The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] I would also like now to sketch out what I have discovered about the relations of the soul element to the physical-bodily element. I can indeed state that I am describing here the results of a thirty-year-long spiritual-scientific investigation. Only in recent years has it become possible for me to grasp the pertinent elements in thoughts expressible in words in such a way that I could bring what I was striving for to a provisional conclusion. I would also like to allow myself to present the results of my investigation in the form of indications only. It is fully possible to substantiate these results with the scientific means available today. This would be the subject of a lengthy book, which circumstances do not allow me to write at this time.

[ 2 ] If one is seeking the relation of the soul element to the bodily element, one cannot base oneself upon Brentano's division of our soul experiences—described on page 69ff. of this book—into mental picturing, judging, and the phenomena of loving and hating. In the search for the pertinent relations, this division leads to such a skewing of the relevant circumstances that one cannot obtain results that accord with the facts. In an investigation like ours, one must take one's start from the division rejected by Brentano: into mental picturing,¹ feeling, and willing. If one now draws together all of the soul element that is experienced as mental picturing, and seeks the bodily processes with which this soul element is related, one finds the appropriate connection by being able to link up, to a considerable extent, with the results of today's physiological psychology. The bodily counterparts of the soul element of mental picturing are to be found in the processes of the nervous system, with its extensions into the sense organs on the one hand and into the internal organization of the body on the other. No matter how much, from the anthroposophical viewpoint, one will have to think many things differently than modern science does, this science does provide an excellent foundation.

This is not the case when one wishes to determine the bodily counterparts of feeling and willing. With respect to them one must first pave the right path within the realm of the findings of today's physiology. If one has achieved the right path, one finds that just as one must relate mental picturing to nerve activity, so one must also relate feeling to that life rhythm which is centered in the breathing activity and is connected with it. In doing so one must bear in mind that, for our purposes, one must follow the breathing rhythm, with all that is connected with it, right into the most peripheral parts of our organization. In order to achieve concrete results in this region, the results of physiological research must be pursued in a direction that is still quite unusual today. Only when one accomplishes this will all those contradictions disappear which result at first when feeling and the breathing rhythm are brought together. What at first inspires contradiction turns out, upon deeper study, to be a proof of this relation.

Let us just take one example from the extensive region that must be explored here. The experience of music is based on feeling. The content of musical configurations, however, lives in our mental picturing,² which is transmitted through the perceptions of hearing. Through what does the musical feeling experience arise? The mental picture of the tone configuration, which is based on the organ of hearing and on a nerve process, is not yet this musical experience. This latter arises through the fact that in the brain the breathing rhythm—in its extension up into this organ—encounters what is accomplished by the ear and nervous system. And the soul lives then not merely in what is heard and pictured; it lives in the breathing rhythm; it experiences what is released in the breathing rhythm through the fact that what is occurring in the nervous system strikes upon this rhythmical life, so to speak. One need only see the physiology of the breathing rhythm in the right light and one will arrive at a comprehensive recognition of the statement: The soul has feeling experiences by basing itself upon the breathing rhythm in the same way it bases itself, in mental picturing, upon nerve processes.

And relative to willing one finds that it is based, in a similar way, upon metabolic processes. Here again, one must include in one's study all the pertinent ramifications and extensions of the metabolic processes within the entire organism. Just as, when something is mentally pictured, a nerve process occurs upon which the soul becomes conscious of its mental picturing, and just as, when something is felt, a modification of the breathing rhythm takes place through which a feeling arises in the soul: so, when something is willed, a metabolic process happens, which is the bodily foundation for what is experienced in the soul as willing.

Now, in the soul a fully conscious, wakeful experience is present only with respect to the mental picturing mediated by our nervous system. What is mediated by the breathing rhythm lives in ordinary consciousness with about the same intensity as dream pictures. To this belongs everything of a feeling nature: all emotions, passions, and so on. Our willing, which is based on metabolic processes, is experienced in a degree of consciousness no higher than that present in the completely dim consciousness of our sleeping state. A more detailed study of the pertinent facts will show that we experience our willing in a completely different way than our mental picturing. We experience the latter the way one sees a colored surface, as it were; we experience willing as a kind of black area upon a colored field. We see something within the area where no color is, in fact, because, in contrast with its surroundings from which color impressions go forth, no such impressions come to meet us: We can picture willing mentally because, within the soul's experiences of mental pictures, at certain places, a non-picturing inserts itself that places itself into our fully conscious experience the same way, in sleep, interruptions of consciousness place themselves into the conscious course of life. The manifoldness in our soul experience—in mental picturing, feeling, and willing—results from these different kinds of conscious experience.

In his book Guidelines of Physiological Psychology, Theodor Ziehen is led to significant characterizations of feeling and willing. In many ways, this book is a prime example of today's natural-scientific way of regarding the connection between the physical and the psychic elements in man. Mental picturing, in all its different forms, is brought into the same connection with the nervous system that the anthroposophical viewpoint also must recognize. About feeling, however, Ziehen says:

Almost without exception, earlier psychology regarded the emotions as the manifestations of a particular independent soul capacity. Kant placed the feeling of pleasure and pain, as a particular soul faculty, between the capacity for knowledge and the capacity for desire, and emphasized explicitly that any further tracing of these three soul capacities back to a common ground was not possible. In contrast to this view, our previous discussions have already shown that feelings of pleasure and pain do not exist at all in this kind of independence, but rather arise only as characteristics or traits—as the so-called nuances of feeling—of sensations and mental pictures.

So this way of thinking ascribes to feeling no independence in our soul life; it sees in feeling only a trait of mental picturing. The result is that it regards not only our life in mental picturing but also our feeling life as being founded upon nerve processes. For it, the nervous system is that part of the body to which the whole soul element is assigned. But this way of thinking, after all, is based on the fact that unconsciously it has already thought up in advance what it wants its findings to be. It grants the status of "soul element" only to what is related to nerve processes, and therefore must regard what cannot be assigned to the nervous system—feeling—as having no independent existence, as being a mere attribute of mental picturing. Anyone who does not set off in the wrong direction with his concepts in this manner and is unbiased in his soul observations will recognize the independence of our feeling life in the most definite way; and secondly, the unbiased evaluation of physiological knowledge will give the insight that feeling must be assigned to the breathing rhythm in the way described above.

The natural-scientific way of thinking denies to will any independent being within our soul life. Will does not even have the status—as feeling does—of being an attribute of mental picturing. But this denial is also based only on the fact that one wants to assign everything of a real soul nature to nerve processes. Now one cannot, however, relate willing in its own particular nature to actual nerve processes. Precisely when one works this through with exemplary clarity as Theodore Ziehen does, can one be impelled to the view that the analysis of soul processes in their relation to the life of the body “offers no cause to assume any separate will capacity.” And yet: unbiased observation of the soul compels one to recognize an independent life of will; and a realistic insight into physiological findings shows that willing as such must not be brought into relation to nerve processes but rather to metabolic processes.

If one wishes to create clear concepts in this realm, one must view physiological and psychological findings in the light demanded by reality; but not in the way this occurs in today's physiology and psychology, where light is shed from preconceptions, definitions, and even in fact from theoretical sympathies and antipathies. Above all, we must take a hard look at the interrelations of nerve activity, breathing rhythm, and metabolic activity. For, these forms of activity do not lie side by side; they lie in one another; they interpenetrate; they go over into each other. MetaboUc activity is present in the entire organism; it permeates the organs of rhythm and of nerve activity. But it is not the bodily foundation of feeling in rhythm; in nerve activity, it is not the basis of mental picturing; rather in both of them, the working will that permeates rhythm and nerves is to be assigned to the metabolic activity. Only a materialistic bias can make a connection between what exists in the nerve as metabolic activity and mental picturing. A study rooted in reality says something completely different. It must recognize that metabolism is present in the nerve insofar as will permeates it. Likewise, metabolism is present in the bodily apparatus of rhythm. The metabolic activity in this apparatus has to do with the will present in this organ. One must connect willing with metabolic activity and feeling with rhythmical occurrences, no matter which organ it is in which metabolism or rhythm appears. In the nerves, however, something completely different from metabolism and rhythm is occurring. The bodily processes in the nervous system that provide the basis of mental picturing are difficult to grasp physiologically. For, where nerve activity occurs, there the mental picturing of ordinary consciousness is present. The reverse is also true, however: where mental picturing is not being done, there no nerve activity is ever to be found, but only metabolic activity in the nerve and a nuance of rhythmical function. Physiology will never arrive at concepts that are in accordance with reality in the study of the nerves as long as it does not understand that true nerve activity absolutely cannot be an object of physiological sense observation. Anatomy and physiology must arrive at the knowledge that they can discover nerve activity only through a method of exclusion. What is not sense-perceptible in the life of the nerve, but whose presence—and even its characteristic way of working—-is proved necessary by what is sense-perceptible: that is nerve activity. One arrives at a positive picture of nerve activity if one looks into that material happening by which the purely soul-spiritual being of a living content of our mental picturing—as described in the first essay of this book—is lamed down into the lifeless mental picturing of ordinary consciousness. Without this concept, which one must introduce into physiology, there is no possibility in that science of stating what nerve activity is. Physiology has developed methods for itself that at present conceal rather than reveal this concept. And even psychology has blocked its own path in this region. Just look, for example, at how Herbartian psychology has worked in this direction. It has turned its gaze only upon the life of our mental picturing, and sees in feeling and willing only effects of our life in mental picturing. But these effects melt away before the approach of knowledge, if at the same time one does not direct one's gaze in an unbiased way upon the reality of feeling and willing. Through such melting away one cannot arrive at any realistic coordinating of feeling and willing with bodily processes.

The body as a whole, not merely the nerve activity included in it, is the physical basis of our soul life. And just as for ordinary consciousness our soul life can be transcribed as mental picturing, feeling, and willing, so can our bodily life as nerve activity, rhythmical function, and metabolic processes.

Immediately the question arises: How does our actual sense perception—which is only an extension of nerve activity— integrate itself into the organism, on the one hand; and on the other hand, how does our ability to move—to which willing leads—integrate itself? Unbiased observation shows that neither belong to the organism in the same sense as nerve activity, rhythmical function, and metabolic processes. What occurs in a sense organ is something that does not belong directly to the organism at all. With our senses we have the outer world stretching like gulfs into the being of the organism. While the soul is encompassing in a sense organ an outer happening, the soul is not taking part in an inner organic happening, but rather in the continuation of the outer happening into the organism. (I mentioned these inner connections epistemologically in a lecture to the Bologna Philosophy Conference in 1911.) ³

In a process of movement we also do not have to do physically with something whose essential being lies inside the organism, but rather with a working of the organism in relationships of balance and forces in which the organism is placed with respect to the outer world. Within the organism, the will is only assigned the role of a metabolic process; but the happening caused by this process is at the same time an actuality within the outer world's interrelation of balance and forces; and by being active in willing, the soul transcends the realm of the organism and participates with its deeds in the happenings of the outer world.

The division of nerves into sensory and motor nerves has created terrible confusion in the study of all these things. No matter how deeply rooted this division may seem to be in today's physiological picture of things, it is not based on unbiased observation. What physiology presents on the basis of nerve severance or of pathological elimination of certain nerves does not prove what appears upon the foundation of experiment or outer experience; it proves something completely different. It proves that the difference is not there at all which one assumes to exist between sensory and motor nerves. On the contrary, both kinds of nerves are of the same nature. The so-called motor nerve does not serve movement in the sense assumed in the teachings of the division theory; rather, as the bearer of nerve activity it serves the inner perception of that metabolic process that underlies our willing, in just the same way as the sensory nerve serves the perception of what takes place in the sense organ. Until the study of the nerves works with clear concepts in this regard, a correct relation of our soul life to the life of the body will not come about.

[ 3 ] In the same way that psycho-physiologically one can seek the relation to the body's life of the soul life that runs its course in mental picturing, feeling, and willing, so one can also strive anthroposophically for knowledge of the relation which the soul element of ordinary consciousness has to spiritual life. And there one discovers through the anthroposophical methods described in this and in my other books, that just as our mental picturing finds a bodily foundation in our nerve activity, so it also finds a basis in the spiritual realm. In the other direction—on the side turned away from the body—the soul stands in a relation to a spiritually real element that is the foundation for the mental picturing of ordinary consciousness. This spiritual element, however, can only be experienced by a seeing cognition. And it is experienced through its content being presented to seeing consciousness as differentiated Imaginations. Just as, toward the body, our mental picturing is based on nerve activity, so from the other side, it streams toward us out of a spiritually real element, revealing itself in Imaginations. This spiritually real element is what is called in my books the etheric or life body. (In speaking about the etheric body I always emphasize expressly that one should take exception neither to the word “body” nor to the word “etheric”; for, what I present shows clearly that one should not interpret the matter in a materialistic sense.) And this life body (in the fourth volume of the first year of the periodical, “Das Reich,” I also used the expression "body of formative forces") is the spiritual element from which our ordinary consciousness' life of mental picturing flows from birth (or conception, as it were) until death.

The feeling in our ordinary consciousness is based, on the bodily side, upon the rhythmical function. From the spiritual side it flows from a spiritually real element that is discovered in anthroposophical research by methods that I call "Inspiration" in my writings. (Again, it should be noted that by this concept I mean only what I have paraphrased in my work; so one should not confuse this term with what lay people understand by this word.) To the seeing consciousness the spiritually real being underlying the soul and attainable to Inspiration is his own spiritual being, transcending birth and death. This is the region where anthroposophy undertakes its spiritual-scientific investigations into the question of human immortality. Just as in the body, through the rhythmic function, the mortal part of man's feeling nature manifests itself, so, in the content of Inspiration of seeing consciousness, does the immortal spiritual core of our soul being manifest.

For seeing consciousness, our willing, which toward the body is based on metabolic processes, streams from the spirit through what in my writings I call “Intuition.” What manifests in the body through the—in a certain way—lowest activity of the metabolism corresponds in the spirit to the highest: what expresses itself through Intuitions. Therefore, mental picturing, which is based on nerve activity, comes almost to full expression in the body; willing shows only a weak reflection in the metabolic processes oriented toward it in the body. Our real mental picturing is the living one; the mental picturing determined by the body is the lamed one. The content is the same. Real willing, even that which realizes itself in the physical world, runs its course in regions accessible only to Intuitive vision; its bodily counterpart has almost nothing to do with this content. Within that spiritually real being that manifests itself to Intuition is contained what extends over from previous earth lives into the following ones. And it is in the realm that comes into consideration here that anthroposophy approaches the questions of repeated earth lives and of destiny.

As the body lives itself out in nerve activity, rhythmical function, and metabolic processes, so the spirit of man lives in what manifests itself in Imaginations, Inspirations, and Intuitions. And as in its realm the body allows for an experience of the nature of its outer world in two directions—in sensory processes, namely, and in processes of movement— so the spirit also: in one direction through the fact that it experiences Imaginatively our mentally picturing soul life, even in ordinary consciousness, and in the other direction through the fact that in willing it unfolds Intuitive impulses that realize themselves in metabolic processes. If one looks toward the body, one finds the nerve activity that lives as the element of mental picturing; if one looks toward the spirit, one becomes aware of the spirit content of Imaginations that flows into this very element of mental picturing. Brentano feels at first the spiritual side of the mental picturing life of the soul; he therefore characterizes this life as a picture life (an imaginative happening). When not merely one's own inner soul life is experienced, however, but also—through judgment—an element of acceptance or rejection, then there is added to our mental picturing a soul experience, flowing from the spirit, whose content remains unconscious as long as we are dealing only with ordinary consciousness, because this content consists of Imaginations of a spiritually real element that underlies the physical object and that only adds to the mental picture the fact that its content exists.

It is for this reason that in his classification Brentano splits our life of mental pictures into mere mental picturing, which only experiences imaginatively an inwardly existing element, and into judging, which experiences imaginatively something given from without, but which brings the experience to consciousness only as an acceptance or rejection. With respect to feeling, Brentano does not look at all at its bodily foundation, the rhythmical function; he only brings into the realm of his attention what arises from Inspirations (that remain unconscious) as loving and hating within the region of ordinary consciousness. Willing escapes his attention completely, however, because his attention wishes to direct itself only upon phenomena in the soul, whereas in willing there lies something that is not enclosed within the soul, something through which the soul experiences also an outer world. Brentano's classification of soul phenomena, therefore, is based on the fact that he divides them according to viewpoints that can be seen in their true light only when one turns one's gaze upon the spiritual core of the soul, and on the fact that he wants to apply his classification only to the phenomena of ordinary consciousness. With what is said here about Brentano I only wished to supplement what was said on this subject on page 74ff.

• 1. Vorstellen here is virtually synonymous with “thinking.” Ed.
• 2. In German, Vorstellen. Please recall that this means “a placing before oneself inwardly,” not necessarily as a visual image. Ed.
• 3. Published as Seeing with the Soul, Mercury Press, 1996.

Members' Lecture

It could seem to the earnest seeker of truth, and – basically, a certain satisfaction is missing within the /illegible abbreviation, then gap] – it could seem to the earnest seeker of truth as if it were possible truth, the realization, to be recorded in a certain way, proclaimed and then given to humanity; and on the other hand, it could seem as if it would be enough for a person to acquire this realization once and for all.

It may be said that from the very beginning of a way of looking at things, nothing seems more plausible than this, and yet it would be a mistake to believe that the one-time possession of a certain number of words could suffice for human striving. If someone who is embodied today, let us say, in one of the previous incarnations, perhaps within the ancient Egyptian culture, had come to high realizations and today would remember those high realizations, so that he would possess that again, could we then say that the realizations attained at that time would already be beneficial in the present embodiment through mere remembrance? We cannot say that. However strange it may seem to say this, given that there is only one truth, we must say that it is absolutely necessary for human development that different forms of truth come to man in different times, because human nature changes over time. It changes in such a way that the powers of cognition also change. Man does not pass from incarnation to incarnation in vain; he progresses from embodiment to embodiment because, as the world changes, he can absorb something new within himself and give the old a new form.

Therefore, it was necessary at all times for people to work their way up to such a higher level of knowledge in the mysteries, so that they were able to judge how the whole earth, with all its physical and spiritual aspects, has changed compared to earlier times, and how human souls change within this earth development. In occult wisdom, this is expressed in the words: There always had to be people who were able to read the signs of the times.

Now, what is particularly necessary to teach people, to proclaim, to recognize this necessity? This all only arises when one is able to fully survey the overall situation of development in any given time. Times change and actually change in shorter periods than is usually assumed. If we consider the development of humanity, we will be able to admit that the interesting periods for the present human being are those that roughly three millennia before the founding of Christianity and after the founding of Christianity, the first and second before and after / gap ]. We ourselves are at the end of the second millennium of the post-Christian era, and the third is approaching.

These six millennia, in which we are placed in such a peculiar way, are of very special importance. What is beneficial for man? What should the soul take particularly to heart? Much is included in the development of mankind during these millennia. Our souls, which have been embodied several times during this time, well, they will have gone through important things during these periods, and these periods are to be characterized to some extent today.

If we go back to the third millennium before the founding of Christianity, it is the time when the little Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, has just begun for people. What is man of this age like? So that we can say: Before that, for a larger number of people, the last remnants of the old, twilight clairvoyance were still [there]. They could see not only the physical world, but also through it into the spiritual world. They could delve into the soul and find what was spiritually at the root of it. They could get there in two ways. Behind the material world they saw the spiritual beings who were guiding and creating, who had not descended into an earthly incarnation. They knew – as we know – that there is earth, air and water, that there are spiritual hierarchies. And on the other hand, when they descended into the physical world of feeling, willing and thinking, they found the spiritual foundations in a second way.

This ceased before the beginning of the third millennium. Then man was increasingly forced to look into the physical world of the senses. In the past, he had directed his mystical gaze into the world of feeling and will; now he said, “I will, I think, I feel,” and could no longer perceive the spiritual realm behind pure human thinking, feeling and willing, from which everything and he himself has its origin.

But the development of the world took such a peculiarly even course; to the deeper view it proves to be permeated with wisdom everywhere. What had been taken from humanity on the one side was given to it on the other, namely, to find the way back into the spiritual world by applying what was given to it in the sensual world in the right way.

How did this happen? What was actually given to man by being pushed out of the spiritual world? - He was given self-awareness. Especially in the most important states in those times, he was without self-awareness; only when he looked into the sensory world did it come to him, but it was completely silent both in those moments when he could see the spiritual through the outer sensory carpet - everyone was then completely raptured, in ecstasy.

This was especially given to the initiates in the northern countries. In ancient times, we find initiation sites in the areas from Britain and Russia to Persia; in the west, the sites of the Druids; and in the east, the trotters. There was the possibility that they would enter into ecstasy, where they were enraptured but felt they were a link to the whole world. They were guided to follow the path of the stellar world, for example. It was not the case that people were banished to the innermost circle of earthly existence; they experienced the great world events. The sun has a different position around our Christmas time. The sun draws a certain part of its strength from earthly existence. What today's people feel only weakly when autumn comes and the vegetation fades, the melancholy of autumn, was intensified in those people to an immensely intense sensation, so that they experienced what the sun experienced, right down to the sun's lowest point.

All this was not only experienced by the soul as a concept, but also as a deep empathy. When this melancholy reached its highest pitch, it was given a substitute, as it were. The soul learned to feel. The outer world of the senses offered nothing joyful, but something like a counter-blow, which came like an elastic ball when it expands after being compressed on one side. The spiritual senses opened up, man was devoted to the spirit of the sun. He saw into, at least sensed, the hierarchies of existence. And when the sun sent more power to the earth again, the human being lived with /gap]. The sun had a certain symbol, and in the temple sites one could experience how the sun works by the shadow that the sun cast there, so that the service of the spirit was one that integrated itself into the service of nature. Man lived with it when the days made it possible for him to turn his gaze back to the world of the senses. He experienced this in jubilant joy until those days when the sun seemed strongest to him.

There were two moments in the course of the year: first, when he was also devoted to the spiritual in ecstasy, and secondly, when he was jubilantly devoted to the external; people were taught this in the Nordic mystery centers. At one point, he no longer felt the germs of the ego; he was poured out into the whole world.

It became less and less possible for people to put themselves in this mood. But something else was given to them. They could now place their I-consciousness more and more in their I, the ecstasy was taken away, the I was strengthened. The moment was prepared for people when the Being was to come who could not come to man in ecstasy, but could enter into the deepest inner being of man. The Christ-entity took on such a form that man could feel in his ego as if he could pour the entity into his ego. In the past, he was outside of himself, outside of the world from which he was taken. Through the appearance of Christ, it should be made possible for man to become aware of his own ego. When I relive what Christ experienced, I experience something divine within me. This could be prepared. It was prepared by the three millennia before the founding of Christianity. There we encounter Abraham. He had the mission [...] to rise with his I first to the deity that wanted to descend. The deity was only fully recognizable after it had descended. This was usually done by selecting, from the whole of humanity, the physical individual who was capable not of seeing God in ecstasy and not of having to delve into the human soul, but who, through his intelligence, was able to see God with some degree of clairvoyance. He had the physical instrument in his brain that, with the help of the physical instrument, he could summarize the external physical conditions and in this combination he understood: there is something underlying the whole world that underlies the human ego. Abraham was the first to recognize the deity as the world-I. This ability was connected to the physical body. In the beginning it was not connected to the physical instrument, but the person had to come to a body-free vision. That was Abraham's special mission. [His era is the third millennium BC.] The knowledge of God was comprehended to the physical level of the brain. In all ancient times, knowledge of God and the spirit was dependent on leaving the physical. With Abraham, a personality first appeared who could attain knowledge of God with the physical brain. He was able to implant this in the development of humanity.

This is expressed in the records in such a low mood that one is amazed and in awe. For example, we are told that Joseph came to dreams. This is supposed to indicate to us that he was an exception to the rule; they were not supposed to have insight through dreamlike clairvoyance. It was present in him as an inherited trait, so it could not be used in a direct line for development and was therefore rejected by his brothers. Such an ability – to see with the physical brain – could only be passed on through physical inheritance, because it was a physical ability.

The people who had this mission must have felt that this physical property was given by God. They showed those who were to find this mission that it was a gift from God by asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He would have sacrificed the whole nation, because all the Hebrew people were to descend from him. By receiving Isaac back, he was given the opportunity to inherit the physical trait. The mission was given to the people as a gift. These things are so deeply presented in the occult documents. If we go back to the first millennium of the Kali Yuga, we find that through which humanity was given the self-awareness for clairvoyance.

But all this had to be increased. The next step was taken in the second millennium of the dark age, in that now, through special developmental processes, the one who had become able to perceive the external God from the mission through the inherited characteristics from external nature - Moses could perceive the ego-God, which man perceives in his own ego, [directly in the elementary events of the world]. The [second millennium of the Dark Age before Christ – the beginning of the Dark Age, the great Kali Yuga 3101 BC, the end of 1899 AD –] is the age of Moses, when the ego-God is perceived in nature.

Third millennium – [the first millennium BC]: The revelation of the same entity, the entity that gave Isaac back and that appeared in the burning bush, now incarnated in human form, is at the end. Prepared for this event to be understood, humanity was to become through those leaders who connect to the name of Solomon. His wisdom in the last millennium should be there so that humanity could understand how this entity incarnated humanly. So that in occult wisdom we call this millennium the Solomonic.

We have outlined these three ages as the first three in the Dark Ages. Then come ages that can only be understood if you know a certain law of human development. Earlier events repeat themselves in a certain way, but you have to know how. Some events repeat themselves like this: 1, 2, 3, then 3, 2, 1. You can only understand them if you know exactly how they repeat themselves. We must not apply any pattern, because it is precisely the fact that the repetition is different that gives rise to the diversity. The repetition of the first three ages was reversed; for those who were able to assess the overall world situation, it was clear that the first age after the founding of Christianity was a repetition of the age of Solomon. It was also a reincarnation of Solomon: the entire spirit that flowed from the wisdom of Solomon dominates the understanding that is gradually developing for the Christ impulse.

In the second millennium, the Moses impulse: the event at Sinai was actually repeated in reverse. When Moses perceived the I-Godhead in the burning bush, it was the perception of the Godhead outside through the elements of nature. The reverse event took place in the second millennium. It consisted of the I-Godhead now announcing itself through a deep insight into the souls. In the mysteries of the Middle Ages, the individualities who were allowed to experience this by descending into the soul lived. A reverse Moses experience: the ego-deity reveals itself to the Christian mystics in their own soul. Now the deity radiates out of the soul. Just as Moses had a kindred spirit, so he also had the other mystics as kindred spirits.

We live in a special age, in which [one] sees the conclusion of the second millennium approaching. In the third millennium, a repetition of the Abrahamic age will be announced, very slowly and gradually, but it will be characterized by the fact that the Abraham event is happening in reverse. What used to be found only in ecstasy was experienced by Abraham as self-awareness. Man will conquer the old clairvoyant abilities in addition to these abilities. Through the mission of Abraham, what was previously found directly has flowed into the brain. Man will have to step out of the immediate circle of his consciousness, preserving this consciousness to a spiritual knowledge with powers that are bound to the physical body.

In a sense, the fact that we are now in an important epoch brings about a decision for the knowledge of the third millennium. The Kali Yuga expired in 1899. Now we are moving towards the development of completely new abilities.

Humanity is moving in two currents. One goes through the mysteries, not the old ones, but the present ones. Through this current, man has to develop the ability to develop clairvoyant insight. Humanity cannot be without this path, because without it no orientation would be possible. Alongside this, there is another current within which humanity is changing in a natural way.

We must realize that these two currents are present. All the souls that are here today were also present in the past. When a soul in ancient Egypt came into existence through birth, it experienced something very specific and had to experience something specific. You cannot relive in a later age what you should have experienced earlier.

You will say: That is something terribly discouraging. What has been missed would be irretrievably lost. Now you come to the realization and yet you can't change it anymore. — This is so because through all previous incarnations, people were actually not in a position to miss anything. Only now is time beginning; in the past, people were guided from the spiritual world. In the ages that preceded the Kali Yuga, the old impulses were still in effect. Now [man] becomes free, he must take [his] own development into his own hands; in the age when it is only possible for man to miss something, it is also ensured that people become aware that they must not miss anything. With each incarnation, the human being becomes increasingly freer. One experiences two to three incarnations in such a time, and only the fifth is so far that it is irretrievably lost. Those who do not come to Theosophy today, without gaining consciousness, will be able to receive it in the next or the second next incarnation. An example that shows how it is true that it is not enough to communicate general truths, but that there is a need for individuals who can assess the overall situation. They know that a new era is now beginning for the benefit and development of humanity. For each time it is necessary to find the particular form of words. We still have to recognize how these abilities of people develop. These abilities, which people will grow into, will be found in the fact that people develop new soul abilities in addition to the old ones, namely ethereal clairvoyance. A certain number of people will walk the earth who, through natural development, will be able to see not only the physical body but also the etheric body. This ability faded with the approach of Kali Yuga. It is beginning again.

Two:} When people have acquired sufficient understanding, they will be able to judge in due time what is real. They will know how to deal with someone who says they see something that penetrates the physical body. We practice Theosophy because we feel a responsibility to make this understandable to people. It could also be that people get stuck in the materialistic swamp, then it would happen that those who see something like that would be regarded as sick people. They will be crushed by the materialistic view.

The prophecy will be wrong if these abilities are ignored. It depends on people how they can receive and understand an event when people will acquire an understanding of the experience that will develop in the first half of our century as a natural human characteristic. The first foundations of initiation will develop naturally. The first to receive this without initiation will show themselves between 1930, -40, -50. This is how progress manifests itself. For those who cannot yet experience this in such an early time, the opportunity arises to attain it in the next 2500 years. During this time, if humanity proves itself worthy, a sufficiently large number will have acquired this ability. It does not matter whether one lives in the life between birth and death or also in the time between death and a new birth. Because this event means something very important. People will experience a renewal of the event of Damascus and more and more will experience it in the next 2500 years. In the beginning, the Christ was physically incarnated, now the abilities of man are rising and he can perceive the Christ with more highly developed abilities. Once Christ was physically incarnated, and since that time the initiate has seen him in his etheric body. When this event occurs, when the illumination of Christ enters our earth, it means not only something for the time between birth and death, but just as Christ descended at that time to the souls that were between death and a new birth, so the event that we call the Christ event of the 20th century extends – he will descend to those who have acquired an understanding of it in the physical world.

If a person passes by without understanding, he does not bring with him the possibility of understanding Christ and he must wait until he can prepare himself in a new incarnation. Understanding must be developed here. Life here is important.

This understanding is, so to speak, the last thing we have to acquire through the brain from the Kali Yuga era. It will be a peculiar moment when the re-appearance of Christ occurs in the 20th century. Little by little, people are losing sight of the external Christian documents. Efforts are being made from all sides to pick apart the documents and to deny Christ altogether. Those who believe that they can preserve the old are short-sighted. With enormous speed, the view that the [truth of the] gospels cannot be determined will spread among so-called enlightened humanity. Those who resist it, who say: “Let [the] human being stop with [theosophy],” are as short-sighted as possible.

When the crisis has reached its peak, the Christ will be there for people. Then there will be no records for them and they will no longer be necessary. How many incredible things there were, so people will become; how many incredible things were seen, so people will know without historical records what Christ is, who will perceive him in clairvoyance. The theosophists will be tested in this age. It will be the case that in the next few decades simply everything will be proclaimed, and the materialists will be unable to believe anything else. /2 blank pages] It must be a sensual perception. Belief in a physical return will become established. Whether they will be ready to believe in the spiritual, or whether they will only believe it when it comes to them in a carnal form? A number of people will embrace the belief in the return of Christ and present themselves as false messiahs to the world.

People must now consciously take their development into their own hands. There have often been false messiahs in the past, and they have all been believed. At that time, it happened without any particular harm to humanity because people did not yet [have] their destiny in their own hands. Now they must learn to distinguish the real from the Maya.

The era in which the Christ will appear as an ethereal being is the time when the first ethereal clairvoyance will show itself and break off shorthand.]

Notes from the lecture

The last two lectures introduced us to the nature of the individual human being. Today we will gain a small insight into certain developmental epochs of humanity as a whole and their spiritual life. Looking back from the standpoint of our present evolutionary epoch, we can see into the distant past and draw conclusions about the future. If we use our clairvoyant eye to help us, our examination will be even easier and our prophetic view of the coming times even more certain.

Human abilities have changed throughout the millennia, and the ancient generations were gifted quite differently than ours. What used to be clairvoyant consciousness is not what can be attained today through Rosicrucian training. It was a duller, yet clairvoyant consciousness that was inherent in all people. We ourselves, who are gathered here, were embodied in those people, but our abilities were different and will continue to change in future incarnations. In our epoch, those abilities should be developed that enable the exact observation of the physical world, such as the outer mind, which makes use of the brain and the physical sense organs. In the past, the soul was not limited to the latter as it is today; it had clairvoyant organs that have gradually become dulled. The soul's ability to perceive has been completely transferred from the inner world to the outer world, but in the future it will be changed and elevated again. Sensory-physical vision will be supplemented by spiritual clairvoyance, which will become the normal gift of all people. We have descended into matter and our vision has become obscured; but the time is near when it will become light around us again and we will look up through matter to the spirit. For this it was necessary that ever new influences should come from the spiritual worlds. Man received gift upon gift, in order to develop his nature in all directions and to become mature, in order to receive the highest of these from Christ when He descended to earth and incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth.

Christ is such a mighty Entity that He remains incomprehensible even to the highest clairvoyant consciousness. However high the initiate may rise, he comprehends only a small part of Him. We, who live 2000 years after Him, are only at the beginning of comprehending Christ. A higher realization of its nature is reserved for the humanity of the future, when more intimate impulses of will will have been awakened in it. Our entire preceding evolution was only a preparation for the reception of the Christ principle, and less exalted forerunners had the task of guiding this maturing of the human souls. Likewise, successors will imprint ever higher ideas and feelings on the human souls, making them ever more suitable for the divine power to rule within them. Those high guides and teachers who sacrifice their spiritual power in the service of humanity and open up our souls are called Bodhisattvas in the Orient. They are beings filled with wisdom, and their mission is to radiate wisdom. Among them, the one who lived 500 to 600 years before Jesus should be emphasized: Gautama Buddha, the great Buddha.

To get a true picture of him, we must think of his previous incarnations, in which he was active on earth as a bodhisattva, just as many others have intervened in the life of humanity over the millennia, forming something of a choir, each member with a specific mission, depending on the state of maturity of humanity.

It was only during his incarnation as Siddhartha, an Indian prince, that he rose to the level of a Buddha. His mission was to prepare the teaching of compassion and love. One might object that Christ did this – but no. Christ not only taught it; he instilled love and compassion into the hearts of humanity.

There is a difference between Buddha's teaching and Christ's power, just as there is between an art connoisseur in front of a painting by Raphael and Raphael himself. This is precisely where many people make the great mistake of seeing in Buddha the highest of all spirits in human form. They do not know that the one who incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth 600 years after him was the incarnation of the Logos Himself. Buddha had to prepare the impulse of compassion and love. He prepared the souls for what Christ was to bring. In the grand scheme of things, his preparatory work is the most significant that has ever been done. To understand his personality better, we need to understand the difference between a Bodhisattva and a Buddha. If we use our clairvoyant eye, we see that a Bodhisattva is a human being who is constantly connected to the spiritual world and does not live entirely in the physical world. His being is, as it were, too great to find room in a human body; only a part of it extends down into the earthly shell, while the greater part remains in the higher worlds. Consequently, the Bodhisattva is always in a state of inspiration.

Gautama Buddha was born as one of these beings. Only in his twenty-ninth year did his personality become strong enough to receive the higher part within himself. According to legend, he settled under a fig tree during his wanderings and received the enlightenment that made him a Buddha. He rose to a higher dignity, according to the hierarchy that prevails in the spiritual world. Another one advanced at the same time and took the place he had left. His successor in the office of Bodhisattva is now carrying out his duties until he himself has attained the Buddha maturity. Another 3,000 years will pass, and then he will incarnate as Maitreya Buddha among people. His task will be discussed later.

What does it mean for humanity that the Bodhisattva has become a Buddha? It has made it possible for them to acquire new abilities. There is a widespread belief that these abilities have always existed to a greater or lesser extent. However, that is not the case at all. In the course of evolution, new abilities have been added, and every time humanity matured to be endowed with a new gift, the new ability had to be incarnated first in a great man. In him it manifested itself first, and he then laid the seeds in the souls that were ready for it. Therefore all feeling and thinking was different before the appearance of Gautama Buddha. Even the reception of the teachings was different from what it was for later people. Half unconsciously, like a suggestion, they received what the Bodhisattvas received as inspiration and allowed to flow over into their disciples as strength. It was only through Gautama Buddha that human beings received the impulse of compassion and love for their fellow beings, and were thus prepared to receive the Christ Impulse. It is not enough, however, to feel this ability; it must become the guiding force in life and be lived accordingly.

But whence do all these Bodhisattvas receive their strength and their teaching? High up in the spiritual worlds, in the midst of their lofty choir, there dwells the teacher of all and at the same time the inexhaustible source of all light and strength and wisdom, which flows over to them: Christ. From Him they drew and descended among men as His forerunners. Then he himself came down to earth and embodied himself in Jesus of Nazareth. And after him they will come again to fulfill his plan.

At the end of his high career, a bodhisattva becomes a Buddha and no longer needs to take on a physical body. The Buddha stage concludes the cycle of his incarnations, and he enters into a new, higher evolution. His lowest vehicle is then no longer a physical body, but an etheric body, and henceforth he is perceptible only to the clairvoyant eye. The seer alone can follow how Gautama Buddha continued to work for the good of humanity after his death and helped develop all the forces on earth so that the Christ Himself could embody Himself in the flesh, in an earthly tool that became His personality: in Jesus of Nazareth. Much had to happen for this to happen, and a series of great events were connected with it, as we can see from the Gospel of Luke. It says that the shepherds in the field were granted the grace of seeing what otherwise no earthly eye could see. They became clairvoyant and saw angels floating above the place where the child Jesus was born. What were these heavenly spirits? It was the gift that Buddha gave by sacrificing himself. They saw him, in his powers, interwoven in the aura that surrounded the place. But it was not only he who had to contribute to this greatest of events; each of the previous Bodhisattvas had his part to give. Buddha's part, the greatest, was visible as an angelic aura.

This interpretation may seem to many to be at variance with what they know of Buddha and Buddhism. They forget that their knowledge comes from ancient scriptures and that Buddha has not remained what he was at his death. They forget that he too has progressed in evolution. The Buddha of that time prepared the way for Christianity; the present Buddha is within Christianity.

If we now look back to his predecessors, we see from their teachings that man has been aware of the Christ-being even in the most distant past. The great leaders of all nations and all times have spoken of him. Thus, for example, we find in ancient India in the Vedas, even if only a small part of the mighty teachings of the holy Rishis. They called the incomprehensible being, which they sensed beyond their sphere, Vishva-Karman. Later, in ancient Persia, Zarathustra proclaimed what his spiritual eye beheld. It was, as discussed in the first lecture, that which one attained through initiation: the seeing of the sun at midnight. Looking through physical matter, he saw the spirit of the sun.

Let us recall, for a better understanding, that the physical body of a celestial body, like that of a human being, is only part of the entire being in question, and that both have more subtle principles, which are visible to the clairvoyant as an aura. Just as the human being has the aura, formed by the astral and etheric bodies, the small aura, so in the macrocosm we distinguish the great aura, “Ahura Mazdao”, as Zarathustra called it. This name was later changed to Ormuzd, which means the Spirit of Light. At that time, Christ was still far from us, so Zarathustra said to his disciples: “As long as your gaze is fixed on earth, you will not see Him. But when you rise with clairvoyant power into the high heavens towards the sun, you will find the great solar spirit.

Likewise, the ancient Hebrew secret doctrine speaks of the great spirit that floats through space and that the seer in the high spheres has to seek. However, the prophecy follows that he will descend and unite with the earth aura. One of those who perceived him in our earthly sphere was Paul. As Saul, he knew that the Messiah would come and that the Earth would be united with the spirit of the Sun, but he believed that this was still far in the future. On the road to Damascus, he suddenly gained clairvoyance and realized that the great event had already taken place and that Jesus of Nazareth was the long-awaited one. This experience converted him to Paul, and henceforth he proclaimed the event as an enthusiastic apostle.

The Christ Impulse is not to be understood as the illumination of only a few individuals. The seer may say that through him the whole earth has become something new. When the blood of Christ flowed at Golgotha, there occurred an intimate union of our earth with the highest Being, Who descended from inaccessible regions of heaven for the salvation of mankind. He has already been recognized by many as the one for whose coming the Bodhisattvas have been preparing down here for thousands of years, but there are few in whom Christianity has come to true life. The Christ impulse is still in its infancy, and humanity will need a long time and the help of many leaders before it comes into its own in all expressions of social life.

However, we can see a tremendous advance in the outlook on life in the short span of time that separates Buddha from Christ. One fact shows it as vividly as possible. When the young king's son Siddhartha, the future Buddha, once stepped out of his palace, where he had never seen anything but lust and splendor, youth and beauty, he saw a cripple whose sight horrified him and he said to himself: Life brings illness, and illness is suffering. Another time, he encountered an old man, and sadly concluded: Life brings old age, and old age is suffering. Soon after, he saw the most horrifying thing, a decomposing corpse, and in horror he repeated: “Life brings death, and death is suffering.” Wherever he looked, he found physical ailments and mental anguish and separation from all that is dear and precious in life. All life is suffering,” he said to himself, and based on this principle, he built the doctrine of renouncing life. Man, he taught, should, in order to escape suffering, strive to rise as quickly as possible out of the cycle of incarnations, to withdraw forever from the painful alternation of life and death.

If we now advance a few centuries, we see countless people who were not Buddhas, but simple souls, who nevertheless sensed the power of the Christ within themselves, looking at a corpse, but not with horror. They are not filled with the sole thought: death is suffering - because in the death of Christ they experienced the exemplary death that means: death is victory of the spirit over everything physical. Death is the victory of the eternal over the temporal.

Never before has there been such an impulse as this one that came from the mystery of Golgotha, and never again will a greater one be bestowed on man on earth. That is what those naive souls felt when they looked up at the cross, the most powerful of symbols. There they felt that there is something higher and stronger than the decaying body, which is subject to disease, old age and death.

Let us now consider the other tenets of the Buddha's teaching with our Christian spiritual perspective: disease and old age cannot discourage us and drive us to flee because we have recognized their cause. Yesterday we saw how the newly acquired abilities of our astral body make the inflexible physical body increasingly uncomfortable and how the growing disharmony between soul and body gradually destroys the latter and it is finally discarded. We are not afraid of old age, because we know that when life here reaches its peak and the body begins to wither, within it the newfound strength contracts into a young germ that will one day flourish into a richer life on earth. This development of the spirit, as taught by Christianity, contains infinite comfort and makes the separation from those we love less painful, for we know that the separation is only due to physical barriers and that we can find our way to our loved ones in spirit.

If we think and feel this way, then our whole life down here takes on a new, spiritualized aspect and becomes more and more valuable to us. Our spiritual eye sees through physical ailments and helps us to bear them with equanimity. We know that our field of work is down here and that the seed for new life must be sown here. What we can recognize today from spiritual teaching will become a certainty for us in the future stages of development. The Christ-power, which is only just beginning to emerge, will soon bring about an increase in our perception. We are at the end of the transitional epoch, which means the lowest point of submergence and spiritual blindness in matter, and in the not too distant future, physical sensory perception will be joined by the beginning of clairvoyance. This ascent will be recognizable by two phenomena. In individual people - and their number will constantly grow - the ability will awaken to see the ethereal forms that surround the physical. They will see the fine covering of the life body shimmering around the human body.

In addition to this enrichment of vision, some people will see something like a dream image when committing an act. At first, these images will hardly be noticed and, above all, not understood. At first they will be shadowy and will only gradually become clearer, especially in those who are materialistic. For the more powerfully materialism holds a person in its thrall, the more difficult it will be for him to become aware of the spiritual and to perceive the superphysical. Naturally, the future clairvoyants will be ridiculed as fools and perhaps locked up as insane. But that will not be able to prevent what is to be. Supernatural vision will become clearer and more frequent, and people will understand what is revealed to their sight. The ethereal forms will teach them that there is life everywhere, and they will soon recognize karmic images of compensation in the emerging visions. They will give what they have created through an act and understand how they will have to compensate for it if it was evil.

But still other abilities will be linked to the ones just mentioned: a smaller number of people will relive through their own experience what transformed Saul of Tarsus into Paul. Just as he did, they will suddenly see that Christ united with the earth through his crucifixion at Golgotha. This powerful inner experience, which some will have in the not too distant future, is what has been promised as the “reappearance of the Christ”. For only once did Christ appear in the flesh and could be seen with physical senses, when humanity was not clairvoyant. But he remained with people, as he himself promised: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Christ did not remain in a fleshly shell and will not reappear in the flesh either. Those who believe in the enhancement of human abilities will understand this.

Through the power of Christ, people shall ascend again, beyond the barriers of the physical world, and their perception shall not remain bound only to the beings embodied in matter. The spiritual kingdom with its essence shall be opened up to them again, and they shall behold Him who redeemed them from darkness and sin.

This will be repeated to people over and over again. Many will accept it in the form in which today's spiritual science presents it. Others, however, will hold on to the erroneous opinion that Christ will come again in the flesh, and will allow themselves to be deceived by false messiahs and go astray. Those who do not want the spiritual, who do not want to see it, will seek it here in matter among men, and hostile powers will send out their representatives and use the stubbornness and blindness for their purposes. In the course of the centuries there has often been talk of such Messiahs, and external history shows many of them in the flesh. It is they who will be the test for those who call themselves theosophists. For many speak as Theosophists and readily profess themselves as such, yet they carry Theosophy on their tongues and not in their hearts. He, however, who will trust his physical eye no more than the unfolding spiritual eye, he will experience the event of Damascus.

At first there will be few and then more and more, and with the number of those who see it, their influence on all mankind will grow and change it. In the course of the next two millennia, new moral abilities will also be added to spiritual perception. For what man creates now, he needs intellectual ability and intelligence, and the morality of the inventor does not matter. This will be different later. At present, for example, the work of the chemist is limited to the composition of substances. However, a time will come when he will be able to infuse life into the structures he puts together. But to get that far, man must first have developed the very finest and noblest impulses within himself, and only then will he be able to let the power contained in them flow into his work. Today man is still too undeveloped and immoral, and he would cause the greatest havoc if such powers were at his disposal. Therefore he will not succeed until he is able to pour not only intellect but also morality, feeling and love into everything he does. The irreverent experimentation with selfishness must have become impossible, love must be the mainspring of all creation and the laboratory table must become an altar.

A new era is dawning with the appearance of the power of Christ, and John the Baptist points this out in the words: “Change your soul's disposition, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” He had seen the descent of the Sun-God, Ahura Mazdao, and recognized in Jesus of Nazareth his representative. We must prepare ourselves for this new era and rise above materialism. We must realize that our horizon will widen and that new organs will be added to the present physical ones for a more perfect perception. Let us not doubt this truth and let us not consider it a fantasy and a dangerous teaching that can harm the Christ impulse. The understanding and the feeling for it will become ever clearer and deeper and the number of those in whom the Christ germ will begin to grow will become ever greater. However, in order for it to come to full development in all of humanity, a great individuality must still embody itself among us.

The Bodhisattva who took Gautama's place when he became Buddha will descend in the form of Maitreya Buddha to bring people to the full recognition of the Christ. He will be the greatest of the proclaimers of the Christ impulse and make possible for many the experience of Damascus. A long time will pass and spiritual science will make the Christ Being understandable to people from ever higher points of view, until the last of the Bodhisattvas will have completed his mission on earth and humanity will have grasped the Christ in all its meaning and their entire life will have been absorbed without reservation in His impulse.

Such a mighty perspective shows us how man must look up to supersensible history in order to understand the meaning of earthly history. Everything leads up to making man understand what the fulfillment of the words is: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age!”

If we want to understand the migrations of the fifth post-Atlantic races, we must be aware that it is difficult to see clearly in this chaos. Descendants of all previous races have settled here, and we are already working in the fourth [root] race with a population that is spreading out in a radiating manner, as it were, and is itself mixed with descendants of other races. In the fifth race, the situation is most complicated. Everywhere we find remnants of populations that once already had a culture. As far as we look at the peoples of the southern Asian continent, we have remnants of the ancient Lemurian population. In the interior of Australia, their descendants can still be found. In western and northern Asia, in Central Asia and southern Europe, we find remnants of the fourth Atlantic epoch. This is the soil into which the branches of the fifth post-Atlantic epoch sink. So here we have the result of two currents: the Lemurian-Aryan on the one hand, and the Atlantean-Aryan on the other. All these cultures, however, have absorbed an even older one; Siberia, Scandinavia, northern Russia, China even have remnants of the Hyperborean culture. These mixtures are difficult to unravel. Let us try to trace the course of the Aryan cultural impact.

From a point in Central Asia, near the Gobi and Khamo deserts, this cultivation spread outwards in a radius. It was a decidedly priestly culture that prepared a spiritually highly educated race to enter the chaos of nations, to send out colonies from which new civilizations would arise. This small tribal people emerged from the fifth sub-race, the Ursemites of the fourth Atlantic epoch. We must bear in mind that these Ursemites were given their specific task, which is expressed in the Law of Manu, to offer to people in the broadest sense what is expressed in the words of Jesus: 'The kingdom of God does not come with external gestures, but the kingdom of God is among you'. Everything that came before was only a preparation for this point in time. It was what became the guiding tendency of Christianity: the sanctification of the personality, the full descent to the physical plane. This mission first had to be carefully prepared.

From the very beginning, the Manu in the root race placed very little emphasis on what goes beyond birth and death in man. These teachings had played an important role in the past and were now slowly dying out to gradually disappear. The Manu of the fifth post-Atlantic epoch wanted to lead people down to the physical plane in order to understand the physical heart, brain, and lungs. So these teachings, which went beyond birth and death, slowly faded in the first three post-Atlantic cultures. For even a Manu cannot direct fate and events as he wills, but must accomplish everything in accordance with the great laws of nature. Two things were available to him: the culture that still existed from the Lemurian population in southern Asia, and the remnants of the Atlantean culture in Africa. He sent his colonies there with initiated priests. Some to India, others to Africa. He gave them the teaching of non-reincarnation, the teaching [about life] between birth and death. In fact, the oldest Vedas contain nothing of what goes beyond birth and death. He said to himself: “Peoples who know nothing about reincarnation are coming together with those who have a precise knowledge of it. The result will be the right one.

In Egypt, they came together with the Atlanteans, who did not have such a sharp doctrine of reincarnation. For while the last Lemurians had trained them to the highest degree, it had already been distorted by the Atlanteans; with them, everything had come to a head in memory; the memory of the Atlanteans was so sharp that it outweighed everything else, that all that was physical lived in them through inheritance. So in this first excerpt we have two branches: the Indo-Aryans and the Hamites.

In India, the immigrating Indo-Aryans, who came with the old teaching of the word revealed by God - Veda word - took up the doctrine of reincarnation, and in Brahmanism we have what comes out so beautifully as the doctrine of reincarnation. This was brought about by the Manu. Meanwhile, the subjugated Lemurians became pariahs, and the Indians became the four castes. This is the principle of the initiates: the blending of the new with the old, here the powerful manasic spirituality with the doctrine of reincarnation.

In the Hamitic branch – Noah's three sons Shem, Ham and Japheth – the doctrine of reincarnation receded somewhat. It was less clear on the surface. The Egyptians placed more emphasis on the preservation of corpses. The inheritance system was more emphasized, which places the main value on physical continuity. The value of the individual life was emphasized and already transformed the ancient Rishi doctrine. A less decided doctrine of reincarnation mixed here with the doctrine of personality.

The second migration consists in the fact that a new branch was sent out, as it were. We can follow it if we first look eastward to the Medes and Persians and then to the tribe that passed through Chaldea and found its historical expression in the migrations of Abraham - from Ur in Chaldea. On the one hand, the tribe that went west also came into contact with the remnants of the Atlantic culture, namely with the fourth sub-race of the Atlanteans, the Turanian population, who had been engaged in agriculture.

Thus a peculiar mixture arises. Grafted onto that Turanian branch was the practice of magic – and it had to be grafted on firmly! From here came the teachings of the Medes and Bactrians. Here the first Zarathustras were active, endeavoring to use the external techniques of magical time in the service of external culture. The result is a mighty flourishing of agriculture and viticulture; in them we have the revival of the old magical skills.

A colonist branch goes further west and came across remnants of the undrawn Ursemites of the Atlantean race, and these form what is called the ancient Semitic tribe: Chaldeans, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Arabs. They form a new Semitic culture.

The most significant events occurred first among the Medes and Persians. They are contained in an ancient saga that has undergone many transformations and finally comes to us in the form of Cyrus: King Astyages had a daughter, Mandane, who married not a Mede but a Persian. The father dreamt that a tree was growing out of his daughter's womb. The dream was interpreted to mean that the Persian tribe would overshadow the Median tribe. The ancient saga of Cyrus has a uresoteric meaning. Cyrus represents the agricultural Persians in contrast to the non-agricultural Medes, and the [peasant] signifies that agriculture will win out: ancient culture will pass to the farmers.

How this came about can be seen from the institution of the Persian character. Physically strong they should become. There were no Lemurians here; the Atlanteans had prepared the ground for the development of personality. The Persians emphasized personal virtues above all. It is a remarkable trait that they had lessons in telling the truth; this was a main subject for boys, along with gymnastic exercises. And that is very important. They were preparing for what would lead to personal prowess reaching its peak.

Now we come to the point where the original Semitic element mixed with the new. Priest-Rishis migrated over and found decadent Old Semites and also decadent Akkadians. Thus the Manu formed a new branch by combining his immigrants with the decadent Semites, those who had developed arithmetic during their Atlantean heyday. What emerged from this was the Chaldean wisdom. [...] Astrology, astronomy, the observatories, the calendar, weights and measures emerged. The immigrants who had encountered the Akkadians, the ancient trading people, were used to create new colonies in this mixture. These were the Phoenicians.

Another excerpt followed: A colony of Rishis with followers went over to Europe. Here he found the old Hyperborean element, and in the south the Atlantic one. The Hyperboreans had already mixed with the Atlanteans; so only a small remnant of them remained. In the south, Hyperborean was almost non-existent. Here, on the soil of ancient Greece, the Pelasgian population arose with a kind of nature service that is reminiscent of Egyptian practices in many ways; only here it is more of a local cult instead of an ancestral cult: we find sacred trees, sacred caves; it is more closely tied to nature. There was a belief that the sacred is more closely tied to the place than to the tribe - Zeus of Dodona and others. The physical place becomes sacred. That was the new formation.

In Italy, too, a mixture of ancient Atlantean and Rishi culture is being brought into the physical plan again. Here, what had developed in the Atlanteans as a social being and as an attachment to technical culture penetrated: in the social legislation and technical skill of the Etruscans.

In the north, the mixture of Hyperborean and Rishi culture gave rise to the new formation of Celtic culture. What was found was an Atlantean-Hyperborean culture that was of little use. A new influence had to be given, and the result is the Celtic mixture with the Druid culture. This has so much spirituality because it absorbed the highly spiritual, which went beyond the spirituality of the Atlantic and Lemurian. Because it had the Hyperborean element in it, the Celtic could not quite withstand it and was absorbed by the later cultures.

We now come to the third sending forth. It is very complicated. It goes partly into what was previously prepared by the first two. We have preserved it in the representations of different peoples. Wherever the strong, powerful people are already in the foreground in the traditions. Thus, above all, a group of initiates went west and fertilized the already fertilized pre-Semitic element once again. Because it is about summarizing everything that was originally poured into the great idea of state-building. The result of this third sending out according to this poetry is Genesis, the Old Testament.

Another dissemination was the one that went to Asia Minor and formed what is preserved in Trojan culture and its daughter cultures, one of which is Albalong culture. These initiates had the task of taking over state formation as soon as it suited the various peoples.

We have thus become acquainted with three groups of initiates, the first of which had the task of creating the religious culture, the second of creating the material cultural basis - Persia - and the third of forming the state and consolidating the passions. This happens in forms adapted to the different peoples, as in Troy, or Alba Longa, or the theocratic state of Palestine. But essentially these were only preparations, made with peoples who were not called to form states. Among the people who were most called upon to carry the spiritual out onto the physical plane through their culture, the formation of states was least successful: the Greeks are above all the people of art. The highest personal thing brought out onto the physical plane: that is art. The initiate of the third group - in the case of the Greeks - is the hero, the strong man.

Over there in Asia, the peoples had already mixed repeatedly. And those who had received the highest legislation, the Jews, had mixed so much that they had already become hypertrophied. In contrast, in Europe, in central Italy, there had been a simpler mixture. We find a very strong Atlantic element there. The Etruscan colony had cooperated with Alba Longa, the priest state, and brought about Rome. Here there was simple racial formation and a great deal of Atlanticism in it. The two traits were enough to establish what is called the Etruscan-Roman culture, with the priestly influence that had to lead to the institution of the Pontifex Maximus. The conditions were simple, and so the people of the Roman Republic emerged, who developed personal bravery purely for themselves. The Roman citizen, the cives, was the fully-fledged human being who felt entirely as a personality. The Greeks had to feel themselves above all as wise men and artists. When they cultivated what most emerges from the personality, oratory and law, they had to perish. Private law and oratory, eloquence, were only developed to perfection in Rome. The Greek first sensed [...] and then developed the perfect personality by representing it in his gods. The Roman represents in his person the perfected personality as a citizen, as a real human being. The works of Greek sculptors, so to speak, arise in the Romans and come to life.

Thus, in Rome something was being prepared that the Lodge of the Initiates could use to give a further impetus. The highest peak of spiritual life had to be taken for this purpose. This could only be found where most spiritual impacts had occurred, namely in the Near East. There spirit was grafted onto spirit:

1. The self-impact: the fifth sub-race of the Atlantians Ursemites on the first sub-race of the Aryan population.
2. The move into the area of the Euphrates and Tigris.
3. The patriarchal period - the time of the heroes.
4. The theocracy.

This wonderful mixture is expressed in all branches of intellectual life. The new influence there could only come from a personality who came from far away, not from their own country.

The lodge carefully selected the family from which an initiate was to come. The old Rishi culture had prepared, foretold the initiate who must now come. It was written in the Sibylline books.

Thus, in secret, away from Judaism, in Galilee, the Messiah of the fourth sub-race was being prepared. There in Galilee, Judaism had never gained a firm foothold; it had not penetrated there. The Galileans are very mixed in racial character. It was important that He should have nothing of the Galilean, that He should come as from the hidden. That is why the apocrypha tell of him as being a son of his mother, and speak of his unchaste birth. This was Jesus of Nazareth, the Galilean. He was initiated to the third degree of a disciple. Now it was a matter of making him the highest initiate for everything that was to be realized on the physical plane. This was done by taking possession of the whole personality by another, who represents the whole fifth root race, by the Christ. In the Greco-Latin culture, the whole fifth post-Atlantic epoch emerged, and this is symbolically represented in the descent of the dove. If one wanted to express the truths at issue here, one could only choose the highest form.

The Manu said to himself, “I will make the fourth sub-race into a union of all the previous impacts and endow it with the spirit of the entire fifth root race. The Christ can do this, who is the actual impact of the entire fifth root race. The Manu prepared it, and Christ, as it were, entered into what had been prepared. The revelation of the actual secret of the fourth race was to take place. Earlier it had only been prepared, the highest initiates had seen it, the others prepared. That was the darkness into which the light came.

If we survey the development, we have results that are prepared by the fact that the first three sub-races are gradually educated to become personalities - until in the fourth the most profound part of the personality is seized, as the equality of all people before God.

Initiates who were sent out were not begotten by the father and mother of the race in question. They were sexless everywhere.

This is really said in the Gospel of John:

He came to that which is His own, but His own did not receive Him. And as many as received Him, to them He gave power to become the sons of God, even to those who believe in His name: <5>they were born, not of flesh and blood, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Christ is the inwardly divine principle; he must pour himself into forms and takes the form of the law from the theocratic state, from Judaism. The Jews could not accept the new forms, they already had their own; that was the highest. But He had to accept them, step by step He had to emerge onto the physical plane. So He expressed His wisdom through the wisdom of ancient Judaism. Now this wisdom had to be understood. This wisdom could be understood where the physical plane had already been conquered, where philosophy existed. That is why the first church fathers came from the Greeks. In their philosophy, they had developed the ability to understand that which emerged on the physical plane. When the will emerged in the personality, they could also understand this personality.

The people who had formed a Zeus, who had incarnated a God in their art of sculpture, could also understand the idea of an incarnated God. This idea could only come to life through the Roman people. The human being who had formed the personality could have this idea. That was the Roman.

The Christ Himself is formed in the Jewish people, He is understood through Greek gnosis and the Greek apostles: Paul and the Greek evangelist John. But all this could not have led to the spread of Christianity on the physical plane, but at most to an understanding. The Romans, who adopt Greek culture, destroy Jerusalem, go to Asia, become Christians.

So:
The Jews form Christ.
The Greeks understand Christ.
The Romans become Christians.

Therefore, Christianity spread only after the destruction of Jerusalem and has a specifically Roman form. In Rome, the physical vessel for the Christ had already been prepared, namely the state, which was already founding the empire, and the priest who could administer it, the Pontifex Maximus. This brings us to the fourth sub-race. We have seen that it was carefully prepared. The fifth sub-race is still in the process of being formed.

We have reached the summit or center. The following teachers are therefore those who have to preserve what has been created in order to apply it again on the particular physical. It is a matter of some initiates specifying these summits for the individuals. Thus we have preserved the Christian tradition in the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail. Christianity is constantly degenerating and degenerating. So it is a matter of continually giving new impetus from what is called the Mount Montsalvatsch, the Grail. These impacts take on a different character. Again, it is the Rishis who experience the actual teaching in a Christian way and only ever want to protect original Christianity from degeneration.

In this way, the most diverse attempts at regeneration have been made. The first attempt can be traced back to an initiate who cannot yet play a historical role because this is still prehistory. However, he is mentioned in legend. He is the German apostle Boniface. He is the source of the original form in which Christianity came from Ireland to Germany, with a mixture of Druidic culture, Indian influence, and the impact of Dionysius the Areopagite.

A new influence was given and a new possibility created by the initiate known as Lohengrin. This initiation proceeded from a very complicated point of view, as all initiations become complicated. For it was necessary to connect the original Christianity, which had developed continuously from Dionysius the Areopagite through Scotus Eriugena up to scholasticism and mysticism. This current could indeed have an effect on peoples through preaching; but gradually it had been lost to the people because it went to the highest heights of thought. Therefore, a fertilization had to be brought from the original spiritual element. A high point had been reached, but it was also an impasse, and in order to have an effect on the initiate Lohengrin, a new fertilization from the Orient had to be brought about through the crusades. The essential thing that emerged from this is the Knights Templar, the actual messengers of the Holy Grail. They build a place of wisdom at the site of Solomon's Temple and after they are prepared there, they become servants of the Holy Grail, are initiated there by the Grail. This happens at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and is prepared in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Now we are in the preparatory stage of the fifth sub-race, the Germanic-English. From the Temple service we can see that it is about the application of Christianity to a new race. The service of the Temple Knights prepares for the transition of Christianity to full externality [...] in Christianity, which later leads to Protestantism. This helps us to understand the actual confession of the Knights Templar and their secret cult. They said to themselves: The Christ represented by the Western Church means nothing to us, because he is the Christ on the cross. But we proclaim the Christ who walked in Jerusalem and received initiation from the Baptist; our teachers about Christ are therefore not church teachers and church fathers, but John the Baptist, the initiator himself. Therefore, the main ceremony consisted of spitting out the crucifix symbol of Western worship and the unconsecrated wafer. This symbolized the contempt of Roman Christianity, the one that had developed into Catholicism, and it was prepared to turn away from Catholic Christ back to evangelical Christ. That was one principle. Another was:

1. We again accept the belief in the elementary forces of the world.
2. We believe that the destinies of men are a result of the interrelationships of the stars and that man himself is born out of the great interrelationships of the stars, the laws of nature.

Out of these two principles the culture of the Anglo-German race has developed: the religious-Protestant on the one hand, the scientific of the physical world on the other.

But this was only the vessel. The content came in a roundabout way

through the Moors. So here we have a Semitic influence again. There were five Semitic influences that provided the content. The mold was always prepared.

The Rosicrucians guarded the common basis of what diverged into a purely secular science and a materialistic religion. They were the ones who wanted to hold together. The Rosicrucians essentially studied evolution in the concrete within the fifth sub-race, prepared social legislation and will be the actual leaders of the sixth sub-race.

[ 1 ] A free spirit acts according to his impulses, i.e., intuitions, which his thinking has selected out of the whole world of his Ideas. For an unfree spirit, the reason why he singles out a particular intuition from his world of Ideas, in order to make it the basis of an action, lies in the perceptual world which is given to him, i.e., in his past experiences. He recalls, before making a decision, what someone else has done, or recommended as proper in an analogous case, or what God has commanded to be done in such a case, etc., and he acts on these recollections. For a free spirit these preliminary conditions are not the only impulses to action. He takes an absolutely original decision. He cares as little what others have done in such a case as what commands they had laid down. He has purely ideal reasons which determine him to select a particular concept out of the sum of his concepts, and to realize it in action. But his action will belong to perceptible reality. Consequently, what he achieves will be identical with a definite content of perception. The concept will have to realize itself in a concrete particular event. As a concept it will not contain this particular event. It will refer to the event only in the same way as, in general, a concept is related to a percept, e.g., the concept lion to a particular lion. The link between concept and percept is the representation.¹ To the unfree spirit this intermediate link is given from the outset. Motives exist in his consciousness from the first in the form of representations. Whenever he intends to do anything he acts as he has seen others act, or as he is ordered to do in each separate case. Hence authority is most effective in the form of examples, i.e., in the form of quite definite particular actions handed down for the consciousness of the unfree spirit. A Christian models his conduct less on the teaching than on the model of the Saviour. Rules have less value for telling men positively what to do than for telling them what to leave undone. Laws take on the form of general concepts only when they forbid actions, not when they prescribe actions. Laws concerning what we ought to do must be given to the unfree spirit in wholly concrete form. Clean the street in front of your door! Pay your taxes to such and such an amount to the tax-collector! etc. Conceptual form belongs to laws which inhibit actions. Thou shalt not steal! Thou shalt not commit adultery! These laws, too, influence the unfree spirit only by means of a concrete representation, e.g., that of the punishments attached by human authority, or of the pangs of conscience, or of eternal damnation, etc.

[ 2 ] When the motive to an action exists in general conceptual form (e.g., Thou shalt do good to thy fellow-men! Thou shalt live so that thou promotest best thy welfare!) there must first be found, in the particular case, the concrete representation of the action (the relation of the concept to a content of perception). For a free spirit who is not compelled by any model nor by fear of punishment, etc., this translation of the concept into a representation is always necessary.

[ 3 ] Now man produces concrete representations from out of the sum of his Ideas by means of the imagination. Hence what the free spirit needs in order to realize his Ideas, in order to assert himself in the world, is moral imagination. This is the source of the free spirit's action. Only those men, therefore, who are endowed with moral imagination are, properly speaking, morally productive. Those who merely preach morality, i.e., those who merely excogitate moral rules without being able to condense them into concrete representations, are morally unproductive. They are like those critics who can explain very reasonably how a work of art ought to be made, but who are themselves incapable of the smallest artistic production.

[ 4 ] Moral imagination, in order to realize its representation, must set to work upon a determinate sphere of percepts. Human action does not create percepts, but transforms already existing percepts and gives them a new form. In order to be able to transform a definite object of perception, or a sum of such objects, in accordance with a moral representation, one must have grasped the law-abiding content of the percept-picture (its hitherto existing mode of working to which one wants to give a new form or a new direction). Further, it is necessary to discover the procedure by which it is possible to change the given law into the new one. This part of effective moral activity depends on knowledge of the particular world of phenomena with which one has got to deal. We shall, therefore, find it in some branch of scientific knowledge in general. Moral action, then, presupposes, in addition to the faculty of moral Ideation ² and of moral imagination, the ability to transform the world of percepts without breaking the natural laws by which they are connected. This ability is moral technique. It may be learnt in the same sense in which science in general may be learnt. For, in general, men are better able to find concepts for the ready-made world than productively to originate out of their imagination future, and as yet non-existing, actions. Hence, it is very well possible for men without moral imagination to receive moral representations from others, and to engrave them skillfully into the actual world. Vice versa, it may happen that men with moral imagination lack technical skill, and are dependent on the service of other men for the realization of their representations.

[ 5 ] In so far as we require for moral action knowledge of the objects upon which we are about to act, our action depends upon such knowledge. What we need to know here are laws of nature. These belong to the Natural Sciences, not to Ethics.

[ 6 ] Moral imagination and the faculty of moral Ideation can become objects of knowledge only after they have first been produced by the individual. But, then, they no longer regulate life, but have already regulated it. They must now be treated as efficient causes, like all other causes (they are purposes only for the subject). The study of them is, as it were, the Natural Science of moral representations.

[ 7 ] Ethics as a Normative Science, over and above this science, cannot exist.

[ 8 ] Some would maintain the normative character of moral laws at least in the sense that Ethics is to be taken as a kind of dietetic which from the conditions of the organism's life, deduces general rules, on the basis of which it hopes to give detailed directions to the body. (Paulsen, System der Ethik.) This comparison is mistaken, because our moral life cannot be compared with the life of the organism. The function of the organism occurs without any volition on our part. We find its laws ready-made in the world; hence we can discover them and apply them when discovered. Moral laws, on the other hand, do not exist until we create them. We cannot apply them until we have created them. The error is due to the fact that moral laws are not, in their content, at every moment new creations, but are handed down by tradition. Those which we take over from our ancestors appear to be given like the natural laws of the organism. But it does not follow that a later generation has the right to apply them in the same way as dietetic rules. For they apply to individuals, and not, like natural laws, to specimens of a genus. Considered as an organism I am such a generic specimen, and I shall live in accordance with nature if I apply the laws of my genus to my particular case. As a moral being I am an individual and have laws which are wholly my own.³

[ 9 ] The view here upheld appears to contradict that fundamental doctrine of modern Natural Science which is known as the Theory of Evolution. But it only appears to do so. By evolution we mean the real development of the later out of the earlier in accordance with natural law. In the organic world, evolution means that the later (more perfect) organic forms are real descendants of the earlier (imperfect) forms, and have grown out of them in accordance with natural laws. The upholders of the theory of organic evolution ought really to believe that there was once a time on our earth, when a being could have observed with his own eyes the gradual evolution of reptiles out of proto-amniotes, supposing that he could have been present as an observer, and had been endowed with a sufficiently long span of life. Similarly, Evolutionists ought to suppose that a being could have watched the development of the solar system out of the primordial nebula of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis, if he could have occupied a suitable spot in the world-ether during that infinitely long period. [That on this supposition, the nature of both the proto-amniotes and of the primordial nebula of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis would have to be conceived differently from the Materialist's conception of it, is here irrelevant.] But no Evolutionist should ever dream of maintaining that he could from his concept of the proto-amniote deduce that of the reptile with all its qualities, if he had never seen a reptile. Just as little would it be possible to derive the solar system from the concept of the Kant-Laplace nebula, if this concept of an original nebula had been formed only from the percept of the nebula. In other words, if the Evolutionist is to think consistently, he is bound to maintain that out of earlier phases of evolution later ones really develop; that once the concept of the imperfect and that of the perfect have been given, we can understand the connection. But in no case should he admit that the concept formed from the earlier phases is, in itself, sufficient for deducing from it the later phases. From this it follows for Ethics that, whilst we can understand the connection of later moral concepts with earlier ones, it is not possible to deduce a single new moral Idea from earlier ones. The individual, as a moral being, produces his own content. This content, thus produced, is for Ethics a datum, as much as reptiles are a datum for Natural Science. Reptiles have evolved out of proto-amniotes, but the scientist cannot manufacture the concept of reptiles out of the concept of the proto-amniotes. Later moral Ideas evolve out of the earlier ones, but Ethics cannot manufacture out of the moral principles of an earlier culture those of a later one. The confusion is due to the fact that, as scientists, we start with the facts before us, and then make them objects of knowledge, whereas in moral action we first produce the facts ourselves, and then gain knowledge of them. In the evolution of the moral world-order we accomplish what, at a lower level, nature accomplishes: we alter some part of the perceptual world. Hence the ethical norm cannot straightway be made an object of knowledge, like a law of nature, for it must first be created. Only when that has been done can the norm become an object of knowledge.

[ 10 ] But is it not possible to make the old a measure for the new? Is not every man compelled to measure the products of his moral imagination by the standard of traditional moral doctrines? If he would be truly productive in morality, such measuring is as much an absurdity as it would be an absurdity if one were to measure a new species in nature by an old one and say that reptiles, because they do not agree with the proto-amniotes, are an illegitimate (degenerate) species.

[ 11 ] Ethical Individualism, then, so far from being in opposition to the theory of evolution rightly understood, is a direct consequence of it. Haeckel's genealogical tree, from protozoa up to man as an organic being, ought to be capable of being worked out without a breach of natural law, and without a gap in its uniform evolution, up to the individual as a moral being in a definite sense. But in no case could we deduce the nature of a later species from the nature of an ancestral species. However true it is that the moral Ideas of the individual have perceptibly grown out of those of his ancestors, it is also true that the individual is morally barren, unless he has moral Ideas of his own.

[ 12 ] The same Ethical Individualism, which I have developed on the basis of the preceding conceptions, might be equally well developed on the basis of the theory of evolution. The final result would be the same; only the path by which it was reached would be different.

[ 13 ] That absolutely new moral Ideas should be developed by the moral imagination is for the theory of evolution no more miraculous than the development of one animal species out of another, provided only that this theory, as a Monistic world-view, rejects, in morality as in science, every transcendent (metaphysical) influence which cannot be ideally experienced. In doing so, it follows the same principle by which it is guided in seeking the causes of new organic forms without referring to the interference of an extra-mundane Being, who produces every new species in accordance with a new creative thought through supernatural influence. Just as Monism has no use for supernatural creative thoughts in explaining living organisms, so it is equally impossible for it to derive the moral world-order from causes which do not lie within the world of our experience. It cannot admit that the nature of moral will is exhausted by being traced back to a continuous supernatural influence upon moral life (divine government of the world from the outside), or a particular act of revelation at a particular moment in history (giving of the ten commandments), or through God's appearance on the earth (as Christ). All that happens in this way to and in man becomes a moral element only when it enters into human experience and becomes an individual's own. Moral processes are, for Monism, products of the world like everything else that exists, and their causes must be looked for in the world, i.e., in man, because man is the bearer of morality.

[ 14 ] Ethical Individualism, then, is the crown of the edifice that Darwin and Haeckel have striven for Natural Science. It is Spiritualized Evolutionism applied to the moral life.

[ 15 ] Anyone who restricts the concept of the natural from the outset to an arbitrarily narrowed sphere, is easily tempted not to find any room within it for free individual action. The consistent Evolutionist does not easily fall a prey to such a narrow-minded view. He cannot let the natural process of evolution terminate with the ape, and acknowledge for man a “supernatural” origin. He is bound, in his very search for the natural progenitors of man to seek Spirit even in nature. Again, he cannot stop short at the organic functions of man, and regard only these as natural. He is bound to look on the life of moral self-determination as the spiritual continuation of organic life.

[ 16 ] The Evolutionist, then, in accordance with his fundamental principles, can maintain only that the present form of moral action evolves out of other kinds of world-happenings. He must leave the characterization of action, i.e., its determination as a free action, to the immediate observation of each action. All that he maintains is only that men have developed out of non-human ancestors. What the nature of men actually is must be determined by observation of men themselves. The results of this observation cannot possibly contradict the true history of evolution. Only the assertion that the results are such as to exclude their being due to a natural world-order would contradict recent developments in the Natural Sciences.⁴

[ 17 ] Ethical Individualism, then, has nothing to fear from a Natural Science which understands itself. Observation yields spiritual activity (freedom) as the characteristic quality of the perfect form of human action. Freedom must be attributed to the human will, in so far as the will realizes purely ideal intuitions. For these are not the results of a necessity acting upon them from without, but are grounded in themselves. When we find that an action embodies such an ideal intuition, we feel it to be free. Freedom consists in this character of an action.

[ 18 ] What, then, from this standpoint are we to say of the distinction, already mentioned above (p. 7) between the two statements “To be free means to be able to do what you will,” and “To be able, as you please, to desire or not to desire is the real meaning of the dogma of freewill”? Hamerling bases his theory of freewill precisely on this distinction, by declaring the first statement to be correct but the second to be an absurd tautology. He says, “I can do what I will, but to say I can will what I will is an empty tautology.” Whether I am able to do, i.e., to make real, what I will, i.e., what I have set before myself as my Idea of action, that depends on external circumstances and on my technical skill (cp. p. 156). To be free means to be able to determine by moral imagination out of oneself those representations (motives) which lie at the basis of the action. Freedom is impossible if anything other than I myself (whether a mechanical process or extra-mundane God whose existence is only inferred) determines my moral representations. In other words, I am free only when I myself produce these representations, but not when I am merely able to realize the motives which another being has implanted in me. A free being is one who can will what he regards as right. Whoever does anything other than what he wills must be impelled to it by motives which do not lie in himself. Such a man is unfree in his action. Accordingly, to be able to will, as you please, what you consider right or what you consider wrong would mean to be free or unfree as you please. This is, of course, just as absurd as to identify freedom with the ability to do what one is compelled to will. But this is just what Hamerling maintains when he says, “It is perfectly true that the will is always determined by motives, but it is absurd to say that on this ground it is unfree; for a greater freedom can neither be desired nor conceived than the freedom to realize oneself in proportion to one's own power and strength of decision.” On the contrary, it is well possible to desire a greater freedom and that a true freedom, viz., the freedom to determine for oneself the reasons for one's volitions.

[ 19 ] Under certain conditions a man may be induced to abandon the execution of his will; but to allow others to prescribe to him what he ought to do—in other words, to will what another and not what he himself regards as right—to this a man will submit only when he does not feel free.

[ 20 ] External powers may prevent me from doing what I will, but that is only to condemn me to do nothing or to be unfree. Not until they enslave my spirit, drive my motives out of my head, and put their own motives in the place of mine, do they really aim at making me unfree. That is the reason why the church attacks not only the mere doing, but especially the impure thoughts, i.e., motives of my action. The church makes me unfree if she calls impure all those motives which she has not enunciated. A church or other community produces unfreedom when its priests or teachers turn themselves into rulers of consciences, i.e., when the faithful are compelled to go to them (to the confessional) for the motives of their actions.

Addition to the Revised Edition, 1918

[ 21 ] In the preceding chapters on human willing I have pointed out what man can experience in his actions, so as, through this experience, to become conscious that his willing is free. It is especially important to recognize that we derive the right to call an act of will free from the experiment of an ideal intuition realizing itself in the act. This can be nothing but a result of observation, in the sense that we observe the development of human volition in the direction towards the goal of attaining the possibility of just-such volition sustained by purely ideal intuition. This attainment is possible because the ideal intuition is effective through nothing but its own self-dependent essence. Where such an intuition is present in human consciousness, it has not developed itself out of the processes in the organism (cp. p. 111 ff.), but the organic activity has retired to make room for the ideal activity. Observation of an act of will which is an image of an intuition shows that out of it, likewise, all organically necessary activity has retired. The act of will is free. No one can observe this freedom of will who is unable to see how free will consists in this, that, first, the intuitive element lames and represses the necessary activity of the human organism and then puts in its place the spiritual activity of a will permeated by the Idea. Only those who are unable to observe these two factors in the free act of will believe that every act of will is unfree. Those who are able to observe them win through to the recognition that man is unfree in so far as he cannot carry through the repressing of the organic activity, but that this unfreedom is tending towards freedom, and that this freedom, so far from being an abstract ideal, is a directive force inherent in human nature. Man is free in proportion as he succeeds in realizing in his acts of will the same mood of soul which pervades him when he is conscious in himself of the formation of purely ideal (spiritual) intuitions.

• 1. See Translator's Preface (cp. p. 80 ff.)
• 2. Only a superficial critic will find in the use of the word “faculty,” in this and other passages, a relapse into the old-fashioned doctrine of faculties of the soul. The precise meaning of this word is evident from what is said on pp. 70 – 71.
• 3. When Paulsen, p. 15 of the book mentioned above, says: “Different natural endowments and different conditions of life demand both a different bodily and also a different spiritual-moral diet,” he is very close to the correct view, but yet he misses the decisive point. In so far as I am an individual, I need no diet. Dietetic means the art of bringing a particular specimen into harmony with the general laws of the genus. But as an individual I am not a specimen of a genus.
• 4. We are entitled to speak of thoughts (ethical Ideas) as objects of observation. For, although the products of thinking do not enter the field of observation, so long as thinking goes on, they may well become objects of observation subsequently. In this way we have gained our characterization of action.

1.

In the history of recent Western philosophy, Rudolf Steiner appears as a unique personality because his whole philosophical work is not the result of a thinking effort, but is based on spiritual experiences. In the world of the East it goes without saying that a great thinker is at the same time a great initiate; in the West, however, it never before occurred that a whole philosophical system was based on immediate spiritual experience. For this reason Steiner had to face the greatest mistrust from the world of the “official” philosophers.

It was Eduard von Hartmann whose works Steiner carefully studied, who influenced his early writings, and to whom he dedicated his doctoral thesis, Truth and Knowledge, published in 1892; and that despite the wide difference in their views. Following Kant, Hartmann believed that true reality can never be grasped by means of our consciousness, and that the experiences of our consciousness are nothing but an unreal reflection of reality. In contrast, there was no doubt for Steiner that “the experiences of our consciousness can enter the true realities by means of strengthening of our soul forces, and that the divine spiritual principle manifests itself in man if he makes this manifestation possible by his soul life.” (See Steiner's autobiography, The Course of My Life.) The unconscious realities of the world which, according to Hartmann, are veiled forever from our knowledge, “can be brought to our consciousness again and again, by means of the efforts of our soul lives,” as Steiner expressed it in the book quoted above. We are by no means separated from the realities of the world forever, but only so long as we are perceiving by means of the senses exclusively. Actually, the world of the senses is spiritual. If by enhancing our soul life, we succeed in experiencing the ideas working in the world of the senses, then we are able to experience the world in its reality. Steiner calls his philosophical system, “concrete” or “objective idealism.”

From his early youth on, Steiner felt the kinship between this kind of idealism and Goethe's world conception. In contrast to almost all philosophers, his education was not a classical, but a technical one-as if this were a kind of presentiment of the world in which, and into which, Steiner wanted to work later. He graduated from the Institute of Technology in Vienna where he was strongly influenced by his personal connection with the famous Goethe researcher, Karl Julius Schröer. Upon Schröer's warm recommendation, Steiner was invited to edit, in 1884, the natural scientific writings of Goethe in the great Goethe edition of Kürschner's Nationalliteratur. Four years later he was invited to join the work at the Goethe Archives in Weimar. Here Steiner lived from 1889 to 1897.

As a fruit of this research work, his book, A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, Fundamental Outlines with Special Reference to Schiller, was published already as early as 1886. (Further editions appeared in 1924, 1936, 1949 and 1960 respectively.) Up to then, Goethe's scientific endeavors had been considered as mere poetic presentiments of the truth. It was Steiner who proved that all of Goethe's various individual discoveries and presentiments had their origin in a total view, and that this is what matters.

2.

Goethe's understanding of nature brought him in opposition to Kant. The problem here is the limitation of our knowledge. In this difference of views, Steiner in his interpretation of Goethe took the side of the latter, in opposition to Kant, and thus put himself in opposition to the Neo-Kantians, whose views were taught in all German universities at that time. Otto Liebmann who renewed Kantianism in the second half of the nineteenth century, had proclaimed that the human consciousness cannot be enhanced. The same line of thought was the foundation upon which Johannes Volkelt had based his thesis that the world known to man has to be separated sharply from the other world, that of the “things in themselves” which, as such, is unknown to man. Thus, the follower of Kant believed that man's knowledge is limited, and that man can never cross this limit; however, in his Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Steiner makes the statement that with his thinking, man lives in the reality of the world as a spiritual world, and that the world of the senses is, in truth, a manifestation of the spiritual principle.

In this, Steiner was in full agreement with Goethe. Goethe had conceived the great idea of metamorphosis. According to the latter, the world is a manifestation of ideal forces in the world of the senses. All plants, for example, are nothing but materializations of the one, ideal archetypal plant. The archetypal plant is the fundamental design of all plants: the knot and the leaf. We have to think of this fundamental design as a living, working idea which cannot be seen by means of our sense organs but which manifests itself in the world of the senses. Whenever this fundamental design materializes physically, it varies in a manifold manner, and in accordance with any of these variations, the different plants are formed, following the living archetypal pattern. The archetypal plant is the Proteus who hides himself and manifests himself in all these various forms and whoever is able truly to imagine this archetypal plant, can somehow invent new plants which do not, or do not yet, exist in the world of the senses.

Time and again, Steiner pointed to a conversation between Goethe and Schiller which took place in the summer of 1794 during which Goethe claimed to look at nature in such a way that nature is to be thought of as “working and living, and having the tendency from the whole into the single parts.” In the course of this conversation, Goethe drew a sketch of the “archetypal plant” as a physical super-physical form according to which all existing plants are shaped. Schiller, the follower of Kant, answered that this “archetypal plant” is nothing more than an idea which man builds up in order to understand the particulars. Goethe did not agree with this. He said that in the spirit, he saw the whole in the same way as physically he saw the particulars; there was no fundamental difference between the spiritual and the physical view. To him both were parts of the reality. Whereupon Schiller answered, “This is not an experience; this is an idea.” To this Goethe replied, “I am very happy about this, that I do have ideas without my knowledge, and that I even see them with my very eyes.”

This conversation reveals two typical approaches to the problem of the relationship between a spiritual and a sense experience. Schiller, on the one hand, emphasizes the contrast: the two experiences can never be united. In Goethe's view, on the other hand, the idea and the sense perception complete each other, forming two means of knowledge by working together. Man has to let things speak to him in a twofold way: one part of their reality is given him without his cooperation, if only he opens his senses; the other part, however, can be grasped by him by means of his thinking only, and if he is blessed as was Goethe, he is able to see it with his very eyes. However, together the two parts form the complete whole of the object itself.

Schiller considers the ideal part as a subjective addition on the part of man. Though Kant had realized that we have to use the concept of the inner functionality if we really want to understand the various products of nature, and that we cannot grasp the reality without this concept, he still allotted it to the “reflective power of judgment” of man only; or, in other words, he considered this concept to be nothing but an invention of man, though an indispensable one. In contrast to this, the young Schelling in 1797, exclaimed, entirely following Goethe's ideas, “No longer is there any reason to be afraid of statements!” And consistently, he wanted nature explained from the side of the idea. And here are Goethe's words: “By looking at ever-creative nature, we become worthy of spiritually participating in her productions. Didn't I, first unconsciously, and only following an inner urge, time and again insist upon that archetypal, typical principle? I even succeeded in building up a description which follows the formative forces of nature; and nothing was able any longer to prevent me from courageously undergoing the adventure of the reason, as the Old Man from Konigsberg himself calls it.” But for Kant, the “Old Man from Konigsberg,” the postulation of an objectively existent idea still remained an “adventure of the reason.”

But how is man able to grasp this idea which, of its own nature is non-physical, yet working in the physical world of the senses? Goethe considered himself as possessing a power of judgment by looking at an object (an “anschauende Urteilskraft”); he says that the thinking itself must be metamorphosed, must be enhanced, in order to experience the idea of metamorphosis; a spiritual activity is needed, a dynamic thinking.

3.

By adopting Goethe's theory of knowledge, Steiner also answers the question as to what meaning man's activity of knowledge has in the cosmos. The positivistic thinkers consider knowledge nothing but a mere comprising of individual objects into groups; and these groups are for us, then, abstract concepts or names. Thinking as such serves economic purposes exclusively, but it will never create anything new, although the latter might be of great importance for man. In contrast to this, Steiner states that Science is by no means a mere repetition of what is presented to us by our senses, in some abbreviated form, but rather it adds to it something fundamentally new, something which can never be found in the mere perception, or in the experience. This fundamentally new principle, however, is by no means something of a subjective nature which, according to Kant, man projects on the given perception, or on nature, but rather the true essence of the world of the senses itself. The physical phenomena are riddles which the thinking solves; but what this thinking thus brings about, is the objective world itself. For the world is presented to us by two means: by sense perception and by spiritual knowledge. Both are parts of the objective world. According to Kant, the unity of the objects as it is expressed in concepts, is merely loaned to them by man's I; every connection, he says, originates in our “transcendental apperception.” Steiner, on the other hand, says that just the opposite is true: that objects have their ideal content within themselves. The objects, however, are not presented to our senses in their completeness. By thinking about the objects, we develop the ideas which are working in the specific objects, thus adding to the perception what has been missing from it. This missing, however, is not an objective fact but only the consequence of the fact that by means of our senses we perceive the world in a fragmentary manner only.

Consequentially, the idea is, and works objectively; however it is not presented to our sense organs but appears, in our own thinking, on the subjective stage of our consciousness. This is the reason why it seems to us to be subjective only. Man, by means of his thinking, reveals the ideal nucleus of the world. If it were supposed that man's spirit did not exist, the ideas as expressed in natural laws would be working, but they would not be expressed, not grasped as such. Thus, our intellect does not create order in the objective outer world, but restores the order and the unity of this objective world, which has been interfered with by its own means of understanding, subject to two ways of knowledge. This, however, entitles him to grasp the concept as such, thus adding to the already existing form of existence, a completely new form. (Here the question arises as to whether or not Peter Wust was influenced by Steiner when in the former's Dialektik des Geistes, Dialectic of the Spirit, page 293 in the original German edition, he expresses almost the same lines of thought.)

Human thinking frees the ideal pure form as such; thus, man becomes a creator. Without him, thinking would not exist.

4.

Steiner's Anthroposophy—with which we are not dealing here—differs from the “mystical” schools in the extremely high value it accords to thinking. This high evaluation of thinking originates here, in Steiner's philosophy: man has his right place in the cosmos as a thinking being.

Thinking, on the one hand, and perception, on the other, belong together; however, we experience them as separated. Perceptions are presented to us; facing them, we are merely passive; thoughts, again, have to be brought about by the effort of our soul forces. The world insofar as it is perceived, cannot solve any riddles; there, dreams and hallucinations are presented to us in exactly the same way as is the world of the senses. Thoughts, however, are completely familiar to us, and—fundamentally, at least—are transparent. If we wish to find relationships within the world of sense perception, we have to use our thinking forces.

However, what is added to the perception by our thinking is by no means of a merely subjective nature. For it is not we who “have” the thinking, but rather it is the thinking which “has” us. We cannot combine contents of thoughts arbitrarily, but we have to follow their laws. The thinking does not produce the thoughts; it merely receives them, as does the eye the light, and the ear the sound. The only difference is that the senses work automatically while we remain passive, while, insofar as thinking is concerned, we have to activate it ourselves. Perceptions are given to us; concepts we ourselves have to work out.

Let us imagine a spirit to whom the concept is given together with the perception; such a spirit would never achieve the idea that the concept is not an integral part of the subject, but something of a “subjective” nature. Steiner suggests that in earlier times, as a matter of fact, all mankind experienced things in this way.

Therefore it is not the fault of the objects that we first confront them without the corresponding concepts, but of our own spiritual-physical organization. The abyss between perception and concept opens only at the moment when I, the perceiving subject, confront the objects. To explain the object by means of thinking means nothing other than to restore the connection which man's organization has broken up. It is up to man to gain knowledge. The objects themselves require no explanation. We are the ones who ask questions because we face the cleavage between perception and concept.

In this way Steiner has succeeded in building up a truly objective idealism, from Kant back to Plato, or forward to Schelling. What is new in Kant's philosophy—his idealism in contrast to dogmatism—remains in Steiner's world conception. Steiner, however, refuses to accept the subjective nature of this idealism, and with it, the disastrous division of the world into that of human experience and that of the objects in themselves. For Steiner, thinking is neither a mere subjective activity nor a shadowy imitation of the perception, but an independent spiritual reality.

5.

By considering from the outset the nature of the transcendental principle to be conceptual-spiritual, Steiner rejects the dogma of the modern theory of knowledge since Kant: that man is never able to grasp reality. In the thinking process, he himself participates in the transcendental order of laws of the objects. What here leads us constantly in the wrong direction is the fact that we think our I to be somewhere within our physical organization, and that impressions are given to it by the “outside.” The truth however is that our I is living within the order of laws of the objects themselves; but this life of the I in the region of the transcendental principle is not consciously experienced by man. It is rather his physical organization by which he experiences himself.

Steiner frequently uses the example of a mirror which reflects outer events; and this “mirror” is our physical body. The activity of the body represents the living mirror which reflects the life of the I, which in turn is of a transcendental nature. Thus the human I is able to enter the transcendental principle without “forgetting” itself. But the content of our ordinary, empiric, every-day consciousness is to what our I experiences in reality, as the reflection of the mirror is to the original.

This difference between our true life and that which is only “mirrored,” enables Steiner to settle the conflict between natural science tending toward materialism, and spiritual research presupposing the spiritual principle. Natural science studies nothing but the “mirrored reflection” of the reality which is bound to the brain; this “reflection,” of course, depends on the “mirror,” or in other words, on our nervous system. Man's illusion—though necessary for his every-day life—of thinking of his I as an entity living within his physical organization, is relatively justified here. However, the true innermost being of man will never be found within this physical organization, but rather in the transcendental field.

Thus man has to be considered as a being who, on the one hand is living in the spiritual world itself, and on the other, is receiving its experiences “mirrored” by its physical organization. The world of the senses is, in reality, a spiritual world, but it does not appear to us as such.

The training indicated by Steiner in his various anthroposophical books seeks to stimulate man's soul development to the point where he is able to experience this spiritual world consciously; and this training consists of laborious spiritual exercises which require, above all, a great deal of patience and perseverance.

For those of us who are not—or are not yet—in the position to come to spiritual experiences, Rudolf Steiner's philosophy will still be a highly important contribution toward man's understanding of himself and of the world in which he lives—even though this philosophy can be used only to guide the student on his own right way. However, this whole philosophy is by no means meant to be a mere theoretical line of thought; rather does it find its true completion in the realms of its practical effects. Steiner had good reasons for giving his book—in the original German at least—the title, Die Philosophie der Freiheit, that is, literally, The Philosophy of Freedom, and he poses the question: When is an action free? And he answers this question by stating that it is free when it has its origin in pure thinking. At first glance, Steiner's philosophy of ethics may appear intellectualistic. As in the theory of cognition we have to differentiate between subjective perception on the one hand and the objective concept on the other, in the same way, in the realm of ethics we have to differentiate between motives which originate in the perception and those having their origin in pure thinking. In the first instance we cannot call the deed a free one, since this kind of action is prompted by our surroundings, by our feelings and our will, as well as by our personal nature. None of these is truly free. Only the action motivated by our thinking is truly free. For this kind of action is objective; it is not in the least connected with our I; the world of thinking is common to all of us.

Spinoza, the great Dutch philosopher of the 17th century, objected to the doctrine that man's actions are free by saying that if a stone thrown by someone were endowed with consciousness, it would also make the statement that it flies “freely.” To this Steiner replied that it is not the consciousness as such that builds up in people's minds the belief that they are free; rather it is the fact that man is capable of comprehending the rationality of his motives—provided they are rational. Only that action can be called free which has been determined by the rationality of its ideas.

But how does man materialize his rational motives? The answer is, By means of his moral imagination, which enables him to obtain his motives from the world of ideas. The unfree man is determined passively by the motives of his surroundings which also include his innate nature. The free man, on the other hand, acts according to his moral intuition which, though his own, nevertheless lifts him from the level of his limited I to the objective world of thinking.

Now the problem arises, How can objective morality be united with personal initiative? Steiner strongly rejects Kant's ethics which claim his “categorical imperative” to be a general law which extinguishes the personality. He claims just the opposite, namely a purely individual ethic, expressing it thus: “I do not ask anybody, no man and no law; I perform my action according to the idea which guides me. In so doing, my action is my own, and not the execution of the will of an authority. The urging of my desires means nothing to me, nor does that of moral laws; I want simply to do what seems right to me.” In strict opposition to Kant, any action dictated by a general law appears to him as unfree, heteronomous, while only those actions are autonomous which originate in a law given by man's own self. In a letter dated December 5, 1893, addressed to John Henry Mackay, the follower of Max Stirner, Steiner expressly laid stress on the full agreement of his own philosophy of ethics with that of Stirner, presented in the latter's book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, The Individual and His Property.

The moral imagination must, out of necessity, be individual. This is the point which counts. However, here we find no opposition between individuality and the general law; we all share in the world of thinking, we all live in one spiritual world. Thus, despite the fact that every single human being draws from his own personal world of ideas, there cannot be any conflict. People are living together, not there is one spiritual cosmos, common to all. This is one of the most important aspects of the picture of Man. For the idea of man is that of a free being. However, we are still rather far from this goal, which belongs to the future. Man's evolution toward this highest goal is far from completed; Man has not yet become a reality. There is something very special in relation to the idea of Man: while all other ideas have materialized, have become one with their perception, as we have seen above, that of Man is still waiting for its materialization, its incorporation. It is Man alone who is able to complete this. While nature performs the task of completion in the case of the plant and animal, so far as Man is concerned nature can do no more than pave the way toward this completion. But it is only and exclusively Man himself who is able to take the last and the decisive step. Books have been written on the question whether or not Man is free, but the manner of asking the question is wrong, for it can never be answered objectively-theoretically. The answer is given by a process of self-liberation.

Rudolf Steiner enthusiastically follows the theory of evolution as it was developed by Darwin and Haeckel. However, he goes far beyond its mere biological aspect. The moral life of man is the continuation of his biological development. Creating new moral ideas out of our “moral imagination”—as, for instance, Gandhi's “non-violence,” or Albert Schweitzer's “reverence for life”—is a “jump” in evolution comparable to the “jump” which creates a new species in the plant or animal kingdom. In a letter dated August 26, 1902, addressed to Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, Steiner wrote, “Nature achieves the most important moments in evolution every time she makes her typical jumps.”

The evolution of mankind as a whole within the hierarchy of the Spiritual Beings is a process of cosmic importance.

HUGO S. BERGMAN
The Hebrew University,
Jerusalem, 1961

Translated by Stephen Michael Engel

[ 1 ] The highest point in an occult school, of which it is possible to speak in a book for general readers, is Initiation. One cannot give public information concerning all that lies beyond, though the way to it can always be found by one who has previously pressed forward and penetrated the lower secrets and mysteries.

[ 2 ] The knowledge and power which are conferred upon a man through Initiation could not be obtained in any other manner excepting in some far distant future, after many incarnations, on quite another road and in quite another form. He who is initiated today experiences something which he would otherwise have to experience at a much later period and under quite different circumstances.

[ 3 ] It is right that a person should learn of the secrets of nature only so much as corresponds to his own degree of development, and for this reason alone do obstacles bar his way to complete knowledge and power. People should not be trusted with the use of fire-arms until they have had enough experience to make it certain that they will not use them mischievously or without care. If a person, without the necessary preparation, were initiated today, he would lack those experiences which, in the normal course of his development, would come to him in the future during other incarnations and would then bring with them the corresponding secrets. At the door of Initiation these experiences must, therefore, be supplied in some other way, and in their place the candidate has to undergo the preliminary teaching. [ 4 ] These are so-called “trials” which have to be passed. These trials are now being discussed in various magazines and books, but, owing to their very nature, it is not surprising that quite false impressions about them are received. For those who have not already gone through the periods of Probation and Enlightenment have seen nothing of these trials, and consequently cannot appropriately describe them.

[ 5 ] Certain matters or subjects connected with the higher worlds are produced before the candidate, but he is only able to see and hear these when he can perceive clearly the figures, tones, and colours, for which he has been prepared by the teachings on Probation and Enlightenment.

[ 6 ] The first trial consists in obtaining a clearer comprehension of the corporeal attributes of lifeless things, then of plants, of animals, of human beings (in the way that the average person possesses them). This does not mean what is commonly called “scientific knowledge;” with that it has no connection, but it has to do with intuition. What occurs is usually that the Initiate discloses to the candidate how the objects of nature and the essence of living things reveal themselves to the spiritual and mental hearing and sight. In a certain way these things then lie revealed—naked—before the beholder. Attributes and qualities which are concealed from, physical eyes and ears can then be seen and heard. Heretofore they have been enwrapped as in a veil, and the falling away of this veil for the candidate, occurs at what is called the Process of Purification by Fire. The first trial is therefore known as the “Fire-Trial.”

[ 7 ] For some people the ordinary life of every day is a more or less unconscious process of initiation by means of the Fire-Trial. These persons are those who have passed through a wealth of developing experiences, and who find that their self-confidence, courage, and fortitude have been greatly augmented in a normal way—who have learned to bear sorrow and disappointment, from the failure of their undertakings, with greatness of mind, and especially with quiet and unbroken strength. Those who have gone through such experiences are often initiates, without knowing it, and it needs but little to open for them the spiritual hearing and sight—to make them clairvoyant. For it must be noted that a genuine Fire-Trial is not merely intended to satisfy the curiosity of the candidate. He would learn, undoubtedly, many unusual things, of which others, devoid of such experiences, can have no idea; but yet this knowledge is not the end or aim, but merely the path to the end. The real aim and object is this—that the candidate shall acquire for himself, through this knowledge of the higher worlds, a greater and truer self-confidence, a higher and nobler courage, and a perseverance, an attitude of mind, altogether different from what he could have obtained in the lower world.

[ 8 ] After the Fire-Trial a candidate may always turn back; but because he has been through it, he will resume his life, strengthened in all his spiritual and physical relations, and in his next incarnation he will continue to seek for initiation. In his present life, at all events, he will prove himself a more useful member of society, will be of greater service to humanity than he was before, and in whatever position he may find himself, his firmness, prudence, and favourable influence over his fellows will have greatly increased.

[ 9 ] But if, after coming out of the Fire-Trial, he should wish, to continue in the occult school, he has then to be instructed in a certain writing system which is used by those in the school. Occult teachings are written in this occult writing-system, because what is really occult can neither be perfectly spoken of in words or our ordinary speech, nor set forth in the ordinary ways of writing. Those who have learned from the Initiates endeavour to translate the teachings of Occultism as best they may into terms of ordinary speech.

[ 10 ] The symbols or signs of the secret script are not arbitrarily invented or imagined, but correspond to powers which are active and efficacious in the world. It is through these symbols or signs, that one learns the language of such matters. The candidate immediately sees for himself that these symbols correspond to the figures, tones, and colours which he has learned to perceive during the periods of Probation and Enlightenment. He now understands that all which went before was only like learning how to spell; and that only now does he begin to read in the higher worlds. All that appeared to him before as separate figures, tones, and colours, is now revealed to him as a Perfect unity, a coherent harmony, and now, or the first time, he attains a real certainty in observing and following the higher worlds. Hitherto it was not possible for him to be sure that what he saw had been clearly or correctly perceived. Now, too, it is possible, at last, that a correct understanding, in the spheres of the higher knowledge, can begin to arise between the candidate and the Initiate. For no matter how close the connection between the two may be, no matter what form their intercourse may take in ordinary life, the Initiate can only communicate to the candidate, on these planes, in the direct form or figures of the secret alphabet.

[ 11 ] Through this occult speech the student also learns certain rules of conduct for life, certain duties and obligations, of which, before he knew nothing whatever. When he learns to know these, he is able to perform actions which have a significance and meaning such as the actions of one who is not initiated can never possess. The only point of view from which he is now able to look upon things, the only plane from which he can now make manifest his deeds, is that of the higher worlds. Instructions concerning such deeds can only be read, or understood, in the secret script.

[ 12 ] Yet it must be emphasized and clearly apprehended that there are persons who, unconsciously, have the ability or faculty of performing these actions, notwithstanding that they have never been in an occult school. Such “helpers of humanity and the world” proceed blessedly and beneficently through life. There are certain fundamental reasons, which cannot be here discussed, why they are in possession of seemingly supernatural gifts. The difference between these persons and the pupils of an occult school is only that the former act unconsciously, but the latter with a full knowledge, insight, judgment, and understanding of the entire matter in hand. The candidate wins by training, what has been bestowed, upon his fellow by a Higher Power, for the good of humanity. One should: freely and openly honour these favoured ones of God; but one should not, on their account, consider the work of the occult schools unnecessary or superfluous.

[ 13 ] Now that the student has learned the “Mystery language,” there yet awaits him another trial. By this he must prove whether he can move with freedom and certainty in the higher worlds. In ordinary life a man will be impelled to actions by outward motives and conditions. He works at this or that because certain duties are imposed upon him by outward circumstances. It need hardly be mentioned that the occult student must in no way neglect any of the duties connected with his ordinary life because he is working in the higher worlds. None of his duties there can constrain him to treat with inattention or carelessness any one of his duties in the lower world. The father will remain just as good a father to his family, the mother just as good a mother, and neither the officer nor the soldier, nor anyone else, will be detained from their necessary duties because they happen to be students in an occult school. On the contrary, all the qualities which make men capable are increased to a degree of which the uninitiated can form no idea. That this may not always appear to be the case in the eyes of the uninitiated is merely due to the fact that he has not always the ability to correctly judge or criticise the Initiate. The deeds of the latter are not always entirely intelligible to the former. But, as we have said before, this only happens in certain cases.

[ 14 ] For him who has arrived at the so-called “Steps of Initiation,” there are now duties to be performed to which no outer stimulus is given. He will be moved to do these things by no external pressure, but by those rules of conduct which have been communicated to him in the mystery-language. In this second, trial he must prove that, led by such rules of conduct, he can act from inner promptings just as firmly as an officer performs his obligatory duties. For this purpose the teacher will set before the pupil certain definite tasks. The latter has now to execute some deed in consequence of observations made from the basis of what he learned during Probation and Enlightenment. He has to find the way to what he is now to perform, by means of the mystery-language, which by this time is familiar to him. If he discerns his duty and executes it correctly, he has endured the trial, and he recognises the success which attends the fulfilment of the task by the changed manner with which the spiritual eyes and ears now apprehend the figures, tones, and colours. The occult teacher tells him distinctly how these must appear after the consummation of the trial, and the candidate must know how he can effect this change. This trial is known as the “Water-Trial,” because in consequence of its performance taking place on the higher planes, that support which would otherwise have been received from outward conditions is now taken away. One's movements are like those which are made in water by someone who is learning to swim. He feels no support under his feet. This practice must be often repeated until the candidate attains absolute poise and assurance.

[ 15 ] These trials are also dependent upon a quality which is produced by the experiences in the higher worlds. The candidate cultivates this quality to an extent which, in so short a time, he could not possibly reach while developing in the ordinary way, but could only attain after many incarnations. In order to bring about the change here mentioned, the following is the principal necessity: The candidate must altogether be guided by what has been proven to him by the cultivation, of his higher faculties, by the results of his reading in the secret ciphers.

Should he, during these experiences, attempt to introduce any of his own opinions or desires, or, should he diverge for one moment from the laws and rules which he has proved to be right, something quite other than that which is meant will occur. In such cases the candidate loses sight of the coal for which these matters are undertaken, and the result is only confusion. He has, therefore, manifold opportunities, during these trials, for the development of self-control, and this, indeed, is the principal quality needed. Those trials are, therefore, much more easily endured by those who, before initiation, have gone through a life which has enabled them to acquire command of themselves. Those who have developed the characteristic of following their higher principles and ideals without thought of personal honour or desire, who discern always the duty to be fulfilled, even though the inclinations and sympathies are too often ready to lead them an. other way, are already, in this midst of everyday life, unconscious initiates. They need but little to enable them to succeed in the prescribed trials. Indeed, one may say that a certain measure of initiation, thus unconsciously acquired in life, will be absolutely necessary before entering upon the second trial. For even as many who during youth have not learnt to write or spell, find much difficulty in learning to do so during later years, so it is also difficult to develop, merely from a knowledge of the higher worlds, the necessary degree of self-control, if one has not already acquired a certain measure of it in the course of ordinary life.

The things of the physical world do not alter, however we may desire them to do so, but in the higher worlds our wishes, inclinations, and desires are causes that produce effects. If we desire to bring about particular changes in these worlds, we must hold ourselves in absolute control, we must follow the right principle, must entirely subdue the personal will.

[ 16 ] There is an attribute which at this stage, of initiation has to be especially considered,—quite a healthy and sure faculty of judgment. Attention must be directed to the education of this faculty during all the previous stages, and in the course of them it must be proved whether the candidate has developed this quality sufficiently to make him fit to tread the path of true knowledge. Further progress is now only possible for him if he is able to distinguish illusion, superstition, unsubstantial fancies, and all manner of such things, from the true realities. At first, this is much more difficult to accomplish upon the higher stages of existence than upon the lower. Every prejudice, every cherished opinion regarding these matters, in whatever connection, must vanish away. Truth alone must guide. There must be perfect readiness to surrender at once any existing opinion, idea, or inclination, when the logical idea demands it. Absolute certainty in the higher worlds is only to be obtained when one never obtrudes one's own opinions.

[ 17 ] People whose mode of thought inclines them to phantasy, prejudice, and so forth, can make no progress on the occult way. In truth, it is a glorious treasure that the occult student shall attain. All doubt as to the higher worlds will be taken away from him. In all their law they will reveal themselves to his gaze. But so long as he is blindfolded he cannot win these heights and compensations. It were, indeed, unhappy for him if his phantasies and superstitions ran away with his intellect and reason. Dreamers and people inclined to phantasies are as unfit for the occult path as are superstitious people; for in dreams, phantasies, and superstitions lurk the most dangerous enemies on the road to knowledge. But because upon the gateway which leads to the second trial are written the words, “All prejudices must fall away;” because the candidate has already seen upon the portals that opened to him in the first trial, the words, “Without a normal common sense all your efforts are in vain,”—yet it is not necessary to think that the capacity for inspiration and enthusiasm, and all the poetry of life, is lost to the student of Occultism.

[ 18 ] If he be now sufficiently advanced, a third trial awaits the candidate. No aim, no boundary lines, are here set for him. All is left entirely in his own hands. He finds himself in a condition where nothing causes or induces him to act. He must find the way of his own accord and from within himself. Conditions or people who might have stimulated him to action are no longer there. Nothing and nobody can give the strength which he now needs, but he himself alone. If he should not find this strength within himself, he will very soon find himself standing where he was before; but it must be remarked that very few of those who have endured the previous trials will fail at this point in finding the necessary strength. Either they will have turned back already or they can endure at this point also. The only thing necessary is the ability to make a resolution quickly. For here, in the truest meaning of the phrase, one must find oneself. In all matters one must quickly resolve to hear the suggestions, the inspirations of the spirit. One has no time for doubt or delay. Every moment of hesitation would add to the proof that one was not yet ready. All that hinders one from hearing the voice of the spirit must be boldly conquered. It is entirely a matter of proving one's presence of mind, and it is this attribute to which attention must be paid during all the foregoing stages of development. All temptations to act, or even to think, which hitherto assailed a man, must now cease; but in order that he may not slip into inaction, he must not lose his hold upon himself. For only in himself can he find that one sure centre-point on which he can depend. No one, without further familiarity with the subject, should feel an antipathy to this principle of self-rejection. For him who has endured the trials already described, it indicates the most perfect felicity.

[ 19 ] And in this, as in the other stages before mentioned, for many people, everyday life itself can be an occult school. People who have reached the point of being able, when suddenly confronted with some task or problem demanding immediate action, to come to a swift resolution, to act without delay or personal consideration, have, indeed, undergone their Occult schooling in everyday life. The situation which one wishes to suggest is one in which a successful action is impossible unless the person concerned grasps the whole matter and acts at once. He is quick to act when misfortune is in sight, when a moment's hesitation may produce a catastrophe; and he who possesses the qualities which can be developed into a permanent attribute of such a kind, has already evolved, unknown to himself the degree of ripeness necessary for the third trial. For, as already remarked, at this stage it all depends upon the development of presence of mind.

In the occult schools this trial is known as the “Air-Trial,” because while undergoing it the, candidate can support himself neither upon the firm ground, nor any external cause, nor that which he has learned in Probation and Enlightenment from the figures and tones and colours, but solely upon himself.

[ 20 ] If the occult student has endured these trials, he is then permitted to enter “the Temple of the Higher Wisdom.” All that can be further said upon this subject can only be given out in the smallest hints and suggestions. That which has now to be performed has been so often put into words that many say that the pupil has here to take an “oath,” promising to betray nothing that comes from the teacher. Nevertheless these expressions “oath” and “betrayal” are in no way appropriate, but are only misleading... It is no matter of an oath in the ordinary sense of the word, but is rather an experience that comes at this stage. Here the candidate appreciates the true value of the occult teachers, and their place in the service of humanity. At last he begins to understand the world correctly. It is not so much a matter of “withholding” the higher truths now learned, but much more of upholding them in the right way and with the necessary tact. That about which one learns to “keep silence” is something quite different. One gains possession of this fine attribute in regard to many things of which one had previously spoken, and especially in regard to the manner in which one has spoken of them. Yet it would be a bad Initiate who did not place all his mystical experiences, as adequately and as far-reachingly as possible, at the service of humanity. The sole obstacle to communication in such matters is the misunderstanding of the person who receives it. Above all, the higher secrets do not allow themselves to be spoken about promiscuously, but to none who has passed the steps of development above described, is it actually forbidden to speak of these matters. No one is asked for a negative oath, but everything is placed on one's own responsibility. What one really learns is to find out within oneself what should be done under all circumstances, and the “oath” means nothing more than this, that one is found qualified to be entrusted with such a responsibility.

[ 21 ] If the candidate is found fit, he is then given what is called, symbolically, “the draught of forgetfulness.” This means that he will be initiated into the secret knowledge enabling him to act without being continually disturbed by the lower memory. This is absolutely necessary for the Initiate, for he must possess full faith in the immediate present. He must be able to destroy that veil of memory which extends itself round humanity more and more thickly with every moment of life.

If one judges of something which happens to one today, according to the experiences of yesterday, one is subjected by so doing to a multitude of errors. Of course, it is not intended that the reader should think that one ought to renounce all the experience acquired in life.

One ought always to keep it in mind as firmly as possible. But as an Initiate, one should retain the ability for judging every fresh experience from outside of oneself, unclouded by all bygone experiences. One must be prepared, at every moment, that a new thing or being shall bring to one a new revelation. If one judges the new by the standard of the old, one necessarily falls into error. For this very reason, the memory of past experiences is useful, for they make one capable of seeing the new. If one had not gone through a certain experience, one would probably not have seen at all the attributes of this or that being or thing; but such experiences ought only to enable one to discern the new and not by any means to cause one to judge it by the old. In this way the Initiate obtains certain definite qualities, and by means of these many things are revealed to him while they remain concealed from the uninitiated.

[ 22 ] The second draught which is given to the Initiate is the “draught of remembrance.” By receiving this he becomes capable of keeping the higher secrets ever-present in the soul. Ordinary memory would not be sufficient to ensure this; one must be absolutely at one with the higher truths. One must not merely know them, but be able, as a matter of course, to manifest and administer them in living actions, even as an ordinary man eats and drinks. They must become one's practice, one's inclinations, one's habits. It must be unnecessary to think of them consciously (in the usual sense of the word); they must become a part of oneself and express themselves through one's very being; they must flow through one, even as the life-currents run through one's organism. So must we make ourselves as perfect in a spiritual sense as nature has made us in a physical.

[ 1 ] A free spirit acts according to his impulses, that is, according to intuitions selected from the totality of his world of ideas by thinking. For an unfree spirit, the reason why he singles out a particular intuition from his world of ideas in order to make it the basis of an action, lies in the world of percepts given to him, that is, in his past experiences. He recalls, before coming to a decision, what someone else has done or recommended as suitable in a comparable case, or what God has commanded to be done in such a case, and so on, and he acts accordingly. For a free spirit, these prior conditions are not the only impulses to action. He makes a completely first-hand decision. What others have done in such a case worries him as little as what they have decreed. He has purely ideal reasons which lead him to select from the sum of his concepts just one in particular, and then to translate it into action. But his action will belong to perceptible reality. What he achieves will thus be identical with a quite definite content of perception. The concept will have to realize itself in a single concrete occurrence. As a concept it will not be able to contain this particular event. It will refer to the event only in the same way as a concept is in general related to a percept, for example, the concept of the lion to a particular lion. The link between concept and percept is the mental picture (see Chapter 6). For the unfree spirit, this link is given from the outset. Motives are present in his consciousness from the outset in the form of mental pictures. Whenever there is something he wants to carry out, he does it as he has seen it done, or as he has been told to do it in the particular case. Hence authority works best through examples, that is, through providing quite definite particular actions for the consciousness of the unfree spirit. A Christian acts not so much according to the teaching as according to the example of the Saviour. Rules have less value for acting positively than for refraining from certain actions. Laws take on the form of general concepts only when they forbid actions, but not when they prescribe them. Laws concerning what he ought to do must be given to the unfree spirit in quite concrete form: Clean the street in front of your door! Pay your taxes, amounting to the sum here given, to the Tax Office at X! and so on. Conceptual form belongs to laws for inhibiting actions: Thou shalt not steal! Thou shalt not commit adultery! These laws, too, influence the unfree spirit only by means of a concrete mental picture, for example, that of the appropriate secular punishment, or the pangs of conscience, or eternal damnation, and so on.

[ 2 ] Whenever the impulse for an action is present in a general conceptual form (for example, Thou shalt do good to thy fellow men! Thou shalt live so that thou best promotest thy welfare!) then for each particular case the concrete mental picture of the action (the relation of the concept to a content of perception) must first be found. For the free spirit who is impelled by no example, nor fear of punishment or the like, this translation of the concept into a mental picture is always necessary.

[ 3 ] Man produces concrete mental pictures from the sum of his ideas chiefly by means of the imagination. Therefore what the free spirit needs in order to realize his ideas, in order to be effective, is moral imagination. This is the source of the free spirit's action. Therefore it is only men with moral imagination who are, strictly speaking, morally productive. Those who merely preach morality, that is, people who merely spin out moral rules without being able to condense them into concrete mental pictures, are morally unproductive. They are like those critics who can explain very intelligibly what a work of art ought to be like, but who are themselves incapable of even the slightest productive effort.

[ 4 ] Moral imagination, in order to realize its mental picture, must set to work in a definite sphere of percepts. Human action does not create percepts, but transforms already existing percepts and gives them a new form. In order to be able to transform a definite object of perception, or a sum of such objects, in accordance with a moral mental picture, one must have grasped the principle at work within the percept picture, that is, the way it has hitherto worked, to which one wants to give a new form or a new direction. Further, it is necessary to discover the procedure by which it is possible to change the given principle into a new one. This part of effective moral activity depends on knowledge of the particular world of phenomena with which one is concerned. We shall, therefore, look for it in some branch of learning in general. Moral action, then, presupposes, in addition to the faculty of having moral ideas (moral intuition) and moral imagination, the ability to transform the world of percepts without violating the natural laws by which these are connected.¹ This ability is moral technique. It can be learnt in the same sense in which any kind of knowledge can be learnt. Generally speaking, men are better able to find concepts for the existing world than to evolve productively, out of their imagination, the not-yet-existing actions of the future. Hence it is perfectly possible for men without moral imagination to receive such mental pictures from others, and to embody them skillfully into the actual world. Conversely, it may happen that men with moral imagination lack technical skill, and must make use of other men for the realization of their mental pictures.

[ 5 ] In so far as knowledge of the objects within our sphere of action is necessary for acting morally, our action depends upon such knowledge. What we are concerned with here are laws of nature. We are dealing with natural science, not ethics.

[ 6 ] Moral imagination and the faculty of having moral ideas can become objects of knowledge only after they have been produced by the individual. By then, however, they no longer regulate life, for they have already regulated it. They must now be regarded as effective causes, like all others (they are purposes only for the subject). We therefore deal with them as with a natural history of moral ideas.

[ 7 ] Ethics as a science that sets standards, in addition to this, cannot exist.

[ 8 ] Some people have wanted to maintain the standard-setting character of moral laws, at least in so far as they have understood ethics in the sense of dietetics, which deduces general rules from the organism's requirements in life as a basis for influencing the body in a particular way (e.g., Paulsen, in his System der Ethik). This comparison is false, because our moral life is not comparable with the life of the organism. The functioning of the organism occurs without any action on our part; we come upon its laws in the world ready-made and can therefore seek them and apply them when found. Moral laws, on the other hand, are first created by us. We cannot apply them until we have created them. The error arises through the fact that, as regards their content, moral laws are not newly created at every moment, but are inherited. Those that we have taken over from our ancestors appear to be given, like the natural laws of the organism. But a later generation will certainly not be justified in applying them as if they were dietetic rules. For they apply to individuals and not, as natural laws do, to specimens of a general type. Considered as an organism, I am such a generic specimen and I shall live in accordance with nature if I apply the natural laws of my general type to my particular case; as a moral being, I am an individual and have laws of my very own.²

[ 9 ] This view appears to contradict the fundamental doctrine of modern natural science known as the theory of evolution. But it only appears to do so. Evolution is understood to mean the real development of the later out of the earlier in accordance with natural law. In the organic world, evolution is understood to mean that the later (more perfect) organic forms are real descendants of the earlier (imperfect) forms, and have developed from them in accordance with natural laws. The adherents of the theory of organic evolution ought really to picture to themselves that there was once a time on our earth when a being could have followed with his own eyes the gradual development of reptiles out of proto-amniotes, had he been able to be there at the time as an observer, endowed with a sufficiently long span of life. Similarly, evolutionists ought to picture to themselves that a being could have watched the development of the solar system out of the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula, had he been able to remain in a suitable spot out in the cosmic world ether during that infinitely long time. That with such mental pictures, the nature of both the proto-amniotes and the Kant-Laplace cosmic nebula would have to be thought of differently from the way the materialist thinkers do, is here irrelevant. But no evolutionist should ever dream of maintaining that he could get the concept of the reptile, with all its characteristics, out of his concept of the proto-amniotic animal, if he had never seen a reptile. Just as little would it be possible to derive the solar system from the concept of the Kant-Laplace nebula, if this concept of a primordial nebula is thought of as being directly determined only by the percept of the primordial nebula. In other words, if the evolutionist is to think consistently, he is bound to maintain that later phases of evolution do actually result from earlier ones, and that once we have been given the concept of the imperfect and that of the perfect, we can see the connection; but on no account should he agree that the concept attained from the earlier is, in itself, sufficient for evolving the later out of it. From this it follows for ethics that, though we can certainly see the connection between later moral concepts and earlier, we cannot get even a single new moral idea out of the earlier ones. As a moral being, the individual produces his own content. For the student of ethics, the content thus produced is just as much a given thing as reptiles are a given thing for the scientist. Reptiles have developed out of proto-amniotes, but the scientist cannot get the concept of reptiles out of the concept of the proto-amniotes. Later moral ideas evolve out of earlier, but the student of ethics cannot get the moral concepts of a later civilization out of those of an earlier one. The confusion arises because, as scientists, we start with the facts before us, and then get to know them, whereas in moral action we ourselves first create the facts which we then get to know. In the process of evolution of the moral world order we accomplish something that, at a lower level, is accomplished by nature: we alter something perceptible. The ethical standard thus cannot start, like a law of nature, by being known, but only by being created. Only when it is there, can it become an object of knowledge.

[ 10 ] But can we not then make the old a measure for the new? Is not every man compelled to measure the products of his moral imagination by the standard of traditional moral doctrines? For something that should reveal itself as morally productive, this would be just as absurd as to want to measure a new form in nature by an old one and say that, because reptiles do not conform to the proto-amniotes, they are an unjustifiable (pathological) form.

[ 11 ] Ethical individualism, then, is not in opposition to a rightly understood theory of evolution, but follows directly from it. Haeckel's genealogical tree, from protozoa up to man as an organic being, ought to be capable of being continued without an interruption of natural law and without a break in the uniformity of evolution, up to the individual as a being that is moral in a definite sense. But on no account could the nature of a descendant species be deduced from the nature of an ancestral one. However true it is that the moral ideas of the individual have perceptibly developed out of those of his ancestors, it is equally true that the individual is morally barren unless he has moral ideas of his own.

[ 12 ] The same ethical individualism that I have developed on the basis of views already given could also be derived from the theory of evolution. The final conviction would be the same; only the path by which it was reached would be different.

[ 13 ] The appearance of completely new moral ideas through moral imagination is, for the theory of evolution, no more miraculous than the development of a new animal species out of an old one ; only, as a monistic view of the world, this theory must reject, in morality as in science, every transcendental (metaphysical) influence, every influence that is merely inferred and cannot be experienced ideally. In doing so, the theory follows the same principle that guides it when it seeks the causes of new organic forms without invoking the interference of an extra-mundane Being who produces every new species, in accordance with a new creative thought, by supernatural influence. Just as monism has no use for supernatural creative thoughts in explaining living organisms, so it is equally impossible for it to derive the moral world order from causes which do not lie within the experienceable world. It cannot admit that the moral nature of will is completely accounted for by being traced back to a continuous supernatural influence upon moral life (divine government of the world from the outside), or to an act of revelation at a particular moment in history (giving of the ten commandments), or to God's appearance on the earth (as Christ). What happens to man, and in man, through all this, becomes a moral element only when, in human experience, it becomes an individual's own. For monism, moral processes are products of the world like everything else that exists, and their causes must be sought in the world, that is, in man, since man is the bearer of morality.

[ 14 ] Ethical individualism, then, is the crowning feature of the edifice that Darwin and Haeckel have striven to build for natural science. It is spiritualized theory of evolution carried over into moral life.

[ 15 ] Anyone who, in a narrow-minded way, restricts the concept of the natural from the outset to an arbitrarily limited sphere may easily conclude that there is no room in it for free individual action. The consistent evolutionist cannot fall a prey to such narrow-mindedness. He cannot let the natural course of evolution terminate with the ape, and allow man to have a “supernatural” origin; in his very search for the natural progenitors of man, he is bound to seek spirit in nature; again, he cannot stop short at the organic functions of man, and take only these as natural, but must go on to regard the free moral life as the spiritual continuation of organic life.

[ 16 ] If he is to keep to his fundamental principles, the evolutionist can state only that the present form of moral action evolves from other forms of activity in the world; the characterizing of an action, that is, whether it is a free one, he must leave to the immediate observation of the action. In fact, he maintains only that men have developed out of ancestors that were not yet human. What men are actually like must be determined by observation of men themselves. The results of this observation cannot contradict the properly understood history of evolution. Only the assertion that the results are such as to exclude a natural ordering of the world would contradict recent trends in the natural sciences.³

[ 17 ] Ethical individualism has nothing to fear from a natural science that understands itself: for observation shows that the perfect form of human action has freedom as its characteristic quality. This freedom must be allowed to the human will, in so far as the will realizes purely ideal intuitions. For these intuitions are not the results of a necessity acting upon them from without, but are due only to themselves. If a man finds that an action is the image of such an ideal intuition, then he feels it to be free. In this characteristic of an action lies its freedom.

[ 18 ] What are we to say, from this standpoint, about the distinction mentioned earlier (see Chapter 1) between the two propositions, “To be free means to be able to do as one wills” and, “To be at liberty to desire or not to desire is the real proposition involved in the dogma of freewill”? Hamerling bases his view of free will precisely on this distinction, by declaring the first statement to be correct but the second to be an absurd tautology. He says, “I can do as I will. But to say I can want as I will is an empty tautology.” Whether I am able to do, that is, to translate into reality, what I will, that is, what I have set before myself as my idea of action, depends on external circumstances and on my technical skill (ee above). To be free means to be able of one's own accord to determine by moral imagination those mental pictures (motives) which underlie the action. Freedom is impossible if anything other then myself (mechanical process or merely inferred extra-mundane God) determines my moral ideas. In other words, I am free only when I myself produce these mental pictures, not when I am merely able to carry out the motives which another being has implanted in me. A free being is one who can want what he himself considers right. Whoever does anything other than what he wants must be impelled to it by motives which do not lie within him. Such a man is unfree in his action. To be at liberty to want what one considers right or what one considers wrong, would therefore mean to be at liberty to be free or unfree. This is, of course, just as absurd as to see freedom in the ability to do what one is compelled to will. But this last is just what Hamerling maintains when he says, “It is perfectly true that the will is always determined by motives, but it is absurd to say that on this account it is unfree; for a greater freedom can neither be desired nor conceived than the freedom to realize oneself in proportion to one's own strength and determination.” In deed it can! It is certainly possible to desire a greater freedom, and this for the first time the true one: namely, to decide for oneself the motives for one's will.

[ 19 ] Under certain conditions a man may be induced to abandon the execution of his will. To allow others to prescribe to him what he ought to do—in other words, to want what another, and not he himself, considers right—to this a man will submit only to the extent that he does not feel free.

[ 20 ] External powers may prevent me from doing as I will. Then they simply condemn me to do nothing or to be unfree. Not until they would enslave my spirit, drive my motives out of my head, and put their own motives in the place of mine, do they really aim at making me unfree. For this reason the Church sets itself not only against the mere doing, but especially against the impure thoughts, that is, the motives of my action. The Church makes me unfree if, for her, all those motives she has not herself enunciated seem impure. A Church or other community produces unfreedom when its priests or teachers make themselves into keepers of consciences, that is, when the faithful are obliged to go to them (to the confessional) for the motives of their actions.

Author's addition, 1918

[ 21 ] In these chapters on the human will I have shown what man can experience in his actions so that, through this experience, he comes to be aware: My will is free. It is particularly significant that the right to call an act of will free arises from the experience that an ideal intuition comes to realization in the act of will. This experience can only be the result of an observation, and is so, in the sense that we observe our will on a path of development towards the goal where it becomes possible for an act of will to be sustained by purely ideal intuition. This goal can be reached, because in ideal intuition nothing else is at work but its own self-sustaining essence. When such an intuition is present in human consciousness, then it has not been developed out of the processes of the organism, but rather the organic activity has withdrawn to make room for the ideal activity (see Chapter 9). When I observe an act of will that is an image of an intuition, then from this act of will too all organically necessary activity has withdrawn. The act of will is free. This freedom of the will cannot be observed by anyone who is unable to see how the free act of will consists in the fact that, firstly, through the intuitive element, the activity that is necessary for the human organism is checked and repressed, and then replaced by the spiritual activity of the idea-filled will. Only those who cannot make this observation of the twofold nature of a free act of will, believe that every act of will is unfree. Those who can make this observation win through to the recognition that man is unfree in so far as he cannot complete the process of suppressing the organic activity; but that this unfreedom tends towards freedom, and that this freedom is by no means an abstract ideal but is a directive force inherent in human nature. Man is free to the extent that he is able to realize in his acts of will the same mood of soul that lives in him when he becomes aware of the forming of purely ideal (spiritual) Intuitions.

• 1. Only a superficial critic will find in the use of the word “faculty” in this and other passages a relapse into the doctrine of faculties of the soul, found in the older psychology. The meaning of the word is clear when taken in connection with what is said in (Chapter 5).
• 2. When Paulsen (on page 15 of the book mentioned above) says, “Different natural endowments and different conditions of life demand both a different bodily and also a different spiritual-moral diet,” he is very close to the correct view, but yet he misses the decisive point. In so far as I am an individual, I need no diet. Dietetic means the art of bringing a particular specimen into harmony with its generic laws. But as an individual I am not a specimen of a general type.
• 3. That we speak of thoughts (ethical ideas) as objects of observation is fully justified. For, although during the activity of thinking the products of thinking do not appear at the same time in the field of observation, they can nevertheless become objects of observation afterwards. And it is in this way that we have arrived at our characterization of action.

Let's imagine that we are in the world into which the Apocalypticer wants to translate men during the next earthly period. He describes his visions of the breaking in of spiritual worlds and of how they will take possession of earthly human beings. He precedes this by three stages which we must become familiar with; three stages,—in a certain sense each of these represents something which must fall before mankind will become worthy and capable of obtaining the spiritual world in a pure form for their working, thinking and feeling.

The first stage is the fall of Babylon; we will call it this to begin with. The second stage is the fall of the beast and his companion the false prophet who spreads the teaching of the beast. The third stage is the fall of the divine counter powers which are usually called Satan. These three stages become quite objective and real in connection with the spiritual perception of future human evolution.

A great deal concerning human evolution will be decided in our century, and one has good reason to direct the eye of one's soul upon these three falls'. For they will break in upon us in a certain form; they will occur after the first appearance of Christ on earth in his etheric body, which is really his second appearance upon earth. And mankind will have to prepare itself and make itself strong enough in order to go through this threefold fall of the adversaries of the Christ impulse without endangering their soul development. We shouldn't forget how precise the Apocalypticer really is, for each time such a fall occurs he lets an angel come down from the spiritual worlds, and we notice something which can give someone who hasn't acquired a spiritual conception of the world a rather strange feeling. He lets the angel who comes down rejoice about the great suffering and terrible things which accompany this terrible fall, and it will be necessary for us to understand this rejoicing. But before we do that let's take a look at the three stages of the fall of the powers who oppose the Christ.

First comes what is called the fall of Babylon. Here we can place the sum of all the errors which men and mankind can fall into through their human nature before our souls. Everything which tends to drag human beings down below the spiritual level at which they really belong is included in what the Apocalypticer calls the Babylonian temptation.

Man is really only a human being—although of course he has to acquire this humanness first, and he can't just have it at every moment in his evolution—man is only truly human if there is a complete harmony between the material and spiritual principles in him, that is, if the material doesn't play up into emotions which are not controlled by the spiritual. This is the important thing and we must understand it quite well, for even the Apocalypticer could not speak the way he does if he assumed that passions, desires and everything which comes from the will sphere was quite unjustified right from the beginning. To say that this is unjustified—this ascetic striving in a false sense—also arises from the sphere of passions and desires, for someone who doesn't feel strong enough to permeate his passions from the spiritual side in such a way, that he places them in the service of good world evolution is indulgencing his weak emotions. He wants the good evolution, but he wants to impoverish it in this way and he wants to indulge his weakness. For the Apocalypticer it's not a question of tearing out emotions or of tearing out passions and desires, it's a question of their not remaining uncontrolled by the spiritual world.

Babylon is the city in which a falling away from spirituality through passions held sway in an almost stereotyped way at a certain period in its mystery development, and everything which represents emotions in human life, which remain out of control on a smaller or larger scale is summarized by this city. Here we should translate the strong, coarse expressions which were used at that time (they weren't coarse then) into our language. The people in ancient times didn't form abstract concepts, they always referred to concrete things, always pointed to something characteristic and looked at concrete things. And so the Apocalypticer speaks of Babylon. Why of Babylon?

Really deep mysteries existed in Babylon or in the mystery centers of Babylon in which one could be initiated into the secrets of the super-earthly cosmos, far out into star worlds, and in which one could learn about starry secrets concerning the star worlds and their spiritual content. The earliest priests in ancient Babylon used human powers of clairvoyance and dreams in a way which we would call mediumistic today; this was the case in ancient Babylon. A wonderful, ancient Babylonian teaching developed in this somewhat mediumistic way. However, as one can also see today, mediums—even though they are suited for spiritual mediations, and they are often used in this way, although the process must be controlled by discerning initiates—have very questionable moral characteristics. Mediums become morally degenerate, and because there is a certain discrepancy between what they reveal and what they are, they can eventually no longer distinguish between truth and lies. Here one gets into a region where morality and immorality are no longer distinct.

You must understand how mediums get into this condition. Someone is a medium if his ego and astral body are pulled out of his physical and etheric bodies by an external force, and this was also what happened at the time of the Babylonian priests. However, another power sits in this ego and astral body as soon as they have been pulled out of the medium's physical and etheric body. Depending on whether the initiate who brings this about has good or bad intentions and belongs to the left or the right, this can be a good power or an evil one. Excellent things came to light in this way in ancient Babylonian times, but the problem was with what occurred when the medium returned to his physical body. You see, one cannot get by in the spiritual world with the logic and discrimination between lies and truth which one has in the physical world. It is a complete error to think that one can use the concepts of lies and truth which one rightly uses in the physical world, in the spiritual world. There is nothing there which one could distinguish in such a way. Some of the beings there are good and others are evil. One has to know them through themselves, and in fact, they tell one the kind of being they are. Even the evil ones are truthful in their own way. Of course this is difficult to understand, just as it is difficult to understand what happens in the spiritual world as soon as one enters it. For instance, here in the physical world we say that a straight line is the shortest path between two points. However, in the spiritual world it is the longest distance between two points and every other one is shorter. So that we cannot apply anything which we have to use in the physical world to the spiritual world.

Hence a true initiate must have the right attitude of soul for the spiritual world, but he must also feel fully responsible for the fact that the moment he returns to the physical world he has to work with physical concepts. A medium cannot do this because he doesn't leave his body consciously. When he comes back again his ego and astral body fill the physical and etheric bodies with a line of thought which is no doubt appropriate for the spiritual world, but it corrupts all moral feelings in the physical world. Hence mediums become corrupted, and the corruption with respect to truth and lies then' extends to other forms of corruption. Hence the fact is that Babylon went through this development from the greatest revelations of spiritual worlds to a terrible corruption; first with respect to the principle of spiritual revelation, and then also with respect to human life in general, so that the previous corruption in the spiritual sphere extended to the latter. This spiritual corruption is very powerful; so that someone becomes more immoral if he becomes corrupt after he has gone into spiritual realms than he did before with his ordinary human tendencies. This is why Babylon was considered to be a representative of moral corruption.

The expressions for corruption which we find here are ones which were in common use. The whole of humanity over the entire earth imitated the Babylonians and thereby became a kind of city of Babylon. And this is what the Apocalypticer means. The city of Babylon is to be found among mankind on earth; it exists wherever human beings have succumbed to the Babylonian temptation. It is this human attitude which must fall before that fin—al condition of which the Apocalypticer speaks can come. And if we investigate what is active in the Babylonian corruption, we find that the Ahrimanic principle is active in it everywhere. Ahriman is sitting in men, and he is a power who stands close to them in the whole world, as it were. He is in our emotions, which thereby degenerate. The Ahrimanic and Luciferic principles are opposite poles. The Ahrimanic element is present in what falls here, as for instance when Babylon falls, and it is opposed to the Luciferic element. What kind of an image must the Apocalypticer use when he sees this? The image of jubilating Luciferic, angelic sentiments. We must be aware of this.

It's a big mistake to look upon the worst world conceptions as the best ones, as for instance the idea about the evil principle being down below and the good principle being in everything which comes to meet it from above. This is not the actual state of affairs. The Ahrimanic principle is down below and one has the Luciferic principle above where the angels are rejoicing about the falls. The rejoicing one hears is the voice of Lucifer which accompanies the diving angels, for the actual Christ principle is the balance between the two.

One can only understand something like what the Apocalypticer is presenting if one understands this threefoldedness in the world's makeup in the right way. For anyone with ordinary human feelings it is completely incomprehensible why pure and good spirits would begin to scream for joy when the misery which is described here befalls other beings. This is of course immediately comprehensible if one sees it as the jubilant cries of those who were basically opposed to the creation of the world in which man experiences his spiritual development. They want to keep his whole evolution on a very different spiritual level. They didn't want that connection or marriage of the spirit with matter which took place in earthly existence. So that when what is grasped by Ahriman is eliminated from earthly existence, what they're really feeling in their souls is: we now have the satisfaction that one part of earth-existence will no longer be continued; it is falling during earth evolution he world view which speaks out of the images which the Apocalypticer describes for each fall is wonderfully honest in this respect.

Now the first one, the fall of Babylon, is all the errors men can fall into when they are also influenced by the initiation principle, it is human perversions. When Babylon falls the remaining human aberrations will be eliminated from further world evolution, at a point in time which we will discuss later. To begin with we will place coming events before our soul in a qualitative way.

The second thing is where man is no longer just involved by himself. The beings who fall with Babylon are men; it is human aberration. However, in the case of the fall of the beast and the false prophet who supports the teaching of the beast, what falls is something spiritual and superhuman, and not something human.

Something which is outside of the human kingdom falls, namely, the beast who breaks in upon human communities, and the one who proclaims the teaching of this beast. Hence one is dealing with something which can take possession of' human beings where something superhuman is working directly in men with an evil impulse, and it's not a matter of a weak nature working, as in the case of a medium. We can add the following to make the Imagination even clearer. All those who will participate in the fall of Babylon will have become degenerate through the fact that they tried to do things which their organization couldn't stand; their organization became weak with respect to these things, and therefore they became corrupt. In the fall of Babylon man's organization acts out of weakness. In the fall of the beast and the false prophet it's not as if a medium became corrupt because he got weak, but it's as if the spirit which overpowers the ego and astral body of the medium during hypnosis would then go into his physical and etheric body and make use of the physical body in order to wreak havoc on earth through the human being.

This is exactly the idea which we encounter here in the Apocalypticer. He wants to say that a time will come when we will see human beings walking around on earth who couldn't stand what really, lay in the Christian annunciation who took the Christ into their souls, but who didn't get to the level of the Christ with their etheric and physical bodies, and therefore became corrupt and devoted to other spirits; but they didn't devote themselves to them with full consciousness, so that they became corrupt. These are the first ones, who are included in the fall of Babylon.

The other ones walk around like men, but their fate is that their human ego is not in them, so that one can no longer speak of them as human beings, for they are possessed by the beast and the false prophet. This will come after the fall of Babylon. There will be people walking around on earth who will be demons, for Ahrimanic powers will act in them directly.

Many of the preliminary conditions for all of these things already exist today; one could say that all of this is already present in a germinal form. After all we already have the terrible case where Ahriman appeared amongst us as an author, perhaps not through a human being entirely, but at least through the temporary weakness of a human being. Nietzsche was a wonderful and brilliant writer, but the Nietzsche individuality was not in him when he wrote the AntiChrist and Ecce Homo. I know this individuality in Nietzsche, and I even described it in my autobiography; but Ahriman becomes a direct author here, and Ahriman is a much more brilliant writer than Nietzsche.

Ahrimanic powers will intervene more and more and Ahrimanic spirits will also use human bodies for other things. A time will come when Christians will have to ask themselves seriously when they meet this or that human being: Is that really a human being or is it a very loose mantle for Ahrimanic spirits? In the future one will have to make this distinction in addition to the other ones one has to make today. This will be the second fall, and the beast and his herald will take possession of human bodies. Thereby these demons will have fallen. So first we have the fall of corrupt human beings and then the fall of certain corrupt spirits, who are close to men. These spirits take a tumble in the second fall.

Then we have the third fall, which is the fall of Satan in the Apocalypse. Here we have a very high being who does a different kind of work than the one which can be done on earth. The beast and the false prophet are powers who lead mankind astray; they want to steer men in the wrong direction in a moral and intellectual respect. However, the power which is meant in the fall of Satan wants something quite different. It wants to throw the whole earth off its course, and not just mankind. Seen from a human, earthly standpoint, this power is a terrible adversary of the Godhead.

One can only ask the following in a hypothetical way, and one can't look at it from the viewpoint of human or earthly evolution, if one doesn't want to commit an intellectual or spiritual sin. If one looks at it from other viewpoints, how does this satanic power in the universe compare with other spirits?

Now Michael has a different standpoint than human beings do, and it's no wonder that his opinion about Satan is quite different from that of men. Human beings tend to be rather abstract, and they think that Satan is an evil power. But he is also a great power from the viewpoints which are important for the earth, a great power that has gone astray. And archangel Michael does not have the rank of Satan, who is at the level of a principality or an archai; Michael is only an archangel. Satan is a very terrifying power from Michael's standpoint and not a despicable one, because he thinks that this power who belongs to the Archai is higher than he is. Except that Michael holds views which are in line with earth evolution.

With respect to everything which is connected with the orbits of the planets, Michael decided a long time ago to travel in the orbits which are prescribed by the sun's existence. Satan is a power who is continually lurking around in our cosmos. There is something sinister about this lurking of Satan. One can perceive this at the moments when one sees a comet shooting through our cosmos, with its different orbit (drawing).

If one draws it according to Copernicus which is not quite correct, although it doesn't make much difference here one has sun, Mercury, Venus, earth, Mars; those are the inner planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune—one can see that such comets have very irregular orbits with respect to these regular orbits. The view that these comets describe long ellipses is nonsense, but we don't have to go into that now. But in any case, the segments of the cometary orbits which lie within our planetary system do not agree with the planetary orbits at all.

And so this Satan lies in wait in order to catch every comet that comes along, and to use its momental inertia so that—when he has collected enough comets—he can throw the planets out of their orbits, and the earth with them. This situation exists in the universe; Satanic powers are continually lying in wait so that they can transform the entire planetary system. Thereby this planetary system would be taken away from the divine, spiritual powers in whose footsteps men should be walking, and it would be taken into quite different directions of world evolution. This intention is a terrible mistake from Michael's point of view, but an intention about which Michael would have to say: I couldn't even do it, for it would be impossible for a being who is in the archangel class to do something like that. Only beings who are in the archai class might have enough forces to carry out something along these lines. Michael—who decided to move in the sun's orbit a long time ago, and who therefore (in the sense of the Ptolemaic system) has become what is known in occultism as an archangel of the rotation of time for the planets and has decided to remain entirely within the orbital periods.

The angels had to decide to remain in these scheduled orbits at some point. In a certain epoch of Atlantean evolution the gods descended into the mystery centers, and one could really perceive that the hosts of archangels which include Oriphiel, Anael, Zachariel and so on, resolved to move within the prescribed planetary orbits. So this came about at a certain time.

However, the mighty hosts which are led by Satan have not made this decision up to the present time and they're still trying to use every cometary orbit in order to give a different configuration to the entire planetary system. Here one is dealing with an adversary of Christ who not only wants to corrupt individual human beings, and who doesn't just want to corrupt groups of human beings like the beast and the false prophet, but we have to do with Satan and his hosts and with direct attacks upon the earth's connection with the planetary system, as it were. This will have to be the third fall. In both of these last two falls we again have the rejoicing of the Luciferic kind of spiritual beings.

One must foresee these things. For the first stage, the Babylonian stage, will have straying human beings who have drawn an aberration into themselves through their physical constitution, so that there is no hope that anything particularly good will become of these walking human bodies over which the ego and astral body have entirely lost control. These bodies must be given up for lost although perhaps not the ego and astral body which belong to them. The former will then go on as such along the karmic paths of humanity. At a particular point in time we see certain men walking around in their bodies, who are men who have succumbed to the Babylonian temptation and whose bodies and what is in them fall out of evolution: the fall of Babylon.

The second thing is that human beings will walk around—one will be able to see this—of whom one will have to say that Ahrimanic power's, are living in them. Here Ahriman is acting directly; this is the beast; the fall of the beast and of the false prophet of the beast, who is a superhuman being and not a man.

The third thing is that one will notice that something about the laws of nature is becoming unexplainable. This will be the greatest and most important experience that people will be able to have, when they notice that something is becoming unexplainable about natural laws and that phenomena are not taking place in accordance with the laws of nature. It will often happen that one will have something which is not merely an erroneous calculation, but is calculated correctly, let's say that a planet should be in a certain place, but it doesn't get there.

Satan will make some first successful attempts to bring disorder into the planetary system. Mankind will have to develop a very strong spirituality in order to counteract this. For the disorder that can be brought about in this way will and can only be harmonized through the strong spirituality of human beings. These are the things which we can foresee today if we place future stages of human and earth evolution before our soul. This is what we see again when the Apocalypticer speaks to us. You should try to feel your way into this coincidence with what can really be gained from Anthroposophy or can gradually be disclosed through Anthroposophy.

For one will be able to speak of comets and one can already speak about them today to the effect that Satan is lying in wait for them in the cosmos, and that he wants to use their orbits to replace cosmos with chaos. For if you take what can be gained through Anthroposophic understanding into yourself and you can discover it again in the Apocalypse, there is something important about this rediscovery. A kind of soul encounter with the Apocalypse and therewith the Apocalypticer himself is present in this; that is important,—thereby with the Apocalypticer himself. For this will be very important, that the priest who is living into the future should increasingly get the longing to meet the Apocalypticer who looked into the future in this way after the Mystery of Golgotha,—the Apocalypticer at any time, regardless of whether he is living on earth or not.

For priests must get the feeling that the help that can come from John, the creator of the Apocalypse, to the one who wants to work in a Christian way that this help is an extremely important one, and one that one needs. However, we will only really be able to accompany John the Apocalypticer if we approach the Apocalypse with the attitude of soul that I described. Then John becomes our ally, and after all he is closely connected with Christ Jesus, he was initiated by Christ Jesus himself, he is an initiate of Christ Jesus. Therefore, he is an important ally. It is tremendously important to come to the Christ through him.

It is really true that a real understanding of the Apocalypse leads deep down into the region where one has the greatest imaginable prospects of meeting John and then the Christ himself. There is a deep truth connected with this and a truth which one can hope will have a very deep aftereffect upon your thinking and feeling, for it is a real priests' truth, that is, a truth which draws a priest into the spiritual realm in a legitimate way. We will continue with this tomorrow.

When one gives a lecture on a Christian theme at a public gathering, it is not possible to speak about the worldwide theosophical movement in the intimate way which is possible in the present case, in a smaller, closed group. The lecture will give an outline of the three ways of initiation.

Many of you will no doubt have been involved with theosophy in all kinds of different ways and also know different views presented within the world-wide theosophical movement. Reading, lectures, and your own reflections will have made some of you interested in finding out more about things that go beyond the sphere of the senses, things eternal, beyond time and mortality.

The science of the spirit has made it its special mission to give instruction on the deeper nature of man and his relationship to the world as a whole, also to try and discover what is the eternal, lasting principle in man, what are the causes of illness, of bad and evil things in the world and in individual human beings, what are the ultimate goals and purposes of the world and of man, and, finally, how the world has come into existence.

Today, however, our theme will mainly be the ways in which insight may be gained into those higher problems.

Human morality is the greatest goal man can set for himself. General brotherhood among people has been the ideal of all great, noble people through the ages. The theosophical association wants this, too. It definitely does not aim to create a sect based on Buddhist views, nor does it seek to abolish or replace Christianity. It also does not want to present anything unscientific. Apart from this it is also important to distinguish between the doctrine of theosophy, its view of the world, and its aims, which are to achieve the general brotherhood of man.

Both are important, the theory and the practice of theosophy. The teaching should serve to make us aware of the higher and highest principles. For we are doing some work on our souls when we follow such theoretical thinking. We prepare it, as it were, for the practice of human love and brotherhood. The theoretical aims are to reach a point where we understand the essential nature of human beings, so that we meet one another with real understanding, judging and treating one another accordingly. Different opinions, occupations, environments and so on drive people apart in life. Deeper insight and knowledge should be the means of creating peace and love among people in spite of many different opinions. That is the theosophical view of the world. It has originally come from individuals who have made efforts to deepen and develop their dormant inner faculties so that they might gain greater insight into the world than is possible by means of our ordinary senses or ordinary human understanding. Such people are called initiates. Different degrees of initiation are known. The great founders of religions were great initiates, among them Hermes, teacher of the priests in ancient Egypt, Zarathustra, Moses, Plato, Jesus Christ. All of them had more highly developed souls. They were able to see into the world of the spirit which is around us in a similar way to the physical world.

For as long as someone does not seek himself to take the path of initiation, there is only one way to look into those worlds of spirit, and that is by using the rational human mind. The world grows clear and lucid if penetrated by the rational mind.

The view of the world gained in the science of the spirit makes insight into the world clearer and deeper than other philosophies do. The rational mind is the judge, accepting or rejecting such teachings about humanity. Human beings have a real need for these, which is also why they are presented to them.

We will now take a closer look at how one may develop one's soul so that it will be able to perceive the sublime realm that lies beyond the senses. There is, of course, no compulsion or obligation about this. Not everyone needs to follow such a path. Those who are able will receive the necessary suggestions and be able to take the right steps in accord with them.

Methods of acquiring such higher faculties have existed at all times. But until a few decades ago they were only known to a few chosen occult teachers and occult pupils. Someone who is called may also find the right path of development for himself. All it needs is serious resolve and one's own free will.

This lecture shall therefore also have no bias towards propaganda nor seek to push people towards such a path. All that will be done is to show the ways that might be followed. Initiation is the goal of such a path of development, that is, gaining the faculties needed for insight into higher worlds.

Unfortunately it is still widely, and wrongly, believed that theosophy is something that comes from the East, really from India, and a kind of neo-Buddhism that is to be pushed on to us Westerners as a new religion. To say this is to do a great injustice to theosophy, for it has existed in Europe from the beginning, and had grown deep roots in many places, especially in recent centuries. It has to be admitted, however, that it was always met with greater understanding in the East. East and West also have quite different ways of initiation, which is in accord with the more deep down nature of individual nations. For us, the European way is of course more important, and it is more appropriate for us to follow this. All these ways lead to one and the same goal, however, for the truth is the same both here and there, today and yesterday and in all eternity.

To begin with, a brief description will be given of the three most important forms of initiation—first the Indian yoga initiation, secondly the Christian and gnostic way, which people would also do well to follow today, and thirdly the Rosicrucian way. This is the most suitable for people today who cannot find what they seek in mere faith and need to enter into the achievements of civilization and technology. Deep down this is also a Christian way, as is evident, apart from anything else, in the fact that someone who has developed by taking the Rosicrucian way learns to understand the wisdom taught in Christianity in the best and deepest way.

Firstly, the Eastern yoga way. The human soul is able to develop to the point where it becomes like an eye that has direct vision of the spirit, of the eternal which is beyond time. The way taken by people of the East for this development differs from the way of the European because their natural disposition and organization are different. A Hindu differs from a European not only in external appearance, for his brain and soul are also built differently. It is evident, therefore, that if they are truly to reach the goal, Hindus must take a different way from that of Europeans. It actually goes so far that a European may possibly ruin himself both morally and physically by taking the Eastern path of development. The isolation and withdrawal of the soul required for the yoga way is practically impossible in our European civilization. One would have to step completely aside from ordinary life here, and indeed from our whole civilization, devoting oneself entirely to one's personal inner development.

Someone who follows this route needs a spiritual guide or guru who pilots him safely through all the chaos. Without such a guru it is impossible to follow this way. It also needs a complete transformation of human nature, a transformation laid down for one by the guru. Such a guru altogether has unlimited power over his pupil. It then is no longer of no concern what the individual does in his life in other respects. It is no longer enough to be a decent, good person of the ordinary kind, simply the kind of person society tends to consider an example.

It has to be possible to keep soul and body quite distinct and separate, they must no longer interpenetrate the way they did before. Passions and animal instincts should no longer have a place in the human soul, for the soul is inhibited and prevented by them from penetrating the mists of the physical world and looking into the higher world of the spirit. However, when soul and body are cleanly separated, the latter may well bring its passions and drives into play at the same time as the soul is in that higher life. It is therefore possible for the soul to develop to a higher level and gain vision in the spirit, whilst the body falls subject to all kinds of bad qualities and perhaps becomes corrupted because its passions and drives are no longer guided towards better things by the soul's insight, which had been possible when soul and body were still interpenetrating. This shows the tremendous importance of proper guidance on this difficult path. One must in that case strictly obey the guru, even if it goes against the grain. The guru is permitted to involve himself in the pupil's most intimate affairs of the heart and give him rules on how to conduct his life. Certain relationships may be forbidden as being an impediment to the development that is in progress. Preconditions for this way of development are firstly the ability to prevent the lower drives to good effect, then regular practice of certain ways of doing things, firmly establishing particular qualities and developing additional faculties that still lie dormant or do not yet exist.

Such preparations for development are: firstly to get out of the habit of letting one's thoughts dart about. This would seem to be an easy condition, but it is in fact difficult. We are driven and put under pressure by external impressions. For at least five minutes a day the individual should have complete control of the way his thoughts run. One exercise one might try, for instance, is to concentrate the mind on a single idea. Nothing else should be linked with this idea, however many things want to come in of their own accord, only the thoughts I myself connect with it, freely deciding to do so. Such exercises should be done with a variety of objects. After some time, the individuaPs thinking will be controlled and this is outwardly apparent in a more precise choice of words, among other things.

Secondly, taking initiative in one's actions. Some people are quite incapable of this, for they may have been forced into an occupation from early on, and this occupies most of their active life. Most of the things we do are dictated from outside. Someone seeking to gain initiation should therefore be deeply concerned to do something regularly, always at the same time of the day, something they have decided on themselves, even if it is something quite insignificant.

Thirdly, the pupil should overcome mood swings, being on top of the world one minute and down in the dumps the next. It means we should not give ourselves without will to pleasure and pain but keep our inner equilibrium even in the bitterest pain and greatest pleasures. This certainly will not make us insensitive and lacking in response; quite the contrary, our inner responses become all the more subtle and intensive.

Fourthly, a Persian legend about Christ Jesus should live in the pupil's heart. It is this. One day Jesus walked in the countryside with his disciples. A half decomposed dog lay by the wayside, a horrible sight. The disciples turned away, feeling shocked. Christ Jesus looked at the cadaver with loving eyes, however, commenting: ‘Look what beautiful teeth this dead animal has!’ The quintessence of this is to find hidden beauty even in ugly things, and altogether always look for the positive aspect, for something to which one can say yes. The life of even the worst of evildoers has moments of light and we can meet these with understanding.

Fifthly, we must seek to gain complete freedom from prejudice, The past should never determine the way we judge the present. We should not reject something new just because we have not come across it before. New insights should be taken in an unbiased way if one wants to be an initiate.

Sixth, developing harmony of soul. This will really arise from all the other things, as if of its own accord.

These qualities are absolutely essential preconditions for anyone who is to be initiated the yoga way.

The actual yoga way involves a number of stages that must be kept clearly distinct.

Firstly the yoga pupil must not kill, lie, steal, live to excess or be covetous. The more one ceases to live at the cost of others, the closer does one come to what is meant by the requirement that one should not steal. For this is not, of course, the stealing that is a punishable crime, but more subtle forms of it. As to the other requirements, each individual will immediately know what they involve.

Secondly it is highly desirable to acknowledge certain symbolic acts for one's own. One must have a feeling for it and come to understand that a rite is really just giving symbolic expression to something much more profound.

Thirdly the assumption of specific body positions, for the position into which one brings the body for the exercises to gain higher wisdom is far from immaterial. As far as possible it should be placed in the direction in which the spiritual streams move in the world.

Fourthly, pranayama, the regulation of one's breathing, is of great importance. It has to do with the requirement not to kill, for man's breath is capable of killing many things in the world around him. Yoga breathing aims gradually to free the breath from its deadly effect on other life forms. Above all, yoga pupils should no longer release so much deadly carbon dioxide. This is possible, for we know that individuals who have been deeply initiated can spend decades in caves where the air is stale and this does not ruin them physically.

The fifth stage relates to suppressing the evolution of certain sensual ideals. We must no longer let every sensual idea influence us but need to take individual ones and concentrate all our attention on them. The rest of our thoughts should also be made to progress in a specific, regulated way.

The sixth stage is that as he progresses the pupil must concentrate on, say, an impression of light, or, put in a better way, to concentrate on the image such an impression has left in the soul. This is an even higher stage. Even more valuable is meditation based on an idea that is no longer part of the world we perceive through the senses. It is essential for the human being to give himself to the contemplation of such ideas if he is to progress.

The seventh stage is very hard. It consists in the individual banishing every idea of any kind from his conscious mind whilst remaining wholly awake. He then comes closer to the state of intuitive conception. Now at last the soil is prepared and the contents of a world that has been unknown to us so far can come to us.

A guru is absolutely essential during the whole of this preparation for the yoga way. It is solely and exclusively due to him that these inner developments take the right course and benefit the pupil.

This has, of course, been only a rough and ready outline of the yoga way. It is certainly not a set of instructions for following it. Let me repeat: the guidance given by the guru from time to time is absolutely essential, and it is given from person to person.

The second way is the Christian gnostic one. The main difference here, compared to the one that went before, is that it is not necessary for every individual pupil to have his own guru. This is no longer required because of the existence of a great, sublime individual, Christ Jesus, who is there to be the pupil's goal and to point the way. The way that has to be followed is given in detail in holy writ, in the Bible, above all in the gospel of John. Deep down this does indeed give direct instructions for training as a mystic.

Along this way, the guide is there more to advise than to be an authoritative guru in the usual sense. The guidance concerning initiation is of the highest authority, that of Jesus Christ. John's gospel gives such guidance. It is not a book for study but a book for life in the true sense of the word. The first few sentences of the gospel have special mystic powers and are tremendously important for setting out on this path of initiation. A pupil of the Christian mysteries needs to take a meditative approach to those few sentences, for instance letting them and nothing else live in his soul at a particular time every morning. After some time the profound meaning of these sentences will be clear to him intuitively, and it is only then that the moment has come when one can begin further study of John's gospel so that it will truly bear fruit.

In the course of one's study, the images of the gospel will gradually slip quietly into our dreams, so that we have real inner experience of the events described. This inner experience then continues through all further stages of development which I am not going to describe in detail here and now.

When the pupil has progressed to the washing of the feet, a symbolic act in which one humbly confesses one's dependence and the fact that one has grown and developed on the basis of something lower, at a lower level than our own, certain symptoms will show themselves also externally—a strange feeling of water running by one's feet. The inner symptom relating to this is an imaginative vision of the washing of the feet. In Christian mystic development, the washing of the feet marks the first stage.

The second station is the scourging, which is also something one enters into in one's feelings. It means that in spite of the great and frequent pair and troubles we have to bear in life we will always stand up straight and not grow faint-hearted. Again we have both an outer and an inner symptoms—a strange physical stabbing sensation and the mental image of our own scourging.

Stage three is the crown of thorns. This means that though it is painful to have our most sacred feelings and convictions derided and have scorn poured on them, we must not lose our inner firmness, our equilibrium. Symptoms are headaches, and vision of one's own person wearing the crown of thorns.

Fourthly bearing the cross (crucifixion). Here the pupil is to gain living experience that the body is really an indifferent object compared to the soul and its importance. When we are truly aware of this we'll also be able to use the body merely as an instrument for higher things, and weUl truly control it. Symptoms are the Christ's stigmata appearing as reddened areas on hands and feet. This blood trial only occurs for brief moments during the meditation, however. Inner vision of being crucified oneself.

Fifth, the mystic death. Here the pupil has a strange experience. It is as if the whole world around him is covered by a veil, and he senses the essence that lies behind the veil. When he feels himself thus to be in utter darkness, the veil will suddenly tear and he looks through it into a new, wondrous world. He now learns to judge the depths of the human soul by a completely different standard. This mystic death is like a descent into hell.

The pupil is now someone who has been awakened and can progress to the sixth stage, the entombment. Here he feels the whole outer environment to be his body. His individual nature expands, encompassing the whole world. The body feels itself to be one with the earth, and individual consciousness expands to become earth consciousness.

The seventh stage cannot be described to any degree, for it is beyond all powers of imagination based on the senses. Individuals who have finally come free of this world by unceasing practice may just be able to grasp it in their thoughts. This stage involves entering into perfect divinity and glory, and we do not have the words to describe it.

This Christian way is difficult, for it demands great inner humility and giving up of self. Anyone who has gone through it, however, will have achieved man's goal and dignity. True Christianity will have come to life in him in a very real way.

The third way is the Rosicrucian one. It is really just a modification of the other two. It developed in the 14th century, when the adepts were able to foresee that civilization would become very different in the centuries ahead.

This is the most suitable way for modern people. It is also the most appropriate for Europeans. This does not mean to say that one of the other ways will not also lead to the goal. But the Rosicrucian system is compatible with our whole civilization and culture. It has not so far been laid down in books or manuscripts, but has been passed from generation to generation by oral tradition. A more detailed description is given in Lucifer-Gnosis under the title ‘How to gain knowledge of the higher worlds’.¹⁴⁶

This is a very different view of the role of a guru. He is no longer absolute authority for the pupil but more a friend and adviser. The only authority lies in the individual's own free decision.

Evolution is in seven stages: 1) study, 2) imagination, 3) insight into occult scripture, 4) making life rhythmic, 5) looking for relationships between macrocosm and microcosm, 6) contemplation, 7) experiencing godliness.

Study is thus required as a first step, though this is not the scholarly type of study but working with thoughts relating to the world and to human life, the origin of the heavenly bodies, and so on, and other ways of training one's thinking. Thinking is able to give us new living experiences—I am referring to logical thinking with a definite goal. It provides secure guidance througJi all worlds, for thinking has to be equally consistent in all of them.

Secondly we have to gain the faculty of imagination. This is a matter of relating to the world around us not only in theory and in our thoughts but in moral terms. We must learn to discover the aspect of every thing that gives its moral background. To develop this kind of imagination we may, for instance, put the image of a plant clearly before our mind's eye. Or we may have a small seed grain before us and develop images of how it gradually sprouts, producing a stem and finally a complete plant with its fruit. After some practice one can really see how a plant emerges and grows from such a seed. This does, however, call for considerable occult powers. With lesser means it is possible to perceive the astral body of the plant as a small flame emerging from the seed.

Thirdly to learn occult script. This means to learn signs that have to do with the cosmic process.

Step 4 is to make life rhythmical. Our breathing needs to be regulated, changing the relative proportions of exhaled carbon dioxide and inhaled oxygen in a specific way. It is altogether most necessary to bring rhythm into life in our restless age. All processes follow one another in a great rhythm, and as far as possible this should also be made part of one's life. Thus we should arrange to have a meditation process at a given hour, or to review our past life at the same time every night. This releases great powers in the soul.

Step 5 is to look for correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm. Goethe put this most beautifully in the following verse:

Were not the eye like to the sun,
The sun it never could behold;
Were not in us the god's own power,
How could we take delight in things divine?¹⁴⁷

Entering intensely into our organs teaches us about the parts of the macrocosm that relate to them. Thus study of the eye teaches us about light, exploration of the lung about the composition of the air, and so on. Using a similar way we should finally also gain self knowledge.

Entering into the small world within us we thus gradually also have the great world revealed to us. Such comparative studies will ultimately lead to the state of godliness, the result of all the work that has gone before and above all of the deep, calm contemplation that is the sixth stage.

With all this, the individual must be imbued with specific good qualities, these being self confidence, self control and being present in mind and spirit.

The pupil has to work unceasingly on this inner development. For although the divine principle is indeed latent in us, it does not reveal itself without work and the right kind of development. To follow this way one does not have to leave one's human and social environment to devote oneself to personal development in solitude. Nor does it ask that we despise matter, merely that we grow beyond it, overcoming it to reach something higher.

Our guiding principle should be that self knowledge is world knowledge.

The three ways I have described take the individual to being a pupil at a higher level. It is only from this that a true initiate can then give us the key to the secret of the world, so that we may gain insight into the deeper connections in the life of the world and in human life. That highest level then means one is able to receive intuitions from higher worlds. It is a state of lucidity in spirit and of divine light.

• 146. Steiner R. Geisteswissenschaft und soziale Frage. Lucifer-Gnosis—Grundlegende AufsStze zur Anthroposophie und Berichte (GA 34) . Originally in Luzifer-Gnosis Nos. 13–28, Berlin, 1904–1905.
• 147. Goethe, Zahme Xenien III.