The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Wherever we, as human beings, have striven for knowledge, whether as mystics or realists or in any way at all, the acquisition of self-knowledge has been demanded of us. As has been repeatedly emphasized on other occasions, however, this knowledge of the human soul is by no means as easy to achieve as many people believe—anthroposophists sometimes among them. The anthroposophist should be constantly aware of the hindrances he will encounter in his efforts. The acquisition of self-knowledge is absolutely essential, however, if we are to reach a worthy goal in world existence and if our actions are to be worthy of us as members of humanity.

Let us ask ourselves why must self-knowledge be so difficult for us. Man is truly a complicated being, and if we speak of his inner life, his life of soul, we should not begin by regarding it as something simple and elementary. We should rather have the patience and perseverance, the will, to penetrate always more deeply into this wonderful structure, this organization of the divine-spiritual powers of the world, which can appear as man.

Before we investigate the nature of this self-knowledge, two aspects of the life of the human soul may present themselves to us. Just as the magnet has north and south poles, just as light and darkness are present in the world as the principle poles of the light, so there are two poles in man's life of soul. Both these poles can appear when we observe a person placed in two contrasting situations in life. Suppose we are watching someone standing on the street who is entirely lost in the contemplation of some strikingly beautiful and impressive natural phenomenon. We see how still he is standing, moving neither hand nor foot, never turning his eyes away from the spectacle presented to him, and we are aware that he is engaged in making an inner picture of what he sees. We say that he is absorbed in contemplation of what surrounds him. That is one situation; here is another. A man is walking along the street and feels that someone has insulted him, injured him. Without much thinking, he is roused to anger and gives vent to it by striking the person who insulted him. We are there witnessing a manifestation of forces springing from anger, a manifestation of impulses of will, and we can easily imagine that if the action had been preceded by thought no blow need have been struck. We have now pictured two extremely different deeds. In the one there is only the forming of a mental picture, a process from which all conscious will is absent; in the other there is no thought, no forming of a mental picture, and immediate expression is given to an impulse of will. These two things present us with the two extreme poles of the human soul. One pole is surrender to contemplation, to forming mental pictures, to thought, in which the will has no part; the second pole is the impelling force of will without thought. We have arrived at these facts simply by exoteric observation of outer life.

We can go into these things more deeply, and we come then into those spheres in which we can find our bearings only by summoning the findings of esoteric research to our aid. Here another polarity confronts us—that of sleeping and waking. We know the esoteric significance of the relationship between sleeping and waking. From the elementary concepts of anthroposophy we know that in waking life the four members of a man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I—are organically and actively interwoven but that in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed while the astral body and I are poured out into the whole great world bordering directly on our physical existence. We could also approach these facts from a different point of view. We might ask what there is to be said about contemplation of the world, forming mental pictures, thinking, and the will and its impulses during waking life on the one hand and during sleep on the other.

You see that if one penetrates more deeply into this question it becomes evident that in his present physical existence man is, in a certain sense, essentially always asleep. He sleeps differently during the night, however, from the way he sleeps during the day. You can be convinced of this in a purely outer way, because you know that one can wake in the esoteric sense during the day, that is to say, one can become clairvoyant and see into the spiritual world. The ordinary physical body is asleep to this observation, and one can rightly say that it is an awakening when man learns to use his spiritual senses. In the night, of course, we are asleep in the normal way. One can therefore say that ordinary sleep is sleep in relation to the outer physical world; daytime consciousness at the present time is sleep in relation to the spiritual world.

These facts can be considered in yet another light. On deeper scrutiny one realizes that in the ordinary waking condition of physical life, man has, as a rule, little power or control over his will. The will quite detaches itself from daily life. Observe attentively what we call the human will, and you will see how little man has in his control during daily life regarding the will impulse. Only consider how little of all you do from morning to evening is really the outcome of your own thinking and forming of mental pictures, of your personal, individual decisions. When someone knocks at the door and you say “Come in!” that cannot be called a true decision of your own thinking and willing. If you are hungry and seat yourself for a meal, that cannot be called a decision made by the will, because it is occasioned by your condition, by the needs of your organism. Try to picture your daily life, and you will see how little the will is directly influenced from the human center. Why is this the case? Esoteric teachings show us that regarding his will man actually sleeps by day; that is, he does not really live within his will impulses at all. We can evolve better and better concepts and mental pictures, or we can become more highly moral, more refined individuals, but we can do nothing regarding the will. If we cultivate better thoughts we can work indirectly upon the will, but we can do nothing directly to the will that concerns life. This is because in our daily life our will is influenced only in an indirect way, namely, through sleep. When you are asleep you do not think; you do not form mental pictures. The will, however, awakes, permeates our organism from outside, and invigorates it. We feel strengthened in the morning because what has penetrated into our organism is of the nature of will. That we do not perceive this activity of the will, that we know nothing about it, becomes comprehensible if we consider that all conceptual activity sleeps when we sleep. To begin with, therefore, we will offer this suggestion for further contemplation, further meditation. You will see that the more progress you make in self-knowledge, the more you will find confirmation of the truth of the words that man sleeps in his will when he is awake and sleeps in his conceptual life when he is asleep. The life of will sleeps by day; the life of thought sleeps by night.

If man is unaware that the will does not sleep during the night, this is because he only understands how to be awake in his life of thought. The will does not sleep during the night, but it works then in a fiery element, works upon his body in order to restore what has been used up by day.

There are thus two poles in human beings, the life of observation and forming mental pictures and the impulses of will, and the human being is related in entirely opposite ways to these two poles. These are only the two poles, however. The whole life of soul lies in various nuances between these two poles, and we shall come nearer to understanding this soul life by bringing the microcosmic life of soul into relation to what we know as the higher worlds.

From what has been said we have seen that the life of forming mental pictures is one of the poles of one's soul life. This life of forming mental pictures is something that seems unreal to externally, materialistically minded people. We often hear the thought expressed, “Oh, mental pictures and thoughts are only mental pictures and thoughts!” This is intended to imply that if one takes a piece of bread or meat into one's hands, this is a reality, but a thought is only a thought. By this is meant that one cannot eat a thought, and thus a thought is not real but “only” a thought. But why? Basically, because what man calls his thoughts are related to what thoughts really are as a shadow-image of an object is to the thing itself. The shadow-image of a flower points you to the flower itself, to the reality. So it is with thoughts. Human thinking is the shadow-image of mental pictures and beings belonging to a higher world, the world called the astral plane. You represent thinking rightly to yourself when you picture the human head thus (this is not absolutely correct but simply sketched schematically). In this head are thoughts, which I shall represent with these dashes. These thoughts that are in the head, however, must be pictured as living beings on the astral plane. Beings of the most varied kinds are at work there in the form of teeming mental pictures and deeds that cast their shadow-images into human beings, and these processes are reflected in the human head as thinking. Continuous streams move from your head into the astral plane, and these are the shadows that establish the life of thought within your head.

As well as what we can call the life of thought, there is yet another life within the human soul. In ordinary life one distinguishes (this is not entirely correct, but I say it so that one can receive a concept from ordinary life) between a life of thought and a life of feeling. Feelings fall into two categories: those of pleasure and sympathy and those of displeasure and antipathy. The former are aroused by good, benevolent deeds; antipathy is aroused by evil, malevolent deeds. Here there is something more than and different from the mere forming of mental pictures. We form mental pictures of things regardless of any other factor. Our soul, however, experiences sympathy or antipathy only regarding what is beautiful and good or what is ugly and evil. Just as everything that takes place in the human being as thoughts points to the astral plane, so everything connected with sympathy or antipathy points to the realm we call Lower Devachan. Just as I could draw lines earlier between mental pictures and the astral world, so now in relation to feeling I can point upward to Devachan or the heavenly world. Processes in the heavenly world, or Devachan, are projected, mainly into our breast, as feelings of sympathy or antipathy for what is beautiful or ugly, for what is good or evil. In what we can call our experience of the moral-aesthetic world, we bear within our souls shades of the heavenly world or Lower Devachan.

There is still a third province in the life of the human soul that we must strictly distinguish from the mere preference for good deeds. There is a difference between standing by and taking pleasure in witnessing some kindly deed and setting the will in action and actually performing some such deed oneself. I will call pleasure in good and beautiful deeds or displeasure in evil and ugly deeds the aesthetic element, as opposed to the moral element that impels a person to do good. The moral element is at a higher level than the purely aesthetic; mere pleasure or displeasure is at a lower level than the will to do something good or evil. In so far as our soul feels constrained to give expression to moral impulses, these impulses are the shadow-images of Higher Devachan, of the higher heavenly world.

We can easily picture these three separate stages of activity of the human soul—the purely intellectual (thoughts, mental pictures, observation), the aesthetic (pleasure or displeasure), and the moral (revealed in impulses to do good or evil deeds)—as microcosmic images within human experience of the three realms which, in the macrocosm, the great world, lie one above the other. The astral world is shadowed in the world of thought, the intellectual world; the Devachanic world is shadowed in the aesthetic sphere of pleasure and displeasure; and the Higher Devachanic world is shadowed as morality.

If we connect this with what was said previously concerning the two poles of the human soul, we must experience the pole of intellect as that which dominates the waking life, the life in which man is intellectually awake. During the day man is awake regarding his intellect; during sleep he is awake regarding his will. Because at night he is asleep regarding his intellect, he becomes unconscious of what he is undertaking with his will. What we call moral principles and impulses are working indirectly into the will. In fact, man needs the life of sleep in order that the moral impulses he absorbs through the life of thought can come into effective activity. In his ordinary life today, man is capable of accomplishing what is right only on the plane of intellect; he is less able to accomplish anything on the moral plane, for there he is dependent upon help coming from the macrocosm.

What is already within us can bring about the further development of intellectuality, but the gods must come to our aid if we are to acquire greater moral strength. We sink into sleep in order that we may plunge into the divine will where the intellect does not intervene and where divine forces transform into the power of will the moral principles we receive, where they instill into our will what we could otherwise receive only into our thoughts.

Between these two poles, that of the will that wakes by night and that of the intellect that is awake by day, lies the sphere of aesthetic appreciation that is continuously present in man. During the day man is not fully awake; only the most prosaic, pedantic individuals are always fully awake in waking life. Human beings basically must actually dream by day, they must always be able to dream a little when awake; they must be able to give themselves up to art, poetry, or some other activity that is not concerned wholly with crass reality. Those who can give themselves up in this way form a bond that can enliven and invigorate the whole of existence. To give oneself up to such thoughts is to a certain extent like a dream penetrating into waking life. You know well that dreams enter into the life of sleep; these are real dreams, dreams that permeate the other consciousness in sleep. This is also something that human beings need by day if they do not wish to lead an arid, empty, unhealthy waking life. Dreams come during sleep at night in any case, and no proof of this is required. Midway between the two poles of night dreaming and day dreaming lies the condition that can live in fantasy.

So here again there is a threefold life of soul. The intellectual element in which we are really awake brings us shadow-images of the astral plane when by day we give ourselves up to a thought, wherein originate the most fruitful ideas for daily life and great inventions. Then during sleep, when we dream, these dreams play into our life of sleep, and images from Lower Devachan are shadowed into us. When we work during sleep, impressing morality into our will—we cannot perceive this directly, but certainly we can perceive its effects—when we are able to imbue our thinking during the night with the influence of divine-spiritual powers, then the impulses we perceive are shadowings from Higher Devachan, the higher heavenly world. These are the moral impulses and feelings that live within us and lead us to say that human life fundamentally is justified only when we place our thoughts at the service of the good and the beautiful, when we allow the very heart's blood of divine-spiritual life to stream through our intellectual activities, permeating them with moral impulses.

What we present here as the life of the human soul, first from outer, exoteric observation and then from observation of a more mystical character, is revealed by deeper esoteric research. The processes that have been described in their more outer aspect can also be perceived in man through clairvoyance. When a man stands in front of us today in his waking state and we observe him with the clairvoyant eye, certain rays of light are seen streaming continually from the heart toward the head. If we wish to sketch this schematically, we must draw the region of the heart here and show the continuous streamings from there to the brain, flowing in the head around the organ known in anatomy as the pineal gland.

These rays of light stream from the heart to the head and flow around the pineal gland. These streamings arise because human blood, which is a physical substance, is continually dissolving itself into etheric substance. In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance that streams upward toward the head and flows glimmeringly around the pineal gland. This process, the etherization of the blood, can be shown in the human being throughout his waking life. It is different now, however, in the sleeping human being. When a human being sleeps, the occult observer is able to see a continual streaming from outside into the brain and also in the reverse direction, from the brain to the heart.

These streams, however, which in sleeping man come from outside, from cosmic space, from the macrocosm, and flow into the inner constitution of the physical and etheric bodies lying in the bed, reveal something remarkable when they are investigated. These rays vary greatly in different individuals. Sleeping human beings differ greatly from one another, and if those who are a little vain only knew how badly they betray themselves to esoteric observation when they go to sleep during public gatherings, they would try their best not to let this happen!

Moral qualities are revealed distinctly in the particular coloring of the streams that flow into human beings during sleep; in a person of lower moral principles the streams are quite different from what is observable in a person of higher principles. Endeavors to disguise one's nature by day are useless. In the face of the higher cosmic powers, no disguise is possible. In the case of a man who has only a slight inclination toward moral principles the rays streaming into him are a brownish red in color—various shades tending toward brownish red. In a man of high moral ideals the rays are lilac-violet. At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, a kind of struggle takes place in the region of the pineal gland between what streams down from above and what streams upward from below. When a man is awake, the intellectual element streams upward from below in the form of currents of light, and what is of moral-aesthetic nature streams downward from above. At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, these two currents meet, and in the man of low morality a violent struggle between the two streams takes place in the region of the pineal gland. In the man of high morality and an outstreaming intellectuality, a peaceful expansion of glimmering light appears in the region of the pineal gland. This gland is almost surrounded by a small sea of light in the moment between waking and sleeping. Moral nobility is revealed when a calm glow surrounds the pineal gland at these moments. In this way a man's moral character is reflected in him, and this calm glow of light often extends as far as the region of the heart. Two streams can therefore be perceived in man—one from the macrocosm, the other from the microcosm.

To estimate the full significance of how these two streams meet in man, we must first consider what was said previously in a more external way about the life of the soul and how this life reveals the threefold polarity of the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the moral elements that stream downward from above, from the brain toward the heart; we must also grasp the full significance of what was said about turning our attention to the corresponding phenomenon in the macrocosm. This corresponding phenomenon can be described today as the result of the most scrupulously careful esoteric research of recent years, undertaken by individuals among the genuine Rosicrucians. (see Note 7) These investigations have shown that something corresponding to what has been described in connection with the microcosm also takes place in the macrocosm. You will understand this more fully as time goes on.

Just as in the region of the human heart the blood is continually being transformed into etheric substance, so a similar process takes place in the macrocosm. We understand this when we turn our eyes to the Mystery of Golgotha, to the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ. This blood must not be regarded simply as chemical substance, but by reason of all that has been described as the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, it must be recognized as something altogether unique. When it flowed from His wounds and into the earth, a substance was imparted to our earth which, in uniting with it, constituted an event of the greatest possible significance for all future ages of the earth, and it could take place only once. What happened with this blood in the ages that followed? Nothing different from what otherwise takes place in the heart of man. In the course of earthly evolution, this blood passed through a process of “etherization.” Just as our blood streams upward from the heart as ether, so, since the Mystery of Golgotha, the etherized blood of Christ Jesus has lived in the ether of the earth. The etheric body of the earth is permeated by what the blood that flowed on Golgotha became. This is important. If what has thus come to pass through Christ Jesus had not taken place, man's condition on the earth could only have been as previously described. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, however, there has existed the continuous possibility for the activity of the etheric blood of Christ to flow together with the streamings from below upward, from heart to head.

Because the etherized blood of Jesus of Nazareth is present in the etheric body of the earth, it accompanies the etherized human blood streaming upward from the heart to the brain, so that not only do these streams that I described earlier meet in man, but the human bloodstream unites with the bloodstream of Christ Jesus. A union of these two streams can come about, however, only if man is able to unfold true understanding of what is contained in the Christ impulse. Otherwise, there can be no union; the two streams then mutually repel each other, thrust each other away. In every age of earthly evolution, we must acquire understanding in the form suitable for that epoch. At the time when Christ Jesus lived on earth, preceding events could be rightly understood by those who came to His forerunner, John, and were baptised by him according to the rite described in the Gospels. They experienced baptism in order that their sin, that is to say, the karma of their previous lives, karma, that had come to an end, might be changed, and in order that they might realize that the most powerful impulse in earthly evolution was about to descend into a physical body. The evolution of humanity progresses, however, and in our present age it is important that man should learn to understand that the knowledge contained in spiritual science must be received and gradually be able so to fire the streams flowing from heart to brain that anthroposophy can be understood. If this comes to pass, individuals will be able to comprehend the event that has its beginning in the twentieth century: the appearance of the etheric Christ in contradistinction to the physical Christ of Palestine.

We have now reached the moment in time when the etheric Christ enters into the life of the earth and will become visible, at first to a small number of people, through a natural clairvoyance. Then in the course of the next 3,000 years, He will become visible to greater and greater numbers of people. This will inevitably come to pass; it is an event of nature. That it will come to pass is as true as were the achievements of electricity in the nineteenth century. A certain number of individuals will see the etheric Christ and will themselves experience the event that took place at Damascus. This will depend, however, upon such human beings learning to observe the moment when Christ draws near to them. In only a few decades from now it will happen, particularly to those who are young in years—already preparation is being made for this—that some person here or there has certain experiences. If only he has truly sharpened his vision through engaging himself with anthroposophy, he may become aware that suddenly someone has come near to help him, to make him alert to this or that. The truth is that Christ has come to him, although he believes that what he sees is a physical man. He will come to realize, however, that this is a super-sensible being, because it immediately vanishes. Many a human being will have this experience when sitting silently in his room, heavy-hearted and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn. The door will open, and the etheric Christ will appear and speak words of consolation to him. The Christ will become a living comforter to men. However strange it may as yet seem, it is true nevertheless that many a time when people, even in considerable numbers, are sitting together not knowing what to do and waiting, they will see the etheric Christ. He Himself will be there, will confer with them, will cast His word into such gatherings. We are now approaching these times, and the positive, constructive element now described will take hold of the evolution of humanity.

No word shall be said here against the great advances made by culture in our day; these achievements are essential for the welfare and the freedom of human beings. Whatever can be gained in the way of outer progress, however, in mastering the forces of nature, is something small and insignificant compared with the blessing bestowed upon the person who experiences the awakening in his soul through Christ, Who will now take hold of human culture and its concerns. What thereby awakens in human beings will be unifying, positive forces. Christ brings constructive forces into human civilization.

If we were to look into early post-Atlantean times, we would find that human beings built their dwelling places by methods quite different from those used today. In those days they made use of all kinds of growing things. Even when building palaces, they summoned nature to their aid by having plants and branches of trees interlace with one another, and so on. Today, human beings must build with broken fragments. We make all culture of the outer world with the products of fragmentation. In the course of the coming years you will understand even better how much in our culture is the product of destruction.

Light is destroying itself within our post-Atlantean earthly processes. Until the time of Atlantis the earthly process was a progressive process, but since then it has been a process of decay. What is light? Light decays, and the decaying light is electricity. What we know as electricity is light that is destroying itself within matter. The chemical force that undergoes a transformation within earthly evolution is magnetism. Yet a third force will become active, and if electricity seems to work wonders today, this third force will affect civilization in a still more miraculous way. The more of this force we employ, the faster the earth will tend to become a corpse and its spiritual part prepare for the Jupiter embodiment. Forces have to be applied to destroy the earth in order that man can become free of the earth and that the earth's body can fall away. As long as the earth was involved in a progressive process, this was not done, since only the decaying earth can use the great achievements of electricity. Strange as this sounds, it must gradually become known. We must understand the process of evolution to evaluate our culture in the right way. We shall learn thereby that it is necessary for the earth to be destroyed; otherwise, the spirit will not become free. We shall also learn to value what is positive, namely, the penetration of spiritual forces into our existence on earth.

We thus realize what a tremendous advance was signified by the fact that Christ necessarily lived for three years on the earth in a specially prepared human body in order that He might be visible to physical eyes. Through what came to pass during those three years, human beings have become ripe to behold the Christ Who will move among them in an etheric body, Who will enter into earthly life as truly and effectively as did the physical Christ in Palestine. If human beings observe such happenings with undimmed senses they will know that there is an etheric body that will move about within the physical world, but they will know that this is the only etheric body able to work in the physical world as a human physical body works. It will differ from a physical body in this respect only, that it can be in two, three, even in a hundred, a thousand places at the same time. This is possible only for an etheric, not for a physical form. What will be accomplished in humanity through this further advance is that the two poles I have mentioned, the intellectual and the moral, will more and more become one; they will merge into unity. This will come about because in the course of the next millennia human beings will learn increasingly to observe the etheric Christ in the world; more and more they will be permeated in waking life, too, by the direct working of the good from the spiritual world. Whereas now the will sleeps by day, and man is only able to influence it indirectly through thought, in the course of the next millennia, through what from our time onward is working in us under the aegis of Christ, it will come about that the deeds of human beings in waking condition, too, can be directly productive of good.

The dream of Socrates, that virtue be able to be taught, will come true; more and more it will be possible on earth not only for our intellect to be stimulated and energized by this teaching but, through this teaching, for moral impulses to be spread abroad. Schopenhauer said, “To preach morality is easy; to establish it is most difficult.” Why is this? Because no morality has yet been spread by preaching. It is quite possible to recognize moral principles and yet not abide by them. For most people the Pauline saying holds good, that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This will change, through the moral fire streaming from the figure of Christ. Through this, the need for moral impulses on earth will be increasingly clear to man. Man will transform the earth in so far as he feels with ever-increasing strength that morality is an essential part of the earth. In the future, to be immoral will be possible only for people who receive immoral help, who are goaded in this direction, who are possessed by evil demons, by Ahrimanic, Asuric powers, and who strive for this possession.

This is the future condition of the earth: there will be a sufficient number of people who increasingly teach morality and at the same time offer a moral foundation, but there will also be those who by their own free decision surrender themselves to the evil powers and thus enable an excess of evil to be pitted against a good humanity. Nobody will be forced to do this; it will lie in the free will of each individual.

Then will come the time when the earth passes into conditions which, as in so much else, are only described in the great definitions of Oriental occultism, Oriental mysticism. The moral atmosphere will by then have gathered considerable strength. For many thousands of years Oriental mysticism has spoken of this moment in time, and since the coming of Gautama Buddha it has spoken especially strongly about that future condition when the earth will be bathed in a “moral-ether-atmosphere.” Ever since the time of the ancient Rishis it was the great hope of Oriental mysticism that this moral impulse would come to the earth from Vishva-Karman or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, from Ahura Mazdao. Oriental mysticism thus foresaw that this moral impulse, this moral atmosphere, would come to the earth from the being we call the Christ. It was upon Him, upon Christ, that the hopes of Oriental mysticism were set.

Oriental mystics were able to picture the consequences of that event but not the actual form it would take. They could picture that within a period of 5,000 years after the great Buddha achieved Enlightenment, pure Akashic forms, bathed in fire, lit by the sun, would appear in the wake of one Who could not be recognized through Oriental mysticism. A wonderful picture in very truth: that something would come to make it possible for the Sons of Fire and of Light to move about the moral atmosphere of the earth, not in physically embodied form but as pure Akashic forms within the earth's moral atmosphere. Five thousand years after Gautama Buddha's Enlightenment, so it was said, the teacher will also be there to make known to human beings what these wonderful forms are, these pure forms of Fire and Light. This teacher—the Maitreya Buddha—will appear 3,000 years after our time and will be able to teach people about the Christ impulse.

Oriental mysticism thus unites with the Christian knowledge of the West to form a beautiful unity. It will also be disclosed that he who will appear 3,000 years after our time as the Maitreya Buddha will have incarnated again and again on the earth as a Bodhisattva, as the successor of Gautama Buddha. One of his incarnations was that of Jeshu ben Pandira, who lived a hundred years before the beginning of our era. The being who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira is the same one who will one day become the Maitreya Buddha and who from century to century returns ever and again in a body of flesh, not yet as Buddha himself but as Bodhisattva. Even in our age there proceeds from him who later will be the Maitreya Buddha the most significant teachings concerning the Christ being and the Sons of Fire—the Agnishvattas—of Indian mysticism.

Those things by which man can recognize the being who is to become the Maitreya Buddha are common to all genuine Eastern mysticism and to Christian wisdom. The Maitreya Buddha who, in contrast to the Sons of Fire, will appear in a physical body as Bodhisattva, can be recognized by the fact that at first in his youth his development gives no intimation of the nature of the individuality within him. Only those possessed of understanding will recognize the presence of a Bodhisattva in such a human being, manifesting between the ages of thirty and thirty-three and not before. Something akin to an exchange of personality then takes place. The Maitreya Buddha will reveal his identity to humanity in the thirty-third year of his life. As Christ Jesus began his lifework in His thirtieth year, so do the Bodhisattvas, who will continue to proclaim the Christ impulses, reveal themselves in the thirty-third year of their lives. The Maitreya Buddha himself, as transformed Bodhisattva, speaking in powerful words of which no adequate idea can be given at the present time, will proclaim the great secrets of existence. He will speak in a language that must first be created, because no human being today could find the words with which the Maitreya Buddha will address humanity. The reason human beings cannot yet be addressed in this way is that the physical instrument for this form of speech does not yet exist. The teaching of the Enlightened One will not stream into human beings as teachings only but will pour moral impulses into their souls. Such words cannot yet be uttered by a physical larynx; in our time they can be present only in the spiritual worlds.

Anthroposophy is the preparation for everything that will come in the future. Those who take the process of man’s evolution seriously resolve not to allow the soul's development to come to a standstill but to ensure that its development will eventually enable the spiritual part of the earth to become free, leaving the grosser part to fall away like a corpse—for human beings could frustrate the whole process. Those who desire evolution to succeed must acquire understanding of the spiritual life through what we today call anthroposophy. The cultivation of anthroposophy thus becomes a duty; knowledge becomes something that we actually experience, something toward which we have responsibility. When we are inwardly aware of this responsibility and have this resolve, when we experience the mysteries of the world so as to arouse in us the wish to become anthroposophists, then our experience is right. Anthroposophy must not, however, be something that merely satisfies our curiosity; it must rather be something without which we cannot live. Only when this is the case do we experience in the right sense; only then do we live as living building stones in that great construction that must be carried out in human souls and that can embrace all humanity.

Anthroposophy is thus a revelation of true world phenomena that will confront people of the future and will confront our own souls, whether still in a physical body or in the life between death and a new birth. The coming upheaval will concern us regardless of whether we are still living in the physical body or whether we have laid it aside. People must acquire understanding of the earth in the physical body if it is to take effect between death and a new birth. To those who acquire some understanding of Christ now in the physical body, it will make no difference, when the moment comes to behold Christ, whether or not they have already passed through the portal of death. But if those who now reject understanding of the Christ have already passed through the portal of death when this moment arrives, they must wait until their next incarnation, because such understanding cannot be acquired between death and a new birth. Once the foundation has been acquired, however, it endures, and then Christ becomes visible also during the period between death and the new birth. Anthroposophy is thus not only something we learn for our physical life but also has value when we have laid aside the physical body at death.

This is what I wished to impart to you today as an understanding of humanity and a handle in answering many questions. Self-knowledge is difficult because man is such a complex being. The reason for this complexity is that he is connected with all the higher worlds and beings. We have within us shadow-images of the great world, and all the members of our constitution—the physical, etheric, and astral bodies and the I—are worlds for divine beings. Our physical, etheric, and astral bodies and I form one world; the other is the higher world, the world of heaven. For the divine-spiritual beings, the higher worlds are the bodily members in high, divine-spiritual worlds.

Man is so complex because he is truly a mirror-image of the spiritual world. Realization of this should make him conscious of his intrinsic worth. From this knowledge, however, that although we are pictures of the spiritual world we nevertheless fall far short of what we ought to be—from this knowledge we also acquire, in addition to consciousness of our worth as human beings, the right attitude of modesty and humility toward the macrocosm and its gods.

Rudolf Steiner's Answers to Questions at the End of the Lecture

Question: How are the words used by St. Paul, “to speak in tongues” (I Cor. 12:10), to be understood?

Answer: In exceptional human beings it can happen that not only is there present the phenomenon of speaking in the waking state but something otherwise present only in sleep-consciousness flows into this speaking. This is the phenomenon about which St. Paul spoke. Goethe spoke about it in the same sense; he has written two most interesting treatises about this phenomenon.

Question: How will one understand Christ's words of consolation?

Answer: Human beings will feel these words of consolation as though they arise in their own hearts. They can also be received through physical hearing.

Question: What is the relationship of chemical forces and substances to the spiritual world?

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances that can combine with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan—the realm of the harmony of the spheres. In the union of two substances according to their atomic weights, we have a shadowing of two tones of the harmony of the spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances in the physical world is like a shadowing from the world of the harmony of the spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are really an expression of the numerical ratios of the harmony of the spheres, which has become dumb and silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able actually to bring material substance into etheric dilution and to perceive the atomic numbers as the inner formative principle, one would hear the harmony of the spheres.

We have the physical world, the astral world, the Lower Devachan, and the Higher Devachan. If one thrusts the body down lower even than the physical world, one comes into the sub-physical world, the lower astral world, the lower or evil Lower Devachan, and the lower or evil Higher Devachan. The evil astral world is the province of Ahriman and the evil Higher Devachan the province of the Asuras. If one drives chemical action down beneath the physical plane, into the evil Devachanic world, magnetism arises. If one thrusts light down into the sub-material—that is to say, a stage deeper than the material world-electricity arises. If what lives in the harmony of the spheres is thrust down farther still, into the province of the Asuras, an even more terrible force, which it will not be possible to keep hidden very much longer, is generated. One can only hope that when this force comes—a force we must conceive as being far, far stronger than the most violent electrical discharge—one can only hope that before some discoverer gives this force into the hands of humanity, human beings will no longer have anything immoral left in them.

Question: What is electricity?

Answer: Electricity is light in the sub-material state. Light is there compressed to the utmost degree. An inward quality, too, must be ascribed to light; light is itself at every point. Warmth can extend itself in the three dimensions of space. In light we must speak of a fourth dimension; it can extend itself in a fourfold way; it has the quality of inwardness as a fourth dimension.

Question: What happens to the earth's corpse?

Answer: As the residue of the ancient Moon evolution we have our present moon that circles the earth. Similarly, there will be a residue of the earth that will circle Jupiter. Then these residues will gradually dissolve into the universal ether. On Venus there will no longer be any residue. Venus will manifest, to begin with, as pure warmth, then it will become light, and then it will pass over into the spiritual world. The residue left behind by the earth will be like a corpse. This is a path along which man must not accompany the earth, however, because he would thereby be exposed to dreadful torments. There are, however, many beings who will accompany this corpse, since they themselves will by that means develop to a higher stage.

 Reflected as sub-physical world: Astral World ............. the province of Lucifer Lower Devachan ........... the province of Ahriman Higher Devachan .......... the province of the Asuras 

A space not circumscribed by artificial walls but enclosed by intertwined plants like trees and structures which spread out and send shoots into the interior. Owing to natural phenomena the whole is moving violently and is sometimes filled with storm. The stage is divided into two groves, separated for a short distance by a row of trees. The grove on right of stage is red, that on the left is blue, the former is appropriated later by Lucifer and his Spirits, and the latter by Ahriman and his Spirits. The dance movements are set to music. Maria and Capesius are on the stage as the curtain rises; then Benedictus, Philia, Astrid, Luna, the Other Philia, Lucifer, Ahriman, and Creatures which move in a dancing fashion and which represent thoughts, lastly the Soul of Dame Balde.

Benedictus (only audible, not yet visible):
Within thy thinking, cosmic thoughts do live.

Capesius (in astral garb):
There echoes Benedictus' noble voice;
His words are ringing in the spirit here,
And are the same as in the book of life
Are written down to aid his pupils' work,
Which souls on earth find hard to understand
And which are even harder to fulfil.
What part of spirit-land is this, where sound
The words which serve to test the souls on Earth?

Maria:
Hast thou abode so long in spirit-land
In such a way that thou hast learned so much
And yet this region is unknown to thee?

Capesius:
What lives here in its own reality
Souls, versed in spirit-ways, can grasp with ease;
Each thing explains itself through something else.
The whole may stand revealed in light, when part
Seen by itself, may often still seem dark.
But when a spirit-essence doth unite
With earthly nature to create some work,
The soul begins to lose her grasp of things.
And not alone a part, but e'en the whole
Is oft concealed from her by darkness deep.
Why words which come in Benedictus' book
And which were written for men's souls on Earth,
Should echo here, within a place like this,
That is the problem which doth offer here.

Benedictus (still invisible):
Within thy feeling, cosmic forces play.

Capesius:
Again there come the words which on the Earth
Did Benedictus to his pupils trust;
And here in his own voice they echo forth.
They stream through all the limitless expanse
Of this great realm arousing darksome powers.

Maria:
I feel already what I must pass through
Within the boundless spaces of this realm;
And Benedictus' nearness draws me on.
In this place he will let me gaze on things
Incomprehensible to souls on Earth
The while they dwell in bodies bound by sense,
And e'en whilst serving spirit-pupilship.
So must the master bring them to this place
Where words do not depend on human speech,
But are imprinted on their souls by signs;
Here he transforms to speech world happenings—
A world-descriptive language for the soul.
I'll loose my inmost being from the Earth,
Condensing all my powers within my soul,
And so await whate'er may be revealed
To indicate my way through spirit-space.
And then when I return to life on Earth
'Twill be a thought which, when recalled will shine
As knowledge in mine inmost depth of soul.

Benedictus (appears from the background):
Win thou thyself in power of cosmic thought,
Lose thou thyself in life of cosmic force;
Thou shalt find earthly aims reflect themselves
Through thine own being in the cosmic light.

Capesius:
So Benedictus is in spirit here
And not his words are echoing.
Doth then the teacher bring the lore of earth
To vivify and work in spirit-realm?
But what can be the meaning here of words
Which he doth use on earth in other ways?

Benedictus:
Capesius, thou hast in thine earth-life
Entered within my circle, though in truth
Thou ne'er wart conscious of thy pupilship.

Capesius:
Capesius is not within this place;
And his soul will not hear him spoken of.

Benedictus:
'Thou wilt not feel thou art Capesius
But him in spirit thou shalt see and know.
For thee the powerful work of thought hath now
In thy soul-body oped the spirit-life.
So that thy soul-life could release itself
From thought's dream-play within thine earthly frame.
Too weak it felt itself to wander forth
From out world distances to depths of soul;
Too strong to gaze at lofty spirit-light
Through all the darkness that surrounds the Earth.
I must accompany each one who gains
The spirit-light from me in earthly life
Whether he knows, or Both not know, that he
Came as a spirit-pupil to myself.
And I must lead him further on those paths
Which he in spirit learned to tread through me.
Thou hast through thy soul-sight in cosmic space
Learned to draw nigh the spirit consciously
Since loosed from body thou canst follow it.
But, not yet freed from thought, thou canst not see
True being in the spirit-realm as yet.
Thy senses' body thou canst lay aside,
But not the fine corporeal web of thought.
Thou only canst perceive the world in truth
When nothing of thy personality
Remains to cloud the clearness of thy sight.
He only who hath learned to view his thoughts
As things outside himself, e'en as the seer
Beholds his earthy form released from him,
Can penetrate to spirit verities.
So look upon this picture that it may
Turn into knowledge through clairvoyant powers
Thoughts, whose true being is built up in space
To forms, which mirror forth the thoughts of men.

(A cheerful subdued light diffuses itself. Philia, Astrid, and Luna appear in glowing clouds.)

(Exeunt Capesius and Maria.)

Voices (which sound together, spoken by Philia, Astrid, and Luna.):
Let thoughts hover round
Like weaving of dreams
And build themselves in
To souls that are here;
Let will that creates
And feeling that stirs
And thought that doth work
The dreamer arouse—

(While this sounds, Lucifer approaches from one side, and Ahriman from the other. They go to their thrones raised on each side at the back of the stage, facing the audience; Lucifer on the right of the stage, Ahriman on the left.)

Lucifer (in a loud voice, emphasising every word):
Within thy will do cosmic beings work.

(On Lucifer's side, beings with golden hair, dressed in crimson and radiantly beautiful representing thoughts, begin to move. These carry out, in a dancing fashion, movements which represent the forms of thought corresponding to Lucifer's words.)

Ahriman (speaking in a loud, hoarse voice):
These cosmic beings do but puzzle thee.

(After these words Lucifer's group is still and the thought-beings on Ahriman's side move and carry out dancing movements which make forms corresponding to his words. They have grey hair and are clad in indigo blue, being square in build, and in appearance distinguished more by force than beauty. After this the movement from both groups is carried on together.)

Lucifer:
Within thy feeling cosmic forces play

(The thought-beings on Lucifer's side repeat their movements.)

Ahriman:
The cosmic forces are but mocking thee.

(The thought-beings on Ahriman's side repeat their movements, then again both together.)

Lucifer:
Within thy thinking cosmic thought doth live.

(Repetition of the movements in Lucifer's group.)

Ahriman:
The cosmic thought doth but bewilder thee.

(Repetition of the movement in Ahriman's group.)

(The movements of each group are then repeated four times separately and thrice together.)

(The thought-beings vanish left and right; Lucifer and Ahriman remain: Philia, Luna, and Astrid advance from the background, and speak together the words they spoke before with the following alteration.)

Philia, etc.:
Thoughts hovered around
Like weaving of dreams
And built themselves in
To souls that are here—
Then will that creates
And feeling that stirs
And thought that loth work
The dreamer aroused—

(Philia, Astrid, and Luna vanish. Enter Capesius in astral garb, and after he has spoken a few words Maria joins him, though at first he cannot see her.)

Capesius:
The soul lives out her life within herself:
Believes she thinks because she does not see
Thoughts all spread out in space in front of her—
Believes she feels, because the feelings show
No flash like lightning leaping from the clouds;
She sees this realm of space, and gazeth on
The clouds above her ...; and were this not so,
Supposing that the lightning were to flash,
And not an eye looked up above to see,
She needs must think the lightning was in her.
She sees not Lucifer, from whom the thoughts
Spring forth, from whom the feelings flow!
And thus she thinks she is alone with them.
Why doth delusion lead her captive thus?
O soul, give answer to thyself ... yet ... whence?
From out thyself? Ah, nay ... perhaps that, too,
Were answered ... not by thee ... but Lucifer. ...

Maria:
And if it were; why then shouldst thou not seek?
Go forth into the deep to find it there ...

Capesius:
A being here, who hears the speech of souls?

Maria:
Souls are not here divided each from each
As when within the body they are pent.
Here each soul hears itself in other's speech.
So dost thou only speak unto thyself
When I say: ‘Seek thine answer in the deep.’

Capesius (hesitatingly):
Ah, in the deep there threatens darksome ... fear.

Maria:
Yea truly, fear is there: but ask thyself,
As thou hast forced thy way within her realm
If she doth not reveal herself to thee.
Ask Lucifer, before whom thou dost stand
If on thy weakness he is pouring fear.

Lucifer:
Who flees from me will love me all the same.
Children of Earth have loved me from the first
And only think that hatred is my due.
So do they ever seek me in my deeds.
If I had not as ornament to life
Sent beauty to their souls, they would long since
Have pined away in truth's cold empty forms
Throughout the long dull progress of the Earth.
'Tis I who fill the artist's soul with power
And whatsoe'er of beauty men have seen
Hath had its prototype within my realm—
Now ask thyself, if thou shouldst fear me still.

Maria:
In these domains which Lucifer commands
Fear hath not verily her proper place.
From hence he must send forth into men's souls
Not fear, but wishes, as his gifts to men.
Fear comes from quite another realm of power.

Ahriman:
At birth I was the equal of the gods,
Who have curtailed my many ancient rights.
I wished in such a way to fashion men
For Lucifer, my brother, and his realm,
That each should bear his own world in himself.
For Lucifer in spirit worlds but seeks
To show himself as peer among his peers;
To others he but shows his form sublime;
He ne'er would seek imperious rulership.
I wished to give unto mankind such strength
That they might grow to equal Lucifer.
And had I stayed within the realm of gods
This too had been in primal days fulfilled.
The gods however willed to rule on Earth,
And from their kingdom they did one day thrust
My power into the depth of the abyss,
So that I might not make mankind too strong.
And thus 'tis only from this place I dare
Send out my powerful strength upon the Earth.
But in this way my power turns into Fear.

(As Ahriman finishes speaking, Benedictus appears.)

Capesius:
He who hath heard what both these two powers here
Spake from their places out into the worlds
May know from this where he can look and find
Both fear and hatred in their own domains.

Benedictus:
In cosmic speech thou shalt perceive thyself;
And feel thyself in cosmic power of thought.
And as thou now didst see outside thyself
What thou didst dream was all thine inmost self,
So find thyself, and shudder now no more
At that one word thou hast a right to use
To prove thine own existence to thyself—

Capesius:
So once more I belong to mine own self!—
Now will I seek myself, because I dare
To see myself in cosmic thought and live.

Benedictus:
And thou must add all this which thou hast won
To victories of old to give the world.

(Dame Balde in her ordinary dress appears in the background beside Benedictus.)

Dame Balde (in a meditative voice suitable for fairy tales):
Once on a time there lived a child of God
Who had affinity with those who weave
The thoughtful wisdom of the spirit-realms.
This child, brought up by truth's almighty Sire
Grew up within his realm to ancient strength.
And when his body, radiant with light,
Did feel his ripened will creative stir,
He often looked with pity on the Earth
Where souls of men were striving after truth.
Then to the Sire of truth the child would say:
‘The souls of men are thirsting for the drink
Which thou canst hand to them from out thy springs.’
With earnest speech the Sire of truth replied:
‘The springs, of which I am appointed guard,
Let light stream forth from out the spirit-suns;
Only such beings dare to drink the light
As need not thirst for air that they may breathe.
Therefore in light have I brought up a child
Who can feel pity for the souls on Earth
And manifest the light 'midst breathing men.
So turn and go unto mankind and bring
The light that's in their souls to meet my light
Enfilled with confidence and spirit-life.’
So then the shining light-child turned, and went
To souls who keep themselves alive by breath.
And many good men found he on the Earth,
Who offered him with joy their souls' abode.
These souls he turned to gaze with grateful love
Upon their Sire who dwells in springs of light.
And when the child heard from the lips of men
And joyous mind of men, the magic word
Of fantasy, he knew himself alive
Dwelling with gladness in the hearts of men.
But one sad day there came unto the child
A man who cast upon him chilling looks.
‘I turn the souls of men on earth toward
The Sire of truth who dwells in springs of light—’
Thus to the strange man did the light-child speak.
The man replied: ‘Thou dost but weave wild dreams
Into men's spirits, and deceiv'st their souls.’
And since the day which witnessed this event
The child who can bring light to breathing souls
Hath often suffered slander from mankind.

(Philia, Astrid, Luna, and the Other Philia appear in a cloud of light.)

Philia:
Now let every soul
That drinks of the light
Awake to full power
In cosmic expanse.

Astrid:
So too let the spirit
That knoweth no fear
Arise in full power
In cosmic domains.

Luna:
Let man who doth strive
To reach to the heights
In Beings' foundation.
Hold fast with full strength.

The Other Philia:
Let man struggle on
To him who bears light
And opens out worlds
Which quicken in men
The sense of delight.
This beauty so bright
Awakened in souls,
Inspired to admire,
The spirit leads on
To realms of the gods.
Achievement consoles
The feelings that dare
The threshold to tread,
Which strictly doth guard
'Gainst souls that feel fear.
And energy finds
A will that grows ripe
And fearless doth stand
'Fore powers that create
And fashion the worlds.

Curtain falls whilst Benedictus, Capesius, Maria, Dame Balde, Lucifer, and Ahriman, and the four Soul-forms, are still in their places

Die Raetsel des geschichtlichen Lebens der Menschheit nach Ergebnissen der Geisteswissenschaft. (The Historical Evolution of Humanity and the Science of Spirit. Lecture given at Stuttgart, Germany, April 25, 1918)

No person with real inner sensitivity would find it any longer necessary to have to speak about a mystery when dealing with human soul life, than he would have to speak about the presence of hunger when dealing with the life of the body.

In the way it functions the life process must be so regulated that it induces hunger. It is possible to disregard hunger by the use of certain drugs and to believe that we can get away from it for a time, but in the long run this cannot be done without injury to the body. Similarly, any attempt to conceal the fact that there is a mystery in human life is bound to lead to injury in the soul. Those who disregard the mystery of the human being, either because of their condition in life or a lack of interest, very easily fall prey to a kind of soul hunger and to what happens as a result of this—a sort of atrophy in the life of the soul, an uncertainty and powerlessness, an inability to find one's way in the world.

Although no really sensitive person would find it necessary to have to speak about a human mystery in general, he would probably find more reason to consider that the great questions of life take on a new character in each succeeding period of time. As our time is so short, it is not possible to do more than indicate this fact. We can see how the outer conditions of life change from epoch to epoch, how new needs, new questions arise about the way we live. This also happens within the soul, which in its search for a solution to the mystery of man, changes its own finer qualities from epoch to epoch in order to make it possible for man to find such a solution. In this age that has been with us for three or four centuries, and particularly in the 19th century and our own day, which has culminated in the controlling of the world by means of steam, electricity, modern economic and social conditions, in this age there are also questions about the world in which the human being is placed that are of a different kind from those of earlier times. The science of spirit or anthroposophy seeks to approach the solution of the mystery of man out of the needs of modern times.

It is a mistake to regard the science of spirit, or anthroposophy, as a renewal of the views of the old mystics. Those who level this sort of criticism, from whatever viewpoint it happens to come, usually construct their own picture of the science of spirit and then criticize this picture, which actually has very little to do with what the science of spirit really is. It is only a caricature of the science of spirit that is criticized.

It is of course not possible within the framework of an evening's lecture to mention everything that would be necessary even to provide an outline of the science of spirit. Only a few further points can be added to what I have been saying about this for many years now, even in this city. It is particularly important to remember that the science of spirit does not take its origin from religion or mystical movements—although we should not conclude that it is necessarily opposed to these, as we shall see later—but it arises out of the life of the modern scientific outlook, out of a scientific approach to the world, connected with what is happening in the evolution of present-day natural science.

I do not think that anyone who despises the modern scientific outlook can penetrate the mysteries of the world as is done in the science of spirit, even if it is not the results of science that matter so much as the method of approach in conscientiously applying one's thinking to the phenomena of the world. The science of spirit must be well versed in the ways natural science investigates and thinks, and in the way in which it disciplines the inner life of the soul in the art of acquiring knowledge. The science of spirit must absorb this and reckon with it, if it is to keep abreast of the times.

It is just in connection with such an approach that the question arises: How is it at all possible for modern science and the outlook which results from it, to arrive at a view of the mysteries of the human being that really satisfies us deep down? If we are really positive thinkers we cannot permit ourselves an answer derived from preconceived opinions, or from one form of belief or another, but only from the facts of present-day scientific development and its method of thought. And so you will allow me to start with the course of scientific thought and research in more recent times. This will be regarded very much from the viewpoint of an admirer of the enormous progress made by the scientific approach in the 19th century, a viewpoint which enables one to realize that the hopes placed in natural science, particularly in the 19th century, for a solution to the great mysteries of man were absolutely honest and genuine.

To take one aspect of this, let us look at the rise of the physical and chemical sciences, along with the hopes and aspirations which came with it. We see how people steeped in the scientific outlook began to believe (around the middle of the 19th century) that the inmost being of man can be explained in terms of the physical body just as the working of the forces and forms of nature can be explained in terms of the wonderfully advanced laws of physics and chemistry. The great progress made by physics and chemistry no doubt justified such hopes for a while, and this progress led to the formulation of particular ideas about the world of the smallest particles: atoms and molecules. Even if people think differently about such matters today, nevertheless what I have to say about the atom and the molecule holds good for the whole of the scientific development. The idea was to investigate them and to explain how the substances and physical forces worked in terms of the constitution of the material molecules and atoms, and of the forces and mutual relationships brought about by this constitution. It was thought that if it was possible to explain a process in terms of the smallest particles, it would not be long before the way would be found to understand even the most complicated process, which was seen as a natural process: the process of human thinking and feeling.

Now let us examine where this approach with its great hopes has led. Anyone having studied the achievements of physics and chemistry during the past decades can only be filled with admiration for what has been achieved. I cannot go into details, but I will mention the views of a representative scientist, who sought his views in physics and chemistry in investigating the nature of the smallest physical particle, the atom,—Adolf Roland, who specialized in spectral analysis. He formulated his views on the basis of everything that is possible to know about the smallest particles that can be imagined as effective in the material world.—And how remarkable his views are! And how justified they are must be recognized by anyone who has some understanding of the subject. Adolf Roland says: According to everything that can be known today, an atom of iron must be imagined as being more complicated than a Steinway piano.

Now this is a significant statement, coming from one so familiar with the methods of modern science. Years ago it was believed that one could investigate the tiniest lifeless beings, or at least produce provisional hypotheses about them, in order to find out something about the world that constitutes the immediate surroundings of our ordinary consciousness. And what, in fact, does one find out? The scientist has to admit that having penetrated this smallest of worlds, he finds nothing that is any more explicable than a Steinway piano. So it becomes quite clear that however far we are able to go by this process of division into the very smallest particles, the world becomes no more explicable than it already is to our ordinary, everyday consciousness.—This is one of the ways of approach, with its great hopes. We see as it were, these great hopes disappearing into the world of the smallest particles. And honest scientific progress will show more and more by penetrating into the smallest particles of space that we can add nothing toward answering the great human mystery to what can be known to our ordinary consciousness.

In another sphere there have been just as great hopes, and understandably so, in view of the condition of the times. Just think of the great hopes people had with the advent of the Darwinian theory, with its materialistic bias! People thought they could survey the whole range of living beings, of plants and animals, right up to man. It was thought possible to understand man through having seen how he arose out of the species below him. And in following the transformation of the different species, from the simplest living being right up to man, it was thought possible to find material which would help solve the mystery of man.

Once again, anyone initiated into the ways of modern research can only be filled with admiration for the wonderful work that has been done on this subject even to this day. It was thought that we would find the single egg cell, out of which man had evolved, in the appropriate simplest living being, and would then be able to explain the origin of man out of this egg cell, which would be similar to what would be discovered as the simplest animal form in the world. Once again the path was taken to the smallest, this time the smallest living beings. And what has been found there? It is interesting to hear what a conscientious and important scientist of the 80's, Naegeli, had to say. He expressed his view, which has become famous, in the following way: Exact research on the individual species of plants and animals shows that even the tiniest cells of each single species have the most varied differentiation. The egg cell of a hen is just as fully differentiated from that of a frog as a hen itself is different from a frog.—In descending to the simplest living cells, by means of which it was hoped to explain the complications facing our normal consciousness, we do not arrive at anything simpler—as for instance when we study the iron atom—and in the end have to admit that it is just as complicated as a Steinway piano. Thus we have to imagine that the difference between the individual egg cells is as great as is the difference between the various species we see in nature with our ordinary consciousness.

Naegeli therefore proves by means of his own scientific conscientiousness that the approach of Darwinism with its materialistic bias is of no value.

But now there is another interesting fact. We could, of course, think that Naegeli, the great botanist, was really a one-sided personality, and in any case what he said was spoken in the 80's and that science has progressed and that his views are out of date. But we can also study the very latest developments on this subject, which have been well summed up by a most significant person, one of the most eminent pupils of Ernst Haeckel:—Oskar Hertwig. In the last week or two there has been published his summing up of what he has to offer as a result of his research on—as he calls his book,—Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufalls theorie.

Just imagine, we are confronted by the fact that one of the great pupils of Haeckel, the most radical exponent of materialistic Darwinism, has in the course of his life come to refute this materialistic Darwinism in the most thorough and complete way. I myself often heard from Haeckel's own lips that Oskar Hertwig was the one from whom he expected the most, and whom he expected to be his successor. And now we find today that it is Oskar Hertwig who refutes what he had absorbed as scientific Darwinism from his teacher, Haeckel! And he does it thoroughly, for his work—if I may use the expression—has a certain completeness.

This is what I wanted to say, to start with. I shall come back to the question later. I would only like to add that Oskar Hertwig makes use of everything that even the most recent research has brought to light in order to prove that what Naegeli said was absolutely true, so that one can say that the present-day position of biological research shows that a study of the smallest living entities does not tell us any more than does a study of the various species that we can perceive quite normally. For these smallest living entities, the cells, are, according to Naegeli and Hertwig, just as different as are the species themselves. A study of them only teaches us that nothing can be discovered in this way that cannot also be discovered by our normal perception in looking at the ordinary world.

Nor is it much different when—I can only mention this briefly—instead of looking at the very small, we look at the very large, the world of astronomy. For here too there has been the most wonderful progress in more recent times, for instance, in the study of the way the heavenly bodies move, which surprised everyone so much in 1859, and which has had such tremendous consequences in astronomy and especially in astrophysics.—And what has been the result? A thing one hears frequently from those who are at home in this subject is: Wherever we look in the world, whether we discover one or the other substance, this is not the main thing, for we find exactly the same substances with exactly the same forces in the universe, in the relatively large, as we find working here on the earth, so that when instead of looking into the very small, we examine the very large we only find what we know from our ordinary experience of space and time in everyday life. It is just in deepening what can be achieved by natural science and in particular in feeling deep admiration for what natural science has achieved that the way for a modern science of spirit or anthroposophy is prepared. But the latter is also well aware that however admirable these achievements of natural science are, however significant they may be for particular purposes, however necessary they may be for sound human progress, they can never penetrate the real mystery of man. This they themselves have proved until now.

The science of spirit or anthroposophy therefore takes its cue from natural science and tries to go quite a different way, and this way is not connected with trying to explain what we experience with our normal consciousness by means of a study of the very small or the very large, nor with methods using microscopes, telescopes or anything that can be attained by our senses or instruments which help them, nor by any scientific methods used in the sense world, nor by studying anything other than what we experience in our normal consciousness, but the science of spirit seeks to approach a solution to the mystery of man by a quite different kind of perception, as far as it is possible for human beings to do this.

In giving an outline of how one can imagine this other way of looking at the things that surround us, and at the events that happen around us in the world, I will make use of a comparison which will help to make the matter clearer.

In ordinary life we are familiar with two states of consciousness, the state of our normal consciousness which we have from the time we awaken in the morning to the time we go to sleep in the evening—this is our normal day consciousness. We are also familiar with the state of our so-called dream consciousness, in which pictures rise chaotically out of depths of the organism that are not accessible to human consciousness, and these pictures appear to be completely without any form of order. It is our experience that makes us aware of the difference between this chaotic dream consciousness and our orderly day consciousness which is encompassed by the real world.

The science of spirit or anthroposophy shows us that just as we awaken out of the chaotic dream consciousness into our ordinary day consciousness there is also a further awakening out of our day consciousness to—as I have called it in my book, Riddles of Man—a perceptive consciousness. The science of spirit does not deal with a reversion into a world of dreams, visions or hallucinations, but with something that can enter into human consciousness, into ordinary day consciousness in the same way that this day consciousness replaces our dream consciousness when we awaken. The science of spirit or anthroposophy is therefore concerned with a perceptive consciousness, with a real awakening out of our ordinary day consciousness, with a higher consciousness, if I may use such an expression. And its content is derived from the results of this perceptive, higher consciousness.—Just as the human being awakens from his dream world, where pictures move chaotically to and fro, into the world of the senses, so now as a scientist of spirit he awakens from the normal day consciousness into a perceptive consciousness, where he becomes a part of a real, spiritual world.

Now, first of all, I must give an idea of what this perceptive consciousness is. It is not acquired by means of any particular fantastic, arbitrary act or fantastic arbitrary decision, but it is acquired by a person working as a scientist of spirit, work which takes a long time, that is no less toilsome than work in the laboratory or observatory, which is pieced together out of the smallest fragments, perhaps even with only small results, but which are necessary for the progress of science as a whole. But everything that the scientist of spirit has to do is not done as in the laboratory or observatory with ordinary methods and appliances, but is done with the only apparatus that is of any use to the science of spirit, the human soul. It consists of inner processes of the human soul, which, as we shall now see, have nothing to do with vague or chaotic mysticism, but which demand systematic and methodical work on the human soul.

How does one acquire the wish to pursue such spiritual work, such an inner development, such a higher self training? It is possible to do it by taking our ordinary conscious life as a starting point, and gradually coming to a particular kind of conviction that becomes more compelling as one immerses one's mind in the modern scientific outlook. For several hundred years already there have been some personalities with this attitude of mind, and today this is increasingly the case. I cannot mention individual names now, but this inner experience, which gradually emerges under the influence of the scientific way of thinking as a distinct and necessary inner outlook and attitude, will affect increasingly wider circles of people and will become a common conviction with all the consequences that such a conviction is bound to entail.

There are two things that we are concerned with here. The first is that we have to acquire a certain view of the human ego, or what we call our self, by means of true and intimate observation, carried out willingly and with discipline. We address this self, we express it in one word, when after a certain point in our childhood development, we begin to use the word “I.” In our honest self-observation based on self-training we ask: What is this ego really like? Where is it to be found in us? Is it possible to find it or, if we are honest and conscientious, do we not have to admit as the great thinker Hume did, who did not arrive at his convictions arbitrarily, but by honest, self-observation, that however much I look into myself, I find feelings, ideas, joy and sorrow, I find what I have experienced in the world, but I do not find an ego anywhere? And how can I in any case—as he quite rightly says—find this ego? If it could be found so easily it would also have to be present when I sleep. But when I sleep, I know nothing about this ego. Can I assume that it is extinguished in the evening and revives again in the morning? Without actually being grasped by the mind, it must be present even when the mind is not working in sleep.

This is absolutely clear. And all those who are familiar with present-day literature on this subject will increasingly find this clear and obvious, that this will become more and more the case.

How are we to understand this? I would have to speak for hours if I were to go into details to prove what I am now saying.—I can only just mention the one fact that the ego of which we are speaking is present in the same way in our day consciousness as it is in the deepest, dreamless sleep. The ego always sleeps. It sleeps when we are asleep, and it sleeps when we are awake, and we know only about a sleeping ego when we are awake, about what lives, even as far as our waking consciousness is concerned, in a hardly conscious sphere of our soul life. Even when we are wide awake in our ordinary consciousness the ego is still only present as it is when we sleep. The reason we cannot imagine anything like an ego in us is because the rest of our soul life is present and, like the black spot in our eyes, cannot see.—The ego is made dark in our souls in a way, and can only be perceived as something we cannot imagine. The ego is always asleep and there is no difference between the way the ego should be imagined in sleep and when we are awake.

It is the same when we consider our minds; for if we train our self-observation properly we realize that our mental images have exactly the same existence in our waking day life as they do in the night in the chaotic mental images of our dreams. In our minds we dream, even when we are awake.

These truths that our ego sleeps and that we dream in our minds and imagination, even when we are awake—these truths, it is true, are washed away by our active life in the day. But for anyone able to observe the human soul they prove to be great and shattering truths which stand at the start of every spiritually scientific investigation.

And if we were then to ask, to ask one's self-observation: This is all very well, but how do we actually distinguish our ordinary waking life of the day from our dream life and our sleeping life? What happens at the moment when we wake up?—As I have said, I cannot go into details—you can find all the details necessary to understand more completely what I am now saying in outline in my book Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.—The question arises: What actually happens when we wake up, if our ego really remains asleep and our ideas and images, even in waking life, are like dream pictures? What is the difference between the waking and the sleeping human being?

Trained self-observation provides the answer: It is solely the penetration of the will into the soul life which differentiates waking life from sleeping and dreaming. The fact that we are awake and do not dream is due solely to the will pouring into us. It is because of this that we do not have dream pictures rising up without any direction of will, that we unite ourselves to the outer world with our will and with our will become a part of the outer world. It is what awakens the dream pictures to the substance of real-ness that they are images of an outer world, that brings it about that after waking up we are able to incorporate ourselves into the world through our will.

However paradoxical this may sound to many people today, it will have to become a basic conviction of a future outlook and will indeed become so, because it is bound to follow from a science based on true self-observation.

It is the flashing of the will into our minds that gives us our real connection with the outer world, which we experience with our ordinary consciousness. It is this that provides us with real self-observation in our ordinary consciousness. But we cannot remain in this consciousness if we really wish to fathom the actual nature of the things that surround us and the connection of human beings with the world. There has to be a similar transformation in our soul life, in the ordinary soul life we have in the day, in relation to the transformation that happens in our sleeping and dreaming life when we wake up. And a transformation can come about by working arduously towards a change, firstly in the life of our minds, and secondly, in the life of our will.

And I would like to point out at the start that what we call the science of spirit or anthroposophy is not based on anything metaphysical, spiritualistic or anything vaguely mystical, but that it is a true continuation of the well-founded and human scientific way of thinking. And so we can, for instance, link on to the sound beginnings that are to be found in the Goethean outlook upon nature and the world.

Allow me this personal remark, because it has something to do with what I have to say. That I am linking on to this Goethean outlook upon nature and the world is due to the fact that my destiny led me to immerse myself in it and to take from it what leads, as we shall see, to real perception into the spiritual world that surrounds us, surrounds us in the same way that the sense world does. What is so noteworthy with Goethe—and which is still not appreciated today—is that for instance he is able to bring physical phenomena that normally are only considered quite apart from the soul being, right into the life of the human soul. It is really quite wonderful to see how Goethe treats the physical aspects in his Theory of Color, which is still looked down upon by most people today, how he starts with the physical and physiological aspects and leads from them to what he expresses so beautifully in the section, “The Physical and Moral Effect of Color.” Naturally, one compromises oneself in many respects if one speaks about Goethe's Theory of Color. It cannot be spoken about as a matter of course because in its present form physics does not allow for any possibilities of discussing a justification of Goethe's theory. But the time will come when Goethe's Theory of Color will be vindicated by a more advanced kind of physics.

I can refer to what I have said about the artistic side of this in my book Goethe's Conception of the World, and in my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. (Published in English as Goethe the Scientist—Ed.) Today, however, I am not concerned with vindicating Goethe's Theory of Color, but only wish to deal with method, with how Goethe manages to evolve beyond purely physical considerations in the chapter “The Physical and Moral Effect of Colors.” Here he describes so beautifully what the human soul experiences when it perceives the color blue. Blue, says Goethe, pours into the soul the experience of coldness because it reminds us of shadow. Blue rooms bestow a feeling of sadness on all the objects in the rooms.—Or let us take what Goethe says about the experience of the color red. Red, says Goethe, produces an experience purely according to its own nature. It can produce the experience of seriousness and worthiness, or of devotion and grace—of seriousness and worthiness in its darker and thicker shades, of devotion and grace in its lighter and thinner shades.—So we see that Goethe does not only deal with the immediate physical nature of color, but he brings the soul into it, the experiences of sympathy and antipathy, as immediate experiences of the soul, as we have in life when we feel joy and sorrow. It may be that the intensity with which Goethe studied the colors is hardly noticeable, but nevertheless he goes through all the colors in a way that one can do if one allows one's soul life to pervade them,—that is, Goethe does not separate the physical from the soul experience. In doing this he laid the foundation for a kind of observation which even today is naturally only in its beginnings, but which will find a serious and worthy further development in the science of spirit. For the human being's relationship to color is exactly the same as exists with the rest of his senses. He is so fully taken up with the perception of something physical, with what works through his eyes and ears, that he does not perceive what radiates through and permeates the physical percept as an element of soul; he does not experience its full power and significance in his inner life. It is like not being able to see a weak light against a strong one. For it is above all the physical object that our eye normally perceives so strongly.

Now it is possible to take what is to be found in Goethe in its first beginnings—albeit instinctively with him because of his naturally sound outlook—a stage further. And it can also be looked at from another viewpoint. Goethe never deals with colors only as they exist in the world, but he also deals with the reaction they stimulate, their effect on the organism. How wonderful, even compared with the latest experiments in physics done by Hertwig, Hume and others, are the things that Goethe brought to light about the reaction of the eye, how the colors are not only perceived as long as one looks at them, but then they only gradually fade away. In all this there are in our ordinary perceptions weak beginnings which can be applied much more to the inner life of our mental images and can undergo further development. For in the conscientious and careful development of particular aspects of our cognitive and imaginative life there is to be found an aspect of science that belongs to the science of spirit or anthroposophy. Goethe's attitude to color has to be applied by those who wish to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of the science of spirit to the content of our minds, which for our normal consciousness is really only a world of dream pictures permeated by the will. The scientist of spirit also approaches the outer world in exactly the same way as our ordinary consciousness approaches the pictures in our minds, concepts and ideas. A sound thinking person does not become any different from anyone else. But if he is to receive a revelation of the spiritual world he has to effect a particular kind of perceptive consciousness. And he does this by inducing a certain metamorphosis in the life of his mind.

The details of what has to be done you can find in the book already mentioned. I only want to put before you now the main principles.

The scientist of spirit gradually manages to free his mental images from their normal task by a particular kind of methodical approach to the content of his mind. The normal function of our mental images is that they enable us to have pictures of the outer world. These pictures are the end result. But for the scientist of spirit they are a beginning, for whatever their significance, whatever kind of picture of the world they give, he immerses himself in its inner life, the inner effects of the picture, the image. And he does this in such a way that he does not look to its content, but to the forces that develop in it, and he does this when his consciousness has been completely brought to rest and becomes alive in the activity of his imagination and thinking.

Normally, a scientist starts with nature as it is in the world and ends up with his ideas. The scientist of spirit has to start with the inner activity of his ideas, with a kind of meditative activity, but which is not at all the same as the kind of meditation normally described and which is nothing more than brooding on something that is on one's mind—no, what we are concerned with here is that the soul is brought to rest, its activity is stilled, so that the life of the soul approaches certain ideas that can be grasped and surveyed like a calm sea. They should then become active in the life of the soul, active solely in the life of the mind. After a great amount of meditative work which is certainly not less than work done in the laboratory or observatory, we arrive at a stage where we perceive remarkable things happening, affecting the life of the soul in this inner life of the mind. One of the most important and significant faculties of the soul that we develop in our normal consciousness is our memory, our ability to remember. What is it that our memory, our ability to remember brings about? It enables us to call up at a later time mental images that we have formed at an earlier time. First of all, we have an experience and this is taken into the mind. The resulting image is like a shadow of the original experience. The experience disappears, but the fact of its existence continues.—We carry the image of the experience in us. Years later, or whenever it might be, we can recall it. What we recall out of the total organism of our spirit, soul and body as a memory image is a shadow-like copy of what was imprinted on the memory in the first place.

If we pursue the methods actively and energetically that are given and described in my books for the cultivation of the mind, we acquire a much stronger kind of activity in the soul working in the memory. However paradoxical it may appear, I have to describe it, because I do not want to speak about the generalities of the science of spirit, but to deal with the positive and concrete aspect of it, upon which it is based. The scientist of spirit experiences that a mental image is brought alive, and by bringing the peace of his consciousness constantly to bear upon this image he gets to the point where he knows: Now you have exercised the powers of your thinking to such an extent that you can continue no further.—Then something shattering happens. The moment arrives when we know that we cannot continue to use our thinking in the same controlled way, but have to let it go, just as we let an idea or image go that then sinks into forgetfulness and that later can be recalled out of this by our memory. But when an image that we have as a result of an energetic meditative life is let go, it enters into much greater depths of our life than an image that is taken into our memory. The scientist of spirit then experiences—this is only one example, other experiences have to be linked to this, but now I only wish to give a few examples—that he has strengthened an image by the powers of his thinking to such an extent that he can allow it to sink into his being so that it is no longer present. But then it appears later, according to the images we have—this has all to be regulated—these images remain present. We acquire views in the course of time in which these images have to remain present, deep down in the unconscious. Some images remain for a longer period in the subconscious, others a shorter period and we acquire the power to recall them again and again. We do not do this by exerting ourselves in trying to remember an image. Images are recalled by peaceful immersion in ourselves; It is not like the way our ordinary memory works, for here we are dependent upon a mood of expectancy that we bring about at the right moment. We become aware of this mood of expectancy by other things which cannot be described here. We have a mood or feeling of expectancy; we do not do anything to bring about an image or an experience. We simply have this peaceful expectancy, this purely selfless immersion in ourselves and only after hours, weeks or even only after years does there come back what we have perceived in the very depths of our being, as if in a kind of abyss. And then the opposite happens from what takes place in our normal consciousness.

With our normal consciousness the experience comes first in all its vividness and then the shadowlike image is produced. Here something quite different happens. We start with something which leads at the same time to self-discipline and self-education, and this is an image which we put before our souls and let it be present in the soul for weeks or months until the moment comes when it can be completely immersed. Then it emerges again—but how it emerges is the surprising thing, for it is not anything as shadowlike as the normal image.

This experience is brought about by working on the image in a certain way and we know full well, if we are familiar with things that lead to such results as these, that we are dealing here with something sound and not morbidly introspective. These are not the same forces that lead to hallucinations or visions, or that produce morbid or unsound states of any kind, but they are the forces that produce precisely the opposite and, in fact, have the effect of banishing everything in the nature of hallucinations and visions.—It is the opposite process. The soul, in undergoing this, is not as it is in everyday life with its normal, healthy understanding, but it has to be much healthier and sounder if the exercises which belong to this whole development and which have to be done regularly are to overcome everything that would lead one astray. What this leads up to is something we have not known before—something spiritual, something super-sensible, that we now perceive in ourselves. What is it that perceives? It is what Goethe called the eye or the ear of the spirit, of which he had an instinctive presentiment.

From the moment onward when we have had an experience such as I have just described, we know that we do not have only a physical body, but that we have a finer, more inward body that is in no way made up of physical substance. However paradoxical it may appear to many people today when in the science of spirit or anthroposophy we speak of a fine etheric body, a soul body, it is nevertheless a truth—but a truth that can really be investigated only in this way I have described. We now know that we have something in ourselves in which spiritual perception can arise, just as perception can arise in the physical organism in the physical eye. We know that the eye or the ear of the spirit, as Goethe called it, becomes something from which there springs something out of the etheric world, out of the super-sensible body. We cannot use this super-sensible body like a physical body, but we know that it exists and we know that there has to be a science of spirit for us to find it. It does not come into being by means of any arbitrary act of the will, but it comes into being with the help of the most recent philosophical thought.

Let me cite a few facts that are especially important in this connection for the formation of a judgment about anthroposophy. The philosophers of more recent times who inherited the work of their predecessors done around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century and in the first half of the 19th century, pointed out, albeit instinctively and not as a result of method, that man does not have only a physical body, which provides the basis for his being, but he also has what one can call an etheric, a soul body. Only the terminology for this fine body was different, a body which exists as a fact for the science of spirit.

This kind of assumption led Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797-1879) to his conception of the process of death, which he expressed in the following way: “For we hardly have to ask how the human being acts in regard to himself” when “going through death ... With this concept of the continuing existence of the soul we are not therefore bypassing our experience and laying hold of an unknown sphere of merely illusory existence, but we find ourselves in the midst of a comprehensible reality accessible to our thinking.” And now Fichte says—and this is what is important—this consciousness points to something beyond itself. “... Anthroposophy produces results founded on the most varied evidence that according to the nature of his being as also in the real source of his consciousness man belongs to a super-sensible world. Our ordinary consciousness, however, which is based on our senses and on the picture of the world that arises through the use of sight, and which includes the whole life of the sense world, including the human sense world, all this is really only a place where the super-sensible life of the spirit is carried out in bringing the otherworldly spiritual content of ideas into the sense world by a conscious free act ... This fundamental conception of man's being raises `Anthropology' in its final result into `Anthroposophy'.”

Into an “anthroposophy!” He uses the expression, anthroposophy. We can see from this the longing for the science that today has to become a reality.

To cite another example—owing to lack of time I can only quote a few examples—I would like to bring in the important German thinker, Vital Troxler (1780-1866), who also did some important teaching in Switzerland. He speaks out of the same approach, but still instinctively, because the science of spirit or anthroposophy did not exist at that time: “Even in earlier times philosophers distinguished a fine, noble, soul body from the coarse body ... a soul, which contained within it a picture of the body which they called a model and which for them was the inner higher man ... More recently even Kant in his Dreams of a Spiritual Seer dreams seriously as a joke about a wholly inward soul man, that bears within its spirit-body all the limbs normally to be found outside ...”

And now Troxler says: “It is most gratifying that the most recent philosophy, which ... must be manifest ... in anthroposophy, climbs to greater heights, and it must be remembered that this idea cannot be the fruit of mere speculation ...”

I do not need to quote the rest. He means that there must be a science which leads to the super-sensible, to the qualities of this super-sensible body, just as anthropology leads to the physical qualities and forces of the physical human body.

I have dealt with characteristic thinkers on this subject in my book, The Riddles of Man. They did not work out these things as the present-day science of spirit can do, but they spoke out of instinctive longing for a future science of spirit that has now to become a reality through this present science of spirit. Thus also the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the important philosopher, Immanuel Herman Fichte.

In his Anthropology, the second edition of which appeared in 1860, Fichte says that there can be nothing that persists in matter: “In the elements of matter it is not possible to find the unifying form principle of the body that is active during our whole life. We are therefore directed to a second, essentially different cause in the body. Insofar as this contains what persists in the digestion it is the true, inner, invisible body that is present in all visible matter. The outer manifestation of this, formed out of the never-ceasing digestion may henceforth be called `body' which neither persists nor is a unity and which is the mere effect or image of the inner bodily nature, which casts it into the changing world of substance in the same way that an apparent solid body is made out of the particles of iron filings by a magnetic force, but which is again reduced to dust as soon as the binding force is taken away.”

Thus we see that Immanuel Hermann Fichte instinctively finds himself in the position of having to accept a force-body which holds the material components together in a material body in a certain formal structure like a magnetic force.

You notice, too, that Fichte also longs for an anthroposophy when he deals with the super-sensible in man and draws our attention to it.

Anthroposophy does not appear at a particular time without reason, but it is something that has long been anticipated by the really deep core of our soul life. This can be seen quite clearly in the examples I have given.

Now I must turn to the other aspect of the development of our soul life, the development of the will. What I have said so far was concerned with the development of the mind. The will, too, can be led beyond the condition it has in our normal consciousness. If you imagine that someone—I only want to mention the most important things, the rest can be read in my books—that someone were to look at his inner life in the same way that we look at our ordinary life between human beings under normal conditions, the life of the human community, we can notice our reaction when a desire or impulse awakens when we say: Conditions allow this impulse, this desire to take its course; another time the conditions do not allow us, or we do not allow it. We see that we evolve a certain responsibility toward outer life that is rooted in our conscience. We develop quite definite feelings, a particular configuration of our soul life in our conscience, concerning what we do or do not do. Our normal consciousness is subject to our soul life in developing such inner demands or standards—we obey logic, but when it comes to thinking or not thinking, to whether thinking is clear or restricted, how cool and logical our relationship is to this as compared to our relationship to outer life! We accept the one because we can, as it were, grasp it in spirit, as a mental image; we reject the other. But one cannot experience the intensive life that we feel in our human responsibility when it comes to our purely logical and scientific thinking.

The second kind of exercise consists in pouring out a certain kind of inner responsibility over our thinking, over our mind, so that we reach the point of not only saying: This opinion is valid, this opinion is properly conceived, I can give it my assent and so on, but also that we manage to preserve a mental image in the same duty-bound consciousness as we have when we do not go through with the one or the other action. Morality—though quite a different kind of morality from the one we have in normal life—is poured out over our mind, over our mental images. Inner responsibility poured out over the life of our mental images results in attitudes where in dealing in certain experiences we allow ourselves some mental images and reject others, in the one case accepting them, in the other rejecting them by a justified but temperate antipathy. From this new aspect, sympathy and antipathy activate our inner life. This again has to be practiced for a long time. I will give an example of how this can be supported by accustoming ourselves to allowing a mental image to be present in our souls in as manifold a way as possible.

In ordinary life one person may be a monist, another a dualist, the third a materialist, the fourth a spiritualist and so on. If we learn to immerse ourselves in the life of our mental images our concepts take on a different aspect in the living inner experience of the world of our mental images so that we come to recognize: Of course, there are concepts of materialism, they can be used for a particular province, for a particular sphere of the world. In fact, they must be available, for one can only get something out of immersing oneself in a particular sphere of the world if one has grasped materialism in all its many aspects. For another sphere of the world spiritualistic concepts are needed, for a third, monistic, for a fourth, the concept of idealism and so on. Monistic, dualistic concepts—they enrich the life of our minds and we know that such concepts mean no more than do different photographs of a tree taken from different points. We learn now to immerse ourselves in an inner element, an inner tolerance, that once again is an outpouring of moral substances over our inner life. It is just like someone receiving a picture of a tree that he has actually seen, who would never say, if he received a picture of the tree taken from a different angle, that it was not the same tree. Just as we can have four or even eight pictures which all portray the same tree, so we learn to look at all sorts of ideas, which singly would represent a one sided picture of reality, and to learn about them, to look into them with great care and immerse ourselves in their manifoldness. This is normally underrated when it comes to doing the exercises which have now to be undertaken. This is something that is not much understood today, even by the best, but it does lead to the further development of the will in a way similar to the development of the mind that I have described. We then experience that the will liberates itself from being bound to the body.

Just as oxygen can be extracted from water, so the will is released by means of the energetic pursuit of these various exercises that are described, and it becomes freer and freer, and more and more spiritual. By these means we awaken a real, higher man in ourselves that is not just an image of an ideal nor something thought out. We make the discovery which is still a paradox to most people today, but which is quite real for the science of spirit, that a second, more subtle man lives in us, having a quite different consciousness from our normal consciousness. And this consciousness that we can awaken in this way shows us that it is a much more real man than the one that we live in the physical body and move around in. This man in us can make use of the eye of the spirit, as I called it earlier, in the etheric body, in the way I have described.

The acceptance of such another consciousness of another more all-embracing man—this has a far more intimate connection with nature and its beings and to the spiritual world than our normal consciousness.—The acceptance of this also was instinctively foreseen by the more penetrating scientists of the 19th century. Here, too, the science of spirit brings about a fulfillment. I would only like to point out how Eduard von Hartmann worked in this direction, though I do not wish to advocate his philosophy in detail in any way. In his really controvertible work, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann referred to the fact that an unknown soul quality is to be found behind the normal consciousness of the human being that—as Eduard von Hartmann describes it—comes to expression painfully in a way, and which has a kind of underground telephone connection with the unconscious spiritual nature of the outer world, and which can work its way up, and does work its way up, through the astral nature and pours out of the unconscious or subconscious into our normal, everyday consciousness.

Eduard von Hartmann really pointed instinctively to what the science of spirit teaches as a fact. Only he believed that this other consciousness of the human being could only be arrived at by theoretical hypotheses, analytical concepts and inferences. This was what he was lacking because he never wanted to take the path which is appropriate to his time: not just to formulate the life of the soul theoretically, but to take it actively into training in the two ways that have been described.

It has been possible to see from this that the acceptance of this spiritual nature in everything is much more helped by the solution of the mystery of the human being—even from a philosophical viewpoint, if it really remains philosophical—than all that can be done by the rest of science in the ways described above. And this can be proved by what has happened. Just in these matters Eduard von Hartmann proves a remarkable figure.

In 1869 he published his Philosophy of the Unconscious. Here he discussed how the spiritual that lives in the soul, hidden, as it were, in the spiritual soul, also lives in nature, and how the materialist today has only a one-sided idea of how the spiritual that lives in the soul also permeates and invades nature. In was 1869 that The Philosophy of the Unconscious was first published. It was the time when people had the greatest hopes of gaining a new view of the world on the basis of the new Darwinian approach, the laws of natural selection and the struggle for existence. Hartmann energetically opposed everything connected with this approach from a spiritual viewpoint, and naturally enough the scientists who were full of materialistic interpretation of Darwinism reacted to what Hartmann said. They said: Well, of course, only a philosopher can speak like that who is not at home in real scientific research and who does not know how conscientiously science works!—And many works were published by various scientists attacking Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. They all wrote basically the same thing—Hartmann was a dilettante and one should not bother to listen to him any further. One only had to protect the layman who always fell for such things; that is why Hartmann's position should be exposed.

Among the many works that appeared there was also one which was anonymous. From start to finish everything was brilliantly refuted. It was shown how from the viewpoint which a scientist had to have, he understood nothing about how science works in its approach to the great mystery of the world!—The scientists were tremendously enthusiastic and were in full agreement with what the anonymous author had written, and it was soon necessary to reprint this ingenious, scientific work. Oskar Schmidt and Ernst Haeckel themselves were full of praise and said: It is a pity that this colleague of ours, this significant scientific thinker, does not say who he is. If he will only say who he is we will regard him as one of ourselves.—In fact, Ernst Haeckel even said: I myself could have said nothing better than what this anonymous author has marshaled from the scientific viewpoint against Hartmann.

And lo and behold, a second edition was needed just as the scientists had wished, But now in the second edition the author revealed himself. It was Eduard von Hartmann himself who had written the work! This was a lesson that could not have been executed more brilliantly for people who constantly believe that those who do not adopt their own attitude could not possibly understand anything about their learning and knowledge. It is a lesson from which we can still learn today, and particularly those could learn who, when it comes to opposing what the science of spirit teaches, approach it with a similar attitude.

The scientist of spirit or anthroposophist knows quite well the sort of things that can be leveled against anthroposophy, however well it may be presented. He is fully aware of what can be said against it, just as Eduard von Hartmann was able to present what the scientists found to be excellent and to their liking. Such lessons, it is true, are soon forgotten, and the old habits soon return. But we can recall them, and we should learn from them. It is not only with Eduard von Hartmann but also with others that an instinctive feeling has arisen that quite a different kind of consciousness is at work in the depths of the human soul.

I would remind you of Myers, the English scientist and editor of the reports of psychic experiments which were published in many volumes and which set out to show how there is something hidden in the human soul that exists alongside our ordinary experience,—what James, the American, called the year of the discovery of one of the most significant facts, namely the discovery of the unconscious in 1886. Today scientists on the whole know very little about such things. They know nothing of Eduard von Hartmann's arguments, nothing about James, nothing about 1886 when Myers discovered the unconscious, the part of us that is of a spirit-soul nature and is connected with the spirit-soul nature of the world, and that rises into and awakens our normal consciousness. It is the same as I have described as awakening as if out of our everyday consciousness, out of a dreaming state, and makes our ordinary consciousness into a perceptive consciousness.—But in Myers and James it is to be found in a chaotic and immature state, rather like a hope or promise.—It becomes a real fact for the first time with the science of spirit or anthroposophy.

And so we see—however paradoxical it may appear today—that the development of the inner powers of the soul emerges on two fronts. I can only indicate how what I have described in its first beginnings, when systematically carried out, eventually leads to our being increasingly able to learn to use the spiritual eye in the etheric body by means of the other man that lives in us, and we discover this world of inner processes in ourselves and are able to feel ourselves as belonging to it. How we then learn not only to overcome our conception of space, but also of time. We come to look at time in quite a different way. And, as I have said, we become able not only to carry ourselves back in our memories into the past, but also to gain experience of ourselves at earlier points of time and also to carry ourselves back beyond the time that we normally remember.

You all know that we can remember back only to a certain point in our childhood. This is as far as we can think back to. What we experienced in the first years of our childhood we can only be reminded of from outside. But now we can carry ourselves back to the time in our earliest childhood when as human beings we were not yet able to recognize or perceive our powers, to the time when the forces we need for our ordinary consciousness were needed for the initial growth of the body. That is to say, we learn to perceive not with the ego of our earliest childhood, but the ego that has brought our spiritual nature out of the spiritual world and united itself with what has been inherited in the way of physical forces and substances from our father, mother and ancestors. We go back to this spiritual human being. From the present moment we look back with an awakened consciousness and see through the sense world into the spiritual; we have a spiritual world before us. Similarly, when we carry ourselves back in time we then have a qualitative experience of the life that we live in the body and that comes to an end with death. On the one hand, our ordinary perception cuts us off in our normal consciousness from spiritual reality; on the other, our bodily experience cuts us off in our normal consciousness from what exists beyond the gate of death. The moment we reach the time which we can remember back to, we see on the other hand life bordered by death, and we see what death makes of us. What is beyond death is revealed, together with what is beyond birth, only divided, kept apart by our life in the body. The spiritual man, the eternal in us, is experienced in that we see our physical life as a river; the one bank is birth and the other bank is death. Death, however, is revealed together with what exists before birth.

We also see maturing in us what leads from this life to a further life on earth. For if we have gone through the gate of death we then see what lives in us. Just as we can say that there is something that lives in the plant which, having gone through the dark and cold time of year, develops into a new plant, so we see how our spirit-soul nature that is within us in this life goes through the spiritual world between death and birth and appears again in a new life on earth. All this becomes accessible to our perception when we develop the powers of the soul in the way that it has been described. Just as we grow accustomed to a physical world through our open eyes and open ears, so we accustom ourselves to a spiritual world, really become concretely aware of a spiritual world that exists around us. We live together with spiritual beings, spiritual forces. Just as we recognize our life, our body, as the expression of our spiritual being which begins at birth, or rather at conception, so we also come to know our physical life on the earth, our physical earth, as a further condition or state of something that has been preceded in planetary existence.

We come to see our earth as a metamorphosis, a transformation of an earlier planet, in which we existed as human beings at an earlier stage, not yet with the present-day physical body, but in a spiritual state and with the nature we have today in a spiritual form. The animals have undergone a downward evolution, the human being has evolved in such a way that the point at which man and animal meet is to be found in the spiritual and not in the physical. Man's evolution on the earth is a continuation of the life on an earlier planet, which has been transformed into the present earth, and which will similarly be transformed into the next stage and will enable the human being to take into himself an ego that today is still slumbering in him, but which will become more and more awake in the further course of evolution. The whole world will be spiritualized.

When we speak about nature we do not content ourselves with referring to a vague pantheism existing in the outer world, but in looking at the being of the earth we speak of rising stages that we get to know. Nor do we enter into a spiritual world with a vague pantheism, but as a concrete individual and real human being.

Today one is forgiven least of all for saying such a thing as this. Nevertheless it is true that a real, concretely spiritual world is opened up to us, the spiritual world that we belong to with our spiritual man, just as with our physical man we belong to ordinary physical reality.

And so in bringing about a methodical awakening of inner life the science of spirit or anthroposophy adds knowledge of spirit to natural knowledge and introduces a different picture of the world from the one we have in our ordinary consciousness. In this connection the science of spirit will gradually have to be taken into the hearts of those who are longing for it, but who for the most part do not know that this longing exists in their hidden feelings. But it is there, and it will come to be more and more recognized.

It is remarkable how even the most eminent thinkers of our time and of the immediate past have not yet been able to grasp the details of the kind of experience I have been describing. I wanted to cite the great philosopher Eduard von Hartmann who had an idea of what it was about, but who was only interested in reaching another consciousness in the human being theoretically, and who was unable to discover that one cannot find one's way into the spiritual by theories or hypotheses, but only by experience, by working upon one's thoughts in such a way that they are sent out as messengers into an unknown world, from which they return as experience, and that leads one into the spiritual world, as I have described. But the experience of it must be based on accepting the existence of a world of ideas and images as real.

Forgive me if I say something personal once more, but it is very much connected with this whole subject. I do not particularly wish to do so, but you will see why I refer to it.

In 1894 I attempted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to provide the world with just such a philosophical approach as a preparation for the science of spirit, where the individual human viewpoints, which sometimes have such remarkable names, could be understood, not as a choice of mutually exclusive views, but that they could be seen like photographs or different pictures of the same object and that these concepts could be allowed to speak for themselves so that one has a many-sided picture.

Eduard von Hartmann studied this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in 1894, and he sent me his copy in which he had made notes. I would like to read a passage from the letter he sent me. It contains singular, philosophical expressions but what he means is quite clear even without going into what these expressions mean.

In the first place he says, for instance: “The title should be `Monism based on the theory of knowledge—ethical individualism,' and not `Philosophy of Spiritual Activity'.”

But he has an instinctive feeling for the fact that these two aspects are supposed to throw light on one and the same thing. He thinks, however, that they cannot be brought together. They are in fact brought together in the life of the soul and not by means of empty theories. This is what he meant. And similarly in other points.

Eduard von Hartmann therefore says: “In this book neither Hume's absolute phenomenalism nor Berkeley's phenomenalism based on God are reconciled, nor this more immanent or subjective, phenomenalism and the transcendental panlogism of Hegel, nor Hegel's panlogism and Goethean individualism. Between these two aspects there yawns an unbridgeable abyss.”

Because all these views exist in such a living way, they all testify to the same thing, they characterize one and the same thing from varying viewpoints!

Hartmann has an inkling of this, a feeling for it, but he does not see that what is important is not a hypothetical and theoretical way of putting them together in thought, but a living way of experiencing them as a unity.

He therefore goes on to say: “Above all, the fact is ignored that phenomenalism leads with absolute inevitability to soliphism [this may be a coined word, a `typo,' or the translator really meant solipsism - e.Ed] (that is, to a doctrine of being one, a doctrine of the ego), to illusionism and to agnosticism, and nothing is done to prevent this plunge into the abyss of un-philosophy, because the danger is not even recognized.”

This danger certainly has been recognized! And Eduard von Hartmann once again instinctively uses the right expression: “plunge into the abyss of un-philosophy.”

This is precisely what I have described today! Of course, this plunge into the abyss is not prevented by un-philosophy or by any hypotheses setting out to be philosophical, but only by our real life being led into the other existence, by the unconscious being made conscious, so that what is experienced objectively and independently in the soul can be guided back again into the conscious.

You can see here how the science of spirit or anthroposophy has gradually to get to grips with the longings and hopes for such a science, that exist at the present time, but which in themselves cannot get as far as what has to be achieved in the science of spirit, because for this to happen it is imperative to see that intimate work on the soul has to be done which does not remain mystically subjective, but is just as objective as ordinary science and knowledge.

What then has been done about this up to now? I have cited Oskar Hertwig to you. Oskar Hertwig is one of those who felt the significance of Eduard von Hartmann!

Ernst Haeckel is one of those who mocked most at what Eduard von Hartmann published in his Philosophy of the Unconscious.

Oskar Hertwig still cites Eduard von Hartmann continuously and does so in full agreement with what he says, even where Eduard von Hartmann says that the way in which the idea of natural selection is treated as a modern superstition is like a childhood disease, a scientific childhood disease of our times. This is cited by Oskar Hertwig, himself a pupil of Haeckel, as an appropriate statement about natural science by Eduard von Hartmann. And there is much more like this. It all adds up to a clear statement as to what science is unable to recognize and what it would really have to recognize. But what has happened is that the pupils of the great teachers of science of the 19th century have already started to refute everything that existed earlier in the nature of the hopes I have been talking about.

Oskar Hertwig is extraordinarily interesting because he shows that science today cannot have any objection to such a philosophy as Eduard von Hartmann's.

If the scientists find their way to Eduard von Hartmann, they will also find their way to the science of spirit. But then the general consciousness of humanity too will be able to find its way.

The science of spirit will encounter opposition enough from other directions as well. To conclude, I would like to mention briefly the objections that are constantly brought by the adherents of various religious organizations against the science of spirit. It is remarkable how it is just from the religious viewpoint that the science of spirit is attacked. It is said, for instance, that what the science of spirit has to say contradicts things in the Bible or that are held according to tradition.—But is this really what we should be concerned about? Could we think of not wanting to discover America because it cannot be found in the Bible or in Christian tradition?

If anyone believes that the power of the greatest thing in the world—Christianity—could be endangered because of some discovery, he cannot have much faith in it!

When I hear of how objections can be made by Christians, I recall a theologian, this time not Protestant, but Catholic, a teacher of Christian philosophy, member of a Catholic faculty of theology, who gave his inaugural lecture on Galileo—and we know how the church dealt with Galileo. This really genuinely Christian and Catholic priest, who up to the time of his death never denied that he was a true son of the church, said in his lecture on Galileo: It is with injustice that a really perceptive Christianity turns against the progress of natural science as brought about by such people as Galileo. It is with injustice that Christianity declares certain ideas which are falsely said to be derived from Christianity, to be irreconcilable with natural science. For modern science, thinks this priest and professor of theology, only appears to be irreconcilable with the more limited view of the world held by the ancient peoples, but not with the Christian view, for this Christian view, properly understood, is bound to confirm the discoveries of more and more wonders in the world, and is bound to confirm the glory of the Godhead and the glory of the Christian view; it is bound to confirm the wonders that divine grace has instituted upon the earth.

We can say the same about the science of spirit, for there is no contradiction between it and Christianity, properly understood. But contradiction exists only between it and a false teaching that unjustly purports to originate from Christianity. The only thing that the science of spirit cannot be reconciled with is a narrowly conceived scientific view of the world and not with a broadly based Christian view. And the discoveries of the science of spirit, the wonders that it finds in the spiritual world, will not mean an end to the wonders that Christianity teaches us about, but on the contrary will confirm them.

Laurenz Mueller, also a genuinely Christian theologian and professor, speaks in a similar vein: Christianity does not contradict and is not intended to contradict a doctrine of evolution properly understood, as long as it does not set out to be a purely causal evolution of the world and to place man only within the framework of a physical causality.

The science of spirit does not clash with Christianity, because it does not lead to the deadening of religious life and vision, but, on the contrary, it encourages and fires religious life and vision.

And those today who still believe that their Christianity would be endangered by the science of spirit will gradually have to realize that whereas wrongly understood science has driven away more and more souls, both outwardly and inwardly, anthroposophy or the science of spirit, because it kindles religious life, will bring even educated people back to the great mysteries, not only of Christian teaching, but also of Christian deeds and ceremonial services. This will largely be the work of the future, in fact, of the relatively near future.

Just in this connection one could wish that things would be better understood and that above all there were more willingness to understand the matter, that one would not formulate a picture without really going into it and then setting up this picture as something contradictory to Christianity.

I can only mention this very briefly. I would have to speak for a long time if I had to go into everything in detail—but this could be done—to show that Christianity has not the slightest grounds for turning against such ideas as repeated lives on earth.

To finish with, allow me to say a few words about the teachings of natural science.

Today natural science has arrived at the point of realizing what it cannot attain. Oskar Hertwig—to keep to our former example—hits upon something in a remarkable way in his book Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie.

In a remarkable way he comes to the conclusion that it is not any objective research, nor analytical research into scientific facts, that has led to the materialistic philosophy of Darwinism, but it arises from the fact that the people of this age have borne this materialistic outlook in themselves, have borne the belief in the unspiritual nature of the outer world in themselves, and have applied this to nature.

And here it is very interesting to feel the weight of Oskar Hertwig's own words to show the real nature of the situation.

Hertwig says: “The principle of utility, the conviction of the necessity of unrestricted commercial and social competition, materialistic tendencies in philosophy, are forces that would have played an important part, even without Darwin. Those who were already under their influence greeted Darwinism as a scientific confirmation of the ideas they already cherished. They could now look at themselves, as it were, in the mirror of science.”

“The interpretation of Darwin's teaching,” Oskar Hertwig continues, “which is so ambiguous in its uncertainties, also allows for a varied application in the other spheres of economic, social and political life. Each person can get what he wants from it, just as from the Delphic oracle, and can draw his own conclusions concerning social, hygienic, medical and other questions, and can call on the scientific learning of the new Darwinian biology with its unalterable laws of nature, to confirm his own views. If however these laws of nature are not what they are made out to be”—and Oskar Hertwig sets out to prove, and does prove, that they are not really laws of nature, “could there not also be social dangers when they are applied in various ways to other spheres? We surely do not believe that human society can use for fifty years such phrases as bitter struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, of the most useful, the most expedient, perfection by selection etc., without being deeply and substantially influenced in the whole direction of this kind of ideas.”

This is what a scientist is already saying today. He is not just saying that these materialistically formulated ideas of Darwinism are wrong, but that they are injurious, that they inevitably lead to difficulties in the soul life, and to social and political harm. Only the restricted and one-sided views of certain scientists could maintain otherwise. And sometimes this works out in the most terrible way.

A great scientist of the present day for whom I have great respect—and it is just because I have respect for him that I cite him now—hints in a remarkable way at how the scientist does not perhaps wish to be understood, but at how he must be understood on the basis of his attitude toward what can be expected of a purely naturalistic view of nature. The scientist, for whom I have the greatest respect, says at the end of a significant book—and these are now his own words that I am quoting: “We live today in the best period of time”—this is what he maintains, it cannot be proved with full validity, but he asserts: “we live today in the best period of time, at least we scientists, and we can even hope for better,” he says, “for in comparing the science of today with the achievements of earlier scientists we can say with Goethe who knew so much about nature and the world:

The pleasure ... is great, to cast

The mind into the spirit of the past,

And scan the former notions of the wise,

And see what marvelous heights we've reached at last.”

—Thus speaks a first class scientist at the end of an important book!

I do not know whether many people notice and think about the person whom Goethe makes say this. Is it really Goethe, the one who knew so much about the world and nature, who says this? No, he puts it into the mouth of Wagner

And Faust replies to Wagner:

“How strange, that he who cleaves to shallow things

Can keep his hopes alive on empty terms

And dig with greed for precious plunderings,

And find his happiness unearthing worms!”

This is the real view of the one who knew so much about the world and nature!

And if scientists today do not yet realize what can be built on the basis of the sound foundations to be found in a view of the world, such as also shone through Goethe, one can understand what Oskar Hertwig so rightly says: The materialistic conception of the world and Darwinism with its materialistic bias have arisen out of the general materialistic attitude of the times, their naturalistic methods, their materialistic impulses and feelings, and which have then been applied to nature. But the facts disprove this.

The scientist of spirit replies to this out of what he believes to be a deeper knowledge of the world and of man: No, it is not such a narrow view like the one prevalent around the middle of the 19th century that should affect our study of nature, but our views should be formulated according to the highest possible content that spirit and soul can attain, and they should then be applied to nature to see if nature really confirms them. We can then expect that the resultant view will not be anything like Darwinism. This latter believed the world to exist according to certain laws and, as we have seen, nature herself has disproved this belief.

The science of spirit strives to study the human soul in its depths, and to draw out of these depths the spirit that exists in the broadest and most embracing sense as the foundation of existence in spiritual beings and forces. It is not a one-sided but a many-sided path that it takes, for there is not only one path it follows, but it follows all the paths on which the human soul is led, from out of its own rich inner life. The science of spirit may be allowed to hope that the questions, the mysteries, which nature has put to it will not be refuted by nature, but that the spirit in nature will affirm them because the spirit that lives in nature also lives in man, and not, as in the other case, to deny what the science of spirit or anthroposophy envisages the real nature of the human mystery to be.

After the introductory remarks last Thursday, I would like to begin by giving you a sketch of world development according to theosophical knowledge. I ask you to bear in mind that as there are only a few hours available, I can only give a sketch in which much can only be briefly indicated. There may be an opportunity later to elucidate further.

Before we pursue the history of the development of the universe and, above all, the formation of our planet Earth, we must make our own certain concepts that westerners no longer possess because they have occupied themselves for so long with only physical phenomena. In every book that deals with cosmology, we are told that we only need to look into space to see thousands and thousands of worlds unveil themselves before our eyes, worlds that are similar to our solar system, and that our Earth, the planet on which life has existed for millions of years, is like a particle of dust within these many worlds; and that man is merely a tiny being on this particle of dust. Natural science has considered this to be the case ever since the advent of the Copernican theory. Science tells us how erroneous it was that man in ancient times saw the Earth as the center of the universe and believed that cosmic evolution was only a preparation for human existence. Science has drummed into us how small the human being is compared to the universe, that is was arrogant of man to believe that the world is fashioned the way it is because of him. Schiller wrote the following beautiful words against this way of thinking:

To the Astronomers

Don't blab so much to me about dust clouds and suns!

Is nature so grand only because it lets you count?

Your subject is surely the most sublime in space;

But, friends, the sublime lives not in space.

And Goethe, about whom you know from other lectures that he possessed occult knowledge, expressed his thoughts about this point as follows:

“For what purpose would the world exist with its solar systems and stars if it didn't direct itself to the human being, so he could edify and be edified by it?”

So you see, people like these with their true spiritual world conception could not be satisfied with the idea of the insignificance of man and the dust particle nature of the universe.

Let us now consider the human being in relation to the history of evolution from the theosophical point of view. I must, however, anticipate this with some thoughts. Let's look for a moment at contemporary humanity's standpoint concerning cosmology. Everything that man can grasp with his senses—be they the rough senses of daily life or the more exact ones that natural science offers us by means of its microscopes and analytical methods—is ultimately merely the exterior, physical human being. Those of you who have heard theosophical lectures more often know that this exterior human being is only the wrapping, the outer manifestation of the inner man. What is the inner man actually? When you study the physical man anatomically, you find that he is composed of various systems: the skeletal and muscle system, the nervous system that has developed into the brain, and so forth. You also know that the brain is the organ of thinking. As Theosophists you also know that it isn't the brain that thinks, but that the brain is only an instrument, that the brain only serves the true being of man as a thinking instrument. This being who thinks in man cannot be discerned with physical sense instruments; not even someone who has opened his astral [soul—tr.] senses can see it. A highly developed clairvoyance is required in order to perceive what it is that thinks in a human being. In a theosophical sense we call that which thinks in man the true Self. This inner nucleus of being, this true Self, is spiritual in nature. It isn't something that extends in space, nor does it flow in time. It is timeless and spaceless, it exists beyond space and time, it is eternal. You have heard a description of this Self in my lectures about the Devachan [spiritual world-tr.], and you will find an exact description in my forthcoming book, Theosophy.

In order for the human being to live and think in the present stage of evolution, the spiritual Self needs a physical brain. We could perceive with this spiritual Self in the astral world and in the Devachan, or mental world, without a physical brain, but in the outer, physical world we can only perceive with the physical brain. If we wish to understand contemporary man correctly, we must say: The contemporary human being is a spiritual Self embodied in a physical brain. This physical brain had to first originate, it had to develop; it isn't eternal as is the spiritual Self. We can follow the spiritual Self back into infinitely remote times, and forward into the infinite future. From a certain point in time this spiritual Self clothed itself in a brain, created it, formed this brain to correspond to its own being. Such an organ cannot be formed just like that, however. It would be impossible for someone to simply create a viable brain through some process or other. It would be an artificial thing, but not a viable brain that could serve as an instrument for a spirit. In order for a brain to arise, other organs had to develop first. A brain can only develop in a physical body, such as the human one. Therefore it was necessary that the evolution of the rest of the physical body precede the brain instrument. When we look back on the preceding evolutionary stages we see how slow and gradual this process was. That the human being with his spiritual Self received such an organ with which he can come to understand the world, that is the goal and meaning of our present earthly development. Everything that has happened since millions of years had as its goal that evolution reach the point in which a brain can serve a spiritual Self.

Let us go back for a moment to the beginning of the earth's evolution. He whose spiritual vision has been sufficiently trained will have the following perception: At the beginning of our planetary evolution, our spiritual Self had reached a certain stage in its evolution. Every one of us was at a certain stage of evolution when the Earth was in its germinal stage. You can think back to the time when the earth's evolution began, and to all the spiritual Selfs that are incarnated today on Earth. You were all there, not as you are now, but at a completely different stage of evolution. During the Earth's evolution we have a distinct task; the human being must became something through this earthly evolution. Allow me to indicate in a descriptive way what the spiritual Self was when it entered into earthly evolution. Our spiritual Self had a completely different consciousness when it stood before the gates of our earthly existence than it does now. We can comprehend this if we imagine that we were dull dreamers who were not able to turn the images that flew by us into concepts, but could only see them as a panorama. Every individual spiritual Self had such a dream consciousness, and it had to pass through earthly evolution and must pass through future evolution in order to develop a bright, clear, conceptual picture-consciousness. The dream-like consciousness in which the spiritual Self was immersed at the start of earthly evolution is comparable to that of the animal's, but the consciousness level is not the same. The task our spiritual Self is to perform during the course of this planetary period is that consciousness brightens more and more—and when we complete this earthly evolution in the distant future, we will have brought this bright, clear consciousness to its zenith.

The beings who entered into earthly evolution at that time we call Pitris, which mean “Fathers”. We were those Pitris then; that was our nature during that earlier phase of evolution. Before we entered into earthly evolution, we passed through preliminary stages, and we worked ourselves up to the dream-like Pitri stage. That is where we stood when earthly evolution began. The Pitris had to gradually develop all the organs they needed in order to become acquainted with and understand their physical environment by means of a physical brain within the physical corporality we know today. The last thing man had to accomplish was to become a physical thinking being in order for his Self to be able to think within the physical world.

Now I come to the second preliminary thought. When you examine the human brain scientifically from all sides with the senses only, you will find that it is composed of the same matter and is ruled by the same energy as that of all other earthly physical systems. If you take a crystal, a piece of limestone or rock-salt, a plant, an animal, and you examine them chemically, you find that all physical nature, insofar as it is seen with the eye and touched by the hand, consists of the same chemical and physical energies—those that are active in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. Therefore, in order for the human being to reach his present stage of evolution, he had to clothe his spiritual Self with a physical body. That took a long time and the process is not yet complete. In the future the human being will develop further in this mineral wrapping. There are germinal organs in our bodies that are still to develop, new senses that are now only present in outline. So you see, the human being—his spiritual Self—needed a long time to clothe himself in the physical body which he now has.

Let us go back to the time when the human spiritual Self began the work of forging this mineral body, that can walk and stand, that possesses growth and reproductive faculties, a nervous system and the kind of brain a human needs. Go back to when all that was in a germinal stage, and then go forward to a time when the human being will have reached his highest point of evolution, when in the center of his head an organ will have developed through which he will have other perceptions than those we know today. In the segment of time between these two points flows the mineral evolution of man. In Theosophy we call such a time segment a “Round”. The Round I have just described to you—this evolutionary segment—we call the “Mineral Round”.

Before the human being could form this body in order to create the brain, however, he first had to prepare other parts of his being. The spiritual Self, this purely spiritual entity, could not have managed such a mineral body. Consider the spiritual Self as a point. And think of the point as being inside a mechanism such as our body; this point would never have been able to think by means of a physical brain.

So we have two things: we know that our spiritual Self had a dream-like consciousness in the beginning, but could never have managed the physical body. It had to create an intermediary in order to move its body. How do I move my hand? I first have the thought: I want to move my hand. If I only had the thought it would live in me, but it could never raise up a physical hand, just as a mere thought could never lift up a bottle, for example. If you want to move the bottle, energy must be added to the thought, which is the intermediary between the thought and my physical body. And we call this energy an astral [soul] energy. This is an energy present in the astral world. I would not be able to move my arm if there wasn't an astral energy in me that acts as intermediary between my thought and my physical arm. There must be an intermediary between my spiritual Self and my physical body and this intermediary is an astral essence. If I move my leg or my hand, if I put my brain into action in order to hatch thoughts—my physical body must be integrated with my thought through the astral organism.

You know from previous lectures that man has such an astral body that the clairvoyant sees in its astral cloud, which we call the aura, and in which his will and his desires live. When I have a thought, it alone is powerless to act. If it is accompanied by a wish, the will, it becomes an energy, a radiation, which is recognizable to the clairvoyant. The human being had to create an astral body, a desire-body, which could be the intermediary between his thoughts and his physical-mineral body, before he built up the physical body he now has. Before the evolutionary period, which I called the “Mineral Round”, another evolutionary period in which the astral body developed, had to precede it. We must therefore go back to the period in which the astral body was prepared. Only then could the physical-mineral body impregnate the astral body. This period, that also had a beginning and an end-point, we call the “Astral Round”.

As you can see, we have two “times”. One is that in which we now live: the mineral round. Another one preceded it: the astral round. But the human astral body also required preparation. A certain method is required to insert it into human nature. The astral body wasn't there when we were born and will not be there a short time after we die. It comes into being and it expires, it is subject to certain laws of origination and expiration. Consider a child. The child's astral body is correspondingly small; it grows according to the child's physical growth. Growth and reproduction are functions of the mineral-physical and the etheric [vital or life-tr.] essences of man. The human being must develop in earthly life according to the laws of growth and reproduction. That we are born and grow, that we survive at all, is not due to our astral bodies. Only wishes, wants and desires reside in the astral body. We are astral beings, just as animals are astral beings, and with the plants and animals we have that essence in common which is capable of bringing forth its own kind and making it grow from small to large. To use another expression: it is the form-giving element. Our physical and etheric bodies must have a very certain form when they are born, and this form must grow. You can conceive of this better if you take a seed ... [gap in the manuscript].

The forming energy is not an astral function. The astral can live within this energy, but it must be formed first itself. The human astral body could not have originated if another evolutionary period had not preceded it—the period in which the human form was prepared. Allow me to call this period the “Formation Period”; in Theosophy it is called the “Rupa-Round”. It is the period in which the form of man was prepared, so that his present form could develop.

All that we can observe in these three “rounds” are the wrappers for the spiritual Self of man. During the mineral round the human being “clothed” himself with the mineral wrapping. In the preceding period, the astral round, the human being prepared the astral wrapping, and during the period preceding that, the “rupa” or formation round, he acquired the ability to give himself the form he needed to perceive, think and act as a human being.

When we were still “Pitris”, when we still lived in a dream-like consciousness at the beginning of our earthly evolution, we were, if I may use the expression, result, fruit. In a way similar to a plant that grows from a seed planted in springtime in new earth, we had to prepare ourselves in order to evolve on the earth. We were the result of another world, and we had then to be the beginning of a completely new world, in which we had to first find ourselves. Just as you receive a seed in the autumn and let it rest over the winter, then plant it in new earth in the spring, so acted the Pitri-natures. They had to be replanted in a new environment, in the matter of the earthly world that was not present in the previous planetary stages. In order for this to happen another evolutionary period had to precede the one we just referred to. We now arrive at a very ancient evolutionary period.

The farther back we go from the present, the harder it becomes to imagine the conditions. The theosophist does not believe that he can go back to the beginning of the world with his questions. When people hear about Theosophy for the first time, they often ask: How did the world begin? Mostly such questions are not answerable, for we cannot go back to the very beginning of the world. You have seen the point in time where we have come from the Pitri-nature. The clairvoyant can follow this point in time by using certain methods. But the human being did not originate there; he was already at a certain phase of evolution. The theosophist does not speculate about this or indulge in abstract concepts. He follows up his experiences, his intuitions in the super-sensible region, and he describes his experiences insofar as he has them. In the same way as a geographical investigator would only describe what he has seen, say about Africa, and not what he has not seen, so the theosophical investigator would not describe the beginning of the world that lies very, very far back. The theosophist can only follow a part of our evolution through experience and does not indulge in speculation.

It was a seed that came from an earlier time into our evolution. Man was a formless seed. We call this point in time the “Arupa-Round”, the formless round. Thus we have three time segments before the one we are in now. We call these segments “Rounds”. The first, second and third rounds have gone by; we are now in the fourth round, and three more rounds will follow in the future, of which we have still to speak. We call the humans of the fourth round the humans of the mineral realm because they were formed by mineral energy; and we call a human of the previous round, the astral round, in which he formed his astral body, a human of the third elemental realm. We differentiate the humans of the third, second and first elemental realms. During the first elemental realm, or the first round, men's thoughts moved in a formless thought-matter. During the second elemental realm, or the second round, human thoughts moved in a formed thought-matter. And in the third elemental realm human thoughts could already form into wishes; they could take on the form that we can follow as astral energy in the astral world. Only in the fourth round is man advanced enough to dominate the mineral realm. Just as in the third round he formed an astral brain from astral matter, so in the fourth round he was advanced enough to form a physical brain with which he could think.

Thus we have three elemental realms and the mineral realm. The human being of the past lived in the three elemental realms. I can only hint at what followed, but you will understand the analogy. Another round, during which man will reach a still higher stage of evolution, will follow our present one. He will then not only think with his physical brain, but also with what we call astral energy. He will not only be able to command physical matter, he will also be able to dominate astral energy. I will give you an example for clarification. If I want to move this glass from here to there, I need a physical intermediary—my hand. Man has advanced far enough in the fourth round that he can consciously act in the physical, mineral world. He cannot yet, however, consciously handle astral energy. He has not yet developed an astral organ of will. He will be able to do so during the fifth round. In the fifth round the human being will be able to command the astral world as well as he now commands the physical world. He will be even more advanced during the sixth round. He will then be able to command the form-giving world, as he today commands the physical world, and in the fifth round will command the astral world. In the fifth round he will not only be able to realize a wish in the place where it is wished, but will also be able to send a wish to distant places. In the sixth round he will be able to form himself. After the sixth round our earthly evolution will have reached its culmination, and by then the human being will have taken unto himself all that he is able to learn on the Earth.

The human being has seven rounds to go through. I could only describe these rounds approximately—but we must be clear about this: During our mineral round man and the earth were not always physical, but had to evolve to that stage. They had to reach this stage in order to be physically perceptible. From our mineral round we look back on previous evolutionary stages. We can thereby conclude that there is a seven-stage evolution of our Earth and that the spiritual Self has seven stages or rounds to go through. During each of these seven rounds the spiritual Self was in one of the nature realms. Look at the human being. He has gone through the first, second, third elemental realms and finds himself now in the fourth round, which is our contemporary world.

Next time I will show that during this fourth round it is only man who has reached the mineral stage. Everything that is already mineral, non-living natural matter such as crystals, rocks, and so on, already reached the culmination of their evolution during the first round. Plants reached the culmination of their evolution during the second round, and today's animals reached their evolutionary culmination during the third round. Man has reached his physical-mineral evolution during the fourth round.

We see, therefore, that our Earth was preceded by another one millions of years ago. Man first appeared in the first elemental realm. The plant nature appeared during the second elemental realm. Then came the third elemental realm and animals were included in earthly evolution. The human being as such was, however, still an astral being, not yet able to descend to a physical incarnation. Only during the fourth round, when minerals, plants and animals already existed, was man able to descend to a physical incarnation. Therefore, in the four rounds we have four coexisting realms: the mineral realm in the first round, the plant realm in the second round, the animal realm in the third realm and the human realm in the fourth round. The human realm had sent out the three other preparatory realms in advance. Goethe was right when he said: “What would nature amount to if it weren't directed towards man?” The great cosmic event had to occur; the human being had to evolve through three realms in order to take on a mineral form during the fourth round. The human being was the co-creator in invisible form. As “Pitri” he came from another evolutionary stage. We worked with our dream-like consciousness during the first round. We worked in the preparation of our Earth in order that a realm could be formed that would be the foundation of our evolution.

That is the path of evolution up until now. We will continue next time.

You will remember that I have discussed in detail how much criticism has come from many sides of the idea of a connection between the Christ Event, the appearance of Christ on Earth, and Cosmic events such as the course of the Sun, or the relation of the Sun to the Earth. The connection can only be understood when one studies more deeply all that we have hitherto said as to the movements of the stellar system. Let us make a beginning in this direction today, for you will see that ultimately astronomy cannot really be studied at all without entering into a study of the whole being of Man. I have already mentioned this, but we shall see how deeply grounded is the statement in the whole being of the world, for we can only understand something of the nature of the world or of the nature of Man when we consider the two together, not separately, as is done at present. You will observe a curious fact in relation to this very matter, namely, that materialism, if only it is not directly acknowledged to be such, is preferred by the religious denominations to Spiritual Science. That is, both Protestants and Roman Catholics prefer to consider the outer world in its various realms in a materialistic sense, rather than to enquire how the Spiritual works in the world and presents itself in material phenomena. In confirmation of this you need only consider the Jesuits' views of Natural Science. These are strictly materialistic; from their point of view the outer world, the Cosmos, is only to be understood in the light of quite materialistic interpretations. The utmost care has been taken to protect in this way a certain form of faith, which has been cultivated since the Council held in Constantinople in 869—to protect it by keeping external science on the level of materialism. Of course in the widest circles, illusions have arisen through the apparent conflict with materialism even in scientific realms. This however is only apparent, for it does not matter whether one says that there is spirit somewhere, or whether one denies spirit altogether, if the material world itself is not explained spiritually.

You know perhaps that the acme of modern interpretation of external nature is Astro-physics, the theory that sets out to study the material starry world, to establish the material unity of the world accessible to the senses. Now one of the greatest Astro-physicists is a Roman Jesuit, Father Secchi. There is no difficulty in standing on the ground of modern material science and at the same time adhering to this shadow of religious belief. This means that as a matter of fact, a materialistic interpretation of the heavens stands nearer today to the religious creeds, and especially to one of the Jesuit persuasion, than does Spiritual Science, for this particular creed is especially concerned not to explain the world by showing the relation of the material to the spiritual. The spiritual must form the content of an independent form of belief in which nothing is said of the scientific study of the Universe; the latter is to remain materialistic, for the moment it ceases to be so it would have to go into what relates to the spiritual—it would have to speak of spirit.

What has just been said must be taken seriously, otherwise we should overlook the significant fact that the Jesuit scientists are the most extreme materialists in the domain of Natural Science. They continually allege that Man cannot approach the spiritual by research into Nature, and they take trouble to keep the spiritual as far removed as possible from such research. This can be traced even in Father Wasmann's studies of ants.

After these preliminary remarks, let us recall an important fact which apparently takes its course entirely in the spiritual world, but which, when we consider this part of our argument more closely, will make clear to us a parallel phenomenon between spiritual life and the life of the external starry world. As you know, we divide the post-Atlantean time into epochs of civilisation, naming the first the old Indian, the second the old Persian, the third the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian, the fourth the Graeco-Latin; and then there is the fifth, in which we now live, beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century. A sixth will follow this, and so forth. I have frequently shown how the fourth epoch began in the continuous stream of the post-Atlantean time, about the year 747 BC., and ceased—speaking roughly, I always say about the middle of the fifteenth century, but to speak more accurately, it really ended in the year AD. 1413. That was the fourth; and we are now in the fifth.

If we thus consider the succession of civilisations, we can describe their characteristics, bearing in mind the descriptions given in Occult Science. Thus we can describe the Graeco-Latin, in which the Event of Golgotha occurred, but in doing so we need not refer to that Event, for we can describe the epoch by connecting it with the preceding one. It is possible to describe the successive epochs in their fundamental nature, and to have an epoch from 747 BC. to AD. 1413 so running its course that nothing in history shows that during this time an important event occurs. Let us recall the time of the occurrence of the Event of Golgotha, remembering all we know concerning the civilisations of the most advanced people of the time—the Greek, the Roman and the Latin. Let us reflect that to these people the Event of Golgotha was an unknown affair. It occurred in a small corner of the world, and the first mention of its effects is to be found in Tacitus, the Roman historian, one hundred years later. It was not observed by its contemporaries, least of all by the most cultured.

Thus the fact comes into evidence in the historical stream of evolution that there was no necessity inherent in the regular progress of the evolution of mankind from the first three epochs of civilisation to the fourth, that the Event of Golgotha should take place. This fact should receive close attention. The Event actually took place 747 years after the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantean period. In trying to understand the Event of Golgotha, we may say that it gave purpose and meaning to the life of the Earth, that the Earth would not have had this meaning if evolution had simply gone on as the outcome of the first, second and third post-Atlantean epochs. The Event of Golgotha came as an intervention from other worlds. This fact is not sufficiently considered. In modern times several historians have alluded to it, but they have not been able to make anything of it. In fact, history practically omits the Event of Golgotha. At most the historians describe the influence of Christianity in the successive post-Christian centuries, but the actual intervention of the Mystery of Golgotha itself is not described in an ordinary course of history. It would indeed be difficult to describe it, if one kept to the ordinary methods of history. Certainly remarkable men—oddly enough, clergy among them—have attempted to explain the causes of the Event of Golgotha. Pastor Kalthoff, for instance, and many others. Pastor Kalthoff tried to explain Christianity from the consciousness and the economic conditions of the last centuries preceding the appearance of Christ. But what did this explanation amount to? In effect it said: People lived in certain economic conditions, and eventually the idea of Christ arose, the dream of Christ, as it were, the ideology of Christ; and from these arose Christology. It arose in humanity only as an idea. People like Paul, and a few others, described what had thus arisen as an idea as though it had occurred as a fact in a remote corner of the world!—Such explanations mean a doing-away with Christianity. It is a noteworthy phenomenon of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries that Christian pastors should set themselves the task of saving Christianity, by eliminating Christ. People were ashamed to admit the facts of the rise of Christianity outright. They found it more satisfactory to explain the rise of Christology, to explain it simply as an idea. Various streams of thought found their way into this domain, and one special province of science has become remarkable in this connection, arising in the materialistic stream of culture which reached its culminating point in Marxism. Thus Kalthoff is a kind of Marxist Pastor who tries to explain Christology out of a sort of pious Marxism. Others have ridden other hobby horses in seeking an explanation for the phenomenon of Christianity; why then should not each explain Christianity or explain Christ Jesus, according to his own fancy? A psychiatrist explains Christ according to psychiatry, simply by saying that the way in which Christ appeared in His time can be explained today from the standpoint of psychiatry as due to an abnormal consciousness. This is no isolated case. And these are phenomena which must not be disregarded, otherwise we do not see what is happening at the present time, for they are signs of present day life as a whole. We must clearly recognise that which has given the Earth a meaning, was an intervention from another world. We must distinguish two streams in human evolution, which indeed run side by side today, but only met for the first time at the beginning of our era. One is the Christian stream, which was added to the continuous current from olden times. Natural Science, for instance, has not yet accepted the Event of Golgotha and flows on in the continuous stream as though that Event had never occurred. Spiritual Science must endeavour to bring natural scientific study and Christology into harmony; for where has Christology any place if the Kant-Laplace theory holds sway and we look back to a primeval mist out of which everything has been formed? Would Christianity ultimately have any real world-significance for Man on Earth if the stars were regarded as they are by Father Secchi? For the starry heavens are regarded by him materialistically, not as though an Event of Golgotha had been born from out of them. And that becomes the chief ground for leaving it to other powers to say how Man should think of the Event of Golgotha. If Man can develop nothing from Cosmic knowledge concerning the Event, some other source must be found to tell him what he ought to think of it, and it is obvious that Rome is that source. All these things are so consistently—in a sense, so grandly—thought out, that it is inexcusable to be under any illusions about them at the present difficult and fateful time.

These 747 years fall in the world's evolution as a period which speaks with the utmost significance. It tells us of all that is connected with the old evolution, all that recalls, and is related to the past periods of time. The new beginning commenced at the end of this epoch, 747 years after, let us say, the founding of Rome—which was really 747, not the point of time given in the ordinary history books.

Here we have a fresh start, and if we now go back and take the periods of time, we shall have to say that everywhere we must add fresh turning-points of time to those already rightly assigned. An entirely new division of the course of time was brought about by the Event of Golgotha's falling in this period, inserted into human evolution from outside, as it were. We must clearly realise the existence of these two streams in world evolution in so far as Man is involved in it. If we hold fast to this we can now see something more.

We know that according to the view of ordinary astronomy, the Moon moves round the Earth. (In reality she does not do this as generally as described; she too describes a lemniscate; but for the moment we will disregard this.) The Moon moves round the Earth. While so doing she also revolves around herself. I have already explained this. She is a polite lady and always turns the same side to us, her back is always turned away from the Earth. Not however quite exactly; we can only say that virtually, speaking generally, she always turns the same side to the Earth. A seventh part of the Moon indeed goes round the edge, as it were, so that really it is not quite always the front of the Moon that is turned towards us, for after a time a seventh part comes forward from the back, and another seventh part retires. This is compensated by the further movements; the whole seventh does not quite go over, it returns; and the Moon reels, as she goes round the Earth—she actually reels. I will only mention this here; in any elementary astronomy book you can look up further details. Could we transport ourselves to a far-distant spot in Cosmic space, which according to the calculations of astronomy would be only a far-distant star, this rotation of the Moon on its own axis would from there take somewhat more than 27 days. If however, we transport ourselves to the Sun, we see that the movements of the Sun and Moon are not uniform, they move with dissimilar velocities; this rotation of the Moon seen from the Sun is not the same as seen from a distant star, but takes rather more than 29 days. Thus we may say that the stellar day of the Moon is 27 days, and its solar day 29 days.

This of course is connected with all the intervolving which takes place in the Universe. As we know, the Sun rises at a different vernal point every Spring, moving round the whole ecliptic, round the whole Zodiac in 25,920 years. These reciprocal movements bring it about that the stellar day of the Moon is considerably shorter than its solar day.

Bearing this in mind we may say: Here too is something remarkable. Every time we make an observation we notice a difference from one full Moon to another in the mutual aspects of Sun and Moon, a difference of almost 2 days. That shows us that we have to do with two movements in Cosmic space, which indeed go together but do not point back to the same origin. What I have set forth here from a Cosmic point of view, can be compared with what I have set forth previously from an ethical-spiritual point of view. There is an interval between the beginnings of the individual epochs of civilisation in the one stream and the beginnings of those connected with the Christ Event. It is always necessary when it is full Moon, as regards sidereal time, to wait for the accomplishment of the solar time. That lasts longer. There is again an interval. Thus in the Cosmos we have two currents, two movements, one in which the Sun takes part, and another, the Moon; and they are of such nature that we may say: If we start from the Moon-stream, we find the Sun-stream intervening in it, just as the Christ-Event intervenes in the continuous stream of evolution, as though coming from a foreign world. To the Moon-world the Sun-world is a foreign world, from a certain point of view.

Now let us consider this subject from yet a third standpoint. This we can do by trying to remember exactly how the human memory works, especially when we include the reminiscence of dreams. We find, for instance, that what has taken place quite recently, although it does not enter the inner movements and course of the dream, plays into its picture world. Do not misunderstand me. We can of course dream of something that happened to us many years ago, but we do not do so unless something has recently occurred which is related by some thought or feeling to the earlier years. The whole nature of dreams is in some way connected with quite recent occurrences. If one wishes to observe such matters, it must be assumed that one is a person who notices the fine details of human life; if such be the case, observation will furnish as exact results as any exact science.

To what is this due? It is due to the fact that a certain time is required in order that what we experience in our soul may be imprinted by the astral body upon the etheric. Approximately from two and a half to three days, though sometimes after only one and a half or two days, but never without having slept upon it, what we have experienced in our intercourse with the world is imprinted by the astral upon the etheric body. It always takes a certain time to be established there. Now compare this fact with another—viz. the fact that in everyday life we alternately separate physical body and etheric body from the astral body and Ego in sleep, and in waking unite them. We may therefore say that altogether between birth and death there is a rather looser connection between the physical and etheric bodies on the one hand and the Ego and astral body on the other. For the physical and etheric bodies remain always together between birth and death, and the astral body and Ego keep together also, but not the astral and etheric bodies; every night they separate. There is thus a looser connection between the astral and etheric bodies than between the etheric and physical; and this is again expressed in the fact that there must in a sense be a certain parting-asunder of the astral and etheric bodies before what we have experienced in the astral body is imprinted upon the etheric body. When some event influences us, it does so of course in the waking condition. This means it works upon the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the Ego. There is however, a difference in their reception of its working. The astral body takes it up at once. The etheric needs a certain time for the impression to be so established that there should be complete harmony between the astral and etheric. Does not this clearly and distinctly show that although we confront an event with all four principles of the human being, there are two currents which do not run the same course in their connection with the outer world, one stream needing longer than the other? There we have the same as we have in history, the same too as we have in the Cosmos—Moon and Sun, Heathendom and Christendom; and now, etheric and astral. Always a differentiation in time. Thus we find this interaction of two streams appearing in our ordinary life, two streams which come together and give a common resultant for life, but yet cannot be grasped so simply as to permit of the causes and effects of the one stream coinciding with the causes and effects of the other.

These things are of the highest importance for the consideration of the Universe and of life, and cannot be dispensed with if one wishes to understand the Universe. There are other facts too which are also entirely overlooked. And what do all these things betoken? They indicate the existence of a certain harmony between cosmic life, historical life and the life of individual men; but a harmony not constructed as is usual today where there is a desire to account for everything by a fundamental law of bio-genesis. The consequence is that we cannot have a single Astronomy but need different Astronomies, one of the Sun, another of the Moon. If we have two clocks, one always a little slower than the other, then the latter will always be in advance; but we should never be able to assume that what happens on the one has its cause on the other. That would be impossible. So too, although there is a certain conformity to law in the one being always the same amount behind the other, the two streams of which we have been speaking have nothing to do with one another; they only work together as I look at them together. Solar astronomy has nothing to do with lunar astronomy. The two only work conjointly in our Universe.

It is important to bear this in mind, and just as we have to distinguish between the solar and lunar astronomy as regards the regulation of the movements of the Sun and Moon, so too must we distinguish in history between what takes place in us by reason of the movement in the periods of civilisation, and what takes place in us through our being in the cycle of time whose central point is the Event of Golgotha. These two things work together in the world, but if we wish to grasp them, we must discriminate between them. We see the prototype of the historical in the cosmic, and we see the ultimate expression—I do not say the effect—but the last expression of these universal facts in our own life in the two or three days which must elapse before our thoughts have become so far firm that they are no longer above in the astral body where they may appear as dreams, as it were, of themselves, but are below in the etheric body and must be brought up by our own active memory or by something that recalls them. Thus within us one movement flows into the other. Just as we have to realise that there is a lunar current that, as it were, generates independent systems or structures of movement, so we must realise that we in our human being are closely connected as regards our physical and etheric bodies with something beyond the human, while on the other hand, in our astral body and Ego we are closely related to something else beyond the human.

Concerning these things a veil of darkness is spread by modern observation, which confuses everything, and assumes a cosmic mist which forms into a ball from which the Sun, Moon, Planets emerge. This is not the case, the Sun and Moon are not from the same origin but are two streams running side by side; and just as little can Man's human Ego and astral body be traced to the same origin as his physical and etheric bodies. They are two different streams. In the book Occult Science it will be seen that these two streams must be traced back to the Sun period. Then to be sure, on going back from the Sun to Saturn, one comes to a sort of unity. This however, lies very far back indeed; from the Sun onwards, there is continually the tendency for two streams to run side by side.

In this description I have wished to show how necessary it is to throw light on the parallel between cosmic existence, historical existence and human existence, in order to arrive at a judgement of how Man has to relate to the cosmic movements. We have seen that if he places himself rightly, the result is not one astronomy, but two; a solar and a lunar astronomy. So too we have a human development of a heathen nature—natural science is still heathen—and a human development of a Christian nature. In our day many have the tendency to prevent these two streams, which have met on Earth in order to work together, from coming together.

Consider for instance, how the whole purport of a book such as that of Traub [*Rudolf Steiner als Philosoph und Theosoph, by Friedrich Traub, Tubingen, 1919.]—the rest of the book has no meaning without this—consists in the assertion: ‘Yes, Dr. Steiner wishes to unite the two streams, heathen and Christian. We will not let that happen. We want natural science to remain heathen, so that there may be no necessity to bring about anything in Christendom which may reconcile it with natural science.’ of course, if Natural Science is allowed to be heathen, Christianity cannot unite with it. Then it can be said: ‘Natural Science is carried on externally, materialistically; Christendom is founded on faith. The two must not be reconciled.’ Christ however, truly did not appear on Earth in order that side by side with his Impulses the heathen impulse should increase in power; He came to permeate the heathen impulse. The task of the present time is to unite what man would keep asunder—Knowledge and Faith—and this must come to pass. Therefore attention must be drawn to such things, as I have done in one of my recent public lectures. On the one side the Church has reached the conclusion that Cosmology is not to be admitted into Christology, and on the other hand a Cosmology is reached by the principle of the indestructibility of matter and force. [*The word “force” on this page is generally rendered “Energy” in English scientific writing (Indestructibility of Matter and Energy).] But if matter and force are regarded as indestructible and eternal, it leads to the treading under foot of all ideals. And then Christianity too is meaningless. Only when what constitutes matter and its laws is regarded as a transitory phenomenon, and when the Christ-Impulse becomes a seed of what will exist when matter and force no longer rule as they do now according to law but have died away, then alone will Christianity, and then alone will ethical ideals and human worth, have a true meaning. There are two great antitheses: The one arising from the final logical conclusion of heathenism—‘Matter and Force are immortal’, and the other arising from Christianity—‘Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away.’

These are the two greatest contrasts which can be expressed in a concept of the world, and our age has indeed every need not to be confused about such things, but with a mind-awake, earnestly to look at what must be attained as a right concept of the world, in which moral human value and the Christian Impulse in the evolution of the world are not lost sight of in the illusion of indestructible matter and indestructible force. More of this in the next lecture.

The habits of thinking that have come to be accepted in the modern study of nature [Naturerkenntnis] can yield no satisfying results for the study of the soul. What one would grasp with these habits of thinking must either be spread out in repose before the soul or, if the object of knowledge is in movement, the soul must feel itself extricated from this movement. For to participate in the movement of the object of knowledge means to lose oneself in it, to transform oneself, so to speak, into it.

How should the soul grasp itself, however, in an act of knowing in which it must lose itself? It can expect self-knowledge only in an activity in which, step by step, it comes into possession of itself.

This can only be an activity that is creative. Here, however, a cause for uncertainty arises at once for the knower. He believes he will lapse into personal arbitrariness.

It is precisely this arbitrariness that he gives up in the knowledge of nature. He excludes himself and lets nature hold sway. He seeks certainty in a realm which his individual soul being does not reach. In seeking self-knowledge he cannot conduct himself in this way. He must take himself along wherever he seeks to know. He therefore can find no nature on his path to self-knowledge. For where she would encounter him, there he is no longer to be found.

This, however, provides just the experience that is needed with regard to the spirit. One cannot expect other than to find the spirit when, through one's own activity, nature, as it were, melts away; that is, when one experiences oneself ever more strongly in proportion to one's feeling this melting away.

If one fills the soul with something that afterward proves to be like a dream in its illusory character, and one experiences the illusory in its true nature, then one becomes stronger in one's own experience of self. In confronting a dream, one's thinking corrects the belief one has in the dream's reality while dreaming. Concerning the activity of fantasy, this correction is not needed because one did not have this belief. Concerning the meditative soul activity, to which one devotes oneself for spirit-knowledge, one cannot be satisfied with mere thought correction. One must correct by experiencing. One must first create the illusory thinking with one's activity and then extinguish it by a different, equally strong, activity.

In this act of extinguishing, another activity awakens, the spirit-knowing activity. For if the extinguishing is real, then the force for it must come from an entirely different direction than from nature. With the experienced illusion one has dispersed what nature can give; what inwardly arises during the dispersion is no longer nature.

With this activity something is needed that does not come into consideration in the study of nature: inner courage. With it one must take hold of what inwardly arises. In the study of nature one needs to hold nothing inwardly. One lets oneself be held by what is external. Inner courage is not needed here. One forgets it. This forgetting then causes anxiety when the spiritual is to enter the sphere of knowledge. Fear is felt because one might grope in a void if one no longer could hold onto nature.

This fear meets one at the threshold to spirit knowledge. And fear causes one to recoil from this knowledge. One now becomes creative in recoiling instead of in pressing forward. One does not allow the spirit to shape creative knowledge in oneself; one invents for oneself a sham logic for disputing the justification of spirit knowledge. Every possible sham reason is brought forward to spare one from acknowledging the spiritual, because one retreats trembling in fear of it.

Instead of spirit knowledge, then, there arises out of the creative force that which now appears in the soul when it draws back from nature, the enemy of spirit knowledge: first, as doubt concerning all knowledge that extends beyond nature; and then, as the fear grows, as an anti-logic that would banish all spirit knowledge to the realm of the fantastic.

Whoever has learned to move cognitively in the spirit often sees in the refutations of this knowledge its strongest evidence; for it becomes clear to him how in the soul, step by step, the refuter chokes down his fear of the spirit, and how in choking it he creates this sham logic. With such a refuter there is no point in arguing, for the fear befalling him arises in the subconscious. The consciousness tries to rescue itself from this fear. It feels at first that should this anxiety arise, it would inundate the whole inner experience with weakness. It is true, the soul cannot escape from this weakness, for one feels it rising up from within. If one ran away it would follow one everywhere. He who proceeds further in the knowledge of nature and, in his dedication to it feels obliged to preserve his own self, never escapes from this fear if he cannot acknowledge the spirit. Fear will accompany him, unless he is willing to give up the knowledge of nature along with spirit knowledge. He must somehow rid himself of this fear in his pursuit of the science of nature. In reality he cannot do so. The fear is produced in the subconscious during the study of nature. It continually attempts to rise up out of the subconscious into consciousness. Therefore one refutes in the thought world what one cannot remove from the reality of soul experience.

And this refutation is an illusory layer of thought covering the subconscious fear. The refuter has not found the courage to come to grips with the illusory, just as in the meditative life he has to obliterate illusion in order to attain spiritual reality. For this reason he interposes the false arguments of his refutation into that region of the life of the soul that now arises. They soothe his consciousness; he ceases to feel the fear that, all the same, remains in his subconscious.

The denial of the spiritual world is a desire to run away from one's own soul. This, however, represents an impossibility. One must remain with oneself. And because one may run away but not escape from oneself, one takes care that in running one loses sight of oneself. It is the same with the entire human being in the soul realm, however, as it is with the eye with a cataract. The eye can then no longer see. It is darkened within itself.

So, too, the denier of spirit knowledge darkens his soul. He causes its darkening through sham reasoning born of fear. He avoids healthy clarification of the soul; he creates for himself an unhealthy soul darkening. The denial of spirit knowledge has its origin in a cataract affliction of the soul.

Thus one is ultimately led to the inner spiritual strength of the soul when one is willing to see the justification of spirit knowledge. And the way to such a knowledge can be had only through the strengthening of the soul. The meditative activity, preparing the soul for spirit knowledge, is a gradual conquest of the soul's “fear of the void.” This void, however, is only a “void of nature,” in which the “fullness of the spirit” can manifest itself if one wishes to take hold of it. Nor does the soul enter this “fullness of the spirit” with the arbitrariness it has when acting through the body in natural life; the soul enters this fullness at the moment when the spirit reveals to the soul the creative will, before which the arbitrariness, existing only in natural life, dissolves in the same way as nature herself dissolves.

A study in Hilary's house. A general atmosphere of seriousness pervades the room. Maria alone in meditation.

Maria:
A starry soul, on yonder spirit-shore,
Draws near,—draws near me clad in spirit-light,
Draws near with mine own self, and as it nears—
Its radiance gains in power,—and gains in calm.
O star within my spirit-circle, what
Doth thine approach shed on my gazing soul?

(Astrid appears to right.)

Astrid:
Perceive that which I now can bring to thee;
From cosmic strife 'twixt darkness and the light
I stole thy power of thought I bring it now
From out its cosmic midnight's wakening
With service true back to thine earthly form.

Maria:
My Astrid, thou hast ever till to-day
Appeared to me as shining shadow-soul;
What turns thee now to this bright spirit-star?

Astrid:
I kept the lightning's and the thunder's power
For thee, that they might stay within thy soul,
And now thou canst behold them consciously—
When of the cosmic midnight thou dost think.

Maria:
The cosmic midnight!—Ere for this earth-life
My self enclosed me in my body's sheath,
In Saturn's coloured light kept endless watch!
Mine earthly thoughts concealed from me before
This spirit scene in soul-obscurity
Now in soul clarity it doth emerge.

Astrid:
Thyself in cosmic light didst speak these words:
‘Of thee, Duration, would I crave a boon
Pour out thyself into this blessedness
And let my guide, and let that other soul
Now dwell with me therein in peacefulness.’

Maria:
Dwell with me also. O thou moment blest,
In which this spirit happening creates
New powers of self. Equip my soul with strength
That thou mayst not pass from me like a dream.
In light which on the cosmic midnight shines,
Which Astrid brings from soul-obscurity,
Mine ego joins that self which fashioned me
To serve its purpose in the cosmic life.
But how, 0 moment, can I hold thee fast,
So that I do not lose thee when once more
My senses feel earth clearness once again?
Their power is great; and often, if they slay
The spirit-vision, it stays dead e'en when
The self in spirit finds itself again.

(Immediately after the last words, as if summoned by them, Luna appears.)

Luna:
Preserve, before the sense-life once again
Makes thee to dream, the power of thine own will
With which this moment hath presented thee.
Think of the words that I myself did speak
When at the cosmic midnight seen by thee.

Maria:
My Luna, from the cosmic midnight thou
Hast brought me hither mine own power of will
To be my prop throughout my life on earth.

Luna:
The Guardian's warning followed thus my words:
‘Then shalt thou see thyself in other guise,
E'en in a picture of an olden time,
And know how strength for lofty spirit-flight
E'en from disaster may the soul's wings gain.
A soul may never wish itself to fall;
Yet, when it falls it must a lesson learn.’

Maria:
Whereto doth thy word's power now carry me?
A spirit-star on yonder shore of souls!
It gleams, it draweth nigh—in spirit-form;
Draws nigh with mine own self; and, as it nears,
The light grows denser and within the light
Forms darken, taking on their being's shape!
A youthful mystic, and a sacred flame,
The stern call of the highest hierophant
To tell the vision seen within the flame!
The group of mystics overcome with fear
At that young mystic's self-acknowledgment.

(The Guardian of the Threshold appears while the latter sentences are being uttered.)

The Guardian:
Hear once again within thy spirit-ear
The stern call of the highest hierophant.

Maria:
‘O human soul, read now what through the flame

(Benedictus appears.)

The cosmic word declares within thyself.’
Who spoke the words my thought brings back to me,
Recalling them from waters of the soul?

Benedictus:
With mine own words thou callest me to thee.
When in times past I uttered this command,
It did not find thee ready to respond.
And so it stayed in evolution's womb;
The course of time kath lent new force thereto
Which flowed therein from out thine own soul's life;
And so it wrought in later lives on earth
In thy soul's depth although thou knew'st it not.
It let thee find me as thy guide again;
By conscious thought it now transforms itself
Into a powerful motive in thy life.
‘This holy mystic rite, which we perform,
Hath not importance for ourselves alone;
Fate's stream of cosmic evolution pours
Through word and deed of sacred priestly rites.’

Maria:
Thou didst not speak this word within that place.
The hierophant did speak, who used to be
Thy colleague in that ancient mystic band.
He knew e'en then that powers of destiny
Foresaw the ending of this mystic band.
Unconsciously the hierophant beheld
The beauteous rising of the rosy dawn
Which to the spirit-stream of earth foretold
A new sun over Hellas should arise.
So he forbore to send the powerful thought
Which he should have directed to my soul.
The cosmic spirit's instrument was he
At that initiation, during which
He heard the whispering stream of cosmic life.
He spoke a word from out his inmost soul
‘One thing especially I deeply feel:
The solitude of this stern spirit-shrine.
Why do I feel so lonely in this place?’

Benedictus:
In his soul there was planted even then
The germ of solitude, which later on
Matured to soul-fruit in the womb of time.
This fruit Capesius as mystic now
Must taste, and so must follow Felix' steps.

Maria:
That woman, too, who near the temple stayed,
I see her as she was in olden time,
But not yet can my vision penetrate
To where she is; how can I find her then
When sense-life causeth me to dream again?

The Guardian:
Thou wilt discover her when thou dost see
That being in the realm of souls whom she
Doth count a shade amongst the other shades.
She seeks to reach it with strong power of soul.
She will not free it from the world of shades
Till in her present body, through thine aid,
She hath beheld her long past life on earth.

Maria:
Like some soul-star my highest guardian glides,
In glowing light toward my shore of souls;—
His light spreads peace, far round the wide flung space;—
His light hath grandeur;—and his dignity
Makes strong my being in its inmost depth;
In this peace will I now submerge myself;—
I feel before that through it I shall find
My way to fullest spirit-wakefulness.
And ye, too, messengers into my soul—
I'll keep within myself as beacon-lights.
Upon thee, Astrid, will I call when thought
Would from soul-clearness fain withdraw itself.
And thee, O Lima, may my prayer then find
When will-power slumbers deep in my soul depth.

The curtain falls while Maria, Astrid, and Luna are still in the room

[ 1 ] The essence of man's waking consciousness cannot be penetrated without observing the condition he lives through in sleep; so too, is the riddle of life insoluble without the study of death. People who have no feeling for the importance of supersensible knowledge will find grounds for skepticism in the very fact that it dwells so much on the facts of sleep and death. We can appreciate the motives of this kind of skepticism. For it is not unreasonable to insist that man is here to lead an active life, and that the more he is devoted to this life, the more efficient and creative he will be; to delve into such things as sleep and death can only spring from a tendency to idle dreaming and lead to nothing more than empty figments of the mind.

People may easily regard the refusal to indulge in such “empty figments” as a sign of mental health, and see in the pursuit of these “idle dreamings” something morbid, natural enough to those deficient in vitality and vigor, without ability to do creative work. We should do wrong merely to brush aside this opinion. There is in it a modicum of truth; it is a quarter-truth, and only needs to be complemented by the remaining three quarters. By arguing against it we only kindle the mistrust of those who see the one quarter well enough but are unaware of the other three.

A study of what lies hidden behind sleep and death is only morbid if it produces weakness and aversion from the realities of life. This may be granted without reservation. Admittedly moreover, much that has claimed the title of “Occult Science” in the past or is pursued today under this name, bears an unhealthy stamp, inimical to life. But the true science of the supersensible does not give rise to anything unhealthy of this kind.

The fact is rather this: As a man cannot always be awake, so for the full reality of life he cannot do without what the supersensible provides. Life goes on in sleep; the faculties with which we work and achieve results in waking consciousness derive strength and renewal from what sleep imparts. So too it is with what man is able to observe within the manifest world. The real world is wider than the field of this type of observation. Therefore the knowledge man can gain within the visible domain needs to be fertilized and complemented by all that he can come to know of the invisible. A man who did not ever and again derive from sleep the renewal of his exhausted powers would destroy his life; likewise, a way of thinking which is not made fruitful by the knowledge of hidden worlds must ultimately lead to emptiness and desolation.

So too with “death.” All living things are subject to death, to the end that new life may arise. It is the knowledge of the supersensible which throws clear light on Goethe's well-known saying, “Nature herself invented death, to have abundant life.” As without death there could be no life in the ordinary meaning of the term, so without insight into the supersensible there can be no true knowledge even of the visible world. Our knowledge of the visible must penetrate again and again to the invisible, that it may live and grow. Thus it becomes apparent that the science of the manifest world is awakened to essential life by the science of the supersensible. In its true form, the latter never has a weakening effect. Time and again it brings refreshment and healing into the outer existence which when abandoned to its own resources becomes weak and ill.

[ 2 ] When a man falls asleep the connection between the members of his being undergoes a change. What we see lying there on the bed includes the physical and the etheric body of the sleeper, but not the astral body nor the I or Ego. Inasmuch as the etheric body remains connected with the physical, the vital functions continue during sleep; left to itself alone, the physical body would of necessity disintegrate. It is the thoughts, the mental images, it is pain and pleasure, joy and grief, the power of giving conscious direction to the will, and all other things of this kind, which are blotted out in sleep. Now of all this the astral body is the bearer.

For an unbiased mind there can of course be no question of supposing that the astral body with its pains and pleasures, with its whole world of ideation and volition, is annihilated during sleep. It is still there, only in a different state. If the human I and astral body are not merely to contain pain and pleasure and all the other things above named, but to have conscious perception of them, the astral body must be united with the physical and etheric bodies, as indeed it is in waking life. In sleep it is not so; it has then withdrawn from the physical and the etheric bodies, as indeed it is in waking life. In sleep it is not so; it has then withdrawn from the physical and the etheric and entered into quite another mode of existence than pertains to it when united with them.

It is the task of supersensible science to investigate this other mode of existence. In sleep the astral body vanishes from external observation; supersensible perception must now trace it through the stages of its life, till on awakening it once more takes possession of the physical and the etheric body.

As with all other knowledge of the world's hidden realities, supersensible observation is necessary for the discovery of the spiritual facts concerning sleep; properly states, however, what has thus been discovered is intelligible to unbiased thinking. For the realities of hidden worlds are manifest in their effects. If we perceive how the processes of the sense-world are made intelligible by the information derived from supersensible perceptions, such confirmation by the facts of life is the kind of proof we may expect. Anyone not wishing to apply the methods—later to be described—for the attainment of supersensible perception, can have the following experience. To begin with, he may simply take the statements of supersensible science and apply them to what is manifest within the compass of his experience. He will discover that life becomes clear and intelligible to him in the process. Indeed the more exact and searching his study of the ordinary life he knows, the more will he be held to this conviction.

[ 3 ] Although the astral body during sleep experiences no ideas or thoughts in consciousness, though it is unaware of pain or pleasure or the like, yet it does not remain inactive. On the contrary, it is precisely during sleep that a most vital activity devolves upon it—an activity into which it has to enter again and again in rhythmical succession, when for a time it has been working in unison with the physical and the etheric body. A pendulum, returning to the middle after swinging left, will swing to the right through the very momentum it has gathered on the left. So it s with the astral body and the I or Ego which it bears within it. Having been active in the physical and etheric body for a time, for a succeeding period of time—precisely as an outcome of this activity—they need to live and move and have their being in a body-free condition, in an environment of pure soul and spirit.

As man is constituted in ordinary life, unconsciousness ensues during this body-free condition of the astral body and Ego. Unconsciousness is in effect the antithesis of the state of consciousness evolved in waking life by union with the physical and the etheric bodies, just as the swing of a pendulum to the right is the antithesis of the swing to the left. The need to enter into this unconscious state is felt by the human soul and spirit as tiredness, fatigue. Fatigue itself is the expression of the fact that during sleep the astral body and Ego are making themselves ready for the next waking state, when they will once again be undoing and reversing in the physical and etheric body what has arisen in the latter—through a purely organic and unconscious formative activity—while free from the soul-and-spirit. This unconscious formative activity, and what takes place in man during his conscious life and by virtue of it, are contrasting states which have to alternate in rhythmical succession.¹

[ 4 ] The form and shape, proper to the physical body of man, can only be maintained by means of a human etheric body, which in its turn must be endowed with the appropriate forces by the astral body. The ether-body is the form-giving agent or architect of the physical. But it can only form the physical body aright if it receives from the astral body the necessary guidance and stimulation. In the astral body are the “pattern-forms” or archetypes according to which the etheric body gives the physical its appointed shape.

Now in the waking life the astral body is not imbued with these archetypal patterns for the physical body, or only to a limited extent. For while awake the soul puts its own pictures, its own images, in their place. Turning his senses to the surrounding world, in the very act of perception man forms pictures, mental images of his surroundings. These images are, to begin with, “disturbers of the peace” for those pattern-forms which stimulate the etheric body in its work of building and maintaining the physical. Only if a man were able by his own inner activity to supply his astral body with such pictures as could give to the etheric body the right kind of stimulus, only then would there be no such disturbance. Yet the fact is that this very disturbance plays an essential part in human life, and as an outcome, while a man is awake the archetypal pictures for his etheric body cannot work with their full power. The astral body fulfills its waking function within the physical body; in sleep it works upon the latter from without.

[ 5 ] Just as the physical body—in the supply of nourishment for example—has need of the outer world to which it is akin, a similar thing is also true of the astral body. Imagine a human physical body taken right away from its appropriate surroundings; it would inevitably perish. The physical body's existence is impossible without the entire physical environment. The whole Earth must be as it is, if human physical bodies are to be present on it. In truth, this human body is but a portion of the Earth-planet, and in a wider sense of the whole physical Universe. In this respect it is as the finger is to the human body as a whole. Separate the finger from the hand—it cannot remain a finger; it will shrink and wither. Such too would be the fate of the human body if severed from the body of which it is a member—from the life-conditions with which the Earth provides it. Raise it a sufficient number of miles above the Earth and it will perish, as the finger does when cut off from the hand. As to his physical body, man may be less aware of this fact than with regard to the finger in relation to this body as a whole. But this is merely because the finger cannot walk about the body as man does about the Earth; hence the dependence is more obvious in the one case than in the other.

Even as the physical body is embedded in the physical world to which it belongs, so too the astral body belongs to a world of its own, from which however it is torn away by man's waking life. This may be illustrated by a comparison. Imagine a vessel full of water. Within the mass of water a single drop has no separate existence. But take a little sponge and draw a drop away, thus severing it from the total mass. Something of this kind happens to the human astral body on awakening. During sleep it is in a world of its own kind, a world to which it properly belongs. On awakening, the physical and the etheric body draw it in and fill themselves with it. These two bodies contain the organs whereby the astral body perceives the external world, to attain which perception it has to be detached from its own world. Yet from the latter alone can it derive the archetypal patterns which it needs for the etheric body.

As food and other necessities are received by the physical body from its environment, so do the pictures of the astral body's environment come to it during sleep. The fact is that the astral body is then living, outside the physical and the etheric, in the great Universe—the selfsame Universe out of which the entire man is born. For in that Universe is the source of the creative patterns,--the archetypal pictures to which man owes his form. In his true being he belongs to the great Universe and is in harmony with it. In waking life he detaches himself from the all-embracing harmony, in order to have outer perceptions. In sleep his astral body returns into the harmony of the Universe, whence on awakening he brings sufficient force into his bodies to enable him for a time once more to forgo the sojourn there.

The astral body thus returns to its pristine home during sleep, and on awakening brings with it into life newly strengthened forces. All this finds expression in the refreshment which a healthy sleep affords. As the further exposition of Occult Science will reveal, the home of the astral body is of far wider compass than the more obvious physical environment to which the physical body belongs. While as a physical being man is a member of the Earth, his astral body belongs to worlds wherein other heavenly bodies are contained besides our planet Earth. The astral body therefore, during sleep, enters a Universe to which other worlds than the Earth belong. But this can only be made fully clear in the further course of our explanations.

[ 6 ] Though it should really be superfluous, prevalent habits of materialistic thought render it not unnecessary to set aside a possible misunderstanding in this connection. People adhering to these ways of thought will be inclined to say: “Surely the scientific procedure is to investigate the physical conditions of such a thing as sleep. Though scientists may not yet be agreed as to its precise causation, this much at any rate is certain: physical processes of one kind or another can be assumed to underlie the phenomenon of sleep.” If only it were realized that supersensible science is not at all against such a contention! All that is said from this quarter is readily accepted, just as it will be admitted that for a house to come into physical existence one brick must be laid on the other, and that when the house is finished its form and its stability are explainable by purely mechanical laws. Yet for the house to come into being the thought of the architect was also necessary. This thought will not be discovered by mere investigation of the mechanical and physical laws. Behind the physical laws in terms of which the structure of the house can be explained, there are the thoughts of the creator. So too, behind what physical science and physiology are perfectly right in bringing forward, there are the hidden realities of which the science of the supersensible is telling.

Admittedly, the same comparison is frequently adduced to justify belief in a spiritual background of the world, and one may find it trite. But in these matters the point is not whether a line of thought is familiar, but whether we have given it due weight. We may well be prevented from appreciating the true weight of an idea because ideas derived from a contrary way of thinking have too much influence upon our judgment.

[ 7 ] A midway condition between waking and sleeping is dreaming. Reflecting on our dream-experiences, we are confronted by a world of pictures, iridescent and in manifold confusion, though not without some hint of underlying method. Pictures arise and fade away again, often bewildering in their sequence. Man in his dream-life is released from the laws which bind his waking consciousness to the perceptions of the senses and the logical rules of judgment. Yet in the world of dreams we seem to divine mysterious laws of its own, fascinating and alluring. This is the deeper reason why we are prone to compare with dreaming the play of fancy and creative imagination which our aesthetic and artistic sense delights in.

We need only call to mind a few characteristic dreams to find all this confirmed. A man will dream, for example, that he is chasing away a dog which has been rushing at him. He awakens and finds himself in the unconscious act of pushing away a portion of the bed-clothes which had been weighing on an unaccustomed part of his body and had become oppressive. In such an instance, what does the dream make of the real, sense-perceptible event? To begin with, the life of sleep leaves entirely in the unconscious what the senses would have perceived in waking life. But it holds fast to one essential—the fact that we are wanting to ward something off—and around this it weaves an imaginary sequence of events. In substance these imaginary pictures are like echoes from the waking life of the day-time, echoes selected at random. The dreamer will generally feel that with the same external cause his dream might just as well have conjured up quite other pictures. Only in one way or another they would relate, in this instance, to the sensation of having to ward something off. The dream, therefore, creates symbolic pictures; it is in fact a symbolist. Inner bodily conditions too can be translated into dream-symbols of this kind. A man will dream that a fire is crackling beside him; he sees the very flames. On awakening, he finds that he put on too many bed-clothes and has grown too hot. The feeling of excessive heat comes out symbolically in the picture of the fire.

Experiences of the most dramatic kind can be enacted in a dream. For instance, a man dreams that he is standing near the edge of a cliff and sees a child running towards it. The dream lets him undergo all the tortures of the thought, “What if the child should fail to notice and fall over!” Presently he sees the child fall and hears the dull thud of the body down below. He wakes up and finds that a familiar object, hanging on the wall of the room, has worked loose and made a dull sounds as it fell. A simple enough event—the dream-life turns it into a sequence of dramatic pictures, full of suspense and excitement.

For the present we need not stop to ponder, how and why—in the last example—the instantaneous thud of the falling object gets extended into a whole series of events, seeming to occupy a considerable time. The point is that the dream translates what waking sense-perception would have shown, into scenes and pictures.

[ 8 ] We see from this that when the senses create from their activity, immediately a creative faculty begins to stir in man. It is the same creative faculty which is at work in fully dreamless sleep, there giving rise to the state of soul we were describing as the antithesis of the waking state. For dreamless sleep, the astral body has to be withdrawn both from the etheric body and from the physical. In dreaming, while separated from the physical body—no longer joined to the physical sense-organs—it still remains connected to some extent with the etheric. The very fact that what is going on in the astral body is perceived in pictures, is due to its connection with the etheric body. The moment this connection too is severed, the pictures fade into complete unconsciousness; dreamless sleep ensues.

The arbitrary, often nonsensical character of dream-pictures is due to the fact that the astral body, disconnected as it is from the sense-organs of the physical, cannot relate its pictures to the proper objects and events of the external world. This becomes very evident when we contemplate the kind of dream in which the I, the Ego, is in a sense divided. For instance, one dreams of oneself as a pupil who cannot answer a question the schoolmaster is putting; yet in the very next moment the master himself gives the required answer. Unable to make use of the organs of perception of his physical body, the dreamer cannot relate the two events to himself as to one and the same person. Even to recognize himself as a continuous and coherent I, man therefore needs to be equipped with outer organs of perception. Only if he had attained the faculty to be aware of his own I without the help of such organs of perception, only then would the continuity and oneness of the I still be perceptible to him even outside the physical body. For supersensible consciousness, faculties of this kind must indeed be acquired. The way to do so will be dealt with in a later chapter.

[ 9 ] Not only sleep; death too is due to a change in the mutual connection between the members of man's being. And here once more, what is apparent to supersensible perception can also be seen in its effects within the manifest world. Here once again, unbiased thinking will find the statements of supersensible science confirmed by the facts of external life, though in this instance the impress of the invisible in the visible domain is less in evidence, and it is therefore not so easy to realize the weight and bearing of those realities of outer life which answer to the statements of supersensible science. Here even more than for other things already dealt with in this volume, if the mind is not open to discern the way in which the sense-perceptible domain relates to the supersensible and indicates the latter's presence, it is only too easy to pronounce the findings of Occult Science mere figments of imagination.

[ 10 ] When a man falls asleep, whereas his astral body is released from its connection with the etheric and physical bodies, the latter still remain united. Not so in death. Left to its own unaided forces, the physical body will now inevitably disintegrate. For the etheric body, on the other hand, death brings about a condition in which it never was throughout the whole time between birth and death, save in exceptional circumstances to be mentioned later. For the etheric is now united with its astral body, and the physical body is no longer with them. The fact is that the etheric and astral bodies do not separate immediately after death. They hold together for a time, by virtue of a force which obviously must be there, for otherwise the etheric body could never have freed itself form the physical, to which it is tenaciously attached, as is shown by the fact that in sleep the astral body fails to part them. At death, the force that holds the etheric and astral bodies together becomes at least effective, detaching the etheric from the physical. To begin with therefore, the etheric body after death is united with the astral body. Supersensible observation shows that this their union varies from one individual to another. All we need say at the moment is that it lasts for a short time—for a few days—after which the astral body frees itself from the etheric body also, and goes on its way without it. While the connection of the two persists, man is in a condition consciously to perceive the experiences of his astral body. So long as the physical body was there, the separation of the astral body from the physical in sleep involved the immediate commencement of its work upon the physical body from without, for the renewal of the outworn organs. With the severance of the physical body at death, this work is at an end. But the spiritual forces which were expended on it during sleep are still there and can now serve a different end, namely to make perceptible the processes within the astral body as such.

From a point of view which would restrict scientific observation to the outer aspects of life, it will be said: “These are so many assertions, evident no doubt to those endowed with supersensible perception; men who are not thus endowed have no way of assessing the truth.” Yet this is not so. Even in this domain, remote though it may seem from ordinary sight and thought, what the science of the supersensible observes can be taken hold of, once discovered, by the normal faculties of thought and judgment. One need only ponder with due judgment the manifest and given relationships of human life. The thinking, feeling and willing of man are related to one another, and to his experiences in and with the outer world, in ways that are unintelligible unless the manifest activities and relationships are understood as the expression of an unmanifest. To thoughtful contemplation, what is here manifest remains opaque and untransparent till we are able to interpret the way the way it takes its course within the physical life of man, as an outcome of non-physical realities disclosed by supersensible cognition. Unillumined by the science of the supersensible, it is as though we were in a dark room without a light. Just as we cannot see the physical objects around us until we have a light, so too we cannot explain what goes on in and through the soul-life of man till we have knowledge of the supersensible.

While man is joined to his physical body, the outer world enters his consciousness in images. After the physical body has been laid aside, he becomes aware of the experiences the astral body undergoes when unconnected with the outer world by physical sense-organs. To begin with, the astral body has no essentially new experiences. Its still remaining connection with the etheric body stands in the way of any new experience. But it possesses in an enhanced degree the memory of the past earth-life, which memory the etheric body—being still united with it—makes to appear in a vivid, all-embracing tableau.

Such is the first experience of the human being after death. He sees his past life from birth till death in a vast series of pictures, simultaneously spread out before him. During this earthly life, memory is only present while—in the waking state—man is united with his physical body. Moreover, it is only present to the limited extent the physical body permits. Yet to the soul herself nothing is lost; everything that has ever made an impression on the soul during this life is preserved. If the physical body were but a perfect instrument for the purpose, it would be possible for us at every moment to conjure up before the soul the whole of our past earthly life. At death all hindrance is removed, and while man still retains the ether-body he has a relatively perfect memory. This vanishes, however, in proportion as the ether-body loses the form it had while it indwelt the physical—a form which bears a fundamental likeness to the latter. This also is the reason why the astral body after a time separates from the etheric. For the astral body can only remain united with the etheric while the latter retains the imprint, the form that corresponds to the physical body.

During the life between birth and death a severance of the etheric body from the physical only takes place in exceptional cases and then only for a short duration. When, for example, a man subjects an arm or leg to an unusual pressure, a portion of the etheric body may become separated from the physical. We say then that the limb has “gone to sleep.” The peculiar sensation it gives is in fact due to the severance of the etheric body. (Here too, of course, materialistic thinking can deny the invisible within the visible, maintaining that the effect is merely due to the physical or physiological disturbances induced by the excessive pressure.) In such a case supersensible perception actually sees the corresponding part of the etheric body moving out and away from the physical. Now when a man undergoes an altogether unaccustomed shock or something of that nature, a like severance of the etheric may ensue for a brief space of time over a large proportion of the body. This happens if he is brought very near to death, as on the point of drowning, or when in imminent danger of a fall in mountaineering.

What is related by individuals who have had such experiences comes very near the truth. Supersensible observation confirms it. They tell how at such a moment the whole of their past life appeared before them in a vast tableau of memory. Among the many examples that might be cited, we select one, the author of which—by the whole tenor of his thought—would have rejected as empty fancies what is here said about these matters. Incidentally, when one is taking the first steps in supersensible observation it is always useful to familiarize oneself with the findings of those who think the science of the supersensible fantastic. They are less easily attributed to favorable bias. (Let occult scientists learn as much as they can from those who deem their efforts futile. If the latter do not respond in kind we need not feel discouraged. Supersensible observation does not of course depend on these evidences for the verification of its results, and in adducing them the intention is not to prove, only to illustrate.)

The eminent anthropologist and criminologist Moritz Benedict, a scientist distinguished too in other branches of research, tells in his reminiscences of an experience of his own. Once he was very nearly drowned while bathing. He saw the whole of his past life in memory before him as though in a single picture.

It is no contradiction if others have described quite differently the pictures they experienced on such occasions, to the extent sometimes that there seemed little connection with the events of their past lives. For the pictures that arise during this altogether unaccustomed state of severance from the physical body are often not so easy to elucidate in their relation to the human being's life. None the less, if thoroughly gone into, some such relation will always be discerned. Nor is it valid to object that someone on the point of drowning did not have the experience at all. For the experience is only possible when the etheric body, while severed from the physical, remains united with the astral. It will not occur if the shock brings about a detachment of the etheric from the astral body too, since there will then be complete unconsciousness, just as there is in dreamless sleep.

[ 11 ] Once more, then: gathered together in a great memory-tableau, the past life of man comes before him during the time immediately following his death. Thereafter, the astral body—severed now from the etheric—goes on its further way alone and by itself. It is not difficult to see that in this astral body there will no remain whatever it has made its own by dint of its own activity while living in the physical. The Ego has to some extent elaborated Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. These, in so far as they are evolved, owe their existence to the Ego to the I—not to the organs of the bodies. Now by its very essence the I is the being which needs no outer organs for its perception. No more does it need outer organs to retain what it has once united with itself.

It may perhaps be objected: why, then, in sleep is there no perception of the evolved Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man? There is none because from birth until death the Ego is chained to the physical body. In sleep, it is true, it is with the astral body outside the physical. Yet even then it remains in close connection with the latter, for to the physical body the activity of the astral body, closely associated with the Ego, is directed. Bound as it is to the physical throughout earthly life, the Ego is dependent for its perceptions on the outer world of the senses; it cannot yet receive the manifestations of the spiritual in its original and proper form. Such manifestations can only come to the human Ego when released by death from its connection with the physical and etheric bodies. In life, the physical world holds the soul's activities chained to itself; another world can light up for the soul the moment it has been drawn forth, out of the physical body.

Yet there are reasons why even at this juncture man's connection with the external, sense-perceptible world does not altogether cease. Cravings, in effect, persist, maintaining the connection. These are the cravings man engenders for himself through the very fact that he is Ego-conscious—endowed with an Ego, the fourth member of his being. The cravings and desires which spring from the nature of the three lower bodies can only take effect in the outer world; when these bodies are laid aside, these cravings cease. Due as it is to the external body, hunger is naturally silenced when this body is no longer joined to the Ego. When death has taken place, the Ego, if it had now no other cravings than derive from its own spiritual nature, could draw full satisfaction from the spiritual world into which it is then transplanted. But life has given it other cravings besides these. Life has kindled in it a longing for enjoyments which, while only satisfiable by means of physical organs, are not in essence attributable to these organs. Not only the three bodies crave for satisfaction through the physical world; the Ego too finds enjoyments in this world—enjoyments such that in the spiritual world there are no objects to satisfy the longing for them.

Two kinds of wishes are proper to the Ego during earthly life. First are the wishes which, originating as they do in the three bodies, have to be satisfied in and through the bodies; these wishes naturally cease when the bodies disintegrate. Secondly there are the wishes which originate in the spiritual nature of the Ego. So long as the Ego is living in the bodies, these wishes too will find their satisfaction by means of bodily organs. For the unmanifest, the spirit, is at work here too—manifested through the organs of the body. In and with all that they perceive, the outer senses are at the same time receiving a spiritual portion. This spiritual portion is present also after death, though in a different form. Therefore the spiritual that the Ego craves for in the world of the senses is still available to it when these senses are no longer there.

If then a third kind of wish were not added to these two, death would merely signify the passing on from cravings satisfiable by means of bodily senses, to such as find fulfillment in the direct revelations of the spiritual world. But there are wishes of a third kind—wishes which the Ego engenders for itself while living in the sense-world inasmuch as it takes pleasure in this world even where the latter is not making manifest the spirit.

The lowest kinds of enjoyment can be true manifestations of the spirit. The satisfaction food affords to a hungry creature—this too is a manifestation of the spirit. For by the creature's nourishment something is accomplished, without which—in one essential direction—the spiritual itself could not evolve. But the I of man is able to go beyond this due enjoyment. The I can long for the tasty dish, quite apart form the function nourishment fulfils and in the fulfilling of it serves the spirit. The same applies to many other things belonging to the “sensual” world—that is to say, the world of the senses. Desires are thus engendered which would never have occurred in the sense-perceptible world of Nature, had not the I of man entered this world. Nor is it from the spiritual being of the I as such that these desires spring. The natural enjoyments of the senses are needed by the Ego—even as a spiritual being—while living in the body. In and through sense-perceptible Nature the spiritual manifests itself; it is none other than the spirit which the Ego is enjoying when given up to sensual manifestations through which the spirit-light is shining. In the enjoyment of this light it will continue, even when the nature of the outer sense is no longer the medium through which the spiritual light is radiating.

For sensual desires on the other hand, from which the living spirit is absent, there can be no fulfillment in the spiritual world. Therefore when death ensues the possibility of their assuagement is utterly cut off. The enjoyment of tasty food can only be brought about by means of the bodily organs—tongue, palate and the like—used in taking of food. These organs man no longer has when the physical body haw been laid aside. And if the Ego still feels need of such enjoyment, the need must remain satisfied. In so far as the enjoyment is in harmony with the spirit, it will be present only as long as the physical organs are there. But in so far as the human I has fostered it without thereby serving the spirit, the wish for the enjoyment will persist after death, vainly thirsting for satisfaction.

What now goes on in man can only be imagined if we think of one who has to suffer burning thirst in a desert country where no water is to be found. Such is the lot of the human I after death in so far as it harbors unextinguished cravings for the enjoyments of the outer world and has no organs for their satisfaction. Only, if thirst is here to serve as a comparison for the Ego's plight after death, we must imagine it boundlessly enhanced and extended to all the manifold cravings which may still persist, for the assuagement of which there is no possibility whatever.

The next stage through which the Ego passes is that it gradually frees itself from all these bonds of attachment to the outer world. In this respect it has to bring about within itself a purging and a liberation. All the desires the Ego has engendered while living in the body and that have not their rightful home within the spiritual world, must now be extirpated. As a combustible material is seized and burned by fire, so is the world of cravings dissolved and annihilated after death.

Herewith we peer into a world which supersensible wisdom has very properly described as “the consuming fire of the spirit.” This “fire” seizes hold of every craving which is not only sensual—related, that is, to the sense-perceptible world—but is so in such a way that in its essential nature it does not express the spirit. Pictures like these, in terms of which supersensible insight cannot but describe what actually happens after death, may appear terrible and cheerless. Well may it seem appalling that a hope, for the satisfaction of which sensory organs are that a hope, for the satisfaction of which sensory organs are required, must after death give way to utter hopelessness, or that a wish which the physical world alone is able to fulfill, must change into the burning want of fulfillment. Yet one can only think in this way while failing to perceive that all the wishes and cravings, seized upon after death by the “consuming fire,” represent forces which are not wholesome but in a higher sense destructive, inimical to life. These forces cause the Ego to form closer bonds of attachment to the sense-world than are needed in order to receive from this world that which will serve the Ego's progress. Nature—the “world of the senses”—is a manifestation of the hidden spiritual. There is a form in which the spiritual can only become manifest by means of bodily senses, and in this form the Ego would never be able to receive it, were it not to use the senses for the enjoyment of what is spiritual in the garb of Nature. But the Ego becomes estranged from the world's real and true and spiritual content when cravings for sensual enjoyments through which the spirit is no longer speaking. While sensual enjoyment as an expression of the spirit helps to uplift and evolve the Ego, that which does not express the spirit spells its impoverishment and desolation. And though a craving of this latter kind may lead to satisfaction and enjoyment within the sense-world, its emptying and devastating effect upon the I of man is still there. Only that this effect does not become perceptible to the I until after death. While life goes on, the enjoyment consequent on such a craving can beget new wishes of its kind, and man does not become aware that by his own doing he is enveloping him in a consuming fire. The fire that enveloped him already during life is made perceptible to him after death, and in so doing becomes transmuted into its wholesome and beneficial consequences.

When one human being loves another, he is not only attracted by those of the other's features which are directly sensible by physical organs of perception. And yet of these alone can it be said that death will render him unable any longer to perceive them. On the other hand, after death there becomes visible in the beloved the very reality of being for the perception of which the physical organs were but the means. Moreover then the one thing that will mar this perfect visibility will be the persistence of cravings which can only be satisfied by means of physical organs. Nay, if these cravings were not purged, conscious perception of the beloved would not be possible at all after death. Looked at in this light, the terrible and hopeless picture which the after-death events described by supersensible science might at first sight be seeming to convey, gives place to one that is deeply comforting and satisfying.

[ 12 ] In yet another respect our experiences after death are different from those we have in life. During the time of purification, man—in a sense—lives backwards. He goes again through all that he experienced in life, ever since his birth. Starting from the events immediately preceding death, he re-experiences it all in reverse order, back into childhood. And as he does so, there become visible to him all those things in his life which did not truly spring from the spiritual nature of the Ego. These too he now experiences in an inverted way. Say for example that a man dies in his sixtieth year, and that at the age of forty, in an outburst of anger, he caused another person pain in body or in soul. He will experience the event in consciousness again after death, when in his backward journeying through life he arrives at his fortieth year—the moment when it happened. But he will no experience, not the satisfaction he felt in giving vent to his anger, but instead the suffering the other person underwent through his unkindness. The example shows that what is painful in the after-death experience of an event of this kind is due to a craving to which the Ego gave way—a craving which had its origin in the outer material world and in this alone. In truth, by giving vent to such a craving the ego was doing harm not only to the other human being but to itself; only the harm done to itself remained invisible during life. After death the whole world of harmful cravings becomes perceptible to the Ego. The man now feels drawn to every being and to every object by contact with which a craving of this kind was ever kindled in him, so that the craving may be destroyed even as it originated—destroyed in the consuming fire.

When in his backward journeying man has attained the moment of his birth, all such cravings having now undergone the cleansing fire, there is no longer anything to hinder his unimpaired devotion to the spiritual world. He enters on a new stage of existence. Just as in death the physical body, and soon after it the etheric body was laid aside, so now there falls away and disintegrates the part of the astral body which is unable to live save in the consciousness of the external, physical world. Therefore for supersensible science there are no less than three corpses—physical, etheric and astral. The point of time at which the astral corpse is shed is given by the fact that the period of purification lasts about a third as long as the past life between birth and death. Why this is so will only be clear at a later stage, when the whole course of human life has been more thoroughly gone into in the light of Occult Science. For supersensible perception there are ever present in man's environment the astral corpses cast aside by those who are passing form the stage of purification on to higher levels of existence. It is analogous to what is obviously true for physical perception: physical corpses come into being where human communities are living.

[ 13 ] After the time of purification an entirely new state of consciousness begins for the I of man. Before death, perceptions came to him from without, for the light of his consciousness to fall upon them. Now, as it were, a world of coming to him—into his consciousness—from within. It is a spiritual world, in which the I is also living between birth and death. Here however, it is veiled in the manifestations of the senses; and only when—turning aside from all outward perceptions—the I becomes aware of itself in the inmost “holy of holies” of its being, what otherwise is shrouded in the veils of sense-perceptible Nature, makes itself known directly and in its pristine form. Like to this inner perception of the I before death, “form within outward” is the manifestation of the spiritual world in its fullness, after death and when the time of purification has been absolved.

This kind of manifestation is indeed already there as soon as the etheric body has been laid aside, but like a darkening cloud the world of cravings obscures it, clinging still to the external world. It is as though a blissful world of purely spiritual consciousness were to be interspersed with black demonic shadows, due to the cravings that are being purged in the consuming fire. Indeed these cravings are now revealed to be no mere shadows but very real beings; this becomes evident to man's Ego as soon as the physical organs are taken from him and he is thereby enabled to perceive what is spiritual. The beings look like distortions and caricatures of what was known to him hitherto by sense-perception. For of this realm of the purging fire, supersensible observation must relate that it is inhabited by beings whose appearance of the spiritual eye can only kindle pain and ghastly horror. Their very joy seems to consist in destruction; their passion is directed to an evil compared to which the evils known to us in the outer world seem insignificant. Whatever man takes with him thither by way of cravings of the kind above defined, appears as nourishment to these beings—nourishment by means of which they constantly renew and reinforce their powers.

The picture we have thus been painting of a world imperceptible to the outer senses may seem less incredible if one will look with open mind at well-known aspects of the animal creation. What, to the eye of the spirit, is a ruthlessly prowling wolf? What is revealing itself in the figure of the wolf as the outer senses see it? Surely it is none other than a soul that lives in cravings and acts out of its cravings. The very form of the wolf may be described as an embodiment of its cravings. Even if man had no organs to perceive this outer form, he would still have to recognize the wolf's existence if the cravings, though invisible, made themselves felt in their effect—if there were on the prowl a power invisible to human eye, yet by whose agency all that the visible wolf is doing were being done.

The beings of the purging fire are not present to the outer senses—only to supersensible consciousness. Their effects however are only too evident, in that they tend to destroy the Ego that gives them nourishment. When right enjoyment is carried to intemperance or to excess these effects are made visible enough.

Nature too, as perceived by the outer senses, would entice the Ego, but only in so far as the enjoyment were true to the Ego's own essential being. An animal is urged by instinct to desire that alone of the outer world for which its three bodies crave. Man has higher forms of enjoyment because he has not only the three bodily members but the fourth, the I—the Ego. If then the Ego craves for forms of satisfaction which serve, not the furtherance or maintenance but the destruction of its own being, such desires can neither be the outcome of the three bodies nor of the Ego's proper nature. They can only be the work of beings whose true shape and form remain hidden from the senses, but who gain access precisely to the higher nature of the Ego and entice it into cravings unfounded in the nature of the senses, yet only satisfiable by its means. In effect, there are beings whose food consists of cravings and passions more evil and pernicious than those of any animal, for they live not in the true nature of the senses but seize the spiritual and drag it down on to the sensual level. Their forms and features are to the spiritual eye more hideous and ghastly than those of the most savage animals. The latter, after all, do but incorporate natural passions, natural desires. The destructiveness of these beings boundlessly exceeds the wildest ravings known to us in the animal world as seen by the outer senses. Supersensible knowledge must in this way extend man's outlook to a world of beings who in a sense are on a lower level than any visible animal, even the most noxious and destructive.

[ 14 ] When after death man has passed through this world, he finds himself face to face with a world of pure spiritual content—a world, moreover, which begets in him only such longings as will find satisfaction in the purely spiritual. But he still distinguishes what appertains to his own I or Ego from what constitutes his environment, which we might also call the “spiritual outer world” for the Ego. Only, once more, his experiences of this environment come to him in the same way in which the inner perception of his own I came to him while living in the body. While in the life between birth and death the environment of man speaks to him through the organs of his bodies, when he has laid all the bodies aside the language of his new environment of man speaks to him through the organs of his bodies, when he has laid all the bodies aside the language of his new environment speaks directly into the inmost “holy of holies” of the I am. Now therefore the whole environment of man is replete with beings alike in kind to his own I, for in effect, only an I has access to an I. Even as minerals, plants and animals, surrounding him in the world of sense, constitute sense-perceptible Nature, so after death man is surrounded by a world composed of spiritual Beings.

Yet he brings with him thither something more—something which in yonder world is not his environment. In effect, he brings with him what his Ego has experienced while living in the sense-world. The sum-total of these his experiences first appeared to him in an all-embracing memory-tableau immediately after death, while the etheric body was still connected with his Ego. The ether-body was then laid aside, but something of the memory-tableau remained as an enduring possession of the Ego. It is as thought an extract, a quintessence, were distilled of all the experiences that had come to the human being between birth and death. This is the thing that endures. It is the spiritual yield, the fruit of life. The yield, once more, is of a purely spiritual nature. It contains all the spiritual content, manifested during life through the outer senses. Spiritual though it is, without man's sojourn in the sense-world it could never have come into existence. After death, the I of man feels this spiritual fruit, culled in the world of the senses, to be his own—his inner world. With this possession he is entering into the spiritual world—a world composed of beings who manifest themselves as an I alone can manifest itself in its own inmost depths. A seed, which is a kind of extract of the whole plant, can only develop when planted in another world—the earthly soil. What the Ego brings with it from the sense-world is like a seed—a seed received into the spiritual world, under whose influences it will now develop.

The science of the supersensible can at most give pictures in attempting to describe what happens in this “Land of Spirits.” Yet the pictures can be true to the reality. Experiencing the facts invisible to the external eye, supersensible consciousness can feel these pictures of them to be true. The spiritual realities can thus be illustrated by comparisons from sense-perceptible Nature. Purely spiritual though they are, they none the less bear a certain likeness to this world of Nature. As in this world a color will appear when the eye receives an influence from the appropriate object, so too in Spirit-land, under the influence of a spiritual Being, the Ego will experience a kind of color. Only the color-experience will come about in the way in which the Ego's own inner self-perception—and this alone—comes about during the life between birth and death. It is not as though light from outside were impinging on him; rather as though another Being directly influenced the Ego of man, impelling him to represent the influence to himself in a color-picture. Thus do all Beings in the spiritual environment of the Ego find expression in a world radiant with color.

Needless to say, since the manner of their origin is so very different, the color-experiences of the spiritual world differ in character from those we enjoy in the world of Nature. The same applies to other kinds of sense-impression which man receives from this world. It is the sounds of the spiritual world which are most like the corresponding impressions of the sense-world. The more man lives his way into the spiritual world, the more does it become for him an inner life and movement, comparable to the sounds and harmonies of sense-perceptible reality. Only he feels the sound, not as approaching an organ of perception from outside, but as a power flowing outward into the world from his own Ego. He feels it as in the sense-world he would feel his own speech or song; yet in the spiritual world he is aware that the sounds, even while proceeding from himself, are in reality the manifestation of other Beings, pouring themselves into the World through him.

There is a yet higher form of manifestation in the Spirit-land, when spiritual sound is enhanced to become the “spiritual Word.” Not only does the surging life and movement of another spiritual Being then pour through the I of man; the Being himself communicates his inmost being to the I. Without the remnant of separation which in the world of the senses even the most intimate companionship must have, two beings live in one-another when the Ego is thus poured through and through by the spiritual Word. In all reality, such is the Ego's companionship with other spiritual beings after death.

Three distinct regions of Spirit-land—the land of Spirits—are apparent to supersensible consciousness. We may compare them with three domains of sense-perceptible Nature. The first is as it were the “solid land” of the spiritual world; the second the “region of oceans and rivers;” the third the “air” or “atmosphere.

Whatever assumes physical form upon Earth and is thus made perceptible to physical organs, is seen in its spiritual essence in the first region of Spirit-land. For example, one may there perceive the power which builds the form of a crystal. Only what there reveals itself is like the antithesis of what appears to the senses in the outer world. The space which is here filled by the rocky material appears to the spiritual eye as a kind of hollow or vacuum; while all around the hollow space is seen the force building the form of the stone. The characteristic color which the stone has in the sense-world is experienced in the spiritual world as its complementary. Seen therefore from Spirit-land, a red stone is experienced with a greenish and a green stone with a reddish hue. Other properties too appear as their antithesis. Even as stones, rocks and geological formations constitute the solid land—the continental region—of the world of Nature, so do the entities we have been describing constitute the “solid land” of the spiritual world.

All that is life in the sense-world is the oceanic region of the spiritual world. To the eye of sense, life appears in its effects—in plants and animals and human beings. To the eye of the spirit, life is a flowing essence, like seas and rivers pervading the Spirit-land. Better still is the comparison with the circulation of the blood in the human body. For while the seas and rivers in external Nature appear as though distributed irregularly, there is a certain regularity in the distribution of the flowing life above all which is experienced as living spiritual sound.

The third region of Spirit-land is the airy sphere or “atmosphere.” All that is feeling and sensation in the outer world is present in the spirit-realm as an all-pervading element, comparable to the air on Earth. We must imagine an ocean of flowing sensation. Sorrow and pain, joy and delight, are wafted in that region as are wind and tempest in the atmosphere of the outer world. Think of a battle being fought on Earth. Not only are there facing one another the figures of the combatants which the outer eye can see. Feelings are pitted against feelings, passions against passions. Pain fills the battlefield no less than the forms of men. All that is there of passion, pain, victorious exultation, exists not only in its outer sense-perceptible effects; the spiritual sense becomes aware of it as a real event in the airy sphere of Spirit-land. Such an event is in the spiritual like a thunderstorm in the physical world. Moreover the perception of such events may be compared to the hearing of words in the physical world. Hence it is said: Even as the air enwraps and permeates the inhabitants of earth, so does the wind of the Spirit—the “wafting of the spiritual Words”—enwrap and permeate the beings and events of Spirit-land.

[ 15 ] Further perceptions are possible in the spiritual world, comparable to the warmth and also to the light of the physical world. Warmth permeates all earthly things and creatures, and it is none other than the world of thoughts which in like manner permeates all things in Spirit-land. Only these thoughts must be conceived as independent living Beings. The thoughts man apprehends within the manifest world are but a shadow of the real thought-being, living in the land of Spirits. One should imagine the thought, such as it is in man, lifted out of him and as an active being endowed with an inner life of its own. Even this is but a feeble illustration of what pervades the fourth region of Spirit-land. Thoughts in the form in which man perceives them in the physical world between birth and death are but a manifestation of the real world of thoughts—the kind of manifestation that is possible by means of bodily organs The thoughts man cultivates—those above all which signify an enrichment of the physical world—originate in this region of Spirit-land. This does not only apply to the ideas of great inventors or men of genius. Fruitful ideas “occur” to every human being—ideas he does not merely borrow from the outer world, but which enable him to work upon this world and change it. While feelings and passions occasioned by the external world belong to the third region of Spirit-land, all that can come to life in the soul of man so that he becomes creative, acting on his environment in such a way as to transform and fertilize it, is manifested in its archetypal being in the fourth region of the spiritual world.

The prevailing element of the fifth region may be likened to the light of the physical world. It is none other than Wisdom, manifested in its pristine, archetypal form. Beings belong to that region who pour Wisdom into their environment, even as the Sun sheds light upon physical creatures. Whatsoever the Wisdom shines upon, is revealed in its true significance for the spiritual world, just as a physical creature reveals its color when the light is shining on it. There are yet higher regions of Spirit-land; we shall refer to them again in later chapters.

Such is the world in which the I of man is steeped after death, with the yield he brings with him from his life in the outer world of sense. This yield, this harvest, is still united with the part of the astral body which was not cast off when the time of purification was over. For, as we saw, only part of the astral body then falls away—namely the part which with its wishes and cravings clung to the physical life even after death. The merging of the Ego into the spiritual world with all that it has gained from the sense-world may be likened to the embedding of a seed into the ripening earth. The seed draws to it the substances and forces of the surrounding soil, so that it may unfold into a new plant. In like manner, development and growth are of the essence of the I of man when planted in the spiritual world.

In what an organ perceives also lies hidden the creative force to which the organ is due. It is the eye that perceives the light, and yet without the light there would be no eye. Creatures that live perpetually in the dark fail to develop organs of sight. Thus the whole bodily man is created out of the hidden forces of what the several members of his bodies are able to perceive. The physical body is built by the forces of the physical world, the ether-body of those of the world of life; the astral body has been formed out of the astral world. Transplanted into Spirit-land, the Ego meets with these creative forces, which remain concealed from physical perception. Spiritual beings who, though unseen, surround man all the time, and who have built his physical body, become perceptible to him in the first region of Spirit-land. While in the physical world he can perceive no more than the outer manifestation of the creative and formative spiritual powers to which his own physical body is due, after death he is in their very midst. They now reveal themselves to him in their original and proper form, previously hidden from him. In like manner, throughout the second region he is amid the creative forces of which his ether-body consists, and in the third there flow towards him the powers of which his astral body is formed and organized. The higher regions too of Spirit-land now pour in upon him the creative powers to which he owes the very form and substance of his life between birth and death.

[ 16 ] These Beings of the spiritual world henceforth collaborate with the fruit of his former life which man himself has brought with him—the fruit which is now about to become the seed. And by this collaboration man is built up anew—built, to being with, as a spiritual being. In sleep the physical and etheric bodies are still there; the astral body and the Ego although outside, are in communication with them. The influences from the spiritual world received by the astral body and the Ego during sleep can only serve to repair the faculties and forces exhausted in the waking hours. But when the physical and the etheric body, and after purification the parts of the astral body which were still chained to the physical world by desire, have been cast off, what flows to the Ego from the spiritual world becomes not only the repairer; henceforth it is the re-creator. And after a lapse of time (as to the length of which we shall have more to say,) the Ego is again invested with an astral body, able to live in an etheric and physical body such as are proper to the human being between birth and death. He can be born again and re-appear in a new earthly life, in which the fruits of his former life have been incorporated.

Till his investment with a new astral body, man is the conscious witness of his own re-creation. And as the Beings of Spirit-land reveal themselves to him not through external organs but from within, like his own inmost I in the act of self-awareness, he can perceive the revelation so long as his attention does not yet incline towards a world of outer percepts. But from the moment when his astral body has been newly formed, he begins again to turn his attention outward. The astral once again demands an external body—physical and etheric—and in so doing turns away form what is manifested purely from within. Hence there now comes an intermediate condition during which man is plunged into unconsciousness. Consciousness will only be able to re-awaken when in the physical world the necessary organs—organs of physical perception—have been developed. During this intermediate time—the spiritual consciousness illumined by purely inner perception having faded—a new etheric body begins to be formed and organized about the astral body. This being done, man is prepared to re-enter into a physical body. Consciously to partake in the last two events—his re-equipment with an etheric and with a physical body—would only be possible for an Ego which by its own spiritual activity had developed the hidden creative forces of these bodies, in other words, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. So long as man has not yet reached this stage, Beings more advanced in evolution than himself have to direct the process. Such Beings guide the astral body towards a father and mother, so as to endow it with the appropriate etheric and physical bodies.

Now before the new etheric body has been formed and incorporated with the astral body, an event of great significance is undergone by the human being about to re-enter physical existence. In his preceding life, as we saw, he engendered hindering and disturbing forces, revealed to him during his backward journeying after death. Let us return to the above example. At age forty in his former life, in a sudden upsurge of anger, a man did harm to another. He was confronted after death by the other's suffering, as a force hindering the development of his own Ego. So too with all such occurrences of the preceding life. Now on re-entry into physical life these hindrances to his development confront the I of man. As after death a kind of memory-tableau of the past, he now experiences a pre-vision of his coming life. He sees it in a kind of tableau once again, showing him all the obstacles he must remove if his development is to go forward. What he thus sees becomes the source of active forces which he must carry with him into the coming life. The picture of the suffering he caused his fellow-man becomes a force impelling his Ego, now about to enter earthly life once more, to make good the hurt which he inflicted. Thus does the former life wield a determining influence upon the new; the deeds of the new life are, in a way, caused by the deeds of the old. In this relationship of law and causation between an earlier and a later life we have to recognize the real Law of Destiny—often denoted by a word taken from Oriental Wisdom, the law of “Karma.”

[ 17 ] The building of a new bodily organization is however not the only activity incumbent upon man between death and a new birth. While this is going on he lives outside the physical world. But this world too is going forward in its evolution all the time. In comparatively short periods of time the face of the Earth is changed. What did it look like a few thousand years ago, say in the regions of Middle Europe? When man appears again in a new life, the Earth will as a rule be looking very different from what it did last time. Much will have altered during his absence, and in this changing of the face of the Earth, here once again hidden spiritual forces are at work. These forces issue from the very same spiritual world in which man sojourns after death, and he himself is working in and with them; he too has to cooperate in the necessary transformation of the Earth. So long as he has not yet developed Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man and thus attained clear consciousness of the connection between the spiritual and its physical expression, he can of courser only do this under the guidance of higher Beings. None the less, he participates in the work of transforming the conditions upon Earth, and it is true to say: During the time between death and a new birth human beings are at work transforming the condition of the Earth so that it shall accord with what has been evolving in themselves. Picture a region or locality on Earth such as it was at a given time in the past, and then again—profoundly changed—a long time after; the forces which have wrought the change are in the realm of the dead. Thus are the souls of men still in communication with the Earth even between death and a new birth. Supersensible consciousness sees in all physical existence the outer manifestation of hidden spiritual realities. To physical observation, it is the rays of the Sun, changes of climate and the like which bring about the transformation of the Earth. To supersensible observation, in the light-ray falling from the Sun upon the plants and virtues of the dead are working. We become conscious of how the souls of men are hovering about the plants, changing the earthly soil, and other things of this kind. Man's activity after death is devoted not only to himself—not only to the preparation for his own new earthly life—but he is called to work upon the outer world in a spiritual way, even as in the life between birth and death it is his task to work upon it physically.

[ 18 ] Not only does the life of man in Spirit-land influence and modify the prevailing conditions of the physical world, but conversely too, his life and action in physical existence have their effect in the spiritual. To take one example: there is a bond of love between a mother and her child. The love proceeds from a natural attraction, rooted in forces of sense-perceptible Nature. Yet in course of time it is transformed. The natural grows ever more into a spiritual bond, and this is welded not only for the physical world but for the spiritual.

So too it is with many other relationships of life. Threads that are spun in the physical world by spiritual beings persist in the spiritual world. Friends who were closely united in this life belong together in Spirit-land as well; nay, when their bodies have been laid aside, they are in still more intimate communion. For as pure spirits they are there for each other in the way that was described before; it is from within that spiritual beings manifest themselves to one-another. Moreover, bonds that have once been woven between one human being and another will lead them together again in a new life on Earth. Thus in the deepest sense it is true that we find one-another again after death.

[ 19 ] The cycle of human life from birth till death and thence to a new birth repeats itself periodically. Again and again man returns to the Earth when the fruits gained in a preceding physical life has ripened in Spirit-land. But this is not a repetition without beginning or end. Time was when man advanced from other forms of existence to those here described, and in the future he will pass on to different ones again. We shall gain an idea of these transitions in due course, when in the light of supersensible consciousness we shall be describing the evolution of the World in its relation to Man.

[ 20 ] For outer observation, what does on between death and a new birth is of course still more hidden than the underlying spiritual reality of manifest existence between birth and death. As to this part of the hidden world, sensory observation will only see the corresponding effects when they enter into physical existence. The question is, therefore, whether on entering this life through birth man brings with him any evidence of the events since a preceding death, described by supersensible science. Finding a snail's shell in which no trace of any animal can be detected, we shall admit that the shell was produced by an animal's activity and vital functions. We cannot imagine this form to have been the product of mere inorganic forces. In like manner, if in our contemplation of man's earthly life we find what cannot possibly have had its origin in this present life, we can admit with reason that is may be the outcome of what the science of the supersensible describes, if in fact, a light of explanation thereby falls on the otherwise inexplicable. Here therefore too, wide-awake observation with the senses and the thinking mind can find the visible effects intelligible in the light of invisible causes. A man who looks at life with fully open mind will come to see increasingly that this is right; it will impress itself on him with every new observation. The question only is to find the appropriate point of view in each instance. Where, for example, are the effects to be seen of what the human being underwent during the time of purification described by supersensible science? How do the effects appear of his experiences after purification in a purely spiritual real—once more, according to the researches of spiritual science?

[ 21 ] Riddles enough impress themselves upon our thought whenever we earnestly reflect on human life. We see one man born in misery and need, equipped with scanty talents. By the very circumstances of his birth he seems predestined to a life of hardship and limitation. Another is tended and looked after with every care and solicitude from the first moment of his existence. Brilliant faculties unfold in him; he seems predestined to a fruitful and fully satisfying life. In face of such questions two different ways of thought and feeling can make themselves felt. The one wants strictly to adhere to what is seen by the outer senses and understood by the intellect which takes its data from them. A man of this way of thinking will see no deeper question in the fact that one human being is born to happiness, another to ill fortune. And even if he does not have recourse to the word “chance,” he will not think of looking for a deeper law or causal nexus to which these things might be due. As to the presence or the lack of innate talents, he will insist that these are “inherited” from parents, grandparents and other forebears. He will decline to seek the causes in spiritual experiences the individual himself went through before his birth, whereby he shaped his gifts and talents for himself quite apart from physical heredity.

A man imbued with the other way of thought and feeling will not be satisfied with this. Surely—he will aver—even in the manifest world nothing happens in a given locality and environment without some underlying cause. And though in many instances our science may not yet have found them, we can assume the causes to be there. An alpine flower does not grow in low-lying plains; there is something in its nature belonging to the alpine heights. So too there must be something in a human being, causing him to be born into a given environment. Nor is it adequate to look for causes within the physical world alone. To one who thinks more deeply, undue insistence on these causes is like attempting to explain the fact that one man hit another, not by the feelings of the one who dealt the blow but by the physical mechanism of his hand.

This other way of thinking will feel equally dissatisfied with the attributing of gifts and talents to “heredity” alone. Of course it may be pointed out how talents have been and are sometimes inherited in families. For two and a half centuries musical talents were inherited by members of the Bach family. No less than eight mathematicians of distinction sprang form the Bernoulli family. Though some had very different careers mapped out for them in childhood, again and again the “hereditary” talent drew them into the family profession. It might also be contended that by a detailed study of his ancestry a particular man's talents can be shown to have appeared in one way or another in his forebears, so that he is merely benefiting by the summation of inherited potentialities.

A man whose thinking leans towards the spiritual will certainly not disregard evidences of this kind, and yet for him they cannot be what they are to those who want to base all their explanations on facts accessible to the outer senses. He will point out that inherited potentialities cannot of their own accord add up into a complete and integrated personality, any more than the several metallic parts will of their own accord assemble into the watch. And if objection is made that the conjunction of the parents can surely have brought about the combination, thus as it were taking the watchmaker's place, he will answer: Look but with open vision, how altogether now a thing is the personality of every child we see! This cannot possibly come from the parents, for the simple reason that it is not there in them.

[ 22 ] Unclear thinking may give rise to much confusion here. It is silliest of all when those of the former way of thinking represent those of the latter as disregarding and opposing well-established facts. For it need never occur to them to deny the truth or value of the facts alleged. They too can fully see that a mental or spiritual gift or even bent of mind will be “inherited” in a particular family, or that inherited potentialities, added and combined in a descendant, have produced a man or woman of eminence. Readily will they acquiesce when told that the most eminent name is seldom to be found at the head but generally at the latter end of a line of descent. But it should not be taken amiss when they derive from all those things quite other thoughts than do those who will not go beyond super-sensible data. For to the latter the following answer can be made. Certainly a man bears the stamp of his forebears, for the soul-and-spirit, entering physical existence through birth, derives the bodily element from what heredity provides. But this is to say no more than that an entity naturally bears the features of the medium in which it is immersed! It is a quaint and no doubt a trite comparison, yet to an open mind it is surely apposite: A man who has fallen into the water will be wet, but his wetness is no evidence of his inner nature. No more is a human beings' however obvious investment with some of the characteristics of his forebears evidence as to the origin of those which are uniquely his. Moreover this too may be said: If the most eminent name comes at the end of a line of descent, it shows that the bearer of the name required that very line of blood-relationship to form the body needed in this life for his own individual development and expression. It is no proof of the hereditary character of what he—individually—was. Indeed to healthy logic it proves, if anything, the reverse. For if individual gifts were inherited, they surely would appear at the beginning of a line of descent and be handed down from thence to the individual descendants. That they appear at the end, is evidence that they are not hereditary.

[ 23 ] Now it cannot be denied that many of those who believe in spiritual causes also tend to make confusion worse confounded. They talk too much in vague and general terms. To maintain that a man is the mere sum-total of his inherited characteristics may indeed by like saying that the metallic parts have assembled of their own accord into the watch. Yet it must also be granted that many would-be arguments on behalf of a spiritual world are as though one were to say: “The metallic parts of a watch cannot of themselves join up so as to drive the hands forward; therefore there must be some spiritual entity driving them forward.” As against such a construction, the man who answers: “What do I care for ‘mystical’ being of this kind? I want to know the mechanical construction by means of which the forward movement is in fact produced,” is building on far better ground. The point is not to be vaguely aware that underlying the mechanical contrivance—the watch, in this instance—there is the spiritual entity, the watchmaker. The thing of practical significance is to get to know the thoughts in the mind of the watchmaker—thoughts which preceded the making of the watch. These thoughts are in the mechanism and can be found there.

[ 24 ] Merely to dream and spin fancies about the supersensible can only lead to confusion and is least likely to satisfy opponents. They are quite right in contending that the vague reference to supersensible begins in no way helps one to understand the facts. Many opponents, it is true, will make the same objection to the precise and clear descriptions of spiritual science. But in this case it can be pointed out how the effects of hidden spiritual causes are manifested in external life. It can be said: Assume for once that what is claimed to have been found by spiritual observation is actually true. Assume that after death a man passed through a time of purification, when he experienced in soul how a thing done by him in a preceding life was going to be an evolutionary hindrance. While he had this experience, there grew in him the impulse to make good the consequences of his action. This impulse he brings with him into a new life; the presence of it is a trait in his nature, leading him to the place and situation where the needed opportunity is given. Think of all impulses of this kind, and you have a cause for the particular human environment into which the man was destined to be born.

Or take another assumption. Suppose once more: what spiritual science tells is true. The fruits of a past life on Earth are embodied in the spiritual seed of man. The Spirit-land wherein he sojourns between death and a new earthly life is the realm where these fruits ripen, to re-emerge in the new life transmuted into aptitudes and talents and making him the man his is, so that his present character and being appear as the effect of what was gained in a former life. Take this as a hypothesis and with it candidly look out into life. If it consistent, in the first place, with a healthy recognition of the outer facts—facts accessible to the senses—in their full truth and import. At the same time it makes intelligible ever so many things which, if one had to rely upon the outer facts alone, must remain unintelligible to anyone whose mind and feeling do not incline towards the spiritual world. Above all, it will put an end to that inverted logic, of which a typical instance was the proposition that because the most eminent name occurs at the end of a hereditary tree, therefore the man who bears it must have inherited his gifts. The supersensible facts ascertained by spiritual science makes life intelligible to sound logic and straightforward thinking.

[ 25 ] Still, the conscientious seeker after truth, without experience of his own in the supersensible world yet looking for a deeper understanding of the facts, may have another difficulty at this point, the force of which should be admitted. He may contend: Surely we cannot assume that a thing is true merely because it helps explain the otherwise inexplicable. Needless to say, this objection will not trouble those who know the thing in question by their own supersensible experience. Later on in this book a path will be indicated which one may go along, to learn to know by one's own experience not only the other spiritual facts here described but the law of spiritual causation too. But for those who do not want to take this path, the difficulty remains. Moreover even for those who do, what will now be said in answer to it may be of value. Rightly received and understood, it is indeed the very best way of taking the first step.

Certainly we ought not to assume things of the existence of which we have no other knowledge, merely because they give a satisfying explanation of the otherwise inexplicable. But with the spiritual facts here adduced the case is really different. To assume them has not the mere intellectual consequence of making life intelligible theoretically. When we receive them—even as hypotheses—into our thoughts, we experience far more than this, and different in kind. Think of a man to whom a great misfortune happens, from which he suffers deeply. He can meet the occurrence in either of two ways. He can experience the pain of it, give himself up to this emotion and maybe even succumb to his distress. But he can fact it in a different way, saying to himself: “In reality, it was I who in the past life planted in myself the forces which have now confronted me with this occurrence. I have inflicted it upon myself.” He can now kindle in himself all the feelings which this thought may carry in its train. Of course the thought must be entertained with great earnestness and intensity to have an adequate effect upon his life of feeling. But anyone who manages to do this will make a very significant discover—best illustrated by a comparison. Each of two men, let us suppose, is given a stick of sealing-wax. The one indulges in intellectual reflections upon its “inner nature.” His thoughts may be profound, but if this inner nature is in no way revealed he will very soon be told that they are vain speculation. The other rubs the sealing-wax with a silken cloth and demonstrates how it will attract small bodies. There is a vital difference between the thoughts that passed through the first man's head, giving rise to his philosophical reflections, and those of the second man. The former are without factual consequence, whereas the latter have led to a force of Nature—a real and potent fact—being conjured forth from its hidden state.

Such are the thoughts of one who thinks how in a former life he planted in himself the force that led him into a painful misfortune. The mere idea that this was so kindles in him a real power—a power to meet the event quite differently than he could do without it. It dawns upon him how inherently necessary, how essential was the event which he could otherwise only have looked upon as an unfortunate mischance. With direct insight he will realize: “This thought was right, for it has had the power to reveal to me the real state of affairs.” Inner experiments of this kind, actively repeated, become an ever increasing source of inner strength, and by their fruitful outcome prove their truth. The demonstration grows impressive—ever more so. In spirit and in soul, and physically too, the experience is health-giving—in all respects a positive and beneficial influence upon one's life. A man becomes aware that with such thoughts he takes his proper stand amid the ups and downs of life, whereas if he were only thinking of the single life between birth and death he would be giving himself up to illusions. Knowledge of reincarnation fortifies his inner life.

Admittedly, this intimate and searching proof of the spiritual law of causation can only be gained by each man for himself, in his own inner life. And it is really possible for everyone. No-one who has not gained it for himself can judge of its demonstrative power, while those who have can hardly doubt it any more. We need not be surprised that this is so. For where a thing is so bound up with a man's individuality, his inmost being, it is but natural that it can only be adequately proved by his own inner experience.

This does not mean however that because it answers to an inner experience of the soul the question can only be settled by each man for himself and therefore cannot be the subject-matter of a valid spiritual science. True, everyone must have the experience himself, just as everyone has to perceive for himself the proof of a theorem in mathematics. But the pathway by which the experience is reached, no less than the method of proving the mathematical theorem, is universally valid.

[ 26 ] Apart of course from actual observation in the supersensible, the proof above described is undeniably the only one which by the potency an fertile outcome of its thoughts stands firm in face of every fair and rational approach. Other considerations may be of great significance, and yet in all of them a sincere opponent may find loopholes. One other thought—evident enough to fair-minded insight—does however deserve mention. The very fact of education—that man is educable—goes a long way to prove that in the human child there is a spiritual being clad in a bodily garment and working his way through into life. Compare man with the animal. The characteristic properties and faculties of the animal are apparent from birth onward—a well-defined totality, of which the plan is manifestly given by heredity and then develops by contact with the outer world. See how the chick begins to fulfill the functions of its life as soon as ever it is hatched. How different with man! While he is being educated things which may well have no connection whatever with his heredity meet him and come into relation with his inner life. He proves able to assimilate and make his own the effects of these external influences. As every educator is aware, powers and faculties from the pupil's own inner life must come to meet these influences; if they do not, schooling and education are useless. An educator of sufficient insight will even mark the clear dividing line between the inherited tendencies and those inner faculties of his pupils which ray right through the latter, originating as they do in former lives.

True, in this field we cannot offer proofs as literally “weighty” as are the scientific proofs for which a balance is used in a physical experiment. But we are dealing here with the more intimate realities of life. To a sensitive thinker the kind of evidence just indicated, intangible though it is, has a validity even more cogent than that of tangible and ponderable data.

Animals too can of course be trained to develop special qualities and aptitudes, as though by education. But if we once discern what is essential, this is no valid objection. Quite apart from the fact that transitions between one thing and another are everywhere to be found, the effects of training do not merge into the animal's individual being as in the case of man. We are even told how the skills and aptitudes domestic animals acquire by their association with man or by deliberate training can be inherited. In other words, the effect is not individual but generic. Darwin describes how dogs will “fetch and carry” without previous training and without ever having seen it done. Who would say the same of human education?

[ 27 ] Now there are thinkers who see beyond the mistaken notion that man is outwardly pieced together by mere hereditary forces. They rise to the idea that a spiritual being, an individuality, precedes and helps to form the bodily existence. But many of them are not yet able to realize the fact of repeated lives on Earth, the fruits of earlier lives playing a decisive part during an intermediate spiritual form of existence. We will cite one of these thinkers, Immanuel Hermann Fichte—son of the great philosopher—who in his Anthropolgie (p. 528) sums up his observations as follows:

“The parents are by no means the progenitors in the full sense of the word. What they contribute is the organic material, and not only this; also the intermediate qualities of heart and mind and sensibility, shown in the temperament, in shades of feeling, instinctive tendencies and the like, the common source of all which we found in the imaginative power—Phantasie—using this word in the wider sense already indicated. In all these elements of a man's personality, the mingling and conjunction of the souls of his parents is unmistakable. These we may justly regard as a simple outcome of procreation, the more so since the act of procreation—as we were driven to admit—is an event in the soul-life too. Yet in all this the core and coping-stone of the individuality is not yet contained. For as a deeper penetration shows, even these subtler traits of heart and mind and feeling are but a sheath, an instrument, a vestment to contain the essentially spiritual, ideal potentialities of the man himself. True, they can further—or it may be hinder—these potentialities in their development, but they can never bring them forth out of themselves.”

A little later on (p. 532) Fichte adds:

“As to his archetypal spiritual form each human being pre-exists. Spiritually seen, two human individuals are no more like one another than are two animal species.”

These ideas only go so far as to allow that a spiritual being enters the physical, bodily nature of man to indwell it. But as they ail to attribute the form-giving powers of this being to causes originating in former lives, a fresh spiritual being would have to issue from the Divine Source of all, every time a human personality arose. On this assumption it would not be possible to explain the undoubted relationship between the innate tendencies which work their way outward from a man's inner being, and what comes to meet this inner being from his external, earthly and social environment during the course of his life. The inner being of man, springing for each single one—as it were, new-born—from the Divine Fount, would then confront what is to meet him in the earthly life as a complete stranger. This will only not be the case as indeed we know it is not—if the man's inner being has already been connected with this inner world and is not living in it for the first time. An open-minded teacher and educator can attain this perception: “What I am bringing to my pupil out of the fruits of human life on Earth is to a great extent foreign to his mere hereditary endowment, and yet it somehow touches him as though he had already been a participant—partaking in the work to which the fruits are due.”

Only repeated lives on Earth—taken together with the events in the spiritual realm between, as shown by spiritual science—can give a satisfying explanation of the life of present-day mankind when looked at in an all-round way. We say expressly, “present-day mankind.” Spiritual research reveals that there was a time when the cycle of man's earthly lives first began. Moreover the conditions then obtaining for the entry of his spiritual being into the bodily sheaths differed from those of today. In the next chapters we shall be going back to that primeval state of man, and in so doing it will emerge from the results of spiritual science how he evolved into his present form, in close connection with the evolution of the Earth as such. Then too it will be possible to indicate more fully how the spiritual core of man's being enters from supersensible worlds into the bodily vestments, and how the spiritual law of causation—how human destiny works itself out.

• 1. Supplementary Notes section.

For we want to approach such a creation as the sublime Bhagavad Gita with full understanding it is necessary for us to attune our souls to it, so to say; bring them into that manner of thought and feeling that really lies at the basis of such a work. This is especially true for people who, through their situation and circumstances, are as far removed from this great poem as are the people of the West. It is natural for us to make a contemporary work our own without much difficulty. It is also natural that those who belong to a certain nation should always have an immediate feeling for a work that has sprung directly out of the substance of that nation, even though it might belong to a previous age. The population of the West (not those of southern Asia), however, is altogether remote in sentiment and feeling from the Bhagavad Gita.

If we would approach it then with understanding we must prepare ourselves for the very different mood of soul, the different spirit that pervades it. Such appalling misunderstandings can arise when people imagine they can approach this poem without first working on their own souls. A creation coming over to us from a strange race, from the ninth or tenth century before the foundation of Christianity, cannot be understood as directly by the people of the West as, say, the Kalevala by the Finnish people, or the Homeric poems by the Greeks. If we would enter into the matter further we must once more bring together different materials that can show us the way to enter into the spirit of this wonderful poem.

Here I would above all draw attention to one thing. The summits of spiritual life have at all times been concealed from the wide plain of human intelligence. So it has remained, in a certain sense, right up to our present age. It is true that one of the characteristics of our age, which is only now dawning and which we have somewhat described, will be that certain things hitherto kept secret and really known to but very few will be spread abroad into large circles. That is the reason why you are present here, because our movement is the beginning of this spreading abroad of facts that until now have remained secret from the masses. Perhaps some subconscious reason that brought you to the anthroposophical view of the world and into this spiritual movement came precisely from the feeling that certain secrets must today be poured out into all people. Until our time, however, these facts remained secret not because they were deliberately kept so, but because it lay in the natural course of man's development that they had to remain secret. It is said that the secrets of the old Mysteries were protected from the profane by certain definite, strictly observed rules. Far more than by rule, these secrets were protected by a fundamental characteristic of mankind in olden times, namely, that they simply could not have understood these secrets. This fact was a much more powerful protection than any external rule could be.

This has been, for certain facts, especially the case during the materialistic age. What I am about to say is extreme heresy from the point of view of our time. For example, there is nothing better protected in the regions of Central Europe than Fichte's philosophy. Not that it is kept secret, for his teachings are printed and are read. But they are not understood. They remain secrets. In this way much that will have to enter the general development of mankind will remain occult knowledge though it is published and revealed in the light of day.

Not only in this sense but in a rather different one too, there is a peculiarity of human evolution that is important concerning those ideas we must have in order to understand the Bhagavad Gita. Everything we may call the mood, the mode of feeling, the mental habit of ancient India from which the Gita sprang, was also in its full spirituality accessible to the understanding of only a few. What one age has produced by the activity of a few, remains secret in regard to its real depth, even afterward when it passes over and becomes the property of a whole people. Again, this is a peculiar trait in the evolution of man, which is full of wisdom though it may at first seem paradoxical. Even for the contemporaries of the Bhagavad Gita and for their followers, for the whole race to which this summit of spiritual achievement belongs, and for its posterity, its teaching remained a secret. The people who came later did not know the real depth of this spiritual current. It is true that in the centuries following there grew up a certain religious belief in its teachings, combined with great fervor of feeling, but with this there was no deepening of perception. Neither the contemporaries nor those who followed developed a really penetrating understanding of this poem. In the time between then and now there were only a few who really understood it.

Thus it comes about that in the judgment of posterity what was once present as a strong and special spiritual movement is greatly distorted and falsified. As a rule we cannot find the way to come near to an understanding of some reality by studying the judgments of the descendants of the race that produced it. So, in the deep sentiments and feelings of the people of India today we will not find real understanding for the spiritual tendency that in the deepest sense permeates the Bhagavad Gita. We will find enthusiasm, strong feeling and fervent belief in abundance, but not a deep perception of its meaning. This is especially true of the age just passed, from the fourteenth and fifteenth to the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, it is most especially true for the people who confess that religion. There is one anecdote that like many others reveals a deep truth—how a great European thinker said on his deathbed, “Only one person understood me, and he misunderstood me.”

It can also be said of this age that has just run its course, that it contained some spiritual substance that represents a great height of achievement but in the widest circles has remained unknown as to its real nature, even to its contemporaries. Here is something to which I would like to draw your attention. Without doubt, among the present people of the East, and of India, some exceptionally clever people can be found. By the whole configuration of their mind and soul, however, they are already far from understanding those feelings poured out in the Bhagavad Gita. Consider how these people receive from Western civilization a way of thought that does not reach to the depths but is merely superficial understanding. This has a twofold result. For one, it is easy for the Eastern peoples, particularly for the descendants of the Bhagavad Gita people, to develop something that may easily make them feel how far behind a superficial Western culture is in relation to what has already been given by their great poem. In effect they still have more ways of approach to the meaning of that poem than to the deeper contents of Western spiritual and intellectual life. Then there are others in India who would gladly be ready to receive such spiritual substance as is contained, let us say, in the works of Solovieff, Hegel and Fichte, to mention a few of many spiritualized thinkers. Many Indian thinkers would like to make these ideas their own.

I once experienced something of this kind. At the beginning of our founding of the German Section in our movement an Indian thinker sent me a dissertation. He sent it to many other Europeans besides. In this he tried to combine what Indian philosophy can give, with important European concepts, such as might be gained in real truth—so he implied—if one entered deeply into Hegel and Fichte. In spite of the person's honest effort the whole essay was of no use whatever. I do not mean to say anything against it, rather I would praise his effort, but the fact is, what this man produced could only appear utter dilettantism to anyone who had access to the real concepts of Fichte and Hegel. There was nothing to be done with the whole thing.

Here we have a person who honestly endeavors to penetrate a later spiritual stream altogether different from his own point of view, but he cannot get through the hindrances that time and evolution put in his way. Nevertheless, when he attempts to penetrate them, untrue and impossible stuff is the result. Later I heard a lecture by another person, who does not know what European spiritual evolution really is, and what its depths contain. He lectured in support of the same Indian thinker. He was a European who had learned the arguments of the Indian thinker and was bringing them forward as spiritual wisdom before his followers. They too of course were ignorant of the fact that they were listening to something which rested on a wrong kind of intellectual basis. For one who could look keenly into what the European gave out, it was simply terrible. If you will forgive the expression, it was enough to give one the creeps. It was one misunderstanding grafted onto another misunderstanding. So difficult is it to comprehend all that the human soul can produce. We must make it our ideal to truly understand all the masterpieces of the human spirit. If we feel this ideal through and through and consider what has just been said, we shall gain a ray of light to show us how difficult of access the Bhagavad Gita really is. Also, we shall realize how untold misunderstandings are possible, and how harmful they can be.

We in the West can well understand how the people of the East can look up to the old creative spirits of earlier times, whose activity flows through the Vedantic philosophy and permeates the Sankhya philosophy with its deep meaning. We can understand how the Eastern man looks up with reverence to that climax of spiritual achievement that appears in Shankaracharya seven or eight centuries after the foundation of Christianity. All this we can realize, but we must think of it in another way also if we want to attain a really deep understanding. To do so we must set up something as a kind of hypothesis, for it has not yet been realized in evolution.

Let us imagine that those who were the creators of that sublime spirituality that permeates the Vedas, the Vedantic literature, and the philosophy of Shankaracharya, were to appear again in our time with the same spiritual faculty, the same keenness of perception they had when they were in the world in that ancient epoch. They would have come in touch with spiritual creations like those of Solovieff, Hegel, and Fichte. What would they have said? We are supposing it does not concern us what the adherents of those ancient philosophies say, but what those spirits themselves would say. I am aware that I am going to say something paradoxical, but we must think of what Schopenhauer once said. “There is no getting away from it, it is the sad fate of truth that it must always become paradoxical in the world. Truth is not able to sit on the throne of error, therefore it sits on the throne of time, and appeals to the guardian angel of time. So great, however, is the spread of that angel's mighty wings that the individual dies within a single beat.” So we must not shrink from the fact that truth must needs appear paradoxical. The following does also, but it is true.

If the poets of the Vedas, the founders of Sankhya philosophy, even Shankaracharya himself, had come again in the nineteenth century and had seen the creations of Solovieff, Hegel and Fichte, all those great men would have said, “What we were striving for back in that era, what we hoped our gift of spiritual vision would reveal to us, these three men have achieved by the very quality and tenor of their minds. We thought we must rise into heights of clairvoyant vision, then on these heights there would appear before us what permeates the souls of these nineteenth century men quite naturally, almost as a matter of course!”

This sounds paradoxical to those Western people who in childlike unconsciousness look to the people of the East, comparing themselves with them, and all the while quite misunderstanding what the West actually contains. A peculiarly grotesque picture. We imagine those founders of Indian philosophy looking up fervently to Fichte and other Western thinkers; and along with them we see a number of people today who do not value the spiritual substance of Europe but grovel in the dust before Shankaracharya and those before him while they themselves are not concerned with the achievements of such as Hegel, Fichte and Solovieff. Why is this so? Only by such an hypothesis can we understand all the facts history presents to us.

We shall understand this if we look up into those times from which the spiritual substance of the Bhagavad Gita flowed. Let us imagine the man of that period somewhat as follows. What appears to a person today in varied ways in his dream-consciousness—the pictorial imagination of dream-life—was in that ancient time the normal content of man's soul, his everyday consciousness. His was a dreamlike, picture consciousness, by no means the same as it was in the Old Moon epoch but much more evolved. This was the condition out of which men's souls were passing on in the descending line of evolution. Still earlier was what we call sleep-consciousness, a state wholly closed to us today, from which a kind of inspiration, dream-like, came to men. It was the state closed to us today during our sleep. As dream-consciousness is for us, so was this sleep-consciousness for those ancient men. It found its way into their normal picture-consciousness much as dream-consciousness does for us, but more rarely. In another respect also it was somewhat different in those times. Our dream-consciousness today generally brings up recollections of our ordinary life. Then, when sleep-consciousness could still penetrate the higher worlds, it gave men recollections of those spiritual worlds. Then gradually this consciousness descended lower and lower.

Anyone who at that time was striving as we do today in our occult education, aimed for something quite different. When we today go through our occult development we are aware that we have gone downhill to our everyday consciousness and are now striving upward. Those seekers were also striving upward, from their everyday dream-consciousness. What was it then that they attained? With all their pains it was something altogether different from what we are trying to attain. If someone had offered those men my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds they would have had no use for it at all. What it contains would have been foolishness for that ancient time; it has sense only for mankind today. Then, everything those men did with their Yoga and the Sankhya was a striving toward a height that we have reached in the most profound works of our time, in those of the three European thinkers I have mentioned. They were striving to grasp the world in ideas and concepts. Therefore, one who really penetrates the matter finds no difference—apart from differences of time, mood, form, and quality of feeling—between our three thinkers and the Vedantic philosophy. At that time the Vedantic philosophy was that to which men were striving upward; today it has come down and is accessible to everyday consciousness.

If we would describe the condition of our souls in this connection we may say to begin with that we have a sleep-consciousness that for us is closed but for the ancient people of India was still permeated by the light of spiritual vision. What we are now striving for lay hidden in the depths of the future for them. I mean what we call Imaginative Knowledge, fully conscious picture-consciousness, permeated by the sense of the ego; fully conscious Imagination as it is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. So much for the technical point that should be inserted here. In these abstract technicalities lies something far more important, that if the man of today will only vigorously make use of the forces present in his soul, what the men of the Bhagavad Gita era strove for with all their might lies right at his hand. It really does, even if only for a Solovieff, a Fichte or a Hegel. There is something more. What today can be found right at hand was in those ancient times attained by application of all the keenness of vision of Sankhya, and the deep penetration of Yoga. It was attained by effort and pain, by sublime effort to lift the mind.

Now imagine how different the situation is for a man who, for example, lives at the top of a mountain, has his house there and is continually enjoying the magnificent view, from that of a man who has never once seen the view but has to toil upward with trouble and pain from the valley. If you have the view every day you get accustomed to it. It is not in the concepts, in their content, that the achievements of Shankaracharya, of the Vedic poets, and of their successors are different from those of Hegel and Fichte. The difference lies in the fact that Shankaracharya's predecessors were striving upward from the valley to the summit; that it was their keenness of mind in Sankhya philosophy, their deepening of soul in Yoga, that led them there. It was in this work, this overcoming of the soul, that the experience lay. It is the experience, not the content of thought that is important here.

This is the immensely significant thing, something from which we may in a certain sense derive comfort because the European does not value what we can find right at hand. Europeans prefer the form in which it meets them in Vedantic and Sankhya philosophies, because there, without knowing it, they value the great efforts that achieved it. That is the personal side of the matter. It makes a difference whether you find a certain content of thought here or there, or whether you attain it by the severest effort of the soul. It is the soul's work that gives a thing its life. This we must take into account. What was once attained alone by Shankaracharya and by the deep training of Yoga can be found today right at hand, even if only by men like those we have named.

This is not a matter for abstract commentaries. We only need the power to transplant ourselves into the living feelings of that time. Then we begin to understand that the external expressions themselves, the outer forms of the ideas, were experienced quite differently by the men of that era from the way we can experience them. We must study those forms of expression that belong to the feeling, the mood, the mental habit of a human soul in the time of the Gita, who might live through what that great poem contains. We must study it not in an external philological sense, not in order to give academic commentaries, but to show how different is the whole configuration of feeling and idea in that poem from what we have now. Although the conceptual explanation of the world—which today, to use a graphic term, lies below and then lay above—though the content of thought is the same, the form of expression is different. Whoever would stop with the abstract contents of these thoughts may find them easy to understand, but whoever would work his way through to the real, living experience will not find it easy. It will cost him some pains to go this way again and feel with the ancient man of India because it was by this way that such concepts first arose as those that flowed out into the words sattwa, rajas, tamas. I do not attach importance to the ideal concepts these words imply in the Bhagavad Gita, but indeed we today are inclined to take them much too easily, thinking we understand them.

What is it that actually lies in these words? Without a living sympathy with what was felt in them we cannot follow a single line of the poem with the right quality of feeling, particularly in its later sections. At a higher stage, our inability to feel our way into these concepts is something like trying to read a book in a language that is not understood. For such a person there would be no question of seeking out the meaning of concepts in commentaries. He would just set to work to learn the language. So here it is not a matter of interpreting and commenting on the words sattwa, rajas, tamas in an academic way. In them lies the feeling of the whole period of the Gita, something of immense significance because it led men to an understanding of the world and its phenomena. If we would describe the way they were led, we must first free ourselves from many things that are not to be found in such men as Solovieff, Hegel, and Fichte, yet lie in the widespread, fossilized thinking of the West. By sattwa, rajas, tamas is meant a certain kind of living one's way into the different conditions of universal life, in its most varied kingdoms. It would be abstract and wrong to interpret these words simply on the basis of the ancient Indian quality of thought and feeling. It is easier to take them in the true sense of the life of that time but to interpret them as much as possible through our own life. It is better to choose the external contour and coloring of these conceptions freely out of our own experience.

Let us consider the way man experiences nature when he enters intelligently into the three kingdoms that surround him. His mode and quality of knowledge is different in the case of each. I am not trying to make you understand sattwa, rajas and tamas exhaustively. I only want to help you to come a little nearer to an idea of their meaning. When man today approaches the mineral kingdom he feels he can penetrate it and its laws with his thinking, can in a certain sense live together with it. This kind of understanding at the time of the Gita would have been called a sattwa understanding of the mineral kingdom. In the plant kingdom we always encounter an obstacle, namely, that with our present intelligence we cannot penetrate life. The ideal now is to investigate and analyze nature from a physical-chemical standpoint, and to comprehend it in this manner. In fact, some scientists spin their threads of thought so far as to imagine they have come nearer to the idea of life by producing external forms that imitate as closely as possible the appearance of the generative process. This is idle fantasy. In his pursuit of knowledge man does not penetrate the plant kingdom as far as he does the mineral. All he can do is to observe plant life. Now what one can only observe, not enter with intellectual understanding, is rajas-understanding. When we come to the animal kingdom, its form of consciousness escapes our everyday intelligence far more than does the life of a plant. We do not perceive what the animal actually lives and experiences. What man with his science today can understand about the animal kingdom is a tamas-understanding.

We may add something further. We shall never reach an understanding beyond the limits of abstract concepts if we consider only the concepts of science regarding the activity of living beings. Sleep, for example, is not the same for man and animal. Simply to define sleep would be like defining a knife as the same thing whether used for shaving or cutting meat. If we would keep an open mind and approach the concepts of tamas, rajas and sattwa once more from a different aspect we can add something else taken from our present-day life.

Man today nourishes himself with various substances, animal, plant, and mineral. These foods of course have different effects on his constitution. When he eats plants he permeates himself with sattwa conditions. When he tries to understand them they are for him a rajas condition. Nourishment from the assimilation of mineral substance—salts and the like—represents a condition of rajas; that brought about by eating meat represents tamas. Notice that we cannot keep the same order of sequence as if we were starting from an abstract definition. We have to keep our concepts mobile. I have not told you this to inspire horror in those who feel bound to eating meat. In a moment I shall mention another matter where the connection is again different.

Let us imagine that a man is trying to assimilate the outer world, not through ordinary science but by that kind of clairvoyance that is legitimate for our age. Suppose that he now brings the facts and phenomena of the surrounding world into his clairvoyant consciousness. All this will call forth a certain condition in him, just as for ordinary understanding the three kingdoms of nature call forth conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. In effect what can enter the purest form of clairvoyant perception corresponding to purified clairvoyance, calls forth the condition of tamas. (I use the word “purified” not in the moral sense.) A man who would truly see spiritual facts objectively, with that clairvoyance that we can attain today, must by this activity bring about in himself the condition of tamas. Then when he returns into the ordinary world where he immediately forgets his clairvoyant knowledge, he feels that with his ordinary mode of knowledge he enters a new condition, a new relation to knowledge, namely, the sattwa condition. Thus, in our present age everyday knowledge is the sattwa condition. In the intermediate stage of belief, of faith that builds on authority, we are in the rajas condition.

Knowledge in the higher worlds brings about the condition of tamas in the souls of men. Knowledge in our everyday environment is the condition of sattwa; while faith, religious belief resting on authority, brings about the condition of rajas. So you see, those whose constitution compels them to eat meat need not be horrified because meat puts them in a condition of tamas because the same condition is brought about by purified clairvoyance. It is that condition of an external thing when by some natural process it is most detached from the spiritual. If we call the spirit “light” then the tamas condition is devoid of light. It is “darkness.” So long as our organism is permeated by the spirit in the normal way we are in the sattwa condition, that of our ordinary perception of the external world. When we are asleep we are in tamas. We have to bring about this condition in sleep in order that our spirit may leave our body and enter the higher spirituality around us. If we would reach the higher worlds—and the Evangelist already tells us what man's darkness is—our human nature must be in the condition of tamas. Since man is in the condition of sattwa, not of tamas, which is darkness, the words of the Evangelist, “The light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not,” can be rendered somewhat as follows, “The higher light penetrated as far as man, but he was filled by a natural sattwa that he would not give up.” Thus the higher light could not find entrance because it can only shine in darkness.

If we are seeking knowledge of such living concepts as sattwa, rajas, and tamas, we must get accustomed to not taking them in an absolute sense. They are always, so to say, turning this way and that. For a right concept of the world there is no absolute higher or lower, only in a relative sense. A European professor took objection to this. He translated sattwa as “goodness” and objected to another man who translated it as “light,” though he translated tamas as “darkness.” Such things truly express the source of all misunderstanding. When man is in the condition of tamas—whether by sleep or clairvoyant perception, to take only these two cases—then in effect he is in darkness as far as external man is concerned. So ancient Indian thought was right, yet it could not use a word like “light” in place of the word sattwa. Tamas may always be translated “darkness” but for the external world the sattwa condition could not always be simply interpreted as “light.”

Suppose we are describing light. It is entirely correct to call the light colors—red, orange, yellow—in the sense of Sankhya philosophy the sattwa colors. In this sense too green must be called a rajas color; blue, indigo, violet, tamas colors. One may say effects of light and of clairvoyance in general fall under the concept of sattwa. Under the same concept we must also place, for example, goodness, kindness, loving behavior by man. It is true that light falls under the concept of sattwa, but this concept is broader; light is not really identical with it. Therefore it is wrong to translate sattwa as “light” though it is quite possible to translate tamas as “darkness.” Nor is it correct to say that “light” does not convey the idea of sattwa.

The criticism that the professor made of a man who may have been well aware of this is also not quite justified, for the simple reason that if someone said, “Here is a lion,” nobody would attempt to correct him by saying, “No, here is a beast of prey.” Both are correct. This comparison hits the nail right on the head. As regards external appearance it is correct to associate sattwa with what is full of light, but it is wrong to say sattwa is only of light. It is a more general concept than light, just as beast of prey is more general than lion.

A similar thing is not true of darkness for the reason that in tamas things that in rajas and sattwa are different and specific merge into something more general. After all, a lamb and a lion are two very different creatures. If I would describe them as to their sattwa characters—the form that the natural element of life and force and spirit takes in lambs and lions—I would describe them very differently. But if I would describe them in the condition of tamas the differences do not come into consideration because we have the tamas condition when the lamb or lion is simply lying lazily on the ground. In the sattwa condition lambs and lions are very different, but for cosmic understanding the indolence of both is after all one and the same.

Our power of truly looking into such concepts must therefore adapt to much differentiation. As a matter of fact, these three concepts with the qualities of feeling in them are among the most illuminating things in the whole of Sankhya. In all that Krishna puts before Arjuna, when he presents himself as the founder of the age of self-consciousness, he has to speak in words altogether permeated by those shades of feeling derived from the concepts sattwa, rajas, and tamas. About these three concepts, and what at length leads to a climax in the Bhagavad Gita, we shall speak more fully in the last lecture of this course.

From the announcement of the theme of today’s lecture “Shakespeare and the New Ideals,” it might be expected that I would speak, above all, about new ideals. But I am convinced that it is not so necessary to speak of new ideals today as it is to speak of a wider question, namely the following: How are men and women of our time to regain the power to follow ideals? After all, no great power is required to speak about ideals; indeed, it is often the case that those who speak most about these great questions, expanding beautiful ideals in abstract words out of their intellect, are those who lack the very power to put ideals into practice. Sometimes, speaking of ideals amounts to no more than holding onto illusions in the mind in order to pass over life’s realities.

At this festival, however, we have every cause to speak of what is spiritual as a reality. For this festival commemorates Shakespeare, and Shakespeare lives in what is spiritual in all that he created; he lives in it as in a real world. Receiving Shakespeare into our minds and souls might therefore be the very stimulus to give us men and women of today the power, the inner impulse to follow ideals, to follow real, spiritual ideals. We shall see our true ideals aright if we bear in mind how transitory many modern ideals have been and are, and how magnificently firm are many old ideals that still hold their own in the world by their effectiveness. Do we not see wide circles of believers in this or that religion, who base their innermost spiritual life and their inner mobility of spirit on something of the past, and gain from it the power of spiritual upliftment? And so we ask how is it that many modern ideals, beautiful as they are, and held for a while with great enthusiasm by large numbers of people, before long vanish as into a cloud, whereas religious or artistic ideals of old carry their full force into humanity not just through centuries but even through millennia?

If we ask this question, we are brought back repeatedly to the fact that, whereas our modern ideals are generally no more than shadow pictures of the intellect, the old ideals were garnered from real spiritual life, from a definite spirituality inherent in the humanity of the time. The intellect can never give human beings real power from the depths of their being. And, because this is so, many modern ideals vanish and fade away long before what speaks to us, through the old religious faiths, or through the old styles of art, from hoary antiquity. Returning to Shakespeare with these thoughts in mind, we know that a power lives in his dramatic work that not only always gives us fresh enthusiasm but also kindles within us—in our imaginations, in our spiritual natures—our own creative powers. Shakespeare has a wonderfully timeless power and, in this power, he is modern, as modern as can be.

Here, from the point of view of the connection between human ideals and Shakespeare, I might perhaps call to mind what I mentioned last Wednesday, namely Shakespeare’s deeply significant influence on Goethe. Countless books and treatises have been written on Shakespeare out of academic cleverness—exceptional cleverness. Taking all of the learned works on Hamlet alone, I think that one could fill library shelves that would cover this wall. But, when we seek to find what it was in Shakespeare that worked on such a man as Goethe, we finally come to the conclusion that absolutely nothing relating to that is contained in all that has been written in these books. They could have remained unwritten. All of the effort that has been brought to bear on Shakespeare stems from the world of the human intellect, which is certainly good for understanding facts of natural science and for giving such an explanation of external nature as we need to found for our modern technical achievements, but which can never penetrate what stands livingly and movingly before us in Shakespeare’s plays.

Indeed, I could go further. Goethe, too, from this standpoint of intellectual understanding, wrote many things on Shakespeare’s plays by way of explanation—on Hamlet, for example—and all of this, too, that Goethe wrote, is, in the main, one-sided and barren. However, what matters is not what Goethe said about Shakespeare, but what he meant when he spoke from his inmost experience, for example, when he said, “These are no mere poems! It is as though the great leaves of fate were opened and the storm-wind of life were blowing through them, turning them quickly to and fro.” These words are no explanation, but voice the devotion of his spirit. Spoken from his own humanity, they are very different from what he himself wrote by way of explanation about Hamlet.

Now, we might ask, why is it that Shakespeare is so difficult to approach intellectually? I shall try to give an answer in a picture. Someone has a vivid dream in which the characters enact a whole incident before the dreamer. Looking back on it later with the intellect, she or he might say that this or that figure in the dream acted wrongly; here is an action without motive or continuity, here are contradictions. But the dream cares little for such criticism. Just as little will the poet care how we criticize with our intellect and whether we find actions contradictory or inconsistent. I once knew a pedantic critic who found it strange that Hamlet, having only just seen the ghost of his father before him, should speak the monologue, “To be or not to be,” saying in it that “no traveller returns” from the land of death. This, the man of learning thought, was really absurd! I do not mean to say that Shakespeare’s dramatic scenes are dream scenes. Shakespeare experiences his scenes in full, living consciousness. They are as conscious as can be. But he uses the intellect only insofar as it serves him to develop his characters, to unfold them, to give form to action. He does not make his intellect master of what is to happen in his scenes.

I speak here from the anthroposophical view of the world. This view I believe, does contain the great ideals of humanity. Perhaps, therefore, I may mention at this point a significant experience that explains fully—by means of “artistic seership”—something that was first known through feeling. I have already had occasion to speak about the way in which “exact clairvoyance” is being cultivated at the Goetheanum, the school of spiritual science in Dornach, Switzerland. I have described the paths to this exact clairvoyance in the books translated into English as How to Know Higher Worlds, Theosophy, and An Outline of Occult Science. By means of certain exercises, carried out no less precisely than in the learning of mathematics, we can strengthen our soul faculties. Gradually, we can so develop our powers of thought, feeling, and will that we are able to live with our souls consciously—not in the unconsciousness of sleep or in dreams—outside the body. We become able to leave behind the physical body with its intellectualistic thought—for this remains with the physical body—in full consciousness. Then we have “imaginations,” by which I do not mean such fanciful imaginings as are justified in artistic work, but I mean true imaginations, true pictures of the spiritual world surrounding us. Through what I have called “imagination,” “inspiration,” and “intuition,” we learn to perceive in the spiritual world. Just as we consciously perceive this physical world and, through our senses, learn to build an understanding of it as a totality from the single sensory impressions of sound and color, so from the spiritual perceptions of exact clairvoyance we learn to build up an understanding of the spiritual world as a totality. Exact clairvoyance has nothing to do with hallucinations and illusions that enter a human being pathologically, always clouding and decreasing consciousness. In exact clairvoyance, we come to know the spiritual world in full consciousness, as clearly and as exactly as when we do mathematical work. Transferring ourselves into high spiritual regions, we experience pictures comparable, not with what are ordinarily known as visions, but rather with memory pictures. But these are pictures of an absolutely real spiritual world.

All of the original ideals of humanity in science, art, and religion were derived from the spiritual world. That is why the old ideals have a greater, more impelling power than modern intellectual ideals. The old ideals were seen in the spiritual world through clairvoyance, a clairvoyance that was at that time more instinctive and dreamlike. They were derived and taken from a spiritual source. By all means let us recognize quite clearly that certain contents of religious faith are no longer suited to our time. They have been handed down from ancient times. We need once more wide-open doors to look into the spiritual world and to take thence, not such abstract ideals as are spoken of on every side, but the power to follow the ideal and the spiritual in science, in art, and in religion.

If we approach Shakespeare with such powers of seeing into the spiritual world, we shall experience something quite specific, and it is of this that I wish to speak. Shakespeare can be understood with true and artistic feeling; exact clairvoyance is, of course, not necessary to have a full experience of his power. But exact clairvoyance can show us something most significant, which will explain why it is that Shakespeare can never let us feel he has left us, why it is that he is forever giving us fresh force and impulse. It is this: whoever has attained exact clairvoyance by developing the powers of thought, feeling, and will can carry over into the spiritual world what we have experienced here of Shakespeare. This is possible. What we have experienced here in the physical body—let us say that we have been entering deeply into the character of Hamlet or Macbeth—we can take this experience over into the spiritual world. We can see what lived in Shakespeare’s deep inner life only when we compare it with the impressions that we are able to take over into the spiritual world from poets of more modern times. I do not wish to mention any particular poet by name—I know that everyone has his or her favorite poets—but any one of the naturalistic poets, particularly of recent years, could be mentioned. If we compare what we take over from Shakespeare with what we have in the spiritual world from these poets, we discover the remarkable fact that Shakespeare’s characters live! When we take them over into the spiritual world, they act. They act differently, but they bring their life here into the spiritual world. Whereas, if we take over the characters created by a modern naturalistic poet into the spiritual world, they really behave more like dolls than human beings! They have no life in them at all, no movement! Shakespeare’s men and women keep their life and character. But the characters of many other poets, derived from naturalism, are just like wooden dolls in the spiritual world! They go through a kind of freezing process! Indeed, we ourselves are chilled by contact with such modern poetry in the spiritual world.

I am not saying this out of any kind of emotion, but as a matter of experience. With this experience in mind, we may ask again: what was it that Goethe felt? “It is as though the great book of fate is opened in Shakespeare, and life’s stormy wind is turning its pages quickly to and fro.” Goethe knew and felt how Shakespeare created from the full depths of the spiritual world. This has given Shakespeare his real immortality: this makes him ever new. We can go through a play of Shakespeare’s and experience it ten, twenty, a hundred times!

Ladies and gentlemen, you have had before you within the last few days the scene from Much Ado about Nothing where the Friar kneels down beside the fallen heroine and utters his conviction of her innocence. It is something unspeakably deep and true, and there is hardly anything in modern literature to be compared with it. Indeed, it is most often the intimate touches in Shakespeare that work with such power and reveal his inner life and vitality.

Or again, in As You Like It, where the Duke stands before the trees and all of the life of nature in the Forest of Arden, and says that they are better counselors than those at court, for they tell him something of what he is as a human being. What a wonderful perception of nature speaks from the whole of this well known passage! “. . . tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. . . .” Here is an understanding of nature, here is a reading of nature! It is true that the more modern poets can also indicate such things, but we often feel that in them it is something second-hand. In Shakespeare, we feel that he is himself everything. Even when they both say the same, it is altogether different whether Shakespeare says it or some other poet.

Thus the great question comes before us: how is it that, in Shakespeare, there is this living quality that is so intimately related to the supersensible? Whence comes the life in Shakespeare’s dramas? This question leads us to see how Shakespeare, working as he did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was able to create something that still had living connections with the life of the most ancient drama. And this most ancient drama, as it speaks to us from Aeschylus, from Sophocles, is in turn a product of the mysteries, those ancient cultic, artistic actions that derive from the most ancient, instinctive, inner spiritual knowledge. We can understand what inspires us so in true art, if we seek the origin of art in the mysteries.

If I now make some brief remarks on the ancient mysteries as the source of the artistic sense and artistic creative power, the objection can of course very easily be made that what is said on this subject from the standpoint of exact clairvoyance is unsupported by sufficient proof. Exact clairvoyance, however, brings us into touch not only with what surrounds us at the present day but also, most empathically, with the world of history, with the historical evolution of humanity, and of the universe. Those who follow the method that I have described in my books can themselves investigate what exact clairvoyance has to say upon the subject of the mysteries.

When speaking of the mysteries, we are looking back into very ancient times in human evolution, times when religion, art, and science did not yet stand separately, side by side, as they do today. Generally, people are insufficiently aware of the changes—the metamorphoses—that art, religion, and science have undergone before reaching the separation and differentiation that they experience today. I will mention only one thing to indicate how, to some extent, modern anthroposophical knowledge brings us into contact again with older forms of true artistic life.

Across the centuries, the works of earlier painters—those, say, before the end of the thirteenth and during the fourteenth centuries—come down to us. We need only think of Cimabue. Thereafter, something that has rightly held sway in modern painting enters into painting. This is what we call perspective. In the paintings in the dome of the Goetheanum in Switzerland, you can see how we are returning once again to the perspective which lies in the colors themselves—where we have a different feeling in the blue, the red, and the yellow. It is as though we were leaving the ordinary physical world: the third dimension of space ceases to have significance, and we work in two dimensions only.

Thus, a painter can return to a connection with the ancient instinctive spiritual experience of humanity. It is this possibility that modern anthroposophy seeks to give through all that I have said concerning exact clairvoyance.

Looking back at the life of ancient, instinctive clairvoyance, we find it connected equally with the artistic, the religious, and the scientific; that is, with the whole of the ancient form of knowledge. There was always an understanding for the union of religion, art, and science—which in those days meant a revelation of divine cosmic forces—in the mystery cults. Insofar as they were a manifestation of divine forces, the mystery cults entered deeply into humanity’s religious feelings; insofar as they were already what we call today artistic—what we cultivate in art—they were the works of art for the people of that time. And, insofar as those ancient peoples were aware that true knowledge is gained, not by seeking it one-sidedly through the head, but through the experience of the whole being, the ancient mysteries in their development were also mediators for human knowledge as it then was. Today, on the other hand, according to the modern view, knowledge can be acquired simply by taking ordinary consciousness—remaining as we are—and observing nature, forming concepts from the facts of nature.

Our modern way of approaching the world in order to gain knowledge of it is not the same as it was in ancient times. In the old way, to look into the spiritual world, one had to lift oneself to a higher level of one’s humanity. Of course, this ancient way of knowing was not the same as our present exact clairvoyance. Nevertheless, the human being did see into the spiritual world. The mystery rites were enacted, not to display something for the outer eye, but to awaken inner experience in the whole human being. Mighty destinies formed the subject of these mystery rites. Through them, human beings were brought to forget their ordinary selves. They were lifted out of ordinary life. Although in a dream and not as clearly as is required today, they entered the state of living outside their bodies. That was the purpose of the mysteries. By the witness of deeply-moving scenes and actions, the mysteries sought to bring the neophyte to the point of living and experiencing outside the physical body.

There are certain fundamental experiences characteristic of life outside the body. One great experience is the following. In the physical body, our ordinary life of feeling is interwoven with the organic processes in our own body. But when we are outside the body, our feeling encompasses everything that surrounds us. We experience in feeling all of the life around us. Imagine that a person is outside the physical body with his or her soul and spiritual life and experiences spiritually—not with the intellect’s ice-cold forces, but with the forces of the soul, with feeling and emotion. Imagine what it feels like to experience outside the body in this way. It is a great sympathy with all things—with thunder and lightning, with the rippling of the stream, the welling forth of the river spring, the sighing of the wind—and a feeling of togetherness also with other human beings, as well as with the spiritual entities of the world. Outside the body, one learns to know this great empathy.

Now, united with this great feeling of empathy, another fundamental feeling also comes over the human being in the face of what is at first unknown. I refer to a certain sense of fear. These two feelings—the feeling of empathy with all the world, and the feeling of fear—played a great part in the ancient mysteries. When the pupils had strengthened themselves in their inner lives so that they were able, without turning away and without losing their inner control, to bear both the living empathy with the world and the fear, then they were ripe enough and sufficiently evolved really to see into the spiritual worlds. They were then ready to live and experience the spiritual world. And they were ready, too, to communicate to their fellow human beings knowledge drawn from spiritual worlds. With their feeling, they could work down from the spiritual worlds into this world, and a new poetic power was revealed in their speech. Their hands became skilled to work in colors; they were able to command the inner rhythm of their organism so that they could become musicians for the benefit of other human beings. In this way, they became artists. They could hand down from the mysteries what the primeval religions gave to humanity. Anyone who looks into the Catholic Mass with inner spiritual knowledge knows that it is the last shadow-like reflection of what was living in the mysteries.

At first, what was living in the mysteries had its artistic and its religious side. Afterward, these two separated. In Aeschylus and in Sophocles we already see the artistic element, as it were, lifted out of the mysteries. There is the divine hero, Prometheus. In Prometheus, the human being comes to know something of the deeply-moving, terrifying experiences, the inner fear of the mysteries. What was living in the mysteries, in which the neophytes were initiated into a higher stage of life, becomes in Prometheus a picture, though permeated with living dramatic power. Thus drama became an image of the deepest human experiences. Aristotle, who was already, in a sense, an intellectual, still lived in some of the old traditions. He knew and experienced how drama was a kind of echo of the ancient mysteries. For this reason, Aristotle said, putting into words what was an echo of the ancient mysteries living on in Aeschylus and Sophocles, what has been dismissed by learned men again and again in their books: “Drama is the representation of a scene calling forth sympathy and fear, in order that human beings may be purified of physical passions, that they may undergo catharsis.” We cannot understand what this catharsis, or purification, means unless we look back into the ancient mysteries and see how people were purified of what is physical and lived through mighty experiences in the supersensible, outside their physical bodies. Aristotle describes what had already become a picture in Greek drama. Afterward, this passed over to later dramatists, and we see in Corneille and Racine something that is a fulfillment of Aristotle’s words. We see characters clothed, as it were, in fear and compassion—compassion that is none other than the ancient sympathy and experience with all the world that the human being experienced outside the body. The fear is always there when the human being faces the unknown. The supersensible is always, in a sense, the unknown.

Shakespeare entered into the evolution of drama in his time. He entered into a world that was seeking a new dramatic element. Something transcending ordinary human life lives in drama. Shakespeare entered deeply into this. He was inspired by that ancient dramatic power which, to a certain extent, was still felt by his contemporaries. And he worked in such a way that we feel in Shakespeare that more than a single human personality is at work: the spirit of his century is at work and, with it, the spirit of the whole of human evolution. Shakespeare still lived in that ancient feeling, and so he called something to life in himself that enabled him to form his dramatic characters and human figures, not in any intellectual way, but by living right within them himself. The characters of Shakespeare’s plays come, not from human intellect, but from a power kindled and fired in the human being. It is this power that we must seek again if we would develop the true ideal of humanity.

Let us come back to the unification of art, science, and religion. This is our aim at the Goetheanum in Dornach. By the development of exact clairvoyance, we come to understand what was at work in the ancient mysteries. The element that the mystery dramatists placed, as yet externally, before their audiences was still at work in Shakespeare who recreated it in a wonderfully inward way.

It is no mere outer feature of Shakespeare’s plays that we find in them about a hundred and fifty names of different plants and about a hundred names of birds, everywhere intimately, lovingly interwoven with human life. All of this is part of the single whole in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare took the continuous current that flows through human evolution from the ancient Mysteries—their cults and rites—wholly into his inner life. He took this impulse of the ancient mysteries and his plays come forth like dreams that are awake and real. The intellect with its explanations, its consistencies and inconsistencies, cannot approach them. As little as we can apply intellectual standards to a Prometheus or an Oedipus, just so little can we apply them to Shakespeare’s plays.

Thus, in a wonderful way, we see in Shakespeare’s own person a development that we can call a mystery development. Shakespeare comes to London where he draws on historical traditions for his material. In his plays, he is still dependent on others. We see then how, from about 1598 onward, a certain inner life awakens. Shakespeare’s own artistic imagination comes to life. He is able to stamp his characters with the very interior of his being. Sometime later, when he has created Hamlet, a kind of bitterness toward the external physical world comes over him. We feel as though he were living in other worlds and judging the physical world differently—as though he were looking down from the point of view of other worlds. We then see him emerge from this inner deepening of experience with all of its inner tragedy. First, Shakespeare learns the external dramatic medium. Next, he goes through deepest inwardness—what I would call the meeting with the World Spirit, of which Goethe spoke so beautifully. Then he re-enters life with a certain humor, and his work carries with it the loftiest spirituality joined with the highest dramatic power. Here, I am thinking, for example, of The Tempest, one of the most wonderful creations of all humankind, one of the richest products of the evolution of dramatic art. In it, Shakespeare, in a living, human way, is able to lay his ripe philosophy of life into every character and figure.

So, having seen the art of drama derive from the ancient mysteries whose purpose was the living evolution of humanity, we can understand how it is that such an educational power goes out from Shakespeare’s plays. We can see how Shakespeare’s work, which arose out of a kind of self education given by nature herself, which he then lifted to the highest spirituality, can work in our schools and penetrate the living education of our youth. Once we have thus experienced their full cosmic spirituality, Shakespeare’s dramas must be livingly present with us when we consider the great educational questions of the day. But we must be active with all of the means at our disposal, for only by the deepest spirituality shall we find in Shakespeare the answer to these questions.

Such are the ideals that humanity needs so sorely. We have a wonderful natural science in our time, but it places a world that is dense and material before us. It can teach us nothing else than the final end of it all in a kind of universal death. And, when we consider natural evolution, as it is given to us in the thoughts of the last centuries, it seems like something strange and foreign when we look up to our spiritual ideals. So we ask whether the religious ideal has a real force, adequate to the needs of the civilized world today. But it has not. We must regain this real force by rising to the spiritual world. Only then, by spiritual knowledge and not by mere belief, shall we find the strength in our ideals to overcome all material aspects in the cosmos. We must be able to lift ourselves up to the power that creates from truly religious ideals, the power to overcome the world of matter in the universe.

We can do this only if we yield ourselves to the spiritual conception of the world and, for this, Shakespeare can be a great leader. Moreover, it is an intense social need that there be a spiritual conception of the world working in our time. Do not think that I am speaking out of egotism when I refer once again to Dornach in Switzerland, where we are cultivating what can lead humanity once more into the reality of the spiritual, into the true spiritual nature of the world. Only because of this were we able to overcome many of those contending interests working in people today and so sadly splitting them into parties and differing sections in every sphere of life. I could mention that, from 1913 until now, almost without a break, through the whole period of the war, while nearby the thunder of the cannon was heard, members of no less than seventeen nations have been working together in Dornach. That seventeen nations could work together peacefully during the greatest of all wars, this, too, seems to me a great ideal in education. What is possible on a small scale should be possible on a large scale, and human progress—human civilization—needs it. And, precisely because we favor an international advance in human civilization, I point to Shakespeare as a figure who worked in all humanity. He gave all humanity a great inspiration for new human ideals, ideals that have a meaning for international, universal humanity.

Therefore, let me close on this festival day with these words of Goethe, words that Goethe was impelled to speak when he felt the fullness of the spirituality in Shakespeare. There then arose from his heart a saying that, I think, must set its stamp on all our understanding of the great poet, who will remain an eternal source of inspiration to all. Conscious of this, Goethe uttered these words on Shakespeare with which we may close our thoughts today: “It is the nature of spirit to inspire spirit eternally.” Hence, we may rightly say, “Shakespeare for ever and without end!”