The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

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.

Yesterday we had to speak of the path pursued by man between death and a new birth; and the whole gist of my remarks will have shown you that every night during sleep we must return to the starting-point of our earth-life.

We can indeed gain insight into these significant matters if we realize that on sinking into slumber we do not stand still at the date reached in the course of our earthly existence (as was already explained in the previous lectures), but that we actually go back to our starting-point. Every time, during sleep, we are carried back to our childhood, and even to the state before our childhood, before our arrival on earth. Hence, while we are asleep, our ego and our astral body return to the spiritual world, to the world of our origin which we left in order to become earth men.

At this point of our discourse, it becomes necessary to let pass before our soul in greater detail what the human being undergoes while asleep; undergoes unconsciously, but, nonetheless, most vividly.

The duration of our sleep does not really matter. Although it is difficult for our ordinary consciousness to conceive of the fact that time and space conditions are utterly different in the spiritual world, we must learn to form conceptions of such a kind.

I have already said that the human being, when suddenly awakened after he has fallen asleep and hence lost consciousness, experiences during that brief moment whatever he would have experienced, had his sleep continued for a long time. In measuring the length of our sleep according to its physical duration, we take into account only our physical body and our etheric body. Utterly different time-conditions prevail for that which is undergone by our ego and astral body. Hence the things that I shall presently explain to you are valid for either a long or a short sleep.

When the human personality enters the realm of sleep with his soul, the first state experienced by him—all this takes place in the unconscious, yet with great vividness—engenders a feeling in him of dwelling, as it were, in a general world ether. (In speaking of feeling, I mean an unconscious feeling. It is impossible to express these matters otherwise than by terms used in ordinary conscious life.) The person feels himself, as it were, disseminated into the whole cosmos. We cease to have the definite perceptions, which formerly connected us with all the things surrounding us in our earthly existence. At first, we take part in the general weaving and surging of the cosmos. And this is accompanied by the feeling that our souls have their being in a bottomless element. Hence the soul, while existing in this bottomless element, has an ardent desire for divine support. Thus we experience every evening, when falling asleep, the religious need of having the whole world permeated by an all-encompassing divine-spiritual element. This is our real experience when falling asleep.

Our whole constitution as human beings enables us to transfer this desire for the divine into our waking life. Day in and day out, we are indebted to our nightly experiences for renewing our religious needs.

Thus only a contemplation of our entire being enables us to gain insight into the various life-experiences undergone by us. Fundamentally, we live very thoughtlessly if we take into account only the conscious life passed between morning and evening; for many night experiences are interwoven with this. The human being does not always realize whence he derives his living religious need. He derives it from the general experiences undergone by him every night just after having fallen asleep—and also, although perhaps less intensively, during an afternoon nap.

Then, in our sleep, another stage sets in—all this, as was said before, being passed through unconsciously, but nonetheless vividly. Now it does not seem to the sleeper that his soul is, as it were, disseminated into the general cosmos, but it seems as if the single parts of his entity were divided. Were our experiences to become conscious, we would feel as though we were being disjointed. And, from the bottom of our soul, an unconscious fear rises up. Every night, while asleep, we experience the fear of being divided up into the whole universe.

Now you might say: What does all this matter, as long as we know nothing about it? Well, it matters a great deal. I should like to explain, by means of a comparison, how much it matters.

Suppose that we become frightened in ordinary daily life. We turn pale. The emotion of fear is consciously felt by the soul. A definite change in our organism makes us turn pale. The blood streams back into the body's interior. This is an objective process. We can describe the emotion of fear in connection with an objective process taking place, in daily conscious life, within the physical body. What we experience in our soul is, as it were, a mirrored image reflecting this streaming away of the blood from the body's surface to its inner parts. Thus an objective process corresponds, in the waking state, to the emotion of fear. When we are asleep, a similar objective process, wholly independent of our consciousness, occurs in our astral body.

Anyone able to form imaginative and inspired conceptions will experience this objective process in the astral body as an emotion of fear. The objective element in fear, however, is actually experienced by man every night, because he feels himself being divided into parts inside his soul. And how is he being divided? Every night he is divided among the universe of stars. One part of his soul substance is striving towards Mercury, another part towards Jupiter, and so forth. Yet this process can only be correctly characterized by saying: During ordinary sleep, we do not actually penetrate the worlds of stars, as is the case on the path between death and a new birth. What we really undergo every night is not an actual division among the stars, but only among the counterparts of the stars which we carry within us during our entire earth life. While asleep, we are divided among the counterparts of Mercury, Venus, Moon, Sun, and so forth. Thus we are concerned here not with the original stars themselves, but with their counterparts in us.

This emotion of fear, experienced by us relatively soon after falling asleep, can be removed only from that human being who feels a genuine kinship to the Christ. At this point, we become aware how much the human being needs this kinship with the Christ. In speaking of this kinship, it is necessary to envisage man's evolution on earth. Mankind's evolution on earth can be comprehended only by someone having real insight into the significant turning point brought to human evolution by the Mystery of Golgotha. It is a fact that the human beings before the Mystery of Golgotha were different with regard to soul and spirit from the human beings after the Mystery of Golgotha had occurred on earth. This must be taken into account, if man's soul is to be viewed in its true light.

When the human beings who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha—and these human beings were actually we ourselves in a former life—fell asleep and experienced the fear of which I have just spoken, then the counterpart of the Christ in the world of stars existed for the human beings of that time as much as did the counterparts of the other heavenly bodies. And as the Christ approached the sleeping human being, He came as a helper to dissipate fear, to destroy fear. People of earlier ages, still gifted with instinctive clairvoyance, remembered after awaking, in a dream-like consciousness, that the Christ had been with them in their sleep. Only they did not call Him the Christ. They called Him the Sun-spirit. Yet these people, who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha, avowed from their innermost depth that the great Sun-spirit was also the great guide and helper of the human being, who approached him every night in sleep and relieved him of the fear of being disseminated into the universe. The Christ appeared as a spirit strengthening mankind and consolidating its inner life.

Who binds together man's forces during his life? asked the followers of ancient religions. It is the great Sun-spirit, who firmly binds together man's single elements and combines them into one personality. And this avowal was uttered by the followers of ancient religions, because their consciousness was pervaded by the memory that the Christ approached man every night.

We do not need to be amazed at these things. In those ancient times when the human being was still capable of instinctive clairvoyance, he could look back at significant moments of his life into the period passed through by him before his soul and spirit descended to earth and was clothed in a physical body. Thus it seemed quite natural to the human being that he could look upward into a pre-earthly existence.

But is it not a fact that—as we explained before—every period of sleep carries us back into pre-earthly existence, into an existence preceding the stage before we became a truly conscious child? This question must be answered in the affirmative. And just as human beings knew that they had been together, in their pre-earthly existence, with the exalted Sun-spirit who had given them the strength to pass through death as immortal beings, so they also consciously remembered after every sleep that the exalted Sun-spirit had stood at their side, helping them to become real human beings, integrated personalities.

The human soul, while acquainting itself with the world of planets, passes through this stage during sleep. It is as if the soul were first dispersed among the counterparts of the planets, and then united and held together by the Christ.

Consider that this whole soul-experience during sleep has changed, with regard to the human being, since the Mystery of Golgotha. For the Mystery of Golgotha has originated the unfolding of a vigorous human ego-consciousness. This ego-consciousness, pervading human culture only gradually after the Mystery of Golgotha, became especially apparent after the first third of the fifteenth century. And the same vigorous ego-consciousness, which enables the human being to place himself as a free, fully self-conscious being into the sense world, this same consciousness—as though trying to maintain equilibrium—also darkens his retrospect into pre-earthly existence; darkens his conscious memory of the helping Christ, Who stood at his side during sleep.

It is remarkable that, since the Mystery of Golgotha, human evolution has taken the following course: On the one hand, man acquired a vigorous ego-consciousness in his waking state; on the other hand, utter darkness gradually overlaid that which had formerly radiated out of sleep-consciousness. Therefore human beings are obliged, since the Mystery of Golgotha, to establish a conscious relationship to Christ Jesus while they are awake. They must acquire, in a conscious way, a comprehension of what the Mystery of Golgotha really signifies: That, by means of the Mystery of Golgotha, the exalted Sun-spirit, Christ, descended to earth, became a human being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, passed through earth-life and death, and, after death, still taught His disciples who were permitted to behold Him in His etheric body after death.

Those personalities who acquire, in the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, a waking consciousness of their kinship with the Christ, and gain a living conception of what took place through the Mystery of Golgotha: to these the possibility will be given of being helped by the Christ impulse, as it is carried from their waking state into their sleep.

This shows us how differently human sleep was constituted before and after the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ invariably appeared as Helper while the human being slept. Man could remember even after awaking that the Christ had been with him during his sleep. After the Mystery of Golgotha, however, he would be utterly bereft of the Christ's help, if he were not to establish a conscious relation with the Christ during the day while awake and carry its echo, its after-effect, into his sleep. Only in this way can the Christ help him to maintain his personality while asleep.

What the human being had received unconsciously from the wide heavenly reaches before the Mystery of Golgotha: the help of the Christ, the human soul must now acquire gradually by establishing a conscious relation with the Mystery of Golgotha. This inner soul-responsibility has been laid upon the human being since the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus we are unable to study the nature of human sleep, unless we are able to envisage the immense transformation undergone by human sleep since the Mystery of Golgotha.

When we enter the realm of sleep, our whole world becomes different from that experienced in the waking state. How do we live as physical men while awake? We are confined, through our physical body, by natural laws. The laws working outside in nature are also working within us. That which we recognize as moral responsibilities and impulses, as moral world order, stands like an abstract world amidst the laws of nature. And because present-day natural science takes into account only the waking world, it is completely ignorant of the moral world.

Thus natural science tells us—although hypothetically, yet in conformity with its principles—that the Kant-Laplace primeval fog marked the starting-point of world evolution; and that this world evolution will be terminated through a state of heat which will kill all living things and bury them, as it were, in a huge cosmic cemetery. (These conceptions have been modified, but still prevail among natural scientists.) Natural science, in describing the evolution of the cosmos, begins and ends with a physical state. Here the moral world order appears as a stranger. The human being, however, would not be aware of his dignity, would not even experience himself as a human being, unless he experienced himself as a moral being. But what moral impulses could be found in the Kant-Laplace primeval fog? Here were nothing but physical laws. Will there be moral impulses when the earth shall perish from heat? Then, also, nothing but physical laws will prevail. Thus speaks natural science. And out of the natural process germinate all living things, and out of living things the human soul-element. The human being forms certain conceptions: One should act in a certain way; or one should not act in that way. He experiences a moral world order. But this cannot be nurtured by natural law. To the waking human being, the moral world order appears like a merely abstract world amidst the rigid, massive world of natural laws.

It is entirely different when imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive consciousness passes through that which the human being, between falling asleep and awaking, experiences in his ego and astral body. Here the moral world order appears real, whereas the natural order below appears like something abstract, something dream-like. Although it is difficult to conceive of these things, they are nonetheless true. The whole world has been turned upside down. To the sleeper acquiring clairvoyance in his sleep, the moral world order would seem something real, something secure; and the physical world order of natural laws would seem to sink below, not rise above, the moral world order. And if the sleeper possessed consciousness, he would not place the Kant-Laplace theory at the starting-point of world evolution, and the death through heat at its end. At the starting-point, he would recognize the world of spiritual hierarchies—all the spirit and soul beings who lead man into existence. At the end of world evolution, he would again recognize the spirit and soul beings who extend to man who has passed through the course of evolution a welcome to enter their community. And below, as an illusion, the abstract physical world order would have its welling and streaming existence. If you were gifted with clairvoyance in the very midst between falling asleep and awaking, you would view all the natural laws of which you have learned during the day as a mirage of dreams, dreamed by the earth. And it would be the moral world order which would give you a firm ground. And this moral world order could be experienced by us if we worked our way—after having received the help of the Christ—into the peace of the fixed stars in the firmament, seen by us again, during nightly sleep, in the form of their counterparts. Soaring upward to the fixed stars, to their counterparts, we look down into the physical realm of natural law.

This is the wholly divergent form of the experiences undergone by the human being between falling asleep and awaking, and leading his soul every night into the image of the cosmos. And just as the human being is led at a certain moment between death and a new birth, as I explained yesterday, by the moon forces into earthly existence and is beset by a sort of longing for earthly existence, so is he beset by the longing, after experiencing heavenly existence in his sleep, to immerse himself again into his physical body and etheric body.

While we get accustomed to earth-life after our birth, we live in a sort of sleep and dream state. If we, disregarding our dreams, look back in the morning, after being awake for an hour, to the moment of awaking, our consciousness is halted abruptly and we see behind us the darkness of slumber. It is similar when we look back into our childhood. In our fourth or the fifth year, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, our consciousness comes to a stop. Beyond the last stage that we can still remember lies something which is as deeply immersed in the darkness of the sleep and dream life of early childhood as is the life of the human soul immersed every night in the darkness of sleep. Yet the child is not wholly asleep, but is wrapt in a sort of waking dream. During this waking dream occur the three important phases of human life which I indicated yesterday. As they occur in the sequence characterized by me, we can see in them echoes and after-effects of the life between death and a new birth. First the child learns, out of a life wrapt in dream and sleep, what we call simply learning how to walk.

Something all-encompassing happens when a child learns how to walk, something which appears as a grandiose and overwhelming process to anyone able to perceive how the subtlest parts of the human body are changed at this time. The child, by adapting himself to the relationships of gravity, learns how to attain equilibrium. The child no longer falls down. By unfolding inner forces, he conforms to spatial directions.

What if we had to do all this consciously: overcome the lack of equilibrium that pulled us to the ground, adapt our organism to a firm state of equilibrium with regard to the three spatial directions, and even maintain this state of equilibrium by swinging our legs like pendulums as we learn how to walk? The child, in performing such a grandiose mechanical task, performs it as an echo of what he experienced while dwelling among spirits between death and a new birth. Here we encounter something so comprehensive, so marvelous, that the most eminent engineer, with all his earthly scientific equipment, could not calculate how the child's human forces adapt themselves to the world's spatial connections. What we, as a child, attain unconsciously is the most miraculous unfolding of mathematical-mechanical, physical forces. We call it simply learning how to walk. Yet in this learning how to walk lies an element of utmost grandeur.

Simultaneously, the correct use of arms and hands is attained. And by placing himself, as physical being, within the three spatial directions, the human being receives the foundation for all that is called learning how to talk.

The only thing known to physiology about the connection between man's dynamics of walking and standing and the faculty of speech is the fact that the speech-center of right-handed persons lies in the left portion of the brain. The gestures of the right hand, vigorously executed by means of man's willpower, are led, by some mysterious process, into the interior of the brain whence the faculty of speech is brought to the human being.

More, however, exists than this connection between the right hand and the third convolution at the left, the so-called Broca cerebral convolution. The whole mobility of arms and fingers; the human being's whole ability to move and maintain equilibrium reaches up into the brain, becomes part of the brain, and thence reaches down into the larynx. Language develops out of walking, out of the grasping of objects, out of gestures flowing from the organs of movement.

Anyone viewing these things correctly will know that a child with the tendency to walk on his toes speaks differently from a child walking on his heels; employs different shadings of sound. The organism of speaking develops from the organism of walking and moving. And speech is again a counterpart of that which I described yesterday as the outpouring of revelation upon the human being passing through the stage between death and a new birth. The child, when learning how to speak, does not grasp the words with his thoughts, but alone with his emotions. He lives in the language as if it were an emotional element; and a child of normal development learns conceptual thinking only after acquiring the faculty of speech. A child's thoughts actually develop out of the words. Just as walking and the grasping of objects, the gestures of legs and hands, reach up into the speech organism, so all that lives in the speech organism and is gained through adaptation to the language of the surrounding world, reaches up into the thought-organs. In the third stage, the child learns how to think.

While encompassed by this dream and sleep state, the child passes through three stages: walking, speaking, and thinking. These are the three terrestrial counterparts of that which we experienced between death and a new birth: living contact with the spiritual world, revelation of the spiritual world, and the gathering of the world ether in order to form our etheric body.

The child's development during these three stages can be correctly estimated only by someone observing the adult human being during his sleep. Here we can observe how we, when sleep puts a stop to our thoughts—for our thoughts are silenced by sleep—let our thought-forces be nurtured, between falling asleep and awaking, by those beings known to us as angels, as Angeloi. These beings, approaching us during sleep, nurture our thought-forces while we cannot do so ourselves.

During sleep, the human being also ceases to talk. Only in abnormal cases, which could be explained, does he talk in his sleep. At present, however, we may disregard these things. The normal human being ceases to talk after going to sleep. Would it not be altogether too dreadful, did people keep on chattering while asleep? Hence speech ceases at that time. And what makes us speak is nurtured during the time between falling asleep and awaking by beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Archangeloi.

If we disregard the sleep-walker, who is also in an abnormal condition, human beings are quiet while asleep. They do not walk, they grasp no objects, they do not move. That which pertains to man's waking life as forces which call forth the movements out of his will is nurtured, between going to sleep and awaking, by beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Archai.

By comprehending the manner in which the hierarchical beings above the human kingdom—Angels, Archangels, Archai—approach the ego and astral body, approach the entire human being during sleep, we can also understand how the little child masters the three activities of walking, speaking, and thinking. We recognize how it is the work of the Archai that brings to the little child, as he masters the dynamics of life, as he masters the faculty of walking and handling objects, what the human being has experienced, between death and a new birth, by coming into contact with spirit and soul beings. Now, the counterpart of these experiences comes forth with the learning to walk of the little child. It is the Archai, the primeval powers, who transmit to the child that learns how to walk the counterpart of all the spiritual movements emanating, between death and a new birth, from spirit and soul beings.

And it is the Archangels that transmit what the human being experiences, between death and a new birth, by means of revelation; they are at work when the child masters speech. And the Angels carry down the forces developed by the human being when, out of the whole world ether, he gathered the substance for his etheric body. The angels, bringing down these forces, mold their counterparts within the thought-organs, which are plastically formed in order that the child may learn thinking by means of language.

You must keep in mind that Anthroposophy does more than look at the physical world and say: It is based on something spiritual. This would be much too easy. By such a way of thinking, we could acquire no real conception of the spiritual world. Someone who is determined to repeat in philosophic terms that the physical world rests on a spiritual foundation, would be like a man who when walking across a meadow is told by his companion: Look, this flower is a dandelion, these are daisies, and so forth. The first man, however, might reply: Indeed, I am not interested in these names. Here I see flowers, just flowers in the abstract. Such a person would be like a philosopher who recognizes only the pantheistic-spiritual element, but refuses to discuss the concrete facts, the particular formations of the spiritual.

What we are given by Anthroposophy shows us how the divine spiritual dwells everywhere in life's single formations. We look at the way in which the child passes from the clumsy stage of crawling to that of walking. Looking in admiration and reverence at this grandiose world phenomenon, we see in it the work of the Archai, who are active when the experiences we undergo between death and a new birth are transformed into their earthly shape.

We follow the process through which the child produces speech out of his inner self; we follow the activity of the Archangels; and, when the child begins to think, the activity of the Angels. And all this has a deeply significant, practical side. In our materialistic age, many people have ceased to regard words as something genuinely spiritual. More and more, people use words only for the purpose of naming physical objects in the outer world. Think how many people in the world are unable to form the slightest conception of spiritual things; this is because the words have no spiritual significance for them and are used merely in connection with physical objects.

For many people, speech itself has assumed a materialistic character. It can be used only in connection with physical things. Undeniably, we live within a civilization making language, more and more, into an instrument of materialism. And what will be the consequence?

The consequence will become apparent to us if we look, with regard to language, at the connection between the waking and the sleeping state. While we remain awake during the day, we talk with others. We make the air vibrate. The way in which the air vibrates transmits the soul content which we wish to convey. The soul impulses of our words, however, live in our inner being. Every word corresponds to a soul impulse, which is the more powerful, the more our words are imbued with idealism; the more we are conscious of the spiritual significance contained in our words. Anyone aware of these facts will clearly recognize what lies behind them. Think of a person who uses words in a merely materialistic sense. During the day, he will not differ greatly from others whose words contain an idealistic, spiritual element, who know that words must be given wings by the spirit. At night, however, the human being takes the soul and spirit element of language, together with his ego and astral body, into the spiritual world. He returns again to his spiritual origin.

Those possessing only a materialistic speech cannot establish a connection with the world of the Archangels. Those still possessing an idealistic speech are able to establish this connection with the world of the Archangels.

The tragedy inherent in a civilization whose materialism is expressed even by its language has the consequence that the human being, by letting his language become wholly materialistic, may lose the nightly connection with the world of the Archangels. For the genuine spiritual scientist, there lies indeed something heart-breaking in present-day civilization. People who forget more and more to invest their words with a spiritual content lose their rightful connection with the spiritual world; with the Archangels. And this terrifying fact can be perceived only by someone envisaging the true nature of the sleeping state.

It is impossible to become a real anthroposophist without rising above mere theory. We may remain perfectly indifferent while developing theories on June bugs, earth worms, and cells. Such theories shall certainly break nobody's heart. For the way in which June bugs and earthworms grow out of a cell is not apt to break our heart. But if we acquire anthroposophical knowledge in all its fullness, we look into the depths of man's being, of man's evolution, of man's destiny. Thus our heart will ever be interlinked with this knowledge. The sum of this knowledge will be deposited in the life of our feelings, our emotions. Hence we partake of the whole world's feelings, and also of the whole world's volition.

The essence of Anthroposophy consists in the fact that it grasps not only the human intellect but the whole human being. Thereby it illuminates, with the forces of feeling and sentiment, the destinies of culture and civilization, as well as the destinies of single persons.

We cannot take part genuinely in human experiences on earth, unless looking also at the other side, the spiritual side, as it is unveiled to us through our knowledge of the sleeping state that leads us back into the spiritual world. Thus spiritual science can be truly at one with human life, understood in its spiritual and ultimately its social, religious, and ethical significance.

This spiritual science is to become real science which leads to wisdom. Such life giving science is greatly needed by mankind, lest it fall into deeper and deeper decline, instead of making a new beginning.

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.

Yesterday we brought our observations on the characteristics of imaginative knowledge to a certain point of view and emphasized that everything that a person consciously brings into their consciousness through imaginative knowledge is actually already within them. I have used the comparison that in a dark room there are various objects, or for that matter people, which cannot be seen with the physical eyes in a dark room. Then one enters with a light, and everything inside is illuminated; nothing is new in it, everything was already there before. The only difference is that the things are seen and perceived afterwards, and not before. It is the same with what imaginative knowledge presents to us. Everything that imaginative knowledge brings to consciousness is present in man, reigns and works in man down there in the hidden depths of the soul; it belongs to what lives and moves in man. And what is especially important for man on the physical plane is that he is continually increased or diminished in his powers in some way through what he absorbs, experiences and lets sink down from his imaginative life into the depths of consciousness.

I shall have more to say to you on this subject on a later occasion, for the process is very incompletely characterized when one says: Here [it is drawn] is the threshold of consciousness; here is an idea that sinks down into the subconscious and is now down there like a living being. As I said, the process is quite incompletely described. But we want to ascend slowly and gradually to the true facts in this area.

What I want to say today is that we are becoming aware of how these imaginative cognitive facts are, of course, - as you can see from the discussion - thoroughly and deeply connected with all the conditions of human life, even on the physical plane from birth to death. But they belong to the unconscious or subconscious conditions of life. So that from what we have considered, we can also gain the important truth that man, as he lives on earth, is dependent on conditions that do not enter into the bright day-consciousness that we have from birth to death, except when we sleep. So we are dependent on life factors that cannot be known with ordinary normal consciousness.

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But from the way I have presented it, these life factors that prevail down there – and we said yesterday, in the etheric body – are still quite close to the person, so close that, because they are related, they connect with what the person continually lets sink down from his world of ideas. For man can, so to speak, when he transforms his thoughts into memories, transform his thoughts himself into the substance that is down there in the subconscious. It is, after all, substantively quite the same as what we think. When what we think is down there, it is just as much a seething, swirling world as what lives and moves down there, which is basically a living thought life. But this is the etheric body, which has come into the etheric body from the cosmos. And because it is related to our conscious thought life, it is still very close to the human being. And just as it lives and moves in us today in our unconscious, so it was basically fully present during the old moon existence. This [moon thinking] was - if you imagine it as a dream, if you think that it is completely immersed in dream life - generally proceeding as when you dream, but perceive the living weaving of thought in the dream. That is the old moon dweller's concept of the imagination. It is only during our life on earth that we have to make an effort to have thoughts, to form thoughts through our own efforts. The old moon dweller did not form thoughts through his own efforts. He lived in dream images, which were not as dead as our thoughts, but were living, weaving images, forming thoughts.

You can see from what I have described to you that when we immerse ourselves in the imaginative world, we gain something and lose something at the same time. We lose the reassurance of the peaceful earthly experience of thoughts; we no longer have that in our power because thoughts themselves are living inner forces. In ordinary life we feel that we are the masters of our thoughts; we do not have them in the imaginative world; but in return we also grasp a life that is just life. The thoughts we have in physical life are dead; what we grasp there lives and moves. And so it was already during the old moon existence for people, only they had it in dreams, and not consciously. Then, in the evolution on earth, there is an ascent to consciousness. And from the conscious realization of that which was a dream during the old moon existence, imaginative knowledge emerges as the first step from which spiritual-scientific knowledge must be taken. This imaginative knowledge is therefore still very much related to the human being.

Now, I said, one gains something and one loses something. People would agree with the first part, gaining something, but they do not agree with the losing. And from this, countless errors arise; very, very many errors arise from this. You see, it is not so easy if you do not make an effort to imagine what this dream-like imaginative imagining was like during the moon phase. When we live here on earth, it is inconvenient, because of the physical developmental period, to always have to form ideas and thoughts only on the basis of earthly facts. That is precisely the inconvenience of studying. One must really weigh the facts, judge the facts, and connect the facts, and one must slowly work one's way through one's own efforts into the worlds of thought and imagination, which one masters as an earthly human being with an earthly will. Some people find it much more comfortable to have the living world of thought simply handed to them, so that they only need to wait for it: when they receive the 'enlightenment' from it, it enters into their soul life, and they no longer need to develop thoughts. That is how they think, but it does not take them any further than they are. One stands much higher as an earth human than as a moon human, because one has developed further. Compared to the dreamy moon-imagination, the earthman, who combines facts and forms concepts from life experiences with his rational judgment, stands much higher than the moonman and than the one who longs for this moonman existence, which is supposed to consist of illuminations that have not been worked out through thought.

One can have peculiar experiences there. Not that a person, when he sinks back to this moon-like realization, has no thoughts. He has thoughts, but they come by themselves, he does not need to do the work of thinking. That seems rather comfortable. One can experience a certain, very important, specific experience over and over again, which must be considered if one wants to understand these things at all.

There are people who develop a certain visionary clairvoyance. This dream-like imagining, this visionary clairvoyance, always involves a regression to a lunar nature. For real clairvoyance that can be desired for the earth must be based on a higher level, on an even greater development through the world of thought than the recognition of the physical plane. The regression is not an elevation, not a development upwards for the person, but a development downwards, a becoming less intelligent than one is as a normal earth person. And then the strange experience occurs, which one can have again and again. There are people who have a certain visionary clairvoyance, but are not really intelligent at all. Yes, their clairvoyance is almost directly related to the fact that they shun intelligence, that they do not want to develop the intelligence that one has to develop as an earthly human being. It is precisely this attenuation of ordinary earthly intelligence that is very often associated with a certain degree of visionary clairvoyance, which is a lunar atavistic one. And then perhaps the following occurs: Such people can then make notes of their images. These notes are not thoughtless, but interwoven with thoughts - the thoughts come with the images and within them are interwoven spiritual, very spiritual images. And then the puzzle can arise: Yes, there is a person who describes in pictures, in very beautiful pictures, Atlantis or other things that come to him in a visionary way, and that is absolutely logically intelligent. But I never perceived such intelligent logic in that person when he was supposed to explain things of the physical plane; then he does not have it. He has not become enough of an earth person. But if he is allowed to fall back into lunar intelligence, then the intelligence comes. But then it is not his intelligence, then he is merely a medium for the lunar intelligence, then the lunar intelligence works in him. One can receive beautiful descriptions of spiritual worlds from people who have sunk a little back into the lunar stage, and who, when they want to apply their earthly acquired intelligence, cannot themselves understand what they have actually produced, and in most cases do not even want to do so.

I said: In the ascent to imaginative knowledge one must gain something and lose something, and that people usually do not want to lose anything. I also pointed out that people who have spirit do not want to lose it. These are not the people who love visionary clairvoyance, for they are quite willing to lose ordinary intelligence, ordinary thinking. But there is another group that does not want to lose this intelligence. They want to maintain this intelligence as it is on the physical plane, they just do not want to develop it further. They do not want to work on this intelligence so that the person comes to use the concepts more freely than they are used in the processes of the physical plane. And then such people come to allegorizing, to symbolizing, which is after all again only an activity of the physical plane, because it does not further the thinking, but leaves it standing, and then puts outer thought-capes on it from all kinds of exquisite occult things. It is very important to bear that in mind.

And you see, that was already in the consciousness of those who slowly and gradually worked or wanted to work their way up to the points of view that we must have in spiritual science today. Today, in spiritual science, we really must bring humanity something of clear thinking, combined with the possibility of knowing something of spiritual worlds, but in clear, completely clear thinking. It has taken a long time for the possibility to arise – and hopefully it has now – to see through these things in this way. And many people have worked their way through to this. People of such great clarity as Goethe, for example, have come very close to complete clarity. But many have worked their way through to this. Just think how Jakob Böhme wrestled with the transition points of the materialistic age, with the chaotically writhing, moving, whirling and tumbling concepts. He had already had them, but to really work through them so that what emerged is what stands with Jakob Böhme as a profound illumination of some secrets of the spiritual world.

Another person has expressed a wonderful sentence – I would say, as if illuminating the field of vision wonderfully, as dawned on modern times – from which one can see, or at least from what he has otherwise achieved, one can see how he was not able to penetrate with a completely clear view to what spiritual science should be today, but he was still able to come so far as to represent the most important nerve. The man I am talking about realized in the 18th century that if you want to know the human being, you have to penetrate through the darkness, through the confusion of external material knowledge. Even if you are at the first stage of imaginative knowledge, this is necessary. Because we have seen what weaves down there in the depths of the soul, you can't reach that with physical knowledge. You have to penetrate through the darkness. But that is not the only thing you have to do. You also have to penetrate through the confusion of ordinary concepts to knowledge, you also have to dispel these confusions. So you also have to get beyond the ordinary thinking that works on the physical plane.

And then this man coined a very beautiful sentence. The first part of this sentence is readily followed, the second part is almost never followed. But it is important to follow it. You see, most people today who want to become or be mystics in some way or other admit that one must strip away the sensual, the material, that one must strip away the confusions of the material in order to penetrate into the spiritual. But that one must also discard the forms of the spiritual that adhere to conceptual thinking, very few people admit; for they would like to take them with them, would like to manage them in the same way as on the physical plane, would like to find the thought down there in the subconscious as a possibility for remembrance in exactly the same form as it has up there.

But it would be a mistake to believe that the clairvoyant, when he looks into the human mind, finds the thoughts there in exactly the same form as the person who has them in his head. That is not true. Down there they are transformed, they are living entities, an elementary world. The world of thoughts that man has here on the physical plane is not found in the spiritual world. That is why that man coined a beautiful sentence that I want to write down for you, because it can really be seen as a kind of trial in one's own mind: how can one possibly get to know something about the worlds that lie outside the earthly world? He said, [it was written on the board]:

Dissipez vos ténèbres matérielles ei vous trouverez l'Homme

With this part of the sentence: To disperse the material darkness and confusion - people who want to be mystics agree. But people today still hardly understand the second part of the sentence. [It was written on the blackboard]:

Dissipez vos ténèbres spirituelles et vous trouverez Dieu

whereby we have to imagine the whole content of spiritual science for “Dieu”, because that is still colored by religious ideas. Not true, he could not yet find the expression that can be found today.

Now you can surely imagine that when someone reads the sentence today: “Dissipez vos ténèbres matétrielles et vous trouverez l'homme”, they think: Yes, fine, that's how I enter the spiritual world, that's what I want. But when he reads, “Dissipez vos ténèbres spirituelles et vous trouverez Dieu,” he says, “Yes, but what will remain for me then? I will have nothing?”

Yes, what remains there? Precisely that remains, which is the content of today's spiritual science. This is necessary: the content of knowledge of the physical plane, which is usually believed to be the only correct one, must be dispelled just as the material darkness is dispelled. Now notice how this is taken into account in our spiritual science... [space in the transcript].

This sentence is a sentence of the so-called “philosophe inconnu”, of Saint-Martin, who saw himself as a disciple of Jakob Böhme. Thus, we already find in Saint-Martin a deep longing for that which is to come to light in spiritual science. But he calls himself “philosophe inconnu”, unknown philosopher, because what he carried within him remained foreign to those who saw him, of course, saw his nose, saw his hands, heard the words he spoke. The actual philosopher Saint-Martin remained unknown to them, quite unknown.

So, after the discussions we had yesterday, the appropriation of imaginative knowledge is a return, a conscious return to the way in which man had his relationship to the world during the lunar time. So that we can say - you remember, we have already presented this from a different side here in lectures: In man, today, still prevail, but supersensibly, as spiritual-supersensibles, the events, which are not actually normal events on earth, but were normal events during the moon time. He has preserved these moon events; he can fall back in a certain sense. Then he produces knowledge in a completely different way than the earth man can produce such knowledge. He can have visionary clairvoyance, have subdued intelligence and pose the very riddle I spoke of earlier, namely that if one were to induce him to work reasonably scientifically, or even to make reasonable conclusions about the most ordinary, everyday events, he cannot do it, that he does not succeed; but when he writes something out of the vision, even about the events that took place at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, he only writes pictures, remains in the moon life, but still writes terribly cleverly. And what he writes does not match what is otherwise known about the person. So, theoretically he can do nothing, but he writes very cleverly in a mediumistic way, so that one can be amazed at the cleverness. But that is not a further development, that is a regression of the human being. Of course, that does not exclude the possibility that truths can come to light through such a person, because he is, after all, in an earthly existence and connected to the earthly existence and, in addition, has this lively moon life in him.

I have tried to depict the different types of people in the Mystery Dramas, and also to draw a character who falls back into the lunar, who is therefore unintelligent on the physical plane and yet can reveal correct things, who is therefore below the level of the normal earthly human being: that is Theodora. Theodora is a figure who is meant to be a regression into lunar consciousness. That is very clear. I would like to say that it is very clearly indicated there, as it is, by saying at the one point where Theodora appears: “Theodora, a seer. In her, the will element is transformed into naive seership.” Naive seership means, of course, naive visionary. It is a naive seership, and that is how the character is developed. And for this reason, it is also that in the last mystery, Theodora herself can no longer appear, but only her soul, because she cannot go through certain things. These Mystery Dramas should be taken very, very literally. Perhaps some of you will one day realize that hardly anything that has happened here in recent days could not already be read in the Mysteries in some form or other. If one had read it as the things were meant to be read, we would not have needed these confusions.

So let us remember: what is experienced as the imaginative world is still relatively close to the human being. What can be experienced as the inspired world, on the other hand, is much less close to the human being. For when one first enters into the inspired world, it encompasses those facts that did not take place during the moon's existence but already during the old sun's existence and that the human being has also retained. So you penetrate into even greater depths of the human soul when you work your way through to the inspired world. And the inspired world that you encounter first has a certain peculiarity.

You see, when a person works his way through to the imaginative world, he encounters facts that took place during the old moon's existence. If you imagine the old moon in the phases when it was separated from the then sun (you can read about this in “Secret Science”), then at certain times, man lived on this moon that was separated from the sun. And what the human being experienced there is what one encounters first when one returns with the old, dream-like, imaginative clairvoyance. But when one enters the inspired world, then one experiences in the return not a being split off from the sun, but a being directly inside the sun; thus the facts that the human being experienced together with the sun. One experiences truly correct solar facts. And these solar facts, you see, are actually no longer related to man. Because the way man is now, during his earthly existence, if he does not look into the depths of his soul, does not look at what is in the deeply hidden reasons of his soul, he is actually, through what he is on earth, really more of a shell. It is not a real human being, it is more of a shell. First of all, there is the physical form itself, which has been created during the earthly existence as it appears to us on the physical plane. But there are forces at work within it that cannot be seen and that are not even sought by current science.

A friend of ours has been encouraged to search in this direction with the biological material at his disposal. The friend is putting a lot of effort into it and perhaps after some time - such things require a great deal of study - will be able to come up with a way to bridge the gap to these hidden parts of human nature. But for this it is necessary to search out those biological facts that are not taken into account by present-day science, that the present-day researcher, who experiments, leaves lying, as it were. So one has to search through the preparations for what does not interest the other researchers at all, what they leave lying. Of course, a lot is still missing, and a lot of new research has to be done. It is quite possible that it will take many years of work before it can be completed. But it would be an eminently important work because it could show us what can still be achieved by physical science of what lives in human nature from the old moon. It will result in a completely new embryology, a new part, a new side to embryology. It is necessary that this be done. But that is really all; more cannot be found by looking at the human being from the outside. For what can be found today in the human being from the outside is actually not older, not even as old as the oldest time of the old moon existence. But from such research, of which I have just spoken, conclusions can be drawn about processes of the old moon existence. These will correspond with what is described in “Occult Science”. But, as I said, we do not get very far back when we look at human beings as they are today; not even to the beginning of the ancient moon existence, let alone to the ancient sun existence.

If you want to go back to the old solar existence, then you have to take much, much less material in the human being than can be taken in the science I just spoke of. Because what it is about is that something actually penetrates into human nature, which man on earth can bring to revelation, but does not have to bring to revelation. He can, but he does not have to, bring it to revelation. When, for example, an artist or poet is truly inspired, then these inspirations come from the spiritual world of the existence of the sun. They really come from the spiritual world of the existence of the sun. It is just that our time is so terribly poor in spirit that what comes from the inspirations of the existence of the sun is rejected, and people actually only ever want to create in a naturalistic way, to stick to the model, that is to say to the earthly, while what can come from the model is only the material for what one should actually create. The arts that protect the individual artist from becoming attached to the model, from falling back on the material, are architecture and music. Architecture cannot reproduce anything; it often does it quite badly. And music cannot reproduce anything either, because it is not real music if you reproduce bird calls and cat meows, as you reproduce models in painting and so on. In music, only the very highest material of sound can be used. But it should be the same in every art. Just as much as the musician takes from music, the painter must take from the model. What the tones are for the musician, the form and color must be for the painter. The model should not give him more than the material. So the artistic cannot be taken from the model, but arises from inspiration, which leads back to the ancient solar existence. Hence the strangeness to the earth of truly great works of art. I said that man can live without artistic inspiration, he can, he can indeed bring it in, but he does not need to bring it in. The Botokude, doesn't he say: Man can also live without art.

But now you can – and those who experience things in a deeper sense will do so sooner or later – you can raise an important, crucial question: Yes, if we have a Saturn existence, a Sun existence, a Moon existence, an Earth existence, all with certain facts, and in imaginative knowledge, to the sun in inspired knowledge, and from this it follows that we return to Saturn in intuitive knowledge; yes, if this is so, that we do not have new facts but return to the old facts, why then does man need further development at all?

Someone might ask this question: Why further development? Why the whole earthly existence, which detaches us from the facts through which we have developed, so that the insights are pushed down into the unconscious, and we must first recognize them again? Why the whole thing?

Yes, you see, it is only through this that we become true human beings, because only through it can we truly perfect our true nature. And this can also be seen outwardly if one really studies those personalities who had something of the flexible concepts, of this conceptual mind, as I have mentioned to you in the examples of Goethe's “Metamorphosis of Plants” and “Metamorphosis of Animals”. Such natures must be studied. And such natures show at the same time that they, when they are completely true to themselves inwardly, stand in a very definite relation to yet another world of the soul. This is especially evident in Goethe. Study “Wilhelm Meister”, study all of Goethe's poetry, and you will find that in his work there is a remarkable way of judging and passing judgment on the world. If you look into these things, you will find that in the same measure as Goethe's idea of metamorphosis develops, so does a truly genuine, magnificent inner soul tolerance. A wonderful tolerance develops in his soul, a remarkable way of relating to the world and to life, a soul tolerance! And this is connected with very deep facts.

You see, if we look at the animal world, this animal world has the most diverse forms. If we compare, for example, the hyena, which has its carrion-craving written all over its face and which carries its nature in its entire posture, with the lion, with the wolf, and if we in turn compare these animals with the eagle and the eagle with the vulture, then these animals in comparison with turtles, snakes, worms, the various insects, if we take all these different animal forms, we must still ask ourselves: How does this relate to the spiritual world?

This can only be studied by studying the old moon existence. Because why? You see, during the old moon existence, man did not yet exist in his present form. The corresponding forms that existed at the human level were the angels. The Angeloi, the angels, had very different judgments and a very different way of thinking [than we have today]. The angels were at the same level back then that people are at today, but they were not in a physical body like the people on earth today. They had a very soft, flexible body, because the spirits of form had not yet been involved in forming a solid body. Now, these angeloi thought in terms that were much more alive compared to our earthly concepts, and this was not during their time on earth but during the time on the moon. These concepts, however, have something very peculiar in addition to their liveliness. They were steeped to a high degree in impulses of feeling. Inspired by the archangels, the archai, the spirits of form, the spirits of movement, and so on upwards, the angels grasped the concepts during the lunar time. But these are living, impulsive concepts; much more impulsive than we find the concepts in today's people, who alternately become either “rapture nickels” or “poison nickels” when they put their emotions into how they judge life. There are such people, and they can be the best of people, but they will alternately be enraptured, enraptured about something, or be quite pronounced “poison nickels”, so that the whole soul is in what they express and the whole goes out in the concepts, doesn't it. Now that was present in a much higher degree - directly creative - in these angels on the moon.

Imagine a moon dweller who thinks in this way! He says to himself: Yes, I must now grasp a concept. Inspiration gives me: Wretched creature, who carries his back rising from behind to the front, who makes a repulsive face out of longing for carrion! - That is how this creature came into being, condemned to be a hyena. The creative concept is there. The forms of the animal kingdom are intimately connected with this creative thinking, which creates according to the principle of good and evil. And the whole animal kingdom in its various forms is such a manifestation of good and evil.

The people [of Earth] were not supposed to learn this. One who did not want to let go of the culture of the moon seduced people into recognizing good and evil in the way he had experienced it during the lunar period. The... [gap in the transcription] judged thus; but people should learn to judge differently. This strong identification of the emotions with the concepts should not go down into deeper psychological levels. That had to be discarded, that had to give way to a more objective, more relaxed form. Therefore man had to progress from lunar to earthly development. And if he continues to progress, he will become even more tolerant. A lunar angel, yes, he hated the hyena in an incredible way because for him it represented evil. He hated the snake, hated everything that was ugly and loved everything that was beautiful. Good and evil belonged to the realm of creative life. Man had to unlearn this. Man could not develop an earth science if he were to classify animals, as the moon angels did, into beautiful and ugly – no, we classify differently, according to objective terms – into decent and indecent animals, into playful, into cunning animals, and so on. The moon angels had all that. But it would not be scientific today, for example, if a learned book were to say: “The weasel - characteristic: cunning.” This may be the case in a satirical poem, but in science today this must be suppressed; it cannot be so today.

So in order to make progress in this field, one must be able to rise to a level at which one regards the animal kingdom without emotion in the same scientific way as one regards the natural world when one has the most intense emotions in one's earthly life. And we can see this in this peculiar distillation of Goethe's mind. For him, human life is to a much greater extent a calm stream, which he observes like natural phenomena. That is precisely the wonderful inner serenity of Goethe's view of life, that for him part of human life also enters into the stream of natural facts. This is how he was able to be so objective.

Now, from this point on, we have to take up the matter again and continue the deliberations tomorrow.

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.

Yesterday our theme was more connected with the external, exoteric aspect of spiritual science.¹⁷⁴ Today we will have some comments on the inner, esoteric aspect of spiritual science.

When one speaks to a large or also a smaller audience about the discoveries made in spiritual research, which is our mission today, people will soon ask where such knowledge comes from. How can one also come to learn something about the higher worlds oneself? The question is very much to the point. One has to understand, however, that one cannot make one's own observations at a very early stage, and certainly not before one is familiar with the important ideas in the science of the spirit. It is necessary first to make the acquaintance, in a way, of the general ideas and thoughts that are part of the anthroposophical approach. One must have made the effort to gain some idea, and it is possible for everyone to do so, that there is truth in anthroposophy. Finally one must have tried, using human logic, to grasp the inner connections in what is taught in the science of the spirit.

In principle there can be no objection today to someone wanting to ascend through the stages of higher knowledge himself. Yes, people talk a great deal of the dangers and obstacles one meets in occult development—which is the term used for our inner development. There is much talk of hatha-yoga and raja-yoga,¹⁷⁵ but this is really just theory. If the thing is done the right way, if the individual who guides such inner development is also entitled to do so, there is really no danger. It is important to do things the right way, that is what matters. A lecture like the one I am giving today is not designed to give instructions—please let me stress this—for these must always be from person to person. Giving such instructions is a tremendous responsibility, and receiving them one must understand that the chosen individual really deserves one's trust. This trust is absolutely essential.

Occult or inner human development will thus gradually take the individual through the stages of higher knowledge. Let me give you an outline of the essential aspects of this, for information, as I said, not in form of instructions.

When someone has reached the summit of understanding, when someone is up on the mountain top, he has an open view in all directions. That is how it is in physical existence and also in the process of gaining insight. One does not have that open view when one has not yet reached the top but is on the way up. As one climbs higher, one is able to perceive more and more, but a great deal continues to be hidden by the mountain. This image of a mountain is a good one for inner development. Everyone who seeks to ascend to levels of higher insight must start from a point that is right for him. This means, people are different on this earth, also in their physical, etheric and astral constitutions. The outer natures of a Hindu, a person from the Near East, a European or American differ, much more so than someone who does not have occult knowledge may think. Exercises suitable for the inner development of anyone who has the Hindu nature cannot be used in that way for a Western person. It was wrong, therefore, to transfer the Oriental yoga teaching to Europe. This has done much harm. A Hindu's much softer body can be developed in a very different way than a European organism which has grown much harder due to Western civilization. Human natures thus differ much more than you may think. An anatomist cannot tell you anything about this, but someone who is clairvoyant and looks inside knows how tremendously natures differ.

We can divide present-day humanity into three types. There are still those for whom the Oriental yoga initiation is essentially right, others for whom the gnostic Christian way is open, and finally those—and they are by far the greatest in number—for whom the way known as the Rosicrucian way from the 14th century is the right one. Please note, these ways do not lead to different insights, for once you are up on the summit all things are the same. But the ways that lead to the summit are and must be different.

Many things can be achieved by taking the gnostic Christian way, and it is possible to gain the most sublime insights. But the Rosicrucian way is suitable for modern people because they may find themselves in situations where doubts arise and trouble looms because of our present-day way of life, and these must be removed for the sake of the individuals concerned and for their work in the world. This is only possible if one goes through inner training based on the Rosicrucian method, which is the right one for the Western world.

Let me present some aspects of gnostic Christian initiation, so that you may see it as a field about which much can still be learned today. I am then going to go straight on to Rosicrucian training. We'll leave the Oriental yoga way aside for today.

The Christian way is laid down in a text that is little understood outside occult circles. The gospel of John gives a complete outline of the right way of Christian initiation.

John's gospel is one of the most profound texts in the world, but one has to be able to read it in the right way, that is, one should not think that just reading it is enough and the right thing to do. It is a book for life. Above all you have to understand that even the first words are not written just for people to read or for philosophical speculation. They are written for meditation. We have to have them the proper way, however, not in the usual translation. The first verses of John's gospel must be created out of the substance of the language so that one has not only the meaning of the sentences but also their sound quality. The sound quality or value still matters for genuine occult life.

To meditate, we enter deeply into particular formulas, sentences or even words. But meditation as an important means of inner development is not a matter of entering into something we are given by our occult teacher in a philosophical or intellectual way. It is a matter of entering into the actual sound qualities. If you were to think about a sentence your teacher has given you, you could only develop thoughts about it that you already have. You are, however, to have something new. That is the important point. Sentences given for meditation open up the gates to the world of the spirit for you. They are based on experience gained over hundreds of years. Every letter, every turn of phrase is known to have an effect on the soul. You therefore need to meditate those first sentences to the letter. Correctly translated they are:

In the origin was the word, and the word was with god, and a god was the word.

This was in the origin with god.

All things have come into being through it, and except by this, nothing of what has arisen has come into being.

In it was life, and the life was the light of humanity. And the light shone into the darkness, but the darkness did not grasp it.

There came to be a human being, sent by god, his name John.

He came to bear witness that he might bear witness to the light and that through him all might believe.

He was not the light but a witness of the light.

For the true light that enlightens all human beings was to enter into the world.

It was in the world, and the world came into being through it, but the world did not recognize it.

Into individual human beings (all the way to the I-human beings) it came, but the individual human beings (the I-human beings) did not receive it.

Those however who did receive it were able to reveal themselves through it to be god's children.

Those who put their trust in its name have come into being not out of the blood, not out of the will of the flesh, not out of the will of man, but out of god.

And the word came to be flesh and dwelt among us and we have heard its teaching, the teaching of the one son of the father, full of loving devotion and truth.

If we had more time together I could tell you many things about these first sentences. Hundreds and hundreds of people have gone through the things I am now telling you about this Christian initiation. It has become practical experience for thousands. Let me just briefly indicate some stages of Christian initiation.

The pupils would first of all be told: For weeks, months, years you must set some time aside every morning when you let these first lines of John's gospel come alive in your soul. Turn your attention away from everything that is going on around you during this time. You must turn blind and deaf to everything around you, and these words should arise in your soul as though you were hearing them, day by day, over and over again.

This exercise will first of all have a particular effect on the soul. Its magic brings it about that such a person suddenly finds his dreams becoming regular, assuming regular forms. And then a moment will come when the individual knows that he is not in a dream world. Instead he'll know that he has a new reality around him—imaginative astral reality. Just as in ordinary conscious awareness we see tree and shrub around us, so we now see the things experienced in yonder world. Initially like dream images, and then more and more in a living vision seen in the waking state, the pupil will see the first twelve chapters of John's gospel before him.

After this experience the teacher of Christian initiation will say to his pupil: ‘You must now prepare for the experience of the 13th chapter. Imagine a plant. This grows out of the mineral world. If it were able to think and have inner responses it would have to say to the mineral world: “I grow out of you. You may be a lower world than I am, but I could not possibly live without you.” And it would have to bend down to the mineral world in gratitude and say: “I thank you, stone! I owe to you my whole existence.”’ An animal would have to speak in the same way to the plant. And man would have to bend down to the lower worlds of nature and have the same inner response. And everyone who has advanced more on the social scale should bend down before those who are below him and say: ‘Without you I could not have life.’

The pupil has to practice giving himself up to this completely and do so for weeks and months. Then two symptoms will arise, which are the same for everyone. He will first of all experience both the external and the inner symptom as a particular fact. He will see himself as the thirteenth, who washes the feet of the twelve. In washing their feet, Christ Jesus sought to make this great truth apparent to the twelve. This wondrous inner experience comes to the human being in the process of initiation. It also goes as far as external symptoms. He will experience something that feels as if he was dipping his feet in water. Nobody needs to be afraid of this; it will soon pass.

When the pupil has gone this far, the teacher will come and say: ‘Now you must enter into another sphere of inner responsiveness. In life pain and suffering come to us from all directions. You must enter into a condition where you meet all the suffering and all the pain that are coming from all directions in this world as an upright human being, so that they cannot harm you. You must stay with these things for weeks and months.’ Then a time comes when an astral symptom shows itself. He'll see himself in a vision of the scourging, with a sensation rather like it felt all over the body, which will pass; but the result will be that the pupil lets this feeling enter into the whole of his body. With this he has reached a level of maturity where he is able to land upright as life plies its scourge.

For the third stage he is given the instruction: ‘You must now enter into an inner feeling of how things would be with you if you not only had to bear pain and suffering but had scorn and derision poured over all that is most sacred to you. You must be able to stand up, using the powers of your inmost soul, and have a centre in you that enables you to stand erect.’ A new vision will then come, where the pupil sees himself wearing the crown of thorns. The external symptom of this is a kind of headache. This indicates, right down into the limbs, that this great experience has come.

Then comes the fourth station. The earthly body must become an outside thing for the pupil. Most people feel it is their I. The body has to be like a piece of wood, something external. The pupil must learn to say not ‘I am walking through this door’, but ‘I carry the body through this door.’ His body must be very much an object to him. Having lived into this for weeks and months, the pupil will have a vision, an astral experience where he sees himself crucified. That is the fourth station. Stigmata will appear for a brief period during meditation as an external symptom on the hands, feet and in the right side—not the left, as is generally thought. They indicate that this degree of development has also entered into the flesh.

The stages that follow cannot be discussed, for we do not have words for them. The fifth stage is the mystic death, where the pupil will first truly have the experience of a black curtain between him and reality. He will feel lost in a way, utterly isolated, as it were, until insight is gained. It is as if the world of the flesh has vanished, and something like an impenetrable black curtain lies before the eye of the soul. This is a moment everyone must go through on this way to initiation. You encounter all the truly great suffering and pain that may rest deep down in the soul, and all the evil there is in the world. This is the descent into hell. Then it seems to the pupil as if the veil tears apart and he looks into the other world.

There follows the entombment, an experience where one feels at one with the planets, and the seventh level, of which we cannot speak, for the individual has to separate his thinking from his brain to have even an inkling of it. This is ascension into heaven.

My aim in giving you this description of Christian initiation was to help you understand what it is about. It is a way full of renunciation. It may be followed quietly, attracting no notice, and there are people among you who have gone through all this. It happens between the lines in life, as it were, and the more serious it is the less will it be visible on the outside.

People must go through the Rosicrucian initiation to be armed against anything that may come from the outside. Many of the things you read about this in books are apt to make you think that the Rosicrucians are really charlatans, for that is how learned people often describe them.

True Rosicrucians have recognized one another by a secret sign since the 14th century. They must never speak of the true nature of Rosicrucianism to an outsider. But from a particular point in time that came in the 19th century it has indeed become necessary to tell people the elementary aspects of Rosicrucian initiation. Human beings are very gradually growing up and developing the maturity they will need if they are to learn something about these things. We'll not be able to go into the question today as to why it has to be like this and why the more sublime secrets must still remain hidden.

Rosicrucian initiation is also in seven stages. These are 1) study, Rosicrucian study; 2) gaining imaginative perception; 3) learning the occult script; 4) finding the philosopher's stone; 5) living experience of the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm; 6) entering wholly into the macrocosm, and 7) godliness.

Let me say once again that I can only give an outline, and no more.

Study is not the kind of learning we generally know. Instead one has to discover that there is a way of thinking that is still fluid and real, keeping out all sensory perceptions of the world around us. Western philosophers deny the existence of such a way of thinking.¹⁷⁶ They say it is only possible to think if the thought still has a residue of sensory perception in it. Those gentlemen do not know that other people have been able to do this, and they do not wish to believe it because they themselves are unable to think in this way. Man must learn to forget everything, to leave everything aside that influences the senses from the outside, yet without being an empty vessel. This is possible if one enters wholly into a pure thought content that has no sensual connection, as given by the spiritual scientist, and reflects on the thoughts that evolve. I have shown this way in my books, writing them in such a way that one element arises from another, as in a living being, so that one thought follows organically from another. You give yourself selflessly to the thought, and an inner separation results. Anyone who wishes to move to a higher level must read things written out of the science of the spirit in this way. Anyone who does not wish to reach a higher level may read them like an ordinary book. The former is the case because higher perception takes the human being into other worlds. You are now living on the physical plan—plan, not plane, for like the plan of a house it has nothing to do with being level. You thus come to different plans, into different worlds. At first you live here in the physical world, then you enter into the astral, imaginative world. It is a world we may describe as follows. Imagine a plant, green, with a red flower. You do special exercises that enable you not only to see what the senses see but to perceive how a cold flame form arises from the plant, is it were. You perceive floating colours. You thus perceive spiritual entities that you cannot perceive with the ordinary senses. Everything evaporates from the surface of things and becomes the expression of purely astral events. This world is much more real than our sense-perceptible world, for the world of the senses has been created out of that world of the spirit. This physical world has condensed out of the astral world. Matter is condensed spirit to the true occultist, and we can dissolve it again. The whole of our sense-perceptible world is condensed astral reality.

Behind this astral world is yet another world which may best be described by showing you how human beings come to gain living experience of it. When someone does the exercises I have described in my books, his dreams will first of all become regular. Try and enter into the nature of dreams. What is a dream? Let me give you some examples. They are taken from life, for I do not speak of other things.

Someone has dreamt he has caught a tree frog and then finds he has taken hold of a corner of his bed covers. The dream symbolized the occurrence. Another example is someone dreaming that he's in a dark, musty hole of a cellar full of spiders' webs. He wakes up with a headache. Some dreams may involve high drama. A student is standing at the door of the lecture theatre. Another one comes in jostles him, and a duel is fought with pistols. The shot rings out—and the chair next to the bed has fallen over. This minor incident has come to symbolic expression in the whole dramatic story of the dream. A farmer's wife dreams she's going to town and entering a church where the priest's sermon is of sublime things. Just when it gets really sublime, the priest begins to change. It looks as if he is growing wings and then he suddenly begins to crow. At that moment the farmer's wife wakes up and the cock is crowing outside. The cock's crow has been transformed and taken symbolic form in the dream.

Dreams are thus highly creative. Everything is chaotic in them. But life is given to this world and everything becomes harmonious and regular if you gain the certainty, up to a point, that this represents a reality. This is how it first shows itself, and later one takes things perceived in the world of dreams across into everyday life. Something develops which we may call ‘continuity of conscious awareness’.

Human beings also have dreamless sleep. The Rosicrucian pupil next learns to perceive entities and events around himself in a sleep state. The revelations of the spirit world sound forth from the darkness of dreamless sleep. In the Pythagorean schools this was called the world of the music of the spheres. The world of the spirit sounds forth. If you really want to hear something about the devachan, this must be such that it is described to you as a world of sound. Goethe, who had this degree of Rosicrucian initiation, knew of this: ‘The sun proclaims its old devotion in rival song with brother spheres.’ That is either nonsense or a higher truth. The physical sun does not resound, but the spirit of the sun is a real, resounding entity. And Goethe stayed with the metaphor; in part 2 of Faust, he wrote: ‘Resounding now for ears of spirit the new day is already being born.’ He wrote like that because the music of the spheres of which the Pythagoreans spoke was a reality to him. I can only refer to these things briefly. All things will speak to us, a new revelation will come forth.

Those are the stages the Rosicrucian pupil can reach by means of exercises. The worlds are always completely different, and someone who only knows the physical world can have no idea of the things one can learn in other worlds. One thing is the same for all worlds, however, and that is logical thinking. Our perceptions are entirely different in the astral, in the devachanic world, but the laws of thinking are the same in all three worlds. A Rosicrucian pupil must therefore first learn this way of thinking, so that he may keep to the proper path and not lose his way.

The 2nd stage consists in gaining imaginative perception. I can only tell you a few things that should explain what is meant by this. When you see a tear rolling down a cheek, you conclude that the soul is filled with sadness. When you see a cheerful face you conclude that the soul is cheerful. You draw these conclusions in relation to people. When you want to ascend to imaginative perception you must do this in relation to the whole world. The life of plants, animals and stones should express the physiognomy of the world soul for you. Some things must be like our cheerfulness, other things like tears wept by the earth spirit. This must become very real to the person. And much can be experienced in this way. The secret of the holy grail, the ideal of medieval Rosicrucian pupils, is connected with this.

Let us take an example. The Rosicrucian pupil would meet his teacher who would give him an exercise to do. I am going to put this in the form of a dialogue, though it has never been spoken dialogue. But what it conveys was practised and became living experience. It is entirely true and absolutely correct in every detail. The pupil would come to his teacher who would say to him: ‘Look at the plant. It extends its root into the soil, it grows upwards, opening its calyx at the top, and in there are its organs of fertilization and reproduction. Chastely and nobly and in purity it lets the sun's ray kiss it; the light, the sacred lance of love, which penetrates the calyx as a sunbeam and calls forth the potential that lies in the plant's organs of fertilization. You would have the wrong idea if in comparing the plant with a human being you were to think that the root is the head and the flower the lower part. Man is an inverted plant.’

The occultist thus sees the inverted plant in man and the inverted human being in the plant, with the animal between the two. ‘Look at the plant. It is the arm of the cross that goes down, the animal is the horizontal arm, and man the vertical arm.’¹⁷⁷ That is the original significance of the cross. It is the symbol for plant, animal and man as three realms of nature. Plato therefore wrote that the world's soul was crucified on the world's body. And the teacher would go on to say to the pupil: ‘Look at the human being, the human being in the flesh. What is this human flesh? Compare it with the matter contained in a plant. Plant matter is chaste and pure. Human flesh is full of passion and desire. Man is higher up on the evolutional scale, but this also means that he has taken in passion and desire.’ And the occult pupil would begin to intuit a future human being whose flesh would be pure and chaste again, like the chaste calyx of a flower which holds out its organs of fertilization to the sunbeam's sacred lance of love. Then his productive powers would reach out to the spirit just as today the plant reaches out to the lance of love, to the light. Those who sought to achieve this went through a transformation of the flesh. And so the pupil was presented with the great ideal of the human being who one day will be as pure and chaste as the plant. This ideal is called the holy grail. It is one of the images that speak to the heart and the whole soul. The pupil was able to rise higher not through thoughts but through images that influence the whole soul, captivating heart, mind and soul. Only then can imaginative perception be achieved.

The 3rd level involves learning the occult script. Something exists in this world which in occult life is called the vortex. It is to be found everywhere in nature and in the world of the spirit. Imagine you are looking up to the Orion nebula, which is a distinctive spiral. If you were a seer you would see that a vortex emerges like a figure 6, with a second vortex that is darker. The two intertwine. This also occurs in the world of the spirit.

We live in the age that follows the great Atlantean flood. Before that, our earliest ancestors were human beings of a very different kind. People imagine today that in those times human beings were just as they are now. But the physical conditions were completely different then. Atlantis was always in darkness, enveloped in masses of dense fog. It is important for you to know this. Old German mythology holds memories of Niflheim [land of mist] and Nibelungs [creatures of the mist]. Under those conditions the human constitution was very different. The Atlanteans also had a completely different culture. You might get an idea of this if I were to give you details of the way people heard articulated sounds in all things at that time. There were no moral laws. If someone wanted to know how to relate to a neighbour, he could not appeal to some authority or other; he would listen to the waves and then he would know.

It was a culture of which no trace seems to remain. It perished. When did this happen? We can see that in the heavens. About 8 centuries before the Christ was born the sun rose in the Ram. It takes about 2160 years to move through a sign of the zodiac. The sun moved into the sign of the Ram, or the Lamb, about 800 years before Christ. People felt the new constellation had brought them the new fruitfulness of spring, something new and good. We see from this that they felt the Lamb or the Ram to be important. Many things point to this, among them the legend of the Argonauts, in which the golden fleece plays such a role. The Christ himself is called the Lamb of God. The lamb was the symbol for offering veneration. Before that, the sun had been in the sign of the Bull, hence the veneration of the bull in Egyptian and Persian culture. Even earlier the sun passed through the sign of the Twins. In accord with this, duality played a great role in the Persian teachings of Ormazd and Ahriman. Traces of this still persisted in ancient Germanic culture. Before that, the sun was passing through Cancer. This was the period that followed the Atlantean flood. A vortex had occurred in the realm of the spirit.

This constellation with the occult sign of Cancer can still be seen in the calendar today. Many such signs are known to man. In reality this is nothing but a recreation of primal forces of nature. If you train your heart and mind to understand the occult signs you will steel your will with this occult script. You get to know the ways of the spirits that are behind nature. A faint echo remains in symbolic signs such as the pentagram and hexagram. One occult sign you often read about is the swastika.¹⁷⁸ The strange explanations given for it are quite unbelievable. In reality it is nothing but the sign for the astral sense organs, the wheels or lotus flowers, several of which are potentially present in the astral body—in the heart, the larynx, between the eyebrows. Astral vision begins when the last named of these wheels begins to turn. The swastika is the sign for this astral organ of perception.

The 4th level is called preparing the philosopher's stone. This is a reality. At the end of the 18th century someone who had got hold of something, but not exactly the right idea, put quite a good description of the philosopher's stone in a journal. He actually did not know himself how good it was. At that time a number of things from the occult school were wrongly made public, and so someone also described the philosopher's stone. This is actually something familiar to everyone, and many people handle it daily without having an idea. To help you see what this is about, follow me in a brief line of thought. Consider human breathing. We inhale oxygen, which changes our blue blood to red, and we exhale carbon dioxide, which means we are all the time exhaling poisonous matter. Plants on the other hand take up the carbon dioxide exhaled by humans and animals and retain the carbon to build up their bodies. They release the oxygen, so that humans can inhale it again. This is a cycle. Occultists attached great importance to this process. If you dig up a plant form that has become coal today you can see that the plant built up its body of carbon. Humans take in oxygen, changing blue blood into red; plants take in carbon dioxide and return the oxygen which humans then take in again.

Let us try and see what happens when the breathing process is regulated in a particular way in Rosicrucian training. The way in which it is done can only be passed on from person to person, but it is possible to speak of the effect. ‘A steady drip will hollow the stone’, as the saying goes. And that applies with the process I am now describing. The occult pupil is instructed by his teacher on doing his breathing exercises out of the spirit. It is an instruction, therefore, to regulate his breathing process in a particular way and this makes it possible for the human mind to expand a little as time goes on. It is something of which human beings normally know nothing and has to do with something that happens in the plant. The plant now becomes at one with him. Normally human beings exhale carbon dioxide and take in oxygen. The pupil must bring this to mind consciously. In his breathing he consciously experiences the change from carbon to oxygen, blue blood to red blood. He learns to do something in himself that is normally left to the plant. He will then be able to build up his own body. He learns to do so by means of regular breathing. This, then, is a real process in which the human being learns to purify his flesh also at the physical level. The alchemy of the human body lies in this. The human being is transformed into the vehicle for a pure, chaste incarnation that may be compared to a plant. The pupil is aware of something sublime, light and bright. He knows he only had to go through the flesh. That is the transformation of coal into diamond. You'll now understand the significance of bringing rhythm into the breathing in Rosicrucian training and know what was meant by the philosopher's stone. The regulated breathing process is the way to the philosopher's stone.

I am only touching on things lightly, but you'll understand that something profound lies behind the search for the philosopher's stone, something connected with the transformation of the whole of mankind, so that human beings will be different from the way they are today—they and the whole earth. That is how great and strong and firm, morally great, the powers of soul must be if man is to make the flesh, too, part of the process of redemption. We also have to redeem everything that exists around us, all creation.

The 5th level is to enter deeply into the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. A great occultist of medieval times, someone we must first learn to read, used a beautiful image to show the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm. Paracelsus said: You see there the individual letters. Man is the word made up of the letters. And so we have to see man spread out in the whole of nature, and man himself as a compendium of nature. Paracelsus referred to a cholera patient as Arsenicus, for example, for the powers active in him are the same as those active in arsenic.

But there is more. When someone concentrates really hard on a particular part inside him, the point between the eyebrows—this, of course, is only a reference point—he will have a particular experience in which he is taken into the inner events of the great world. These correspond to the part which in the human microcosm lies between the eyes. And so the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm has to be experienced bit by bit. Entering deeply into his inner life, the pupil must get to know the outside world.

At the 6th and 7th levels the Rosicrucian pupil comes to be at one with the whole world. He gains true knowledge of the outside world. And his feelings and his whole soul become one with the outside world to the same degree. This is the condition known as godliness. The earth's body is then his body. And the pupil achieves the stage known as being at one with the universe. It is a long road along one particular path. Those who have gone through it become messengers of the spiritual world, speaking from real experience.

It is a road anyone can follow today—certainly in principle. It will take a long time for some, and a shorter time for others. One of the best theosophists, the late Subba Row, said about the time needed, which people ask about so often: ‘It is true that one person needed 70 incarnations, another 7 incarnations, someone else again 70 years or perhaps 7 years; there have been people who achieved it in 7 months, and some in just 7 days, depending on their karma from former lives on earth.’ Setting out on the road one must be patient and persevere, knowing that one will be exposed to great dangers unless one has first gone through character training.

Let me give you an analogy. Take a green liquid produced by mixing blue and yellow. You can separate the blue from the yellow by using a chemical agent. Before that, the individual properties of the two solutions were not apparent. Now they show those properties. And that is how it is with the human being. High and low qualities are mixed. The lower ones are prevented from taking full effect because the higher ones have been added. If you now separate the two by doing the exercises you may find that someone who until now was more or less bearable grows malicious and cunning and also shows a whole lot of other bad characteristics. This is something you have to understand. The danger can definitely be prevented by doing specific preliminary exercises that establish a particular inner morality full of character.

The pupil must first learn to keep strict control of his thoughts. He must practise making one thought the focus of his inner life for a long period, the more intensely so the better. He must stick with it and let all thoughts follow from it. This exercise must be done for at least five minutes every day. The more the better, but one should not overdo it.

2) It is necessary to be able to take initiative in one's actions. This is done by the pupil doing one particular thing on his own initiative every day. It may be something quite small and insignificant, for instance watering one's flowers. After a time one takes up another initiative.

3) One has to gain mastery over pleasure and pain. There must be no more of being on top of the world one moment and down in the dumps the next. This mastery will make you more subtly receptive, but you yourself must be the master, not your inner responses.

4)There is need to be positive. A Persian legend about Christ Jesus will show you what is meant. The Christ was walking with some of his disciples. A dead, partly decomposed dog was lying by the roadside. The disciples turned away and said: ‘How horrible that creature is!’ The Christ stopped, however, and said: ‘Look how beautiful the animal's teeth are!’ You can look for and find something beautiful in the ugliest things, something great in the smallest of things. One must always look for the positive side.

5) One has to learn to be completely unbiased towards anything new. Absence of bias to the highest degree. People tend to say: ‘I've never heard of this before, seen this before; I don't believe it!’ We have to learn in the widest possible sense never to say something is impossible. There should be a place in our hearts where one allows it to be possible, say, that the church tower is at an angle if someone says it is at an angle. We should at least consider it to be possible if we hear such a thing.

The 6th level consists in bringing the 5 qualities into harmony.

The pupil will then have developed such inner strength that he will be protected from anything occult training might otherwise do to him. It would be wrong to set limits to occult training and say: ‘All I want is the ethical value.’ Anyone wishing to enter into the higher worlds must follow the indicated route. The road to the most sublime insights is also the way of greatest compassion. We must gain such compassion from insight, not with phrases. When someone has broken a leg all the people standing around full of compassion will be of no use, only the one individual who knows what to do and does it properly. Merely to preach theosophy is like standing in front of the stove and saying: ‘It is your duty to get the room warm.’ And it is the same if you tell people to practise brotherly love. Just as you have to put wood in the stove and put a match to it, so you have to give people what they need if their souls are to unite in one great brotherhood, and that is insight. True insight is the fuel for the great brotherly union among human beings. Today we have the age of materialism, and because of this people have gone their separate ways.

• 174. Public lecture on spiritual research and its mission given in Vienna on 21 February 1907. Rudolf Steiner spoke on the same subject in Berlin on 11 October 1906 (see Supersensible Knowledge (GA 55); tr. R. Stebbing. Hudson & London: Anthroposophic Press & Rudolf Steiner Press 1987.
• 175. Hatha-Yoga uses mainly external methods such as holding one's breath and special body positions. Raja-Yoga is the 6th to 8th stages on the way to salvation in Sankhya philosophy—concentration, meditation, complete absorption.
• 176. Rudolf Steiner was probably thinking mainly of E. von Hartmann. See note 166.
• 177. Rudolf Steiner often referred to this, e.g. in a lecture he gave in Basel on 22 Nov. 1907 (in GA 100); Typescript notes EN 50 at Rudolf Steiner House Library, London. There he said: ‘You draw the plant vertically, pointing to the earth, the human being also vertically, but pointing away from the earth, and the animal horizontally.’ Also in Berlin on 29 May 1905, in The Temple Legend GA 93); tr. J. Wood. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1985. This is in contrast to the drawing for the lecture given in Leipzig on 16 February 1907 (in this volume); see note 168.
• 178. The next public lecture Rudolf Steiner gave was the one on 29 April 1906 (in this volume). There followed the fundamental course of lectures he gave on 22 August–4 September 1906 in Stuttgart (At the Gates of Spiritual Science; GA 95).

What makes it difficult to fully understand spiritual science, as it is meant here, is that it not only has to think in a different way than ordinary consciousness about certain life riddles – about life riddles that very many people believe to be inaccessible to human knowledge altogether, some even believe to be outside of the real. But spiritual science comes to a way of thinking that is different in its kind, in its whole form, than the thinking of ordinary consciousness. Spiritual science comes to a thinking that, in the way it was indicated in the last two lectures I gave here, must first be unfolded out of ordinary consciousness, just as the blossom must be unfolded out of the plant that is not yet flowering. It can be said, however, that the development of human spiritual culture in the nineteenth century and up to our time has given rise to many ideas and conceptions that are on the way to this spiritual science. Even if the corresponding endeavors within the modern development of the spirit radically differ from this spiritual science, they nevertheless make demands for the knowledge of certain life and world riddles that are on the way to spiritual science. And here particular attention may be drawn to an idea which has been much discussed lately within certain circles, not only those circles in which it has been popularized by Eduard von Hartmann, the well-known philosopher, but also within other scientific circles. I am referring to the idea of the unconscious or, as one might perhaps better say, the subconscious in human mental life.

Let us see what is actually meant by this unconscious or subconscious. Even though it is interpreted in the most diverse ways by the most diverse people, what is meant ultimately comes down to the fact that in the depths of the human soul there is something that actually constitutes the basis of this human soul, but which cannot be reached with the ordinary consciousness of the day, nor with the ordinary consciousness of science. So that one can say: Those who speak of the subconscious or unconscious in the human soul speak of it in such a way that one can see that they are convinced that the actual essence of the soul cannot be grasped with everything that the human being can bring into his ordinary thinking and feeling, into the penetration of his will impulses into everyday and also into ordinary scientific consciousness. It may be said that, in so far as this conception has been characterized here, spiritual science can fundamentally agree with it. But it is the fate of spiritual science, as it is here meant, to agree with many a direction in world-conception from a certain point of view, but to have to take the paths indicated by these world-conceptions in a different way from that in which they do so. And here we come to something that the representatives of the subconscious or unconscious believe, but in which spiritual science must fundamentally differ from them. These representatives of the unconscious believe that what lies unconsciously for ordinary consciousness down in the depths of the soul and constitutes the actual essence of the human soul must remain unconscious or subconscious under all circumstances, and can never rise up into ordinary consciousness. This is why Eduard von Hartmann, who, as I said, has made the unconscious most popular in the last half-century, is also of the opinion that one can learn just as little about the nature of the soul as about the nature of nature itself through direct knowledge, through experience, through observation. He believes that one can only draw conclusions about the unconscious or subconscious and only hypothesize about it, that one can draw such conclusions from observations arising from the ordinary world, from everyday experiences or from science, and then hypothetically form ideas about what the world of the unconscious or subconscious looks like. Spiritual science cannot go along with this. And that it cannot do so, those revered listeners who were at the last lectures will have been able to deduce from them. For it was characterized there how spiritual science comes precisely to the realization that this unconscious or subconscious does indeed rest in the depths of the soul for ordinary knowledge, but that it can be brought up under certain circumstances. It can be brought up when that consciousness comes to development in man, which, as I have shown in my book 'The Riddle of Man', can be called the seeing consciousness, in the further development of Goethe's words 'contemplative judgment'. With these words about the 'contemplative judgment', Goethe gave a significant, a momentous suggestion. This stimulus could not be fully developed in his time simply because spiritual science was not as advanced as it is now. But spiritual science regards it as its task not to create all kinds of fanciful images in a nebulous, enthusiastic way, but to develop on serious scientific ground precisely what Goethe stimulated with his very significant words about the power of contemplative judgment. The way in which the human soul comes to this power of judgment or to the consciousness of direct perception is described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in other books of mine to which I must refer here. But what underlies this power of judgment will, I hope, emerge from a certain point of view, especially in today's lecture.

If spiritual science is compelled to follow the paths taken by the representatives of the unconscious in a different way from them, on the other hand it is in complete agreement with the scientific results of modern times. And here too, it is in a position to follow the path that this scientific research takes, but in a different way than the research itself; precisely because it is more in harmony with nature than the scientific view often is with itself.

As for the question of the actual nature of the soul, the scientific view is that this soul, as the human being experiences it in his ordinary consciousness, is entirely dependent on the human bodily organization. And as I have often indicated here, it would be a futile effort to resist this view of the dependence of the soul life, as experienced by man, on the bodily organization, from whatever point of view. Nothing seems clearer, even if natural science still has a lot to go through in this way, than that it has shown in a subtle way, even if the main points were known long ago, how the course of all human life clearly shows this dependence of the soul in its development on the bodily organization. One need only point out the many delicate facts, and it can be seen how, from childhood on, the human being develops organically as a living being, and how the development of the soul goes hand in hand with this development, how the soul life grows along with the development of the organs that natural science, with a certain justification, attributes to the soul life as its tool. And if we add the fact that the soul life is undermined by undermining the health or the organic connection of certain parts of the body, it becomes clear from all this how right the scientific world view is in this area. It can also show us how, with the gradual decline of the forces that permeate the human body, with aging, these soul forces decline in exact parallel to the bodily organization. Only dilettantism could, in principle, raise any objection to this view, which is put forward by the scientific world view. Those who believe that spiritual science does not reckon with the results of natural science do not judge this spiritual science, as it is meant here, in itself, but the false image that they build of it out of their imagination, and which they then find to be little in agreement with the natural scientific results of recent times, which rightly appear true to them. Spiritual science is therefore entirely based on the results of natural science. But I would like to add that spiritual science is in harmony with these results in a much deeper sense precisely because of its insights, than natural science itself can carry out. This can be seen in particular when one looks at a school of thought about the soul that is confused by many people with what is meant here by spiritual science. All kinds of unclear mystical ideas and experiences of people have to be pushed aside when one criticizes spiritual science, and one then confuses this spiritual science with these unclear, confused mystical ravings.

When one studies in depth, especially from the point of view of spiritual science, what has been called mysticism through the ages, something very remarkable emerges, not in all cases but in many. One can come to the most esteemed mystics and clearly see in them how the newer natural-scientific world view is right when they often do not attach much cognitive value to these mystical endeavors for the actual riddles of the soul and humanity. What is interesting and extraordinarily attractive is certainly what mystics have experienced when properly observed. And it is not the study, the objective, good consideration of mystical experiences of different times that should be objected to here, but rather the principle of the matter; that should simply be characterized. Mystics try, which is again a correct way in the sense of spiritual science, as I just characterized it, through what they call “union of the soul with the world spirit or with the divine” — as one wants to call it — to undergo a deeper experience, an experience that leads them beyond the reality of the senses, allowing them to be one with the spiritual-divine, and thus, as it were, elevating them out of the transitory into the sphere of the eternal. But how do they usually try to do this? Well, if you really study mystical development, you find that they try to do it by refining their ordinary everyday consciousness, by deepening it in a certain way, warming it through and glowing through with all kinds of inwardness, but by remaining within this ordinary consciousness. Now, spiritual science knows precisely from its insights that the scientific view is correct, that this ordinary, everyday consciousness is entirely dependent on its tools, on the life of the body. So if you delve into the ordinary, everyday consciousness in the mystical sense, however inwardly and finely you do it, but you stop at it, then you achieve nothing more than something that is dependent on the bodily organization. There are mystics who, through great poetic beauty, through wonderful flights of fancy, through a remarkable intuition for all kinds of things turned away from the world, can uplift the human heart and refresh the human soul to such an extent that I might say they amaze one through these things. But in the end one must always awaken from this amazement with the feeling: yes, what is the whole thing after all, if not a more intimate, often, one might say, refined imagining and thinking that is bound to the bodily organization; only now it is not bound in the same way as man is bound to it in everyday life, but is connected with the finer, more subtly developed powers of the bodily organization. One can find amiable, respectable mystics, of whom one must nevertheless say: their mystical experiences are nothing more than refined, or let us say spiritualized passions, affects, feelings, which are, however, similar to the passions, affects, feelings of ordinary life. Such mystics have only brought their bodily organization, through all kinds of ascetic means or through all kinds of predispositions, to the point that this bodily organization may express itself in quite different ways than is the case with ordinary people, but in the end it is still the bodily organization. Often one can see from the most sweeping expositions and effusions of such mystics that although they have turned away from the ordinary life of the senses of the day, from standing in the outer world, they have brought into this life of the senses, into the ordinary life of passion and affect, only what their imagination is able to experience. Therefore, the scientifically minded person will, with a certain right, call the experiences of such mystics abnormal, because they differ from ordinary experience. He may call them unhealthy, but he will also be right in saying that they prove nothing against the dependence of the human soul-life on the bodily organization, even if it occurs in a mystically refined way. In a sense, the bodily organization has only been trained so that what would otherwise appear in brutal sensuality is expressed in the soul in spiritual images, in metaphors, in symbols, behind which images, metaphors, and symbols, however, the connoisseur can find nothing but a refined expression of the ordinary life of passion.

In contrast to this, spiritual science says, and it is in complete agreement with the advocates of the subconscious or unconscious: however mystically refined ordinary consciousness may be, however much this ordinary consciousness 'spiritualized' - as it is often called - so that it brings a feeling of union with the spirit, within this ordinary consciousness one does not enter into that sphere which one actually seeks when one wants to speak of the deeper soul mysteries of man. In particular, the trained observation of the spiritual researcher shows that everything that a person can have and store in his soul in his ordinary experiences, which he makes into a memory, is tied to the physical organization. So that with everything that a person experiences within himself when he delves into his memories, he does not come out of this bodily organization, and one may say: a real spiritual scientific self-observation shows precisely that the more faithfully the experiences are retained by the memory, the more the activity of the memory is bound to this bodily organization. Therefore, spiritual science must resort to completely different methods than those used to develop ordinary consciousness. Even if this ordinary consciousness can summon up particular fidelity for memory in that the bodily organization functions well and experiences can be faithfully recalled even after a long time, spiritual science must take different methods than those known to ordinary consciousness. And I have already pointed out in the last lectures what arises as an observation of thinking itself, and I will only repeat it from a different point of view.

Ordinary thinking, I said, is indeed the starting point for all spiritual scientific research, and only he finds this starting point who, through a true observation of this thinking, already realizes how true and real it is that this thinking already leads beyond the sensual-physical, that it itself is already a spiritual thing. But one cannot stop at this point. One cannot stop at the recognition that this thinking, as it arises in ordinary life, is a final thing. Even then it is not a final thing when it has apparently spiritualized itself the most, namely in the memory representations. That is why I said: All that a person can think, feel and want in ordinary life does not lead to a knowledge of the nature of the soul when it is observed, when it is experienced. Rather – and this is only one of the many measures that must be taken in the intimate life of the soul, others can be found in the books mentioned – the human being must develop his thinking and unfold his imagination in such a way that he is no longer present with his personality, or let us say with his subjectivity, in this thinking; for he is present as long as consciousness is ordinary, and there his physical organization is involved. If we only develop ideas and seek out ideas that can be retained and reappear with our thinking, we only achieve what is accomplished through the tools of the bodily organization. Therefore, as I have said, one must develop this thinking in such a way that one is no longer present during this development. But for that one needs patience and persistence, not the belief that the great questions of the world can be decided in the twinkling of an eye, that one only needs to approach them in order to get behind these world riddles or to form an opinion about them; something quite different is needed for that. To do that, we need the secrets of the entire human life. We need patience to develop such inner methods, the life of which cannot be taken in an instant, but which can only develop if we leave them to the development they can experience in the course of human life.

I have indicated that this is called a “meditative life”: when one introduces certain ideas, preferably ones that one can survey precisely so as to avoid any unconscious or other reminiscences of life from emerging, into one's soul, into one's consciousness, and really lives through these ideas on all sides with a calm consciousness. If one does not merely observe how, in ordinary consciousness, these ideas, as they are, can be brought into memory again, if one does not merely pay attention to how they remain, as one might say, true to their own form, but if one reaches to let these ideas out of ordinary consciousness, so to speak, by no longer being present during their development. For if one has only enough patience and persistence, one will always find that the images descend into the depths of human consciousness, where, to put it trivially, one no longer knows anything about them; then one will be able to experience how they emerge again into one's memory. At first spiritual research cannot do anything with all this. But another thing takes place. For the one who develops his inner soul life in the sense of the books mentioned, it shows that the ideas on which consciousness has rested in a corresponding way do indeed emerge as memories again after months or years, just like the others. but these ideas are encountered again in a way that a faithful memory does not show, but rather in such a way that they have now shaped not his physical but his mental life, in such a way that they have made it different in a certain area. These images do not resurface in the same form in which we let them down into the subconscious, but they do resurface and announce themselves in such a way that one must say: they have not worked in what is your personal, but in what is below the conscious personal, they have unfolded their power there and now appear in a substantially different form. Therefore, one can say: When the idea that one has had, that one has kept faithfully, that one has faithfully reawakened, once again encounters what has become of it, without us being there with our consciousness, what has resulted from it through working in some hidden sphere without our knowledge, this encounter between the ordinary consciousness and the images that arise from the subconscious, transforms the former so that one can see its effect on the human soul. This encounter shows how man is involved in a completely different sphere of life than that of physical-sensory reality, how truly unconscious or subconscious things live in the depths of the soul life, but how it can be brought up through appropriate methods, and how it penetrates into consciousness differently than it does in ordinary memory.

Spiritual science therefore takes the view that through appropriate treatment of our soul life, the unconscious can move into the conscious, but should only move up when it has achieved its work, its development, in the unconscious. But in this way spiritual science comes to what is called the seeing consciousness. For here a real experience is undergone that may be compared to the transition from ordinary dream-life to waking consciousness. In dream-life, what do we experience? We experience the subjective pictures of the inner man, which, while dreaming, we take for reality. When we wake up, we know from our direct contact with external reality that the dream has only brought us images, and these images – as closer observation shows – arise from our organic interior, showing this organic interior in symbols, but arising from us. And no one will be tempted to believe that in a dream one can become aware of what a dream actually is; no one can dream what a dream is. On the other hand, if one moves out of the dream into ordinary consciousness and tries to explain the dream from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, one comes to its fantastically chaotic pictorial nature. It is the same when one moves up from ordinary consciousness to the seeing consciousness in the way described. In the same way as one comes out of a dream into physical-sensory reality, one passes from external physical-sensory reality into what might be called — the word is debatable — higher spiritual reality. One awakens into another world, a world that now throws light on the ordinary physical-sensory world just as the world of ordinary consciousness throws light on the world of dreams. In this way, spiritual science not only comes to think differently about the riddles of the world and the soul, but above all it comes to the realization that in order to enter the spiritual worlds, a different consciousness from the ordinary consciousness must first be brought out of the depths of the soul. Today I can only present certain results and their consideration, but in many lectures here, a great deal of justification has been said about these results and it can be found in the relevant literature.

With reference to, I would like to say, the most immediate science, just as it agrees with natural science, this spiritual science must now also again differ from mere natural science. This spiritual science, as it wants to appear today, stands fully on the basis of the same scientific conscience, the same scientific attitude as natural science of modern times. But it cannot stop at the kind of thinking that natural science develops. Therefore, as things stand today, the spiritual scientist will have a good foundation above all if he has developed his thinking, his imagination, his feeling about the world based on the most rigorous scientific ideas, and these are today those that are permeated as much as possible by mathematics, the ideas of the physical, the chemical, and even the mechanical. One day it will be different when the biological sciences, physiology, will have progressed as far as the inorganic natural sciences have. But the spiritual researcher cannot stop at thinking about the world as natural science does. He can only discipline his thinking by training it in the strict thinking of science. And when he has trained himself, I might say, to allow himself nothing in his thinking but what can stand the test of the scientific attitude of mind, he will have created the best foundation for himself as a spiritual-scientific researcher. It therefore turns out that this spiritual science must in many ways be compared with what has occurred with the rise of the newer scientific way of thinking. I have often pointed out how, with the Copernican world view, people had to learn to think differently with regard to the external world, how what Copernicus asserted must initially have seemed absurd to people because it contradicted the statements of the external sense world. When objections are raised against spiritual science, in particular, on the grounds that it contradicts the statements of the external sense world, then it must be pointed out again and again that, for example, astronomy has made great strides through Copernicus precisely because it did not stick to what the external senses show, but boldly transcended them by taking what the external senses show to be mere appearances. If the inner nerve of such a change were recognized in the field of natural science, then people would be much less likely to raise unintelligent objections to spiritual science, as still happens quite often today. But today I want to bring up another point in which spiritual science must recognize itself as similar to the progress of natural science in the Copernican worldview. Copernicus had to turn thinking about the planetary world, one might say, completely upside down, in order to take account of what had to be taken into account. Here the earth stands still, the sun revolves around it – so the ordinary sensory consciousness told people. Even if the Copernican world view must undergo some revision if we are to make progress, we cannot think in such a way as to imagine the Earth at the center of the planetary system and the Sun orbiting around it; rather, we must turn the fact, which presents itself as an apparent fact to the senses, completely upside down: we must place the Sun at the center of the planetary system and let the planets orbit around the Sun. It is well known how certain circles did not accept the Copernican world view for a long time. Just because it has become so customary today, one no longer reflects on the grotesque that it must have appeared to many people to whom it came from other points of view. One had to develop completely new ideas; one had to get used to having different ideas than those that one had had for centuries for ordinary thinking.

Now it is somewhat more difficult in the field of spiritual science to see the analogy in its own field, but only because it is today in the same position as the Copernican world view was at the time of its appearance. The ideas that spiritual science must develop are quite unfamiliar today, and they must take a similar path with regard to a certain point in human soul life, I would say, to the path taken by the Copernican world view. What appears to be clearer for the ordinary soul life, for ordinary observation – as clear as the fact that the sun revolves around the earth is for sense perception – than that the human being is born with his soul, goes through his life, that his soul or its ego changes gradually in the course of this life, accompanying this life, that when the person turns 7, 13, 15, 18, 20, 25 years old, it has accompanied the person through the years of this life. In a sense, as if it were walking through life from birth to death, one sees the soul being as if it were accompanying it. Spiritual science shows it completely differently. Spiritual science shows the remarkable fact - which will be further explained in the following lectures - that what we call the soul, to which the idea of immortality is linked, does not at all undergo the course of life in the usual sense. Just as the sun does not move in the usual sense in its heavenly course around the earth, so the human ego or the human soul does not travel the path from birth to death. The matter is completely different. It only looks different because we are not accustomed to observing it in this way. The matter is completely different:

We remember ourselves in later life back to a certain point, which lies a few years after our birth. Up to this point, the I or soul-being accompanies its development alone. Then it remains — if I may use the expression, it is correct — in time, remains in time like the sun in space, and the course of life does not take the I with it, but moves on, just like the planets around the sun, while the I or soul remains at rest at the point I have indicated. The course of life radiates that which flows in it back to the soul that remains dormant. The only reason the idea is so difficult is because it is easier to imagine rest in space than in time. But when one considers that for certain circles the Copernican view of the world only became acceptable in 1827, one can indeed also assume that spiritual science can take its time until people are able to imagine that resting in time is just as possible as resting in space. One can say: the soul remains in itself, and life continues until death, in that the experiences only reflect back onto that which remains at the aforementioned point in time. But there is something else connected with this: that what we actually call the soul does not emerge at all in those events and facts that are related to the life of the body, that the soul in its actual essence remains within the spiritual. It does not enter into the ordinary course of life because this course of life flows into the sensual-physical event. The soul remains behind, holding back in the spiritual. Now, in the ordinary course of life, with the ordinary course of life between birth and death, consciousness proceeds in such a way that it appears in accordance with the physical tools. But the deeper, the true soul essence does not pour into this physical being as such, but remains in the spiritual. But this already indicates that knowledge and understanding of this soul-life cannot be acquired in the ordinary course of life, dependent as it is on the outer world. Such knowledge and understanding can only be attained when, in the manner described, the consciousness is set aside, when — to repeat this example once more — the thought that has remained in the consciousness now encounters the thought that is working subconsciously. But then the significant thing happens that gradually this subconscious work pours out over the entire human life, insofar as it has been lived through, and that the person, in his inner experience, really knows himself at the starting point of his life on earth, at the boundary up to which his memory reaches, knowing himself as standing within the spiritual life, but raised out of the time in which the ordinary consciousness runs. Therefore, no mysticism that is as I have characterized it, and that seeks to bring about a deeper experience than the ordinary into the consciousness that runs in time, can reach the soul being. Rather, this soul essence can only be reached when time itself is transcended, when the soul moves up into the realm that emerges before memory takes hold, or perhaps it is better to say: when the human being, with his inner experience, moves up beyond this point in time, develops the soul in order to find the soul there, as it is in its inner essence.

All these are difficult ideas, but the difficulty does not lie in the fact that the human soul could not carry them out, but only in the fact that people have become accustomed to thinking differently over the centuries. Therefore, man must not seek union with the spiritual through the ordinary consciousness, in the sense of ordinary mysticism, when he wants to develop spiritual-scientific methods. Rather, what he seeks must be the object itself. He must approach it with the awareness that it is actually something foreign to ordinary life, that it remained standing before this ordinary soul life occurred. Then, when a person recognizes his inner soul being in this way, then basically he only has the soul in such a way that he now knows: this soul has cooperated by passing through the birth with the powers that it already had in the spiritual, in the shaping of the entire life down to the bodily organization, by combining its power with what the person has attained through physical inheritance. In this way, the human being arrives at the immortal soul.

For spiritual science, the question of the riddle of immortality changes in relation to the form that one otherwise gives to this question. One always thinks, when one raises this question, that one can answer it if one puts it this way: Is the soul, with its ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, such that it retains any of it as something immortal? The way this thinking, feeling and willing is in ordinary life is precisely because it has to make use of the bodily instruments. When these bodily instruments are discarded as the soul passes through the gate of death, the form of thinking, feeling and willing naturally ceases to be an inner experience that can be reached by ordinary consciousness. On the other hand, there is something in every human being that is hidden from ordinary soul observation, just as things are hidden that can only be explored through natural science about nature, but which can be achieved in the manner outlined above, and which remains, so to speak, at the gateway of memory. It can absorb the events of the ordinary course of life by reflecting them back. And when what is contained in this ordinary life, what is bound to the bodily tools, is taken from the person when he passes through the gate of death, that which has never left the spiritual world will also pass through the gate of death. That which carries itself through has not developed within the ordinary consciousness, but has developed in the subconscious, and can only be brought up in the way described.

Thus the question for spiritual science changes in such a way that the spiritual researcher shows, above all, the way to find the true soul being, and by showing this way, its true nature reveals its immortality as a truth. Just as there is no need to prove that the rose is red when someone has been led to the rose and is looking at it, so there is no need to prove by means of all kinds of hypotheses and conclusions that the soul essence is immortal when one shows the way by which man finds the soul being so that he sees: the mortal works out of itself, it is the creator of the mortal, the mortal is its revelation – if one can show immortality as a property of this soul being, just as one shows the blush as a property of the rose. What matters is that the question changes completely when spiritual science in its real form approaches this mystery of the soul.

What has only been hinted at here will, one might say, be clarified a little by sidelighting if one takes a look at something that plays such a significant role in human life, but which, as has been said many times, seems completely inaccessible to most philosophers of thought and scientific observation: if one takes a side glance at what is called human destiny. In the succession of events that befall man, human destiny appears to many as a mere sum of coincidences; to many it appears as a predetermined necessity, as a necessity of Providence. But all these ideas approach the riddle of destiny from the point of view of ordinary consciousness. And no matter how mystically deep these ideas are, one does not come any closer to such riddles through them. That is why I showed last time, with reference to the question of fate, how one prepares oneself in the right way to approach this question of human destiny. It must be repeated once more from a certain point of view, so that the question of the forces of fate can be discussed more precisely. I said: When a man, as a spiritual researcher, devotes himself inwardly to certain developments, one kind of which I have shown in the development of thinking, this inner development means for him a real raising of himself out of ordinary consciousness; not merely a mystical deepening of this ordinary consciousness, but a raising of himself, an ascent to that which does not enter at all into ordinary consciousness. Then much patience and perseverance is needed to carry this inner development further and further. It need not in the least impair the outer life. Those people are poor investigators of the spirit who, through spiritual research, become useless and impractical for ordinary life. They show that they are basically still materialistic natures. For anyone who is torn out of the ordinary life, who is torn out of the firm footing he has in life, out of life's duties and tasks, in short, out of the practice of life, by some kind of spiritual research, shows that he has not grasped the essence of true spiritual research; for this proceeds in the spiritual, in that which cannot at all come into direct conflict with ordinary life. And anyone who believes that he can, let us say, starve himself up into the spiritual world, or can enter the spiritual world through some other external, material means, shows that, despite seeking the spirit, he is steeped in materialistic ideas. But when a person follows the path of true spiritual research or even just true spiritual science, by penetrating and absorbing into his soul what spiritual research brings to light, then at the right moment what the person experiences inwardly gradually becomes for him an inner question of destiny, an inner turning-point of destiny. He experiences an inner permeation that carries him into the spiritual sphere so vividly and intensely that this experience, which takes place without any impairment of the outer experience, becomes a turning point in destiny that is greater and more significant than any other turning point in destiny, no matter how significant it may be. Indeed, the significance of being inwardly absorbed in spiritual science is precisely this: that it can become a turning point in a person's destiny. This does not mean that a person needs to become indifferent to other fates for his soul; a person can fully feel what happens as outer destinies, not only for himself but also for others, when he has also experienced the higher turning point in destiny, which happens purely inwardly. He who becomes indifferent to outer life and outer fate, and who would dull his compassion and sympathy for the outer world and men, is not on the right path. But for those who, as may happen in the case of good education, find themselves standing in a spiritual world while fully immersed in social life, it may happen that a point in time comes when, having inwardly found the way to that which does not enter into the sensual world, perceives this inner experience as a turn of fate that is greater and more intense than the most terrible fate or the most joyful turn of fate that can otherwise befall him in life. But the fact that such a turn of fate can occur deepens the mind and internalizes the human soul; it equips it with powers that always rest in the soul but are not usually brought up.

Above all, the soul is prepared in one way: when the soul has experienced a destiny purely inwardly, so that it now faces this destiny only with the inwardly experienced powers of the soul, the human being becomes so intimately acquainted with the greatest twist of fate that he gains a measure of knowledge for outer fate. We need a yardstick for everything in life. The yardstick for judging fate is acquired not by looking at the dark course of fate through all kinds of speculation and fantasy, but by looking at a clear course of fate, such as one experiences when one has developed one's inner soul life step by step to such an extent that one has seen it all. One sees: This is how it has become over the years. We have gradually created for ourselves an inner, true, self-disclosing conviction of the spiritual world in which we live and weave and are. When we are present at the turning point of fate, it does not confront us as something that remains dark and in which we can only rejoice or suffer, but it confronts us in bright inner clarity. And when we have developed in our soul the forces that confront us in bright inner clarity, only then are we able to illuminate with inner light that which remains dark, and then we are also able to look at the course of external fate. These events of outer destiny are dark for ordinary consciousness. But ordinary consciousness has become a seeing consciousness for the study of the question of destiny precisely by allowing such a turn of destiny to occur. For the question of destiny, this consciousness has made itself a seeing consciousness. Only through this does one acquire what is necessary to approach the fateful question in such a way that it can receive a certain enlightenment in the sense in which it is meant to be. But this shows that, however much one observes fate with the ordinary consciousness, all statements about this fate remain, so to speak, hypothetical or an empty, fantastic assumption. For it is precisely shown that fate, as it appears externally to the ordinary consciousness, only appears in its revelation, in its penetration into the ordinary consciousness, but that this fate works on the human soul in the subconscious, so that this human soul, which never steps out of the spiritual world, as I have indicated, lives in the subconscious in the stream of fate. It lives in the stream of fate in such a way that its entanglement with fate is no more apparent to the ordinary consciousness than what surrounds a dreamer as physical reality in the outer world is apparent to him.

When the observing consciousness trains to develop the powers of consciousness that are necessary for this, then one is able to look at the question of fate with completely different spiritual eyes – to use Goethe's expression. The soul then comes to look at the connections that are entangled in what we call a turn of fate quite differently than one looks at them in ordinary consciousness. One only recognizes what one must direct one's attention to in the question of fate when one is prepared for it by being inwardly moved by a purely spiritual turn of fate. Let us take any turn of fate that may easily confront us in our outer life. As a typical example of what happens in our outer life, one could tell the following story, which may well have happened in this way: A person is fully prepared, let us say, for some outer profession, for some outer work. His abilities show that he could fully rise to this work, that he could be of great use to the world, to humanity, by doing his outer work. Things have, so to speak, progressed so far that the position to which the person in question is to be appointed has already been chosen. Everything is prepared, the person himself is prepared, those people who can give him the appropriate position have become aware of what he can achieve; everything is prepared. There, just, I would like to say, before these people meet the document that he is transferred to the position, some accident occurs that makes him incapable of filling this position. — There we have a typical twist of fate. I am not saying that the person in question must die immediately, but in the ordinary course of life he would be unable to achieve what had been well prepared from all sides. A blow of fate strikes this person.

Now, when you look at the human course of life in the ordinary consciousness – even if you think you are doing it differently – you do it in such a way that you look at what preceded some fact in the course of life. You look at the world in such a way that you always string together effect and cause and again effect and cause, that you always go back from the later to the earlier. Now, when a person is prepared to recognize this turn of fate that can teach us something, it now shows that we are dealing with a confluence of two series in this turn of fate. Here in the cited typical example, on the one hand we are dealing with the fact that a person has become something through which he has also forced events in the external world to be directed towards him. Another series of events comes, which crosses this first series of events. When one observes such processes of fate, one learns to recognize that it is right and excellent in the highest sense to regard the human course of life in the same way as natural processes, by seeing how the later follows from the earlier. But one also learns to recognize that this consideration is only a highly one-sided one. One learns to recognize that if one wants to consider existence in its entirety, one cannot and must not consider only the continuous, growing, ascending currents of events, but must also consider the descending current, the current that always intersects, crosses, and destroys the ascending current. Then, through the meeting of the two currents, one arrives at the point where the spirit reveals itself. For man has not become another by experiencing a crossing of what he has become on the one hand; two currents of life have come together, but man has not become another. And precisely this, that one encounters with one's soul powers this crossing of the two streams of life, shows one how, at the moment when something is to work on the human soul in accordance with fate, it must withdraw precisely from the outer life. In this way one enters into the inner life of the soul, which does not, however, arise out of the outer life of the senses. By seizing existence where it not only reveals itself, but where it disappears from outer manifestation, one finds the way into the realm from which the soul never emerges, and in which fate works on it.

And now, when you have taken your meditations this far, you realize that it is absolutely in the nature of the soul that fate should relate to the soul as I have just shown. For let us assume that the human soul, in full consciousness, with fully developed ideas, would approach the chain of fate in the same way as it approaches external sensual reality and explains it in scientific terms. What would be the consequence? It would follow that the soul would remain inwardly dead, that it would inwardly face fate, I would say, so calmly, not to say indifferently, as it faces the statements that science makes. But that is not how the human soul faces fate. I am not merely developing ideas of expediency here. Anyone who goes into the methods of what is presented here will realize that I do not fall back into teleological or purposive ideas, but that I pose the question this way: What is necessary for the nature of the soul? —, as one might ask: How is the root necessary for the entire life of the plant?

Insofar as the soul is involved in fate, it does not experience this fate through cognitive ideas, but rather it experiences it in such a way that affects, sensations, feelings of joy, feelings of suffering arise in this soul, and that not so clear ideas hover over these sensations as one otherwise has in cognition. But if such clear ideas were to hover above it, they would be ideas that operate only in the sphere of ordinary consciousness, that is, in the sphere that is bound to the body. Precisely because the experience of fate is set apart from these ideas, which are bound to the body, because the experience of fate is driven by sensations and feelings, by the progressive or conflicting impulses of the will, this experience of fate remains in the subconscious or, better said, is guided down into the subconscious. In this way, the experience of fate works on the soul outside of consciousness, just as the experiences of the external world around the dreamer take place without them penetrating into his consciousness, at least not directly.

The way in which a person experiences his sufferings and joys is what causes his fate to be channeled into the deeper subconscious regions of the soul life, into those regions from which the soul life never emerges at all. So that in the course of life, a person is driven by his fate below the threshold of ordinary consciousness. But down there, where consciousness, which is in the ordinary life and directed towards the ordinary life, does not reach, there is order; down there the experiences of fate shine back onto the soul, which has remained before the boundary of feeling. There, fate itself is continually working on our soul, so that the way in which man is involved in his fate can be understood just as little by ordinary consciousness as what is happening in the room in which one is dreaming can be understood by the dreaming consciousness in terms of external, sensual-physical events. Fate connects with the soul below the threshold of consciousness. But then it becomes apparent how this fate may be constituted, that it is intimately connected with the soul, that it is precisely the worker on the shaping of our soul life. One of the workers is the one who ensures that what we go through in the course of our lives between birth and death is carried over to the soul, which goes through birth and death in repeated lives on earth, so that this soul is carried through this entire life, which goes through repeated lives on earth, through accomplishments, through forces, through effects that do not reach into ordinary consciousness. There we see the connection between human destiny and the human soul. There we arrive through destiny itself at the subconscious, eternal foundations of the human soul. And only where immortality reigns, there does destiny also reign in its true form. And it is carried there by the fact that in ordinary life we are so at its mercy that we do not penetrate it cognitively. Because we live through it emotionally, fate itself is carried to the region where it can work on the immortal part of the soul.

In this way, fate proves itself – and this may sound pedantic, almost philistine – as the great teacher throughout our entire life. But it is so. Fate carries us forward. And what individuals who have been prepared by a particularly predisposed course of life feel about the coherence of the human destiny is true. I would like to read you an example of this verbatim. In his later years, Goethe's friend Knebel was led to ideas about fate that truly did not arise from speculation or philosophical fantasies, but that, I would say, radiated up from what otherwise takes place in the subconscious life of the soul when fate works on the soul. Knebel says:

This did not come about through speculation, through philosophy about fate, but is a result that the soul itself has brought up from the region where fate works on it. Therefore, as a rule, only people who are fully involved in the events of life, not only their own lives, but who also live with compassionate sympathy for the fate of many people at a certain point in their lives, will see such an insight into fate shining forth from the depths of their soul.

Now, questions of science, including spiritual science, do not depend on any external events – questions of science, questions of knowledge follow their course. Rather, the outer life, in many of its peculiarities, is guided by what science brings to light. But on the other hand — and this can also be observed in natural science — certain external circumstances contribute to the fact that insights can only be properly appreciated and accurately observed by people. One need only recall how the transits of Venus, which only occur twice a century, have to be awaited before they occur, how the external circumstances have to arise for a particular insight to arise in a certain field. The same may be true of questions of spiritual science as they relate to the life of the soul. And although this does not properly belong to spiritual science, the intuitive perception of our fateful time can be directed to how our time in particular, in the deepest sense of the word, brings to people in their soul what spiritual science is able to give.

The old Heraclitus, the great Greek philosopher, from whom individual but deeply significant rays of his research have been penetrating through all times since his life, once said, pointing to the dream life: In relation to the dream world, every human being has his or her own world. The most diverse people can sleep in one room, and each can dream the most diverse dreams; there everyone has their own dream world. The moment they wake up, they are all in a common external environment. This common environment evokes a large soul picture, they are in unity. In spite of everything that can be said against it, for that is only seemingly, what can be said against it, people are in an even greater, more meaningful unity when they look at what the seeing consciousness brings out of the spiritual world. People come together here, and it is only an illusion if one believes that one person asserts this and the other that. One may calculate correctly and the other incorrectly, but the method of calculation remains correct. In a higher sense, people find unity when they advance into the realm of intuitive consciousness and enter the spiritual world. But external circumstances can also lead people to a certain unity in life. Then these experiences can be a stimulus for that which strives towards the unity of life: for spiritual science. And in our time we are living in a fateful event that unites people in a completely different way – let us say now, because it is of immediate concern to us – the people of Central Europe, when they are united from outside in a different way. Shared experiences of fate, which one person experiences in one way and another in another, flow over human souls, flow over human bodies, flow over human lives. This can be a stimulus, and hopefully will be a stimulus, to steer people out of the difficult, fateful time and also towards the difficult paths of spiritual science. And one may think: Even if spiritual science always has an important message for people in relation to the eternal questions, in our time, when so many destinies are being decided, when fate is so terribly questioning before the whole soul of time, the questions of fate and soul arise in a particularly profound way. Spiritual science, because it appeals to that which not only stands in life but, because it remains in the spiritual world, carries this life through the human course of life, spiritual science can give people special strengths, special powers, to all twists of fate, with the awareness of what fate means for immortality, for eternal life, to find oneself through life in an appropriate way, to await what will be born out of this fateful time. If one learns to understand fate, then one also learns, when necessary, to confront fate with true, not with deadening, calmness of soul, with that calmness of soul that is strength. And the soul often works more powerfully in its calm than it can when it is carried on the waves of external life, itself rocking up and down with these waves.

And perhaps it is precisely this awareness of the stillness of the soul in our life cycle, however abstract this idea may still seem today, that is capable of merging with the fundamental forces of the human mind, and there it can become a great, not blunting, but invigorating motivator for this human mind. For, as the present study of the question of immortality and fate shows, it is just as incorrect to say of someone who has a magnet in front of him: this is a piece of iron in the shape of a horseshoe and nothing else, and you are a fantasist if you believe that there are special powers in it, as it is incorrect to call someone who cannot immediately demonstrate the powers by attracting iron, but only asserts them, a fantasist. if you believe that there are special powers in it, just as it is wrong to consider someone a fantasist if they cannot immediately demonstrate the powers through the attraction of the iron, but only assert them. It is therefore wrong to consider someone a fantasist who speaks of the outer life that takes place in the physical senses in such a way that this life is not only that which it appears to the outer senses, but that it is permeated, illuminated and glowing with the spiritual in which the soul is rooted and moves. For the word of Heraclitus remains true – let me conclude with this – affirming, if correctly understood, that which is the innermost nerve of spiritual science, affirming that only he knows the world who is able to see through the spirit in the light of the mind:

“Eyes and ears bear witness to what is going on in the world, witnesses to people. But they are poor witnesses to those people whose souls do not understand the language, the true language of the eyes and ears.”

Spiritual science seeks to speak the true language of the eyes and ears and thus to find the way into that which the ordinary consciousness of eyes and ears is unable to show; into that from which life itself springs and weaves. Therefore, the human being will work best when they are aware that they, as an eternal being, not only come from this eternal source of life, but are always within it.

[ 1 ] WE speak to-day of the ‘Unconscious’ of ‘Subconscious’, when we wish to signify that the soul-experiences of ordinary consciousness—observation, representation, realization, volition—are dependent on a state which is not included in this consciousness. That knowledge which would base itself only on these experiences can no doubt, by logical sequence of argument, point to such a ‘subconscious’; but that is all it can do. It can bring no contribution to a definition of the unconscious.

[ 2 ] The imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge which has been described in the foregoing considerations, can give such a definition. Now we shall try to do the same for the soul-experiences of man during sleep.

[ 3 ] The sleep-experiences of the soul do not enter upon ordinary consciousness, for this rests on the basis of the physical organization; and during sleep the experience of the soul is outside the body. When in waking the soul begins, with the help of the body, to imagine, to feel, and to will, it joins up in its memory with those experiences which took place before sleep on the basis of the physical organization. The experiences of sleep reveal themselves only to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. They do not appear in the guise of memory, but as if in a psychic review of it.

[ 4 ] I shall now have to describe what is revealed in this review. Because it is hid from ordinary consciousness, such a description of this review must, when the consciousness is faced with it unprepared, naturally appear grotesque. But the foregoing explanations have shown that such a description is possible, and how it is to be taken. Although it may even be laughed at from some quarter or another, I shall give it as it emerges from the states of consciousness already described.

[ 5 ] At first, in falling asleep, a man finds himself in an inwardly vague, undifferentiated state of being. He sees there no difference between his own being and that of the universe; nor any between separate objects or people. His state of existence is universal and vague. Taken up into the imaginative consciousness, this experience becomes an ‘Ego-feeling’, in which the ‘universe-feeling’ is included. He has left the sphere of the senses, and has not yet clearly entered upon another world.

[ 6 ] We shall now have to use expressions such as ‘Feeling’, ‘longing’, etc., which also in ordinary life refer to something known; and yet we shall have to use them to denote processes which remain unknown to the ordinary soul-life. But the soul experiences them as facts during sleep. Think, for instance, how in daily life joy is experienced consciously. Physically an enlargement of the small blood vessels takes place, and other things, and this enlargement is a fact; when it takes place, joy is consciously felt. Similarly, the soul goes through real experiences in sleep; and this will be described in terms which refer to corresponding experience of the imaginative, inspired and intuitive consciousness. If, for example, we speak of ‘longing’ we shall mean an actual soul-process which is imaginatively revealed as longing. Thus the unconscious states and experiences of the soul will be described as if they were conscious.

[ 7 ] Simultaneously with the feeling of vagueness arid the absence of differentiation, there arises in the soul a longing for rest in what is spiritual and divine. The human soul evolves this longing as a counterbalance to the feeling of being lost in infinity. Having lost the sphere of the senses, it craves for a state out of the spiritual world that will support it.

[ 8 ] Dreams interweave themselves into the state of soul just described. They traverse the unconscious with half-conscious experiences. The real form of sleep experiences is not made clearer through ordinary dreams, but still less clear. This lack of clearness applies also to the imaginative consciousness if this latter is clouded by dreams arising spontaneously. One perceives the truth on the further side of life both awake and in dream by means of that conception of the soul which is attained by free will through the exercises previously explained.

[ 9 ] The next state through which the soul lives then is like a division or partition of itself into inner happenings which are differentiated from each other. During this period of sleep, the soul feels itself to be not a unity but an inner plurality, and this state is one suffused with anxiety. Were it felt consciously, it would be soul-fear. But the human soul experiences the real counterpart of this anxiety every night, though remaining unconscious of it.

[ 10 ] In the case of modern man there appears at this moment of sleep the soul-saving effect which corresponds in the waking condition to his self surrender to Christ. It was different, of course, before the events of Golgotha. Then men, when awake, received from their religious beliefs the antidote which carried over into the condition of sleep and was the medicine for this fear. For the man who lives after the events of Golgotha are substituted the religious experiences which he has in the contemplation of the life and death and being of Christ. He overcomes his fears through the working of this into his sleep. This fear prevents, as long as it is present, the inner vision of that which should be experienced by the soul in sleep, as the body prevents it in the waking state. The leadership of Christ overcomes the inner division and transforms the plurality into a unity. And the soul comes now to the point of having an inner life different from that of the waking condition. The physical and etheric organisms belong now to its outer world. On the other hand in its present inner self it experiences a reflection of the planetary movements. The soul experiences something cosmic in place of the individual, conditioned by the physical and etheric organisms. The soul lives outside the body; and its inner life is an inner reflection of the planetary motions. This being so, the inspired consciousness is aware of the corresponding inner processes in the manner which has been described in our previous studies. This consciousness perceives also how that which the soul receives through its contact with the planets continues to have an after-effect in the consciousness after waking. This planetary influence continues in awakeness as a stimulant in the rhythm of breathing and blood-circulation. During sleep the physical and etheric organisms are subjected to the effect of the planet-stimulation, which by day influence them, as described, as the after-effect of the previous night.

[ 11 ] There are other experiences side by side with these. In this phase of its sleep-existence, the soul experiences its relation to all human souls with which it had come into contact in earthly life. Considered intuitively this leads to certainty on the subject of repeated earth life; for these earth-lives reveal themselves in their relation to the soul. And the connection with other spirit-beings, which live in the world without ever assuming a human body, is also one of the soul's experiences. [ 12 ] But in this condition of sleep the soul experiences also what point to good and evil tendencies, and good and evil events in the predestined course of earthly life. In fact, what older philosophers have termed ‘Karma’ is now presented to the soul.

[ 13 ] In daily life all these happenings of the soul have so much effect that they help to cause the feelings, the general mood of the soul, of happiness or unhappiness.

[ 14 ] In the further course of sleep another state of the soul is added to the one just described. It goes through a copy or imitation of state of the Twin Stars. As the bodily organs are sensed in waking, so a reconstructing of the fixed constellations is now attempted. The cosmic experience of the soul is widening. It is now a spirit amongst spirits. ‘Intuition’ sees the sun and the other fixed stars as physical projections of spirits, in the manner just described. These adventures of the soul reverberate during daily life as its religious leanings, its religious feeling and willing. It can be said indeed that the religious longing, stirring in the depth of the soul, is in awake life the aftermath of the stellar experience during the state of sleep.

[ 15 ] But it is significant above all that in this state the soul is faced with the facts of life and death. It sees itself as a spirit-being, entering into a physical body through conception and the life of the cell, and unconsciously it sees the event of death as a passing over into a purely spiritual world. That the soul in its waking state cannot believe in the reality of what outwardly represents itself to the senses as the events of birth and death is therefore not only the imaginative picturing of a longing but a vaguely-felt reliving through things presented to the soul in sleep.

If man could recall to his consciousness everything he lives through unconsciously from falling asleep to waking up, he would have a consciousness-content giving the experiences of truth to his philosophical ideas in the first occurrence in which sense-phenomena merge Into a universal inner cosmic life, and in which a kind of pantheistic knowledge of God occurs. If he was conscious of this planet and fixed-star life of sleep he would indeed have a cosmology full of content. And the conclusion could be formed from the experience of star-life, that a human being has a life as spirit among spirits.

From falling asleep, through further states of sleep, man actually becomes an unconscious philosopher, cosmologist, and God-filled being. From the depths of experiences otherwise only possible in sleep, ‘Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition’ lift up that which shows what kind of being man himself really is; how he is part of the Cosmos and how he becomes one with God.

[ 16 ] This last happens to man in the deepest stage of sleep. From there the soul begins to return to the world of the senses. In the impulse leading to this return the intuitive consciousness recognizes the activity of those spirit beings which have their physical counterpart in the moon. The spiritual moon-activities are the ones recalling men in their sleep back to their presence on earth. Naturally these same lunar activities are also present in the New Moon. But the transformation of whatever changes visibly in the moon has its significance concerning the part lunar activities play in man's holding on to his earthly life from birth or conception to death.

[ 17 ] After the deepest state of sleep man returns to his waking state through the same intermediate states. Before awakening he goes once more through experiencing the universal world state, and the longing for God, in which dreams can play their part.

[Man's yearning to answer the question of eternity does not arise] only from a [fearful] desire for existence, not only from a [petty] yearning for one's own immortality, but, [as a deeper look into the human soul teaches us, it] corresponds to the soul's need for eternity, [it arises from] a deep [spiritual], moral need for human perfection. [There is no moment in the soul when it does not have to be filled with the striving for perfection.] The question about the nature of eternity corresponds to the question of all deeper reflection. It is one of the fundamental questions of all deep human research.

But there was also a certain shyness in the human soul to approach these questions.] Hence the belief in immortality: Only through religious feeling one comes [to a conception of eternity], to the feeling of the immortality of the human soul.

The task of Theosophy is to show that research, [real science], is also possible in the realm of the spirit. [For decades, it has always endeavored to awaken the consciousness in certain circles that research in spiritual spheres is possible.] This contradicts today's habits of thought, people's perceptions [yes very much; it is only too understandable that Theosophy must still be considered fantasy, wild reverie]. But the completely logical way of proceeding in spiritual research, [the basic methods] meet the strictest requirements of natural science, even if it is not admitted.

[All this comes to us in a very special way when we raise the fundamental question of the eternity and nature of the human soul, which is connected with it.

The soul and spiritual core of the human being is already manifest in ordinary life and will do so more and more in spiritual science. [Spiritual science must point to what actually governs human life [...], what the soul and spiritual core is like, how this core relates to the realm of transience.

The idea of repeated lives is a spiritual-scientific idea, as is the developmental principle of the human soul and spirit. [Most of you are familiar with these facts, which should be considered from the perspective of ordinary life.] Goethe said: “Consider the ‘what’, more consider the ‘how’.” The 'what' is known, but what can enlighten us arises from the 'how'. It is believed that the human soul is exhausted in conscious thinking, feeling and willing. [One does not sufficiently take into account the factors that are constantly taking place in the depths of the soul. How little man can say about his temperament, disposition.]

But just as the depths of the sea are unknown to him who only observes the play of the waves on the surface, so the subconscious, in which the ordinary life is rooted, is unknown. [A fleeting glance at life reminds us how unconscious factors are constantly playing into life.] An injustice, for example, experienced as a child and repeated in the student, can lead to suicide. [The student had been reproached and so on by the teacher. Now, that also happens with other children. It is only with this child that it leads to suicide. It is the experiences of the fifth year that had so stirred his soul in hidden depths that they led to the act.) The conscious part of the soul points everywhere into hidden depths of the soul. Where consciousness fades, darkness surrounds you – in sleep or in dreams. [If we eavesdrop on human consciousness, we can find many things.] There is an extensive science of dreams, even if it is not known. An example: a student was given a difficult drawing assignment. After a whole year, he still hadn't finished it. This caused the pupil to become anxious towards the end of the year when the drawing was still not finished. Later in life, the following happened: he kept having a very specific dream in which he saw himself as a pupil with the same fear; but each time it was followed by greater manual dexterity. The latter is only an expression of the abilities developing in his whole being. First it worked in the lower depths of the soul life, and as a transition comes the presence in the half-consciousness of the dream consciousness. It is not enough to say: there is a transformation of natural processes. Humanity will have to come to terms with the fact that there is also a transformation of forces in the spiritual realm. Before they become conscious, they live in hidden depths of the soul in the subconscious. Man would have destroyed these soul forces if he had consciously submerged himself before. At first the soul force works in the subconscious, in the soul core; it is not exhausted by the work on the soul, it works in the subconscious on the human body. The body thus shows the effect of the soul-spiritual shaping.

In a child, we first find untrained movements, an expressionless gaze, and so on. However, the soul-spiritual works into the physical, and gradually the physiognomy changes. Memory only comes from the third year onwards. [Jean Paul's word is true]: There - [in his first three years, of which he has no memory] - the child has learned more than in three academic years, and has also done much more intimate work in the brain. [When we come into existence through birth, our brain is in many ways not yet differentiated.] Consciousness is still dull, still asleep, dreaming. Thus we find the work of this dream-conscious soul-spiritual in the whole human being first in the lower parts of the bodily organization, then in the finer shaping of the human body. Does this activity ever stop? As long as the human being is physically present, from conception onwards, the physical is shaped by the spiritual. From the moment that the subconscious achieves its goal, it can penetrate into the consciousness of the person. It must first work in the subconscious of the organization, on the fine shaping of the human body.

In this way, we can follow the activity of the core of our being in its own physicality by methodically observing our mental life.

The first thing that spiritual research teaches is that the spirit connects with the line of inheritance. Two cases are possible here: that the spiritual soul is doing this for the first time or for the umpteenth time. [Now it will be a matter of finding out whether what is working on the person was already there, whether it provides us with evidence that it was present in previous lives.

A person would have to see himself as a mayfly if he had no memory of previous days. [How does a person recognize himself as a unified being throughout his life, since his consciousness breaks down every day? Without memory, this would not be possible.] He does not have memories of previous earthly lives, but he does have an inkling of them.

[We have to develop the ability to observe how this works in a person's physicality from year to year.] The most important educational problems are solved when we recognize how the abilities that the child brings with them can be adapted to what is already on earth. This is how temperament develops. In a person with a distinctly melancholic disposition, life shows the keynote of a certain sadness. How does this person come to this? A mourning experience looks quite different for a melancholic than for a sanguine person. This basic mood goes to the depths of the soul. [The soul lives in the aftermath of the grief it once went through, which can sometimes be seen even years later. The soul's mood is the consequence of previous grief. In the melancholic, we find grief in the most hidden depths of his being.] The mood of mourning was already imprinted in the body because it was brought from the core of the soul. This cannot come from experiences on earth, it was brought from previous lives on earth. [The spiritual core of the human being worked the mood of mourning into the structure of the human body.] For the mood of mourning could only be brought from there, not from the spiritual world, where there is no mourning. Here it is shown with all clarity what a person has acquired in previous lives. It is just as accurate as the results of science. So that is what ordinary life reveals.

Only through an instrument can a person see into the spiritual world; that is the person himself, as he stands before us in his spiritual and soul life. Through concentration and meditation, he can work his way up into the spiritual world. Another soul life is to be developed. A radical transformation of the soul life in order to gain this instrument is necessary for higher knowledge. Then the human being feels: You are something other than what you were before, when you only thought you were in the physical body [because your feeling ran parallel to certain external or physical processes]. Now he realizes: Now you experience yourself as a real being outside of the physical body; you can completely free yourself from the physical body.

In a spiritual sense, such a person carries out an experiment as in a laboratory. The first experience is a kind of idiocy. One experiences oneself as a new being. No concept can make this clear to a person. It cannot be grasped in concepts, it seems “idiotic” because the brain cannot grasp these experiences, [because there is nothing in the physical world that can provide clarity about them]. At a higher level, [when the soul powers are getting stronger and stronger, then concepts arise]; there the brain, [which appears as a rough block], must now be consciously worked on, as unconsciously in the case of a child. Then we look at what we can only grasp logically in ordinary life.

[Humanity would be paralyzed in the future if it did not receive knowledge about its spiritual and mental powers.

In the thirty-fifth year of life, the ascending line is transformed into the descending line. On the descending line, the forces from earlier lives are exhausted, but forces from new experiences are accumulated, [which we have acquired in this life]. These never attain the strength to work into the bodily organization. One will accumulate body-forming forces, but one's own physical body stands as an obstacle.

[But at the same time, the person will feel forces entering him that can shape a new life for him.

For many people, the joy of life fades by the age of thirty-five because they have not kept the sense of the richness of life open in their youth, but in the depths of the soul, forces develop, a feeling that one carries within oneself, forces for a new core of being, then no sadness of old age follows.

In the education of the child, one should never lose the sense of the school of life. An open, healthy mind will develop the human soul from an early age in such a way that the person remains open to spiritual science. The feeling is to be developed that the human being carries within himself a spiritual-soul core of being that freely builds itself a new body after death. [Through spiritual science, we gain security and confidence through the moral forces it gives us.]

In this way, we can experience the victory of the immortal, the victory of eternity over mortality. All creations are mortal, but what lives to eternity is immortal, as Giordano Bruno says. [The spirit is the creator of the mortal, and we thereby recognize its immortality.] Immortality does not begin only after death; man can already experience it now.