The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The concept “tree” is conditioned for our knowledge by the percept “tree.” There is only one determinate concept which I can select from the general system of concepts and apply to a given percept. The connection of concept and percept is mediately and objectively determined by thought in conformity with the percept. The connection between a percept and its concept is recognized after the act of perception, but the relevance of the one to the other is determined by the character of each.

In willing the situation is different. The percept is here the content of my existence as an individual, whereas the concept is the universal element in me. What is brought into ideal relation to the external world by means of the concept, is an immediate experience of my own, a percept of my Self. More precisely, it is a percept of my Self as active, as producing effects on the external world. In apprehending my own acts of will, I connect a concept with a corresponding percept, viz., with the particular volition. In other words, by an act of thought I link up my individual faculty (my will) with the universal world-process. The content of a concept corresponding to an external percept appearing within the field of my experience, is given through intuition. Intuition is the source for the content of my whole conceptual system. The percept shows me only which concept I have to apply, in any given instance, out of the aggregate of my intuitions. The content of a concept is, indeed, conditioned by the percept, but it is not produced by it. On the contrary, it is intuitively given and connected with the percept by an act of thought. The same is true of the conceptual content of an act of will which is just as little capable of being deduced from this act. It is got by intuition.

If now the conceptual intuition (ideal content) of my act of will occurs before the corresponding percept, then the content of what I do is determined by my ideas. The reason why I select from the number of possible intuitions just this special one, cannot be sought in an object of perception, but is to be found rather in the purely ideal interdependence of the members of my system of concepts. In other words, the determining factors for my will are to be found, not in the perceptual, but only in the conceptual world. My will is determined by my idea.

The conceptual system which corresponds to the external world is conditioned by this external world. We must determine from the percept itself what concept corresponds to it; and how, in turn, this concept will fit in with the rest of my system of ideas, depends on its intuitive content. The percept thus conditions directly its concept and, thereby, indirectly also its place in the conceptual system of my world. But the ideal content of an act of will, which is drawn from the conceptual system and which precedes the act of will, is determined only by the conceptual system itself.

An act of will which depends on nothing but this ideal content must itself be regarded as ideal, that is, as determined by an idea. This does not imply, of course, that all acts of will are determined only by ideas. All factors which determine the human individual have an influence on his will.

In a particular act of will we must distinguish two factors: the motive, and the spring of action. The motive is the conceptual factor, the spring of action is the perceptual factor in will. The conceptual factor, or motive, is the momentary determining cause of an act of will, the spring of action is the permanent determining factor in the individual. The motive of an act of will can be only a pure concept, or else a concept with a definite relation to perception, i.e., an idea. Universal and individual concepts (ideas) become motives of will by influencing the human individual and determining him to action in a particular direction. One and the same concept, however, or one and the same idea, influences different individuals differently. They determine different men to different actions. An act of will is, therefore, not merely the outcome of a concept or an idea, but also of the individual make-up of human beings. This individual make-up we will call, following Edward van Hartmann, the “characterological disposition.” The manner in which concept and idea act on the characterological disposition of a man gives to his life a definite moral or ethical stamp.

The characterological disposition consists of the more or less permanent content of the individual's life, that is, of his habitual ideas and feelings. Whether an idea which enters my mind at this moment stimulates me to an act of will or not, depends on its relation to my other ideal contents, and also to my peculiar modes of feeling. My ideal content, in turn, is conditioned by the sum total of those concepts which have, in the course of my individual life, come in contact with percepts, that is, have become ideas. This, again, depends on my greater or lesser capacity for intuition, and on the range of my perception, that is, on the subjective and objective factors of my experiences, on the structure of my mind and on my environment. My affective life more especially determines my characterological disposition. Whether I shall make a certain idea or concept the motive for action will depend on whether it gives me pleasure or pain.

These are the factors which we have to consider in an act of will. The immediately present idea or concept, which becomes the motive, determines the end or the purpose of my will; my characterological disposition determines me to direct my activity towards this end. The idea of taking a walk in the next half-hour determines the end of my action. But this idea is raised to the level of a motive only if it meets with a suitable characterological disposition, that is, if during my past life I have formed the ideas of the wholesomeness of walking and the value of health; and further, if the idea of walking is accompanied by a feeling of pleasure.

We must, therefore, distinguish (1) the possible subjective dispositions which are likely to turn given ideas and concepts into motives, and (2) the possible ideas and concepts which are capable of so influencing my characterological disposition that an act of will results. The former are for morality the springs of action, the latter its ends.

The springs of action in the moral life can be discovered by analyzing the elements of which individual life is composed.

The first level of individual life is that of perception, more particularly sense-perception. This is the stage of our individual lives in which a percept translates itself into will immediately, without the intervention of either a feeling or a concept. The spring of action here involved may be called simply instinct. Our lower, purely animal, needs (hunger, sexual intercourse, etc.) find their satisfaction in this way. The main characteristic of instinctive life is the immediacy with which the percept starts off the act of will. This kind of determination of the will, which belongs originally only to the life of the lower senses, may however become extended also to the percepts of the higher senses. We may react to the percept of a certain event in the external world without reflecting on what we do, and without any special feeling connecting itself with the percept. We have examples of this especially in our ordinary conventional intercourse with men. The spring of this kind of action is called tact or moral good taste. The more often such immediate reactions to a percept occur, the more the agent will prove himself able to act purely under the guidance of tact; that is, tact becomes his characterological disposition.

The second level of human life is feeling. Definite feelings accompany the percepts of the external world. These feelings may become springs of action. When I see a hungry man, my pity for him may become the spring of my action. Such feelings, for example, are modesty, pride, sense of honour, humility, remorse, pity, revenge, gratitude, piety, loyalty, love, and duty. [A complete catalogue of the principles of morality (from the point of view of Metaphysical Realism) may be found in Edouard von Hartmann's Phanomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins. ]

The third and last level of life is to have thoughts and ideas. An idea or a concept may become the motive of an action through mere reflection. Ideas become motives because, in the course of my life, I regularly connect certain aims of my will with percepts which recur again and again in a more or less modified form. Hence it is, that with men who are not wholly without experience, the occurrence of certain percepts is always accompanied also by the consciousness of ideas of actions, which they have themselves carried out in similar cases or which they have seen others carry out. These ideas float before their minds as determining models in all subsequent decisions; they become parts of their characterological disposition. We may give the name of practical experience to the spring of action just described. Practical experience merges gradually into purely tactful behaviour. That happens, when definite typical pictures of actions have become so closely connected in our minds with ideas of certain situations in life, that, in any given instance, we omit all deliberation based on experience, and pass immediately from the percept to the action.

The highest level of individual life is that of conceptual thought without reference to any definite perceptual content. We determine the content of a concept through pure intuition on the basis of an ideal system. Such a concept contains, at first, no reference to any definite percepts. When an act of will comes about under the influence of a concept which refers to a percept, i.e., under the influence of an idea, then it is the percept which determines our action indirectly by way of the concept. But when we act under the influence of pure intuitions, the spring of our action is pure thought. As it is the custom in philosophy to call pure thought “reason,” we may perhaps be justified in giving the name of practical reason to the spring of action characteristic of this level of life. The clearest account of this spring of action has been given by Kreyenbuhl (Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xviii, No. 3). In my opinion his article on this subject is one of the most important contributions to present-day philosophy, more especially to Ethics. Kreyenbuhl calls the spring of action, of which we are treating, the practical a priori, i.e., a spring of action issuing immediately from my intuition.

It is clear that such a spring of action can no longer be counted in the strictest sense as part of the characterological disposition. For what is here effective in me as a spring of action is no longer something purely individual, but the ideal, and hence universal, content of my intuition. As soon as I regard the content as the valid basis and starting-point of an action, I pass over into willing, irrespective of whether the concept was already in my mind beforehand, or whether it only occurs to me immediately before the action, that is, irrespective of whether it was present in the form of a disposition in me or not.

A real act of will results only when a present impulse to action, in the form of a concept or idea, acts on the characterological disposition. Such an impulse thereupon becomes the motive of the will.

The motives of moral conduct are ideas and concepts. There are Moralists who see in feeling also a motive of morality; they assert, e.g., that the end of moral conduct is to secure the greatest possible quantity of pleasure for the agent. Pleasure itself, however, can never be a motive; at best only the idea of pleasure can act as motive. The idea of a future pleasure, but not the feeling itself, can act on my characterological disposition. For the feeling does not yet exist in the moment of action; on the contrary, it has first to be produced by the action.

The idea of one's own or another's well-being is, however, rightly regarded as a motive of the will. The principle of producing the greatest quantity of pleasure for oneself through one's action, that is, to attain individual happiness, is called Egoism. The attainment of this individual happiness is sought either by thinking ruthlessly only of one's own good, and striving to attain it even at the cost of the happiness of other individuals (Pure Egoism), or by promoting the good of others, either because one anticipates indirectly a favourable influence on one's own happiness through the happiness of others, or because one fears to endanger one's own interest by injuring others (Morality of Prudence). The special content of the egoistical principle of morality will depend on the ideas which we form of what constitutes our own, or others' good. A man will determine the content of his egoistical striving in accordance with what he regards as one of life's good things (luxury, hope of happiness, deliverance from different evils, etc.).

Further, the purely conceptual content of an action is to be regarded as yet another kind of motive. This content has no reference, like the idea of one's own pleasure, solely to the particular action, but to the deduction of an action from a system of moral principles. These moral principles, in the form of abstract concepts, may guide the individual's moral life without his worrying himself about the origin of his concepts. In that case, we feel merely the moral necessity of submitting to a moral concept, which, in the form of law, controls our actions. The justification of this necessity we leave to those who demand from us moral subjection, that is, to those whose moral authority over us we acknowledge (the head of the family, the state, social custom, the authority of the church, divine revelation). We meet with a special kind of these moral principles when the law is not proclaimed to us by an external authority, but comes from our own selves (moral autonomy). In this case we believe that we hear the voice, to which we have to submit ourselves, in our own souls. The name for this voice is conscience.

It is a great moral advance when a man no longer takes as the motive of his action the commands of an external or internal authority, but tries to understand the reason why a given maxim of action ought to be effective as a motive in him. This is the advance from morality based on authority to action from moral insight. At this level of morality, a man will try to discover the demands of the moral life, and will let his action be determined by this knowledge. Such demands are (1) the greatest possible happiness of humanity as a whole purely for its own sake, (2) the progress of civilization, or the moral development of mankind towards ever greater perfection, (3) the realization of individual moral ends conceived by an act of pure intuition.

The greatest possible happiness of humanity as a whole will naturally be differently conceived by different people. The above mentioned maxim does not imply any definite idea of this happiness, but rather means that every one who acknowledges this principle strives to do all that, in his opinion, most promotes the good of the whole of humanity.

The progress of civilization is seen to be a special application of the moral principle just mentioned, at any rate for those to whom the goods which civilization produces bring feelings of pleasure. However, they will have to pay the price of progress in the destruction and annihilation of many things which also contribute to the happiness of humanity. It is, however, also possible that some men look upon the progress of civilization as a moral necessity, quite apart from the feelings of pleasure which it brings. If so, the progress of civilization will be a new moral principle for them, different from the previous one.

Both the principle of the public good, and that of the progress of civilization, alike depend on the way in which we apply the content of our moral ideas to particular experiences (percepts). The highest principle of morality which we can conceive, however, is that which contains to start with, no such reference to particular experiences, but which springs from the source of pure intuition and does not seek until later any connection with percepts, i.e., with life. The determination of what ought to be willed issues here from a point of view very different from that of the previous two principles. Whoever accepts the principle of the public good will in all his actions ask first what his ideals contribute to this public good. The upholder of the progress of civilization as the principle of morality will act similarly. There is, however, a still higher mode of conduct which, in a given case, does not start from any single limited moral ideal, but which sees a certain value in all moral principles, always asking whether this or that is more important in a particular case. It may happen that a man considers in certain circumstances the promotion of the public good, in others that of the progress of civilization, and in yet others the furthering of his own private good, to be the right course, and makes that the motive of his action. But when all other grounds of determination take second place, then we rely, in the first place, on conceptual intuition itself. All other motives now drop out of sight, and the ideal content of an action alone becomes its motive.

Among the levels of characterological disposition, we have singled out as the highest that which manifests itself as pure thought, or practical reason. Among the motives, we have just singled out conceptual intuition as the highest. On nearer consideration, we now perceive that at this level of morality the spring of action and the motive coincide, i.e., that neither a predetermined characterological disposition, nor an external moral principle accepted on authority, influence our conduct. The action, therefore, is neither a merely stereotyped one which follows the rules of a moral code, nor is it automatically performed in response to an external impulse. Rather it is determined solely through its ideal content.

For such an action to be possible, we must first be capable of moral intuitions. Whoever lacks the capacity to think out for himself the moral principles that apply in each particular case, will never rise to the level of genuine individual willing.

Kant's principle of morality: Act so that the principle of your action may be valid for all men—is the exact opposite of ours. His principle would mean death to all individual action. The norm for me can never be what all men would do, but rather what it is right for me to do in each special case.

A superficial criticism might urge against these arguments: How can an action be individually adapted to the special case and the special situation, and yet at the same time be ideally determined by pure intuition? This objection rests on a confusion of the moral motive with the perceptual content of an action. The latter, indeed, may be a motive, and is actually a motive when we act for the progress of culture, or from pure egoism, etc., but in action based on pure moral intuition it never is a motive. Of course, my Self takes notice of these perceptual contents, but it does not allow itself to be determined by them. The content is used only to construct a theoretical concept, but the corresponding moral concept is not derived from the object. The theoretical concept of a given situation which faces me, is a moral concept also, only if I adopt the standpoint of a particular moral principle. If I base all my conduct on the principle of the progress of civilization, then my way through life is tied down to a fixed route. From every occurrence which comes to my notice and attracts my interest, there springs a moral duty, viz., to do my tiny share towards using this occurrence in the service of the progress of civilization. In addition to the concept which reveals to me the connections of events or objects according to the laws of nature, there is also a moral label attached to them which contains for me, as a moral agent, ethical directions as to how I have to conduct myself. At a higher level these moral labels disappear, and my action is determined in each particular instance by my idea; and more particularly by the idea which is suggested to me by the concrete instance.

Men vary greatly in their capacity for intuition. In some, ideas bubble up like a spring, others acquire them with much labour. The situations in which men live, and which are the scenes of their actions, are no less widely different. The conduct of a man will depend, therefore, on the manner in which his faculty of intuition reacts to a given situation. The aggregate of the ideas which are effective in us, the concrete content of our intuitions, constitute that which is individual in each of us, notwithstanding the universal character of our ideas. In so far as this intuitive content has reference to action, it constitutes the moral substance of the individual. To let this substance express itself in his life is the moral principle of the man who regards all other moral principles as subordinate. We may call this point of view Ethical Individualism.

The determining factor of an action, in any concrete instance, is the discovery of the corresponding purely individual intuition. At this level of morality, there can be no question of general moral concepts (norms, laws). General norms always presuppose concrete facts from which they can be deduced. But facts have first to be created by human action.

When we look for the regulating principles (the conceptual principles guiding the actions of individuals, peoples, epochs), we obtain a system of Ethics which is not a science of moral norms, but rather a science of morality as a natural fact. Only the laws discovered in this way are related to human action as the laws of nature are related to particular phenomena. These laws, however, are very far from being identical with the principles on which we base our actions. When I, or another, subsequently review my action we may discover what moral principles came into play in it. But so long as I am acting, I am influenced not by these moral principles but by my love for the object, which I want to realize through my action. I ask no man and no moral code, whether I shall perform this action or not. On the contrary, I carry it out as soon as I have formed the idea of it. This alone makes it my action. If a man acts because he accepts certain moral norms, his action is the outcome of the principles which compose his moral code. He merely carries out orders. He is a superior kind of automaton. Inject some stimulus to action into his mind, and at once the clock-work of his moral principles will begin to work and run its prescribed course, so as to issue in an action which is Christian, or humane, or unselfish, or calculated to promote the progress of culture. It is only when I follow solely my love for the object, that it is I, myself, who act. At this level of morality, I acknowledge no lord over me, neither an external authority, nor the so-called voice of my conscience. I acknowledge no external principle of my action, because I have found in myself the ground for my action, viz., my love of the action. I do not ask whether my action is good or bad; I perform it, because I am in love with it. Neither do I ask myself how another man would act in my position. On the contrary, I act as I, this unique individuality, will to act. No general usage, no common custom, no general maxim current among men, no moral norm guides me, but my love for the action. I feel no compulsion, neither the compulsion of nature which dominates me through my instincts, nor the compulsion of the moral commandments. My will is simply to realize what in me lies.

Those who hold to general moral norms will reply to these arguments that, if every one has the right to live himself out and to do what he pleases, there can be no distinction between a good and a bad action, every fraudulent impulse in me has the same right to issue in action as the intention to serve the general good. It is not the mere fact of my having conceived the idea of an action which ought to determine me as a moral agent, but the further examination of whether it is a good or an evil action. Only if it is good ought I to carry it out.

In reply I would say that I am not talking of children or of men who follow their animal or social instincts. I am talking of men who are capable of raising themselves to the level of the ideal content of the world. It is only in an age in which immature men regard the blind instincts as part of a man's individuality, that the act of a criminal can be described as living out one's individuality in the same sense in which the embodiment in action of a pure intuition can be so described.

The animal instinct which drives a man to a criminal act does not belong to what is individual in him, but rather to that which is most general in him, to that which is equally present in all individuals. The individual element in me is not my organism with its instincts and feelings, but rather the unified world of ideas which reveals itself through this organism. My instincts, cravings, passions, justify no further assertion about me than that I belong to the general species man. The fact that something ideal expresses itself in its own unique way through these instincts, passions, and feelings, constitutes my individuality. My instincts and cravings make me the sort of man of whom there are twelve to the dozen. The unique character of the idea, by means of which I distinguish myself within the dozen as “I,” makes of me an individual. Only a being other than myself could distinguish me from others by the difference in my animal nature. By thought, i.e., by the active grasping of the ideal element working itself out through my organism, I distinguish myself from others. Hence it is impossible to say of the action of a criminal that it issues from the idea within him. Indeed, the characteristic feature of criminal actions is precisely that they spring from the non-ideal elements in man.

An act the grounds for which lie in the ideal part of my individual nature is free. Every other act, whether done under the compulsion of nature or under the obligation imposed by a moral norm, is unfree.

That man alone is free who in every moment of his life is able to obey only himself. A moral act is my act only when it can be called free in this sense.

Action on the basis of freedom does not exclude, but include, the moral laws. It only shows that it stands on a higher level than actions which are dictated by these laws. Why should my act serve the general good less well when I do it from pure love of it, than when I perform it because it is a duty to serve the general good? The concept of duty excludes freedom, because it will not acknowledge the right of individuality, but demands the subjection of individuality to a general norm. Freedom of action is conceivable only from the standpoint of Ethical Individualism.

But how about the possibility of social life for men, if each aims only at asserting his own individuality? This question expresses yet another objection on the part of Moralism. The Moralist believes that a social community is possible only if all men are held together by a common moral order. This shows that the Moralist does not understand the community of the world of ideas. He does not realize that the world of ideas which inspires me is no other than that which inspires my fellow-men. I differ from my neighbour, not at all because we are living in two entirely different mental worlds, but because from our common world of ideas we receive different intuitions. He desires to live out his intuitions, I mine. If we both draw our intuitions really from the world of ideas, and do not obey mere external impulses (physical or moral), then we can not but meet one another in striving for the same aims, in having the same intentions. A moral misunderstanding, a clash of aims, is impossible between men who are free. Only the morally unfree who blindly follow their natural instincts or the commands of duty, turn their backs on their neighbours, if these do not obey the same instincts and the same laws as themselves. Live and let live is the fundamental principle of the free man. He knows no “ought.” How he shall will in any given case will be determined for him by his faculty of ideas.

If sociability were not deeply rooted in human nature, no external laws would be able to inoculate us with it. It is only because human individuals are akin in spirit that they can live out their lives side by side. The free man lives out his life in the full confidence that all other free men belong to one spiritual world with himself, and that their intentions will coincide with his. The free man does not demand agreement from his fellow-men, but he expects it none the less, believing that it is inherent in human nature.

There are many who will say that the concept of the free man which I have here developed, is a chimera nowhere to be found realized, and that we have got to deal with actual human beings, from whom we can expect morality only if they obey some moral law, i.e., if they regard their moral task as a duty and do not simply follow their inclinations and loves. I do not deny this. Only a blind man could do that. But, if so, away with all this hypocrisy of morality! Let us say simply that human nature must be compelled to act as long as it is not free. Whether the compulsion of man's unfree nature is effected by physical force or through moral laws, whether man is unfree because he indulges his unmeasured sexual desire, or because he is bound tight in the bonds of conventional morality, is quite immaterial. Only let us not assert that such a man can rightly call his actions his own, seeing that he is driven to them by an external force. But in the midst of all this network of compulsion, there arise free spirits who in all the welter of customs, legal codes, religious observances, etc., learn to be true to themselves. They are free in so far as they obey only themselves; unfree in so far as they submit to control. Which of us can say that he is really free in all his actions? Yet in each of us there dwells something deeper in which the free man finds expression.

Our life is made up of free and unfree actions. We cannot, however, form a final and adequate concept of human nature without coming upon the free spirit as its purest expression. After all, we are men in the fullest sense only in so far as we are free.

This is an ideal, many will say. Doubtless; but it is an ideal which is a real element in us working up to the surface of our nature. It is no ideal born of mere imagination or dream, but one which has life, and which manifests itself clearly even in the least developed form of its existence. If men were nothing but natural objects, the search for ideals, that is, for ideas which as yet are not actual but the realization of which we demand, would be an impossibility. In dealing with external objects the idea is determined by the percept. We have done our share when we have recognized the connection between idea and percept. But with a human being the case is different. The content of his existence is not determined without him. His concept (free spirit) is not a priori united objectively with the perceptual content “man,” so that knowledge need only register the fact subsequently. Man must by his own act unite his concept with the percept “man.” Concept and percept coincide with one another in this instance, only in so far as the individual himself makes them coincide. This he can do only if he has found the concept of the free spirit, that is, if he has found the concept of his own Self. In the objective world a boundary-line is drawn by our organization between percept and concept. Knowledge breaks down this barrier. In our subjective nature this barrier is no less present. The individual overcomes it in the course of his development, by embodying his concept of himself in his outward existence. Hence man's moral life and his intellectual life lead him both alike to his twofold nature, perception (immediate experience) and thought. The intellectual life overcomes his twofold nature by means of knowledge, the moral life succeeds through the actual realization of the free spirit. Every being has its inborn concept (the laws of its being and action), but in external objects this concept is indissolubly bound up with the percept, and separated from it only in the organization of human minds. In human beings concept and percept are, at first, actually separated, to be just as actually reunited by them. Some one might object that to our percept of a man there corresponds at every moment of his life a definite concept, just as with external objects. I can construct for myself the concept of an average man, and I may also have given to me a percept to fit this pattern. Suppose now I add to this the concept of a free spirit, then I have two concepts for the same object.

Such an objection is one-sided. As object of perception I am subject to perpetual change. As a child I was one thing, another as a youth, yet another as a man. Moreover, at every moment I am different, as percept, from what I was the moment before. These changes may take place in such a way that either it is always only the same (average) man who exhibits himself in them, or that they represent the expression of a free spirit. Such are the changes which my actions, as objects of perception, undergo.

In the perceptual object “man” there is given the possibility of transformation, just as in the plant-seed there lies the possibility of growth into a fully developed plant. The plant transforms itself in growth, because of the objective law of nature which is inherent in it. The human being remains in his undeveloped state, unless he takes hold of the material for transformation within him and develops himself through his own energy. Nature makes of man merely a natural being; Society makes of him a being who acts in obedience to law; only he himself can make a free man of himself. At a definite stage in his development Nature releases man from her fetters; Society carries his development a step further; he alone can give himself the final polish.

The theory of free morality, then, does not assert that the free spirit is the only form in which man can exist. It looks upon the freedom of the spirit only as the last stage in man's evolution. This is not to deny that conduct in obedience to norms has its legitimate place as a stage in development. The point is that we cannot acknowledge it to be the absolute standpoint in morality. For the free spirit transcends norms, in the sense that he is insensible to them as commands, but regulates his conduct in accordance with his impulses (intuitions).

When Kant apostrophizes duty: “Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name, that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating, but requirest submission,” thou that “holdest forth a law ... before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly counter-work it,” [Translation by Abbott, Kant's Theory of Ethics, p. 180; Critique of Pure Practical Reason, chap. iii.] then the free spirit replies: “Freedom! thou kindly and humane name, which dost embrace within thyself all that is morally most charming, all that insinuates itself most into my humanity, and which makest me the servant of nobody, which holdest forth no law, but waitest what my inclination itself will proclaim as law, because it resists every law that is forced upon it.”

This is the contrast of morality according to law and according to freedom.

The Philistine who looks upon the state as embodied morality is sure to look upon the free spirit as a danger to the state. But that is only because his view is narrowly focused on a limited period of time. If he were able to look beyond, he would soon find that it is but on rare occasions that the free spirit needs to go beyond the laws of his state, and that it never needs to confront them with any real contradiction. For the laws of the state, one and all, have had their origin in the intuitions of free spirits, just like all other objective laws of morality. There is no traditional law enforced by the authority of a family, which was not, once upon a time, intuitively conceived and laid down by an ancestor. Similarly the conventional laws of morality are first of all established by particular men, and the laws of the state are always born in the brain of a statesman. These free spirits have set up laws over the rest of mankind, and only he is unfree who forgets this origin and makes them either divine commands, or objective moral duties, or the authoritative voice of his own conscience.

He, on the other hand, who does not forget the origin of laws, but looks for it in man, will respect them as belonging to the same world of ideas which is the source also of his own moral intuitions. If he thinks his intuitions better than the existing laws, he will try to put them into the place of the latter. If he thinks the laws justified, he will act in accordance with them as if they were his own intuitions.

Man does not exist in order to found a moral order of the world. Anyone who maintains that he does, stands in his theory of man still at that same point, at which natural science stood when it believed that a bull has horns in order that it may butt. Scientists, happily, have cast the concept of objective purposes in nature into the limbo of dead theories. For Ethics, it is more difficult to achieve the same emancipation. But just as horns do not exist for the sake of butting, but butting because of horns, so man does not exist for the sake of morality, but morality exists through man. The free man acts because he has a moral idea, he does not act in order to be moral. Human individuals are the presupposition of a moral world order.

The human individual is the fountain of all morality and the centre of all life. State and society exist only because they have necessarily grown out of the life of individuals. That state and society, in turn, should react upon the lives of individuals, is no more difficult to comprehend, than that the butting which is the result of the existence of horns, reacts in turn upon the further development of the horns, which would become atrophied by prolonged disuse. Similarly the individual must degenerate, if he leads an isolated existence beyond the pale of human society. That is just the reason why the social order arises, viz., that it may react favourably upon the individual.

My dear friends! At the end of this lecture I would like to explore the arrangement of the material which we want to consider in the time remaining available to us. Today I want to start by continuing what I had begun yesterday. This will make it easier to reach clarity quite quickly regarding the effects of the teaching when the necessary basics are there in the sense I have imagined them and added them to this. For these basics to be more solid, we need a little additional time.

If we consider how to enter into the Gospels in the sense of working with the Gospel processes, then we first of all discover before our souls how in a most particular way the Gospels can be related to, and it is of course necessary, regarding this point, that everyone approaches them from a personal perspective. You then generally understand the content when such a perspective is asserted. For this reason, you may allow me to say something personal in today's lecture. I'm urged to do this because it is the best way for you to receive the following. When I approach the Gospels, it often happens that I have quite a distinctive feeling that within the Gospels, as far as they can be understood, what has been thought and said about them—and you could even, I say this explicitly, however often you approach them—always encounter something new. You can never know enough about the Gospels. Learning about the Gospels is linked to something else; it is linked to the fact that the further you occupy yourself with them, the more your admiration grows for the depth of the content, for just that, I could call it the immeasurable, into which you can become immersed, which calls for the actual experience, that there is no end to this immersion into the depths, that this admiration increases greatly with every deepening of the Gospel involvement.

There are however difficulties along this path which come to the fore when some strides are made into the Gospel—I stress the words "into"—that make you stumble over the inherited content. For actual spiritual researchers this creates less of a disturbance, because such a person would place the primordial Gospel into, what one could nearly call, a wordless text, and that makes it easier not to stumble over the inherited content. Admiration as a basis for reading the Gospels, seems to me an indispensable element for individuals, as a foundation for their religious learning processes. I once more need to stress that it is not important to characterise religious life in general, but to supply a foundation for the teaching process, in any case for religious processes as such.

This admiration you develop for the Gospels actually connects to everything, including details in the Gospels, and follows something else which will probably surprise you, but as I said, I'm speaking from a personal perspective; as a result of this admiration there is the feeling that you are never completely satisfied with just one of the Gospels, but you would only be satisfied with a combined harmony sounding through all the Gospels in a lively way. For instance a great deal of meaning can be found if you let the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel work on you and strive to enter into it as I've tried to indicate yesterday and want to continue with today; then again taking the parallel position, but now with Luke's Gospel, into your soul, where approximately the same situation is described, then you will have quite a changed impression of the experience. The impression becomes quite different; one arrives at quite another synopsis to one which one usually experiences, compared with an inner, lively synopsis.

You see, when you have occupied yourself with such things for a long time, you have had all kinds of experiences in life, and these experiences could seem quite important in as far as having started as a youngster and entering into these teaching processes which you wanted, in the majority.

I once encountered a man with a New Testament. For this New Testament he had acquired four differently coloured pencils and then he had with one pencil, I think it was the red one, underlined everything carefully which appeared as common content in all four Gospels. That meant, as he showed me, very little. He had taken St John's Gospel. There were four pencils; the other three he had applied to delete what only is contained in the Matthew Gospel, and then, what only was in Mark's Gospel and finally that which only appeared in the Gospel of Luke. In this way he had in his way created a strange analytical synopsis about which he was extraordinarily proud. I objected, saying such attempts were often made; we also know about it within German literature—it was an Englishman who held this achievement in front of me—where these attempts are made with corresponding places indicated next to one another in columns and blank intermediate spaces left where it can only be found in one of the Gospels. He was a priori convinced that his synopsis was the best.

It is exactly the opposite way to what can be found with the choice of the spiritual route. Here the different Gospels' content doesn't fall apart in contradictions, but they are enclosed into the totality of the deed, together; the coming-into-admiration is an experience which has to be had, an experience which is resisted in the most imminent sense by our present spirit of the time. For the spiritual scientist, however, it turns out that what I cannot even ask you to accept is still there, it turns out that there is no other way, than that the content of truth must appear other than just by the harmony between the four Gospels. It would, even if one would create an external synopsis as in Tatian's sense, which are not contradictory within certain limits, it would not result in what is found in the four Gospels as a concrete harmony.

You need to allow all four to work on you and then wait to see what comes out of this, not by first prescribing what the unopposed abstract truth should be and then only look for all which you can eliminate which contradicts the abstract truth. The truth needs to be experienced, and the Gospels themselves are such written works in which truth can be experienced; however, you need to have patience in order to experience this truth in the Gospels. You can of course object and say, you will never actually be able to experience the truth within the Gospels. I have to agree with your point of view because I still never presume to believe that I have found the truth of the Gospels completely; by continuously making further progress I have the decisive feeling that remaining patient in waiting is the basis, because the certainty of truth does not diminish, but becomes increasingly bigger. You can calmly feel the truth as an ideal placed before you at an immeasurable distance yet with the awareness that you are on your way towards it. These are the things you need to place in the soul with Gospel reading, and shape in your heart, otherwise you would actually never be able to cope with the Gospels in a real way. Of course, you could ask: Should I do this?—It will be shown in the next few days, that yes, one should do this after all.

Now I must say, it was quite an inner rejoicing for me when I came across something in the Gospels which someone else probably have found as well, but I came across it through spiritual research into the Gospels. I came across an image which really should be grasped with the eyes of the soul; an image of the three Wise Men or the Three Kings—kings were in those days initiates, inspired by wisdom—how the three Wise Men according to their knowledge discovered in the stars, clearly saw the starry script in the heaven leading them to the Star of Christ, and they came to worship Christ. They actually saw that Christ had to come, according to the prophecy in the stars. For those who know out of scientific foundations what is called star wisdom, can actually only honour this image in the right sense, because they would know that star wisdom is in the most imminent sense different from what we call astronomy today.

What we call astronomy today is mathematical and, at most, of a physical nature. If we talk about astronomy today, which is a science of calculations, and we talk of astrophysics, which is a mechanical science, also when we as religious individuals come from a different basis to our feeling towards the cosmos, we speak out of our time spirit and feel and think within it. However, prophetically predictive star wisdom of the Tree Wise Men is something quite different.

Star wisdom was at that time not taken like earth wisdom. Star wisdom was called something which could not be calculated purely by mathematics or physics, it was regarded as something that must be read like a scripture which had to be learned. The starting point was the twelve fixed signs of the zodiac, and then to look what changes the planets experienced in their positions—seven were accepted, as you know—in relation to the fixed signs of the zodiac. These curved movements were taken up by man; just as we read letters, so man saw signs in the curves, signs giving through the planetary positions in the zodiac, and with their own observations of the stars, to each was added a plane. These planes were differentiated according to how man experienced the world-all from the physical point of view: (draws on blackboard) north, south, east, west, with which you could intensively think about the depth of the dimensions, with nothing added, but everything that was found in the dimensional depth, projected on this plane. By looking at these fourfold differentiated planes as the table on which you read what is shown in the starry worlds as revealed, resulted in a feeling as if you read in the cosmos, and there were specific tasks, which one attains through this reading of the cosmos.

One such task was that you said: Shift yourself particularly into seeing, into your inner seeing and understand how you feel yourself within it, and by understanding yourself in this inner positioning, you now follow the moon's course, follow therefore what can be placed here (demonstrates on blackboard), and you will understand as earthy man, the secrets of Saturn.

I initially just want to indicate how such things came about. These were once lively human occupations and through this reading in the heavens a certain amount of knowledge was gathered. Today's astronomy and astrophysics by comparison appear as someone describing the letters, but in the astronomy under consideration here, I'm not even talking about the letters but about reading the text. That's the difference. With this I wanted to characterise how wisdom was created for humanity from which the wise men rose up out of the Orient in search of Christ: this wisdom directed them to the Christ.

My dear friends, what has actually arisen in our souls with this? What is placed before our souls is that the highest wisdom which could, at that time, be reached in the world, was leading towards the Mystery of Golgotha, the highest wisdom. To a certain extent in this lies the thought of the proclamation: May you obtain the highest wisdom; the highest wisdom which can be gained from reading the stars, proclaiming the Mystery of Golgotha to you. This image appears in the Matthew Gospel when you are in the position to fully engage in the Matthew Gospel, in its own time epoch. This experience forms itself in such a way that it really turns into admiration for the depictions of the Matthew Gospel.

Now you leave this image for a moment. Going on to Luke's Gospel you find the verse of the shepherds in the fields. In contrast to the Three Wise Men from the Orient, who have the highest knowledge, you are taken to the simple-minded shepherds in the fields, who know nothing about knowledge, who can't for a moment sense the knowledge possessed by the three Wise Men from the Orient. The shepherds, through the natural relationship they have with their consciousness, only have an inner experience in which the announcement is given: The Divine is revealed in the Heights, so that peace may come to all mankind—only out of their uncomplicated, simple-minded experience this manifests as an image, not a mere dream image, but a picture of an imagination of a higher reality, a higher actuality. We are led to the hearts of these shepherds, who out of this human simplicity, in the absence of all knowledge, come to the decision to go and worship the Child.

Let's now place these two side by side. We don't look at them as something about who said this or who said that, but we place them side by side as the complimentary experience towards the complete truth. What do we get then? We have the direct, enlivened conviction: The Mystery of Golgotha has appeared in such a way that it is revealed to the highest of knowledge of that time and the most simple-minded hearts, if they are open to it in a selfless way. On the one hand, hardly anything can be seen with greater illumination and on the other hand experienced with greater depth in the soul, than the feelings in the Mystery of Golgotha.

You have to have the boldest of modern intellectualist minds towards experiences, well founded in present knowledge and not only in an outer content of old wisdom, but in the soul constitution of the old wise ones, if you want to behave like modern science behaves towards these things. Just as deeply as the cosmic reading resides within the starry worlds, so deeply are the simple-minded shepherds in the fields certain of the strong validity of the announcement. Today, mankind no longer knows how the soul constitution has changed in the course of time, humanity doesn't know how, what can be read in the outer knowledge of the stars, can be experienced inwardly in the human soul as it was experienced in olden times, how astral truths were heart-felt experiences, and how we as human beings, in order to gain our freedom, were led out of these stages of consciousness, and after gaining our conscious freedom, we can again return to this earlier stage. My dear friends, we must be able to acquire this selfish feeling. To achieve our freedom, we must go back so far, let's say from 20 December to 6th or 7th January just as abstractly as people with our souls, as we do, for example, when we (abstractly) experience Easter time. Let me express this particularly clearly—as I've said, these things even take root in life's experiences—I once attended a small gathering where the discussion was about a reformed calendar, a reformed calendar to be developed from modern needs. A modern astronomer who was highly regarded in the astronomic scholarly community, was also present. He obviously was an expert witness and pleaded for the uniformity in the Easter festival being determined as always being on the first Sunday of April, that it would be at least purely outwardly, abstractly, fixed. He had no understanding at all that mankind had to look at the alternating relationship between the sun and moon in order to determine the Easter festival. To speak like this in such a gathering would of course have been complete foolishness. We are so far away from our inner religious experience of what current humanity can understand of the cosmos, which, just when it's at the highest point of its particular chapter of scholarship, they see it only as normal for mankind.

Among the reasons given at the time to determine the Easter festival, there was also introduced the disorder which had to be put into the annual accounting records, when the variable time of Easter had to be placed into these books, they no longer preserve anything other from the old religion than inserting the words "With God" on the first page. This was recorded in the accounting records. I ask you to please go and look for yourselves, how much of this expression is observed in the pages that follow.

You need to understand such things thoroughly, as expressions of the spirit of the time. If you don't grasp the spirit of the time even into the details, how will you then sense the actual impulse for religious renewal? You have to be able to say to yourself with certain seriousness that this "with God" should prove true on the pages of the General Ledger and Cash Book or Journal. Just imagine what power is needed to encounter the forces active in today's social life, to really bring religion into life. This has to be sensed constantly in the background, or otherwise the drive to religious renewal is not serious enough, as it should be today. So, a feeling must develop for change in the soul constitution. You must understand that in olden times the soul constitution was such that when the earth was frozen and the stars appeared in its extraordinary aura in the second half of December, inner mankind was so contracted that they came to visions which allowed them to inwardly experience what in reality was outwardly read in the stars by the exploring astrologers.

From the same source did the poor shepherds on the fields and the astrologers (for that was they were, the Wise Men) come to worship the Christ infant. They came from different sides to the same place. The ones from the periphery of the world-all, the others from the centre of the heart of mankind, and they discovered the same. We must learn while doing one thing or another, to also really find the same, we must, particularly as religious teachers do this, so that our words gather content, content of such a kind as the content in the words the Tree Wise Men brought from the Orient.

In the same way as the shepherds went forth in the fields, we must go, because only then will words become as powerful as they need to be. We need content for our words, and we need power in words. We attain such content for our words when we deepen ourselves in something like the Matthew Gospel; and we attain the power when we deepen ourselves in something like the Luke Gospel. These two Gospels—we will still come back to the others—stand to a great extent as complimentary opposite each other. It is what anyone can give and taken into their being, just as if we break through what is given as religious teaching content coming from of the depth of the human soul.

So you see, we can only really speak in this way through Anthroposophy. Just try for once if you can find the possibility somewhere, to speak in this way. Where you will find it, Anthroposophy is actually subliminally present; it doesn't always have to be called dogmatic, it is not meant that way.

Now, as soon as we approach such feeling and experiences as we find in the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel, my dear friends, then first of all we will find—by just taking the words, as they are expressed—that their experienced content is not the same as what we so easily have in the awareness of our time—we discover first of all an elevated admiration for the entire composition of the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel. The entire composition can only leave one filled with admiration.

First of all, we have the parable of the sower. After this parable we have three parables, from the sowing of the herbs and the weeds which should grow until the harvest, we have the mustard seed parable and the parable of the sourdough. Between these parables we have certain instruction of the disciples who should listen differently compared to how other people listen. Then come the dismissal of the people and more parables which are addressed to the disciples only. During the course of the chapters we are led through parables spoken to the people, and to instructions given to the disciples regarding the parables which had been given to the people. Then follows the disciples being taken into, I'd like to call it, the secrecy of the parables which only the disciples share, followed by the question: Have you understood the parables?—and the answer: Yes, Lord.—

This is a wonderful composition and it becomes even more admirable when we go into details. First of all, we simply have the parable of the sower. After introductory words having been said, we are told what the sower sows; that birds also eat the sown seeds, some seeds fall on stony ground where they can only have weak roots and get too little inner strength, others fall on good earth. This is clearly put to us; and after this has been given, the next parable already starts with the words: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like ..." The parables that follow and that are also spoken to the people, begins with "The Kingdom of Heaven is like ..." The people are therefore thoroughly prepared, by first having the facts established and then they are softly led to what is said as facts, facts aimed at the nature of the kingdoms of heaven. That's all the people will be told, then they will be released.

The following parables are taught to the disciples: the parable of the treasure in the field, the parable of the precious pearl, the parable of the fish caught in the net from which many are thrown out, and the good ones gathered for nourishment. These parables are only spoken about to the disciples, and they are asked whether they have understood. They answer with the word "Yes," which in the context of the Gospel would mean the same if today we could acquire the right feeling for it, and say: Yes, Amen.—In this the wonderful composition lies, which does not have to be looked for because it comes across in a natural way.

Sceptics may well say: this layout means nothing, as it is put down.—However, my dear friends, if you let yourself live into the Gospels, you will not be able to do anything other than experience these things; and it will have its reasons why we must experience them so, as to live into the wonderful composition, in order to really notice all the details, the Gospels have to reveal. Here you have a wonderful composition.

Let's try and enter into this wonderful composition. Let's go to the three parables only told to the disciples about heaven. According to the total sense in which the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel is expressed, out of the spirit of Matthew's Gospel of Christ Jesus, this is not said to the people. Listen carefully what I emphasize: in the spirit of the Matthew Gospel this would not be told to the people. Try to remember exactly what is said in these parables which are only told to the disciples. Firstly, there's the parable about the treasure in the field, discovered by a man who then sells all he has in order to buy the field with the treasure in it, so he may own it. Actually, it comes down to this, that he sells everything in order to acquire this treasure; that he gives up everything so that he may have the treasure. This relationship of Jesus to his disciples may not be expressed to the people. Why? Because it contains a certain danger; that of becoming egotistic, the danger of reward-ethics. One could not, without damaging the people, without further ado speak about egoism. Egoism is addressed when one urges good deeds with reference to the reward of the Eternal. Reward ethic, which fundamentally is still present to a marked degree in the Old Testament, this reward ethic is rejected by Christ Jesus. That is why he speaks about this parable—for which the unprepared would look for as reward—only to those who had already progressed far enough that there would no longer be a danger for this parable to indicate its egotistic meaning. The disciples who through their communal life with Christ Jesus had gone beyond egoism, to them this could be said as it is in this parable, to them the heavenly realms could be compared with a treasure. In the disciples the urge for selfishness was not agitated. To the people in this sense of the Matthew Gospel it could not be said, just as little as what follows, which is structured accordingly with the parable of the merchant who sells everything in order to acquire the Heavenly realm. Because Christ Jesus knows he may speak to his disciples in this way, he can speak to them about the last, the most dangerous parable. It is the parable which must have a terrible effect on unprepared people, the parable of everything which is in offensive, evil or sinful, will finally be burnt in the furnace of fire, and only the good be gathered for Heaven. This can only be tolerated by minds which have learnt to be un-egoistic; otherwise it would anger their minds regarding such a parable.

What is it actually, that should be avoided with such an instruction, which Christ Jesus gives his disciples? Becoming angry should be avoided, that people should become angry with the way of the world and about being human. The entire 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel is an instruction to make people patient regarding their destiny; for this reason, it can only be revealed at the very end, as to what will happen at the end of the world. So these final parables are the ones which could only be spoken to the disciples in secrecy because in they were—whatever the Christ Jesus may also say, as the most terrible thing, at this moment, in this immediate present—to be found in unselfishness. For this reason, they could say: Yes, Amen.

After we have tried to have an experience of these particular parables addressed only to the disciples, we can go back to the others. A person can only be prepared for a selfish notion of something if he approaches something which exists outside of him in nature, without agitation of his judgement. If a person dwells on the contemplation of the four processes of the seeds—if a person doesn't think of anything other than: the seeds which fall on to the ground are eaten by the birds, the seeds that fall on stony ground, fall under the thorns, and some on good ground—by simply spending time with these observations, one can actually not be engaged with oneself: one is drawn into selfless observation. After one has, in this way, presented the outside world to the usually selfishly dominated mind, then only can something happen. What is it that can happen?

Now you see, here we again come to an important detail of the 13th Matthew Gospel chapter. I can do nothing towards someone finding this examination of details as perhaps pedantic; for me it is not pedantic, it is certainly a reality. From out of the time consciousness of the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha important differences are made between ears, errors in hearing, and eyes which are slumbering, sleeping and not awake. The explanation is given that the evolution of mankind should be discovered through the inaccurate hearing and that the eyes should be awakened.

You see, this leads us to, as at that time—which we know about from other anthroposophic foundations—a clear differentiation made between the organisation of hearing and the organisation of seeing. People in the present day clearly know nothing about this. They don't know for example, that the total organisation which stream out from the rhythmic, goes up into the head organisation, and encircles an inner organisational harmony between hearing and speech. Hearing and speech belong together. Hearing and speech is to a certain extent combined in a single organ complex, which today's physiology doesn't list. When I show you my wooden sculpture group you will be able to use this practically demonstrated physiology—but which it doesn't want to be—to see how it appears these days, out of anthroposophic foundations, that they are a unit: breathing, speaking and hearing. These three are also present in seeing. Take this for example (writes on blackboard):

• Breathing
• Speaking
• Hearing

I could also have written: speaking, breathing hearing—the sequence is unimportant. Take these three as the members of a single deed. The three members are also present in seeing. Also in seeing it is there on the one hand, something driven through breathing into the brain, the breathing process participates in seeing. All this is so quietly indicated in the human organization that we are able to say: This here (note on blackboard: breathing) is completely atrophied in human consciousness; what we are still able to observe, when we speak, and thus look at our breathing, we don't notice in the visual act; it is completely atrophied. (Beside the word Breathing he writes on the blackboard):

—completely atrophied

With the act of seeing there is also something half atrophied that links to hearing. (Beside the word Hearing he writes on the blackboard):

—half atrophied

That is partially atrophied, it remains quite in the shadows of the subconscious. The only thing which is expressed in seeing, corresponds to speaking. (Beside the word Speaking he writes on the blackboard):

—developed

In conjuring up the images around us through our eyes, we speak etherically. However, the other two members which otherwise clearly diverge, which diverge while listening and speaking, are hardly present with seeing, but atrophied; here mere formation of the image overwhelms us. Because this connection is not perceived, today's tricky physiological foundation lies in epistemology. All epistemological theories, or at least many of them, start from the physiological foundation of observation, which are equally described for all the senses; they actually have no meaning other than an act of seeing. What you can find in the physiological foundation only really fits the act of seeing and is therefore unclear, because people can't see that some things are atrophied. One could say that these physiological views, which dominate there in relation the sensory physiology, are the most dreadful, able to depress the human mind: one is forever being bothered with things said about the senses in general while each sense must be treated concretely, individually. In many cases it is so that a sensory unit theory is taken as a basis.

Such a science as we have developed in Anthroposophy was of course not available at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. How we can discover the truths about things today essentially depends on our admiration for the Gospel content. Today there's been talk that one must apply great efforts to reach into spiritual research, and that we must regard seeing differently to listening. With listening one must say: People can actually only hear in error because listening is fully developed as a single act. We also have ears that are open during sleep; we have no wilful influence on our auditory images. Our 'I' doesn't quite flow into them and form what is heard, but only in such a way that it can penetrate them with erroneous judgements. Hearing can become incorrect. Seeing has caused hearing to become half atrophied. Seeing has only developed what corresponds to it in speech. Added to this one must be awake, the eyes must be awakened just as people need to learn to speak.

Without it being explicit knowledge in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, it would have been simply correctly spoken and understood out of the inner soul constitution of the people. I'm not saying something like the Christ having learnt Anthroposophy—that sounds very amusing—or to those he had spoken, had learnt about Anthroposophy. He spoke in such a way because he was aware how the other, by listening, would have understood. Yet also there he had to speak in such a way, as one spoke at that time, regarding seeing, and regarding hearing, from out of the most inner soul constitution. Because of me you use the expression "out of the subconscious" which is a term often misused today in an inconvenient way for these things. In order to have this understood in the right way, you can also understand the third which is also contained in the Matthew Gospel: to understand it with a person's whole being; his concentration, understanding through the heart. Understanding with your whole being is quite a different kind of understanding; one must speak to the heart of the person if you want to explain the parables. You can't speak in a different way to the heart if it is not functioning in such a way that the eyes are made to see in the right way, the ears to hear in a right way. This is how you have to distinguish: you must awaken the ability to see and make the ears hear in the right way. The ears don't need to be awakened, they only need to hear correctly.

In the total style of the 13th Matthew Gospel one's first attention is directed to the full human being; to the focus of the whole human being in his heart, perceiving through his senses, if he is to approach the interpretation of the parables. In the following way Christ Jesus makes it understandable to his disciples: after he has gone through from quite an objective observation given in the parable of the sower, he can no present further active parables and allow these to lead towards the functions of the heavenly realms. First, we have the parable of the plants and the weeds which point out that the good seeds could not flourish, without evil next to it. Then again one could say this is being expressed in a wonderful, quite scientific knowledge, because we know in a certain sense that plants can be damaged if the weeds are taken out in the wrong way. Likewise, we would harm mankind if we were to eradicate sin, for example, by not leading sinful men spiritually to the righteous, but by eradicating them before "the harvest," that is, before the end of the earth. This is approachable to people; what works in plants or in weeds, can be placed before their souls. It can be taken further, placed there objectively, how the world is spread out in the wide-open spaces, and how to carry what comes from the world, to the heavenly kingdom. The kingdom of heaven is the mustard seed, which is small compared with other seeds, then again it becomes a bigger tree compared with other plants.

This too, has to be pointed out to people, how it needs to be seen that the sprout is less visible to the eye than the grown-up plant, the heavenly less obvious than the worldly. Then awareness is drawn to how the kingdom of heaven works like sourdough, but all permeating, also working—at that time this imagination was far more obvious—as something spiritual. At that time this imagination could be uttered without introduction: Look at the sourdough as it is taken by the woman who leavens the bread with it; look at the bread which it spiritualises, behold the kingdom of heaven as it spiritualizes the world. You could not say to the people: Sell everything! The people had to behold what is indicated here, otherwise if you said: Sell everything!—in their selfishness they would really sell the whole world in order to buys something which is in the heavenly realm.

So we see in the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel the construction and composition of the truth because the truth is not simply stated as an abstraction, but the activity of truth consciously works from one person to another, that one needs to feel all the time, how one should speak. This is not the teaching of a hierarchy, this is simply the result of what becomes necessary through reality. It is in fact necessary, my dear friends, to speak to you in a different way because you want to become pastoral workers, than I would have spoken to non-pastoral workers, who are only believers. This content of the truth we find in the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel comes to us as a direct life experience which we can have in our time, which calls such a strong feeling within us, that it actually has something of a religious character.

You see, for those who have the sense that a way must be found to the truth, the truth must turn into such an inner component that it exists among people and that people can experience the truth—they would feel that university education, as it lives in writing books, is actually something hostile. Today something exists in our writing of books; when we write a book, we don't really feel like a human being among other human beings, for it is conceived as an abstraction; while writing the book it is without regarding who would be acquiring the book. This even produces the desire particularly when spiritual supersensible things are spoken about, for things that can stand alone in a book, and that, because it is ignorant, can only give something very deficient to unknown crowds of people, also again jointly experience the truth with the people in the manner and way these people are prepared for truth, while much is given in the preparation of the truth and less to the ignorant formulation of the truth content. This gives one a clear and strong experience of what I yesterday called the vital content of the Gospels. The vital content of the Gospels must also not be understood abstractly, as many do today. People do not believe, when they as religious teachers allow their words to a certain extent to flow together, that words are permeated with feelings; they firmly insist that in what one calls sacramental, they believe they should find something flowing forth out of the abstraction.

This is not the essential thing; the essential is the sense of feeling oneself a person among people, by experiencing truth with other people. This is after all Christian. For this reason, it is necessary to believe in Christian community building, not only Christian proclamation. It is very necessary to believe that everything must necessarily flow towards real community building: this means not merely thinking about what others are saying, but to communally feel and act together. In community building the foundation must be for the community feeling communally, and act communally. It must be a real soul-spiritual organism built by the community. We will talk about this further.

The following list was given for the material to be discussed:

1. Preliminary conditions
2. Foundation of teaching activity
3. The way to experiencing the truth
4. The essence of the breviary, the sermon
5. Building the ritual
6. The treatment of the Community.

With reference to my presentations I would like to ask you to take these four lectures as a unit. This means the content of one lecture is not to be taken as independent and judged this way. The relative theme is so comprehensive that it can only be manageable by doing a number of lectures.

In today's lecture I would like to make a provisional outline for possible solving techniques distilled from actual knowledge of the being of the social organism, of such solution possibilities for the social question which do not come out of some one-sided remark about some or other class, some or other state, but coming from appropriate reality, coming from the properly observed evolutionary forces of humanity and in particular those evolutionary forces which are the most pronounced at present and valid for the near future of humanity. If one tries to find a solution for the social question through the aspirations or the demands of a state, of a class, out of some part of the social organism, then one does nothing other than undermine the other elements of the social organism by calling on yet another class which in some way or other restrict development or healthy living conditions.

For our time here, it is relevant to reveal and substantiate my indications of truths in the following lectures. In modern life, or it could be called the modern social organism, quite a particular form is experienced through expressions characteristic of modern life, through technology, through the technical operation of economic life and its relationships and through the capitalistic process which organises this economic enterprise. Not necessarily only those with a conscious focus observe this modern technology and modern capitalism as they were introduced into life, but their focus was on the more or less conscious or the more or less instinctive, actively organised forces within the social structure of the human community.

The characteristic, particular form of the social question coming to the fore in modern times can be expressed as follows: economic life supported by technology and modern capitalism have worked in a natural self-evident way and brought order into the modern community. Besides this claim for human awareness towards technology and capitalism, the awareness was deflected by other branches, other spheres of the social organism, where awareness should have become as necessary as the health of the social organism as it was with the economic field.

Perhaps I may use a comparison to clearly communicate what I could call the nerve of a comprehensive, many-sided observation of the social question. Please consider that with a comparison I don't mean anything other than a support of human understanding in order to orientate it towards the healing of the social question. Whoever wants to consider what we know as the most complicated organism—that of the human being—needs to pay attention to the existence of three operative systems working side by side in the human form. These three cooperative systems can be characterised in the following way. One could say in the human, natural organism a system works incorporating the nerves and senses. One could call the most important member of this system where the nerves and senses are centralized, the head organisation.

As to the second member of the human organism, in order to develop a real understanding of this organism it is necessary to consider what I would like to call the rhythmic system, in relationship with breathing, blood circulation and everything expressed as rhythmic processes. As a third system, one can recognise all the organs whose actions relate to metabolism. In these three systems are the combined effects, when they interact in a healthy way, of all that is contained in the human organism. I have tried, in full agreement with all the research science has claimed, to characterise this threefold aspect of the human being as an outline in my book Riddles of the Soul I am clear about all the aspects to be introduced in the future by biology, physiology and science regarding the human organism which will see how this threefold head-, circulation-, (or chest system) and digestive systems are maintained—that these members each work in a particular independent way which indicates it is not an complete centralisation of the organism. These three systems each have a particular relationship to the outer world; the head system through the senses, the circulation or rhythmic system through breathing and the digestive system through the nutritional organs. In relation to scientific methods we have not progressed as far as these ideas I'm indicating here, out of spiritual scientific foundations for natural science as I've tried to use, in order to present it in scientific circles as a general statement and in a way, make it desirable for the evolution of knowledge. This means however that our thinking habits, the entire way we imagine the world to be has not completely been adjusted to the example of the human organism as it is presented in its natural processes. In a way one could say yes, science can wait, they may gradually rush to their ideals, they will soon come to the view that such observations are their own. However, regarding the examination and especially the processes of the social organism, one can't wait. Not with some or other expert but for every human soul—because every human soul shares in the work of the social organism—at least must take part in the work of the social organism—at least by an instinctive knowledge of the necessities of this social organism. Healthy thought and experience, a healthy will and desire in relation to the expression of the social order can only develop when people—whether more or less instinctive—can understand that this social organism, if it is to be healthy, must be a natural threefold organism.

Now I am at the point where I need to be very careful not to be misunderstood. Since Schäffle wrote a book about the social organism, there have been repeated attempts at establishing an analogy between a natural organization, let's say an organisation of people, and on the other side, a human community as such. So many efforts have been made to determine the cell of the social organism, where the cell structure exists, what the tissues could be and so on! Recently a book appeared by Aleray, Weltmutation (mutation of the world), in which certain scientific facts and scientific laws are simply transferred on to, what they call, the social organization. With all these analogy games, nothing relates to what we are considering here. Those who at the end of this lecture could say: ‘Oh, here we have yet again such a game of analogy between the natural organism and the social organism’—would prove that the real spirit within the meaning has not been penetrated by the listener. This I don't want—some or other scientific facts adjusted as truth and transplanted on to the social organisation. What I want is for human thinking, human feeling to learn through observation of the natural organism that this method, this way of sensing can in turn be applied to the social organization. When you simply take the belief you learnt about natural organisms and apply that to social organism, like Schäffle has done, like others have done too, likewise with Weltmutation then it shows you are unwilling to develop a capability to consider the social organism as independent, to examine it as such, to research it according to its own laws, just as you do with natural organisms. In order for you to understand me I have made this comparison with a natural organism. The very moment you continue, like the researcher in nature, objectively meeting the natural organism, as you would place yourself before the independence of the social organism in order to learn about its laws, in that moment the game of analogy regarding the earnestness of your observation, will stop.

I want to call your attention now to how this play of analogies must come to an end. The examination of the social organism—here it involves something becoming, something which must come into existence first—in as far as it must be healthy, leads to the three members of this social organism, but they both can only be recognised as independent as such, when considered objectively. On the one side, you can distinguish three members of the human organism, on the other side the objective, independent members of the social organism. If you look for analogies, then you most likely will experience the following. You would say that this human head- or nerve-system relates to human spiritual life with its spiritual abilities; the circulatory system rules the relation with this spiritual system with the crudest system, and the materialistic system with the digestive system. The digestive system could be considered through certain fundamental experiences as the crudest of systems in the human organism. What then, if you continued the game of analogy, would be the next thing? The next thing would be to say the social organism divides into three branches.

Spiritual life develops within a person. That is one member. Within a person his actual political life develops too—we will speak about this division of branches afterwards—and also his economic or business life develops within. You could, if you wanted to play the analogy game, believe that spiritual life as in spiritual culture in the social organism is subject to the same kind of laws which allow a comparison with the laws in the nervous and sense systems. The system considered as unrefined, the most materialistic, the digestive system, can in the game of analogy probably be compared with what one calls the crude system of material business life. Whoever can consider things for themselves and stay far away from the mere game of analogy will know that in reality, things are actually reversed in comparison with what comes out of mere analogy. See, the social organism lies opposite the economic production and consumption, opposite the economic circulation of goods at the basis of life's rules, just like the natural human organism's laws are at the foundation of the nerves- and sense-life, which is its spiritual system. Certainly the life of public law, the actual political life, life which is often too all-encompassing, which can be described as the actual civil life, allows itself to be between the two systems of the digestive and the nerve-sense systems where the rhythmic system lies, the regulating system of the breathing and heart. Only by comparing how the human organism has, between its digestive and nerve-systems the central circulation or rhythmic systems, so between the public rights and the economic system stand the actual life of spiritual culture. This life of spiritual culture, this spiritual life of the social organism has no laws which can be thought of as analogous to laws of human talents, laws of human sense and nerve existence but the spiritual life in the social organism has laws which can only be compared with laws in the crudest system, the metabolic system.

This leads to an objective observation of the social organism. Regarding this particular point the assumption must be clear in order for no misunderstanding to arise in a belief that the physiological or biological elements are simply transferred on to the social organism. The social organism must be considered as an independent organism throughout for its success towards recovery to take place. In various areas in central and eastern Europe the word “socializing” is heard. This socializing will not become a healing process but a fake process in the social organism, perhaps even a disturbing process if the human heart, the soul does not have insight with instinctive knowledge of the necessity for a threefoldness in the social organism. This social organism has in every case, if it is to work in a healthy way, three members. The first member, to begin with from the one side—one could understandably also start on the side of the spiritual life but for now we will start on the economic side as this obviously controls the rest of life through modern technology in modern capitalism—therefore, the first member of the social organism as business life, or economic life, will be looked at. This economic life, we will partly today and partly in the course of these lectures see it has to be an independent member within the social organism just as in comparison, the nerve- sense system is relatively independent in the human organism. Our economic life is connected to all that takes place in the production, circulation and consumption of goods. With everything connected to these three things, economy is linked. We will soon consider its characteristics in order to understand it more closely.

As a second member of the social organism we observe the life of public law, the actual political life, for the purposes of the old constitutional state it could be called the actual life of the state. Meanwhile economic life involves the business of everything which the human being brings out of nature as his own production, because the economic life involves the circulation and consumption of goods, so this second member of the social organism is involved with everything with a human foundation with its relationships of people with people. This I ask you to consider comprehensively, because it is important for knowledge of the members of the social organism to know the difference between public laws which relate to the foundation of one human being to another, while in the economic system it involves the production, circulation and consumption of goods. One must be able to distinguish between the natural human system in relation to the lungs and outer air, the processing of this outer air, how this differs from the manner and way nourishment is transformed in the third natural system within the human being.

As a third member which must be placed independently from the others, there has to be a distinction from everything in the social order which involved spiritual life. More precisely the name ‘spiritual culture’ does not cover everything connected to spiritual life; it should be everything flowing into the social organism which depends on the natural gift of individuals, the natural spiritual and physical talents coming from single individuals. Similar to the first system, the economic system which needs to exist for humanity to relates and regulates the outer world, the second system which must exist in the social organism, relates to everything happening between one person and another; there we have the third system. In order for this third system to have a name it will be called the spiritual system, involved with everything which is created out of the single human individuality and needing to be incorporated into the social organism.

Even as true as it is that modern technology and modern capitalism have given a stamp to our modern community life, it actually is so necessary for the wounds of humanity beaten from this side to be healed and thus enable people and communities to develop the right relationship to the threefold social order I am characterizing here.

Economic life has in our modern time taken on particular forms. It has so to speak penetrated human life with its own rules. Both the other members of the social organism are in the position to bring their own independent laws in the right way into this social organism. For them it is necessary that people out of independence and from a point of awareness carry out the social membership, each in its place, where it is positioned. For the purpose of finding solutions to the social question which we are considering, every single person has a social task in the present and near future. The first member of the social organism, the economic life, rests primarily on a natural background. Just as each individual depends for his learning and his education on the talents of his spiritual and physical organs, on those gifts and talents given to him, likewise economic life depends on certain natural foundations. This natural basis gives economic life—and through this the totality of the social organism—its character. However, these natural foundations are there without having to be discovered through some social organisation, some or other socializing of its original form. This needs consideration. Just as with the education of humanity the various gifts they have need consideration, in natural bodily and spiritual abilities, so every attempt at socializing community living by giving it an economic form as well, need consideration out of its natural foundations. All circulation of goods and also all human labour and any spiritual cultural life lie at the foundation of the first elementary origins chained by human beings to a particular part of nature. Here one needs to really think about the social organism's relationship with the natural foundation, for instance as in individuals in regard to learning and education, in relation to their gifts in thinking. This can be made clear by taking extreme examples.

For instance, you can imagine how in various parts on earth, locally produced bananas present a source of nourishment, how bananas qualify in the community to be displaced from their point of origin and be made into a consumable product at a specific destination. Compare the human labour involved in making bananas into consumables for the community with the work of making wheat into a consumable product in the vicinity of Central Europe, it is clear the work needed for the bananas, modestly calculated, is three hundred times less. The work necessary to make the wheat consumable is, lightly calculated, three hundred times bigger.

This is indeed an extreme example. Such differences regarding the measure of work necessary in relation to its natural origin exist in our production line also, under the production line which is represented in some or other social organism in Europe. Not as radical a difference as between bananas and wheat, but the differences are there. Just as the economic organism is founded on the relationship between human beings and their consumption of nature, the measure of the work talents in reality dependent on the natural origin, so the being of a person is dependent on his natural physical or spiritual gifts. One can make a comparison. In Germany, in the region of middle profit abilities, the sowing of wheat has a crop return of seven to eight times at the harvest. In Chile this becomes twelve times, in north Mexico seventeen times and in Peru twenty times, south Mexico twenty-five times up to thirty-five times. For different regions of the earth the return in wheat productivity is in relation to the earth, to the yield of the earth. This actually affects the measure of labour needed to bring the wheat in an appropriate manner into the economic life.

Just as one can make such data for the measure of labour needed to process the wheat into a consumable item in different regions, so comparisons can be made for the labour needed in the most varied production lines, raw materials with different production lines made consumable within the economic sphere of a social organism.

This whole interconnected being found in the preliminary processes at the beginning of the relation of people to nature, which continue in every human action by transforming products of nature into consumables for the community, all these processes which are involved as a whole from the natural foundations up to consumables, all these processes, and only these, are included in a healthy social organism as a pure economic member of the social organization. This economic member of the social organisation must be—I will in the course of the lectures give more details with proof—with just such an independence be positioned in the whole social organism as the human head organisation stands in relation to the entire human organism.

Independently standing beside the economic system another system must exist and that is the relationship between one person and another. Living within the purely economic system is the relationship which needs to be established between people and objective goods. A healthy social life needs to develop as a second member of the social organism which regulates everything in relationships between one person and another.

People have neglected achieving the correct difference between the two members of the social organism through the hypnotic belief that modern technology and ancient thinking habits in modern times are the economic forces and processes necessary, either for single regions or in the radical social sense, which can be transformed into the totality of economic life, applied to what I have here as the second member, as the actual state region in a narrower sense, as the region of public law, as the area of relationships between one person to the other.

This region of the state can only then develop in a healthy way when the conflicting streams of development cut in, which are considered by some as correct. Many people believe that healing the social organism is only achievable through nationalization as much as possible; with the greatest degree of association with nationalism—but it involves far more the necessity for complete autonomy, acknowledged and applied to all the separate branches of life, which must step in between economic life—with all its laws on the one side—and the narrower life of the state on the other side—again with its own laws.

I can well imagine how many people there are who say: ‘For Heavens' sake, these things are becoming so complicated! Things which are brought together out of necessities for new developments are now to be separated from one another by various systems!’ Whoever speaks in this way, unable to consider origins developing in a natural way, would even refuse to understand that the human organism can only be alive as a result of the relative autonomy of the rhythmic life, the vital breathing and hart in the breast, concentrated, centralized in the breathing and in the heart system. The entire human organism is dependent on such systems being closed in and yet working together. The health of the social organism depends on the economic life having its own laws, that the legal life, the life of public law and public security, everything fitting the narrower description of political, has its own laws and its own proficiencies. Only then will both these spheres work in the right way, in the social organism. May it come about with some, who believe certain requirements have finally been accomplished, while others may well raise a shoulder, that it can eventually be said: no healing in the central management of the social organism, as within a party, can happen without cooperation between economic life and political life. If this does happen we will see it is valid for the third member as well. It is necessary nonetheless, that just as the circulatory system has its own lungs, just as the nerve-sense system has its own brain system, so in a single management system its own management, an autonomous replacement system or party or other representation is there for the economic and political or public legal systems, and then again for the third domain, an autonomous area for spiritual life.

These three spheres have a valid autonomy in a healthy organism and relate to one another through their independent representative, enabling this mutual relationship between the three members of the social organism. This corresponds to them in the same way as the independent relationship is produced by the three members of the natural human organism. It turns out that essentially those representations and administrations produced out of the economic members of the organism, that these essentially work towards the economic organism building an associated foundation for itself, a cooperative, trade unionism, but in a higher form. This cooperative trade unionism will only work with the laws of production, work with the circulation and consumption of goods. This is what creates the foundation, builds the content for the economic member of the social organism. It will depend on the vitality of association. It will depend on those who have given the necessary inequality produced from natural foundations, to balance it out. I have pointed out how many variations exist in the amount of human labour needed according to different relationship of the natural source of a member's production. All this enters into an unnatural social organization, when such cooperation is achieved as it has been up to now, of nature, human labour and capital. In a most chaotic way nature, human labour and capital are infused into a unified state or remain outside lawlessly, outside this unitary state. Even though the life of spiritual culture which is dependent on people's physical and spiritual talents for their expression, so also the chosen public and political laws of life must be acknowledged for their need to develop an independent life for themselves, such as the economic system.

I could, to make myself better understood as far as it is needed today, include the following. Besides other foundations out of which we live today, there is also a surfacing out of mankind's deep, natural foundations for a renewal of the social organism, in which can be heard the three words: brotherhood, equality, freedom. Whoever is unprejudiced towards a healthy human experience for all that is really human, will not feel anything but the deepest sympathy and deepest understanding for the meaning in the words, brotherhood, equality, and freedom. Nevertheless, I know of extraordinary thinkers, deep astute thinkers who repeatedly in the course of the 19th Century took the trouble to show how impossible it is to make a united social organism comprising brotherhood, equality and freedom, a reality. An astute Hungarian searched for proof that these three things, but when they are realized, when they penetrate human social structure, they will contradict themselves. Shrewdly he referred to the example of how impossible it is to instil equality into social life because every human being also wants the necessity for freedom to be valid. He found these three ideals to be contradictory. Interestingly, one can't but agree that there is a contradiction and one can't but sympathise out of a general human experience regarding these three ideals. Why these?

Because as soon as the true sense of these three ideals become clear, it will be recognised as necessarily a threefold social organism. The three members should not be an abstract, theoretical parliament or some unit assembled and centralized, they should be living reality and through their lively activity side by side be brought together in a unit. When these three members are independent they contradict one another in a certain way, just like the metabolic system is at variance with the head and rhythmic systems. However, in life, contradictions are just what work together in a unit. Through an understanding of life one is able to figure out the real gesture of the social organism. A realization will arise that brotherliness must be active in order for cooperation within economic life, where rules are needed among one another regarding particulars, are to be created in this first social member. In the second member of public law where it deals with the relationship of one person to another, only in as far as a human being is a person, it works with the activation of the idea of equality. In the spiritual sphere, where again it has to exist independently in the social organism, it deals with the idea of freedom. Now suddenly the three golden ideals gain their real value when it is known that they may not reach success through an inter-scrambled mixture but that they are orientated according to laws within the threefold organism in which each single one of the three members can achieve its applicable ideal of freedom, equality and brotherhood.

Today I can only propose the structure of the social organism in the form of a sketch. In the following lectures, I will substantiate and prove each one individually. Adding to what has been said is a third member of a healthy social organism with everything arising out of the human individuality, on the foundation of freedom and based on the physical and spiritual gifts of individuals. Here again an area is touched which causes quiet shudders when things are truthfully defined. To continue with this healthy organism, a third area is added which encompasses everything which relates to the religious life of humanity, everything related to schools and education in the widest sense which includes spiritual life, the practice of art and so on. While I only want to mention this today, in the next lectures I will create an extensive foundation regarding everything which belongs to this third sphere—which is not related to public law which belongs in the second sphere—but which is related to private law and criminal law. I found with those to whom I've explained this threefold social organism and who have understood some of it, that they could not grasp the idea that public law, the law which relates to the security and equality of people, should be separated from the right towards law breaking, or towards the private relationships between people; that this could be regarded as separate, and private law and criminal law must be included in the third, in the spiritual member of the social organism.

Modern life has unfortunately turned away from considering these three members of the social organism. Just like the body of economics with its concerns have penetrated into the government, into actual political life, penetrated its concerns into the representative body of political life, the result has clouded the possibility for the second member of the organism to be formed in which human equality can be realized, so too the economic and public life have absorbed the possibility which can only develop itself in a freer form. Out of a certain instinct, out of an erroneous instinct however, modern social democracy has tried to separate religious life from the life of the public state: “Religion is a private affair”; unfortunately, not out of particular care for religion, not out of a special evaluation accessible through the religious life, but out of disregard, out of complacency towards religious life linked to the content I presented in my previous lecture, the day before yesterday. This progression is right for the separation of religious life from the other spheres, from the formation of the economic life and from the formation of political life. Just as necessary as the separation of the lower and higher educational systems are, so too is the spiritual life actually from the two other members. A really healthy social organism can only develop when within these entities they ensure equality of all people before the law, when only out of these entities it is ensured that free human individualities develop schools, religious and spiritual life, when it is ensured that life is developed in freedom and no claim is made according to economic or state rules placed on school, educational and spiritual life.

That sounds radical today. Such radicalism must be expressed as soon as it is detected. Spiritual life, inclusive of education, inclusive of jurisdiction in public and criminal matters, actually underlies the complete freedom flowing out of single individuals which both the other members of the social organism can have no influence upon in its configuration, upon its forms.

Yesterday I only offered a sketch towards the direction thinking can move in the search for solutions of the social question, attempts at solutions based on necessities of life, not based on abstract demands of a single party, of a single class, but based on the powers actually developing in modern people.

I wish to say I can understand every objection raised but ask you to wait with objections until my sketch has been carried to completion in my coming lectures. Particularly today I can understand objections being raised as I'm just trying to characterise; the evidence of the World Trade Organization is not yet clear. I must say I can understand every objection coming out of various experiences which I want to represent here with ideas which I believe I can recognise in frequently misjudged spiritual science as the actual foundations of life which I have related to these things.

Behind us lie a time containing the most terrible human catastrophe. Within the life we had to lead within this catastrophic time, we have not had the human heart in the right place if our vision did not contain the power and ability to say: ‘Where can we find help out of this terrible chaos into which we have been driven?’—I told you the day before yesterday I would speak about the particular relationships of these wars to their causes and their unfolding in relation to the social question in both my following lectures. Today I would like to say it is clear to me, as we are going to be within these events for a long time to come, events now having entered a crisis which some short-sighted thinkers believe are soon at an end, that out of these things, out of chaos, out of the terrible catastrophe in some or other area of the civilized world it is possible to find the correct thoughts, the correct picture of more truthful, more realistic impulses for the human social organism. Towards various personalities who have been active and advisory during the last years within these terrible events, I have proposed what is also the vein of my various presentations here: I have tried to make it clear to these personalities who are involved, how different events would have been if from an authoritative place in the world it was said: ‘We want to head towards a healthy social goal.’—The entire interrelationship of states would have been different if, instead of mere laws and state programs being introduced, a comprehensive program for people in the way indicated here, had been introduced.

One can say that these things have been understood in a certain theoretical way. The content of my lectures has appeared to some in a really sympathetic way. The bridge which needs to be established between understanding such content and the will to actually do something to make it a reality in actual life, each in its own place, this bridge is quite another matter. This would mostly have an uncomfortable effect. For this reason, they compose themselves and say: ‘It all sounds a bit like a dream to me, quite impractical.’—They remain calm only because they don't have the will forces to really involve themselves with the course of events. Not a revolutionary course of events is meant here, not something which should happen from one day to the next, but a direction in which all single measures of public and private life should be brought for healing, to form a healthy social organism. The content of my lecture the day before yesterday, I have brought in another form to some people on whom one wanted to depend during these difficult times, addressed in the following way: Today, I would say for example, we are in the most terrible time of the war. Expressing the social necessity in this, the most terrible time of The War, it would be to say: People who are committed to this or that state into giving humanity a worthy self-realization which will become a reality for humanity, will enable this terrible course of events to take on quite a different, healing direction than merely the sword, the cannons and such like, or offer nothing through existing regional politics. I say they have the choice to either acknowledge what is offered here out of the developmental conditions and developmental forces within humanity, or to stand alone.

Today we stand, because during the last decade humanity has somehow missed acknowledging the essence of these things, today we stand in front of the most terrible catastrophe which has broken out like a plague, an illness attacking an organism which has failed to live according to its natural laws. This war catastrophe should now clearly reveal what is necessary for the healing of the social organism of humanity. This indication could have been perceived before the war but then it was not so clear, not even recognised. To some I have said: You have been given these indications regarding human evolution in the social sphere which will be brought into a reality in the next twenty to thirty years in the civilized world. I'm not talking about a program or ideal but it is the result of observation of those who want to make a reality of the seed towards an inclination already in humanity today, towards the next ten, twenty or thirty years. You have only to choose, I say, either to work through to its realization with reason, or to face revolutions of social cataclysms, terrible social upheavals. No third choice is possible. The war will probably be the time—so I say to some—where reason is acceptable. After that it could be too late. It is not a program which can be implemented or left undone, but involves recognising something which needs implementation through people, because in it lie their necessary historical growth forces for the future.

Another particular obstacle towards understanding is some or other belief that these things only relate to an inner structure of some state or some human territory. No, such social thoughts are at the same time the basis for the real necessary transformation of outer politics of states under one another. Just like the human organism turns each of its particular organs to the outside world, so also can a state only accomplish it when—if I might use this whole expression—such a social organism can shift its three members into outer activity. Relationships between one individual state and another appear quite different when a centralized government and administrations no longer remain in connection with one another but when one socially educated representative with a spiritual life relate to another representative with a spiritual life in another social state; whether it be an economic or a political representative, corresponding to the representative in the other state. When there is an intermixing, a confused mess due to the three members working outwardly in such a way to create an ensuing conflict at its boundary through the chaos of this intermixing of the three members, then, when across the boundary an independent state with threefold representatives working independently, the process of one member in the international relationship will not only be disrupted by the other, but by contrast, will balance out and be corrected.

This is what I wanted to sketch for you today to support the idea that it doesn't merely involve an assertion of inner social structure of one state but involves the international and social life of humanity. I have already tried to make all these things clear while we are in the middle of these horrific catastrophic events. At the moment, terrible misfortune has broken out over many people in central and eastern Europe, terrible misfortune for every individual, for every perceptive person the rest of the world indicates threatening misfortune. This must take place in relation to the real understanding of humanity for their tasks in the present and future: whoever wants to bring about a healing of life out of the actual evolutionary elements in humanity must take this up, not as an impractical ideal but as an actual practical application in life.

The obvious form modern life has taken on through technology and capitalism has to stand in opposition to the most inner human initiative forms of the spiritual, independent spiritual culture and independent state culture, which bring about in actual fact an equality between one person to another and which also, as we will soon see, could regulate labour and wage relations in a desirable way for the Proletariat.

The question about the form or human labour, about the liberation of labour from goods will only become detachable when threefoldness enters the social organism. The desire of the modern socialist is certainly legitimate as a desire; what they consider a remedy would work the least effectively as a remedy when it transforms outer reality in the way they want it to be.

This I need to stress yet again: I am not trying to come from some one-sided class or party position but from the side of the observation of human developmental forces in order to speak about what some call social integration and others call the healing of social life and others the reawakening of a healthy political sense, and so on.

What we are dealing with here is not some random program but the deepest true impulses coming to the fore in the next decades in humanity's evolution, it is actually the very foundation of the entire meaning and intention which I want to make into a reality with these lectures; it doesn't relate to the opinion of a person from this standpoint, but it relates to the expression of the deepest wishes in mankind for the next decades. This I would like to found and implement and prove in my lectures during the week ahead.

The whole cycle of these talks is dedicated to the knowledge of spirit, and if one wants to speak about the knowledge of spirit and soul, this happens, because we can come to an understanding with each other about the concept of the spirit relating it to the concept of the soul. Since for those who deal with spiritual science it is especially annoying that one mixes up the concepts “soul” and “spirit” considering the human being.

You all probably know that we have a so-called psychology or soul science that is today conducted to a relatively high degree just like in school. In the schedules of lectures at the universities, you find lectures on psychology that is literally the doctrine of the soul. One has to note that with all people who talk of psychology or soul science in such a way no distinct consciousness exists of the fact that one has to speak of soul and mind with the human being. One summarises the human inner life—thinking, feeling, and willing—under the concept of the soul. Soul is almost considered as the contrast to the bodily and physical, and one says—if one deigns generally to such a thing, if one is not completely addicted to the materialistic way of thinking—the human being consists of body and soul.

At first, we want to regard those opinions only that have the point of view that the soul is a real being. If one says that the human being consists of body and soul, one is mostly not aware of the fact that one falls a victim to dogmatics that relatively late, in the course of the Christian development originated. Even the older Christianity that has still gone out from the teachings of wisdom distinguished, as all teachings of wisdom of the different times and people did, body, soul and mind of the human being. Only later decisions of Councils have abolished, so to speak, the mind, and only since the (fourth) Council of Constantinople (869/870), one speaks of body and soul. The modern scholarship which deals with such a thing which thinks not materialistically believes to stand on the ground of absolutely free research and has no idea that it has taken up this later Christian concept of the soul, which refrains from the mind, as a prejudice, as a preconceived opinion. This applies to many concepts generally which play a role in our scholarship and are accepted as if they were results of research, while they signify only an ancient prejudice.

We will now have a look at the general psychology in the most different directions. However, I do not criticise here, but only characterise. Psychology has suffered—we are allowed to state this—mostly and most thoroughly from the materialistic attitude and way of thinking. Not only the outer science of the sensory phenomena has lost the concept of mind gradually, but also psychology has even lost the concept of soul, that is its own object. The cultural life went through an interesting development there.

A daring researcher and thinker who performed many quite extraordinary things in some fields had the courage to pronounce what is, so to speak, only a basic attitude and basic sensation within the modern psychology with others. This daring thinker was Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–1875, German philosopher). You can buy cheap his History of Materialism (1866) from Reclam's Universal Library. It is an excellent book because just someone who studies it thoroughly must come to the conviction—I have explained it in the last talk—that materialism as a worldview is to be compared to a man who draws himself upwards with his own shock of hair. This Friedrich Albert Lange has pronounced in relation to psychology something that can be summarised in three words: “psychology without soul.” This is from Friedrich Albert Lange. Other researchers did not dare to pronounce this consequence; but they act and do psychological research in such a way, as if a concept of the soul did not concern them. Also today, you find all kinds of concepts about the soul in the most famous works of the academic psychology. However, if you want to get to know something about the soul, you ask for advice in vain, because this psychology has lost—this should be no criticism, but only a characteristic—the concept of the soul completely even if this is not always pronounced. Whether you ask advice from Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832–1920, German physiologist, psychologist, philosopher) or another about those questions in which the human beings are interested concerning the soul life, you nowhere get information. You find all kinds of questions answered about the way in which the human being perceives objects in his surroundings. You also find all kinds of speculations about the relation of perception to consciousness.

For example, one asks, how long does it last, until the human being becomes aware of it, after he has received a stimulus? You find questions about attention, questions in which way the human being judges in which way he compares the things with each other, how he remembers and so on. However, who could deny that the impartially feeling soul—in the usual sense—if it asks for its own being has in mind above all: what is the nature of my soul? Does it share the fate of the physical to disintegrate and to end if death occurs? Does it only take share in the life of the sensuous surroundings or does it take share in a far higher one, in an extrasensory life that does not wear out itself in the physical world? You will search these questions in vain, which are vital matters for the human being in the modern psychology even as questions. Everything in the human life points to them; but if the real nature of the soul is considered, one says, this goes beyond the limits of human knowledge.

If you have a little bit patience and have a look at such psychology, you become aware of the fact that it applies quite the same methods of research as the natural sciences. If one applies these methods, just nothing else can result than what faces us in this psychological literature. More than in any other field it concerns in the soul research who does these researches. Where one thinks materialistically, one has come more and more to the conviction that the research results can be only of the kind that they face everybody from the outside. Who does understand the sense of the nice Goethean saying completely and thoroughly still today?

Unless the eye were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own strength were in us,
How could delight us the divine?

Nothing faces us in the outside world if we are not related to the concerning thing or being or to the concerning force in the outside world if we do not carry something related in ourselves. Thus, only someone can investigate the soul who searches something beyond his self that he has experienced in himself. Not everybody—this must be stressed in particular in relation to psychology—can be a psychologist; for the human being notices only so much of the secrets of the other souls as he has experienced in himself.

Spiritual science deals with the spirit as such, as we said at the beginning. All the talks are dedicated to the consideration of the spirit. Howsoever the titles are called in detail, the spirit has to be searched everywhere. As it arises already from the talk, which I have held two weeks ago here, spiritual science has to show that behind everything that faces us the spirit lives and works.

What is matter to spiritual science? It is only another form of the spirit. If spiritual science speaks of matter, material, and body, it speaks of it in such a way as it speaks of ice and water. Ice is water in another form. Now, however, somebody could come and say, then spiritual science denies the matter and corporeality if it asserts that everything is spirit—and then there is no matter for spiritual science. Spiritual science stands on this weird point of view by no means. We remain with our comparison of ice and water. What come into consideration for life are not empty words, not empty definitions, but effects that you meet in life. Even if one says, ice is water in another form—and one is right with it completely-, are, nevertheless, the effects of the water different from those of ice as everybody can perceive if he puts a piece of ice on his hand instead of pouring water on it.

Someone who wanted to deny that ice is water in another form would make a fool of himself. Thus, spiritual science does not dream of denying the matter. It exists; it is only spirit in another form. In which form? In the form, that one can observe it from the outside by the senses. These are the essentials of matter. This talk links to the talk eight days ago where we could show how any materialistic view disintegrates into nothing before the progress of the natural sciences as the fantastic concept of the matter dissolves in smoke and fog due to the new researches. Concepts like ether, matter scatter today in light of the other researches. What remains to us of that which approaches us in the outside world? What we see and hear, tone, colour, warmth et cetera: what we perceive. We should soar the view that behind the warmth, behind the tone, behind the light nothing is of this terribly crude whirl of atoms that was the only real during the long time of materialism. Real is in this sense what we see what we hear what we feel as warmth. If we look behind the colour, behind the tone, behind the warmth, as we feel it, what do we find behind them? We find behind them if we take the tone, as long as it remains in the sensuous world, moved air. However, we are not allowed to go behind the sensuous world with our speculations. We have to stop in the sensory world. Someone pronounced something most important whom the scholars did not take seriously, who was not only a poet but also a great thinker: “Never search anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the teachings.”

If we go behind the tone, behind the light, we do not find material atoms that dive into our retina, which impregnate it and create the mental picture of the colour and the light. If we really look behind, what do we find there?—Spirit! Colour relates to the spirit like ice to water. Tone relates to the spirit like ice to water. Instead of that fantastic world of whirling atoms the true thinker and spiritual researcher finds spirit, spiritual reality behind that what he sees and hears, so that the question of the nature of matter loses all sense. For how does the question of the nature of matter answer itself for the spiritual researcher? What surrounds us outdoors in the world and appears to us as matter? It is spirit! We know the spirit! We must visit its nature in ourselves. What we are in our innermost being, these are all things outdoors in the world, only in other forms. They are it in such form that one can look at them from the outside if the spirit gives itself a surface. Let me pronounce something that every scientist regards as madness: if the spirit goes outwardly, he appears as colour, tone. Nothing else is colour and tone than spirit; it is completely the same what we find in ourselves if we properly understand each other. Thus, every mineral is spirit to us in spiritual science. The true being of the lowest member of the human being, the physical body, is spirit for us in the form in which it exists just also in the apparently lifeless nature.

In what way does the human spirit differ from the spirit that faces us outdoors as mineral and plant, as mountain, as thunder and flash, as trees and bodies of water et cetera? By the fact that this spirit in the narrower sense appears as mind in its very own figure, in the figure that is due to itself as mind. What one normally calls nature, indeed, is spirit, but spirit, which turns its outside to the senses, and what one calls spirit or mind in the narrower sense, is exactly the same. According to its form, nature is what turns to the core of our being. If we search the spirit outdoors in nature, we find it lifeless in the minerals, animated in the plants and feeling in the animals. The human being combines this triple figure of the spirit in himself in three members of his being, as we know them from the point of view of spiritual science. Thereby only, you come to a real knowledge of the human being that you look at his complex nature and are not content with the abstract differentiation between body and soul, but ask yourselves, how is the human being built up?

At first spiritual science distinguishes the physical body of the human being that he has in common as materials and forces with the entire so-called lifeless nature. In the physical body of the human being are the same materials and forces that we find outdoors in the mineral world. However, he has a second member, which we call etheric body or life body. If we speak of ether, it has nothing to do with the fantastic ether that has played a role in science so long and that one will dethrone in the next time. In relation to the etheric body, we cannot get involved in the methods of the higher beholding. However, we understand the etheric body best of all saying: if we take a plant, an animal, the human being, the physical body has the same materials and forces, but in an endlessly complex mixture and variety, so that these materials cannot form the physical body by themselves. No plant body can be what it is by the physical forces, no animal body, and no human body. There is the complication, the variety of the mixture that would make the body destroy if it were left to its own physical and chemical forces. At every moment of life, its so-called etheric body or life body works against the decay of the physical body. A permanent struggle takes place in it. At the moment of death when the etheric body or life body separates from the physical body, the materials and forces of the physical body follow their own principles. Hence, spiritual science says, the physical body is physically and chemically an impossible mixture, it cannot survive. The etheric body is that which struggles against the decay of the physical body permanently.

The third member of the human being is that which we have often called the bearer of desire and pain, of joy and grief, of instincts and passions. If the life starts becoming internal, then we start in spiritual science speaking of an astral body. This is the third member of the human being and of the animal.

Today one has such an unclear concept of that what constitutes the single being that certain researchers cannot make a distinction between an animal and a plant. Of course, there are transitions; but they do not interest us here. You can read in the popular works that are otherwise very meritorious that the plant shows the same manifestations as an animal or a human being, and one talks there about a “plant soul” in the usual sense. One confuses the animal soul and the human soul with simple manifestations of life in the plant. When do we speak of an animal or human soul or of an astral body? If to the outer appearance inner life, inner experience is added. It depends on the inside. If you see a plant, if you touch it, and it contracts its leaves, a stimulus is exercised on the plant, and this shows a certain response to this stimulus. Calling this answer a soul manifestation is the most unbelievable dilettantism. One is not allowed to speak already of soul or astral body if any counter-effect takes place; otherwise, you must also attribute a soul to the litmus paper if it turns red in the acid. It does not depend on any outer reaction, but on the fact, whether anything happens inside of such a being.

If you push a being and it shows a change of form or, otherwise, any outer reaction, you may call that a manifestation of life. However, talking of sensation or soul in this case means to turn all concepts upside down. One can speak of soul or astral body only if to that what goes forward outside a new event, a new fact is added inside if because of a push or pressure pain or because of another stimulus joy is experienced. The outer manifestations do not make a being a soul being, but the processes which it experiences in its inside. Only where sensation starts where life itself is transformed internally into joy and sorrow where any object outdoors not only exercises an attraction on any being, but where inside of the being an experience appears in relation to the outer object, only there we can speak of soul or astral body. If a plant twines spirally round a rod, an effect responds to the stimulus, it is a manifestation of life. Even if it seems with some plants that—if you bring a finger in their nearness—it follows the finger and not the rod, you are not concerned with an inner process. It can be talk of such a thing only if a desire inside of the being exists and it follows the stimulus because of this influence. He who does not distinguish these matters strictly is incapable to rise to the concept of the soul, the astral body. The human being has this in common with the animals, however, not with the plants.

Then we have, as often mentioned, the fourth member by which the human being experiences something in himself that makes him the crown of the earth creation, that what we call “I” or ego. It is an exceptionally important matter for any knowledge to recognise this ego in its nature. In former talks, I have drawn your attention to the fact that there is in our entire language only one word, one name that differs from all other names. You can call any other object with its name, the clock, the table, the notebook. You cannot call that in such a way that is the “I” with its name. Try to say “I” to another being! You can say I only to yourselves. Any being is “you” for the other, and for any being is the other “you.” Should the name I be pronounced, this name must sound from the core of the being. The religions that were based on spiritual science felt this too, and, therefore, said correctly: here the divinity speaks the first tone, the first word in the human soul in its very own figure, and thus the expression for the ego was something holy for them. They called it the ineffable name of God. What the Hebrew religious doctrine called with the expression Yahveh is nothing else than for the ego which calls itself. This is the fourth member of the human being.

Considering this four-membered being—physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego—we have to say: with these four members, which no other being has on earth than the human being, everybody faces us, the uneducated savage and the high developed human being. In what way do the individual human beings differ on earth, if they all have four members? This is because the one has worked more, the other less on his three members from his ego. If we compare the savage who follows any desire, any passion with a high-minded moralist who has pure holy moral concepts and follows these who only accepts that of his desires and passions to which the mind is able to say “yes.” In which way do both differ? By the fact that the high-minded man worked on his astral body from his ego. The uneducated savage has worked less on his astral body; he has it still in such a form as he has received it from nature, from the divine powers. The high-minded moralist and idealist has transformed and purified it.

An astral body consists of two parts; of one part that the human being has got without his co-operation, and the other part that is the work of his ego. Human beings who stand on such a height as for example Francis of Assisi have brought the whole astral body under the control of the ego, so that nothing happens in their astral body that the ego does not control. How does such a human being differ from the savage? In the savage, everything happens without the ego; in the high-minded human being, everything happens by what he has done from his astral body. As much as the ego has transformed the astral body, as much spirit self or manas exists in the human being.

We have five members of the human being now: physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego and spirit self. Then we have the possibility to transform, to purify and to improve not only our astral body, not only the sum of our desires and instincts but we have also the bigger ability to transform our etheric body. In the usual life, the human beings work in the spiritual development on improving their astral bodies gradually, already with the usual impulses of life, the moral concepts, the intellectual mental pictures. Everything that we learn transforms the astral body. If we want to imagine the contrast of the transformation of the astral body and the transformation of the etheric body by the ego, we must remember how we were as eight-year-old children. Then we did not know many a thing that we know today. We have learnt a lot. With the sensations which we have taken up in such a way the astral body has transformed itself, it has incorporated the spirit self or manas. However, everything that constituted our temperament, our inclinations etc. when we were eight years old have not transformed themselves in the same way. If you were a hot-tempered contrary child at the age of eight years, you are probably hot-tempered or contrary sometimes even today. The change of the temperament and the inclinations advances much slower. One can compare the progress of the astral body to the advance of the minute hand and the progress of the etheric body to the advance of the hour hand. However, the inclinations change only if the etheric body changes, and stronger impulses are necessary than for the change of the astral body. The human being who stands in spiritual science has such strong impulses and can already have them if he exposes himself to the impression of a piece of art, behind which he realises the infinite sense, we say of Wagner's Parsifal or of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. These impulses not only have effects on the astral body, but they are so strong that the etheric body is purified and transformed. The same applies standing before a picture of Raphael or Michelangelo, and an impulse of the everlasting penetrates us due to the colours. However, the strongest impulses are the religious ones. They have transformed the human being so strongly that they have seized their etheric bodies, so that the human beings bear two parts of their etheric bodies in themselves, the untransformed one, received from nature, and the transformed one. One calls the transformed part life spirit or buddhi.

If that approaches the human being which we get to know in the talk on the initiation, it becomes more prominent what transforms the etheric body. The initiation consists in giving the means to the human being to transform the etheric body more and more. Hence, it also applies to the student of occultism that any intellectual learning, everything that he can take up just like in school is only a preparation. More important than any intellectual taking up is for that who submits himself to a spiritual-scientific training to transform only one single inclination consciously into another, and if it is only a movement of the hand. Transforming such a thing has more value than any acquired theoretical knowledge. The initiation consists in the impulses that purify the human etheric body. Then these impulses go on purifying the physical body, and this is the highest that the human being can attain in this life.

One could say that the physical body is the lowest; if the human being works on the physical body, is this something particular.—Just because the physical body is the lowest member, one has to apply the strongest forces to transform it into its original form, into the form of the pure spirit. The purification of this physical body begins with certain methods to adjust the respiratory process. Therefore, one calls the part that is converted atman or the spirit man; atman means breathing (German atmen). When the body is transformed—which keeps being as before—the spiritual-scientific training takes place on the highest level. Then the human being attains not only the ability to live consciously in his physical body, to know any blood corpuscle, any nerve he also attains the ability to work on the big nature, to become a human being having an effect on the forces of the universe from a human being that was enclosed in his skin before. Thus, the human being changes into that stage by which he becomes one with the universe. Any other talk of becoming one with the universe that does not happen on the way of proper training and development is gossip and phrase. The human being thereby becomes one with the universe transforming his astral body first, then the etheric body and, finally, the physical body. He becomes one with the entire universe, as the small finger is one with the physical body. This is a quite regular course of the human development which many human beings have gone through, which we all experience already to a certain degree, and which all human beings experience in the future.

What happens there, actually? Let us visualise it: what is the astral body? It is nothing else than the sum of desires, drives and passions, of joy, sorrow, and pain. Everything that co-operates there in the human being is a phenomenon of the spirit, spirit in any form, because everything is spirit. In what way is it possible that the ego works on the astral body? It is possible because the spirit discloses itself to the ego in its very own figure. In the passions, drives and desires the spirit is hidden, there it appears in its phenomena. It flows into the ego in its very own figure, and the ego lets flow it again into the astral body, so that the ego mediates between the very own figure of the spirit and its manifestations. The same applies to the etheric body and, finally, also to the physical body, and thus a perpetual spiritualisation takes place during the transformation of the three human bodies or members. As true it is that any mineral is spirit—but spirit in its outer effect-, as true it is that the human being is on the way to spiritualisation by that which his ego pours into the lower being. Only because the ego is between these manifestations of the spirit, his physical, etheric and astral bodies, and the members of the spirit, which illumine the three bodies, this transition of the spirit into the three bodies is possible. The ego has to be in between. Then the upper can work on the lower.

In what way did we get to know the nature of the ego? We got to know it already in its name. The name of the ego can never sound from the outside to our ear if it means us. With it, one says more than with all phrases that you read in the books of the usual psychology. If one understood substantially what the ego is because this name can never come from the outside to us, then one would have performed more than any academic psychology. The philosopher Fichte already said: the human being as an ego is the nicest. However, most people would prefer to regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an ego because they need own energy to look at it.

We shall see in the talk on the animal soul that the animal also has an ego, but not in the physical world. The human being thereby differs from the animal that he has his ego in the physical world. The ego is something that lets the spirit flow from the inside into another form of spirit, into the different matters, even into the soul, into the astral body. Hence, we can call the being of the ego almost an internalisation. This internalisation is only prepared with the animal. Because we will still speak of the animal soul, I only suggest this today. One must not forget that also the animal has an ego, but not the single animal, but the animal species. All lions together, all tigers together have an ego, and this ego is in the supersensible world. It is in such a way, as if from an animal, which belongs to a species, invisible ropes or threads run to the common group soul in the supersensible world. Such a group soul has become the individual human soul. Any individual human being has what an entire animal group has.

Hence, the internalisation only prepares itself with the animal. We realise it if we study the so-called animal soul, the astral body. The real internalisation of this soul, the first irradiating of the spirit is possible in our world where the ego exists as an individual soul. The soul that has the ego in itself is thereby able to let the spirit flow into the matter. Thus, we see how mind and body or also spirit and matter are two beings; however, one being is the same as the other, only in another form. Matter and body are spirit in other form. They are different from each other in the world generally as ice and water. They are different, even though they are the same. In the middle, the soul exists. It connects mind and body. Hence, we understand the human being only if we understand him in this tripartite composition, consisting of the physical, etheric and astral bodies and consisting of nascent spirit: manas, buddhi, and atman or spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. The soul is the being that transforms one into the other that participates in the body and in the mind. We can understand the soul in the right light only if we see it working from the mind on the body. If we study it from this viewpoint, spiritual science answers just those questions that the human being must put to the real soul being. We realise that the human soul is positioned between body and mind at every moment. With the savage, the soul is only able to take up a droplet of the spirit in his body. Hunger and thirst, the manifestations of the etheric body, almost animal instincts, and desires still completely influence him. The soul of the sophisticated idealist, as for example of Schiller or Francis of Assisi, tends to the spirit, attains a higher consciousness, and frees himself from the material existence. Spiritual science shows that there is transformation of forms what we call matter. That often will meet us in the winter talks but nobody can expect that he can absorb all concepts of spiritual science in one talk.

If we look at the world round ourselves from this spiritual-scientific viewpoint, it appears in a continual transformation as also nature appears in a continual transformation. We see the flower arising from the seminal grain in the spring. In autumn, we see it wilting, but the being is preserved in the seminal grain to arise again. Thus, spiritual science also shows how the spirit builds up the body, and how the being of this spirit is preserved as a spiritual seed when the body disintegrates. It appears again and again.

We can transform ice into water and water into ice. Similarly, spirit also changes into body. The body disintegrates, but the spirit remains and appears in always-new forms. There we are led to the principle of transformation in the human life. The human being lives here in the physical, etheric and astral bodies. However, he still has a second life that existed before this life and will be after this life. There he lives, as well as he lives here in these three bodies, in the spiritual world. From there he brings the forces that build up his bodies, which give him that form which he has, even if the life in spirit is different. We get to know this if we understand spiritual science in the right way.

It becomes apparent that the human being leads a life by turns: a life in the body between birth and death and a life in the spiritual between death and a new birth, until he prepares himself for a new incarnation. What lives here in the body and there in spirit and changes between the life in the body and the life in spirit is the soul. However, every time when it has gone through an incarnation, the human being has worked on his body and comes back to the spirit land as a soul enriched with the fruits of the earth-life. The soul keeps on developing higher and higher. Hence, it is also the mediator between spirit and body. Thus, we are led to the border which shows us—considering mind, soul and body correctly—how the relation of the three human parts is to each other. We get to know everything that disintegrates that scatters as a transformation of that which constitutes the innermost being of the soul as we recognise everything temporal as a form of the everlasting. Spiritual science leads to a science, which really the questions of the temporal and of the everlasting answers and of the human destiny after death. The human heart has these questions generally if it wants to know something about such a science. A science that sets limits to itself cannot see the most important. Hence, our academic psychology is limited. In a certain sense, it is important to learn what it offers. Spiritual science does not disdain it, but it finds it insufficient, as long as one does not go into the being of the spirit and the soul. This is the right way to the knowledge of the spirit and the soul: the soul is connected with its bodies in the temporal life, it is involved in these bodies, and that which attracts it to these bodies is that part which is an obstacle for the pure, purified life in spirit between death and a new birth. There we learn to understand gradually where the obstacles of the soul are for the new birth. We also learn to understand that the soul must free itself completely not only from the body—by death—but from the longing for the body. By the right concepts of mind, soul, and body, we also come to the destiny of the soul during its bodily and spiritual pilgrimage.

I have today tried to show how one gets correct concepts of the soul and spirit using the ordinary human mind. I did it without taking into account what one can attain by the methods of clairvoyance and initiation. I speak about them in the next talks. We must hold on this: what faced us in the course of this winter will be results of the spiritual research. One can only discover them with the methods as I gave them in the talks on initiation et cetera. However, one can understand them by the ordinary logic and thorough thinking. Someone who says, what does the spiritual science concern me, because I am no clairvoyant? He turns away from the spiritual science not because of lack of clairvoyance, but, because he does not apply his thinking thoroughly and extensively enough to it. Just psychology has suffered a lot in our time of materialism—which some people regard as finished and is also dismissed in philosophy, but flourishes just in the way of thinking of psychology. Today the concepts of soul and spirit have suffered mostly from this materialism. Spiritual science has the mission to bring pure, purified concepts of the soul and the spirit again to humanity. Thereby it will be the best servant of the high religious traditions that distinguish between the human mind and the world enclosing spirit that the religious traditions call the Holy Spirit. We understand these scriptures as means of understanding only if we comprehend them deeply enough and consider everything in great enclosing pictures which are the expression of facts.

We spiritual scientists still know many things that humanity knows in future and only anticipated due to its most significant spirits in former times. Many strange feelings go through the human soul, if it immerses itself in the spiritual activities. Some people say to the spiritual scientist: you give us something for the mind, but nothing for the soul; we search soul and you give us spiritual achievements. They do not know that they reject just that which gives the soul what they require. They covet the will impulses of the soul. However, the soul can be only happy if it lets the spirit flow in itself and develops the bodies from the spirit.

What faces us from the outside is formed spirit, and what shapes the matter flows from the spiritual world down. What the eye sees in the figure as colour is, so to speak, compressed spirit, and the force that causes the figure in the matter comes from the everlasting. Thus, someone who does not have the clearness of spiritual-scientific concepts but feels and anticipates the surrounding world says. everything appears to me as shaped by the spiritual world. The figure appears to me as the holy that flashes in the mere matter, and if I see the figure, it seems to immerse itself in the matter and to withdraw again from the matter. The poet anticipated this of spiritual science when he put up the contrast between the body, the human soul, and the spirit that both work creatively in the body. Schiller (Friedrich Sch., 1759–1805, German poet) anticipated how the soul lets the spirit flow in the matter in reality whereby the matter disappears to the view. Considering this, he let the sensation flow out in the nice words:

Only the body appertains to those powers that braid the dark destiny. However, far from any temporal power, the playmate of blessed spirits walks aloft in the acres of light, divine among divinities: the shape.

Translator Unknown, revised

It may well be said that the anthroposophical conception of the world is distinguished from any other we may meet because it can satisfy to such a great extent the desire for knowledge. In the present time we so often hear that it is impossible to gain knowledge of certain things—that our capacity for knowledge has limits and cannot rise above a certain height. On becoming acquainted with modern philosophical research we constantly hear of such limits to knowledge, especially among those schools of philosophy which owe their origin to Kant. The understanding of anthroposophists and of those who practice mysticism is distinguished from all such doctrines through never setting limits to man's capacity for knowledge, but rather looking upon it as capable of being both widened and uplifted. Is it not, to a certain extent, the greatest arrogance for anyone to regard his own capacity for knowledge, from the point at which it stands, as something decisive, and then to say that with our capacities we cannot go beyond definite limits of knowledge? The anthroposophist says: “I stand today at a certain point in human knowledge, from which I am able to know certain things and not others. But it is possible to cultivate the human capacity for knowledge, to heighten it.” What is called a school of initiation has as its essential aim to raise to a higher stage this human capacity for knowledge. So it is quite correct if one from a lower stage of knowledge says that there are limits to his knowledge and that certain things cannot be known. One can, however, raise oneself above this stage of knowledge and press on to a higher stage, so that it becomes possible to know what at a lower stage was impossible. This is the essence of initiation, and this deepening or heightening of knowledge is the task of the initiation schools. This means raising man to a stage of knowledge to which nature has not brought him, but which he must acquire for himself through long years of patient exercise.

In all ages there have been these initiation schools. Among all peoples, those having a higher kind of knowledge have arisen from these initiation schools. And the essential nature of such schools—and of the great Initiates themselves, who have soared above the lower stages of the human capacity for knowledge and, through their inspirations, have been acquainted with the highest knowledge accessible to us in this world—finds expression in Initiates giving to the various peoples on earth their various religions and world-conceptions.

Today we wish with a few strokes to illuminate the essential being of these great Initiates. As in every science, in every spiritual process one must first learn the method through which one penetrates to knowledge. This is also the case in the initiation schools. And here too it is a matter of our being led through certain methods to the higher stages of knowledge, about which we have spoken precisely. I shall now briefly refer to the stages that here concern us. Certain stages of knowledge can only be attained in the intimate schools of initiation where there are teachers who have themselves in their own experience gone through each school, have devoted themselves to every exercise, and have really pondered every single step, every single stage. And one must entrust oneself only to such teachers in the initiation schools.

In these schools there is, it is true, no hint of authority, nothing that smacks of dogmatism; the governing principle is entirely that of counsel, the imparting of advice. Whoever has gone through a certain stage of learning, and has himself acquired experiences of the higher, super-sensible life, knows the inner way that leads to this higher knowledge. And it is only one such as this who is qualified to say what one must do. What is necessary is simply that there be trust between pupil and teacher in this sphere. Whoever lacks this trust can learn nothing; but whoever has it will very soon perceive that nothing is recommended by any occult, mystic, or mystery teacher other than what the teacher has himself gone through. What concerns us here is that, of the whole being of man as he stands before us today, it is essentially only the outward visible part already within human nature that is today complete. This must be made clear to anyone aspiring to become a student of the mysteries—that man as he stands before us today is by no means a completed being, but is in the process of developing so that in the future he will reach many higher stages.

That which today has attained to an image of God, that which has arrived at the highest stage in man, is the human physical body, that which we can see with our eyes and perceive in any way with our senses. That is not, however, the only thing that man has. He has still higher members of his nature. To begin with, he further possesses a member that we call his etheric body. This etheric body can be seen by anyone who has cultivated his soul organs. Through this etheric body man is not simply a creation in which work chemical and physical forces, but a living creation, a creation that lives and is endowed with capacities for growth, life, and propagation. One can see this etheric body, which represents a kind of archetype of man, if, with the methods of the art of clairvoyance—which will be characterized still further—one suggests away the ordinary physical body. You know how, by the ordinary methods of hypnotism and suggestion, the point can be reached when, if you say to anyone that there is no lamp here, he actually sees no lamp. So you can also, if you develop in yourself sufficiently strong willpower—a willpower that shuts out, entirely shuts out, all observation of the physical body—so you can, in spite of seeing into space, completely suggest away physical space. Then you see space not empty but filled by a kind of archetype. This archetype has practically the same form as the physical body. It is, however, not of the same nature through and through, but is fully organized. It is not only interlaced with fine veins and streams but it also has organs. This creation, this etheric body, produces man's essential life. Its color can only be compared with the color of the young peach blossom. It is no color that is contained in the sun spectrum; but it is something between a violet and a reddish tinge. This is then the second body.

The third body is the aura, which I have often described—that cloud-like formation of which I spoke last time when describing man's origin, in which man is as if in an egg-shaped cloud. In this is expressed all that lives in man as lust, passion, and feeling. Joyful self-sacrificing feelings express themselves in this aura in luminous streams of color. Feelings of hate, physical feelings, express themselves in dark color tones. Sharp, logical thoughts express themselves in sharply outlined forms. Illogical, confused thoughts come to expression in figures with blurred outline. Thus, we have in this aura an image of what is living in man's soul as feeling, passion, and impulse.

As man has now been described, so he was set down on the earth—from the hand of nature, so to speak—at the point of time that lies approximately at the beginning of the Atlantean race. Last time I described what is to be understood by “the Atlantean race.” At the moment when the fertilization by the eternal spirit had already taken place, man confronts us with the three members—body, soul, and spirit. Today this threefold nature of man has taken a somewhat different form, as since that time, since nature has released him, since he has become a being with self-consciousness, man has worked on his own being. This work on himself means the refining of his aura; it also means sending light into the aura out of this self-consciousness. A man who stands at a very low stage of development and has never worked on himself—let us say a savage—has the aura which nature has provided him. But all those within our civilization, our cultural world, have auras on which they themselves have helped to work, for in so far as man is a self-conscious being he works upon himself and this work comes into expression first through changing his aura. All that man has learned through nature, all that he has absorbed since he was able to speak and think self-consciously, is a recent acquisition in his aura brought about by his own activity.

If you put yourself back into the Lemurian age, in which man had already had warm blood flowing in his veins for some time, and in which, in the middle of this Lemurian age, his fertilization with the spirit had taken place, man then was not yet a being capable of clear thinking. All this occurred at the beginning of evolution when the spirit had just taken possession of the corporeality. At that time the aura was still completely a consequence of forces of nature. One could then perceive—as one still can with men at a very low stage of development—how at a certain place in the interior of the head (that is to say, a place that we have to seek in the interior of the head) there exists a smaller aura of a bluish color. This smaller aura is the outer auric expression of the self-consciousness. And the more a man has developed this self-consciousness through his thought and through his work, the more this smaller aura spreads itself over the other, so that often in a short time both become totally different. A man who lives in outer culture, a refined man of culture, works on his aura in the particular way that this culture impels him. Our ordinary knowledge, which they offer in our schools, our experiences that life brings us, are absorbed by us and they are perpetually transforming our aura. But this transformation must be continuous if a man wishes to enter into practical mysticism. Then he must make a special effort to work upon himself. For then he must not incorporate into his aura only what culture offers him, but must exercise an influence upon it in a definite, orderly manner. And this happens through so-called meditation. This meditation, this inner immersion, is the first stage which a student of initiation must undergo.

Now in what does this meditation take an interest? Just try to bring to mind and reflect upon the thoughts that you shelter from morning to night, and upon how these thoughts are influenced by the time and the place in which you live. See whether you can hinder your thoughts, and ask yourself whether you would have them if you did not happen by chance to be living in Berlin at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, men did not think in the same way as men do today. If you consider how the world has changed in the course of the last century, and what kind of changes time has brought about, you will see that what passes through your soul from morning to night is dependent upon time and space. It is different when we give ourselves up to thoughts that have an eternal worth. Actually it is only certain abstract, scientific thoughts to which men have given themselves up, the highest thoughts of mathematics and geometry, that have an eternal worth. Twice two is four holds good at all times and in all places. It is the same with the geometrical truths that we accept. But leaving aside a certain fundamental stock of such truths, we may say that the average man has very few thoughts that are not dependent on time and space. What is thus dependent unites us with the world, and only exerts a trifling influence upon that essence which is in itself enduring.

Meditation means nothing other than surrendering oneself to thoughts which have eternal worth, in order to raise oneself up in a conscious way to what lies above both space and time. Such thoughts are contained in the great religious writings: the Vedanta, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gospel of John from the thirteenth chapter to the end, and the “Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis. He who sinks himself with patience and perseverance so that he lives in such writings; he who deepens himself anew every day—perhaps working for weeks on one single sentence, thinking it through, feeling it through—will gain unlimited benefit. Just as each day one learns more nearly to know and love a child with all its individual characteristics, so one can daily draw into one's soul an eternal truth of the kind that flows from the great Initiates, or from inspired men. This has the effect of filling us with new life. Very significant also are the sayings in the “Light on the Path” that have been written down by Mabel Collins, under the instruction of higher powers. Actually in the first four sentences there is something that, when applied with patience in the appropriate way, is capable of so seizing upon man's aura that this aura is completely shot through with new light. One can see this light in the human aura shining and glistening. Bluish shades arise in the place of the reddish or of the reddishbrown shimmering shades of color, and, in the place of yellow, clear reddish ones arise, and so on. The whole coloring of the aura transforms itself under the influence of such eternal thoughts. The student cannot yet perceive this in the beginning, but he gradually begins to notice the deep influence that emanates from the greatly transformed aura.

If a man, in addition to these meditations, consciously and in a most scrupulous way practices certain virtues, certain achievements of the soul, then, within this aura, his sense-organs of the soul develop. We must have these if we want to see into the soul-world, just as we must have physical sense-organs to be able to see into the material world. As the outer senses were planted into the body by nature, so must man, in a regular way, implant the higher sense-organs of the soul into his aura. Meditation leads man to become ripe from within outwards, forming, developing, and interweaving the available capacities of the soul's senses.

But if we wish to cultivate these sense organs we must turn our attention to quite definite accomplishments of the soul. You see, man has a series of such organs in his organization. We call these sense organs the so-called Lotus flowers because the astral image, which man begins to evolve in his aura when he is developing himself in the way described, takes on a form that may be compared with that of a Lotus flower. It goes without saying that this is only a comparison, just as one can speak of the wings of the lung, which also bear only a resemblance to wings. The two-petalled Lotus flower is found in the middle of the head above the root of the nose, between the eyes. Near the larynx is the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower, while in the region of the heart there is the twelve-petalled one, and in the region of the pit of the stomach the one with ten petals. Still farther down are found the six-petalled and four-petalled Lotus flowers. Today I want to talk only about the Lotus flowers that have sixteen petals and twelve petals.

In Buddha's teachings you are given an account of the so-called eightfold path. Now ask yourselves once why Buddha offered precisely this eightfold path as particularly important in the attainment of the higher stages of man's development. This eightfold path is: right resolve, right thinking, right speech, right action, right living, right striving, right memory, right self-immersion, or meditation. A great Initiate such as Buddha does not speak out of a vaguely felt ideal, but out of knowledge of human nature. He knows what influence the practice of such exercises of the soul will have on the future development of the body. If we look at the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower in the average man of today we actually see very little. If I can so express it, it is in the process of flaring up again. In the far-distant past this Lotus flower was once present; it has gone backward in its development. Today it is appearing again, partly through man's cultural activity. In the future, however, this sixteen-petalled Lotus flower will come again to full development. It will glisten vividly with its sixteen spokes or petals, each petal appearing in a different shade of color; and finally, it will move from left to right. What everyone in the future will possess and experience is today being cultivated by those who seek in a conscious way their development in the school of initiation, in order to become leaders of mankind. Now eight of these sixteen petals have already been formed in the far-distant past; today eight have still to be developed, if the mystery pupil wishes to have the use of these sense-organs. These will be developed if man treads the eightfold path in a conscious way, observantly and clearly, if he consciously practices these eight soul activities given by Buddha, and if he arranges his whole life of soul so that he takes himself in hand, practicing these eight virtues as vigorously as he can only do when sustained by his meditation work, thus bringing the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower not only into bloom but also into movement, into actual perception.

I will now speak of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower in the region of the heart. Six petals of this flower were already developed in the far-distant past, and six must be developed by all men in the future, by present-day Initiates and their pupils. In all anthroposophical handbooks you can find reference to certain virtues in the forefront of those that should be acquired by anyone aspiring to the stage of Chela, or pupil. These six virtues which you find mentioned in every anthroposophical handbook concerned with man's development are: control of thought, control of action, tolerance, steadfastness, impartiality, and equilibrium, or what Angelus Silesius calls composure. These six virtues, which one must practice consciously and attentively in conjunction with meditation, bring to unfolding the six further petals of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower. And these are not gathered blindly in the anthroposophical textbooks, nor are they stamped by haphazard or individual inner feeling, but they are spoken out of the great Initiates' deepest knowledge. Initiates know that whoever really wishes to evolve to the higher super-sensible stages of development must bring about the unfolding of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower. And to this end he must today develop, through these six virtues, the six petals that were undeveloped in the past. Thus you see how the great Initiates essentially gave their directions for life out of their own deeper knowledge of the human being. I could extend these remarks to still other organs of knowledge and observation, but I only wish to give you a brief sketch of the process of initiation, and for that these indications should suffice.

When the pupil has progressed so far that he begins to form the astral sense-organs, when he has progressed so far that he is capable of perceiving not only the physical impressions in his surroundings but also what belongs to the soul—in other words, to see what is in the aura of man himself as well as what is in the aura of animals and plants—he then begins a completely new stage of instruction. No one can see in his environment that which has to do with his soul before his Lotus flowers revolve, just as one without eyes can see no color and no light. But when the barrier is pierced, when the pupil has gone beyond the preliminary stages of knowledge so that he has insight into the soul-world, then true “pupil-ship” first begins for him. This leads through four stages of knowledge. Now what happens in this moment, when man has passed beyond the first steps and has become a Chela? We have seen how all that we have just described related to the astral body. This is organized throughout by the human body. Whoever has undergone such a development has a totally different aura. When man out of his self-consciousness has illuminated his astral body, when he himself has become the luminous organization of his astral body, then we say that this pupil has illuminated his astral body with Manas. Manas is nothing other than an astral body dominated by self-consciousness. Manas and astral body are one and the same, but at different stages of development.

One must understand this if, in the practice of mysticism, one wishes to apply in a practical way what is given in anthroposophical handbooks as the seven principles. Everyone acquainted with the mystic path of development, everyone who knows something about initiation, will say that these have a theoretical value for study but for the practicing mystic they have value only if the relation existing between the lower and the higher principles is known. No practicing mystic recognizes more than four members: the physical body, in which work chemical and physical laws, the etheric body, the astral body, and finally the self- or Ego-consciousness, called at the present stage of development Kama-Manas, the self-conscious thinking principle. Manas is nothing other than that which has been worked into the body by the self-consciousness. The etheric body in its present form is deprived of any influence of the self-consciousness. We can indirectly influence our growth and nourishment, but not in the same way as we cause our wishes, our thoughts and ideas to proceed from self-consciousness. We cannot ourselves influence our nourishment, digestion, and growth. In men, these are without connection to the self-consciousness. The etheric body has to be brought under the influence of the astral body, the so-called aura. The self-consciousness of the astral body has to penetrate the etheric body—to be able to work out of itself upon the etheric body—as man, in the way already shown, works upon his astral body, his aura. Then, when man through meditation, through inner immersion, and through practicing activities of the soul, which I have described, has come so far that the astral body has organized itself, then the work extends to the etheric body, and the etheric body receives the inner word. Then man not only hears what lives in the world around him, but there resounds in him his etheric body, the inner meaning of things.

I have often said here before that the essentially spiritual in things is a resounding. I have drawn your attention to how the practicing mystic, when speaking in a correct sense, talks of a sound in the spiritual world in the same way as of a light in the astral world, or world of desire. Not for nothing does Goethe say, when guiding his Faust to heaven: “Die Sonne tönt nach alten Weise im Bruderspharen Wettgesang ...” (“The sun resounds in ancient fashion, contending with his brother spheres”). Nor are the words of Ariel empty when Faust is being escorted by the spirits into the spiritual world: “Tönend wird für Geistesohren schon der neue Tag geboren” (“Hear the new day being born, Spirit ears can hear its ringing”).

This inner sounding which, of course, is not at all a sound perceptible to the outer physical ear, this inner word through which things can express their own nature, is an experience that man has when he becomes able to influence his etheric body from his astral body. Then he has become a Chela, a real student of the great Initiates. Then he can be led further upon this path. A man who has thus ascended this step is called a homeless man, because fundamentally he has found the connection with a new world, because it rings to him out of the spiritual world, and because he thereby no longer has his home, so to speak, in this physical world. One must not misunderstand this. The Chela who has reached this stage is just as good a citizen and family man, just as good a friend, as he was before he had reached the stage of Chela. He need not be torn away from anything. What he has experienced is an evolution of the soul, thus acquiring a new home in a world lying behind this physical one.

What then has happened? The spiritual world sounds within man, and through this sounding of the spiritual world man overcomes an illusion, the illusion which takes in all men before they begin this stage of development. This is the illusion of the personal self. Man believes himself to be a personality separate from the rest of the world. Mere reflection could teach him that even physically he himself is not an independent being. Bear in mind that if the temperature in this room were 200 degrees higher than it now is, none of us would be able to survive as we now survive. As soon as the outer situation changes, the conditions for our physical existence are no longer there. We are simply a continuation of the external world, and are as separate beings absolutely inconceivable. This is still more the case in the world of the soul and of the spirit. Thus we see that man conceived of as a self is only an illusion—that he is a member of the universal divine spirituality. Here man overcomes the personal self. Here arises what in the mystic chorus of Faust Goethe has expressed in the words: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.” (“All that is transitory is but a likeness.”) What we see is only a picture of an eternal being. We ourselves are only a picture of an eternal being. When we have surrendered our separate being—for we live a separate life through our etheric body—then we have overcome our outer, separate life, we have become part of universal life.

There arises in man something which we have called Buddhi. Buddhi is now practically reached as a stage in the development of the etheric body, that etheric body which no longer occasions a separate existence but enters into universal life. The man who has attained this has arrived at the second state of Chela-ship. Then all doubts and reservations fall away from his soul; he can no longer be superstitious any more than he can be a doubter. Then he has no more need to secure the truth in order to compare his ideas with the outer environment; then he lives in tone, in the word of things; then what it is sounds and resounds out of its being. And there is no more superstition, no more doubt. This is called the surrendering of the keys of knowledge to the Chela. When he has reached this stage, within it there sounds a word from the spiritual world. Then his own words no longer proclaim an echo of what is in this world, but his words are an echo of what stems from another world, which works into this world, but which cannot be perceived with our outer senses. These words are messengers of the Godhead.

When this stage is passed beyond, a new one comes. This is entered by man gaining influence over what is done directly by his physical body. Before this, his influence only extended to his etheric body, but now it extends to his physical body. His actions must set the physical body in motion. What man does is incorporated into what we call his karma. Man, however, does not work on this consciously; he does not know how each of his deeds causes a consequence. It is only now that he begins in a conscious way so to fulfill his actions in the physical world that he consciously works on his karma. Thus, through his physical actions, he wins influence over his karma. And now there is not only a sounding from the objects in his environment, but he has come far enough to be able to utter the name of all things. Man lives in our present stage of culture in such a way that he is only able to utter one single name. That is the name he gives himself: “I.” That is the only name man can really give to himself. (Whoever immerses himself in deeper knowledge can arrive at depths of which psychology does not dream.) It is the only instance in which you yourself can give the name in question. No one else can say “I” to you, only you yourself. To everyone else you must say “you,” and they in return must say the same. There is something in everyone to which only they themselves can apply the name “I.” On this account the Jewish mystery teachings speak also of an inexpressible name of God. That is something which is immediately a proclamation of God in man. It was forbidden to utter this name unworthily, sacrilegiously; hence the sacred awe, the significance and reality when the Jewish mystery teachers uttered this name. “I” is the one word that says something to you that can never approach you from the outer world. So now, as the average man alone names his “I,” so the Chela in the third stage gives to all things in the world names which he has received out of intuition. That means he has passed into the world “I.” He speaks out of the world “I” itself. He may call everything by its most profound name, whereas the man today standing at the average stage can only say “I” to himself. When the Chela has arrived at this stage, he is called a Swan. The Chela who has been able to raise himself to the point of naming all things is called Swan because he is the messenger of all things.

What lies beyond these three stages cannot be expressed in ordinary language. It demands knowledge of a special script only taught in mystery schools. The next stage is the stage of what is veiled. And beyond this lie the stages which belong to the great Initiates, those Initiates who at all times have given the great impulses to our culture. They were Chelas to begin with. To begin with they acquired the keys of knowledge. Next they were led further to the regions where were disclosed to them the universal and the names of things. Then they raised themselves to the stage of the universal, where they could have the deep experiences through which they were qualified to found the great religions of the world.

But it was not only the great religions that came forth from the great Initiates; it was every mighty impulse, all that is important in the world. Let us take just two examples that show the kind of influence that has been exercised on the world by the great Initiates who have gone through the schooling. Let us go back to everyday life at the time when the pupils of the initiation schools were guided under the leadership of Hermes. This guidance was in the end an ordinary, so-called esoteric, scientific instruction. I can sketch for you in only a few strokes what such instruction contained. It was shown how the Cosmic Spirit descended into the physical world, incarnated himself here, and how he began afresh a material existence, how he then reached the highest stage of man and celebrated his resurrection. Paracelsus in particular has expressed this very beautifully in the following words: “The individual beings we meet in the outer world are the single letters, and the word that is formed from them is MAN.” Outwardly we have all contributed human virtues or failings to this creation. Man, however, is the fusion of all this. It was taught as esoteric instruction in the Egyptian mystery schools, in all detail and with great richness of spirit, how there lives in man, as microcosm, the fusion of the rest of the macrocosm.

After this instruction came the Hermetic instruction. What I have said one can grasp with the senses and the understanding. But what is offered in the Hermetic instruction can only be grasped if one has attained the first stage of Chelaship. Then one can learn that special script which is neither arbitrary nor a matter of chance, but which gives us the great laws of the spiritual world. This script is not, like ours, an external picture arbitrarily fixed in single letters and parts; it is born out of the spiritual law of nature itself, because the man who becomes versed in this script is in possession of this natural law. All his conception of soul and astral space itself thus becomes regulated by law. What he conceives is conceived in the sense of the great signs of this script. He is capable of this when he has renounced his self. He unites himself with primal everlasting law. Now he has his Hermetic instruction behind him. Henceforward he himself can be admitted to the first stage of a still deeper initiation. Now, as the next stage, he should experience something in the astral world, the essential soul world, that has a significance reaching beyond the cosmic cycles. After he has acquired the capacity for the astral senses to be fully effective, so that they work right down into the etheric body, then for three days he is ushered into a deep mystery of the astral world. In that astral world he then experiences what last time I described to you as the primal origin of the Earth and man. He has before him and he experiences this descent of the spirit, this separation of Sun, Moon, and Earth, and the coming forth of man—this whole series of phenomena. And at the same time they form themselves into a picture before him. And then he emerges. After he has this great experience in the mystery school behind him, he goes among the people and relates what he has experienced in the soul and astral world. And what he relates runs approximately like this:

“There was once a divine couple who were united with the earth, Osiris and Isis. This divine pair were regents of everything that happens on earth. But Osiris was pursued by Typhon and cut into pieces, and Isis had to search for the corpse. She did not bring it home, but graves of Osiris were distributed among the various parts of the earth. So he was brought completely down into the earth and buried there. But a ray from the spiritual world fell upon Isis, fertilizing her through immaculate conception with the new Horns.”

This picture is nothing other than a mighty representation of what we have come to know as the exit of Sun and Moon, as the separation of Sun and Moon and as the dawning of mankind. Isis is the image of the Moon; Horns stands for earthly mankind, the earth itself. Before man was endowed with warm blood, before he was clothed with his physical body, he felt in mighty pictures what proceeded in the soul world. In the beginning of the Lemurian, of the Atlantean and the Arian evolutions, man was always prepared by the great Initiates to receive the mighty truths contained in such pictures. For this reason, the truths were not simply represented but were given in the pictures of Osiris and Isis. All the great religions we meet in antiquity are from what the great Initiates experienced in astral space. And the great Initiates emerged from these experiences and spoke to each particular people in the way they could understand, that is to say in pictures of what the Initiates themselves had experienced in the mystery schools. This was so in ancient times. Only through being in such a school of initiation could one rise to higher astral experience.

All this was changed with the coming of Christianity. It cut into evolution with great significance. And since the appearance of Christ it has been possible for man to be initiated as an initiate of nature, just as one speaks of a poet of nature. There have been Christian mystics who by grace have received initiation. The first who was called to carry Christianity into all the world under the influence of the words: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed,” was Paul. The appearance on the road to Damascus was an initiation outside the mysteries. I cannot go into further detail here.

It was the great Initiates who gave the impulse to all great movements and founding's of culture. From medieval times there comes a beautiful myth that may be said to show us this in a time when one did not yet demand materialistic foundations. The myth arose in Bavaria and has, therefore, assumed the garb of Catholicism. What then happened we will make clear as follows. There arose at that time in Europe the so-called civic culture—modern citizenship. The onward development of man, the progress of each soul to a higher stage, was understood by the mystic as the advancing of the soul, of the womanly element in man. The mystic sees in the soul something womanly that was fertilized by the lower sense impressions of nature and by the eternal truths. In every historical process the mystic sees such a process of fertilization. For those who see more deeply into man's path of development, for those who see the spiritual forces behind physical appearances, the great and deep impulses for the progress of mankind are given by the great Initiates. Thus the man with a medieval world outlook ascribed to the great Initiates the raising up of the soul to higher stages during the new period of culture that was brought about by means of cities. This city-development was attained by souls making a sudden move forward in history. And it was an Initiate who brought about this move. All mighty impulses were ascribed to the great lodge of Initiates surrounding the Holy Grail. From there came the great Initiates who are not visible to ordinary men. And the Initiate who at that time provided the civic culture with its impulse was called, in the Middle Ages, Lohengrin. It is he who was the missionary of the Holy Grail, of the great lodge; and Elsa of Brabant stands for the soul of the city, the womanly element that was to be fructified through the great Initiate. The mediator is the swan. Lohengrin was brought by the swan into this physical world. The Initiate must not be asked his name. He belongs to a higher world. The Chela, the Swan, has been the mediator of this influence.

I have merely been able to indicate how this great event has again been symbolized for the people in a myth. It is in this way that the great Initiates have worked and have put into their teachings what they have to make known. And in this way worked all those who have founded man's early culture—Hermes in Egypt, Krishna in India, Zarathustra in Persia, Moses among the Jewish people. Orpheus continued the work—then Pythagoras, and finally the Initiate of all Initiates, Jesus, who bore within Him the Christ.

Here only the greatest of Initiates are mentioned. We have tried in these descriptions to characterize their connection with the world. What has been described here will still remain remote to many people's thoughts. But those who have become aware of something of the higher worlds in their own souls have always raised their eyes not only to the spiritual world but also to the leaders of mankind. It was only from this standpoint that they have been able to speak in as inspired a way as Goethe. But you find among others, too, something of the divine spark leading towards the point to which spiritual science should again bring us. You find it in the case of a German, a young, intelligent German poet and thinker, whose life has all the appearance of a blessed memory of some former existence as a great Initiate. Those who read Novalis will notice something of the breath that guides us into the higher world. There is something in him that also contains the magic word, though not expressed as explicitly as usual. Thus he has written the beautiful words about the relation of our planet to mankind that convey as much to the lowly and undeveloped as they do to the Initiate:

“Mankind is the sense of our earth-planet, mankind is the nerve that binds the earth-planet with the higher worlds; mankind is the eye through which this earth-planet lifts its gaze to the heavenly Kingdoms of the Cosmos.”

Goethe who gave simple expression to so much that men find great and moving, once wrote: “Each man should consider with what part of himself he can and will influence his time!”

When we allow such a saying—with all that we know may have passed through Goethe's mind as he said it—to affect us, we are initiated into the whole relationship of man to history. For most people, of course, the search for their own particular standpoint, from which they can deploy their powers in the development of humanity in accordance with the spirit of the age in which they live, is more or less unconscious. Yet even a superficial examination of human development shows that men have increasingly been compelled to organize their lives in a conscious manner. Instinctive living was a feature of earlier civilizations. The transition to increasing consciousness is itself a factor in history. Nowadays, indeed, we can see that the increasing complications of life require man to participate in the development of humanity with a certain degree of consciousness, however humble his position. It is unfortunate that as yet we really have very few points d'appui in the study of mankind's historical development to help us in our efforts to reach this point of view.

As a scientific discipline, this study is of fairly recent origin, after all. Its novelty is apparent, one might say, in the historical writing that has been published.

Historians have produced magnificent things. In developing from the unscientific chronicle-writing that still prevailed even in the eighteenth century, however, history, falling as it did within the age of natural science, attempted increasingly to take on the forms appropriate to that science. Thus the historical attitude gradually became identified with the concept post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Although this way of looking at human history as cause and effect does indeed carry us a long way, yet to the unprejudiced observer there remain countless facts in history which are not consistent with a simple causal interpretation. And at this point we are struck by an image that can symbolize history: the image of a flowing river. We cannot simply derive its features at a given point from what lies a little farther upstream, but must realize that in its depths there operate all kinds of forces that may come to the surface at any point, and may throw up waves which are not determined by those that went before.

So, too, human history seems to point to unspoken depths, to resemble a surface on which countless forces impinge from below. And human observation can scarcely presume to gain a complete picture of the particular features of a given epoch. For this reason, the study of history will doubtless have to come more and more to be what I would call symptomatological. In the human organism itself, which is such a richly differentiated whole, a great deal has to be discovered about its health and ill-health by observing the symptoms through which the organism expresses itself. In the same way, we must gradually accustom ourselves to study historical symptomatology. We must learn to interpret surface features precisely, and, by including more and more symptoms in our interpretation, contrive to allow the vital essence of historical development to work on us. In this way, by a spiritual comprehension of the forces of human history—which in all kinds of indirect ways also affect our own soul—we can find our own place in the development of mankind.

A view of the world and of life such as I have put before you is particularly fitted to reveal how, even in one's most intimate inner experiences, what is historically symptomatic is manifest. What I have described to you, the awakening of cognitive capacities that are not present in ordinary consciousness, being dormant deep down in the soul—this awakening of capacities appropriate to modern man leads us to see that we must develop these cognitive powers differently nowadays from the way they were developed in earlier times. Not only this: when we do develop these powers, the spiritual vision that results is something quite different to the man of today from what it was, for example, to the men of the ancient East, which we touched on the day before yesterday in describing yoga exercises.

Looking at these ancient Oriental attitudes, as they were developed by men who sought to elicit, from within, powers of cognition reaching into the super-sensible sphere, we conclude: everything we know about it indicates that such knowledge, in gaining a place within the soul, took on a permanent and enduring character there. What men think in ordinary life, what they absorb from the experiences of earthly existence, and what then takes root as memories—these have permanence in the soul; and we are simply unhealthy in spirit if we have any considerable gaps in our capacity to remember what we have experienced in the world from a given point in childhood onwards. To this state of mental permanence were admitted all the insights into the spiritual world gained by ancient Oriental methods. They deposited memories, as the ordinary experiences of the day deposit memories. The characteristic of the early Oriental seer was precisely that he found himself increasingly absorbed into a lasting communion with the spiritual world, as he made his way into it. Once inside the divine and spiritual world, he knew himself to be secure. He knew that it also represented something enduring for his soul.

The opposite, we may say, is true of anyone today who, by virtue of the powers to which mankind has advanced since those early days, rises to a certain spiritual vision. He develops his views on the spiritual sphere to the point of experiencing them; but they cannot possibly become memories for him in the way that the thoughts we experience daily in the outside world become memories.

It is certainly a great disappointment to many who struggle to gain a certain spiritual vision by modern methods to find that, although they do gain glimpses of this spiritual world, these are transitory, like the sight of a real object in the outside world, which we no longer perceive when we go away from it. In this mental activity, there is no incorporation into memory in the ordinary sense, but a momentary contact with the spiritual world. If we later wish to regain this contact, we cannot simply call up the experience from our recollection. What we can do, however, is to recollect something that was an ordinary experience in the physical world: how by developing our powers we achieved our experience of the spiritual world. We can then retrace our steps and repeat the experience, exactly as we return to a sensory perception. This is one of the most important factors that authenticate this modern vision: that what we see does not combine with our physical being; for if thoughts are to gain some permanence as memories, they must always be combined with our physical being, held fast by our organism.

Perhaps I may interpolate a personal observation here by way of explanation. Anyone who has some contact with the spiritual world, and wishes to communicate what he has experienced, is unable to make this communication from memory in the usual sense. He always has to make a certain effort to attain again to direct spiritual observation. For this reason, even if someone who speaks out of the spiritual world gives a lecture thirty times, no lecture will be an exact repetition of the one before: each must be drawn direct from experience.

Here is something which, in my view, can remove certain anxieties that might arise in troubled minds about this modern spiritual vision. Many people today, with some justification, see the grandeur of the most significant riddles of existence in the very fact that they can never be completely solved. Such people are frightened of a philistinism of spiritual vision which might confront them with the assertion that the riddles of existence could be finally “solved” by a philosophy. Well, the view of life we are discussing here cannot speak of such a “solution,” for the reason that has just been given: what is always being forgotten must constantly be re-acquired.

But therein lies its vitality! We are brought back again to life as it is revealed externally in nature, as opposed to what we experience inwardly on seeing our thoughts become memories. Perhaps what I want to say will sound banal to many people; but it is not meant to be banal. No one can say: I ate yesterday and so I am full, I do not need to eat today or tomorrow or the day after; similarly, no one can say of modern spiritual vision: It is complete, it has now become part of memory, and we know where we are with it once and for all.

Indeed, it is not just that we must always struggle afresh to perceive what seeks to manifest itself to man; but that, if we dwell continuously over a long period on the same concepts from the spiritual world, seeking them out repeatedly, it will even happen that doubts and uncertainties appear; it is characteristic of true spiritual vision that we should have to conquer these doubts and uncertainties again and again in the vital life of the soul. We are thus never condemned to the calm of completion when we strive towards spiritual vision in the modern sense.

There is another point, too. This modern spiritual vision demands above all what may be called “presence of mind.” The spiritual visionary of ancient Oriental times could take his time. What he achieved was a permanent possession. If man as he is today wishes to look at the spiritual world, he must be spiritually quick-witted, if I may so put it; he must realize that the revelations of the spiritual world appear, only to vanish again at the next moment. They must therefore be caught by “presence of mind” at the moment of their occurrence. And many people prepare themselves carefully for spiritual vision, but fail to attain it through omitting to train this “presence of mind.” Only by doing so can we avoid a situation in which we only become sufficiently attentive when the thing itself is past.

I have now described to you many of the features that the modern seeker after the spiritual world encounters. In the course of my lectures, other features will become apparent. Today, I should like to point to just one more of them, since it will lead directly to a certain historical view of humanity.

When we try as modern men in this sense to find our way with certainty into the spiritual world, without becoming eccentrics, it is best for us to start from concepts and ways of thinking we have obtained from a fundamental study of nature and by immersion in a fundamental natural science. No concepts are quite so suitable for the meditative life I have described as those gained from modern science—not just for us to absorb their content, but rather to meditate upon it. As modern men, we have really learnt to think through science. We must always remember that we have learnt through science the thinking that is suited to our present epoch. Yet what we gain in thinking techniques from modern science is only a preparation for a true spiritual vision.

No logical argument or philosophical speculation will enable us to use ordinary thinking, trained on the objects of the outside world and on experiment and observation, as anything more than a preparation. We must then wait until the spiritual world approaches us in the way I have been describing. For each step we take in the observation of the spiritual world we must first become ripe. We cannot of our own volition do anything except make of ourselves an organ to which the spiritual world is willing to reveal itself. Objective revelation is something we must wait for. And anyone who has experience in such things knows that he has to wait years or decades for certain kinds of knowledge. Again, it is precisely this that guarantees the objectivity of what is real in the spiritual world—that is, of knowledge.

This again was not so for those in ancient times in the Orient who sought through their exercises the way into the super-sensible world. The nature of their thinking from the beginning was such that they needed only to extend it to find the way into the spiritual world which I described two days ago. Even in ordinary life, therefore, their thinking needed only to be extended to lead to a certain clairvoyance. But because it developed from the ordinary life of the times, this was a rather dream-like vision, whereas the vision towards which we as modern men strive operates with complete self-possession, like that which is active in the solution of mathematical problems. It is just when we turn our attention to the intimate experiences of spiritual research that we see in this change the expression of great transformations in human nature as a whole in the course of historical times. I mean times that are “historical” in the sense that they are approachable not only by anyone who can examine the history both of men and of the cosmos through spiritual vision, but also by anyone who examines the external documents quite straightforwardly. In these external documents, too, we can look at early periods in the spiritual life of humanity and perceive how they differ from the position within this spiritual world which we and our time must aspire to.

By virtue of the fact that our thinking cannot just be extended automatically to bring us to spiritual vision, but can only make us ready to see the spiritual world when it appears to us, it is suited to operate within the field of experiment and observation, within the field that natural science has made its own. Yet just because we perceive what inner rigour and strength our thinking has achieved, we shall be all the more likely to apply it to our training, and thus be able to await the revelation of the spiritual world in the true sense of the word. Even here, it is apparent that our thinking today is rather different from that of earlier times.

I shall have opportunities later on for historical digressions. Much that refers to the outside world can then be deduced from what I have to say today. Today, I shall speak rather about the inner powers of man's development. This is a subject that brings us in the end to thinking and to the transformation of this thinking in the course of man's development. But in the last analysis all external history is dependent on thinking, and what he achieves in history man produces from his thoughts, together with his feelings and impulses of will; and therefore, if we want to find the deepest historical impulses, we must turn to human thinking.

But the thinking employed today for natural science on the one hand, and for achieving human freedom on the other, differs quite considerably from that which we find in earlier ages of mankind. There will, of course, be many people who will say: thinking is thinking, whether it occurs in John Stuart Mill or in Soloviev, in Plato, Aristotle and Heraclitus or in the thinkers of the ancient East. Anyone with an intuitive insight into the way thoughts have functioned within humanity, however, will conclude: our thinking today is fundamentally something very different from that of earlier epochs. This raises an important problem in human development.

Let us examine our present-day way of thinking. (I shall have an opportunity later to give evidence from natural science for what I am now expounding historically.) What we call thinking actually developed from the handling of language. Anyone with a sense of what is operative in a people's language—of the logic, familiar to us from childhood, operative in the language—and with enough psychological awareness to observe this in life, will find that our thinking today actually derives from what language makes of our soul's potentialities. I would say: from language we gradually separate thoughts and the laws thoughts obey: our thinking today is given us by speech.

Yet this thinking that is given us by speech is also the thinking that has come of age in human civilization since the days of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, in periods when humanity has been devoting its attention principally to the observation of nature in the modern sense. The thinking that is applied to observation and experiment inevitably becomes a part of us; we refine what we absorb with language as part of our common heritage until it becomes a thought-structure by which we then apprehend the outside world.

But we need only go back a relatively short distance in human history to encounter something quite different. Let us go back, for example, to the civilization of Greece. Anyone who can enter the world of Greek art, Greek literature, Greek philosophy—can catch, in fact, the mood of Greece—will discover quite empirically that the Greeks still experienced thoughts closely interwoven with words. Thought and word were one. By the concept logos, they meant something different from what we mean when we speak of a thought or a thought sequence. They spoke of thought as if the element of speech was its natural physical aspect. Just as in the physical world we cannot conceive our soul as spatially separated from our physical organism, so too in Greek consciousness thought was not separated from word. The two were felt as a unity, and thought flowed along on the waves of words.

But this produces an attitude to the outside world quite different from ours, where thought has already separated from word. And thus, when we go back into Hellenic civilization, fundamentally we have to adopt a quite different temper of soul if we are to penetrate into the real experiences of the Greek soul. By the same token, all the science, for example, that was produced in Greece no longer seems like science by modern standards. The scientist of today will say: the Greeks really had no natural science; they had a natural philosophy. And he will be right. But he will have perceived only a quarter, so to speak, of the problem. Something much more profound is involved. What this is we can explore only by regaining spiritual vision.

If we make use of the way of thinking which is particularly apt for scientific research, and to which we now train ourselves by inheritance and education, and develop what we call scientific concepts, then in the nature of our consciousness we separate these concepts strictly from what we call artistic experience and what we call religious experience. It is a fundamental characteristic of our age that modern man demands a science which involves no element of artistic creation or outlook, and nothing that claims to be the object of religious consciousness and religious devotion to the temporal or the divine. This, we conclude, is a characteristic of our present civilization. And we find this characteristic increasingly well developed the further West we go in our examination of the foundations of human civilization. This is the characteristic: that modern man keeps science, art and religious life separate in his soul. He even endeavours to form a special concept of science, to prevent art from invading science, to exclude the imagination from everything that is “scientific,” except for that part concerned with inventions; and then to put forward another kind of certainty—that of faith—to play its part in religious life.

If you try, in the manner I have described, to rise to a spiritual perception, then, starting of course from the trained scientific thought of the present, you arrive at what I have characterized as vital, plastic thinking. With this plastic thinking, too, you feel equipped to comprehend, in what I will call a qualitatively mathematical way, what cannot be comprehended with ordinary mathematics and geometry: living things. With vital thinking you feel yourself equipped to apprehend living things.

When we look at the purely chemical compounds in the inorganic world, we find that all their materials and forces are in a state of more or less unstable equilibrium. The equilibrium becomes increasingly unstable and the interaction increasingly complicated, the further we ascend towards living things. And as the equilibrium becomes more unstable, so the living structure increasingly evades quantitative understanding: only vital thought can connect up with a living structure in the way that mathematical thought does with a lifeless one. We thus arrive (and as I have previously indicated, I am saying something now that will be shocking to many people) at an epistemological position where ordinary logical abstract thinking is continually being converted into a kind of artistic thinking or artistic outlook, yet one as exact as ever mathematics or mechanics can be.

I know how, impelled by the modern spirit of science, people shrink from transposing anything exact into the artistic sphere, which represents a kind of qualitative mathesis. But what is the good of epistemology insisting that we can only arrive at objective knowledge by moving from one logical deduction to the next, and by excluding from knowledge all these artistic features—if nature and reality do in fact operate artistically at a certain level, so that they only yield to an artistic mode of comprehension?

In particular, we cannot examine what it is that shapes the human organism from within, as I described the day before yesterday—that operates in us as a first approximation to a super-sensible man—unless we allow logical thinking to flow over into a kind of artistic creation, and unless from a qualitative mathematics we can recreate the creative human form. All we need is to retain the scientific spirit and absorb the artistic spirit.

In short, we must create from the science of today an artistic outlook, whilst maintaining the whole spirit of science. In so doing, however, we approach the reconciliation of science and art that Goethe sensed when he said: “The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature—laws which, but for its appearance, would have remained eternally hidden from us.” Goethe was well aware that, if we seek to comprehend nature or the world as a whole solely with the kinds of thought that prove to be healthy and correct for the inorganic world, then the totality of the world simply will not yield to our enquiry. And we shall not find the bridge from inorganic to organic science until we transpose abstract cognition into inwardly vitalized cognition, which is at the same time an inward freedom of action.

In thus turning, within the mental endeavour of today, to a comprehension of living things, we also come closer to what was present in the Greek mind, not in the controlled and conscious way at which we aim, but rather instinctively. And no one can really understand what was being expressed even in Plato, still less in the pre-Socratic philosophers, unless he is aware of the presence there of a co-operation between the artistic and the philosophical and scientific elements in man. Only at the end of the Hellenic age—in philosophy, for instance, with Aristotle—does thought become separated from language and later develop via scholasticism into scientific thought. Only at the end of the Hellenic age is thought sifted out. Earlier on, thought is an artistic element in Greece. And, fundamentally, Greek philosophy can only be understood if it is also apprehended with an artistic understanding.

But this now leads us to see Greece in general as the civilization where science and art are still linked together. This is apparent both in its art and in its science. Naturally, I cannot go into every aspect of this in detail. But if you will look at Greek sculpture with sound common sense and a sound, spiritually informed eye, you will find that the Greek sculptor did not work from a model as is done today: his plastic creation sprang from an inner experience. In forming the muscle, the bent arm, the hand, he made what he felt within him. He felt an inner, living, second man—what I will call an ethereal man; he experienced himself through his soul and in this way felt his outward envelope. His inner experience went over into the sculpture. Art was a revelation of this vision. And the vision, which was carried over into the thought living in the language, became a science that retained an artistic character by being one with what the spirit of the Greek language made manifest to a Greek.

We thus enter, with Greece, a world accessible to us otherwise only if we advance from our own science, divorced from art, to a kind of knowledge that flows over into the artistic sphere. I would say: what we now evolve consciously was once instinctively experienced. Indeed, we can actually see how, in the course of history, this association of art and science gradually passes into the present complete separation of the two.

As humanity developed through Roman times into the Middle Ages, the higher levels of education and training had a quite different basis from that which later prevailed. Later, in the scientific age, the main concern was to communicate to men the results of observation and experiment. In our education, we live almost entirely by absorbing these results. Looking back at the period when some influence of Greek civilization was still at work, we can see that even scientific training touched man closely then and was aimed rather at developing abilities in him. We see how in the Middle Ages the student had to work through the seven liberal arts, as they were called: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. What mattered was abilities. What you were to become as a scientist you achieved through the seven liberal arts—and yet these were already well on the way to becoming knowledge and science, as later happened.

If you study the now much-despised scholasticism of the Middle Ages, which stands at the meeting-place of earlier times and our own, you will see what a wonderful training it provided in the art of thinking. One could wish that people today would only assimilate something of the best type of medieval scholasticism, which fostered in men a technique and art of thinking. This is particularly necessary if, as indeed we must, we are to arrive at clear-cut concepts. By starting from the attitude of today, however, with its strict separation of science, art and religion, and tracing human development back through the Middle Ages, we approach the civilization of Greece. And the further we go back in this, the more clearly we see the fusion of science and art.

Yet even in Greek civilization there is something separate from science and art: religious life. It affects men quite differently from scientific or artistic experience. The vital element in art and science exists objectively in space and time: the content of religious consciousness is beyond space and time. It belongs to eternity; admittedly, it is brought to birth by space and time, but we cannot approach it by remaining within space and time.

We can see even from the external documents what spiritual science today needs to discover about these things. And I should like to draw attention to a work which has just appeared in Austria and which is extraordinarily helpful in this connection. It is Otto Willmann's History of Idealism, a book that stands head and shoulders above many other currently concerned with similar problems. (One can judge such things dispassionately, even if they spring from views opposed to one's own, provided that they lead to something beneficial to spiritual life.)

In Greece we find on the one hand this unity of art and science, and on the other hand the religious life to which the Greek devotes himself. In popular religion, it is true, this is represented plastically, but in the religious mysteries it is gained by initiation in a deeper sense. But everywhere we can see that religion plays no part in the soul-powers evolved in science and art. Instead, in order to partake of the religious life, the soul must first take on that temper of piety, that universal love, in which it can comprehend revelations of the divine and spiritual realm with which man can unite in religious devotion.

Let us now look across at the Orient! The further back we go, the more we find that its spiritual life is something different again. Here, once more, we can be guided by what we have gained through our modern spiritual training: we ascend from experience of the vital concept to that inner pain and suffering which we have to overcome in order that our whole self may become a sense-organ or spiritual organ; and we cease to experience the world in the physical body alone, by existing in the world independently of our physical body. In so doing, we exist in the world in such a way that we learn to experience a reality outside space and time. We thus experience the reality of the spiritual sphere and its influence on the temporal in the way I have described. But if by overcoming pain and suffering within ourselves we do gain spiritual vision, we shall have brought into knowledge something of this other element—the element which, whilst remaining intact as real knowledge, real spiritual cognition, is continually leading knowledge into religious experience. And while continuing to experience what has survived from ancient times as a religious element in venerable traditional concepts, we also experience a similar spiritual element of more recent origin, if we work our way up to a cognition that can exist in the sphere of religious devotion.

Only then do we understand how deep in man lie the springs of the unity of religion, art and science in the ancient East. They were once united: what man knew and admitted to his corpus of ideas was another aspect of what he set up to shine before him in artistic beauty; and what he thus knew and comprehended, and made to radiate beauty, was also something spiritual to which he made his devotions and which he treated as subject to a higher order. Here we see religion, art and science united.

This, however, takes us back into an age where not only did thought live on the waves of words, but where also it was man's experience that thought inhabited regions deeper even than words, and was connected with the innermost texture of human nature. For this reason, the Indian yogi elicited thoughts from breathing, which goes deeper than words. Only gradually did thought raise itself into words and then, in modern civilization, beyond words. Originally, however, thought was connected with more intimate and deeper human experience, and that was when the unity of religious, artistic and scientific life could unfold in complete harmony.

Today, there remains in the Orient an echo of what I have described to you as a harmonious unity of religion, art and philosophy, as it appears for instance in the vedas. But it is an echo which requires to be understood—and which we cannot easily understand simply from the standpoint of that isolation of religion, art and science which exists in Western civilization. We do truly understand it, however, if by a new spiritual science we rise to an outlook that can again produce a harmony of religion, art and science. In the Orient, meanwhile, we still have the remnants of that early unity before us. If you look, you will see that just where the East touches and influences Europe, the echo still persists. A past historical epoch remains present at a certain spot on the earth. We can perceive this presence in a great philosopher of Eastern Europe, in Soloviev.

This philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century has a quite special effect on us. When we look at the philosophers of the West, John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer or others, we find that their standpoint has grown out of the scientific thinking I have described today. In Soloviev, however, something survives which presents religion, art and science as a unity. When we first begin to read Soloviev, it is true, we notice that he uses the philosophical language he found in Kant or Comte; he has complete command of the modes of expression of these philosophers of Western and Central Europe. But when we become at home in his mind and in what he expresses by the use of these modes, our awareness of him changes. He arouses a sense of the past; he seems like someone who has come to life again from the discussions that preceded the Council of Nicaea. We perceive, in fact, the tone that prevails in the discussions of the early Christian fathers; and in those early centuries of Christianity there certainly did survive an echo of the unity of religion and science. This unity, in which volition and thought also flow together, informs Soloviev's East European philosophy of life.

And if we look at the culture and civilization around us today, we do indeed find in the more Westerly parts just that separation of religion, art and science; what really belongs to our moment of history, the real basis of our activities and our picture of the world, is the discipline that is strictly built up on scientific thinking, whereas in art forms and religious matters we take over older traditional material. We can see today how few new styles are produced in art, and how everywhere old ones live on. The vital element in our time is what is vital in scientific thinking. We must wait for a time that will have lively imaginal thinking as I have described it—a thinking that will again lead to what is vital and will be capable of artistic creativity in new styles, without becoming insipidly allegorical and inartistic.

Scientific thought, we find, is thus the motive impulse of the immediate present, especially the further West we move; while in the East we find an echo of an earlier unity of religion, art and science.

This religious strain forms part of the temperament of East Europeans, with which they look at the world. They are able to understand the West only indirectly, via a spiritual development like that contained in our spiritual science movement; they have no direct understanding of the West, precisely because people in the West attempt to distinguish sharply religion and art from scientific thought.

We who live between the two must allow the world of the senses to obtrude on us and must entertain the thought appropriate to it; but we cannot help also looking inward and experiencing our inner self, and for the inner self we need religious experience. But I would say: more deeply buried in human nature than the religious experience we need within us and the scientific experience we need for observing the outside world, is the link between the two, artistic experience.

Artistic experience is thus something which today is not a first demand on life. We have seen that Western civilization is concerned with scientific thoughts, and Eastern civilization with religious ones. We have seen that we are part of an artistic tradition, but that we cannot feel entirely at home in it, indeed that the artistic tradition itself is in many ways a revival. And yet one must say: the yearning for a balance of this kind is certainly present in the central region between East and West. We see it, for example, when we look at Goethe.

For what was Goethe's great longing when, with what I would call his predominantly artistic talents, he was faced by the riddles of nature? His artistic sense transformed itself naturally into his scientific outlook. One could say: in Goethe, the representative Central European, we find art and science all of a piece; all of a piece, too, is Goethe's life when we follow its development and know how to locate it properly within the history of recent times. Goethe made himself at home in the collaboration of art and science. There thus arose in him a longing that can only be understood historically: the urge towards Italy, to a more southerly civilization. After looking at the works of art he found in the South, he wrote to his friends in Weimar something that followed on from the philosophy and science he had come to know there in Weimar. In Spinoza he had found divine power represented philosophically. That did not satisfy him. He wanted an extended and spiritualized approach to the world and to spirituality. And in the sight of the Southern works of art he wrote to his friends: “Here is necessity, here is God!” “I have an idea that the Greeks operated according to the laws by which nature herself operates; I am on their track.” Here Goethe is trying to merge science and art.

If in conclusion I introduce a personal note, I do so only to show you how a single pointer can reveal the way in which the Middle region can take up a position between East and West. I encountered this pointer some forty years ago here in Vienna. In my youth I made the acquaintance of Karl Julius Schröer—he was then lecturing on the history of German literature from Goethe onwards. In his introductory lecture he made a number of important points; and he then said something entirely characteristic of the longing that instinctively inspired the best minds in Central Europe. Schröer's words, too, were instinctive. Yet in fact he expressed a longing to combine art and science, to combine Western scientific thought and Eastern religious thought in artistic vision; and he summed up what he wanted to say in the, to me, significant words: “The Germans have an aesthetic conscience.”

Of course, this does not describe an actual state of affairs. It expresses a longing, the longing to look at art and science together. And the feeling when we do look at them together has been finely expressed by another Central European, one whom I have just characterized: when we can look at science and art together, we can then raise ourselves to religious experience, if only the science and art contain true spirituality in Goethe's sense. This is what he meant by saying:

Whoever has science and art.
Has religion too;
Whoever does not have them,
Let him have religion.

Anyone with an aesthetic conscience attains to scientific and religious conscientiousness too. From this we can see where we stand today.

I do not like using the word “transition”—all periods are transitional—but today, in a time of transition, what matters is the kind of transition. In our time we have experienced and developed to its supreme triumph the separation of religion, art and science. What must now be sought, and what alone can provide an understanding between East and West, is the harmonization, the inner unity of religion, art and science. And this inner unity is what the philosophy of life of which I have been speaking seeks to attain.

Today I would like to address myself to a subject specifically requested by our friends here, a subject having great significance for modern spiritual life. It shall be considered from the standpoint I have often taken when speaking of things of the spirit. As a rule, it is difficult to speak of such a unique and deeply significant subject unless it be assumed that the audience keep in mind various things explained in other lectures given on the foundations of spiritual science. This science is neither widely recognized nor popular; in fact, it is a most unpopular and much misunderstood spiritual stream of our day. Misunderstandings can easily arise especially with a subject like the one chosen today, because the opinion is far too widespread that anthroposophy might undermine this or that religious creed, thereby interfering with what someone may hold precious. Anyone willing to go into anthroposophy in any depth sees that this opinion is completely false. In one sense, spiritual science aims to develop further the way of thinking that entered human evolution through natural science. By strengthening the human soul, it seeks to make this kind of thinking fruitful. The way spiritual science must proceed differs significantly, however, from the way taken by natural science. Anthroposophy takes its start, not from the world perceived by the external senses, but from the world of the spirit. Questions pertaining to the spiritual life of the soul must therefore be considered from the standpoint of spiritual science. Undoubtedly for many in our time the most important question in the spiritual life of humanity pertains to the subject of today's lecture, that is, Christ Jesus.

To ensure that we shall understand each other at least to some extent, I would like to make a few preliminary observations before moving on to any specific questions. Spiritual science, though it is the continuation of natural science, makes entirely different demands on the human soul. This fact accounts for the misunderstanding and opposition spiritual science encounters. The kind of thinking derived from natural science is tied up with a problem that more or less concerns human souls today when they consider higher aspects of life. This is the problem of the limits to knowledge. Spiritual science in no way belittles the most admirable attempt of philosophers to ascertain the extent of human thought and knowledge. Thinkers who judge on the basis of what can ordinarily be observed in the soul easily conclude that human knowledge can go so far and no farther. It is commonly said, “This fact can be known; that other cannot.”

On this issue spiritual science takes a completely different stand because it takes into consideration the development of the human soul. Granted, in ordinary life and science the soul does indeed confront certain limits of knowledge. The soul, however, may take itself in hand, transform itself and thereby acquire the possibility of penetrating into spheres of existence radically unlike those usually experienced.

Here I can only indicate what in earlier lectures and in such books as An Outline of Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have already explained, namely, that the soul can completely change itself. Through practicing certain exercises, the soul may bring about an infinite enhancement of its inherent forces of attention and devotion. Ordinarily, the soul-spiritual life uses the human body like an instrument. Just as hydrogen is bound to oxygen in water, so is this life closely connected with the body, within which it works. Now, just as hydrogen may be separated from oxygen and shown to have completely different qualities from water, so may the soul, through the exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, separate itself from the body. By thus turning away from and lifting itself out of the body, the soul acquires an inner life of its own.

Not by speculation or philosophy but by devoted discipline can the soul emancipate itself from the body. To live as a soul-spiritual being, apart from the body is the great experience of the spiritual investigator. Here I can only indicate things I have elaborated elsewhere.

Today my task is to show how the spiritual investigator must regard the Christ Jesus Event. Statements of religious creeds concerning this event are derived from experiences of the soul in its life within the body. The statements of the spiritual investigator come from clairvoyant experiences of the soul as it lives independently of the body in the spiritual world. In this condition the soul can survey the whole course of mankind's evolution.

What the spiritual investigator thereby learns of Christ Jesus calls for a certain way of speaking, because the investigator acquires his knowledge in immediate spiritual vision while living separated from his body. Yet he can communicate this knowledge only indirectly by turning his attention to the things of this world. His description, however, must convey what he has experienced in spiritual vision. Thus, what follows in way of explanation of certain processes in man's external life is not meant to be taken metaphorically. It is intended rather to express something in which spiritual science must come to an understanding with natural science. In respect to one point in particular it is most important to come to terms with present-day thought.

In natural science it is admitted that a mere descriptive enumeration of single events in nature is inadequate. It is recognized that the scientist must proceed from a description of natural phenomena to the laws invisibly animating them. These laws we perceive when we relate phenomena with each other, or when we immerse ourselves in them. In this way they reveal their inner laws. In the treatment of historical facts, however, this natural scientific method is not easily applied.

Now, as a rule, I am disinclined to speak of personal matters, but in the following case I can speak of something objective. The title of my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, which was first published many years ago, was not chosen without due reflection. It was selected to indicate a certain way of observing things. It was not entitled The Mysticism of Christianity because I did not intend to deal with this topic, nor was it entitled Christian Mysticism because I did not intend to write on that theme, the mystical life of the Christian, either. What I sought to show was that the Christ impulse, the entrance of Christianity into mankind's development, can be comprehended only by perceiving how the super-sensible plays into the development ordinarily described in history. As these facts are accessible only to spiritual vision, they can be called mystical. They are mystical while at the same time having occurred on earth.

The origin and development of Christianity can be understood only when we realize that facts in history arrange themselves as do facts in our solar system, where the sun has the major role and the other planets less important parts. This arrangement can be recognized when facts are seen from a natural scientific standpoint. In the field of history, however, facts are rarely so viewed. Here, the succession of facts is easily described, but the fact that the way of contemplating the historical facts differs from the way of contemplating scientific facts is lost sight of.

There is a law in natural science whose validity is more or less acknowledged by all, despite this or that detail of it being open to dispute. This law, first formulated by Ernst Haeckel, has become fundamental to biology. It states that a living being recapitulates in its embryonic life, passes through stages of development that resemble those of the lower animals such as the fishes. This is a law recognized in science.

Now there is another law, which can be discovered by spiritual vision, that is of great importance in mankind's development. Because it is valid only in the sphere of spiritual life it presents a rather different aspect than the law just mentioned, but it is as true as any in natural science. It enables us to say what is undoubtedly true, that humanity has passed through many stages in its development, and that as it has passed from one epoch to another, from one century to another, it has taken on various forms. We need only assume that the epochs known to history were preceded by primeval ones. At this point we may ask if the life of humanity as a whole can be compared with anything else. Of course, any comparison concerning mankind's development must be the outcome of spiritual-scientific observation. External facts must be used as a language, as a means of communication, to express what the spiritual investigator perceives. What he perceives is that mankind's development as a whole may be compared with the life of a single man.

The experiences of mankind in ancient cultures—in those of Egypt and China, Persia and India, Greece and Rome—were different from those of our time. In those ancient epochs man's soul lived in conditions different from those of today. Just as in the individual human life the experiences of childhood are not the same as those of youth or old age, so in these cultures mankind's experiences were not the same as ours are today. Human development passes through various forms in the various ages of life.

The following question now arises. What stage in the individual life of man may be compared with the present epoch of humanity? This question can be answered only by spiritual science. Anthroposophy stands upon such a foundation that it can say that when man enters his life on earth he does not inherit everything from his mother and father that belongs to his being. We can say that man descends from a life in the spirit to an existence on earth, and that the spiritual part of his being follows certain laws whereby it connects itself with what is inherited from the parents. Further, we can say that the spiritual part helps in the whole growth and development of the human body. We see how the soul and spirit takes hold of and works upon physical substance. The wonderful mystery of man's gradual development, the emergence of definite traits from indefinite, capacities from incapacities, all bear witness to the sculpting power of these spiritual forces. Through spiritual science we are lead to look back from this present life to former lives on earth. We see that the way our soul-spiritual being prepares the bodily organization and the course our destiny takes depend[s] upon what we have elaborated and gained for ourselves in former lives.

Exact spiritual-scientific investigation shows that during the whole ascending course of our lives, up to our thirties, the fruits won from former lives on earth and brought with us from the spiritual world still exercise an immediate influence upon our physical existence and destiny. Our soul, being connected with the external world, progresses as we experience life on earth. From these experiences a soul-spiritual kernel forms itself within us. Up until our thirtieth to thirty-fifth years we arrange our lives in accordance with the spiritual forces we have brought with us from the spiritual world. From the middle of our lives onward the forces of our soul-spiritual kernel begin to work. This seed, containing what we have already elaborated, continues to work within us for the rest of our lives.

Even after a plant has faded away, the forces capable of producing a new one survive. These forces are like the soul-spiritual forces we gain for ourselves in the first half of life and that predominate in the second. When, in this second period of life, our senses weaken, our hair turns gray and our skin becomes wrinkled, our external life may be compared with a dying plant. Yet, in this period what we have prepared since our birth, what we have not brought with us from a preceding life but have rather elaborated in this life, grows ever stronger and more powerful. It is the part in us that passes through the portal of death, that casts off life as something faded. It is that part in us that passes over into the spiritual world. At an important moment in our life, when the fresh forces of our youth start to wane, we begin to cultivate something new on earth, that is, a soul-spiritual seed that passes through death.

We may now ask ourselves what period in human life can be compared with the present epoch, considering the whole development of humanity. Can our present age be compared with the first part of human life, with the first thirty to thirty-five years, or with the latter part. Spiritual-scientific observation of the present age reveals that our existence in the external world can in fact be compared only with the period of human life lying beyond the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years. Human development on earth has already passed the middle part of life. We need only compare the experiences of mankind in our present culture with experiences undergone in the Egyptian-Babylonian or Greco-Roman cultures. We need only point to our mighty and admirable technical and industrial achievements to show that man has now severed himself from what is directly and instinctively connected with his body.

Men in ancient cultures faced the world as a child does. The child's life is an ascending one, completely dependent upon the body. Mankind's life today, in contrast, is mechanical, cut off from the body. History, science, philosophy and religion all show that mankind in its evolution has reached a point lying beyond the middle of life. Modern pedagogy, with its efforts to be established on rational lines, especially bears out this fact. Modern pedagogy differs markedly from ancient pedagogy. Children growing up under our artificial education become severed from the direct impulses of humanity. An earlier education, one in an epoch lying before mankind's middle life, was derived from intuition and instinct. Observation of the riddles of education strongly confirms the fact that humanity has now passed beyond the point of maturity. We may now ask ourselves what point in humanity's evolution corresponds to the point in the individual life of man that lies between the thirtieth and thirty-fifth years.

When the spiritual investigator, objectively observing the evolution of humanity, turns his gaze on ancient times, he finds a trend that culminates in the Greco-Roman epoch. He finds that then humanity as a whole reached that age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of an individual man. The individual man may use a surplus of vital forces in his body to live beyond the descending point in his life and to cultivate up until his death a soul-spiritual kernel. In the life of humanity as a whole, however, things take a different course. When the youthful forces of humanity cease to flow, as it were, a new impulse is needed for its further development, an impulse not lying within humanity itself. Even if we know nothing whatsoever of the Gospels or of tradition, we need only look at mankind's historical development to discover in the Greco-Roman epoch the entrance of such an impulse. There, at a certain moment, the turning point of man's whole earthly development occurred. A completely new impulse entered the course of man's evolution, when its youthful forces were on the wane. An examination of the ancient mysteries will throw more light on this historical fact.

These mysteries, which existed in every culture and which to some extent have reached our knowledge through literature, were functions performed at centers that served both as schools and churches. Through cultic rites intended to transform the everyday life of soul, these functions enabled men to attain to higher knowledge. These mystery schools took different forms in different countries, but at all centers those souls whom the leaders of the schools believed capable of development received training.

In the mysteries man's soul life was not regarded as it is today. In this ancient viewpoint, which anthroposophy must renew, the soul was deemed unfit in its ordinary state to penetrate into those spheres where its inmost being flows together with the very source of life. The ancients felt that the human soul had to prepare itself for knowledge by undergoing a certain moral and esthetic training. They thought that through this inner training the soul could transform itself and thereby acquire forces of knowledge surpassing those of ordinary life. The soul then became capable of perceiving those mysteries that lie behind external phenomena.

There were basically two kinds of center[s] where pupils were trained to acquire spiritual wisdom and a vision of life's mysteries. Pupils of the first kind, under the guidance of the centers' leaders, especially developed the psychic life. During spiritual vision they could free themselves from the body. The Egyptian and Greek mysteries offered this kind of training. The other kind existed in the Persian mysteries of Asia Minor.

Pupils of these Egyptian and Greek mysteries were trained to turn their senses away from the external world and thus eventually to enter the condition man ordinarily falls into unawares when he is overcome by sleep, when sense impressions cease. The soul of the pupil was led completely into his inner self, and his inner life was given a strength and intensity far surpassing that required to receive merely sense impressions. After pursuing his exercises for a long time, the pupil reached a certain stage in his inner life when he could say to himself, “Man learns to know his real being only when he has torn himself away from his body.” The strange but distinct mood evoked in the pupil's soul gave rise to an experience he could characterize with the words, “In everyday life, when I use my body to connect myself with the world of the senses, I do not really live within my full human nature. Only when I have a deeper experience of myself within my own being am I a man in the fullest meaning of the word.” This experience impressed on him that man can know his spiritual essence by penetrating into his innermost soul. He thereby could draw near to God, the primeval source of his being. Within himself he could feel that point where his soul life united with the divine source of existence.

It must be added that this type of training resulted in an increase of egotism, not a decrease. The leaders of the mysteries thus set great store upon a schooling in human love and unselfishness. They knew that through the wisdom of the mysteries a pupil could indeed unite with his god even though he were insufficiently prepared, but they realized that he could do so only at the price of increased egotism. By withdrawing from the sense world and entering the spiritual world he could experience the human self, the human ego, far more strongly than is usually the case. The men in these mysteries who, by strengthening their inner lives perceived God, remained useful members of human society only if they had first passed through a spiritual development grounded in a sound preparation of the moral life. This, the Dionysian initiation, led man to experience within himself what lies at the base of all human nature, that is, Dionysos.

In the other type of initiation, practiced mainly in Asia Minor and Central Asia, man was led to the secrets of life by an opposite method. He had to subdue all his inner soul experiences, to free himself of the cares and troubles, the passions and instincts of his personal existence. He could then experience the outer course of nature far more intensely than is normally done. Whereas we normally experience only winter and summer, the disciples of these initiation centers had to experience, in a special way, the change from one season to another. Even as our hands share in the life of our bodies, so did the disciple have to share in the life of the earth. When the earth grew cold, when its plant covering began to fade, he had to feel within his soul its life of sadness and desolation. He had to share in these experiences as a member of the whole organism of the earth. Too, he could share in the rising life of spring and of the earth's awakening at midsummer, when the sun stands at its highest point on the horizon. He felt those forces of the sun in union with the whole earth.

In this kind of initiation the disciple's soul was drawn out of his inner being, whereby he could participate in the events of the cosmos and raise himself to the soul-spiritual essence permeating the universe. His experience differed markedly from ordinary contemplation of nature because he felt he lived within the very soul of the universe. In not a bad but a good sense, he was beside himself. He was, though one hesitates to use this word because it has taken on an unpleasant connotation, in ecstasy. Upon achieving this union with the cosmos he could say to himself that through living in the universe and through experiencing its most intimate soul-spiritual forces, he had come to realize that everywhere the final goal of the cosmos is the creation of man. Did man not exist, the whole creation could not fulfill its end, because he was the meaning of the cosmos.

It is one thing to say this; it is quite another to experience it. The disciples of the mysteries felt this fact because they entered into the life of the universe with an enhanced selfconsciousness. Indeed, this proud sense of self was indispensable to their experience of the cosmos. Whereas egotism resided in man's penetration into his spiritual being, pride lay in his union with the soul-spiritual essence of the world. Therefore, those who prepared the disciples for such an experience took care that they did not completely fall prey to pride.

In ancient times, all the truths constituting man's knowledge were acquired through the mysteries on the one or the other path. Humanity's course of development was then on the ascent. Man was unfolding fresh forces and lived in the stage of childhood, as it were. He had to learn through the mysteries how to reach the spiritual worlds. Ancient civilizations always revealed one of these two sides: that derived from man's strengthening his inner life, and that derived from his surveying the whole universe, which enabled him to say that all this pointed to the human being, to the soul-spiritual part he bears within him. Such a disciple of the second kind of initiation could also say when he looked out into the world's spaces, “There, in the wide reaches of the universe, something lives that must enter into me if I am to fully know myself as a human being. But when I live on the earth, unable to look out into the wide world, the spirit cannot come to me, and I cannot really know myself as man.”

Humanity then entered an epoch in which its youthful forces became exhausted. The whole human race reached an age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of the individual man. In this epoch the ancient mysteries, which existed to help humanity in its youth, had lost their meaning. Furthermore, something happened that is most difficult to understand even now. When man attempted to rise to the soul-spiritual essence of the cosmos, this essence no longer drew near him; he could no longer experience the god within himself.

When the ancient Persian surpassed his ordinary state of consciousness, he could feel how God descended upon his soul, how his soul became permeated by the God of the universe. Humanity always had this possibility so long as it possessed its youthful forces. But in the Greco-Roman epoch this possibility ended. Then, everything prescribed in the ancient mysteries to bring inspiration to man became ineffectual, because humanity was receptive to this inspiration only in the time of its youth. Something else now arose. What man could no longer receive because individual human nature had lost the capacity of receiving it even with the help of the mysteries, now entered into the whole evolution of humanity. One human being had to come who could directly unite the two initiation paths.

Purely from the standpoint of spiritual science, apart from all the Gospels, we now see Christ Jesus entering the evolution of the world. Let us imagine someone who knows nothing whatsoever of the Gospels, knows nothing of traditions, but who has entered modern civilization with a soul permeated by spiritual science. Such a person would have to say to himself, “There came a time in the evolution of the world and in the history of humanity when man's receptivity for spiritual life ceased.” But humanity has preserved its soul-spiritual life. How can this be? The soul-spiritual essence that man once took into himself must have entered the evolution of the earth in some other way, independently of man. A Being must have taken into himself what the mystery disciples once received through the power of a most highly developed soul life. In sum, a human being must have appeared who inwardly possessed what the one mystery path enabled the soul to experience directly, namely, the spiritual essence of the external world, the spirit of the universe.

Spiritual science thus regards Christ Jesus as one who inherently possessed those strengthened powers of soul formerly acquired by disciples of the one mystery path. With these powers of soul he could take into himself from the cosmos what the disciples of the other mystery path had once received. From the standpoint of spiritual science we can say that what the disciples of the ancient mysteries once sought through an external connection with the Godhead came to expression in immediate form and as historical fact in Christ Jesus. When did this happen? It happened in that age when the forces that were already exhausted in humanity as a whole were also exhausted in the life of the individual human being. In his thirtieth year of life Jesus had reached the age humanity as a whole had then attained. It was in this year that he received the Christ. Into his fully developed, inwardly strengthened soul he received the spirit of the cosmos. At the turning point of human evolution we discover that a man has taken into his soul the divine-spiritual essence of the universe. What was striven for in the ancient mysteries has now become an historical event.

Let us proceed, bearing in mind indications of the Gospels concerning the life of Christ Jesus from the Baptism in the Jordan to His Resurrection. Spiritual science enables us to say that in this period something completely new entered the evolution of humanity. In the past, man made a real contact with the divine essence only through the mysteries. What was thus experienced in the mysteries went out into the world as revelations, to be accepted in faith. In the event we are now considering, the contact with the spiritual-divine essence of the cosmos happened in such a way that within the man Jesus, Christ entered the stream of earthly life for a period of three years. Then, at the Mystery of Golgotha, a force that formerly lived outside the earth poured itself out into the world. All the events through which Christ passed while living in the body of Jesus brought about the existence of this power in the earthly world, in the earthly part of the cosmos. Ever since that time this power lives in the same atmosphere in which our souls live.

We may term one of the two types of initiation sub-earthly and designate the other, in which man took up the spirit of the cosmos, super-earthly. In either case, man had to abandon his human essence to make contact with the divine essence. The Mystery of Golgotha, however, concerns not only the individual human being but the whole history of man on earth as well. Through this event humanity received something completely new. With the Baptism in the river Jordan something formerly experienced by every disciple of the mysteries entered a single human being, and from this single human being something streamed out into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, enabling every soul that would do so to live and be immersed in it. This new impulse entered the earthly sphere through the death and resurrection of Christ. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha man lives in a spiritual environment, an environment that has been Christianized because it has absorbed the Christ impulse. Ever since the time when human evolution entered upon its descent, the human soul can revive itself; it can establish a connection with Christ. Man can grow beyond the forces of death that he bears within him. The spiritual source of man's origin can no longer be found on the old path; it must be found on a new path, by seeking a connection with Christ within the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

The Christ Event appears to the spiritual investigator in a special light. It may be of interest to describe what he can actually experience after he has so changed his soul that he can perceive the spiritual world. The spiritual investigator can behold a variety of spiritual processes and beings, but he sees them in a special way, depending upon whether or not he has experienced the Christ impulse during his physical existence. Even today one may be a spiritual investigator without having made any inner connection with the Christ impulse. One who has passed through a certain soul development and attained to spiritual vision may thereby investigate many mysteries of the world, mysteries lying at the foundation of the universe; yet even with this vision, it is possible that he still cannot learn anything of the Christ impulse and of the Being of Christ. If we establish a connection with Christ while in the physical body, however, before the attainment of spiritual vision, if this connection is established through feeling, then this experience of Christ that we have gained while in the body remains with us like a memory when we enter the spiritual world. We perceive that even while we lived in the body we had a connection with the spiritual world.

The Christ impulse thus appears to us as the spiritual essence given to man at a time when the ancient inheritance no longer existed in human evolution. What the individual human being experiences after his thirtieth to thirty-fifth years, the whole of humanity experienced at the beginning of our era. Humanity, which unlike the individual human being does not possess a body, would have lost its connection with the divine-spiritual world had not a superearthly Being, a Being who descended to the earth from the cosmos, poured out his essence into the earth's evolution. This act enabled man to restore his connection with the spiritual world.

I realize that I am presenting things that are even less popular with the public than are the principles of spiritual science. Today I can give but a few indications, which in themselves cannot produce any kind of conviction. In regard to the Christ impulse I can only point out the direction taken by spiritual science, which seeks to be a continuation of natural science. The thoughts I have just presented must gradually enter into human evolution, which they will the more spiritual science enters into it. Unlike many other things being advanced today, spiritual science is not easy. It assumes that before attaining to certain definite experiences the soul must first transform itself.

In respect to the Christ experience in particular, spiritual science points out the significant fact that in the ancient mysteries man could find a connection with the divine essence only by going out of his own being. To experience the divine essence he had to abandon his humanity, become something no longer human. After the turning point of human evolution, however, the wonderful and significant possibility arose that man no longer needed to go out of himself in the one direction or the other. Indeed, man lacked the strength to do so. Nor could he in his youth anticipate a time when this would be possible since humanity had already reached a definite age.

The Mystery of Golgotha enabled man to transcend his ordinary human essence while still retaining his humanity. He could now find Christ by remaining man, not by increasing his egotism or pride. It now became possible for man to find Christ by deepening and strengthening himself in his own being. With Christianity something entered human evolution that enabled man to say to himself, “You must remain a human being; you must remain man in your inmost self. As a human being you will find within yourself that element in which your soul is immersed ever since the Mystery of Golgotha. You need not abandon your human essence by descending into egotism or by rising into pride.”

Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha the quality that each human soul now needs, the quality that in past epochs could be found only outside humanity, must be found in humanity itself, within the evolution of the earth. This deepest and most significant human quality is love. Man in his development must no longer follow the course of strengthening his soul on the one mystery path that leads to egotism, because ever since the Mystery of Golgotha it is essential that man acquire the capacity of transcending egotism, of conquering egotism and pride. Having done this, he can experience the higher self within him. A path of development must now be followed that does not lead us into egotism and pride but that remains within the element of love. This truth lies at the foundation of St. Paul's significant words, “Not I, but Christ in me.”

Only after the Mystery of Golgotha did it become possible to objectively experience Christ as that element enabling man to unite with the divine essence. A pupil of the ancient mysteries may indeed have anticipated St. Paul's words, but he could not have experienced their fulfillment. The mystery disciples and their followers could say, “Outside my own being is a god who pours his essence into me.” Or else they could say, “When I strengthen my inner being, I learn to know God in the depths of my own soul.” Today, however, each human being can say, “The love that passes over into other souls and into other beings cannot be found outside my own being; it can be found only by continuing along the paths of my own soul.”

When we immerse ourselves lovingly into other beings, our souls remain the same; man remains human even when he goes beyond himself and discovers Christ within him. That He can be thus found was made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. The soul remains within the human sphere when it attains to that experience expressed by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.” We then have the mystical experience of feeling that a higher human essence lives in us, an essence that enwraps us in the same element that bears the soul from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation. This is the mystical experience of Christ, which we can have only through a training in love.

Spiritual science shows how it became possible for the human being to have this inner, mystical experience of Christ. By way of comparison, we find in Western philosophy the thought expressed that had we no eyes we could not see colors. Our eyes must be so built that they can perceive colors; there must be an inner predisposition to colors in our eyes, so to speak. Had we no eyes, the world would be colorless and dark for us. The same reasoning applies to the other senses. They too must be predisposed for the perception of the external world. From this argument Schopenhauer and other philosophers have concluded that the external world is a world of our representations. Goethe has coined the fine motto, “Were the eye not sun-like it could never perceive the sun.” We might say further, “The human soul could never understand Christ were it not able so to transform itself that it could inwardly experience the words, ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’”

Goethe had something else in mind when he expressed the truth that were the eye not sun-like it could not see the sun, namely, that our eyes could not exist had there been no light to form them from the sightless human being. The one thought is as true as the other: There could be no perception without eyes and also no eyes without light.

Similarly, it can be said that did the soul not inwardly experience Christ, did it not identify itself with the power of Christ, Christ would be non-existent for the soul. How can the human soul perceive Christ unless it identifies itself with Him? Yet the opposite thought is just as true, that is, man can experience Christ within himself only because at a definite moment in history the Christ impulse entered the evolution of humanity. Without the historical Christ there could be no mystical Christ. The assertion that the human soul could experience Christ even if Christ had never entered the evolution of mankind is a mere abstraction. Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha it was impossible to have a mystical experience of Christ. Any other argument is based on a misunderstanding. Just as it would be impossible for us to have the mystical experience of Christ without the historical Christ, even though the historical Christ can be discovered only by those who have experienced the mystical Christ.

Through spiritual science we are thus led to a vision of Christ not based upon the Gospels. Through spiritual science we can perceive that in the course of history Christ entered the evolution of humanity, and we know that He had once to live in a human being so that He could find a path leading through a human being into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

Spiritual research thus leads us to Christ, and through Christ to the historical Jesus. It does this at a time when external investigation, based upon external documents, so often questions the historical existence of Jesus.

The thoughts I have here presented may of course meet with opposition, but I can fully understand it if some say my statements appear to them like a fantastic dream.

From a spiritual contemplation of the whole evolution of humanity we can, through spiritual science, come to a recognition of Christ, and through Christ's own nature we can recognize that He once must have lived in a human body. Spiritual-scientific investigation necessarily leads to the historical Jesus. Indeed, it is possible to indicate with mathematical precision when Christ must have lived in the man Jesus, in the historical Jesus. Just as it is possible to understand external mechanical forces through mathematics, so is it possible to understand Jesus by regarding history with a spiritual vision that encompasses Christ. That Being Who lived in Jesus from his thirtieth to thirty-third years gave the impulse humanity needed for its development at a time when its youthful forces were beginning to decline.

In recapitulation, I can say that a new understanding of Christ is a necessity today. Spiritual science not only tries to lead us to Christ; it must do so. All the truths it advances must lead from a spiritual contemplation of man's development to a comprehension of Christ. Men will experience Christ in ever greater measure, and through Christ they will discover Jesus.

Thus, I have tried to day to take my start from the evolution of humanity, directing your gaze from Jesus, upon whom many look with skepticism, to Christ. In future, Jesus will be found on that path we may characterize with the words, “Through a spiritual knowledge of Christ to an historical knowledge of Jesus.”

The theosophical world view differs from all remaining world views, which we can meet in the present, because it also satisfies knowledge. We have so often heard in the present: we cannot recognise certain matters; our cognitive faculties have limits and cannot rise up above a certain height. If we let the philosophical investigations of the present approach us, then one often speaks of such limits of knowledge in particular those philosophical schools which go back to Kantianism. The view of the theosophist and the practical mystic differs from all such discussions because it never puts limits to the human cognitive faculties, but considers them in such a way that they can be extended. Is it not a big immodesty, if anybody considers his particular cognitive faculties, his point of cognition as something decisive and says that we cannot go with our cognitive faculties beyond a certain limit?

The theosophist says: I stand on a certain point of view of human cognition today. From this point of view I can recognise this or that, and I cannot recognise this or that. But it is possible to develop the human cognitive faculties to increase them. What one calls initiatory schools is intended basically to increase these human cognitive faculties to a higher level, so that it is indeed correct if one says from a lower level of knowledge that there are limits of cognition, that one cannot recognise this or that. But one can also rise up above such a level of knowledge, one can get to higher levels, and then one can recognise what one could not recognise on subordinate levels. This is the nature of initiation, and this deepening or rise of knowledge is the task of the initiatory schools. It is a matter of raising the human being to the levels of knowledge on which he cannot stand from nature which he has to attain only with long-standing patient exercises.

At all times, there have been such initiatory schools. With all peoples recognising men of higher kind came from such initiatory schools. The nature of such initiatory schools and of the great initiates who have outgrown the lower levels of the human cognitive faculties and got to the highest knowledge, which is accessible to us on earth, expresses itself in the fact that these initiates gave the different religions and world views to the different peoples.

We want to outline the nature of these great initiates today. As one must get to know the methods of every science, of every spiritual procedure with which one penetrates to knowledge, it is also in the initiatory schools. Also there it is the point that we are led to higher stages of cognition using certain methods of which we have just spoken. Now I shortly invoke the concerning stages. Certain levels of knowledge are to be attained only in the intimate initiatory schools, where teachers are who themselves have experienced that school, who have carried out those exercises, who can really consider any single stage, any single step. One has to confide in such teachers of these initiatory schools only.

Indeed, there is nothing of authority in these initiatory schools, nothing of the principle of dogmatism, but only the principle of advising holds sway. Who has gone through certain stages of study and has thereby acquired the experiences of the higher super-sensible life knows the intimate ways leading to this higher cognition. Only such a man/woman is competent to say what one has to do. What is necessary in this field between pupil and teacher is confidence only. Who does not have this confidence is not able to learn anything. Who has this confidence sees very soon that by any esoteric or mystic teacher nothing else is recommended than what this teacher himself has worked through. The point is that only the externally visible part of the whole entity of the human being is completed, as well as the human being faces us today. Everybody who strives for esoteric instructions has to get clear in his mind that the human being is not a completed being today, as he faces us, but that he is developing that he gets to much higher stages in future.

What has already attained the image of God today, what of the human being has come to the highest level is the human sensuous body what we see of him with eyes, what we can generally perceive with our senses. However, this is not the only what the human being has. The human being has even higher members of his nature. At first, he has a member which we call the etheric body. Someone who has developed the soul organs can see this etheric body. Because of this etheric body the human being is not only a creation in which chemical and physical forces work but a living creation that lives and is provided with growth, life and the capacity of reproduction. One can see this etheric body which is a kind of archetype of the human being, if one suggests the usual physical body away with the methods of clairvoyance that are still characterised afterwards. You know that one can achieve by the usual methods of hypnosis and suggestion that if you say to anybody that here is no lamp he really sees no lamp. Thus you are able to thoroughly suggest the room away although you look into the room. That is possible if you develop enough strong willpower in yourselves, that willpower which diverts the attention from the physical body. Then you see the room not empty, but filled with a kind of archetype. This archetype has approximately the same figure as the physical body. However, it is not through and through of the same kind, but is organised thoroughly. It is not only interspersed with fine little veins and currents, but it also has organs. This formation, this etheric body causes the real life of the human being. Its colour can be compared only with the colour of the young peach-blossom. It is no colour which is included in the solar spectrum; it is approximately between violet and red. This is the second body.

The third body is the aura which I have already described occasionally, that cloud-like formation of which I have spoken last time, when I described the origin of the human being, in which the human being is like in an ovoid cloud. Everything expresses itself in it that lives in the human being as desire, passion and feeling. Happy, devoted feelings express themselves in bright colour currents in this aura. Hatred, sensual emotions express themselves in darker hues. Keen, logical thoughts express themselves in well-defined figures. Illogical, confused thoughts find expression in figures with unclear contours. Thus we have an image of the human soul-life in this aura.

As well as I have now described the human being he was placed so to speak, by the hand of nature on earth at that time which lies nearly in the outset of the Atlantean age. I have described last time what one has to understand by the Atlantean age. At the time when the fertilisation with the eternal spirit had already taken place the human being faces us with three members: body, soul and mind. Today these three members of the human being are basically somewhat changed because the human being has worked on himself since that time, since nature has dismissed him, since he has become a self-conscious being.

This work on himself means improving his aura, irradiating light from the self-consciousness to this aura. The human being who stands on a very deep level who has not worked on himself, we say a savage, has an aura as nature has given him. All those, however, who are within our civilised world, have auras in which they themselves have co-operated. For as far as the human being is a self-conscious being, he works on himself, and this work finds expression in him at first that his aura changes. Everything that the human being has learnt from nature what he has taken up, since he can speak and think self-consciously, is a new impact in his aura, caused by himself.

If you transport yourselves back to the Lemurian age when the human being was warm-blooded since long time when his fertilisation by the spirit had taken place in the middle of this Lemurian age, the human being was not yet a being capable of clear thoughts. All that just started developing. The spirit had just taken possession of the corporeality. At that time, the aura was completely a result of the natural forces. There one could notice and one can notice it still today with people of very low level , a smaller aura of bluish colour originating at a certain place within the head. This smaller aura is the external auric expression of the self-consciousness. The more the human being has developed this self-consciousness by his thinking and working, the more this smaller aura spreads out about the other aura, so that both become often completely different in short time. The human being who lives in the external civilisation who is an educated civilised person works on his aura in such a way as civilisation just drives him. We take up our usual knowledge, as our school offers it, our experiences, which life brings us, and they perpetually change our aura. But this change must be continued if the human being wants to join the practical mysticism. There he has to work particularly on himself. There he has to incorporate into his aura not only what civilisation offers him, but there he has to exert an influence in certain, regular way on his aura. This happens by means of the so-called meditation. This meditation or the inner contemplation is the first stage which the student of an initiate has to go through.

What is the sense and purpose of this meditation? Attempt once to hold the thoughts before yourselves, which you hold in the mind from the morning up to the evening, and to ponder how these thoughts are influenced by the space and time in which you live. Attempt once whether you are able to prevent your thoughts and ask yourselves whether you had them if you did not live by chance in Berlin and in the beginning of the 20-th century. At the end of the 18-th and at the beginning of the 19-th century, the human beings have not thought in the same way as the human beings of today. If you imagine how the world has been changed in the course of the last century and which changes time has caused, then you see that what permeates your soul from morning to night depends on space and time. It is different if we dedicate ourselves to thoughts which have an eternal value. Actually, these are only certain abstract, academic thoughts, the highest thoughts of mathematics and geometry to which the human being dedicates himself and have eternal value. Twice two is four: this must hold good at all times and places. The same applies to the geometrical truths which we take up. But if we refrain from the certain foundation of such truths, we can say that the average person thinks very little that is independent of space and time. What is dependent on them connects us with the world and exerts a small influence only on that being which itself is something permanent.

Meditation is nothing else than dedicating oneself to thoughts of eternal value, to educate oneself consciously to that which is beyond space and time. The great religious writings contain such thoughts: the Vedanta, the Bhagavad Gita, the John's Gospel from the thirteenth chapter up to the end, also the Imitation of Christ (1441) by Thomas à Kempis (~1380-1471, canon regular). Who becomes engrossed with patience and perseverance in such a way that he lives in such writings, who becomes engrossed every day anew and maybe works on one single sentence for weeks, and thinks and feels it through, gets an infinite use. As well as one gets to know and love a child with all its peculiarities more and more every day, one lets such a sentence of eternity penetrate the soul every day which arises from the great initiates or inspired human beings. This fulfils us with new life. The sayings in Light on the Path (1885), written down by Mabel Collins (1851-1927) according to higher instructions, are also very important. Already the first four sentences are suitable if they are exercised patiently to intervene in the human aura in such a way that this aura is completely illuminated with a new light. One can see this light lighting up in the human aura. Bluish colour nuances replace the reddish or reddish-brownish ones, light reddish nuances replace the yellow ones et etcetera All the colours of the aura change under the influence of such thoughts of eternity. The student cannot yet perceive this in the beginning, but he starts gradually feeling the deep influence that goes out from this changed aura.

If the human being exercises certain virtues, certain performances of the soul most carefully beside these meditations, then his soul senses develop within this aura. We must have these if we want to behold into the soul-world, just as we must have physical senses to be able to look into the physical world. As the external senses are implanted by nature into the body, the human being has to implant higher soul senses lawfully into his aura. The meditation causes that the human being becomes mature to work on these senses which exist as rudiments.

But we have to turn our attention to particular soul performances if we want to develop these senses. Consider that the human being has a number of such senses as rudiments. We call these senses lotus-flowers, because the astral structure which the human being starts developing in his aura takes on the figure of lotus-flowers comparatively. Of course, this is only comparative, just as one speaks of lungs which resemble to wings. The two-petalled lotus-flower is in the middle of the head about the nasal root between the eyes. Then near the larynx is the 16-petalled lotus-flower, near the heart is the twelve-petalled one, near the pit of the stomach the 10-petalled one. More far below there are the 6-petalled and the 4-petalled lotus-flowers. I would like to speak only of the 16-petalled and the 12-petalled lotus-flowers today.

In Buddha's teaching the so-called eightfold path is given. Now ask yourselves once: why does Buddha give just this eightfold path as especially important for the attainment of the higher stages of the human being? This eightfold path is: right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Such a great initiate like Buddha does not speak out of a vaguely felt ideal, he speaks out of the knowledge of the human nature, and he knows which influence the soul performances have on those bodies which must develop only in future. If we consider the 16-petalled lotus-flower of a modern average person, we see, actually, very little. It is about to light up again, so to speak. In times of very distant past this lotus-flower existed already once. It declined in its development. Today it appears again due to the cultural work of the human being. However, in future this 16-petalled lotus-flower comes again to full development. It begins to gleam in its sixteen spokes or petals brightly, any petal appears in another hue, and, finally, it moves from the left to the right, clockwise.

Someone develops in the initiatory school consciously what every human being experiences and possesses once in future, so that he can become a guide of humanity. Eight of the sixteen petals were already developed in the very distant past. Eight are still to be developed today if the esoteric student wants to get to the use of these senses.
These are formed,
-If the human being goes consciously and carefully the eightfold path
-If he exercises the eight soul activities given by Buddha
-If he arranges his whole soul-life in such a way that he exercises these eight virtues as intensely as possible,
So that he controls himself, supports his meditation work and not only matures the 16-petalled lotus-flower, but sets them also in motion to be able to really perceive.

Now I still want to speak of the 12-petalled lotus-flower near the heart. Six petals were already developed in the far-off past; six have to be developed in future with all human beings, with initiates and their pupils already today. In all theosophical manuals you can find certain virtues cited which someone who wants to ascend to the stage of a chela or student should acquire in the forecourt. These six virtues, which you find cited in every theosophical manual where of the development of the human being is spoken, are: control of thoughts, control of actions, tolerance, steadfastness, impartiality and balance or what Angelus Silesius calls calmness. These six virtues, which one has to practice consciously and carefully and to add to the meditation, develop the other six petals of the 12-petalled lotus-flower. This is not blindly or accidentally picked up in the theosophical textbooks or written down out of own internal feeling, but is spoken from the deepest knowledge of the great initiates. The initiates know that somebody who really wants to develop to higher super-sensible stages has to develop the 12-petalled lotus-flower. For this purpose he has to develop the six petals, which were not developed in the past, with these six virtues. Thus you see how from a deeper knowledge of the human being the great initiates gave their instructions for life. I could still extend this consideration to other organs of cognition and observation, but I want only to give you an outline of the initiatory process with these remarks which should be sufficient.

If the student has advanced so far that he starts developing these astral senses if he has advanced so far that he is thereby able to see not only the sensuous impressions in his surroundings but also what is mental, what the aura is in the human being, in the animal and in the plant, a quite new level of instruction begins. Nobody can see anything mental in his surroundings, before his lotus-flowers rotate, just as somebody who has no eyes can see no colours and no light. If now the wall is broken through if he has progressed on the preliminary stage of knowledge so far that he has an insight into this astral world, then only the real apprenticeship begins for him. This leads through four stages of knowledge. What happens now at this moment when the human being has become a chela, after he has gone through the preliminary stages? We have seen that everything that we have now described refers to the astral body. This is organised thoroughly by the human body. The human being who has experienced such a development has another aura. If he then examines his astral body with self-consciousness, if he himself has become the clear organisation of his astral body, we say that this student has examined his astral body with manas. Nothing else is manas than an astral body which is controlled from self-consciousness. Manas and astral body are one and the same, but on different developmental stages.

One has to realise this if one wants to practically use for the practical mysticism what is given in the theosophical manuals as seven principles. Everybody who knows the mystic way of development, everybody who knows something of initiation says that they have a theoretical value for the study, but for the practical mystic only if one knows the relationships which exist between the lower and upper principles. No practical mystic knows more than four members: the physical body, in which the chemical and physical laws are working, the etheric body, the astral body and, finally, the self-consciousness which we call kama-manas in the present development, the self-consciously thinking principle. Manas is nothing else than what the self-consciousness works into the body. The etheric body, as it is now, is taken away from any influence of the self-consciousness. We can influence growth and nourishment indirectly, but not in such a way as we let our wishes, our thoughts and ideas come from the self-consciousness. Thus we ourselves cannot influence our relationships of nourishment, digestion and growth. These are without any connection with the human self-consciousness. This etheric body has to come under the influence of the astral body, the so-called aura. The self-consciousness of the astral body must penetrate and treat the etheric body in the same way as the human being his aura, his astral body. If the human being has advanced so far by meditation, by contemplation and by the exercise of the soul activities that the astral body is organised of its own accord, then the work proceeds to the etheric body, then the etheric body receives the inner word, then the human being hears not only what lives in the environment, then the inner sense of the things sounds to him in his etheric body.

Many a time I have said here that the actually spiritual in the things is something sounding. I have drawn your attention to the fact that the practical mystic if he speaks of a sounding in the spiritual world that he speaks of a luminescence in the astral world, the world of desires. Not without reason Goethe says when he leads his Faust to the heaven:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
the sun still sings its glorious song,
and it completes with threat of thunder
the journey it has been assigned.

And not without reason Ariel says, as Faust is led by the spirits to the spiritual world: “In these sounds we spirits hear the new day already born.”

This inner sounding which is, of course, no sounding perceptible to external sensuous ears, this inner word of the things by which they express their own nature is the experience which the human being has if he is able to influence his astral body from his etheric body. Then he has become the chela, the real disciple of a great initiate. Then he can continue this path. One calls such a human being who has ascended this level a homeless human being, because he has found the connection with a new world because the spiritual world sounds to him and because he has no longer his home, so to speak, in this sensuous world. One must not misunderstand this. The chela who has attained this level is a good citizen and father of a family, a good friend as he would be, if he had not become a chela. He needs to be torn out from nothing. What he experiences there is a course of soul development. There he attains a new home in a world which lies behind these sensuous one.

What has happened there? The spiritual world sounds in the human being, and while the spiritual world sounds into the human being, he overcomes an illusion, the illusion generally, in which basically all human beings are prejudiced before this level of development. This is the illusion of the personal self. The human being believes that he is a personality, separated from the rest of the world. Already a mere reflection could teach him that he himself is no independent being in the physical. Take into account if in this room the temperature were 200 degrees higher than now, we would not be able to exist here as we exist now. As soon as the circumstances change outside, the conditions are no longer appropriate to our physical existence. We are only the continuation of the outside world and absolutely inconceivable as a special being. This is even more the case in the psychic and in the spiritual worlds. We see that the human being, understood as a self, is only an illusion that he is a member of the general divine spirituality. Here the human being overcomes the personal self. It appears what Goethe pronounced it in the chorus mysticus (Faust) with the words: “All that is transitory is only a symbol.” What we see, is only an image of an eternal being. We ourselves are only an image of an eternal being. If we give up our special being, we have the external life and we live a separate life with the whelp of the etheric body , then we have overcome the external, separate life, we have become a part of the All-life.

In the human being something now appears that we have called buddhi. Buddhi is virtually now achieved as a developmental stage of the etheric body, of that etheric body which does no longer cause a special existence, but enters the All-life. The human being, who arrives at this, has arrived at the second level of chelahood. Then all scruples and doubts drop from his soul, and then he can no longer be a superstitious person, just as little as he can be a disbelieving person. Then he does no longer need to get truth comparing his ideas with the external environment, then he lives in the sound, in the word of the things, then it sounds and sounds out of the being what it is. Neither superstition nor doubt is there. One calls this the delivery of the key of knowledge to the chela. If he has attained this stage, a word of the spiritual world sounds into this. Then his word does no longer echo what the world is but what comes from another world which works into our external world which cannot be seen with our external senses. Messengers of the divinity are these words.

If this stage is stepped over, a new one comes. It happens that the human being wins influence on what his physical body is immediately doing. He had only influence on the etheric body before, now, however, on the physical body. His actions have to set the physical body in motion. What the human being does is integrated into what we call his karma. But the human being does not work consciously on it; he does not know that he pulls an effect behind himself because of his action. Only now the human being starts performing the actions consciously in the physical world in such a way that he consciously works on his karma. There he wins influence on the karma with the physical action. There it sounds not only from the things of the environment, but there he is so far that he is able to pronounce the names of all things. As the human being lives in our cultural stage, he is able only to pronounce one single name. And this is the name he gives himself: I. This is the only name the human being himself can give. Who becomes deeper engrossed in it, can come to profound knowledge nothing of which the academic psychology dreams.

It is only one thing to which only you yourselves can give the concerning name. No one else can say to you I, only you yourselves. To anyone you must say you and every other must say you to you. It is something in everybody that everybody can call I. Therefore, the Jewish secret doctrine also speaks of the inexpressible name of God. This is something that is immediately an announcement of the God in him. It was forbidden to pronounce this name unworthily and unholy. Hence, the holy shyness, the importance and fundamentality if the Jewish esoteric teacher pronounced this name. “I” is the only word which says something to you what can never come to you from the outside world. As the average person gives his self only the name, the chela of the third degree gives names which he has from intuition to all things of the world. That is he is merged up in the world-self. He speaks out of this world-self. He is allowed to say the deepest name of a thing to this thing, whereas the average present-day human being is only able to say “I” to himself. If the chela has attained this level, one calls him a swan. The chela who can rise to the names of all things is called swan because he is the herald of all things.

What is beyond the third degree cannot be expressed with everyday words. This requires the knowledge of a special script which is taught only in the esoteric schools. The following degree is the degree of the disguised. Beyond it are the degrees which the great initiates have, those initiates who gave our culture the big impulses at all times. They were chelas first. First they attained the key of knowledge. Then they were led to the regions where to them the universal and the names of the things were disclosed. Then they ascended to the stage of the All and could have the deep experiences by which they were enabled to found the great religions of the world.

Not only the great religions, but generally every big impulse, everything that is important in the world originated from the great initiates. Only two examples are cited which kind of influence on the world the great initiates have who experienced the training.

We transport ourselves back to that time where under the guidance of Hermes the students of the initiatory schools were instructed. These instructions were usual, so-called esoteric, scientific lessons.

Only with a few lines I am able to draw what such lessons contained. It was shown there how the world spirit descends to the body world, embodies itself, and how it revives in the matter, how it gets to its highest stage in the human being and celebrates its resurrection. Paracelsus expressed this pleasantly saying: what we meet outside, these single beings are the letters, and the word which is joined together from them is the human being. We have off-loaded all human virtues or weaknesses on the creatures outside. However, the human being is the confluence of all that. How in the human being a confluence of the remaining macrocosm revives as a microcosm, this was taught in details and with immense spiritual wealth as esoteric lessons in the Egyptian initiatory schools.

After these lessons the hermetic lessons followed. One can understand with the senses and with the reason what I have said. One can only understand what in the hermetic lessons was offered if one has achieved the first degree of chelahood. Then one gets to know that special script which is not an accidental and arbitrary one but echoes the great laws of the spiritual world. This script is not like ours an external image which is fixed arbitrarily in single letters and members, but it is born out of the spiritual law of nature because the human being who is expert of this script is in the possession of these laws of nature. Thus all his ideation is following a set pattern in the psychic and astral space. What he imagines he imagines in the sense of these big characters. He is able to do that if he gives up his self. He submits to the eternal laws. Now he is over his hermetic lessons. He is admitted to the first stage of a more profound initiation. He has to experience something in the astral world, in the real soul-world that has a significance extending over the world cycles. After he has attained the capacity that the astral senses fully work, so that they work down to the etheric body, he is introduced in a deep secret of the astral world for three days. He experiences in the astral world what I have described to you as the origin of the earth and the human being last time. He experiences this descent of the spirit, this separation of sun, moon and earth and the origin of the human being, he has this whole sequence of phenomena before himself. At the same time, he has them before himself in such a way that they become a picture. And then he comes out of the temple. After he has gone through this great experience in the initiatory school, he steps among the people and tells what he has experienced in this psychic and astral world. This story runs approximately in such a way:

Once a divine couple, Osiris and Isis, was combined with the earth. This divine couple was the regent of everything that happens on earth. But Osiris was persecuted and dismembered by Typhon, and Isis had to search for his corpse. She did not bring it home, but at different places of the earth Osiris's graves were laid out. There he descended completely and was buried in the earth. There a ray of the spiritual world radiated on Isis, fertilising her to the new Horus by an immaculate conception.

This image was nothing else than a big representation of what we have just got to know as the emergence of the sun and moon, as the separation of the sun and moon and as the origin of the human being. Isis is the symbol of the moon; Horus signifies the earthly humanity, the earth itself. When humanity was not yet provided with warm blood, when it was not yet covered with the physical body, it felt in big images what occurred in the soul-world. It was prepared to receive the big truths in such images from the great initiates in the beginning of the Lemurian, Atlantean and Aryan developments. Hence, these truths were not simply arranged, but were given in the picture of Osiris and Isis. All great religions which we find in antiquity were experienced by the great initiates in the psychic space. These great initiates came out and spoke to the people in the way how it could understand, namely in images of that which they themselves had experienced in the initiatory schools. This was in antiquity that way. Only because one was in such initiatory school one could ascend to the higher astral experience.

With the emergence of Christianity this changed. It represents a significant incision in the development. Since the appearance of Christ, it was possible that one could be initiated as a nature initiate as one also speaks of a nature poet. There are Christian mystics who had received the initiation by mercy. The first who was called to bring out Christianity all over the world under the effect of the saying “happy are they who find faith without beholding me” (John 20:29) was Paul. The appearance on the road to Damascus was an initiation outside of the mysteries. I cannot deal with further details.

To all great movements and cultural foundations the great initiates gave the impulses. A nice myth has survived to us from the Middle Ages which should show this in a time when one did not yet ask for materialistic reasons. The epic originated in Bavaria and, hence, has taken on the dress of Catholicism. We want to realise what happened at that time in the following way. At that time the so-called urban culture, the modern bourgeoisie originated in Europe. The mystic understood the further development of humanity, the advance of every soul to the next stage as the advance of the soul, of the female in the human being. The mystic sees something female in the soul that is fertilised by the lower sensory impressions of nature and by the eternal truths. In every historical process the mystic sees such a fertilisation process. The big impulses for the progress of humanity are given by the great initiates. Somebody can notice this who looks deeper into the evolution of humanity who beholds the spiritual forces behind the physical phenomena. Thus the medieval world view also attributed that rise of the soul to higher stages during the new cultural stage which was caused by the cities. This urban development was achieved because the soul took a leap forward in history. It was an initiate who caused this leap. One attributed all big impulses to the great lodge of the initiates who surrounded the Holy Grail. From there the great initiates came who are not visible to the external human being. And one called that person Lohengrin who provided the urban culture in those days with an impulse in mediaeval times. This is the emissary of the Holy Grail, the great lodge. And the urban soul, the female principle that should be fertilised by the great initiates is suggested by Elsa of Brabant. That who should mediate is the swan. Lohengrin is brought by the swan to this physical world. The initiate must not be asked for his name. He belongs to a higher world. The chela, the swan, provided this influence.

I could only suggest that the big impact was symbolised again for the people in a myth. The great initiates worked that way and put into their teachings what they had to announce. Also those worked this way who founded the elementary culture of humanity: Hermes in Egypt, Krishna in India, Zarathustra in Persia, and Moses in the Jewish people. Then again Orpheus, Pythagoras and, finally, Jesus worked who is the initiate of the initiates who carried Christ in himself.

With it only the great initiates are called. I have tried to characterise their connection with the world in these explanations. What has been described with it is still abstruse to many people. But those who themselves felt something of the higher worlds in their souls looked always up not only to the spiritual worlds but also to the leaders of humanity. Only with this point of view they were able to speak so enthusiastically like Goethe. But you also find something of a holy spark with others, which leads us to this point which spiritual science should give us again. You will find it with a German, with a young sensible German poet and thinker whose life looks like a blissful recollection of a former life of a great initiate. Who reads Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801, German poet and philosopher) feels something of the breath which leads to this higher world. It is not so pronounced as usually, but it is something in him that also the magic words have. That is why he wrote the nice word of the relationship of our planet to humanity, which applies to the lower, undeveloped human being as well as to the initiate:

Humanity is the sense of our earth planet, humanity is the nerve that connects this earth planet with the upper worlds, and humanity is the eye with which this earth planet faces the heavenly kingdoms of the universe.

Answer-to-Question

Question: Why did Christ not leave writings behind?

This is just the basic difference between him and the former founders of a religion. Christ says: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” The other founders of a religion were way and truth. They announced what should be done and believed, as Moses did, for example. If we study the ancient religious confessions, we find no difference of the contents, no difference between Christianity as doctrine and the other great religions. Who knows the Egyptian religious system in its deepness finds everything that is included in Christianity also there. That applies to all religions. Christianity is still something absolutely new, not as a doctrine but as a fact. Hence, I have called my book: Christianity as Mystic Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity (CW 8). The appearance of Christ signifies something that is termed “blessed” (selig), filled with the soul (Seele). Now everybody should become blessed who was connected in faith with the founder. Christ descends to the valley and becomes a human being among human beings. He teaches nothing new, but he lives in the immediate existence, in the innermost personality in that which the others taught. What the others taught was the Logos, the divine truth. If you study Buddha, if you penetrate the lofty teachings of Hermes or of the Vedas, you have external sayings of the divine creator's word. The Logos became doctrine there.

My intention is to give a series of lectures which will enable you to understand the present time and the immediate future in some aspects at least. It should be a coherent whole, but it may sometimes be necessary to go a long way back. There will be a continuous thread through it all, but I would ask you to see the parts always in the context of the whole. I will sometimes go far and wide to collect the material we need to understand the present time, and some of it may seem remote.

When I say ‘the present time’ I mean quite a long period of time, going back several decades and also looking decades ahead. It is important to realize that it will be necessary to present truths based on the science of the Spirit that in many respects go utterly against current and generally accepted beliefs. The world holds opinions that not only differ but often are the direct opposite of the truths that have to be spoken out of anthroposophy. It is only to be expected, therefore, that people will consider these truths to be incredible, warped and downright foolish.

When truths which differed from generally accepted views had to be said in the past, in order to open up a road to the future, the difference between those truths and common opinion was probably never as marked as it inevitably is today. This may not be absolutely the case, but, relatively speaking, it is so, for people are tremendously intolerant in their hearts today and less able to accept views which differ from their own.

In the immediate future, people will feel more strongly than ever before that the new and different views presented to them are fanciful and absurd. Nevertheless, truths that until now were closely guarded by small groups of people, with strict silence demanded of anyone to whom they were made known, must increasingly be made public. It does not matter how public opinion and those who hold it react to these truths; nor do the prejudices and counter-currents matter that are provoked by them.

The reason for this will be discussed later on in these lectures. To begin with, I must speak of some of the ways in which people will react to truths today and in the immediate future. People believe they have long since outgrown the illusions and superstitions of the past, yet in some respects they are entirely given up to illusion. There is a growing tendency to live in illusion concerning some important and essential aspects of the great scheme of things, and this to such an extent that these illusions become powers that rule the world, nations and, indeed, the whole earth. It is important to realize this, for illusory ideas are a major element in the chaos in which we find ourselves today; in fact, they make it a chaos.

Let me tell you of one common illusion which exists today and is closely bound up with the materialistic trends of the age. It is the growing tendency to form utterly wrong opinions about what in the science of the spirit is called the physical plane. And the New Testament words that are fundamental in this respect: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’,¹ are increasingly less understood today. They are misunderstood in so far as the leading personalities of the outer world are caught up in the illusion that their kingdom should be very much of this physical world.

What do I mean to say? Anyone who is able to see the reality, and to see through it, knows that this world on the physical plane can never reach perfection. Yet people who think materialistically have the illusion that perfection can be achieved on the physical plane. This is the source of many other illusions, and particularly and characteristically the socialist illusion of the present age.

People's illusions come in all shades of meaning; they are coloured by party politics and so on. People who take a liberal view of the world and of life have constructed their own ideal of the physical world and believe that if they realize this we shall have paradise on earth. All that the socialists are able to think of is how to arrange things on this physical plane so that everybody can live what they consider to be the good life, the same for everybody, and so on. Their vision of the future on this physical plane is of a wonderful paradise. Do examine the programmes put forward by people who see themselves as belonging to the many different socialist parties and you will see for yourselves.

They are not the only people, of course, who have such views and opinions. Teachers also do, for instance. Today, every educational agitator and writer is absolutely convinced that it is up to him to establish the best possible educational system, the best principles of education one can think of. And in an absolute sense they really are the best, one cannot imagine anything better.

To go against such endeavours must seem sheer madness to people. The way things are today, people simply must consider anyone who does not want things to be the best possible in the world to be evil-minded. One can understand people feeling this way. Yet it is not evil-mindedness that stops us from thinking their way but a clear vision of the truth. It tells us that it is illusory to think such levels of perfection can be achieved in the physical world. And if it is a law that there never can be perfection in the physical world, just as it is a law that the three angles in a triangle add up to 180°, then people will simply have to face such a truth boldly and not shrink from it.

So there you have the kind of illusion which arises from entirely materialistic premises. Many say they believe in the world of the spirit, but with many of them this is mere words, nothing but hot air. In their innermost hearts, in their feelings and unconscious impulses, lives something different—the inclination to think materialistically. However much people may pretend to themselves that they believe in something else, in reality they believe only in the physical world. And since they do not believe in anything more than just the physical world around them, the only ideal they can possibly have is to arrange things in the physical world in such a way that it becomes a paradise; otherwise the whole world would make no sense to them. Until materialists are prepared to say that the world makes no sense at all, they can only live in the illusion that, however imperfect this physical world may be, it will be possible to create conditions that will put an end to imperfection and let perfection take its place.

Everything coming to the fore today in this respect—in general terms, with all kinds of political, social and other agitators making great words about it, or in specific instances, such as in education—is based on illusion because people are unable to see the connections between the physical world and the other spheres of the world. In no way can they gain an idea of what Jesus Christ meant when he said: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, and why Jesus Christ did not want to bring a kingdom of perfection to realization here in the physical world. There is nothing in the gospels to show that Christ intended to reform this outer kingdom of the physical world and make it into one of perfection. He certainly did not cherish that illusion. But he made up for this lack of desire to establish paradise in the physical world by giving people something which is not of this world: to let impulses enter into their souls which are always alive in the world but are not of this physical world.

Illusions of this kind dominate the human race today in the widest possible sense, and this creates an unhealthy climate. People are free individuals and therefore free to live in illusion. In more down-to-earth contexts their illusions would immediately be seen to be illusions. When we are dealing with physical objects, fools who invent things which merely work in theory are instantly seen to be under an illusion. It is not immediately obvious, however, in the vast field of social and political life.

The following story is one I have told before. When I was a young fellow of 22 or 23, one of my fellow students came to me one day, his head aglow, absolutely fired with enthusiasm, and told me he had just made an important, epoch-making invention. Oh, I said, that is nice; what are you going to do with it? Well, he said, I'll have to go and see Ratinger—our professor of mechanical engineering at the university—and tell him about it. No sooner said than done, and off he went. Ratinger was not free at the moment and so the student came back; he had been given an appointment for later on. So I said to him: Why don't you tell me about it in the meantime? We have some time to spare. Tell me about your invention. It was a very clever thing. He had invented a steam engine that needed just a very small amount of coal to heat it up; after that no more coal would be needed, for a special mechanism kept it going of its own accord. One merely had to start it up. This was certainly epoch-making! You will be wondering why we do not have it today. I got him to explain it all to me and then told him: You know, that is really clever; but if one looks at the whole thing it is no different from wanting to get a railway truck going by getting into it and pushing as hard as you can from inside. Someone standing outside can, of course, get it to move, but anyone inside will not get it to move a millimetre, even if they apply the same amount of energy. This is what it all came down to.

Things can be extremely logical and clever, developed by applying all kinds of technical principles, and they may still be nonsense, having been thought up without taking account of reality. What matters is not to be merely clever, or logical, but to relate to reality. In the end the student never went to see the professor.

When one is dealing with physical matter and mechanics, such a thing will soon be obvious. But in social and political affairs, and with reference to what in its widest sense may be defined as making everyone happy, it will not be immediately obvious. You can easily put forward ideas of exactly this kind; people will be impressed and believe you. Yet it is all a matter of being inside the truck and pushing from there. A time will come when a certain basic characteristic of the present time may actually be labelled with a particular name, a name that will typify a way of thinking which at heart is utterly illusory and unreal. I am very sure that in future people will speak of early twentieth century ‘Wilsonianism’. For Wilson's ideas are typical of those of someone who wants to push a railway truck from inside.

All the basic ideas of ‘Wilsonianism’ which make such an impression today are utterly unreal, though they also have a major influence on people for other reasons. They are powerful for the very reason that they cannot be realized. Any attempt to implement them it would soon show them to be meaningless. But people are able to imagine they could be implemented. If we were able to implement Wilsonian ideas, world philistinism would be realized throughout the world. Woodrow Wilson² really deserves to be made the universal saviour of general philistinism. Of course, philistines would not actually do all that well in a world organized by Wilson, which anyway cannot be realized, but at least they imagine that if Wilson's ideas were to conquer the world we would be able to live according to our ideals.

A time will come when people say: At the beginning of the twentieth century a peculiar ideal arose, which was to make the world into a perfect image of philistine, or bourgeois, ideals. Wilson's ideas will be analysed one day and presented as typical of the early twentieth century.

You see, we have not only small but also big examples of illusory ideas in our time. These illusions and unreal ideas are held not by otherworldly sects, but by groups whose beliefs spread far and wide.

Important and vital genuine truths must now be proclaimed to the world. For the reasons and because of the kind of conditions we have been discussing, they will show little relationship to the general opinions of today. Different conditions have to be created to enable people to grasp the truth. The truths which must inevitably come up are repulsive to many people today; they are thoroughly uncomfortable. The truths people like and ask for are convenient truths, for that is the way people are today.

Some of these uncomfortable truths will have to be presented in the course of these lectures. They need to be made known out of a feeling of responsibility, and above all they must relate not only to the physical plane. They must cut across the illusions people have of the physical plane and offer reality rather than fantasy. The most unrealistic and fantasy-ridden people today are those who consider themselves to be more or less entirely realistic. One makes the strangest discoveries in this respect.

I was recently sent a kind of lexicon listing the names of writers.³ It purports to list the names of all writers who have a connection with Judaism and anything which seeks to bring Judaism to realization in this world. I am one of the writers listed in the book, the reason being that, according to the author of the lexicon, I have many similarities with Ignatius de Loyola who is stated to have founded the Jesuits precisely because of his Judaism. Furthermore, I come from a border region between Germans and Slavs—which is where I happen to have been born, though my family certainly do not come from there—and apparently the fact that I come from there indicates that I am Jewish in origin—I have no idea why. This does not really surprise me, for I think you will agree that even odder things are published today. But the lexicon also includes Hermann Bahr as someone who is promoting Judaism—I was merely leafing through the book. Yet he is an out-and-out Upper Austrian. It is really and truly impossible to think of any way in which he can be connected with Jewish blood or the like. Nevertheless, this literary lexicon quotes a well-known literary historian as saying that Hermann Bahr definitely had Jewish traits.

Well, when I was said to be Jewish on one occasion—these things are not new—I had a photograph of my certificate of baptism made. Hermann Bahr also had to jump through those hoops, because a literary historian had said he was Jewish.⁴ Bahr wanted to establish the truth. The literary historian then said: Well, his grandfather may have been a Jew. But it simply is not possible to find anything in Bahr's family which is not absolutely Upper Austrian German. This was of course an embarrassment for the literary historian, but he would stick to is opinion. He went so far as to say that if Hermann Bahr were actually to present the certificates of baptism for the last twelve generations to show that he did not have a drop of Jewish blood rom anywhere, then he, the historian, would believe in reincarnation if forced to do so. So you see, the reason for believing in reincarnation is a highly peculiar one in the case of this renowned and widely-read literary historian.

There are times today when it is really difficult to take what is said by famous people at all seriously. It is a pity, of course, that it is so difficult to convince the wider public of this. People are rather in the habit of believing in authority, despite the fact that modern people do not believe in authority at all, of course! Such, at least, is their opinion. Yesterday we were able to learn something about the opinions people have of themselves.

Today, when people's basic instincts sometimes take them so far from the truth, it is extremly difficult to accept the truths relating to the region which borders immediately on the physical world. To characterize anything relating to this region one has to appeal to healthy, incorrupt minds, and this presents the greatest difficulties one can imagine. For when it comes to the truths which must now be made known, the whole constitution of the human soul will be affected even if people merely get to know them, let alone gain direct perception of them.

External knowledge about the physical world has a certain effect—let us say on the human head. But truths which go deep, even if only to the depth where they relate to the world immediately next to the physical world, touch the whole human being and not only the head. To proclaim such truths one must be able to depend on a sound, incorrupt mind.

In many spheres of life today a sound, incorrupt mind is almost a rarity, whilst unsound, corrupt minds are far from uncommon. And the way individuals accept truths today strongly reveals the particular nature of their life of instincts and drives, the whole constitution of their souls, and their state of mind. People with corrupt instincts who are unwilling to apply some degree of discipline to their life-styles quickly tend to take an attitude which is completely determined by the base mind, particularly when the truths to be accepted relate to the world bordering on the physical world. This happens only too easily. If people do not take a healthy objective interest in what goes on in the world, if they are essentially only interested in anything that relates to themselves, this will often corrupt their mind and attitudes to such an extent that they do not have the right instincts for occult truths and particularly for truths relating to the world bordering on the physical world.

With respect to the physical world and anything relating to it, and to all the great advances humanity has made, I think I can say that physical nature makes sure this corruption does not go too far in human minds. People are confined within the Limits imposed by physical nature; they cannot get very far with their instincts and have to obey the laws of nature. When we move from the physical world into the one bordering on it, we are no longer on those leading reins; guidance has to take another form and a different, inner certainty is needed. This is only possible, however, if the mind is incorrupt as we go beyond the physical level; otherwise we lose all control in that other region where we are no longer controlled by physical nature, nor by social and traditional prejudices. We are suddenly quite free and cannot bear such freedom. For instance, the physical world has many ways of preventing people from lying: If someone were to say at 6 o'clock in the evening that the sun had just come up, nature would soon demonstrate this to be wrong. It is like this with many things relating to the physical world. If people insist on talking nonsense about things relating to the higher worlds, even if it is only the one immediately next to our own, the physical world will not immediately show them to be wrong. This, then, is the reason why people may lose all control if they rush to escape the discipline which is imposed in the physical world.

Here we have one of the great problems which may arise when truths relating to the non-physical world are presented. Yet the answer always has to be that it is simply necessary to present these truths today. We must not forget that truths relating to the non-physical world cannot be received in the same frame of mind as truths relating to the physical world. To take them in we must slightly loosen the etheric and astral bodies; otherwise we shall only hear words. The state of mind has to be such—and with reference to the phenomena of the subjective inner life it merely is a state of mind—that for any real understanding of the things of the spirit one has to loosen the etheric and astral bodies a little. This loosening should only be a means of gaining understanding of the world of the spirit. It must not become an end in itself; this would be a very serious matter.

Imagine—to take an extreme case—someone comes to an anthroposophical lecture, not in order to gain insight into the realms of the spirit, which would be the right thing, but because he thinks this is truly mystical. As he listened he would let the words flow through him, as it were, because this would slightly loosen the ether body and the astral body. People certainly do come to lectures of this kind, sometimes also to those on pseudospiritual science, and listen in a kind of sleepy ecstasy; they are not really interested in the content, but more in the feeling of voluptuous pleasure which comes when the ether body and the astral body go partly outside the physical body. There may be other situations in life when to be thus ‘given up’, or ‘warm’, is a good thing; it is no good at all when it comes to revealing the truths relating to things of the spirit.

This must be properly understood. If spiritual truths are rightly understood, and if people are in all seriousness following the lines of thought used to develop concepts which may make the world of the spirit accessible to our understanding, their humanity will be enhanced and they will learn the things which have to be known at the present time for the salvation and further development of humanity. People who take these truths into themselves in the right way will also find their drives and instincts ennobled and raised to a higher level. By merely listening to spiritual truths they go through a development that is for the good.

Anyone who is not willing to accept anthroposophical truths in this sense but is perhaps doing so from some kind of purely personal interest—let us say he wants to belong to a society and has not found another one which suits him as well as the Anthroposophical Society does—anyone who comes to this Society with personal interests may indeed find that spiritual truths will first of all activate low instincts, and perhaps even the lowest of the low. It therefore does not come as a surprise that people who really should not be members but nevertheless do come and hear such things, find their lowest instincts brought to life. It is something that cannot be avoided at this time, for these things have to be made public and it is difficult to draw the line. The right way will only be found if those who have the inner justification to be part of such a movement use their wide-awake judgement and take themselves to task. People who in any way bring personal interests to bear, before or after leaving the Society, merely show that they never should have been members. And I think it is not really difficult to distinguish between personal interests and interest in objective understanding.

But it is not surprising that in the situation which has arisen because it is now necessary to make things generally known, it happens again and again that some of the instincts of the lower human nature come to the fore. The potential dangers must be consciously and clearly considered and ways must be found to correct them. If we take the right attitude to these dangers we shall certainly be able to meet them. This is very much a time—it is part of the chaotic situation we are in—when aberrations of this kind are far from uncommon. The tragic situation of today makes tremendous demands on the powers of many people. It is true to say that people who were not in the habit of working hard in the general rather than merely personal interest really have learned to work hard in the last three years. Many people have learned to work and to acquire general interests.

People who rightly belong to our movement will have come to it out of more than personal interest. Nevertheless, the present age does offer enormous opportunities for a kind of lazy outsider attitude. The specific constellation created by the war means that some people have really nothing to occupy them. If they are part of our movement they will also be aware of it. Before the war we had many lecture tours; a whole raft of people would get together and travel from one lecture to the next. Outer interest may have been lacking, but excitement could be found, and if this did not come from outside, people created their own excitements. This has now become difficult. It cannot be done. However, some people have not found a way of occupying themselves usefully. And that is why a lazy outsider attitude is to be found in our ranks exactly at this time, with people whiling away the time by creating all kinds of opposition. Being unable to get the excitement of travelling from lecture cycle to lecture cycle they find other ways of entertaining themselves. This merely shows the true nature of the interest that formerly made them travel from lecture cycle to lecture cycle.

When there is an inner obligation to represent anthroposophical truths before the world, in all seriousness and with dignity, you also know that more than fifty out of an audience of a hundred may well become opponents. That is a law; it is the way it is. If these fifty per cent of such people do not actually become opponents, there will be a reason for this, but it will not be because they are consistent. For reasons which have already been given and others that will be given, this is how matters are. Someone who represents anthroposophical truths is therefore not in the least surprised if there is opposition. We might take up the points that these opponents keep coming up with all the time, things they generally know better than anyone else to be untrue—for they do of course know that they are not true—but it would be much more useful to consider the sources from which such Opposition has Sprung.

All kinds of peculiar things will happen when we do so, and we shall then no longer feel inclined to take up the points that our opponents want us to take up. Instead, we are going to discover their true reasons. This can sometimes be more of an effort than to take up the points the opposition is making. Think of all the years in which lectures have been given here and how it has been necessary over and over again to say the same things I am also saying today, though this is always pointed out. But it is necessary to consider them with profound seriousness and dignity, and to consider them in a way which is fitting for an anthroposophical movement.

Believe me, I have more important things to do, if I am to lead this movement and be fully responsible for it, than to take account of the fact that three or four people, or even more if you will, get together and invent all kinds of gossip. I have more important things to do and never feel the inclination to go into such matters. But unfortunately this is so little understood! Even within this Society, there is more interest in excitement and sensation than genuine scientific interest. From the scientific point of view it is, for instance, interesting to study not only useful but also poisonous plants, but one has to find the right point of view. Very few of those who profess to follow anthroposophical spiritual science have even the least notion of the immense seriousness and importance of what it really should be. Forgive me for saying this. If there were the right seriousness and if the importance of this were really understood, people's attitudes would in many respects be very different from what they are. Of course I am not saying that people should turn their attention elsewhere. Rather the opposite: We should not turn our attention away from the phenomena which go hand in hand with the will to destroy this anthroposophical movement. But we have to find the right approach.

People may, for instance, write volumes in the way in which I have contradicted myself in my written works and with reference to all kinds of other things. One way of countering this would be to say that Luther was shown to have contradicted himself in hundreds of ways, not just a few dozen. His answer was: These asses are talking of contradictions in my works. I wish they would make the effort to try and understand just one of the things that appears to be in contradiction to other things!⁵ So one way would be to point out something like this. But there is no need for this. For when people speak in opposition today it is not because they are interested in finding and revealing contradictions but for quite a different reason.

Someone⁶ offered a manuscript to Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag,⁷ for instance. The publishing house was unable to use it and therefore returned it to the author. From this moment the author, who until then had been running after me wherever I went, became an opponent. The real reason was not that he had found contradictions. If that were the real reason we might use Luther's words. But we cannot do that, for the individual concerned can only be seen in his true colours if we know he is giving vent to his spleen because the publishing house was not able to publish his book. This was the real reason. So if we simply listen to the things people say, we shall have little opportunity for getting at the truth—just as little, perhaps, as the literary historian who would convert to reincarnation if this allowed him to continue in the belief that Hermann Bahr had Jewish connections. Conversion would be necessary if he were to be shown certificates of Christian baptism for Hermann Bahr's ancestors down to the twelfth generation.

Much is said about the courage which people are showing today. To assert the truths humanity needs today, in the sense I have spoken of, will need quite a different kind of courage—inner courage. But the place where this courage should be in the soul is occupied by cowardice, reluctance to take action, and this is tremendously widespread. In many respects it is due to this cowardice that anthroposophical spiritual science finds it so difficult to make its way today. It will make its way. But one should not sit back and accept; one should not think that things will go the right way without human involvement. One thing you will have to get used to—and it will be different from what you have been used to so far—is that I myself will have to be a lot less lenient in some respects than I have been until now. Do not think this is because I have changed my will and intention; you must look for the reasons in the existing situation.

You will have to understand that I cannot let the movement which I have to represent before the world go to the dogs in any old way. Forgive the expression. Higher duties are involved than people may dream of. I cannot be involved in whatever excitements or sensations some group or set may be desiring. Consideration must be given to many general and more important interests and impulses than to the purely personal ambitions which rule one set of people or another. To find the right way of presenting anthroposophy we simply must be able to set aside the purely personal element which for many is about the only thing that interests them today.

And so I must conclude here today with something which I have also been saying in all the other places where I have been speaking these days. There are many members of our anthroposophical science of the spirit who are truly dedicated and who have a clear idea of the seriousness of our work. But again and again there are others who do not belong and who behave in a way that simply would not happen if membership of the Society were limited to those who rightfully belong to it. Things keep coming up among members which are far removed from what is really intended; some of these can only be said to relate to what is really intended if one takes a totally distorted view.

Things are said by groups of people who have to be ignored—for our real interests go far beyond giving one's attention to the ambitions which are alive in those groups—things are said there, and people are beginning to believe them, which have no more to do with our true intentions than a dung beetle has to do with a pendulum clock. It is quite impossible to see how they go together. Yet fantastic stories created out of base instincts that are left to run riot are set in circulation. And this despite the fact that the people who generate them know full well that not a word is true. Such things can be explained in natural science, but we must also draw the logical conclusion and take the necessary actions. In the first place I am going to impose two rules an myself. Anyone who is going to speak of the one rule without the other, will be saying something which is not true. I have made these two rules known in all the places where I have been giving lectures in recent months.

In principle, I shall no longer continue to give private interviews to members of the Anthroposophical Society. For all those private interviews have led to reports which are full of lies. I have better things to do than refute the tales told by people who let their imaginations run riot, and so there is no other way but to discontinue these private interviews. Some individuals have a true esoteric impulse, and I will find other ways of making sure they are able to progress; it will just take while. The measure should not prevent anyone from progressing in esoteric development. But, generally speaking, all private interviews must now stop. This, then, is the first rule. Do not come to me, as people have done in some local groups, and say it is a harsh rule. No, do not come to me, go to those who are responsible.

The second thing is that I release everyone who has ever had a private interview with me from the promise not to talk about it, if they wish to do so. Anyone can tell anything they like about what has happened or been said in those private interviews—that is, in so far as they wish to do so. I am not going to prevent anyone from telling the whole truth about anything ever discussed with me in a private interview.

These two rules go together. The one does not apply without the other. And, as I said, if you think they are harsh, go to those who are responsible. Unless I am less lenient in these matters than I have been until now, the problems I am speaking of will not stop. As I said, I shall find other ways to make sure this does not harm anyone's esoteric development. Ways and means will be found. But, people being as they are today, it is not possible to establish such a science without things going badly astray on occasion, with people always jumping to the wrong conclusions. This is why there will have to be these rules.

People who take a serious and dignified approach to our spiritual-scientific development may find it difficult to understand how such things could come about, but they will accept the two rules as inevitable. From now on, everything will be entirely in the open. For there is nothing there which needs to shun the light! This is what is so shameful about it all: The truth and the whole truth could be told by everybody without leaving the least stain on our movement. But people have grown attached to something which has survived in our work as a continuation of earlier practices: to have individual interviews. 1f talking to individuals had not resulted in lies, the rule would not have been necessary. But everything ever said to any member can be truthfully told. Our movement can only gain from the truth—go and tell as much as you like. The truth will not be affected by the lies which are told; but it must not even appear to be affected, for it is important for humanity that anything presented out of a background of spiritual science is presented in a serious and dignified way.

So let me repeat once more: Without causing any loss to those who are seriously seeking esoteric development, I will generally no longer give private interviews for members. Everyone is free to tell everything they want about the interviews which have been given, but it must be the truth. I release everyone from whatever vow of silence there may be. But it should only be because individuals want to tell others for their own sake; they do not have to do it for my sake. And I have no objection to people spreading it about far and wide that these rules exist and are characteristic of our movement. Then the world will realize the infamous nature of the things that are so often said, especially about our Society.

• 1. John 18:36. The German for ‘kingdom’ in this sense is Reich (Trans.).
• 2. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), President of the United States 1913–1921. (Wilson propagated ‘open’ diplomacy but refused to permit publication of his discussions at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris. His Fourteen Points were to be the basis for the armistice in November 1918. Trans.)
• 3. Semi-Kuerschner oder Literarisches Lexikon der Schriftsteller, Dichter, Bankiers, Geldleute, Schauspieler, Kunstler, Musiker, Offiziere, Rechtsanwlte, Revolutionre, Frauenrechtlerinnen, Sozialdemokraten usw. jdischer Rasse und Versippung, die von 1813–1913 in Deutschland ttig oder bekannt waren (Semi-Kuerschner or literary lexicon of authors, poets, bankers, financiers, physicians, actors, artists, musicians, officers, lawyers, revolutionaries, women's rights activists, social democrats, etc., who were Jewish by birth or marriage and were active or known in Germany from 1813–1913), published by Philipp Stayff, Berlin 1913. The passage about Hermann Bahr reads as follows: ‘It is said, and people have assured me over and over again, that Hermann Bahr is not a Jew, but I believe in the adage: ‘Tell me who your friends are’ (Bahr's first wife was Jewish), and would maintain that Bahr is of Jewish origin even if he were to show me the certificates of baptism of his forebears for the last ten generations, and indeed if really pushed into a corner I would rather subscribe to belief in the transmigration of souls.’
• 4. Adolf Barthels in his Kritiker und Kritikaster, Leipzig 1903.
• 5. Martin Luther (1483–1546) religious reformer who led the German Reformation. He translated the Bible into the vernacular to make it accessible to everyone and wrote many works, their vigour still much appreciated today. The actual quote is: ‘How can these asses form an opinion on contradictory elements in our doctrine if they don't understand any aspect of those contradictory elements?’ From Ricarda Huch, Luthers Glaube, 10. Brief (translates as ‘10th letter’).
• 6. Max Seiling (1852–1928), Austrian poet and writer.
• 7. Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag is the publishing house established by Marie von Sivers in 1913 in Berlin for the publication of Rudolf Steiner's works. It moved to Dornach in November 1923.

Today I shall speak more generally, perhaps aphoristically, to prepare the way for Tuesday, when I shall discuss our anthroposophical spiritual science and its significance for the present time and for human evolution. I shall then bring to your notice some things which we should certainly take to heart. On the one hand we will look back on our work, and on the other hand I shall present certain matters which are important for the whole way in which we assess our spiritual scientific movement, as well as the manner in which we relate to it. It seems to me to be appropriate, at this time, to take into our hearts a consideration of this kind.

Let me start today with some remarks on what it is that can give us, as human beings, a sense for our situation in the cosmos. Actually, human beings in this materialistic age feel, you might say, deserted and isolated in the cosmos. If you cut off a person's finger or hand, or amputate his leg, he feels you have taken away something that belongs to his physical, bodily nature; he feels that the missing part belongs to the whole of his bodily nature. In earlier periods of human evolution people felt quite differently about this. Not only did they feel their hand, or arm or leg to be a part of their whole being, but they felt that they were, in turn, a part of a totality. In those days it was possible to speak quite differently about a group-ego. Tribes, families, for generations back, felt themselves to be a totality. We have gone into this frequently. As for their external, physical existence, however, people felt something quite different. They felt in a way as though they stood within the cosmos as a whole, as though they had been formed out of the whole cosmos.

Just as today we feel that our finger, our hand, is one member of our total organism, so in olden times people felt: Up there is the sun; it runs its own course but it is not unrelated to us; we are a part of the region traversed by the sun; we are a part of the universe as it is given certain rhythms by the moon. In short, they felt the universe to be one great organism and that they were within it, just as today our finger might feel that it is part of our body. The fact that this feeling, this perception, is virtually lost to us today has not a little to do with the rise of materialism. Today's science, in particular, disdains to have anything to do with an idea that man might be a part of the cosmos. Science regards a human being as an individual body, of which the separate parts are examined and described anatomically and physiologically. It is no longer customary in science to regard the human being as a member of the total organism of the universe in so far as this is physically visible.

But people's view of things, especially their scientific view, will have to return to the concept of man embedded in the whole cosmos. Human beings will have to sense once again that they stand within the cosmic universe. This will not be possible in the way that was the case in olden times. They will have to achieve it by expanding their science, which today is abstract and directed to the individual, to include certain considerations. They will have to apply certain judgements, of which we shall discuss only one today—which we mentioned several weeks ago. This will show us the direction scientific thinking will have to take—having become far more human than current scientific thinking—if human beings are to find once again an awareness of how they stand within the universe as a whole.

You know that the position of the sun on the ecliptic at the spring equinox moves forward in the Zodiac. You know that this point has always been designated, ever since mankind began to think, according to its position in the Zodiac. So from about the eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha until about the fifteenth century after the Mystery of Golgotha, the sun at the spring equinox rose in the sign of the Ram, though not always at exactly the same spot. During this period the sun traversed the sign of the Ram. Since then, the sun at the spring equinox has been rising in the sign of the Fishes. Note, please, that astronomy takes no account of the constellations, so you will find that calendars still say that the sun rises in the constellation of the Ram at the beginning of spring, which is in fact not the case. Astronomy has stuck to the earlier cycle. It simply divides the Zodiac into twelve equal parts, each of which is named after one of the signs. You know from our calendar what the situation is.

However, this is immaterial as far as we are concerned. What is important for us is the fact that the position of the sun at the spring equinox moves forward, passing through the whole Zodiac little by little. It traverses the whole Zodiac until it finally returns to the original position, taking approximately 25,920 years. These 25,920 years are termed the Platonic Year, the Cosmic Year. The exact figure varies according to the various methods of calculation. However, we are not concerned with exact figures but with the rhythm this precession entails. You can imagine that a cosmic rhythm must lie in this movement which repeats itself every 25,920 years.

We can say that these 25,920 years are very important for the life of the sun, for during this time the life of the sun passes through one unit, a proper unit. The next 25,920 years are then a repetition. We have a rhythm in which one unit measures 25,920 years.

Having looked at this great Cosmic Year, let us now turn our attention to something small, something intimately connected with life between birth and death, that is, with our life in so far as we are inhabitants of the physical universe. It is indisputable that one of the most important things in this life in the physical body is a single breath, an in-breath and an out-breath, for our very life depends on this breathing in and breathing out. If it were to be interrupted, we should cease to be capable of living. One breath is indeed something very important. A breath brings in the air which enlivens us in a particular way. Within our organism we transform this air into the breath of death, for it would kill us if we were to breathe it in again once we have breathed it out.

On average, a human being takes eighteen breaths a minute. Not all breaths are equal, for those in youth differ from those in old age, but the average is eighteen breaths a minute. Eighteen times a minute we rhythmically renew our life. Multiply this by 60 and you have 1,080 times an hour. Now multiply by 24, and the number of breaths in twenty-four hours comes to 25,920!

You see how a remarkable rhythm underlies the course of our life in one day. Let us take one unit of life to be one breath. This is something very important for us, since the rhythmical repetition of our breathing maintains our life. In one day we are given exactly as many units of life as the years it takes the sun to return to its original position on the ecliptic at the spring equinox. This means that if we imagine one breath to correspond to one microcosmic year, then we complete one microcosmic Platonic Year in one day, an image of the macrocosmic Platonic Year. This is most exceptionally significant, for it shows us that the process of our breathing, something which takes place within us, is based on the same rhythm, on a different time-scale, as the great rhythm of the sun's passage.

It is important for us to consider such a thing in our soul. For if we transform what has been said into a feeling, then this feeling will tell us that we are an image of the macrocosm. To say that the human being is an image of the macrocosm is no mere empty phrase, no idle chatter, for it can be proved down to the last detail. From this you can gain a feeling of the solid foundation on which stand all the laws that come from spiritual science. They are all based on similar intimate knowledge of the inner connections of the cosmos, even though it is not always possible to go into every detail.

Now in considering these things, it must above all be clear to us that the human being is, in some way and to some extent, detached from the cosmos. He stands within the rhythm of the cosmos and yet he is to some extent free. He changes things subtly, so that the rhythms do not exactly match, but it is just this fact of not quite matching which gives him the possibility of freedom. In general, however, he stands within the rhythms of the cosmos.

I had to bring forward these considerations so that what I now want to say might not be misunderstood. Having considered the rhythm of breathing, let us now turn to a larger one, the next in size: the alternation of sleeping and waking. A single breath is the smallest element of life. Now let us look at the alternation between sleeping and waking, which is indeed, to some extent, an analogy to the rhythm of breathing.

As you know, I have often described the taking in of the astral body and ego on waking up, and the letting go of the astral body and ego on going to sleep, as a breathing in and a breathing out in the course of a day and a night. But we can look at this in an even more materialistic sense. When we breathe the air, it goes in and it goes out. We inhale, we exhale. Something material swings back and forth like a pendulum; out, in, out, in. The alternation of sleeping and waking occurs as a very similar rhythm. In the morning, when we wake up and take in our ego and our astral body, our etheric body is displaced, is pushed down from the head and more into the other elements of the organism. And when we go to sleep again, pushing out our astral body and our ego, then our etheric body spreads back into our head and is there just as it is in the whole of the rest of our body. Thus there is an incessant rhythm. When the etheric body is pressed down, we wake up, and it stays down while we remain awake. When we go to sleep it is pushed back up into our head. Up and down it goes in the course of twenty-four hours. The etheric body moves rhythmically during the course of twenty-four hours. Of course there are irregularities, and this is in keeping with the human being's capacity for freedom, his degree of freedom. But, overall, what I have described takes place.

We could say that something breathes in us—though it is not an in-and-out but an up-and-down—something breathes in us during the course of a day which resembles our breathing every eighteenth of a minute. Let us see whether what breathes in this up-and-down of the etheric body also represents a kind of circulation, something which returns to its starting-point. We must fathom the meaning of 25,920 days, for 25,920 such up-and-down movements could be seen as a replication of the Platonic Year. Just as a day corresponds to 25,920 breaths, so 25,920 days ought to correspond to something in human life too. How many years does this come to?

A year has 365¼ days and if we divide 25,920 by 365.25 the answer is: nearly 71. Let us say 71 years, which is the average life-span of the human being. The human being is free, however, and often lives much longer, but you know that the patriarchal life-span is given as 70 years. The span of a human life is 25,920 days, 25,920 great breaths, and so we have another cycle wonderfully depicting the macrocosm in the microcosm. We could say that by living for one day, taking 25,920 breaths, we depict the Platonic Cosmic Year, and by living for 71 years, waking up and going to sleep 25,920 times—a breathing on a larger scale—we once again depict the Platonic Year.

Now let us turn to something which time will not allow us to discuss in detail today, but which I nevertheless want to indicate, something that can be sensed in an occult way. We are surrounded by air. It is the air which gives us the possibility of that closest element of life that takes place in the rhythm of breathing. This rhythm is given to us by the air, which is something belonging to the earth. And what gives us the other rhythm? The earth itself! That rhythm arises because the earth turns on its own axis—speaking in accordance with modern astronomy—and brings about the alternation of day and night. So the air breathes in us when we take a breath. And the earth, by letting us wake up and go to sleep, breathes, pulses in us by turning on its axis and giving us the alternation of day and night. Our life-span can be seen in relation to the earth as one day in the life of an organism which, instead of taking one breath every eighteenth of a minute, takes one breath in one day and night. For such an organism seventy years are one day, and ordinary days and nights are its breaths.

You see how we can feel ourselves to be within a life on a larger scale, a life which takes one breath every twenty-four hours and for which one day takes seventy, seventy-one, years. We can feel ourselves to be within a living being which has much longer rhythms of pulse and breathing. So you see that it is quite correct to speak of the microcosm as being an image of the macrocosm, for every part of the image can be proved mathematically. If we maintain that the air breathes within us, that it breathes itself in us, that the earthly realm breathes in us because we belong to this greater living organism, then we might come to ask: Apart from being related to the air, which is on the earth, and to the whole of the earth with its rhythm of day and night, are we perhaps also related in a certain way to the rising of the sun as a whole, as it progresses during the course of the Platonic Year, returning to the position from which it set out?

These things are of the utmost interest, yet science today takes no more notice of them than of shadows. On one occasion I found myself startlingly confronted by this contrast between today's science and the science which must come in the future. Perhaps I have told you that in the autumn of 1889 I was called by the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar to edit Goethe's natural-scientific works for the extended complete works. I had to examine all the documents left behind by Goethe containing his studies on anatomy, physiology, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology and also meteorology. He made an enormously thorough study of the weather during the course of a year, recording especially the barometric data, and it is astonishing how many tables he worked out in this connection. Only small parts of this work have been published. A few of the tables are reproduced in my edition, but otherwise little is publicly known. Like temperature charts, he made graphs showing the barometric data at a particular place compared with other places and he recorded his readings every few hours for months on end. In this way he hoped to show how the curves differed in different places.

Graphs showing barometric data are something for which today's science has little use as yet. But Goethe wanted to record these curves which for him represented an analogy with the pulse as we record its fluctuations in temperature charts. He wanted to record a kind of pulse of the earth, the regular, day-to-day earth-pulse. Why? He wanted to prove that the fluctuations in the barometric data during the course of the year are not as irregular as ordinary meteorology supposes but are subject to a certain degree of regularity which is only modified by secondary conditions pertaining at certain times. He wanted to prove that the earth's gravity depicts a breathing out and a breathing in during the course of a year; he wanted to point to the very thing that is expressed in the human being's breathing out and breathing in. He wanted to find the same thing in the barometric data. Science will embark on such projects in the future, when once again the microcosm will be examined in its relationship to the macrocosm.

So you see how Goethe was working towards a form of science which will come about at some time in the future. We also gain an idea of the immense diligence he applied in order to reach the results he achieved. He never simply makes an assertion, as is so often the case with others. When others speak of the pulse of the earth, they often intend this simply as a metaphor, an aperçu. But when Goethe says, in three or four lines, for instance, that the earth breathes, he can back this statement with a large pile of tables. Empirical knowledge is behind whatever he says. Yet most people consider empirical knowledge to be stuff and nonsense. We can learn from Goethe that one must have material with which to back one's assertions. In this way we now have material to back our statement that the earth breathes like a great organism.

Let us now see whether we can speak in a similar way about breathing if we place ourselves within the great Platonic Year of the sun, which has a span of 25,920 years. Without more ado let us now regard these 25,920 years as a single year, and let us see how much a single day amounts to. To do this we must divide by 365¼, and the answer will be a single day. We have already done this sum, and the answer was seventy-one years, the span of a human life. This means that a human life takes one day of the whole Platonic Year. So we could look at the whole Platonic Year with regard to the human life-span as follows: As physical beings we are breathed out by the whole process of the Platonic Year, so that if seventy-one years are seen as a single day, this would be one breath of the being who lives in the rhythm of the Platonic Year.

With regard to an eighteenth of a minute we are a limb of the life of the air, and with regard to a day we are a limb of the life of the earth. With regard to our life-span it is as though we were breathed out and breathed in again in one day of that being who lives in the rhythm of 25,920 years. So we could consider our physical body, which lives out its patriarchal span, to be a single breath of that great being which lives so long that 25,920 years are as one year for it. Our patriarchal life-span is then one day. So looking at a being who lives with our earth and experiences day and night in twenty-four hours, this is one breath for our etheric body. And one breath for our astral body is our actual breath of one-eighteenth of a minute.

Herein you have an analogy for an ancient assertion, for something that was called the ‘days and nights of Brahma’. Think of a spiritual being for whom our seventy-one years are as is a single breath for us. We find we are a single breath for that being. When we enter the world as a tiny baby, that being for whom the Platonic Year is one year breathes us out. It breathes us out into the cosmos, and when we die it breathes us in again; we are breathed out and we are breathed in. Now turn to the earth: It breathes us out and in again in one day. Now turn to the air, which is a part of the earth: It breathes us out and in again in an eighteenth of a minute. Whichever way we look at it, the number 25,920 represents the return to the starting point. This is a regular rhythm; it gives us the feeling of being embedded in the cosmos; it teaches us that the span of a human life, and one day in a human life, are indeed, for greater, more all-embracing beings, the same as is one breath for us. If we can transform this knowledge into feeling, then the expression ‘resting in the world-all’ assumes immense significance.

Such things really do belong in the orbit of scientific research, and nothing other than the attitude of mind of spiritual science will lead to such research into these figures, which are to be found, after all, in any encyclopaedia. One day such research will be carried out and then ordinary science will be able to find a link with anthroposophical spiritual science.

As we have seen, everything is ordered according to numbers. But it is also ordered according to measure. Human science will lend great depths to the Biblical words: Everything in the universe is ordered in accordance with measure and number.

Let us continue. There is something connected with our breathing, a kind of dependant of our breathing, and that is our speech. Organically, speech is connected with breathing. Not only does it emerge from the same organ but it is also connected with the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of an eighteenth of a minute. Thus we speak, and thus speak those who are with us on the earth. Just as the air surrounds us on the earth, so are we surrounded by human beings whose speaking bears a relationship to the rhythm of breathing. It should follow that the other breathing, the breathing connected with day and night, also has a kind of speaking linked with it. This would be a speaking by beings who belong to the organism of the earth, just as human beings belong to the air.

In olden times, the wisdom imparted to human beings by higher beings came, not via the breathing rhythm of an eighteenth of a minute, but via the rhythm of breathing which has one day as its unit. In those ancient days they could not learn as quickly as we can today; they had to tarry longer for words which were linked to a breathing rhythm of twenty-four hours. In this way ancient knowledge came to man, knowledge which is at the foundation of everything and which can be discovered in various traditions. It was brought by higher beings who are linked to the earth in the way man is linked to the air, and who approach man. Those who today work towards an initiation still notice something of this. For knowledge which comes from the spiritual world comes to us far, far more slowly than does that which is imparted to us on the wings of our ordinary air processes.

That is why it is so important for one striving for initiation to learn to sense within himself the great significance of the transitions of going to sleep and waking up. In going to sleep and in waking up, in this transition, we are most likely to sense how spiritual beings mysteriously speak with us. Later we can then gain some control over this. If you seek entry into the world inhabited by the dead, it is good to be aware that the dead are most likely to speak at the moment of going to sleep and the moment of waking up. The moment of going to sleep is more difficult, because here we usually become immediately unconscious and fail to perceive what the dead have said. But in waking up, if we succeed in becoming fully aware of the moment of waking up, that is when the dead are most likely to communicate with us. But we must seek to gain a firm hold of the moment of waking up. This means that we must endeavour to wake up without immediately entering into the light of day. You know that there is a—shall we say—superstitious rule, that if we want to hold on to a dream we must not look at the window or the light because if we do, we will forget easily. This applies just as much to the delicate observations which flow to us from the spiritual world. We must endeavour to wake up in the dark, in darkness which we wilfully create by not listening to noises, by not opening our eyes, by waking up consciously while not yet going out to meet the day. That is when we best notice the approach of communications from the spiritual world.

You could say that if this is the case we shall receive precious few communications during the course of our lifetime! For just think how difficult it would be if this situation meant that in the course of our lifetime we could only receive as many communications as could come to us during the course of one day. This would be sufficient, no doubt, but we should have no chance of making use of any of them, for think of the time taken up by our childhood, and so on. However, the earth takes part in all this—please bear this in mind—the earth receives these communications into its etheric body. And because they are inscribed on the earth's etheric body, the communications remain available for study. We can also study, in the sun-ether which fills the whole world, the more comprehensive communications given to us by the being whose life element is the Platonic Year. This is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and other books.

You see how a thread can be spun to link ordinary science with spiritual science, although those who are strangers to spiritual science will hardly find themselves in a position to evaluate what ordinary science gives them in a suitable way. But those who have the attitude of mind of spiritual science will not doubt, when they approach these matters, that a time will come one day when external science and spiritual science will join forces fully.

As I said, I have only spoken to you about a part of all this, namely, the rhythmical process which is built into breathing. There are many other things which, if studied in relation to numbers, show how the microcosm is in harmony with the macrocosm, and human beings can gain a comprehensive sense for this harmony. Such a comprehensive sense for this harmony was given to the pupils of the ancient Mysteries, right up to the fifteenth century. Before any knowledge was imparted to them, their teachers endeavoured to imbue them with a feeling for the way man stands within the cosmos. It is another sign of these materialistic times that knowledge today can be absorbed without any preparation in the feeling life. I pointed this out in the opening words of the first chapter in Christianity as Mystical Fact.

A feeling for the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm will be especially important when the endeavour is made to reach concrete concepts for what at the moment only exists in abstractions. For instance what is ‘a people, a nation’ in today's abstract materialism? Nothing but so and so many people who speak the same language! For our materialistic age has, of course, no conception of a folk being as a separate individuality, such as we have often described. We speak of a folk being as a separate individuality, a real single individuality. But in the materialists' view a folk being is merely a collection of people who speak the same language. This is an abstraction, for the concept does not refer to a concrete being. So what does it mean to you when discussing a people or a nation to speak, not of an abstraction but of a concrete being?

Well, in Anthroposophy we have the possibility of studying the human being, who is also a concrete being, and who possesses a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. So can we assume that a folk being is also a concrete being with differentiated parts?

Indeed we can. In addition to man, true occultism studies all the beings who exist, and who are as concrete as man. However, in the case of a folk soul we have to look for different elements, for if they were the same as in man, then a folk soul would be a human being, but it is not; it is a different kind of being. In fact, in the case of folk beings we have to study each folk soul individually in order to arrive at concepts which are real. Generalization would lead us back to abstraction, so each has to be considered individually.

Let us do so. Take the folk soul which today rules the Italian people to the extent that the individual members of a people can be ruled by a folk soul. What can we say about it? In the case of a human being we say that he has a physical body consisting of various salts, various other minerals, five per-cent solids, so much that is liquid, so much that is gaseous, and so on. That is his physical body. A folk soul such as that of the Italian people does not possess a human body, but it does possess something which can be seen as analogous to the physical body. The Italian folk soul does not have a physical body made up of salts or solids or liquids, though this does not mean that other folk souls have no liquid components. However, the Italian folk soul has none; it begins with components which are aeriform. There are no liquid or other components, for the most densely material part of the Italian folk soul is woven out of air. All its other components are even less dense. The human being has earthly substance, whereas the Italian folk soul has, to start with, aeriform substance. And where the human being has liquid substance, the Italian folk soul has warmth. The human being has aeriform substance which he breathes in and out, and the Italian folk soul has light which corresponds to air in the human being. The human being has warmth, and the Italian folk soul has sounds instead, the sounds of the spheres.

This is approximately what corresponds to the physical body, but the ingredients are different. Instead of solid, liquid, gaseous and warmth elements, as in the human being, the Italian folk soul has something similar—though not a physical body in the same sense—consisting of air, warmth, light, sound. From this you can see that if the Italian folk soul wants to ensoul the human beings who belong to it, this can take place via their breathing, since its lowest, densest component is air. And indeed it is so that the communication between the individuals and the Italian folk soul takes place through the breathing process. In the breathing the folk soul spreads down into the human beings. This is an actual, real process. Of course breathing is done through something quite different, but in the actual breathing process the folk soul steals in and influences its people.

In a similar way we could consider what corresponds to our etheric body. This would start with the life ether, and then in place of the light ether there would be what I called in my Theosophy ‘burning desire’; then, corresponding to the sound ether, would be what is there described as ‘mobile sensitivity’, and so on. You can find all the ingredients in Theosophy, but you have to know how to apply them. If you were to take further this study of the correspondence, the communication, between the folk soul and the individual human being; if you were to continue on the basis of what we have said so far, you would find that all the qualities in the character of the Italian people are connected with these things. This can be studied concretely in every detail.

Only examples can be given here. Suppose we wanted to study the Russian folk soul. We would find that the lowest component has nothing material in it, nothing solid, liquid, gaseous, aeriform, not even warmth. The lowest component, what in the Russian folk soul corresponds to the salt, the solid element in the human being, would be found to be the light ether. The sound ether would be what corresponds to the liquid element in the human being; the life ether would correspond to the air in the human being; the ‘burning desire’ to warmth in the human being. Then we could ask how the Russian folk soul communicates with the individual Russian human being. This takes place in that light, streaming down, is reflected in a certain way by the earth. Light exercises certain influences on the earth. It is reflected not only physically, but also out of the vegetation, out of whatever is in the soil. The light does not work directly on the individual Russian. First it works into the earth, not the coarse, physical earth, but the plants and everything that grows and flourishes on the earth. And this light is reflected. In what is reflected back lies the medium through which the Russian folk soul communicates with the individual Russian. That is why the Russians' relationship to their soil, to everything brought forth by the earth, is so much stronger than is the case with other nations. It is because of this extraordinary bearing of the folk soul. And ‘mobile sensitivity’—this is immensely significant—is the first etheric ingredient of the Russian folk soul, corresponding to light in the human being.

Thus we come to the concrete folk being; thus we can study how one spirit speaks to another, when one is a human being and the other a folk soul. This takes place in the subconscious realm. When an Italian breathes, when he maintains his life by breathing—when what he consciously wants is to maintain his life by breathing—then, in his unconscious, the folk soul speaks and whispers to him. He does not hear it, but his astral body perceives it and lives in the exchange that goes on beneath the threshold of consciousness between the folk soul and the individual human being.

And in what streams back out of the Russian soil, fructified by sunlight, are contained the mysterious runes, the whispering runes by which the Russian folk soul speaks to the individual Russian while he paces across the face of his land or senses the life which rays forth from the light. Do not imagine that these things must be taken in a material way. Of course a Russian might live in Switzerland, but in Switzerland, too, there is light which is reflected by the earth. If you are an Italian you will hear your folk soul whispering in your breathing when you are in Switzerland. If you are a Russian you will feel rising up from the soil of Switzerland whatever it is you can hear as a Russian. You must not take these things in a material way. Such things are not tied to locations—though, of course, because the human being is to some extent material, one's own location yields more. The air of Italy, together with the whole climate there, naturally facilitates and promotes the kind of speaking I have described. And the soil of Russia facilitates and promotes that other kind of speaking. But you must not take these things materialistically, for of course a Russian can be a Russian not only in Russia—although it is Russian soil which especially promotes Russian-ness. You see, on the one hand materialism is given its due, but on the other hand we have here something relative, not absolute. For light above the soil of Russia is not only part of the body of the Russian folk soul, but it is also light, as elsewhere. On the other hand the Russian folk soul—I have described all this before—has the rank of an archangel. And archangels are not fettered to one location, they are supra-spatial.

Concrete concepts such as these are what ought to underlie any talk of the relationship of the individual to his people. Yet consider how far mankind is today from even the faintest notion of what is contained in the name of a people. Notwithstanding such considerations, world programmes are scattered abroad and the names of nations cast in every direction. When you take proper account of the fact that a folk-being is a concrete being and that every folk-being differs from every other, you will be able to realize fully just how much of what is flying around in the world today is nothing but empty phrases. What is air for the Italian folk-being is light for the Russian folk-being, and these things lead to quite different kinds of communication between the folk-being and the individual human being. Anthropology is the materialistic, external view; Anthroposophy will have to reveal the true conditions, the actual realities. Since, in their materialism, people today are such a long way from any reality, it is no wonder that things which are included in world programmes are spoken about in such an arbitrary and mendacious manner.

On Tuesday we shall continue to speak about the nature of our anthroposophical spiritual science. In connection with this I also want to refer to a number of things at the present time which can really only be properly understood from the standpoint of spiritual science. The suffering mankind is having to bear today is connected in large measure with the fact that people do not want to find clarity with reference to the things they discuss. Instead they send into the world furious messages which bear no relation to reality. This is once again brought home to us when we come across something like the pamphlet which has been published in Switzerland, Conditions de Paix de l'Allemagne by someone who calls himself ‘Hungaricus’. For those of us whose attitude of mind is that of spiritual science, we need only read this through in order to discover every single defect in present-day materialistic thinking with all its awkward complications. So on Tuesday I shall say a few words about this pamphlet and its method and the kind of thinking it reveals, for it really is so very characteristic of today's awkward and complicated materialistic thinking.