The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I would have liked to follow my usual procedure in lecturing to the kind members of the Anthroposophical Society and to have addressed this gathering on purely anthroposophical matters. The whole course the meetings have taken, however, and the things that have been happening in the past few days have made me decide to confine my comment to questions of immediate interest to this assemblage. I hope there will be other opportunities to speak on more specifically anthroposophical subjects, if not to all of you at once, then at least on several occasions to smaller groups.

The goal of this pair of lectures is to show how anthroposophy can really become wisdom to live by, how it can influence our day-to-day intentions and attitudes. I shall, therefore, devote myself to laying an anthroposophical foundation on which to approach the problems we shall be dealing with here. Yesterday I spoke from that angle about community building in the Anthroposophical Society; today I want to continue and to add something on the subject of the contribution that an anthroposophical view of the world makes to living life in a more adequate way than one could do without it.

In order to show you the opposite side of the matters discussed yesterday, I am taking as my starting point something well-known to everybody familiar with the history of societies built on foundations similar to those on which our own sciety is based. A little later on I will also characterize some of the differences that distinguish the Anthroposophical Society from every other. But for the moment I want to point out that there have been a great many societies that have based their existence on one or another method of attaining insight into the spiritual world, though the level reached was influenced considerably by various historical settings and the particular characteristics and capacities of the groups of people who participated. One finds every shading and level in the wide variety of societies, which covers the whole range from a really serious and significant level down to that of charlatanism.

But one thing is well-known to anyone acquainted with the history of such socities. That is, that a certain moral atmosphere is always created—and indeed, necessarily so—when certain conditions exist. One could describe this atmosphere as being that of a real, genuine striving for brotherliness among the members of such a society. This goal is usually listed among the precepts or in the statutes of these societies, and—as I said—necessarily so, brotherliness being one goal and insight into the spiritual world the other.

Now the thing that people familiar with the history of such societies know is that these societies built on brotherliness and spiritual insight are the worst beset with conflicts. They present the widest opportunities for fighting, for partings-of-the-way, for splitting up into separate factions within the larger group, for group resignations, for sharp attacks on those who stay and those who leave, and so on. In short, human strife is at its most rampant in groups dedicated to brotherhood.

This is a strange phenomenon. But anthroposophical insight enables us to understand it. What I am presenting in these two lectures is also part of the system of anthroposophy, if you will forgive me the pedantic term. So, though this lecture will not be a general discussion, it will still be an anthroposophical one, shaped with special reference to our meetings.

If we return to the matters brought up yesterday, we find three levels of experience among the phenomena of human consciousness. We find people either asleep or dreaming, who, in a state of lowered consciousness, experience a certain world of pictures that they take to be real while they are sleeping. We know that these people are isolated from others inhabiting the physical world in common with them; they are not sharing common experiences. No means exist of conveying what they are experiencing. We know further that a person can go from this state of consciousness to that of everyday awareness, can be awakened to it by external nature, and this includes the natural exterior of other people, as I described yesterday. A certain degree of community feeling is awakened simply as a result of natural drives and the ordinary needs of life, and languages come into being in response to it.

But now let us see what happens when these two states of consciousness get mixed up together. So long as a person continues in completely normal circumstances and is able, by reason of a normal psychic and bodily condition, to keep his isolated dream experience separated from his shared experience with others, he will be living acceptably in his dream world and in the world of reality. But let us assume that, due to some psychological quirk, and it would have to be considered such, a person finds himself in a situation where, though he is in a day-waking state of consciousness involved in a common life with others, he is not having the same feelings and ideas as his companions. Let us assume that the pathological condition he is in causes him to project into his waking consciousness a world of feelings and ideas similar to those of dream life. Instead of developing logically ordered thoughts, he produces a pictorial world like the picture world of dreams. We call such a person mentally ill. But for the moment the thing of chief interest to us is that this person does not understand the others, and unless they are looking at him from a medical pathological angle they cannot understand him either. At the moment when the state of mind prevailing at this lower level of consciousness is carried over to a higher level, a person becomes a crass egotist in his relations with his fellow men. You need only think this over to see that a person of this kind goes entirely by his imaginings. He comes to blows with the others because they cannot follow his reasoning. He can commit the wildest excesses because he does not share a common soul world with other human beings.

Now let us move on from these two states of consciousness to the two others. Let us contrast the everyday state of consciousness, to which we are guided by the natural course of external events, with that higher one that can, as I showed yesterday, awaken through the fact that a person wakes not just in the encounter with the natural aspect of his surrounding but also in the encounter with the inner being of the other person. Though one may not ordinarily be fully and immediately aware of it, one does waken to such a higher level of consciousness. Of course, there are many other ways of entering the higher worlds, as you know from my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But for the period of time one is privileged to spend with others in that way, one can find oneself in a position to understand and witness things one would otherwise not understand or witness. One is presented with the possibility of living in the element that those who know the spiritual world describe in terms applicable to that world—the possibility of speaking of the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the ego, of repeated earth lives and their karmic aspects.

Now at this point there is a possibility of the whole state of mind of ordinary consciousness being carried over into the spiritual world one thus enters and applied to it. This is the same thing that happens on another level when the state of soul of a person absorbed in dream pictures is projected into ordinary life: one turns into an egotist in the most natural way. This occurs if one fails to realize that everything in the higher worlds of the spirit has to be looked at in an entirely different way than one looks at the sense world. One must learn to think and feel differently. Just as dreamers have to switch over into a totally different state of consciousness if they want to share a life with others in an ordinary state of waking, so must there be similar awareness of the fact that the content of anthroposophy cannot be approached with the attitude of soul one has toward the things of ordinary experience.

That is the root of the problem of reaching any understanding and agreement between the everyday consciousness, which is also that of ordinary science, and the consciousness anthroposophy makes possible. When people come together and talk back and forth, one with the ordinary consciousness exemplified in the usual scientific approach and the other with a consciousness equal to forming judgments that accord with spiritual reality, then it is exactly as though a person recounting his dreams were trying to reach an understanding with someone telling him about external facts. When a number of people meet in an ordinary state of consciousness and fail to lift themselves and their full life of feeling to the super-sensible level, when they meet to listen in a merely ordinary state of mind to what the spiritual world is saying, there is a great—an immeasurably great—chance of their coming to blows, because all such people become egotists as a natural consequence.

There is, to be sure, a powerful remedy for this, but it is available only if the human soul develops it. I am referring to tolerance of a truly heartfelt kind. But we have to educate ourselves to it. In a state of everyday consciousness a little tolerance suffices most people's needs, and social circumstances put many a situation right again. But where the ordinary everyday state of mind prevails, it often happens that people talking together are not even concerned to hear what the other is saying. We all know this from our own personal experience. It has become a habit nowadays to give only scant attention to somebody else's words. When a person is part way through a sentence, someone else starts talking, because he is not the least interested in what is being said. He is interested only in his own opinion. One may be able, after a fashion, to get by with this in the physical world, but it simply cannot be done in the spiritual realm. There, the soul must be imbued with the most perfect tolerance; one must educate oneself to listen with profound inner calm even to things one cannot in the least agree with, listen not in a spirit of supercilious endurance, but with the most positive inner tolerance as one would to well-founded utterances on the other person's part. In the higher worlds there is little sense in making objections to anything. A person with experience in that realm knows that the most opposite views about the same fact can be expressed there by, let us say, oneself and someone else. When he has made himself capable of listening to the other's opposite view with exactly the same tolerance he feels toward his own—and please notice this !—then and then only does he have the social attitude required for experiencing what was formerly merely theoretical knowledge of the higher worlds.

This moral basis is vital to a right relationship to the higher realms. The strife that I have described as so characteristic of the societies we are discussing has its root in the fact that when people hear sensational things, such as that man has an etheric and astral body and an ego as well as a physical body, and so on, they listen for sensation's sake but do not undertake to transform their souls as these must be transformed if they are to experience spiritual reality differently than they would a chair or a table in the physical world, and one experiences even these objects differently in the physical world than one does in dreams. When people apply their ordinary soul habits to what they think they are understanding of teachings about the higher worlds, then this inevitably develops strife and egotism.

Thus it is just by grasping the true nature of the higher worlds that one is led to understand how easily societies with a spiritual content can become involved in conflicts and quarreling, and how necessary it is to educate oneself to participation in such groups by learning to tolerate the other person to an immeasurably greater degree than one is used to doing in situations of the physical world. To become an anthroposophist it is not enough to know anthroposophy from the theoretical side: one's whole approach has to be transformed in certain ways. Some people are unwilling to do this. That resulted in my never being understood when I said that there were two ways of occupying oneself with my book, Theosophy, for example. One way is to read or even study it, but with the usual approach and making the judgments that approach engenders. One might just as well be reading a cookbook as Theosophy for all the qualitative difference there is. The value of the experience is identical in both cases, except that reading Theosophy that way means dreaming rather than living on a higher level. When one thus dreams of higher worlds, the impulses one receives from them do not make for the highest degree of unity or the greatest tolerance. Strife and quarreling take the place of the unity that can be the reward of study of the higher worlds, and they keep on spreading. Here you find the cause of the wrangling in societies based on one or another method of gaining insight into the spiritual world.

I said that the various paths described in part in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds lead into the spiritual world. Now when a person has to concern himself intensively with seeking knowledge of those higher worlds, this requires his developing a certain attitude of soul, as you will understand from what I have been explaining in this pair of lectures, though in quite another connection. A true spiritual investigator has to have a certain attitude of soul. One cannot find one's way to truth in the spiritual realm if one is constantly having to give one's attention to what is going on in the physical world in ways quite proper to that sphere, if one has to occupy oneself with matters requring the kind of thinking suited to the physical realm.

Now you will agree that a person who gives his fellowmen a reliable account of things in the spiritual world, a person justified in calling himself a spiritual investigator in the sense in which the other sciences use that term, needs a lot of time for his research. You will therefore find it natural that I, too, need time to do the research that enables me little by little to present anthroposophy or spiritual science in an ever widening perspective in my lectures.

Now if one goes one's way alone, one can of course make time for this within the framework of one's destiny. For a person who is a genuine spiritual investigator and wants to give his fellowmen a trustworthy account of what he discovers in the spiritual world will, as is natural, form the habit of ignoring his opponents. He knows that he has to have opponents, but he is not bothered by their objections to his statements; he could think up the objections himself. So it is natural for him to take the attitude that he is simply going to go his own positive way without paying much attention to anyone's objections, unless there is some special reason to do so.

But this attitude is no longer tenable when one has joined forces with the Anthroposophical Society. For in addition to the responsibility one feels toward the truth, one has a further responsibility in relation to what the Society, of which it is often said that it makes itself an instrument of that truth, is doing. So one has to help carry the Society's responsibilities. This can be combined to a certain extent with the proper attitude toward opponents. Until 1918 that situation obtained with the Society and myself. I paid as little attention as possible to objections, and did so, paradoxical though this may seem, as a consequence of maintaining the tolerance I have been describing. Why, indeed, should I be so intolerant as to be constantly refuting my opponents? In the natural course of human evolution everything eventually gets back on the right track anyhow. So I can say that up until 1918 this question was justified, to some extent at least.

But when the Society proceeds to take on the activities it has included since 1919, it also takes on the responsibility for them. Their destiny becomes involved with that of the Society, and the Society's destiny becomes involved with that of the spiritual investigator. The spiritual investigator must either assume the burden of defending himself against his opponents—in other words, of occupying himself largely with matters that keep him from his spiritual research, since they cannot be combined with it—or else, to get time for his research, turn over the handling of opponents to those who have accepted a certain responsibility for the peripheral institutions. Thus the situation in our Society has undergone fundamental changes since 1919, and this for deeply anthroposophical reasons. Since the Society, as represented by certain of its members, decided to launch these institutions, and since the foundation on which they are all based is anthroposophy, that foundation must now be defended by people who do not have to carry full responsibility for the inner correctness of the material that genuine research has to keep on adding, day by day, to the previous findings of spiritual investigation.

A large proportion of our opponents consists of people in well-defined callings. They may, for example, have studied in certain professional fields where it is customary to think about things in some particular way. Thinking the way he does, such a person simply has to oppose anthroposophy. He doesn't know why, but he has to be an opponent because he is unconsciously on the leash of the profession in which he has had his training and experience.

That is the situation in its inner aspect. From the external standpoint, the question whether what has been established as the Anthroposophical Society is to flourish or decline requires that these opponents be dealt with.

But the real leaders of the opposition know full well what they are about. For there are some among them who are perfectly familiar with the laws that govern spiritual research, even though their view of those laws and that of anthroposophy may differ. They know that their best means of keeping a person who needs peace to pursue his spiritual research from doing his work is constantly to bombard him with hostile writings and objections. They know very well that he cannot give his attention to both refuting them and carrying on his research. They try to put obstacles in his path with their opposition. The mere fact of their putting these attacks in writing is the hostile act. The people who know what they are doing are not so much concerned with the contents of such books as they are with using them as weapons to hurl at the spiritual investigator, and they are particularly intent on tricking and otherwise forcing him into the necessity of defending himself.

These facts must be looked at completely objectively, and everyone who really wants to be a full member of the Anthroposophical Society ought to know them. A good many people are, of course, already familiar with what I have just been saying. The trouble is that some informed members habitually refrain from mentioning any such matters outside their circle.

Experience has long shown that such a course cannot be maintained in the Society. The Society used to publish lecture cycles labeled, “For members only.” Here in Germany, and probably elsewhere too, one can go to public libraries and borrow these same cycles. All the cycles are available to non-members. One can tell from writings of our opponents that they too have them, though it may sometimes have been difficult to get hold of them. But people of this sort are far less apt to shy away from difficulties than is sometimes the case with anthroposophists.

The secrecy that many societies still find it possible to maintain is simply out of the question in the Anthroposophical Society, due to its special character as an institution based on the most modern concept imaginable. For its members are meant to remain free individuals. They are not bound by any promises; they can simply join the Society as honest searchers after knowledge. I have no desire to make secrecy an aim. If that interested me, I would never suggest setting up a loose confederation of groups alongside the old Anthroposophical Society. For I predict, though without implying condemnation, that a great many more escape channels will be opened to the world at large by such a confederation, allowing egress to material that older members believe should be kept in their own cupboards. But the innermost impulse of anthroposophy cannot be grasped by people unwilling to see it put to work in complete accord with the most modern human thinking and feeling. It is, therefore, the more essential to understand what the prerequisites of such a society are.

Now I want to bring up something that I will illustrate with an example taken from my own experience, though not in a spirit of foolish conceit. Last summer I gave a course of lectures at Oxford on the educational methods of the Waldorf School.¹ An article appeared in an English journal that, though I cannot quote it verbatim, made the following point. It began by saying that a person who attended the lectures at the Oxford educational meetings without prior awareness of who Dr. Steiner was and that he had some connection with anthroposophy would not have noticed that a representative of anthroposophy was speaking. Such a person would simply have thought him to be a man speaking about pedagogy from a different angle than the listener's own.

I was exceedingly delighted by this characterization because it showed that there are people who notice something that is always my goal, namely, to speak in a way that is not instantly recognized as anthroposophical. Of course, the content is anthroposophical, but it cannot be properly absorbed unless it is objective. The anthroposophical standpoint should lead, not to onesidedness, but, on the contrary, to presenting things in such a way that each least detail can be judged on its own merits and its truth be freely recognized.

Once, before the Oxford lecture cycle was delivered and the article about it written, I made an experiment that may not seem to you at all significant. In June of this year I attended the Vienna Congress and gave two cycles comprising twelve lectures.² I undertook to keep the word anthroposophy out of all of them, and it is not to be found there. You will also not find any such phrase as “the anthroposophical world view shows us this or that.” Of course, despite this—and indeed, especially because of it—what was presented was pure anthroposophy.

Now I am not making the philistine, pedantic recommendation that anthroposophists should always avoid using the word “anthroposophy.” That is far from my intention. But the spirit that must inspire us in establishing right relations with the rest of the world can be found by looking in that general direction. That spirit should work freely in leaders active in the Society; otherwise I will again be held responsible for unanthroposophical things that are done in its name. Then the world would have some justification for confusing the one agent with the other.

Here too the objective spirit of anthroposophy needs to be properly grasped and, above all, manifested in what is done. We will first have to undertake some degree of self-education to that end. But self-education is needed in anthroposophical circles; countless mistakes have been made in the past few years for want of it, with the launching of the peripheral institutions contributing to the problem. I state this simply as an objective fact, without meaning to accuse anyone personally.

If the Anthroposophical Society is to flourish, every single one of its members is going to have to become fully aware of these facts. But this cannot happen under present day social conditions unless an effort is made to set up a lively exchange, even if only in the form of some such medium as a news sheet conceived as a link between the Society's various centers of activity. But again, that would require every such circle, even if not every individual member, to develop a living interest in the concerns of the whole Society, and particularly in its ongoing evolution. There has been too little of this. If the Anthroposophical Society did not exist, there would presumably still be a certain number of books on anthroposophy. But one would not have to be concerned, as a society is, with the people who read them. These people would be scattered all over the world, singly or in groups, according to their karma, but one would not have to have any external contact with them. The spiritual investigator is not in any fundamentally different situation, even in a society such as ours was up to 1918. But the situation changed at the moment when the Anthroposophical Society assumed responsibility for things that existed on the physical plane.

I am putting all this in a much more plain spoken way than I have on other occasions. But say them I did, in one form or another, when the peripheral institutions were being launched. I couldn't, of course, whisper them in every member's ear, and I don't know whether it would have helped if I had done that. But the Society existed and had leaders. They should have seen to it that conditions in the Society were such that it could include the various institutions without jeopardizing spiritual research.

I will call this the negative aspect of community building in contrast to the positive aspect I presented yesterday. I would like to add that everyone interested in creating community of the positive kind that I described from the standpoint of the prerequisites of its existence must be aware of the matters discussed today in relation to the Anthroposophical Society's life and progress. They must all be taken into consideration as affecting the various areas of anthroposophical life.

In this connection let me cite the following instructive example. I come back again to the tragic subject of the ruined Goetheanum. In September and October 1920 we held a three week course there, the first of the so-called High School courses. Yesterday, I described how the Goetheanum was built in a definite artistic style that was the product of an anthroposophical approach. How did this style originate? It came into being as a result of the fact that persons to whom we cannot be grateful enough undertook, in 1913, to build a home base for what existed at that time in the way of anthroposophical works in a narrower sense, and what, again in that narrower sense, was still to issue from anthroposophy. They wanted to create a home for the staging of mystery plays, for the still germinal but nevertheless promising art of eurythmy, and, above all, for presentations of anthroposophy itself as these projected cosmic pictures derived from spiritual-scientific research. That was my intention when these persons asked me to take initiatives in this connection. I saw it as my task to erect a building designed in a style artistically consonant with the work that was to go on in it. The Goetheanum was the outcome.

At that time there were no scholars or scientists in our midst. Anthroposophy had indeed taken some steps in a scientific direction. But the development that was to include activity in the various professional fields among the Society's functions had not yet begun. What developed later came into being as a direct outgrowth of anthroposophy, exactly as did the Waldorf School pedagogy, the prime example of such a process.

Now an artistic style had to be found to suit each such development. It was found, as I believe, in the Goetheanum. The war caused some delay in building. Then, in 1920, I gave the course of lectures just referred to. It was given at the behest of the professionals who had meanwhile joined the Society and were such a welcome addition to it. They arranged a program and submitted it to me.

In my belief, complete freedom reigns in the Anthroposophical Society. Many outsiders think that Steiner is the one who decides what is to go on in it. The things that go on most of the time, however, are such as Steiner would never have thought up. But the Society does not exist for my sake; it exists for the members.

Well, I sat there, all attentiveness, at this lecture series of September and October 1920—this is just an aperçu, not a criticism—and let my eyes range over the interior of the Goetheanum. In the Goetheanum Weekly I described how, in eurythmy for example, the lines of the Goetheanum continued over into the eurythmists' motions. But according to the original intention, this should have been the case with everything done there. So I let my inner eye test whether the interior decoration, the architecture, the sculptured forms, the painting, harmonized with what the speakers were saying from the podium. I discovered something that people did not at that time have to be faced with, namely, that everything I may call in the best sense a projection of the anthroposophical outlook, everything that had its origin in pure anthroposophy, harmonized marvellously with the Goetheanum. But in the case of a whole series of lectures, one felt that they should have been delivered only when the Goetheanum reached the point of adding a number of further buildings, each so designed that its style would harmonize with the special studies and activities being carried on inside it. In its destiny of almost ten years, the Goetheanum really shared the destiny of the Anthroposophical Society, and one could readily become aware, by feeling out the way the architectural style harmonized or failed to harmonize with what went on in the building, that an inorganic element had indeed insinuated itself into the pure ongoing stream of the anthroposophical spiritual movement.

Now this is not said to blame anybody or to suggest that things should have been done differently; everything had to happen as it did, naturally. But that brought another necessity with it: The necessity of bringing about a complete rebirth of chemistry, physics, mathematics, and so on, through anthroposophy, to give consciousness the quick forward thrust I described it as needing. For the ordinary way of looking at things simply does not provide a basis for anthroposophical presentations. But that forward thrust was not always in evidence. Its lack could be felt in the testing that the artistic style of the Goetheanum gave it; in the Anthroposophical Society it manifests itself in the phenomenon of the clouds that have gathered and hung over us these past days. Now that a most welcome destiny has brought science into the anthroposophical stream, we face the immediate and future task of bringing it to rebirth through anthroposophy. No purpose is served by losing ourselves in all kinds of meaningless polemics; the urgent task is rather to see to it that the various disciplines are reborn out of anthroposophy.

We had to make do somehow during the period when substitutes were the order of the day. I was often called upon, in response to a need somewhere, to deliver cycles of lectures to this or that group on subjects which, had anthroposophical life been progressing at a normal tempo, might better have waited for future developing. Then these cycles became available. They should have been put to use in the first place as a means of helping the various sciences to rebirth through anthroposophy. That lay in the real interests of anthroposophy, and its interests would have coincided fruitfully indeed with those of the Anthroposophical Society.

People have to know all these facts. You see, my dear friends, in the course of the various seminars held here and there under the auspices of the High School, I repeatedly assigned problems that needed solving. At the last address I gave in the Small Auditorium of the Goetheanum during the scientific course, which was held at the end of 1922 and was to have continued there into 1923, I gave the mathematical physicists an assignment. I discussed how necessary it was to solve the problem of finding a mathematical formula to express the difference between tactual and visual space. There were many other occasions when similar matters were brought up. We were confronted with many urgent problems of the time, but they all needed to be worked out in such a thoroughly anthroposophical way as to have value for every single group of anthroposophists, regardless of whether tactual and visual space and the like meant anything to them. For there are ways in which something that perhaps only one person can actually do can be made fruitful for a great many others when it is clothed in some quite different form.

Thus, the difficulties that have proliferated are a consequence of what I must call the exceedingly premature steps taken since 1919, and, in particular, of the circumstance that people founded all sorts of institutions and then didn't continue sharing responsibility for them—a fact that must be stressed again and again. These difficulties have given rise to the problematical situation now confronting us.

But none of them can be laid at the door of anthroposophy itself. What my kind listeners should be aware of is that it is possible to be quite specific as to how each such difficulty originated. And it must be emphasized that it is most unjust to dismiss anthroposophy on account of the troubles that have arisen.

I would, therefore, like to append to the discussion of just such deeper matters as these a correction of something that was said from this platform yesterday; it disturbed me because of my awareness of the things we have been talking about here. It was stated that people were not aware that the Anthroposophical Movement could be destroyed by our opponents. It cannot be. Our opponents could come to present the gravest danger to the Anthroposophical Society or to me personally, and so on. But the Anthroposophical Movement cannot be harmed; the worst that could happen is that its opponents might slow its progress. I have often pointed out in this and similar connections that we must distinguish between the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society. My reason for saying this was not that the Society no longer needed to be taken into account, but that the Society is the vessel and the Movement its content. This holds true for the single member as well as for the Society. Here too, full clarity and awareness should reign. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with the Anthroposophical Society. Nor should the fact go unrecognized that developments of the past three or four years have meant, for members, a close interweaving of the unfolding destiny of anthroposophy with the Society's destiny. The two have come to seem almost identical, but they must nevertheless be sharply differentiated.

There could, theoretically, have been a Waldorf School even if the Society had not existed. But that could not have happened in reality, for there would have been no one to found and steer and look after the school. Real logic, the logic of reality, is quite a different thing than abstract logical reasoning. It is important that members of the Society understand this. A member ought to have some rudimentary realization, even if only on the feeling level, that insight into higher worlds has to be built on an awareness that super-sensible experience differs greatly from experience of the ordinary physical world. Something in the physical world can seem just as right as a dream content does to the dreaming person. But the carrying over of things of one's dream life into situations of everyday waking consciousness nevertheless remains an abnormal and harmful phenomenon. It is similarly harmful to carry over into the consciousness needed for understanding the spiritual world convictions and attitudes quite properly adopted in ordinary waking consciousness.

I can give you an instructive example. As a result of the way modern man has become so terribly caught up in intellectuality and a wholly external empiricism, even those people who are not especially at home in the sciences have taken up the slogan: Prove what you are saying! What they are stressing is a certain special way of using thought as a mediator. They know nothing of the immediate relationship the soul of man can have to truth, wherein truth is immediately apprehended in just the way the eye perceives the color red, that is, seeing it, not proving it. But in the realm of reason and intellect, each further conceptual step is developed out of the preceding one. Where the physical plane is concerned, one is well advised to become a bright fellow who can prove everything, and to develop such a good technique in this that it works like greased lightning. That is a good thing where the physical plane is concerned, and a good thing for the sciences that deal with it. It is good for the spiritual investigator to have developed a certain facility in proving matters of the physical world. Those who acquaint themselves closely with the intentions underlying the work of our Research Institute will see that wherever this technique is applicable, we, too, apply it. But if you will permit me the grotesque expression, one becomes stupid in relation to the spiritual world if one approaches it in a proof-oriented state of mind, just as one becomes stupid when one projects a dreamer's orientation into ordinary waking consciousness. For the proving method is as out of place in the spiritual world as is an intrusion of the dream state into the reality of waking consciousness. But in modern times things have reached the point where proving everything is taken as a matter of course. The paralyzing effect this trend has had in some areas is really terrifying.

Religion, which grew out of direct vision, and in neither its modern nor its older forms was founded on anything susceptible of intellectual-rational proof, has now become proof-addicted rationalistic theory, and it is proving, in the persons of its extremer exponents, that everything about it is false. For just as it is inevitable that a person become abnormal when he introduces dream concerns into his waking consciousness, so does a person necessarily become abnormal in his relationship to higher worlds if he approaches them in a way suited to the physical plane. Theology has become either an applied science that just deals practically with whatever confronts it or a proof-minded discipline, better adapted to destroying religion than to establishing it.

These, my dear friends, are the things that must become matters of clear and conscious experience in the Anthroposophical Society. If that is not the case, one takes one's place in life and in human society simply as a person of many-sided interests who functions sensibly at all the various levels, whereas from the moment one concerns oneself with the material contained in innumerable cycles, one cannot exist as a human being without spiritual development.

The spiritual investigator does not need to rely on proof in meeting his opponents. Every objection that they might make to something I have said can be taken from my own writings, for wherever it is indicated I call attention to how things stand with physical proof as applied to super-sensible fact. Somewhere in my books one can always find an approximation of the opponents' comments in my own statements, so that, for the most part, all an opponent need do to refute me is to copy passages out of my writings. But the point is that all these details should become part of the awareness of the members. Then they will find firm footing in the Society. To occupy oneself with the anthroposophical outlook will mean finding firm footing, not only in the physical world but in all the worlds there are.

Then anthroposophical impulses will also be a fountainhead of the capacity to love one's fellowmen and of everything else that leads to social harmony and a truly social way of life. There will no longer be conflict and quarreling, divisions and secedings among anthroposophists; true human unity will reign and overcome all external isolation. Though one accept observations made in higher worlds as truth, one will not wander about like a dreamer in the physical world; one will relate to it as a person with both feet set firmly on the ground. For one will have trained oneself to keep the two things separate, just as dream experience and physical reality must be kept separate in ordinary life.

The key need is for everyone who intends to join with others in really full, genuine participation in the Anthroposophical Movement within the Society to develop a certain attitude of soul, a certain state of consciousness. If we really permeate ourselves with that attitude and that consciousness, we will establish true anthroposophical community. Then the Anthroposophical Society, too, will flourish and bear fruit and live up to its promise.

• 1. Spiritual Ground of Education Oxford, August 16-25, 1922. Rudolf Steiner Press, London.
• 2. The Tension Between East and West, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1963.

Quite a number of lectures have now been given by me on the changes that must necessarily take place in our whole civilization. First and foremost, what was said in this connection was expressed in such a way as to appeal to the will of men. We now live in a cycle of humanity's evolution in which people have to discover inner activity in order to contribute their share towards the necessary change. For human soul substance will have to stream into external life, into the objectivity of external life, and human beings themselves will have to bring about what should appear. In the present cycle of human development it is no longer possible to wait passively for divine powers, far removed from man, to step in and to do something for human evolution, without the participation of man himself.

The essential thing is to be in a position to understand such things by observing the individual phenomena of social life and the life of nature, but today, certain phenomena of social life shall be our topic. I would like to start with a quite definite fact. Let us suppose that someone announces himself; he may, for example, send his business card with the name “Edmund Miller” printed on it. Yet, on seeing this card with the name “Edmund Miller,” it would be foolish to assume that a miller was coming, a man who grinds corn. For the person announcing himself by this name may be a contractor, or a professor, or a court advisor, and so on. It would not be justified in such a case to deduce anything from the name “Miller.” Initially, it would perhaps be better to form no thoughts whatever, but just to wait and see what kind of a person conceals himself behind the name. Or, through certain other circumstances, we may already know something about the actual person, the real living entity concealed behind this name, “Miller.”

It is clear to us in this case that it would be quite wrong to infer from his name anything about the character of the approaching individual. If a person named “Smith” announces himself we would not think that he is a smith. This shows that in regard to those words we consider proper names, we feel the need to discover, by means of something that is not inferred from the name, what or whom we are dealing with.

Well, in this respect, even proper names have undergone a certain history. A person bearing the name Smith today no longer has anything to do with a real smith; a person called Miller has nothing to do with a miller. Yet these names originally arose at a time when name-giving such as is customary today did not exist, when people in a village would remark, “The smith said,—the miller said this or did that,”—or, “I saw the miller,”—and referred to the actual smith or miller. One who has lived in villages knows that people frequently do not refer to each other by proper names but say instead that they saw the smith, or the mason, or somebody else. Therefore, the name itself originally caused people to infer from the words what lay behind them.

All words, the whole language, will undergo the same development in the-course of evolution from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch that proper names have undergone, a development which in their case we can clearly survey. Nevertheless, human beings today are still almost completely caught up in the whole of language; we basically acquire all our knowledge out of language. In actual fact, the general attitude towards nearly the whole compass of language is to infer the things from their words. Now, it is convenient to do so, but human evolution follows a different course, and in regard to such things we must have the same attitude that we adopt in regard to natural phenomena. They contain objective necessity. Objective necessity also exists where the causality of nature holds sway in the sphere of life, something that is experienced by many people with abstract superficiality. It happens frequently—I have often pointed this out—that people will say, “I never intended to do or say this; I meant it quite differently; I had this or that intention with regard to this matter.” But regardless of how pronounced the child's intention is not to get burned, when it reaches into fire, it will burn itself. Concerning the things of life, intentions that do not delve into life are not decisive; at most, only those intentions that do delve into life, or, certainly, facts, and the relationships of these facts that follow natural laws, are decisive.

People must become used to this way of thinking; based an spiritual science, this is, above all, necessary in the most eminent sense. And one must also get used to the thought: “As pleasant as it might be if one could just take words as they are, it is nevertheless a fact that the objective course and laws of human evolution point in a different direction.” They indicate that man's whole conception, his whole soul life, is becoming emancipated from words. Words are gradually becoming mere gestures that simply indicate the being or thing in question, no longer designating and explaining anything fully. If spiritual-scientific descriptions are to be taken seriously, for example, then something must come about for which people are often annoyed with me, namely, that one can no longer use words in the manner that words and sentences are customarily used at present. For if one sets forth spiritual-scientific facts, one is above all presenting facts of the future; something is represented that in future time will have to become the possession of mankind. In a certain sense, one has to anticipate something that is supposed to occur in the future. What is to happen in the future must be received into one's will. Therefore, one is obliged to give spiritual-scientific descriptions in such a way that even the words point like gestures to the essential reality lying behind them. Since our ideal today concerning the reconstruction of the social order will have to be born out of spiritual science, as I explained yesterday, it is necessary that, particularly in matters of social reconstruction, we speak from the above-mentioned viewpoint. This is precisely what people did not at all wish to comprehend, for instance, in my book, Towards Social Renewal. They absolutely wanted matters presented to them in the old style, matters that cannot be described in the old style since they are part of the future. And basically, what one is being faced with here can best be made evident by the fact that almost all the questions that, up to now, have been connected by one side or another to the expositions in Towards Social Renewal always proceed totally out of the old manner of thinking. No attempt is made to find one's way into the transformed new way of thinking.

Thus we may say that, particularly in the descriptions of social relationships of the future, it must become evident that we have to develop an emancipated soul life that no longer clings merely to words. One who follows my descriptions in the various fields of spiritual science, including the recent ones into the field of social life, will find that I am always at pains to describe a matter from many different sides. As a rule, I use two sentences instead of one, because the first sentence indicates the matter from one side, the other one from the other side. This is then supposed to call forth a desire in the listener or reader to approach the matter by transcending the words and sentences, as it were. This is what must be mentioned in reference to human soul life as far as the transformation of the meaning of human language is concerned. This is an important matter. It is important for the reason that the greatest part of what occurs today in regard to confusion of one's manner of thinking and conceptions comes about for no other reason than the fact that the objective laws and impulses of human evolution already demand that we free ourselves from language. Because of their easy-going habits of thinking, however, human beings do not wish to give up clinging to language. When such a phenomenon is clearly understood, it leads to a deeper insight into the whole course of human development. Indeed, from this transformation of our language or languages, we can actually build a bridge to profound spiritual facts. Naturally, this is more the case in one language than in another. But this is then a matter of the specific treatment of a language, of the meaning of words in a language in the individualized differentiated regions of human civilization, as I have pointed out.

We now live in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of human civilization and are approaching the sixth condition of development. These evolutionary conditions are not of such a nature that a clear line could be drawn between one and the other epochs; instead, one epoch, bearing its own peculiarities, passes over into the next; and long before it arises, the future one casts its shadows—one could also say its lights—into the present. One must take hold of these lights if one wishes to participate in the evolution of humanity with one's soul.

Let us try and connect what might be termed the “suprahistorical” fact, namely, that we are supposed to work our way towards the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, with another fact known to all of us. It is this: With his spirit-soul entity, the human being descends out of a spiritual world to earthly incarnation through birth or conception. On earth, he then experiences the life between birth and death; then, he passes through the gate of death, and in so doing bears his soul-spiritual being once again into that environment of life which is definitely of a spiritual and soul nature.

Now we must clearly understand—and the significance of this for the art of education, for example, has also been outlined here recently—that we bring down from the spiritual world, at least in the form of effects, what we have experienced in this spiritual world. When we move in ordinary life from one locality to another, we take with us not only our clothes but also our soul-spiritual belongings. In like manner, one brings along into this world through conception and birth the consequences and effects of what has been undergone in the spiritual world. In the period that mankind has presently lived through, concerning which we know that it began around the middle of the fifteenth century A.D., man, through his spirit-soul entity, brought along forces of the soul life devoid of images, forces containing no pictures. It is for this reason that, above all, the intellectual life has arisen and has flourished. During this period, prior to descending through conception and birth into physical existence, the human being was endowed in a sense with something lacking in capacities, lacking in images. This explains the slight inclination mankind had for developing original creations of fantasy since the middle of the fifteenth century. Human fantasy is, in truth, only a terrestrial reflection of super-earthly imagination. The Renaissance does not contradict this, for lust the fact that one had to resort to a “renaissance,” not a “naissance,” clearly shows that original forces of imagination were not present, only a fantasy that required fructification from earlier periods. In short, the fact is that the human soul was permeated in a certain sense with forces that are devoid of images.

Now begins the age—and in many respects, this is the real reason for the stormy character of our times—in which the souls who descend through conception and birth into earthly life bring along for themselves images from the spiritual world. When pictures are brought along out of spiritual existence into physical life, and if salvation is to arise for the human being and his social life, they must under all circumstances be united with the astral body, whereas the element lacking images only unites with the ego. It is predominantly the unfolding of the ego which has blossomed in humanity since the fifteenth century.

Now, however, the time is beginning when man has to feel: Within me there live pictures from my prenatal existence; during my earthly life, I have to make them come alive. I cannot accomplish this merely with my ego; I must work deeper into myself, and this must reach as far as my astral body.

Now, it is generally true that humanity resists the images indwelling in the astral body, images experienced prior to conception. In a way, human beings repel what is supposed to find its way out of the depths of their being into the astral body. The dry, prosaic attitude of the present time is one of its fundamental characteristics, and there are many broadly based movements that oppose an education whose concern it would be that the forces arising from the soul and trying to make themselves felt in the astral body will actually assert themselves. There are insipid, dry people who would really like to exclude any education by means of fairy tales, legends and anything illuminated by imagination. In our Waldorf School system, we have made it our priority that the lessons and instruction of the children entering primary education will proceed from pictorial descriptions, from the life-filled presentation of images, from elements taken from legends and fairy tales. Even what the children are initially supposed to learn about the nature and processes of the animal kingdom, the plant and the mineral kingdoms, is not supposed to be expressed in a dry, matter-of-fact manner; it is supposed to be clothed in imaginative, legendary, fairy tale-like elements. For what is seated deep within the child's soul are the imaginations that have been received in the spiritual world. They seek to come to the surface. The teacher or the educator adopts the right attitude towards the child if he confronts the child with pictures. By placing images before the child's soul, there flash up from its soul those images, or, strictly speaking, those forces of pictorialized representation which have been received before birth or, let us say, prior to conception.

If these forces are suppressed, if the dry, prosaic person guides the education of the child today, he confronts the child from earliest childhood with something that is actually not at all related to the child, namely, the letters of the alphabet. For our present letters have nothing to do anymore with the letters of earlier pictorial scripts. They are really something that is alien to the child; a letter should first be drawn out of a picture, as we try to do it in the Waldorf School. The child is confronted today with something devoid of a pictorial element; the young person, on the other hand, possesses forces in his body—naturally, I am referring to the soul when I am now speaking of “body,” for after all, we also speak of the “astral body”—forces seated in his body that will burst out elsewhere if they are not brought to the surface in pictorial representation. What will be the result of modern mistaken education? These forces do not become lost; they spread out, gain existential ground, and invade the thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will after all. And what kind of people will come into being from that? They will be rebels, revolutionaries, dissatisfied people; people who do not know what they want, because they want something that one cannot know. This is because they want something that is incompatible with any possible social order; something that they only picture to themselves, that should have entered their fantasy but did not; instead, it entered into their agitated social activities.

Therefore, we can say that people who, in an occult sense, do not have honest intentions in regard to their fellowmen, do not have the courage to admit to themselves: “If the world is in a state of revolt today, it is really heaven that is revolting.” It means the heaven that is held back in the souls of men, which then comes to the fore, not in its own form, but in its opposite—in strife and bloodshed instead of imaginations. No wonder that the individuals who destroy the social fabric actually have the feeling that they are doing good. For what do they sense in themselves? They feel heaven within themselves; only it assumes the form of a caricature in their soul.

This is how serious the truths are that we must comprehend today! To acknowledge the truths that matter today should be no child's play; such acknowledgment should be pervaded by the greatest earnestness. In general, it is no light task today to describe such things, for, in the first place, people do not care for them; secondly, they cling to words. Indeed, one who states that heaven is revolting in human souls is naturally taken literally by his words; people do not notice how he is trying to show that additional facts must be known, whereby the word “heaven” is related to something more than they are in the habit of connecting with the term. This is the same as not thinking of a miller who grinds corn when a “Mr. Miller” announces himself. The emancipation from language is definitely required in individual concrete cases if, in the sense that the laws of human evolution demand it, we wish truly to make progress.

Here, we see how something that comes from the life before birth pushes into the social life. One who is familiar with these relationships knows that he has to recognize something that is actually heavenly in what appears on earth in a caricature. This is in regard to the social questions, but there is something else in addition.

During the age of intellectualism, which has developed predominantly since the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings have obtained very little from their life of sleep in the form of imaginations for their waking life. Even those who have somewhat more lively dreams tend to interpret them quite rationally and intellectually. In this direction, theosophists, for example, are rational and intellectual. I could not begin to describe in a small volume, only in a big one, how many people have come to me in the course of time and wished to have rational explanations for their dreams! What is important here is that even those imaginations that express themselves in dreams point to a deeper spiritual life. I have often said that the outward appearance of the dream does not matter at all; that has already emancipated itself from the actual content. The content which we receive and then interpret in words of a language, from which, in turn, we actually have to emancipate ourselves as well, is not the true course of the dream; it really has very little to do with the true course of the dream. The dream's content is represented in its dramatic sequence, in the way one image follows another, the way complications arise and are resolved; one can experience the same spiritual content in a number of different ways as a dream. One person comes and describes how he climbed a mountain; he ascended quite easily up to a certain point, then, he suddenly stood before an abyss and could not proceed. Another person relates that he was walking along a path; everything around him filled him with joy. Suddenly, when he reached a certain point in the road, a man with a #8224 came up 'to him and killed him. Here we have two completely different dream images. Yet the process concealed behind them may be exactly the same. It can express itself in one instance in the climb up the mountain and the feeling of confronting an abyss; in another instance, it can be expressed in a cheerful walk down a path until one confronts a person who intends to kill one. The content of the images is not important; it is the dramatic sequence of experiencing something that offers resistance. It is the dynamics behind the images that matters. The course taken by the forces can envelop itself in any number of images, indeed in hundreds of pictures!

We can only understand the spiritual world when we know that what appears in the physical world in the form of dreams, or what clothes itself in images from the spiritual world in such a manner that it resembles the physical world, is only an image. As long as one has the inclination, however, to interpret the images in a rationalistic, purely intellectual way, so long does one also occupy an intellectual standpoint in regard to the dream life of sleep. What matters here is that we understand this dream life of sleep as the expression of a deeper spiritual life. Then only do we comprehend it imaginatively; then we grasp the pictures as something that stands in place of the content.

Then we shall not turn against something that is beginning for the human being today, namely, making inner soul demands out of sleep in a manner similar to the demands made by the imaginations prior to birth or conception. For today we are beginning to sleep differently from the way sleep was experienced in the regular life of the intellectual age since the middle of the fifteenth century. Man brought along into the waking state little inclination for faculties that wish to experience, rather than interpret, the images.

We have now reached the point in human evolution where, out of sleep as well, we draw imaginations that seek to indwell not only our ego, where rationality reigns supreme, but also our astral body. If we work against this, we once more reject something that is trying to rise into consciousness out of the depths of the human soul; we also work against the whole course of mankind's evolution, and what matters here is that we do not oppose humanity's development but work in harmony with it. We do this in the first place by permeating our culture once again with as many elements as possible connected in some way with the spiritual world. Naturally, in regard to external life, it is important for us to imbue ourselves with what is grasped from the spiritual world; hence, that we also imbue ourselves with a true spiritual insight, to fill ourselves with something that in this physical world cannot be comprehended in terms of the physical world. The whole past epoch of human life was actually opposed to this. Consider a case that I have already mentioned a number of times.

It is true that Christianity confronts human beings in such a way that they can only grasp its essence, especially the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha, if they come round to a comprehension of something super-sensible. For one must envisage that Christ, a being Who formerly had not been connected with earth evolution, united with the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and that super-sensible events took place. One must conceive of the fact that in regard to the event of Golgotha, even birth and conception differed from the way they take place in ordinary human circumstances. In short, the demand is made by Christology to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in a super-sensible sense.

There is an interesting passage in a book written by a modern naturalist⁹⁴ where fulminations are uttered against the Immaculate Conception, where it is said that it is an impertinent insult to human reason to claim that an immaculate conception can occur.

Well, a modern rationalist, a purely intellectual person, can't help feeling this way. In a certain sense, what is intended out of the spiritual life is indeed an impertinent mockery of human reason. But the point is that we now live in an age where we must gradually begin to bring into waking life what has been spiritually experienced between falling asleep and waking in such a manner that our astral body can be impregnated and permeated with a pictorial element—not merely our ego, which is the seat of rationality, of intellectualism.

It is interesting that even the theology of the nineteenth century developed in such a way that it opposed Christology with rationalism, with pure intellectualism. Increasingly, modern theology felt called upon altogether to deny Christ as such, and to describe the humble man from Nazareth, the mere Jesus, as a human personality somewhat more outstanding than other human beings. One did not wish to make the effort to comprehend something super-sensible. What is to confront the human being supersensibly, what is to awaken him to the super-sensible realm, this one tried to grasp with concepts gained here in the sensory world.

A Protestant theologian,⁹⁵ with whom I once discussed this matter, told me after we had talked about it for some time, “Yes, we modern theologians should really not call ourselves Christians any longer, for we no longer have Christ. If the name ‘Jesuit’ had not been appropriated already, we should really claim it for ourselves.” This is not something that I am saying; it is something that a Protestant theologian of the modern school said to me as a confession of his own soul.

One who has insight into the whole character of our time, however, will understand that we must advance to a comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just because it is the central manifestation of our human evolution, it will tear us away from the earthly manner of thinking, and will draw us with might and mean to understand something that is incomprehensible based an the earthly sense domain. Whoever wishes in everything to remain caught in the earthly sensory sphere would say, “The Immaculate Conception is an impertinent insult against human reason.”

One who understands the task of present-day man will say: I must accustom myself to such ideas. In that case, I must emancipate myself from the customary use of words today. When somebody by the name of Smith or Miller announces himself, I must not assume that he is coming with a hammer in hand or overalls powdered with flour. I must expect something quite different from what I might deduce from the words. Thus, I have to become used to emancipating myself from what was ingrained into the words by the merely physical life of the senses.

Today, the Mystery of Golgotha is in fact the first test for us to see whether we are willing to go along with the comprehension of something that extends beyond the physical-sensory sphere. We, therefore, can no longer content ourselves with a merely traditional, historical description of Christianity, we need instead a creative understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Out of spiritual science, we need inner strength of soul which, in a new way, approaches the Mystery of Golgotha and is in a position to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha as a supersensory fact. Then, having positioned the Mystery of Golgotha into the central point of human thinking and feeling, we must make a new beginning especially in regard to education, and prepare the child in such a way that it does not suppress, does not have to suppress, the imaginations that seek to arise from the depths of the soul. We must meet the imaginations halfway by making pictures of our conceptions.

This is the deeper reason why, in the last issue of Soziale Zukunft (Social Future),⁹⁶ which is a magazine dealing with education, I described education and instruction as an art in the most eminent sense. In the field of pedagogy, teachers and educators must actually proceed in the way an artist does—indeed, they must proceed in a style surpassing that of an artist. It does not do to impose abstract principles in an abstract pedagogical sense. What matters is that one penetrates the being of man, and, through this comprehension of man's nature, arrives at the point of reading from the inner human being what one has to do in each case. An artist who is creating something cannot go by abstract rules. The purpose of aesthetics is not that of establishing rules for the artists. An artist cannot even go by what he has created yesterday when he creates something today. At every moment he must endeavor to be creative and original. This is how the teacher must be, in a still higher sense. One must not say based an a certain attitude of mind: "Well, if we are looking for teachers like that, we have to wait another three to four hundred years." The only reason that we do not have such teachers as yet is because we say things like this. We can have them the very moment that we have the strong power of faith in it; but it is the strong, not the passive, power of faith that is needed here. Therefore, what is important here is that when we return from sleep, upon awakening, we truly experience in the astral body and imprint into the etheric body what the astral body experiences from the moment of falling asleep until waking up. It can only take place through pictorializing the whole cultural life.

This pictorialization of the whole life of culture, this pictorialization that is demanded by the laws of humanity's evolution, will come into being when the whole spiritual life is left to the decision of those who participate in the spiritual life; when no instructions, no school regulations are laid down by a government which by its very nature stands outside the spiritual life. It is important here that the state does not hand down pedagogical regulations, school curriculums, and such like in an abstract manner. What matters is that one has human beings in an emancipated spiritual life who act out of their own free personality, and that one accomplishes with them what one can or wishes to accomplish with them.

The fact that the human being is presently beginning to bring along through conception and birth something that differs from what he brought with him since the middle of the fifteenth century, and the fact that he also brings something different with him out of sleep, both these facts demand that careful attention be given such matters, and that one really permeates oneself with the knowledge of such decisive facts. But from where can this knowledge be gained, if not from spiritual science? The external culture, today's science, certainly does not deal in any way with these matters. It ignores them; indeed, its present methods compel it to do so. I feel obliged to say that the present situation becomes most poignant when one observes the frequent and strange discrepancy between the inner requirements of humanity's evolution and the way in which people meet them. In recent times, the need has arisen to reckon with what flows into the human being from the spiritual world. Those who were intellectual, who did not reckon with what flows out of the spiritual world, made hypotheses about atoms, molecules, and the like. It was thought that bodies possessing volume point back to an atomistic formation, and so on. Out of the root causes of mankind's evolution, the need arose to grasp spiritual facts. And this instinct to grasp the spiritual expressed itself also in something, for example, like the Theosophical Society. One of its heroes is a certain Mr. Leadbeater who wrote an occult chemistry. What did he do in this book? He did something quite horrible, for he pictures the spiritual world in an atomistic sense; meaning, the materialistic manner of thinking is carried into the spiritual world.

I have recently mentioned this whole grotesque thing. Something very clever came about in the Theosophical Society. Someone wished to prove that here is one life; there is the next one (see drawing below). Now, it is so, isn't it, that something has to pass from the preceding life to the later one. One sees the body fall into decay. A proper materialist says that the body disintegrates and it is all over with man. A theosophist, however, wants another earth life to come; so, something must pass from one life to the other! The proper materialist says that all atoms unite with the earth. The theosophist also does not think in any other way than materialistically, but at the same time he tries to think “theosophically.” He wants something to pass from the first to the next life. So he says: “Of course, the atoms become one with the earth; one atom, however, remains and it passes through the whole period of existence between death and a new birth. There it appears again. This is the permanent atom.” One atom! Oh, the theosophists were especially proud then, when they discovered this “permanent” atom! They had no inkling that in this way they were carrying materialism into the spiritual world conception! Materialism induced them to believe that something—they never said what it was—of the many atoms that sink down into the ground is saved; and this fortunate, saved, permanent atom then reappears in the next incarnation. Much has been written about this permanent atom. It is nothing more than an example of the fact that something was borne into spiritual science that people could not rise above, namely, materialism. It permeates, by the way, the whole description of man, in the way it is frequently presented in the literature of the Theosophical Society. As I have often pointed out, they present the physical body as dense, the etheric body as thinner, the astral body as still thinner. Then come degrees of thinness, where even thinking and conceptions become quite thin. Yet, one is still dealing with something substantial, like mist; hence, although Buddhi and Atma are mists, they are still tangible as mists. One does not have the will power truly to discard materialism even in one's conceptual life; to pass from concepts of matter to concepts of the spirit.

All these things prove how closely human beings are tied to the old ways of thinking. Out of such considerations, anybody who honestly wishes to acknowledge spiritual science should take up the inner challenge to test himself as to how far he has freed himself from the old materialistic concepts; or, when he turns to something spiritual, to what extent he imagines this spiritual manner in materialistic pictures, not being aware of the fact that they are just pictures.

It is always a matter of being conscious of this. For if, say, I were to draw a picture of one of you on the blackboard, the picture could mean a lot to me, if the person in question were no longer present. But if I were then to imagine that the person in the picture would shake my hand, or would speak to me, in other words, that he would be the actual person, then I would be suffering from illusions! Therefore, one may naturally sensualize the spiritual in pictures, but one must always be aware of the fact that they are nothing but pictures.

In the case of words, too, people must realize more and more clearly that language is on the way to turning the word into a gesture, and that we should go no further than to allow the word to indicate something to us that no longer is contained in the word. All words will have to take the same direction that proper names have taken.

For philosophers, I have something even better to say. Philosophers of recent times have set up any number of theories. When I say, “The child is small,” they have a concept of “small;” they have a concept of “child.” The “is,” however, the copula of the two—what does it mean? Oh, much has been written about this copula even in the philosophical sense, not just from the grammatical or philological standpoint. Everything that has been written about it suffers from the fact that this verb, “is,” no longer has the meaning of which people speak. It has already emancipated itself from its meaning and the soul content has become a different one. Thus, people in fact philosophize about something that no longer lives in the soul in an alive sense.

This is just an incidental philosophical remark which perhaps doesn't have much significance, but it is supposed to draw your attention to the fact that something that is not noticed by the outer world is by no means noticed immediately by the philosophers. Nevertheless, it is often true that the philosophers are the last to notice the things that really occur in the world, and many of our philosophical systems lag considerably behind what exists outside of themselves!

By proceeding principally from the example of language, however, I have tried to show you quite concretely how present-day human development presents itself. What actually takes place in regard to human development can really only be seen by looking at super-sensible facts. Anthropology can no longer discover what actually takes place, only anthroposophy. This is the reason why anthroposophical cultural thinking must lie at the foundation of everything that constitutes work for the progress of mankind.

• 94 . Ernest Haeckel: Anthropogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen, Leipzig, 1891, p. 871.
• 95 . Max Christlieb: 1862–1916.
• 96 . In “Soziale Zukunft,” #5–7, Dornach, 1920.

Yesterday I spoke of abnormal and pathological approaches to the spiritual world: the path through enrichment of inner understanding, the path of deeper penetration into the world of dream on the one hand, and on the other, the path which sets out to investigate the external manifestations of somnambulists and mediums by methods which are really a travesty of those of natural science. I pointed out that it is essential to follow both these paths and to pursue them purposefully if we are to develop true Initiation-knowledge. Today I propose to examine this problem more closely and to explore those cosmic influences to which man's consciousness and his total being are subject.

It is easy to see that amongst the influences working upon man, apart from those of the Earth, the influences of the Sun and Moon are paramount. Although people as a rule do not pay much attention to this, it is none the less evident today, even to the scientist, that nothing would exist on Earth without solar radiations.

Sun forces conjure plant life out of the Earth. They are essential to all animal life and to the physical and etheric bodies of man. Sun activities are to be found everywhere if we are prepared to look for them; they are vitally necessary to the higher members of man's being. Less attention, however, is paid to the Moon influences. They often survive today in the form of superstitious beliefs, and any precise knowledge about them is frequently distorted by the existence of superstitious notions about such influences. Those who propose to work in the scientific field today feel themselves to be above superstition; in consequence they deny that Moon influences have any significance and refuse to consider them seriously. Now and then, however, not only poets who are aware that the magic of the Moon stimulates their poetic imagination, not only lovers who exchange their tender passion by the light of the Moon, but also sages have a presentiment of the influences of the Moon upon the Earth, each in their different way. And this can prove highly instructive.

In the middle of the nineteenth century there lived in Germany two professors, Schleiden and Gustav Theodor Fechner. Fechner was attracted to a scientific study of the more mysterious workings in man and in the wider kingdom of nature. He collected data and statistical evidence to show that the rainfall over a particular area was related to Full Moon and New Moon and he concluded that rainfall varied with the phases of the Moon. He did not hesitate to defend his point of view against the scientific theories of the day. His colleague at the university, the eminent botanist Professor Schleiden, held a different opinion. He ridiculed the ideas of Fechner and declared that it was nonsense to speak of Moon influences of this kind. Now both professors were married and in the relatively small university town of the day conditions were still patriarchal. At that time it was customary for the wives to collect rainwater because they believed it was ideal for washing linen. Not only the two professors debated the issue, but their wives also tried to get to the bottom of the question. One day Professor Fechner said to his wife: “Professor Schleiden refuses to believe that the phases of the Moon have any influence on the rainfall. I want you to collect the rainwater that falls during one phase of the Moon, and Frau Professor Schleiden to collect the rainwater that falls during the following phase. As Professor Schleiden does not believe that the Moon phases play any part in the matter, there can be no possible objection.” But Frau Professor Schleiden was unwilling to grant to Frau Professor Fechner that phase of the Moon during which, according to her husband, a higher rainfall was impossible! A regular quarrel ensued; university and families took sides.

Now this incident has a scientific basis. When we investigate these influences with the methods of Spiritual Science we find that we can speak of powerful Sun and Moon influences, not merely as a relic of superstitious beliefs, but as a scientific fact. Having stated this, we have virtually exhausted all that modern man in normal consciousness can know on this subject. Modern man lives, so to speak, under the influences of Earth, Sun and Moon, and his consciousness also is fundamentally dependent upon them. For, as I have already pointed out, the external, visible aspect of the stars, Sun and Moon, is not the decisive factor. We have already emphasized that the Moon sphere harbours those Beings who were once the primordial teachers of mankind. The Sun sphere also harbours a vast multitude of spiritual beings. Every star is a colony of beings, just as the Earth is the cosmic colony of humanity. As I have already indicated, man lives today almost exclusively under the influence of Earth, Sun and Moon during the period between birth and death. We must now acquire a more precise knowledge of the spiritual, psychic and physical conditions in which man lives under the influence of Sun and Moon.

Let us consider the two poles of consciousness between which lies the state of dream—the waking consciousness and the emptied consciousness of sleep, of dreamless sleep. If we observe man during sleep when his physical and etheric bodies are detached from his astral body and Ego, we find that between falling asleep and waking he carefully preserves in the astral body and Ego the Sun influences which are withdrawn from the physical and etheric bodies.

From waking to sleeping we experience the Sun externally. We are aware of its effects even when totally blanketed by rain, for we owe our perception of objects around us to the reflected rays of the Sun. During the whole of our waking life we are exposed to the influence of the Sun which illumines objects from without. The moment we pass over into the condition of sleep the Sun begins to shine in our Ego and astral body and we perceive it with our spiritual eyes. Between sleeping and waking the Sun is within us. You are aware that certain minerals when left in a dark room after exposure to irradiation absorb the light and then become luminous. To spiritual perception the Ego and astral body of man follow the same pattern. In the waking state they are to some extent overpowered by the external sunlight. They begin to glow and to shine, since they are now imbued with sunlight between sleeping and waking.

To sum up: in waking life man lives under the influence of the external Sun forces; during sleep he is under the influence of the Sun forces which he now bears within himself until the moment of waking. During sleep we have the Sun within us and only the physical and etheric bodies are left behind. But from the spiritual world during sleep we irradiate from without our physical and etheric bodies with the sunlight stored within us. If we should omit to do this, if we did not irradiate our skin and the innermost recesses of the sense-organs with the sunlight stored within us, then we would soon collapse and die. In fact we provide for the vigour, growth and vitality of our organism by directing the stored-up sunlight from without on to our skin or by assimilating it into the sense-organs.

In effect, therefore, when man's astral body and Ego are outside his physical and etheric bodies during sleep, he first of all irradiates his skin with sunlight and then directs the sunlight through the eyes and ears to the nervous system.

This is the phenomenon of sleep. The Sun shines from the human Ego and astral body, irradiating the skin and penetrating into the human being through the doors of the senses.

Then, irrespective of whether it is New Moon or Full Moon—for the influences are always present, although they change with the phases of the Moon—Moon forces from without invade man's physical and etheric bodies. Thus, in the physical and etheric bodies during sleep we see the workings of the Sun proceeding from the Ego and astral body; in the physical and etheric bodies the workings of the Moon.

We have thus characterized the state of sleep in relation to the Cosmos. During sleep man's inner life is related to the Sun, his external life to the Moon. For, although the astral body and Ego are outside, they are, in reality, his inner being.

In waking life, the situation is reversed. When we are awake, Moon influences permeate our whole inner being, whilst Sun influences invade us from without. In waking life, therefore, Sun influences stream directly into our physical and etheric bodies, and the Ego and astral body within us are subject to the stored-up Moon forces.

During waking life, therefore, the Sun forces stream into our physical and etheric bodies from without and our inner being is permeated with the stored up Moon forces. During sleep the Sun inhabits the astral body and Ego; during waking life, the Moon. In waking life the Sun inhabits the physical and etheric bodies, during sleep, the Moon.

Even when man becomes a night-reveller and by sacrificing sleep invites the next day's hang-over, even then these influences are still present. For although we may choose to ignore nature's laws, the fact remains that things will take their normal course for man by virtue of their inherent inertia, by virtue of the law of cosmic continuity.

If man sleeps by day and wakes by night, the Moon influences are still active within his Ego and astral body during his nocturnal waking life; and the Sun influences also stream into him, but he experiences them as he would normally experience the light shed by street lamps, or dim starlight were he to lie out in the open and look up at the stars. But the Sun forces which man stores up during sleep and the Moon forces which pervade his inner being during waking life are present everywhere. With the physical and etheric bodies the position is reversed.

Man owes his ordinary consciousness between birth and death to this pattern of events. We shall now consider how the situation changes when man attains to higher forms of consciousness. For the relationship of the Initiate to Sun and Moon is progressively modified, and through this change of relationship to the Cosmos man finds his way into the spiritual world.

There is no need for me to describe man's relationship to the world, to the Sun and Moon in normal consciousness; everyone is aware of this when he recalls how man lives in his day consciousness and his night consciousness. The moment man begins to strengthen his inner soul-forces in relation to the normally chaotic dream consciousness, the moment he succeeds in transforming this dream consciousness into an instrument for the apprehension of reality, in that moment he becomes aware that the accumulated Moon forces are present in his Ego during waking life. The moment he actually transforms the dream into reality through Initiation-knowledge, he feels the presence of a second being within him, but he knows that the forces of the Moon sphere live within this second being.

In the early stages of Initiation consciousness man becomes aware that Moon forces are within him and that they always tend to develop within him a second man who is encased within the first man. A conflict now sets in. When the Moon forces begin to be inwardly active in this second man of whom I am speaking, not in waking consciousness, but during sleep, in such a way that this second man is released naturally by these inner Moon forces—when he is set free by the presence of the Moon at night and begins to wake to consciousness in the passive condition of sleep, then this second man concealed within the first, the normal man, seeks to wander around in the light of the Moon and takes the other with him. This is the origin of the somnambulistic condition peculiar to sleep-walkers.

When the Moon is shining outside, it is possible to awaken the second man who then makes contact with magical forces, i.e. anomalous forces which differ in kind from those of nature. He begins to wander around. As a sleep-walker in a diminished state of consciousness he behaves in a way that would be foreign to ordinary consciousness. Instead of lying in bed, as he would normally do, he wanders around and climbs on roofs. He is looking for the sphere which, in reality, he ought to experience outside his physical body. .

When this becomes a conscious inner experience and is directed into normal channels we take the first step in Initiation-consciousness. In this case however, we do not contact the actual external Moon influences; but the Moon forces in our inner being enable the second man to develop his consciousness. We must at all costs prevent this second man from breaking loose. There is always the danger that the second man might break loose, wander phantom-like abroad and stray along false paths. He must be kept under control.

Inner stability and self-control are essential for the acquisition of Initiation-knowledge in order to ensure that this potentially errant second man stays within the body and remains linked to the ordinary, matter-of-fact consciousness associated with the physical body. We must perpetually struggle to prevent this second being, the creation of the strengthened inner Moon nature, from dissociating itself from us. The second being is strongly attracted to everything associated with metabolism, peristalsis, the stomach and other organs, and makes heavy demands upon them.

The first indication, the first experience, of man's dawning Initiation-knowledge is that he follows one of the two paths which have to be traversed—the path that leads through the development, through the conscious realisation of the dream world.

And if he now becomes aware (in the dream state)—and, as I have pointed out, this is a necessary step—he realizes that though it is day without, within himself he bears the night. In the daytime there awakens within him something like an inner night.

When this Initiate-consciousness awakens, the day is still day to the outward eyes and for the external apprehension of things; but in the course of this day the spiritual light of the Moon with its refulgent beams begins to invade and illumine all around—and the spiritual begins to shine.

We know, therefore, that by inner effort man brings the night consciousness into the day consciousness. When this happens in full consciousness, just as other activities are performed consciously during the day, when this vigilant man is able to invoke the night activities of the Moon into the waking experiences of the daytime, then he is on the true path. If he allows anything to enter into him when he is not fully conscious so that out of their own inner momentum the night experiences arise in the day consciousness, then he finds himself on the false path that ultimately leads to mediumism.

The essential point is, therefore, that we must be fully conscious, in full control of experiences. The phenomena and experiences as such are not the decisive factors, but the way in which we respond to them. If the ordinary sleepwalker could develop full consciousness at a time when he is climbing on the roof top, he would at that moment experience an intimation of Initiation. Since he fails to develop this consciousness he falls to the ground when we shout at him to awaken him. If he did not fall, but developed full waking consciousness and could maintain this condition, he would then be an Initiate. The task of Initiation-knowledge is to develop along sound lines, sound in every respect, what is developed in the sleep-walker pathologically.

You will note, then, how a hair's breadth separates the true from the false in the spiritual world. In the physical world there is no difficulty in distinguishing between the true and the false because man can appeal to common sense and practical experience. As soon as he enters the spiritual world, it is exceedingly difficult to establish this distinction; he is wholly dependent on inner control, inner awareness. Furthermore, when man has awakened the night in the day, the moonlight gradually loses its character of external radiance. We experience it less externally; it creates a general feeling of inner well-being. We become aware however of something else. The wonderful glowing light of Mercury illumines this spiritual night-sky. The planet Mercury actually rises in this night that has been wooed into the day; it is not the physical aspect of Mercury, for we realize that we are in the presence of something living. We cannot recognize immediately the living spiritual Beings who are the inhabitants of Mercury, but we have a general impression that, from the way in which Mercury appears to us, we are in touch with a spiritual world.

When the spiritual moonlight becomes a universal life-giving force within us in which we participate, then the spiritual planet Mercury gradually rises in the night consciousness that has been wooed into the day consciousness. Out of this sparkling twilight in which Mercury appears there emerges the Being whom we call the Divine Being Mercury. We have absolute need of him for otherwise confusion will set in. We must first of all find this Being in the spiritual world, the Being whom we know for certain belongs to Mercury. Through our knowledge of this Divine Being (Mercury) we are able to control at will the “second man” who is awakened within us. We no longer need to stumble along undefined paths like the sleep-walker, but we can be led by the hand of Mercury, the messenger of the Gods, along the clearly defined paths that lead into the spiritual world. .

If, then, we wish to find the true paths into the spiritual world we must first undergo certain definite experiences which serve to guide and direct us. The ordinary mystic looks inward. Through introspection he sets up an emotional ferment compounded of God, the universe, angels and devils. At best his introspection leads to normal dream states where it is impossible to tell whether they come from the sexual or the intellectual plane. As a rule the experiences are confused and chaotic. This is the vague and nebulous mysticism which does not illumine the dream, but, as only the Initiate can understand, makes the confusion more confounded.

Such experiences, so instinct with wonder and poetry as described by Catherine of Siena and others, can only be understood by the Initiate, for only he knows what they really experience. Hence, if we pursue our Initiation with the same clear and lucid consciousness with which we calculate, or study geometry, if we penetrate with full consciousness into these things, we are on the right path. Only through the realization that we woo the inner night of the Moon into the external day, do we discover the real spiritual world. Just as no one can deny that the Moon or Mercury rises in the outer world of space, that this is a reality, not a dream delusion, so we find that the spiritual world is equally real and no delusion when we enter it in full consciousness and meet with spiritual Beings, just as we meet with human beings here on Earth. When we seek the spirit without becoming conscious of the nature of the spiritual world we are at all times on a false track. If we remain on Earth and are content to experiment with mediums and their manifestations and do not have direct contact with the spiritual, then we are on the false path. Every activity that fails to awaken consciousness in the spiritual world, that stumbles along blindly and only looks for effects, as superficial occultism for example, is on the false path. Everything which, on penetrating into the spiritual world, immediately experiences this world as a spiritual reality, is on the right path.

And thus an inner, living knowledge of the Moon sphere is the starting-point of the one path of Initiation. And we may say: man's normal experiences in relation to Sun and Moon which are normally experienced in sleep, the Initiate now experiences in waking life. Man becomes aware of the Moon influences as though they were external to him. He woos the night into the day. And instead of the night sky which we normally see studded with stars when we look out into the night, we see first of all the planet Mercury rise up before our inward vision: and if we have followed the instructions described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and have succeeded in developing real Imaginations, then in this Moon sphere during waking life, the world of Imaginations is revealed to us as a reality.

When we enter into the sphere of Mercury influences these Imaginations pass over to the Mercury Beings. We do not now experience mere visions devoid of reality, but we perceive visions as Imaginations. These Imaginations pass over to the beings corresponding to them. Therefore, if we have not advanced far enough along the path of Initiation we may have the vision of an Archangel, but it remains a vision. Only at a further stage does the vision really contact the Archangel and then the real Archangel is revealed within the vision. At an earlier stage, when we experienced the light of the Moon within us, the Archangel was not of necessity there. But now the Archangel has become a reality. Thus we become conscious of the Mercury influences in that our world of visions passes over into a world in which we really perceive the spiritual. I must emphasise constantly that all this can only be achieved in the right way when we are fully conscious.

And then if we pursue our meditations further, strengthen and vitalize our inner being in increasing measure, we attain to the sphere where the Venus influences are added to those of Mercury. Then, when we contact the Venus influences, when Venus rises in this inner night which has been wooed into the day, the visions of the Beings who have appeared in the Imagination pictures, in the images of the true visions, are lost and we face the spiritual world with emptied consciousness. We know that the spiritual Beings are there; we have attained to the Venus sphere where the spiritual Beings dwell. We wait until the Sun sphere draws near to us. The whole process is a preparation for experiencing the Sun a second time. All this takes place during the waking consciousness of day, when we are subject to the influences of the Sun from without. We take the path I have described through Moon, Mercury and Venus. Then the visions vanish. We press on. The entire path was a path leading from Earth, to Moon, to Mercury, Venus and finally to the Sun. We enter into the inner being of the Sun and behold the Sun a second time, spiritually. Its appearance is fleeting and undefined, but we know that we are perceiving it spiritually. We gaze into the inner being of the Sun.

If I may use a crude analogy, it is as if we were to say to ourselves: I see something in the distance, and draw near to it. At first I take it for an inanimate object, take hold of it, whereupon it bites my hand. Now I know that it is not an inanimate object, but a real dog; I realize that it is possessed of inner being.

This crude comparison may draw your attention to the fact that these experiences are rooted in reality. We pass from the Earth through the influences of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and arrive at the stage where we behold the Sun; we realize that it is a living spiritual Being and that spiritual Beings dwell within it.

In the first place this is the path that can be followed. At every stage along the path it becomes abundantly clear that as the Initiate progresses, he must retain his full consciousness and that he is then on the right path, and that if man, irrespective of the way he leaves his body, loses consciousness and enters into the Cosmos that has become spiritual reality before his spiritual gaze, then he is on the false path. We must have an inner realization of the difference between the true and false paths of inner spiritual perception.

Yesterday I indicated how, in accordance with the demands of the time, various psychic and occult societies, using methods which are a travesty of those of natural science, are attempting to investigate the spiritual world through external phenomena. Please do not misunderstand me. I have no wish to disparage these methods for I know only too well how ardently men desire to know scientifically the real nature of the spiritual world through observation of external phenomena. I only wish to point out how these paths must lead into error and what must be the nature of the true paths. Since we are living today, and must continue to live, in a scientific age, it is perfectly understandable that there should be men who wish to investigate the spiritual world by the direct methods of natural science and who consider other, purely spiritual paths to be unreliable. And they come to the conclusion that there exists, on the one hand, the ordinary world in which men live and fulfil the demands of social life and who think and act in terms of this social life. There is nothing unusual in this. It is the accepted way of life. This is the field of scientific investigation which is concerned with external phenomena, with the phenomena of heat, light, electricity, magnetism and so on.

On the other hand, however, abnormal situations occur in life. Men practise automatic writing; they perform various acts under the influence of hypnosis and suggestion. They suspect that an unknown world is revealed in this way in the ordinary world and they want to interpret these external signs and abnormal phenomena. They want to explain how the thoughts and experiences of someone in New York are communicated telepathically to a friend living in Europe who has a psychic affinity with him, whereas normally the news is transmitted by wireless telegraphy. Phenomena of this kind of which innumerable instances could be cited, are investigated by the statistical methods of natural science. This path cannot lead to any goal or final understanding because man lacks the necessary spiritual orientation which must be sought in the spiritual world itself. All these phenomena, wonderful as they may seem, are seen to be aggregates of unrelated phenomena in the external world. We cannot arrive at any knowledge or understanding of them, we can only record them, regard them as extraordinary and formulate hypotheses about the spiritual world which are meaningless, because the phenomena themselves have their source in the spiritual world and do not betray their real nature. However much we concern ourselves with mediums and scientific facts, the spiritual world is always with us, but it does not reveal its real essence.

In this context I would like to recall the investigations which I mentioned yesterday when I stated that Dr. Wegman and I are now endeavouring to provide an accurate description of these phenomena. This method of investigation, even as the other line of enquiry I have just described which seeks to throw light on the inner life of dreams, cannot dispense with spiritual insight. It proceeds in such a way that the phenomena to be investigated are related directly with their counterpart in the spiritual world itself.

But these phenomena are not associated with the isolated and miraculous events which we encounter in the external world in the manner I have just described. They belong to the realm that is perceived by the person who is trained in medicine, anatomy and physiology when his perception of the external form of a human organ—the lung, the liver, or some other organ—is transformed into an imaginative apprehension of this organ, when he gradually begins to be able to see the human organisation in Imaginations.

This becomes possible therefore when we are able to study the organs of man which normally function after the fashion of the abnormal rather than the normal external phenomena of nature, i.e. when we are in a position to transform our initial human, scientific, anatomical knowledge into spiritual penetration into the human organisation. In the method which I described before, we take our starting-point from the total being of man. The path that starts from the individual human organs which we apprehend and perceive directly through a spiritual anatomy is the path that can lead to true results in contrast to the false approach that seeks to understand external phenomena by statistical methods that are a travesty of natural science. You will appreciate, therefore, that before these matters could be discussed, we needed the co-operation of a medical practitioner trained along these lines. Furthermore you will realize that when a human organ is apprehended spiritually in this way by a person who looks at anatomy from this standpoint, he must harbour no doubts about the goal before him. And now there is disclosed to spiritual perception not an inner man such as I described earlier, but an external, cosmic man, still nebulous of course, but in the form of a mighty, gigantic being—man as he is perceived, not as a totality, but as he appears through an inner spiritual perception of his organs. Because these organs are seen spiritually, not merely the physical man, but the cosmic man stands revealed. Just as formerly the world of night—the Moon-sphere—was wooed into the day, so we now woo into this being—who is not the complete man, but a being who consists of the single organs—the impulses of the Saturn sphere.

Just as at an earlier stage the Moon sphere was charmed into the ordinary waking consciousness, the Saturn sphere is now charmed into the scientific consciousness. We become aware that the forces of Saturn work in a special way in every organ, most strongly in the liver, relatively feebly in the lungs and least of all in the head.

We thus become conscious of the goal which demands of us that we seek the Saturn influences everywhere. Just as in the earlier stages we advanced spiritually through the practice of meditation, so now, through identification with the search for Saturn, for the inner spiritual structure of each organ, we penetrate into the Jupiter sphere and come to recognize that every organ is in effect the terrestrial counterpart of a divine-spiritual Being.

In his organs man bears within him the images of divine-spiritual Beings. The entire Cosmos first appeared as a gigantic Being in the Saturn sphere and the whole man is seen as a gigantic cosmic Being appearing as the sum-total, as the inner-organic, cooperative activity of generations of Gods.

Once again we must pursue this path in full consciousness so that we are activated by forces which are able to support and sustain us in the course of our spiritual experiences. We must bear in mind that all these influences are in the first instance in the embryonic stage, but their appearance is transient. It is indeed easy to recognize their presence, but it is impossible to describe them, to retain a clear impression of them and mould them into mental images if we succumb to the inherent danger, namely, that all that arises in this sphere may immediately disappear from our consciousness, so that we are never in a position to contemplate it.

Now those who are today engaged in psychical research never dream of taking the spiritual into account. They prefer to work experimentally in their own way, by inviting certain individuals for laboratory tests. But spiritual realities cannot be reduced to the human level, especially when the declared intention is to apprehend them by these methods and to arrive gradually at a scientific explanation.

The medical book of which I spoke yesterday can only offer a first, elementary introduction to what will become a fully developed science in the distant future. But to the extent to which these things exist in the spiritual world today and are natural to the Beings who live, not on Earth, but on the Sun—to that extent they can be brought into earthly consciousness in the manner I have described. We should not imagine that we can develop spiritual insight by means of laboratory experiments or the abstract anatomy to be found in text-books. The essential point is that all spiritual matters must be directly experienced by man himself. Why is this so?

We can only hold these realities steady in the light when they are supported and sustained by the forces which arise from the common endeavours of man, by the forces which man derives from earlier incarnations on Earth. When this happens there enters into the world of the Saturn and Jupiter spheres what we may call the Mars sphere. From then onwards these things begin to speak. They are revealed through Inspiration. Then we return to the Sun once more with the consciousness of Inspiration.

This is the other path that is demanded of natural science today and which the Initiates of whom I spoke yesterday would prefer to avoid. They feel ill at ease when they are brought in contact with this path, but none the less it is a path which must be traversed.

The path through the Moon sphere, as you will realize from the present discussions, was admirably suited to the old Initiates and we have remarkable information about this Moon path in H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine. If we can distinguish fact from fiction, many important truths are to be found in the Secret Doctrine. But this path leads through the sphere of the Lunar-astral light with which H. P. Blavatsky was intimately associated and where an exalted Mercury messenger directed her interpretations. When we follow her disquisitions we realize how she always directed her imagination to the right source. The remarkable thing about Blavatsky is that no sooner does she feel the first promptings of an Imagination than it is immediately realized. Guided by the Mercury messenger, she is led to a secret library. The idea takes shape within her and the Mercury messenger leads her to a book carefully guarded by the Vatican. She reads the book and we find in her writings a variety of information to which she would otherwise not have had access because it had been jealously guarded by the Vatican for centuries! This path is indeed a well trodden path which must be carefully distinguished from everything that is achieved under firm inner control.

The other path takes the course I have described and relies upon the methods of modern natural science which H. P. Blavatsky detested like the plague. This is the path that must be trodden in the manner I have described, in the full realization that it finds its strength and support in the karmic development of the forces of human beings, not so much for the sake of awakening karmic memories, but in order to hold fast to them for the purpose of describing them.

The science of today must be imbued with human values such as I described yesterday, when I referred to my collaborator in this sphere. It is by discussing concrete examples, not through definitions that we can best discover the origin of the true and false paths. In order to conclude this course of lectures I propose tomorrow to add as much information upon this subject as is possible in the short time at our disposal.

In continuing our studies on karma, we are under the necessity, at the outset, of casting a glance at the manner in which karma intervenes in the evolution of man, how destiny, which intervenes with the free deeds of man, is really fashioned in its physical reflection out of the spiritual world.

To begin with, I shall have to tell you today a few things about that which is connected with the human being in as far as he lives on earth. This earthly man—during these lectures we have been studying him in regard to the various members of his being. We have distinguished in him the physical body, the ether body, the astral body, the ego organism. We can, however, by directing our gaze upon him, just as he stands before us in the physical world, perceive the membering of the human being in yet another way.

Today we intend—quite independently of what we have already been discussing—to consider a certain membering of the human being, and we shall try to build a bridge between what we discuss today and that which we already know.

If we consider the human being as he stands before us on the earth, simply according to his physical form, then this physical form has three clearly differentiated members. This differentiation is, however, not usually observed, because that which asserts itself as science nowadays really looks at things and facts in a merely superficial way. It has no sensibility for what reveals itself when things and facts are considered with a perception inwardly illumined.

We have, to begin with, the human head. Even outwardly considered, this human head shows itself as something quite different from the remainder of the human form. We need but turn our attention to the formation of the human being out of the human embryo. The first thing we can see developing in the body of the mother as human embryo is the head organization.

The whole human organization takes its start from the head, and everything else in the human being which afterwards flows into his configuration is, actually, an appendage-organ of the human embryo. As physical form, the human being is a head in the beginning. The rest are appendage-organs. And the functions which these appendage-organs assume in later life—such as breathing, circulation, nutrition—are, in the first period of the embryonic existence, activities proceeding not from within the embryo, but from without inward, out of the body of the mother, through organs which afterwards fall off, organs which are no longer present later in the human being.

Figure IX

The human being is, at the outset, entirely head. The rest is appendage-organ. We do not exaggerate in the following sentence: The human being is in the beginning head; the rest is, so to speak, appendage-organ. Since that which at first was appendage-organ later on grows and gains in importance for the human being, his head finally loses its sharp distinction from the rest of the organs.

But this gives only a superficial characterization of the human being. For in reality he is, also as physical form, a threefold being. All that which actually constitutes his first form—the head—remains throughout his earthly life a more or less individual member. We fail merely to recognize this; nevertheless, it is a fact.

You will say: Indeed, one ought not to divide the human being in such a way that we behead him, as it were, chop off his head. That this happens in Anthroposophy was only the belief of Professor “Blank” who reproached Anthroposophy for dividing men into head, chest organs, and limb organs. But this charge is not true; it is not at all a fact; for in what is outwardly head configuration, lies only the main outer expression of the head configuration. Man remains completely “head” throughout his whole life. The most important sense organs—the eyes, ears, the organs of smell, the organs of taste—are, to be sure, in the head, but the sense of warmth, for example, the sense of pressure, the sense of touch, are spread out over the whole human being. That is precisely because the three members of the human organism are not to be differentiated spatially, but only in such a way that the head formation mainly appears in the outwardly formed head, while in reality it permeates the entire human being. And this is true also for the rest of the members. The head is, throughout man's earthly life, in the big toe, in so far as the big toe possesses a sense of touch or a sense of warmth.

Thus we have characterized, to begin with, the one member of the human being's essential nature, that human nature which confronts us as something sensuous. In my books I have designated this organization also as the nerve-sense organism in order to characterize it more inwardly. This, then, is one member of the human being, the nerve-sense organism.

The second member of the essential nature of the human being is all that manifests in rhythmical activity. You cannot say of the nerve-sense system that it finds expression in rhythmic activity, for example, in the perception of the eye; for in that case you would have to perceive one thing at a certain moment, then another, then a third, then a fourth, and then return again to the first, and so on. In other words, there would have to be a rhythm in your sense perception. But that is not the case. Observe on the other hand the main characteristic of your breast organism. There you will find the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of circulation, the rhythm of digestion, and so forth. There, everything is rhythm.

Rhythm, with its organs of rhythm, is the second thing to develop in the human being; and it also extends over the whole human being, though its chief external manifestation is in the organs of the breast. The whole human being, again, is a lung; yet lung and heart are localized, so to speak, in the organs so named. The whole human being, indeed, breathes; you breathe in every spot of your organism. People speak of skin respiration. Only, in the activity of the lung is respiration mainly concentrated.

The third human organism is that of the limbs—the limb organism. The limbs terminate in the breast organism. In the embryonic stage of existence, they appear as appendages. They are the latest to develop. They are, however, the organs which are chiefly connected with metabolism. The metabolic process finds its chief stimulus through the fact that these organs are put into motion, perform most of the work in the human being. We have thus characterized the three members that appear to us in the human form.

But these three members are intimately connected with the soul life of the human being. His soul life can be divided into thinking, feeling, and willing. Thinking finds its physical expression chiefly in the head. But it has its physical organism also in the entire human being, because the head exists, in the way I have just described, throughout the entire human being.

Feeling is connected with the rhythmic organism. It is a prejudice, indeed even a superstition on the part of modern science to assume that the nervous system has directly to do with feeling. The nervous system has nothing directly to do with feeling. The respiration and circulation rhythms are the organs of feeling, and the nerves only transmit the fact that we cognize our feelings, that we experience them. The feelings have their organism in the rhythmic system, but we should know nothing of our feelings if the nerves did not procure for us percepts of them. And because the nerves procure for us these percepts of our feelings, modern intellectualism creates the superstition that the nerves themselves are tin* organs of feeling. This is not the case.

But, when we consciously observe our feelings, as they arise out of our rhythmic organism, and compare them with the thoughts which an* bound to our head, to our nerve-sense organism, then—if we are able to observe at all—we shall perceive the same difference between our thoughts and our feelings that exists between our daytime thoughts which we have in waking life and our dreams. Our feelings have no greater intensity in consciousness than dreams. They only have a different form; they only make their appearance in a different way. When you dream in pictures, your consciousness lives in pictures. But these pictures, in their picture character, have the same significance—although in another form—as our feelings. Thus, we may say that we have the clearest consciousness, the most illumined consciousness in our visualizations, in our thoughts. We have a kind of dream consciousness in regard to our feelings. We only believe that we have a clear consciousness of our feelings; we have no clearer consciousness of our feelings than we have of our dreams. If on awaking from sleep we recollect our dreams and form of them wide-awake visualizations, we do not seize hold of the dream. The dream is far richer than our visualization of it afterwards. In like manner is the world of feeling infinitely richer than our mental pictures of it, which we make present to our consciousness.

Figure X

And completely immersed in sleep is our willing. This willing is bound to the limb-metabolic organism, to the motor organism. All that we really know of our willing are the thoughts. I form the visualization: I shall take hold of this watch. Just try to think quite sincerely that you form the visualization: I shall take hold of this watch. Then you do take hold of it. What proceeds from your visualization, your thought, right down into the muscles and finally leads to something which again appears as a visualization—your taking hold of the watch, which is a continuation of the first visualization—what lies between the thought of the intention to act, and the thought of its fulfilment, what occurs in your organism, all these activities remain just as unconscious as your life in the deepest dreamless sleep.

We do at least dream of our feelings, but from our impulses of will we have nothing but what we have from our sleep. You may say: I have nothing at all from sleep. Well, I do not speak now from the physical standpoint; even from the physical standpoint it is, indeed, entirely senseless to say that you have nothing at all from sleep. But psychically, too, you have a great deal from your sleep. If you were never to sleep, you would never reach your ego consciousness.

You need only realize the following: When you remember the experiences you have had, then you say that you are going back in time, that from the present you go further back in time. Indeed, you imagine that it is a fact that you go further back in time. But it is not so at all. In reality you only go back to the moment when you awoke from sleep the last time. (See Figure X.) Then you have fallen asleep. What lies there between is eliminated. And then in the interval from the last time you fell asleep back to the time before the last when you woke up, memory appears again. So the matter continues on, back in time. And by looking back, you must really always insert the periods of unconsciousness. In doing so we must insert unconsciousness for one third of our life. We do not pay attention to this. But it is just as if you had a white plane with a black hole in the center. (See Figure XI.) You see the black hole, in spite of the fact that there are no forces present. Thus, in looking back in memory, in spite of the fact that it contains nothing from life's reminiscences, you see, nevertheless, the blackness—the nights, through which you have slept. There your consciousness strikes against this blackness continually, and that impels you to call yourself an I, an ego.

Figure XI

If this really continued on and you were to knock against nothing, you would never gain an ego consciousness. Thus we can, indeed, say that we benefit from sleep. And just as we benefit from our sleep in the ordinary earth life, do we benefit from the sleep which rules in our willing. We sleep through that which really takes place in us with every act of will. But in it there lies the true ego. Just as we receive our ego consciousness through the black void (see Figure XI), so does our ego lie in that which sleeps in us during the act of will—the ego, however, which passed through our former earth lives.

That is where karma holds sway. Karma rules in our willing. In our willing all the impulses from our preceding earth life hold sway; only, even in the waking human being, they are sunk in sleep.

Thus, when we visualize the human being as he confronts us in earth life, a threefold membering of his organism is observable: the head organism, the rhythmic organism, and the motor organism. That is a schematic division. Each member belongs in turn to the whole man. Visualizing is bound to the head organism, feeling is bound to the rhythmic organism, and willing to the motor organism. Our state while visualizing is wakefulness, while feeling is dreaming. Our state in which willing, in which the will impulses take place is sleep, even during our waking life.

Now, in the head—that is, in our visualizing—we must distinguish two things; we must discover, as it were, a more subtle membering of the head. This more subtle membering leads us to distinguish what we have as momentary visualization by virtue of our having intercourse with the world, from what we have as memory.

You go through the world, constantly forming visualizations, mental images, according to the impressions you receive from the world. But it remains possible for you to call up these impressions again out of your memory. The visualizations you form in your intercourse with the world at present are not differentiated inwardly from the visualizations aroused to life when memory becomes active. In one case they come from without, and in the other from within. It is, indeed, a naive thought to imagine that memory works in the following way: I now confront a thing or event, form a visualization, a mental picture of it; this visualization sinks down into me somewhere, into some sort of pigeon-hole, and, when later I remember, I take it again out of the pigeon-hole. There are, indeed, whole philosophies which are able to describe how the visualizations sink down beneath the threshold of consciousness, then are fished out again in the act of recollecting. These are naive concepts.

There is, of course, no such pigeon-hole in which our visualizations lie when we remember them. Nor is there any such place in us where they are moving about and whence, when we remember them, they walk up again into our head. All these things are utterly non-existent, nor is there any explanation in their favor.

The facts are rather as follows, you need only to reflect on the following: When you wish to exercise your memory, you often do not work merely with your powers of visualizing, but you bring to your aid very different means. I have seen people memorizing who exercised their power to visualize just as little as possible, but carried on vehement outer movements accompanying their speech (arm movements) again and again:

And it undulates, surges, and roars and hisses

[Und es wallet und woget und brauset und zischt.
A well-known line of German poetry. (Tr.)]

Thus, people memorize in this way, and in so doing the least possible thinking occurs. And in order to add a further stimulus—And it undulates, surges, and roars and hisses—they beat their forehead with their fists. Even this happens. It is definitely a fact that the visualizations we form as we occupy ourselves with the world are as evanescent as dreams. On the other hand, what emerges out of memory are not visualizations which have sunk below into us, but something quite different. Were I to give you some notion of it, I should have to draw it thus (see Figure XII). This is, naturally, only a kind of symbolic figure. Imagine the human being as a seeing being. He sees something. I shall not describe the process more exactly; that could be done, but for the moment we do not need it. The human being sees something. It passes through his eye (see Figure XII), through the optic nerve into the organs into which the optic nerve then merges.

We have two clearly distinct members of our brain: the more external brain, the gray matter; and, beneath it, the white matter. The white matter terminates in the sense organs, the gray matter lies within it; it is far less developed than the white mass. “Gray” and “white” are, of course, only approximate terms. But even thus crudely anatomically considered, the matter is as follows: The objects make an impression on us, pass through our eyes, and on into the processes that take place in the white matter of the brain.

On the other hand, our visualizations have their organs in the gray matter (see Figure XII) which, incidentally, has quite a different cell structure. Therein our visualizations glimmer and vanish like dreams. They glimmer, because the impressions are occurring underneath.

If you were dependent upon having the mental images sink down into you, and you then had to call them up again in memory, you would remember nothing at all, you would have no memory. The fact is like this: At the present moment, let us say, I see something. The impression of it—whatever it may be—sinks into me, the white matter of the brain acting as the medium. The gray matter functions by dreaming in its turn of the impressions, making pictures of them. These are only transitory pictures; they come and go. That which remains we do not visualize at all at this moment, but that goes down into our organism. And when we remember, we look within; down there below, the impression remains.

Thus, when you see something blue, then an impression of blue sinks down into you (below, in Figure XII), here (above, in Figure XII) you form the visualization of blue. It is transitory. Then, after three days, you

observe in your brain the impression which has remained. Now, by looking inward, you visualize the blue. The first time, when you saw the blue from without, you were stimulated from outside by the blue object. The second time, when you remember, you are stimulated from within, because the blueness portrayed itself within you. In both cases, the process is the same. It is always a perception. Memory, too, is a perception. So that our day-waking consciousness is actually to be found, as it were, in the visualizing process; but, beneath the visualizing, certain processes are going on which also rise into consciousness through visualizing, namely, through the memory visualizations. Below this visualizing lies perceiving,

Figure XII

the actual perception, and only below this lies feeling. Thus, we can distinguish more intimately between the processes of visualizing and perceiving in our head organism, our thought organism. That which we have perceived we can then remember. But it remains, indeed, very unconscious; only in memory does it rise into consciousness. What really takes place in the human being is actually no longer experienced by him. When he perceives, he experiences the visualization. The effect of the perception penetrates him. Out of this effect he is able to awaken the memory. But then the unconscious has already begun.

In reality it is only here, in this region—where in waking-day consciousness we visualize—there only do we ourselves exist as human beings. There only are we really aware of ourselves as human beings (see Figure XIII). Where we do not reach down with our consciousness (we do not even reach the causes of our memories) there we are not aware of ourselves as human beings but are incorporated into the world. It is just as it is in the physical life. You inhale, the air you now have within yourself was a short while ago outside, it was the air of the outer atmosphere; it is now your air. After a short time, you give it back again to the world; you are one with the world. The air is now outside you, now inside you, now without, now within. You would not be a human being were you not united with the world in such a way that you possess not only that which is

Figure XIII

present within your skin, but that by means of which you yourself are connected with the whole surrounding atmosphere. And just as you are thus connected on your physical side, so are you connected on your spiritual side—the moment you descend into the nearest sub-conscious region, the region out of which memory arises—so are you connected with that which we call the third Hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Just as you are connected through your breathing with the air, so are you connected through your head organism, the lower head organism, with the third Hierarchy. The outer lobes of the brain, consisting of gray matter, only and solely belong to the earth. What is beneath (the white matter) is connected with the third Hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

Now let us descend into the region, psychologically speaking, of feeling; corporeally speaking, of the rhythmic organism, out of which the dreams of our feeling life arise. There we do not at all possess ourselves as human beings; there we are connected with what constitutes the second Hierarchy—the spiritual beings who do not incarnate in any kind of earthly body, but who remain in the spiritual world. They, however, send unceasingly their currents, their impulses, that which streams from them as forces, into the rhythmic organism of the human being. Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—these are the beings whom we bear within our breast.

Just as we bear our human ego only in the outer lobes of our brain, so do we bear the Angeloi and Archangeloi, directly beneath this region, but still within the head organism. That is the scene of their earthly activities; there the starting-points of their activity are to be found.

In our breast we bear the second Hierarchy—Exusiai, and so forth; there in our breast are the starting-points of their activity. And if we now descend into the sphere of our motor organism, if we enter our movement organism, then in this sphere the beings of the first Hierarchy are active—Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones.

The transmuted food-stuffs, the food-stuffs we have eaten, circulate in our limbs, undergo there a process which is a living combustion process. For, if we take just a single step, there arises in us a living process of combustion, a burning up of that which was outside us. We are connected with it. Through our limb and metabolic organism, we are connected as human beings with the lowest, and yet it is precisely through the limb organism that we are connected with the highest. With the first Hierarchy, with the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, we are connected by that which permeates us with spirit. Now the great question arises—it may sound trivial in that I clothe it in earthly words, but there is nothing else I can do—the question arises: With what are they occupied—these beings of the three successive Hierarchies, while they are among us—with what do they occupy themselves?

The third Hierarchy—Angeloi, Archangeloi, and so forth—concerns itself with that which has its physical organism in the head; this Hierarchy occupies itself with our thinking. Were it not concerned with our thinking, with that which takes place in our head, we would have no memory in ordinary earth life. The beings of this Hierarchy retain in us the impulses which we receive with our perceptions. They underlie the activity which manifests itself in our recollection, manifests itself in memory. They lead us through our earth life within this, our first unconscious region.

Now let us proceed to the beings of the second Hierarchy—Exusiai, and so forth. They are the beings we encounter when we have passed through the gate of death, in the life between death and a new birth. There we encounter the souls of the departed human beings who lived with us on earth; but we encounter there, above all, the spiritual beings of this second Hierarchy also, it is true, those of the third Hierarchy, but the second Hierarchy is more important. We work with them during the time between death and a new birth upon all that we have felt in our earth life, all that we have transplanted into our organism. In union with these beings of the second Hierarchy, we elaborate our next earth life.

When we stand here on the earth, we have the feeling that the spiritual beings of the divine world are in us. When we are there beyond in the sphere between death and a new birth, we have the reverse thought. The Angeloi, Archangeloi and so forth, who guide us through our earth life in the manner indicated, live on the same plane with us, so to speak, after our death. Directly underneath are the beings of the second Hierarchy. With them we work on the forming, the shaping, of our inner karma. And all that I told you yesterday about the karma of health and disease we elaborate with these beings, the beings of the second Hierarchy.

And if we look still deeper in the time between death and a new birth, that is, if we, as it were, look through the beings of the second Hierarchy, then below we discover the beings of the first Hierarchy, Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones. As earthly human beings, we seek the highest Gods above us. We seek as human beings between death and a new birth in the profoundest depths below us for the highest Divinity attainable by us. And while we are working with the beings of the second Hierarchy, dab- orating our inner karma between death and a new birth, that inner karma which afterwards appears reflected in the healthy or diseased constitution of our next earth life, while we are engaged in this work, while we work with ourselves and with other human beings upon the bodies which will then appear in our next earth life, the beings of the first Hierarchy are occupied below in a peculiar way. We behold that. They stand within a certain necessity in regard to their activity, in regard to a part, a small part, of their activity. They must imitate—for they are the creators of the earthly—that which the human being has molded during his earth life but imitate it in a quite definite way.

Think of the following: In his will, the human being performs certain deeds on earth. The will belongs to the first Hierarchy. Be these deeds good or bad, wise or foolish, the beings of the first Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—have to mold the counterparts of these deeds in their own sphere.

You know, my dear friends, we live together. No matter, whether the things we do together are good or evil, for all that is good, for all that is evil, the beings of the first Hierarchy must shape the corresponding counterparts. Among the first Hierarchy all things are judged, but also shaped and fashioned. While we work on our inner karma with the second Hierarchy and with the departed human souls, we behold between death and a new birth what Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones have experienced through our earthly deeds.

Indeed, my dear friends, here upon earth the blue sky with its cloud formations and sunshine arches overhead, and at night, as the starry heavens, it vaults above us. Between death and a new birth, the activity of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones vaults beneath us. And we gaze down upon these Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones just as we here look up to the clouds, to the blue heaven, to the star-strewn heaven. Beneath us we behold the heavens formed of the activity of Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. But what kind of activity is it? While we live between death and a new birth, we behold the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones performing the activity which results as the just and compensating activity from our own deeds on earth—our own and the earthly deeds lived through with other human beings. The Gods are obliged to exercise the compensating activity, and we behold it as our heavens which are now beneath us. In the deeds of the Gods we behold the consequences of our earthly deeds, whether good or bad, wise or foolish. And by looking downward we relate ourselves, between death and a new birth, to the reflection of our deeds in the same way as in earthly life we relate ourselves to the vaulting heaven above us.

We carry our inner karma into our inner organism. We bring it back with us onto the earth as our faculties and talents, our genius and our stupidity. What the Gods fashion there beneath us, what they must experience in consequence of our earth lives, confronts us in our next earth life as the facts of destiny which come to meet us from without. We may say that what we pass through to which we are asleep carries us into our destiny in our earth life. But in this lives what the Gods in question, those of the first Hierarchy, had to experience as the consequences of our deeds in their domain during the time between our death and a new birth.

One always feels the need of expressing such things in pictures. Let us imagine ourselves standing somewhere in the physical world. The sky is overcast; we behold the clouded sky. Soon thereafter, a rain begins to trickle down; the rain is falling. What previously hovered above us we now see on the dripping fields, on the dripping trees. If we look back, with the eye of the initiate, from human life into the time we passed through between our last death and our last birth, we then see therein, first of all, the forming of divine deeds, the consequences of our own deeds in our last earth life. We then see how this spiritually rains down and becomes our destiny.

If I meet a human being who has significance for me in earth life, who has a determining influence upon my destiny, what occurs with (his meeting of the other human being has been previously experienced by the Gods as a result of what I have had in common with him in a former earl h life. If I am transferred during my earth life to some locality important to me or placed in some important calling, all that comes to me thus as outer destiny is a likeness of what the Gods have experienced—Gods of the first Hierarchy—as a consequence of my former earth life, during the time when I was myself between death and a new birth.

Indeed, if you think abstractly, then you think: “There we have the former earth lives; the deeds of the former earth lives work across into the present. Previously they were causes; now they are effects.” With this we cannot think very far; we have actually little more than words when we make this statement. But behind what we thus describe as the law of karma lie the deeds of the Gods, experiences of the Gods; and behind all that lie the other facts.

If we human beings approach our destiny only through feeling, then we look up, according to our faith, either to the Gods or to some Providence, upon which we feel the course of our earth life depending. But the Gods—those whom we know as the beings of the first Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones—have, as it were, a reverse religious confession. They feel their necessity lies with men on earth whose creators they arc. The aberrations human beings suffer, and the progress they enjoy, must be equalized by the Gods. And what the Gods prepare for us as our destiny in a subsequent life they have already lived through before us.

These truths must be found again through Anthroposophy. Out of a consciousness not fully developed, they were perceived by mankind in an erstwhile instinctive clairvoyance. The ancient wisdom contained such truths. Then only a dim feeling about them remained. In much that meets us in the spiritual life of mankind, there is still a dim feeling for these things. You need only remember the verse by Angelus Silesius which you will also find quoted elsewhere in my writings. To a narrow religious understanding it sounds like an impertinence:

Without me, God could not a moment live at most.
Came I to naught, must He from need give up the ghost.

Ohn' mich könnt' Gott ein Nu nicht leben.
Würd' ich zunicht, müsst' er vor Not den Geist aufgeben.

Angelus Silesius went over to Roman Catholicism and as a Catholic wrote such verses. To him it was still clear that the Gods are dependent on the world, just as the world is dependent on the Gods, that this dependence is something mutual, and that the Gods must direct their life according to the life of human beings. But the divine life acts creatively and has its effect in turn in the destiny of human beings. Angelus Silesius, dimly feeling, but not knowing the exact truth, said:

Without me, God could not a moment live at most.
Came I to naught, must He from need give up the ghost.

World and Godhead depend on one another and work into one another. Today we have seen this interactivity in the example of human destiny, of karma.

Play in three acts by J. V. Widmann
Performance at the court theater, Weimar

In his latest work, the play "Beyond Good and Evil", Joseph Viktor Widmann, to whom we owe many a novella worth reading and numerous intellectual feuilletons, has taken up the fight against the intellectual current of the present, whose followers see the dawn of a new moral world order in the views of Friedrich Nietzsche. In the Swiss mountains and under the skies of Italy, Nietzsche dreamed and thought of a revaluation of all moral values, of a morality of the future that would not be based on external authority but on man's proudest self-consciousness. Good and evil are not eternal concepts that have come to us through extra-human, supernatural revelation, but ideas that have formed within humanity in the course of time, and which only prejudice and bias can regard as insurmountable limits of morality. The morally strong, who has the strength to act according to his own new impulses, cannot allow himself to be limited by the moral concepts established by a generation of the past that was unaware of the ideas and needs of contemporary mankind. Man should not realize the ideals of his ancestors, but the goals and aspirations that arise within himself. He who lives only according to the ideas of others, however excellent they may be, is morally weak. He who is master of himself, who is able to determine his own standard of morality, is the morally strong, the virtuous. The ideal of the virtuous, the strong, is the unleashing of the individual's inherent impulses; the ideal of the morally weak is the exploration of the moral laws that are supposed to have been given to them from somewhere. The weak want to be humble and submit to the commandments given to them; the strong are proud and self-important, because they know for themselves what they should do. The present is not favorable to such views; for decades the man who expressed them in a wonderful way lived unnoticed. And now that his name is that of an apostle to many, both to those who have a judgment about it and to those who monkey with every fashion, he lives in spiritual derangement in Naumburg, with no memory of the time of his spiritual work.

Widmann is directed against the spiritual seed of this man. If he had done it with Aristophanic comedy, if he had fought with wit and humor against the excesses of a school of thought he detested, no one of understanding would have thought of objecting to his tendency. If Nietzsche were mentally healthy, he himself would have turned against the baseless intellectual lumpenism that now often trails behind his abused banner and wants to live out its life in insignificance and insignificance, because that lies in his individuality. The fact that Widmann now places such an intellectual rag at the center of his drama makes it repugnant. Robert Pfeit is a professor of art history and is supposed to be a Nietzschean. Because of this attitude, he neglects his wife, who is far removed from Nietzschean pride, but whose moral worth surpasses Robert's, and throws herself away on the frivolous, frivolous young widow Viktorine v. Meerheim, who only turns her eyes to the professor because he is supposed to illegally obtain a doctorate for her foppish, limited and ignorant brother. The web into which the cunning woman has spun the weak-character follower of Nietsche's morality of the strong is to be completely pulled together at a masked ball, at which Pfeil wants to appear as Sigismondo Malatesta, Prince of Rimini, and Viktorine as Isotta degli Atti. These are figures from the Renaissance period to which Pfeil has devoted his studies and in whose purely arbitrary view of life he sees his Nietzschean ideals realized. Pfeil's wife is unhappy because of her husband's 'aberrations'. She therefore decides to stay away from the unfortunate ball at which Viktorine wants to crown her disastrous doings; indeed, she has already obtained poison from her brother Dr. Lossen's laboratory because she does not want to survive her husband's fall. As this brother, a traveling naturalist, surveys the situation, a saving thought occurs to him. He has found a substance in distant lands that lulls you into a gentle sleep. He mixes it with cigarette tobacco and lets the deceived Nietzschean smoke a suitably prepared cigarette as he prepares to go to the fateful masked ball. Of course, Pfeil now dreams the dream that cures him of all Nietzschean ills. His ideal people and their opponents are presented to him. Those who profess his doctrine are despicable tyrants, scoundrels or boors; the opponents of his doctrine are noble and good, angels in every respect. Divided into these two camps, we are presented with a disgusting, repulsive and boring picture of the court of Rimini in the form of a pickled dream. And when Robert Pfeil wakes up, behold, he has become a pious man; the dream has shown him the disgraceful deeds to which Nietzscheanism could still lead him. One need not be a follower of Nietzsche to be unpleasantly affected by Widmann's theatrical machinations. The writer of these lines knows the weaknesses and dangers of Nietzscheanism quite well, but it is contrary to his feelings to see J.V. Widmann fighting against Friedrich Nietzsche.

Now just a few words about the performance. Mr. Weiser played the main role, Professor Robert Pfeil, as well as a contradictory and unclear character can be played. If the portrayal was not that of a human being but that of a stereotyped theatrical character, the fault lay not with the actor but with the poet. Mr. Weiser deserves special recognition as director. The staging was brisk and tasteful. Mrs. Wiecke, the best-trained female force in local acting, as the professor's wife, sympathetically portrayed the representative of the humble, gentle, tolerant humanity that has to suffer under the evil Nietzscheanism; Mrs. Lindner-Orban, who as "Kluge Käthe" has already fought against Nietzsche once during this season in a splendid acting performance, this time found little opportunity to show off her skills. A character as marked as this Viktorine could not be given flesh and blood by the best actress. Also worthy of mention are Miss Schmittlein (maid in Pfeil's house), who I particularly liked in the first act, and Mr. Kökert, who played Viktorine's brother in the excellent way we have known him to play similar roles since we first saw him.

Let us now approach the problem which lies before us in these lectures once more from another starting-point. For in spiritual science it must be so: we must always seek to encompass a problem and approach it from many different aspects.

Broadly speaking, one thing especially must strike us when we consider such a life as Goethe's. It is a great riddle in human evolution, even when we take into account repeated earthly lives and their effect in moulding the life of man. How is it that isolated individuals like Goethe are able to produce such wonderful creations out of their inner life? We think especially of Goethe's Faust. How is it that a single human being' can have so great an influence on the remainder of mankind through his creations? How does it come about that single individuals are thus lifted out of the remainder of mankind, summoned, as it were, by universal destiny, to do such mighty works? We will compare the life and work of every man with these great lives and works, and ask ourselves: What can we tell by this difference between the life of any individual and the lives of great men so-called?

This is a question we can only answer if we consider life a little more' in detail by the means which spiritual science affords. All that a man can perceive to begin with, especially with the knowledge of our time, is calculated to conceal certain truths, keeping them far removed from the free and open vision of mankind. This too makes it necessary for us to begin to speak of many things in connection with spiritual science, which alone will enable us to understand them rightly.

In spiritual science, as you know, we describe the human being as follows. Man, we say, as he appears to us in life, consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego. We then characterise the alternating conditions of sleeping and waking. In waking life, we say, the Ego and astral body are inside the physical body and the etheric, in sleep they are outside.

For an initial understanding of the matter that is enough, and it is quite in accordance with the spiritual-scientific facts. But the point is that in thus describing it we are giving only a portion of the full reality. We can never comprehend the full reality in one description. Whatever we describe, it is always only part of the full reality, and we must look for light from other quarters, rightly to illumine the partial reality which we have thus described.

In general, it is so: sleeping and waking represent a kind of cyclic movement for the human being. Strictly speaking, it only applies to the head when we say that the Ego and astral body of man are outside the physical and etheric body during sleep. In actual fact, precisely because they are outside the physical and etheric head of man, the Ego and astral body in sleep are acting all the more vividly upon the rest of man's organisation. During sleep—when the Ego and astral body are working- upon man as it were from without—all that is not 'head' in man, but the remainder of his organisation, is subjected to a far stronger influence by the Ego and the astral body, than it is in waking life. Indeed, we may truly say, the influence which the Ego and astral body wield over the head of man in waking life,—this influence they wield over the remaining organism during sleep. In a certain sense we may compare, notably the Ego of man, to the Sun. When it is day with us, the Sun is shining on our regions of the Earth. When it is night, the Sun is not merely out yonder; it actually illumines the other side of the Earth, making it daytime there. So in a certain sense it is the 'day' in our remaining organism, when for our sense-perception, which is mainly bound to the head, ˃t is the night-time. And it is night for our remaining organism when it is day-time for our head. For when we are awake the remainder of our organism is more or less withdrawn from the Ego and from the astral body. This too must be added, to illumine the full reality and so to understand the human being in his totality.

To understand what I have just said, we must however also realise the connection of the soul and the physical being of man in the following respect. I have often emphasised that the nervous system of the physical body is a single organisation. It is mere nonsense, not even justified by external anatomy, to divide the nerves into 'motor' and 'sensory.' The nerves are all of one kind, and they all have one function. The so-called motor nerves differ from the so-called sensory nerves only in this respect: the sensory nerves are so arranged that they serve for our perception of the outer world, whereas the motor nerves, so-called., enable us to perceive our own body. A motor nerve is not there to enable me to move my hand. That is mere nonsense. It is there to enable me to perceive the movement of my hand, that is, inwardly to perceive, whereas the sensory nerves are there to help me perceive the outer world. That is the only difference.

Now our nervous system, as you know, has three distinct members: first there are the nerves whose chief centre is in the brain—nerves, therefore, which are centred in the head. Then there are the nerves which are centred in the spinal column, and lastly, there are the nerves which we include in the so-called sympathetic system. These, in the main, are the three kinds of nerves which man possesses. Now the point is for us to recognise the relation between the three kinds of nervous systems and the spiritual members of man's organisation. Which is the most advanced, as it were the most refined member of the nervous system, and which the least advanced?

It goes without saying—those that come from the ordinary scientific outlook of to-day will answer—the nervous system of the brain is of course the most refined, the highest; for it distinguishes man from the animals. But it is not so in reality. The nervous system of the brain is connected in the main with the organisation of our etheric body. Needless to say, there are more far-reaching relationships on every hand, and our brain system also has its relations to the astral body and the Ego. But these relations are secondary. The primary, the most original relations are those between our brain-nervous-system and our etheric body. This does not affect the other aspect which I once explained, namely that the whole nervous system has come into being with the help of the astral body. That is an altogether different matter and should be kept distinct. In its original plan and predisposition, it was brought about during the old Moon epoch. But it has gone on evolving, and other relationships have entered in since its prime formation. And so in fact, our brain-nervous-system has the most intimate and important relations with our etheric body. On the other hand, the nervous system of the spinal column has the most intimate and primary relations with the astral body, such as we have it in us now. Finally, the sympathetic nervous system is related to the Ego, the real Ego of man. These are the primary relationships, as we now have them.

Bearing this in mind, we shall readily conceive that there is a peculiarly vivid relationship in sleep between our Ego and our sympathetic nervous system. This system, as you know, is mainly spread out in the abdominal organism, and with its strands it envelopes the spinal column from without ... Now these relations between the Ego and the sympathetic system are loosened during our day-waking life. They are still there, but they are loosened. In sleep they are more intimate. Moreover, the relations between the astral body and nerves of the spinal column are more intimate in sleep than in our day-waking life. Thus we may say: during our sleep the most intimate relationships arise, between our astral body and the nerves of our spinal column, and at the same time between our Ego and our sympathetic nervous system. In sleep, with our Ego we live more or less intensely in connection with our sympathetic system. Once the mysterious world of dreams is more accurately studied, what I am now saying out of spiritual- scientific research will soon be recognised.

If you bear this in mind, you will find the way over to another most essential thought. Something deeply significant is given to our life inasmuch as there is this rhythmic alternation, for example, in the living-together of the Ego with the sympathetic and the astral body with the spinal nervous system—a rhythmic alternation which is really identical with that between sleeping and waking. It will not appear altogether surprising to you, if we now assert: Inasmuch as the Ego is well inside the sympathetic system and the astral body well inside the spinal system during sleep, man with respect to his sympathetic and his spinal nervous system is awake in his sleep and asleep in his waking life.

Only this question may perhaps be raised at this point: How is it that we know so little of this wide-awake activity which is said to be unfolded during our sleep? Well, you must bear in mind how man has come to be. It was only during the present Earth- evolution that the Ego took up its abode in man. The Ego is in fact the 'baby' among the members of our human being. If you bear this in mind you will be less surprised that this Ego, in its life, cannot yet bring to consciousness what it experiences in the sympathetic nervous system during sleep, while it can well bring to consciousness what it experiences when it dwells in the fully perfected head. For the head, as you know, is in the main the outcome of all the impulses that worked throughout the old Moon and Sun and so on. What the Ego can bring to consciousness depends on the instrument it is able to use. The instrument it uses in the night is still comparatively tender. In former lectures I have explained that the remainder of man's organism was not evolved until a later time. Only at a later time was it added to the more highly perfect head-organisation. It is in fact a mere appendage of the latter. We say that in his physical body man has gone through the long stages of evolution from old Saturn onward,—but in reality we can only say this of the head. What is attached to the head is to a large extent a subsequent creation—Moon-creation, nay, no more than Earth-creation. Hence we are scarcely conscious, to begin with, of the vivid life which is unfolded in our sleep, the organic source of which is chiefly in the spinal column and the sympathetic system. But this life is therefore no less vivid, nor is it any the less important to us. Just as we say, In waking life man must be able to rise into his senses and his brain- system, so we may say with equal truth, In sleep he must be enabled to descend into his sympathetic system. No doubt you may reply, How complicated this makes it,—how it confuses all that we have learned hitherto. But man is a complicated being. We cannot understand him unless we receive with open mind these complications of his nature.

And now imagine, happening- with any human being, what I described in Goethe's case. The etheric body is loosened. When the etheric body is loosened, quite a different relationship arises in waking life between the soul- and-spirit and the physical-organic nature of man. He is placed, as I showed in the last lecture, on a kind of insulating stool. But such an effect necessarily involves another. It is very important to bear this in mind. Such a relationship cannot take place one-sidedly. Broadly speaking, we may say: Through the loosening of the etheric body the entire waking life of man is influenced; but this cannot happen unless his sleeping life is influenced at the same time. In such a case as Goethe's the consequence is simply this: The human being comes! into a less close relation to the impressions on his brain, and thereby, even in his waking life, he comes into a stronger and more intimate relation to his spinal and his sympathetic nervous systems. This too was the effect of Goethe's illness. He developed, as it were, a looser relation to his brain, and at the same time a more intimate relation to his sympathetic and spinal nervous systems. Now we may ask, generally speaking, what will be the result of this? What does it signify for the human being to come into a more intimate relation to his sympathetic and spinal nervous systems?

The fact is that he thereby comes into a quite different relation to the outer world. We are indeed always in a very intimate relation to the outer world,—we only do not observe how intimate it is. How often, for example, have I drawn your attention to this: The air which you carry within you at one moment, is outside you in the next moment, and another air is then inside you. What is now outside you, will, in the very next moment, have the form of your body; will have united itself with your body. The human organism is only apparently separated from the outer world. In reality it belongs to the whole outer world. When therefore such a change arises in its relation to the outer world, this will soon make itself felt very strongly in the whole life of man.

Here you may say: 'Surely the result would be that the lower nature of a man like Goethe would come into play with unusual intensity. For that which is connected with the spinal column and the sympathetic nervous system, is generally thought of as man's lower nature, and in this case the forces have withdrawn from the head and come more closely into connection with the sympathetic and the spinal nervous system.'

But we only begin to understand the matter when we fill ourselves with the perception that what we call 'understanding' or 'Intelligence' is not so closely bound to our individuality as we are wont to assume. These are things of which our present time has the most incorrect ideas,—naturally enough, according to its fundamental notions. These are the things which it is least able to tackle—a fact which emerged recently in the somewhat dense and idiotic way in which even the great scholars of our time received the alleged sensational discoveries and experiences with learned animals: dogs, monkeys, horses and the like. You know how suddenly the news went out into the world, about the learned horses, who were able to speak and to do all kinds of other things besides. Or of the learned dog which made such a sensation in Mannheim. Or of the learned monkey in the Frankfort Zoo, which was taught arithmetic and other arts, the details of which one would rather not explain in polite society. For by contrast to the remaining members of his tribe, the Frankfort chimpanzee learned to behave, with respect to certain human functions, not in the way monkeys generally behave, but like a human being. I will not pursue the matter any further.

Now all these things gave rise to great astonishment, not only among the ordinary public, but in the most learned circles. Even the most learned folk were quite enraptured when they heard, for instance, how the Mannheim dog had written a letter, after the death of a dear relative, of how the dear relative (the offspring of the dog) would now be with the archetypal soul, and what sort of a time it would be having, and so on ... It was really a most intelligent letter which the dear dog had written. Well, we need not concern. ourselves with the peculiarly complicated intelligence which was shewn in other matters. Let it suffice that all these animals performed sums of arithmetic. People afterwards spent much time investigating what such animals could do. In the case of the Frankfort monkey a strange discovery was made. When a sum was laid before him, which he was expected to work out to a certain number as the answer, he would point to, the required number. A series of numbers being placed side by side before him, he would point to the correct answer, for instance, of an addition sum. Alas, eventually they discovered that the learned monkey had simply grown accustomed to follow the direction of his trainer's look. Some who had formerly been astonished now declared: There is not a trace of intellect; it is all in the training. Indeed, it was only a more complicated instance, as when a dog fetches a stone you throw. So did the monkey pick out of a series of numbers the one to which—not the line of throw this time, but the line of vision of his trainer was directed.

Undoubtedly, on a closer investigation similar results would emerge in the other cases too. There is only one thing which must surprise us, namely, the fact that people are so astonished when animals occasionally perform these seemingly human feats. For after all, how much more spirit, how much more intelligence—taking intelligence objectively—is needed to achieve what is already so well known to us in the animal kingdom! I mean what the creatures do out of their so-called instinct. Things of untold significance are done in this way. Deep and profound relationships are here contained, which truly make us marvel at the Wisdom which everywhere holds sway, wherever the world's phenomena appear before us. We have Wisdom not only in our heads. Wisdom surrounds us everywhere, like light. Wisdom is working everywhere, and through the animal creatures also.

Incidentally, these unusual phenomena can only astonish those who have not entered seriously enough into the developments of modern learning. As to the men who write such learned dissertations nowadays about the Mannheim dog or other dogs, or about the horses or the Frankfort monkeys or the like,—I should like to read them a passage from Comparative Anatomy, by Carus, published as early as 1866. Nor is this by any means an isolated instance. And since they will not listen to me, I will read the passage to you now. Carus says, on page 231: "When a clog for instance has long been treated with tenderness and consideration by its master, these human qualities are impressed upon the animal, objectively, although it has no sense for the concept of goodness as such. These qualities become amalgamated with the sensible image of the human being, whom the dog sees so often. They cause the dog to recognise the man as the one who has shown it kindness in the past; even without the sense of sight, merely by smell or hearing it will know him. If therefore some injury is now done to the man, or if he is only made unable to show the dog further kindness, the creature feels it as an evil done to itself and is moved to wrath and vengeance. All this takes place therefore without any abstract thinking, merely by the sequence of one sense picture on another.' (It is undoubtedly true that for the dog one sense picture follows another in this way, but at the same time, intelligence and wisdom hold sway in the whole process.) 'It is, however, wonderful how near this interweaving, separating and re- associating of images of the inner sense can come to actual thought, and how like it can be in its effects! Thus I once saw a well-trained white poodle' (not the Mannheim dog,—the passage was written in 1866!) 'which rightly selected and put together the letters of the words which were recited to it. Or again, the animal seemed to solve simple sums of arithmetic by carrying the several figures, written (like the letters of the alphabet) on separate sheets of paper. Or again, it seemed able to count how many ladies there were in the room, and so on. Had it been a question of any real understanding of number as a mathematical concept, all this would have been impossible without true thought and reflection. But in the end it was found that the dog had been trained to perceive a very slight sign made by its master, and accordingly to pick out of the row of papers, along which it went up and down, the leaf with the right letter or number. Then, at another equally silent signal (like the flicking of the thumb nail with the nail of the fourth finger), it would lay the paper down again in another row and thus achieve the apparent miracle.'

So you see, not only has the phenomenon itself long been known, but even the solution, which the learned folk are rediscovering to-day, because they do not concern themselves with what has already been achieved in the development of science. Only so can these things come about, and they bear witness to the advancement not of our science but of our ignorance. On the other hand, the following comment has quite rightly been made. Such explanations as are given nowadays are certainly naïve, for, as Hermann Bahr has rightly said, Here comes Herr Pfungst and proves how these horses will react to the slightest signs, which the men who train them are quite unable to perceive—signs which they make unconsciously and which he himself was only able to perceive when he had spent a long time in his psychological laboratory, constructing the1 apparatus to perceive the minutest play of features. And as Hermann Bahr goes on to say, it is a strange conclusion. Only the horses are clever enough to observe such play of features, while a University lecturer needs many years—I think it was ten years or even more—to contrive the apparatus to perceive them.

There is of course a fragment of truth in all these things. But we must only consider them in the right way. Then we shall see that they can only be explained if we imagine objective Wisdom, objective Intelligence, implanted in the things of the world, just as it is in the instinctive actions of animals. We must imagine the animal included in the whole 'circuit' of objective Wisdom-relationships flowing through the World. We must not have the limited idea that Wisdom came into the World merely through man. We must think of Wisdom holding sway throughout the World, while man is only called upon through his peculiar organisation to perceive more of the Wisdom than the other creatures do. That is the difference between man and the other creatures. He, by virtue of his organisation, can perceive more of the Wisdom than they can. Nevertheless, the other creatures, through the Wisdom that is implanted in them, can perform functions as wise as men,—only that they are filled with Wisdom in another way. For one who studies the world in real earnest, the abnormal phenomena of Wisdom's working are indeed far less important than those that are constantly spread out before our eyes. These are far more significant. If you bear this in mind, you will no longer find the following so unintelligible. The animal is harnessed into the universal Wisdom so as to be connected with it quite instinctively,—far more so than the human being. The animal's route is, as it were, mapped out for it far more exactly than man's; man has been left far more free play. By this very means it is made possible for man to save up certain forces for his conscious knowledge of the world's relationships.

The most important thing is this: In the animal—especially the higher animal—the physical body is harnessed in the same World-connections, in which man is only harnessed with his etheric. Therefore, while man knows more about the World-relationships, the animal lives within them more closely, more intimately,—is more deeply contained in their circuit.

Think, therefore, of this objectively prevailing Intelligence, and say to yourself: All around us is not only light and air, but the prevailing Intelligence is everywhere. We move not only through the space of light, but through the space of Wisdom, filled with the all-prevailing Intelligence. Now you will estimate what it may mean for a man to be connected with the Universe—not in the ordinary way but in another way, with respect to the finer conditions of his organs. In normal life man is connected with the spiritual relationships of the Universe in such a way that the connection between the Ego and the sympathetic nervous system, and that between the astral body and the spinal nervous system, is to a large extent broken in his day-waking life. Because the connection is thus weakened, man in his ordinary normal life pays little heed to what takes place around him—what he would only be able to perceive if he actually perceived with his sympathetic nervous system just as he ordinarily perceives through his head.

Now in a case like Goethe's, because the etheric body is withdrawn from the head, the astral body is brought into a more living relation to the spinal nervous system, and the Ego to the sympathetic system. Such a human being, therefore, comes into far more living intercourse with that which is always going on around him, which in normal human life is veiled from us inasmuch as we only enter into relation with our spiritual environment when we are asleep at night. In this way you will understand how such things as Goethe described were, for him, real perceptions. Of course they could not be so brutally clear and bright as the perceptions we receive from the outer world through our senses. Nevertheless, they were brighter than the perceptions a man ordinarily has of his environment where it is spiritual. What then did Goethe perceive most vividly in this way? Let us make it clear to ourselves by an example.

Goethe, by his peculiar Karma—by complications of Karma, as I have indicated—was destined to grow into the life of learning, not like an ordinary scholar, but in quite another way. What did he experience in this way?

For long centuries past, a man who grows into the life of scholarship and learning has had to experience a peculiar duality. It is more hidden today than it was in Goethe's time. But everyone experiences a certain split, inasmuch as in all our recorded learning we have before us an immense field wherein we find what has been preserved, more or less, from the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch. It is preserved in terminologies, word-systems which we are obliged to put up with. Far more than we imagine, we burrow in mere words. This has indeed become less flagrant in the 19th century, inasmuch as countless experiments have now been made. When we grow up into the life of knowledge we see far more than people used to see. And so, to some extent at least, such sciences as Jurisprudence have fallen from the very high throne they used to occupy. But when Jurisprudence and Theology still occupied their very lofty thrones, much that a man had to absorb as heritage from the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch was an immense system of words. That was what one had to enter into, to begin with. But alongside of it, what was emerging from the real needs of the 5th Post-Atlantean epoch was making itself felt increasingly,—the immediate life which springs from the great achievements of modern time. A youth who is merely driven forward from class to class may not feel it consciously, but one like Goethe felt it in the highest degree. I say again, one who is merely crammed from class to class does not feel it consciously, but he undergoes it none the less. Here we are touching on a real secret of modern life. Take the students who go through their University curriculum. Of course, we can fix our attention on what they actually go through, what they themselves know of it; but that is not all. Their inner life is something very different. They who thus experience the interwoven strata of the 4th and 5th Post- Atlantean epochs,—what if they only knew what a certain member of their being, all unawares, is doing within them? They would have quite a new understanding of what Goethe as a young man secreted into his Faust. For unconsciously, countless individuals who enter the modern life of education are undergoing this.

Through all that Goethe developed in himself by virtue of his special Karma, the human beings whom he came near during his youthful years were to him something quite different from what they would have been to him, had he not had this special Karma. He felt how the human beings, with whom he was growing up, must somehow be benumbed in order not to experience the Faustian life within them in its full reality. They must have it benumbed. This experience he had. For what was living so mysteriously in his fellow-men made an impression on him, such as is ordinarily only made by one human being on another when intimate relationships arise,—I mean when love arises between the one and the other. For when this happens, even in ordinary life the connection of the Ego with the sympathetic nervous system, and of the astral body with the spinal nervous system, is powerfully at work. However unconsciously, a peculiar activity here comes into play. In ordinary life, it only happens in this relationship of love. For Goethe it arose in a far wider circle. He had an immense sympathy and compassion, more or less subconscious, with these poor fellows who did not know what their inner life was passing through, while outwardly they were being driven from class to class, from examination to examination. All this became in him a rich experience. Now experiences become ideas. Ordinary experiences become the ideas of everyday life. These experiences became the ideas which Goethe thundered forth into his Faust. They are simply the experiences he underwent in wide circles around him, because the life of his sympathetic and spinal nervous systems was called, as it were, into greater wakefulness than usual. This was the other pole as against the damping-down of his head- life. But this tendency was already there in him from boyhood. We can see it from the descriptions he gives. He describes, for instance, how in his piano lessons not only the part of the human being which is otherwise concerned but his whole human being was brought into activity. Goethe, in fact, entered into communication with Reality far more intensely with his whole human being than others are wont to do. Therefore, we may truly say, Goethe was more awake by day than other men. So it was in the youthful time when he was working at his Faust. For this very reason he needed what I described in the last lecture as the period of sleep in the ten years at Weimar. This, too, was necessary—it was once more a 'damping-down. '

Thus Goethe was drawn into the Wisdom-filled working—the purely spiritual working—of the World around him, far more consciously than other men. He perceived what was living and weaving mysteriously in the human beings around him. Yet man is always standing in the midst of this. What is it in reality? Placed into the world as we are in the ordinary crude waking life, we are placed into it with our Ego; we are connected with it through our senses and our every-day ideas. But as you have seen, we are really connected with it far more intimately than this. For our Ego is in an intimate relation to our sympathetic system, and our astral body to our spinal system, and by virtue of this relation we have a far deeper and fuller connection with our environment than we have by virtue of our senses-system, our head. And now consider: Man needs this rhythmic alternation. His Ego and his astral body are in the head during his day-waking life and outside of it during his sleep. Inasmuch as they are outside the head during sleep, they develop a vivid inner life together with this other system, as I described before. The Ego and astral body need this alternation of diving down into the head, and going out of it. When man is outside the head with his Ego and his astral body, he develops not only the intimate relation to the rest of the body through the sympathetic and the spinal nervous system. For on the other side he also develops spiritual relations to the Spiritual World. Corresponding to this active living-together with the spinal and with the sympathetic nervous system, we have an active living-together in soul and spirit with the Spiritual World. At night the soul-and-spirit is outside the head, and consequently unfolds this vivid life in the remaining organism. Conversely we must say that in the day-waking life, when the Ego and astral body are more in the head, we are living together spiritually with our surrounding spiritual environment. We dive down, as it were, into a spiritual inner world in our sleep; but on awakening we plunge into a spiritual world around us.

In a man like Goethe this living- together with the spiritual environment i.s only more alive; he dreams it—he is like a man who, instead of 'sleeping like a log,' dreams in his sleep. It is rare for a man to dream thus consciously during his waking life. People like Goethe, however, do come into a kind of dreaming during their waking life. What for ordinary men remains unconscious, thus becomes for them, so to speak, the dream-woven forming of life.

Here then you have a more precise description of the matter. Of course you may now deduce from it a rather conceited notion, for you may say to yourselves: If that be so, we could all of us write Fausts, for we experience Faust inasmuch as in the daytime we penetrate into the surrounding world and live together with it. That is quite true; we do experience Faust. Only we experience it as we generally experience the other pole during the night, with our Ego and our astral body, when we are not dreaming. Only Goethe did not experience it thus unconsciously; he dreamt the experience, and was therefore able to express it in his Faust. Goethe dreamt the experience. What men like Goethe create is related to what ordinary men experience unconsciously, like dreaming and deep sleep are related on the other side of life. It is no different—this is the full reality! Like dreaming and deep sleep,—so are related the creations of the great spirits to the unconscious creations of other men.

Some things may still remain a riddle, even now. Nevertheless, you can here gain some insight into a fact which is deeply connected with the life of man,—which we may characterise somewhat as follows. Undoubtedly we could always tell a very great deal of the relation of our Being to the surrounding World if we were able to awaken, to- the level of a dream, our connection with the surrounding World. We need only awaken to the level of the dream; then we should experience immense things and be able to describe them, too. But this would have a peculiar effect. Think what would happen if—to put it tritely—all men were so conscious as to be able to describe what is in their World-environment. If, for example, all men could describe experiences expressible like those of Goethe which he expressed in his Faust, where should we get to? What would become of the World? Strange as it may sound, the World would come to a standstill! The World could not go on. The moment all human beings were to dream in the way a poet like Goethe dreamt his Faust,—the moment every one were to dream his connection with the outer World—human beings would spend in this way the forces they evolve out of their inner life, and human existence would in a certain sense consume itself. You can gain a feeble idea of what would happen if you consider the devastating effects which are already taking place because so many people—though they do not really dream—imagine that they dream, and go about parroting the reminiscences which they have picked up elsewhere. What I mean is that there are far too many 'poets.' Who does not believe himself to-day a poet or a painter or the like? The World could not exist if it were so, for all good things have their disadvantages, all good things cast their shadow.

Schiller, too, was a poet, and he dreamt many things in the way I just described. But what would happen if all men, who like Schiller were prepared in their youth to become doctors, hung up their medicine on a peg as Schiller did, and (since they would need support) were appointed Professors of History by wire-pulling from above, without ever having studied History in the proper way? What would happen, even if like Schiller they gave very stimulating lectures? After all, the students of Jena did not really learn what they needed to learn at Schiller's lectures. Indeed, by-and-bye Schiller let them drop and was very glad that he need no longer hold the lectures. Imagine that it happened so with every would-be Professor or Doctor! … All good things cast their shadow, that goes without saying. The World mu.st be preserved from coming to a standstill. Therefore, not all men can 'dream' in this way. It may sound trite to put it so, but it is a profound truth-—so deep that we may call it a truth of the Mysteries. For the forces with which ordinary human beings dream must still be used in the outer World to other ends,—namely to create the foundations for the further evolution of the Earth, which would indeed come to a standstill if all men were to dream in this way.

We have now arrived at a point where a very strange thing emerges. What are these forces in men really used for in the World? If, looking with the eyes of Spiritual Science, we ask what they are used for—these forces of which you might say at first, 'If only they were used for dreaming in every human being!'—what do we find that they are used for? (For in effect they are not spent in dreaming but in deep sleep.) They are used in all that is poured out, for the evolution of mankind, in the manifold work of human callings and professions. All this is poured into the multitudinous labour of our several callings.

Compared to such work as Goethe did in his Faust or Schiller in his Wallenstein, our work at our several callings in life is like deep sleep compared to dreaming. In our work at our particular calling we are asleep. This will sound strange to you, for you will say: That is just where you are wide awake. No, in this idea there is a great illusion. Man is not engaged with full waking consciousness in that which is actually brought about through his work at his life's calling. True, some of the effects of his calling upon his soul are brought home to his waking consciousness. Nevertheless, men know nothing of what is actually present in the whole texture of work, in craft and calling anfd profession, which they are constantly weaving about the Earth. It is indeed astonishing to find how these things hang together. Hans Sachs was a shoemaker and a poet; Jakob Boehme was a shoemaker and a mystical philosopher. In these cases, by a special constellation as it were—of which we may yet have opportunity to speak—we have 'sleeping' and 'dreaming' alternately, passing from one into the other.

What signifies—in such a man as Boehme—this interplay, this alternating life in the labour of his calling (for he really did make shoes for the brave men of Görlitz) and in his writings of a mystical and philosophic character?

Some people have strange views about these things. I have told you what we found on one occasion when we were at Görlitz. One evening before my lecture—I was about to lecture there on Boehme—I fell into conversation with a master of the local Grammar School. We spoke of the statue of Jakob Boehme, which we had just seen in the park. The people of Görlitz, as were told, called it, 'the cobbler in the park.' We remarked that the statue was beautiful. But the schoolmaster did not think so. Boehme, he said, is made to look like Shakespeare. One does not see that he is a cobbler. If you are going to make a statue to Jakob Boehme, he opined, you ought at least make him look like a cobbler.

Well, we need not concern ourselves with such an opinion. When a man like Jakob Boehme was writing down his great ideas in mystical philosophy, this was an outcome of something which can only have come into existence when Man was being gradually built up through the Saturn time, the Sun time, the Moon time and on into the Earth-epoch,—when, as we might say, a broad stream was flowing onward which in the last resort came to expression in this work of Jakob Boehme's. It is only by special karmic relationships that this broad stream can so express itself in an individual. Altogether, for the very existence of the human being upon Earth, all that has gone before, through the old Sun and Moon time, is necessary. So, too, needless to say, all this was necessary to create what was there in Jakob Boehme. (Only it was necessary here in a peculiar way.)

But then again, Boehme set to work and made boots and shoes for the worthy folk of Görlitz. How are these things connected? Undoubtedly, the fact that a man could acquire the skill for making boots and shoes is also connected with the same broad stream. But when the shoes are finished, they leave the man, and in the effects which they then have, they have no more to do with his skill and craftsmanship. Now they have to do with the protecting and warming of feet, and so forth. They go their way, independently, and here, too, they fulfil certain functions. They are loosed from the man, and what they now bring about out there in the world, will only have its effects at a later time. For it is only a beginning. The thing is now as follows:—[At this point in the argument the reader must imagine Dr. Steiner drawing on the blackboard as he speaks.]

Suppose I draw the initial cosmic activity which eventually led up to Jakob Boehme's mystical philosophy in this way. I out the very first beginning here. (See the drawing.) Then I must put the first beginning of his cobblery here. This streams on, and in the future Vulcan evolution will have reached the same perfection which has now been reached by what took place from Saturn evolution onward and flowed into his work as a mystical philosopher. This is an end; his mending of shoes is a beginning. We say, the Earth to-day is Earth,—and so of course it is. But if we could follow it back even beyond Saturn, then we should say: With respect to certain things the Earth is 'Vulcan.' We should then have to assume 'Saturn' at this point (in the drawing). Taken in this way, everything is relative. So we may also say: The Earth is Saturn, and Vulcan as it were is Earth. That which is done on Earth in Jakob Boehme's labour at his calling—not in his free production which goes beyond his 'job,' but what he does as his life's calling—that is the starting-point of something which on Vulcan will be as far advanced as that which was achieved on Saturn is now, on the present Earth. For Jakob Boehme to be able to write his mystical philosophy on Earth, something had to be done on Saturn, analogous to what he himself does in his cobbling. And this again he does, in order that in the future Vulcan evolution something may be done analogous to his writing of mystical philosophy on Earth.

A remarkable truth lies hidden here. That which on Earth we often value so little,—we value it little because it is the starting-point of what we shall only value in the future. It is natural for men to be far more intimately connected, in their inner being, with the past. They must first grow together with what is now in the beginning. Therefore, they are often far less fond of it than of what comes over to' them from the past. As to the whole range of those things into which we must yet be placed during this Earth-epoch in order that something of significance may come into being upon Vulcan, the full consciousness (which we have already upon Earth for such a thing as the philosophy of Jakob Boehme) will only arise when the Earth has evolved on through the Jupiter and Venus to the Vulcan time. Hence what is truly significant in man's external labour is wrapped in unconsciousness to-day, even as man was wrapped in unconsciousness on Saturn. For it was only on the Sun that he developed sleep-consciousness, and on the Moon dream-consciousness, and on the Earth waking-consciousness, with respect to his present conditions.

And go man really lives in deep sleep- consciousness with respect to all those things into which he enters when he places himself into any calling or profession. For it is just through his calling that he creates the future values. Not through what delights him in his calling, but through what unfolds without his being able to enter into it. If a man is making nails and he goes on and on, making nail after nail—well, my dear friends, naturally enough, to-day it gives him no great pleasure. But the nail goes on its way. It has its proper task. He concerns himself no longer with what happens to the nail; he does not follow up every nail that he manufactures. Nevertheless, all that is there veiled in the unconsciousness of deep sleep, is destined to come to life again in the future.

Thus, to begin with, we have been able to place side by side what the ordinary human being does—even the most insignificant labourer at his calling—side by side with what appears to us as the highest achievements. The highest achievements are an end; the least significant labour is always a beginning. I wanted to place these two conceptions side by side to start with. For we cannot understand the way man is connected with his calling through his Karma, if we do not know already in a wider way how a man's work in life (with which he is often connected quite externally) is related to the whole cosmic evolution in the midst of which the human being stands. So we shall presently go forward to work out the real Karmic question of a man's calling or profession. I had to give you these conceptions to begin with. For we must first gain, as it were, a universal concept of what flows from man into his calling.

Moreover, all these things are calculated very strongly to mould our moral feelings in the right direction. For our valuations are often incorrect because we do not envisage things in the true way. A grain of corn may often seem most insignificant when we see it lying there beside the beautiful unfolded flower. Nevertheless, the flower of a future evolution lies hidden in the grain of corn. And so I wanted to explain to you to-day, in connection with human work, how seed and flower are related in the evolution of all mankind.

We have seen that if man would enter into the realm to which, among other things, the woven fabric of our dreams belongs, he must take with him from the ordinary world something we designated as an intensified self-consciousness. There must be a stronger and fuller life in his ego than he needs for his purposes on the physical plane. In our age this excess of self-consciousness is drawn forth from our soul by the experiences we gain through occult exercises such as I have given. Thus the first step consists in strengthening and intensifying one's inner self.

Man instinctively feels that he needs this strengthening, and for this very reason a kind of fear and shyness comes over him if he has not yet attained it. He tends to shrink from the prospect of developing into higher worlds. We must continually bear in mind that in the course of evolution the soul of man has passed through many different stages. Thus, in the period of the Bhagavad Gita it was not yet possible for a human soul to intensify its self-consciousness by such occult exercises as may be practiced today. In that ancient time, however, something else was still present in the self; I mean, primeval clairvoyance. This is also a faculty man does not really need for his ordinary life on the physical plane, if he can be content with what his epoch offers him. But the men of that ancient time still had the remnants of primeval clairvoyance.

So, we can look far back and put ourselves in the place of a person living at the time when the Bhagavad Gita originated. If such a man were to express his experience he would say, “When I look out into the world around me I receive impressions through my senses. These impressions can be combined by the intellect, whose organ the brain is. Apart from that I still have another faculty, a clairvoyant power that enables me to acquire knowledge of other worlds. This power tells me that man belongs to other realms, that my human nature extends far beyond the ordinary physical world.” This very power, by means of which there arises in the soul the instinctive knowledge that it belongs not only to the physical world—this power is actually a stronger kind of self-consciousness. It is as though these last remnants of ancient clairvoyance still had the power to surcharge the soul with selfhood. Today man can again develop in himself such surplus forces if he will go through the right occult exercises.

Now, a certain objection might be made. You know that in anthroposophical lectures we must always forestall objections that the true occultist is well aware of. It might be asked, “Why should it occur to present-day man to want to undertake occult exercises at all? Why isn't he content with what his ordinary intellect offers him?” That, my friends, is a big question because we touch something here that is not only a question but an actual fact for every thoughtful soul in the present cycle of evolution. If man did not reach out to anything more than what his senses and his brain-bound intellect can show him, he would certainly be content with his existence. He would observe the things and events around him, their relationships, and how they come into being and pass away again, but he would ask no questions about this ebb and flow of activity. He would be content with it as an animal may be content with its existence. In fact, if man were really the being that materialistic thinking considers him, he could quite well accept his life as such and ask no questions. This is the life of the animal, being content with all that arises and passes before its senses. Why isn't this the case with man?

Remember that we are speaking of present-day man, for even in ancient Greece the human soul was different in this respect from what it is today. When we today give ourselves with our whole soul to the study of natural science, or when we consider all the events of historical evolution and gain knowledge of the external science of history—with all this something else finds its way almost imperceptibly into our soul, something that has no purpose or sense for physical life. Many comparisons have been made to illustrate this fact. I would like to mention one of them because people often make use of it without considering its deeper significance. A famous medical authority in the last third of the 19th century, wishing to enhance the honor of pure science, once drew attention to a Greek philosopher Pythagoras who was asked, “What do you think of the philosophers who spend their time speculating on the meaning and purpose of life? How does their occupation compare with the activities of ordinary men who pursue some useful calling and play a useful part in community life?” The philosopher replied, “Look at a fair or market; men come to buy and sell and everyone is busy, but there are a few among them who do not want to buy or sell but simply want to stroll about and watch what is going on.” The philosopher implied that the market represented life, people busy in all sorts of ways; but the philosophers are not busy with such affairs, instead they look at what is happening and try to learn all about it.

Somehow a great respect for the philosophers who do not seem to take part in any productive activity has penetrated deeply into the minds of the so-called intellectuals among mankind. The philosophers are honored just because their science is independent, detached, self-sufficient. Yet this comparison ought to give us food for thought, for it is by no means so banal as it might appear at first sight. After all, it is curious that philosophers should be compared to idlers in the market-place of life, useless folk while their fellows labor. One might indeed think of it in this way, but we must realize that judgments are passed that originally are quite correct but become altogether wrong if they linger on for centuries, or as in this case for thousands of years. Therefore we ask again if these people who stroll about in life are really to be judged as idlers. That depends upon the standards by which we value human life. Certainly there are those who regard the philosophers as useless loiterers and think they would do better to carry through some productive work. From their point of view they may be quite right, but when man today observes life through the senses and considers it by means of the brain-bound intellect, something steals into his soul that obviously has no connection with the outer world of the senses. That is the point.

This can be seen clearly in books that try to construct a satisfactory picture of the world and life on a purely materialistic basis. It usually turns out that the big questions do not arise until the end. These books claiming to solve the riddle of the universe actually begin to set forth those riddles only in their concluding pages. In effect, when one begins today to study the external world that is the subject treated in such books, the thought slips in that either man exists for other worlds besides, or else the physical world deceives us and makes fools of us because it is continually putting questions we cannot answer.

An enormous part of our soul life is meaningless if life really ends with death; if man has no part in, no connection with a higher world. Indeed, it is not the longing for something he does not have, but the lack of sense for what he has, that impels man to follow up these questions and ask what it is that comes into the soul that does not belong to this world of the senses. Thus he is driven to cultivate something evidently without foundation in the external world. He is impelled to take up occult exercises. We would not say man has an inward longing for immortality and therefore invents the idea of it, but rather that the external world has implanted something in his soul that would be meaningless, unreal, if the whole of existence were included between birth and death. Man is impelled to ask the very nature, not of something he does not have, but of something he has.

In fact, present-day man is no longer quite in the position of a mere loiterer or on-looker, so he cannot appeal now to the Greek philosopher. In those times the comparison held good, but today it does not. Today we might say that buyers and sellers come and go. When at length they close the market and make up accounts they find something that certainly could neither have been bought nor sold, nor can they find out whence it came. That never happens in an ordinary market, but so it is in the market of life. (Every comparison has its flaw and this one is all the better for it.) As we go on living we are continually finding things that life opens to view, yet no explanation for them is to be found in the world of sense. That is the deeper reason why there are people in the world today who despair of life yet at the same time have vague, unrecognized longings. Something is active in them that does not belong to the physical world but keeps on putting forth questions about other worlds. For this reason we now have to acquire a spiritual culture. Otherwise we shall be overcome by hopelessness and despair.

What today we have to acquire, a man like Arjuna had, simply because he lived in the ancient age of primeval clairvoyance. Yet it also was a period of transition, because he belonged to that time in evolution when only the last remnants and echoes of that clairvoyance remained. If we are to understand the Bhagavad Gita it is important to realize that at the time of its origin men were entering an age in which this old clairvoyance gradually became lost. In this lies the deep undercurrent of that sublime poem; or we may say, the source of the breath poured out through it. For this song resounds with tones of a great turning-point in time, when, from the twilight of the old clairvoyance, a night was to begin in which a new force could be born to mankind. Only in that night could a force be born that the soul of today possesses, but that souls of that time did not yet possess. About Arjuna then we can say that ancient clairvoyance is still present in his soul but it is flickering out. It is no longer a strong, spontaneous force but requires such a harrowing experience as I have described to re-awaken it. What then can Arjuna perceive through this awakening of the ancient power of vision, which at other times was dying away within him? He sees the Spiritual Being who is called Krishna.

Here it is necessary to point out that though man may lift his soul today into that realm where his dreams are woven, this is no longer enough to give him a full understanding of Krishna's being. Even if we develop the forces enabling us to consciously pass into the region of dream-consciousness, we still are not able today to fully discover what Krishna is. Referring again to what was said yesterday, let us call our everyday consciousness the lowest realm. About it lies a realm we are unconscious of in daily life, or rather that reaches us in a kind of phantom picture veiled in our dreams. When we push these aside impressions from another world enter. Into all the experiences man has of his physical environment something now enters that is like a kind of overflow in his soul and belongs really to other worlds, to inner super-sensible worlds. Now he has an experience that cannot be described as a reminiscence of ordinary life, because the world now has a different aspect from anything known on the physical plane. We discover that we are seeing something we do not see in the ordinary world. Though we often imagine that we see light, in reality it is not so. On the physical plane we never see light, only color and different shades of color, darker and lighter colors. We see the effects of light but light itself speeds invisibly through space. We can easily convince ourselves of this fact. When a ray of light strikes through the window we see a kind of streak of light-rays in the room, caused by dust in the air. We see reflections of light from the glittering particles of dust, the light itself remaining invisible.

After lifting his experience to the higher realm we have spoken of, man really does begin to see the light itself. There he is surrounded by flowing light, just as in the physical world he lives in flowing air. Only he does not enter this world with his physical body. He has no need to breathe there. Man enters that world with the part of his being that needs the light as in the physical world his body needs the air. In this region light is the element of life—light-air we might call it—and it is a necessity for existence.

Further, that light is permeated and transfused with something not unlike the cloud-forms shaping and re-shaping in our atmosphere. The clouds are water, but up there what meets us like floating forms is nothing else than the weaving life of sound, the music of the spheres. Still further we shall perceive the flowing of life itself. Thus we may begin to describe the world into which our soul enters, but the terms of our description must remain meaningless for the physical world. Perhaps he who uses words most lacking in meaning for the physical world will best describe that other world that has a far higher reality.

Of course our materialistically-minded friends will find it easy to refute us. Their arguments against what the occultist has to say are plausible enough. The occultist himself knows how easily such objections are made, for the very reason that the higher worlds are best described by words not suitable for things of the physical plane. For example he would speak of light-air, or air-light. On the physical plane there is no such thing, but over there, there is. Indeed, when we penetrate into that realm we also discover what it is to be deprived of this life element, to have insufficient light-air. We feel a pain of suffocation in our soul, comparable to losing our breath for lack of air on the physical plane. There we also find the opposite condition, a fullness of pure, holy light-air when we live in it and when we perceive spiritual beings who manifest themselves in full clearness in this element of airy light and have their life in it. Those are the beings who stand under the guidance of Lucifer. The moment we enter that realm without sufficient preparation, without proper training, Lucifer gains the power to deprive us of the light-air we need. We can say he suffocates our souls.

It is not quite the same effect as suffocation on the physical plane. But like a polar bear transported to the South, we thirst and long for something that can reach us from the spiritual treasure, the spiritual light of the physical plane. That is just what Lucifer desires, for then we do not pay attention to all that comes from the higher hierarchies but thirstily cleave to all that Lucifer has brought onto the physical plane. This is what happens if we have not sufficiently trained ourselves in preparation. Then when we stand before Lucifer he takes away the light-air from us. We crave breath, and long for the spiritual that comes from the physical plane.

Let us suppose that someone goes through a training that brings him far enough to enter the higher worlds, to reach this upper region. But suppose he has not done all that belongs to the training; suppose he has forgotten that with all his exercises he must at the same time be ennobling his moral sense, his moral feelings, that he must tear all earthly ambitions and lust for power from his soul. Indeed a man can reach the higher worlds even though he is vain and ambitious, but then he takes these qualities with him. When a person has not purified his moral feelings Lucifer takes the light-air away from him, so that he perceives nothing of what is really there, and instead he longs for the things on the physical plane. He breathes in, so to say, what he has been able to perceive on the physical plane. So he may imagine that he perceives something only to be seen spiritually in the light-air. He imagines that he sees the different incarnations of various human beings. But it is not so. He does not see them because he lacks the air-light. Instead, like a thirsty being, he sucks up into that realm things of the physical plane below, and describes all manner of things acquired there as though they were processes in the higher region. Actually there is no more harmful way of raising one's soul into the higher worlds than by means of vain and earthly love of power! If one does this, one will never be able to bring down true results of knowledge. What one brings will be a mere reflection, a phantom picture of the speculations and conjectures one may have made in the physical world.

Here we have been describing what may be called the general scenery of that realm. There are also Beings we meet there, whom we may call Elemental Beings. In the physical world we often speak of the forces of nature. In that higher realm these same forces manifest themselves as real beings. There we make a definite discovery. Through the actual facts that meet us we discover that whereas on the physical plane good and evil exist together, in that higher realm there are separate, specific forces of good and evil. Here in the physical world good and evil are combined and interwoven in each human soul. One has more of a tendency to good, another less. In that realm there are evil beings who exist to battle against the work of good beings. On entering that realm, therefore, we already have occasion to make use of the strengthened self-consciousness we mentioned yesterday. We have need of the more acute power of judgment that must come with our enhanced self. Then we may really be in a position to say that here in the higher realm there must needs be beings who have the mission of evil. Such beings have to exist alongside those who have the mission of good.

We often hear it asked, “Why didn't the all-wise God of the universe simply create the good alone? Why isn't it everywhere, always?” Now we gain this conviction, however, that if only the good were present the world would become one-sided, it would not bring forth all the fullness of life that it does yield. The good must have something to oppose it. This, in fact, can already be realized on the physical plane, but in that higher realm we perceive it with far greater force. There we see that only people who are content with a merely sentimental and dreamy outlook can imagine that good beings alone could bring about the purposes of the universe. In the realm of everyday life we might do with sentimentality, but we cannot tolerate it when we enter the stern realities of the super-sensible world. There we know that the good beings alone could not have made the world. They would be too weak to mold this universe. In the totality of evolution those forces must be included which come from the evil beings. There is great wisdom in this fact that evil is mingled in cosmic evolution. Thus, one of the things we have to get rid of when we enter spiritual life is sentimentality. Bravely and unflinchingly we must approach the dangerous truths that dawn upon us when we perceive the battle that is fought in just this realm—the battle between the good and evil beings that can there be revealed to us. All these are experiences we have when we have trained and adapted our souls to entering consciously into this realm.

So far we have only entered the realm of dreams. We human beings live in still another realm, one for which we are so little adapted in ordinary life that we generally have no perceptions whatever in it. It is the realm through which we live in dreamless sleep. Here already an absolute paradox appears, for sleep after all is characterized by the complete cessation of consciousness. In normal human life today man ceases to be conscious when he falls to sleep, and he does not regain consciousness till he wakes up again. In the age of primeval clairvoyance this realm too was something the soul could experience. If we go back into those ancient periods of evolution there was actually a condition of life corresponding to our sleep in which, however, man could perceive in a still higher, still more spiritual world than the world of dreams. This was true even in early post-Atlantean times. There we find conditions that, in regard to the usual human processes, are exactly like the condition of sleep, but are not, because they are permeated by consciousness. When we have reached this height we do not see the physical world, even though we still see the world of light-air, of sound, of cosmic harmony, and of the battle between the good and evil beings. The world we see may be said to be still more fundamentally different from all that exists in the physical world. So it is yet more difficult to describe than the world we find on entering the region of dream consciousness. I would like now to give you an idea of how one's consciousness in this realm works, and of its actual effects.

Anyone who describes that sublime world into which our dreams find their way, and about which I have given the merest hint, will be labeled a fantastic visionary by the bigoted intellectualism of today. If anyone begins to speak of that still higher realm through which man ordinarily sleeps, then people, if they take any notice at all, do not stop at abusing him as a visionary. They altogether lose their heads. We have already had an example of this. When my books were first published in Germany, the critics, who are supposed to represent the intellectual culture of today, attacked them with all sorts of insinuations. In one point, however, their criticism ran absolutely wild; in fact, they became foolish in their fury. I mean the point where I had to call attention to something that could only originate in the spiritual realm we are now considering. This was the question of the two Jesus children mentioned in my book, The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind.

For those of our friends who have not heard of this I may say once more that it appeared as a result of occult research, namely, that at the beginning of our era not only one but two Jesus children were born. One was descended from the so-called Nathan line of the House of David, the other from the Solomon line. These two children grew up side by side. In the body of the Solomon child lived the soul of Zarathustra. In the twelfth year of the child's life this soul passed over into the other Jesus child and lived in that body until its thirtieth year. Here we have a matter of the deepest significance. Zarathustra's soul went on living in the body that until its twelfth year had been occupied by a mysterious soul. And then, only from the thirtieth year onward, there lived in this body the Being Whom we call the Christ, Who remained on earth altogether for three years.

We really cannot take amiss the reaction of the critics to this statement, as it is natural that they should want to have something to say about the matter from their scholarly viewpoint. But what they set out to criticize comes from a realm in which they are always fast asleep! So we cannot expect them to know anything about it. Yet a healthy human understanding is able to grasp this fact. People only will not give themselves a chance to understand. In their haste they change their power of understanding into bitterness and fury.

Such truths as that about the two Jesus children, which are to be found in this higher realm, never have anything to do with sympathy and antipathy. We find such truths; we never experience them in the way we gain experience in the usual manner of knowledge in the physical world, or even in the realm of dream life. In both these areas we are there, so to say. We are present at the origin of our knowing or perception. This is true also of those occultists who are conscious only as far as the realm of dreams. We can say that a person witnesses the birth of his knowledge, of his perceptions, in that realm, but truths like this concerning the two Jesus children can never be found in this way. When truths come to us in that higher realm and enter our consciousness, the moment in which we actually acquired them has long since passed. We experienced them long before we met them with our full consciousness, as we have to do in our time. We have them already in us. So that when we reach these truths—the most important, the most living and essential of all truths—we distinctly have the feeling that when we gained them we were in an earlier time than the present; that we are now drawing out of the depths of our soul what we acquired in an earlier time and are bringing it into our consciousness. Such truths we discover in ourselves, just as in the outer world we come across a flower or any other object. Even as in the outer world we can think about an object that is simply there before us, so can we think about these truths when we have discovered them in ourselves, in our own self.

In the outer world we can only judge an object after we have perceived it. In the same way we find those sublime truths objectively in ourselves, and only then do we study them, in ourselves. We inwardly investigate them as we investigate the external facts of nature. Just as it would have no meaning to ask of a flower whether it is true or false, there would be no sense in asking about these truths that we simply come upon in ourselves, whether they are true or false. Truth and falsehood only come into the picture when it is a question of our power to describe what we find or what arises in our consciousness. Descriptions can be true or false. Truth and falsehood do not concern the facts, they concern the manner in which any thinking being approaches or deals with those facts. Thus, when we do research and get results in this realm we are really looking into a region of the soul we have lived in before but did not look into with our consciousness.

In carrying on our occult exercises we are best able to enter this realm if we pay positive attention to those moments when from the depths of our soul not mere judgments arise, but facts; facts that we know we did not consciously take part in originating. The more we are able to wonder at the things there unveiled, like the objective things of the outer world, the more astonishing it all is for us, the better are we prepared to enter into this realm. So, as a general rule, we do not make a good entrance if we have all sorts of conjectures and constructions in our minds. For example, there is no better way of finding nothing at all about the previous incarnations of some person than to speculate as to who they may have been earlier. Let us say you wanted to investigate the earlier incarnations of Robespierre. The best way of finding out nothing at all about him would be to search about for historical personalities you think might possibly have been his previous incarnations. In that way you never can discover the truth. You must get out of the habit of making conjectures and theories and forming opinions.

He would become a true occultist who would set himself to making as few judgments as possible about the world because then he will most quickly attain the condition in which the facts can meet him. The more a man cultivates silence in his conjectures and opinions, the more will his soul be filled with the actual truths of the spiritual world. Someone, for example, who had grown up with a particular religious bias, with definite feelings and ideas or perhaps views about the Christ—such a person in general would not be the most adapted to discover a truth like the history of the two Jesus children. Just when one feels a little neutral about the Christ event one is well prepared for such a discovery, provided of course he has made all the other necessary preparations. People with a Buddhistic bias will least easily be able to talk sense about Buddha, just as those with a Christian bias will least easily be able to talk sense about Christ. This is always true.

If we would enter into the third realm just described, it is necessary that we go through all the bitterness—for in ordinary life we cannot help feeling it in this way—of becoming, so to say, a twofold person. We are, in fact, twofold beings in ordinary life, even if we make no conscious use of the one-half of our existence, for we are both waking and sleeping beings. Different as these two conditions are, so is that third realm in the higher worlds different from this physical world. That realm has a peculiar existence of its own. There also we are surrounded by a world, but one so altogether new and different that we get to know it best if we extinguish not only the sense impressions of this world of ours but even our feelings and sentiments and all the things that have the power to arouse our passions and enthusiasms. In ordinary life man is so little fitted for conscious experience of that higher world that his consciousness is extinguished every night. He can only attain experience there if he is able to become a twofold man. Those who have the power at will to forget and to blot out all their interests in this physical world, are then able to enter that higher realm. The world between—that is to say, where our dreams are woven—is made of the materials of both worlds, it is penetrated by reflections of the higher worlds of which man is generally not aware, and by reminiscences of ordinary consciousness. That is why no one can perceive the true causes of events in the physical world who is not able to penetrate with understanding into that third realm.

Now if a man of today wishes to discover through his own experience who Krishna is, he can only make that discovery in the third realm. Arjuna's impressions, which in the sublime Gita are described to us through the words of Krishna, have their origin in that world. For this reason I have had to prepare the way today by speaking of man's ascent into the third realm. Only so will you be able to understand the origin of the strange and wondrous truths that Krishna speaks to Arjuna—truths that sound so altogether different from anything that is spoken in ordinary life.

These lectures are to help us gain knowledge of Krishna; that is to say, of the very essence of the Bhagavad Gita. Also, the occult principles of this wonderful Song are to give you something which, if you really make use of it, can enable you to find the way into the higher worlds because the way is open to every man. We have only to realize that the grain of gold with which we must begin is ours once we are aware of how many things there are in which the highest spiritual beings live and work and are interwoven in our everyday life.

Every occultist knows the great dangers that lie in the frivolous popularization of occult truths and insights. On the other hand, however, it should also be taken into account that Theosophy, among other things, imposes the duty of spreading and advocating certain occult teachings that come only from occult research. When we do this, those who have familiarized themselves with such teachings feel the need to learn something about the methods by which such insights are actually gained. Theosophy speaks of the development of humanity and of the world, of races, rounds and so on, of planetary systems and other things. Those who hear these truths will, even if they believe that the intellect can grasp them, still feel the need to ask what the paths are by which such insights are attained.

Now, in general, it is not easy to talk about this path. However, today a few remarks will be made about the nature of what the occultist calls clairvoyance. One must not confuse occultism and theosophy. Theosophy is basically only the external expression for the experiences gained in the field of occultism. Occultism is the source of the theosophical teachings. Today we will talk about one chapter of this occultism.

The experiences on which the theosophical teachings are based are made in completely different states of consciousness than those that are characteristic of the ordinary person. Two such different states of consciousness come into particular consideration. We will start with what the ordinary person experiences. This person has their everyday, waking daytime consciousness – through which they are able to perceive the things around them and to educate themselves about cause and effect and the other laws of this physical world through their mind, through their reason, in short, through their intellectuality.

But this state of consciousness is not the only state of experience for the everyday person. The human experience extends far beyond what is accessible to his consciousness. The normal person has two other states of experience, which are the so-called dream sleep and dreamless deep sleep.

This second state of consciousness, sleep interspersed with dreams, does not plunge the person completely into the unconscious. The person is able to bring something into the waking consciousness. However, what he brings into consciousness is not the content of the actual experience he had during the dream-filled sleep. The experience is something quite different from what he later becomes aware of. It is, so to speak, only a bringing across of individual fragments, of fragmentary mirror images. What a person experiences in a completely different world during dream-filled, not very deep sleep, are coherent, ordered facts. And of these facts, which he experiences but of which he does not become aware, he has some memory. He has brought them into his memory for the waking consciousness and later remembers what happened over there. However, the content is remembered only sparsely and distorted. This content cannot be compared in any way with what is experienced over there.

This is a world that, if it could be seen through, would be filled with the facts of the so-called astral world. Just as the physical world is filled with the facts of the sensual world, here one experiences the spiritual facts. But over there we experience feelings, passions, desires, cravings, instincts as facts. We experience them only as they exist as mental processes, not as they otherwise are in our personal form, refracted through our earthly life. It is simply a different world that the human being experiences there and from which he only brings pieces over into the ordinary waking consciousness of the day. No one should ever characterize the experiences in the so-called astral realm by what he brings over from the content of his dreams into his waking consciousness. This is just as rich, indeed much richer, than the world of the senses, and in terms of the contrasts it offers, it cannot be compared to what goes on in our world of the senses. The manifoldness of what appears good, bright, radiant, and, on the other hand, of the terrible, repulsive, and gruesome phenomena, cannot be compared to what our sensory world offers.

The third state is dreamless sleep. In most people, very little of the experiences that occur during the dreamless sleep state come through into the waking day consciousness. What comes across is usually not consciously perceived. The experience of dreamless sleep appears in the waking 'day consciousness' not in its causality, but in its effect. What is experienced there are the great laws of reality, the true, to a certain extent much more true, original causes and essences of our world. What takes place in the outer physical forms of existence in the animal and plant kingdoms (the mineral kingdom does not belong here, for nothing can be learned about the true nature of the mineral kingdom in dreamless sleep) — the way in which life manifests itself in these kingdoms, how forms develop from one to another, what great laws life actually has – that, if we were to penetrate it in its true form, would suddenly illuminate many connections in life that are otherwise mysterious and obscure in the ordinary consciousness. Man undergoes all this without retaining anything consciously in his waking day consciousness.

This is nothing more than a description of the three states, of which only one is a real state of consciousness that we encounter in people.

Now it is self-evident that none of the experiences gained in this way can be the content of occult teaching. Occult experience begins only when a very specific transformation of the state of consciousness has taken place. This transformation will be briefly characterized.

There is a point in ordinary human consciousness that marks a turning point in the development of every person who is in any way reflective or sensible. This is the awakening of self-awareness. You all know that at first the child does not speak in the first person, but says: “Charles wants,” “Mary wants.” It is a very specific stage in the development of the human being when the possibility arises that he may say “I”. This awakening of self-awareness is different from all other facts that one can experience. It is a very intimate experience. Everyone can say “I” to themselves. You can give any other thing a different name. I can only say “I” to myself and no one can say “I” to another “I”. Only a person can refer to themselves with the very specific name, “I”.

Self-awareness is something completely different. The thought of the ego is exclusive and cannot be compared to any other. There is now a way to work on the ego in such a way that, just as it is only within itself in ordinary self-awareness, its entire world of thought is shaped from the center of the ego in the same way that the thought of the ego usually occurs. When, through diligent and sustained meditation, a person brings himself to face his entire world of thoughts in the same way that an ordinary person faces only the point of the ego, and not only his world of thoughts but the world of thoughts in general, then he is called an intuitive person. Then the world of thoughts emerges from the center of his being itself. He then produces thoughts in the same sense as he previously produced thoughts of the ego.

This stage of ego development can be attained. Through correct meditation in a certain sense, a person can come to relate to his world of thoughts in the same way as he previously related to his ego. Two sentences in “Light on the Path” have the power, when applied in the right way, to bring the ego to this point of view. They are not mere abstract sentences, but are written out of the astral experience of thousands of years. These two sentences, which are an extraordinary means of education, are:

Before the eye can see, it must wean itself from tears.
Before the ear can hear, its sensitivity must fade.

There is strength and life in these sentences; they need only be applied in the right way. When man has reached this stage, then something else necessarily occurs: he is able to experience in an orderly way what is otherwise only experienced in dreamless sleep and what otherwise comes only in fragments. In this way, this world, which takes place in the astral, becomes just as real to him as the world of the senses was real to him before. Man then has the memory of the facts of the Kama world.

The next higher level is where the person no longer has dream-filled sleep, but is able to look into the higher world through intuition. This world is full of spiritual clarity; there is no longer any arbitrariness. Two perceptions are associated with this intuitive state. When a person has reached this stage of development, he perceives in his own experience the dangerous enemies of human life: the elemental spirits of birth and death, which continually lurk in the adjoining natural realms, which are always there, which try to seduce the human being, and so on. These elemental beings, which move into the astral body and influence its desires, are always there. In ordinary life, they are hidden by the veil of Maya.

These enemies in the neighboring natural realms are what a person first becomes aware of at this stage of development. And this is of the utmost importance for development in occultism. In this state, which can be compared to dreamless sleep, the person perceives – this is his first experience in this state of consciousness – what the enemies are that pull him down and lead him to the lower realms. It is good that these forces, which thus prevail in man, are hidden from the ordinary person. It is good that a veil is spread over them here. For it is not speaking of them, but really getting to know them, that only those who have attained a certain level of self-confidence and moral strength within themselves can bear. Therefore, no true occultist will give instructions on how to reach such a level before a person has achieved a decisive development of character in the direction of self-confidence, morality and presence of mind, so that he does not run the risk of losing himself, but can hold his powers together. These three qualities are required for every occultist.

That which is hidden from the consciousness of the day in this way, and which confronts man at this stage, is called the Guardian of the Threshold. He guards the threshold because he must not allow the ordinary man to see what is behind it. However, it loses much of its horror if the person has the designated character traits or has acquired them to a certain degree. By the end of the Atlantean era, people had ceased to develop these moral powers sufficiently. Hence the peculiar conditions arose that are known from the description of Atlantis.

In the continuation of this path, man must not only be brought to experience the world of thought as his own, but in order to be able to connect with reality at a higher level, he must also transform the entire world of feeling. Then the ability to see things directly in the higher worlds during the waking day consciousness begins, for example the human aura; initially only in the lower stages. When a person has reached this stage, he has basically already opened up a source of extraordinarily profound experience. Then he lives just as consciously in the spiritual as the ordinary person lives within the sense things.

On the third level, however, he lives where there is no longer any conscious experience for the ordinary person. He experiences the same as the ordinary person in the outer sense world, only on a higher level. He then experiences the laws of the world of causes. There is no longer any difference between the experiences in the so-called unconscious state of sleep and the conscious state of the day. This is the continuity of consciousness, which is gradually and very gradually attained. But relatively soon the separation of the soul will have progressed so far that it can live not only in thoughts but also in sensations. Then he can form concepts from these, as things actually look in reality.

“Light on the Path” gives the right instruction to reach this stage. It requires patience, perseverance and steadfastness in an extraordinary degree. The possibility for this lies in the forces hidden in the next two sentences:

Before the masters can speak, the wound must be unlearned.
Before the soul can stand, the blood of its heart must moisten its feet.

They contain the forces that lead people to direct experience and direct perception.

Those who have reached this stage and are able to say “I” to their world of feeling are now able to consciously experience all the truths related to devachan. The teachings of devachan can be consciously experienced at this level of consciousness.

One may well believe that when man has passed through evolution to this stage, he becomes a dreamer, that he loses his usual soberness and power of judgment. On the contrary, the possibility of yielding to superstition or dogma ceases. Even doubt and skepticism disappear from the soul when man has arrived at a concept of this stage of development. There is now a state analogous to dream-filled sleep and to deep sleep. When man has progressed so far as to see the Devachan, there are still other states into which he can consciously place himself. These are states in which he can experience something much higher. These states consist in the following.

From direct observation, one learns to recognize how the various forms of the universe transform and metamorphose into one another. It becomes clear how a thought form is formed out of mental substance, then encloses astral substance and plastically dominates the astral substance. But it is also learned how the beings of higher planes, from the mental plane through the astral plane, move down to the physical world. The entire sum of possible transformations of form in the universe lies before the initiate. He can answer the question of what forms a plant has undergone in earlier, long-gone epochs. The various forms of transformation that belong to our planetary system are revealed at this level of knowledge. This is called the conscious experience of form development in esotericism.

The state that is analogous to dreamless deep sleep shows how life, the essence itself, pours into the various forms. In this case, the difference is that during the second state, the various forms are perceived in very different colors than in the third stage. When a thought form is perceived, for example, it can appear in bright yellow colors. There are thought forms that are perceived in this way. There are also thought images that have a certain spiritual form. In the third stage, the vital ether flows into these thought forms, which may, for example, have the beautiful light color of a peach blossom. You can then not only see rigid or completely mobile forms that transform into one another, but also perceive how these forms are animated from their center.

The result is that you can place yourself in the various etheric forms of consciousness, so that you can not only recognize the laws of devachanic life, but also the transformations of our earth – only our earth, it does not go further – that it has undergone during the time of the so-called round developments. The process of passing through several planets or globes, of Arupa planets and Rupa planets and the like, is undergone. These transformations can be learned in this state of consciousness. And then the different rounds themselves can be undergone, learned.

Thus, through appropriate exercises, man can learn to understand part of the teaching that the theosophical movement has brought into the world. The further path can no longer be presented. On the other side, the state of consciousness begins, which consists of becoming insensitive to the possibility of external sensation. And with that, the actual life of the adept begins. From the experiences of the adept, only that which goes beyond the designated boundary can be gained.

The purpose of what has been presented here is to indicate the methods that lead to the knowledge that is available in the theosophical textbooks.

After all, the communication and reception of theosophy is partly based on trust. This must also be the case today. But it can be demanded that explanations be given as to the origin of this knowledge, which we in the West have the opportunity to access again. In this, the leading spiritual individuals, the masters, have the opportunity to provide not only the teachings, but also the esoteric perspectives, which, if used correctly, can promote development in a corresponding spiritual direction.

In addition to the significant work of “Secret Doctrine” by H.P. Blavatsky, the book “Light on the Path” has also been inspired, which really is a light on the path that humanity is to follow from now on into the future. When this path is trodden, or at least understood, only then will it be possible to know something of how this knowledge and this will, which are to lead to our goal, can be attained and how they must be attained in the future. For only a few today may the path be passable. This should not be talked about further. But we can be clear about the fact that that human experience in which the appearance of meaning ceases and higher experience occurs cannot be attained other than through a certain development of the spiritual life.

In a more intense way than in any other way, it is precisely through this spiritual development, which should live through teaching and word in the theosophical movement, that the great goal of development can be achieved, which has been expressed in that deep realization, that great esoteric truth, which can easily be said but is difficult to understand, and which belongs to the most ancient wisdom of mankind:

One life dwells in all beings, one and many, like the moon that reflects in many images on the water.

Impulses connected with the spiritual world, whatever their direction, can only be understood from the viewpoint of spiritual science. As we have seen, playing into today's events there are impulses which we have traced back to human beings, but only to those who know how to handle spiritual impulses in one way or another.

We must ask ourselves: Why do certain people do the kind of things we have been talking about? Which leads to the next question: Why are we living in an age when untruth—untruthfulness—is working as a dominant force in the world, a force which drives human beings with a veritable passion that could, if only it would turn towards the truth instead, bring about infinitely much in the way of healing?

These things are indeed connected with what are, at the moment, the deepest impulses of humanity. We can gain a closer understanding of them, in a manner appropriate for our time, by including in our considerations the most urgent task of that spiritual-scientific view of the world which we have made our own. Remember that our anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to understand certain spiritual aspects which exist in the world, certain forces which are at work in the world of human beings in so far as they develop not only between birth and death but also between death and a new birth. It is difficult for people today to think about these things in the right way, because they have lost certain faculties which were once present in human evolution; for a while these faculties had to go underground, but now they must light up again through spiritual science.

We know well enough that in olden times the human soul was linked with the spiritual world in a way that was more elementary, more natural; such links did not have to be brought about by active spiritual work but existed of themselves. We called them atavistic. We know, too, that in those days it was impossible for human beings to doubt the existence of life after death. The possibility of such doubt only arose for an interim period which is now to be succeeded by an age in which all shall know about life between death and a new birth.

In those olden times something else—a third condition—came as naturally to the human soul as waking and sleeping do today. In today's state of being awake, human beings are restricted entirely to the physical world which they can perceive with their senses; they live between birth and death in a world which they can experience through their senses and through their understanding which is bounded by the brain. And in sleep they are unconscious. The entities of ego and astral body in which they live between falling asleep and waking up are not yet strong enough to supply them with a comparable consciousness. We know that the astral body has only been developing since the time of ancient Moon and the ego only since the beginning of Earth evolution. Both are young measured against cosmic evolution and they are not yet strong enough to achieve consciousness when left to themselves between going to sleep and waking up.

Dreams, however, with all their manifold pictures, do rise up out of sleep. These dreams can contain a great deal that belongs to the spiritual world. There is a great deal in dreams which belongs to the spiritual world, but the human soul as it is today is not capable of seeing beyond the dreams in order to discover what it is that lives in these dreams. Dreams are deceptive pictures woven out of a veil of maya. When they are rightly interpreted they yield experiences of earlier times or prophetic indications for the future. They also reveal the interplay which takes place between the living and the dead during sleep. Everything can come to us through dreams. But, at the present stage of their evolution, human beings do not understand the strange language of dreams. Dream pictures remain incomprehensible, and this is quite natural. Just as Europeans cannot interpret the sounds spoken by the Chinese, so people today cannot interpret the picture language of dreams.

Thus during this interim period the human being is totally restricted in consciousness to whatever he can discover through those older instruments, the physical body and also the etheric body, which have been developing since the time of ancient Sun and ancient Saturn and are therefore so constituted that they can offer him consciousness as long as he is in them, that is, between waking up and going to sleep.

Now the spiritual science for which we are striving gives us concepts of the super-sensible world working in and behind the sense-perceptible world. The concepts and ideas given to us by spiritual science and which we make our own are related to nothing that can be perceived by the senses. They relate either to what lies between death and a new birth, or to the super-sensible world which lies beyond the world of the senses. Comprehension of these is not, or ought not to be, a mere comprehension of certain theories. We are not concerned with knowing one thing or another but with achieving a certain inner mood of soul when we take in truths relating to the super-sensible world.

It is difficult to describe these things in words because our language has been coined for the external, physical plane, so we have to exert ourselves when applying it to super-sensible conditions. You could say that everything to which we ordinarily apply our understanding lives coarsely, densely in our soul because our brain is always at our disposal and is trained to deal with ideas and concepts relating to the physical plane. But to explain things which do not relate to the physical plane we have to exert our soul to such an extent that, when we study spiritual science, our brain plays an ever-decreasing part. When we experience difficulties in understanding what spiritual science gives us, this is only because our brain impedes our understanding. Our brain is adjusted and adapted to the coarse concepts of the physical plane and we have to exert ourselves to acquire the subtler concepts—subtler only in so far as human comprehension is concerned—of the spiritual world. This exertion is entirely healthy, it is certainly good, because with spiritual science we then live in our soul in a new way, quite different from that required by physical knowledge and understanding and ideas. We transport ourselves into a world of mobile, subtle pictures and ideas, and that is significant.

It is possible for all of you to be aware of the point at which you are sufficiently within the sphere where the etheric body more or less lives on its own, using the brain only in faint vibrations. It is the point at which you begin to feel that you no longer have to exert yourself to think the thoughts given by spiritual science, in the way in which you have to exert yourself to think everyday thoughts. You know very well that you yourself make the thoughts which you think about everyday matters on the physical plane; you develop the concepts in accordance with the daily requirements and conditions of life, in accordance with sympathies and antipathies and with whatever is prepared by your senses and by your brain-bound understanding. With spiritual science, however, once you really enter into it, you will begin to sense: I have not thought all this myself; it has already been thought before I think it; it is floating there as a thought and merely enters into me. When you begin to feel: This is floating in the objective thinking of the universe and merely enters into me—then you will have won a great deal. You will have experienced a relationship to that delicate etheric, floating and weaving world in which your soul lives. After that it is really only a matter of time, though it might be quite a long time, before you gradually enter that sphere which we share with those among the dead with whom we are karmically linked.

I said that in olden times there was no question of discussing whether immortality existed or not. People then had a third condition apart from sleeping and waking, an in-between condition which was not merely a state of dreaming. It was an elementary and natural condition, in which human beings saw their dead spiritually face to face. They were there and they lived together with them. In those earlier times, when people did something, or when something happened to them which was a little out of the ordinary—and this of course happened and still happens all the time, for we are not only creatures of habit—they then felt beside them one or another of those who had gone through death before them, either long, or not so lang, ago. They felt as though the dead person acted with them, or joined in their counsel. So when the soul of a person living on the earth decided to do something, or when something happened to that person, this soul felt that there was one who had died who joined in the action or the suffering. The dead were present. So there was no discussion about immortality or the lack of it. It would have been as pointless as questioning whether someone with whom we are speaking is actually there or not. Whatever we experience is a reality, and in olden times people experienced how the dead shared in all that happened.

We know the reasons why those times had to go into the underground of existence. But they will return, though in a different form. The manner of their return will be brought about by human beings who achieve the mood of soul which can be achieved through spiritual science, through actively living in the pictures of the spiritual world given by spiritual science. This will enable the soul to attain a delicate attuning, and then into this delicate attuning the souls of the so-called dead will enter. Of course they are always present, but what matters now is that we should be aware of how they enter into our soul-sphere. Of course, the dead always surround those of us with whom they were karmically linked during life. But to enable them to enter our consciousness we must go to meet them with the fine attuning I have just described. For you see it is always possible for the dead to gain entry into human souls if these souls lead their life in a mood such as that described just now, where the concepts and ideas formed by these souls live, somehow, in a super-sensible sphere. From the bodily, physical aspect of man the dead have to flee, for at the moment they cannot enter there. Neither can they enter those thoughts which only rise up from the brain after the manner of the physical world. And because today human beings mostly entertain only thoughts that rise up from the brain, it is so very difficult for the dead to make contact with the living.

But if the living go to meet the dead by developing the fine attuning that arises when one concerns oneself a great deal with super-sensible ideas, then the dead can enter that floating and weaving world which extricates itself from the bodily aspect and takes no account of it. Today everything depends on whether human souls will find it possible, in some measure, to tread the path which leads to the dead. For then the dead will come to meet them. There must be a meeting in a common realm.

I have often stressed that what spiritual science has to say about the super-sensible world, the concepts and ideas we develop—all this is there for both the living and the dead. That is why I have recommended the practice of reading to the dead: that is, of unfolding thoughts orientated to them which refer to the super-sensible world. Doing this is a way of offering them a bridge and it is one which can reach not only those who have died recently, but all those who have died, even a very long time ago.

In this way the living have the possibility of approaching the dead. And similarly the dead have the possibility of working into the thoughts of the living. When you have absorbed the spirit of spiritual science you will be able to form from such arguments a fair conception of the fact that in the materialistic age we human beings have lived through for so long the dead can have less and less influence on the course of events here in the physical world where human beings have turned towards more materialistic ideas relating only to the physical plane, ideas which are of no use to the dead. So events in the physical world now run their course without any, or with only very little, influence from those who have passed on. This will have to change. Active communication must once more be established between the living and the dead. Those who have died must become able to work into the physical world, so that what takes place there no longer goes on solely under the influence of conceptions which arise in this physical world.

So our pursuit of spiritual science is indeed intimately bound up with giving the dead an opportunity to work here in the physical world. It must be said that a grave and lofty aim of our work in spiritual science is the creation of a link between the spiritual world, where the dead have their home, and the physical world. Then the dead will no longer have to say to themselves that they are more or less exiles from the physical world owing to the fact that the living, down here, cannot develop thoughts through which the dead might bring their influence to bear in this physical world.

Many, for sure, will say: I have been striving to open myself to the ideas of spiritual science, but I have seen no sign of any influence emanating from the dead. My dear friends, these things demand a good deal of patience. You must take into account the degree to which for centuries the life of mankind on the physical plane has tended towards materialism and against anything that might make it possible for the dead to work here in a suitable way. Amongst all that has been going on for centuries, certain feelings, certain sensations have developed which human beings now entertain quite unconsciously towards the spiritual world. To these feelings and sensations, what comes today from spiritual science frequently appears as no more than abstract theory. One may well be convinced that what spiritual science has to say about the spiritual world is true. And yet it has not thus far entered so fully into one's whole soul life as to enable one to develop those sensations and feelings which do not disturb the delicate and subtle play of what comes over from the dead.

It is not easy to see these things in their proper light. People today are the children, or the grandchildren, or the great-grandchildren, or even the great-great-grandchildren of those who have lived during recent centuries and who have, under the influence of rising materialism, turned their sensations and feelings in certain directions. These directions are now expressed in every detail of these feelings and sensations. We can have the best will in the world to turn in the right way to someone who has died, to remember someone in the right way. But the whole disposition of our feelings and sensations working, perhaps one could say, through our blood which flows down to us from our ancestors, is not suited to placing before our soul in a proper way the delicate and intimate manifestations and revelations which come from the dead. Instead our feelings are like flickering lights, excitable flickering lights which interpose themselves in front of these subtle impulses which are today still so very delicate and intimate.

But though this may be the case we need not be discouraged, but should always cling to the positive aspect. And the positive aspect is that we genuinely strive for that condition which in certain moments of life, as the fruit of studying spiritual science, can give us a peacefulness of soul. What matters is that peacefulness of soul, the fine attuning in that peacefulness of soul, which makes it possible for us to receive these delicate, intimate manifestations and revelations from the kingdom of the dead.

Something else, too, is necessary, and that is the goodwill to resist all that untruthfulness about which we have been speaking in these lectures. All these untruthfulnesses that buzz about in the world enter into what might be called the spiritual aura and generate there a thick fog which the dead find impossible to penetrate. This thick fog contains all that black rubbish which comes, for instance—to name only one source—from today's journalism, in the form of untruths which are printed and repeated, creating an aura of untruthfulness spanning the earth. It is no exaggeration to say that it is exceedingly difficult for the dead to penetrate this black fog. Therefore, with the help of ideas such as those we have been developing concerning the absolutely concrete untruthfulness buzzing about in the world, it is necessary to endeavour to reach clarity, to really make the effort in this field to recognize the purely external truth of the physical plane in so far as this can become accessible to us, in order not to cover our soul with a dense fog through which the spiritual world simply cannot penetrate. You will understand how very necessary this is.

In conjunction with the concepts we have just been discussing, let us now touch on the question: What is the aim of those secret societies which send impulses of the kind we have been describing into the world, impulses which then live in the life of untruthfulness and which have led, out of this untruthfulness, to the painful events of today? What do these secret societies want? Among others—we cannot go into everything—there is one particular thing they want: They want to materialize materialism even further; they want to create even more materialism in the world than would come about as part of the natural evolution of mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean period. They want even more materialism. This is only one aspect of what they are aiming for, but it is the aspect we want at least to touch on here. With this aspect in mind such societies are founded and with this aspect in mind people are persuaded to join them, people who are approached during their lives because they are deemed suitable.

There are the most varied types of such societies. One type, much in evidence in the West and taking all kinds of forms, includes organizations which practise ceremonial magic. Ceremonial magic can, of course, be good magic, but we are speaking now of those societies which do not practise ceremonial magic for the good of mankind in general, but for the good of certain groups of people, or certain specific aims which are not general human aims.

Let us look first at those societies which practise ceremonial magic from this point of view. As we have said, it can be good, but in these societies it is not good. Certain kinds of ceremonial magic have definite effects on the human physical body. Everything physical is, after all, a manifestation of the spirit. Certain spiritual aspects which come into being under the influence of ceremonial magic can have an effect on the human physical body, specifically on the system of ganglia, as I described it the other day, and also on the spinal system. The cerebral system is the most difficult of all to influence by means of ceremonial magic. All this has to be done via the detour of the spiritual element, but it can be done and it can become effective.

Imagine certain secret societies carrying on a form of ceremonial magic directed towards its grey or black aspects. Imagine they influence their members in a way that affects even their physical body, even the delicate vibrations and weavings of their physical body, so that something spiritual flows into this physical body.

What is the consequence? The consequence is that something now comes about which was suitable in earlier periods of human evolution but is no longer permissible today. Such procedures make it possible for the spiritual world to influence those human beings who participate, even though they do not turn towards it along the path I have described. This means that it becomes possible for the dead, as well as other spirits, to influence the members of a circle created by ceremonial magic. In this way today's materialism can be made hyper-materialistic.

Imagine a human being—and there are countless such in the West—who is entirely materialistic, not only in his view of the world but also in all his feelings and sensations. And then imagine this materialistic disposition increasing to a high degree. Such a person must of necessity develop an urge to exercise an influence on the material world, not only while he lives in his physical body but also after he has died. He is bent on the following: When I die I want to have some abode through which I can affect the people I have left behind on the earth, or who are trained in such a way in relation to me. There are indeed certain people today whose materialistic urge is so great that they strive for means by which they can cultivate connections with the physical world even beyond death. And such means, through which a person secures for himself the possibility of affecting the material world from beyond death, are abodes of certain kinds of ceremonial magical practice.

This is something that can have immense consequences. Imagine a number of people brought together to form a certain brotherhood. These people know: Others have gone before us; their urge to exercise their power was so great that their life on earth was not enough for its gratification, so they want to go on gratifying it even after death. For them we are creating an abode, and through the acts of ceremonial magic we perform, they work into our bodies. Because of this we gain greater power than we have; because of this we are enabled to exercise a certain degree of magical power over other, weaker people who stand outside such brotherhoods. When we speak words, when we give a speech, these dead souls work in us because we have been prepared by sharing in these acts of ceremonial magic.

It is one thing if somebody who simply participates honestly in the cultural processes of our time gives a speech in parliament or writes a newspaper article. But it is something entirely different if a person who belongs to a circle of ceremonial magic, and is thus strengthened by the power urges of some who have died, gives a speech in parliament or writes an article for a newspaper. The latter exercises an immensely greater degree of influence in the direction of his wishes than would be the case if he did not have this backing. This is one side of the matter.

The other side is that those who enter the circle of certain societies practising ceremonial magic are securing for themselves a power that reaches beyond death, a kind of ahrimanic immortality. For these people this is their main concern. For them, the society they enter provides a kind of guarantee that certain forces—which should by rights only live in them until the moment of death—will continue to live, even beyond death. More people than you might think are nowadays filled with this idea of guaranteeing for themselves an ahrimanic immortality, which consists in exercising influence not only as an individual human being, but also through the instrument of a society of this kind. Such societies exist in the most varied forms, and individuals who have attained certain degrees of advancement in these societies know: As a member of this society I shall become to some degree immortal because forces which would otherwise come to an end at my death will continue to work beyond death.

What these people then experience through this ceremonial magic makes them quite oblivious to a thought which would concern someone who takes such things truly seriously and in a genuinely dignified way. This is that the more a person gains by way of materialistic immortality, or rather ahrimanic immortality, the more he loses of the consciousness of true, genuine immortality. Yet materialism has taken such a hold on many souls today that they remain unconcerned about this and are tricked into striving for ahrimanic immortality. It could indeed be said that societies exist today which, from a spiritual or occult point of view, could be called ‘insurance companies for ahrimanic immortality’!

It is only a small number of people in each case who understand all these things. For as a rule these societies are organized in such a way that the ceremonial magic they practise influences only those who are unaware of the implications, merely desiring to make contact with the spiritual world by means of symbolic ceremonies. There are many such people. And those who have this desire are by no means necessarily the worst. They are accepted as members of the circle of ceremonial magic among whom there are then a few who simply use the rest of the members as instruments. Therefore one should beware of all secret societies administered by so-called higher grades whose aims are kept hidden from the lower grades. These administrative grades usually comprise those who have been initiated to a stage at which they only have a vague idea of what I have just been explaining to you. They comprise those who are to work positively in connection with certain goals and aims which are then realized by the wider group of those who have been merely inveigled into the circle of ceremonial magic. Everything these people do is done in such a way that it leads in the direction required by the higher grades but is strengthened by the forces which come from ceremonial magic.

Those who know how huge a number of such societies exist in the West can begin to gain an idea of what immensely effective tools such societies of ceremonial magic can be for certain far-reaching plans for the world. As you have seen, the chief aim is to prolong into our time a way of proceeding in which the spiritual world works into the sense-perceptible, physical world in a manner that was right in earlier times. For our times, however, the right procedure is for human beings to go towards the dead and meet them half-way. In the mood we have just been discussing, however, a path is sought which was appropriate in earlier, atavistic times but which today is brought about through the medium of ceremonial magic.

This should give you an idea of the disproportionate lengths to which exaggerated materialism, materialism that is hyper-materialistic, is prepared go in order to cross the border to the spiritual world, a border which today should only be crossed by means of attuning the soul to that mood which can be achieved through contemplating super-sensible concepts. An attitude appropriate for today is one that never accepts things which are given out by many secret societies, and which are not understood, for indeed a great deal that has not been understood is today both given out and accepted. Today it is appropriate to treat what these societies give out as something that is at most a failure to give the spoken word its true value, that is, something that uses words as mere concepts.

In much that today buzzes about in the world by way of untruthfulness and by way of egoism, in much that has even led to the canonization of egoism—not by the Pope, of course—in much that has led to the coining of the phrase sacro egoismo, which has become a new saint, though not canonized by the Pope, in much that today buzzes about in the world by way of egoisms and untruthfulnesses, influences and impulses are at work which gain extra strength from the world of the dead, in the manner described. And by searching for these impulses you will be led on to link up with other impulses about which you may find information in my book The Spiritual Guidance of Man. The lectures on which this book is based were given in 1911 in Copenhagen, for the most varied reasons. You will find there a description of how certain angelic powers remained behind in the third post-Atlantean period, in order today to unfold a force resembling that developed during the ancient Egyptian epoch. In those lectures I said:

‘Anything wonderful can become a tempter and seducer of mankind if people follow it one-sidedly; and then if this one-sidedness starts to take a hold, the great danger arises that all kinds of good endeavours begin to manifest as fanaticism. True though it is that mankind progresses by means of its noble impulses, it is equally true that an over-enthusiastic, fanatical pursuit of these most noble impulses can lead to all that would be worst for their right unfolding.’

The lecture then goes on to describe how certain forces which had their proper place in the third post-Atlantean period are now starting to work in our time. One may now add that just as an individual quite rightly finds a connection with his proper angel, so is it also possible for him to find a connection to those retarded spirits of the Egypto-Chaldean period, those retarded angels, if he seeks those forces and impulses which, in fact, are exaggerated ahrimanic forces coming in the manner described from the realm of the dead. These retarded angels play an important role in the secret societies I have been describing to you. There they are important helpers and leading spirits. A great deal that goes on in such secret societies is aimed at bringing Egypto-Chaldean elements in the old way into the present time. When these matters are no mere tomfoolery but stand fully in occult life, this takes place under the influence of retarded beings from the hierarchy of the angels who become leaders there. These are the beings from the hierarchy next above man who are sought by these societies.

This points to something exceedingly important. When we understand how the living testaments of these societies—not written testaments left over for those still alive, but testaments which are forces going beyond death—when we understand how these work and are preserved, which is something that ought not to happen, then we understand something of the magical power wielded by such societies which often enables them to impress the stamp of truthfulness on to something untrue. And indeed, one of their important magical functions is to spread untruth in the world in such a way that it gives the effect of being the truth. For in this working of the ‘untruth in what is true’ lies one of the mighty strengths of evil. This strength of evil is then put to considerable use in all kinds of quarters.

This I wanted to say today, in order to give you the esoteric background to the more exoteric matters I have been describing. Tomorrow we shall continue with this and endeavour to enter even more deeply into certain aspects.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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