The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we are going to explain how Karma works and make clear to ourselves how it is connected with the so-called three worlds. All other worlds, with the exception of these three, hardly come into consideration when it is a question of human development; the relevant three are the physical, astral and mental worlds. During the day condition of consciousness, we are in the physical world; there, in a certain sense, we have purely and simply the physical world before us. We must only direct our senses outwards in order to have the physical world as such before us. But the moment we look on the physical world with interest, approach it with feeling, we are already partly in the astral world and only partly in the physical world. Only the beginnings of living purely in the physical world are present today in human life; for example, when one simply contemplates a work of art without experiencing any wish to possess it. Such a contemplation of a work of art is an important act of the soul, when, forgetful of self, one works as though on a spiritual task. This living purely in the physical world, forgetting oneself, is very rare. It is only seldom that nature is looked at in pure contemplation, for usually many other feelings are involved. Nevertheless, this selfless living in physical nature is of the very greatest importance; for only so can man have a true consciousness of self. In all other worlds the ordinary man is still immersed in a world of unconsciousness.

In the physical world man is not only aware of his self, he can also become selfless. His day-consciousness is however not yet selfless if he is unable to forget himself. Here the physical world is not the hindrance, but the playing in of the astral and mental worlds. If, however, he forgets himself, the separateness vanishes and he finds his ‘self’ spread out into what is outside. But it is only in physical life that present day man can develop this consciousness of self without separateness. Consciousness of self we call the ego. Man can only become conscious of self within an environment. Only when he gains senses adapted to a particular world can he become self-conscious in that world. Now he only has senses for the physical world but the other worlds continually play into the consciousness of self and cloud it. When feelings play into it, it is the astral world; when one thinks, the mental world plays into the consciousness.

Most people's thoughts are nothing more than reflections of the environment. It is very rare to have thoughts which are not so connected. Man only has such higher thoughts when senses awaken for the mental world, so that he not only thinks the thoughts, but perceives them around him as beings. He then has the same consciousness of self in the mental world as that possessed by the Chela, the Initiate. When someone tries to eliminate first the physical world around him, then all impulses, passions, changes of mood and so on, usually no thoughts are left. Let us only try to picture everything that influences man inasmuch as he lives in space and time. Let us try to call up before the soul everything connected with the place where we live and the time in which we live. Everything that the soul continually has within it as thoughts is dependent on space and time. All this has a transient value. One must therefore pass on from the reflected impressions of the senses and allow an enduring thought content to live in one in order gradually to develop devachanic senses. A sentence such as that from ‘Light on the Path,’ “Before the eyes can see they must give up tears”,^* holds good for all times and all places. When we allow such a sentence to live within us, then something lives in us which is beyond space and time. This is a means, a force, which gradually allows devachanic senses to awaken in the soul for the eternal in the world.

Thus man has his share in the three worlds. It is only gradually however that he has come into this situation. He was not always in the physical world; only by degrees did he become physical and acquire physical senses. Previously he was on the higher planes. He descended from the Astral Plane to the Physical and before this from the Mental Plane. The latter we divide into two parts, the Lower Mental or Rupa Plane, where everything is already differentiated, and the Upper Mental or Arupa Plane, where everything's undifferentiated in a germinal condition. Man has descended from the Arupa Plane through the Rupa Plane and the Astral Plane to the Physical Plane. Only on the Physical Plane did he become conscious of self. On the Astral Plane he is not conscious of self and on the Rupa and Arupa Planes still less so. On the Physical Plane man for the first time came into contact with external objects in his immediate surroundings. Whenever a being encounters external objects, this marks the beginning of self-awareness. On the higher planes life was still completely enclosed within itself. When man lived on the Astral Plane the only reality he had arose out of his own inner life. This was in its very nature a picture consciousness. Even though this was a vivid experience it was nevertheless only a picture that arose within him. Of this, present daydreams are only a weak reminder. When for instance an astral human being approached salt, this affected him unconsciously and a picture of it would have arisen within him. If he approached someone who was sympathetic to him he would not have seen him externally, but a feeling of sympathy would have arisen within him. This life in the astral was one of absolute selfhood and separateness. Only on the physical plane can man relinquish his separateness, in that through the medium of his senses he perceives objects, merges himself with his surroundings, with the Not-I. Therein lies the importance of the physical plane. If man had not set foot on the physical plane, he would never have been able to relinquish his separateness and turn his senses outwards. This is actually where work on the development of selflessness begins. Everything except pure contemplation of physical things belongs more to the Ego. One must accustom oneself to live on higher planes just as selflessly as man has begun to do on the physical plane, albeit up to now but rarely. The objects of the physical plane compel man to become selfless and to give something to the object, which is Not-I. In regard to wishes, to that which lives in the soul, man still orders his life in accordance with his desires. On the physical plane he must learn to renounce, to free his wishes from self. That is the first step.

The next step is to order himself not according to his own wishes but according to those coming to him from outside. Further, when man consciously and out of his own will does not act in accordance with the thoughts that arise within him, but surrenders himself to thoughts which are not his own, then he soars upwards to the Devachanic Plane.

We must therefore seek in the higher worlds for something lying outside us in order to relate ourselves to it as we do to objects in the physical world. Hence, we must consider the wishes of the Initiates. The occult student learns to know the wishes which are right for humanity and he orders himself in accordance with them, just as through external compulsion one orders oneself according to sense objects. Culture and the education of wishes lead us to the Astral Plane.

When one becomes selfless in thoughts, allowing the eternal thoughts of the Masters of Wisdom to pass through our souls—through concentration and meditation on the thoughts of the Masters—then one also perceives the thoughts of the surrounding world. The occult student can already become a Master on the Astral Plane, but on the Mental Plane this is only possible for the higher Masters.

In the first place man stands before us in his physical nature. He lives at the same time in the Astral and Mental Worlds, but has self-awareness only in the physical world. He must traverse the entire physical world until his awareness of self has absorbed everything that the physical world can teach him. Here man says to himself: ‘I’. He connects his ‘I’ with the things around him, learns to expand his ‘I’ through contemplation; it flows outwards and becomes one with the objects which he has completely comprehended. If we had already comprehended the entire physical world we should no longer need it, for then we should have it within us. At present however man has within him only a part of the physical world. The human being who is born as a Lemurian in his first incarnation, who is just at the point of directing his ego towards the physical world, knows as yet but little of it. When however he comes to his last incarnation, he must have united the entire physical world with his ‘I’.

In the physical world man is left to himself, here nobody leads him, he is in very truth god-forsaken. When he came forth from the astral world the Gods forsook him. In the physical world he had to learn to become his own master. Here therefore he can only live, as he actually does live, swinging pendulum-wise between truth and error. He must grope about and seek his way for himself. Now for the most part he is groping in the dark. His gaze is turned outwards; he has freedom of choice, but he is also exposed to error. On the Astral Plane man had no such freedom; there he was subject to compulsion from the powers standing behind him. Like a kind of marionette he still dangled on the strings of the Gods; they still had to guide him. In so far as man today is still a soul being, the Gods still live in him. Here freedom and unfreedom are strongly mixed. His wishes are continually changing. This ebb and flow of wishes proceeds from within. Here it is the Gods who are working in man.

Man is still less free on the Rupa Plane of the Mental World, and even less free on the Arupa Plane of the Higher Mental World. Man gradually becomes free on the Physical Plane the more, through knowledge, he has become incapable of error.

To the same degree that he works on the Physical Plane and learns to know it, he gains the faculty of carrying up into the Arupa Plane what he has learned to know in the physical world. The Arupa Plane is in itself formless, but gains form through human life. Man gathers the results of the lessons he has learned on the Physical Plane and carries these, as firmly established forms in the soul, up into the Arupa Plane. This is why in the Greek Mysteries the soul was called a bee, the Arupa Plane a beehive and the physical earth a field of flowers. This was taught in the Greek Mysteries.

Now what was it that drove the soul down on to the Physical Plane? It was desire, craving: in no other way does one descend to a lower plane except through desire. Previously the soul was in the Astral World; this is the world of wishes. Everything which the Gods in the Astral World have implanted into human beings was purely a world of wishes. The most outstanding attribute of these Pre-Lemurian beings was the wish for the physical. Man at that time had a real craving for the physical: he had within him an unconscious, blind craving for the physical. This craving is only to be appeased through its satisfaction. Through the ideas, through the aspects of knowledge which he gains, this craving for the physical disappears.

After death the soul goes to the Astral Plane and thence to the Rupa and Arupa Planes. What the soul has gained it deposits there. What it has not yet brought with it, what is still unknown, drives it down again; this engenders the longing for new incarnations. How long the soul remains on the Arupa Plane depends upon how much the human being has gained on the Physical Plane. In the case of the savage this is very little and so in his case there is only a weak flashing up on to the Arupa Plane. Then he descends again to the physical world. One who has learned everything in the physical world no longer needs to leave the Arupa Plane, no longer needs to return to the Physical Plane, for he has fulfilled his duty in the physical world.

In regard to his astral being, man today still half belongs to the astral world. The astral sheath has been half broken through and he perceives the world of the physical through his senses. When he succeeds in living on the Astral Plane as he now lives on the Physical Plane, when he learns to make observations there in a similar way, then he also carries the perceptions of the Astral Plane up to the Arupa Plane. What he then bears upwards from the Astral Plane streams however still higher from the Arupa Plane up to the next higher, the Buddhi Plane. That too which he achieves on the Rupa Plane through meditation and concentration he takes with him up to the Arupa Plane and there gives it over to still higher Planes.

That part of man which is astral is opened half towards the physical world and half towards higher worlds. When it is opened to the physical world he allows himself to be directed by the perceptions of the sense world. From the other side he is subject to direction from above. The same is the case with his mental body. The latter is also partly directed from outside and partly directed from the inner world by the Gods, the Devas. Because this is so man must dream and sleep.

Now we can also understand the nature of sleeping and dreaming. To dream means to turn towards the inner Deva-forces. Man dreams almost the whole night only he does not remember it. During sleep the mental body is continually guided by the Devas. Man has as yet no consciousness of self on the higher planes, hence in dream he is not self-conscious. He begins to be so on the Astral Plane. In deep sleep he is on the Mental Plane. There he has absolutely no self-consciousness. It is only on the Physical Plane that man is awake. Here his ego is present and finds its full expression. The astral ego cannot yet fully express itself on the Physical Plane and must therefore at times leave the body. Man must sleep in order that this can take place. The conditions of dreaming and sleeping are only a repetition of earlier development. On the Astral Plane he was in a state of dream, on the Mental Plane he slept. He repeats these conditions every night. Only when he has acquired senses for the other planes does he no longer dream and no longer sleep, but he then perceives realities. The occult pupil learns to perceive such realities on the Astral Plane. He then has a reality around him. Whoever carries his development to a still higher stage is surrounded by a reality even in deep sleep. Then begins continuity of consciousness.

One must understand this sequence of delicate concepts; then one comprehends why man, when he has been on the higher planes again descends. What he does not yet know, what he has not yet recognised, what the Buddhists call Avidja, not-knowing, drives him back into physical existence. Avidja is the first of the forces of karma. According to Buddhistic teaching there are twelve Karmic forces which drive man down. These together are called Nidanas. As man gradually descends, the way in which Karma takes hold becomes apparent. Avidja is the first effect. It is the opposite pole to what meets man on the physical plane. Because he treads the physical plane and there unites himself with something, a reaction is called forth. Action always calls forth reaction. Everything that man does in the physical world also produces a reaction and works back as Karma. Action and reaction is the technique, the mechanism of Karma.

• *. The original English of Mabel Collins is “Before the eyes can see they must be incapable of tears.”

The great advances in natural science in recent centuries, but especially in recent decades, are rightly admired, as I have repeatedly mentioned in the lectures on spiritual science given here. And it is only right that the modern man, in order to get to know the present point of human development, likes to put himself in the mindset and the way of thinking from which these results, this progress of natural science, have been achieved. But by putting himself in this way of thinking, the modern man's thinking, his whole mind, takes on certain forms. And without detracting from our admiration for the progress of natural science, it must be said that in recent times this very immersion in the scientific way of thinking has, in many people, produced a kind of inability to be attentive to what knowledge of the nature of the human soul, of the human spirit itself, gives, what knowledge it gives about the most important, most incisive riddles of human existence.

If one follows the course of spiritual history from the points of view just mentioned, one not only gets a general idea of the inability just described. If we look in detail at what has been attempted in recent times with regard to the study of the soul, we immediately get the impression that minds that have been trained by the scientific way of thinking often pass by the points where the knowledge of the soul, the knowledge of the most important questions of existence, should open up. As an example today, I will mention the ideas of a thinker of recent times, whom I have often referred to here and who can indeed be considered one of those who have endeavored to go beyond the merely external, sensual existence and point to something that lives in the spiritual behind the sensual. I would like to start with certain thoughts that Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious, wrote down at the beginning of his psychology, his theory of the soul. He expresses how it is actually impossible to observe the phenomena of the soul, and how the difficulty of a psychology lies precisely in the fact that it is almost impossible to observe the phenomena of the soul. Let us allow Hartmann's thoughts to arise in this direction before our soul. He says:

“Psychology seeks to establish what is given; to do so, it must above all observe it. But observing one's own psychic phenomena is a peculiar matter, since it inevitably disturbs and changes what it focuses on to a lesser or greater degree. Anyone who wants to observe their own delicate feelings will, by focusing their attention on them, alter these feelings quite considerably.”

Hartmann therefore believes that you cannot observe the soul, because if you want to observe feelings, you have to observe the soul; but when you want to direct your attention to a tender feeling, it disappears into the soul; the soul withdraws, as it were, from the observation of the human being.

“Yes, even,” he says, “they can slip away from him underhand. A slight physical pain is intensified by observation.”

So he means: pain is a mental experience; but how can we observe it? How can we find out what is there when pain lives in the soul in such a way that when we start observing it, it becomes stronger. So it changes. By observing, we change what we want to observe. Or:

“Reciting the most familiar memorized material can falter or become confused in its sequence if the observation is trying to determine the course of this sequence.”

He means: It is a mental phenomenon when we recite something that we have memorized. But if we want to start observing what is actually happening while we are reciting, it does not work. So we cannot observe this mental phenomenon of reciting. Or he says:

"Strong feelings or even emotions, such as fear and anger, make it impossible to observe one's own psychological phenomena. Often, observation falsifies the result by introducing into what is given only that which it expects to find. It seems almost impossible to objectify one's psychic experiences of the present moment in such a way that one makes them the object of simultaneous observation; either the experience does not allow the simultaneous observation to arise, or the observation falsifies and displaces the experience.

We see here a personality that, as it were, recoils from the observation of the soul under the influence of thinking. If I want to grasp the soul, then I change the soul precisely through this soul activity of grasping. And that is why observation is actually not possible at all – so Hartmann thinks.

Now this is indeed an extraordinarily interesting example of the wrong track that this research in particular can take due to a certain inability. After all, what would we actually gain if we could truly observe, say, a tender feeling? A tender feeling would remain in the soul exactly what it is. By observing this tender feeling, we would experience nothing other than what this tender feeling is. Nothing about the soul; nothing at all about the soul. And it is the same with the other examples Hartmann cites. For it depends on the fact that what we should actually call soul never shows itself in what the moment offers. Rather, the soul can only truly appear to us when we are experiencing the changes of the individual soul experiences. If we wanted to observe what is present in the soul in a moment, we would be like the person who goes out into the fields at a certain time of year and sees the brown soil of the fields, spread out widely, and says to himself: this brown soil of the fields is what is actually spread out there. After a certain time, he goes out again. Now there are green shoots everywhere. If he is observing rationally, will he not say: Yes, then the brown soil that I saw recently did not show me everything that is actually there. Only by observing the changes that have taken place at different points in time can I understand what it actually is: that it is not just soil that has been spread, but that this soil has contained so many seeds that have sprouted and are sprouting.

Thus, the soul presents itself only when we become attentive: a delicate feeling is extinguished when I direct a strong thought of observation towards it. This interaction of the delicate feeling and the strong thought that observes it is the first manifestation of the workings and essence of the soul. So Eduard von Hartmann regrets not being able to observe that which changes, while he should be observing change. If he were to start from a point of view that allows him to look deeper into the life of the soul and into the connection between the life of the soul and the physical life than he is able to, then he would say the following about memorization, for example. He would recognize that memorizing is based on the fact that something of the soul has become engrained in the bodily process as a result of me having activated it many times, so that when I recite what I have memorized, the body automatically carries out what has to happen so that what I have memorized comes out again, so to speak without the soul having to be present. The person who is able to observe soul experiences knows that through memorization the soul element moves deeper into the bodily organization, so that there is more activity in the bodily realm than when we form present thoughts through direct contemplation that we have not memorized. When we form thoughts directly, I would say that we are working at a higher level in the soul than when we recite what we have memorized, where we bring forth more or less automatically what the soul has engraved in the body. But then, when we automatically run what we have buried from the soul into the body, we disturb this automatism when we intervene with a directly present thought that arises at a higher level, namely in the soul. It is when we enter with our thoughts from the soul into the automatism of the body, which takes place when reciting a piece of memorized material, just as if we were to insert a stick into a machine and disturb its operation.

When we grasp such things, which Hartmann regrets, we will immediately see how the various modes of activity of the soul and also of the body interact in man.

And Eduard von Hartmann says: “Observation often distorts the soul.” Well, in the course of the last few decades, popular science has basically more or less abandoned actual observation of the soul, at least methodical observation of the soul. But certain flashes of light have emerged. And such flashes of light have been had precisely by those who are not really recognized by regular school philosophers. Nietzsche, for example, had many such flashes of insight. In a certain, increasingly morbid and ingenious grasp of the soul's life, Nietzsche recognized how what takes place on the surface of it differs greatly from what takes place in the depths of human life. One need only read something like Nietzsche's arguments about the ascetic ideal to which some people devote themselves, and one will see what is actually meant here. How is the ascetic ideal often described? Well, you describe it in such a way that you have in mind what the person who devotes himself to asceticism in the usual sense imagines: how the person trains himself more and more to want nothing himself, to switch off his will and, precisely as a result, to become more and more spineless and selfless. From pursuing this train of thought, what is called the ascetic ideal is then formed. Nietzsche asks: What is actually behind this ascetic ideal in the soul? And he finds: The one who lives according to an ascetic ideal wants power, an increase of power. If he were to develop his ordinary soul life as it is, he would have less power – as he perceives it – than he wants. Therefore, he trains his will, seemingly to reduce it. But in the depths of the soul, it is precisely by diminishing the will that he wants to achieve great power, great effects. The will to power is behind the ideal of lack of will, of selflessness. So says Nietzsche. And there is indeed a flash of insight here, which should certainly be taken into account when judging, especially when it comes to self-knowledge of the human being.

Let us take a more obvious example than the one Nietzsche discussed in Asceticism. A person once wrote to me and often said: “I devote myself to a certain scientific direction; actually, I don't have the slightest sympathy for this scientific direction, but I consider it a mission, a duty, to work in this direction because humanity needs it in the present. I would actually rather do anything than what I am doing. I was not embarrassed to keep telling the man in question that, according to how he appeared to me, this was a superficial view of his soul about himself. Deep in the subconscious, in those layers of the soul's life of which he knows nothing, there lives in him a greed to carry out precisely that which he said he actually dislikes, that he only accepts as a mission. And in truth, I said, the whole thing seems to me that he regards this as a mission for the reason that he wants to develop these things out of the most selfish motives. So one can see, without going deeper into the soul life, that the superficial soul life almost falsifies the subconscious. But in this falsification lies a remarkable activity of the soul.

It was precisely from such trains of thought, as I have cited them, and from a failure to pursue such trains of thought further, as I have followed them up, that Eduard von Hartmann reached his hypothesis of the unconscious. He says: From what takes place in the soul as thinking, feeling and willing, from what one has there as consciousness, one can actually gain no view of the real soul. But because one has only this, one must altogether renounce any view of the real soul-life and can only put forward a hypothesis. — Therefore Hartmann puts forward the hypothesis: Behind thinking, feeling and willing lies the unconscious, which can never be reached. And from this unconscious arise thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will. But what is down there in the unconscious can only be the subject of thoughts that have a greater or lesser degree of probability, but which are only hypotheses. It must be said that anyone who thinks in this way simply blocks their own access to the life of the soul, to that which is beyond the ordinary life of the soul. For Hartmann correctly recognized that everything that enters into ordinary consciousness is nothing more than a mere image. And it is precisely one of Hartmann's merits that he emphasized time and again in the most eminent sense: What falls into ordinary consciousness arises from the fact that the soul, as it were, receives its own content mirrored from the body, so that we only have mirror images in what we experience in thinking, feeling and willing. And to talk about the fact that these mirror images of consciousness contain a reality is quite similar to the assertion that the images we perceive from a mirror are reality. Hartmann emphasized this again and again. We will come back to this point today. But Hartmann, and with him countless thinkers, countless people in general in the last decades and the immediate present, they blocked their own possibility of penetrating into the soul because, I would say, they had an indescribable fear of the path that can penetrate into the soul. This fear remains in the subconscious; in ordinary consciousness it protrudes in such a way that one conjures up numerous reasons that tell one: one cannot go beyond certain limits of knowledge.

For anyone who really wants to penetrate into the life of the soul needs not to stop at ordinary consciousness, but to move on to what I have called “visionary consciousness” in the lectures I have given here, a consciousness that is, to a certain extent, higher than ordinary consciousness. I have chosen the following comparison: During sleep, man lives in images. The images of the dream that arises from sleep become conscious to a certain degree. I said in previous lectures: the essential thing is that in these images that he experiences in his dreams, man is not able to relate his will to the things around him. At the moment of waking up, when a person enters from dream consciousness into waking consciousness, what remains of the images and perceptions is basically the same as it is in the dream; only now the person enters into a relationship with their surroundings through their will, and they integrate what otherwise only exists as images in their dream into their sensory environment. Just as a person wakes up from dream consciousness into ordinary waking consciousness, so too can he bring himself, through certain soul activities, to wake up from ordinary waking consciousness to a “visionary consciousness,” whereby he does not integrate himself into the ordinary world of the senses, but with his soul powers into the spiritual world. This intuitive consciousness is the only way by which man can penetrate into the beyond of soul phenomena.

I might say that the most enlightened minds of the present believe that one would be committing a sin against knowledge if one were to speak of a human being's ascent to such an intuitive consciousness. And for many of the philosophical minds of the present day in particular, this intuitive consciousness is simply condemned by the fact that such a person says: Yes, it is just like clairvoyance! — Now the thing is that — in order to tie in with something — it is perhaps best characterized by characterizing the tremendous progress that has taken place in man's attitude to reality from Kant to Goethe. In doing so, one does indeed commit a sin against the spirit of many a philosopher. But this sin must be committed at some time. Kantianism is, after all, what began to erect barriers to human knowledge within the development of the continental spirit. The “thing in itself” is to be presented as something absolutely otherworldly, which human knowledge cannot approach. That is what Kantianism wants, and that is what many people in the 19th century wanted with Kantianism, right up to the present day and including the 20th century. In a few short sentences, Goethe has put forward something tremendously significant against this principle of Kantianism. And if one really wants to evaluate German intellectual life, one could consider Goethe's short essay “On the Power of Judging by Intuition”, which is usually printed in the natural scientific writings of Goethe, as one of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy, for the simple reason that what is alive in this short essay is the starting point for a tremendous development of human intellectual life. In this essay, “On the Power of Judgement,” Goethe says something like this: Yes, Kant excludes the human being from the thing in itself and only allows the categorical imperative to enter into the soul, commanding him what he should do. But if, in the moral sphere, one should rise to thoughts about freedom and immortality, why should it be closed to man to raise himself directly in knowledge to that world in which immortality and freedom themselves are rooted? — Goethe calls such a power of judgment, which transports itself into such a world, the contemplative power of judgment. Now, in his contemplation of natural phenomena, Goethe continually exercised this power of judgment. And in the way he observed plant and animal forms, he set a magnificent example of the use of this power of judgment. Kant saw this power of judgment as something demonic, which one should leave alone, which one should pass by. He called the use of this power of contemplative judgment “the adventure of reason.” Goethe countered: “Why should one, after making the effort I have, to recognize how the spirit lives and moves in natural phenomena, why should one not bravely face this adventure of reason?”

This is, of course, only the beginning, but it is the beginning of a development that proceeds as I have characterized it in these lectures. Today, too, I would like to point out that in my writings, in “How to Know Higher Worlds?”, in “The Occult Science in Outline”, in my last book, “The Riddle of Man”, you will find information and hints about what the soul has to undertake in order to find within itself, as it were, the strength to awaken from ordinary waking consciousness to observing consciousness in the same way that one awakens from dream consciousness to ordinary waking consciousness. Just as the soul must exert itself by virtue of the natural forces given to it in order to awaken from the dream-life, in which man is passively surrendered to the succession of images, into the waking consciousness, so can it, by taking itself in hand and applying to itself all that I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” She can strengthen herself to awaken within a world that is now just as different in comparison to the ordinary waking consciousness as the ordinary sense world of the waking consciousness is different from what one experiences in the mere world of images in a dream. Out of the ordinary waking consciousness and into a world of intuitive consciousness: this is the path that the most outstanding thinkers of modern times have avoided so much. And we have the peculiar phenomenon that precisely the most enlightened minds have remained with Kant and have not found the way from Kant to Goethe, in order to advance vividly into the realm of the seeing consciousness, which is only the development at a different level of what Goethe meant by contemplative judgment.

But then, when the human being rises to such an awakening in the seeing consciousness, then he first reaches what I have already characterized in my lectures as imaginative knowledge, which is not called “imaginative” because it represents only something imagined, but because one lives in images; but in images that are not taken from the sensual outer world, but from a more powerful, more intense reality than the outer sensual reality. When a person develops the strength within themselves to reach this imaginative knowledge, it means that they truly live in what I have called in earlier lectures the ethereal in the sense of spiritual science. Through ordinary waking consciousness, we become aware of the external sense world. In imaginative consciousness, we enter into a completely different world, in which, so to speak, other things live and move than in the ordinary sense world.

Now it is certainly difficult for those who have no idea of this seeing consciousness to form an idea of it. And it will probably be the same for some of my honored listeners who have told me in recent times that these lectures are difficult to understand. They are not difficult with regard to what is communicated, but they are difficult for the reason that they speak of something that is not there for ordinary consciousness.

They speak of the results of perception that are based on the research of the seeing consciousness. But one can also gain an approximate idea in the ordinary consciousness of that which is actually the very first of the seeing consciousness. Imagine yourself — and basically anyone can do this — in a very vivid morning dream from which you wake up, and try to remember such a dream in which you have tried, I would even say, to really live in the dream, more or less subconsciously trying to really live in it. Then you will have experienced that what you feel as thoughts, as if they were banished to your body, and of which you have to say to yourself, “I feel my thoughts as though they were thought by me,” you will have to think about that, so to speak, spread out over the images of the dream as they flood in. You cannot distinguish yourself from what is flooding in the images of the dream, as you can distinguish yourself in sensual consciousness, so that you can say, “I stand here and I think about the things that are out there.” You do not perceive something outside and think about it, but you have the direct experience: in what is flooding up and down, the forces live that otherwise live in my thinking. It is as if you yourself were immersed in the surging life, so that the surging, the form of the surging, everything that is there is formed like weaving, living thought forces: objective life and weaving of thought forces. This, what can only be imagined in the dream life, I would like to say, can be perceived very distinctly in the seeing consciousness as a first impression. There really the possibility ceases to think: There outside are the objects and there inside in my head I think about the objects. No, there one feels embedded in something, what one would like to call a surging substantial sea, in which one is a wave. And that, what thought power is, is not only in one, that is outside, that drives this surging and surging, that goes outward, inward. That is to say, one sometimes feels connected to it, sometimes in such a way that the power of thought flows outside without one.

What one achieves – whereby, in a sense, a substantial element is connected with what otherwise only lives in us as thought – that is what should really be called ether. For the ether is nothing other than a finer substantiality, but one that is so permeated everywhere that thought is at work in it, that in reality thoughts outside fill the ether itself. Only in this way, through the development of consciousness, does one arrive at what should really be called ether. But then one also arrives at a more intimate relationship between one's own soul and the environment. In sensory observation, one can never enter into such an intimate relationship with one's surroundings as in this experience of the observing consciousness, which now really has no boundaries between inside and outside, but flows in and out - into and out of one's own soul life - that which is ether filled with thoughts and thoughts of the soul.

But only when one has entered into this intuitive consciousness can there be a higher self-knowledge. And here I now touch on something that again belongs to the significant results of spiritual research; but it will also be transferred to scientific research, insofar as it will find confirmation of this, as it will find confirmation of those results of spiritual research that I have presented in previous lectures. Man is a complex being, even if we look at him only externally and physically. If Goethe's approach had already been fruitful earlier, if it had not been overgrown by the 19th-century materialism hostile to spirit and soul, Goethe's theory of metamorphosis would also have been applied to man himself. Goethe made a very beautiful distinction between the green leaf and the colored petal of a flower, which are the same thing, only at different levels of existence, one being only a transformation product, a metamorphosis of the other. If we start not from a merely theoretical reception, but from the intuition that lived in Goethe, in that he applied the idea of metamorphosis in the simplest way, to the plant, and now applies this metamorphic applies this view of metamorphosis to man in all the complexity of his being, one comes to recognize that man, by having a head and a remaining organism, is a very remarkable creature.

When we observe the human being as he develops from an early age, from early childhood onwards, we encounter many things that are full of meaning and that are still not sufficiently appreciated by science today. Let us just emphasize the fact that in early childhood the part of the human being that develops most physically is the head. The head grows throughout life in such a way that it increases fourfold, while the rest of the organism grows twentyfold from its childhood state. Consider, then, how different the pace of growth is for the head and for the rest of the organism. This is due to the fact that the head and the rest of the organism are two different metamorphoses of one and the same, but in a very peculiar way. The head appears in man, as he begins his physical life, immediately in a certain perfection; the rest of the organism, on the other hand, appears with the greatest conceivable imperfection, and must first develop slowly to the degree of perfection that it is to achieve in physical life. Thus the head and the rest of the organism undergo quite different periods of development. I have already mentioned how spiritual science shows the origin of this. The human head points back to a long preceding spiritual development. When we enter our physical existence through conception and birth, we come from a spiritual world as soul-spiritual beings. What we go through during our spiritual development in the spiritual world contains a sum of forces that initially express themselves primarily in the head; therefore, what appears in the head as something so perfect and needing little further perfection points to a development that the person has already undergone.

The rest of the organism is, as it were, the same at an initial stage. It is in the process of developing the powers which, if they could reach full development, would tend to make the whole of the rest of the organism what the head is physically. However paradoxical it may sound, that is how it is. The head shows that it is a transformed remaining organism; the remaining organism shows that it is a head that has not yet become. In a sense, just as the green leaf is a petal that has not yet become a flower, and the colored petal is a transformed leaf. And that which the human being develops through his remaining organism, that is incorporated into the soul. And when a person passes through the gate of death, it enters into a spiritual world, undergoes a development between death and a new birth, and in a later life becomes one of the powers that then develop in the head, just as the head of the present has developed out of the organism of an earlier life on earth.

Now you may ask: How can such a thing be known? Something like this can be known as soon as a person enters into intuitive consciousness. For then something really occurs that compels one to see the human being as this duality: the head human being and the human being of the rest of the organism. And the head is, so to speak, a tool of the etheric world, as I have just described it, and the rest of the organism is also a tool of this etheric world.

The human being not only has his physical organism as a kind of section of the whole physical world, but he also has, held together by the physical organism, an etheric organism within him that can only be perceived if one ascends to imaginative knowledge, as I have described. But then, when what is ethereal really becomes vivid, then one encounters the great difference between what underlies the etheric body of the human being and the head and what underlies the etheric body of the rest of the organism. And just as the head and the rest of the organism have very different growth rates, so that which lives and is active in the etheric body of the head and that which lives in the etheric body of the rest of the organism has very different inner developments of strength, which evoke different inner imaginations. And when one enters the imaginative world at all, then the imagination of the etheric body of the head interacts with the imagination of the etheric body of the rest of the organism. And this living interaction in the human etheric organism is the content of a higher self-knowledge. The fact that the human being comes to truly recognize himself in this way also enables him to evaluate certain soul experiences in the right way. If what I have stated were not as I have described it, the human being would never be able to have what is called a memory. The human being would be able to form ideas from sensory impressions, but these would always pass by. The fact that a person can remember something that he has once experienced is based on the fact that the etheric body of the head, in interaction with the etheric body of the rest of the organism, causes that which takes effect in the etheric body of the head to bring about changes in the etheric body of the rest of the organism that are permanent and that work their way up into the physical organism. Every time something takes hold in the soul and bodily life of a person that belongs to memory, a change first occurs in the etheric organism that can be imagined through imaginative knowledge; but this change continues into the physical organism. And through this alone we have the possibility of again bringing up certain thoughts, that what is sent from the ether organism of the head into the other ether organism is imprinted in the physical body. Only by the fact that something has made impressions in our physical body are we able to retain it in our memory. But what happens in the physical organism in the manner described, can only be observed by the seeing consciousness. This can only be observed if the observing consciousness continues the exercises that are characterized in the books mentioned, if the observing consciousness rises from mere imaginative knowledge to what I have called “inspired knowledge”. Through imaginative knowledge we enter into a world of surging ether, which is animated by thoughts that permeate it. If we continue the exercises, we will gain more strength in our soul life than is necessary for this imaginative knowledge, and then we will not only perceive a surging thought life in the ether, but we will also perceive beings within this surging thought life, real spirit beings, which do not reveal themselves in any physical body, but which only reveal themselves in the spiritual. But by coming to the real perception of a spiritual world, we also come to the possibility of achieving what can be called: to look at the actual human being as well as at things from the outside, to really face oneself, not just to feel what I have now called one's own thought life in the surging ether, in one's own ether organism, but to perceive oneself among other spirit beings as a spirit being in the spiritual world. When this happens, something occurs that is difficult to even characterize, but that can be understood with some good will.

When you imagine something and hold the image in your mind, and later you recall this image, you say you are remembering. But as I have just explained, this is based on something that is happening in the physical organism. It is just that we cannot follow it with our ordinary consciousness. But if we ascend into the consciousness of vision, then we come, as it were, to see what happens behind the memory, what happens in man in the time that elapses from the moment when he conceived a thought that has now disappeared as it were, and lives only down in the physical organism until it is brought up again. All that lives beyond the thought that is remembered is not perceived if one cannot lift oneself out of oneself through the seeing consciousness and, as it were, look at oneself from the other side. So that one not only sees a thought going down and sensing it coming back up, but perceiving everything that happens in between while the thought is going down and coming back up. This is only possible for the inspired consciousness; it is possible for the beholder who has made it possible for himself not only to look outward while living in the physical body, but to look even within the body of man himself while living in the spirit. Thus man reaches, on the one hand, a beyond of the soul, which assures him that he lives in the spirit. But man also reaches the beyond of the soul, which works in what lives unconsciously from the disappearance of a thought until the reappearance of the same, what lives down there as what Eduard von Hartmann calls the “unconscious”, and which he believes can never be reached by consciousness. It cannot be reached by ordinary consciousness because the thought is reflected in the organism beforehand; but if one gets behind this reflection, if one goes beyond oneself and lives in the observing consciousness, then one experiences what really happens in a person between the moment of conceiving the thought and the moment of remembering it. And this we will now hold fast, what man can perceive, as it were, beyond that stream through the seeing consciousness, which is usually limited to him by memory. For we see well: there we enter through the seeing consciousness into a beyond of the soul.

Let us keep this thought in mind and look at many other endeavors that have emerged in the scientific age from the same point of view.

Not only does the scientific world view, I might say, take such erroneous paths to the soul life as I have characterized it, but in a certain respect it also takes erroneous paths when it wants to explore what lies beyond the senses. In this respect, scientific research is indeed in a strange position at present when it forms a world view. It has actually come to the conclusion that everything that lives in consciousness is only an image of reality. It starts from an incorrect idea; but this incorrect idea, despite its incorrectness, gives a certain insight that is correct, namely that everything that lives in consciousness is an image. Scientific research starts from the idea that out there is a reality of vibrating, thoughtless ether atoms, completely without spirit or soul. We have found the ether to be a surging, thought-filled life; the scientific world view starts from the thoughtless, soulless ether. These vibrations impress our senses, effects arise in us, conjuring up the colorful, resounding world for us, while outside everything is dark and silent. Now, however, thinking, on which this world view is based, wants to get behind these images. What does it do? What it does there can be compared to someone -— well, let's say a child - looking into a mirror. Mirror images come towards him, his own and the images of his surroundings. And now the child wants to know what actually underlies these mirror images. What does it do? Yes, what is actually underlying them is behind the mirror, it says; so it will either want to look behind the mirror. But there it sees something quite different from what it was actually looking for. Or it may well smash the mirror to see what is behind the glass. The same is true of the scientific view of the world. It has the whole carpet of sense phenomena before it, and it wants to know what actually lives behind the sense phenomena. It goes so far as to approach the substance, the matter. Now it wants to know what is out there, apart from the senses. But that is merely as if it wanted to smash the carpet, which is like a mirror. She would not find what she was looking for behind it. And if someone were to say: “I have red through the eye, and behind it are certain vibrations in the ether,” he is talking just like someone who believes that the origin of what shines in the mirror is behind the mirror. Just as when you stand before a mirror you see the image of yourself in the mirror, and you are together with what is in the surroundings, and with what also reflects itself of yourself, so you are together in the soul with what is behind the sense phenomena. If I want to know why other things are reflected with me, I cannot look behind the mirror, but I have to look at those who are to my left and right, who are of the same nature as I am, who are also reflected. If I want to explore what is out there behind the sensory phenomena, I must explore that in which I myself am involved; not by breaking the mirror, but by exploring that in which I myself am involved.

Indeed, ingenious and wonderful trains of thought have been developed over the airwaves in relation to natural science. But all these trains of thought have led to nothing, to the realization that the path of physical research leads only to the same thing that is seen in the sense perception, only that because some things are too fine or too fast to be perceived by the senses. One comes to no ether. This is clear today after the beautiful research with the pumped tubes, the vacuum tubes, where one thought one had the ether in one's hands; for today one knows that nothing else comes about through these experiments than radiant matter, not what can be called ether. I would even say that ether research in particular is undergoing the greatest revolution today. For one will never arrive at anything other than that which reflects, by way of physical research. If one wants to get further, then one must consider that which reflects with a community — but one can only do that with the seeing consciousness. And that is what lives in the ether that is truly inspired by thought. Therefore, when one asks about the beyond of the senses, one finds only one answer through the seeing consciousness. For when one recognizes the surging thought-inspired ether within oneself through imaginative knowledge, then one also comes to seek it behind the red, behind the sound, behind all external sensory perception; no longer the dead ether of today's physical conception, which is just fading away, but the living, thought-inspired ether. Behind what the senses perceive, lives the same thing that is found in us when we penetrate down into that which lives in us between the grasping of a thought and the remembering of a thought. We do not reach the beyond of the senses by the methods of modern physics, but by finding what is beyond the senses in our own being, by learning to recognize: the same process works in our own being between the grasping of a thought and the reminiscence of a thought, which lives outside and which penetrates my eye when I perceive red. Behind this red is the same thing that is in me between the grasping of a thought and the remembering of a thought. The beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul leads into the spiritual.

I had to lead you through a deducted train of thought today because I wanted to say something in the context of these lectures about the perspective that must arise from spiritual science. I wanted to show how true self-knowledge leads to the beyond of the soul, but also how, when one steps into the beyond of the soul, one also stands in the beyond of the senses, and how one thereby finds the way into the spiritual world through the observing consciousness. And once we enter this spiritual world, the intuitive consciousness discovers that which also plays a role in our soul life and which I have described in the previous lectures as that which, as our destiny, rises and falls in our experiences. In this way, the life of fate is linked to the moral life, to what happens in destiny. When we first know that behind the experience of the senses there is not a spiritless reality, but a reality inspired by the spirit, then our moral life will have just as much place in this spiritual world, which lies beyond the soul and beyond the senses, as the material world, which we perceive all around us, has in this outer world.

Spiritual science today, when it develops these things, is still seen as something paradoxical; the things I have described are, so to speak, considered foolishness; and yet they can be considered just as much as facts, simply by looking at them as if one wanted to describe an external event. But this approach of spiritual science is only digging in one epistemic tunnel from one side; from the other side, natural science digs into the mountain. If the two strive in the right direction, they will meet in the middle. And I would like to say: in a kind of negative way, those who cultivate natural science do come to meet those who cultivate the humanities; for remarkable things have come about among natural scientists in recent times. Those who think they are firmly grounded in natural science research because they know what has been discovered up to twenty years ago do not yet know much about what natural scientists actually do. But if you look more closely, you will make some very strange discoveries in the course of scientific thinking. For this very reason, I have today cited Eduard von Hartmann as a thinker who at least points to a beyond the senses and a beyond the soul. He just does not admit that it is possible for the observing consciousness to penetrate beyond the senses and the beyond of the soul. Therefore he says, dipping it into a general sauce of knowledge - knowledge sauce, one says nowadays! -: What lies beyond the senses and beyond the soul is the unconscious. He now puts forward quite questionable hypotheses about it. But these are only truths of thought. Thought does not reach into these worlds. Only the seeing consciousness reaches into them, as I have described. But at least Hartmann does advance to at least a presentiment of the fact that in the beyond of the senses and in the beyond of the soul there is something spiritual, even if he did not bring it to consciousness. When he published his Philosophy of the Unconscious in 1868, he offered a critique of the already then rampant materialistic interpretation of Darwinism. “Materialistic Darwinism” — not what Darwin found in the way of individual facts, that is not under discussion here — believes that it can explain how the more perfect arise from imperfect, simplest living creatures by leaving out everything of a spiritual nature, as they say, through mere selection, through mere struggle for existence. Due to the fact that the perfect ones develop by chance and overcome those that remain imperfect by chance, the perfect ones gradually prevail; this is how something like a developmental series from the imperfect to the perfect arises. As early as 1868, Hartmann explained that such a play of purely external natural necessities, which can also be called chance, is not sufficient to explain the development of organisms, but that certain forces must be at work, even if unconsciously, when a living being develops from imperfection to perfection. In short, he sought a spiritual element in evolution, that spiritual element that can really be found beyond the senses and beyond the soul, he hypothetically assumed. He assumed it only hypothetically, because at that time one had not yet penetrated to the stage of direct intuitive consciousness.

When the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published, which criticized Darwin's theory of chance in a sharp-witted way, a large number of scientifically minded people came forward to oppose this “dilettante thinker” Eduard von Hartmann. A dilettante philosopher who doesn't understand anything of what Darwinism has brought, and who speaks so glibly from his own intellectual standpoint! And among those who criticized Hartmann at the time was Oscar Schmid, a professor in Jena. Haeckel himself was also among them. Haeckel himself and numerous of his students were now highly astonished that among the many writings that, in their opinion, brilliantly refuted Eduard von Hartmann, who talked such amateurish nonsense, there was also a writing by an anonymous author – by a man who did not name himself. And Haeckel said: He should come forward! And others also said: He should come forward and we would accept him as one of our own! It is so wonderful that a scientific paper has now been published in this way against the nonsense of the “philosophy of the unconscious”! — And a second edition of this paper “The Unconscious in the Light of Darwinism” was published. And the author called himself – it was Eduard von Hartmann! You see, there were reasons why people no longer declaimed: He calls himself us and we consider him one of us. They now kept quiet about him. That was a fundamental lesson that had to be taught to those who believe that the one who talks about the spirit does so because he does not understand their science. It became quite quiet now. But something else was noticed: in 1916 a very interesting work was published that can be said to stand at the pinnacle of the field it discusses. This work is called: 'The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance'. And this work - well, who wrote it? Well, it is by the often mentioned most brilliant Haeckel student, by Oscar Hertwig, the Berlin professor of biology. We are witnessing the strange spectacle that the next generation of Haeckel's students, the generation of students of which he himself was most proud, is already writing books to refute the Darwinian theory of chance, which at the time when they turned against Hartmann was precisely the one prevailing in the Haeckel circle. And what does Hertwig do, whom I myself knew as one of the most loyal Haeckel students with his brother Richard? He adopts what can be called a “materialistic interpretation of the Darwinian theory” and refutes it piece by piece, quoting Eduard von Hartmann at several points. Hartmann now reappears in Oscar Hertwig's writing “The Becoming of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance” and is honored again. In the past, when he was not known, people said: He calls himself unconscious, and we consider him one of us. And now we are beginning to come back to what Hartmann still put into the unconscious. Now we are beginning to recognize the spiritual in what is there sensually.

However, this book “The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance by Oscar Hertwig” is indeed strange. For while all earlier materialistic interpretations of Darwinism boiled down to saying: We have perfect organisms, we have imperfect organisms; the perfect ones have developed from the imperfect ones through their external natural forces, Hertwig comes back to to the fact that in the perfect organism, if one goes back microscopically to the first germ, one can prove that Nägeli's view is correct, that in the first germ the perfect organism is already distinguished from the imperfect organism. For there is already something quite different in the perfect organism than in the imperfect one, which one believes the perfect one has developed from. Microscopic research has gone to a limit, but it has achieved nothing more than to come across a mirror, and has not progressed further than the limit of the sensory world. The consequence will be that many people who stand on the standpoint of the natural-scientific world view will not merely state, as Hertwig does: the materialistic interpretation of Darwinism is impossible. Rather, they will acknowledge: If we want to arrive at anything that explains the sense world and lies behind it, then we cannot stop at ordinary consciousness; we cannot get out of the sense world, not even with as many telescopes as we want. We can only get out of the sense world if we arm ourselves with the seeing consciousness.

But in general, even philosophers have not yet gone very far in arming themselves with the soul to the point where they would recognize that the seeing consciousness can sprout forth from this ordinary consciousness, just as the waking consciousness sprouts forth from the dream. Today philosophers are even less qualified to penetrate to these things. I have often said that I only act in opposition to those whom I basically respect very much. Therefore, I may say: It is only because of this inability to think in a way that is in accordance with the spirit and reality, that one would strive for this seeing consciousness, that people are considered great philosophers today who, basically, their whole thinking and meditating only swim around in what surges up and down in this ordinary consciousness, without even feeling the need to get beyond mere talk of surging ideas. And so it has also come about that someone who revels in the surface of the surging and swaying ideas, as Eucken did, for example, can be regarded as a great philosopher today. It is just one of the things that one has to characterize by saying that this clinging to ordinary consciousness has also taken away from man the sharpness of thought that allows him to see that there are not such limits to knowledge as Kant states, but such limits that one must reckon with in order to transcend them through the seeing consciousness. That is why those who declaim about all kinds of spiritual worlds, but who, within the ordinary consciousness, come to nothing but what Eduard von Hartmann long ago recognized as mere ordinary consciousness operating in images, are regarded as great philosophers today.

And so much could be shown in the present day that would draw attention to the fact that, I would say, the admirable scientific way of looking at things has led us away from the paths that lead to the soul. For some, however, it has been quite the opposite. There are people in the present who sense what I have said today. For example, there is a personality in the present who senses that what lives in the soul between birth and death in the form of thinking, feeling and willing is only something that is conditioned by the body, while the eternal comes from the comes out of the spiritual world, enters into existence through birth, transforms itself in the body so that it works in the body, and then leaves again through death, and that what works in the body is not the true soul. The personality that I mean recognizes this. But it says that in what lives in ordinary consciousness, we only have images. This personality calls it “events”. Behind these lie the primal factors that are experienced in the seeing consciousness as beyond the soul and beyond the senses. But the personality that I mean does not want to go into this seeing consciousness. And so it stands before the occurrences, again, I would like to say, smashing a thick mirror over and over again, and saying: Behind it the primal factors must be. But it rages. And by raging against the mirror surface and not wanting to come to the seeing consciousness, it believes that all philosophy has only raged. With Fichte one can see (I have spoken about this in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man)) that he did not rave, but that he pointed to the seeing consciousness in an important point. The personality I am referring to now, which does recognize the image-nature of ordinary consciousness, says: “He who cannot laugh (at Fichte) cannot philosophize either.” And as this personality lets all philosophers from Plato and Heraclitus to the present day pass before it in their interrelations, it calls these philosophies “The Tragicomedy of Wisdom”. And there is an interesting sentence on page 132: “We have no more philosophy than an animal, and only the frantic attempt to arrive at a philosophy and the final surrender to not-knowing distinguish us from the animal.”

That is the judgment of one personality about all philosophy, about all attempts to penetrate into the beyond of the soul and the beyond of the senses! This is truly a raging man who, in his rage, believes that others are raging. Therefore, because he speaks so beautifully about philosophy, he is currently a university professor of philosophy! Philosophy is currently being taught in such a way as to express itself in such a phenomenon.

I know very well that for some people what I am saying seems bitter. I can fully understand that. I can understand all the bitterness and also all the paradoxes. But it must be pointed out once and for all that in the present time there is the necessity to emerge from what is enclosed in the mere sense world and to submerge into what leads beyond the soul, beyond the senses. For it is not the world that sets up limits to our knowledge. What sets up the limits of knowledge is man himself.

Sometimes one can make very interesting discoveries, such as what the human being is like when he does not even want to look at what, as a seeing consciousness, leads to the very essence of the soul. I have just given a sample of a philosophical view of a university professor Richard Wahle, who wrote the “Tragicomedy of Wisdom”. I could mention another: the famous Jodl. The man would certainly - he is no longer alive - regard everything that has been said here today, and that is said here at all, as the most complete madness. But he does speak about the soul in the following way: “The soul does not have states or capacities, such as thinking, imagining, joy, hatred, and so on, but these states in their totality are the soul.” Very ingenious! And the whole of Jodl's philosophy is permeated by this ingenuity. Only this definition of the soul is no more valuable than if someone were to say: It is not the table that has corners and edges and a surface, but corners and edges and a surface are the table.

And that is the quality of most of the thoughts that now live in that tangle of mere thought-webs, which are, however, only a product of the body because they do not want to penetrate to the observing consciousness, where one first discovers the soul. Today, however, one will still find that such a view takes many revenge. I have called the world-view represented in these lectures Anthroposophy. This is in reference to the “Anthroposophy” of Robert Zimmermann, who was also a university professor, but who was equally opposed to Anthroposophy. For what would Robert Zimmermann have said about the Anthroposophy that is presented here? Well, he would say what he has already said about Schelling: the philosopher must remain within that which can be attained through thought. He must not appeal to something that requires a special training of the soul! One can speak in this way, then one is just practicing an anthroposophy like Robert Zimmermann did. You will find a thicket of thoughts in it; it will not interest you, because not a word is said about all the questions of the soul and the spirit. Of what I have discussed in these lectures, what is connected with the beyond of the soul and the beyond of the senses, what is connected with the question of the immortality of the human soul, with the question of fate — none of this is contained in that anthroposophy. For the whole of the thinking of this last century has, on the one hand, admittedly produced the great advances of natural science, which cannot be sufficiently admired, but on the other hand, it has also produced the attitude of mind towards knowledge that the youthful Renan, when he left college, expressed as his conviction when he had been led astray in his religious ideas by the insights of the modern scientific way of thinking. At that time he said: “The man of the present day is aware that he will never know anything about his highest causes or his destiny.” That is ultimately the confession of many today, except that because the confession has been around for so long, very many have become numb to it and do not feel how such a confession eats away at the soul when it is new. This confession has blocked the paths to the beyond of the soul and to the beyond of the senses that are characteristic of today. Ernest Renan, after all, was someone who felt how it is possible to live with such a blockage. And so, as an old man, he made a strange statement:

The non-recognition of the observing consciousness does not lead to the knowledge of the origin and essence of man, just as the breaking of a mirror does not lead to the knowledge of those beings who are reflected in it. Renan felt this. He felt that where earlier times sought the spiritual origin of man, his world view posits a nothing. His mind protested against this by him declaring in old age that he would rather know that there is a hell than believe that nothingness is real. As long as only the mind protests in this way, as long as humanity will not get beyond the limitations of the world view that has so far blocked the paths to the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul. Only when humanity declares its willingness to develop such strong thinking and imagining that the soul can strengthen itself for what is, in the seeing consciousness, a living continuation of what Goethe suggested in his concept of the contemplating power of judgment, and which Kant regards as an adventure of reason, only when humanity decides to to advance to this realization of thoughts, to the whole soul world, in order to penetrate into spiritual reality with the seeing consciousness, then not only a mere protest of the mind, but a protest of knowledge will arise against the powers of compulsion of that so-called monism, which wants to split man off from a knowledge of his actual being. And I think that today we can already feel the inner nerve that lives in the spiritual-scientific debates in such a way that we are living at the starting point of those upheavals in human soul life that lead out of the realization of the already admired natural scientific world view into the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul, into the actual place of origin of the human being, into the spirit.

And thus man will again be able to link that which lives in his destiny, in his moral existence, to the origin of the world, just as he can link that which lives in the outer necessity of nature. And in this way man will ascend to a truly unified and also truly satisfying view of nature and soul, because as spirit he speaks to spirit.

From our Studies of such an impulse in human life as is contained in man's calling or vocation and in all that is connected with it, you will have seen how difficult it is to make these matters clear. For in effect, so many things are here involved. We must bear in mind that all that is introduced into our life through the law of Destiny or Karma depends on countless factors. To this, indeed, the manifold nature of human life is due. In describing certain human aspects of our life's destiny by the word ‘calling’ or ‘vocation’ one remark must perhaps be made, namely this: We ought not to confuse what we may describe as man's calling or vocation with what is commonly spoken of as his office or position in the widest sense of the term. For it goes without saying, much confusion would arise, if, having in mind what one man or another represents in his official position, we applied to this the points of view which have here been brought to bear on the vocational life. Frequently, though by no means always, man has to pursue his vocation in some official position, and many an extraneous factor comes into play at this point in human life, mingling other Karmic threads with that one which we may call the ‘Karma of vocation.’ We are living in a time which is slowly undergoing a certain transformation. Nevertheless, in our time, the aspects we are here outlining for the ‘Karma of vocation’ are by no means exclusively predominant in placing a man into this or that position in life. As you are well aware, the Karma of vocation is still cut across in many ways by the Karma of classes, social castes, etc. Within such groupings, ambitions, vanities, the prejudices of himself and other people, and many other factors too, help to determine how a man is placed in his official post. All these things, entering into the Karma of vocation as extraneous factors, make it possible for Ahrimanic influences constantly to interfere with the true course of human activity. A man who has been placed at a certain post in life—who has become a Cabinet Minister for instance, or a Privy Councillor or the like (through circumstances which are well enough known, and need not be gone into here)—such a man need not by any means have the corresponding vocation. He can occupy a high position and yet his vocation may only be that of a ‘pen-pusher’—perhaps not even that. Nor must you imagine that the position then remains unoccupied. That is just the peculiarity of our time. In its materialistic interpretation of the just foundations of Darwinism, it has evolved such a theory of life as the ‘Selection of the Fittest,’ which is now being criticised so vehemently by Haeckel's pupil, Oskar Hertwig. (Our standpoint need not be that of the pessimist who adversely judges his own time and constantly refers back to the ‘good old days.’ We simply take our stand on the real facts.) While on the one hand the people of this age pride themselves on the ‘Selection of the Fittest,’ this age in its reality is dominated by the very opposite tendency—that of selecting the worst, the un-fittest, for the very posts in life which one would think the most important. Bitter as it may be for our time to hear it, this truth would be admitted, were it not for the fact that our time is impressed with a far-reaching belief in authority, combined with the greatest possible opportunism and slackness. I say again, it is a bitter truth, which would be recognised were it not for the prevalence of what is called ‘public opinion.’ (Public opinions, according to a 19th century philosopher, are private stupidities.) We should recognise the fact to which I here refer, were we not so much impressed by the public opinions with which we are fed to-day from such unclean sources. On this we must be clear, our age needs above all to be educated to a more intense grasp of life. The prevalent one-sidedness—the selection of the un-fittest—must be recognised for what it is, albeit these ‘un-fittest’ are overwhelmed with adulation by the aforesaid ‘public opinion.’

The offices are occupied, in fact, only too frequently by Ahriman-Mephistopheles. And you may well see from the further course of Goethe's Faust how Mephistopheles fulfils his office. Not until the end of his life does it become possible for Faust to free himself from Mephistopheles. Faust comes to the imperial court. He even makes an invention—most important for the last few centuries. He invents paper-money. Mephistopheles is the real inventor. Afterwards, Faust is conducted into the world of classical antiquity by Homunculus. Homunculus himself, once more, is brought into being with Mephistopheles' assistance. Faust even becomes a military commander and conducts wars. But from Goethe's manner of description in this act especially, we see that it is really Mephistopheles who conducts them. Only at the very end do we see Faust gradually free himself from Mephistopheles.

Though Faust is roaming through the world without any definite position—having vacated his professorship—nevertheless, we must admit, the whole way in which Mephistopheles stands at his side is not unlike the way the Mephistophelean forces frequently play into the life of mankind to-day.

That is the one thing which must be borne in mind, but there is another thing as well. It is by no means easy rightly to discover in human nature what it is that really works in Karmic evolution. Here, too, the development of natural science has reached a point, which must be attained once more by spiritual-scientific study.

Notably when it tries to enter into the life of the soul, the natural-scientific way of thought makes the most ghastly errors. Witness the rise to-day of a mistaken school of science, which ventures to approach the human life of soul, studying it in the spirit of mere natural science. This school of thought admits that the life of the soul does not merely take its course as it appears to man's present consciousness. It admits that much is there beneath the threshold of consciousness—or as they say, in the unconscious or subconscious—beating-up into the conscious life.

In former lectures we have mentioned specific things which are truly there in the subconscious, and surge up into consciousness like the clouds of smoke which arise in the Solfatara country when one sets a light to a piece of paper. Much indeed is present down below in depths of consciousness.

So we may say: There are those today, who, wishing to pursue a science of the soul, already divine the fact that dark unconscious faculties of soul—and failings of soul—must be included for any true explanation. But as these schools will not yet admit a comprehensive spiritual-scientific world-conception, they can only bring to light mistaken notions. Those who take this standpoint of a purely natural-scientific psychology, observe a human life,—how it has evolved. They have indeed departed from the belief that what a soul feels and wills, wherewith it is happy or unhappy, filled with joy or grief, depends only on what the soul itself has preserved in the immediate consciousness. So now they try to catechise the soul. Somehow they try to get out of human souls the joys and pains, the disappointments of life which they have some time undergone and in their every-day power of thought have forgotten. What is forgotten, so these theorists declare, has not therefore vanished. It is still burrowing on in the subconsciousness.

Cravings, above all, are burrowing in the subconsciousness—cravings which at some earlier time of life remained unsatisfied or were repressed. Take a concrete instance—it is a woman in her 30th year. At the age of 16 she fell in love. She evolved a strongly erotic craving (so says this school of science), but this craving, if she had given herself up to it—if it had been fulfilled—would have led into some bye-way of life. Influenced by education, by the exhortation of her parents, she repressed it. To put it tritely, she ‘swallowed it down’ in her soul's life. Then she lived on. Fourteen years have passed. Perhaps she has married meantime according to her station. For her daily thoughts and feelings it is long forgotten. But the forgotten has by no means disappeared. The soul is not exhaustively contained in what it knows. In the underlying levels of consciousness the thing is still there, and presently it finds expression. For though the lady in her outer life is happy, she suffers from an indefinable, pessimistic leaning, a partial weariness of life or something similar. She is, as they say, ‘nervous,’ neurasthenic, or the like.

Now they seek to introduce this kind of psychology into medical science. They try to cure such souls by catechising them. Such experiences, they say, abiding in the hidden depths of the soul's life and for the surface consciousness apparently forgotten, must be drawn forth. If this be done—if under the influence of a good catechiser (who must of course, after the prevailing notions of to-day, be a physician) the patient gets to grips with the thing—then it will all grow better.

Cures are indeed effected in this manner. Often indeed they are more or less real cures, though in the majority of cases they will prove to be only semblances of cures. (We can explain how this is on some other occasion.)

That is one kind of thing they seek for, down in the depths of the soul's life. Here is another: It is a man of 35 or 40, suffering from a certain weariness of life, a morbid indecision. He does not know why, and the people around him do not know why. He knows it least of all. One who busies himself with the aforesaid ‘science of the soul,’ will try in this case too, to rummage in the forgotten though not vanished depths of the inner life, and will elicit the fact that in his 15th, 16th or 17th year, may be, the man had this or that plan in life, which plan fell through. He was obliged to turn to another plan of life—not according to the one he cherished. In all that he daily feels and thinks and wills, he has apparently been reconciled to the change. But what a man consciously feels and thinks and wills is not the entire life of the soul. In hidden depths the disappointed plan lives on as a real force.

Once more, these people believe that they can effect a cure by catechising and bringing the disappointment to the surface, giving the man an opportunity to discuss the whole matter with his catechiser.

But there are many other things besides, which they believe are resting there in the soul's depths without man's consciousness being aware of it. In short, they have perceived the fact that consciousness is a small circle and the soul's life a far larger circle of which the consciousness comprises only a little part. Not only so, they also look in the very depths of the soul's life for something else which is not of the soul—which, it appears, a theologian recently described—with questionable taste—as ‘the animal slime at the bottom of the soul.’ Thus they find disappointments, suppressed craving's, broken plans of life and finally the ‘animal slime at the very bottom of the soul,’ which means: all that is rooted in life, coming, so to speak, from flesh and blood, from the hidden animal nature, and rising from the soul's foundation in an unconscious way (for the consciousness would naturally rebel against it and does indeed rebel).

There is of course some truth in this theory of the ‘animal slime.’ We often see it happening in life:—Consciousness says to itself, ‘I want nothing more; I want to discover this or that. Therefore I turn to this or that person.’ But the ‘animal slime’ is really at work, for it may well be animal cravings which are only camouflaged and masked by what the consciousness declares.

Moreover this school of science (‘science,’ I say, with a grain of salt) has conjectured that in these same unconscious regions we shall also find what comes from the individual's connection with race and nation, with all manner of historic residues which play their part in the human soul unconsciously, while consciousness behaves quite differently. In view of what is now surging through the world, we cannot even deny that these things are apparently confirmed by multitudinous examples. For who will fail to see how many a man declares by word of mouth lofty ideals of ‘right and freedom for the nations,’ while in his soul's reality that alone is active, which, stirring the slime in the soul's depths, arises out of such connections as the Psycho-analyst would analyse—or pretend to analyse—in the above directions.

Moreover, the theologians among the Psycho-analysts especially, include in the subconscious regions of the soul's life the ‘demonic’ element which, they allege, arises from still more hidden depths—from the mysterious depth of the ‘irrational.’ I am unaware how the natural scientists and the theologians among Psycho-analysts come to terms with one another. But the latter class too undoubtedly exists, and they especially are fond of saying that unknown demons are at work in the subconscious in the human soul, so as to make men Gnostics for example, or Theosophists. ‘Psycho-analyse the soul and penetrate to the foundations where the primeval slime resides and you will find it. Gnosis is a demonic teaching, likewise Psycho-analysis’ ... no, I beg your pardon, not Psycho-analysis. Psychoanalysis, according to these men and women (for ladies, too, are taking part in these things) Psycho-analysis is not included in the black list, but Theosophy and other things.

I do not wish to enter now into any detailed criticism of Psycho-analysis. I only wish to have pointed out that in the Psycho-analytic school we have the evidence, how modern research is driven to observe what works and weaves beneath the conscious portions of the soul. But the prevailing scientific prejudices can only result in the most wrong conclusions on these matters. Meanwhile these people are quite unwilling to consider the investigations of Spiritual Science. Consequently they will not discover how impossible it is truly to analyse what they find in the soul's life, so long as they are unaware that man's existence takes its course in repeated lives on Earth. For in their Psycho-analysis they try to explain, what is there at the bottom of the soul, out of one Earth-life only. No wonder they are then obliged to place it frequently in a distorted light.

For example, suppose we find disappointed plans of life, deep down within the soul. We ought first to consider what kind of meaning this wrecking of a plan in life may have for the human being's existence as a whole, which goes on through repeated lives on Earth. Then perhaps we shall discover that there are also working in the man's subconsciousness certain aspects of his life, which, by a true working of destiny, have prevented the fulfilment of his plan. And then we shall observe that the disappointed plan, which is still there in the soul's depths, is not merely destined to make the man ill in this incarnation, but to be carried through the gate of death when this life is at an end, and to become a potent force in the life between death and new birth. For only in the next life will it play its proper part. It may indeed be necessary for such a broken plan of life to be preserved and nurtured to begin with, in the depths of the soul, so that it may be strengthened and enhanced. Then between death and a new birth it will be able to rise to its true stature, till in the next life on Earth it assumes its predestined form, which, on account of other qualities within the soul, it was not able to assume in this life.

Then as to the so-called ‘animal slime at the bottom of the soul's life’ (though, as I said, the expression is by no means in good taste), undoubtedly such a thing is there. But I beg you to remember what I have explained, of the relation between the head of man and the remainder of his organism. The latter is in many respects connected with man's earthly life, his present incarnation, while the head is the result of former planes of evolution of the Earth itself, and is, moreover, related to the man's former incarnations. If you consider this, then you will understand how many things are working upward from the remainder of the organism (by virtue of the part it plays in the whole karmic connection)—things which are at a different stage of maturity than that which comes from the human head and from the nervous system. But the Psycho-analyst, who to begin with only ‘analyses’ the ‘slime,’ will go completely wrong. Analysing this ‘animal slime,’ as they call it, he is like a man who wants to know what kind of corn will grow on a given soil. He analyses the soil. He digs and finds a certain manure, with which the field was manured. He says, Now I know the manure, and out of this the corn will presently spring forth. But the corn does not grow from the manure, albeit the manure is necessary. The point is, what is imbedded in the basic slime; for that which is imbedded in it is generally destined to work on through the gate of death, into the next evolution on the Earth. It is not a question of investigating the animal slime itself. The point is, what is imbedded in it as a real ‘seed of the soul.’

Psycho-Analysis, so called, gives ample opportunity to observe how perilous are the prejudices of the present time. True, it is entering a realm to which the thought of our time is tending. For the soul can no longer rest satisfied with what the surface experience of consciousness provides. So do the men of our time find themselves driven to the very quarters where they should indeed investigate; but as they cannot understand spiritual science they have no guiding lines for such investigation. Therefore they rummage about in the most clumsy way in these realms which are assigned to them by their profession, or by their own agitations. They put everything in the wrong place, not knowing how to put in it the right. For this they could only do, if they were able to follow up the real Karmic threads as I have tried to indicate them now, in the one case and in the other. Above all when Psychoanalysis begins to burrow in the elemental realms, it proves itself appallingly unsound.

Nevertheless, the desire to pursue the continuous thread of destiny into its finer and more intimate ramifications is important. That which goes on in the conscious life of a man's soul, from the time he awakens until he falls asleep again, reveals very little of the Karmic stream which works on and on through his incarnations. What we experience consciously in waking life largely belongs to the present incarnation, and it is good so. For in the present incarnation man should be healthy and efficient. On the other hand, much of what is carried through the gate of death—as a seed which grows out of our experiences and trials and faculties acquired during the present life—plays a great part in our life from our falling asleep to our awakening, and very largely finds its way into our dreams. We must only be able to estimate the dream-formations truly. We say, Dreams are reminiscences,—and so they often are. But in the stream of our Karma they do not work in a simple and straightforward way. In their inherent forces they often signify the opposite of what appears upon the surface. Let me give you an example from literature to explain what I now mean.

Vischer, the aestheticist, tells a pretty little story in his book, Auch Einer. I quote it here because I am now speaking in a wider sense of the vocational life and all that is connected with it. Vischer relates a conversation between a father and his son. They are going for a walk together, and after the father has asked him many things the boy tells the following story: ‘Teacher told us one should always find out what kind of a job a man has. A man should have a proper occupation. By that you can recognise whether he is a sound and good man altogether.’ ‘Oh,’ said the father. ‘Yes, and after teacher had told us that in school, I dreamt I was walking past yonder lake, and in the dream I asked the lake what kind of a job it had. And the lake said: My job is to be wet.’ ‘Hm,’ said the father.

A witty story, revealing some knowledge of life in him who thought it out. The father said ‘Hm’ because he did not wish to spoil the boy. He did not wish to tell him what nonsense his teacher had been talking. No doubt he kept his thoughts to himself. He should have enlightened his son more wisely than the teacher. He should have said, One must not pass judgments in such a superficial way, for it may well be that one's judgment of what constitutes a ‘decent and proper occupation’ is mistaken, and one will thus be led to misjudge one's fellow-men. Or again, the man's career might somehow have been marred. In short, the father should have instructed the son. But in this case he did not need to do so. For in the young human being the dream can still work helpfully. The dream, which in this instance came to the boy's consciousness, is there as a real inner force, in place of such instruction. In the sub-consciousness the dream is working. And it works in such a way as to expunge from the soul the nonsense which the teacher created by his foolish teaching. This explains the forming of the dream in the boy's sub-consciousness, which is wiser than the surface consciousness. It spreads an atmosphere of laughable absurdity over the teacher's foolish exhortations. The lake says, ‘It is my job to be wet.’ That will work wholesomely. It will drive away the noxious effects to which such teaching might otherwise give rise.

In this case the dream is indeed a reminiscence; it follows in the very next night. But at the same time it is a corrector of life. Indeed the life of the astral body frequently works in this way. Beside the relics of what is there in the soul from the experiences of life, we should frequently find this factor. Especially where a mistaken education is at work, we can frequently detect in the sub-conscious forces of the soul this ‘corrector,’ who often works even in the same incarnation, especially in young human beings. But above all, this corrector is carried through the gate of death and there works on. There is really a kind of self-corrector in the human being. This must be borne in mind.

With all these things I only want to point out how much there is in the soul of man, pressing on from one incarnation to another. There is a whole complex of forces, working across from one incarnation to another. We must now consider what is the relation between this complex of forces and the human being of the present, inasmuch as his life continues between birth and death.

In this respect man is really a four-stringed instrument, on which the above-named ‘complex of Karmic forces’ plays. Physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego are the four strings, and Karma plays on them. According as the one or the other string is played on more or less intensely by the bow of Karma (if we may retain this analogy of the violin which also has four strings), so does the individual life arise. It may be more the etheric body or the astral body, or the etheric and the astral together, or the physical and the astral together, or the physical body and the Ego. In the most manifold ways, the four strings of human life can play together. Therefore it is so difficult if we desire to speak not in general and vague abstractions but in reality. It is so hard to decipher the several melodies of a man's life, for we can only decipher them if we are able to behold how the fiddle-bow of Karma plays on the four strings of Man.

Consider the human being in those years of life when the physical body and especially the etheric body are developing (as indicated in my little book Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy)—from the seventh to the fourteenth year—all these things are approximate. During this time we shall find certain peculiarities emerging, which distinguish this period of life especially. Certain things, we shall observe, are in a way consolidated during this time. True, many of these things already emerge in the first seven years of life—for all these things merge into one another. But it is only between the seventh and about the fourteenth year that we can observe it deeply and accurately. Certain inner characteristics become consolidated in the growing human being, expressing themselves through the corporeality, through the whole conduct and appearance as it expresses itself in the tenure of the body, in the gestures, in the behaviour as a whole. What is thus consolidated (not all, but a great part of it) causing the human being to be short and thickset, or to have shorter or longer fingers, or to tread in a certain way—with a firm step in one case, tripping it lightly in another (to describe the radical contrasts)—in short, all that is connected with the bodily aspect of deportment, is here intended. As I said, not all, but a great part of what thus appears in the growing human being comes from his Karma. It is the effect of his vocation in the former life on Earth. People who do not observe what I have now said, often make a great mistake, especially when they try to be clever, observing the child's behaviour, and wishing somehow to determine his occupation in this life from the way he deports himself. In this way it is easy to make the mistake of wishing to place him into a similar vocation to what he had in his preceding life on Earth. And that would not be wholesome for him. What we observe in this period of life are the effects of the former incarnation; and when this period is at an end, or even before (as I said, these things merge into one another), the astral body emerges in a very peculiar way, and reacts on what has been developing hitherto. Once we are aware of these facts as derived from spiritual science, we can observe them even outwardly on the physical plane. The astral body reacts. According to quite other Karmic forces, it transmutes that which resulted from the pure ‘Karma of vocation’ between the seventh and fourteenth year. Thus there are two forces in the human being in conflict with one another. The one set of forces mould and form him; these arise more from the etheric body. The others, counteracting and partly paralysing the former, come more from the astral body. Through these latter forces, man is impelled to transform what was stamped upon him by his vocational Karma of the former incarnation. We may say therefore: The working of the etheric body is formative. (All that appears as gesture, posture and deportment in the physical body comes from the etheric.) The working of the astral body is transformative. And in the interplay of the two forces, which are very decidedly in conflict with one another, much of the working of the Karma of vocation finds expression.

This, however, is woven together with other Karmic streams. For we must also bear in mind the physical body. As to the physical body, it is especially important to observe in the first epoch of life how the human being places himself through his Karma into the world. The kind of physical body we have depends on this. For by our Karma we place ourselves into a certain family, belonging to a certain nation and so forth. Thus we get quite a definite kind of body. But not only so. Think how much the course of our life depends on the situation into which we place ourselves, in that we enter a certain family. This already gives the starting-point of infinitely much in our life.

In effect, notably in the first seven years of life, when the physical body is developing, forces are working in (or rather, about) the physical body—forces which come not from the vocational aspect of our former incarnation, but from the way in which we lived with other human beings. In our former incarnation we stood in this or that relation to this or that human being. (I mean now, not in a particular part of our life—for that belongs to a different chapter—but throughout our life.) All this we assimilate. We carry it through the gate of death, and through these forces we bring ourselves once more into a certain family, a certain situation or set of circumstances. Thus we may say: That which places our physical body into life and works on through our physical body—that is what shapes the situations of our life. (It goes on working, of course, through our succeeding lives.) And now it receives a counter-force through the Ego. The Ego works so to annul the given situations of our life. It battles against all that determines our circumstances. Thus we may say: The physical body works so to create life's situation; and the Ego works to re-create it. In the working together of these two-battling one with another—another stream of Karma enters our life. For? there is always present in man on the one hand what strives to maintain him in a certain situation, and on the other, what strives to lift him out of it. Thus I would say, primitively speaking, 1 and 4, and 2 and 3, work upon one another. (See the diagram at the end.) And in manifold other ways the four strings play together. The way we come into connection with fresh human beings in a given life according to our Karma, depends on 1 and 4 and their connections. And this leads back in turn to our relationships of life in former lives. The way we find our connections in calling, work and occupation depends on 2 and 3 and on their mutual interplay.

To begin with I beg you to consider these things well. We shall then continue in the next lecture.

We will begin to-day by turning our thoughts to the event known as Pentecost. I said in the first lecture that clairvoyant research may first of all be directed to this event, for as we look back into the past it presents itself as a kind of awakening, experienced on the day commemorated in the Whitsun Festival, by those who are generally known as the Apostles or Disciples of Christ Jesus. It is not easy to form clear and precise pictures of all these undoubtedly strange phenomena. And if we want to think truly about the matter we shall have to call up from deep down in our souls, many things we have learned from previous studies of Theosophy. It seemed to the Apostles that they were like men who had awakened, feeling at the moment of waking that they had been living for a long time in an unusual state of consciousness. In very truth it was a kind of awakening from a deep sleep, a wonderful, dream-filled sleep ... remember that I am speaking of how it was experienced by the Apostles themselves ... a sleep of such a kind that at the same time a man carries out all the affairs of everyday life and goes about just like a normal person, so that those with whom he comes into contact do not notice at all that he is in a different state of consciousness. The moment came when it seemed to the Apostles as if they had been living for a long time, for many, many days, in a kind of dream from which they woke at this time of Pentecost; and the awakening itself was a strange experience. The Apostles felt as if there had actually descended upon them from the Cosmos, something which could only be called the Substance of the all-prevailing Love. They felt as if they had been quickened from on high by the all-prevailing Love and awakened from the condition of dream into which they had fallen. It seemed to them as if they had been wakened to life by the primal force of Love pervading and warming the Cosmos, as if this primal force of Love had come down into the soul of each one of them. And to others who could observe them and hear how they were speaking now, they seemed altogether strange. The others knew that they were men who until now had lived in extraordinary simplicity, a few of whom had, it is true, behaved somewhat strangely during recent days, as if lost in dream. This they knew. But now it seemed to the people as if these men had been transformed, as if their very souls had been made new; they seemed to have lost all narrowness, all selfishness in life, to have acquired largeness of heart, an all-embracing tolerance and a deep understanding for everything that is human on the earth. Moreover they were able to express themselves in such a way that everyone present could understand them. It was felt that they could look into every heart, could read the deepest, innermost secrets of the soul and so were able to bring consolation to every single individual, to say to him exactly what he needed. It was naturally amazing that such transformation could take place in a number of men. But these men themselves in whom the transformation had come about, who had been awakened by the Spirit of Cosmic Love, now felt within them a new understanding of what had, it is true, come to pass in intimate connection with their own souls, but which they had not previously grasped. Now, at this moment, there dawned in their souls an understanding of what had actually transpired on Golgotha.

And when we look into the innermost soul of one of these Apostles, into the soul of him who is called Peter in the other Gospels, it is revealed to clairvoyant sight as it gazes backwards into the past, that his normal earthly consciousness completely ceased to function from the moment referred to in the other Gospels as the Denial. He beheld this scene of the Denial, how he had been asked whether he knew the Galilean; and now he knew that at that moment he had denied any such connection because his normal consciousness was beginning to fade and an abnormal condition to set in—a kind of dream condition indicating a withdrawal into an altogether different world. Peter's experience was like that of a man who when he wakes in the morning remembers the last events of the previous evening. Thus did Peter remember the scene usually known as the Denial, the triple Denial before the cock had crowed twice. And then, like outspreading night, the intermediate condition came upon his consciousness. But this intermediate condition was filled, not with mere dream-pictures but with pictures representing a kind of higher consciousness, an experience of things belonging to the world of pure Spirit. And all that had happened, all that Peter had as it were slept through since that time arose before his soul like a vision. Above all he was now able to gaze at that event of which it can truly be said that he had slept through it, because for a full understanding of this event the quickening by the all-prevailing Cosmic Love was necessary. Now there came before the eyes of Peter the pictures of the Mystery of Golgotha, as we, looking backwards with clairvoyant consciousness, can again evoke them if the conditions necessary for such vision are induced.

Frankly, it is with a feeling altogether unparalleled that one makes the decision to put into words what is revealed when one gazes into the consciousness of Peter and of the others who had gathered together at that Whitsun Festival. The decision to speak of these things can only be fraught with holy awe. One is almost overpowered by the consciousness of treading on the most sacred soil of human vision when one puts into words what is here revealed to the eyes of the soul. Nevertheless for certain inner reasons it seems necessary to speak of these things in our time, while realising that in ages other than our own and yet to come, they will find more understanding than is possible now. For in order to comprehend many a thing that will have to be said on this occasion, the human soul will have to break free from much that has been and will be instilled into it, quite inevitably, by the culture of the times.

To begin with, there arises before the gaze of clairvoyance something that seems like an affront against the conceptions of modern science. Nevertheless I feel compelled to put into words what presents itself here to the eyes of soul—as far as I am able to do so. I cannot help it if what has to be said finds its way to inadequately prepared hearts and souls and if the whole thing is mooted as untenable in face of the scientific views by which the present age is entirely dominated. The gaze of clairvoyance lights, to begin with, upon a picture that represents an actual happening, one that is hinted at in other Gospels too, but is a particularly striking spectacle when one sees it emerging from the myriad pictures arising before the backward-turned eye of vision. This clairvoyant gaze actually beholds a kind of darkening of the earth. And one feels, as it were in aftermath, that deeply significant moment when, as in a solar eclipse, the physical sun was darkened over the land of Palestine, over the place of Golgotha. And one has the impression, which vision schooled in the sense of Spiritual Science can still confirm when an actual, physical eclipse of the sun casts shadow over the land: that to the eyes of soul the whole environment of man looks quite different during the time of an eclipse. I shall refrain from dealing with the spectacle presented during a solar eclipse and with all those things that are the creations of human artifice and technique. To be able to endure the spectacle of those demonic powers and entities which during an eclipse of the sun rise out of the creations of art-forsaken, technical science, requires great courage and the realisation that all these things were inevitable. I do not propose, however, to go further into this particular matter but merely draw attention to the fact that a vision, at other times only to be reached after very difficult meditation, lights up and reveals that during a solar eclipse all plant-life, all animal life, every butterfly, take on quite a different appearance. It is an experience that in the very deepest sense brings the conviction of how intimately a certain form of cosmic-spiritual life belonging to the sun and having its physical body in the visible sun, is connected with life on the earth. And when the physical radiance is darkened by the intervening moon, this is different from when, during the night, the sun is merely not shining. The spectacle of the earth around us is quite different during an eclipse of the sun from what it is during an ordinary night. During an eclipse of the sun one feels the group-souls of the plants and of the animals lighting up ... all the physical embodiments of the animals and plants seem to pass into shadow, while the group-souls become radiant. All this presents itself very vividly when the backward-turned gaze of seership contemplates that moment in the earth's evolution when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. And then comes an experience which may be described by saying: one learns to read what this remarkable phenomenon of nature perceived in the Cosmos really signifies! I cannot help it if—in defiance of all contemporary materialism—I am obliged to read in the occult script at this particular point in the earth's evolution, a purely natural event, one that has also occurred, of course, both before and since, and to speak of the direct impression it makes. It is like opening a book and reading the script ... one feels when this event is there before one that what one should read comes out of the very script itself. This cosmic script compels one with a kind of necessity to read something that mankind must come to know. It appears before one like a word inscribed in the Cosmos, like a sign in the Cosmos. And when one opens the soul to it, what is it that one reads?

In the lecture yesterday I spoke of how by the time of Greek culture, mankind had evolved to the point where, in Plato and Aristotle, a very high development of the human soul, a very high level of intellectuality had been attained. In many respects the intellectual knowledge attained by Plato or Aristotle has never since been surpassed. Intellectuality in mankind there reached a certain zenith. A vast store of knowledge had been acquired. And if one pictures this intellectual knowledge to which humanity had attained, which at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha had been spread abroad by wandering preachers far and wide over Greece and Italy, if one pictures how this knowledge had spread in a way incomprehensible to-day—then it is possible to receive the impression which seems to be like a reading of that occult script out in the Cosmos. And when clairvoyant consciousness has been mustered, one realises: all this knowledge, gathered and garnered by humanity in pre-Christian times, has its symbol in the moon, as for earthly sight it passes through the Cosmos. The moon is the symbol, because for all higher stages of human cognition this knowledge has acted, not as a light-bringer or solver of riddles, but rather as a bringer of darkness, just as the moon darkens the sun during a solar eclipse. That is what one reads. All the knowledge existing at that time shed darkness, not illumination, upon the riddle of the universe. And as a seer one feels the higher, truly spiritual regions of the world darkened by the intellectual achievements of antiquity which placed themselves like a screen in front of the real knowledge, just as the moon screens the sun during a solar eclipse. And the external event becomes a symbolic expression of the fact that human evolution had reached a stage where the knowledge born of man's own mind placed itself in front of the higher knowledge, like the moon before the sun during an eclipse. In that eclipse of the sun one feels the darkening of the sun of humanity in earthly evolution, engraved into the Cosmos in a stupendous sign of the occult script. I have said that the modern scientific mind may take this as an affront, because it has no understanding of the sovereign power of the Spirit in the universe. I do not want to speak of miracles in the ordinary sense of the word, of any infraction of the laws of nature, but I cannot do otherwise than convey to you how one can read that darkening of the sun—read with the eyes of soul what it is that this happening of nature expresses. With the moon-knowledge, darkness crept over the higher message of the sun.

And then there actually comes before the clairvoyant consciousness, the picture of the Cross raised on Golgotha, of the body of Jesus hanging upon it between the two thieves; the picture, too, of the body being taken down from the Cross and laid in the grave ... And here I will add that the more one tries to prevent it, the more forcibly does it present itself. And now comes a second mighty sign, whereby again there is written into the Cosmos something that one must read in order to discern it as a symbol of what has actually transpired in the evolution of humanity. One contemplates the picture of Jesus taken down from the Cross and laid in the grave, and then, while the gaze of the soul is thus directed, one has the experience of being shaken through and through by an earthquake which spread through that region.

One day, perhaps, people will understand—in the scientific sense too—more about the connection between that darkening of the sun and the earthquake, for certain theories which are already current in the world, but somewhat haphazardly, indicate that there is a connection between solar eclipses and earthquakes, and even fire-damp in mines. That earthquake followed upon the eclipse of the sun. It shook the grave in which the body of Jesus had been laid, and the stone covering it was wrenched away; a fissure was rent in the earth and the corpse was received into it. Another tremor caused the fissure to close again over the corpse. And when the people came in the morning the grave was empty, for the dead body of Jesus had been received into the earth. The stone, however, still lay where it had been hurled.—Once again let us follow the sequence of pictures! Jesus dies on the Cross of Golgotha. Darkness breaks in upon the earth. The corpse of Jesus is laid into the grave. A tremor shakes the land and the corpse is received into the earth. The fissure caused by the tremor closes; the stone is hurled aside. These are all actual happenings. I cannot describe them in any other way. Let those who wish to approach these things from the basis of natural science form what opinion they like, bring forward all kinds of contrary arguments: what the gaze of clairvoyance perceives is as I have described it. And if anyone were to say: it is impossible that from the Cosmos there should be set up, as it were in a mighty language of signs, a symbol of something New having entered into the evolution of mankind; if anyone were to say: the Divine Powers do not write into the earth in such signs a happening like an eclipse of the sun and an earthquake ... then I could only answer: You believe in all sincerity that such things are impossible. Nevertheless they actually happened. I can imagine someone like Ernest Renan, the author of that strange work, The Life of Jesus, saying that such things are incredible, because one only believes in what can at any time be re-confirmed by experiment. But this thought is not tenable ... for would a man like Renan not believe, let us say, in the Ice Age, although that cannot be confirmed by experiment? It is quite impossible to reconstruct the conditions prevailing in the Ice Age and yet all scientists believe in it. Equally impossible is it that this unique cosmic sign can ever appear again to men—yet for all that, the sign was there.

We can only be led to these events when, as seers, we find the way to them as I have indicated, when we sink in deepest contemplation into the soul of Peter or of one of the other Apostles who at the time of Pentecost felt themselves quickened by the all-prevailing Cosmic Love. Only when we contemplate the souls of those men and discern the nature of their experiences, is it possible in this indirect way to gaze at the Cross raised on Golgotha, to behold the darkening of the earth at that time and the subsequent earthquake. It is not denied that in the external sense this darkening and earthquake were ordinary happenings of nature, but one who having induced the requisite conditions in his soul, follows and reads these events with clairvoyant sight, will be emphatic that they were as I have described them. For in the consciousness of Peter, what I have now described was, in very truth, an experience that crystallised out of the long sleep. Among the manifold pictures crossing Peter's consciousness, those of the Cross raised on Golgotha, the darkening and the earthquake, for example, stood out in vivid relief. These experiences were for Peter the first result of the quickening by the Cosmic Love at Pentecost. And he now knew something he had not really known before: that the event of Golgotha had taken place and that the body on the Cross was the very same body with which he had often gone about together in life. Now he knew that Jesus had died on the Cross, that this dying was in reality a birth: the birth of that Spirit outpoured as the all-prevailing Cosmic Love into the souls of the Disciples assembled at Pentecost. Peter felt it as a ray of the primordial, aeonic Love ... born when Jesus died on the Cross. And this stupendous truth sank down into Peter's soul: It is only illusion that on the Cross a death took place. This death, preceded as it had been by infinite suffering, was in truth the birth of the ray now penetrating the soul. The all-prevailing Cosmic Love which had previously been present everywhere outside and around the earth, had, with the death of Jesus, been born into the earth. In the abstract, such words seem facile, but one must for a moment actually be transported into the soul of Peter to realise what he experienced then for the first time: When Jesus of Nazareth died on the Cross, at that moment there was born for the earth something that was previously to be found only in the Cosmos. The death of Jesus of Nazareth was the birth of the Cosmic Love within the sphere of the earth.

This is, so to speak, the first knowledge we are able to read from the Fifth Gospel. What I have now been describing begins with what is called in the New Testament the coming, or the outpouring, of the Spirit. The nature and character of the souls of the Apostles at that time did not make it possible for them to participate in the real sense in this event of the death of Jesus of Nazareth otherwise than in an abnormal state of consciousness.

To Peter, as also to John and James, there came, inevitably, the remembrance of another moment in their lives, the moment that can only be revealed to us in all its majesty by the Fifth Gospel. He with whom they had gone about on earth had led them out to the mount and had bidden them: Watch! And they had fallen asleep. The condition which spread with greater and greater intensity over their souls had already then set in. Their normal consciousness faded, they sank into the sleep which lasted beyond the time of Golgotha; and from this sleep the experiences I have been trying in halting words to describe, shone forth. Peter, John and James were inevitably reminded of how they had fallen into this condition of sleep and now, as they looked back, the vision lit up of the mighty events which had transpired around the earthly body of Him with whom they had gone about together. And gradually ... as submerged dreams rise up into the consciousness of men ... gradually the Apostles became conscious of what had transpired during those past days. During those days they had not experienced these happenings in their normal consciousness. What now came into their ken had lain deep down in their souls, submerged as it were for the whole of the period between the event of Golgotha and Pentecost. This period seemed to them to have been one of deepest sleep—above all through the days between the event known as the Ascension, and Pentecost. As they looked backwards, the whole period—day by day—between the Mystery of Golgotha and the Ascension of Christ Jesus into heaven, came before their souls. They had lived through it all but only now did they become conscious of it—and in a strange and mysterious way. Forgive me if I here interpose a personal remark. I must confess that I myself was amazed in the highest degree when I became aware of the manner in which all that the Apostles had lived through between the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and the Ascension rose up into their consciousness. It is indeed remarkable.

Pictures like these came before the souls of the Apostles: You were together with the Being who has been born on the Cross, you were with Him in very truth ... Just as on waking in the morning the remembrance of a dream might tell one: during the night you were with this or that person! ... But what is so remarkable is how the particular events came up into the Apostles' consciousness. Over and over again they were compelled to ask themselves: Who, then, is that Being with Whom we have been together? And time after time they did not know who He was. They knew with certainty that they had gone about with Him, but they did not recognise Him in the Form which had then been before them and which now, after they had been quickened by the all-prevailing Cosmic Love, appeared to them in a picture. They saw themselves going about after the Mystery of Golgotha with Him whom we call the Christ. And they saw, too, how He had taught and instructed them from the realm of the Spirit. They came to realise that for forty days they had gone about with this Being who upon the Cross had been born, that this Being—the All-prevailing Love itself born out of the Cosmos into the world—had been their Teacher, but that they had not been mature enough to understand His words; they realised that they had been obliged to receive His teachings with the subconscious forces of their souls, that they had gone about with the Christ like sleep-walkers, unable to understand with their ordinary minds what this Being imparted to them. During these forty days they had listened to Him with a kind of consciousness quite unfamiliar to them and which now, at Pentecost, became alive in them for the first time. They had listened to Him like sleep-walkers. This Being had come to them as their spiritual Teacher and had instructed them in mysteries which it was only possible for them to understand because He transported them into quite a different state of consciousness. Therefore not until now did they realise that they had gone about with Christ, with the Risen Christ. It was only now that they recognised what had really happened to them. And how did they recognise that this was the very same Being with whom they had gone about in the body, before the Mystery of Golgotha? This can be described in the following way:—

Let us suppose that now, after the event of Pentecost, a picture of this kind came before the soul of one of the Apostles. He saw how he had gone about with the Risen One. But he did not recognise this Being. Then another picture interposed itself, a picture which, mingling with the purely spiritual picture, represented an experience actually undergone by the Apostles in the presence of Christ Jesus before the Mystery of Golgotha. There was a scene where they felt that they were being taught by Christ Jesus about the Mystery of the Spirit. But they did not recognise Him, they merely saw themselves in the presence of this spiritual Being. And in order that they might recognise Him, this picture, while still intact, merged into the picture of the Last Supper—an experience they had shared with Christ Jesus. Try to envisage in all reality that as the super-sensible experience with the Risen One lit up in the consciousness of an Apostle, there—working as it were in the background—was the picture of the Last Supper. Then the Apostles knew that He with whom they had gone about in the body was the very same Being who was teaching them now—in the quite different Form in which He appeared after the Mystery of Golgotha. Remembrances from the state of consciousness that had been like a sleep were interwoven with the memory-pictures of events preceding the onset of this sleep. The Apostles experienced this as if two pictures were superimposed: one picture was of their experiences after the Mystery of Golgotha and another of the time before their consciousness had clouded. Then they realised that these two Beings belonged together: the Risen One and He with whom, a relatively short time before, they had gone about together in the body. And now they said to themselves: Before we were awakened by the all-prevailing Cosmic Love, we were as if transported from our ordinary consciousness. And Christ, the Risen One, was with us. All unknowing, we were taken up into His Kingdom; He went about with us, revealed to us the mysteries of His Kingdom of which we are now becoming conscious as if we had once experienced them in dream.—That is what causes amazement: the invariable coincidence of one picture of an experience of the Apostles with Christ after the Mystery of Golgotha with a picture of a happening which before the Mystery of Golgotha they had actually lived through in their normal consciousness while together in the physical body with Christ Jesus.

A beginning has thus been made to impart what can be read in the so-called Fifth Gospel. And at the end of this first communication to-day it may be allowable for me to add a few additional and necessary words. In an occult sense I feel it my duty to speak about these things now. What I want to say is the following. I know well that we are living in a time when many things are being prepared for the near future of mankind on earth, and that within our Anthroposophical Society—as it has now become—we must feel ourselves as those in whom an inkling is dawning that something essential for the future has to be made ready in the souls of men. I know that times will come when it will be possible to speak of these matters in a way quite other than present conditions allow. For we are all of us children of the age. But a time will come in the near future when it will be possible to speak with greater precision, when a great deal that can at present only be of the nature of indication may perhaps be discerned with far, far greater exactitude in the spiritual chronicle of World-Becoming. Improbable as it seems to the modern mind, such a time will come. For this reason it is a certain matter of duty to speak about these things to-day by way of preparation. And although I have had to overcome a certain reluctance in speaking as I have done, this was outweighed by the duty to the preparation that must be made in our time. This was what led me to speak on this subject to you here. When I speak of having overcome reluctance, please take this exactly as it is meant. I ask explicitly that what I have to say on this occasion shall be taken merely as a kind of stimulus, as something which in the future it will be possible to express much more adequately and with greater precision. You will better understand what I mean by “overcoming reluctance” if you will allow me not to withhold a personal remark. I know full well that in the spiritual research to which I have devoted myself, many things can only be extracted with the very greatest difficulty and effort from the spiritual record of the world's happenings—particularly things of this nature! And I myself should not be in the least surprised if the word “indication” which I have used in connection with them were to prove to have still weightier and wider implications than need to be attributed to it now. I do not say—most emphatically I do not say—that I am already in a position to say with all precision what presents itself in the spiritual script. For particularly in my own case I am aware of all kinds of difficulties and of the labour required when it is a question of drawing from the Akasha Chronicle pictures relating to Christianity. It costs me great effort to make these pictures sufficiently concrete to be able to fix them and I regard it, so to speak, as my karma that the duty is imposed upon me to say what I have now brought myself to say. For without any doubt it would cost me less effort if, as in the case of many of our contemporaries, circumstances in my early youth had enabled me to have a genuinely Christian education. I had no such education. I grew up in an entirely free-thinking environment. My own education was of a purely scientific character. And that is why it costs me great effort to discover these things of which it is my duty to speak. This personal reference may be justified for two reasons.—One is that with an utter lack of probity, an absurd story [It had been alleged by Annie Besant that Dr. Steiner had been educated by the Jesuits.] has been sent broadcast through the world about my having been connected with certain Catholic influences. There is not a single word of truth in this. And it is easy to judge the pass to which things have come in what calls itself Theosophy nowadays when such dishonest statements and rumours emanate from its soil. As, however, we cannot ignore them but must confront them with the truth, this personal reference is justified. Just because of my remoteness from Christianity when I was young, I feel all the freer from bias in regard to it; I believe that the Spirit has led me to Christianity and to the Christ. Especially in this domain I think I have a certain right to claim freedom from bias and prejudice. Perhaps—in this particular epoch of world-history—more reliance can be placed upon the words of a man who has come from a scientific education, who in his youth stood at a distance from Christianity, than upon the words of someone who has been connected with Christianity since early childhood. If you ponder these words you will realise that they indicate something of what lives within me when I speak of the mysteries which I will designate as the mysteries of the Fifth Gospel.

We will remind ourselves again of what I told you yesterday about the actual relationship of man to the world. I said: In reality it is Maya, illusion, to assume that as human beings of soul-and-spirit we are inside our skin, that things are merely round about us and we take their images into ourselves. In reality, as human beings of soul-and-spirit, we live in the things themselves. We could not become aware of them if our experiences were not reflected to us by our organism. Living in the ordinary physical world, the things are reflected by our physical organism, by its sensory system, by its thinking system, feeling system, willing system.

The truth, then, is this: our organism is a reflecting apparatus. What we experience is not produced in us by our physical organism—which is an erroneous conception of materialism—but it is reflected. Now just as little as a mirror produces what is seen in it, does our organism produce what we experience in our life of soul about the things around us. And the materialist who asserts that the brain or some other organ produces the experiences in our life of soul, is stating, in regard to these things, the same as one who declares that the face he sees when looking in a mirror, belongs not to him but has been produced by the mirror.

The truth of the matter, therefore, has to be experienced when we progress, in the way described yesterday, to the stage of occult reading. After due preparation we experience the more fleeting, more fluctuating beings and happenings of the spiritual world—more fleeting and fluctuating by comparison, of course, with the physical world. We see them inasmuch as we experience them in our astral body and they are mirrored by our etheric body. And we experience these reflections as pictures.

I said yesterday that, generally speaking, we can regard these pictures merely as signs of the spiritual reality. I made this clear by pointing out that anyone who experienced these pictures as dream-pictures (although they are far more living than ordinary dream pictures) would be subject to error. To regard these dream pictures as reality would be like someone who regarded the word BAU (building) not merely as the sign of the building but as the reality itself. We have to envisage that when those fleeting, fluctuating pictures of the spiritual world are reflected from outside by our etheric body, we have the world before us like an open book, like a book which has been opened for us but which we must first learn to read in the right way. In general terms, this is correct. But there is one principle which applies to experiences of the higher worlds far, far more strongly than to those of the physical plane: it is the principle that there are exceptions to everything, real exceptions. Especially are there exceptions to those things of which I have been speaking. Z his must be realised. What I have said holds good in general and if we pay heed to it we can find our bearings in the spiritual world. But there are exceptions and I will explain more concretely the extent to which this is so.

I will take a definite case. Let us suppose that somebody who has developed certain genuine clairvoyant powers, endeavours—and this lies near to the hearts of many people—to find, in the spiritual world, one who recently or some time previously has passed through the gate of death and is now living in the spiritual world in the existence which we describe as the life between death and a new birth.

As I emphasised yesterday, such a search is dependent upon the grace of the spiritual world. It is an act of grace on the part of the spiritual world to be able actually to behold the dead whom we are seeking. As a rule, in such striving, curiosity will certainly not be satisfied. Anyone who were to start merely with the intention of satisfying his curiosity in searching for someone who is dead, would either see nothing at all or inevitably be exposed to errors of every possible kind.

But now we will assume that this is not the case, that there is an important reason, recognised by the Beings of the spiritual world, for meeting the dead. Let us assume that everything is in order—to use a trivial expression—and that a meeting with the dead is permissible. Here again I speak quite generally. It will not be a simple matter of the clairvoyant concerned transporting himself through meditation into the spiritual world and there directing his desires, his wishes or his thoughts to the dead in order to have the grace of vision bestowed upon him. To embark on such an undertaking presuming in advance that it will succeed, would be an error. For as a rule, something quite different will happen.

Please realise that one can only describe special cases; it is not possible to give general, abstract theories when one is speaking, as I am doing now, of a theme like this which concerns the occult world. I can only give an example.

Let us therefore assume that a seer has a justified reason for coming into contact with someone who is dead and through meditation, through concentration of his thoughts finds measures which enable this contact to take place. To describe the character of these measures would lead us too far today but let us assume that they are right. If through meditation and concentration the soul is really in the condition in which the dead can be perceived, the seer may possibly, to begin with—if he has not already had experiences in this sphere—be very easily inclined to see something that he does not connect at all with the manifestation of the dead or with anything to do with him. He may see before him a widespread world of pictures, pictures that are far more living than those of ordinary dreams. Again, and again I must emphasise, because so many errors are current in this respect, that this world of pictures is a world of signs, signs of the higher world. It is this world of signs that we learn to understand. We experience inwardly mobile pictures, all kinds of happenings that are connected with this or that personality. This is experienced—only to begin with there is hardly any resemblance to be found between what we are seeking and the pictures that are experienced. But one thing reveals itself when we are not on the wrong track: within this moving world of pictures we shall experience something that seems to be the most essential point. In the case of the other pictures, you will say to yourselves: these pictures contain something that reminds you of all kinds of things which might also arise from your own memory. Although you have no remembrance of these actual events, nevertheless it is possible—because they are connected with what you have experienced—for them to have given rise to remembrances that are interwoven with fantasy. It is precisely now that the genuine clairvoyant must be on the alert and remember that he is here concerned with a world of pictures which might have been gathered together from his memories. But there is some one point which no memory presents. You can therefore make a precise distinction between what might possibly be the result of fantasy in connection with memories and the other element that is there on its own, and around which everything else groups itself. Of that one point you know that it is not a memory, that it could never have come in a dream into your field of vision. Certainly, one must have had a certain practice in distinguishing dream-pictures from reality before this difference can be seen quite precisely. But then the point comes where one knows: There is something there.

I will try to speak quite precisely. As a rule, this one thing among the pictures may, in a sense, seem even to be paradoxical, absurd. It is possible for something strange and very curious to appear in a sequence of pictures which may otherwise be so beautiful, so splendid, so powerful. The seer will very often find that this experience passes away from him again, that he really cannot begin to make anything of it. Then, of course, he must make the attempt over and over again, from the start. After he has had certain practice in seership, he will find as a rule that again and again such a sequence of pictures comes before him, pictures perhaps of a quite different kind, but there will always be among them something that is certainly the same as what previously constituted the central point of the series of pictures.

Now a certain stage of seership must have been attained if one is to succeed at the first or second attempt in doing the right things with these pictures. When the pictures are in front of us, we must grasp them, be completely conscious so that they do not fade away like dream-pictures. We must face them just as we face a thing in the external world, when we have it in our hand and can say: ‘I am here, and you are there.’ We must be able to distinguish ourselves from the picture and must not be absorbed by it.

In order to achieve this, it is good to try deliberately to change something in the picture as it stands before one. Let us suppose that the picture is there in front of us and we have a conscious hold of ourselves, being able to distinguish ourselves from the picture … let us suppose that some personality comes into the pictures and looks at us with a frowning, unfriendly expression. And now try, while remaining in the whole situation and without freeing ourselves from the clairvoyant vision, now try to feel: How would it be if I were really kind to this person, so that he no longer looks at me frowningly, but with friendliness? If something then changes in the world of pictures it is at once easier to maintain our position within it.

The next stage must be this … it is difficult to find the right words because the affairs of the spiritual world are so different from those of the physical world. ... The next stage is that we must identify ourselves with the picture, with all the pictures, sink down into them, become one with them. For by becoming one with them we put an important truth into execution, as we shall see. If I may use another trivial expression here—we have to consume this whole, series of pictures spiritually, devour them, take them into ourselves, identify ourselves with them, sink into them. In other words, we must realise and know: I have now distinguished myself from these pictures, I have maintained my position outside them, and now, by my own will, I sink into them, just as if I were jumping into water in order to swim in it.—And now comes the important experience—for now you experience in your own soul everything that is expressed in this series of pictures, as if one person were fighting or wounding another or being kind to him. The experience, therefore, is: I am the wounder, also the one who is wounded. I am everything that is in this picture. It is as if you had a picture before you, let us say, of someone who is being beheaded and you experience yourself simultaneously as the one who is doing the beheading and the one who is being beheaded. It is in this real way that you experience yourself in this whole fluctuating world of pictures. You yourself are every picture, every movement in it. Then the picture as such, as an Imagination, becomes invisible, but the inner experiences as such become all the more full of meaning. You cease, now, to behold the picture, but you live in a world of rich experience.

When we really succeed in living right in the pictures, the second act begins. But it needs by no means follow immediately.

From this point onwards, a great deal of discouragement may be in store for seership. It may quite well happen that the moment comes when the resolve is made to sink down into the pictures, to swim in them, and lo! they have vanished like a dream or like something that is forgotten. It may happen—but it will be in the rarest of cases—that the experience of which I shall now speak, comes immediately. But most often of all, what will happen is that the whole episode seems to have entirely vanished, like a dream. Now as genuine clairvoyants we must realise that it need not necessarily be a fact that it has gone altogether. The second experience—which, as I have said, follows in the rarest of cases immediately upon the first—may come much later, may come right out from among the day or night experiences. For very often, what we have thus consumed takes time to be wholly united with us, to be wholly ‘digested,’ by the soul. It may take a long time. ... But when we are sufficiently united with the experience, when it is sufficiently digested, the moment comes when we know: Now I am connected with the personality, or rather with the individuality of the dead and he is sending his thoughts into me. Now I am thinking what the dead is experiencing in his soul. That is what I am thinking now. I am connected with him; he is now speaking to me and I am listening to him.

In reality it is the picture with which we have united ourselves or the series of pictures we have taken into ourselves which has now become one with us—it is this that really hears and takes in the truth. As a rule, this hearing, this spiritual hearing is no longer bound up with pictures but is borne by the consciousness that the soul of the seer is connected with the dead and is enabling the dead to say to him things that cannot be heard by the physical ear, nor perceived with physical sight but are received together with the thoughts. Then the seer knows: This is not thy thought; it is what the dead is saying to thee.—

As you can realise, a certain preparation is necessary to come near an individual who has passed through the gate of death—a preparation which can be described as I have just done. Then, when we have reached this stage of hearing the dead, after having identified ourselves with the picture, all possibility of delusion is eliminated. For delusion could only be like a delusion on the physical plane if I were to meet a human being and take him to be somebody else. That, as a rule, will not occur; a human being is recognised on the physical plane. When I meet a Mr. X on the physical plane, I need not prove to myself on the basis of theoretical principles: ‘That is Mr. X.’ The being himself whom I meet enables me to recognise him. As soon as we stand before a being of the spiritual world, we know that we are in his presence ... although in the spiritual world he naturally speaks to us in a spiritual way, communicating something to us in a spiritual way.

What I have just described to you denotes the transition from the signs with so many meanings which we read and do not attempt to interpret with the intellect, but by absorbing, become one with them. We ‘consume’ them, as it were. Through the process which is set going in the soul as the result of having become one with the pictures, we prepare ourselves to hear the objective process, the objective reality.

The reading is a truly living process—one's very soul has to be directed to it. Something quite different is demanded than is ever demanded on the physical plane. Suppose someone were to publish a book on the physical plane and were to demand that in order to understand the book, we must first eat it, consume it ... Then suppose we were so organized that we could digest an ‘A’ in a different way from an ‘I’ and, through the inner process, realise the difference. If we could experience all this, then the process would be comparable with the spiritual process just described.

We cannot approach a spiritual happening or a spiritual being until we have given up our whole soul to understanding the happening or being concerned. We must ourselves have become one with the signs or letters of the spiritual world. We must read—and then, while we are reading, we must hear, spiritually.

I have said that this holds good as a general principle. But in Spiritual Science we must speak quite accurately. I say, ‘as a general principle,’ for there are also exceptions. For instance, it may happen that some seer, when in a clairvoyant state, does not only experience a series of pictures as I have described, but actually experiences as a picture, as an Imagination, something that resembles the dead as he was in life, as an external figure. Then, of course, the seer may think that he is confronting the dead. But he can never be quite sure. It may be so, but it need not necessarily be absolutely certain. In order to explain this case, let me again make a comparison. Our ordinary script, printed script or writing script, consists of signs. If I write the word BAU (building), this word in itself has no resemblance whatever to a building. But it was not always so in the evolution of writing. If we go back to olden times we find a picture-script. Men drew pictures which still had a resemblance to what they were meant to represent. And it was out of this pictorial script that our script, consisting of signs or letters, evolved.

It is the same with the clairvoyance which may arise as the result of development by our Rosicrucian methods or the atavistic, more or less primitive clairvoyance which may arise as the result of certain conditions.

Just as our modern script of signs and letters is something that has developed, and the pictorial script is more primitive, so the clairvoyance which immediately sees what is being looked for, is a more primitive form. It is precisely developed clairvoyance that often will not immediately be able to see what is there to be seen. With developed clairvoyance things will be as I have described. But there are also exceptions, as for example a man may have the powers, without having trained his clairvoyance, simply from the nature of his organism. In the pictures which come to a natural clairvoyant there may be far more similarity with the spiritual happenings than there is in the pictures which come to the trained clairvoyant who has to go through the whole procedure I have described. Naturally, however, primitive clairvoyance can never succeed in reaching true Imaginations, can never learn anything with certainty. And even when things are known with certainty, they are only happenings which are connected with earthly life.

I will give you an example. Suppose someone has died and before his death put a Will somewhere, without being able to tell anyone where it is. He dies. Some person endowed with primitive, untrained clairvoyance may, in a kind of trancelike, imaginative condition, come into connection with the dead man. This person can be led by the dead so that he can actually discover the place where the Will was placed. The clairvoyant in question may even be able to show the place, the cupboard, for example, where it lies. Such things may happen, but these cases are always connected with the physical plane and with something that has happened on the physical plane. They may be very complicated, but they are always connected in some way with the physical life.

One will not come much further than this in the sphere of primitive clairvoyance. To move about with absolute clarity and certainty in the spiritual world the preparations of which I have spoken are necessary.

In order that in the following lectures we may get down to details of spiritual reading and hearing, I must still say something more precise about what I have told you.

I said that what lies behind the Maya of external experience becomes a truth the moment we enter the spiritual world in the way described. It is not enough to see a picture through clairvoyance and just to see pictures as we see beings on the physical plane. That is not enough. We must be able to plunge right into the pictures, we must make it come true that we are in the spiritual world. We do this by submerging ourselves in the pictures. We put ourselves consciously into a condition in which we also are under other circumstances, but without knowing anything about it. If, therefore, I have this series of pictures, with what I have described as the centre-point of them, I must go right into them, I must consume them, must be within them.

What I have described is a spiritual experience and what matters about a spiritual experience is that we understand it. To understand it we must be able to practice spiritual self-observation. During the process of submerging ourselves in the pictures, something happens that we feel—we feel it in ourselves. Just think ... I have told you that we become conscious of our own position—separate from the Imagination ... and then we sink into the pictures. When we are still consciously standing before them, the feeling is different from what it is when we have sunk down into them. I must try to describe these two feelings.

The moment we have sunk down into them, knowing that now we have made these pictures disappear by identifying ourselves with them, in that moment we are seized with the feeling of insufficiency concerning ourselves. These things are difficult to describe. The feeling is this: ‘I am now only a part of what I was before—only one part.’

Naturally, such observations must be made again and again before we are able to interpret these things rightly.

Again, a comparison is best. It is just as though one had a 12 kilos weight, and then, without anything happening, the 12 kilos weight suddenly became only a 1 kilo weight. The feeling is: ‘You are only one-twelfth of yourself and the other eleven-twelfths are outside in the universe.’ It can be expressed in a diagram. One feels oneself somewhere out in the Universe, but with one's whole being. One feels: ‘Out there in the Universe are still eleven-twelfths of me; my being is distributed.’ It can be expressed by saying: ‘I myself am at some point in a circumference and the other eleven-twelfths are distributed around that circumference. Here am I, at the point AI and there are the other eleven-twelfths.’

At this stage we realise that we are actually within the Universe; we have become one-twelfth part of ourselves. We have left the other eleven-twelfths of our being in a circumference.

The occult expression can be used here. We can say: Man becomes a living Zodiac. Man has himself become the Zodiac. Then comes the hearing; it comes from within that Zodiac. So, if I keep my former example, that of speaking with one who is dead, the dead is speaking from within the Zodiac.

Just think of the difference between this and an experience in the physical world. In the physical world we feel enclosed within our skin; objects are outside, and they seem to come into us as we look at them. In the spiritual experience we are outside at some point, in one-twelfth of the spiritual horizon. Now the world at which we are looking is within our circumference. We look inwards from outside; in ordinary life we look outwards from within. And now there come what seem to be spiritual voices from within, with which the dead speaks to us—we become aware of them when we accustom ourselves to listen in a different way, when we learn to pay attention in a different way. More exact details will be given—I will now just indicate it figuratively. At this stage we may have the feeling: ‘I am aware of what the dead is saying; he is speaking within the circumference ... I hear him only when my spiritual ear is turned for instance, to the 5 (see diagram). Now he ceases to speak there ... but he goes on again, and now I only hear him when I turn my spiritual ear to another point (i i) and so on.’ Knowledge comes gradually when seven voices, seven different voices are distinguished within the circumference. Seven voices have to be distinguished. They are heard in the most diverse ways, according to the point from which they are heard. Everything that we experience here speaks from within the circumference, as it were from seven voices.

We have now gone out into the circumference of the Universe ... whatever we are to experience is within this circumference. We must learn to feel ourselves as one part of that circumference and with a kind of cosmic humility, shall I say, make no claim to be anything more than one-twelfth of the circumference. But the other eleven-twelfths have to be called to our aid. We must endeavour to acquire the faculty of distinguishing what speaks to us. We must differentiate in all kinds of ways what a being can say to us in this way.

Again here, only a comparison makes things clear.—What speaks to us from within this sphere can really be called: Spiritual Vowels. And everything that we ourselves are, everything that lives at the periphery are Spiritual Consonants. Consonants and vowels work together; the consonants are stationary when we have poured out our being in twelve parts into the Universe; the vowels move within it, bringing to expression what is to be voiced.

Once again, I will return to our example.—I am seeking for one who is dead, trying to come into contact with him. A series of pictures appears to me and, among the pictures, something that seems paradoxical, perhaps even absurd. I realise however that this is something which could not have come to me from my own life of soul. Then I succeed in sinking down into the pictures, I become one with them. At this moment I stand at a definite point—A.

My being is so submerged in what is outside that I have released, as it were, one-twelfth of my being.

You must remember that language must be precise when occult matters are spoken of. I have told you that the series of pictures belongs to us; we have this series of pictures in ourselves; the pictures are within that one-twelfth, and everything else that cannot become one with these pictures is now distributed over the periphery. At, this stage, for a short or long period, we may really be able to receive the spiritual voice, the communication of the dead. Then we hear the dead speaking from the periphery that we ourselves have formed around that with which we want to be related.

What is it that has really been done? We have gone out of ourselves, have become one with the Universe, but with only one part of the Universe. Therefore, we have ourselves to become part of the Universe, to grasp with the whole of our being that of which we want to become aware. We have, as it were, built a spiritual aura around one part ... but we cannot build it completely, we can only stand at one point; we have to build the aura out of what we, ourselves, are not.

Again, let us repeat.—I perceive a series of pictures. To begin with I stand outside these pictures, but then I plunge into them; thereby I build a cosmic sphere around what I want to perceive; I build it with what I have given up, offered up. This cosmic sphere contains within itself—like seven planets—the vowels through which the dead can speak to us when we ourselves form the consonants through the twelve-foldness of our being.

We can only come into connection with a being of the spiritual world by enfolding him, embracing him in such a way that this very act of enfolding forms the cosmic consonants; the being can then announce himself to us in the cosmic vowels: The cosmic vowels can then act together with the cosmic consonants which we ourselves have fashioned. Then reading and hearing work together. Thus, do we penetrate into a particular sphere in the spiritual world.

Now I beg you not to be led by what I have said into the error of thinking that what I have described has anything to do with the physical Zodiac or with the seven physical planets. That is not the case and is not meant so. What happens is that in the twelve-foldness a cosmic sphere is built around the being whom we want to find. We build a world for ourselves.

Whenever, on the physical plane, we want to get to know something, we have to look at it from many different sides, from many standpoints; we have to go around it. In the spiritual world this must become a reality. Not only must we go around it with our whole being, we must so divide our being that we create a periphery around what we perceive. Every time there is a real spiritual perception, a spiritual periphery of this kind has been created. And only because those Divine Beings whom we have learnt to know as the higher Hierarchies have done this on a vast scale, has the Zodiac appeared.

Suppose that what I have described has been attained.—Intercourse with someone who is dead has been achieved. Suppose this intercourse could be consolidated, held static ... then this consolidation would represent a human being—a spiritual human being, of course, divided into twelve parts, twelve fixed stars. If that which is perceived could be consolidated, a planetary system would arise. Inasmuch as the Gods did this and consolidated it into a gigantic plan, our world-system arose. Whereas we, in our single acts of clairvoyance create something transitory which naturally passes away again when the clairvoyance is over.

Our whole world-system is consolidated clairvoyance of the Gods, of the higher Hierarchies. That is why we shall know this world only when our knowledge is based on spiritual foundations.

The physical world is something that is not at all real, it is just as little real as the water of a flowing river is real. The Spiritual alone is real. So it is too, with a whole solar system. Thus, we must learn to know the solar system in its reality, by deciphering it in spiritual reading and hearing. In many respects we have already done this.

Dear attendees! Anyone who takes a look at our spiritual life will realize how deeply the mystery associated with the name of Christ Jesus is intertwined with our present education. And it may well be said that all questions touching the present time are the consequence of the Christ or Jesus problem, one of the most significant problems of all. We have even seen that even men of our time who believe they are above what they call the religious prejudices of Christianity are intensively occupied with this problem. For example, there is the fact that interest in this mystery has been shown from more or less monistic sides. The only question that arises is that it has been tried to solve this mystery in the most diverse, the most profound and sometimes also the most superficial way at all times since Christianity has existed.

Since we have to start from a very specific point of view, namely that of spiritual science, let us first visualize the underlying reasons for the particular coloration that our present age gives to this riddle. We must then see – and this is particularly indicative of our present time – that in souls, in hearts, an enormous contradiction is emerging: on the one hand, there is the need, the intense longing to know something about those questions that have occupied the human mind since time immemorial; on the other hand, there is the cleft, the chaos that emerges. While one feels too soft or too weak to really attack this problem in all its depths, there are again experts in this field who deal with it in the most detailed way, expecting some new revelation, some new event in relation to this problem.

The peculiarity of this question is already included in the two names that come to mind: “Christ” and “Jesus”. And if we just take a brief look at what has happened over the centuries, from the time of the evangelists, the first Christians, and across the centuries, we encounter the question: How can man form a conception that the divine essence of Christ can embody itself in a human being, in a human body? How is it possible that the divine nature has accomplished in a human body what is called redemption? In short, we can say that what has occupied humanity so powerfully at all times is the question: How could Christ appear on earth, how did that very union of the two natures, of the God Christ and the man Jesus, come about? But the closer we get to the present, the more and more the question takes on a different form. The question takes on a form - that is the remarkable thing - that is completely adapted to the respective cultural view that humanity has struggled to achieve. When we look at the present, we find the opposite pole, the complete opposite of what was recognized at the very beginning of Christianity in relation to the Christ-question.

One could point to hundreds and hundreds of cases similar to the one I am about to mention. In a Swiss journal of 1861, a man who was close to Christianity says the following: If I were compelled by anything to admit that Christ rose bodily, that the resurrection is at all possible in an evangelical sense, then I would have to admit everything that, not corresponding to my own worldview, would somehow confront me; then I would have to find that my whole worldview has a crack. How many people of the present day, including religious scholars and theologians, would have to make the same confession! If they thought about it, they would come to the conclusion that they would have to confess the same thing.

Let us contrast this confession with what Paul said when he said:

If Christ is not risen, then your works are in vain and so is your faith.

If you look at what Paul says, you have to admit that the most essential thing that permeates him is the fact that the Christ has risen. You have to admit that Christianity loses its meaning altogether if the mystery of the resurrection is removed, if what happened for the development of humanity is removed. Paul regarded the resurrection as the most essential thing, as the fundamental nerve of the Christian world view. And in our time it has come to this - this is deeply significant - that certain people say to themselves, if they had to acknowledge the resurrection, then their whole world view would be split.

It does not exactly touch someone sympathetically, to whom one has not yet plastered over these things, to find the fundamental question of Christianity – because that is what it is – presented to the soul in this form. But theosophy does not have the task of whitewashing things, so to speak, but rather of characterizing them according to their true names. In a sense, time cannot, out of itself, [out of its nature]; the general character of the formation of time is also expressed in the conception of the Christ-question. We see the Christ-question transformed into a Jesus-question in the nineteenth century; we see how, through the progress of science, it is becoming less and less possible for man to see in the man Jesus of Nazareth a divine-spiritual being, as it could be seen in ancient times. As the gospels became more and more accessible through the spread of education, people read deeply into them, and their souls were, as it were, drawn up to something divine. Then a gradual transition took place from the most paradoxical ideas about the Christ Jesus to what many theologians now profess, namely, that one has to assume that Jesus was only an exceptionally outstanding personality in world development, so that what man regards as the highest ideal was present in him to a great extent. One sees in him only a human being, albeit raised to a higher level.

Naturally, all possible shades of opinion are to be found in the conceptions of Christ Jesus. Thus, in the eighteenth century, we are confronted with the fact that people only put into the Christ Jesus problem what they could imagine, what they could think. Thus, to the Enlightenment thinker Reimarus, Christ Jesus appears hardly as anything more than an especially outstanding human being. [In contrast, Lessing had a substantially different spiritual image within himself.] He once said that he wished he could still live to see someone come along who would thoroughly refute what is being spread about Christ Jesus. Everything [at that time] was based on the criticism of the Gospels, especially on the contradictions, and specifically on those that come to light when comparing the different resurrection accounts. The obvious conclusion was that the reporters had passed on something that was not real – but this is by no means a fact.

If witnesses are heard in any matter who give different testimony, this is by no means proof against the fact itself. If we now imagine a world court case and ask: Are these witnesses credible? this is not correct. Rather, another question is the only decisive and important one: Who won the trial? Undoubtedly, Christianity, which was based on the fact of the resurrection, has carried the victory in world history. So the fact is that even if the witnesses testified differently, the trial itself is decided.

Then the time drew nearer and nearer when the matter was so arranged that every possibility of thinking of something superhuman in it disappeared, or, to speak with the spirit of that age: The time is drawing ever nearer when it will be impossible to think and speak of the resurrection in the same way as we originally did. Therefore, in the nineteenth century, the first concern of religious history was to get a picture of the man Jesus from the Gospels. We do not need to discuss here what has been done with the Gospels, how attempts have been made to compile the synoptic material in order to arrive at an approximately uniform overall picture, or how attempts have even been made to exclude altogether the Gospel that has the most supersensible content, the Gospel of John, on the grounds that it is a hymn to the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth. But there were also other researchers in the nineteenth century who said that if the Gospel of John were no longer recognized, then the whole of Christianity would have to be abandoned. One scholar, who is now considered outdated but who was once highly regarded, emphasized the facts of the Gospel of John. But all efforts were aimed at credibly presenting the man Jesus to the soul; however, from the outset, much had to be excluded that was indeed in the Gospels but that could no longer be believed in the nineteenth century. So a lot of facts, such as miracles and so on, were taken away and any possibility of admitting anything non-natural ceased.

It was therefore of particular significance when a theologian of the nineteenth century, Franz Overbeck, who lived in Basel, wrote a very remarkable book entitled “On the Christianity of Today's Theology”. This book is remarkable not only for its content, but it is significant for anyone interested in such things as an expression of the confession of a man who, as a theologian, had to struggle with the fact that he had to stand before his students with such feelings in his soul. Overbeck had to wrestle with this fact until it finally pushed him to express what lived in his soul. Anyone who understands such things will truly see a stormy destiny in following the strange life of the Basel native Overbeck, who basically answered the question, “Can theology today still be called Christian at all if it is also a science?” only with “no”. As a theologian, he sought to prove that theology as a science could not be Christian at all, because any science - according to Overbeck - must do away with and break with much of what is the basic meaning of any religion; the moment a pre-Christian religion came into contact with science, it underwent a process of decomposition, and so it happened with Christianity: science destroys Christianity under all circumstances and must always be an opponent of it.

When this is stated, it may not go deep to the heart, and in a certain respect it may be easily accepted by the layman. But when one is confronted with an era that urges such a significant theologian to make such a confession, one must feel how deeply the corresponding question [about the relationship of Christ to Jesus], the Christ-Jesus problem, actually goes to the root of our current development. And Overbeck says something else, namely, roughly the following: Whatever thoughts and scientific reasons we can muster about the Christian worldview must seem terribly small and inadequate to support the Christian creed. In the early days, Christians lived with the idea that a new world was coming, but soon a different time came, and it was no longer the doctrines of the Church Fathers that fertilized Christianity. At first there was hope for heaven to come to earth, but then finally the feeling that this world could never satisfy the human heart; an ascetic mood became apparent.

Today we see that people place some value on scientific truths – these are self-evident, they conquer the world of the outer senses, and so we see the driving force of religious belief slumbering in people. Who would not want to admit that this is deeply, deeply characteristic of our time? Is it not moving, distressing, that that which gave thousands upon thousands consolation and hope should increasingly lose its power? Let us face a fact: in 1873 an attempt was made in France to count those who were still touched by Christ, and it was found that one-third of the total population still believed in him. Today, it is estimated that only about one-fifth of London's total population is still imbued with Christianity. What does it matter that those who are quickly satisfied with themselves say, “What do we need a new foundation for? The old is enough for us.” Those who think only of themselves and are satisfied with that may speak thus; but those who think of humanity and see how the best truth-seekers can no longer find support will have to admit that the times are serious and that it is understandable when people long for a renewal of the old.

And so it gradually happened that on a theological basis a man named Jesus of Nazareth arose, from whom all the supernatural had been removed. In the nineteenth century, there was also a reaction of a strange kind. One could say: in order to deal with the Christ problem, which had been completely lost sight of in the Jesus problem, people sought to hold on to the Christ nevertheless, to recognize him. But in doing so, he was made into a being who basically lacks true reality. It has led to the Christ being made into a mystical being who does not need to be bound to what the evangelists tell – they tried to hold back the gospels [so to speak]. It would lead to chaos if one wanted to cover all the trends of the last few decades – at any rate, we are dealing with a crisis.

For those who have followed this development, there is something easy to grasp. The combination of mystical insight with all that has been brought to light by gospel research represents the last phase of this development. Something emerged that can be described as the connection between these two currents, and the result was that people even doubted whether a Jesus had lived at all. It is entirely in keeping with the style of our time that, once the mere external, historical yardstick was applied to Jesus, the question arose: Is there anything left at all in the Gospels that provides us with proof that a Jesus lived? — But one has no right to deny that a Jesus existed, because with a certain justification one is led to the conclusion that the existence of Jesus is clearly provable. However, for anyone familiar with today's historical research and aware of the current state of Jesus research, proof of the existence of Jesus cannot be provided because it is possible – if one wants – to challenge the documents of the Gospels. And one would have to be reckless not to admit that this challenge has quite significant reasons.

But what does all this show us? It shows us that we are in a state of crisis in the whole field [of Jesus research]. However, a new world view has also become part of the present education, which initially knows how to plausibly demonstrate that it has different sources of truth than those that have been available so far - I am referring to Theosophy or spiritual science. Even if Theosophy has something to say about Christianity and its origin, it could still be necessary for religion and religious research to deal with what Theosophy says about Jesus Christ. It is therefore important to know that both sides start from some elementary, fundamental events that have happened and cannot be denied.

The thing that our present education must undoubtedly take the greatest umbrage at is the story of the resurrection, that something has occurred that can no longer be understood today, namely that there was a victory of life over death. From a theosophical point of view, something can only be said about this if one considers the most obvious thing, namely the scene of one's own heart and soul. And what does this scene show us? It shows us something that cannot be admitted by the prevailing education; it shows us how the possibility exists for man that an inner miracle takes place at some time in his life. If we can call a miracle that which can be characterized as being in contrast to what is connected to the intellect, then it is a fact that such a miracle can take place in the human soul. And for every soul in which this miracle has taken place, it is inwardly clear that miracles exist.

It is a fact that there is an inner, mystical experience in which something enters the human soul that has no connection with the soul in the natural course of life. To understand this, one must follow the natural course of a person's life. It shows that, alongside all the external facts of life, we are constantly dealing with a deep inner life - we are dealing with the fact that the course of life shows itself in the human soul. Let us take a soul that belongs to the struggling souls in life - not a scientific one. Let us take a human soul that is dealing with the existential issues of life, that experiences inner tragedy, pain and suffering, but also bliss and salvation. Let us take such a human soul that has been living in such moods for years, and let us imagine that someone has not seen this person for ten years. He would make a remarkable discovery, namely that this struggle of the soul expresses itself in changes in the physiognomy, gestures and so on. The spiritual struggle expresses itself in the body. What takes place within a person also works on the transformation of the human exterior.

But what is much more interesting is the following: anyone who struggles in this way senses that when an answer or a solution to certain riddles has occurred, they are in a different state of mind. And the characteristic feature is that when the solution has occurred, the transformation of the physiognomy stops and the expression remains constant. As long as the struggle lasts, furrows form. But this too has an end; it is as if the human body reaches the limit of its elasticity. When the human being reaches this limit, the physical transformation finally ceases. The forces of consciousness transform, the soul forces. First they work on the body, and then, when this is no longer possible, they consciously work their way into themselves. It has been established that these human soul forces work inwardly throughout the whole of human life, and it has been shown that sometimes something of what is working in the depths of the soul also rises up into consciousness, and this shows itself in particularly strange dreams. This means that the dream images reveal something of what is going on in the soul.

Let us take a typical dream from the life of a friend close to me. When he was a young person attending secondary school, he had to do a drawing in the last grade, and because they knew he had talent, they gave him an especially difficult template, and that is precisely why the work progressed rather slowly. The end of school was approaching, and the student realized that it would be impossible for him to finish on time, since only a small part had been drawn. He felt anxious about this, but at the end of school his performance was still enough for the teachers, because they realized that he had only progressed slowly due to his great talent. The man grew older, became a draftsman, and strangely enough, this school experience came back to him in his dreams at certain intervals, and he experienced everything exactly as it had happened once, only the fear that he would not be able to finish was much, much greater in the dream. It happened that the dream came back regularly for days in a row, then it stopped for years and then came back.

The full significance of this dream experience can only be understood by comparing it with life. It turned out that every time this dream experience occurred, this person recognized an increase in his abilities. He could do more in terms of observing forms and expressing them through his hand; he experienced noticeable progress every time. Man works spiritually and mentally like this draftsman, and from time to time his soul work is revealed in 'dream' - in that strange state that exists between consciousness and unconsciousness, in that transition from the subconscious to the conscious. We see this throughout life.

We have an important point in human life, up to which one remembers in the course of life. Everyone must say: I remember up to a certain point in time, but what lies before that point in time is completely unconscious to me, and I only know something about it through the reports of others. This point in time is the one at which we have appropriated the word “I” for ourselves. But what happened before that moment? Let us look at the child, with its clumsy movements and actions. We know that the most important organ in the human being, the brain, is still completely undeveloped when the child comes into existence, and it is only during life on earth, until the child learns to say “I”, that it works on the organs of thought. We are therefore dealing with a spiritual-natural consciousness that is completely independent of the human being, with a supersensible-spiritual activity that represents the starting point of that cerebral activity. The following example characterizes that supersensible, spiritual element in man.

It is common knowledge that Nietzsche ended in madness. In the last period before the outbreak of madness, he wrote “captious” letters to acquaintances, including the Basel theologian Overbeck mentioned earlier. When Overbeck received one of these letters at the end of the 1880s, he knew that he could no longer delay in picking up his friend Nietzsche from Turin, where he was staying. The following now appears important as an example of what I have mentioned: When Nietzsche met Overbeck, he had no attention for what surrounded him; he let himself be done with whatever was wanted and showed absolutely no interest. Only when he heard the name of the personality standing before him, who was the same person who had been his colleague for years, did it flash through him: “That's the psychiatrist I was with back then.” And Nietzsche, to Overbeck's greatest astonishment, began to continue a conversation at the point where it had been interrupted seven years ago. A person who has no attention for the outside world continues a conversation at the point where it was interrupted seven years ago! Overbeck had forgotten that conversation in the meantime, but he remembered it immediately. And it is remarkable: when Nietzsche was brought to Jena and Overbeck visited him in the insane asylum, one could not talk with him about what was going on around him — only about what he had thought, devised, mentally struggled with and experienced years before; only about that could one talk with him.

But what does this show us? It shows us that there is a supersensible body within the physical body. If one builds on facts, then what is at issue here must be recognized as highly important. Man can only enter into connection with the objective external world through his physical organs. Nietzsche's organs were destroyed, and therefore he could no longer do this; only the central spiritual core within the physical body was unaffected. This one example could be multiplied a hundredfold. The existence of this central spiritual core in the physical body cannot be denied, and it is a fact that under certain circumstances man is able to see into the supersensible world. When we place thoughts that are symbolic through the strong will into the center of consciousness in such a way that all attention is focused on them and nothing is distracted, when we only look at them and repeat them over and over again - for a year, and if a year is not enough, then for ten years: a result will eventually emerge. The soul manages to bring everything up from the depths; she looks into everything.

This supersensible state cannot be reached with the help of ordinary tools, but only through intimate soul work. When a person has concentrated all thoughts and worked with them long enough in this way, he finally comes to a point where he says to himself: Yes, I am now experiencing something within me that I am quite sure is something supernatural. But strangely, I cannot think it in the way I usually think things. - Man then feels something that only comes to the consciousness of those who experience it, because in this moment of transcending the resistance of his physical body, the brain is no longer capable of expressing what has been experienced. Man recognizes: That which he was accustomed to feeling in the soul wants to transgress into consciousness. But he senses: the bodily tools were indeed suitable for the natural life up to now, but now I am experiencing something for which my brain is not yet sufficiently developed. Man then perceives the duality of the spiritual-soul being. He then experiences further how that which was initially weak finally begins to work perceptibly and tangibly on the brain, on consciousness, on the body.

I have now described this process of development to you. It is not a matter of something arbitrarily conceived, not a theory, but a fact that every true seeker of the spirit can experience. But what does the seeker of the spirit experience? He experiences what I have termed the “miraculous fact”. Something extra-worldly enters into the soul, to which man had no relationship before. One could describe what enters as a higher human being in the human being, as something that joins the spiritual that was already there before. Now a question might arise: Yes, but only a small circle of people experience something like that, only the spiritual seeker experiences something like that, who undertakes these exercises with the soul. — But what has just been described can be experienced by every soul, albeit in the most diverse shades, in the most diverse gradations, corresponding to the individuality of the person concerned. When we read the descriptions of those people whom we call the Christian mystics, we sense that these mystics did not experience what I have just described, but that something of a different nature has entered into these souls, something other than the existing spiritual - this transformation is called 'resurrection'.

Anyone who immerses themselves in the descriptions of the gospels with the necessary devotion will experience what I have described to a greater or lesser extent. But everyone can experience it - apart from studying the Gospels - feel that there is a feeling in the soul that cannot be found in the natural course of life in the soul. However, the Bible is the easiest way to bring a supersensible spiritual world into the horizon of consciousness. If one admits this miracle fact, then humanity provides a necessary supplement to it, and this arises from Theosophy itself. If we look back at what was said about the central core of spirit, we see that this central core of spirit cannot be traced back to the mere beginning, to the origin of the body, because this central core of spirit is completely independent of the beginning of life, of the brain activity of the human being. Rather, it must be traced back to an earlier human life, so that we must speak of repeated lives on earth. What we have come to know as the central core of the spirit, as supersensible life, asserts itself through death, and with this point of view we stand on the ground of spiritual science.

This view of repeated earthly lives has already been incorporated into our newer culture. Lessing was compelled to speak of the repetition of life out of an inner necessity. He said: “If one considers the entire human development, it appears to one as an all-embracing education of mankind.” It would have seemed senseless to Lessing if a soul that had ended completely [with death] had lived. Lessing thought that the soul takes with it what it possesses in the way of training, [then comes back to earth with it and so on. In this way a unified organism would be created: the soul, which is in a state of development, does not die], but lives on and on, lives forever. The nineteenth century, however, had little interest in elaborating on this fact. But this fact emerges with necessity. When a few decades ago a prize was offered for the best literary work on the subject of 'The Immortality of the Soul', the first prize was awarded to a work entitled 'The Immortality of the Soul on the Basis of Repeated Life on Earth'. This is proof that even then there were people who were drawn to this view of repeated lives on earth.

If we consider the development of humanity, it turns out that only from a certain point in time was it possible for the human soul to experience that inner miracle, that certainty, which [initially] comes to the soul as a question. We can distinguish two great epochs: the old, pre-Christian times, when man had not yet come to the consciousness of his ego, and the time after Christ, when man enters the world with the full maintenance of his self-conscious ego. Just as human descent can be traced back to a primal being, so too must that which can prove to be an inner resurrection for each individual in the soul be traced back to a progenitor for this inner miracle. Just as resurrection takes place for the individual, so it must also have taken place for humanity, and Theosophy shows us clearly: What makes the individual a different person also made the man Jesus of Nazareth a different person.

Just as we live with our central spiritual core, to which no boundary is drawn by death, so the world with its central spiritual core is subject to its own law. Therefore, according to theosophy, the resurrection for the whole of humanity is virtually the same miracle as the inner miracle for the individual. After [Jesus'] physical body was hung on the cross, the spirit [of the Christ] lived on. Let us consider Paul's words in the Gospel, that the Christ died for humanity and was resurrected on the third day, and that he then appeared first to Peter, then to more than five hundred people, and finally to himself. He did not appear to Paul in his original Jesus form, but in a spiritual form, which he had to recognize as the Christ form, which was such that the conviction asserted itself from within: the Christ lives! We cannot speak of the resurrected Christ in any other way than to say that that which lived in him spiritually, independently of the physical body, was not truly dead in death, but continued to be there, to live on.

It would take us too far afield today if I were also to explain to you what happened to the body. The important thing is that Scripture clearly and unambiguously points this out to us: from the moment of the resurrection onwards, we are dealing with the emergence of a new spiritual power that was not present before, with an outpouring of the spirit. And this inward miracle leads back to the resurrection from the dead, to the continuing life of the Christ, who was crucified as Jesus of Nazareth. Christ has made possible a new relationship with the spiritual world for humanity; thus the miracle of the cross is the progenitor of all miracles that take place in human life. In this way, spiritual science shows us a path to Christ; it shows us that the Christ is necessary for humanity. Only a timid mind could sense danger in such a path to Christ, because every path to Christ that is based on truth must and will be welcome (to those seeking the Christ).

Today, we want to talk about some peculiarities of the occult development of the human being, in order to then prepare for something else. We are allowed to speak of this occult development because, basically, engaging with spiritual science is the beginning of a real occult development. Even if most people do not recognize the fact that simply occupying oneself with spiritual science is really the first step towards occult development, it is nevertheless the case. And it has been emphasized time and again, and must always be emphasized, that spiritual science is not meant to merely convey knowledge to us, a theoretical knowledge, but that spiritual science is meant to give us something that transforms our whole being, that makes something different out of our whole being than the external culture of the present can do.

Now we will gain an insight into the difficulty that spiritual science has in impressing itself not only on our memory but also on our whole cultural life of the present, if we familiarize ourselves with the peculiarities of spiritual scientific research, with the way in which the results of spiritual scientific research relate to us humans. They relate to us differently than other knowledge that we acquire in life. We acquire knowledge through our experiences, through our experiences; because even if we acquire scientific knowledge, it is either through direct or indirect experience. Wherever we acquire knowledge, we acquire it first through experience and then we store it in our memory, in our recollection. We keep these results of life.

We have often made it clear what it means, in more intimate terms, to store something in our memory, especially in recent times we have talked a little more about what memory is. In any case, for life, memory is an extraordinarily important thing. Just think: if we did not have memory, if we could not remember what we experienced yesterday, the day before yesterday, a year ago or ten years ago, how very different our lives would have to be. It is inconceivable to us that the ordinary life of the soul, taking place on the physical plane, could take place without memory.

But compare the power that enables you to retain experiences of the physical plane in your memory with the much lesser power that enables you to retain dream experiences in your memory. Consider how much more easily you forget a dream than experiences in the physical world. One may initially ask the question: Why do we forget dream experiences more easily than experiences of the physical world? Well, the answer to this question will also give us an important point of view for higher knowledge.

How are dream experiences acquired? They are acquired by not being completely inside the physical body. When we are completely inside the physical body, we do not dream. Then we experience through the senses on the physical plane and through the mind bound to the senses. When we dream, we must at least be partially outside the physical body. What does the physical body do when it works through the power of memory? Yes, as difficult as it is for a person to think at first, it is nevertheless true: every time a person has an experience and stores this experience in their memory through a thought, an imprint, a kind of cliché of the experience, is formed in our etheric body. But – and I have already discussed this – it is not the case that this imprint would photographically depict the experience. Just as the letter of a writing has nothing to do with the sound, what exists in our body as an imprint has just as little to do with the experience itself. The imprint is only a sign. And this sign is strangely similar to the human form itself. And if you take the upper parts of the human form, the head and at most a little of the upper body and the hands, you have what can be observed in the etheric body every time a person forms a memory of an experience.

So, we can say: I experience something; the experience remains with me, whether it be a small or a great experience, as a memory. An impression is formed, something like this (see drawing). Something like this arises in your etheric body every time a memory is formed, and if it were to be extinguished, you would no longer be able to remember the experience.

Think of how many things you remember in life! You have just as many thousands and thousands of such ethereal images of people within you. Your etheric body, and also your physical body, allow so many different images to be there. If two were the same, you would not be able to distinguish the experiences. If you observe a person occultly, you will find thousands and thousands of such images of people within him. But they do not only arise in the etheric body; a fine impression of each such human image also arises in the physical body, and these impressions also all remain, insofar as the person has memories. So thousands upon thousands of such homunculi are present in a person.

Let us say you are listening to today's lecture. Just by listening to this lecture, hundreds and hundreds of such homunculi are forming in your soul. These also make impressions in your physical body when you remember them later, and these impressions also remain.

But what about dreams? Yes, you see, in a dream the homunculus is formed in the etheric body, but

but it does not leave an impression on the physical body. It leaves a weak impression, or sometimes no impression at all. Then the person is well aware that he has dreamt, but he cannot remember what he dreamt. Dreams leave a weak impression, much weaker than any experience on the physical plane. This is why it is so difficult to retain a memory of them.

The strength of the memory therefore depends entirely on how strong the impression is that the homunculus of the etheric body makes on the physical body. However, what the spiritual researcher finds, what he experiences in the spiritual world, is initially such that it cannot make any impression on the physical body at all. For if an experience can make an impression on the physical body, then it is no longer a purely spiritual experience; then it has already been acquired with regard to the physical body. This must be the peculiar thing about the spiritual experience, that at first nothing at all happens in the physical body, while the spiritual is being experienced.

What follows from this? It follows that the spiritual researcher has to understand that there is no memory for the results of spiritual research. The experiences of the spiritual researcher cannot be memorized. They pass away the very moment they arise.

This is the difficulty of knowing anything of the spiritual world while living in the physical world and wanting to live only through the physical body. Since man has a poor memory even for dreams, which still have a loose connection with the physical body, it shows how understandable it must be that man has no memory for what he really experiences occultly.

There are now people who begin to apply to themselves the rules of my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds,” the rules that are called the rules of occult development. They may apply them for a very long time; but then, after years, they come and say, “I have practiced over and over again, I have done all kinds of exercises; I see nothing, I hear nothing of the spiritual world. My sense for the spiritual world does not want to open up. Perhaps what these people say is completely wrong; it can be completely wrong. The people in question may have long since found entry into the spiritual world and may have perceptions in the spiritual world. But these perceptions disappear the moment they are made, because these perceptions cannot be incorporated into the physical memory. The fact that one can know something from one's spiritual experiences depends on something quite different from memory. And I would now like to make clear to you what it depends on.

Imagine that you make a toy for a child. The child can enjoy this toy. You can make it today and the child can enjoy it. You take the toy and put it in the cupboard. Tomorrow you give it to the child again, and the day after tomorrow, and so on. And the child can always enjoy the toy that you made today.

But something else can also happen. Let us assume that you are not interesting the child by making a toy, but that you are putting something together for him out of random things. Or you might even just make something up for him by imitating gestures or something similar. Let us assume that you attract the child's attention by imitating something with your hands or fingers in a very specific way, by pre-evolving something, for example. You cannot put this in the cupboard, take it out again tomorrow and the day after and give it to the child again and again like a toy. What is to make such an impression on the child must be done afresh each time. You can make a doll and keep it; the child can have it again and again. But if you use something you have done yourself, through gestures or the like, to attract the child's attention, you must do it freshly each time.

This is something that can explain to us the difference between what we acquire on the physical plane and what can become memory, and what we experience on the spiritual plane and what cannot immediately become memory. When we have experiences on the physical plane, something like a homunculus forms in our etheric body and an imprint of it is imprinted in the physical body. It remains, like a doll with a child. You can store it and find it in yourself again and again. This then points to the experience of the past. The experience you have in the spiritual world passes. But you had to do something to bring it about. You had to use the rules that you apply to the soul in the sense of “How to Know Higher Worlds” to put the soul in such a state that the occult experience could occur. You can evoke this state in yourself again and again, so that you can have the experience again and again, but you cannot store it like a memory image. For the physical plane, experiences become memories by preserving after-images, by being remembered. The re-occurrence, the re-memory - if we now use the word “memory” in a figurative sense - of occult experiences can only occur if we create the same conditions through which we experienced the event for the first time.

Let us be clear about one thing: we really have to be infinitely more active and engaged with experiences in the spiritual world than with experiences in the physical world. In contrast to experiences in the physical world, something really forms in us that, I would say, gradually acquires the greatest density. Something internally diverse and manifold is this in us. These many people that you have inside you go through life with you and are something complete. This makes life in the physical world easier for you, because you are spared the work that you have to do over and over again in the occult experiences in the spiritual world if you want to have the experience again. You can only remember the conditions under which you brought about the experience, so never the occult experience itself, but only the way in which it was brought about. And you have to bring about these conditions again to have the occult experience again.

If we – and I say this not comparatively but in the real sense – if we go down a path and there is a church or a house at the end of that path and we go back, we can carry the memory of this image of the church or the house with us on the whole way back. This is because the experience of the church or the house is an experience on the physical plane. If a spirit had stood there instead, and the spirit would only manifest itself at this place, then it would be necessary each time to go to the same place again to see this spirit. One must bring about the same conditions, for one can only remember by which route, through which conditions, one arrived at this experience.

That is the strange thing about these things, that a good memory is of no immediate use for retaining occult experiences, but that on the contrary, something that supports us in ordinary life in consciously developing a good memory can be a hindrance to us in the occult. Certain people are born with a good memory right from the start. Now they live and have a good memory. Others have a less good memory. This is based on very specific karmic conditions: A good memory is something that comes into the world from a previous incarnation in such a way that the soul's penetration of the whole body is as late as possible, and that certain parts of the physical body remain untouched by the soul for as long as possible. In this case it is possible that, without our doing anything, these impressions, these homunculi, which I have described, are formed.

But when someone enters life through physical birth and their personality is so inwardly disposed for their individual physical experience that the impressions take complete possession of their physical body as quickly as possible, then they will not be able to develop a particularly good memory because they fill their memory with themselves; and then it is too hard for so many impressions of such homunculi to enter it. Therefore, we will preferably find a good memory in those people who, I might say, have an otherwise vague egoistic interest in the experiences of the physical plane.

On the other hand, memory can also be developed to a certain extent. But it can only be developed by stimulating attention and interest. Interest, attention and memory belong together. If you try to take a very intense interest in some experiences, in some area of life, to be very much involved with it with your whole self, your memory, your recollection of these experiences will also become better and better. So if someone wants to develop their memory for something, the best way to do it is to sharpen their interest in the subject as much as possible. There is nothing we remember for which we do not create an intense interest. Thus, attention and interest are something that can help us to improve a poor memory in the physical world.

For the right approach to occult experiences, so that these experiences do not constantly flash past us like dreams and we are unaware of them, loving attention and loving interest for the spiritual in general is of the utmost importance. Without this spiritual interest, without this loving attention, we cannot have spiritual experiences again and again that we have had once. It is quite possible to have an occult experience. It flits by. Only through this will one be able to create not memories, but the conditions under which one can have the experience again and again, and again and again, by intensifying one's interest in the events in the spiritual world.

That is why it is so important that we do not just acquire as much knowledge as possible about the spiritual world by way of memory; that is actually the least important thing. The more important thing is that we never pursue these matters of the spiritual world without love, never without the most intense interest. If we absorb knowledge from spiritual science indifferently, perhaps just so that we can boast about it or for some other reason, as we so often absorb other knowledge of the world, then it has no significance. What is important is the degree of love, of sympathy for the spiritual world that we acquire. That is the important thing, that is the meaningful thing. And that is why we try to present the events of the spiritual world from so many points of view, again and again from different points of view; because this way we are more and more encouraged to actively approach the knowledge of the spiritual world, and not to come to the desire to understand this knowledge of the spiritual world in the same way as the knowledge of physical things. That is actually the most fatal thing for the real occultist: when the longing arises in a person to gain spiritual knowledge, but when one desires to gain this knowledge in a different way than physical knowledge.

People would prefer to have books about the spiritual world, just as they have books about the physical world; they would like to acquire knowledge about the spiritual world in the same way that they acquire knowledge about the physical world. But it is not at all possible to acquire knowledge of the spiritual world in this way; instead, books that deal with the spiritual world must stimulate our inner activity each time anew, setting our inner powers in motion. Therefore, it is not the same as when we acquire knowledge about the physical world, where we have to repeat it over and over again in order not to forget, when we acquire knowledge about the spiritual world. When we read a cycle again and again or a spiritual science book, then that is actually not a repetition, but an immersing ourselves in the activity through which we arrive at the knowledge. And that is the most important thing, that is the essential thing. You see, if someone were asked to pray when they went to church, you would look at them rather strangely if they said: I don't need to pray today; when I was seven years, three months and two days old, I read the prayer once. I will always remember that I have prayed it; I do not need to pray it again, because I know that I have prayed it; I will just remember it now. You would look at this person strangely, you would make it clear to him that it is not important to remember the prayer once it has been said, but to keep bringing it up because it is alive in every renewal. This is precisely how we should understand our experience in occult science. We should not say, as we do about ordinary science: Yes, we have absorbed it, we remember it - but we want to get used to delving into the subject again and again, to going through the activity again and again. But people of the modern age do not like this at all. Rather, people of modern times love to stop at what they have once attained. Isn't it true that one feels most happy when one has acquired some knowledge and then carries this knowledge in one's inner “backpack,” as it were, through life, and when one needs it, takes it out and remembers it again. This is something that modern humanity is increasingly in danger of falling into. But in modern times, I would say, there is an immediate need to transform this sitting on the acquired content so that human work, human striving, corresponds to the

Only he earns freedom and life who
must conquer them daily.

This beautiful saying from Faust.

And it is truly the case that nothing more than the Faust attitude, which we have often considered here, awakens and stirs in the human soul that which gradually leads to the occult, to the occult attitude.

Goethe wrote the first great monologue of Faust in the 1770s, in keeping with his mood at the time. Today it has become trivial for many, but it is something that, when viewed in its originality, weighs on the soul with all the tragedy of life:

I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and, unfortunately! theology,
with great zeal.
There I stand, poor fool that I am!
And I am as wise as before.

Goethe wrote this himself, from his own nature, from the depths of his soul, as a young man in the 1770s. Then came the time when a high point of human philosophical development was experienced in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. But this high point of philosophical development was connected with legal development. Hegel wrote a natural law, Fichte wrote a natural law; Schelling published a medical journal. Something mighty and great has passed through the human soul, leading to Goethe's saying:

Have now, alas! Philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine,
And unfortunately! also theology,
studied thoroughly, with ardent endeavor.

But do you think that if Goethe had lived in 1840 and had begun his “Faust” only in 1840 instead of in 1772, do you think that because great and mighty things have been achieved in the cultural development of humanity, and that he had really searched in a truly philosophical way for what goes on in the human soul, do you think he would have said: “Now, thank God, I have found the answer!” studied philosophy, law and medicine and, of course, theology with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: “There I stand now, I clever, wise man, and am no longer as foolish as before, but have become quite wise, as wise as one can only be”? Do you think that Goethe would have said that? Suppose it took much longer for the Earth's culture to develop, would this opening monologue of “Faust” have been written exactly the same way in 1840 as it was in 1772, exactly the same way? All these things are part of the real understanding of “Faust.” This great, gigantic idea cannot be understood if you do not grasp it in its details. And if Faust were to be started today, it would have to begin with the same words.

And once countless facts from the humanities have been brought to light, the following sentiment will no longer be shared: “Thank God I have studied philosophy, law and medicine, and thank God theology too, and of course theosophy as well, and am as wise as can be.” That would never be the true Faust mood! Only the one to whom the following applies would have the true Faust mood: “Only he earns freedom, like life, who must conquer it daily.” This is the mood that underlies “Faust” and at the same time shows us where the impulses lie that lead from the old, frozen culture to the new culture of humanity. Man must never cease to acquire something new and different, and I have also advocated this within the spiritual scientific movement to which we belong. It was truly terrible when one repeatedly heard in the old society: Yes, we need schemas, and when I presented this or that, then there should be schemas and tables hanging on the walls so that one has something to remember by. And people were dissatisfied when one came and basically reversed what was once there, what was established; since it always has to be acquired anew. Because it is this never-resting, never-ceasing striving forward that matters.

It can be said directly: By having driven out of itself a Faust, the newer culture has really built the bridge from the merely external materialistic culture to the new spiritual culture that must come over humanity.

But much, very much, in relation to the right view of life is connected with all this, with these peculiarities of the new knowledge, which must indeed be drawn from occultism, and which therefore makes demands on the active impulses of men. Thus it is connected with the principle of taking everything as it is finished, as it is complete, when people strive to preserve that which cannot be preserved. For example, something that I have really tried to explain for decades now, I can say, cannot be preserved; something that is called human freedom.

Freedom as an external institution, as an external condition in the human organization on earth, is something impossible, something unthinkable. Preserved in this way, as it was once conceived for a particular point in time, freedom would be a terrible fetter for man at the next point in time. Freedom is something that must constantly be unleashed as it arises, and man can only acquire freedom in each moment by developing within himself a sense of relating to the whole spiritual world. You can read about this in my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom'. There you will find that the whole mood is expressed there. There you can see that freedom is truly a key to that which leads into the spiritual world.

But it is obvious that freedom can only be understood by people who gradually develop the will to study spiritual science. Freedom cannot be understood by other people, because other people will always confuse certain peculiarities of external institutions with freedom, whereas freedom can only ever exist in the state that a person can acquire at any given moment.

We impair our freedom, namely, already through one thing by which we usually do not believe our freedom to be impaired: we impair our freedom already through our memory. For suppose, for a moment, that you have acquired certain sympathies and antipathies through the experiences you have undergone since your birth; then your freedom is already impaired by what has remained of these sympathies and antipathies. These acquired sympathies and antipathies, everything that is stored in the memory, impairs your freedom. And all knowledge that humanity strives for and that is then executed in order to become memory, that also distances us more and more from a real concept of freedom. On the other hand, with every acquisition of occult knowledge, one is brought closer to the true concept of freedom, genuine freedom.

But this whole thing is connected to something else: consider that with everything that takes root as memory, we are actually planting a homunculus within us. And everything that takes shape in us as a homunculus is really the case that by setting our inner life in motion, we do not get any further with our activity than this homunculus, than these impressions. We cannot get beyond them. If we could break through what has accumulated as memory, if we could really bring out of ourselves everything we have experienced since the time of our childhood, up to the time we can remember back to, we would break through something like a skin of life. But behind this skin of life is the spiritual world. There it is, right behind it! And by beginning to build up a picture of his own life from earliest childhood, by retaining from all his experiences that which makes up the content of his memory, he weaves a veil throughout his life, and this veil covers the spiritual world.

We could not stand in the physical world if we did not spin this web, for we are, insofar as we remember, this web itself.

But we arise as human beings in the physical world only by forming ourselves out of the veil, which we at the same time hold up before the spiritual world. It is really as if someone, well, I would like to say, wants to look at a stage and says: I want to look in there now. But he does it by hanging a curtain in front of it. In doing so, he covers up bit by bit what is behind it. That is what man does in life. The memories man stores up are a curtain that is hung over spiritual reality, woven before the spiritual world. This is a contradiction that we face in life, but it must not be blamed or criticized because it is the condition for our being in the physical life. It can only be characterized, but not blamed. If we did not spiritually weave the curtain before us, we would not be there in the physical world. And that is precisely what matters: that we know such a thing, that we do not mistake ourselves for a reality when we are only a curtain.

We immediately penetrate all deception by considering ourselves a curtain and not a reality, in the moments when we say to ourselves: You are actually only what stands before the true world, and your own form, what you yourself are, stands behind the form that you yourself weave throughout life. - When you keep this fact in mind, you stand in truth. Then you do not consider yourself to be reality, but only a curtain. But people are afraid of considering themselves a mere curtain. They want to consider themselves a reality in what they are. But that is why they cannot come to any clarity about the most important things in life.

All people thirst for preservation after death, for immortality, they all thirst to know something about the fact that they still exist after death. But they secretly think: if everything that is in me, that I have on the physical plane, perishes, what will then still be there? That this must go away after death, that the curtain not only tears, but must be dissolved, so that the human being can emerge: this is self-evident for the one who ascends in spiritual knowledge.

Thus we must accept such things, as they have been touched upon today, in such a way that we really say more and more to ourselves: For spiritual science, different human attitudes must be inwardly adopted than those in the culture up to now. There must arise a much greater striving for constant activity among people, for activity, for being there. The idea that one has grasped something and can retain it and carry it through life must disappear. If that disappears, all the other things that stand in the way of clear perception will disappear as well. I have often pointed out how people, even in science, have the most confused ideas about what is true. For example, you will often read in physiological works today that people sleep because they experience this or that in their waking state and become tired from it. Sleep would therefore be a result of fatigue. I have pointed out that the reindeer, which does not need to work very hard, should not have any need for sleep either. But if you listen to the reindeer, you will learn that if you do nothing at all, you feel most tired and you fall asleep without having done the slightest thing. From this you can see that fatigue has nothing to do with sleep, and sleep has nothing to do with fatigue, any more than day has to do with night.

At most, minds like Hume or Kant will have difficulties because they confuse what follows from each other. No one will consider the day as the cause of the night and the night as the cause of the day. Day and night arise one after the other. Day arises from the sun rising above the horizon, and night from the sun going below the horizon. The sun's standing above the horizon is the cause of day, and the sun's going below the horizon is the cause of night. Just as night is not the cause of day, or day the cause of night, so it is not essentially true that waking is the cause of sleeping or sleeping the cause of waking. Rather, it is rhythmic states that alternate, just as the positions of the sun above and below the horizon alternate, and these have nothing to do with a cause-and-effect relationship.

But just as it is true that the sun, when it goes below the horizon, causes twilight, and when it goes further down, causes darkness, so the truth is not that because we feel tired, we also want to sleep, but we feel tired because we want to sleep. We must have a desire for sleep, then we feel tired.

This seems to contradict everything that is thought today, but it is true, just as true as that day is not the cause of night and night is not the cause of day. So tiredness is not the cause of sleep. But just as night occurs when the sun goes down, so tiredness occurs because one wants to sleep. Here, cause and effect are completely confused and mixed up.

Today I want to draw attention to something else. There is an enormous difference between the relationship between day and night, the relationship between the sun and the earth, and the relationship between sleeping and waking in humans: you cannot imagine that the same thing can happen to the sun as can happen to humans. I mean, a person has a good meal and sleeps at the wrong time, or sleeps at the wrong time for some other reason. The sun does not do that. Because, think about what it would be like if the sun suddenly decided not to rise above the horizon at a certain time and everything that makes day into night happened all at once. You cannot possibly imagine that a constellation will arise in the universe that is analogous to man sleeping when he wants, arbitrarily arranging his waking and sleeping times. How far removed the sun is from that! It is impossible for the sun to overdo itself and stop shining in the middle of the day, so that night falls. As far as it is from anyone falling asleep during the day – it is easy, it just needs to be a little hot and one thinks that one has to sleep with the heat – so far away from freedom are natural necessity and natural law, so far away from the spirit is nature. But so far is the understanding that humanity has today, that the present time has, from the understanding that it will have to acquire through spiritual science.

We must always bear in mind that it is not only a serious but also a great task to find our way into the aspirations that spiritual science wants to bring to human culture. And there are many things that have not yet been overcome that will have to be overcome if spiritual science and its results are to be incorporated into the spiritual development of humanity.

Today, I would like to draw attention to two things – we will see more tomorrow – that must be acquired by anyone who wants to enter the field of spiritual science and make it fruitful for the spiritual life of the future: the first is a certain shyness, a certain reverence for the truth. One need only open one's eyes to see that, especially today, everything that happens in the world seems to be a revolt against this awe, against reverence for the truth. Those who have reverence for the truth will wait a long time before making an assertion about something or passing judgment on it. Today there is a tendency to do the opposite, to feel as little respect as possible for the truth, but rather to shape the truth to suit one's own convenience, to suit one's own feelings and perceptions. The ability to wait until the truth reveals itself as the chaste divinity of the human soul is a feeling that can be said to It is truly necessary for today's humanity to acquire it. But external culture resists this acquisition; it is a culture in which it is important to fabricate messages and to communicate all facts as quickly as possible, as today's journalism does. The opposite mood is present to that which our spiritual science must produce in us. The way in which the world is presented today through the press and the media is the opposite of what must be striven for by spiritual science, by those who mean well by humanity. This must be admitted by those who want to belong to the spiritual science movement. The first is reverence for the truth.

The second is reverence for knowledge. It must weigh heavily on the soul of those who recognize the impulses of the times and strive to introduce new impulses into the development of humanity that people do not take reverence for knowledge seriously enough. It is sad that people everywhere show that they do not have reverence for knowledge.

Particularly in our time, in view of the terrible events of the present, we do indeed see that people - most of all those who write and have it printed, but unfortunately the others do it too - judge as if the world were really created, say, in June or July 1914.

Strangely enough, when the events of the present are being discussed, one repeatedly hears the beginning of the story “In 1914” being repeated, and there the events are jumbled up and mixed up, and people believe that something can come of it. Nothing can come of it. One cannot understand why things are as they are in the present if one does not have the reverence for knowledge that leads to the times of the distant past and sees that the events of the present are the consequences of these distant pasts and are deeply connected with them.

The heart bleeds for those who are serious about the development of humanity when they see how thoughtlessly people judge the way cause and being are connected here or there. And these judgments are made by people whose judgments show that they basically do not know what is important.

Now one could object: You cannot demand that everyone should be able to judge. - Yes, certainly not. But what one can demand is reverence for knowledge, an awareness that one must first know something before judging.

This is something one would like to wish for people above all today: that they should not judge before knowing. It is one of the most terrible evils of the present day that people judge without knowing. It is what makes the products of contemporary culture so terrible, because you can see everywhere that they breathe exactly the opposite of what reverence for real knowledge is, what reverence for truth is.

Reverence for truth, reverence for knowledge, that is what we should acquire. I say: reverence for knowledge. I do not, of course, say reverence for scientific authority – so as not to distort things – but reverence for knowledge, especially for one's own knowledge. You have to acquire that first; then you can also have reverence for your own knowledge. As long as you do not possess it, you cannot, of course, have reverence for what does not exist. Then you also lack the necessary reverence in life.

But above all, it is important that we penetrate into our souls, that we experience new feelings and emotions, and that we do not try to make progress in the same way, now on the paths, on the paths of spiritual science, as has been attempted in material culture. Our serious task here must be to acquire the ability to distinguish.

Our end-of-year festival will begin with Frau Dr. Steiner giving us a recitation of the beautiful Norwegian legend of Olaf Åsteson, of whom we are told that at the approach to Christmas he fell into a kind of sleep which lasted for thirteen days; the thirteen holy days that we have explored in various ways. In the course of this sleep he had significant experiences, that he was able to narrate when he awoke.

During these past days we have examined various things that make us aware that the spiritual-scientific outlook gives us a new approach to an understanding of gems of wisdom which, in past times, people realised belonged to spiritual worlds. Time and again we shall encounter this prehistoric knowledge of the spiritual worlds in one instance or another, and we shall continually be reminded that what was known in former ages, was due to the fact that the human being was so organised at that time that he had the kind of relationship with the whole of the cosmos and its happenings that we would now call being immersed with his human microcosm in the laws or the activities of the macrocosm, and that in this process of immersion in the macrocosm he was able to experience things that deeply concern the life of his soul, but which are hidden from him as long as he lives as microcosm on the physical plane and is equipped only with a knowledge given him by his senses and an intellect bound to the senses.

We know that only a materialistic outlook can believe that man is the only being in the world order equipped with thinking, feeling and willing, whereas a spiritual point of view must acknowledge that just as there are beings below the human level, there are also beings above the human stage of thinking, feeling and willing. The human being can live his way into these beings when, as microcosm, he immerses himself in the macrocosm. However, in this case we should have to speak of the macrocosm not only as a macrocosm of space, but as if the course of time were of significance in cosmic life. Just as in order to kindle the light of the spirit within him when he wants to descend into the depths of his own soul, man has to shut himself off from all the impressions his environment can make on his senses and has, as it were, to create darkness round him by closing off his sense perception, likewise the spirit we can call the spirit of the earth has to be shut off from the impressions of the rest of the cosmos. The outer cosmos has to have least effect on the earth spirit if the earth spirit is to be able to concentrate its forces within. For then the secrets will be discovered that man has to discover in conjunction with the earth spirit, because the earth has been separated as earth from the cosmos.

The time when the outer macrocosm exercises the greatest effect on the earth is the time of the summer solstice, midsummer. And many accounts of olden times connected with festive presentations and rituals remind us that festivals like these take place at the height of summer; that in the midst of summer, the soul, in letting go the ego and merging with the life of the macrocosm, surrenders in a state of intoxication to the impressions from the macrocosm.

On the other hand, the legendary or other kind of presentations of that which could be experienced in olden times remind us that when impressions from the macrocosm have least effect on the earth, the earth spirit, concentrated within itself, experiences within the eternal All, the secrets of the earth's life of soul, and that if man enters into this experience at the point of time when the macrocosm sends least light and warmth to the earth, he learns the most holy secrets. This is why the days around Christmas were always kept so sacred, because whilst man's organism was still capable of sharing in the experience of the earth, man could meet the spirit of the earth during the point of time when it was most concentrated.

Olaf Åsteson, Olaf the son of earth, experiences various secrets of the cosmic All whilst he is transported into the macrocosm during the thirteen shortest days. And the nordic legend which has recently been extricated from old accounts, tells of these experiences Olaf Åsteson had between Christmas and New Year up till the 6th January. We often have reason to remember this former manner in which the microcosm took part in the macrocosm, and we can then take these things further. First of all, however, let us hear the legend of Olaf Åsteson, the earth son, who during the time in which we are now, experienced the secrets of cosmic existence in his meeting with the earth spirit. Let us listen to these experiences.

The Dream Song

I

Come listen to my song!
The song of a nimble youth.

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

II

He laid him down on Christmas Eve
And soon lay deeply sleeping.
Nor could he awaken
Until the people went to church
Upon the thirteenth day.

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

He laid him down on Christmas Eve
And he slept long indeed!
He could not awaken
Until the bird was on the wing
Upon the thirteenth day.

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

Olaf could not awaken
Until the sun shone o'er the peaks
Upon the thirteenth day.
Then saddled he his nimble horse
And rode in haste to the church.

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

The priest was at the altar
Reading holy mass
When Olaf alighted at the gate
To tell the many dreams
That had passed through his soul
When he did sleep so long.

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

Then old and young they all gave heed,
To Olaf's words they harkened
That told them of his dreams

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

III

‘I laid me down on Christmas Eve
And soon lay deeply sleeping.
Nor could I awaken
Before the people went to church
Upon the thirteenth day.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I was borne up into the clouds
Thrown down to the ocean's depths,
And whosoever will follow after
Good cheer he will not find.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I was borne up into the clouds
Then hurled into murky swamps,
And I saw the horrors of hell
And also heaven's light.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I had to go through deep, dark clefts
Where heaven's rivers rushed and roared.
The power to see them was not mine
Yet I could hear their roaring.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

My coal-black horse he did not neigh,
Nor did my good hounds bark,
The bird of morning did not sing
For a wonder lay on all.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I had to travel in spiritland
Through stretch on stretch of thorny heath,
My scarlet mantle was torn to shreds
The nails of my feet likewise.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

Then I came to the Gjallar Bridge
Suspended in the windblown heights,
Studded it is with rich red gold
And the nails thereon have sharp points.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

The spirit snake he struck at me
The spirit hound bit me,
And lo! the bull did bar the way.
These are the three beasts of the bridge,
Most wicked are they all.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

The hound he is a snappish beast
The serpent waits to strike,
The bull is ready to attack!
And no one may pass o'er the bridge
Who will not honour truth!

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I passed o'er the Gjallar Bridge
On dizzy heights and narrow.
I who had waded in the swamps . . . .
Behind me now they lie!

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I had waded in the swamps
There seemed no foothold I could find
As I passed o'er the Gjallar Bridge
Earth did I feel within my mouth
As the dead who lie in their graves.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

To the waters then I came,
’Twas where the icy masses gleamed
Like unto flames of blue. . . .
And God did guide me in my steps
That I did not come close.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

So I went on the wintry way
And saw on my right hand:
Like unto paradise it was,
Light shining far and wide.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

God's Holy Mother then I saw
Amidst most wondrous glory!
‘Now take thy way to Brooksvalin,
the place where souls are judged!’

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

IV

In other worlds I tarried then
Through many nights and long;
And God alone can know
The suffering I saw there—

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

I could see a young man
Who in life had killed a child.
Now he must carry him always
And stand in mud to his knee

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

Also I saw an old man
Wearing a cloak of lead;
Thus was he punished,
The miser on earth,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

And men appeared before me
Wearing apparel of fire;
So does their dishonesty
Weigh on their poor souls

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

Children I also saw,
Glowing coals beneath their feet,
In life they did their parents ill,
Now must their spirits feel it

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

And to a house I had to go
Where witches toiled in blood;
This was the blood of those
Who had enraged them whilst on earth,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

Now there came riding from the North
Wild hordes of evil spooks,
Led by the Prince of Hell,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

This horde riding from the North
Was the wickedest ever seen;
And the Prince of Hell rode out in front,
And he rode on his coal-black steed

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

Yet now came a host from the South
Bringing holy calm,
And at their head rode Saint Michael
At the side of Jesu Christ

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

The souls weighed down by sin
Had to tremble in anguish and fear!
Their tears ran down in streams
To hear of their wicked deeds

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

Michael stood in majesty
And weighed the souls of men
Upon his heavenly scales,
And near him, judging, stood
The Lord of Judgment, Jesu Christ

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

V

Blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives shoes unto the poor;
He does not need, with naked feet,
To walk on the heath of thorn.

Thus speaks the Balance,
And World truth
Sounds forth in spirit heights.

Blessed is he who in earthly life
Unto the poor gave bread!
For nothing of harm can come to him
From the hounds of spiritland.

Thus speaks the Balance,
And World truth
Sounds forth in spirit heights.

Blessed is he who in earthly life
Gave corn unto the poor!
The horns of the bull are no threat to him
When he crosses the Gjallar Bridge.

Thus speaks the Balance,
And World truth
Sounds forth in spirit heights.

Blessed is he who in earthly life
Unto the poor gives clothes!
He need not fear the freezing wastes
Of ice in Brooksvalin.

Thus speaks the Balance,
And World truth
Sounds forth in spirit heights.

VI

And young and old they all gave heed,
To Olaf's words they harkened
That told them of his dreams.
You have slept long indeed. . . .
Awaken now, O Olaf Åsteson!

My dear friends, we have just heard how Olaf Åsteson fell into a sleep that was to reveal to him the secrets of worlds that are hidden from the world of the senses and ordinary life on the physical plane. This legend brings us tidings of ancient knowledge and insight into the spiritual worlds, which we shall regain once more through what We call the spiritual-scientific world outlook.

You have often heard the words that are included in all proclamations concerning the human soul's entry into the spiritual world, namely, that man beholds the spiritual world only when he experiences the gates of death and then enters into the elements. This means that the elements of earth existence do not surround him in the way they do in ordinary life on the physical plane, in the form of earth, water, air and fire, but that he is lifted above this sensory exterior of the elements and enters into what these elements really are when you know their true nature, where beings exist that have a relationship with man's soul experience.

We could feel that Olaf Asteson experienced something of this descent into the elements when we come to the part where Olaf reaches the Gjallar Bridge and crosses over it on to the paths of the spiritual world that all led far away. What a vivid description we are given of his experience as he descends into the element of earth. It is described in such detail that he tells us he himself feels earth in his mouth like the dead who lie in their graves. And then there is a clear indication of his going through the element of water, and of all that can be experienced in the watery element when one also experiences its moral quality. Then he also indicates how man meets with the elements of fire and of air.

All this is described in a wonderfully graphic way and centred in the experience of the human soul meeting the secrets of the spiritual world. The legend was found at a later date; it was collected at the place where it lived orally among the people. Parts of the legend in their present form are no longer the same as in the original. No doubt the graphic description of the experiences in the earth realm originally came first and then the experiences in the realm of water. And the experiences in the realms of air and of fire were no doubt far more differentiated than they are in the feeble after-echo that we have today, and which was found centuries later.

The conclusion was undoubtedly also much more impressive and less sentimental, for in its present form it does not in the least remind us of the sublime language of olden times, nor of the capacity to raise one on to a superhuman plane that used to exist in folk legends. The present conclusion merely moves on on a human level, and the reason why it is moving is purely because of its connection with such deep secrets of the macrocosm and of human experience.

If we rightly understand the season of the year in which we now are, we have a strong urge to remember the fact that humanity used to possess a knowledge—even if it was less defined and clear-cut—that has been lost and which has to be regained. And the question can arise in us, that as we surely recognise today that that particular kind of knowledge has to return if mankind is to be made whole, then should we not consider it one of our most urgent tasks to do everything we can to bring knowledge like that into the culture of the present?

Many things will have to happen in order for this change to come about in the right way, in what I would like to call the feeling content of man's world conception. One thing will be particularly necessary—I say one, for it is one among many, but you can only take one at a time—it will be essential for human souls to acquire on the basis of our spiritual-scientific world conceptual stream, reverence and devotion for what was known in ancient times in the old manner about the deep secrets of existence. People must arrive at the feeling that during the materialistic age they have neglected the development of this reverence and devotion.

We must get the feeling of how dried-out and empty this materialistic age is, and how proud of our intellectual knowledge mankind was in the first centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, in face of the revelations of ancient religion and knowledge handed down from former times, which, when approached with the necessary reverence, truly give us the feeling that they contain the most profound wisdom. Fundamentally speaking we have no reverence for the Bible nowadays, either! Disregarding the kind of atrocious modern research that tears the whole Bible to shreds, we have merely to look at the dry and empty way we approach the Bible today armed, as it were, only with the knowledge of the senses and ordinary intellectual powers, and at the way we can no longer muster a feeling for the tremendous greatness of human perception that comes to meet us in some of its passages. I would like to refer to a passage from the second Book of Moses, chapter 33, verse 18:

And Moses said to God, ‘I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.’

And the Lord said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy.’

But then the Lord said, ‘Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.’

And the Lord said, ‘Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock:

And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I shall put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:

And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.’

If you gather together various things we have taken up in our hearts and souls during the years we have been working with spiritual science and then approach this passage, you can have the feeling that infinite wisdom is speaking to us there and how, in the materialistic age, human ears are so deaf that they hear nothing of the infinitely deep wisdom that comes to us from this passage. I would like to take this opportunity to refer you to a booklet that has been published under the title Worte Mosis by Bruns Publishing Co. in Minden, Westphalia, because certain things out of the five Books of Moses have been translated better in this booklet than in other editions. Dr. Hugo Bergmann, the publisher of Worte Mosis, has taken a lot of trouble over the interpretation.

The fact that man, if he wants to penetrate to the spiritual world, has to acquire a totally different relation to the world than that which he has to the sense world, has often been stressed. Man has the sense world all about him. He looks at the sense world and sees it in its colours and forms and hears its sounds. The sense world is there, and we are in the midst of it, feeling its influence, perceiving it and thinking about it. That is how we relate to the sense world. We are passive and the sense world, as it were, works its way into our souls. We think about the sense world and make mental images of it.

Our relationship is quite different when we penetrate into the spiritual world. One of the difficulties consists in getting the right idea of what a person experiences when he enters the spiritual world. I have attempted to characterise some of these difficulties in my booklet Die Schwelle der geistigen Welt (‘The Threshold of the Spiritual World’). We make mental images of the sense world and we think about it. If we go through all a person has to go through if he wants to follow the path of initiation, something occurs that can be described like this: We ourselves relate to the beings of the higher hierarchies in the same way as the things around us relate to us; they make a mental image of us, they think us. We think the objects around us, the minerals, plants and animals; they become our thoughts, whereas we are the conceptions, thoughts and perceptions of the spirits of the higher hierarchies. We become the thoughts of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on. They take us in, in the same way as we take in the plants, animals and human beings. And we must feel their sheltering protection when we say, ‘The beings of the higher hierarchies think us, they make mental images of us. These beings of the higher hierarchies take hold of us with their souls’. In fact we can actually picture that when Olaf Asteson fell asleep he became a mental image of the spirits of the higher hierarchies, and in the course of his sleep these beings of the higher hierarchies experienced what the beings of the earth spirit were experiencing (these are, of course, a plurality for us). And when Olaf Asteson sinks back into the physical world he remembers what the spirits of the higher hierarchies experienced in him.

Let us imagine for a moment that we are setting out on the path of initiation. How can we relate to the spiritual world, which is a host of spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, into which we wish to enter? How can we relate to them? We can appeal to them and say ‘How can we enter into you, how do you reveal yourselves to us?’ And then, when we have acquired an understanding of the different kind of relationship the human soul has to the higher worlds, there will sound forth to us, as it were from the spiritual worlds, ‘You cannot perceive the spiritual world the same way as you perceive the sense world, the way the sense world appears before you and impinges on your senses. We must think you, and you must feel yourself in us. You must feel the kind of experience in you which a thought you think in the sense world would have if it could experience itself within you. You must surrender yourself to the spiritual world, then the beings of the higher hierarchies who can reveal themselves to you will enter into you. This will stream into your soul and live within it, bringing grace, in the same way as you live in your thoughts when you think about the sense world. If the spiritual world wishes to favour you and have compassion on you, it will fill you with its love!’

But you must not imagine that you can approach spiritual beings in the same way as you approach the sense world. Just as Moses had to creep into the cave, you must go into the cave of the spiritual world. You have to put yourself there. Like a thought lives in you, you must be taken up into the life of the spiritual beings. You yourself must live as a universal thought in the macrocosm. To have experiences there of your own accord is not possible during earthly life between birth and death, but only after you have passed through death. No one can experience the spiritual world in this way before he has died, yet the spiritual world can come close to you, bless you and fill you with its love. And if after, or whilst you are within the spiritual world, you develop your earthly consciousness, the spiritual world will shine into this consciousness.

Just as when an object is outside us we confront it, and when it enters our consciousness it is inside us, the soul of man is within the cave of the spiritual world. The spiritual world passes through him. Here, man confronts things. When man enters the spiritual world the beings of the higher hierarchies are behind him. There, he cannot see their face, just as a thought cannot see our face when it is within us. Our face is in front and the thoughts are behind, so they cannot see our face. The whole secret of initiation is concealed in the words Jehovah speaks to Moses.

And Moses said to God, ‘I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.’

And the Lord said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy.’

But then the Lord said, ‘Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me, and live.’—Initiation does indeed bring you to the Gate of Death.

And the Lord said, ‘Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock:

And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I shall put thee in a cleft of rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:

And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.’

It is the opposite of the way we perceive the sense world. You must muster a lot of the spiritual-scientific effort you have developed over the years, in order to encounter a revelation like this with the right kind of reverence and devotion. Then human souls will gradually acquire more and more of this feeling of reverence towards these revelations; and this reverence, this devotion, is among the many things we need in order that the change we have been speaking of can come about in mankind's spiritual culture.

The time when the macrocosm sends down least influence to the earth, the days from Christmas over New Year until roughly the 6th of January, can be a suitable time not only for remembering the facts of spiritual knowledge, but also for remembering the feelings we have to develop as we take up spiritual science. We are really and truly taken up again into the life of the spirit of the earth, together with whom we form a whole, and in which ancient clairvoyant knowledge lived, as this legend of Olaf Åsteson shows us. Humanity in the materialistic age has in many ways lost this reverence and devotion for spiritual life. It is most essential to see to it that this reverence and devotion come back, for without them we shall not develop the mood to approach spiritual science in the right way. Unfortunately the mood with which spiritual science is spproached to start with is still the same mood we have for ordinary science. A thorough change will have to come about in this respect.

Having lost the understanding for the spiritual world, mankind has also lost the proper relation to the being of man, to humanity. The materialistic world conception produces chaotic feelings about universal existence. These chaotic feelings about the world and humanity were bound to come in the age of materialism. Think of a time—and this is our time, the first centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch—when people no longer had any real awareness that the being of man is threefold: a bodily nature, soul and spirit. For it really is like that. The threefold nature of man, which, to us, is one of the basic elements of spiritual science, was something that people did not have the slightest notion of from the first four centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch right into our time. Man was just man, and any talk of membering his being in the way we do into body, soul and spirit was considered complete nonsense.

You might imagine that these things are valuable only in the sphere of knowledge, but that is not so. They are important not only as knowledge, but for the whole manner in which man faces life. In the fourth century of modern times, or, as we say in our language, during the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period, three great words came to the fore in which people saw, or at least endeavoured to see, the essence of human striving on earth. Important though these words are, what made them significant was the fact that they appeared at a time when mankind knew nothing of the threefold nature of man. Everyone heard of liberty, equality and fraternity.

It was a profound necessity that these words were heard at a certain time in modern civilisation. People will only really understand these words when the threefold membering of the human being is understood, because until then they will not realise the significance these words can have with regard to man's real being. Whilst these words are being approached with the sort of chaotic feelings that are engendered by the thought that man is man, and the threefold membering of man is nonsense, human beings will find no guidance in these three words. For the three words, as they stand, cannot be directly applied to one and the same level of human experience. They cannot be. Simple considerations which do not perhaps occur to you because they seem too simple for such weighty matters, can go to show that if they are taken on the same level, what these three words mean can come into serious conflict.

Let us start by looking at the realm where we find fraternity in its most natural form. Take human blood relationship, the family, where there is no need to instil brotherly love because it is inborn, and just think how it warms the heart to see real genuine brotherhood among a family, to see everyone united in a brotherly way. And yet—without losing any of the wonderful feeling we can have about this brotherly love—let us have a look at what can happen to a family fraternity just because of this brotherliness. Brotherliness is justified within a family, yet a member of a family can be made unhappy by it, and can long to get away from it because he feels he cannot develop his own soul within the family fraternity and must leave it in order to develop in freedom. So we see that freedom, the unfolding in freedom of the life of the soul, can come into conflict with even the best-meant brotherliness.

Obviously a superficial person could maintain that it is not proper brotherliness if it does not agree with a person's freedom. But people can say anything they like. No doubt they can say that everything agrees with everything else. I recently saw a thesis in which one of the articles that had to be proved was that a triangle is a quadrangle. You can of course plead for a thing like that, you can even prove exactly that a triangle is a quadrangle! And you can also fully prove that fraternity and freedom are compatible. But that is not the point. The point is that for the sake of freedom many a realm of brotherliness has to be—and in fact is—forsaken. We could give further examples of this.

If we wanted to count up the discrepancies between fraternity and equality it would take us a long time. Obviously we can say in abstracto that everyone can be equal, and can show that fraternity and equality are compatible. But if we take life seriously it is not a question of abstractions but of looking at reality. The moment we realise that the human being has a bodily nature that lives on the physical plane, a soul nature that actually lives in the soul world, and a spiritual nature that lives in the spiritual world, we have the right perspective for the connection between these profound words. Brotherliness is the most important ideal for the physical world, freedom is for the soul world, and insofar as man enters into the realm of the soul we ought to speak of the freedom of the soul, that is, of the kind of social conditions that fully guarantee the soul its freedom. If we bear in mind that in order to develop the spirit and enter spirit land we, that is, each one of us, has to strive for spirit knowledge from our own point of view, we shall soon see where we would get with our spiritual conceptions if each one of us only went his own way and we all filled ourselves with a different content.

As human beings we can only find one another in life if we seek the spirit, each one for himself, yet can arrive at the same spiritual content. We can speak of the equality of spiritual life. We can speak of fraternity on the physical plane and with regard to everything that has to do with the laws of the physical plane and which affects the human soul from the physical plane; liberty with regard to all that comes to expression in the soul in the way of laws of the soul world; equality with regard to everything that comes to expression in the soul in the way of laws of the spirit land.

So you see, a Cosmic New Year must come about, where there will be a sun that will increase in power to give warmth and to radiate light: a sun that must bring light-filled warmth to many a thing that lived on during the age of darkness, yet was not understood. It is characteristic of our time that many a thing is striven for and expressed in words, yet is not understood.

This, too, can bring us to feel reverence and devotion for the spiritual world. For if we ponder on the fact that many people strove for fraternity, liberty and equality in the fourth century of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and uttered these words without understanding them properly, it is possible for us to see an answer to the question, ‘Where did these words come from?’ The divine-spiritual universal order implanted them into the human soul at a time when we did not understand them, in order that key words of this kind might lead us on to true universal understanding. We can notice the wise guidance in world evolution even in things like this. We can observe this guidance everywhere, whether in past ages or in more recent times, observing that often we do not notice until afterwards that something we did previously was actually wiser than the wisdom we had at our command at the time. I drew attention to this at the very beginning of my book, The Spiritual Guidance of Man.

However, if you look, for instance, at the fact that in world evolution, in the evolution of man, a part is played by directional words that can only gradually be understood, you might be reminded of an image we can use when we want to characterise this period of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch that is drawing to a close. In many respects it can really be compared with the season of Advent where the periods of daylight grow shorter and shorter. And now in our time, when we can begin to have knowledge of revelations of the spiritual worlds again, evolution is entering the phase that we can picture as the days growing longer and longer, and we can speak of this season really being comparable to the thirteen days and to the time of increasing daylight.

But it goes deeper than this. It would be absolutely wrong if we were only to find bad things to say of the materialistic age of the past four centuries. Modern times were ushered in by the great discoveries and inventions that are called ‘great’ in the materialistic age, sailing round the world, for instance, discovering lands that were not previously known and starting to colonise the earth. That was the beginning of materialistic civilisation. And then the time gradually came when people were almost stifled by materialistic civilisation. The time arrived when all our spiritual forces were applied to understanding and grasping material life. Insights, understanding and visions of the spiritual world existing in ancient knowledge were forgotten more and more, as we have seen.

Yet it is wrong to have nothing but bad things to say about this age. It would be far better to put it this way: ‘The human soul has been thinking materialistically and founding a materialistic science and culture in the part of it that is awake, but this human soul is a totality.’ If I wanted to put it schematically I could say that one part of the human soul founded materialistic civilisation. This part was inactive before that, and people knew nothing about external science and outer material life; at that time the spiritual part was more awake. (He did a drawing.) During the past four centuries the part of the soul was awake that founded materialistic civilisation, and the other part was asleep. And, in truth, during the age of materialistic culture, the seeds were being sown in the sleeping parts of the soul for the forces we can now develop in humanity to bring us to spirituality again. During these centuries mankind was really an Olaf Asteson as far as spiritual knowledge was concerned. That really was so. And humanity has not yet woken up! Spiritual science must awaken it. A time must come when both old and young must hear the words that are being spoken by the part of the human soul that was asleep in the age of darkness.

The human soul has slept long indeed, but world spirits will approach and call to it, ‘Awaken now, O Olaf Asteson!’—Only we have to prepare ourselves in the right way, so that it does not happen that we are faced with the call, ‘Awaken now, O Olaf Åsteson!’ and have not the ears to hear it. That is why we are engaged in spiritual science, so that we shall have the ears to hear, when the call to be spiritually awake sounds in human evolution.

It is a good thing if man remembers sometimes that he is a microcosm and that he can be receptive to certain experiences if he opens himself to the macrocosm. As we have seen, the present season is a good one. Let us try to make this New Year's Eve a symbol for the New Year's Eve that has to come to mankind in earth evolution, a New Year's Eve that will herald a new era bringing ever more light, soul light, vision, knowledge of what lives in the spirit and which can stream and flow into the human soul from out of the spirit. If we can bring the microcosm of our experience on this New Year's Eve into connection with the macrocosm of human experience over the whole earth, we shall then have the kind of feelings we ought to experience, sensing as we do the dawning of the great new Cosmic Day of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, at whose beginning we stand, and the midnight of which we want to understand worthily.

The Dream Song: Draumkvaedet, see collection Norske Folkeviser, edited by Thorwald Lammers, Kristiania 1910, by Aschehoug & Co.

Rudolf Steiner spoke about the Norwegian Dream Song of Olaf Asteson on 1st January 1912, 7th January 1913 and 31st December 1914, and his talks were always accompanied by Marie Steiner-von Sivers reciting the Dream Song. These three lectures or addresses were put together as a volume and published in 1958 as an enlarged new edition of the lecture ‘Cosmic New Year’. Ingeborg Möller-Lindholm, the Norwegian poetess (1878–1964), drew Rudolf Steiner's attention to the old legend, and it is largely due to her initiative that this extraordinary folk epic has acquired such an important place in the anthroposophical movement. Through her help we are in a position to include in this edition the notes she made of her conversation with Rudolf Steiner. We have also included in the references, several points from a lecture Ingeborg Möller-Lindholm gave on the Dream Song of Olaf Asteson, which she kindly put at our disposal in translation, and which we have attributed accordingly.

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Notes on the Dream Song by IngeborgMöller-Lindholm of Lillehammer

In June 1910 Dr Steiner held a cycle of lectures in Oslo entitled The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in Relation to Teutonic Mythology. As I lived in Oslo and had a large room at my disposal, I invited to tea about forty anthroposophical friends who had come to Oslo for this occasion. Dr Steiner and Frau Marie Steiner had also agreed to come. I asked Dr Steiner the previous day whether he could tell us something about the unusual Norwegian folk epic, ‘The Dream Song of Olaf Åsteson’. Rudolf Steiner smiled amiably and said he would first have to have read or heard it. I saw the point of this. Then he himself made the suggestion that he should arrive the next day an hour before the other guests, so that I could read the song to him and make a rough translation. And that is what happened.

While I read it to him, Dr Steiner sat with his eyes closed and listened intently. He was obviously deeply affected by the unusual content of the song. After tea the Dream Song was read out in Norwegian by a member of the Society, whereupon Dr Steiner gave a short but moving lecture on the song. In particular he dwelt on the fact that these events took place during the time of the twelve holy nights when extraterrestrial influences are at their strongest. He also gave special mention to the name of Olaf Asteson. Olaf or Olcifr means the ‘one left behind’ after his predecessors have gone. He is the one who passes on the blood of the father of the generations. Ast means love; so he is ‘the Son of Love’.

Dr Steiner asked me to translate the song into German. He himself did not know Norwegian, let alone the old dialect in which the Dream Song had been written down, and which was difficult even for modern Norwegians. To begin with I made the excuse that I did not have a sufficient command of the German language to convey the wonderful musical rhythm. Dr Steiner said that did not matter, I should just translate the song literally word for word, so that he could get an exact picture of the content. I did this in the course of the autumn and sent him the translation, which was very prosaic and in many respects extremely inadequate. Later on Rudolf Steiner put the song into its own characteristic rhythms and gave several lectures on it. It was also used for eurythmic presentation, especially at Christmas time.

Dr Steiner told me in 1913 that I should not think that Olaf the Saint was the original Olaf Åsteson. (St. Olaf, a Norwegian king, died in 1035 at the battle of Stiklestad, championing the cause of Christendom.) There had been several people with the name of ‘Olaf Åsteson’, said Dr Steiner. It was a kind of mystery title.

Dr Steiner was in Norway again after the First World War, in 1921 and 1923. On these occasions he stayed with engineer Ingero. Mrs Ragnhild Ingero, who died a few years ago, told me that Dr Steiner had talked to her about the Dream Song. He had meanwhile gone into it further and discovered new things. One of these was that the song was much older than people believed. It originated about 400 AD. At that time there was a great Christian initiate in this country. He founded a mystery school in Southern Norway; the place was not mentioned. His mystery name was Olaf Asteson, and the song describes his initiation. Originally, so Dr Steiner says, the song was much longer and had twelve sections, one for each sign of the zodiac. The song describes Olaf Asteson's journey through the whole zodiac and what he saw and experienced there. Today we only have fragments of the original song. The aforesaid mystery school continued into the early Middle Ages. The leader was always called Olaf Åsteson

Dr Steiner said that in course of time he would publish these facts and other important things connected with the song. However he did not want to do this until he had found certain external proofs of his findings. He thought he would be able to find these . But the burning of the Goetheanum, excessive work and finally illness and death prevented this intention being realised. Now these indications are all we have.

I have given much thought to these findings of Dr Steiner's and have come to the conclusion that this mystery school was possibly in Skiringssal. This place is or rather was in Vestfold, a region in south-western Norway. In old legends it has always been described as a holy place. Vikings who died on foreign soil wished to be buried in Skiringssal. There was also a kaupang there (market). Archaeologists are excavating things at present which they assume to be remains of this market. Up to now, though, nobody has been able to prove conclusively where Skiringssal is. At the time of the mystery school it lay on the coast; however loam deposits have now ‘pushed’ the place further inland. Skiringssal means ‘The Hall of Purification’. Skim means baptism or purification (old Norwegian)

Where did the first Olaf Asteson come from? It has been historically proved that Irish-Scottish monks were in this country long before Christianity was officially introduced. According to legend, Joseph of Arimathea came to the British Isles as early as the first century AD, and began his missionary work there. There have been mystery centres in Ireland since very early times. The tribes on the neighbouring islands were heathen. The Irish-Scottish Church, also called the Culdee Church, arose as a result of the confluence of the work of the Christian missionaries and ancient Druid wisdom. It flourished in many places as early as 300 to 400 AD. There were churches, schools and monasteries, despite the fact that these were always under attack from powerful heathen tribes of the neighbourhood. Many priests and monks died a martyr's death. This Culdee Church was based in particular on the Gospel of St. John and the preaching of the apostle John. It was like the first communities of Christians and contrasted strongly with the Petrine or Roman Catholic Church. But the latter was victorious. The Culdee Church was destroyed and dissolved in the year 664 AD. It sent a lot of missionaries to various European countries both before and after being externally destroyed. This Church was definitely of an esoteric nature. Many things suggest that the first Olaf Asteson was a representative of this spiritual stream.

‘Among these Norwegian people, who still possess many things in their popular tongue that approach very closely the threshold of occult secrets, possibilities existed for souls to remain connected longer with everything living and working behind outer material phenomena,’ said Rudolf Steiner in his lecture on Olaf Asteson in Berlin on 7th January 1913, in Der Zusammenhang des Menschen mit der elementarischen Welt (Man's Connection with the Elemental World), GA 158, 1970.

An esoteric who meditates and is approached by things from outside could ask: Would this have happened to me if I hadn't become an esoteric? An esoteric should make it his duty to observe life and himself very intimately. The fact that he has set out on this path should stand at the center of his life, for him, for he is a small center of spiritual life, and this radiates out into his environment—more of less unconsciously for him—and brings about the things that approach him. Through his higher development, a pupil leaves his lower self that connects him with the outer world alone—at least for a short time. During meditation he leaves it to itself and qualities that we thought we had overcome already crawl out from all corners of our nature and can make us worse if we don't keep ourselves under firm control. Certain exercises have been given us to support us here, in addition to our meditations.

As you know, everything runs cyclically, and this is also true of development. If we begin an esoteric training now, then after seven years all kinds of qualities that were slumbering in us can emerge strongly and set one back. But this can't happen if a man pays enough attention to himself, his life and his surroundings.

Anyone who has a hidden opposition to his teacher will find that this feeling soon breaks through and adversely influences the effect of meditation. In an esoteric's daily meditations he should keep it in mind that he's mainly trying to get through to his higher self, and he should reflect on what this higher self is. He shouldn't think that he's supposed to bring something to this higher self—he should have an expectant attitude towards him and expect everything from him. Usually there are three ways in which it approaches a pupil on his path. The first way is a rather flitting one and it requires the attentiveness that an esoteric should have for all things. Namely, this is in a dream, and what happens there is what one calls a doubling of the I. For instance, one has a problem or wants to do something. Then someone appears to one in a dream who tells one what to do or who solves the problem, one who is better and cleverer than oneself. One should pay attention to such dreams. Then in the course of development it may happen in helpless moments or at times when one has made a decision that one hears a quiet voice that, for instance, advises one not to do what one has decided on. It's often a decision that one has made with the best knowledge and conscience, and if one follows the voice that nevertheless advises against it, it may seem as if one has done the wrong thing, but in by far the most cases, one will immediately notice that one did the right thing in following the voice. Now, if one practices paying attention to this, one will notice that one has something in one that's higher than one's own reason, that's cleverer than one is oneself. And the third time that one confronts one's higher self is a very important and sacred one. This is during meditation. One will only unite with him for short moments there. But to attain this, one must silence one's whole lower nature. We must eliminate everything that fills us with antipathy or petty feelings for the world and life. In observing himself, a pupil must always keep the polarity law in mind, that is, if he has a bad quality and wants to get rid of it, he must also look for the opposite quality in himself. It's certainly there. The presence of one quality definitely conditions the existence of the opposite one, whether one believes it or not, and this must be eradicated—then the other one also disappears. For instance, if one feels then there's also the polar hate in one, be it ever so hidden, and one has to drive this out. Then the fear disappears by itself. The higher self will only unite with us if such qualities are eradicated in meditational moments.

This union with the higher self is beautifully depicted in the saga of Lohengrin and Elsa. Lohengrin comes to save Elsa, to unite himself with her. Distrust, a negative quality is sown in her soul, and the higher self, Lohengrin, must withdraw to higher worlds, can't unite with her.

In viewing the soul of man, we find its inner element composed of thinking or forming of mental representations, feeling, and willing. You know that these three soul-activities have been often discussed by me. Nevertheless, I should like to say a few words today about this threefold constitution of the human soul, inasmuch as it is in especial connection with the present cycle.

Life in the waking state is essentially concerned with our mental activity. Of what we are thinking we are fully conscious in the waking state. If you ask yourself: Are we as conscious of the feelings that we experience in the waking state as we are of the mental representations? the answer would have to be in the negative. In a certain sense, feelings are apprehended but dimly and vaguely by waking consciousness. And if you compare the experiences of your world of feelings with those confronting you in the manifold imagery of the dream-world, you will find the same degree of consciousness in the world of feelings that you do in the world of dreams. In the world of feelings, we dream in a different way; yet also in that world it is still only dreaming.

We may be easily misled regarding the character of this world of feeling by translating that which is felt into mental representations. We make a mental image of our feelings. In this way, the feelings are raised into waking consciousness. Yet the feelings, as such, are no more conscious than dreams.

What remains still more unconscious—it might be said, wholly unconscious—are man's will-impulses. Try to visualize what you know of the faculty generally called willing. Suppose that you stretch out your hand in order to grasp something. First, you have a mental image of the fact that you are going to stretch out your hand. This is what you intend to do. But how this intention streams down into your whole organism; how it is imparted to the muscles, the bones, so that your hand be enabled to grasp an object: of all this you know as little as you know, in your ordinary consciousness, of what happens to your ego during sleep. Only after grasping the object, you become aware—again by means of a mental image—of having carried out a movement.

What lies between the mental image forming the intention and the image engendered within you after this intention has been acted upon externally, what happens within your organism between these two stages is hidden by a sleep which takes possession of you even in the waking state. Willing is a matter of sleeping, feeling a matter of dreaming. And only mental activity, thinking, is a matter of real waking.

Here we have, even in the waking state, the threefold human soul: the waking soul that forms mental images; the dreaming soul that feels; and the willing soul that sleeps. Hence man can never know, out of his ordinary consciousness, what goes on in those regions where the will is weaving and living.

If, however, we illuminate by the methods of anthroposophical research the regions where the will is pulsating, we discover the following: The intention of carrying out a will-impulse is primarily a thought, a mental image. At the moment when this intention streams down into the organism, something is produced which might be called a process of inner combustion. Invariably, this combustion is kindled in the organism along the entire path followed by the will-impulse. The combustion of metabolic products existing within you brings forth the movement used by the arm in order to carry out a will-impulse. Hence someone who wills an action undergoes, in a physical sense, a burning-up and consuming of his metabolic products. The metabolic products must be renewed for the reason that they are being constantly burned up, consumed by the will-impulse.

It is different in mental activity. Here a constant depositing of salt-like particles takes place. Earthy, salt-like, ash-like particles are excreted from the organism. Thus, in a physical sense, thinking or mental activity is a depositing of salt. Willing is a combustion. To the spiritual view, human life appears as a continuous depositing of salt from above, and a combustion from below. This combustion has the effect of preventing by the fire within our body—if I may express it in this way—our perceiving, by means of our ordinary consciousness, the real nature of will. This combustion puts us to sleep in regard to our will, or will-impulses.

And what becomes invisible to our ordinary consciousness while we are asleep? If by the methods of spiritual research, we illuminate the organic fire constantly being kindled through the will, we perceive that this fire contains the effects of our moral behavior during previous earth-lives. What lives in this fire may be designated as human destiny, human karma.

It is actually true that a certain fact may assume an entirely different significance if looked at from a correct, spiritual viewpoint instead of an external, sensible-intellectual one.

For instance, a man may become acquainted, in a certain year of his life, with another man. This is generally considered as accidental. And it really seems as if the two persons had been led together by the accidents of life and become acquainted at a chance moment. Things, however, happen otherwise. If we use the methods of spiritual research and look into the whole connection of human life, if we look into everything made invisible by the previously mentioned process of combustion, we then find that an acquaintance made in a man's thirty-fifth year has been longed for and striven for by this man during his entire life according to a definite plan. If we follow someone's life from his thirty-fifth year back into his early childhood, we may uncover and reveal what paths were pursued in order to arrive at the point where the other man was encountered. All this has been carried out in accordance with a plan harbored in the unconscious.

If we look at a human being's destiny in this way, it is remarkable to discover what wiles were occasionally employed by this person in order to arrive at a certain place, in a certain year, and to encounter a certain person. Anyone having real insight into human life cannot help but say that, if someone is undergoing an experience, he himself has sought it, with all the force at his command, during his entire earth-life.

And why do we seek a particular experience? Because this seeking has been poured into our soul out of former lives. These former earth-lives, however, do not show their effect inside our waking thought-consciousness. They show their effect in that state of consciousness constantly lulled to sleep by the process of combustion. Although striving unconsciously, we are nonetheless striving for the attainment of our earthly experiences.

Now, if something of this kind is said, various objections may arise in our thoughts. First of all, the following argument might be raised: If all this be true, then our whole life is determined by destiny; we have no freedom. But do we lose our freedom through the fact that our hair is blond and not black? This, too, is predestined. We are nevertheless free, even if our hair is blond instead of black—although we might possibly prefer black hair; we are nevertheless free, even if we cannot pull down the moon, as we might have longed to do as children. We are nevertheless free, even though we have sought certain experiences since the beginning of our earth-life. For not all of human life is composed of such destined experiences; these experiences are always joined to freely chosen experiences.

And these freely chosen experiences joined to the others are found by spiritual science in a different place.

I have often spoken of the three stages of spiritual knowledge: Imagination, when we first view a world of images; inspiration, when this world of images is penetrated by spiritual reality and essence; intuition, when we stand amid spiritual reality and essence.

If the human being, in the course of his spiritual research, attains imagination and hence sees before him the tableau of his life, something else always becomes visible at the same time. One cannot be attained without the other. We cannot attain imagination, real spiritual knowledge of the life lived by us heretofore on earth, without seeing emerge, in a strange, memory-like manner, the experiences undergone by us during sleep between going to sleep and awaking. I have told you of what these experiences consist.

When attaining imagination on the one hand, we attain, on the other, by means of the inner silence enveloping our soul, an especially profound view of what the human being experiences during sleep. I have already described to you many things experienced by us during the sleeping state. What, however, is mainly set before our inner eye in sleep concerns destiny, as it forms itself anew.

If we illuminate the sleep that encompasses our will even in the waking state, we can see at work the karma resulting from previous earth-lives.

And, if we see in their true light the experiences undergone by us between going to sleep and awaking, we recognize how the karma that will be realized in our next earth-life is being woven out of the free deeds performed by us in the present earth-life.

You might believe that those able to fathom the realm of sleep might be perturbed when saying to themselves: Your own moral conduct during the present earth-life is preparing your karma. Yet this fact is no more perturbing than the knowledge that the sun has risen, climbed to its highest position at noon, sunk in the evening below the horizon, and will repeat the same course on the morrow. The lawfulness rising from the depth of slumber does not perturb us; because through freedom all that has been formed in the sleeping state of the present earth-life can, in the most manifold ways, be brought forth during the next earth-life.

And, when we envisage that which begins to weave itself in sleep, hidden from our ordinary consciousness, as new karma, we can clearly see karma at work in the subconscious states of our will—clearly see karma being spun anew.

We can also see how the past is being interwoven in the human being with the future; we can see how that which is veiled to the waking human being by sleep in the day-time, that is to say, the inner secrets of his will, is being spun together with that which is veiled to him by sleep at night: namely, the inner secrets of his ego and astral body as they have separated themselves from the physical and etheric bodies and are taking part in weaving the future karma.

Consider that the things thought by man in his ordinary waking state are mostly concerned with outer matters. These outer things thought by us remain fixed, by means of our soul-life's ordinary content, in our memory.

All this, however, represents only the surface of our soul-life. Beyond this thought-level lies a soul-life of much greater profoundness. Whatever we experience during the waking state as our thinking, we experience in the etheric body, the formative-force body. All that happens at a deeper level in the astral body and the ego can be experienced only by consciously penetrating the events passed through by the astral body and the ego when they have separated themselves from the physical and etheric bodies and fallen asleep. Then the future karma is being spun.

In the day-time, this future karma is veiled to us by the outward thoughts contained in the etheric body. In the depth of the soul, however, it is being woven together, also during the day, with that which dwells in unconscious, sleeping will as the karma emerging from the past. Hence the karma of the human being can be accurately divulged.

Here we find several interesting facts. The age of the human being's earliest childhood is especially revealing for the observation of karmic connections. The resolutions of children appear to us as utterly arbitrary; and yet they are not at all arbitrary.

It is indeed true that the child's actions imitate what goes on in the child's surroundings. I have indicated in my public lecture how the child, completely at one with his sense-organism, inwardly experiences every gesture, every movement made by the people around him. But he experiences every gesture, every movement, in its moral significance. Hence a child who is confronted with a choleric father experiences the immoral element connected with a choleric temperament. And the child experiences, through the subtlest movements of the people around him, the thoughts that these people harbor. Hence we should never permit ourselves to have impure, immoral thoughts in a child's presence and say: Such thoughts are permissible, because the child knows nothing about them. This is not true. Whenever we think, our nerve-fibers are always vibrating in one way or another. And this vibration is perceived by the child, especially during his earliest years. The child is a subtle observer and imitator of his surroundings.

The strangest and—it might be said—the most interesting fact, in an exalted sense, is the following: The child does not imitate everything, but takes his choice. And this choosing is done in a very complicated manner.

Let us assume that the child has before him a hot-headed, choleric father who does many things that are not right. The child, wholly one with his sense-organism, must absorb all these things. Since his eye cannot protect itself, it must perceive what takes place in the child's surroundings.

What the child absorbs, however, is absorbed only in the waking state. Eventually the child goes to sleep. Children sleep a great deal. And during sleep the child is able to choose: What he wants to absorb is sent out of his soul into his body, his physical organism; what he does not want to absorb is ejected during sleep into the etheric world. Thus the child takes into his bodily organism only those things that have been predestined for him by his destiny, his Karma. The working of destiny is seen with especial vividness in the child's very first years.

A person with a merely intellectual bent often feels that he is tremendously clever and the child tremendously stupid. After acquiring insight into the world, we discard this opinion and begin to realize how stupid we have become since our childhood. Our present cleverness, as opposed to that of childhood, is a conscious one. Yet far, far greater than all the wisdom given to us in later years is the wisdom with which the child, as was previously described, chooses between that which, according to the destiny resulting from former earth-lives, he must incorporate into himself, and that which he may eject into the general etheric world. And what is brought by man from former earth-lives into his present one becomes especially visible during the first years, when the question of freedom does not matter as yet. At the age when the consciousness of freedom arises, we have already brought into the present earth-life most of what had been destined to be garnered from previous earth-lives. And if someone has a certain experience at the age of thirty-five, he has blazed a trail towards this experience since his first childhood years. The first steps of life are the most important and essential for all that is determined by destiny.

I have tried to point out how wise we were as children and how, fundamentally, we become less and less wise as life continues. Our consciousness expands: hence we value conscious rationalism, and do not value the child's unconscious wisdom. Only by acquiring the science of initiation are we taught how to value this wisdom.

I have called attention to these things in the very first chapter of my booklet: Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity [Anthroposophic Press, New York.] Official philosophy has taken me severely to task on this score. It is important, nevertheless, that we are capable of looking at the first years of childhood in the right way.

People, once they have understood these things, will attain a sounder judgment on something that is mentioned today again and again, but not understood in the least: the question of inherited qualities.

In present-day literature and science the tendency is to base everything on qualities that have been inherited from the parents. If we once realize how the child, in a karmic sense, gathers from previous earth-lives whatever his wisdom urges him to select, we shall comprehend the correct relation between that which is determined by destiny and that which represents external inheritance and garb. For this inheritance is nothing but an external garb. That the latter exists will not seem strange to those comprehending in the right way how the human beings connect themselves, at a certain point between death and a new birth, with the sequence of generations. Turning their glance from the Beyond to the earthly realm, they are able to foresee who their parents are going to be. From the Beyond, we help to determine the qualities that our parents will have. Hence it is no wonder that we inherit these qualities. Yet—as was previously described—we make our choice concerning the qualities that we inherit.

To observe the human being during his first childhood years is a study as interesting as it is exalted. I must use this expression again and again. You will remember that I called your attention to the three things learned by the child in his first years: walking, which includes so many things that were discussed yesterday, speaking, and thinking. These three faculties are attained by the child.

Now let us observe correctly how the child takes his first steps. He may put down his little legs and feet firmly or gently; advance courageously or timidly; bend his knee vigorously or with less vigor; use his index finger or his little finger more frequently. Those who have the right insight into what is connected with walking, what is connected with the sense of equilibrium through which the child orientates himself in the three spatial directions—all those will recognize that the child's karma is symbolically expressed in his attempts at walking. We see a certain child, as he learns how to walk, put down his little feet with firmness. This shows us that he has proved himself as brave and courageous in various situations belonging to previous earth-lives. This brave and courageous quality coming from previous earth-lives is expressed, in a sensible image, by the firm manner in which the child plants his little feet on the ground. Thus we may observe just in the child's first attempts at walking a miraculous image of human karma. A man's personal karma is especially expressed by the manner in which he learns how to walk.

In the second place, we learn how to speak. We imitate what is spoken around us. Every child does this in his own way; yet all human beings who learn how to speak their mother tongue within a lingual province imitate just this one language. Hence we find that the human being's folk destiny is expressed by the way in which the child adapts himself to the imitation of sounds. The child, when learning how to walk, expresses his individual destiny; when learning how to speak, his folk destiny. And, when learning how to think, he expresses the destiny of universal mankind living in a certain period all over the globe. Thus a threefold destiny is interwoven in man.

It is true that we clothe our thoughts with diverse languages. Yet, when penetrating across language to the thoughts, we assume that these can be understood by every person anywhere in the world. A Chinese and a Norwegian language exist; nonetheless there is no difference—except an individual one—between Chinese and Norwegian thoughts. For it must be admitted that thoughts as such, with regard to their truth or untruth, are the same everywhere. They are differently colored for the sole reason that human beings express themselves through language and individual traits. The thought-content, however—not the form—is alike for all men. By adjusting himself to thought-life in his third stage, the child adjusts himself, at a certain point, to all of mankind. Through language, he adjusts himself to the folk destiny; through his orientation in three spatial directions (by learning how to walk, how to handle objects, and so forth) he adjusts himself to his personal, individual destiny.

In order to understand man's being in the right way, these things must be viewed from all sides. Now I should like to explain to you by means of another fact how the whole of human life is constituted.

Let us go back to the sleeping state; to those experiences undergone by us between falling asleep and awaking. Here we go back, with our ego and astral body, into the spiritual world; we go back to the starting-point of our life. Yet the ego and astral body are weaving our future destiny.

When the ego and astral body return again to the physical body, then destiny has been woven anew night by night. Man's ordinary consciousness, however, does not yet know anything of this destiny. He enters again into his physical and etheric bodies. In the etheric body, he had left behind his thoughts. We only assume that we do not think while lying in bed. We think unceasingly, but unbeknown to ourselves, because our ego and astral body dwell outside our thoughts. Thinking is an activity of the etheric body. You can easily observe this fact even in every-day life. For instance: you have heard, for the first time, a symphony that excited you greatly. If you are inclined to wake up during the night, you will do so again and again, always finding yourself amid this symphony's sounds, which continue to vibrate within your etheric body. These vibrations do not cease. It is not necessary that your ego be present while the symphony reverberates within you. If your ego were present, you would be aware only of the etheric body's vibrations. It is the same with other thoughts. You are thinking all night long while lying in bed; since your ego is away, however, you do not know that you think.

I can even disclose to you that waking life often spoils our thinking. Generally, our thoughts are much keener when our ego is away at night. This is true, whether you believe it or not. Most people's judgment on life is much sounder at night than in the day-time. If the etheric body, which is in harmony with the laws of the universe, thinks by itself and man does not ruin these thoughts, then man's thinking, no longer muddled up by the ego (as happens so often in the day-time) becomes much sounder.

While our ego and astral body are outside our physical and etheric bodies, we are engaged in weaving our future karma. What as ego and astral body lives and weaves outside us between falling asleep and awaking must pass through the portal of death; it must enter and pass through the super-sensible world. It is true that the astral element is subsequently merged with the ego, which thus undergoes a change of substance and must continue its way alone. Yet all that which has been weaving, in the sleeping state, outside the physical and etheric bodies must pass through the portal of death and must, between death and a new birth, pursue its path across the stages described by me during the recent days. My description has shown you how the ego passes through a stage where it works in unison with the beings of the higher Hierarchies, in order to prepare the spiritual germ of a future physical body.

This work necessitates the experiencing of profound wisdom between death and a new birth—an experience that can be undergone only if sharing a spiritual activity with beings of the higher Hierarchies.

Many other things must be merged with the karma, as it is woven between falling asleep and awaking, in order to unite all the elements into a future physical body. For you must consider what kind of path has to be pursued. All that is being woven as karma dwells in the ego and astral body. It must descend into those regions possessed by us, in the next earth-life, as the unconscious will-regions. All these elements must be thoroughly blended with our entire bodily organism. During the ordinary sleeping state, the ego and astral body have as yet but little of what they must attain during their transition between death and a new birth.

From the sleeping state, the ego and astral body must return to the physical body; and, when they wake up, they do not quite understand how to deal with this physical body. For, having received this body as the result of a previous earth-life, they do not know how to immerse themselves into it in the right way.

Because the astral body and ego can form the physical and etheric bodies only in the next earth-life, working on them in childhood during the first and second seven-year period and because the ego and astral body will only then encompass all that can work in the right way on the physical body: therefore now, when the ego—on falling asleep—has just absorbed the human being's moral conduct and karma has just begun to weave itself, this ego, on awaking, does not rightly understand all the things contained in the physical body.

The ego, when again immersing itself in the physical body, is utterly unconscious. Yet, as it passes through the region of mental activity, confused dream-images arise. What do these signify? Why do they correspond, in many cases, so little to life? Because the ego and astral body try to immerse themselves in the physical and etheric bodies, but find it difficult to do so. This discrepancy between that which the ego cannot do, but which it should do according to the wise principles of the physical and etheric bodies—this discrepancy is expressed by the confused images dreamed by us just before awaking. These dreams show us pictorially how the ego tries to bring what it has not yet attained into a certain harmony with the physical body and etheric body. And only when the ego, suppressing consciousness in regard to the will, immerses itself in subconscious regions, and hence no longer relies upon its own wisdom, can it enter again into the physical body without producing confused mental images.

If the ego, on awaking, plunged into the physical body when fully conscious, or half conscious as in dreams, then the most terrifying dreams would arise from man's entire physical body. Only the circumstance that we plunge, at the right moment, into the unconscious will subdues the fleeting dream-images and lets us sink down as proper egos and proper astral bodies into the regions of the unconscious will.

It is quite clear to anyone looking at these things without prejudice that every dream can show us the disharmony existing in the present life between what the ego and astral body have acquired in this present life and the fully developed physical and etheric bodies. First that which has been woven as moral element must unite itself, during the transition between death and a new birth, with the spiritual germ of the physical body. Then, whatever has been woven in the present life between falling asleep and awaking, becomes so powerful that it is really able to sink down during the next childhood life, during this dreamy, half asleep childhood life, into the physical and etheric bodies, using them as tools for earth-life.

We carry within us the result of preceding earth-lives. Only all that we carry below in our will-organism as forces of the preceding earth-life is concealed by an inner fire which consumes our physical substance and products. Yet these forces, although consumed by fire, are nonetheless active. We pursue our path across the world by means of our karma. There exists an especial path for every single experience. By choosing, from childhood on, what we want to imitate from the surrounding world, and by so doing, initiating an event that may not occur until our fiftieth year, and at the same time by exerting our will for the purpose of bringing about this experience, we undergo within ourselves a combustion of that which is bodily substance. And, because the fire renders us unconscious with regard to our life-path, our inner perception transposes what is really a continuous course of destiny into something appearing to us like momentary desires, instincts, urges, varieties of temperament, and so forth. Below courses the life-path determined by destiny. The fires are always flaming forth anew. We, however, can only see the fires' surface. And on this surface, out of the seething flames, as it were, there comes to life what dwells in our souls as passions, desires, instincts. Here is only the outer semblance, the outer revelation of that which weaves in the depths as human destiny.

What men observe are the single passions, the single instincts, the single desires, momentary likes and dislikes, deeds carried out or not carried out because of momentary sympathy or antipathy. In making such observations, however, we behave like someone who has a sentence before him and says: “Here I see g,o,d,r,u,l,e,s,t,h,e,w,o,r,l,d.” All he can do is to spell the single letters. Then another person comes and says: “The letters spelled by you mean God rules the world.” Just as spelling differs from reading, so does ordinary science differ from spiritual science.

Ordinary psychology is able to spell. By looking at a human life, it finds certain instincts and urges in the child. The scientist, who only knows how to spell, registers these things, and thus it continues during the human being's entire existence on earth.

Those understanding spiritual science are able to read. Looking beyond the fire's surface, they see what is below: man's destiny-determined life-path.

Between ordinary psychology, such as it is still practiced today, and genuine knowledge of human soul-life there is a difference akin to that between spelling and reading.

We could make ourselves understood with less difficulty, if we could only tell the others that they are wrong. But, if someone spells g,o,d,r,u,l,e,s, it is impossible to tell him: “What you say is wrong.” For it is perfectly correct. Only the other, lacking the knowledge that the letters can be combined and read, will say to us: “You are a crazy fellow. All that I can see is g,o,d, and so forth. It would be utterly foolish to combine the letters.” He cannot understand that we are not only able to spell but also to read.

This fact makes our position very difficult. The anthroposophist could easily reach an understanding with the others; he does not have to refute them. Neither is he entangled into polemics against external science. If this science, however, begins to call him a crazy fellow—then, naturally, he is forced to state that this is wide of the mark and point out his willingness to consider as valid what the others want to consider as valid. Only he would have to exclude the following principle: Whatever this or that person does not see is non-existent. For this principle is no criterion of truth. And those persons who hold to it should first ascertain whether others can see what they themselves cannot see.

In view of these things, those standing on anthroposophical ground must be able to fathom this difficult relationship between Anthroposophy and other world views. At most, we could come to the conclusion that the one tolerating nothing but g,o,d,r,u,l,e,s, should be considered as semi-illiterate. Likewise, we might possibly say to the one who could not wean himself of the habit to spell out the single instincts, urges, passions, temperaments, and so forth: “You are a semi-Philistine, a semi-blockhead. The trouble with you is that you cannot soar.” We could not tell him, however, that he was wrong.

The issue between Anthroposophy and other world views is of such nature that no understanding can be reached until those, who know only how to spell, will have a mind to learn how to read. Otherwise no mutual comprehension is possible; and for this reason all the customary debates lead to no result whatsoever. This fact is noticed by very few opponents of Anthroposophy. In my opinion, it is essential that these things should be known to you.

The opponents of Anthroposophy increase with every month. Yet they are unable to find a foothold. For, since Anthroposophy always agrees with them, but they refuse to agree with Anthroposophy, they cannot attack very well what the Anthroposophist says. And for this reason they attack his personality: defame it, tell lies about it. Unfortunately, polemics tend more and more towards such a form. This must be envisaged by those standing on anthroposophical ground.

You must consider that a very odd assortment of antagonistic books exists now-a-days. Many of their authors, who have read anthroposophical literature, may have found out that I myself, in certain passages of my own books, mention all the objections that could be raised. I engage in polemics against myself, in order to show how that which I affirm could be blotted out. Hence all possible objections against Anthroposophy can be found in my own books. Consequently, many of my opponents busy themselves with copying the arguments which I myself, in my own books, have cited against Anthroposophy. They then distribute these writings to others in order to attack Anthroposophy. Thus you can find hostile writings plagiarizing my own books and simply copying my words when I say: this or that objection could be raised. The fact that the anthroposophist himself has to point out all the arguments that can be advanced against him makes his opponents' task rather easy.

I mention these things not for the purpose of harrowing my opponents, but in order to characterize how one must progress if one desires to read life-experiences (with regard to the will-impulses) instead of merely spelling them out. Spelling only shows us what momentarily wells up in the form of urges, of animal life expressed by desires, passions and wishes. Those able to combine these letters and read them will penetrate every individual human destiny. This human destiny is working at the source of life; and, by means of this destiny, the human being joins himself to the ever continuing course of mankind's whole evolution. And only by comprehending in this way a single human being's entire life are we able to comprehend human history. During the following days, we shall contemplate mankind's history; contemplate it as the life of mankind in its destiny before and after the Mystery of Golgotha. And we shall also see how the Mystery of Golgotha has influenced mankind's development on earth.

First, however, I had to erect a foundation and show what is at work within the human being. Only thus can it be recognized in the right way how the gods and the Mystery of Golgotha are at work within the individual man, within his entire destiny.