is a shadow, a projection of a being that wants to embody itself.

This is how one must look at the individuality, the peculiarity of each act of love, because in each such union a human individuality wants to emerge through those whom it has chosen as its parents and educators.

In this way of looking at things, we learn to distinguish between what is individual and what is inherited. Since the father and mother are involved in reproduction, the male and female of the father and mother – their physical and etheric bodies – interbreed in various ways. However, what the human ego, which wants to embody itself, brings with it from the higher worlds and from its previous lives, appears to us as an individual aspect.

So you have to distinguish between what is individual and what is inherited from father and mother. We see this well in families where there are many children: What they have inherited from their father and mother appears in all children, but above all, we can observe something special and individual in each child, something that the spirit itself has brought with it, which is not in the father or mother, but which was already there in the human being before birth.

Then we can also correctly assess what has really been inherited from the nature of a parent and in what a wonderful way it happens. We learn why daughters so often take after their fathers and sons after their mothers, and why when reading biographies of great men we also study the characteristics and nature of their parents. On the other hand, we learn how that which is original in man plunges into the inherited shell and partially merges with it.

Nevertheless, we see how today's materialistic science repeatedly points out how often characteristics of parents and even spiritual qualities are inherited. We are often reminded how genius inherits its characteristics from parents and family. Here, too, only inherited characteristics are mentioned. A person's talent, it is said, the whole soul of a person consists of what has been accumulated over several generations. The highest peak, it is said, always comes at the end, because then we have a kind of accumulation. — That is a peculiar logic! A logically correct argument would have to lead here to the gates of spiritual science. This is where genius should begin. The fact that genius often stands at the end of many generations is unmistakable proof that this is not mere inheritance. That genius appears tinged with inheritance is no more surprising than that, to use a rather trivial comparison, if someone has fallen into water, they come out wet. But there is something that has accumulated over generations, but these are only the outer qualities, those shells that develop from generation to generation. These things must be considered in the right way, then the internally coherent, closed individuality presents itself to us, which finds its first expression in the feeling of love between the future parents as a foreshadowed shadow and is embodied in complete diversity and difference from what will be inherited.

Many people are afraid when they hear these teachings that the feeling of love for the children and parents could suffer in this way, could grow cold. But that is not right. On the contrary, this spiritual connection between parents and children would be further strengthened and intensified. Why should certain parents have this child in particular? Because it is this child that wants to go to these parents and be born with and from them.

Hence the individuality in the feelings of love, this dawn of love that precedes the birth of a child: love even precedes, even before birth the child loves the parents, even before sexual intercourse and conception by the mother, expressing to the parents that it wants to be born.

From this, we also see the necessity of the parents' love for their children, which is actually only the repayment of the love that the child already had for the parents before birth.

And so it is with many concepts that we encounter in everyday life and on which Theosophy, when we delve deeper into it, sheds an [ever] brighter light.

Here we see a wonderful harmony of this trinity in father, mother and child, which is the basis of life everywhere in nature and in humans. Here we encounter it in an extremely vivid and understandable form.

Man is the ever-flowing life, woman is the symbol of the form that receives and encloses this life and allows it to crystallize in beauty; these two principles then unite within each other, man and woman unite in love, to enable the descent of the spiritual being from the sexually neutral worlds to the form of the physical world, and thus to open with all their love this gate between the higher world, the spiritual world and the world of matter.

If, as already mentioned, such concepts do not remain dry abstractions for us, but we transform them into powerful impressions and feelings and then go out into life enriched by them, then we see how Theosophy explains and solves all the riddles and mysteries of life that we encounter at every turn.

Thus we also come to an understanding of numerous phenomena of social life, to the solution of the contradictions between conservatism and progress; we see how, on the one hand, the forces of life work, hurrying forward, and on the other hand, the forces of form, maintaining and preserving.

On deeper study, we learn that even progress can be harmful if it does not give to the second pole of life what belongs to it, if it does not do justice to the form that life cultivates and strengthens through resistance.

If we approach life from the standpoint of spiritual science, we find that life will not burden us, but will fill us with understanding and reverence, making us free and ; correctly understood, Theosophy shows us guidelines that we can take up, opens up the depths of life to us and, as a worldview, shows us ways to transform our views and ideas into certainty, strength and hope. Then we will not lose ourselves in difficult moments, nor drown in our grief in dark moments, if we were once privileged to look deeper into the foundations of life and the world.

But for such an acceptance of the theosophical teaching, no other proofs are needed than those which life itself gives us step by step. Those who saturate themselves with these teachings and then approach all questions of life understand that Theosophy is not only a theory, but also practical wisdom for life and ultimately a precious wealth of life of inestimable value.

The Genesis of the Trinity of Sun, Moon, and Earth. Osiris and Typhon.

Up to this point in these lectures we have tried to construct a picture of the earth's evolution in connection with the evolution of man, because we had to demonstrate how the earth's past, how the facts of its evolution, were reflected in the knowledge displayed by the various cultural periods of the post-Atlantean time. The deepest experiences of the pupils of the Rishis were characterized, and it was shown how these inner experiences of the neophyte portrayed, in inward clairvoyantly-perceived pictures, the relationships and events that prevailed in the primeval earth, when sun and moon were still contained in it. We also saw what a high stage of initiation such a pupil had to reach in order to build for himself such a world-conception, which appears as a recapitulation of what occurred in the remotest past. We also saw what the Greeks thought when, in the campaigns of Alexander, they became acquainted with what was experienced by such an Indian neophyte, in whose soul arose the picture of the divine-spiritual creative force that began to express itself in the primeval mist when sun and moon were still united with the earth. This picture, the Brahman of the Indians, which was later called I-Brahma (Aham Brahma) and which appeared to the Greeks as Heracles—this picture, we sought to bring before our souls as an inner recapitulation of the facts that actually occurred in the past.

It was also emphasized that the succeeding evolutionary periods of the earth were reflected in the Persian and Egyptian cultures. What occurred in the second epoch, when the sun withdrew from the earth, appeared in pictures to the Persian initiates. All that happened as the moon gradually withdrew became the world-conception and the initiation-principle of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, Assyrians.

Now, in order to look quite clearly into the soul of the ancient Egyptian, which is the most important thing for us—and considering the Persian initiation only as a sort of preparation—we must examine a little more narrowly just what happened to our earth during the periods when the sun and moon were separating from it. We shall sketch how the earth itself gradually evolved during these times. We shall disregard the great cosmic events and direct our attention to what happened on the earth itself.

If again we look back on our earth in its primeval condition, when it was still united with sun and moon, we do not find our animals or plants, and especially not our minerals. At first the earth was composed only of man, only of the human germs. Of course it is true that the animal and plant germs were laid down on the old Sun and the old Moon, and that they were already contained in the earliest condition of the Earth, but in a certain way they were still slumbering, so that one could not perceive that they would really be able to bring forth anything. It was only when the sun began to withdraw that the germs that later became animals first became capable of germinating. Not until the sun had completely withdrawn from the earth, leaving earth and moon alone, did the same thing happen to the germs that later became plants. The mineral germs formed themselves gradually, only when the moon had begun to withdraw. We must keep this clearly in mind.

Now, for once, let us look at the earth itself. When it still had sun and moon within itself, the earth was only a sort of etheric mist of vast extent, within which the human germs were active, while the germs of the other beings—animals, plants, and minerals—slumbered. Since only human germs were present, there were no eyes to behold these events externally, hence the description given here is visible only for the clairvoyant vision in retrospect. It is given on the hypothesis that it is what one would have seen had one been able at that time to observe from a point in universal space.

On ancient Saturn, too, a physical eye would have seen nothing. In that primeval condition, the earth was merely a vaporous mist that could be felt physically only as warmth. Out of this mass, this primeval etheric mist, there gradually took shape a shining ball of vapor, which could have been seen had a physical eye been present. Could one have penetrated this with a feeling-sense, it would have appeared as a heated space, somewhat like the interior of an oven. But soon this mist became luminous, and this ball of vapor that thus took shape contained all the germs of which we have just spoken. We must be quite clear that this mist was nothing like a fog or cloud-formation of today; rather did it contain in solution all the substances which at present are solid or liquid. All metals, all minerals, everything, were then present in the mist in transparent and translucent form. There was a translucent vapor, permeated by warmth and light. Think yourself into this. What had grown out of the etheric mist was a translucent gas. This grew brighter and brighter, and through the condensation of the gases the light grew ever stronger, so that ultimately this vapor-mist appeared like a great sun that shone out into world-space.

This was the period when the earth still contained the sun, when the earth was still irradiated by light and rayed its light into world-space. But this light made it possible, not only that man should live with the earth in that primeval condition, but that in the fullness of the light there should also live all those other high beings who, although not assuming a physical body, were connected with the evolution of man: Angels, Archangels and Principalities. But not only were these present. In the fullness of the light lived still higher beings also: the Powers, or Exusiai, or Spirits of Form; the Virtues, or Dynameis, or Spirits of Motion; the Dominions, or Kyriotetes, or Spirits of Wisdom; those spirits who are called the Thrones, or Spirits of Will; finally, in looser connection with the fullness of the light, more and more detaching themselves therefrom, the Cherubim and Seraphim. The earth was a world inhabited by a whole hierarchy of lower and higher beings, all sublime. What radiated out into space as light, the light with which the earth-body was permeated, was not light only but also what was later the mission of the earth: It was the force of love. This contained the light as its most important component. We must imagine that not only light was rayed forth, not physical light alone, but that this light was ensouled, inspirited, by the force of love. This is difficult for the modern mind to grasp. There are people today who describe the sun as though it were a gaseous ball that simply radiates light. Such a purely material conception of the sun prevails exclusively today. The occultists are the only exception. One who reads a description of the sun today as it is represented in popular books, in the books that are the spiritual nourishment of countless people, does not learn to know the true being of the sun. What these books say about the sun is worth about as much as if one described a corpse as the true being of man. The corpse is no more man than what astrophysics says of the sun is really the sun.

Just as one who describes a corpse leaves out the most important thing about man, so the physicist who describes the sun today leaves out the most important thing. He does not reach its essence, although he may believe that with the help of spectroanalysis he has found its inner elements. What is described is only the outer body of the sun.¹ In every sunbeam there streams down on all the inhabitants of the earth the force of those higher beings who live on the sun, and in the light of the sun there descends the force of love, which here on earth streams from man to man, from heart to heart. The sun can never send mere physical light to earth; the warmest, most ardent, feeling of love is invisibly present in the sunlight. With the sunlight there stream to earth the forces of the Thrones, the Cherubim, the Seraphim, and the whole hierarchy of higher beings who inhabit the sun and have no need of any body other than the light. But since all this that is present in the sun today was at that time still united with the earth, those higher beings themselves were also united with the earth. Even today they are connected with earth-evolution.

We must reflect that man, the lowest of the higher beings, was at that time already present in the germ as the new child of the earth, borne and nourished in the womb by these divine beings. The man who lived in the period of earth-evolution that we are now considering, had to have a much more refined body, since he was still in the womb of these beings. The clairvoyant consciousness perceives that the body of the man of that time consisted only of a fine mist-form or vapor-form; it was a body of air or gas, a gas-body rayed through and entirely permeated by light. If we imagine a cloud formed with some regularity, a chalice-like formation expanding in an upward direction, the chalice glowing with inner light, we have the men of that time who, for the first time in this earth-evolution, began to have a dim consciousness, such a consciousness as the plant-world has today. These men were not like plants in the modern sense. They were cloud-masses in chalice-like form, illuminated and warmed by the light, with no firm boundaries dividing them from the collective earth-mass.

This was once the form of man, a form that was a physical light-body, participating still in the forces of the light. Because of the refinement of this body there could descend into it not only an etheric and an astral body, not only the ego in its first beginnings, but also the higher spiritual beings who were connected with the earth. Man was, as it were, rooted above in the divine spiritual beings, and these permeated him. It is really not easy to portray the splendor of the earth at that time. We must picture it as a light-filled globe, shone round by light-bearing clouds and generating wonderful phenomena of light and color. Had one been able to feel this earth with his hands, he would have perceived warmth-phenomena. The luminous masses surged back and forth. Within them were all the human beings of today, woven through by all the spiritual beings, who rayed forth light in manifold grandeur and beauty. Outside was the earth-cosmos in its great variety; inside, with the light flowing about him, was man, in close connection with the divine-spiritual beings, raying streams of light into the outer light-sphere. As though by an umbilical cord that sprang from the divine, man hung upon this totality, on the light-womb, the world-womb of our earth. It was a collective world-womb in which the light-plant man lived at that time, feeling himself one with the light-mantle of the earth. In this refined vaporous plant-form, man hung as though on the umbilical cord of the earth-mother and he was cherished and nourished by the whole mother earth. As in a cruder sense the child of today is cherished and nourished in the maternal body, so the human germ was cherished and nourished at that time. Thus did man live in the primeval age of the earth.

Then the sun began to withdraw itself, taking the finest substances with it. There came a time when the high sun-beings forsook men, for all that today belongs to the sun forsook our earth and left the coarser substances behind. As a result of this departure of the sun, the mist cooled to water; and where there was formerly a mist-earth, now there was a water-sphere. In the middle were the primeval waters, but not surrounded by air; going outward, the waters changed into thick, heavy mist, which gradually became more refined. The earth of that time was a water-earth. It contained various materials in a soft state, which were enveloped by mists that became ever finer until, in the highest spheres, they became extremely rarefied. Thus did our earth once appear and thus was it altered. Men had to sink the formerly luminous gas-form into the turbid waters and incarnate there as shaped water-masses swimming in the water, as previously they had been air-forms floating in the air. Man became a water-form, but not entirely. Never did man descend entirely into the water.

This is an important moment. It has been described how the earth was a water-earth, but man was only partially a water-being. He protruded into the mist-sheath, so that he was half a water, half a vapor-being. Below, in the water, man could not be reached by the sun; the water-mass was so thick that the sunlight could not penetrate it. The light of the sun could penetrate into the vapor to some extent, so that man dwelt partly in the dark light-deprived water and partly in the light-permeated vapor. Of one thing, however, the water was not deprived, and this we must describe more minutely.

From the beginning, the earth was not only glowing and shining, but was also resounding, and the tone had remained in the earth, so that when the light departed the water became dark, but also became drenched with tone. It was the tone that gave form to the water, as one may learn from the well-known experiment in physics. We see that tone is something formative, a shaping force, since through tone the parts are arranged in order. Tone is a shaping power, and it was this that formed the body out of the water. That was the force of tone, which had remained in the earth. It was tone, it was the sound that rings through the earth, out of which the human form shaped itself. The light could reach only to the part of man that protruded out of the water. Below was a water-body; above was a vapor-body, which the external light touched, and which, in this light, was accessible to the beings who had gone out with the sun. Formerly, when the sun was still united with the earth, man felt himself to be in their womb. Now they shone down on him in the light and irradiated him with their power.

We must not forget, however, that in what remained behind after the separation of the sun other forces, the Moon-forces, were present. The earth had to separate these forces from itself.

Here we have a period during which only the sun was withdrawn, when the plant-man had to descend gradually into the water-earth. This stage, at which man had then arrived in his body, we see preserved today in a degenerated form in fishes. The fishes that we see in the water today are relics of those men, although naturally in a decadent form. We must think of a goldfish, for example, in a fantastic plant-form, agile, but with a feeling of sadness because the light had been withdrawn from the water. It was a very deep longing that arose. The light was no longer there, but the desire for the light called up this longing. There was a moment in the earth's evolution when the sun was not yet entirely outside the earth; there one can see that form still permeated with light—man with his upper part still at the sun-stage, while below he is already in the shape preserved in the fishes.

Through the fact that man lived in darkness with half his being, he had in his lower parts a baser nature, for in the submerged parts he had the Moon-forces. This part was not petrified like lava, as in the present moon, but these were dark forces. Only the worst parts of the astral could penetrate here. Above was a vapor-form, resembling the head parts, into which the light shone from outside and gave him form. So man consisted of a lower and an upper part. Swimming and floating, he moved about in the vaporous atmosphere. This thick atmosphere of the earth was not yet air; it was vapor, and the sun could not penetrate it. Warmth could penetrate, but not light. The sun-rays could not kiss the whole earth, but only its surface; the earth-ocean remained dark. In this ocean were the forces that later went out as the moon.

As the light-forces penetrated into the earth, so also did the gods penetrate. Thus we have, below, the godless, god-deserted mantle of waters, permeated only by the force of tone, and, all around this, the vapor, into which extended the forces of the sun. Therefore in this vapor-body, which rose above the surface of the water, man still participated in what streamed to him as light and love from the spiritual world. But why did the world of tone permeate the dark watery core? Because one of the high sun-spirits had remained behind, binding his existence to the earth. This is the same spirit whom we know as Yahweh or Jehovah. Yahweh alone remained with the earth, sacrificing himself. It was he whose inner being resounded through the water-earth as shaping tone.

But since the worst forces had remained as the ingredients of the water-earth, and since these forces were dreadful elements, man's vapor-portion was drawn ever further down, and out of the earlier plant-form a being gradually evolved that stood at the stage of the amphibian. In saga and myth this form, which stood far below later humanity, is described as the dragon, the human amphibian, the lindworm. Man's other part, which was a citizen of the realm of light, is presented as a being which cannot descend, which fights the lower nature; for example, as Michael, the dragon-slayer, or as Saint George combating the dragon. Even in the figure of Siegfried with the dragon, although transformed, we have pictures of man's rudiments in their primeval duality. Warmth penetrated into the upper part of the earth and into the upper part of physical man, and formed something like a fiery dragon. But above that rose the ether body, in which the sun's force was preserved. Thus we have a form that the Old Testament well describes as the tempting serpent, which is also an amphibian.

The time was now approaching during which the basest forces were hurled out. Mighty catastrophes shook the earth, and for the occultist the basalt formations appear as remnants of the cleansing forces that rocked the globe when the moon had to separate from the earth. This was also the time when the water-core of the earth condensed more and more, and the firm mineral kernel gradually evolved. On the one hand, the earth grew denser through the departure of the moon; on the other the upper parts gave off their heavier, coarser substances to the lower. Above, there arose something which, although still permeated by water, became more and more similar to our air. The earth gradually acquired a firm kernel in the middle, around which was the water everywhere. At first, the mist was still impenetrable for the sun's rays, but by relinquishing its substances the mist grew thinner and thinner. Later, much later, air developed out of this, and gradually the sun's rays, which earlier could not reach the earth itself, were able to penetrate it.

Now came a stage that we, must picture correctly. Earlier, man dived down into the water and extended up into the mist. Now, through the condensation of the earth, the water-man slowly acquired the possibility of solidifying his form and taking on a hard bony system. Man hardened himself within himself. Thereby he transformed his upper part in such a way that it became suited for something new. This new thing, which previously was impossible, was the breathing of air. Now we find the first beginning of the lungs. In the upper part there has previously been something that took up the light, but could do nothing more. Now man felt the light again in his dull consciousness. He could feel what streamed down in it as divine forces coming toward him. In this transitional stage man felt that what streamed down upon him was divided into two parts. The air penetrated into him as breath. Previously only the light had reached him, but now the air was inside him. Feeling this, man had to say to himself, “Formerly I felt that the force that is above me gave me what I now use for breathing. The light was my breath.”

What now streamed into him appeared to man as two brothers. Light and air were two brothers for him; they had become a duality for him. All earthly breath that streamed into man was at the same time an annunciation that he had to learn to feel something entirely new. As long as there was light alone, he did not know birth and death. The light-permeated cloud transformed itself perpetually, but man felt this only as the changing of a garment. He did not feel that he was born or that he died. He felt that he was eternal, and that birth and death were only episodes. With the first drawing of breath, the consciousness of birth and death entered into him. He felt that the air-breath, which had split off from its brother the light-ray, and which thereby had split off also the beings who earlier had flowed in with the light, had brought death to him.

Formerly, man had the consciousness, “I have a dark form, but I am connected with the eternal being.” Who was it that destroyed this consciousness? It was the air-breath that entered into man—Typhon. Typhon is the name of the air-breath. When the Egyptian soul experienced within itself how the formerly united stream divided itself into light and air, the cosmic event became a symbolic picture for this soul—the murder of Osiris by Typhon, or Set, the air-breath.

A mighty cosmic event is hidden in the Egyptian myth that allows Osiris to be killed by Typhon.² The Egyptian experienced the god who came from the sun and was still in harmony with his brother, as Osiris. Typhon was the air-breath that had brought mortality to man. Here we see one of the most pregnant examples of how the facts of cosmic evolution repeat themselves in man's inner knowledge.

In this way the trinity of sun, moon, and earth came into being. All of this was communicated to the Egyptian pupil in deep and consciously formed pictures.

• 1. This sentiment as to the sun is eloquently expressed in English by D. H. Lawrence in his Apocalypse (New York, Viking, 1932), pp. 41-46.
• 2. Fairly complete versions of this myth may be found in Padraic Colum: Orpheus Myths of the World (New York, Macmillan, 1930) and in Lewis Spence: Mysteries of Egypt (London, Rider & Co., 1929).

First, in case it should mislead, a word about the English title. The German original bears the formidable superscription: Westliche und östliche Weltgegensätzlichkeit; and the modest little English word “tension” signifies very much more than the diplomatic and political strain, which is more or less chronic now between the Western democracies on the one hand and Russia and the Communist countries on the other. At the same time the book which follows is far from irrelevant to that strain, of which it is in a measure prophetic.

“The spectre of Eastern Europe,” we read on page page 115 (and these words were spoken in 1922), “gazes threateningly across to the West.” But it is only at surface level, and when something specific is amiss, that a “tension” betokens an unnatural strain, or one that threatens disaster unless it is relaxed. Thus both modern psychology, and modern theology, often speak of “holding in tension” as a normal and healthy activity. The clash of two opposites—such for instance as individual freedom and responsibility—will always create a tension. Whether the tension snaps in a neurosis or a war, or whether it is “held” in health and strength and peace, will often depend on whether the clash is merely encountered as a bewildering contradiction, or is understood in depth as a necessary and life-engendering polarity.

Since the end of the nineteenth century the world has been moving steadily in the direction of a single closed economy; and now willy-nilly it seems on the way to becoming a single social unit also. The only question is: of what kind is that unity to be? A living unity, as distinct from the monolithic unity of mere spatial cohesion, always (as Coleridge among others has pointed out) springs from a polarity; and polarity involves, not only the two opposite extremes or poles, but also, as its tertium quid, the vibrant tension in the midst between them. It is a principal object of this book to furnish an understanding in depth of what most unites the habitable globe, historically and culturally, into an organic whole, and this necessarily involves an understanding of the abiding tension between East and West.

To understand anything in depth involves some knowledge of how it came into being, and here the attempt is made to view the relation between typically Eastern and typically Western modes of consciousness in the light of the whole process of the evolution of human consciousness. In this Rudolf Steiner was up against the difficulty that the very existence of such a process was then—and it is still today—not generally recognized. That this is surprising “in an age permeated with evolutionary concepts” has recently been pointed out by Mr. Charles Davy, in his book Towards a Third Culture, in the course of which he defines the evolution of consciousness as “a constant-direction change in the normal experience of the perceived world.” It is the more surprising because it would seem that, without such a concept, little can be accomplished in the way of understanding man and his problems. Examples of this abound in the ensuing pages. Thus, just as the concept of biological evolution is necessary before we can distinguish whether the resemblance of one living form to another is due to a superficial analogy or to a true homology rooted in their nature and growth, so does the concept of evolution of consciousness enable us to discern the purely superficial nature of the resemblance between “division of labour” in oriental antiquity and in modern times. Or again, in the same lecture (8) in which the above example occurs, compare with the usual chatter about “escapism” Steiner's treatment of the old conflict between the image of the artist as a “committed” human being and the image of “art for art's sake.”

In his book, The Yogi and the Commissar, which appeared in 1945, Arthur Koestler began by placing his Yogi and Commissar at the opposite poles of a “spectrum” of human nature or social behaviour—an ultra-violet and an infra-red pole, between which all human types subsist. The Yogi, he said, accepts the inner spirit as the source of energy; he attempts to produce change from within. The Commissar does not believe in any “within;” he attempts to change the behaviour of man by manipulation from without. Koestler defines his Commissar as “the human type which has completely severed relations with the subconscious.” And there is more to the same effect. But this promising introduction is never developed; nor does Koestler so much as notice the paradox implicit in his own striking choice of labels—redolent, as they are, of a polarity between East and West, and yet with the “Yogi” corresponding, not to the Eastern (as one would expect), but to the anti-communist Western pole.

Let the reader contrast with this brilliant but inadequate aperçu the counter concepts of “maya” and “ideology” which Steiner builds up in Lecture 4 on the historical foundations (including a careful appraisal of actual yoga) which he has laid in the first three lectures. They are the fruit of understanding in depth, because they are rooted in a deep grasp of the whole history of man and of his place on earth and in the cosmos.

In the threefold nature of man, as Steiner expounded it, the rest is as it were implicit. Past, present and future; religion, art and science; the slow shift of the earth's cultural centre of gravity from orient to Occident, and with that the transition from an ancient instinctual wisdom to our modern self-consciousness, subsisting in free but lifeless thoughts—all this (such is the message of the following pages) can really only be contemplated and understood in understanding and contemplating threefold man. In his head, taken alone, the human being, qua thinker, does really reach a “commissar's” inner emptiness. He also experiences “the terror of that emptiness,” as Steiner points out on page 104 and as the Existentialists have since so heavily stressed. But there is a way, of which Existentialism knows nothing as yet, by which humanity can fill its experienced emptiness with spiritual substance. If a man is willing to follow that way and to develop his dormant powers, if he will learn how to hold his conscious but empty thinking in tension with the opposite pole of his being, his unconscious but substantial will, then not only his nerves and senses but the whole man can become a sense-organ, capable of re-experiencing in freedom the instinctual wisdom by which mankind was formerly nourished—but also controlled. He finds (we are told on page 94) “the cosmos stored up as recollection inside him.”

Thus the problem of the relation between East and West leads quickly into an exposition of both the philosophical basis and what may be called the “methodology” of that spiritual science, or anthroposophy, with which the name of Rudolf Steiner is principally associated. This is, of course, the original feature that marks our book off from any other on the same subject. It may also be, for many, a stumbling-block in the way of according to the thoughts it contains the candid attention which their intrinsic quality would otherwise command. For, if the method is presented as open to all—as indeed it is—the actual development of the dormant powers referred to depends on certain qualities, of character and otherwise, which few human beings have as yet brought with them into the world. Among those few, though he never expressly makes the claim, Steiner himself was pre-eminent. Readers who become aware, or who already know, how much the findings of anthroposophy, including this very concept of the evolution of consciousness, depend on Steiner's own raids on that stored up cosmic memory (elsewhere more technically referred to by him as the “Akashic Record”) and who are perhaps inclined to dismiss for that reason their claim to attention, will find here a reasoned justification of the method of spiritual science, which asks no more than to be fairly considered on its merits.

For this reason among others “the Vienna Course,” as it is often called, seemed a good choice to make, out of the voluminous material available, for a special book to lay before the English public, under a well-known imprint, shortly after the centenary of Steiner's birth in 1961, when through public lectures, a broadcast talk and other avenues, the attention of many was no doubt drawn for the first time to his work and its practical results.

Another reason for the choice is, that the relation between spiritual science and natural science is here clearly and fully stated at the outset. The reader will be left in no doubt of Steiner's immense respect for the science of the West, as it has actually developed since the scientific revolution; perhaps also in little doubt of his thorough acquaintance with the natural science of his own day. That can in any event in fact be demonstrated from other sources. To the present writer the most significant ground for the claim of spiritual science to be a science, and to merit careful investigation alongside the deferential attention paid as a matter of course to the established sciences, is the one which is glanced at on page 56, and more fully stated on pages 69, 70. It is a ground which has broadened a good deal during the forty years that have elapsed since these lectures were delivered, and it is this. If we look aside for a moment from their proven efficacy in the field of straightforward physical manipulation and consider rather their claim (abandoned now altogether in some quarters) to furnish us with knowledge about the nature of man and the world, it must be admitted that the matter dealt with by the established sciences is coming to be composed less and less of actual observations, more and more of such things as pointer-readings on dials, the same pointer-readings arranged by electronic computers, inferences from inferences, higher mathematical formulae and other recondite abstractions. Yet modern science began with a turning away from abstract cerebration to objective observation! And this is the very step which spiritual science claims to be taking again today. Once grant the possibility that observations other than those made with the passive and untrained senses are possible, and you have to admit that the method of cognition which Steiner describes is more scientific, because more empirical, than the method of the schools.

In addition to the twenty or so books which he wrote, most of which are translated into English, Rudolf Steiner delivered several thousands of lectures, many of them in courses or cycles, in different parts of Europe. His followers saw to it that most of these were taken down in shorthand and afterwards transcribed for the use of the Movement. Later the transcriptions, unrevised by the lecturer, were in many cases made available as printed books; and this is the case here. Audiences varied widely in size, nationality, educational background and other respects, and Steiner was wont to vary his style accordingly. The reader may like to know that these particular lectures were given during a “West-East Congress” of the Anthroposophical Movement in Vienna in June 1922. They provided each evening a sort of temporary culmination of the various themes which had been studied during the day, and the usual number in the audience was about two thousand.

Steiner remarked afterwards, in a written report, that public conferences of this magnitude represented a new departure from his normal practice of approaching only those who were in a manner predisposed to listen sympathetically to what he had to say. Surely it was no small achievement to shepherd an audience of two thousand, not all of them sympathetic, through such unfamiliar and subtle catenations of thought as the reader will find in Lecture 2! Some of those who are familiar with the literature of anthroposophy have detected in this particular cycle a special note—a touch of almost apologetic urbanity—which is found nowhere else. Perhaps this also makes them a suitable choice for the purpose mentioned above.

Rudolf Steiner died in 1925. The years that have passed since then have been crowded and fateful ones, changing the face of the world and the colour of its thought. It would be surprising if there were nothing here that “dated.” For instance, a contempt for Western technological achievement, as something philistine and unspiritual, can no longer be regarded as the characteristic oriental reaction it was in 1922, when he was speaking. Indeed the whole difference between the spiritual—or unspiritual—life of Orient and Occident daily becomes increasingly blurred. But is not this a symptom of the very trend to which Steiner was drawing attention? The elimination of a tension-holding middle between the two extremes leads here, as elsewhere, to their chaotic and sinister interaction. Even in 1922 the typically Western materialism of the German Karl Marx was streaming back to Germany and the West from Eastern Europe. Since then, we have seen the rise and fall of a largely Westernized Japan, the succumbing of China to the crudest materialism of all, the incipient industrialization of India. Almost as these lines were being written the elimination of anything that could be called Middle Europe was carried to its absurdly logical conclusion, and the interval between East and West reduced, in Berlin, to the thickness of a wall.

An Austrian subject, born in a part of Europe which is now just behind the iron curtain, Steiner was himself a child of that vanishing Middle Europe. Nowhere perhaps could the disappearance after 1914 of the old order, rich in ancient hierarchy and symbol, rotten in so much else, be experienced as vividly as in Austria-Hungary. Nowhere was the need so apparent, and (for a short time after the first World War) the opportunity so promising for the construction of a new social order, which might unite in a single organism the impulse of humanity towards the future with the wisdom it inherited from the past. It was this fleeting opportunity which he had been seeking to exploit during the brief period in 1919 and the early twenties when the Threefold Commonwealth Movement was founded and vigorously propagated, and when for a time his name was well known in Central Europe.

The opportunity passed that might have brought quick returns from a lightning campaign. But few of the problems have been solved. That “faith in the supreme power of the State” (page 166) which he noted as accompanying the growth of technology, has only gone on increasing; and everywhere within it, between class and class, between one State and another, and between East and West, antagonisms swell and proliferate. Koestler's Yogi had his emotional energies fixed on “the relation between the individual and the universe,” his Commissar on “the relation between individual and society.” In the second half of this book an attempt is made to show how the two relations coalesce in the threefold nature of man. A reconstruction of society is, no less than is a rebirth of individual psychology, implicit in the findings of spiritual science and would follow naturally and inevitably from a wider understanding of these. Whereas a society “planned” on abstract principles must inevitably strangle all progress, if only because (as F. A. Hayek has recently argued on purely empirical grounds) the unpredictable, free individual spirit is your only source of novelty and change.

Once again all turns on the basic fact of the evolution of human consciousness. On the one hand such an evolution necessarily involves changes in the social structure, but on the other hand that structure, and the changes which it demands, cannot be understood except in the light of that evolution. In the long run the views on diet of a man who had never heard of bread would be about as practical as the views on social reform of a man who is unaware that humanity is evolving from a typically oriental condition, in which the existence of the individual is latent in society, to a typically occidental one, in which the existence of society is latent in the individual. “What is needed,” says Steiner, on page 164, “is prefigured in the unconscious will of mankind in Europe.”

In Europe and, as he elsewhere makes clear, in America. Perhaps few passages in this book could be more immediately fruitful in removing perilous misunderstandings than the closing pages of Lecture 9, where much, over there, of what we on this side of the Atlantic are apt to despise as emotionally crude or intellectually superficial, is related to a certain un-European conception of the human will; and it is emphasized that this very conception, primitive as the terms in which it is expressed may be, nevertheless “carries within itself striking potentialities for the future.”

But it is time the reader was left to make his own acquaintance with the ideas which follow in the form in which Steiner himself expressed them. He will be disappointed if he seeks in them a schematic diagram of the nature or history of humanity or a panacea for its personal and social ills. But it may be otherwise if with an open mind he travels through these pages expecting only what he will find: a patient examination into the way in which we form our ideas and the historical and geographical factors by which that way is conditioned, and, along with that, a preliminary contribution towards the unfreezing of certain hidden reserves of energy, imagination and wit, which would seem to be essential if human civilization is to be rescued from decline.

London,
February 1962.

Owen Barfield

Today I will summarize some truths that will serve us in turn to provide further explanations in a certain direction in the coming days. If we consider our soul life, we can say that towards one pole of this soul life lies the element of thinking, towards the other pole the element of will, and between the two the element of feeling, that which in ordinary life we call feeling, the content of the mind, and so on. In the actual life of the soul, as it takes place in us in our waking state, there is never just one-sided thinking or will, but they are always in connection with each other, they play into each other. Let us assume that we behave very calmly in life, so that we can say, for example, that our will is not active externally. However, when we think during such outwardly directed calmness, we must be aware that will is at work in the thoughts we unfold: in connecting one thought with another, will is at work in this thinking. So even when we are seemingly merely contemplative, merely thinking, at least inwardly the will is present in us, and unless we are raving or sleepwalking, we cannot be willfully active without letting our volitional impulses flow through thoughts. Thoughts always permeate our volition, so that we can say: the will is never present in the life of the soul in isolation. But what is not present in this isolated way can still have different origins. And so the one pole of our soul life, thinking, has a completely different origin than the life of the will.

Even if we only consider everyday life, we will find that thinking always refers to something that is there, that has prerequisites. Thinking is mostly a reflection. Even when we think ahead, when we plan something that we then carry out through the will, such thinking is based on experience, which we then act upon. In a certain respect, this thinking is, of course, also a reflection. The will cannot be directed towards what is already there. In that case, it would always be too late. The will can only be directed towards what is to come, towards the future. In short, if you reflect a little on the inner life of thought, of thinking and of the will, you will find that even in ordinary life, thinking relates more to the past, while the will relates to the future. The inner life of feeling stands between the two. We accompany our thoughts with feeling. Thoughts please us, repel us. Out of our feeling we lead our impulses of will into life. Feeling, the content of the mind, stands between thinking and willing, right in the middle.

But just as it is the case in ordinary life, even if only in a suggestive way, so it is in the great world. And there we have to say: what constitutes our thinking power, what makes up the fact that we can think, that the possibility of thought is in us, we owe it to the life before our birth, or rather before our conception. In the little child that comes to meet us, all the thinking abilities that a person develops are already present in the germ. The child uses thoughts only - as you know from lectures I have already given - as directing forces to build up its body. Especially in the first seven years of life, until the change of teeth, the child uses the powers of thought to build up its body as directing forces. Then they emerge more and more as actual thought forces. But they are thoroughly predisposed in the human being as thought forces when he enters physical, earthly life.

What develops as will forces - an unbiased observation readily reveals this - is actually connected with this thought force only to a small extent in the child. Just observe a wriggling, moving child in the first weeks of life, and you will already realize that this wriggling, this chaotic movement, has only been acquired by the child because his soul and spirit have been clothed with physical corporeality by the physical external world. In this physical body, which we only develop little by little from conception and birth, the will initially lies, and the development of a child's life consists in the fact that gradually the will is, so to speak, captured by the powers of thought that we already bring with us into physical existence through birth. Just observe how the child at first moves its limbs quite senselessly, as it comes out of the activity of the physical body, and how gradually, I might say, thought intrudes into these movements, so that they become meaningful. So there is a pressing and thrusting of thinking into the life of the will, which lives entirely within the shell that surrounds the human being when he is born, or rather, conceived. This life of the will is contained entirely within it.

So that we can draw a schematic picture of a human being, in which we say that he brings his life of thought with him when he descends from the spiritual world. I will indicate this schematically (see drawing, yellow). And he begins his life of will in the physical body that is given to him by his parents (red). The forces of will are within, expressing themselves in a chaotic manner. And within are the powers of thought (arrows), which initially serve as directing forces to spiritualize the will in its corporeality in the right way.

We then perceive these forces of will when we pass through death into the spiritual world. But there they are highly organized. We carry them through the gate of death into spiritual life. The powers of thought that we bring with us from the supersensible life into earthly life, we actually lose in the course of earthly life.

With human beings who die young, it is somewhat different. For now, let us speak first of normal human beings. A normal human being who lives past the age of fifty has basically already lost the real powers of thought that were brought along from the previous life and has just retained the directional powers of the will, which are then carried over through death into the life that we enter when we go through the gate of death.

One can assume that someone is now thinking: Yes, so if you are over fifty years old, you have lost your thinking! - In a sense, this is even the case for most people who are not interested in anything spiritual today. I would just like you to really endeavor to register how much original, inventive thought power is produced by those people today who have reached the age of fifty! As a rule, it is the thoughts of earlier years that have automatically moved on and left an impression on the body, and the body then moves on automatically. After all, the body is a reflection of our mental life, and the person continues in the old rut of thought according to the law of inertia. Today, the only way to protect oneself from continuing in the old rut of thought is to absorb thoughts during one's lifetime that are of a spiritual nature, that are similar to the thought-forces in which we were placed before our birth. So that indeed the time is approaching when old people will be mere automatons if they do not take care to absorb thought-forces from the supersensible world. Of course, man can continue to think automatically; it may appear as if he is thinking. But it is only an automatic movement of the organs in which thoughts have been laid, have been woven in, if the human being is not grasped by that youthful element that comes when we absorb thoughts from spiritual science. This absorption of thoughts from spiritual science is certainly not just any kind of theorizing, but it intervenes quite deeply in human life.

But the matter takes on particular significance when we now consider man's relationship to the surrounding nature. I now understand by nature all that surrounds us for our senses, to which we are thus exposed from waking up to falling asleep. This can be considered in a certain way in the following way. One can visualize what one sees — I mean before spiritual eyes. We call it the sensory carpet. I will draw it schematically. Behind everything that one sees, hears, perceives as warmth, the colors in nature and so on – I draw an eye as a schema for what is perceived there – there is something behind this sensory carpet. Physicists or people of the present world view say: Behind it are atoms and they swirl -, and afterwards, right, as they continue to swirl, there is no sensory carpet at all, but somehow in the eye or in the brain or somewhere or not somewhere, they then evoke the colors and the sounds and so on. Now, please, imagine, quite impartially, that you begin to think about this sensory carpet. If you start thinking and do not assume the illusion that you can observe this huge army of atoms, which the chemists have arranged in such a military way of thinking, let us say, for example, there is Corporal C, then two privates, C, O, O, and then another private as an H; isn't that right, that's how we arranged it militarily: aether, atoms and so on. Now, if, as I said, you do not succumb to this illusion but remain with reality, then you know: the sensory carpet is spread out, the sensory qualities are out there, and what I still grasp with consciousness about what lies in the sensory qualities is just thoughts. In reality, there is nothing behind this sensory carpet but thoughts (blue). I mean, behind what we have in the physical world, there is nothing but thoughts. We will talk about the fact that these are carried by beings. But you can only get behind what we have in our consciousness with thoughts. But the power to think we have from our prenatal life or from the life before our conception. Why is it then that we can penetrate behind the sensory curtain by means of this power?

Just try to familiarize yourself with the idea that I have just mentioned, and try to properly present the question to yourself on the basis of what we have just hinted at, which we have already considered in many contexts. Why is it that we can reach below the sensory level with our thoughts, when our thoughts come from our prenatal life? Very simply, because behind it is that which is not in the present at all, but which is in the past, which belongs to the past. That which is under the carpet of sense is indeed a past, and we only see it correctly when we recognize it as a past. The past has an effect on our present, and out of the past sprouts that which appears to us in the present. Imagine a meadow full of flowers. You see the grass as a green blanket, you see the meadow's floral decoration. That is the present, but it grows out of the past. And if you think through this, then underneath it you do not have an atomistic present, but in reality you have the past as related to what comes from you yourself from the past.

It is interesting: when we begin to reflect on things, it is not the present that is revealed to us, but the past. What is the present? The present has no logical structure at all. The sunbeam falls on some plant, it shines there; in the next moment, when the direction of the sunbeam is different, it shines in a different direction. The image changes every moment. The present is such that we cannot grasp it with mathematics, not with the mere structure of thought. What we can grasp with the mere structure of thought is the past, which continues in the present.

This is something that can reveal itself to man as a great, as a significant truth: When you think, you basically only think the past; when you spin logic, you basically reflect on what has passed. - Anyone who grasps this thought will no longer seek miracles in the past either. For in that the past is woven into the present, it must be in the present as it is in the past. If you think about it, if you ate cherries yesterday, that is a past action; you cannot undo it because it is a past action. But if the cherries had the habit of making a mark somewhere before they disappeared into your mouth, that mark would remain. You could not change this sign. If every cherry had registered its past in your mouth after you had eaten cherries yesterday, and someone came and wanted to cross out five, he could cross them out, but the fact would not change. Nor can you perform any miracle with regard to all natural phenomena, because they are all intrusions from the past. And everything we can grasp with natural laws has already passed, is no longer present. You cannot grasp the present other than through images; that is a fluctuating thing. When a body lights up here, a shadow is created. You have to let the shadow properly define itself, so to speak, and so on. You can construct the shadow. That the shadow really comes into being can only be determined by devotion to the picture. So that one can say: even in ordinary life, limitation, I could also say logical thinking, refers to the past. And the imagination refers to the present. In relation to the present, man always has imaginations.

Just think, if you wanted to live logically in the present! No, to live logically means to draw one concept from another, to move from one concept to another in a lawful manner. Now, just imagine yourself in life. You see some event: is the next one logically connected to it? Can you logically deduce the next event from the previous one? When you look at life, are not its images similar to a dream? The present is similar to a dream, and only that the past is mixed into the present, which causes the present to proceed in a lawful, logical manner. And if you want to divine something in the future in the present, yes, if you just want to think of something you want to do in the future, then that has happened in a completely non-representational way in the first instance. What you will experience tonight is not in your mind as an image, but as something more non-pictorial than an image. At most, it is in your mind as inspiration. Inspiration relates to the future. Logical thinking: past Imagination: present Intuition Inspiration: future.

We can also use a simple diagram to visualize what is involved. When a person – let me characterize him here by this eye (see drawing on page 198) – looks at the tapestry of the senses, he sees it in its transforming images, but he now comes and introduces laws into these images. He develops a natural science out of the changing images of the sensory world. He develops a specialized science. But think about how this natural science is developed. You investigate, you investigate while thinking. You cannot possibly, if you want to develop a science about what spreads out as a carpet of senses, a science that proceeds in logical thoughts, you cannot possibly gain these logical thoughts from the external world. If what is recognized as thoughts and laws of nature were to follow from the external world itself, then it would not be necessary for us to learn anything about the external world. Then the person who, for example, looks at this light would have to know the exact electrical laws and so on, like the other person who has learned it! Equally, if he has not learned it, man knows nothing at all, let us say, about the relationship of an arc to the radius and so on. We bring forth from our inner being the thoughts that we carry into the outer world.

Yes, it is so: what we carry into the outer world as thoughts, we bring forth from our inner being. We are first of all this human being, who is constructed as a head human being. This human being looks at the carpet of senses. Inside the carpet of senses is what we reach through thoughts (see drawing page 198, white) and between this and between what we have inside us, what we do not perceive, there is a connection, so to speak an underground connection. Therefore, what we do not perceive in the external world because it extends into us, we bring out of our inner being in the form of thought life and place it in the external world. This is how it is with counting. The external world does not present anything to us; the laws of counting lie within our own inner being. But that this is true arises from the fact that between these predispositions, which are there in the external world, and our own earthly laws, there is an underground connection, a sub-physical connection, and so we draw the number out of our inner being. It then fits with what is outside. But the path is not through our eyes, not through our senses, but through our organism. And that which we develop as human beings, we develop as whole human beings. It is not true that we grasp some law of nature through the senses; we grasp it as a whole human being.

These things must be considered if we want to properly bring to mind the relationship between man and the environment. We are constantly in imaginations, and one need only compare life with dreams without prejudice. When a dream unfolds, it is certainly very chaotic, but it is much more similar to life than logical thinking. Let us take an extreme case. If you take a conversation between reasonable people of the present day, you listen and you talk yourself. Think about what is said in the course of, say, half an hour, and whether there is more coherence in the succession of thoughts than there is in dreams, or whether there is as much coherence as in logical thinking. If you were to demand that logical thinking develops there, you would probably be greatly disappointed. The present world presents itself to us entirely in images, so that basically we are actually dreaming all the time. We have yet to bring logic into it. We wrest logic from our prenatal existence; we first bring it into the context of things and thereby also encounter the past in things. We embrace the present with imagination.

When we observe this imaginative life that constantly surrounds us in the sensual present, we can say to ourselves: this imaginative life gives itself to us. We do nothing to it. Just think how hard you had to work to arrive at logical thinking! You didn't have to make any effort to enjoy life, to observe life; it reveals its images to you by itself. Now, that's how it is in life with imagining the images of the ordinary world around us. But all one needs is to acquire the ability to make images – but now through one's own activity, as one otherwise does in thinking – and to experience images through inner effort, as one otherwise does in thinking. Then one not only sees the present in images, but one also extends pictorial imagination to life before birth or before conception, and one sees before birth or before conception. And when you look into these images, then thinking is populated with the images, and then prenatal life becomes reality. We just have to be able to think in images by training the abilities that are spoken of in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, without these images coming to us by themselves, as is the case in ordinary life. When we make this life of images, in which we actually always live in ordinary life, into an inner life, then we look into the spiritual world, and then we do see the way in which our life actually unfolds.

Today, it is considered almost exclusively spiritual when someone – I have spoken about this often – truly despises material life and says: I strive towards the spirit, matter remains far beneath me. This is a weakness, because only the one who does not need to leave matter below him, but who understands matter itself in its effectiveness as spirit, who can recognize everything material as spiritual and everything spiritual, even in its manifestation as material, only he truly attains a spiritual life. This becomes especially significant when we look at thinking and willing. At most, language, which contains a secret genius within it, still has something of what leads to knowledge in this field.

Consider the basis of will in everyday life: you know that it arises from desire; even the most ideal will arises from desire. Now take the coarsest form of desire. What is the coarsest form of desire? Hunger. Therefore, everything that arises from desire is basically always related to hunger. From what I am trying to suggest to you today, you can see that thinking is the other pole, and will therefore behave like the opposite of desire. We can say: if we base desire on the will, we have to base thinking on satiation, on being full, not on hunger.

This actually corresponds to the facts in the deepest sense. If you take our head organization as human beings and the other organization that is attached to it, it is indeed the case that we perceive. What does it mean to perceive? We perceive through our senses. As we perceive, something is actually constantly being removed within us. Something passes from the outside into our inner being. The ray of light that enters our eye actually carries something away. In a sense, a hole is drilled into our own matter (see drawing on page 201). There was matter, but now the beam of light has drilled a hole into it, and now there is hunger. This hunger must be satisfied, and it is satisfied from the organism, from the available food; that is, this hole is filled with the food that is inside us (red). Now we have thought, now we have thought what we have perceived: by thinking, we continually fill the holes that sensory perceptions create in us with satiety that arises from our organism.

It is extremely interesting to observe, when we consider the organization of the head, how we fill the holes that arise in our remaining organism through the ears and eyes, through the sensations of warmth; there are holes everywhere. Man fills himself completely by thinking, by filling that which is there, in the holes (red).

And it is similar with us if we want it to be. Only then it does not work from outside in, so that we are hollowed out, but it works from within. If we want, hollows arise everywhere in us; these must in turn be filled with matter. So that we can say, we receive negative effects, hollowing out effects, both from outside and from inside, and constantly push our matter into them.

These are the most intimate effects, these hollowing effects, which actually destroy all earthly existence in us. Because by receiving the ray of light, by hearing the sound, we destroy our earthly existence. But we react to this, we in turn fill this with earthly existence. So we have a life between the destruction of earthly existence and the filling of earthly existence: luciferic, ahrimanic. The Luciferic is actually constantly striving to partially turn us into something non-material, to completely remove us from our earthly existence; for if he could, Lucifer would like to spiritualize us completely, that is, dematerialize us. But Ahriman is his opponent; he works in such a way that what Lucifer excavates is constantly being filled in again. Ahriman is the constant filler. If you form Lucifer plastically and make Ahriman plastically, you could quite well, if the matter went through in confusion, always push Ahriman into the cavity of Lucifer, or put Lucifer over it. But since there are also cavities inside, you also have to push in. Ahriman and Lucifer are the two opposing forces at work in man. He himself is the state of equilibrium. Lucifer, with continuous dematerialization, results in continuous materialization: Ahriman. When we perceive, that is Lucifer. When we think about what we have perceived: Ahriman. When we form the idea, this or that we should want: Lucifer. When we really want on earth: Ahriman. So we are in the middle of the two. We oscillate back and forth between them, and we must be clear about ourselves: as human beings, we are placed in the most intimate way between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. Actually, you only get to know a person when you take these two opposing poles in him into account.

This is an approach that is based neither on an abstract spiritual reality – for this abstract spiritual reality is, after all, nebulous and mystical – nor on a material one, but rather everything that is materially effective is also spiritual at the same time. We are dealing with the spiritual everywhere. And we see through matter in its existence, in its effectiveness, by being able to see the spirit in everything.

I have already told you that imagination comes to us of its own accord in relation to the present. When we develop imagination artificially, we look into the past. When we develop inspiration, we look into the future, just as one calculates into the future by calculating solar or lunar eclipses, not in relation to the details, but to a higher degree in relation to the great laws of the future. And intuition encompasses all three. And we are actually subject to intuition all the time, we just sleep through it. When we sleep, we are completely immersed in the outside world with our ego and our astral body; there we unfold that intuitive activity that one must otherwise consciously unfold in intuition. But in this present organization the human being is too weak to be conscious when he is intuiting; but he does intuit in fact at night. So one can say: Asleep, the human being develops intuition; awake, he develops—to a certain extent, of course—logical thinking; between the two stands inspiration and imagination. When a person comes out of sleep into waking life, his I and his astral body enter into the physical body and the etheric body; what he brings with him is the inspiration to which I have already drawn your attention in previous lectures. We can say: Man is asleep in intuition, awake in logical thinking, when he wakes up he inspires himself, when he falls asleep he imagines. - You can see from this that the activities we mention as the higher activities of knowledge are not alien to ordinary life, but that they are very much present in ordinary life, that they only have to be raised into consciousness if a higher knowledge is to be developed.

It must be pointed out again and again that in the last three to four centuries, external science has summarized a large number of purely material facts and brought them into laws. These facts must first be spiritually penetrated. But it is good - if I may say so, although it sounds paradoxical at first - that materialism was there, otherwise people would have fallen into nebulosity. They would have finally lost all connection with their earthly existence. When materialism began in the 15th century, humanity was in fact in danger of falling prey to Luciferic influences to a high degree, of being hollowed out more and more and more. That is when the Ahrimanic influences came from that time on. And in the last four or five centuries, the Ahrimanic influences have developed to a certain extent. Today they have become very strong and there is a danger that they will overshoot their target if we do not counter them with something that will effectively weaken them: if we do not counter them with the spiritual.

But here it is important to develop the right feeling for the relationship between the spiritual and the material. In the older German way of thinking, there is a poem called “Muspilli”, which was first found in a book dedicated to Louis the German in the 9th century, but which of course dates from a much earlier time. There is something purely Christian in this poem: it presents us with the battle of Elijah with the Antichrist. But the whole way in which this story unfolds, this fight between Elijah and the Antichrist, is reminiscent of the ancient struggles of the sagas, the inhabitants of Asgard with the inhabitants of Jötunheim, the inhabitants of the realm of the giants. It is simply the realm of the Æsir transformed into the realm of Elijah, the realm of the giants into the realm of the Antichrist.

This way of thinking, which we still encounter, conceals the true fact less than the later ways of thinking. The later ways of thinking always talk about duality, about good and evil, about God and the devil, and so on. But these ways of thinking, which were developed in later times, no longer correspond to the earlier ones. Those people who developed the struggle between the Gods' home and the giants' home did not see the same in the Gods as, for example, today's Christian understands in the realm of his God. Instead, these older ideas had, for example, Asgard, the realm of the Gods, above, and Jötunheim, the realm of the giants, below; in the middle, Man unfolds, Midgard. This is nothing other than the same thing in the Germanic-European way that was present in ancient Persia as Ormuzd and Ahriman. There we would have to say in our language: Lucifer and Ahriman. We would have to address Ormuzd as Lucifer and not just as the good God. And that is the great mistake that is made, that one understands this dualism as if Ormuzd were only the good God and his opponent Ahriman the evil God. The relationship is rather like that of Lucifer to Ahriman. And in Middlegard, at the time when this poem “Muspilli” was written, it is still not imagined that The Christ sends his blood down from above – but: Elijah is there, and sends his blood down. And man is placed in the middle. At the time when Louis the German probably wrote this poem into his book, the idea was still more correct than the later one. For later times have committed the strange act of disregarding the Trinity; that is, to understand the upper gods, who are in Asgard, and the lower gods, the giants, who are in the Ahrimanic realm, as the All, and to understand the upper, the Luciferic ones, as the good gods and the others as the evil gods. This was done in later times; in earlier times, this opposition between Lucifer and Ahriman was still properly envisaged, and therefore something like Elijah was placed in the Luciferic realm with his emotional prophecy, with that which he was able to proclaim at that time, because one wanted to place the Christ in Midgard, in that which lies in the middle.

We must go back to these ideas in full consciousness, otherwise we will not come back to the Trinity: to the Luciferic Gods, to the Ahrimanic powers and in between to what the Christ-realm is. Without advancing to this, we will not come to a real understanding of the world.

This is the topic I wanted to broach, and we will continue to discuss it in the coming days in various ways.

Arithmetic and geometry, indeed all mathematics, occupy a unique position in education. Education can only be filled with the necessary vitality and give rise to a real interplay between the soul of the teacher and the soul of the child, if the teacher fully realizes the consequences of his actions and methods. He must know exactly what effect is made on the child by the treatment he receives in school, or anywhere else.

Man is a being of body, soul and spirit; his bodily nature is formed and moulded by the spirit. The teacher, then, must always be aware of what is taking place in the soul and spirit when any change occurs in the body, and again, what effect is produced in the body when influences are brought to bear on the life of spirit or soul.

Anything that works upon the child's conceptual and imaginative faculties, anything that is to say of the nature of painting or drawing which is then led over into writing, or again, botany taught in the way indicated yesterday, all this has a definite effect. And here, above all, we must consider a higher member of man's being, a member to which I have already referred as the etheric body, or body of formative forces. The human being has, in the first place, his physical body. It is revealed to ordinary physical sense-perception. Besides this physical body, however, he has an inner organization, perceptible only to Imaginative Cognition, a super-sensible, etheric body. Again he has an organization perceptible only to Inspiration, the next stage of super-sensible knowledge. (These expressions need not confuse us; they are merely terms.) Inspiration gives insight into the so-called astral body and into the real Ego, the Self of the human being.

From birth till death, this etheric body, this body of formative forces which is the first super-sensible member of man's being never separates from the physical body. Only at death does this occur. During sleep, the etheric organization remains with the physical body lying there in bed. When man sleeps, the astral body and Ego-organization leave the physical and etheric bodies and enter them again at the moment of waking.

Now it is the physical and etheric bodies which are affected when the child is taught arithmetic or geometry, or when we lead him on to writing from the basis of drawing and painting. All this remains in the etheric body and its vibrations persist during sleep. On the other hand, history and such a study of the animal kingdom as I spoke of in yesterday's lecture work only upon the astral body and Ego-organization. What results from these studies passes out of the physical and etheric bodies into the spiritual world during sleep.

If, therefore, we are teaching the child plant-lore or writing, the effects are preserved by the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, whereas the results of history lessons or lessons on the nature of man are different, for they are carried out into the spiritual world by the Ego and astral body. This points to an essential difference between the effects produced by the different lessons.

We must realize that all impressions of an imaginative or pictorial nature made on the child have the tendency to become more and more perfect during sleep. On the other hand, everything we tell the child on the subject of history or the being of man works on his organization of soul and spirit and tends to be forgotten, to fade away and grow dim during sleep. In teaching therefore, we have necessarily to consider whether the subject-matter works upon the etheric and physical bodies or upon the astral body and Ego-organization.

Thus on the one hand, the study of the plant kingdom, the rudiments of writing and reading of which I spoke yesterday affect the physical and etheric bodies. (I shall speak about the teaching of history later on.) On the other hand, all that is learnt of man's relation to the animal kingdom affects the astral body and Ego-organization, those higher members which pass out of the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. But the remarkable thing is that arithmetic and geometry work upon both the physical-etheric and the astral and Ego. As regards their role in education arithmetic and geometry are really like a chameleon; by their very nature they are allied to every part of man's being. Whereas lessons on the plant and animal kingdoms should be given at a definite age, arithmetic and geometry must be taught throughout the whole period of childhood, though naturally in a form suited to the changing characteristics of the different life-periods.

It is all-important to remember that the body of formative forces, the etheric body, begins to function independently when it is abandoned by the Ego and astral body. By virtue of its own inherent forces, it has ever the tendency to bring to perfection and develop what has been brought to it. So far as our astral body and Ego are concerned, we are—stupid, shall I say? For instead of perfecting what has been conveyed to these members of our being, we make it less perfect. During sleep, however, our body of formative forces continues to calculate, continues all that it has received as arithmetic and the like. We ourselves are then no longer within the physical and etheric bodies; but supersensibly, they continue to calculate or to draw geometrical figures and perfect them. If we are aware of this fact and plan our teaching accordingly, great vitality can be generated in the being of the child. We must, however, make it possible for the body of formative forces to perfect and develop what it has previously received.

In geometry, therefore, we must not take as our starting point the abstractions and intellectual formulae that are usually considered the right groundwork. We must begin with inner, not outer perception, by stimulating in the child a strong sense of symmetry for instance.

Even in the case of the very youngest children we can begin to do this. For example: we draw some figure on the blackboard and indicate the beginning of the symmetrical line. Then we try to make the child realize that the figure is not complete; he himself must find out how to complete it. In this way we awaken an inner, active urge in the child to complete something as yet unfinished. This helps him to express an absolutely right conception of something that is a reality. The teacher, of course, must have inventive talent but that is always a very good thing. Above all else the teacher must have mobile, inventive thought.

When he has given these exercises for a certain time, he will proceed to others. For instance, he may draw some such figure as this (left) on the blackboard, and then he tries to awaken in the child an inner conception of its spatial proportions. The outer line is then varied and the child gradually learns to draw an inner form corresponding to the outer (right). In the one the curves are absolutely straightforward and simple. In the other, the lines curve outwards at various points. Then we should explain to the child that for the sake of inner symmetry

he must make in the inner figure an inward curve at the place where the lines curve outwards in the outer figure. In the first diagram a simple line corresponds to another simple line, whereas in the second, an inward curve corresponds to an outward curve.

Or again we draw something of this kind, where the figures together form a harmonious whole. We vary this by leaving the forms incomplete, so that the lines flow away from each other to infinity. It is as if the lines were running away and one would like to go with them. This leads to the idea that they should be bent inwards to regulate and complete the figure, and so on. I can only indicate the principle of the thing. Briefly, by working in this way, we give the child an idea of “a-symmetrical symmetries” and so prepare the body of formative forces in his waking life that during sleep it elaborates and perfects what has been absorbed during the day. Then the child will wake in an etheric body, and a physical body also, inwardly and organically vibrant. He will be full of life and vitality. This can, of course, only be achieved when the teacher has some knowledge of the working of the etheric body; if there is no such knowledge, all efforts in this direction will be mechanical and superficial.

A true teacher is not only concerned with the waking life but also with what takes place during sleep. In this connection it is important to understand certain things that happen to us all now and again. For instance, we may have pondered over some problem in the evening without finding a solution. In the morning we have solved the problem. Why? Because the etheric body, the body of formative forces, has continued its independent activity during the night.

In many respects waking life is not a perfecting but a disturbing process. It is necessary for us to leave our physical and etheric bodies to themselves for a time and not limit them by the activity of the astral body and Ego. This is proved by many things in life; for instance by the example already given of someone who is puzzling over a problem in the evening. When he wakes up in the morning he may feel slightly restless but suddenly finds that the solution has come to him unconsciously during the night. These things are not fables; they actually happen and have been proved as conclusively as many another experiment. What has happened in this particular case? The work of the etheric body has continued through the night and the human being has been asleep the whole time. You will say: “Yes, but that is not a normal occurrence, one cannot work on such a principle.” Be that as it may, it is possible to assist the continued activity of the etheric body during sleep, if, instead of beginning geometry with triangles and the like, where the intellectual element is already in evidence, we begin by conveying a concrete conception of space. In arithmetic, too, we must proceed in the same way. I will speak of this next.

A pamphlet on physics and mathematics written by Dr. von Baravalle (a teacher at the Waldorf School) will give you an excellent idea of how to bring concreteness into arithmetic and geometry. This whole mode of thought is extended in the pamphlet to the realm of physics as well, though it deals chiefly with higher mathematics. If we penetrate to its underlying essence, it is a splendid guide for teaching mathematics in a way that corresponds to the organic needs of the child's being. A starting-point has indeed been found for a reform in the method of teaching mathematics and physics from earliest childhood up to the highest stages of instruction. And we can apply to the domain of arithmetic what is said in this pamphlet about concrete conceptions of space.

Now the point is that everything conveyed in an external way to the child by arithmetic or even by counting deadens something in the human organism. To start from the single thing and add to it piece by piece is simply to deaden the organism of man. But if we first awaken a conception of the whole, starting from the whole and then proceeding to its parts, the organism is vitalised. This must be borne in mind even when the child is learning to count. As a rule we learn to count by being made to observe purely external things—things of material, physical life.

First we have the 1—we call this Unity. Then 2, 3, 4, and so forth, are added, unit by unit, and we have no idea whatever why the one follows the other, nor of what happens in the end. We are taught to count by being shown an arbitrary juxtaposition of units. I am well aware that there are many different methods of teaching children to count, but very little attention is paid nowadays to the principle of starting from the whole and then proceeding to the parts. Unity it is which first of all must be grasped as the whole and by the child as well. Anything whatever can be this Unity. Here we are obliged to illustrate it in a drawing. We must therefore draw a line; but we could use an apple just as well to show what I shall now show with a line.

This then is 1. And now we go on from the whole to the parts, or members. Here then we have made of the 1 a 2, but the 1 still remains. The unit has been divided into two. Thus we arrive at the 2. And now we go on. By a further partition the 3 comes into being, but the unit always remains as the all-embracing whole. Then we go on through the 4, 5, and so on. Moreover, at the same time and by other means we can give an idea of the extent to which it is possible to hold together in the mind the things that relate to number and we shall discover how really limited man is in his power of mental presentation where number is concerned.

In certain nations to-day the concept of number that is clearly held in the mind's eye only goes up to 10. Here in this country money is reckoned up to 12. But that really represents the maximum of what is mentally visualised for in reality we then begin over again and in fact count what has been counted. We first count up to 10, then we begin counting the tens, 2 times 10=20, 3 times 10=30. Here we are no longer considering the things themselves. We begin to calculate by using number itself, whereas the more elementary concept requires the things themselves to be clearly present in the mind.

We are very proud of the fact that we are far advanced in our methods of counting compared with primitive peoples who depend on their ten fingers. But there is little foundation for this pride. We count up to 10 because we sense our hands as members. We feel our two hands symmetrically with their 10 fingers. This feeling also arises and is inwardly experienced by the child, and we must call forth the sense of number by a transition from the whole to the parts. Then we shall easily find the other transition which leads us to the counting in which one is added to another. Eventually, of course, we can pass on to the ordinary 1, 2, 3, etc. But this mere adding of one or more units must only be introduced as a second stage, for it has significance only here in physical space, whereas to divide a unity into its members has an inner significance such that it can continue to vibrate in the etheric body even though quite beneath our consciousness. It is important to know these things.

Having taught the child to count in this way, the following will also be important. We must not pass on to addition in a lifeless, mechanical way merely adding one item to another in series. Life comes into the thing when we take our start not from the parts of the addition sum but from the sum total itself. We take a number of objects; for example, a number of little balls. We have now got far enough in counting to be able to say: Here are 14 balls. Now we divide them, extending this concept of a part still further. Here we have 5, here 4, here 5 again. Thus we have separated the sum into 5 and 4 and 5. That is, we go from the sum to the items composing it, from the whole to the parts. The method we should use with the child is first to set down the sum before him and then let the child himself perceive how the given sum can be divided into several items.

This is exceedingly important. Just as to drive a horse we do not harness him tail foremost, so in the teaching of arithmetic we must have the right direction. We must start from a whole which is always actually present, from a reality, from what is present as a whole and then pass on to the separate parts; later, we find our way to the ordinary addition sum.

Continuing thus, from the living whole to the separate parts, one touches the reality underlying all arithmetical calculations: i.e., the setting in vibration of the body of formative forces. This body needs a living stimulus for its formative activity and once energised it will continually perfect the vibrations without the need of drawing upon the astral body and Ego-organization with their disturbing elements.

Your teaching work will also be essentially enhanced and vivified if you similarly reverse the other simple forms of calculation. To-day, one might say, they are standing on their heads and must be reversed. Try, for instance, to bring the child to say: “If I have 7, how much must I take away to get 3,” instead of “What remains over if I take 4 from 7?” That we have 7 is the real thing and that 3 remains is also real; how much must we take away from 7 to get 3? Beginning with this form of thought we stand in the midst of life, whereas with the opposite form we are dealing with abstractions. Proceeding in this way, we can easily find our way further. Thus, once more, in multiplication and division we should not ask what will result when we divide 10 into two parts, but how must we divide 10 to get the number 5. The real aspect is given; moreover in life we want eventually to get at something which has real significance. Here are two children, 10 apples are to be divided among them. Each of them is to get 5. These are the realities. What we have to deal with is the abstract part that comes in the middle. Done in this way, things are always immediately adapted to life and should we succeed in this, the result will be that what is the usual, purely external way of adding, by counting up one thing after another with a deadening effect upon the arithmetic lessons, will become a vivifying force, of especial importance in this branch of our educational work. And it is evident that precisely by this method we take into account the sub-conscious in man, that is, the part which works on during sleep and which also works subconsciously during the waking hours. For one is aware of a small part only of the soul's experience; nevertheless the rest is continually active. Let us make it possible for the physical and etheric bodies of the child to work in a healthy way, realizing that we can only do so if we bring an intense life, an awakened interest and attention, especially into our teaching of arithmetic and geometry.

The question has arisen during this Conference as to whether it is really a good thing to continue the different lessons for certain periods of time as we do in the Waldorf School. Now a right division of the lessons into periods is fruitful in the very highest degree. “Period” teaching means that one lesson shall not perpetually encroach upon another. Instead of having timetables setting forth definite hours:—8 – 9, arithmetic, 9 – 10, history, religion, or whatever it may be, we give one main lesson on the same subject for two hours every morning for a period of three, four, or five weeks. Then for perhaps five or six weeks we pass on to another subject, but one which in my view should develop out of the other, and which is always the same during the two hours. The child thus concentrates upon a definite subject for some weeks.

The question was asked whether too much would not be forgotten, whether in this way the children would not lose what they had been taught. If the lessons have been rightly given, however, the previous subject will go on working in the subconscious regions while another is being taken. In “period” lessons we must always reckon with the subconscious processes in the child. There is nothing more fruitful than to allow the results of the teaching given during a period of three or four weeks to rest within the soul and so work on in the human being without interference.

It will soon be apparent that when a subject has been rightly taught and the time comes round for taking it up again for a further period it emerges in a different form from what it does when it has not been well taught. To make the objection that because the subjects will be forgotten it cannot be right to teach in this way, is to ignore the factors that are at work. We must naturally reckon on being able to forget, for just think of all we should have to carry about in our heads if we could not forget and then remember again! The part played by the fact of forgetting therefore as well as the actual instruction must be reckoned with in true education.

This does not mean that it should be a matter for rejoicing whenever children forget. That may safely be left to them! Everything depends on what has so passed down into the subconscious regions, that it can be duly recalled. The unconscious belongs to the being of man as well as the conscious. In regard to all these matters we must realize that it is the task of education to appeal not only to the whole human being, but also to his different parts and members. Here again it is essential to start from the whole; there must first be comprehension of the whole and then of the parts. But to this end it is also necessary to take one's start from the whole. First we must grasp the whole and then the parts. If in counting we simply place one thing beside another, and add, and add, and add, we are leaving out the human being as a whole. But we do appeal to the whole human being when we lay hold of Unity and go from that to Numbers, when we lay hold of the sum, the minuend, the product and thence pass on to the parts.

The teaching of history is very open to the danger of our losing sight of the human being. We have seen that in really fruitful education everything must be given its right place. The plants must be studied in their connection with the earth and the different animal species in their connection with man. Whatever the subject-matter, the concrete human element must be retained; everything must be related in some way to man.

But when we begin to teach the child history, we must understand that at the age when it is quite possible for him to realize the connection of plant-life with the earth and the earth itself as an organism, when he can see in the human being a living synthesis of the whole animal kingdom, he is still unable to form any idea of so-called causal connections in history. We may teach history very skilfully in the ordinary sense, describing one epoch after another and showing how the first is the cause of the second; we may describe how in the history of art, Michelangelo followed Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, in a natural sequence of cause and effect. But before the age of twelve, the child has no understanding for the working of cause and effect, a principle which has become conventional in more advanced studies. To deduce the later from the earlier seems to him like so much unmusical strumming on a piano, and it is only by dint of coercion that he will take it in at all. It has the same effect on his soul as a piece of stone that is swallowed and passes into the stomach. Just as we would never dream of giving the stomach a stone instead of bread, so we must make sure that we nourish the soul not with stones but with food that it can assimilate. And so history too, must be brought into connection with Man and to that end our first care must be to awaken a conception of the historical sequence of time in connection with the human being.

Let us take three history books, the first dealing with antiquity, the second with the Middle Ages, and the third with our modern age. As a rule, little attention is paid to the conception of time in itself. But suppose I begin by saying to the child: “You are now ten years old, so you were alive in the year 1913. Your father is much older than you and he was alive in the year 1890; his father, again, was alive in 1850. Now imagine that you are standing here and stretching your arm back to someone who represents your father; he stretches his arm back to his father (your grandfather), now you have reached the year 1850.” The child then begins to realize that approximately one century is represented by three or four generations. The line of generations running backwards from the twentieth century brings him finally to his very early ancestors. Thus the sixtieth generation back leads into the epoch of the birth of Christ. In a large room it will be possible to arrange some sixty children standing in a line, stretching an arm backwards to each other. Space is, as it were, changed into time.

If the teacher has a fertile, inventive mind, he can find other ways and means of expressing the same thing—I am merely indicating a principle. In this way the child begins to realize that he himself is part of history; figures like Alfred the Great, Cromwell and others are made to appear as if they themselves were ancestors. The whole of history thus becomes an actual part of life at school when it is presented to the child in the form of a living conception of time.

History must never be separated from the human being. The child must not think of it as so much book-lore. Many people seem to think that history is something contained in books, although of course it is not always quite as bad as that. At all events, we must try by every possible means to awaken a realization that history is a living process and that man himself stands within its stream.

When a true conception of time has been awakened, we can begin to imbue history with inner life and soul, just as we did in the case of arithmetic and geometry, by unfolding not a dead but a living perception. There is a great deal of quibbling to-day about the nature of perception, but the whole point is that we must unfold living and not dead perception. In the symmetry-exercises of which I spoke, the soul actually lives in the act of perception. That is living perception. Just as our aim is to awaken a living perception of space, so must all healthy teaching of history given to a child between the ages of nine and twelve be filled with an element proceeding in this case not from the qualities of space, but from the qualities of heart and soul.

The history lessons must be permeated through and through with a quality proceeding from the heart. And so we must present it as far as possible in the form of pictures. Figures, real forms must stand there and they must never be described in a cold, prosaic way. Without falling into the error of using them as examples for moral or religious admonition, our descriptions must nevertheless be coloured with both morality and religion. History must above all lay hold of the child's life of feeling and will. He must be able to enter into a personal relationship with historic figures and with the modes of life prevailing in the various historical epochs. Nor need we confine ourselves merely to descriptions of human beings. We may, for instance, describe the life of some town in the twelfth century, but everything we say must enter the domains of feeling and will in the child. He must himself be able to live in the events, to form his own sympathies and antipathies. His life of feeling and will must be stimulated.

This will show you that the element of art must everywhere enter into the teaching of history. The element of art comes into play when, as I often describe it, a true economy is exercised in teaching. This economy can be exercised if the teacher has thoroughly mastered his subject-matter before he goes into the classroom; if it is no longer necessary for him to ponder over anything because if rightly prepared it is there plastically before his soul. He must be so well prepared that the only thing still to be done is the artistic moulding of his lesson. The problem of teaching is thus not merely a question of the pupil's interest and diligence, but first and foremost of the teacher's interest, diligence and sincerity.

No lesson should be given that has not previously been a matter of deep experience on the part of the teacher. Obviously, therefore, the organization of the body of teachers must be such that every teacher is given ample time to make himself completely master of the lessons he has to give.

It is a dreadful thing to see a teacher walking round the desks with a book in his hands, still wrestling with the subject-matter. Those who do not realize how contrary such a thing is to all true principles of education do not know what is going on unconsciously in the souls of the children, nor do they realize the terrible effect of this unconscious experience. If we give history lessons in school from note-books, the child comes to a certain definite conclusion, not consciously, but unconsciously. It is an unconscious, intellectual conclusion, but it is deeply rooted in his organism: “Why should I learn all these things? The teacher himself doesn't know them, for he has to read from notes. I can do that too, later on, so there is no need for me to learn them first.” The child does not of course come to this conclusion consciously, but as a matter of fact when judgments are rooted in the unconscious life of heart and mind, they have all the greater force. The lessons must pulsate with inner vitality and freshness proceeding from the teacher's own being. When he is describing historical figures for instance the teacher should not first of all have to verify dates. I have already spoken of the way in which we should convey a conception of time by a picture of successive generations. Another element too must pervade the teaching of history. It must flow forth from the teacher himself. Nothing must be abstract; the teacher himself as a human being must be the vital factor.

It has been said many times that education should work upon the being of man as a whole and not merely on one part of his nature. Important as it is to consider what the child ought to learn and whether we are primarily concerned with his intellect or his will, the question of the teacher's influence is equally important. Since it is a matter of educating the whole nature and being of man, the teacher must himself be “man” in the full sense of the word, that is to say, not one who teaches and works on the basis of mechanical memory or mechanical knowledge, but who teaches out of his own being, his full manhood. That is the essential thing.

The Etheric Body

[ 1 ] When higher members of man's nature are observed by supersensible perception, the perception is never exactly similar to one that is given by the outer senses. When by the touch of an object we have a sensation of heat or warmth, a distinction must surely be made between what comes from the object—streaming from it, so to speak—and what our soul experiences. The inner experience of the sensation of heat is not the same thing as the heat emitted by the object. Now think of this actual experience in the soul, without the object; think of the soul's experience of the sensation of warmth, without any outer physical object being there to cause it. If such an experience arose without any cause, it would be mere fancy. The student of spiritual science has such inner perceptions for which there is no physical cause, above all no cause attributable to his own body. But at a certain stage of development, from the way in which these perceptions appear, he can know by the very nature of the experience (as was explained in an earlier chapter) that the inner perception is no mere fancy but is due to a being of soul and spirit belonging to a supersensible outer world, just as the ordinary sensation of heat, for example, is due to some physical object.

It is the same with a perception of color. A distinction must be made between the color of the object and the soul's inner experience of the color. Now think of what the soul experiences when perceiving a red object in the physical world. Let us picture to ourselves that we retain a vivid memory of the impression but look away from the object. The memory-picture of the color is an inner experience; we can distinguish between the inner experience evoked by the color and the external color as such. These inner experiences are substantially different from the immediate outer sense-impressions. They bear much more the stamp of feelings of pain or joy than do our normal and immediate sensations. We have to picture an inner experience of this kind arising in the soul without being caused either by an outer, physical object, or by the memory of such an object. Such an experience may come to someone who is on the way to attaining supersensible knowledge. Moreover he will be able to know in a given case that it is no mere figment of the mind, but that a real being of soul and spirit finds expression in it. And if evoking the same impression as a red object of the physical world, the being may be said to be “red.” With a physical object, however, the outer impression will always come first and be followed by the inner experience. In true supersensible vision, for a human being of the present epoch, the process must be the reverse; first the inner experience—shadowy, like a mere memory of color—and then a living picture, growing ever more vivid. Unless it is realized that such must be the sequence, it will be hard to distinguish between genuine spiritual perception and the delusions of fancy (hallucinations, and the like.)

Whether in a spiritual perception of this kind, the picture becomes truly vivid and alive—whether it remains shadowy, like a dim inkling, or its effect grows as intensely real as that of an outer object—depends upon the stage of development which the aspirant has reached.

The general impression which the seer has of the ether-body of man may now be described as follows. If the aspirant for supersensible knowledge has developed such strength of will that even when a physical man is standing in front of him he can turn his attention right away from what is seen by the physical eyes, he will be able to look with supersensible consciousness into the space occupied by the physical man. Naturally, will-power must e greatly enhanced before it is possible to divert attention not only from what is in one's own mind but from something with which one is actually confronted, so that the physical impression is entirely obliterated. But such enhancement of the will is possible and is achieved by means of the exercises for the attainment of supersensible cognition. It is then possible for the student to have, to begin with, a general impression of the ether-body. There arises in his soul the same inner experience which he has at the sight, let us say, of the color of a peach-blossom; this experience then becomes vividly alive, and he can say: the ether-body has a “peach-blossom” color. Then he perceives the several organs and currents of the ether-body. But the ether-body can also be described in terms of other experiences of the soul—experiences which correspond to sensations of warmth, impressions of sound, and so on, for it is not only a color-phenomenon. Moreover the astral body and other members of man's being can be described in like manner. Bearing in mind what has here been said, it will be realized how the descriptions of spiritual science are to be understood. (Compare Chapter II.)

The Astral World

[ 2 ] As long as the physical world alone is being observed, the Earth—man's dwelling place—appears as a separate heavenly body. When supersensible cognition rises to other spheres, there is no longer this separation. Hence it was possible to say that together with the Earth, Imaginative consciousness perceives the Old Moon condition, such as it has become up to the present time. The world thus entered is one to which not only the supersensible nature of the Earth belongs; other heavenly bodies, physically separated from the Earth, are part of it as well. In that realm the knower of supersensible worlds observes the supersensible nature not only of the Earth but of other heavenly bodies too. (It is, once more, the supersensible nature of other heavenly bodies which he observes to begin with. This should be borne in mind by those who feel impelled to ask why the seer does not tell us what it looks like on Mars, and so on. In putting questions of this kind they think of physical and sense-perceptible conditions.) Hence in the course of this book it was also possible to speak of relationships obtaining between the evolution taking place on Earth and simultaneous evolutions on Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and so on. When man's astral body is drawn away in sleep it belongs not only to the Earth and earthly conditions, but to worlds in which other cosmic realms—stellar worlds—participate. Moreover, these worlds permeate into man's astral body even in the waking state. Therefore the term “astral body” appears justified.

Man's Life After Death

[ 3 ] Reference has been made in the course of this book to the period of time during which the astral body remains united with the ether-body after a man's death. A gradually fading memory of the whole of the life just ended is present throughout this time (see Chapter III.) It varies in duration with different individuals, depending upon the tenacity with which the astral body holds the ether-body to itself—in other words, the power which the astral body has over the etheric. Supersensible cognition can get an impression of this power by observing a human being who, by the state of his soul and body, ought really to be sleeping but keeps himself awake by sheer inner strength. It becomes evident that different people can, if need be, remain awake without being overcome by sleep for different periods of time. The memory of the life just ended—which means that the connection with the etheric body is still maintained—lasts for about as long after death as the extreme length of time for which, if compelled to do so, the individual would have been able to stay awake.

When the ether-body is detached from the human being after death (see Chapter III,) something that may be described as a kind of extract or quintessence of it remains for the whole of his future evolution. This extract contains the fruits of the past life. It is the bearer of the “seed” of his coming life—the seed which is developing throughout man's spiritual evolution between death and a new birth.

[ 4 ] The length of time between death and a new birth is determined by the fact that as a rule the I of man returns into the physical world only when this world has been so transformed as to give opportunity for new experiences. While the Ego is in the spiritual worlds, man's earthly dwelling-place is changing. In one respect this change is connected with the changes that are taking place in the great Universe—changes for example, in the relative position of the Earth to the Sun. Periodic changes involving cosmic repetitions are connected with the development of new conditions on the Earth. They find expression, for example, in the fact that the region of the heavens where the Sun rises at the vernal equinox makes an entire circuit in about 26,000 years. Throughout this period of the vernal point has therefore been moving from one region of the heavens to another, and in a twelfth of this period of time—that is to say, in about 2,100 years—conditions on the Earth will have altered sufficiently for the soul to be able to have essentially new experiences upon Earth. Moreover as these experiences differ according to whether one is incarnating as a woman or as a man, two incarnations will as a rule take place during this time—one as a man, one as a woman. However, these things also depend upon the forces gathered during earthly life—forces the individual takes with him through the gate of death. Therefore all such indications as have been given here are only valid in the most general sense; there will be many and manifold individual variations.

Thus it is only in one respect that the length of the human Ego's sojourn in the spiritual world between death and new birth depends upon the above-mentioned cosmic data. In another respect it will depend upon the stages of the evolution through which the human being passes in the spiritual world. After a time this very evolution brings the I of man into a spiritual condition where he no longer finds sufficiency in the inner experiences of the Spirit. He beings to long for that altered consciousness which is reflected in physical experience and derives satisfaction from this reflection. The re-entry of the human being into earthly life is an outcome of these two factors: the inner thirst of the soul for incarnation, and the cosmically given possibility of finding a suitable bodily nature. Two factors therefore have to work in conjunction. Hence in one instance incarnation may result even before the “thirst” has reached its full intensity, a well-adapted incarnation being within reach; while in another it may have to wait till the thirst has outlived its normal culmination, since at the proper time no opportunity to incarnate was given. In so far as it is due to the whole character and quality of his bodily constitution, a man's prevailing mood and attunement to life will also be the outcome of these conditions.

The Stages of Man's Life

[ 5 ] Fully to understand the life of man and its successive stages between birth and death, it is not enough to consider only the physical body as seen by the outer senses. It is essential also to take into account the changes undergone by the supersensible members of man's nature. They are as follows. At physical birth man is released from the physical integument of the maternal womb. Forces hitherto shared by the human embryo with the mother's body must from now on be functioning independently in the body of the little child. Now the fact is that for supersensible perception other events of this kind are undergone in the further course of life—supersensible events, analogous to that of physical birth as seen by the outer senses. For his etheric body man is enveloped by an ethereal sheath—an etheric integument—until about the change of teeth, the sixth or seventh year, when the etheric integument falls away. This event represents the “birth” of the etheric body. After it man is still enveloped by an astral sheath, which falls away at the age of puberty—between the 12^th and 16^th year. The astral body in its turn is “born.” Then at an even later point of time the I is born. (The very helpful educational points of view arising from these supersensible realities are set forth in my booklet The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science, where the facts briefly indicated here are described in greater detail.)

With the birth of the I, man's adult life begins. With the three members of the soul (Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul and Spiritual Soul) progressively awakened and activated by the I, he finds his proper place in life amid the prevailing world-conditions, to which he makes his own active contribution. At length however there comes a time when the etheric body begins to decline, reversing the development it enjoyed from the seventh year onward. There is a change in the functioning of the astral body. To start with it unfolded the potentialities brought with it from the spiritual world at birth. After the birth of the Ego it was enriched by all the experiences coming to it from the outer world. But now the moment comes when in a spiritual sense the astral body begins to feed on its own etheric body. It draws on the etheric body and consumes it. And in the further course of life the etheric body in its turn begins to draw upon the physical body and consume it. There facts are closely related to the physical body's degeneration in old age.

The life of man is thereby naturally divided into three epochs. First is the time during which the physical and etheric bodies grow and develop. In the middle period the astral body and the I come into their own. The third and last is the period of bodily decline when the youthful development of the etheric and physical bodies is in a sense reversed. Now in all these events—from birth until death—the astral body is concerned. Moreover inasmuch as it is not spiritually born until the 12^th to 16^th year, and in the final epoch is obliged to draw upon the forces of the etheric and physical bodies, what the astral body has to achieve by virtue of its own faculties and forces unfolds at a slower rate than it would do if it were not inhabiting a physical and etheric body. Hence after death (as explained in Chapter III,) when the physical and etheric bodies have been cast off, the evolution of the astral body through the “time of purification” takes about a third as long as the past life between birth and death.

Higher Regions of the Spiritual World

[ 6 ] Through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition supersensible cognition gradually reaches up into the regions of the spiritual world where it can apprehend the Beings who participate in the evolution of the World and Man. There too it can perceive and, in perceiving, find intelligible the life of man between death and a new birth. Now there are even higher regions of existence, though we can do no more than briefly allude to them here.

>Having once risen to the stage of Intuition, supersensible cognition lives and moves amid a world of spiritual Beings. But the spiritual Beings too are evolving. The concerns of present-day mankind reach up, as it were, into the spiritual realm accessible to Intuition. True, in the course of his development between death and a new birth man receives influences from yet higher worlds, but he does not experience them directly; the Beings of the spiritual world convey them to him. In the Intuitive contemplation of these Beings we perceive all that they are doing in and on behalf of man. Their own concerns however—what they require for themselves to enable them to guide human evolution—can only be apprehended by forms of cognition higher than Intuition.

In saying this we refer to worlds among those lower functions are the highest that are known to us on Earth. Reasoned resolves for example are among the highest things on Earth; the actions and reactions of the mineral kingdom among the lowest. For the sublime worlds to which we are now referring, reasoned resolves have approximately the same value as have the mineral reactions on Earth. Beyond the realm of Intuition is the region where the great cosmic plan is being woven out of purely spiritual causes.

The Members of Man's Being

[ 7 ] Toward the end of Chapter II it was described how the I or Ego works upon the members of man's being to transform them—the astral body into Spirit-Self, the etheric body into Life-Spirit, the physical body into Spirit-Man. This was in reference to the working of the Go on man's nature by virtue of the highest faculties—faculties, the development of which has only been beginning during the successive stages of Earthly evolution. Now there is also a preliminary transformation on a lower level, whereby the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual or Mind-Soul and the Spiritual Soul are developed. AS in the course of man's evolution the Sentient Soul comes into being, far-reaching changes are going on in the astral body. So too the development of the Intellectual Soul and of the Spiritual Soul involves a transmutation of the ether-body and of the physical body respectively. Much of this was incidentally described in the chapter on the evolution of the Earth.

Thus in a sense it is true to day that the Sentient Soul is due to a transmuted astral body, the Intellectual Soul to a transmuted ether-body, and the Spiritual Soul to a transmuted physical body. But it may equally well be said that all three members of the soul are part and parcel of the astral body. The Spiritual Soul, for example, can only come into being as an astral entity in an appropriate physical body. It lives an astral life in a physical body molded and worked upon to be its proper habitation.

The State of Consciousness In Dreaming

[ 8 ] In some respects the dream has been described in the third chapter of this book. Dream-consciousness is on the one hand a relic of the picture-consciousness which man enjoyed on the Old Moon, and -for a long time too—in former periods of Earth evolution. Earlier conditions generally go on working even while evolution is advancing to fresh stages. Dreaming is thus a relic of the normal state of consciousness of former times. And yet the dream-condition of today differs essentially from the old picture-consciousness, for the Ego, which has since developed, influences what goes on in the astral body during sleep while we are dreaming. It is therefore a picture-consciousness transmuted by the presence of the Ego. Yet inasmuch as the Ego's influence on the dreaming astral body is unconscious, nothing deriving from the dream-life can be a direct source of spiritual-scientific knowledge of higher worlds. The same applied to what is often spoken of as visions, premonitions and second sight. In all of these the Ego is more or less eliminated, in consequence of which, relics of earlier states of consciousness can supervene. They have no direct spiritual-scientific application; what man perceives in such conditions cannot be included among the valid researches of true spiritual science.

The Way to Supersensible Cognition

[ 9 ] The way to the attainment of knowledge of higher worlds, of which a fairly detailed account has been given in this book, may be described as the “direct path” of knowledge. There is also another way, known as “the path of feeling.” Not that the former way leaves feeling undeveloped; quite on the contrary, it leads to an immeasurable deepening of the life of feeling. But the other path—the “path of feeling”—appeals to the feeling-life directly, seeking to rise from thence to detailed spiritual knowledge. The fact is that a feeling to which a man unreservedly devotes his inner life for a sufficient length of time becomes transformed of its own accord into cognition—into Imaginative vision. If, for example, the soul is deliberately steeped for weeks and months or even longer in feelings of humility, the feeling-content is transformed into spiritual perception. A gradual ascent through this and other feelings of this kind can thus become a pathway into the supersensible. But it is very difficult to carry out in ordinary present-day surroundings. Seclusion—withdrawal from the prevailing conditions especially of modern life—is well-nigh indispensable for this spiritual pathway. For above all in the initial stages, the impressions one is constantly receiving from everyday life in our time disturb and interfere with what the soul would otherwise achieve by dwelling on deliberately chosen feelings. The path of knowledge here described is different; it can be carried through no matter what one's situation is amid the typical conditions of our time.

The Observation of Particular Events and Beings

[ 10 ] It may be asked whether by meditation, contemplation and kindred methods of attaining supersensible cognition described in this book, we arrive at the general realities—say, of the life between death and rebirth, and other spiritual facts—or whether we are also enabled to perceive particular events and beings, for example an individual human soul after death. The answer is that one who has thus acquired the ability to see into the spiritual world also becomes able to perceive in detail what is going on there. He does indeed become capable of communication with individuals living in the spiritual world between death and new birth. But in accordance with true spiritual science it can only be done after a regular and proper training has been undergone, for this alone makes it possible to distinguish truth from illusion as to the several beings and events. Those who would claim to recognize the spiritual details, without have undergone a proper training are liable to countless illusions. Even the most elementary requirement, namely the true interpretation of the impressions one receives, presupposes spiritual training—training the more advanced where the impressions relate to detailed facts and individual beings.

Thus the same training which enables one to see the facts of higher worlds described in this work on Occult Science, also enables one to perceive an individual human soul during his life after death, or severally to observe and understand the diverse spiritual beings who influence the manifest from hidden worlds. Yet the reliable observation of the particular is only possible against the background of a more universal knowledge—namely a spiritual knowledge of the great facts of the Universe and Man, facts which relate to all mankind in common. Craving the former without the latter, one will go astray. In observation of the spiritual world it is an unavoidable experience. Into the very regions for which a man is most apt to long, entry is only granted when he has gone along the stern and exacting path of knowledge, where interest is focused upon universal questions and he gains insight into the deeper meaning of all life.

When he has walked along these paths in the sincere and unselfish quest of knowledge, then and then only is a man fit to observe the details, the premature exploration of which would but have satisfied in him a hidden egoism. For in the longing to see into the spiritual world it is only too easy to persuade oneself that one is actuated by pure love—such as the love of an individual friend who has died. Unalloyed insight into the single facts and beings is only possible for those whose sincere interest in the universal truths of spiritual science enables them to receive the detailed revelations too in a scientific spirit and without selfish longing.

We saw last time that the initiatory process is the antithesis of the great world doctrines of the origin of the cosmos in the spiritual sense, and that there is a strict correspondence between the small and the great world, so that we can almost see how the images of Genesis, which have to do with cosmological views, with contemplations of the universe, recur in the history of the Redeemer.

The personality of Christ is to be placed at the center in such a decisive way that it was not only a consequence of the Messiah-consciousness of Christ himself, but that it was also something that lay in the whole time at that time. The whole time had the need to place a personality, a person reborn on the heights of spiritual development, at the center of the whole world view, so that there was a profound need not only among those who founded Christianity, but also in the spirit of the time, not only in the expectation of the Messiah among the Jewish people, but also among the pagan peoples. So there was also an urge to come face to face with this personality, to see him. We see that one or the other could be mistaken for him. Paganism virtually created a counter-image in Apollonius of Tyana. He is perhaps as interesting a figure in paganism as Socrates, Plato and so on. But he still has a special interest in that a pagan-human deity was to be tendentiously created, which was to be contrasted with Christ. There is, however, a clear difference between the world of thought associated with Christ and that associated with Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius is seen more as a man loved by God. Basically, it is the same view that emerged from the Jewish consciousness. I would say, from the pagan point of view, while the deity is emphasized more in Christ, in Apollonius it is said more that he is a man who has come to divinity, a man loved by God, not a god.

And this man loved by God appears to us only as a later development of Socrates, of Plato. [Just as Plato had a special relationship with the god of medicine, Asclepius, the son of Apollo, so did Apollonius:] He was a healer, a sage, and likewise prophecy is said to have been one of his gifts. These ideas were formed from Pythagorean ideas. Just as these live on in the people, following in secret, mystical connection, Apollonius was imagined to be the reborn Plato, a savior.

We are told of Apollonius that he traveled far and wide, seeking less to enrich his own wisdom - which was available to him as he was at a higher stage of reincarnation - than to connect the various religions through a spiritual bond. A cosmopolitan [religion-uniting activity] is attributed to him. He is said to have been with the Indians, Persian magicians and Egyptian priests. Among the Indian sages he was immediately recognized as a deified personality. We are also told that he got to know the Egyptian religion in its various forms, but that he was able to tell the Egyptian priests more than they could tell him. He was able to tell them that they should have their religious ideas about India. He was able to show them their own in the Indian. Thus we see how Apollonius endeavored to see the common ground in the various religions, and so he appears to us at this time as the bearer of a real theosophical striving. He set himself the task of searching for the common ground in all religions. Therefore, when we delve into his teaching, it appears to us as an extract from all the religious teachings existing at that time. He had collected the extract from all of them. It is also a mature teaching. The idea of reincarnation appears to us to have been fertilized in the old Pythagorean sense.

He speaks of the popular religions as an external symbol of what it is really supposed to be. Apollonius draws attention to a very important idea that he can only have drawn from pagan mysticism. He draws attention to the fact that in the various acts of worship performed with the mystic, we are not only dealing with events that represent the world process, but that we are also dealing with the representation of phenomena of nature in symbolic acts. Apollonius therefore presents us with a highly important concept that leads us into the relationship that exists between Christianity and the time. He shows that everything we can see around us and also what is in the starry sky, the stars, can be regarded as a symbol, that all this is nothing other than a symbol of spiritual processes that dominate the world cosmos. Those who heard my lecture on Goethe's "Faust" the day before yesterday will remember that something similar was said there: Everything external, "everything transient is only a parable". This is what Apollonius says. But it is the common view of the entire age at that time.

I must draw attention here to a misunderstanding which consists in the belief that this great symbolism between the small and the great world, between man and the small world occurrences and the great world mysteries is a product of the imagination. In our nineteenth century this doctrine has developed. We see in the popular religions the fairy tale that creates religion, the imagination that creates religion, which personifies the processes [in nature] in the circle of air, lightning, thunder and so on in manifold ways and forms gods for itself. The laws that the stars obey are seen as the expression of a divine-spiritual world order. But within the actual priestly theosophy there was the conviction that when the sun is followed as it moves across the celestial vault, it is not only the process of moving across the celestial vault that is to be seen. This process is only a symbol for the process taking place behind it. That which the popular imagination originally possessed in an exoteric way was later taught as a symbol by the priest. But he saw in the laws - we know that there was a highly developed astronomy in the Assyrian empire - he did not see in the laws the dry naturalistic law, he saw in them the language of the deity, only a symbol for the deeper spiritual process.

For Apollonius of Tyana, the subordinate folk symbolism was only one stage. The initiate was later given a higher parable. David Friedrich Strauss, Darwin and so on were wrong in saying that the imagination [of the people] had imagined the lightning passing through the clouds as a divine fact, that it had then progressed from that to the gods, to the god Zeus and so on. But these were only ideas of the imagination, of popular mythology. In this way they have stripped away everything religious. The [scientific] truth has taken its place. But this matter has never been represented [in this way] within the mystical teachings. Even if there was an ascent from [the ideas of] popular religion to the scientific investigation of the course of the stars, the divine was first sought behind the phenomena. Not that which man absorbed within himself was to be a symbol for the external process, no, just the opposite. The whole of nature itself became a parable. In the mysticism of those centuries we have to do with exactly the opposite of what the materialistic scholars of the nineteenth century imagine. They believe that what the ancients thought up was only a parable. No, it is just the opposite. The scientific idea is only a parable for what lies behind it.

Oriental scholars knew that Christianity drew from the same source as they did. They therefore long regarded Christianity only as a Persian sect.

However, this whole context of the theosophical doctrine of the whole world as a parable for the eternal divine [...] confronts us clearly and particularly deeply in the Apocalypse, which is nothing other than an interpretation of the older mysteries in Christian terms.

But first I have to say something in advance. I said that the whole of external nature was regarded as a parable, as was the case with Assyrian-Babylonian or Persian scholars. They had a precise idea of the laws to be observed in the course of the stars. This will also be clear to other circles because you have heard Professor Delitzsch's lecture on "Babel and the Bible". I could have started from Asian ideas, you find the same thing everywhere. If science now unearths things of which Theosophy must claim otherwise for other reasons, we will nevertheless see confirmation through the excavations of Babylonian antiquities. One finds the results of the excavations compiled in an easy and fine manner by this Professor Delitzsch. I said that from Oriental priestly religions a part of the views emerged which regarded nature as a parable for the eternal divine. You can understand this if you look at the oriental religions. The Egyptians attached more importance to great monuments and laid them down on the outside, while the Orientals sought the parable more in the [theoretical].

When we follow the literature of the pagan writers, we see how the awareness becomes clearer and clearer that in the teachings of astronomy we are dealing with a language for the eternal word of the gods in the world. I only wish to draw attention to a few facts which will make the whole matter clearer. [In the writer Apollonius of Rhodes], then also in Plutarch - although there only sparsely - one finds precise references to this and to the world of legends - such as the legend of Heracles, the legend of the Golden Fleece - and so on, which I have already dealt with earlier. But we can also see from their writers that these legends also presented themselves to the first Christians in such a way that they concealed great world truths.

We see that the sun, in its annual course, in its annual movement, is a symbol of the eternally changing, sinking and renewing world. Given the brevity of time, I can only hint at what the main point is. It is not without reason that the twelve labors of Heracles have been related to the twelve constellations of the zodiac. It is a repetition of what happens in the sky above. The upper and lower correspond to each other.

When we follow these views, we find that great importance is attached to the fact that the sun, the god of light, was worshipped with the annual arrival of spring - just as in theosophy, which sees light symbolized in the sun and truth in the light. It was not the sun itself that was worshipped, but the sun was only a symbol. With the rejuvenating sun, it was seen as a symbol of eternally reborn nature, of spiritual rebirth, of the God who renews himself again and again.

What the Egyptians saw in the firmament is also seen in the sun renewing itself in spring. And the fact that the sun [in spring] is in the sign of the lamb, the ram, means that the sun gains power in the world order through the lamb. This becomes a symbol for the world redeemer. This is why we encounter the lamb, which signifies the rebirth of the sun in spring, the rebirth of the new God. This is why the beginning of spring was also referred to as the point at which the young god is born. The virgin at Sais gives birth to the new god Heracles.

Where the legends are not completely correct, we can prove where the changes came from. The same legends are interpreted by pagan writers in the same way, namely that nothing else can be found in them than what can also be read in the sky. The mystics of that time saw the serpent in the sky as a symbol of the downfall of the god in dark matter. The passage of the sun in the snake symbolizes this. On December 21, in the middle of winter, when the days are getting longer, the sun enters the constellation of Sagittarius. In the middle of winter, Virgo receives the child. Easter is actually the resurrection, the redemption. There the sun enters the constellation of the Lamb of Aries. In summer we have the lion reflected in the course of the sun. What takes place in the individual personalities first took place in the celestial vault. Seen in this way, the course of life of the individual personalities is a mystery of the eternal course of the world. Also in the Greek mysteries, also in the Orient and in Persia, [Zeus] transforms himself into the Golden Fleece at this time.

So we see that the passage of the sun through Aries is given to us as a resurrection festival. Nonnos] mentions a relationship between Zeus and his son Dionysus. He is to ascend to his father and sit at his father's right hand. Here you have the pagan version of the Christian creed. Christianity means the new form of the teachings of paganism. A large number of Christians can be shown to have been inspired by pagan mysticism. These ideas appear again and again in Christianity. There is an indication even in Christianity that isolated spirits of paganism have turned to Christianity and then sought a symbolic expression for the fact that they were able to understand Christianity all the more. The expression can be found in the Gospel, namely that magicians follow the stars to find Christ. They read the stars, and all they had to do was follow what they read in the stars. After following [the star], they see what is given to Christianity. Christianity is represented there in a single person. That is why the Indian scholar said: "In Christianity, we are dealing with nothing other than a Persian sect."

If you take the sun myth and try to translate it into the personal as the course of life of a single personality, then you can say nothing other than that the Christians sought the truth in a humanized way, which was previously sought in the firmament.

The fact that at Easter time the sun passes through the constellation of the Lamb, the Ram, is quite natural [for that time]. At other, earlier times, the Lamb was replaced by Taurus, Gemini, Cancer and so on. This has to do with the fact that these ideas were formed at a time when the position of the constellations was different [from today]. They are always shifting. Our astronomical data is also no longer correct today. So we can say that this Christianity was actually born out of the ancient mysteries and religions. This is not a degradation, but merely shows that it was a necessity of the times.

I have shown how the individual teachings in the Orient are already pre-formed. What interests us in particular, however, is how they are incorporated into the Apocalypse. If one does not grasp the basic idea in this way, it cannot be understood. It cannot be understood that the world of imagination, the sum of [religious] feelings, was already present and reappears in a new form in Christianity. The author [of the Apocalypse] was aware of this. He did not want to reproduce anything other than the old mystical mysteries. He says that everything he has read from the starry world has now taken place as a direct experience in the life of an individual personality. What you previously only saw as cosmic-historical events has become the life of an individual person. That is the basic idea of the Apocalypse. We see how the old priestly concepts confront us in all the descriptions: the seven trumpets, the seven seals and so on. In all this we see nothing other than the expression of ancient, long-existing mysteries, and what is presented to us in the Apocalypse is nothing other than the fulfillment of these things in Christianity. At one point I will show how this old teaching is presented to us there and how the new teaching is then brought into connection with it, how the new teaching develops out of the old. I will deal with the earlier chapters later. First the whole passage from the middle.

The 11th chapter: Measuring the temple of God. Two witnesses killed and alive again. [Gap in the transcript] The seventh trumpet.

"1 And there was given me a reed like a rod, and he said, Arise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. (2) But the court outside the temple, throw it out and do not measure it. For it has been given to the nations, and they will trample the holy city underfoot for forty-two months. 003 And I will give unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. 004 These are the two olive trees and the torches that stand before the Lord of the earth: 005 And if any man will hurt them, fire shall proceed out of their mouth, and shall devour their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he shall be put to death. 006 These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and they have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will. 007 And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war with them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. 008 And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. 009 And some of the nations and kindreds and tongues shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not leave their dead bodies in graves. 10th And they that dwell on the earth shall rejoice over them, and shall live well, and shall send gifts one to another: for these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth." - Being born again is nothing other than being born again in the initiation process. - 11 "And after three days and a half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon those who saw them. 12 And they heard a great voice from heaven saying to them, 'Come up here! And they ascended into heaven in a cloud, and saw their enemies. 013 And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell: and in the earthquake were slain seven thousand names of men: and the rest were afraid, and gave glory to the God of heaven. 014 The second woe is past; behold, the third woe cometh quickly. 015 And the seventh angel sounded, and there were great voices in heaven, saying: The kingdoms of the world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever."

It is to be described here that, whereas previously only the individual was permitted, now the Good News is to be brought to all people through Christ.

The 12th chapter: The woman clothed with the sun and the dragon. Michael's conflict with him: "1 And there appeared a great sign in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. 002 And she was with child, and cried out in travail, and was in great pain in childbirth. 003 And there appeared another sign in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. 004 And his tail drew away the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman who was to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child. 005 And she brought forth a son, a little child, which should feed all nations with a rod of iron. And her child was caught up to God and to his throne. 6 And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared of God, that she may be nourished there a thousand two hundred and threescore days. 007 And there was a battle in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon fought with his angels. 008 And they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. 009 And the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. 010 And I heard a great voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ; because that accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before God day and night. 011 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, and loved not their lives unto the death. 12 Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell therein. Woe to those who dwell on the earth and on the sea! For the devil cometh down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. 013 And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child. 014 And the woman was given two wings like a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she would be nourished for a time and times and half a time before the face of the serpent. 015 And the serpent cast out of his mouth water like a flood after the woman, that he might drown her. 016 But the earth helped the woman, and opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth. 17 And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ."

The stream from the serpent's mouth symbolizes nothing other than the element through which man must return in order to find his way back to God.

The 13th chapter: Seven-headed beast from the sea. "001 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. 002 And the beast that I saw was like a pardel, and his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. And the dragon gave him his power and his throne and great authority. 003 And I saw one of his heads as if it had a deadly wound, and his deadly wound was healed. And the whole earth marveled at the beast, 4. and they worshiped the dragon that gave power to the beast, and worshiped the beast, saying: Who is like the beast, and who can war with him? 005 And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and it was given unto him to continue with him forty and two months. 006 And he opened his mouth to blaspheme against God, and to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. 007 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. 008 And all that dwell on the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. 009 If any man have an ear, let him hear. 010 If any man lead into prison, he shall go into prison: if any man kill with the sword, he shall be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and faith of the saints."

Two-horned beast from the earth.

"11 And I saw another beast come up out of the earth, having two horns like a lamb, and speaking as a dragon. 012 And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. 013 And he doeth great signs, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven in the sight of men: 014 And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast, saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. 015 And it was given unto him to give the spirit to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. 016 And he made the small and the great, the rich and the poor, the free and the bond, all put a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 017 so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of his name. 18 Here is wisdom! Let him who has understanding consider the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred and sixty-six."

The secret of the mysteries was generalized, was brought to all people. This can be clearly seen in the symbol in the Apocalypse of the four beasts and the three powers that are above the beasts, so that we are confronted by seven powers. We are then told that ten kings, the kings of the new kingdom, will overcome these seven old powers. Now we have to see what all this means.

First I would like to develop it as it has been stated in the ancient mysteries. Then you will realize it for yourself. The Apocalypse sees the world and man as made up of seven principles. The four lower or inferior principles or powers are represented by the four beasts. These must be overcome. By overcoming the lower, the three upper ones are built up. After this has been presented to us, we are shown how the entire seven-membered nature of the world and of man is scorched in fire, that the divine lightning strikes and that the entire material, in which the seven-membered nature is immersed, is once again overcome. The eighth stage is when the actual material, the evil, really perishes. We are then shown that in addition to the three spiritual elements, the fourth physical element appears as an overcomer; the fourth physical element is seized by the three spiritual elements and then also the three lower ones. The fourth element is man himself. Eagle, [bull], lion and man. Man represents nothing other than KamaRupa. The fourth, the human being, combines the three lower physical elements and the three upper ones and gives birth to three new ones from the three physical elements. The physical elements are spiritually reborn, as it were. So we have ten elements instead of seven. This is what the Apocalypse wants to depict with the ten kings.

These are ancient mystical teachings, nothing other than what pagan ideas already knew. From the transformation and victory of the ten kings, we can see that they represent nothing other than the victory of the spiritual over the material, the victory of the Mystery Doctrine.

At the opening of the first six seals, John saw four horses, a white horse, a red horse, a black horse and a pale horse. Death and hell followed them. "And when the fifth seal was opened, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held." This killing symbolizes being born again in the spirit and the killing of the lower nature. Man must devour the book, he must become one with the book. The same is also indicated by a Christian mystic, Angelus Silesius. He said: ["Friend, it is enough. If you want to read more, go and become the scripture and the being yourself."] - With this he concludes his "Cherubinischer Wandermann".

The ancient mysteries were a preparation for Christianity. They were reborn through the Lamb. Those who cannot fully comprehend that they have to go further, that they actually have to seek bodily death and spiritual resurrection in Christ, are not yet mature. They are the ones who are to be admonished.

The Apocalypse is one of the most important books of the New Testament. It must not and cannot be understood in any other way than that we see in it a fusion of the Christian mystery truths with the ancient mysteries. It contains the ancient mysteries born out of Christianity.

We have seen how at his death a man leaves behind him the corpse, first of his physical body, then of his etheric body and finally of his lower astral body. What is then left when he has shed these three bodies? The memory-picture which comes before the soul at death vanishes at the moment when the etheric body takes leave of the astral. It sinks into the unconscious, so to speak, and ceases to have any significance for the soul as an immediate impression. But although the picture itself vanishes, something important, something that may be called its fruit, survives. The total harvest of the last life remains like a concentrated essence of forces in the higher astral body and rests there.

But a man has often gone through all this in the past. At each death, at the end of each incarnation, this memory-picture has appeared before his soul and left behind what I have called a concentrated essence of forces. So with each life a picture is added. After his first incarnation a man had his first memory-picture when he died; then came the second, richer than the first, and so on. The sum-total of these pictures produces a kind of new element in man. Before his first death a man consists of four bodies, but when he dies for the first time he takes the first memory-picture with him. Thus on reincarnating for the first time he has not only his four bodies but also this product of his former life. This is the “causal” body. So now he has five bodies: physical, etheric, astral, ego and causal. Once this causal body has made its appearance, it remains, though it was first constituted from the products of previous lives. Now we can understand the difference between individuals. Some of them have lived through many lives and so have added many pages to their Book of Life. They have developed to a high level and possess a rich causal body. Others have been through only a few lives; hence they have gathered fewer fruits and have a less developed causal body.

What is the purpose of man's repeated appearance on Earth? If there were no connection between the various incarnations, the whole process would of course be senseless, but that is not how it goes. Think how different life was for a man who was incarnated a few centuries after Christ, compared with the conditions he will find when he reincarnates today. Nowadays a child's life between the sixth and fourteenth years is taken up with acquiring knowledge: reading, writing, and so on. Opportunities for the cultivation and development of human personality are very different from what they were in the past. A man's incarnations are ordered in such a way that he returns to the Earth only when he will find quite new conditions and possibilities of development, and after a few centuries they will always be there. Think how quickly the Earth is developing in every respect: only a few thousand years ago this region was covered with primeval forests, full of wild beasts. Men lived in caves, wore animal skins and had only the most primitive knowledge of how to light a fire or make tools. How different it all is today! We can see how the face of the Earth has been transformed in a relatively short time. A man who lived in the days of the ancient Germanic people had a picture of the world quite different from the picture which prevails today among people who learn to read and write. As the Earth changes, man learns quite new things and makes them his own.

What is the usual period between two incarnations and on what does it depend? The following considerations will give us the answer and we shall see how the changing conditions of the Earth come into it.

In the course of time certain Beings have enjoyed peculiar honours. For example, in Persia in 3000 B.C. the Twins (Gemini) were specially honoured; between 3000 B.C. and 800 B.C. the sacred Bull Apis (Taurus) was revered in Egypt and the Mithras Bull in Asia Minor. After 800 B.C. another Being came into the foreground and the Ram or Lamb (Aries) was honoured. So arose the legend of Jason, who went to fetch the Golden Fleece from the sacred Ram in Asia beyond the sea. The lamb was so highly revered that in due time Christ called Himself the “Lamb of God”, and the first Christian symbol was not the Cross with the Saviour hanging on it, but the Cross together with the Lamb.

This means that there were three successive periods of civilisation, each associated with important happenings in the heavens. The Sun takes his course in the sky along a particular path, the Ecliptic, and at the beginning of Spring in a given epoch the Sun rises at a definite point in the Zodiac. So in the year 3000 B.C. the Sun rose in Spring in the constellation of the Bull; before that in the constellation of the Twins, and about 800 B.C. in the constellation of the Ram. This vernal point moves slowly backwards round the Zodiac year by year, taking 2,160 years to pass from one constellation to the next, and people chose as the symbol of their reverence the heavenly sign in which the vernal Sun appeared. If today we were able to understand the powerful feelings and the exalted states of mind which the ancients experienced as the Sun passed on into a new constellation, we should understand also the significance of the moment when the Sun entered the sign of Pisces. But for the materialism of our time no such understanding is possible.

What was it, then, that people saw in this process? The ancients saw it as an embodiment of the forces of nature. In Winter these forces were asleep, but in Spring they were recalled to life by the Sun. Hence the constellation in which the Sun appeared in Spring symbolised these reawakening forces; it gave new strength to the Sun and was felt to be worthy of particular reverence. The ancients knew that with this movement of the Sun round the Zodiac something important was connected, for it meant that the Sun's rays fell on the Earth under quite different conditions as time went on. And indeed the period of 2,160 years does signify a complete change in the conditions of life on Earth. And this is the length of time spent in Devachan between death and a new birth. Occultism has always recognised these 2,160 years as a period during which conditions on Earth change sufficiently for a man to reappear there in order to gain new experience.

We must remember, however, that during this period a person is generally born twice, once as a man and once as a woman, so that on average the interval between two incarnations is in fact about 1,000 years. It is not true that there is a change from male to female at every seventh incarnation. The experiences of the soul are obviously very different in a male incarnation from those it encounters in a female incarnation. Hence the general rule is that a soul appears once as a man and once as a woman during this period of 2,160 years. It will then have had all the experiences available to it under the conditions of that period; and the person will have had the possibility and opportunity to add a new page to his Book of Life. These radical changes in the conditions on Earth provide a schooling for the soul. That is the purpose of reincarnation.

A man takes with him into Devachan his causal body and the purified, ennobled parts of his astral and etheric bodies; these belong to him permanently and he never loses them. At a particular moment, just after he has laid aside his astral corpse, he stands face to face with himself as if he were looking at himself from the outside. That is the moment when he enters Devachan.

Devachan has four divisions:

1. The continents
2. The rivers and oceans
3. The airy region; etheric space
4. The region of spiritual archetypes

In the first division everything is seen as though in a photographic negative. Everything physical that has ever existed on this Earth, whether as mineral, plant or animal, and everything physical that still exists, appears as a negative. And if you see yourself in this negative form, as one among all the others, you will be in Devachan. What is the point of seeing yourself in this way?

You do not see yourself once only, but by degrees you come to see yourself as you were in former lives, and this has a deep purpose. Goethe says: “The eye is formed by the light for the light.”¹⁸ He means that light is the creator of the eye, and this is perfectly true. We see how true it is if we observe how the eye degenerates in the absence of light. For example, in Kentucky certain creatures went to live in caves; the caves were dark and so the creatures did not need eyes. Gradually they lost the light of the eyes, and their eyes atrophied. The vital fluids which had formerly nourished their eyes were diverted to another organ which was now more useful for them. These creatures, then, lost their sight because their whole world was without light: the absence of light destroyed their power of sight. Thus if there were no light, there would be no eyes. The forces which create the eye are in the light, just as the forces which create the ear are in the world of sound. In short, all the organs of the body are built up by the creative forces of the universe. If you ask what has built the brain, the answer is that without thinking there would be no brain. When a Kepler¹⁹ or Galileo²⁰ directed his reasoning power to the great laws of nature, it was the wisdom of nature which had created the organ of understanding

Ordinarily a man enters the earthly world with his organs to a certain extent perfected. During the interval since his last incarnation, however, new conditions have arisen, and he has to work upon them with his spirit. In all his experiences there is a creative power. His eyes, and the understanding which he already possesses, were formed in an earlier incarnation. When after death he reaches Devachan, he finds, as we have seen, the picture of his body as it was in his last life, and within him he still carries the fruits of the memory-picture of his last life. It is now possible for him to compare the course of his development in his various lives: what he was like before the experiences of his last life and what he can become when the experiences of this latest life are added to those of the others. Accordingly he forms for himself a picture of a new body, standing one step higher than his previous bodies.

At the first stage in Devachan, therefore, a man corrects his previous life-picture, and out of the fruits of his former lives he prepares the picture of his body for his next incarnation.

At the second stage in Devachan, life pulsates as a reality, as though in rivers and streams. During earthly existence a man has life within him and he cannot perceive it; now he sees it flowing past and he uses it to animate the form he had built up at the first stage.

At the third stage of Devachan, a man is surrounded by all the passions and feelings of his past life, but now they come before him as clouds, thunder and lightning. He sees all this as it were objectively; he learns to understand it, and to observe it as he observes physical things on Earth; and he gathers all his experiences into the life of his soul. By dint of seeing these pictures of the life of soul he is able to incorporate their particular qualities, and thus he endows with soul the body he had formed at the first stage.

That is the purpose of Devachan. A man has to advance a stage further there, so he himself prepares the image of his body for his next incarnation. That is one of his tasks in Devachan; but he has many others also. He is by no means concerned only with himself. Everything he does is done in full consciousness. He lives consciously in Devachan, and statements to the contrary in theosophical books are false. How is this to be understood? When a man is asleep, his astral body leaves the physical and etheric bodies, and consciousness leaves him also. But that is true only while the astral body is engaged on its usual task of repairing and restoring harmony to the weary and worked out physical body. When a man has died, his astral body no longer has this task to perform, and in proportion as it is released from this task, consciousness awakens. During the man's life his consciousness was darkened and hemmed in by the physical forces of the body and at night he had to work on this physical body. When the forces of the astral body are released after death, its own specific organs immediately emerge. These are the seven lotus-flowers, the Chakrams. Clairvoyant artists have been aware of this and have used it as a symbol in their works: Michaelangelo²¹ created his statue of Moses with two little horns. The lotus-flowers are distributed as follows:

• The 2-petalled lotus-flower at the base of the nose, between the eyebrows;
• The 16-petalled lotus-flower in the region of the larynx;
• The 12-petalled lotus-flower in the neighbourhood of the heart;
• The 8- or 10-petalled lotus-flower in the region of the stomach;
• A 6- and a 4-petalled lotus-flower are to be found lower down.

These astral organs are hardly observable in the ordinary man of today, but if he becomes clairvoyant, or goes into a state of trance, they stand out in shining, living colours, and are in motion. Directly the lotus-flowers are in motion, a man perceives the astral world. But the difference between physical and astral organs is that physical organs are passive and allow everything to act on them from outside. Eye, ear and so on have to wait until light or sound brings them a message. Spiritual organs, on the other hand, are active; they hold objects in their grip. But this activity can awaken only when the forces of the astral body are not otherwise employed; then they stream into the lotus-flowers. Even in Kamaloka, as long as the lower parts of the astral body are still united to the man, the astral organs are dimmed. It is only when the astral corpse has been discarded and nothing remains with the man except what he has acquired as permanent parts of himself—i.e. at the entrance to Devachan—that these astral sense-organs wake to full activity; and in Devachan man lives with them in a high degree of consciousness.

It is incorrect for theosophical books to say that man is asleep in Devachan; incorrect that he is concerned only with himself, or that relationships begun on Earth are not continued there. On the contrary, a friendship truly founded on spiritual affinity continues with great intensity. The circumstances of physical life on Earth bring about real experiences there. The inwardness of friendship brings nourishment to the communion of spirits in Devachan and enriches it with new patterns; it is precisely this which feeds the soul there. Again, an elevated aesthetic enjoyment of nature is nourishment for the life of the soul in Devachan.

All this is what human beings live on in Devachan. Friendships are as it were the environment with which a man surrounds himself there. Physical conditions all too often cut across these relationships on Earth. In Devachan the way in which two friends are together depends only on the intensity of their friendship. To form such relationships on Earth provides experiences for life in Devachan.

• 18. “Goethe says ...” Literally, “And so the eye is formed by the light for the light.”
• 19. Johannes Kepler, 1571–1630, astronomer and mathematician. Established the three laws concerning the movements of the planets.
• 20. Galileo Galilei, 1564–1642. Laid the foundations of mechanics, discovered the laws of free fall, of the pendulum, of ballistics.
• 21. Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475–1564. His “Moses”, intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II, is in the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome.