The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Gentlemen, at our last session I started to answer your question about the inner organs of man. Of course, this subject must be seen from a broad perspective and treated from its foundations. We saw how William Windom, who died while delivering a speech, expressed his own inner condition by reading it off, as it were, from his body. After citing another case, we found in examining certain facts about the course of human life that the mortality rate is highest in man's infancy, that human beings die most frequently in their early years. In the period from birth up to the change of teeth at age seven, the mortality rate is at its peak, though it diminishes with the third, fourth and fifth years.

The human being is healthiest from the time of his change of teeth to puberty. This is indeed so, and if we ourselves are careful to prevent the causes of ill health, such as bad posture, which can lead to curvatures, and foul air, which can afflict the internal organs, we can count on children to be healthiest during their school years. The illnesses that do befall them then are for the most part due to external causes. Not until the teens does the danger again arise when man can fall ill from processes arising within his own constitution.

These illnesses, however, are quite different from those of early childhood.

I have mentioned that infants are highly susceptible to suppuration of the blood. It can become so purulent that symptoms of jaundice appear. In children, irregular digestion frequently results in diarrhoea. They also get thrush—those little white pustules in various places—and another, completely different kind of illness, so-called infantile convulsions. A childhood disease that is particularly prevalent these days is infantile paralysis, which can also affect adults. It is extremely damaging; the children cannot move their legs and become quite paralyzed. This disease is increasing rapidly. Perhaps you have read that schools have had to be closed in the province of Thüringen because of an epidemic there.

Thus, we can see that childhood illnesses have a distinctive character; they are quite different from the diseases man gets in later life. Scarlet fever and measles are specifically childhood illnesses, though adults, too, can contract the latter. But we must now ask ourselves why children are particularly susceptible to all these illnesses.

We can explain this susceptibility only if we know how forces work in the human body. When we examine the human embryo in the first, second or third months of pregnancy, we see that it is utterly different form what the human being later becomes. In the first and second months the child is all head; the other organs are only appendages to the head. What later turn into limbs, hands and feet are little stumps, and the actual lung and abdominal region are not yet functioning.

You see, if you take the human embryo (a sketch is drawn here) it looks like this. It is enclosed in a kind of sack, to which are attached blood vessels from the body of the mother. These blood vessels penetrate throughout the embryo, which the mother supplies with blood and nourishment. The other matter is supplementary and is later discarded. In comparison to the rest of the body the embryo's head is huge. See (pointing to the drawing), this is the head; the rest consists of appendages not yet functioning. This part will later become the heart and digestive system. The blood circulation is provided from outside, from the mother. These little stumps will develop into hands and feet. So we can say that the embryo is all head. Its other organs are insignificant because the mother's system provides all the nourishment and air. Hence, during the first few months, the embryo consists primarily of a head.

People are surprised that mental illnesses are hereditary. In fact, mental illnesses are always based on physical ailments; they arise from a malfunctioning of the body. Neither the spirit nor the soul can fall ill. Though mental illnesses are always rooted in physical problems, people wonder how they can occur through heredity, which indeed they can do. If a parent, particularly the mother, suffers from tuberculosis or another disease like arteriosclerosis, which admittedly occurs rarely in younger persons, the children do not necessarily become afflicted with these illnesses but instead can suffer from mental deficiencies. People are surprised about this, but need it puzzle us, gentlemen? Whatever the child can inherit must be inherited first of all from its head. Therefore, if the mother is consumptive, one need not be surprised that her condition is not passed on to the lungs of the unborn child, which, after all, are not even functioning yet. The condition is rather carried over into the head and comes to expression in the brain. Thus, nobody should be surprised that the disease inherited is quite different from that of the parent. Venereal disease, for example, can appear in children as an eye disease. It is no wonder, for when the child's head is developing, its eyes are exposed to what afflicts the parents; its eyes are in an environment that's venereally diseased! So it is not at all surprising.

When the child is born, everyone knows that the most completely formed part of it is its head. In the succeeding years it is the rest of the body that grows the most; the head has much less growing to do than the other organs. This fact tells us how, in reality, the inner organs of man function. Materialistic science cannot form an accurate conception of this because it fails to realize that all growth proceeds from the head. In the child everything is regulated from the head. We can see this most clearly in the embryo, which is nothing more than a head. But even after birth all inner processes are regulated from this part of the body. The digestion, the blood circulation and all other activities in human organization are directed by the head.

Suppose that a child is born whose blood circulation is too slow. For some reason, through some hereditary factor, it can happen that the child's blood circulation is too slow. Let us imagine this case. (See drawing.) Here is the child's heart, and here, its arteries; through both the blood is travelling too slowly. The heart is being formed from the head, but even when the head functions perfectly, the circulation can still be too slow. Thus, even though the heart is properly developed, the blood doesn't flow into it correctly. This is often the case in earliest infancy. The head is perfectly developed, but the blood flows too slowly into the heart. Poor circulation may result simply from keeping the child in stifling air. It cannot breathe properly, and its circulation slows down. The blood circulation may slacken also if the baby is not properly nourished. Then its blood cannot thoroughly penetrate the body. The head may be in excellent shape and try to form the heart aright, but the blood circulation remains sluggish. What happens in such instances is that, because the blood is not circulating well enough, certain substances that normally would be pushed down from the heart into the kidneys and expelled remain in the body; they stay in the blood. When these substances that should have been discharged stay in the system, the blood suppurates.

In the seventh, eighth or ninth years, this danger is not so acute as it is in the earliest years of childhood. You see, the fact that a child has its second set of teeth shows that its body is sufficiently strong; if it were not, the teeth would not come in properly. Why? Well, you must understand that what is contained in a tooth comes out of the whole body. The second teeth emerge from within the whole system; they are the product not just of something in the jaw but of the whole body. This is true only of the second teeth, however, for the first teeth, the so-called milk teeth, are completely different. They are the result of heredity, of the fact that the child's mother and father have teeth. Only after the milk teeth are expelled in the course of the first seven years does the child get its own teeth. The body must make the second teeth for itself.

Actually, a child nine or ten years old already has its second body. It has already completely discarded the one it had inherited, and comes into possession of its own body only around the age of seven. During these first seven years it demonstrates that it was born with enough resistance to tolerate air and nourishment. After it has built up its body and produced its second teeth, the danger of falling ill is no longer so acute. The danger is most acute in earliest infancy while it is learning to cope for itself in breathing, eating, that is, everything that once was done for it within the protection of the mother's womb. In these early years the head is actually in good shape; only with age does it become less perfect. In old age the head doesn't work as well as it did in infancy. It must think and occupy itself with the surroundings and so something often goes amiss. But the infant does not yet need to learn anything, go to school or possess skills. The head works only on the child's own body, and in most cases it does this quite well. During these tender years, however, when the human being is just becoming used to the world, the rest of the body is quite vulnerable. Modern science also has described these matters but not quite as I have, for what I tell you is exact. Popular science does not really comprehend the whole process and cannot explain why the human being is most vulnerable in its earliest years. It cannot come to terms with this fact because it explains away the soul and spirit.

In reality, soul-spiritual elements are united with the child, mainly with the head, while it is still in the mother's womb and after birth. The forces that work on the child from within the head are invisible soul-spiritual forces. Should any of you think that this is merely an arbitrary opinion, you would be committing the same error as one of the following men. Suppose one man says, “Here is a piece of iron,” and the other says, “Fine! I'll shoe my horse with it.” The first man then says, “No, it would be stupid to shoe your horse with this. It's a magnet, and it has a hidden force. Magnets are used for quite other things than for shoeing horses!” The one man thinks the piece of iron should be used for a horseshoe, while the other knows that it is a magnet containing an invisible force. Well, the person who says, in accordance with materialistic science, “The head is nothing but a bit of bones and brains,” is just like the fellow who says of the magnet, “This is a horseshoe.” Indeed, it is not a horseshoe, nor is the head of the infant just flesh and bone. Within it invisible forces are working like a sculptor to build up the whole organism. The human form is among those things the child keeps as an inheritance, but the forces that, during the first seven years, tirelessly build up this form from the head are brought into the world not from the parents but from quite another source.

Suppose a man received these forces from his parents. Well, gentlemen, if a parent is a genius, does that make the child a genius as well? Or if a child is a genius, does that mean the parents were also highly gifted? Not at all! Goethe, for example, was certainly a genius, but his father was a dreadful philistine, and his mother was a kind and pleasant woman who could tell a good story but surely was no genius. Goethe's son was rather stupid; he was no genius either. Whatever pertains to the soul and spirit is not hereditary; it is brought into this world from quite other realms and then is united with the part that is inherited. Aside from the time he spends in his mother's womb, man lives before birth as a being of soul and spirit.

The only reason people disavow this today is that all through the Middle Ages the Catholic Church forbade anyone to ascribe to man a life of soul and spirit before birth. It assumed that the soul was created at birth by a God whose nature was also assumed. So throughout the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church forbade the concept of pre-existence, as it was called, meaning “existence before, prior to birth.” Modern materialistic science has merely followed suit and then congratulated itself on its cleverness. Now people think they are extraordinarily clever to hold this opinion; unfortunately, they fail to realize how they were conditioned to do so.

In truth, man not only inherits a physical existence from his parents and forebears but also brings into the world a soul-spiritual element that works within him. If one does not acknowledge that the soul-spiritual aspect is present before birth, one cannot see that the same soul and spirit remain after death; at most, one can believe it. Knowledge of the immortality of the soul is dependent on knowledge of its existence before birth. If one maintains that the soul came into being with the creation of the body, then, of course, a divine creator would have the privilege of letting the soul disappear upon the body's dissolution. If, however, it is the soul that builds up the body in the first place, then it certainly remains unaffected when the body dies.

Thus, the existence of the human soul follows readily from all the aspects that one can correctly observe. Indeed, how could the soul die, since it is the soul itself that builds up the physical body! One would have to investigate far different regions to discover whether or not the soul can perish. In future lectures we shall consider this question and find that it cannot die in these realms either. It obviously cannot die with the body because it is the soul that built it up.

We have now become acquainted with illnesses that originate because the soul-spiritual element works out of the head, and the body is malfunctioning. But the blood circulation can also be too slow. Stagnation sets in and the blood then suppurates. Still, something entirely different can happen, too. The infant may be too weak to absorb nourishment through its intestines into its blood. Because the body is too weak, nourishment does not pass through the villi and the child becomes afflicted with diarrhoea. What should have been absorbed to remain longer in the body is expelled. Because the food was not properly digested, diarrhoea results, and the substance is discharged unchanged. This is connected with something else. Obviously, a child can get diarrhoea in different degrees, and it may even get summer cholera. Whatever the degree, however, it is only the first stage. If the child cannot digest its food for a considerable length of time, its inner organs cannot be built up properly. The head constantly wants to work on them, but the inner organs cannot be correctly constructed because the necessary substances are lacking. Say you were working on a statue and ran out of clay but continued to make empty-handed motions in the air. In a like manner the head starts to move and fidget around when the child lacks the substance from which its organs can be built. It wants to form the heart or stomach but can only aimlessly fidget about because the substances the head should have received have been eliminated causing diarrhoea.

The educated but materialistic scientist faces a complete puzzle here. He examines the child, discovers diarrhoea and prescribes some medication to stop it. As a result, food will merely accumulate in the intestines because they cannot be absorbed, and the child will get nothing more than a swollen stomach. If one were to examine the organism further, one would discover that the heart is malformed, that it is an empty pouch, or that the lungs are empty sacks. They want to be formed but lack the necessary substances. The forces originating from the head that penetrate into the lungs, which may now be empty sacks, need something to grasp and work with. I can grasp this chair and shake it or, without having taken hold of it, I can merely fidget about like an idiot. But what happens when the head forces fidget about in the lungs? Convulsions occur. A rational explanation of convulsions must acknowledge that the head is fidgeting around and finds no support. Diarrhoea may be explained materialistically but convulsions can no longer be accounted for along these lines.

All this demonstrates that in the infant the soul-spiritual processes are at their height of activity. Later, this activity subsides. Up to the child's sixth or seventh years, however, these spiritual forces are so active that they can separate minute amounts of matter from food that will constitute the second teeth. Imagine having to do that yourself! You would have to be clever enough to distinguish the magnesium salts and carbonates contained in the food. Even if you could do that you would first have to analyse the teeth chemically and learn from them themselves. The teeth made artificially today are not living teeth; no one really knows how teeth are produced. Yet minute portions of the nourishment the child receives up to its seventh year are withdrawn to make the second teeth. Furthermore, to correctly separate the various substances you would need to know not only the chemical composition of food and teeth but also the activity in the stomach. What happens to the minute particles secreted in the second or third years? How do you retain them long enough in the blood stream so that, at just the right time, during the sixth and seventh years, they will penetrate the jaws to build up the teeth? All this that must be accomplished is done unconsciously by the child's soul and spirit. No one here would feel insulted if I said that you cannot produce or make one hair grow on your head. But a child can. It drives the proper substances to the spot where the hair takes root and then offers them to the light, for hair grows under the influence of light. All this occurs in the child, but modern science is unwilling to consider these aspects. It leaves people in the dark by refusing to acknowledge that soul-spiritual forces work within the organism that originate, not from the parents, but from the spiritual world.

Let us return to this matter of hair. Man normally grows hair only on certain parts of his body, but once, ages ago, he was covered completely with a shaggy growth of hair. Why did he lose it? I will not give you a theory, which anyone can dream up, but merely point out some facts. Consider another creature, the pig. When pigs are free in nature, they are covered with hair, but domesticated pigs lose it. In their natural habitat wild boars grow thick coats of fur; when they are domesticated and in surroundings not originally their own, they lose it. Man, like the domesticated animals, did not originally live under today's conditions. But there was a time when, under the influence of light and warmth, he grew hair all over his body, and we may witness this fact today in an embryo a few months old. During the first months of pregnancy the whole embryo, insofar as it is only a head, is covered with hair. Later, the hair disappears. I have already explained how plants in their first stage of growth utilize light and warmth from the previous year. Likewise, the child has hair on account of the light and warmth emanating from the mother. Only later is it lost. So a consideration of hair, too, can show us how forces of soul and spirit work on the body.

I have said that the human being is most healthy during the school years, between the ages of seven and fourteen. Why is this so? Only those children who can develop those strong forces that produce the second teeth survive. During that period, the child unfolds vigorous forces, but they must first be acquired in the earliest years through radical adaptation. Everything that the head accomplishes within the organism is most pronounced during those early years. Though the child is unaware of its activity, the head must really exert itself and be a great artisan. It has to overcome the body's constant resistance all by itself because it gets no support in its continual and taxing efforts during the first seven years. This tremendous strain causes all those illnesses I have told you about.

Let us now suppose that the circulation of the blood is malfunctioning, not on account of its absorbing too little nourishment, but because it absorbs too much. This can also happen. Indeed, the parents, who often think it is best to stuff the baby with food, may not be as wise as the organism. They can hardly be reproached for this practice, though, because it is usually quite difficult to tell when the child has had enough. Children know their limits, as a rule, through their own inherent wisdom and instinct. If the mother produces too much milk, however, and it is fed to the child, its instinct will become uncertain through eating too much. Now, if too much food is absorbed by the system, the head cannot keep up; it cannot handle too large an amount and will try to eliminate the surplus. The food has already been absorbed into the blood through the intestines, however, so the head cannot eliminate the surplus in the normal way. What does it do then? It discharges the superfluous substances through the skin. Measles and scarlet fever are the result.

These illnesses differ completely from diarrhoea and convulsions. A child gets the latter because it does not receive enough food and its forces fidget around aimlessly within the body. When too much food is absorbed, however, it must somehow be eliminated, occasionally even through the lungs. Diphtheria and pneumonia are the body's defence measures used to rid itself of substances it cannot otherwise eliminate through the skin. When one understands the human being and the processes that occur in the body, one finds it quite natural that an infant is susceptible to these illnesses.

A child can be afflicted with yet other diseases. Take the case of a child who is too weak to produce his second teeth. His milk teeth were inherited and required no effort from his system. Now, it can happen that the forces unable to produce the new teeth are diverted into the lungs. The lungs become inflamed and the child gets pneumonia. You see, the human body is extremely complicated, and when a child falls ill with pneumonia the doctor should examine the condition not only of the lungs but also of the kidneys, stomach, etc. When an illness arises, one must always examine the whole body and not just the part immediately affected.

When a child has reached the age of seven, however, its breathing processes have become sufficiently developed to function without the intervention of the head. In the infant the head must constantly regulate the breathing. It must not only build up the teeth but also care for the organs of breathing. When the head has been relieved of these tasks at age seven or eight, the child is now in a position to breathe properly. It is of utmost importance to realize that with the second teeth the child can bring order into its breathing, and can receive its second lungs and bronchi, as it were, which have by now been built up. The child no longer breathes with a weak inherited organism but with the new one that has been built up. Now it is in quite a different situation; now it has support. It is one thing if the child has inherited from, say, a weak mother and father, a breathing apparatus that must be directed from a head that is too weak, and it is quite another thing if it has properly built up a second apparatus suited to its needs. A head that is too weak simply cannot build up the lungs properly. Thus, because from age seven to fourteen the organs of breathing are in such fine shape, the individual is then at his healthiest. The positive aspect of these years is that the breathing process is at its best. With the onset of puberty, however, some of the nourishment is now diverted to this development. In the younger child substances are not yet absorbed through the later processes of puberty, but now digestion must take a completely new form. The reason is easily understood, for something completely new has come into play and its food is diverted in a new direction. From the age of puberty onward the mature organs of breathing cause the digestive organs to readjust so that the right counter-pressure is exerted from the stomach and intestines, since some of what earlier constituted the overall pressure was diverted. Now, the proper counter-pressure must come about. No wonder that anaemia and other illnesses afflict girls of this age since the organism must take time to adjust.

From age seven to fourteen the child enjoys its greatest protection from illness. In earlier years the head must make a tremendous effort to work into the rest of the organism and it must adjust to this task. Then, during the school years, the child is at its healthiest. The second breathing system is unhindered and can freely distribute the oxygen to the benefit of both the brain and the digestion. As I have mentioned before, things can be upset only through outside causes—activities in school and the like.

But now the child reaches puberty. Look at a boy. Up to this point he has perfected his body and is as healthy as a human being can be. He has successfully renewed his organism and everything has gone smoothly. But with the onset of puberty his metabolism begins to affect his whole body. The processes of digestion begin to work upward into his breathing system and, as a result, his voice changes. At the age when he must again reform his organism, the metabolic system becomes influential. This is expressed in a deepening of the voice. He must make new exertions and again illnesses threaten.

You see, only when we observe the human being in this manner are we able to answer the question one of you gentlemen posed last time. Otherwise, we cannot even think about it, let alone learn anything. But knowing now that it is the head that works the most during the first seven years, what conclusion may we reach? You must understand that, while the head is developed in the mother's organism, it is not merely formed by conception and substance but by the whole universe. The mother's substances represent only the foundation on which the form occurs. The head is a representation, an image of the universe. Its roundness indicates the working of the whole universe, and it is no idle fancy that the starry heavens work upon the skull, which is sometimes covered by a stupid looking hat. It is as true as this fact that I've mentioned to you before. Suppose we have a compass; the magnetic needle always points north, not just anywhere. Now, no one thinks that the needle contains the forces that determine its position. Everyone agrees that it is the magnetic forces of the earth, and that the needle takes its direction from these earthly forces. Everyone comprehends that. Yet, in regard to human embryonic development, men falsely think it all arises from conception. It would be just as clever to think that the direction pointed to by the magnetic needle was determined by its own forces.

The human head represents the whole cosmos, and this it is that has worked upon it. In addition, these forces bestowed by the universe continue to work within the child through its head. To build up the lungs, for example, the head must receive the right forces from the universe. To perfect the kidneys, forces must be received from far-off regions, from Jupiter, for instance. This is no idle fancy. It can be investigated just as other, physical matters can be investigated. Thus, when a child is born, it carries within its head all the forces of the universe.

Of course, it is nonsense to say that the moon, sun or Jupiter have an influence on an organ, or to cast a horoscope thinking the planet Jupiter, for example, is dominant. The head is formed from the whole universe, and the forces that work on the human being during the first seven years have been given to the head from the cosmos. During the next seven years, man becomes increasingly accustomed to the earth's atmosphere, so that whereas before he was influenced by the stars, he is now influenced by the air.

After this period the substances of digestion and the metabolic system play such an important part that they can even affect the voice. What does this mean? It is all a result of what we absorb through digestion from the earth. I have already explained to you this process of how, for example, substances from the earth must first be made lifeless within the intestines. This becomes man's main task when he reaches puberty. At that time he becomes dependent on the earth. As males we owe our voices first of all to the air, but the deepening results from the action of earthly substances. We can be born on earth because originally we were beings of the stars. After birth we let the forces we have brought with us from the starry worlds echo within our organisms. Then we become beings of the air. Only at puberty are we assigned to the earth to become its beings. Only then do we become attached to those things that fetter us to this planet. Thus, you see the course of man's descent to the earth from the cosmos.

Often materialists blindly fantasize about human development. They do not realize that man gradually accustoms himself to the earth and then, in old age, grows away from it. For what happens in old age? The forces we possess in advanced age we also possessed in youth. They hardened the bones while the other parts stayed pliable. But in old age the forces contained in the bones pass into the rest of the body, and the initial result is arteriosclerosis. The arteries harden, and the brain can calcify. Actually, the brain must always contain a minute amount of what arises through calcification. The child would be dull if its brain lacked these minute traces of calcium secreted by the pineal gland. The soul could not act; it would not have the substances in which to work. But if later in old age too much calcium is secreted and calcification occurs, the soul again cannot direct matters because it encounters too much resistance. This can result in paralysis or apoplexy or some other kinds of stroke. One can also become senile, since one can no longer take hold of and use the brain. Calcification in other parts of the body has the same effect, lifting one out of the region of the earthly forces. Thus we can see how man, up to the end of puberty, grows into the forces of the earth and how, later, when the secreted deposits become increasingly resistant and the soul's activity is impeded, he grows away from the earth.

So you see that it is, in fact, possible to discover what man has received and brought down from the universe. But one must not fall for superstitions such as a certain star is influencing the lung of a thirty-five year old man even though the lung has indeed been built up by the forces that initially descended from the stars into the head of the infant.

By examining such things scientifically, one arrives at a real science of the spirit. A spiritual science exists, and it can be studied just like any other science. We can belittle ancient times as much as we like, but in those days people did know something. Granted, we cannot bring back the past; what was right for people then is not so for us today. But if once again we have men who understand the world and man, men who know that the human head is not just produced in the mother's womb as a kind of pinhead, then we shall also have better politicians. You see, gentlemen, a person who knows nothing of these matters and of the nature of the human being cannot be a good politician simply because he will not know what people need. It is absolutely essential that once more there be men who really know something about the world. This is what we must strive for.

Schools must again teach people something of value. Today, much importance is placed on learning the skills required for making machines. Nothing can be said against this from the standpoint of spiritual science because it is quite worthwhile. But the skills needed to cope among human beings are neglected. An abstract social science, ignorant of man's needs, was invented and this is taught instead. Above all, one must study man as we have done here, but unhappily what I told you is not taught. Look back on your own school days! Where is something like this taught today? That is what our age lacks. Teaching men the things they learn today is about as good for them as feeding them rocks instead of bread. Maybe the stomach of a goose can take rocks but that of a human being cannot! To do so would ruin the digestive system, and when you teach men what is being taught today, you actually ruin their heads. You know that the arm becomes weak if it is unused, and the head also becomes weak if it is not used in the right way. While the head was developing in the mother, it received forces from the stars. If it is told nothing about them, if it entertains no thoughts of them, it grows weak, just as muscles do when they are not exercised. If the child learns nothing of the real world, it remains weak. The worst thing about conditions today is that people have weak heads and do not understand anything about one another. They separate themselves according to social standing and do not speak to those of other classes. This is like training a man to become an athlete while neglecting his biceps. If, in educating men, I leave their heads weak, they will not know the very thing that matters most. This is how things stand.

When children have finished building up their organisms with inherent, unconscious wisdom and have received their second teeth, it is of utmost importance to impart to them something that they have previously employed unconsciously. Then do they become proper human beings, people who can direct their thoughts properly and conceive of spiritual science in the right way. Once social thinking is ruined, nothing rational can be achieved. But if we make use of a genuine science of the spirit, much can be improved in that respect.

In these lectures I should like to bring forward some details about the connections existing between the spiritual life of nations and their destiny in history.

Natural Science is an especially important element in our civilization to-day because of the constitution of our present day souls, and I shall therefore select from the many different points of view from which the theme can be treated, the scientific element, and show that the entire historical development of nations is the deep basis for our present day inclination towards the scientific view. It will be necessary first to give an introduction and treat the theme itself on the basis of to-day's observations.

If we turn our attention to the historical development of nations—and for the moment we will remain within what is historic—we will see that by the side of external political and economic destinies, spiritual endow¬ments, acquisition and accomplishments are forced upon us. You know that to-day two modes of thought oppose each other strongly. I have pointed out these opposing tendencies of thought in an earlier lecture held here in Stuttgart. First there exists the view proceeding more from the Ideal, the supporters of which are of the opinion that a spiritual basis, merely in the form of an abstract idea, prevails in the evolution of a nation. Accord¬ing to this view external events are produced from out of such a spiritual basis. One can say that ideas prevail in history which express themselves from epoch to epoch, but usually one is not clear regarding the shadowy relation between the real spiritual basis and the sequence of ideas which are brought to expression in the course of history.

The other view, which at present exercises great sway, considers that all spiritual phenomena, including Morals, Rights, Science, Art, Religion, etc., are simply a result of material events, or rather, as a great portion of mankind would say to-day, of the economic life. It is thought, in this case, that certain dim forces which are not investi¬gated further, have brought about this or that economic system or method of co-operation in the time sequence of history ; and so, through purely material economic processes, what men regard as Ideas, Morals, Rights, etc., have arisen.

One can produce if desired convincing reasons for the one view as well as for the other. Both are capable of proof in the sense in which ' proofs' are often spoken of to-day. Whether a proof is regarded as decisive for the one or the other view depends on the way one is placed in the world with reference to one's ordinary interests or what one has experienced in life through mode of philosophic thought. Everything in this Wundt characterization is built up, is constructed. Some observations are made about the way in which modern uncivilized tribes show their way of thinking through their language. The hypothesis is continued and the primaeval population of the world is shown to have been like these primitive tribes which have remained in this earlier condition, only perhaps more decadent. From the ideas found here one can see how they have arisen. They are not gained from experience, but their originator who built them up uses the modern concepts of Causality, Cognition, Natural Causes, etc., and then he reflects how these would appear in more primitive conditions. Then he proceeds to carry over to primitive races what he has thus constructed.

There is but little possibility to-day for looking into the soul of another human being. There is absolutely nothing in Wundt's exposition of which one can say, one can recognize that it has arisen from insight into the soul conditions, even those of primitive races to-day. The renowned Wundt merely revolves about his own ideas which he simplifies and applies to the human creatures he is studying.

Because nothing correct exists to-day connecting primaeval races and the races with developed outlook upon the world, we see these things placed historically side by side without regard to the fact that it is, one might say, logically offensive to find highly developed views of the world supported by wonderful intuitions of the Hindus and Chinese placed immediately after such a description of primitive man as given by Wundt. What is so lacking to-day is this power of penetrating feelingly into other modes of thought. We go back with what we are accustomed to think in the 19th or 20th centuries to the 15th and 16th centuries and then to the middle ages. We do not feel allied to them and cannot understand them and so we say they were dark ages and that human civilization came to a certain pause. Then we go back to Greece and here one feels the necessity for close contact while retaining the same ideas one holds regarding the ordinary life of culture to-day. At best, men of fine feeling, like Hermann Grimm, speak differently. He has emphasized the fact that, with our modern ideas, we can only go as far back as the Romans. Generally speaking, we can understand them, we can grasp with modern ideas what transpires with the Romans. If we go back however to the Greeks we see that already Pericles, Alcibiades, even Socrates or Plato, Aeschylus or Sophocles are shadowy beside our modern understanding; there is something foreign about them, if we approach them with modern ideas. They speak to us as if from another world. They speak to us as if history itself starts with them as a fairy-tale world. Hermann Grimm has spoken in this way of facts. But one must add something if we proceed from another point of view, from the view existing in the world through the spirit of Natural Science (this was not the view of Hermann Grimm.) One cannot go back in thought even to the Romans so as to make them appear really objectively before us.

Grimm, who did not have an education in Natural Science but only received what existed as a continuation from the Roman epoch into modern times, is still able to enter into, the spirit of Roman times but not into the Greek. And if the concepts of Rights of the State which are copied from Rome were not known to us, if we possessed nothing of that singular feeling for Art which arose again in the Renaissance and into which Grimm entered deeply, but if instead of all this we lived in purely scientific ideas we should be as little at home in the Roman world or even in the medieval world as Grimm felt himself at home in the Greek world. This is one point that must be added, and the other is that Grimm paid no attention either to the World of the East. With his whole observation of the world he only traces back as far as the Greeks. Consequently he does not attain to what he would have attained according to his own suppositions if he had applied himself to, let us say, the Vedas, to Vedantic philosophy. He would then have said: If the Greeks meet us as shadows, those men whose special conditions have found expression in the Vedas, in Vedanta, meet us not even as shadows but as voices from out of a quite different world, a world which does not resemble ours even in its shadow-images. But this is only valid if we have so taken up the present mode of thought and condition of spirit that we are able to understand these as soul content.

Quite different is it if we adopt the methods which to-day are alone purposeful. Because of a certain entanglement in natural-scientific education, we are to-day imprisoned in a system of ideas which appear to be almost absolute. It is only through Spiritual science that one can to-day enter with one's feelings and one's life into past epochs of time. From the standpoint of Spiritual science the single epochs of human evolution appear absolutely different from each other; indeed, it is only in Spiritual Science that the possibility arises of entering into the spirit of what men in past epochs of historical development possessed as soul-constitution. How does this possibility arise? It is possible in the following way. I have often explained in lectures that Spiritual Science rests on a definite development of our soul powers. The cognition which we apply in Natural Science and in ordinary life and which in recent times we have carried over into History and into Social Science and even into the science of Religion, I have called in my books 'Objective Cognition.' This is namely what every human being who belongs to our modern civilized life is aware of. We observe the external world through the senses and combine sense impressions through the medium of the intellect. We thereby gain serviceable rules for life, a certain survey over life or over the laws of nature. In this consists what one calls objective cognition.

As characteristic of this we acquire a clear distinction between ourselves and the surrounding world. Ignoring for the moment the different theories of knowledge, the different psychological and physiological hypotheses, we know that we face sense-perception as an Ego. Through the intellect, in which we clearly know ourselves to be active, we gain a kind of synthesis of what is given through the senses. We thus distinguish active, intellectual activity from passive perception. We feel ourselves as an Ego in the environment which reveals itself through sense experience. In other words, man distinguishes himself as a thinking, feeling and willing being from the environment which imparts itself to him through sense revelation.

But I have continually pointed out that beyond this method of cognition other methods can be developed and I have shown in my books How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science how such methods are attained.

The first steps for such cognition—whether one calls it 'higher' or something else does not matter—is Imaginative Cognition. This is distinguished chiefly from objective cognition by its working, not with abstract ideas, but with pictures which are as pregnant and as evident as ordinarily perceived images but which are not transformed into abstract thoughts. In our rela-tion to these pictures, as I have often emphasized, we produce and dominate them just as one does mathematical ideas.

The method of raising oneself to Imaginative Cognition has a quite definite effect on the constitution of the soul. But this result—and I say this with emphasis—lasts only during the time given to Imaginative Cognition. For when the spiritual investigator finds himself once again in ordinary life he makes use of ordinary knowledge, or objective cognition, like anyone else. He is then in the same disposition of soul as another man who is not a spiritual investigator.

During spiritual investigation, within that condition of looking into the spiritual world, the investigator is actually in his imaginative world. But there imaginations are not dreams, they are experienced with as much presence of mind as are mathematical ideas.

With regard to this presence of mind the condition of soul is not changed during imaginative experiences, but with regard to ordinary working experience in the world it is changed. During imaginative experience the feeling is at first that of being one with all that runs its course in our own soul life in time apart from space. Space does not come into question here, only time. I have already explained how, with this entry into imaginative representations, our experiences since birth or since some definite time later stand before us as a tableau arranged in time, a time picture made perceptible. This is difficult for the ordinary intellect to conceive because we are dealing with a picture which is not spatial but must be thought of only in time in which, however, simultaneity is an inherent factor. In ordinary consciousness one has always to do with the single moment. From this one looks back into the past. During this moment the world is seen surrounding us in space and we see ourselves existing in a definite epoch in time distinct from this surrounding world.

In Imaginative Cognition this is different. Here there is no sense in saying: I am living in the definite moment now; for when I behold this picture of life I flow with my life, I am just as much in the time of 10 or 20 years ago as in the present. To a certain degree the Ego is absorbed in the state of 'becoming' which is here perceived. One is united with this perception in time to the state of 'becoming.' It is as if the Ego which usually is experienced in the present moment is spread out over the past. As you can imagine, a transformation of the whole soul life is thus involved during the moments of such experiences. We have to deal with a world of pictures in which we are living. We feel ourselves to a certain extent to be a picture among pictures.

Whoever understands this in the right frame of mind will no longer talk foolishly about the spiritual investigator being subject to some kind of suggestion or hypnosis; for he himself is absolutely clear about the picture and the character of his experience; clear that he is a picture among pictures. But just because of this he knows also that the pictures in his consciousness are just like other ordinary representations, they are copies of a reality; images which he does not yet perceive as reality but the pictures of which he beholds inwardly.

One is in the condition of suggestion or hypnosis only if one has pictures and believes them to be realities like the realities perceptible through the senses. As soon as we are clear regarding the character of our experiences in consciousness, then it is simply a question of an inner possession of the same faculties that one uses in mathematics.

The essential thing that I want especially to emphasize to-day is this merging into what is objective-temporal, into this 'becoming' so that one no longer clings to the 'Now' in time but feels alive in the stream of happenings.

The next stage obtained through exercises, which I have also described in the books named, is that of Inspiration. This is distinguished from the Imagination stage by the picture element almost vanishing. One must first have the pictures in order to obtain correct ideas of Spiritual Science, but one must also be able to extinguish them from consciousness, one must obliterate them arbitrarily. And then the possibility comes for a holding back of something and what is held back is actually a revelation from the spiritual world. In my books named above I speak of inspired ideas of the spiritual world. But even with such experiences one has not yet attained the spiritual world. At first one had pictures, now one has the revelation to a certain extent of the spiritual world, but one stands independent and facing it, recognizing its reality in that one stands outside it.

To-day I should like to consider especially the soul condition when, from out of one's own will, such Inspiration is evolved. The ordinary objective world is then renounced, one knows then what it means to have outside one's body a revelation of the spiritual world. In other words, we can now float in unison not only with time, but with all that is spiritually objective, external to man; we no longer feel the distinction between cosmic existence and Ego existence in the way pertaining to objective cognition, but we experience the Ego and in the Ego the Cosmos in its concrete variety and multiplicity. It is fundamentally the same, at this stage of knowledge whether I say 'I am in the world' or 'The world is in me.' Ordinary methods of expression cease to have validity. Prepositions such as 'in' or 'outside' can only be used when one connects them with another condition. One feels poured out in the whole world not only in the 'becoming' but in everything that appears anew in consciousness as spiritual. One no longer feels this 'outside you' and 'in you.' This is the soul condition which holds us during Inspiration. It is not as if the Ego were submerged, not as if the outpouring of the Ego were identical with a suppression of the Ego, but the Ego in all its activity feels that it has become one with the concrete, manifold varied world it now experiences.

We know ourselves apart from our ideas, our feelings and our will impulses in spite of the fact that these are one with ourselves. So also through Inspiration we feel the manifold nature of the world in spite of knowing that we are really merged together with this world.

In the present epoch of human evolution, these stages of cognition must be evoked by such energies as I have described in my books How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science. They have to be reached consciously. But we can distinguish what constitutes the feeling of the soul in these conditions from what we con-sciously evoke there as content. One can distinguish how one feels in the state of Imagination and Inspiration from what one gains there by working and from what one finally apprehends there.

I do not want to indicate this soul condition through abstract considerations; I would like to describe it concretely. You see, when Goethe learnt to know Herder he, together with Herder, buried himself deep in the work of Spinoza. Whoever knows anything of Herder's biography knows to what an enthusiastic degree Herder admired Spinoza. But if one reads again such a work by Herder as, for instance his 'God,' in which he records his feelings regarding Spinoza's works, one must realize that Herder speaks about Spinoza, from out of Spinoza, but quite differently from Spinoza the philosopher himself. In one point Herder is similar to Spinoza and that is in the soul condition from which he reads Spinoza. Herder's soul was very similar to the soul condition from which Spinoza's Ethics, for example, were written. This condition passed over to Herder and, in a certain way, passed over also to Goethe while he plunged into the study of Spinoza with Herder. But while Herder had a certain satisfaction in this soul condition, Goethe had none. Goethe felt deeply that passing over into the object, that merging together of the Ego into the outer world, so magnificently alluded-to by Spinoza when he speaks in absolute passionless contemplation, as if the Cosmic ALL itself spoke, as if he would forget himself and as if his words were merely the means through which the Cosmos itself were speaking. Goethe could experience what can thus be experienced in objectivity, and in this connexion he felt just as Herder felt: but he was not satisfied. He still felt a longing for something else and it seemed to him that in spite of the depth of feeling acquired, Spinoza's philosophy cannot by any means fill the whole of man's needs. Fundamentally, what Goethe felt in this way towards Spinoza is but another 'nuance' of his feeling towards the northern world. The civilization accessible at Weimar dissatisfied him, and, you know how he was driven south, to Italy through this feeling.

In Italy he at first saw only what the Italians created on the basis of Greek art, but something like a reconstruction of the Greek spirit and method in Art arose in his soul. One can feel deeply what is characteristic of Goethe at this period if one reads what he wrote to his Weimar friends while standing before those works of art which called up before his soul the creative art faculty of the Greeks. 'There is Necessity, there is God' (with reference to Herder's work' God' inspired by Spinoza). Goethe did not find in Spinoza that Necessity he wanted: he found it in what was presented to his soul during his Italian journey. Out of what fashioned itself then there arose in him the possibility of developing his own special outlook on Nature. One knows how he brought to expression his longing for an exposition of Nature in abstract, lyrical words in a 'Prose-Hymn,' before he travelled south. And one sees how what was poured out in abstract lyrical form in this prose hymn 'Nature' became in Italy concrete perception. How for example, the plant nature appeared before his soul as supersensible perceptible pictures and how he then discovered the 'primal plant archetype' among the manifold plant forms. This archetype is an ideal-real form which can only be seen spiritually, but in this spirit form it is real, lying at the base of all individual plants.

We can see how from now on the object of his search is to bring before his soul those archetypes for all nature which are one and many. We can see how his knowledge rests on the transforming pictures, from the single plant's leaf-sequence on to the blossom and the fruit. He wishes to hold fast in pictures what is in process of becoming. From Spinoza's ethics which he read with Herder there streamed something that seemed invisible, resounding from out of another world, a world in which man can immerse himself with his feelings if he attains a passionless contemplation. But with Spinoza this was not perceptible. The longing for vision lived in Goethe's soul and this longing was fulfilled in a certain way when he was stimulated by those pictures appearing like resurrected art creations of the Greeks. And it was also satisfied when he was able to conjure pictorially before his soul the primal archetypes of Nature.

What was it that Goethe thus experienced in sequences? It was that soul feeling—not soul content, not that which one can investigate—but the soul feeling which, on the one hand is Inspiration and on the other hand is Imagination. Neither Goethe nor Herder had the possibility in their time of looking into the spiritual world as can be done to-day through spiritual Science, but as a premonition of this spiritual science the feeling prevalent in them was the feeling which appears in special strength and intensity in Inspiration and Imagination. Herder and Goethe felt themselves in the mood of Inspiration while they read Spinoza and Goethe felt himself in the mood of Imagination when lie formulated an outlook on nature through the Italian works of Art. Out of this Inspiration mood of Spinoza Goethe experienced the longing for the Imaginative mood. What he discovered as the archetype of plant and animal, this was not yet real Imagination, for Goethe did not possess the method of acquiring real imagination. What he possessed was the mood for Imagination. He could kindle the mood in himself, not because lie strove towards real, pure imaginations freely created inwardly, but because he experienced in himself sensible supersensible pictures stimulated by what plants, animals and what the cloud world express. He could find himself in the mood which accompanies Imagination just as in reading Spinoza he found himself in the mood of Inspiration. He recognized the soul condition in which man experiences what he utters in such a way that he uses words so as to allow the secrets of the Cosmos to be uttered, to a certain extent, by the Cosmos itself.

Whoever has really felt the transition in the soul which can take place through reading Spinoza's Ethics as a mathematical treatise, becoming immersed in the ideas as mathematical ideas so as to rise to the Scientia Intuitiva which speaks in Spinoza as consciously as though the world were using him as its mouthpiece,—any one who has felt thus will realize what Goethe and Herder felt in Spinoza. How the one, Herder, was satisfied and how the other lived with longing more in a mood of Inspiration. And we can say that a certain soul mood proceeds from what spiritual scientific investigation offers to-day as methods to attain Imagination and Inspiration. We can follow historically how Goethe, without having Inspiration or Imagination, tends towards these moods.

Now if we go further we can regard Spinoza more exactly. When we study him historically (not as is often done to-day by the historians of philosophy) one is led from Spinoza to know who stimulated him. These were the adherents of Arabism, living in the South-west of Europe, adherents to the Arab-Semitic outlook on the world. He who understands such things will be able to experience once again that which flowed from the Kabbalah into the ideas of Spinoza. One is then led further back beyond Arabism to the East and one learns to know what comes forth in Spinoza is the conception of an ancient view of the world. In the old Eastern world what appears is the same as in Spinoza only not in intellectual form but as ancient Eastern inspiration. This inspiration was not acquired as ours is to-day, but it existed among certain oriental races as a natural gift and went through an especially profound development there.

If we go back to the Egypt from which Moses created his views, to the sources from whence the Greeks created, we find that what came to Egypt from the Asiatic east is developed to a very high degree. The Egyptians before the 8th pre-Christian century lived instinctively in their environment so that they felt themselves one with it, so that what they discerned of their environment they experienced in inner contemplation.

Now let us turn to the Imagination, to what Goethe longed for when he felt the mood of Inspiration. At first he recognized this to a certain degree in the art of Greece. He sensed in vision what Herder felt in concepts, in the world of perceptions as these appeared contemplatively with Spinoza. And what Goethe realized he deepened into a view of outer Nature so that later on he could utter, from out of his spirit, this deep saying:

'He to whom Nature reveals her manifest secret, yearns for Art, Nature's worthiest interpreter.'

In Art, Goethe saw through to the basis of Imagination, and by relying on evolution in Nature he sought that soul mood which a man enters if he become one with this evolution. This conquest of oneself, together with maintaining oneself in Imagination, was revealed to Goethe through the art of the Greeks, and he sought it not only in Art but as the basis for a view of Nature. And if we follow on to further consequences this special element which Goethe thus developed, we attain in a fully conscious manner Imaginative Perception.

If we follow this method of Goethe back to its origins, as we follow Spinoza's method, we are led to the Greeks, and from them further East. From the Greeks we come back to that view of the world which existed in the development of the so-called Chaldees, who again created from out of the Persian world and out of the entire Asiatic world. And just as we look back through the soul mood of Spinoza to ancient Egypt, so we look through the Goethe-Greek view of Art to that view of evolution which obtained in ancient Chaldea. One can follow, even into the details, this opposition of Chaldea and Egypt in Goethe and Spinoza.

We can thus go back in feeling to earlier epochs of time if we do not entangle ourselves in what alone is regarded to-day as absolutely correct and exact. If we attempt to press forward to other kinds of ideas, to Imagination, to Inspiration, if we know the moods of soul pertaining to Imagination and Inspiration, then we can go back in cognition to earlier epochs. Whoever reads Spinoza today merely with the intellect which has been so strongly developed with us, and as if everything previous were fundamentally but childish ideas, he cannot feel how in Spinoza there lived as a mood what was productive intuitively and creatively as the highest blossom in ancient Egyptian civilized life. He cannot feel how the soul mood of the ancient Chaldeans lived on in that which ensouled Goethe as he uttered the words: 'There is Necessity. There is God,' or 'He to whom Nature reveals her manifest secret yearns for Art, Nature's worthiest interpreter.' Whoever bases himself merely on the abstract thought content of to-day, does not come back to the earlier historical epochs. Therefore there results for him that abyss to which I pointed at the beginning of this lecture. Only he can come into ancient epochs of humanity who immerses himself in this basic mood as it appears in Spinoza and Goethe. No Egyptian Myth, least of all the Osiris-Isis Myth, can be really experienced in its import if one does not base oneself in this mood. People may be ever so clever and give ever so many allegorical, symbolical interpretations. This is not the point. It is a question of feeling with one's entire being what was felt in ancient times. One may think this or that about ancient ideas, one may choose clever or foolish symbols, it is not a question of choice but of experiencing a basic mood. Through this we can come to what lived in an earlier epoch. One cannot find what existed in ancient Chaldea by the present means of investigating, but only by being able really to immerse oneself in the mood of Imagination which actually appeared to a certain extent with the Chaldeans as a view of the world. They lived in a 'becoming.'

One understands what contrasts existed between the Chaldeans and Egyptians, for instance, as contemporary races. Trade relation went from Chaldea to Egypt and from Egypt to Chaldea. Their culture was so fashioned that they could write letters to each other. Everything consti-tuting external life stood in regulated interchange.

Their inner soul constitution was however quite different. An Imaginative element lived with the Chaldeans, an Inspirational one with the Egyptians. There was, with the Chaldeans, an external perception, such as reappeared, intensified, in Goethe. With the Egyptians, from what proceeded out of inner being, the soul, there was that which later on appeared at a higher stage from out of the inner being of Spinoza. One can follow this into minute details. I will give an instance and one will see how such details are to be understood on the basis of these general moods.

The Chaldeans had fundamentally a highly developed astronomy. They developed it by means of cleverly devised instruments, but above all by a quite definite kind of perception which was an instinctive Imagination. They came thereby to divide the course of time into Day and Night so that each was regarded as 12 hours long. But how did they divide the days and nights? They made the long summer day into 12 hours and they also made the short summer night into 12 hours. In winter they similarly divided the short day into 12 hours and the long night also into 12 hours, so that the winter hours by day were short and the summer day hours were long. Thus with the Chaldeans the hours in the different seasons had quite different lengths of time. This means that the Chaldeans so lived in the sense of 'becoming' that they carried this 'becoming' into Time. When they lived in the outer world in summer they could not let the hours run as they let them run in winter. In summer the course of time, the 'becoming' was drawn out. This "becoming was inwardly moveable, not rigid as it is with us. Time was elastic with them.

How was it with the Egyptians? The Egyptians reckoned 365 days to the year. Through this they were obliged to add supplementary days at definite times, but they could not decide to depart in any way from their 365 days to the year. In reality the year is longer than 365 days, but this length remained immoveable with them up to the third pre-Christian century, and thereby the perceptible outer world got beyond their control. Through this the Festivals changed. For instance, a festival of early autumn became a festival of late autumn, and so on. Thus the Egyptians so lived into the course of time that they had a conception of time which was not applicable to outer perception. Here we see an important contrast. The Chaldeans lived so intensely in the externally perceptible that they made time elastic. The Egyptians made time so rigid, experiencing what lives subjectively from within, that they could not even correct it through intercalary days in order to make the feasts of the year harmonize with the seasons; and so they let the external festivals fall on the wrong months while the whole external world thus became unsteady. They did not find themselves in the outer world, they remained in their own inner being. That is the mood of Inspiration which we must have in order to come to real cognition. The Egyptians had it as instinctive Inspiration.

As a man knowing the higher worlds one should be as mobile on the one hand as the Chaldeans and on the other hand be able to enter deeply to inner being as the Egyptians could. A rigid system of time was the basis of their whole life, even of their social and historical life. This contrast between the mood of naïve Inspiration and naïve Imagination thus comes to expression in History.

Goethe, as a complete being, re-experienced the experience of Spinoza as a continuation of Orientalism and Egypt. Goethe experienced his longing for a complete adaptation to the external world from out of his inner feeling where everything is invisible, from whence a man looks out into the world and does not recognize things because he judges them according to what the inner being offers, so that the things are beyond his control. While Goethe felt the mood of Egypt, he sought to experience in himself the mood of Chaldea, as that of the other pole. If a man re-create out of his own nature historical moods, one can then see the threads extend from a newer over to an earlier epoch, and one hopes to reunite the different epochs of time through this observation.

This now is essential, that one does not merely designate from documents what happened in this or that epoch, but that one learns as a complete human being to immerse oneself in these epochs, in what was felt and inwardly experienced by men and by races in the different epochs, in what mood of soul they existed. Their external fate was the result of this inner experience, of this peculiar soul constitution.

This is the way that will lead us above such ideas as 'Does the egg come first or the hen?' and can lead us into the deeper regions of reality. It is the way which shows us how each time we observe the reality we must press forward beyond what is given by external objective cognition.

And if it is often emphasized that one must learn from history about our activities to-day and in the future, then attention must be directed to the manner in which we should learn. We should so learn that what we experienced with our soils in past epochs should become living. The abyss of which I have spoken is bridged through this consideration. We are able to look hack into the metamorphosis of the soul constitution of men during the different epochs of time, and ardour and thoughtfulness will flow into our present soul constitution, so that we find the necessary thoughtfulness to build those ideas which are needed for the healing of the social relationships of to-day. But the necessary ardour must be kindled to have the force to attain full consciousness and to express in ideas that Imagination and Inspiration which formerly were developed instinctively.

Dear attendees! In yesterday's lecture, I tried to show that the aims and essence of spiritual research, as it is meant here, correspond to the urge and yearning of the present time, that they essentially meet the needs of human souls, which have been preparing for a long time up to our present day and which are now clearly perceptible to everyone who wants to see, to everyone who just wants to understand themselves correctly. One can now, especially when considering the question of the significance of this spiritual research or spiritual science for life, for the immediate, one might say fully active life of the human being, take up yesterday's remark, because one can best understand the significance of a thing for life when one first sees certain urges and needs arising from life that this thing demands. Today, many people expect a [satisfying] worldview. Spiritual research or science will provide it.

What the soul needs when its I wants to develop its character is what many people today expect from a kind of conclusion that can be drawn from the truly advanced natural science of our time. For certain things this is certainly justified; however, an attentive observation of what is happening in our time clearly shows us how many things cannot be achieved in this way, how the life of the present so longingly, so strongly longs for a research, for the spirit.

Many facts could be cited; only one of the most recent will be presented here. On September 18 at the Naturalists' Assembly in Münster, Professor von Wettstein gave a lecture on the importance of biology, the science of life, for culture and life; that is, [he pointed out] with complete justification, how one could see in the course of the nineteenth century that a worldview should be given in a popular way that should be based on the achievements of natural science. And he emphasized how natural science has progressed steadily, and how it had to be broken by science with what was to be shown for the human soul in the materialistic age; and with full justification, he endeavored to remain calm in observing the fact and not to draw hasty conclusions about those world-view questions that may very much enter into the realm where human thinking goes astray into what is indeed unjustified.

In fact, spiritual science wants nothing more than to follow such advice in its own way and in its own field; not by arriving at the truth of life through all kinds of conclusions and circumstantial evidence of the world view from external sensual facts , but by awakening the slumbering powers of the soul, that which Goethe describes as “spiritual eyes”, observing what is behind the world of the senses, behind being in the senses in general, and with which the human soul thinks itself connected.

This is what our time and life craves. And if spiritual science is about fathoming the truth, then the way in which it can relate to life in a way that fertilizes and heals it must be such that every soul finds satisfaction. Therefore, this demand may well be made in response. And here one thing can be said: spiritual science must fulfill one thing if it is to meet the needs of life: it must have the power, independently of a certain higher education, independently of the development of this or that fact of science, independently even of a certain height of philosophical worldview, to also enter into the simplest mind that has to do its daily work as a human being and does not have time to deal with this or that individual science in a detailed way. Spiritual research must be generally accessible. In order to avoid being misunderstood, I would like to add that spiritual research must be in complete harmony with the science of the time, and must not contradict its just demands. The strictest researcher with his strictest demands may come, and spiritual science must be able to answer to him. And anyone who engages with the serious literature of spiritual science will see how this can be.

But it is also important that it brings things to light that every soul, regardless of education, can understand. And here I would like to respond, not with a theory, but with a kind of fact. I would like to mention not a fact that is taken directly from spiritual science itself, but a fact that actually points to something that happened before spiritual science emerged, but which shows how souls that long for an inclination towards the spiritual world understand each other in a remarkable way, regardless of their level of education. I will cite something that bears witness to such understanding, and which will occur to an increased degree when spiritual science becomes more and more established in the souls that need it.

Moriz Carriere, one of the most amiable and thoughtful philosophers of the present day – it can only be noted here that he was one of those who always held philosophy's idealism in high regard at a time when materialism was sweeping in over the great questions of world view – of his work on the cultural development of humanity, he not only shows how the spiritual works in the development of humanity, but also how true science can be reconciled with the genuine needs of the soul in terms of the big questions of existence, and with the relationship between world view and religion. Now Moriz Carriere himself relates a remarkable experience that he had just as he was trying to show how the spiritual works in the pursuit of human development, and how the great figure of Christ Jesus in particular fits into human development. Then he received a series of manuscript pages in the mail. They came from a simple man. His name was never known either. His name was Karl Zeuner. At a time when the waves of revolutionary life were running high, he had somehow broken the law and was imprisoned. He was thrown into prison. And now he tells how he despaired of the friends who had striven with him for external goals, of the remnants of what was left to him from the religious education of the school, how he was lonely. He recounts how he then heard a familiar song from afar in his prison. He recounts how that inspired his soul, how special powers stirred in his soul. He wrote down thoughts that gradually came to his reawakening soul in prison.

Right when you start reading these pages, you come across strange sentences, especially at the beginning. He says something like: “When I look at my own soul and then at what surrounds me, I feel in my soul the same essence that lives in all things outside, and I feel in my own soul like a part of the whole world soul.” And from there he starts to form his ideas about the course of world history, describing how the spirit in people, who have gradually developed, is active.

Why did Moritz Carriere find this so surprising? It is surprising when you compare these pages of the simple man with what Moritz Carriere wrote based on a knowledge of contemporary science and studies of the cultural development of the world. If you take his main ideas, they are almost an agreement down to the last word between the two, the simple man and the highly educated philosopher. The simple man in his solitude, who only calls upon his innermost soul forces, writes something that is the same as what the philosopher draws from the wells of learning. That is, when he comes to questions of worldview, if a person only wants to search, there is an understanding between the one who searches in his soul and the one who searches this path on the basis of comprehensive learning.

This shows us how understanding through the spirit is possible between the most educated and the simplest, most primitive soul. And if in a particular case it was possible even without spiritual science, on the basis of certain concepts and ideas, then we may say: Firstly, the promotion of such an agreement corresponds to an urge of our present life. It corresponds to the spirit of our time that souls of all stations and degrees of education should communicate about their deepest needs; and secondly, such communication will be all the more necessary when souls need not come to the spirit through concepts and ideas that they squeeze out of their inner being – which are like shadows compared to what spiritual science has to give – but through spiritual science, this will be achieved all the more.

This means that our time in particular is faced with the challenge of finding a way to achieve general understanding of the fundamental questions of existence, and we have arrived at the gateway to their practical solution through spiritual science.

This means that spiritual science is able to intervene directly in life. However, there is an objection to this spiritual science, as some people emphasize, especially when it comes to putting this generally understandable knowledge in its proper perspective. They say: Yes, but first it is taught that the one who penetrates into the spiritual world awakens the slumbering soul. And what is said in my “Knowledge of Higher Worlds” requires a long journey before one can gain insight into this spiritual life. How can one speak of general comprehensibility when only one who has transformed one's soul can penetrate it?

This objection is understandable and yet not entirely justified, because this is a necessary requirement for the spiritual researcher to establish the facts of the spiritual world for himself. The spiritual researcher can investigate spiritual facts that are important for life. He can then formulate them, express them in words, concepts and ideas, and communicate them to the general public. Spiritual training is necessary for research; but when these facts are there and, formulated in concepts, words and ideas, then even the simplest mind can understand them, anyone can understand them. Nothing more is needed than to surrender to these ideas, concepts and words without prejudice; for it is the case with these spiritual facts that when we let these ideas take effect on us, they prove themselves. They can give us everything we need from them for the purposes of practical life — the upliftment, strengthening and recovery of our health that we require from them. What true spiritual researchers can give to the world can always be tested by science! These things may not, of course, stand the test of superficial criticism, but they can stand the true test. But what more or less everyone says and feels is that they have to admit a general turning of human knowledge towards the higher world. But as soon as one goes into the details of spiritual research, as soon as one begins to describe the observations of the spiritual world, to describe what happens between death and a new birth, what is called the development of humanity, according to the impulses given by spiritual science. In short, when details are given, our contemporaries still often recoil. They seek a general indication, without this - they admit - human life, the strengthening, healthy one, could not exist. But when one goes into details, when one describes the nature and things of the spiritual world, then the same objection immediately arises: no one can penetrate up there, we cannot know anything about that. Here we are at the point, honored attendees, where spiritual science will first have to make itself understood to what are indeed expressed needs of life, but what one only wants in generalities.

Let me give you another specific example of how humanity is seeking a new answer to the needs of the soul. The former president of Harvard University, USA, spoke of it, calling it the need for a new religion. Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion; spiritual science has nothing to do with forming sects; it wants to understand the old ones, wants to explore in the spiritual what the human soul needs. Our contemporaries believe that this urge for spiritual research is an urge for a new religion. Dr. Eliot has pointed out how our needs in life are pushing us towards spiritual science. Dr. Eliot, who was at the forefront of science for a long time and was president of a university, expressed the following in essence: People have always assumed that the soul is different from the body, although it is inherent in it. Everyone believes that there is in man a living, ruling, peculiar essence or spirit, which is himself. This is something as fundamentally real as the body. It is the most active part of the human being and is recognized as such: and this has always been the case and will always be the case.

When one hears such words, one can conclude that even people who have a broad education have this urge and aspiration.

Many examples could be given; everywhere one will see that the spirit is indicated out of the need for life, not out of knowledge, but in a peculiar way that shows what aversion still exists to the details of how they are to be presented through spiritual science.

When someone, like Dr. Eliot, points out the needs of the time, then this reference is somewhat as if one were to say with regard to natural science: No one can deny that there is a nature, a nature that brings forth beings in space, a nature that causes events to occur in time that have a beginning and an end, and so on. Someone who points to nature in this way can be compared to someone who points to the spirit as Dr. Eliot does. But can anyone be satisfied with the fact that there is a nature with various living beings and events?

What is satisfying is that a person can go out and perceive the individual concrete entities. Not the abstract satisfies people, but the details; facts must come before our soul. What could never satisfy anyone in relation to nature is what should still satisfy many in relation to the spiritual – an empty generality, an abstraction.

But people still refuse to go into the details, the details, the facts of the spiritual world, which shine out of spiritual science just as the individual facts of nature shine out of natural science.

Spiritual science today stands on the same ground as natural science did four centuries ago, when it began to look at nature through its means. While yesterday it was pointed out that one goes into the details of natural scientific matters, today it must be pointed out that one must first get used to thinking about the details of spiritual life in the same way as about the details of natural processes; and how it is not enough to know that there are general natural products, how the natural scientist must distinguish, for example, between oats and wheat, so man will also need more and more the details of spiritual facts. Just as one cannot approach natural needs in the same way with wheat and oats, so one cannot approach spiritual needs with general references to the spiritual world. When this or that consolation is needed or when this or that character trait is to be poured into the soul, then details and facts must be given. This is the path that spiritual science has to take. And because this tendency towards the general dominates the world today, we see from the individual things that are demanded how, although people admit that their present life contains a yearning for the spirit, which has a fertilizing effect on the soul that it fills when it is satisfied, no one can say anything accurate about the most essential things, because people generally resist the individual.

From this speech by Eliot, we can also take out another sentence in which he talks about how the spiritual worldview that is being built seems to apply to all the scientific achievements of the new era, and will deal with joy and life.

He thus opposes old age, death, and so on. We have before our eyes a distancing from death and mourning, death and sin, on the part of those who tell people what the life of the soul should be when they have passed through the gate of death. Dr. Eliot demands that all this is unnecessary in the new world view, that it should be concerned with life and joy. This is entirely in keeping with the outlook of our time, which focuses on the living deed and sees reasons to make life strong and joyful. That is fully justified. It is also justified to say that the new view of life must deal with life and joy; and in contrast to this, the sentence sounds wonderful: the new world view should ignore death and mourning. There is still a weighty objection: however much human thinking does not want to deal with it, death and mourning will deal with man and show their existence to man, and life will always demand, so that one can understand it, to know something about death and its riddles, and joy will demand forces that lift us up again when mourning weighs us down.

But this is precisely the aim of spiritual science: to awaken in the soul that which brings one to the justified, certain conviction that what is human existence in its true nature is not part of the external sensual world, but is of an eternal nature, passing from life to life. And this realization of the deepest life in its individual life will only bring the knowledge of true life that Eliot demands, because as knowledge it knows how the truly living always conquers death. And this knowledge will know how to draw out of the depths of the soul the forces that arise from the spiritual and that know how to lift us up again when the outer life depresses us through grief or something else.

We can take a fact from human life, a fact from the spirit of our time, and then draw our conclusions as to what the life of the individual can get from the results of spiritual research.

Everyone experiences that their life has a youth, progresses, and that a point of culmination is finally reached, and that they then descend again. They experience how gradually withers that which they call their physical body. A superficial science has just concluded from this fact that the spiritual depends on the physical. Because the brain withers so that an external stimulus of the intellect is not possible, one draws the conclusion that the soul-spiritual withers with the physical. This is as if one concludes from the unusability of a piano that the player would no longer be there.

If spiritual science is allowed to flow in, what it knows from the spiritual world, then the soul will have powers towards old age, which intervene in life in a healing way. In my little writing about the education of the child, you can see how spiritual science also intervenes in the details of practical education. How often one hears people giving all kinds of educational advice. Those who know life are often alarmed by such general sentences and rules, and those who follow the literature attentively will see how inadequate these reformist ideas of today are for the growing human being. But when one knows from spiritual research how, under completely different conditions, the human being grows up in the different years and periods of his life, how the physical body develops up to the seventh year, how then the educational measures have a completely different effect in the seventh to fourteenth years, when the etheric body is forming, and from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, when the astral body develops. Only when one knows how these epochs in human life are differentiated, and how the human being progresses in precisely differentiated stages, only then is one able to establish such principles from the nature of the human being that truly bring forth what lies in the soul. The future will show how life can be enriched by such pedagogy, which is taken from spiritual science; for anyone who approaches life in such a way that the conditions are created for us to give the soul the forces that awaken life at certain times must then always see for himself what spiritual science can become for all people. Wherever the human being stands, he cannot only acquire theoretical knowledge. Instead, spiritual science gives the human soul truly spiritual substance, spiritual nourishment that works in the soul and is digested, if I may use the trivial expression, and always keeps the soul soft, inwardly active, full of content, and aware of itself. This is knowledge that is needed in life and will be needed more and more.

Then, when life begins to decline, when wrinkles start to appear on our faces and our hair begins to turn white, then we not only have theosophical knowledge, but, through a spiritual-scientific view of life, we carry within us a living core that is full of content, experiences itself more and more as the outer shell falls away, and the human being feels within: You lay aside the shell and the body, the physical, but within you carry the strength to go through the spiritual world, to get new strength there for building a new life. Saying this to yourself inwardly gives security.

This applies in general to all people. In a sense, spiritual science will help people more and more to overcome what must naturally arise if one does not feel the living spirit.

Another fact that is particularly important in our time is nervousness. In a certain way, everyone today feels what is meant by the age of nervousness, because it is inwardly connected with certain concepts that have been formed. How often does a person feel this or that powerlessness, this or that fault, this or that vice, in the sense of the materialistic world view, so that the person looks at his ancestors, at his line of inheritance.

In poetry, it is often depicted how a person, feeling burdened by his ancestors, says to himself: This is inherited disposition, this cannot be changed. The product of such a state of mind is weakness, desolation - no observer should fail to see how this actually makes people weak.

Today, one encounters strange experiences. Materialistic researchers, in particular, speak of the nervousness of our time, as materialistic explanations have always done. Only recently a book was published by an Austrian scholar who, curiously enough, attributes the whole predisposition with one expression: that everything in man is based on the physical and chemical composition of his organism, even his character. And if you read the book further, something strange happens: the author gives advice. You would think that you could expect some kind of remedy to be taken to help with the chemical-physical imbalance; the gentleman in question does not recommend any pills, at least not for many cases, but rather recommends strengthening the character through moral means, through all kinds of soul things!

We do not want to argue with our time in such areas. We want to focus our attention on the question: where should the things be taken from that make a person who is desolate with this or that ailment - physical-chemical conditions that make up his character - where should the means be taken to make him a fighter against his nervousness, against his neurasthenia?

Spiritual science will answer: When people realize that it was just as much a mistake to claim that the complex of characteristics of the child arises solely from the inheritance from the parents, when one draws that conclusion, it is just as much an error of observation as it once error of observation when in the sixteenth century, and even in the seventeenth, it was said, and not only laymen but also learned researchers believed it, that higher animals, even fish, can arise from inanimate substance.

And there was a great revolution when the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi stated: Living things can never arise from non-living things. Living things can only arise from living things. With great difficulty, Francesco Redi escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

The same must be said for the spiritual and soul: the spiritual and soul can only emerge from the spiritual and soul. We look back to the spiritual and soul, which is the seed in earlier times for our present life. We feel the injustice of what we carry within us as fate, as predispositions, as spiritual-soul possessions, being supposed to be only something inherited from our ancestors, and we recognize that it is rooted in the spiritual that we acquired in earlier times. Then the human being becomes aware that there is something in him besides the inherited traits. And to the extent that he recognizes this, he need not look at his inherited traits and say to himself, “I have to bear these.” No, the spiritual researcher, when he has recognized his soul core, must seek to strengthen his powers and help them develop.

In this way spiritual science will have an effect on life, making it healthy, and the individual will place himself firmly in life.

This basically indicates the other result of life research: the social. Our time has initially only the tendency - albeit justified - to study the external arrangement, how one should make this or that institution so that people can find their existence. The inner tendency brings spiritual science, how people should bring their inner being out, in order to grow into life and stand in life.

All this will include the fact that this time must become aware that it is not dealing with dead theory in spiritual research, but that life forces themselves are being awakened. As a result, the age will recognize the reality of what comes from spiritual science, will experience it, because spiritual science will grasp itself in life. Thus the human being who carries spiritual science within himself will face life in a different way, which is impossible without spiritual science, but which life will foster more and more. When the spirit, the soul, is grasped as reality, when it is realized that the soul is reality, then there will no longer be a lack of understanding for the serious fact of life that out of a healthy, powerful grasp of the soul's core, forces also flow that can protect the outer physical body from damage, weakness, and even illness.

In this respect, the view of our time is shown in the common use of a saying that is, however, increasingly dying out: “A healthy soul dwells in a healthy body,” which means that if you just make the body healthy, then a healthy soul dwells in the body. In spiritual science, this will be understood quite differently, that a healthy soul dwells in a healthy body, because the innermost soul, in its health, forms the physical life in the body. People will recognize the healing powers that spiritual science instills into the soul, although not with the means that people want to use for recognition today, because today they will look and say: There is a person who has studied spiritual science but still became ill. The answer to this is that spiritual science or spiritual research has not yet come very far in terms of its dissemination, and secondly, of course, nothing can be done directly against external damage to the physical body if this damage comes only from the physical, just as you cannot heal a broken leg from the soul.

But there is also something that we recognize through the peculiar way in which the insights of spiritual research work, that the soul transforms back to an external coexistence with existence, as it had before the alienation from nature. We see in the child, and also in the animal, an instinctive growing together with the existence of the spiritual world. We see how the animal does not eat too much, how the instinct is healthy, but we see how certain things are conditioned in the cultural human being by the fact that he is alienated from nature. Sometimes one can look at this with a shudder, how humanity is moving away from this direct experience and coexistence with existence. Just the other day I saw a person who weighed out a certain amount of food for each meal. In the current transformation into a purely mechanical science, we even treat the human stomach and digestive tract like retorts. There it remains - the mechanical - not only in science, there it goes over into the treatment of human life. In contrast to this is the stream of spiritual research. With knowledge, the human being returns to existence in such a way that he instinctively protects himself in the higher sense from that which should not be. And then, of course, the healing effect of spiritual research will have to be assessed somewhat differently than it is today.

If questions now arise, such as: How many illnesses does the healing of spiritual science actually protect us from? — is difficult to answer, because the illnesses don't come; nevertheless, it is more reasonable that man, by living in the instinct life, is protected by spiritual science from illnesses than that he has to heal himself afterwards. Thank God, it cannot be proven, because the result is that these damages no longer occur.

Thus we see how a return to nature, in the very modern sense, is brought about for life through spiritual science. Much more could be said; in the end everything would clearly indicate that spiritual science brings about healing, advancement in life, and the right place in life, in the natural context of life.

Thus not only knowledge, the most valuable possession, but significant consequences for life are brought about by spiritual science, consequences that one can only imagine when one considers them as they have been, albeit only briefly, hinted at today. But all this will come about because man will penetrate into the spiritual worlds, not only in general, but by recognizing the individual spiritual facts. Just as he speaks not only of general nature in nature, but recognizes the details, the individual minerals, the individual plants and the individual animals, so he will also recognize the spiritual world in its details. Then the spiritual nature around him will be as nature itself is meant to foster, fertilize and even sustain physical life.

Then man will feel himself embedded in the spirit as he otherwise feels embedded in the physical in the substances of nature. One will learn to feel that one lives in the spirit as one lives in the physical. Just as one feels the processes that take place outside in the universe in the physical organism, one will feel the spiritual relationships, to grief and joy, to suffering and desire, to desire and contemplation in their own world, and life will find that which promotes life and health from the spirit.

That is what can be hoped for from spiritual science, because this spiritual science is to fulfill the soul's desire to feel at one with everything that is going on in the universal spiritual realm. When man will no longer think that everything is just an event, a life, what is going on in him, and his will like a power that has no significance for the environment, when he will know that what is going on in him is as interconnected with the spiritual as with the physical of the physical body, then man will receive strength and power, health through such science health; then will man find what I sought to indicate in my drama 'The Test of the Soul', as a soul expresses this sense of security in the spiritual, that man knows himself in the spirit, experiences himself in the spirit, thinks in the spirit and really breathes in it and in this real breath of life attains a life-filled existence.

This soul health will emanate from spiritual science when it is fulfilled, when it is given through spiritual science, which is expressed in those words, where it is said what can take place in a seeking soul. What has been said today can be summarized in what a soul that feels at home in the spirit can say to itself:

In your thinking live world thoughts

— do not dwell in man merely temporarily, but are eternal world thoughts —

In your feeling weave world forces
In your will work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts
experience yourself through cosmic powers,
create yourself from will-beings.
Do not end with what is worldly remote,
through the play of thought-dreams – –;
begin in the expanses of the spirit,
and end in the depths of your own soul: –
you will find divine goals,
recognizing yourself within yourself.

My dear friends! There is something that we must do before we can introduce and cultivate worship, and this is something that is not easily understood, especially in Protestant circles, because in these circles religion is not based on worship and what worship stands for is less understood, felt and appreciated. Worship naturally stands as a revelation of the spiritual. Now I assume that what you have either heard directly from me here in discussions that were actually always meant for you in the esoteric sense, or what has come to you from such discussions through others, that this is already bearing on your soul with a certain power, with a certain force, and that you are aware of how seriously this movement must be meant if it is to take place at all. Therefore, under these circumstances, I would like to say what needs to be said today.

In the true sense of the word, churches and religious communities should always be founded out of the spiritual world in accordance with the order of the world. And in essence, churches and religious communities have been founded out of the spiritual order of the world. This spiritual order of the world underlies, of course, everything that appears here on earth as a manifestation of the spiritual, even if, for example, a spiritual mission is not necessarily present in sectarian movements. In the case of a particular sect there may even be the illusion of a spiritual mission, or perhaps the whole justification is more or less conscious or even unconscious. But you will always notice, even in such cases where untruthfulness instead of truth is present, that those who found such a thing usually invoke at least an alleged impulse from the spiritual world. In any case, however, what goes out into the world as a religious community, as it is meant here, must derive the impulse for it from the spiritual world. This must be particularly emphasized for the reason that both the Catholic communities, that is, the Roman Catholic and also the Eastern Catholic communities, and the Protestant communities have failed in this respect, only in two different directions: The Catholic community, which essentially, though transformed beyond recognition, has retained the cultus that is older than Christianity on earth and also older than its present form, the Catholic community has failed by gradually allowing the center of gravity to shift into a secular institution built on external domination, into which, of course, the personal impulses of the individual rulers then always play a role. You only have to go back to the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite to see clear evidence that the community of priests – if I may put it this way, the hierarchy of priests on earth – is intended as an image of the spiritual hierarchy above. It is intended only as an image, and this, according to the view of the early Christian period, precludes the church from exercising power in the sense of a secular imperial principle here on earth. It is true that the Catholic Church has the possibility within itself of placing one or other of its priests in an objective position and of making the cult there or there true; on the other hand, as an institution, it has completely lost the possibility of being an be an image of a spiritual reality, although there are priests within the Catholic Church through whose own purity, I might say, the impurity that enters the cultus through the personal element is in turn thrown out. So in a sense, the Catholic Church has brought down into the secular institution what should be felt as the original impulse of the spiritual worlds.

The Evangelical Protestant churches – we need not speak of the Russian Orthodox Church here for the time being because it has no current significance for Central Europe – have, by completely discarding ritual, brought the entire religious practice down to the individual human individuality with their subjective conviction of the truth of so-called “propositions”. What I mean is that the individual represents before the community what he, subjectively, can believe to be true. This counteracts the formation of communities, since such subjective belief is the beginning of the atomization of the community. The convictions of individuals will, of necessity, always take on a personal and subjective coloration if they are inwardly honest and sincere, and so every pastor will have to have his own opinion, especially if his religious conviction is related to a theology that engages in discussions of propositions about the spiritual world. In addition, there is something that you must all carefully, deeply and seriously consider if you really want to practice pastoral care: You must be aware that in the Protestant church regulations today, the necessary contrast between the lay believer and the pastor has actually disappeared. The disappearance of this contrast is seen as something excellent by certain modern convictions, but it can never be a real impulse for pastoral care. Almost everything that arises within the Protestant clergy today in discussions and debates about religion is such that the clergy speak in such a way that the simple religious person must speak. Of course, they speak in a more educated, scientific way, but they speak about the recognition or non-recognition of this or that religious impulse; they also speak about: What is religion at all? What is the relationship of the soul, the heart of the religious person to God, to the supersensible world? and so on. The discussions take on this coloration. But these discussions can have this coloring with simple religious people, but not with those who exercise a priestly office. The priest must be clear about the fact that he is not the one who is protected, but the shepherd of souls, that he therefore cannot put the question in the foreground: How does the soul of man relate to God or to the supersensible world? but must ask himself: How can I teach these people, how can I care for the souls of those entrusted to me? — If religious questions are of concern to him, they must, so to speak, have only an esoteric character for him, which he never brings up for discussion before a lay audience.

This is, of course, a somewhat radical statement, but it must be stated so radically so that it is felt: If you want to establish such a community today, as your group wants to do, where you want to become priests and not simple lay believers, then you have to be aware that the questions of the special character of religion and religious life do not play a role, but rather the esoteric community of soul shepherds must be felt from the outset. Of course, one can say that this contradicts the democratic feeling. But every church, every real religious community, contradicts the democratic feeling. And if something is to become purely democratic, as is attempted within the Protestant Church, the result is the absurdity that the religious community is completely atomized by the fact that the community elects its pastor according to democratic considerations. This introduces a completely unspiritual principle, the principle of an unspiritual choice, into the religious current, and this further atomizes it. Each individual shepherd of souls must receive his special mission from the spiritual world, and the result must be that the whole procedure of [democratic] election [of the shepherd of souls by the community] is regarded as a farce, which it actually is.

It is essential that we look at these things in complete earnest and not cast a veil over them, because otherwise there would be no need to found a new community, otherwise one could still hope that the old communities could be improved. But this new community is based on the conviction that the old one can no longer be improved. Only on this rock can that which you want to found rest. But then you must have such a sense of coherence that you perceive it directly as coming from the spiritual world itself.

Now, of course, you may object: Anthroposophy speaks in such a way that it derives its insights from experiences in the spiritual world; but it is difficult to maintain a direct connection with the spiritual world in such a way that this religious community can truly speak from an awareness of this connection with the spiritual world. — But, my dear friends, here we have something that must not be left untouched. The education of Western humanity has, of course, brought forth many human virtues in the field of outer activity. There have been brave people in the outer world, even in recent centuries, of course. But what has been rooted out by Western education – I mean the whole Ahrimanic education of the last centuries – is the courage of the soul. If we are to be blunt about it, we must say that souls have become cowardly, and that the souls of the spiritual leaders of Western human development have become cowardly. That is to say, they do not dare to bring the active soul forces into real activity; they shrink from calling upon the spiritual that lies in the human soul to such an activity that the connection with the spiritual world is established. In this case they rely on the passive, they rely on passively receiving visions to which they surrender, while the real connection with the spiritual world must be sought in activity. And so I cannot say otherwise than that this enormous burden, which rests on the spiritual life of Western humanity, has gradually caused such an eclipse of the soul that these souls are indeed little inclined to courageously and bravely unfold the activity to ascend to the spiritual world through the path of exercises.

My dear friends, take only what has been given to you as a breviary; after all, this is just one of many things you have received. If you simply apply with the appropriate spiritual courage what has been given to you as a breviary, you have every opportunity to gain a connection to the spiritual world. What is then still missing is merely the inner spiritual courage. Of course, today there is nothing else for it but to take the, I would say paradoxical path, to achieve courage through humility, to say to ourselves: We human beings live in community; that which is general lives in each and every one of us, and so , what is general, has also initially paralyzed our courage; we must wait in humility until we have the opportunity to awaken this courage in our soul through practice, and we must use the first steps of our priesthood to wait in humility until this courage awakens in our soul. But we must understand humility in the sense that it is a detour to courage, which consists in man really knowing himself in spiritual community with spiritual beings. Actually, this knowledge is the prerequisite for any priesthood. In this respect, perhaps a model can be gained from the Catholic Church, albeit a daunting one, but a real one. Those who become clergy within the Catholic Church are trained in such a way that the consciousness of their connection with the spiritual world is awakened in them, that the intellectual principle, which makes man so passive, is first extinguished, paralyzed. This is actually something that the Catholic Church has been doing since the fourth century AD: sweeping away the burgeoning intellectuality, paralyzing it, so that the deeper powers of the soul can develop more easily. One could say, in fact, that for a person who has gone through what you all went through in elementary school, before you had even really become human, through an education colored by intellectualism, for such a person, choirs of angels could appear on any occasion. These revelations of the angelic choirs would have no connection to the person, because intellectuality simply paralyzes the ability to receive. In contrast to this, the Catholic Church adorns the authoritative clergy in such a way that it may be enough for a person thus liberated from his intellectuality to hear the “Ite missa est” just once at the end of a mass, intoned in the way it is in some churches, for the gates of the spiritual world to be opened to such a person through what comes from the words of the mass. You may need to speak to such a person only a single word, a single sentence, and the connection with the spiritual world is there.

Of course, this is most eminently difficult for you all, because it is impossible for you to de-intellectualize yourself. You have to go through everything that is taught about all kinds of ecclesiastical concepts that are not needed at all in the sense of the Catholic Church, and that are even harmful in its sense. But this must be pointed out in order to draw attention to the fact that those powers of activity, which a priest does need if he wants to feel the connection with the spiritual world, are covered with a thick layer. But at the same time, the principles of priestly ordination are implied, and the principles for the practice of worship are implied. But for that you must understand something else.

In the spiritual world, the validity of human language begins to fade at a relatively low level. It is simply the case that when one establishes contact with a dead person, one must first learn the language through which one can communicate with the soul in the spiritual world. After a relatively short time, this soul loses all understanding of nouns, of everything that is crystallized in nouns. But it still retains the ability to understand verbs, that is, everything that points to what is becoming, to what is active. But the more the soul grows into the spiritual world, the more it loses the ability to even feel that the way of human speech is its property, and one must, in speaking, pass over to what can be expressed in interjections, to come to a common ground between people here on earth and those in the spiritual world, of course also with such spiritual entities that never appear in a human body on earth. Language is an earthly product, and it is more or less so in different degrees, according to the particular language. And so we must realize that what is put into words, what is expressed in words — such as the pulpit or the theological — can indeed only ever be a one-sided presentation of the reality of the spirit. It is impossible for you to tell people higher spiritual truths in a single unequivocal sentence if you do not present the things from different sides. This is not a triviality, but it even applies to the relationship of human thought, not only of human language, to the higher spiritual world. If I say “Christ in me”, that is one truth, but we can also turn it around and say “I am in Christ”, that is also a truth. Both are truths in the sense in which one can establish a human theory of knowledge, but they contradict each other. You cannot elaborate the image: Christ in me - I am in Christ. How do you want to elaborate the image that the Christ can be in you by being in him? And yet both are truths, that is to say, they are truths with regard to the world and not truths with regard to the supersensible world. The truth with regard to the supersensible world lies between the two statements, which, of course, need not be in complete opposition to each other, but can be at a different angle to each other.

What is impossible in this way – to bring religious substance to people – is possible to bring to people in worship. It is also possible if you are able to carry what you gain from the cult into your preaching. For the lay believer, the cult is an edification, a revelation; for the one who practices the cult, the cult must be a constant source of inspiration. It is a true cultus when it is this source of inspiration, when the one who practices the cultus – and in the highest degree this applies of course to the cultus of the Mass – feels in the act of saying the words: You can only preach in this way when you say the Mass; you would not have the spiritual substance within you from which you speak if you did not say the Mass. There must be a real relationship between the person performing the service and the reality of the cult, especially the cult of the Mass. For the cult of the Mass actually contains everything that connects man with the spiritual world, and it contains it in such a way that it can work as a continuous inspiration, in which one stands when the Mass is experienced in the right way.

It is therefore necessary, my dear friends, to grasp the concept of the Mass in such a way that you say to yourselves each time: the day brings sunrise, the day brings sunset; between sunset and sunrise there is then the night; but there is also a period of time between the daylight and the light that comes into the world when the Mass is celebrated. This belongs to the course of events in the cosmos, just as the course of the sun belongs to it. Reading or celebrating the Mass is a real thing. Perhaps it can be expressed in another way: when we look at our earth and its surroundings, we have minerals, plants, animals, and further afield we have stars, sun and moon, clouds, rivers, mountains; but although physicists dream of the constancy of matter, all this will one day no longer be there. All this is a temporary phenomenon in the universe, that is, in place of what we have on earth in our minerals, plants, animals, and so on, there will be nothing, less than nothing. But if you then look back at the events that took place on this earth as a sacrifice, their effects would always be present. The cult is more real than nature, if it is practiced in the right way. It is more real than nature. If you do not just take this theoretically, but grasp it in its full severity, it means something tremendous. It deepens the words: Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away, whereby, of course, by “words” is not meant what any Chinese, Japanese or German language has as a random formulation in relation to the cosmos. If the Christ is understood as speaking in Aramaic, then of course this is also a random formulation. But the Logos is that which lives in reality and in reality passes over into the evolution of the world, so that one is indeed standing in a reality with the sacrificial act, which is a reality that is more real than any natural process. This gives us a sense of responsibility, and this sense of responsibility is needed if we wish to be mediators between the spiritual world and people who are in great need of such mediation, but cannot receive it through a mere teaching, however edifying it may be. This does not mean, however, that no teaching should be given; it should certainly be given, but this teaching acquires its special power and authority through its appearance in the context of the cultic. Thus the things that are given as teaching are precisely integrated into what lives as reality in the cult.

One could say that the greatest contribution to the spread of materialism was the rejection of the cultic, because it simply limited humanity to views of the divine that only appear in the guise of the earthly. One speaks about the Divine in earthly words, in poor earthly words. These earthly words can become rich when they are backed by inspiration, which is effectively evoked by the cult. It is indeed the case that the action should carry the word. And so the word of reading the Gospel should also be carried by the action. Therefore, we incorporate the reading of the Gospel into the Mass action, and in doing so, we acquire the right to understand and also to feel and sense the reading of the Gospel in such a way that the message from the spiritual world, which the Gospel represents, introduces that which then prepares for the actual sacrificial action in the offertory. For it is through the offertory, which, as one of the main acts of the Mass, follows the reading of the Gospel, that the setting for the Mass is actually only given. If you let the content of the ritual, which you all became well acquainted with during your stay in Breitbrunn, sink in, you will see that the entire spirit of the Gospel particularly sets the scene for the offertory, and that even the utensils and so on are purified to such an extent that the next step can take place. Naturally, within the Catholic Church, the view that one should have towards these things has actually been materialized. There they consecrate a chalice or a monstrance once and for all, so that the monstrance is once and for all the Holy of Holies. They even consecrate the water there. That is not a spiritual reality, but a spiritual reality has actually been externalized, materialized. The essential thing is that the spiritual reality is carried by the human soul, and that with every single sacrifice of the Mass, the chalice and what goes with it, the bread and the wine, must first be consecrated during the sacrifice of the Mass. So consecration is an ongoing act that must be maintained in perpetual liveliness, so that only during the offertory is the consecration venue created for the following one. And when the transubstantiation follows, the transubstantiation, one is indeed in the midst of a real, spiritual transformation.

Now it is simply the case that the views of the first Christian centuries, that is, of the people on whom it depended, could not actually be disputed, but were only begun to be disputed and discussed in later centuries, since the approach of Wycliffe and others, because these discussions were all already influenced by materialism. Just think, if we take the dispute in the most crude way, it is the case that people said: The bread cannot contain the body of the Lord, it cannot be the body of the Lord!

Yes, my dear friends, only someone who sees a gross reality in this external appearance before him would speak in such a way. What you have before you as bread is not real in the true sense of the word. You must first go to the real thing if you want to discuss such things as transubstantiation. Because it is a matter of getting beyond the trivial view that what appears as a whitish or yellowish color filling the space or what meets the sense of taste is a reality. As long as it is supposed to be a reality, in which even all kinds of little demons are supposed to be present, corresponding to the imperishability of matter, one can raise all kinds of objections in a discussion. But that does not address the issue. The issue here is such things as were hinted at here yesterday with the expression “spiritual chemistry”, which is also used in the new era. For transubstantiation must be considered in such a way that what is actually taking place outwardly at the altar for the eye is Maya, appearance, but that the process that is taking place spiritually is nevertheless a reality within this community, and not only within this community, but within this place. Transubstantiation is there. And only because the spectators have ahrimanically configured eyes, which make them believe that the outer sensual reality is a reality, they do not see what is going on. This is something we must have in our consciousness. You must feel this in what I am saying and what I am now saying here and there to characterize the full seriousness of the present spiritual situation of humanity.

I said in a lecture in London recently that one must get used to the fact that the things said for the physical plane may sound contradictory when the same things are said from the spiritual world. I used the example that it is quite correct, when speaking for the physical plane, to say that Rousseau was a great man for this or that reason; that is quite all right for the physical plane. But seen from the spiritual world, one can only say: Rousseau was the general babbler of modern civilization, because everything he said is, seen from the spiritual worlds, the shallowest chatter. That is, today one must become accustomed in an intensive way to the fact that the spiritual world is something different than this physical world. This must be seen if one wants to gain a connection with the spiritual world.

Now you might say that this is just the old grumbling about the spiritual world, as it was in the Middle Ages. That is not right. The physical world becomes something completely different when viewed in the way I have just characterized it. Every flower becomes different; but it loses nothing, it only gains the fact that it becomes a mediator to the spiritual world. Does the flower lose something when I admire it as it stands in the field, when I can say all kinds of beautiful things about it, right up to the revelations of a good lyrical poet, and when it then becomes clear to me: yes, but that is not all the flower is, the flower also reveals that it merges upwards into an ethereal substance? This astral substance runs in coils (he draws on the blackboard), and through these coils one can ascend to the world of the planets. What underlies the flower is a kind of spiritual ladder into the supermundane world, and by ascending this ladder one encounters the forces that make flowers grow out of the earth and up towards heaven. Yes, if you add this to what you can say about the flower based on sensory observation, will you live in a medieval asceticism? Your view of the flower will only be enriched by it. The soul must immerse itself in this mood if it wants to receive what worship can bring it, if it simply learns to see what the physical eye does not see.

You must bring these feelings and perceptions with you to the ritual; only then will what happens become what it should be; and only then can it be said that you really enjoy with the host what the ritual speaks of. And only then are the four parts of the mass fulfilled: the gospel, the offertory, the transubstantiation or consecration, and communion.

These are things that you should not take as theory, but which I am telling you today for the reason that you approach the matter with the right feeling and only by doing so make things the truth; because without this feeling they are not truths. A mass can be a sacrifice to the devil just as easily as it can be a sacrifice to God. It is not the insignificant thing that the Protestant mind would like to make of it. A mass celebrated by a priest may be a sacrifice to God today within the

table of the Catholic Church, but it is never the nothing that the Protestants would like to make of it. They certainly do not succeed in making the Mass an insignificant material act, but they can make it a sacrifice to the devil under certain circumstances. Because what happens [in the Mass] is a reality, that is, the action in question is oriented either in the right or in the wrong direction, but not in a direction that leads to nothingness. However, it can also lead in a very bad, harmful direction. You must be aware that you can say to yourself: I cannot actually remain neutral, I can only serve God or the devil – with all possible intermediate stages, of course. Serving the devil is a very difficult task, for that you must be a consciously bad person; but there are all kinds of powers between the divine and the ahrimanic world.

This is part of the state of mind that one must have for the whole of the cult. When one has this state of mind, this inner liveliness that places one in the spiritual world, then the degree of consciousness that one attains is simply a matter of time. Do not forget that what you can achieve during the sacrifice of the Mass always draws your soul into the spiritual world, that your soul is drawn into the scene of the spiritual world, that you are not just saying something with your mouth and doing something with your hands, but that you are standing within the spiritual world. You must be aware of this when you consider the concept of worship. That means you must be very clear in your own mind that in the act of worship you are performing something that is a reality, and that when you speak as the celebrant, you are also speaking as a messenger from other worlds. You must feel as such a messenger. You must not feel as one who only establishes a connection between what is here on earth and heaven, but also as one who brings something from heaven into the earthly. That is your difference from the mere lay believer, and that is the tone that you must bring to the world if you want to found a justly existing priestly community. The world must feel that you, as priests, are attuned to the impulses from the spiritual world. You do not have to tell the world this in theory, for that would stir it up. But you must do what you do with your consciousness; then you will do the right thing. And then you can say, for example, that the words spoken at the ordination or at other ceremonies are the reflection of what takes place beforehand in the spiritual world, because you yourself have this connection to the spiritual world in your state of mind. What then appears as an outward act visible to the eyes is, of course, the legitimate reflection of the spiritual event; but one must not see it as a mere symbol when one stands before the believer. For the believer, what takes place outwardly in relation to the religious is really the same as - take any human being whom you say is a great painter, but he has never painted a picture. It may well be that he is a great painter for the spiritual world, but here in this world a painter must have actually painted a picture. They may all be priests for the spiritual world, but here in the physical world they must practice a cult in order to be true priests; then they behave in the same way as a painter behaves in order to paint. That is the great error of Protestantism today, when it says, figuratively speaking, that it does not matter that pictures are painted, but only that painters are there, so one should abolish painting, so that such terrible sensual elements do not enter into the treatment of the spiritual. It is really so. Only, when one says it, today things are such that they seem quite paradoxical to man, because even within the Catholic Church the self-evident, organic nature of worship is no longer felt, although even today one can still find naive Catholics who already have a feeling for the reality that lies in worship. Sometimes this is even more intense in the faithful than in the Catholic priesthood.

That is what I wanted to tell you, because anything I could add to what has been said so far can only be a deepening of the feeling and the state of mind. During the time we are gathered here, we must become priests, so to speak, through what is said and done among us. After all, everything that needs to be said to become a priest has already been said. Basically, not much needs to be added, except perhaps to clarify one or other sentiment.

So now we have reached the point that tomorrow at the beginning of the lesson I will first explain how we in this community now have to relate to this whole thing in practice, because of course some kind of consecration of the community will have to be carried out. To do this, it will be necessary for what has so far been described as necessary in theory to become immediately real in practice within this community. So tomorrow we will first deal with the question: How does an individual become a priest, and how do the individual members of the community relate to one another, so that those sitting here today become a priestly organism? Then we must move on to the practical exercise, to the demonstration of what I have said about celebrating a cult, and we will see that we can then really bring about the sacrifice of the Mass in a practical way.

I would like to have said this today for the strengthening of your souls. If you take it in the right way and bring with you the necessary mood for it, you will really be able to become what you want to become. You must leave as different people than when you came. You have not needed that so far, but you must have it now. You must leave here not only with the feeling that you have taken something in, but with the feeling that you have truly become something else. Consider what that means for human consciousness. If you have thought about it properly, we will be able to proceed in the right way tomorrow.

We have now put together a number of building blocks that should be suitable for erecting a kind of building to penetrate deeper into the essence of the human being through this building of contemplation. In order to proceed from the discussions we had yesterday and the day before yesterday, it is necessary that we expand our considerations today to areas that we have touched on, in such a way that we consider the soul-spiritual, which of course works in man, and the bodily-material, which also works in him, in connection. In the scientific development of modern times, it has become difficult to combine this view of the interaction of the spiritual-soul and the physical-material in the human being in a fruitful way, because modern man actually only knows a duality in this area. He is familiar with the material world and its effects and configurations, and then he also looks at this material world in the human being. He looks at it in the human being by studying physiology, chemistry and biology. Certain views then arise from these studies and are absorbed into popular consciousness. People cling to them with a certain tenacity, and it must be emphasized again and again that even those who, in their Sunday best, still live in old traditional religious ideas, fully recognize as authority what popular science says about the physical body of the human being, perhaps even more so. On the other hand, certain people do have ideas about the spiritual and mental. But these ideas about the spiritual and soul are so abstract, sometimes they are actually just empty words about something that was once known more precisely, but the knowledge of which has been lost, so that not much can be done with them. People today do talk about thinking, feeling, and willing; they talk about imagining. But they do not really have any experiences of these things. One might say that words have been handed down and humanity clings to these words without associating much meaning with them. One also sees that his game is introduced into the literary works on psychology and the like that appear today, where thinking, feeling and willing are nothing but empty abstractions.

Then people realize that on have the material view on the one hand, which they cannot deny because they have eyes, hands with which the material can be grasped and seen, because they have scales with which it can be weighed, because they can measure and the like. Thus, the material is recognized as such from direct inspection, from sensory perception.

On the other hand, people do speak of a spiritual soul, but in the way I have just discussed. And then they cannot somehow find a relationship between this spiritual soul and the bodily physical, the material physical. All kinds of theories have been proposed as to how the spiritual-mental is supposed to interact with the physical-material. But all these theories are just figments of the imagination. Before gaining insights into these things, it is absolutely necessary to be able to look at the whole person. In the whole human being, it is ultimately the case that no expression of soul or spirit occurs between birth and death that is not accompanied by a physical manifestation. And when we speak of the physical and the spiritual as opposites, we are talking in abstractions, for it is the same thing seen from different sides. But this is not realized, that it is one and the same thing, and one sees only the difficulties in constructing a theory of how the two interact. But only what we grasp in a truly heightened, trained observation is what helps in this field. And for this it is necessary to draw attention to the things that arise in such an observation. It is natural that a certain schooling in the sense I have described in “How to Know Higher Worlds” must precede exact observation in this field. But if one has the goal in mind, if one knows what has been observed there, one can indeed make use of one's common sense, if one really wants to, if one is willing to follow the ideas that are then brought to light through spiritual scientific observation, in their content properly to pursue.

These ideas are of course always such that, if you apply to them what is familiar to you from ordinary science, then you will not keep up. You have to get involved with the ideas that are given. But you can always get involved with ideas using common sense. Ideas could come from the most unknown worlds; if they are there, one can engage with them. If only the experiences from the corresponding worlds are really brought into such comprehensible ideas, then one can engage with them. But one must rise to that, for which one does not need occult training: to grasping ideas.

Of course, most people today are unable to do this, and least of all today's scientists. They are accustomed to having ideas only when these ideas are borrowed from the external sense world. And they are willing to engage in mathematics at most, but otherwise they do not engage at all in grasping ideas, which are then pursued from within, just as mathematical structures are pursued from within. Everything that the humanities scholar brings can be followed if one develops the will to engage with such ideas, and in fact one can verify everything conceptually. But one must want to. To do this, one does not need occult training, but one does need to overcome what one takes on board as recognized scientific methods of thought, which do not coincide with common sense, because they have produced the habit of thinking that only what has a correlate in the sensory world is valid. Today we have to develop a number of ideas that can lead us further in the considerations we have gained. When our imaginative life takes place, when we imagine, something is going on in us. And what is going on there is not the abstract process that is often described today, but it is a process in which something that is called material processes is also alive. One does not become a materialist by pursuing the spiritual into its material effects, one only becomes a materialist by rejecting the spiritual out of prejudice.

As soon as one becomes fully aware what actually takes place in the soul when one thinks, when one visualizes, then one will gradually be able to arrive at an inner grasp of the soul-physical process that is taking place, even without occult training. And this soul-physical process of thinking, of imagining, is one that, even in its soul characteristics, shows that it is the opposite of another process. Just try to find, in the realm of ordinary consciousness, what the opposite process of thinking is. It is the process in which our thoughts fade away, where we become incapable of pursuing thoughts in a bright, clear way, where, in other words, what we call consciousness in ordinary life ends, at least where our control over what we call consciousness in ordinary life ends. Now you can see how this counter-image of thinking has a physical correlate: Wherever the actual growth process, the process of becoming in us, the process of nourishing and growing, is particularly strong, the thought element, the element of imagination, recedes. You only need to look intelligently at the lively organic growth activity in the first years of childhood. This growth activity is particularly vivid then. But thinking is only present in the germ, at least the power of the human being over thinking. Or follow disease processes through which, as in feverish phenomena, the organic activity becomes particularly vehement, where it becomes intensified, there the conscious control over the life of imagination fades away.

We can see a contrast that we could describe in more and more detail, but I would like to point out only the main lines. One is the life of the imagination; we understand this primarily in its spiritual aspect. The other is the life of growth. In order to point out more clearly what is actually involved, I will write “growth proliferation”, since the contrast is now more physically grasped.

But try to go further from this starting point. Remember that I have often pointed out how man, in his ordinary consciousness, only has this bright, clear day-consciousness, which he carries from waking to falling asleep, through his life of ideas, while what goes on in us when we develop the will plunges into a darkness like the life between falling asleep and waking up. We sleep, as I have often said, not only completely from the time we fall asleep until we wake up, but we also sleep partially for our will activity when we are awake. Everything in us that lives as a volitional activity is actually shrouded in a state of sleep. We are aware of our intentions, our volitional motives, when we want to raise our hand, but we relate to what is actually going on inside us by actually raising our hand, that is, by unfolding our will, just as we relate to ourselves when we are asleep. What is actually happening? What is actually going on?

What is going on is this: What underlies the will in us organically is to be found below, in the growth processes that remain unconscious to us. The will has plunged down into the growth processes. Everything that proliferates as growth in us is at the same time akin to the will, is a growth process when viewed externally in the body, and will when viewed internally in the soul. So we can already see how the growth proliferation, like everything that lies within the currents of strength that express themselves in growth, in nourishment, in life itself, is akin to the will. If we look at it from the soul, we can say that it is connected to the will.

Now, if we look at the human being between birth and death, we see that what we call our will is an abstraction in every single activity. This will does not run separately by itself. There is always a metabolic process within us, a process of growth, a process of nutrition or a process of malnutrition, in which the will unfolds. In a lesser degree, the same thing is present that, let us say, extinguishes consciousness in a particularly heightened growth or life process. That is why our consciousness is also extinguished in the actual region of the will. This region of will is where the growth proliferation is; therefore it is in the unconscious. We must therefore distinguish in ourselves as human beings an area - I am drawing it schematically, of course - where the growth proliferation is, and in this growth proliferation, which does not fall within the scope of ordinary consciousness, the will is rooted. But this is actually one thing in the concrete human being. Only in thinking do we separate the will from this growth proliferation.

Another area that we have initially only considered in terms of the soul is that which encompasses our thinking. This thinking, this imagining, develops either in connection with external ideas or through the process of remembrance being transformed into imagining when experiences are remembered.

Now, in our soul we can basically see very clearly that this life of imagining is the opposite pole of the life of will and also the opposite pole of the life of growth, of the life in the organism in general. This thinking life, this life of imagination, is precisely where we are fully in control of ourselves, where we string together our ideas, where we analyze and synthesize within the life of imagination. We can contrast thinking with the will. The will, in its essence, is completely unconscious to us. We now know that we are unconscious of it because the will is rooted in growth, in the processes of life, in the processes of metabolism. Thinking stands opposed to the will. We have it under control.

However, in the moment when the spiritual researcher advances to imagination, it immediately becomes clear to him what is actually present in thinking. For just imagine this process that the human being undergoes, who advances from ordinary thinking to imagination.

Ordinary thinking is abstract. Man, in thinking, is conscious only of the life of thought (yellow). When, through the methods I have described in “How to Know Higher Worlds,” this thinking condenses into imaginative life, then the images of imaginative life arise. But it is understandable that nothing that takes place in the soul, that is, is experienced, does not also have some kind of physical correlate in ordinary life between birth and death. One perceives something in oneself when one ascends to the imagination. And what one perceives is precisely the process that takes place in thinking in general, because this imaginative cognition is only a further development of thinking. I have already said that the facts about a person do not change when one ascends to higher, supersensible cognition. One only learns to recognize what is always present in a person. What one learns to recognize always happens, but one does not know it with the ordinary consciousness. If one now has the images in the advanced consciousness, then one knows that certain figural deposits, correct material deposits (red), correspond to these images in the human organization. These correct material deposits are always present in man; they are just not noticed. For what one experiences in the imagination are not new deposits, but the imagination only enables one to see the ever-present deposits. One would not be able to have imaginations if one did not see in a certain way - one can hardly call it 'seeing' - if one did not become aware of these deposits, because the imaginations are reflected in these deposits. One then notices that these deposits are present even in ordinary thinking. They are connected with the delicate organization of our nervous system and with that which belongs to the nervous system. They constitute the nervous system. The life of our nervous system depends on these deposits. As I said, they remain unknown to ordinary consciousness. They are recognized by imaginative consciousness.

This concludes a series of considerations that can be undertaken as follows: the life of imagination is opposed to the will. But the will is bound – as can be experienced through such considerations as I have presented to you – to growth proliferation. Now we can consider: So the life of imagination is bound to the opposite of growth proliferation, to dying away. And indeed, what takes place in us and what is, as it were, inwardly perceived in imaginative knowledge, is the falling out of the material as organic matter from the process of growth proliferation.

Soul: Life of Imagination

Will: Death of Growth and Growth

It is indeed the case that we have within us the process of growth and proliferation, that is, the process of metabolism, and dying matter is constantly falling out. We are continually being filled with such dying matter by thinking. We perceive this dying of matter when we ascend to the imagination. And our thinking, our imagination is bound to this dying matter.

It is really the case that we human beings carry the metabolic process within us, the dissolution and composition of the substances and so on, that the life of the will lives in it, and that matter continually dies within itself, that is, that it excretes parts that are no longer included within its organizing forces. Inorganic matter is constantly being eliminated from the organic, and the life of imagination is connected with this falling away. If the growth process, the metabolic process, becomes overgrown, our imaginative life fades. If this dying process predominates, then our ideas become increasingly rigid and pedantic. It cannot be expected that a person without occult training can easily arrive at such self-insight; but he could arrive at it, he can come to a self-insight through which it becomes clear to him: just as when his consciousness fades away in any way, even if only when falling asleep, there is a victory of the growth and metabolic forces over those forces that underlie this inner activity and dominate the thoughts. But one can also perceive, if one is only unbiased enough to acquire such inner self-insight, how an inner fatigue, a lowering of matter takes place within, in that thoughts are developed, in that one lives more and more consciously and consciously in one's imaginative life.

We do indeed carry birth and death within us continually. And what is at the beginning of life as birth, where the forces of growth are still most active, where consciousness has yet to arise, that lives with us continually until death and is basically the bearer of our will, our unconscious will, which only becomes conscious when the light of thought is thrown into it. But what is rampant is permeated by continual processes of dissolution, by a continual, continuous fulfillment of that which is then compressed into one at the moment of death, by a process of dying. And just as the growth and proliferation process reveals the element of will to the outside world, so the inward process of dying reveals the element of thought and imagination. If we cultivate this insight within us, we come to the conclusion that we are actually born and die continually, and that the single birth at the beginning of an earthly life is nothing more than a summation of what runs through our whole life until death in miniature.

For mathematicians, one could say that the real birth is an integral of all the birth differentials that are effective throughout life. But the death differentials are also effective, and real death is only the integral of this. This means that if we are continually dying inwardly, so that dying is constantly being suspended, so that it is already suspended at the moment of its arising, then this is the material basis of the life of imagination. When dying occurs, when what is constantly active in us simply becomes more intense in an unlimited way, then the moment of death is there, just as in real birth that which is constantly a process of growth in us is more intense in us in an immeasurable way. Thus one sees the spiritual-soul process and the physical-material process as one. And without this, one cannot really arrive at spiritual knowledge at all.

Now, at a certain moment in our lives, we are always very close to the point where we make a transition between thinking, which, after all, must fill our healthy consciousness from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, and between what is proliferating and what thinking constantly seeks to extinguish. That is the moment of falling asleep. We can say that we arrive at a maximum proliferation of growth that life must initially reckon with. Those who advance to imaginative knowledge get to know it very well. For at the moment when imaginative knowledge arises, he is also able to have such experiences that are overslept in ordinary consciousness, where ordinary consciousness extinguishes itself because it is overgrown by the development of the will-growth.

These are such states into which ordinary consciousness must not enter. If the ordinary consciousness enters, then, so to speak, the growth proliferation takes hold of that which lies in the dying life of the imagination; it drives up - I must now express myself in images, but one also speaks in the imagination or out of the imagination - the growth proliferation that which lies in the dying life of the imagination. It, so to speak, does not allow the dying life of the imagination to reach its higher development.

This is the process that occurs in hallucinatory life and, to a certain extent, in life in illusions, in visions. Visions are pathological formations, hallucinations are also pathological formations. One understands them, I would say, in a soul-physical sense, when one sees the will in a certain harmony with the growth proliferation, which then takes hold and, as it were, tears apart what should consolidate in the dying process of thinking. In a sense, the continuous inward mortification is suspended. Something is torn out of the person and proliferates that should die in him if he were healthy. These are bloated masses of thoughts, and we only understand them as bloated masses of thoughts if we see what is physical and material in harmony with what is spiritual and soul-like. Something of the growth processes in man always proliferates when he has hallucinations or visions. You will recognize certain preparatory training sessions for the imaginative; if these preparatory training sessions are done in the appropriate way, then the person is able to consciously immerse themselves in what is constantly taking place in the change of life, namely, that we really live into the complete state of sleep through the dream images. In this state, where ordinary consciousness is taken from us, one learns to live by advancing into the imagination. One thus arrives where the dying process is in a certain way really overcome. It is overcome in everyday life in a state of sleep. But it is into such a state, which is then a conscious state, that man is introduced to higher knowledge. And when man rises above his ordinary consciousness in this way, then he learns to recognize that this ordinary consciousness cannot enter into this state. A person in the ordinary state of consciousness goes out of his physical and etheric bodies asleep; a person with imaginative knowledge goes out while awake. But the region one enters first, I would say the first region one enters when one enters this spiritual world, which then opens up in the imagination, one initially perceives as an absolutely empty, dark space, and one cannot actually enter the spiritual world without making this detour through this empty darkness.

But that is what lies beyond the limits of our sensory perception. If you remember the schematic drawing I made on the board yesterday – sensations that are sent into us, as it were, and are the waves on which the I moves – you will see from this drawing how the I goes out into the environment, where it is otherwise also. But in waking it stretches its feelers into the body. Now, however, it withdraws from the body and comes with those parts that have become accustomed to sharing in the life of the body, out into the world that lies beyond our senses. It gets to know the spiritual realm. It does not get to know atoms, it gets to know the spiritual world beyond the senses. But it must go through the absolute dark emptiness, because only out of this dark emptiness is the spiritual born.

You have the one boundary, I would like to say, where human experience borders on, or has, towards the world. There you have the one boundary. This boundary must be there. If it were not there, we would not be separated from our surroundings as if by an empty abyss, so to speak; we could never develop what real love is, because that requires that the human being around him can get to know emptiness. Because if he were to fill everything around him, he would never be able to flow over into the other with his being. But that is what develops in the essence of love.

If you want to know the essence of love in a real process of knowledge, then you just have to know how a person, especially when feelings of love develop in him, expands, so to speak, where his consciousness has emptiness. Therefore, he can fill himself with something else. The development of love is precisely the opposing of the emptiness of consciousness to the other, which then fills the consciousness.

But if the right harmony does not exist between the spiritual-mental and the physical-bodily – you will notice that this is only an expression that does not fully capture the fact, because we speak of harmony as a harmony for the other processes, but it is understood in this way of speaking what it is about - if the right harmony does not exist, if the one-sided spiritual-mental or physical-bodily develops too much in one or the other direction, so that the two sides are not fully expressed, then a morbid state occurs. On the one hand, a morbid state occurs when a person pours his own being into that place where he should feel an emptiness. He then lives in this empty being, in the world of his visions and hallucinations. This is precisely what is overcome by a real occult training: having hallucinations and visions. For it cannot be emphasized enough: this is precisely what is morbid. And what occult training develops is the development of forces that are opposed to the forces that arise when hallucinations or visions occur.

In hallucinating and having visions, people develop forces within themselves that are opposed to what is needed for imaginative life. We will therefore experience time and again that there are people who, for this reason, do not have to be extremely ill, but who have visions. I do not want to say hallucinations, because then one must speak of being ill, but who have visions. There are even very many people who go through life with visions and are very proud of them and live in these visions, believing that a real spiritual world is revealed in them, while it is only the proliferation of their vital forces pouring out into the void. There are also those who are so arrogant, who become megalomaniac, that they say they are undergoing an initiation, whereas what they are experiencing is merely an abnormal growth that overgrows their thinking. And when such people then approach what must seriously be recommended as exercises for imagination, then sometimes something very special happens. Because when they then say, “Yes, I have now lost my spiritual vision,” they have in fact lost their visionary visions; and that is because the exercises for true imagination that they apply to themselves counteract their morbid power of vision. Those who believe in this way, in the spiritual world through natural forces to live, they live morbidly in it, and they usually lose what they have become so fond of in a rather haughty self-love. This can always be experienced again, and this only proves, when it is experienced, how the visionary powers are morbid powers, and how what is striven for in imaginative seeing is the opposite, healing powers.

From this it can be seen that beyond sense perception there is an area of human experience that can only be grasped objectively in imaginative life. In the visionary life, we only radiate our own life into emptiness. But when we experience emptiness, then into this emptiness comes — just as the external world works through our senses — that which I have already described as the weaving, active world of the angeloi hierarchy. The weaving, active world of the angels-hierarchy is at work around us.

But now we can also find the other side of the area bordering on human experience, and that is the one that lies more inwardly beyond thinking. We can indeed say: This perception is connected with the I (see drawing on page 135). Now we enter the astral body: we have imagination. Now we go down into the etheric body: we have the activity of memory. And in the physical body, images. Ordinary consciousness does not come down into the etheric body; nor does it go out of it. Outside, there is the world, which must be said to be the world of living, weaving angels. It is therefore a spiritual world that exists above our world of consciousness. It is not outside the realm of human life, but it is outside the realm of ordinary consciousness. For our ego, it was explicitly said that it lies outside the sense perceptions and carries them in, so our ego is definitely connected to this world. It is the world that we can only enter with strengthened consciousness, because otherwise we would have our consciousness diminished, that is, we would fall into unconsciousness. We do indeed fall into this unconsciousness every time we fall asleep, and then we descend into this world. So that is how we penetrate beyond sense perception into this realm.

But now we can also descend down to the other side into our own true being. This happens when the destructive powers of dying within us take hold of us more than they usually do; or rather, when they become conscious. Just as we can penetrate beyond the boundaries of the life of the senses, so we can also penetrate downwards through that which I call occult schooling.

But what is experienced there must, if it is not to occur in a certain pathological way, remain entirely within the human being. The human being must not allow it into his ordinary consciousness. He must leave this area below, where it is otherwise unconscious. That is to say, the human being must not allow this area, which lies in the etheric body, to flow up into his ordinary consciousness, but must guide his ordinary consciousness down into the etheric body. So what is down there must not penetrate into ordinary perception, but ordinary perception must penetrate down there.

From this you can see, however, that it is an area that, just like the other one I have described, is, so to speak, the physical body of the human being, so that this area is always present within the physical body of the human being. This belongs to the inner human entities, which are often referred to in spiritual scientific contexts, and this field is always referred to in such a way that those who have recognized it, who have glimpsed something of it, say: It is impossible to express in human words what is down there. You can follow this from the descriptions of the older Egyptian initiations up to Bulwer.

But in a certain way, and in a suggestive way, it is already possible today to speak about this area. In this area, namely, all that is rooted in the human soul-body life, which in the ordinary sense should not actually develop in the outer behavior of the human being. Human evil is rooted there.

You can see from this that it is a very remarkable fact. This source of evil is actually constantly within us. We must not for a moment be under the illusion that the source of evil is not in us. It is, if I may say so, located below the level of our thinking. It must not infect our thinking, otherwise our thoughts become motives for evil; it must remain below. And the one who wants to look at it there must be morally strong enough not to let it up, so that he really only sends the consciousness down. Now you may say: But why is that in man? Yes, this question can only be raised by someone who would say, for example: Why does a plant not stop growing when it has got green leaves? It just continues to grow through its own power. We carry within us the process of dying that develops our thinking. This process is still conscious, but it must descend into the unconscious. For if this process were to cease, our thoughts would never consolidate in such a way that memory could arise in us, that thoughts could later arise in us again from the experiences we have had. So the process of dying away must continue for us to have a memory. And the beingness to which we owe our memory as human beings is the same beingness that, when it emerges in the wrong way, emerges when the motives of evil arise in man. To some extent, the tendency towards evil present in certain people is a spiritual-soul belching, forgive me for using this expression, of what should remain down and take care of the memory.

The power of memory is rooted in the human being. And just as there is a physical burping, there is also this spiritual-soul burping. When that which is granted to us in divine wisdom in the depths of our being as the power of remembrance, when that comes up into consciousness, just as something – forgive the unsavory expression – physically , then you have the criminal tendency.

There is nothing in the world that does not have its place and that cannot turn out badly when it is out of place. When something in the world appears to us as if it should not be, we must ask the question: Where must it be so that it can fulfill its task there? And here, by diving down there, we then come to the other realm, to the realm of the hierarchy of seraphim, cherubim, thrones, just as we go beyond the realm of the senses to the realm of the angels, archangels and archai. We come down into a realm where we now see clearly how that natural force that is connected with our memories has a moral side.

Just consider what that means: spiritual science discovers something where a natural process has a moral side, that is, where something that seems out of place takes on a moral character! That is precisely what ails our time, that the moral life is on the one hand an abstract one, and the natural, the causalistic, is on the other. The method of how the two can come together is not found. Here you have a very concrete process in which something natural carries within itself what, in contrast to the moral, can become immoral.

But doesn't something strange appear to you here? If we look at the matter from the point of view of degeneration, we come, as it were, into the anti-moral under our consciousness. We need it for the sake of remembrance. But, as I said, if we go beyond the sensations, we enter the realm of love. This is basically the power of the moral. We enter the moral. We are on the way to being able to build the bridge better and better between the moral-religious world on the one hand and the physical-bodily world, the world of natural causality on the other. This bridge must be built. And indeed, when we go out, we enter the spiritual, when we go down, we enter the spiritual, and we enter the world of hierarchies. We have been able to strike, so to speak, from two sides the field of hierarchies.

Of course, this consideration can only proceed in such a way that we approach the goal in a circle, so to speak. It cannot be done as in mathematics, where one starts from elementary concepts and builds up, but rather one must approach in a circle that which is to be understood last.

for the inauguration of the Novalis branch

Due to the circumstances, a number of our friends here in Strasbourg have founded a second branch in addition to the already existing one, which is to bear the significant name “Novalis Branch”. Our friends from other places, who have lovingly gathered in Strasbourg today, have shown through their visit how they understand that branches can also exist side by side in one city and that the diversity of work in different fields need not preclude what we must call harmony and concord, which must prevail among all those who consider themselves members of our society spread across the globe. And so this branch should also be part of the great current that we call spiritual science.

You, my dear friends of the Novalis branch, have chosen a significant name for your signature, a sign of your work. The name Novalis belongs to a personality who last, that is, in her last incarnation, was active only in the 18th century; a personality whose whole being is permeated, spiritualized, by what we regard as a spirit-knowing sense, as spirituality. And so you showed from the very beginning that you want spiritual science to be something directly alive, that you seek it wherever it can be found, not just in this or that time, but as it lives through all times, and how it can pour out into the world through one or the other personality in many different ways. In Novalis, we can see how the striving for spiritual knowledge is something that can permeate and interweave our ordinary everyday lives. Of course, if we wanted to point to the sources of the theosophical spirit in Novalis, we would have to look into earlier incarnations of this lofty spirit, and from these earlier incarnations it would become clear to us how what can only be the most profound form of theosophical spiritual life was lived in the incarnations that preceded Novalis's own. But even if we consider only that Novalis, who was barely thirty years old and lived at the end of the 18th century, if we consider only that one incarnation, then we can already see in him how spiritual knowledge is not something that takes people up into a dreamy, fantastic world, something that draws him away from immediate reality. On the contrary, in the most diverse ways, we can see in Novalis how the spirit of reality, how real life acquires its value and true content by permeating it with spiritual science.

Novalis came from a noble family in central Germany in which there was a certain, I might say materialistic piety – for such a thing also exists – but not really that which one can describe as the yearning of the heart for a real, living spirit. In order to fulfill the karma of Novalis in the right way, it happened that the father of Novalis, the old Hardenberg, even in his later age - although he was not imbued with spiritual life, but because he came into the Herrnhut sect, a pietistic sect - was interspersed with pious impulses from a certain side. And from this middle-class, German-speaking environment – which, as I said, had enough of the spirit in it to enable even old Hardenberg, in his later life, to achieve a certain spirituality, even if it was sectarian – our Novalis emerged. He grew into – not into what was destined for him according to the will of his family, for that would have been some military or diplomatic position – he grew into a great time; into that time in which great, powerful minds worked at the chair of the Central German University of Thuringia.

So he could still hear Schiller's history being presented in Jena at that time. Contemporary history teachers may say that Schiller was not an erudite historian. But what history should be in life, a permeation of the whole of human development with spiritual life, that is what came from Schiller to those souls who were able to hear him in Jena as a history teacher. Schiller spoke as a great personality above all. Spirit spoke from this personality; it awakened the spirit.

And there was yet another teacher when Novalis was young, a teacher who, through the great energy of his spiritual life, not only created things in the field of philosophy that belong to the whole human race but are still little understood today. Fichte was working at the time when Novalis was living his life. He worked in such a way that his whole demeanour, Fichte's demeanour, had something spiritual about it. One can look at it as an externality. Those who have a sense for it will not look at it as an externality, that Fichte, when he lectured in the dark hall in the evening and the candle was burning on his lectern, first extinguished the candle by saying: So, my dear listeners, now the physical light has been extinguished, now only the spiritual light should shine in this room.

When the relationship between the spiritual and the physical is conjured up not only before the soul but also before the eyes at the right moment, this means something tremendous for receptive souls like Novalis. Such a soul can thereby become capable of maintaining an unshakable belief in spiritual life. It imbues the soul with a noble sentiment that remains for life when a Novalis comes into such an environment. One cannot say that Novalis was prone to enthusiasm. Those who believe that he was a dreamer do not understand Novalis. No, the spirit that lived in Novalis said – we can read it today in his unpublished writings –: the state of sleep is different from the state of wakefulness. When a person is awake, the inner soul – as it was called in those days, what we would call today the astral body – is united with the outer body. The body enjoys the soul. A beautiful word that Novalis used to express the relationship between the physical and astral bodies. And in sleep, the soul is released from the body, as Novalis said, and the body digests the soul when the person is asleep. This is another beautiful, short, concise expression for a relationship that we also encountered in spiritual science. It is beautiful when Novalis writes the saying in his notes: We are always surrounded by a spiritual world. Wherever we are, spiritual beings are around us. It is only up to the human being to project his or her self in such a way that he or she becomes aware of the spiritual beings that surround us wherever we are. It is wonderful how he shows a deep understanding of the course of esoteric human development and writes: In ancient times, attempts were made to lead the soul to a higher development by mortifying the body, through self-chastisement and so on. In more recent times, the strengthening of the soul must take its place: strengthening the soul. Through this strengthening, the soul must gain power over the body, must not become weaker as a result, and must then exercise a certain mastery.

We could talk about Novalis for hours. We would not find a spirit that expresses itself in words and teachings like the ones we can give in spiritual science today, but we would find a spirit that expresses exactly the same thing with its words. He was no dreamer, no fantasist. Although his lyric poetry took on the highest momentum we can imagine, leading us up to the highest warmth of feeling, Novalis – and this applies to him, who did not live to be thirty – was a practical mind, who studied at the Mining Academy, was a practical man, through and through a mathematician, who felt that mathematics was a great poem, according to whose lines the divine spirit had woven the world, but who proved himself to be practical in everything a mining engineer needs. Novalis was a spirit who, despite this practicality, knew how to implement in his emotional life, in his heart, what was for him a theosophical attitude, directly into his life. Truly, what we know of his relationship with Sophie von Kühn should not be understood as something related to sensuality. He loved a girl who died at the age of fourteen. He actually only began to love her so ardently when she was already dead. He felt that he now lives in the realm in which she has been since her “death.” He decided to die after her. His further life was a living with a physically dead personality. All this shows us what Novalis grew into through the strong pull of his spiritual being.

We can see from Novalis that, as a human being, you basically only need to have one quality in order to have a sense of this spirituality that spiritual science is supposed to bring us. You only need one quality, and this one quality becomes so difficult for people. Because it becomes so difficult for people, people do not come to spiritual science easily. When this one quality is mentioned, it seems to people as if they all have it. Nevertheless, it is this quality, the lack of which prevents people from coming to spiritual science: truthfulness, honestly confessing what really is in the deepest soul. Seemingly, they have so many people — in their own opinion. Nevertheless, Novalis in particular gives us an example of how just a moment of real honesty is needed, and how through this one moment of honesty a person should confess what spirituality can be for the human heart. Novalis' father had a certain inclination towards spirituality; otherwise he would not have joined the Moravian Church. But his soul was not as free and honest as is meant here. What lived in his soul from the external physical world prevented him from doing so. The physical world, with all its prejudices, did not allow him to ascend into the spiritual world. But his son had this truthfulness. What was more obvious than that the father could have no inkling of what lived in this son? The physical world, with its separateness, disharmony, and lack of truthfulness, erected a barrier here between what the young Novalis really was and what the old Hardenberg wanted to be , but which he could not be because of a lack of real inner truthfulness, the physical world with all that it makes of a person did not allow him to realize his son's importance as long as Novalis lived. The son had been dead for a few weeks when old Hardenberg was in his Herrnhut community. They sang a hymn in the community: “What would I have been without you, what would I not be without you.” And this hymn that was sung – old Hardenberg had not yet heard it, but in that moment everything that was spiritual in his soul ignited. He was so overwhelmed by the great impression of what flowed from this song that in that moment his soul, which had become honest, was filled with the spirit of the world, with spiritual life. And when the meeting was over, the old Hardenberg asked someone the name of the song that had so deeply moved him. Then they told him: It is your son's song. It was only necessary that for a moment everything that the physical plane brought could be forgotten, and then, without knowing it, pure truthfulness, pure objectivity, not the prejudices of the physical plane, lived in him for a moment, brought into him by him who had brought it. This is how spirit would find spirit if we, without what are the obstacles of the physical plane, were to face soul to soul. In that moment when man, given over purely to the truth, can find the soul of the other and the soul of the world, in each such moment he must be imbued with what might be called theosophical spirituality.

What could be called theosophical spirituality does not lie only in some theory, in some doctrine, although we must never forget that for us humans, who are born to think, a doctrine is indispensable. But the essence of theosophy does not lie in the doctrine. Anyone who might want to emphasize that the doctrine is superfluous and that it is only important to cultivate what is called universal brotherly love must be repeatedly and repeatedly reminded that universal brotherly love cannot be achieved anywhere in the world by preaching universal brotherly love. If we preach only of love, then for the connoisseur of life it is as if we were saying to a stove: Dear stove, it behoves you, for your stove-love, to warm the room. But the room remains cold, no matter how often we preach of love. If, however, we give it fuel, wood and fire, then the wood and fire in it are transformed into warmth, and it warms the room. The fuel for the human soul is the great ideals, the great thoughts that we can absorb, through which we recognize the context of the world, through which we can learn the secrets of human destiny and human life. These are not thoughts that only fill us with theory, but those that warm us inwardly, and the result of theosophical wisdom is love. And just as surely as the stove warms the room by heating and not by preaching, so surely the right teaching of the great thoughts that permeate the world will make the soul loving. For that is the secret of real wisdom: that it transforms itself into love in the soul through its own power. Those who have not yet found the way from wisdom to love only show that they have not yet come far enough in wisdom. But anyone who wants to believe that the thoughts we absorb about the evolution of the world, the evolution of man, about karma and so on, are unimportant for man should realize again and again in his soul that these are not just human thoughts, that they are not just thoughts that we think first, but that these thoughts, which penetrate our soul, are the thoughts according to which the divine spirits have built the world.

In spiritual science, it is not our thoughts that arise in our mind's eye, but the thoughts of the divine architects, the divine spirits of the world. What the gods of the world thought among themselves before the creation of the physical world is what we reflect on in spiritual science, and in so doing we explore that which flowed from the divine beings into the activity and becoming of the world to which we belong. But that which the gods have thought is spiritual light. And anyone who does not want to think what the gods have thought, even if he does not know it, does not give himself the direction towards the light, but towards darkness. The only possible foundation for a real development of the human soul is the one in which we start from what the divine thoughts of the world are. The abilities of the spirits of the world have not been given to us as potentialities to be left fallow. They have been given to us to develop. And since thinking is our most important and outstanding ability in this cycle of human development, we must start from thinking. But we must not stop at thinking. This gradually leads us to implement spiritual science in our attitudes, so that we learn to understand the secrets of how knowledge leads to character traits, to emotional qualities. Correctly understood knowledge leads to character traits, to real emotional qualities.

We can make this clear to ourselves by means of a single example, by realizing that we humans undergo successive, ever new embodiments, incarnations. What would be the point of these incarnations, these repeated lives on earth, if they were not meant to make man more and more perfect? We must look back from our present incarnation to earlier incarnations and say to ourselves: What we have become at the present time, we have become through the fact that, incarnation after incarnation, these or those qualities of our soul have been added, that our soul has always absorbed new and ever new forces, had new and ever new experiences, had new and ever new experiences. What is built into this soul in one incarnation then comes out in the following incarnation.

We have now become what we have been prepared to become in previous incarnations. But then we can stop for a moment and say: we are not only looking back into the past, but we are also looking up into the future, to later, more perfect lives. What would this human life be through all these many embodiments if we could not say to ourselves: The further we develop into the future, the higher the stages will have been attained by what sits within us today as our ego.

We can only guess at what we are still capable of becoming, for otherwise we would already be it. We must ascribe to ourselves the ability to rise ever higher. — But so we must look shyly and reverently into the future; we must say to ourselves, even if we can already recognize this or that today, are able to experience this or that in the world already today: with the greater abilities that we can attain, we will be able to experience and recognize many more things.

How impossible it is for someone who writes such a thought as has now been expressed in his soul, how impossible it is for him to say to himself: I can decide today what is true or false, I can ultimately judge between true and false. — It behoves him only to say: If I could decide today, then it would be impossible for even higher abilities to arise in me in the future. But when we internalize this, it gives us the great modesty, the true, dignified humility that we need to truly be human in every moment of our development. Thus, the realization of reincarnation transforms into a feeling, a character trait: into dignified humility, into true modesty.

You could put it this way: Anyone who today realizes that he is going through successive incarnations and is constantly rising higher in his development would have to be a fool if he said to himself, “I am perfect.” Or he would say, “There is no need for me to learn today, because tomorrow I will experience it quite differently.” Knowledge is transformed into a real character trait. And when viewed correctly, every spiritual-scientific insight is transformed into a character trait. But we can see that if we are unable to apply our powers at any stage of our existence, then these powers from spiritual worlds would not have been given to us. If we want to wait until the world has reached its final stage, in the belief that we must first be so perfect that we can finally recognize and experience, then we would not have to go through various incarnations. That means, we must be clear that we have to apply our powers of knowledge in every incarnation. We must not say: we want to recognize only in the following incarnation, or at the end of our existence. — We should apply the power that we have despite humility and modesty.

Thus, alongside humility and modesty, there arises a justified human sense of self, which flows directly from our being imbued with the Divine-Spiritual and which tells us: although our knowledge will only be complete when we have reached a high level, we can make it complete precisely by becoming aware of our human dignity today and applying our strength today. In this way our character will acquire something that can be compared to a pair of scales. We can put humility and modesty on one side of the scales and justified self-esteem, boldness in judgment on the other, and say: We have attained a level in knowledge and self-awareness. In short, we will find that whenever you try to introduce into your feelings what spiritual science teaches, the teachings or theories of spiritual science are transformed in our soul, because they contain thoughts of the divine spirits, are transformed in our soul into our character, our will, our feelings. This can show us that in spiritual science the teaching, the theory, is not the main thing, but that it is, so to speak, the kindling for the development of the human soul; that it is that which is to bring forth higher qualities precisely in our soul. And anyone who demands these qualities without realization lives in the worst of illusions, in self-deception, that self-deception which has entered into human evolution in that, in the course of earthly development, other beings have also entered into it, have participated in our evolution, beings who were not only harmful, but also useful. But however useful they were to us, in that they brought us freedom and self-awareness, we must nevertheless be clear about the fact that precisely these gifts of the so-called luciferic entities: freedom and self-awareness, must not be allowed to degenerate into extremes, into radicalism, for then they become pride and arrogance. And pride and arrogance in the face of knowledge lead this knowledge into darkness. Knowledge is the acceptance of divine light, of divine thoughts. Rejection of knowledge is something that leads into darkness and that cannot lead to higher qualities of the soul either. If we look at spiritual science in this way, we will recognize it as one of the most important matters for humanity. We will recognize it as something that we do not do just for our own sake, but because we are aware of our duty to humanity and to development.

We are not living in a completely unimportant time today; we are living in an important time. It is often said by people living in this or that time that they live in a transitional time. All times of human development have been called transitional times, but not all are such significant transitional times. But today we can truly say that our time is a transitional time. To what extent is this the case? Let us first realize the character of another transition period. For example, it was a transition period for human development when the predecessor of our Christ Jesus, John the Baptist, appeared. When John the Baptist appeared, he told the people what was later repeated in significant words by Christ Jesus: “Change your minds, the Kingdoms of Heaven are near.”

What does this mean? We can understand what it means if we remember that as people have developed from incarnation to incarnation, they have passed through various qualities of soul. In the distant past, people did not yet have the qualities and soul abilities that they have today. It was possible for all people in ancient times to develop a dim, twilight, dream-like clairvoyance, to look into the spiritual world. There was the possibility for all people not only to see the physical, but to look into the spiritual world. But in those days when clairvoyance was common, people did not yet have what they have today: clearly developed self-awareness. At that time, people could not yet say “I am” to themselves in a clear way. Stability in the center of the inner being could only be achieved by the old clairvoyance disappearing for a while. They had to accept, as it were, their isolation from the spiritual world in order to develop a clear self-awareness here on the physical plane. Later, this clairvoyance will develop again together with self-awareness, so that the two qualities will arise together again and people will have them once more. We can therefore look back into the distant past. At least for certain periods of time, when people were inattentive to the physical, when they closed their eyes and turned away from the physical, and left their ears inattentive to sounds, they were able to see into the spiritual world and gain direct conviction of the existence of the spiritual world. These qualities faded, but in their place came more and more the ability to think, the ability to be self-aware, to draw conclusions, to make independent judgments, which is what makes up our present-day consciousness. The time can be roughly estimated when it gradually occurred that the old clairvoyant abilities completely disappeared from the abilities of mankind. Before the year 3101, almost all people on our planet were still endowed with dim clairvoyance. Then, from that year on, it diminished more and more, became weaker and weaker. But with this, self-awareness, self-consciousness, judgment, reasoning, and self-confident thinking grew. So, as it were, the light of spirituality grew dim, and that which is the human ego dawned, became brighter and brighter. It grew brighter within, but it grew darker in spirituality. In this year begins what Oriental philosophy calls the Kali Yuga, the dark, black age. Something had come to a crisis, so to speak, at the time when John the Baptist and then Jesus the Christ appeared as forerunners. They had to say to mankind: You must now learn that spirituality exists, even though you do not see spirituality with any spiritual eye. You must learn that the Kingdoms of Heaven are there. You must grasp it from your own self. — Therefore, the Christ had to embody himself in a physical body, because only on the physical plane could self-awareness perceive spirituality during the Kali Yuga.

At that time there was a transition period. The old abilities had faded away. If the people of that time had not heard the call of the Baptist, of Christ Jesus, then they would have fallen into decline at this stage, would not have progressed. Those who heard these voices had to recognize the God who descended into the physical and carnal. They understood that the Kingdoms of Heaven had come close to the ego.

Christ was on Earth in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth for three years. That was the time when people could only see with the physical eye when a God descended to them.

Today, we are once again living in a transitional age, in a crisis. The Kali Yuga expired around the year 1899. And now, although people are unaware of it, new qualities are developing in them. New qualities are developing in the human soul in a natural way. The fact that so many people are unaware of this is no proof to the contrary. A hundred years after Christ, Tacitus was still writing about an unknown sect of Christians; and in Rome, after Christ Jesus had accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha seventy to eighty years earlier, people still talked about a sect that was said to live in a back alley and was led by a certain Jesus. But the most important events had taken place in front of countless people. If people do not perceive something, that is no proof that this most important, most decisive and most incomparable thing is not there. Since about 1899, abilities have been developing unnoticed in people that will emerge in the mid-thirties of the twentieth century, roughly between 1933 and 1937. Then, because the time has come, these soul abilities will arise in a whole series of people; abilities of etheric clairvoyance will arise. They will be there. Just as there were people with an ego consciousness carried to the highest peak when Christ Jesus was here, so in our century there will be people who will not only see with the physical eye, but who, as a natural development, will experience what strives down from spiritual levels, so that spiritual-soul abilities emerge from their soul, and they enter into the etheric existence. And the happiness of these people will be to understand the new world that they will see. One thing is true and important for our soul to know that Christ Jesus said, “I am with you until the end of our Earth cycle.” He is here. He has been within our Earth orbit since that time. And when their spiritual eyes are opened, they will see him as Paul saw him at the event outside Damascus. That is what will happen around 1933, that he will be seen as an ethereal being, as a being that does not descend to the physical plane, but can be seen in the etheric body, because a certain number of people will then ascend to etheric vision. But people will be ignorant if they are not prepared for what they will see through spiritual science. That is why we are living in a time of transition, because we are growing into a new way of seeing.

Spiritual science has the responsible task of preparing people for the great moment when the Christ will not appear in the fleshly body – for He was only once in the fleshly body – but He is there and He will come again in a form that those whose eyes are open will see Him in the world, which is only visible to clairvoyant eyes. People will grow up to Him. That will be the return of Christ: a growing up of people into the sphere in which the Christ is. But they would stand there foolishly if they were not prepared for this great moment through spiritual science. This preparation must be a serious one, for it is a responsible one. Humanity is to be prepared for the fact that more will be seen than what has been seen so far, if people do not lead this ability into darkness and cause it to wither. Because it could also happen that the whole of the twentieth century would pass without bringing the fulfillment of this goal. We have the responsible task of preparing people for the great moment through spiritual science. But we have to prepare people spiritually, to make them understand that only the spirit will meet the Christ with the spiritual eye open. A materialistic mind might believe that the Christ would appear in a carnal body again. But that would not be spiritualistic, it would be materialistic. If we humans believed that, we would not have the will to work our way up to his spirit. That is why certain prophecies from the Apocalypse will be fulfilled at that time. Relying on and building on the materialistic spirit, individuals will appear in physical bodies who will then say that they are the embodied Christ. And those who are not led to the right knowledge through spiritual science will fall prey to them, for Maya will be great and the possibility of self-deception will be enormous. Temptations will grow to gigantic proportions. Only spiritual knowledge that is aware of its responsibility will bring people to an understanding of what is to happen.

These were reflections intended to show how spirituality through spiritual science should work in the individual human soul, and that spiritual knowledge is a task for the times, because we can also say of today's times: We are facing the most important things. But because even the most important things could be completely overlooked by humanity in the darkness, because the great moment could pass without people seeing it, that is why spiritual science must work in the right way. Penetrating with our spirit what is transmitted to us by the study of the spirit will give us the spirituality we need in every branch to develop our own soul ever higher, to perform ever higher and higher services for humanity.

Let us try to remember more often that the words spoken at the time of Christ also apply to our time: “Change your minds, for the time is at hand.” At that time it was said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Today, prophetically looking into the near future, we must say: “For the human ego is close to the Kingdoms of Heaven”. Let us prepare ourselves through correct spiritual science so that we may enter worthily into the kingdom that demands something of us. And we ourselves can only flourish if we find the way to the Kingdoms of Heaven. When we process the experiences we have on earth and allow what we experience in the higher spiritual existence to arise, offering it as a great sacrifice at the altar of divine existence, then we fulfill our destiny as human beings to the fullest. Let what you are working on here be imbued with both the spirit of Novalis and the spirit of spiritual science itself, which has come before our soul, and you will see that your work will proceed in the good sense. For when our work is imbued with such an attitude, then, while we are gathered in our branches, there flows in that which we call the light of the Masters of Wisdom and the harmony of the intuitions. We are never without the help of these advanced individuals when we are united in the right attitude in one of our branches. May such spirit unite you! Such spirit, which is at the same time the spirit of the Masters of Wisdom, inspire you! Work in this spirit and your work will be a part of the great spiritual scientific work, your work will be a part of the spirit that shall go throughout the whole world.

Distinguished attendees! When speaking of human knowledge, one initially has two things in mind. One is the knowledge that the individual human soul, the human mind, acquires for its own sake; the other is the knowledge that is a means of progress for the life of all humanity. One has only to think of knowledge that deals with the observation of natural phenomena and that is concerned with putting the forces of nature at the service of humanity to realize that what is called knowledge in this field not only gives satisfaction to the individual human soul, but that this knowledge wants to be a selfless servant to all humanity. It is easy to see that knowledge of the forces of nature serves the aims of humanity to a large extent. We see the knowledge gained through the thinking of researchers and inventors applied in practical life, and anyone who reflects on its value will easily see that the knowledge gained from the study of matter is intended to serve all of humanity.

But beyond this knowledge there is still another knowledge, which by its very nature does not allow for such practical application. This knowledge must exist for its own sake. Humanity needs it and could not live without it. But with this knowledge, too, we may ask whether it is really something that the human soul seeks only for its own satisfaction, or whether this knowledge, too, which we often say exists for its own sake, is not also in the service of human progress. If one tries to explore why the human soul thirsts and hungers, as it were, for such knowledge for its own sake, why it strives for an examination of the secrets of the world in order to recognize the significance of knowledge in the service of humanity, then one must delve into the essence and the [primordial] reasons of the human soul itself.

Now the branch of human research that is called spiritual science or theosophy seeks to recognize the essence of the human soul by pursuing this human soul into its deepest depths and trying to find the essence of the human soul on the basis of knowledge that goes beyond what the senses offer and what the mind, which is tied to the brain, can achieve. Spiritual science believes that, on the basis of its research, it can say something about the human soul that is of particular importance to this striving human soul. However, it must approach all that the intellectual culture of the last centuries has produced in an independent way. In no way does spiritual science take a position against the great achievements of human culture, especially of natural science; but in our time it must undertake exactly the same thing that natural science has undertaken many times over the last few centuries - it must test all the prejudices, all the beliefs of people today in the light of its insights. Spiritual science looks at something that is one of the most important things for knowledge in our time – at something that has only been instilled in science relatively recently.

People are very forgetful. Many truths that are generally recognized today were only conquered by the human mind in the 17th century, because until the 17th century, for example, both laymen and learned naturalists believed that earthworms, fish and other lower animals could develop from river mud. There are books from this time that discuss how living things develop from carcasses, for example. It was only in this 17th century that Francesco Redi first uttered the sentence that living beings could only come from germs of living beings of the same kind. That living beings can only come from living beings was a great heresy in the 17th century compared to the science of the time, and only with great difficulty did Francesco Redi escape the fate of Giordano Bruno.

The situation for the spiritual researcher today is similar when, for example, he focuses his attention on the properties of a human soul that comes into existence through birth. Today, when looking at the different properties of children, it is easy to say that these properties are inherited from the father and mother. Today it is believed that the structure of the human soul is composed of what comes from the physical environment, just as it was believed in the 17th century that living beings would consist only of what came from the physical environment. But the spiritual researcher must say: spiritual-soul can only come from spiritual-soul. He observes the miracle of how a human germ, which comes into existence through birth, develops in the course of its life from stage to stage, and he is clear about the fact that the human essence, which develops so mysteriously, can only come from its own kind. He knows that in order to understand what is developing, one must go back to another spiritual-soul realm. As we ascend from the animal to the human, we have to distinguish between the generic and the individual. We cannot ascribe to the human core of being the same thing that we address as generic in the animal. We have to say: what develops in the child over time does not lead back to a generic, but to an individual that comes into existence through birth. And when this thought is followed to its logical conclusion, this spiritual research into the origin of the soul and spirit leads the spiritual researcher to the idea of re-embodiment, to the idea of repeated lives on earth for human beings. For anyone who looks impartially at all the facts of life, repeated lives on earth are a reality, however much the feelings of people today may still rebel against it. Of course, it is no longer customary to burn heretics, but such things, which are heresies according to today's consciousness of people, are ridiculed. But this truth will be treated the same way as other truths and laws that humanity has acquired in the course of its development; after some time, it will no longer be possible to understand how there could have been people who could not believe that spirit comes from spirit.

Goethe pointed to what his essence had drawn from his environment. He could say:

From my father I got the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful nature
and the desire to tell stories.

And then, after pointing out what he had attracted from his environment through inheritance, he modestly asks:

What, then, of the whole figure
can be called original?

Anyone who, like me, has studied everything related to Goethe has certainly acquired the respect due to Goethe's parents. But try to put together all their qualities – you will try in vain to bring to light what is original about the “little fellow”. Precisely that which we cannot find in the heritage of father and mother, precisely that is the Goethe whom we know and who he will always be in our culture. It is the most appealing task for an educator to assume that in the education of a child, a mysterious core of being struggles into existence that lies beyond all laws of inheritance, and that in every young human being this riddle must be solved anew. If we really apply this truth of repeated earthly lives to a child, it will no longer be out of keeping with us to look at the child's outer form in such a way that it appears to us as shaped, formed out of a soul-spiritual core of being. We observe the indeterminate features of this human countenance in the first days of the child's life; we see that they become more and more definite and, little by little, the child's entire body shows an ever more definite form of its own. We can see how the soul, which has come over from a previous existence, transforms these vague features into ever more distinct ones. It becomes visible how the inner core of the human being works on the forming physical shell.

If we consider this carefully, we will not find it difficult to recognize an ascending and a descending line of human life. We see how indeterminate forces work their way from the inner being to the surface, and at a certain point in time we see how everything that is inherent in the human being is revealed in the skills and abilities that he acquires. Then it happens that a person makes one side of his nature the dominant one. We see a kind of confrontation with his environment through the absorption of knowledge and wisdom, and we can say: This is something that is added to what was brought from previous embodiments. Then a descending current sets in in life, where we can no longer transform anything of what we have become externally and physically in our abilities - we can no longer even absorb anything into our memory.

We will only understand this actual work of the individual core of our being on the human being if we consider the whole of human life. This work on the human being can be divided into two clearly distinguishable states. The human being alternates between two states of consciousness: waking life and sleeping life. To consider life as a whole, we must ask ourselves: What do we owe to sleeping life and what do we owe to waking life? From sleep the soul must draw the strength for new work, and it is shown that invigorating forces accrue to the soul from sleep. An example of this: people who, by reason of their occupation, are obliged to learn much by heart, can experience that they do not progress well with their memorizing if they do not have a good amount of sleep between their work. Today, scientific observation also recognizes the importance of sleep for the removal of fatigue. In scientific circles, the prevailing view is that people get tired because the muscles, nerves, etc. are worn out and need to be supplied with new strength. However, this does not take into account the fact that muscles can also work without showing signs of fatigue. The heart muscles, for example, work without tiring. Why is that?

Asking this question is of tremendous importance for a healthy view of life. On closer observation, it becomes clear that fatigue only occurs under certain conditions. The heart does not tire, but the smallest muscles in the fingers can tire to such an extent that cramp-like pains occur, as can be seen, for example, in writer's cramp. When you research these things, you come to realize that fatigue and our waking daily activity are related. We come to see that fatigue occurs when we do not leave parts of our body to themselves, but instead permeate them with the effectiveness of the external work we do. The laws of the universe are implanted in our body; they are effective in it, and under their effectiveness the body does not tire. Fatigue does not occur when - unconsciously to the person - the laws of the universe work in his body. Fatigue occurs only when the human consciousness permeates the organism with its nature.

The naturalist Thomson asserts the independence of the soul life in relation to the bodily life. He says that the soul life is as separate from the body as the rider is from his horse. It is admitted that there is something in man that stands in the same relationship to his body as the rider to his horse. We tire our body, says Thomson, just as the rider tires his horse, because we are outside the horse and use the horse. Does the old image not emerge from a distant time in human development, in which people looked into a spiritual world by natural gift? There they saw the centaur, the man connected with the horse. It is true that “wise” natural science says today that the people of that time were childlike people, that they saw wild barbarians sitting on their steeds and coming out of the fog from the north, and that in the fog they could not distinguish where man and where steed was; from this these childlike people would have formed the image of the centaur. But in fact the centaur is a reality that shows, from a clairvoyant perspective, the relationship that arises between soul and body, and that is like that between rider and horse.

Thus the fact of fatigue compels us to recognize a certain independence of soul from body. That the course of certain processes in the human body does not result in fatigue is due to the fact that a universal law is at work, but the human being is not present with his consciousness. The human being tires because he is present with his consciousness in the processes of his body. But in the state of sleep, the human being is surrendered to the universal law. The human being needs this immersion in a different element, as it happens every night during sleep, and we will ascribe the right effect to sleep if we follow the essence of the human being as he lives in the world into which he enters when he falls asleep.

Then I have to speak of the experiences of the spiritual researcher. Spiritual research does not mean that one can gain knowledge of the secrets of the existence of the world at any level, but that we awaken dormant, germinal powers of knowledge within us. When these dormant powers of knowledge awaken, they give us eyes and ears of the spirit, so that we find ourselves in a situation like that of a blind person who regains his sight through an operation. We can only recognize how many worlds are around us if we have the organs to perceive them. We can only experience the world of light and color if we have eyes to see them and the world of sounds if we have ears to hear them. The spiritual researcher becomes a spiritual researcher by awakening the powers of knowledge that lie dormant in him, by opening spiritual eyes and ears. He carries out a certain training of the soul, that is, certain exercises through which the soul acquires organs with which it can see and experience new worlds. When a person becomes a spiritual researcher in this way, the perception of the spiritual world is not speculation, but reality.

When a person begins to look into these spiritual worlds, he makes new experiences, and I would like to emphasize one such experience that can shed light on the nature of sleeping and waking. It is the task of the spiritual researcher to investigate certain tasks of ordinary life and then to illuminate them with the light of the spirit. For example, you may reflect on a certain task in life and cannot solve it; the tool of thinking proves blunt. Then the spiritual researcher really feels separated as a thinking and knowing being from his physical body. He feels his physicality as one feels a hammer or another tool or instrument outside of one's being. Just as one can feel a hammer as too heavy, one can feel the failure of the individual parts of the brain: One feels that one cannot intervene in the brain.

The separation of body and spirit can be felt by the spiritual researcher in every one of his activities. But when the spiritual researcher wakes up from a state of sleep, perhaps a very short sleep, which he can induce at will through his developed will, it is as if he woke up from a very specific world in which he has done something, so that when he wakes up, activities that he performed immediately before waking up linger, and these have a very specific configuration. When he wakes up, the activities he performed before waking up could be painted by him in very specific figures and colors. But there is a difference between this mental activity and the usual daily activities. The usual daily activities are such that you think them through beforehand, so you work as if according to a model and are bound to the lines of a template.

The [spiritual] activity, on the other hand, [that a person performs while sleeping] proceeds as if we were following a line from our spirit that arises from the inner laws of our own soul. During sleep, the spiritual researcher feels this as an intervention of his soul activity in his physical body, in his brain. And he feels this activity, to which he has devoted himself in sleep, flowing into his body like warmth, so that this body has grown to meet the demands of the day. He experiences: You have worn out your instrument, and this activity is a repair of the instrument for the daytime work of the physical body. Like an architect, we work on our own physical body during sleep, and the spiritual researcher does this consciously. During the day, the physical body is constantly worn out, and we bring with us from another world the forces we need to build up our physical body. We do this unconsciously during sleep. If we consciously consider what we do unconsciously in our sleep, then we will find it credible that during sleep our soul dwells in a world other than the physical one. From the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, the soul really does enter a spiritual world, and that is the world from which man comes. Every night we have to dive into this sea of spirituality to draw from it the strength we need for our physical body and which alone makes it possible for us to survive between birth and death.

So our life goes, in that we appeal again and again to our spiritual existence, and we see this spiritual essence of man emerging anew from the spiritual world every day, as in a small re-embodiment. We find only one difference between re-embodiment and waking up: when we wake up in the morning, we always encounter the same body that we have built up since our birth. When we re-embody ourselves for a new life, however, we must first build up our corporeality anew.

When we consider the course of life, we see many, varied things approaching us that we can take in with our soul, but which we cannot implement in the life of our body. We develop by repeatedly drawing new strength from our sleep, but there is a certain limit to the incorporation of these forces into our physical being. For example, the soul can only receive musical impressions if there is a musical ear. The soul encounters a limit in the physical. Much of what is in our soul, what it wants to process, it cannot incorporate into the outer physical body. This gives rise to a certain disharmony, which is more than the usual tiredness that forces us to sleep. This gradual mismatch of the body to what our soul is becomes more and more pronounced the more a person develops a richer soul life. The soul life becomes increasingly unadapted to the life of the outer body. And here we must ask ourselves: where do we get this body from? When we see this body developing out of indeterminacy into a definite form in physiognomy and gestures, we regard the body we have in a particular life as a result of previous lives. We use this body as an instrument. We enrich our soul in the course of our life, and we find that what we have acquired in this life reaches the limits of our physical body, and that finally bursts this body.

So we have the descending line of life. We should be grateful to be separated from this body again, to be heading towards death, to have a soul with richly developed content that bursts the bounds of the body, right up to death. Those who look more deeply into these things will understand that a richly developed soul must go beyond the body and that we should not be surprised that in old age, especially in people with a richly developed soul, the brain can no longer serve the soul's life. Kant, for example, became weak-minded in old age, despite his rich mind. The outer tools of the body are no longer suitable for the soul; it withdraws with the content it has gained in this life, and it finally breaks the body. What we call death is different in humans than in animals. The ever-enriching soul of the human being breaks the corporeality and passes through death. Then this soul builds itself up according to the abilities and contents it has acquired during life, the body for a new incarnation.

Now one could say that we do not remember our past life. This objection would have the same justification as if someone wanted to say: A four-year-old child cannot calculate, so no human being can calculate at all. - We want to try to see through the following consideration that it is possible to acquire the ability to remember earlier lives. To make this clear to us, I must mention that there is also a time for the ordinary human life when the person cannot remember. These are the first years of childhood, which a person does not remember, even though he was already there at that time. The point in time up to which memory reaches is connected with another point in time. You know, of course, that in the very earliest period of his life, a person has no sense of self. At a certain point in time, the sense of self arises in the child, and the beginning of remembering coincides with this. What lies before this point in time is not remembered. Why is that? Spiritual research shows that in his normal mental life today, through the development of this self-awareness, through which man attains the highest of this life, man erects something like a boundary around himself. A person's memory goes back to the point where self-awareness occurs. That is the boundary. At this boundary, self-awareness stops and withdraws from observation what happened before.

We can learn to see beyond this boundary if we apply the exercises that the spiritual student has to do to look into the spiritual world to our soul. There comes a moment when the person succeeds in leading this I one step beyond himself. That is the moment when one comes to switch off the ordinary I-consciousness that forms the boundary for memory. Then the person enters the spiritual world. He only has to learn to switch off the ordinary I-consciousness. The sense of self is brought about by the impact with the body. When a person overcomes this, as it is otherwise overcome in sleep, and when he learns to consciously enter the world in which he unconsciously dwells in sleep, the possibility of looking back on past lives begins.

This can only be achieved if man consciously turns his gaze to this other side of life, to the side that lies beyond the gate of death. We must uproot from the soul all fear and dread of what comes to man from the future. How afraid and anxious man is today of all that lies in the future and especially of the hour of death. Man must acquire composure in relation to all feelings and sensations towards the future, look forward with absolute equanimity to all that may come, and only think that whatever may come to us through the wisdom-filled guidance of the world. This must be brought before the soul again and again. This leads us to receive the retrospective powers for past earth lives as a gift.

In this way we can educate our soul until we attain the consciousness that past earth lives are not hypotheses and dreams, but that they stand before the soul as fact, as something that the soul can learn to observe. Our contemporaries do not want to admit that there is a possibility of awakening dormant powers in the soul, so that new worlds, hitherto hidden in the infinite bosom of existence, may be added to what the soul can experience. But we are on the verge of a time when people will gradually develop more and more of a relationship with what can be explored from the dark depths of the past and the future. We are heading towards a future where more and more people will have the urge to know, to recognize what the human soul and its destiny are all about. Thus, we are looking at an expansion of the ability to know, which enters into an alliance with the spiritual world.

All higher knowledge, says Goethe, is an extension of ordinary knowledge. Such extended, such higher knowledge is not abstract reflection on things. Such higher knowledge is a connecting of what is the essence of our soul with the spiritual and soul-like around us. Plato cites as proof of the immortality of the soul the possibility of the human soul's connection with the eternal, with that which is eternal outside of space and time, while things in space and time arise and pass away. If such higher knowledge is taken seriously, it contradicts everything that otherwise occurs as fatigue. Fatigue occurs in the knowledge that strives to explore the things around us. But when man allows the knowledge he has gained about things to take effect in his soul, when he has moments in life when what he has gained through his eyes becomes ideas and he can let these ideas work in him, when he can transform the lofty realm of sounds into ideas and let them continue to resound in his soul, then he learns to be awake in a state that can be compared to the state of sleep. Knowledge is given to us in the same measure as the consciousness of our ordinary ego begins to fade. The arbitrariness of this ordinary ego consciousness shatters, and man experiences true knowledge by feeling that he must fit into the laws of the spiritual world with his true ego.

While man is limited to a small space in the outer world by his physical body, which he repeatedly tires through the work of the day, and he must always compensate for this wear and tear of the body through sleep, he feels when the soul is truly “with itself” that it can also draw forces from the spiritual world while awake. He gets the feeling that a source is opening up for the soul, through which healing potions flow to us from the spiritual world, so that he can become master of the body. He feels that we can consciously enter the spiritual world, as we unconsciously do every night while sleeping. He feels that we can then consciously enter the realm of eternity when our knowledge becomes life. Then it will become something completely new, something that it cannot be for the ordinary consciousness of today's man. Plato said that in ancient times people developed the highest knowledge out of enthusiasm. Even if this ability of enthusiasm may have been lost to today's people, what has not been lost to them is that the knowledge of the world of ideas can become a life force in them, that they can feel how they connect with the root of existence and eternity by penetrating into things with their spiritual self through knowledge.

In this way we come to know knowledge as a living thing, as a healing process that extends into the physical body. It takes a long time before we get to know this knowledge, that is, this source of life in our soul. And we also get to know the connection with a very different factor of our culture. All our knowledge must be incorporated into what we can call being imbued with the living Christ. What is this living Christ in the human soul? It is nothing other than what we can experience when knowledge and truth come to life in us, as has just been explained, when we can feel our personality as if it were being filled by a second personality, by something that is truth itself. This is the living Christ, who is truth and life in the human soul. When one grasps the Christ in this way, He is not an abstract idea, but He is the living Entity Who at a certain point in time intervened in the evolution of humanity, an Entity Who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha and thereby entered into the life of human souls.

In the past of human evolution, the way people recognized each other was different than after the Mystery of Golgotha. In ancient times, people looked to the origin of man and they felt: Man is not valuable for the development of humanity as a sensual being; as spiritual beings we have descended from a spiritual world into this sensual world to live in a physical body, after we were previously in an ocean of divine spiritual life; through our soul we can in turn find our way back to this common human origin.

This is no longer appropriate for our time; something else corresponds to our time. In ancient times, the human soul sought the origin of humanity in order to become aware of what united people. Today we look at what the human being can become, at a common goal for all people. Looking towards this goal, people must be able to say to themselves: This concerns every human being; something must come alive in the innermost being of every human being – this is the living Christ. In the future, human souls will come together in him. The earth, the physical body – it will fragment in its material existence. But the human souls that have the living Christ within them will advance to other levels of existence. When the body of the entire planet has disintegrated, all mankind will be one again, not as it was before it descended to the earth, but one in which the Christ will live as a common soul-blood in this humanity.

All our knowledge must be dedicated to the great moment in the evolution of mankind when the human soul can turn to the God-man who accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha. When we look into the future of mankind, we look for the Christ-consciousness in every human being. This has a completely different sense and a completely different meaning than when the Buddhist teaching speaks of a Nirvana and means by that a detachment of the soul from all earthly things. No, the soul should not detach itself from the earthly. We look to the living Christ, who can grasp our souls with his life, and to how the soul can shape itself ever more richly through the life of Christ in it, through immersion in the source of wisdom and truth in ever new incarnations.

Thus we see that spiritual science does not stand in opposition to that without which our culture cannot be imagined - to Christianity. It does not want to fight Christianity, but to deepen it by pointing to the living Christ. We, as Westerners, look to the event of Golgotha as to the point in time that is also known from history, but which only acquires its deep value, its deep meaning for us through the fact that we gain the Christ-idea not only from the historical Christ, but deepen this Christ-idea through spiritual science. Only when we have imbued our knowledge with soul, light and spirit through the idea of Christ does this idea of Christ become for us that through which the true idea of immortality is revealed to us ever more surely. And when the Christ in us has become the light of knowledge and the life of knowledge, then we connect with the power through which we pass through many deaths and through many lives. Knowledge of Christ is the way for man to absorb within himself the forces that lead him to true immortality, that is, to victory over death.

This idea can only be gained from higher knowledge - not with ordinary knowledge, which only wants to deal with the material. Nowadays, only the external, the material, is pursued in man, and that is the most fleeting, the most transient. The words of Hamlet, for example, point this out, showing how dying and death must appear to him in his melancholy mind, in which the light of Christ does not yet shine. He speaks of the great Alexander, saying:

Alexander turned to dust;
Dust is earth;
From earth we make clay.

And he speaks of the great Caesar:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole as well as the rough north;
Oh that the earth,
Before the wind and weather, might stick a wall.

But Hamlet is only talking about where the earth that became Caesar's body may have gone. He pursues the fleeting, transient material instead of reflecting on where the great, richly developed souls of the great Alexander and the great Caesar have gone. You don't see what is important in man if you only look at the transitory, at the material, and think about what might have become of it. You should look beyond what goes through death and birth to recognize what true immortality is.

In recent centuries, when knowledge of the material world has made such great strides, we have become more and more accustomed to regarding matter, that which forces the spirit into its fetters, as the essential. But matter will perish, disintegrate; the earthly body, consisting of matter, will disintegrate. The spiritual researcher, for example, views today's radium research in such a way that he knows: here is the beginning of the disintegration of the atoms that form the earthly body. The material of the earth will perish, but the eternal, even of the earthly body, will merge into the eternal essence of things. Today's striving for knowledge pursues the material, forcing the soul into its spell. One believes that one can speak of eternity, of the indestructibility of matter. In the face of words such as those spoken by Hamlet, it must be said, based on the realization of the true nature of the human being and at the same time on the realization of the true nature of materiality: Not only the great Alexander, the great Caesar, no, all human souls are parts of eternity; they take on a physicality from the materials of the earth in ever new lives, they go through ever new lives, which are only steps towards immortality. This applies to every human being:

The humblest man on earth
is a son of eternity.
And in each new life he will
conquer the old death.

Eight days ago, we discussed important connections between the human organization, the physical build and the astral world on the basis of the Germanic creation myth. We have seen the interesting connection between the twelve pairs of cranial nerves and the twelve currents that our ancestors saw through their kind of clairvoyance in the astral plane, and which are nothing other than the inflows of that which then forms the twelve pairs of cranial nerves in the human being. We have also seen how the softer parts of the human body, so to speak, what belongs to the larynx, what belongs to the heart and to the lower organic parts, how all this is connected with the roots of the world ash - which is of course an astral phenomenon - and how the formation of the human brain is connected with the treetop and branches of the world ash. Here we have looked deeply into the connection between what the myth tells us and what we can acquire through our knowledge. We have also seen that the signs and symbols that the myth offers us are not things that have been thought up or invented by the imagination, but that they correspond to real observations in the astral world. This must be emphasized again and again, that all the beating about the bush with regard to symbols and signs that comes from the intellect and from speculation is worthless. For the real symbols that play a role in occultism are renderings of experiences and encounters in the spiritual world.

Today we will take an even deeper look into this area. We will come to a chapter that can really only be discussed in a working group that has been dealing with these questions for some time. Now, younger members are still being added to such working groups. They have to get used to hearing things that may still be shocking to them. But we would not make any progress if we did not want to discuss what applies to the advanced. This does not mean advanced in terms of study and knowledge, but what is meant by “advanced” is that the members who have been here for a long time have acquired a certain feeling that one of other worlds in the same way as if they were things or people that one encounters in the physical world, and with whom one can, under certain circumstances, associate and converse as familiarly as with the beings one encounters when one steps outside into the street. In this sense, I mean “advanced” so that they are not shocked when the spiritual worlds and their inhabitants are spoken of in an unbiased way. And the younger members may at least for the time being have the good will to listen to such a thing and accept it as naturally as a story from the ordinary sensory world. The composition of the lecture today will also be somewhat colorful. But that does not matter. We will get an overview of an important chapter of the spiritual world on the one hand and on the other hand we will get the connection with our own human physicality.

You know that within our sensual world there is a second world that we call the astral world, which initially presents itself as a flowing sea of light, in which colors and forms flow. For the researcher in the astral world, these color formations arrange themselves into certain entities, which he recognizes as astral entities, which are just as real there as plants and animals are here in the physical world. Then there is the world of spiritual sound, the harmonies of the spheres, the world of Devachan, which can be recognized by clairaudience. We will discuss this another time. Today we will limit ourselves to the astral world from a few points of view.

Anyone who studies the astral world with the means that those who study these things in depth can gradually learn through their own development will find that this world is much, much more populated than our physical world. For the astral world has a property that the physical world does not have, and in occultism this property is called 'permeability'. Astral beings can pass through each other; physical beings cannot do that. From this you can already see that the astral world can be much more populated, can contain many more beings than the physical world. This is also the case.

Just think back to the time when a large number of people were still able, even without occult training, to see into the spiritual world through their natural abilities. You will get a slightly different idea of some of the old pictures that earlier painters have painted. I would just like to remind you of the 'Sistine Madonna', which is in Dresden. Even if some have not seen the Sistine Madonna themselves, they are at least familiar with the good engravings that exist of it. You will have seen that in the background the whole atmosphere is filled with the heads of angels or genii. Just as the observation of nature otherwise makes cloud formations grow out of the air, so here angelic or genii figures grow out of them. This is not mere fantasy, but something that is a complete reality for those who can see the astral world. The astral world, which surrounds us as a surging sea of light, is filled with beings that, as it were, spring from space at every point with infinite vitality. This is how the astral plane appears in every respect; it is a moving spiritual life. Now it is not to be said that the painters who lived at the time of Raphael had this full understanding. That would be too much to say; but there were great predecessors of these painters, whose works have long since been lost, who in some respects were real clairvoyants, who, from their clairvoyance, indicated the tradition in such a way that a painter like Raphael, even if he was not clairvoyant, knew from tradition: this is how it is, and was therefore able to reproduce it appropriately. Even more appropriate are older pictures from the 13th and 14th centuries. If you go back to a time that is best known through the painter Cimabue, you will see how the strange phenomenon of the gold background appears in the pictures, and how angelic or genie-like figures emerge from it. This, too, corresponds fully to the reality of the astral vision. Down to the golden background, this corresponds to reality. For indeed, when we enter the higher regions of the astral plane, the flowing sea of light, which shines and is illuminated in other color tones, transforms into such a flowing sea of light that appears to be glowing with gold. This is beautifully depicted in a painting by Raphael, in a fresco, the “Disputa”, opposite another painting called “The School of Athens”, a name that should actually be crossed out. In the “Disputa” you have at the very bottom the disputing people - who are believed to be church fathers, popes, doctors of the church - then the region of the apostles and prophets begins, and then the region that Raphael depicts in the heads of the genii is divided, which is the region that we can call the lower astral plane. Higher up on the same picture, you can see the region of the higher astral plane, glowing with gold. That is why the pictures of these old painters are so convincing, because those who know these things find the truth of the inner vision reflected in them. They are also convincing for those who do not know this, because they can feel in their subconscious the deep truth from which these things are created. I mention this to draw attention to the way in which people in earlier times were aware of these higher realities and also reproduced them in pictures.

Today we want to discuss something about this world, which we have now tried to characterize as the painters have reproduced it in pictures. Today we want to draw attention to very specific entities that the clairvoyant person encounters in the astral world, partly in the lower, partly in the higher astral world. There are such entities that are shaped like a very complicated bird body, but of tremendous beauty, endowed with mighty wing-like organs and with a head similar to the human head; that is how they appear formed and shaped. These are definitely realities of the astral plane. The great teachers of the religions, who were able to see into it, were well acquainted with this type of being. And when in the most ancient times one tried to depict these beings - the cherubim, or the somewhat less correct, but at least well-intentioned griffins - then one painted such strange figures, which are something between a genius and a mythical creature.

If we recall the old legends, we see in them an attempt by people to recreate these higher, genially beings. They are shaped in the most diverse ways, and those who worked in the secret schools and knew them have, as it were, characterized this choir of beings. These types of entities are grouped into six classes. There are six regents, six leaders of these hosts. They have been named in various ways, these six main geniuses of the higher astral plane, the golden region. The Persian Secret Doctrine calls them “Amshaspands”; it speaks of the six Amshaspands.

A second type of such astral entities, occurring in a somewhat lower region, looks different; it does not at all resemble forms that exist here on the physical plane. But one can at least make oneself understood by trying to express their forms through those of the physical plane. This is what the secret teachers did when they gave the mythologies to the nations and the art of which we have spoken, which emerged from the secret teachings. There are no figures that look exactly like these beings, so we can only characterize them by depicting them as having a kind of human body with all kinds of different animal heads. The Egyptians, who knew a great deal about this area of the astral plane and were quite familiar with the spiritual beings of this sphere, tried to recreate this category of astral plane spirits in the various forms, such as human forms with the head of a sparrowhawk or human forms with other animal heads. These are not arbitrarily invented fantasies either, but rather forms with which one can interact on the astral plane just as one can with humans and animals on the physical plane.

Then there is a third kind of entity. There are now innumerable such beings, and it is no longer really possible to characterize them by drawing comparisons from the animal or human world, but rather by trying to draw the plant kingdom or the lower animals for their physicality and the human head as their head, so that the whole is somewhat similar to a plant body from which a human head grows, or a fish body with a human head. All this roughly gives a picture of the beings that are present on the astral plane.

As I have told you, there are six types of such genies, which the Persians called “Amshaspands”. You now also know the second type, which is best characterized by human form with an animal head; they are formed in the most diverse ways. If you go through these figures, you get about twenty-eight to thirty-one groups, and each of these groups is headed by a regent, so that you have twenty-eight to thirty-one such entities as regents in the astral plane. The Persian secret teachers called these regents the twenty-eight or thirty-one “Izards”. Those beings that I have discussed as the third category, they called “Farohars”. These are innumerable, and one would not be finished if one wanted to divide them all into classes according to their number. Today we are only interested in the six Amshaspands with their hosts and the twenty-eight to thirty-one Izards with theirs, because they have a very remarkable significance for all human life. Those who have insight into the spiritual world can answer the question that someone might ask: What do these beings of the astral plane actually occupy themselves with? What do they do all the time? It would be quite wrong to believe that these geniuses and spirits are only there to form groups. One could easily think, if one takes certain poetic descriptions, that they are only assigned to the different spheres to form groups. That would, of course, be a very boring existence for these spirits. The formation of living groups is not an issue in the spiritual world. All these beings have their mission in the world plan. These entities, which the Persians called Amshaspands and Izards, were also known to the ancient Germans, the ancient trotters and druid priests, they only list them differently. According to some traditions there are twenty-eight, according to some thirty or thirty-one. We will hear in a moment why the number is uncertain. Those entities that the Persians call Amshaspands are higher spiritual entities that preside over and guide the natural forces around us. The natural forces, that which causes plants to grow, animals to flourish, and humans to live, these forces that are around us, that we call light, heat, electricity, magnetism and so on, nervous energy, blood power, reproductive power – call it what you will – are not merely unspiritual forces. It is a superstition to think that they are unspiritual forces. These forces are the external expression of spiritual entities. The great forces of existence, light, air, warmth, electricity, and the great chemical forces that permeate the world, they are all the external expression of the working Amshaspands and their hosts. There they work within. If I may express myself trivially: they “boil” in the world. For the senses they are behind the scenes. But you can still get an idea of them if, for example, you think of them as in a puppet theater, an actor, a performer who is not visible himself, but can be recognized by the way he works through wires and strings. Just as in a puppet theater the actor works behind the figures, so the spiritual beings stand behind the forces of nature. It is bad for a materialistic superstition if it only sees the puppets and is unaware that spiritual entities are behind them. This is the business of the Amshaspands, the six great genii who, as the Persian doctrine of the gods says, stand by the good god Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd as executive genii.

They are assisted by the twenty-eight Izards. What is the significance of these? This is best revealed by direct clairvoyant observation, observing them day after day. You will understand me best if I talk quite bluntly about these twenty-eight Izards. If the six Amshaspands were to work with light, air, warmth and so on without the Izards, this world structure of ours would not come about as it is. There must be a lower level of assistance for this world to come about. There must be subordinate, executive spirits. These are the twenty-eight Izards. And there is a very curious hierarchy to be observed. If you observe the way they work, day after day, you will see that the six great group genii, the Amshaspands, work constantly, continually, evenly. They are tireless. But the subordinate twenty-eight Izards have a substantially shorter working time. They relieve each other, so that on one day you see one category of Izards as helpers, on the second day the second category, and on the third day the third, and so on. This is what makes it possible for the world to move forward at all. When a certain type of plant comes up in spring, the Amshaspands are at work. Although they are always working tirelessly, one of them takes the lead for a period of time; this one is the most active. The others are also active, but they are not in the lead. After some time, another one takes the lead. When a plant species emerges in spring, the Amshaspands work in the manner of the great natural forces, and the lower forces, the Izards, work in such a way that everything fits and is right on a specific day. For example, one category of Izards ensures that the climate is right, that the temperature is just right on that particular day. Plant growth would not be able to continue if another category of Izards did not arrive on the other day. After twenty-eight days, however, the first category arrives again, and so it continues. This is actually the mechanism in the spiritual order that underlies nature. There we look right into the workings, we see how the work is done on the astral plane.

Let us now recall what we said eight days ago. We said that the part of the Germanic myth that we discussed then ties in with the exodus of the chosen few near present-day Ireland, which was once part of Atlantis, whose population had advanced in development and then moved east. What is called the more advanced race of the Atlanteans founded the eastern cultures. The story of the World Ash expresses the becoming of the new man as it was seen in the astral world at that time. It was seen how the twelve currents, which we described last time, flow down from the north and have been flowing in for a long time. These twelve currents are really present on the astral plane, even today. If you follow the twelve pairs of nerve cords that pass through your head and extend the lines further out into the world, they all merge with the twelve basic currents that are present on the astral plane. They actually flow in through the six openings of the head, through two eyes, two ears and two nostrils. Inside, they become twelve currents again, two and two. And who sends them in there? After light and air, which work outside as natural forces, are directed by the six Amshaspands, at the highest level of human formation these twelve currents are sent into our head to form our head nerves. The secret teachers saw this in the six Amshaspands. They saw the six directing spirits sending the twelve currents into the head, so that man acquires the ability to perceive the world through his nervous system. So you see the human head as being connected to these six genii as in a kind of telephone or telegraphic connection. You have them to thank for the ability to perceive through your senses. Thus man stands as a microcosm, as a small world, in connection with the great world, the macrocosm.

And what do the subordinate spirits do, the twenty-eight Izards? You see, before man was ripe to receive the high powers of the Amshaspands within himself, he was already ripe to receive the powers of the Izards, which express themselves in his lower nerves. Just as the above-mentioned currents flow into the nerves of the head and build them up, so the currents of the twenty-eight izards flow into the human trunk, which was built earlier than the head. Before man was able to absorb the forces of the amshaspands and form the head from them, man's trunk was able to absorb the inflows of the twenty-eight izards. Does he also have the powers of the Izards within him now?

If we examine the human spinal cord, we find that it passes through the spine in a nerve cord that has a whitish matter on the outside and a gray matter on the inside, whereas in the brain the inside is white and the outside is gray, exactly the opposite. This has a special significance. It is interesting to note that nerve cords extend from the spinal cord along the entire length of the backbone, supplying the lower functions of the body. They extend downward from above and spread throughout the entire body. How many such nerve cords are there? If we want to understand how many there are, we must first answer the question: Where do they come from? — These are the cords that are formed by the influxes of the twenty-eight Izards; therefore, there are twenty-eight to thirty-one pairs of such left and right nerve cords. You know that before man was formed on earth, he went through a moon formation. During the moon formation, only twenty-eight such nerve cords were initially formed as a disposition. Then, as the moon developed towards the earth, two to three new ones were added. Therefore, the number of the original twenty-eight Izards, which already served the higher genii on the moon, was increased by three. Because the higher education of man had to be prepared on earth, three more Izards had to be added. These latter three are Izards that only affect man; they have no function in nature outside of man. This is very interesting to survey.

Now it is even more interesting to follow all these processes in such a way that we observe them not only in man, but also outside in the great nature. For man has been formed little by little according to the constellations of the great nature outside. If our Earth were not in the vicinity of the Sun, around which it moves in one year, if the Moon were not in its vicinity, moving around it in one month and showing itself in four phases, then man would be different, because all these things are strictly connected. Light and air have a different effect when the sun shines on the earth from a certain point in the sky, and they have a different effect when the sun shines on the earth from a different point. Why is that so? Because the apparent progress of the sun is precisely connected with the fact that the Amshaspands take turns in governing. From month to month, through six months, the Amshaspands take turns in governing. This is connected with the passage of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac. After every six months, it is the turn of another Amshaspand, so that we have one reign of the Amshaspands in the months of summer and the other in the months of winter. Each year, an Amshaspand has to rule for one month twice, and during this reign the Izards take turns, they take turns exactly with the change of the moon. Therefore, the moon needs twenty-eight days to return to its original form through its four phases. The orbit of the moon regulates the work of the Izards, and the orbit of the sun regulates the guidance of the Amshaspands.

And so the formation of the human brain with its twelve pairs of nerves is connected with the course of the sun over the year and with the twelve months. What the twelve months are outside in nature, that the twelve pairs of nerves in our head are inside, and what the twenty-eight lunar days are outside, that the twenty-eight nerves of the spinal cord are inside. And because it was necessary that a new order emerge from the old lunar form when our Earth was newly formed, three new izards were added, whereby the order was established in which the months with thirty or thirty-one days must necessarily vary. Today's astronomical division is not quite exact, because the three supernumerary izards have a special effect on humans and less on nature. If a month always had thirty-one days, then all thirty-one Izards would actually work on the human being. They regulate the functions of the organic body below the head, and so these functions of the organic body are actually connected with the different reigns of the Izards, even if they shift in the individual human being. Originally they are connected with the arrangement of the great nature.

Here you can see deeply into the connection between the inner human structure and the spiritual world of the astral plan. In the various popular theosophical works, one speaks of the “formers”. Here you can see them at work, how they work into you from the outside and build you up; here you can also see what a complicated being man is, what kind of beings are at work so that man, this complicated being, can be built up. Six categories of spirits must be present so that his cognitive head can be built; and twenty-eight to thirty-one lower spirits must be present so that his trunk and all the functions of his trunk can come about. That is a wonderful connection between man and the spiritual world. Now you will understand that it is not enough for the knowledge of the relation of man to the Infinite to just prattle about the fact that man is built out of the spiritual world, but that we must patiently study what it is like. Occultism knows the entities of every organ that is in man, which have built the organ together from the outside. This is an occult anatomy that leads you from the effects in the sensory world to the causes in the spiritual world. The effects can be seen by anyone who looks at the world with an open mind; but the only way to learn to recognize the causes is through occultism. From this you can see that we are not trying to provide abstract proof of the existence of a spiritual world with all kinds of logical conclusions. Because anything that can be proven can also be refuted. You can object to anything. That is not the point. But if you piece together the individual insights so that the things match the effects that are present in the sensory world, then you can come to recognize as true what is recognized by the occultist, how the human being is constructed from the spiritual world. It did not occur to the Persians to count the twenty-eight nerve cords of the spinal cord; they saw the twenty-eight Izards at work. You can find the whole human being in the mythologies and legends. That is what gives the real occult study of the world of legends its great appeal.

These phenomena that we have studied can be found everywhere in the secret schools from Persia to the Druids in Central Europe. Whether you call the supreme spirit presiding over the Amshaspands, Ahura Mazdao, Ormuzd, or Huu - as he was called in the Druid schools - does not matter. The spiritual beings that were given to humans in the mythologies were known. The individual gods and spirit figures are not fantastic inventions of a popular imagination. Anyone who speaks of “popular imagination” has a certain right to do so, but the imagination does not lie with those who gave the figures to the peoples, but the imagination lies with our present-day scholars, who speak of a popular imagination that does not exist at all. And in many cases, scholarship is a much worse superstition than what scholarship designates as superstition. In myths and legends, a much, much deeper wisdom can often be found, because they go back to the origins of things that were in the invisible beyond the sensual. When one engages in such contemplation, it is as if one were to cease being confined to one's own skin and one's existence were to continue from the inside out. One becomes familiar with the beings that are in the spiritual world; they have put one together and one can come into relationship with these beings again. For it is a real coming into relationship with these entities, which we attain through the path of knowledge that leads to the higher worlds. We ascend from the effects visible to the senses to the supersensible, invisible causes. Through the path of knowledge, man becomes one with the universe again.

We could cite many, very many more examples along these lines, but today we will conclude this reflection - so as not to prolong it too long - with a fact from Germanic mythology that will show you how, on the one hand, things happen in the development of humanity, and how, on the other hand, these events are preserved in myth, how many things are preserved in simple popular belief.

What is physical today was entirely spiritual in the beginning. Before these twelve brain nerves took shape, there were only the astral currents that entered them. Before the twenty-eight nerve cords of the spinal cord were formed, the corresponding astral currents were there. How do these nerve deposits arise in the human being? In the following way: Imagine that originally there was a watery, muddy fluid. Think of the brain in this way. You can still see this today in the part of the brain that has remained fluid and watery; if it remains too strong, a so-called hydrocephalus develops. Our brain emerged from such a watery brain and then became gelatinous. At first astral currents coming from outside flowed through this watery mass in all directions, and along these astral currents the gelatinous mass became structured and hardened, and nerves developed. Where nerves run today, there were originally astral currents, then etheric currents, and finally they became physical nerves. Imagine man gradually hardening. The mass was hardly cartilaginous when the first rudiment of the backbone appeared. The bony covering was still soft. The astral currents flowed in on the right and left, which later became the spinal nerves. We are looking back to an ancient time when the twenty-eight Izards began to send their currents - first astral - into man.

The twenty-eight Izards also had a leader, a controller who had a dignity between the Izards and the Amshaspands in the middle; this leader of the Izards was a kind of foreman, a divine spiritual being. When we look back into the ancient times, we see him working in such a way that he commanded the twenty-eight Izards and directed them to channel the astral currents into human beings. The whole earth was surrounded by this astral sphere; and just as today the winds flow through the earthly atmosphere, so the astral currents flowed into the human bodies. The old clairvoyants really saw these currents flowing into the heads and spines of people in the Atlantic Age. That was a living astral image. When the physical nerves gradually formed, this image disappeared, and that meant: their origin was forgotten, it was forgotten how the currents had been directed into the body.

The leader of the twenty-eight Izards initially commanded the forces of nature as they worked day after day. In the great course of the year, all this worked rhythmically and harmoniously. In the course of the day, it worked somewhat irregularly. Terrible lightning, thunder, and storms flashed through that air in the earth's orbit, which still had the astral in it. Then the god, the leader of the Izards, who had been working out there, changed his scene and worked inside, in the twenty-eight nerve currents of the spinal cord. He went out of that spiritual earth orbit and finally unfolded his powers in man. Germanic myth calls this god Thor or Donar. He is the same according to the Germanic view, who is later called Jupiter according to the Roman view. He is correctly worshipped as the thunderstorm god who caused the storms. He is also seen as being married to Sif, the astral earth atmosphere; these two now have a daughter who is something very special. How does this daughter come about? Because Thor has withdrawn into the inner being of the person and works through the twenty-eight nerve cords. Through the twenty-eight nerve cords, people do not perceive the astral on the outside, but in certain states of emergency they do perceive it, for example in a dream-like state of sleep. Those who were particularly predisposed to perceive this then said according to popular belief: “I am being pressed by Thrud” – and this is none other than the daughter of Thor. There people still knew that Thrud was born where Thor lives with his wife. That is why they called it “Thrudheim”.

You see, that is how closely folk tales are related to the occult truths. In this way, little by little, we can gain a deep insight into that wonderful structure that has been built by so many beings, into the human being. How childish and small a materialistic science appears to us, which wants to understand this wonderful structure in such a trivial way. In older times, this was felt quite differently. They expressed what modern science knows through realization with feeling. And when the old poet looked around and sensed how man, as the wonderful final structure, stands among the beings he sees on the physical plane, as the work of so infinitely many entities, he was allowed to speak the beautiful grand word that emotionally expresses such a deep truth:

Many powerful things live,
but nothing is more powerful
(than what can be seen)
than man.

Automated Translation

We have tried to visualize the main ideas that are struggling for expression, or one might say for existence, in our fifth post-Atlantean period, struggling for existence in such a way that they develop one-sidedly under the characterized twofold impulses. Under the influence of the one impulse, more or less everything that can be connected to the fact of birth, the fact of the relationship between living beings, and in general the beings and forces within our earthly existence, is formed and shaped. Influenced by the other impulse, we see the facts that follow death, what is called suffering, pain, evil. And how one-sidedly the series of facts in human thinking develop, which follow on from what has been characterized, we have tried to illuminate from various sides. Now it must be clear that the two most important ideals for this fifth post-Atlantic period are: firstly, the ideal of presenting purely what is present in the sense world and tracing it back to the original phenomena, as Goethe did, as we have already discussed, who tried to trace the phenomena back to what he called the archetypal phenomena. On the other hand, the fifth post-Atlantic period must strive to achieve free imagination arising in the human soul. In the synthesizing of imaginations, which the human being receives from the spiritual world, of which only a few can be present now, because the fifth post-Atlantic period, as we know, only began in the 15th century. With these free imaginations, the human being should comprehend what presents itself in the outer world of the senses. As you can see from various of my statements, some of which have been given in lectures and some of which can be found in my books, it was Goethe who made a great beginning with such a view of the world. That is why Goethe can also be the genuine, appropriate basis for a world view that is truly required by the fifth post-Atlantic epoch.

It is a peculiar feature of world evolution that it must, as it were, take place in waves, that certain impulses arise, have a strong effect, then subside and can only arise again later, and so on. This is felt particularly strongly by those who understand the Goethean worldview in its nerve. Of course, spiritual science itself cannot yet be found in the Goethean world view, but it will be able to arise more and more under the influence of the understanding of the Goethean world view. For it is truly the case that everything that could still be given without the actual form of spiritual science as a world view is given in the Goethean world view. And this Goethean world view has cast its light first into circles that are narrow for the world at large, but wide for spiritual life, and much in spiritual life has already been influenced by the Goethean world view, even if what has been influenced has basically also been swept away, just as the Goethean world view itself has been swept away. For there is no need to deceive ourselves: even if Goethe is mentioned by many today, even if many believe they know his works, that which actually lives and breathes in his world view is still something that belongs to the most unknown in the development of mankind and which, when it enters more and more into human evolution, will substantially transform not only scientific and social thinking, but also the rest of human thinking, but also the impulses of human action. In our time, there are still few favorable forces and impulses working outside of the anthroposophical movement for an understanding of Goethe's world view. For as justified and as magnificent as the so-called democratic principle is for the development of humanity, when it is understood in the right sense, it has a corrupting effect in our time, when it is often grasped and applied in the wrong way. In our time there is an intense dislike, antipathy, yes more than that, in many souls an intense hatred and antagonism towards a world view of the kind that has its sources in Goethean thinking and Goethean sentiment. For this world-view requires much that our time, in particular, is least willing to accept. In our time, everyone wants to have, as it were, their own world-view, to build up their own world-view, to be a loner in their world-view, without having laid the foundations for it. And the next feeling that everyone has is something like that the individual world-views stand side by side with equal rights. What Goethe so uniquely characterizes in Faust's striving, is something that every journalistic drip and everyone who parrots these drips speaks of today; but today, there can be no question of knowing the innermost nerve of this Faustian striving. And we will still have much to discuss when we consider what has only been sketched out here, and what is unfavorable to a harmonious balance of the impulses mentioned in modern times, and then also discuss how this harmonious balance of the one-sided impulses that we have come to know should be brought about.

Today, I would like to add a few more random thoughts to help you understand how it could come about that Goethe's world view, which was already at such a high level, petered out in the 19th century and all sorts of other world views came to the fore. This nineteenth century increasingly came to find the world surrounding man uninteresting. One often pays little attention to this, but it is nevertheless the case. This is because in the nineteenth century, in the spiritual development of mankind, there arose a crisis that caused the contemplation of the spiritual life in things to dry up more and more. People only saw the external sensory qualities, sensory properties, and modes of activity of things, and these became less and less interesting. What lives and breathes through the sensory world spiritually was no longer seen. The sensory world as such became less and less interesting. Hence the dream of seeking something hidden within this world of sense itself, which after all was the only thing that corresponded to the spirit of the time. The spiritual hiddenness in the world of sense was not perceived. So people sought the hidden in the world of the senses itself, and that led to the fact that one sought to deepen the view spatially in another direction, though in a highly fruitful way, through microscopic and telescopic research, through that which can be seen purely sensually in the smallest and largest. Faith in the spiritual and hidden vanished. So people wanted to be allowed to believe at least that the riddles of the world would be solved by exploring what was immediately hidden from the senses, and in this field they did indeed go an enormous way. One need only think of the great and powerful progress that microscopic research has made in relation to living things in the 19th century. The science of cells has emerged from this. It was realized that the living organism of plants and animals and humans consists of the smallest parts, cells, and the perfection of microscopic research made it possible to study the life of these smallest cell creatures, about which one could previously only make more or less guesses. In this way, one wanted to explain the sensory from another sensory. And this mode of explanation became especially important for a series of facts that emerged in the fifth post-Atlantic period, for the facts that are connected with birth, with the becoming of living beings. One saw a living being, up to and including the human being, emerge from a cell; one saw it develop by observing the progressive life and multiplication of cells, and one finally arrived at an understanding of how the simple round cell that multiplies gradually in the course of its life before birth, also in humans, and finally becomes the human form, how it comes into existence through birth, is transformed.

As I said, people began to develop ideas about how the simple cell becomes that which then enters into existence through birth as a human being, and these ideas led to what can be called the problem of birth, the riddle of birth in humans, being closely linked to the processes in animal life. It was seen that the animal world in its simplest forms presents itself in such beings, which themselves are only like a single cell, that there are therefore animal beings in the world which, so to speak, take on the form throughout their entire life that humans only take on in the very earliest period in the mother's body. Other animals present themselves in forms that are similar to a later developmental form of man. In a certain period of development before birth, that is, in embryonic development, the human form presents itself in such a way that it looks, or at least resembles, a little fish, and between the cell form and the form of a little fish lie the other forms, which in turn live outside as independent beings. In a sense, then, through his embryonic development, the human being gradually recapitulates the forms that are outside. As we know, this led to the formulation of the biogenetic law, made famous by Aaeckel, which states that during his development before birth, the human being recapitulates the animal forms in abbreviated form, as it were. This, however, led to the belief that man, as he enters earthly existence, must have descended from animal forms. It was thought that in ancient times only cell-forms existed, and that somewhat more complicated beings developed from these cell-forms through these or those processes, which were thought of as being more or less accidental or purely scientifically necessary – which is ultimately the same. So that in the next stage of the development of the world, we have the simple cell creatures and somewhat more complicated ones, but the somewhat more complicated ones first go through the stage of simple cell development; then came the more complicated ones, which in turn had gone through cell forms, that is, what had emerged earlier, and then their form. And so, it was thought, the whole animal world had developed, finally man, who, during his embryonic development, briefly recapitulates all animal forms.

In this way, an idea arose about the connection between what one can call human birth and the gradual emergence, as one thought, of organic life forms. This linked man directly to the various animal forms, and since man is easily dazzled by what he sees directly, in the course of the 19th century one forgot to take into account anything other than what thus appeared to be a similarity between human embryonic development and the formations of the other organic forms. The thoughts and ideas by which the connection that had been recognized or believed to have been recognized through the advanced means of research was recognized were only as narrow as they were, and could only take on the materialistic form that they did because, in the course of the 19th century, Goethean thinking and imagination had really dried up completely. One need only recall how Goethe, in the course of his life, came to what he calls his theory of metamorphosis.

Before arriving at his theory of metamorphosis, Goethe was probably concerned with the knowledge of the spiritual world that was available to him in his time, and he became familiar with various ways, various means, through which man can try to approach the spiritual world. Only after Goethe's mind had been greatly deepened by his experiences with these means and ways did he begin to formulate scientific ideas. And there we see, first of all, how Goethe, after coming to Weimar and gradually having the resources of the University of Jena at his disposal, does everything to enrich his scientific knowledge and insights, but at the same time does everything to gain coherent ideas about the various forms of organisms. And then again we see how Goethe sets out on his Italian Journey, how he, while on the Italian Journey, takes in everything he encounters in plant and animal forms, in order to study the inner relationship of the plant and animal forms in the rich diversity that now presents itself to him. And in Sicily, finally, he thought he had found what he then called his 'primordial plant'. What did Goethe have in mind when he thought of the primal plant? This primal plant is not a physical structure. Goethe himself calls the primal plant a physical-supernatural form. It is something that can only be seen in the spiritual, but it is seen in this spiritual in such a way that when you see a particular plant, you know: this particular plant is a special manifestation of the primal plant. Every plant is a particular form of the original plant, but the original plant is not a plant that can be perceived by the senses. The original plant is a being that lives in all plants, both sensually and supernaturally. Goethe's idea was to not just follow the various sensory forms, but to seek the one original plant in all plants. In doing so, he had, one might say, essentially deepened, very, very much deepened, what had always existed as a doctrine of metamorphoses, and it was obvious to him that he should now also apply the idea of this doctrine of metamorphoses to a broader extent to the organic, to the living.

It is interesting to see how he now describes how he wanted to conceive of the human form itself in such a way that its individual limbs represent transformation products, so to speak, that the human being is the complication of an idea. He recounts how, in 1790, he found a sheep's skull in the Jewish cemetery in Venice that had decomposed particularly well, so that he could see from the individual skull bones how these skull bones are formed in such a way that one can recognize in them transformed vertebral bones. He had noticed that the spinal column consists of individual bones, which I will only draw schematically, but that the skull then consists of such remodeled vertebral bones. Of course, when they are remodeled, they take on completely different forms, but then the skull bones are only remodeled vertebral bones. The vertebral bones lie one above the other in a ring shape. By thinking of them as rubber and pulling the rubber apart in a variety of ways, one can imagine that the forms of the skull bones arise from the vertebral bones (see drawing a). For Goethe, it was something extraordinarily important to be able to say: in the vertebral bone that envelops the spinal cord, something is given like a basic element of human development, which only needs to be transformed in order to shape itself into more complicated elements of this human development. Thus, on the one hand, Goethe had recognized in the plant leaf: When a plant grows, it develops leaf after leaf; but then, at a certain point, the development of the leaf comes to an end. Through the transformation of the leaf, first the petals arise (see drawing b), but then also the stamens, which are organs of a completely different design, which are also nothing other than leaves, but transformed leaves. For Goethe, the whole plant is contained in the leaf.

There is much that is invisible and supersensible in a leaf; the whole plant is in a leaf. In the same way, however, the whole skull skeleton is already in the spinal column. The spinal column and the skull together form a whole, and the complicated skull bones are just as much transformed vertebral bones as the petals, just as the stamens and pistils are transformed green leaves of the plant. Thus Goethe has the idea that that which underlies the leaf in a supersensible way is transformed in the most diverse ways and then becomes the whole plant; that that which lies in the spine is transformed in a complex way and becomes the head. Goethe came to this conclusion in his views.

Spiritual science did not yet exist at that time, and it is particularly interesting to see how Goethe is a spirit who always remains at the level of consciousness to which he can penetrate through his rich observation, and does not does not grasp any speculative thoughts, does not hypothesize, for example, in order to penetrate beyond this point, to which he can penetrate through his rich experiences, in an unjustified way, in a fantastic way.

Now, although it is a long way, but it is a way that can now be taken, more than a hundred years after Goethe formulated these ideas. In relation to the human being, Goethe more or less stopped: the human being has a spinal column, one vertebra lies on top of the other, then the vertebra transforms into the skull bone. Goethe stopped there. Today, there is no longer any need to stop at what he stopped at. For from there to an idea that allows a wide, wide view, there really is a path, and a path must even be created through spiritual science. When one looks at the human being as a whole, with the same spirit with which Goethe, after — as they say, by a “coincidence” — a sheep's skull happily came across him in the Jewish Cemetery in Venice, when one looks with the same spirit with which one examined the individual bones of this sheep's skull and recognized through this spirit that they were transformed vertebrae, one sees the human being as a whole, then one notices something today. I have already hinted at this, but I must mention it again in this context and illuminate it from a different point of view. Today we recognize that the human being is essentially a twofold creature: he consists of his head and the rest of his organism. Just as the petal develops from the stem leaf of the plant, as the petal is a transformation of the stem leaf of the plant, so the human head is also a transformation of the whole rest of the organism. I have said that in order for this transformation to come about completely, the human being must develop from one incarnation to the next. What we carry today, as I said, in our other organism, that becomes our head in the next incarnation.

You see, this view is only a fully developed impulse that arises when one inwardly follows what began in Goethe's world view. If one really stands on the ground of this doctrine of metamorphosis, one attempts to describe the organism in its individual members; but these members are conceived in their connection in such a way that the connection is only possible if one sees through to something that lives there as a spiritual essence. For, of course, if a leaf were what the senses see, it would never be able to become a petal or a stamen; if a vertebra were what the senses see, it would never be able to become a be able to become a limb of the head skeleton; if the human body were to be what it presents to the external senses, then, however much it might transform its powers, it would never be able to become a human head. But now, even with regard to external observation, this Goethean world view is clearer in the demands of the fifth post-Atlantic period than the natural science of the 19th century, which prided itself so much on its external observation and experimentation. Goethe is truly better at looking, and those who try to rely on him are better at looking at what happens in nature and what is present in nature than the biological science of the 19th century in particular.

As two members, I said, man presents himself to us: as the head and as the rest of his organism. This fact, that the head is, so to speak, a transformed rest of the organism, must first be understood if one wants to build further. Only then will one be able to ask: Yes, what then is on the one hand this human head, and what on the other hand is the rest of the human organism? To answer this question, one must take quite different things as important than the usual modern natural science takes.

You see, when you imagine an animal, the essential thing about the animal is that its spinal cord - I have also mentioned this several times - is parallel to the earth's surface, and that the animal stands on the earth's surface with its front and hind legs (a) and carries its head horizontally in the extension of the spinal cord, essentially as an extension of this spinal cord. What is known as the human spinal cord is now aligned vertically, exactly perpendicular to the direction of the animal's spinal cord (b).

But we do not want to consider this spinal cord for the time being, because it does not belong to the head; it belongs to the rest of the organism. We want to consider another spinal cord first. Yes, but what kind of another spinal cord? We want to consider the human brain. You will say: Is that a spinal cord? Yes, that is a spinal cord! It is nothing more than a transformed spinal cord, so to speak, an expanded spinal cord. Imagine a horizontal spinal cord, as found in animals, expanded, transformed, metamorphosed, and you get the human brain (c).

The true fact is this: during the development of the moon, what is now the brain looked like the spinal cord of an animal today. And only during the transition from the lunar to the terrestrial development did this spinal cord, which man had on the moon, become more complicated, becoming the present human brain; but it retained its horizontal position. For essentially its axis is perpendicular to the spinal cord belonging to the body, and this spinal cord belonging to the body was only acquired by man during his time on earth. That is still at the stage at which the spinal cord that became brain was on the moon during the lunar evolution (d).

What appears simpler in humans today, their spinal cord, was acquired later in the course of evolution than what appears more complicated today, their brain. Only the brain that humans have today used to be a spinal cord. So we see that humans have a spinal cord that has been transformed into a brain, and only later in the course of evolution was an original spinal cord added to it.

Thus, when we look at the human head, it does not appear to us to be very different from that of an animal; for the direction of the head is like the direction of the backbone of the animal, which is also the direction of the head of the animal, horizontal, parallel to the earth (f).

And many other characteristics could be indicated that would show that the human head, when viewed as it is in the whole development, is a transformed 'animality', and that the rest of the human organization has been added to this transformed animality. This idea is not at all similar to the one that natural science development in the 19th century came to. For the scientific development in the 19th century, because it places the main emphasis on the external-sensual, will find precisely the human head most different from the animal. Here (see drawing) the human head does not appear to us to be so different from the rest of the animal, only ennobled: the brain is a fluffed-up spinal cord, which the animal also has.

You will now have the question on your lips: Yes, do you perhaps believe that the rest of the human organism is now even nobler than the head organism in terms of external form, that the rest of the human organism might even resemble the animal less than the head? And you yourself may find it paradoxical today, but you will already find your way into the idea that this must be said. And basically, doesn't our head, after all, look most like animal forms, of all our limbs taken as a whole? At least for a large part of our lives, we are hairy on the head, men more so than women. The rest of the organism is by no means as hairy. This already strongly suggests its relationship to the animal organism. I will leave it at this suggestion for the time being, but we will elaborate on this over time. But it will lead us more and more to the realization that something quite different takes place in nature than what is very often believed. Man looks down from man to the lower animals and sees, for example, a turtle or a shell or a snail, and he believes in the sense of today's natural science that the snail, the shell, in fact the lowly creatures, first developed gradually, and the human head was added to the lowly organisms of the lowly animal world. This is nonsense, complete nonsense! If you look at a shellfish or a turtle today, you see a human head at a subordinate level, and the rest of our organism has been added to it. After what are lower animal forms – I will schematize them – have gradually been transformed into the human head, the rest of the organism has been added to it.

So we have an evolution that goes from lower animal forms further and further, and what is animal nature has formed the human head and the rest of the organism is attached to this human head as the later. In our head alone we carry within us what connects us to the other animals, not in our other organism. Therefore, the human head has the same direction in its main axis as an animal: parallel to the earth's surface. The rest of the organism is built upright, perpendicular to the earth's surface.

It is very unfortunate that this false idea, which is characterized by this, has been incorporated into the scientific development of the 19th century. For this reason, it is thought that man as such, as he is, emerges with his whole organism as a somewhat more developed form from earlier animal forms. The truth is that what could have become of earlier animal forms can only be the head, but that what is completely new within the evolution of the earth has been added to this head.

Now, therefore, we are dealing with two things at once. The first is this: that in our head we actually have a transformed form for the other animal forms. And yet, from that which has only just been added to the head and which we have as the rest of the organism in an incarnation, we develop the form of the head through corresponding forces in the next incarnation. This might seem like an apparent contradiction. We shall see, by looking at these things more closely, that it is not a contradiction.

I wanted to show you, by recalling the fact that man actually carries the animal within himself, that with his earthly organism he supports the animal that has become his head, just how wrong today's external ideas can be. But I would also like to show you something else in a positive way. If the human head is only a transformed animal, how did the human head become what it is today? How can the head, as it is today, develop through being prepared by an earthly organism in a previous incarnation, to become the human head? Well, the animal walks on the earth with its two pairs of legs, that is, with four legs. Anyone who believes that this animal only walks over the earth and that nothing else happens but that this animal walks over the earth is greatly mistaken. Forces are constantly rising from the earth into the animal, going up through the spine, and then, as it were, always influencing the brain, going back down into the earth again (a). The animal belongs to the earth. And the way it stands on it, how the forces that are active in the earth go through its legs into its spine and back again, that is part of the animal's whole life.

The relationship that the animal has to the whole earth is what the human being, the human head, has to the rest of the human organism. The fact that the human being has an organism that stands vertically out of the earth makes this rest of the organism the same for the human head as the earth, the whole earth, is for the animal. Thus, in our head-attached organism, we have the secrets of the whole earth within us. And it can easily be shown, though today it can only be hinted at, that when we study the head and the brain within it, the rudiments, the appendages, are there for front and back limbs , by means of which man, with his head, stands on himself like the animal on the earth, as we do, only transformed into internal, other organs, have hind limbs and forelimbs. And the whole formation of the head is such that it is in fact related to the rest of the human organism as the animal is to the earth (b).

This is so significant that one can see what kind of significance such an idea, which of course only arises from the views fertilized by spiritual science, has. For with this idea one must now go back to what the 19th century, with its crude means, observed only insufficiently; with this idea one must now go back and follow embryonic development. Then something quite different will emerge from what 19th-century science was able to find. But then, in turn, ideas will arise that can be fruitful for human life, even beyond mere inanimate technology. But without these ideas, humanity will not get out of the deadlock it has now entered. For the real progress of humanity is based on the development of ideas, not of general ideas, which are cultivated today in associations with great ideals, not in these ideas, which anyone can grasp by spending three hours in a coffee house, but in the ideas that are borrowed from reality through research and are then applied to life. It is easy enough to come up with fine ideas that can be used to found associations, but they do not prevent culture from reaching dead ends like the one it is in now. Only concrete ideas can prevent this.

We must truly feel this, then we will first understand the great tasks of spiritual science, and we will correctly assess the reality around us. This reality is bent on preventing spiritual science from emerging, especially in its most important form. The spirit that caused the Goethean world view to dry up in the 19th century is still present to a sufficient extent, and this spirit finds expression in a certain mania for persecution: a mania for persecuting everything that strives for ideas saturated with reality. To this spirit of the age, these ideas, saturated with reality, often seem fantastic, because it is not suited to assimilate them. And what will increasingly come to be faced by spiritual science and its strongest adversary is this: a worldview that seeks real spiritual paths and seeks to research realities without prejudice will be rejected precisely because one wants to reject this research into realities. It is too uncomfortable to get to know what is necessary to arrive at a truly comprehensive worldview. Therefore, this comprehensive worldview will be vilified and will not let the world see how comprehensive it is, but will pretend to the world that it is based on just as superficial, narrow-minded, limited concepts and research results as other worldviews are at present. And more and more will be felt a certain recognition of the dishonesty of the pursuit, namely, that pursuit which insists on narrow-mindedness and a rejection of precisely that which, with the consciousness that only leads satisfactorily forward, really wants to research the realities and thereby also come to a certain comprehensive point of view. Arrogance and presumption are qualities that have not yet reached their peak. What will yet come about under the influence of that arrogance, which will be fostered not by natural science but by the world view that is often drawn from natural science, is something that people of the present still have no conception of. And what tyranny will arise when more and more external powers allow themselves to be privileged by materialism in the field of medicine, in the field of other so-called science, what will arise from this, the present man is still far too comfortable to even feel. He much prefers to accept bit by bit how, day by day, the spiritual is allowed to be privileged more and more by the external powers. And there are still few people who feel what a dreadful future humanity is heading for if they do not learn to feel what is at stake in this very area, what a decline can be observed in this very area compared to the points of view that have already been reached.

I just wanted to hint at this feeling, which is necessary for people of the present day. For this feeling is countered by an enormous sleepiness, especially among the idealistically minded people of the present. In the face of what one should feel to be one's task, it seems to be the worst sin when those who, precisely imbued with idealistic attitudes, find their way into a newer world view, then withdraw from the rest of the world's work and life and found all kinds of colonies and the like, while the most urgent thing is that the newer world view, the spiritual-scientific world view, be fully integrated into life and not sleepily stumble towards the enormous abyss that opens up from what one can thus hint at, as I have hinted at again today.

I wanted to present something episodic today. Because to explain the very important things that I still have to say, I need three consecutive lectures.