The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the study of Anthroposophy, a justifiable objection at first can be that the anthroposophical investigation of facts concerning the spiritual worlds depends upon calling up, through the training I have described, deep-lying forces in the human being, before these facts can be reached. Hence it might be said: All those who have not gone through such a development, and have therefore not yet reached the point of perceiving super-sensible facts for themselves, and actually experiencing super-sensible beings, have no means of proving the truth of what is said by the investigator of those worlds. Often, when the spiritual world is spoken of in public and information about it is given, the protest is heard: How should such ideas concern those who cannot yet see into this super-sensible world?

This objection rests on an entirely erroneous idea—the idea that anyone who speaks about the super-sensible worlds is talking of things quite unknown to his listeners. That is not so at all. But there is an important distinction, with regard to this kind of Initiation-knowledge, between what is right today and what was once right in the old days of which I was speaking yesterday.

You will remember how I described the path into the spiritual worlds. I spoke of how it leads us first to a great life-tableau, in which we see the experiences that have become part of our personality during this life on Earth. I went on to speak of how, having progressed from Imaginative-knowledge to that of Inspiration, a man is able, with empty consciousness and in absolute stillness and peace, to survey his pre-earthly life. He is thus led into that world of spiritual deeds which he has passed through between his last death and his recent descent to Earth.

Consider how, before making this descent, every human being has gone through such experiences; there is no-one who has not experienced in its full reality what the spiritual investigator has to tell. And when the investigator clothes in words facts at first unrecognised, he is not appealing to something quite unknown to his hearers but to what everyone has experienced before earthly life. The investigator of the spiritual world is simply evoking people's cosmic memories; and all that he says about the spiritual world is living in the souls of everyone, though in the transition from pre-earthly to earthly life it has been forgotten. In fact, as an investigator of the spiritual world, one is simply recalling to people's memories something they have forgotten.

Now imagine that during life on Earth a man comes across another human being with whom he remembers experiencing something, twenty years before, which the other man has completely forgotten. By talking with him, however, about the incident that he himself remembers clearly, he can bring the other man to recall it also. It is just the same process, though on a higher level, when I speak to you about spiritual worlds, the only difference being that pre-earthly experiences are more completely forgotten than those of earthly life. It is only because people are disinclined to ask themselves seriously whether they find anything in their souls in tune with what is said by the spiritual investigator—it is only because of this feeling of antipathy that they do not probe into their souls deeply enough when hearing or reading what the investigator relates. Hence this is thought to be something of which he alone has knowledge, something incapable of proof. But it can quite well be proved by those who throw off the prejudice arising from the antipathy referred to. For the spiritual investigator is only recalling what has been experienced by each one of us in pre-earthly existence.

Now someone might say: Why should anyone be asked, during his life on Earth, to take on this extra task of concerning himself with matters which, in accordance with cosmic ordering, or one might say with divine decree, he experiences during life beyond the Earth? There are those, too, who ask: Why should I go to this trouble before death to gain knowledge about the super-sensible worlds? I can very well wait till I am dead. Then, if all these things really exist, I shall come face to face with them.

All this, however, arises from a misunderstanding of earthly life. The facts of which the spiritual investigator speaks are experienced by human beings in pre-earthly existence, but they are not then the subject of thought, and only during life on Earth can thoughts about them be experienced. And only those thoughts about the super-sensible world that have been worked upon during earthly life can be carried with us through the gate of death, and only then can we understand the facts we experience between death and rebirth.

One might say—if one wished to give an uncompromising picture—that at this present stage of evolution a man's life after death is extraordinarily hard if, during life on Earth, he gives no thought to the spiritual world. For, having passed through the gate of death, he can no longer acquire any real knowledge of his surroundings. He is in the midst of what is incomprehensible for him. Understanding of what is experienced after death has to be striven for during life on Earth. You will learn from further descriptions that it was different for men of earlier ages. But, at the present moment of human evolution, men will be increasingly constrained to strive for an understanding of what they are to experience in the super-sensible world between death and rebirth. So one can say that speaking publicly of Spiritual Science is fully justified, for it can be proved by everyone. When it is established deeply enough in a man's soul, he will gradually come to say to himself: “What has been said through this spiritual investigator lights things up for me. It is just as if I had already experienced it all, and was now being given the thoughts in which to clothe the experience.” For this reason, when speaking of Spiritual Science, of spiritual knowledge, it is very necessary to choose terms of expression different from those used in ordinary life. The point is that a student of Spiritual Science, through the very words used, should have the impression: “I am learning something which does not hold good for the sense-world, something which in the sense-world is sheer nonsense.”

Then, you see, our opponents come and say: “What is said there about spiritual knowledge is all nonsense—pure fancy.” As long as these people know of nothing outside the world of the senses, and do not want to know of anything else, such a statement is justified, for the super-sensible world looks different from that of the senses. But if someone forgoes the one-sided witness of his senses and delves more deeply into his own soul, then he will say: “What the spiritual investigator says should simply give me the impulse to draw up from my own soul what is already there.”

Naturally there is much to hinder our making such a confession. Yet, where understanding of the super-sensible worlds is concerned, it is the most necessary confession of all. And it will be found that even the most difficult things become comprehensible when we are willing to penetrate in this way into our own depths.

There is no doubt that mathematical truths are among the most difficult things. They are held to be irrefutable. But the curious fact is that on entering the spiritual world we find that our mathematics and geometry are no longer correct. A very simple example will make this clear. From early youth we have learnt to look upon the old truths of Euclid as axiomatic, self-evident. For instance, it is stated as obvious that, given two points, A and B, the shortest distance between them is a straight line, and that any curved path between them is longer.

On a recognition of this fact—obvious for the physical world—rests the greater part of our geometry. But in the spiritual world it is the other way round. The straight line there from A to B is the longest way, and any other way is shorter because it can be taken in freedom. If at the point A one thinks of going to B, this very idea suggests an indirect way; and to hold to a straight course, and so at each single point to keep in the same direction, is hardest and causes most delay. Hence, in determining the most direct way in the two-dimensional or one-dimensional space of the spiritual world, we look for the longest way.

Now anyone who reflects about attentiveness, and delves deeply into his soul to discover what attentiveness really means, will find that in this connection, also, what is said by the spiritual investigator is true. For he will say to himself: “When I go around just as I choose, I get there easily, and I don't have to worry about traversing a particular stretch; I need do only what I do every day.” And most people are bustling around from morning to night. They are in such a hurry that they hardly notice how much of all they do is done from sheer habit—what they have done the day before, what other people say they should do, and so forth. Then it all goes smoothly. Just think what it would be like if you had to pay careful attention to every detail of what you do during the day. Try it! You will soon see how this slows you down.

Now in the spiritual world nothing is done without attentiveness, for there is no such thing as habit. Moreover, there is no such word as the impersonal pronoun “one”—at a certain hour one must have lunch, or one must have dinner at some other time. This “one”—for this occasion one ought to dress in a certain way, and so on—all that under the aegis of this little word plays such a great part in the physical world, particularly in our present civilisation, has no place in the spiritual world. There, we have to follow with individual attention every smallest step, and even less than a step. This is expressed in the words: In the spiritual world the straight way between two points is the longest way. So we have this contrast: In the physical world the direct way between two points is the shortest, whereas the direct way between two points is the longest in the spiritual world.

If we go down far enough into our soul, we find we can draw up from its depths a real understanding of this curious circumstance; and it becomes easier and easier to admit: “What the spiritual investigator says is actually wisdom I myself possess—I have only to be reminded of it.”

Then, side by side with this—since the steps to be taken for acquiring super-sensible cognition can to-day be found in books such as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds—everyone, in so far as his destiny, his karma, make it possible, can, as we shall see, follow this path and thus acquire his own perception of the spiritual worlds. In this way he comes to knowledge of the facts. Understanding for the ideas of the spiritual world has to be won by his coming to know in his own being all that was forgotten on entering earthly life.

Now it may be said that anyone is capable of grasping knowledge of the spiritual world when it is communicated in ideas. Thus, for understanding what the spiritual investigator offers, all that a man needs is his own sound, unprejudiced reason, provided it searches deeply enough into the soul. The investigator of spiritual facts, entering into the spiritual world, and speaking of its facts from first-hand knowledge—all this naturally requires a person to have pursued the path of knowledge on his own account. Hence it is justifiable for anyone who has acquired knowledge of the spiritual worlds to speak of them quite publicly to-day; for what people now absorb in life, if only at school, is an intellectual capacity, a power of discrimination, which equips them to understand what Spiritual Science brings forward. Here, too, things were different in earlier times, and the teachers in the Mysteries, the teachers of art and religion, went about it in a different way. Anyone to-day who speaks about spiritual knowledge to his contemporaries must so order his ideas that memories are aroused of their pre-earthly life. What he says to his audience, what he writes for his readers, must be so arranged that memories of the life before birth are evoked.

Whenever one speaks about Spiritual Science it is as if this appeal were made to the audience: Listen to what is said, and if you look deeply enough into your souls you will find it all there. Moreover, it will dawn on you that you cannot have learnt it during your life on Earth; no flower, no cloud, no spring, nothing earthly can have told you, not even science—for that is founded on the senses and the intellect. Gradually you will realise that you have brought this knowledge with you into earthly life, and that before this life you took part in things which have lingered on in your soul as a cosmic memory. All this has ben stirred up in you by the spiritual investigator. What he says, therefore, is indeed a call to the very depths of the human soul, not a demand that you should accept anything unknown. It is simply an appeal to men to call up in memory the greatest treasures of their own souls.

It was not so for mankind in the distant past. The wise men of the Mysteries, the priests, had to proceed in another way, for people then had a spontaneous memory of their pre-earthly existence. A few thousand years ago, even the most primitive man would never have questioned the presence in his soul of something brought down with him from the super-sensible into the life of the senses; it was an everyday experience in his dreamlike imaginations. In his soul he had something of which he said: “I do not owe this to my eyes that see the trees; I do not hear it with my ears that listen to the nightingale's song; nor have I received it through any other sense. I cannot have absorbed it during life on Earth; it was there as I made my descent; and when as an embryo I was given my earthly, physical body by another human body, there was already within me that which lights up now in my dreamlike imaginations. I have clothed it in my physical human body.”

Hence in those olden days a man would not have been shown the way to further development by his attention being called to what must be emphasised to-day: that we have a memory, at first unconscious but capable of being made conscious, of pre-earthly existence. In the old Mysteries, attention had to be drawn to something quite different.

A man in those days had a feeling of intense sadness when looking at all that was most lovely in the sense-world. He looked at the flowers, springing out of the earth in their wonderful beauty, and watched the blossoms unfold. And he saw also how beneficent the flowers were for him. He saw the loveliness of the springs bubbling forth in shady places, and his senses spoke to him of their refreshing powers. But then, he said to himself: “It seems as though all this has fallen—fallen through sin from the world I bear within me and which I have brought down into physical existence out of spiritual worlds.” So the teachers in the Mysteries then had the task of explaining how in the flowers, in the rippling waters, in the woodland murmurings and the song of the nightingale—everywhere spirit is working and weaving, everywhere spiritual beings are to be found. They had to impart to men the great truth: What is living in you lives also outside in nature. For a man looked upon the external world with sorrow, with pain, at the very time when his senses were freshest and most responsive—a time when least of all the intellect spoke to him of natural laws, and he looked upon the outer world with primitive senses. The beauty of its sprouting and budding forced itself upon his sight, his hearing and other senses; but all he felt was sorrow; for he was unable to reconcile it with the content of his pre-natal existence, which still lived on in his soul. Thus it was incumbent upon the wise men of the Mysteries to point out how the divine-spiritual dwells in all things, even in those of the senses. It was the spirituality of nature that these teachers had to make clear.

This, however, could be done only by taking a different path from that of to-day. Just as now it is necessary above all to guide men to a remembrance of their life before birth, for teachers in the ancient Mysteries it was necessary to call up in those around them a different memory.

Now a man passes his life rhythmically between two states, or really three: waking, dreaming, sleeping. Sleep takes its course in unconsciousness. The human beings of older epochs had indeed this state of unconsciousness in sleep, although it differed in certain respects from that of people to-day. They did sleep, however; they did sink down into the state of experiencing nothing in their souls, in their consciousness. But during sleep we are of course still living; we do not die and are born again when we wake. As soul and spirit we have a life during sleep, but the experience of it is completely wiped out for ordinary, everyday consciousness. People remember their waking experiences and at the most those during their dreams, but in ordinary consciousness they have no memory of anything they experience during dreamless sleep. The Mystery teachers of old treated their pupils—and through the ideas these spread abroad, all who came to them—in such a way that they were awakened to what was experienced in sleep.

Modern Initiation-knowledge has to recall what has lived in men's souls before earthly existence, whereas the old Initiation-knowledge had to evoke a memory of experiences during sleep. Thus all the knowledge that the Mystery teachers clothed in ideas was so designed that their students, or anyone else who heard it, could say: “We are being told of something we always go through in sleep. We press it down out of mind. The priests of the Mysteries have simply been enabled by their Initiation to perceive in sleep many things that are hidden from ordinary consciousness, but are all the same experienced.”

Just as in the old Initiation-wisdom there was a recalling to memory of what a man had lived through in sleep, to-day there is a recalling to memory of pre-earthly life. One of the signs distinguishing the old Initiation from the new is that in the old Initiation a man was reminded of what he normally slept through, which means that he had no recollection of it in waking life. The wise men of those Mysteries drew the experiences of the night up into waking consciousness of day, and to the people they said: “During the night you dwell with your soul in the spiritual world, and the spiritual world lives in every spring, in every nightingale and every flower. Every night you enter into the midst of all that you merely perceive with your senses during the day.”

And then a man could be convinced that the Gods he experienced in his waking dreams were also there outside in nature. Thus, by showing his pupil what happened in sleep, the wise teacher of the Mysteries made clear to him that divine-spiritual Beings were active out there in the realms of nature all the time. In the same way the spiritual investigator now has the task of showing that a man, before descending to Earth, was living as a spiritual being among spiritual beings in a world of spirit; and that what he experienced there he can recall on Earth in terms of concepts, of ideas.

In the Initiation-science of to-day, the real facts that distinguish sleep from waking come to be known when we advance from Imagination to Inspiration. What a man himself is as soul, as spirit, from falling asleep until he wakes, becomes clear only to Inspired knowledge, whereas the advance to Imaginative knowledge gives a man the tableau of his life. When this life-tableau unfolds for him in his waking state and with empty consciousness he is wrapped in cosmic stillness—as I have described—there enters his soul from the Cosmos, as Inspiration, the life before birth. And then his own true being appears to him in the form he lives in as a being of soul and spirit between going to sleep and waking.

Through Inspiration we become conscious of that which remains unconscious during sleep. We learn to perceive what we do as soul and spirit while asleep, and we become aware that on falling asleep the soul and spirit leave the physical body and the etheric body. The physical body is left in bed and also the etheric body—or body of formative forces, as it is seen to be in Imagination, and as I have described it. The higher members of man's nature, the astral body and the Ego-organisation, leave the physical and etheric bodies, returning to them when the time of waking comes. This cleavage of our being, which comes about in the rhythmical alternation of sleeping waking, can be seen in its real nature only through Inspiration. We then perceive that everything absorbed in ordinary waking life through our thinking, through our world of thought, is left behind. The thoughts we work upon, the thoughts we struggle with at school, whatever we have done to sharpen our earthly intelligence—all this has to be left behind with our physical body and etheric body every time we sleep. Out of these two bodies we take into the spiritual world, where as Ego and astral body we pass the time of sleeping, something quite different from anything we experience in our waking state. When we pass from waking to sleeping we experience what is not normally brought into consciousness. Hence, in speaking to you of these experiences, I have to clothe them in pictorial concepts, so that they can be reflected on with healthy human understanding. These pictorial concepts, which are mere shadows of really living thoughts, we leave behind when we fall asleep; and we then come to live in a world where thinking is not as it is here on Earth, but where everything is inwardly experienced. During sleep, in fact, we experience light unconsciously. In waking life we think about the effects of light—how it makes shadows and colours appear in relation to objects. All these thoughts, as I have said, we leave behind. In sleep we enter into the weaving, living light; we pour ourselves out into the light. And as in day time here on Earth we carry our body with us, and also our soul and spirit, and go about on the surface of the Earth through the air, so there, as sleeping man, we enter the weaving, waving light, becoming ourself a being, a substance, of the living light. We become light within the light.

When a man comes to Inspired knowledge of what he actually is each night, when this rises up into his waking consciousness, he at once realises that during sleep he lives like a cloud of light in cosmic light. This does not mean, however, living simply as the substance of light, but living in the forces which in waking life become thoughts, are grasped as thoughts. The light then experienced is everywhere permeated by creative forces, the forces which work inwardly in the plants, in the animals, besides existing independently as spiritual worlds. Light is not experienced in the same way as in the physical world but—if we may express it figuratively—the weaving, living light is the body of spiritual weaving, as it is also the body of each spiritual being.

Here, as men of the physical world, we are enclosed in our skins, and we see our fellow-men so enclosed. But in our sleeping state we are light within the light, and other beings are also light within the light. We do not, however, perceive it as light in the way it is perceived in the physical world, but—again figuratively—the clouds of light that we ourselves are, perceive other clouds of light. These clouds of light are either another man, or some kind of being giving new life to the plant world, or a being who, never incarnating in a physical body, dwells always in the spiritual world.

Light, accordingly, is not experienced there as it is in earthly life, but as living, creative spirituality. Now you know how, as physical men here on Earth, we live in something besides light—in the warmth our senses perceive. We feel and experience heat and cold.

If, now, on going to sleep we pass out of our physical body and etheric body, we live as substance of the warmth in the cosmic substance of warmth, just as we live as light in the light. Thus we are not only what I have called a cloud of light, but a cloud of light permeated by weaving waves of warmth; and what we perceive also bears warmth within it. Just as when we are asleep, and as beings of soul and spirit, we experience light not as light but as living spirit, and when through Inspiration we realise ourselves and other beings also to be living spirit—so it is in the case of warmth. It is impossible to make any headway in the spiritual world, even with Inspiration, if we cling to ideas acquired here on Earth. We have already found it necessary to get used to a different conception concerning the distance between two points, and we must do likewise for everything else. And just as when experiencing ourselves as light within light we actually experience ourselves as spirit in the spiritual world, so when experiencing ourselves as warmth, within the cosmic warmth, we do not experience this as warmth in the usual way of the sense-world, but as weaving, strength-giving love. As the beings of love which we are in the super-sensible, we experience ourselves among beings who can do no other than draw love out of their own essence; who can have no other existence than that of beings of love in the midst of a cosmic existence of love. Thus do we experience ourselves, to begin with, between going to sleep and waking, in a spiritual existence imbued through and through with love.

Therefore, if we wish really to enter the world in which we are every time we go to sleep until we wake, we must enhance our capacity for loving; otherwise this world is bound to remain an unknown world. Here in our earthly world it is not spiritualised love that holds sway, but a love in which the impulse of the senses prevails. In the spiritual world, however, it is spiritualised love—as I have been picturing it. Hence, whoever aspires to enter consciously the world he experiences every night has to develop his capacity for loving in the way described yesterday.

Now a man cannot find his true self without this capacity for love; for all that he really is during sleep—during a third part of his life on Earth—remains a closed book for him unless he can find his way into it through the training and enhancement of love. All that is experienced during sleep would have to remain an unsolved riddle for earthly being if they had no wish to enhance their capacity for love, so as to be able to gain some degree of knowledge about their own existence, their own being, in the changed condition between going to sleep and waking. But the form of activity developed in our thinking when we have our physical body and etheric body within us—that is, in our waking state—we leave behind in bed, and during sleep this becomes united in movement with the whole Cosmos. Anyone who wishes to understand clearly what goes on in the physical and etheric bodies during the night would have to be able to perceive from outside, while living as a being of warmth and light, how the etheric body goes on thinking all through the night.

We still have the power to think even when with our souls we are not there at all, for what we leave behind in the bed carries the waves of thinking on and on. And when we wake in the morning, we sink down into what has thus continued to think while lying there in bed. We meet our own thoughts again. They were not without life between our going to sleep and waking, although we were not present. To-morrow I shall be describing how, when thus absent, we can be much cleverer, far more intelligent, than during the day, when with our soul we are actually within our thoughts.

To-day I wished to indicate how thinking is continuous in the etheric and physical bodies, and how on waking in the morning, when we are aware of having had a dream, the dream tells us, as it were: When your soul wakes, and dives down again into the etheric body and physical body, it loses something of its power. On the one hand you have the physical body and etheric body; and on the other hand you have the astral organisation and Ego-organisation which in the morning re-enter the physical and etheric bodies. When they re-enter, it is as if a dense wave were flowing into one less dense—there is a blockage, experienced as a morning dream. The Ego and the astral body, which have been weaving all night in light and warmth, dive back into the thoughts, but by not at once understanding them, get them confused, and this blockage is experienced as a morning dream.

What more there is to say about dreams, how they are a puzzling element in human life, and the further relation between sleeping and waking—all this we will consider tomorrow.

I tried yesterday to give certain indications about the constitution of the human being, and at the end it was possible to show that a really penetrating study of human nature is able to build a bridge between the external constitution, and what it unfolds through self-consciousness, and the inner life. As a rule no such bridge is built, or only very inadequately built, particularly in the science current today. It became clear to us that in order to build this bridge we must know how the human constitution is to be regarded. We saw that the solid or solid-fluid organism—which is the sole object of study today and is alone recognized by modern science as organic in the real sense—we saw that this must be regarded as only one of the organisms in the human constitution; that the existence of a fluid organism, an airy organism, and a warmth organism must also be recognized. Naturally, up to the warmth organism itself, everything is to be conceived as physical body. But it is paramountly the etheric body that takes hold of the fluid body, of everything that is fluid in the human organism; in everything airy, the astral body is paramountly active, and in the warmth organism, the Ego. By recognizing this we can, as it were, remain in the physical but at the same time reach up to the spiritual.

We also studied consciousness at its different levels. As I said yesterday, it is usual to take account only of the consciousness known to us in waking life from the moment of waking to the moment of falling asleep. We perceive the objects around us and reason about these perceptions with our intellect; we also have feelings in connection with these perceptions, and we have our will impulses. But we experience this whole nexus of consciousness as something which, in its qualities, differs completely from the physical which alone is taken account of by ordinary science.

It is not possible, without further ado, to build a bridge from these imponderable, incorporeal experiences in the domain of consciousness to the other objects of perception studied in physiology or physical anatomy. In regard to consciousness too, we know from ordinary life that in addition to the waking consciousness, there is dream consciousness, and we heard yesterday that dreams are essentially pictures or symbols of inner organic processes. Something is going on within us all the time, and in our dreams it comes to expression in pictures. I said that we may dream of coiling snakes when we have some intestinal disorder, or we may dream of an excessively hot stove and wake up with palpitations of the heart. The overheated stove symbolized irregular beating of the heart, the snakes symbolized the intestines, and so forth. Dreams point us to our organism. The consciousness of dreamless sleep is, as it were, an experience of nullity, of the void. But I explained that this experience of the void is necessary in order that we feel ourselves connected with our bodily nature. As an Ego we would feel no connection with our body if we did not leave it during sleep and seek for it again on waking. It is through the deprivation undergone between falling asleep and waking that we are able to feel ourselves united with the body. So from the ordinary consciousness which has really nothing to do with our own essential being beyond the fact that it enables us to have perceptions and ideas, we are led to the dream-consciousness which has to do with actual bodily processes. We are therefore led to the body. We are led to the body even more strongly when we pass into the consciousness of dreamless sleep.

Thus we can say: On the one hand our conception of the life of soul is such that it leads us to the body. And our conception of the bodily constitution, comprising as it does the fluid organism, the airy organism, the warmth organism and thus becoming by degrees more rarefied, leads us to the realm of soul. It is absolutely necessary to take these things into consideration if we are to reach a view of the world that can really satisfy us.

The great question with which we have been concerning ourselves for weeks, the cardinal question in one's conception of the world, is this: How is the moral world order connected with the physical world order? As has been said so often, the prevailing world view—which relies entirely upon natural science for knowledge of the outer physical world—can only resort to earlier religious beliefs when it is a matter of any comprehensive understanding of the life of soul. In modern psychology there really is no longer any such understanding—this world view is unable to build a bridge. There, on the one side, is the physical world; according to contemporary views this is a conglomeration from a primeval nebula and everything will eventually become a kind of slag heap in the universe. This is the picture of the evolutionary process presented to us by the science of today, and it is the one and only picture in which a really honest modern scientist can find reality.

Within this picture there is no room for a moral world order. It is there on its own. One receives the moral impulses into oneself as impulses of soul. But if the assertions of natural science are true, that first everything was astir with life, then finally the human being emerged out of the primeval nebula and only then the moral ideals well up within. And when, as is alleged, the world becomes a slag heap, this will also be the graveyard of all moral ideals. They will have vanished.—No bridge can possibly be built, and what is worse, modern science cannot, without being inconsistent, admit the existence of morality in the world order. Only if modern science is inconsistent can it accept the moral world order as valid. It cannot do so if it is consistent. The root of all this is that the only kind of anatomy in existence is concerned exclusively with the solid organism and no account is taken of the fact that the human being also has a fluid organism, an airy organism, and a warmth organism. If you picture to yourselves that as well as the solid organism with its configuration into bones, muscles, nerve fibers and so forth, you also have a fluid organism and an airy organism—though these are of course fluctuating and inwardly mobile—and a warmth organism, if you picture this you will more easily understand what I shall now have to say on the basis of spiritual-scientific observation.

Think of a person whose soul is fired with enthusiasm for a high moral ideal, for the ideal of generosity, of freedom, of goodness, of love, or whatever it may be. That person may also feel enthusiasm for examples of the practical expression of these ideals. But nobody can conceive that the enthusiasm which fires the soul penetrates into the bones and muscles as described by modern physiology or anatomy. If you really take counsel with yourself, however, you will find it quite possible to conceive that when one has enthusiasm for a high moral ideal, this enthusiasm has an effect upon the warmth organism.—There, you see, we have come from the realm of soul into the physical!

Taking this as an example, we may say: Moral ideals come to expression in an enhancement of warmth in the warmth organism. Not only is one warmed in soul through what is experienced in the way of moral ideals, but one becomes organically warmer as well—though this is not so easy to prove with physical instruments. Moral ideals, then, have a stimulating, invigorating effect upon the warmth organism. You must think of this as a real and concrete happening: enthusiasm for a moral ideal—stimulation of the warmth organism. There is more vigorous activity in the warmth organism when the soul is fired by a moral ideal.

Neither does this remain without effect upon the rest of one's constitution. As well as the warmth organism there is also the air organism. We inhale and exhale the air; but during the inbreathing and outbreathing process the air is within us. It is of course inwardly in movement, in fluctuation, but equally with the warmth organism it is an actual air organism in us. Warmth, quickened by a moral ideal, works in turn upon the air organism, because warmth permeates the whole human organism, permeates every part of it. The effect upon the air organism is not that of warming only, for when the warmth, stimulated in the warmth organism, works upon the air organism, it imparts to it something that I can only call a source of light. Sources of light, as it were, are imparted to the air organism, so that moral ideals which have a stimulating effect upon the warmth organism produce sources of light in the air organism. To external perception and for ordinary consciousness these sources of light are not in themselves luminous, but they manifest in the astral body. To begin with, they are curbed—if I may use this expression—through the air that is within us. They are, so to speak, still dark light, in the sense that the seed of a plant is not yet the developed plant. Nevertheless we have a source of light within us through the fact that we can be fired with enthusiasm for moral ideals, for moral impulses.

We also have within us the fluid organism. Warmth, stimulated in the warmth organism by moral ideals, produces in the air organism what may be called a source of light which remains, to begin with, curbed and hidden. Within the fluid organism—because everything in the human constitution interpenetrates—a process takes place which underlies the outer tone conveyed in the air. I said that the air is only the body of the tone, and anyone who regards the essential reality of tone as a matter of vibrations of the air, speaks of tones just as he would speak of a person as having nothing except the outwardly visible physical body. The air with its vibrating waves is nothing but the outer body of the tone. In the human being this tone, this spiritual tone, is not produced in the air organism through the moral ideal, but in the fluid organism. The sources of tone, therefore, arise in the fluid organism.

We regard the solid organism as the densest of all, as the one that supports and bears all the others. Within it, too, something is produced as in the case of the other organisms. In the solid organism there is produced what we call a seed of life—but it is an etheric, not a physical, seed of life such as issues from the female organism at a birth. This etheric seed which lies in the deepest levels of subconsciousness is actually the primal source of tone and, in a certain sense, even the source of light. This is entirely hidden from ordinary consciousness, but it is there within us.

Think of all the experiences in your life that came from aspiration for moral ideas—be it that they attracted you merely as ideas, or that you saw them coming to expression in others, or that you felt inwardly satisfied by having put such impulses into practice, by letting your deeds be fired by moral ideals—all this goes down into the air organism as a source of light, into the fluid organism as a source of tone, into the solid organism as a source of life.

These processes are withdrawn from the field of our normal consciousness but they are active nevertheless. They become free when we lay aside our physical body at death. What is thus produced in us through moral ideals, or through the loftiest and purest ideas, does not bear immediate fruit. For during the life between birth and death, moral ideas as such become fruitful only insofar as we remain in the life of ideas, and insofar as we feel a certain satisfaction in moral deeds performed. But this is merely a matter of remembrance, and has nothing to do with what actually penetrates down into the different organisms as the result of enthusiasm for moral ideals.

So we see that our whole constitution, beginning with the warmth organism, is, as a matter of fact, permeated by moral ideals. And when at death the etheric body, the astral body, and the Ego emerge from the physical body, these higher members of our human nature are filled with all the impressions we have had. Our Ego was living in the warmth organism when it was quickened by moral ideas. We were living in our air organism, into which were implanted sources of light which now, after death, go forth into the cosmos together with us. In our fluid organism, tone was kindled which now becomes part of the Music of the Spheres, resounding from us into the cosmos. And we bring life with us when we pass out into the cosmos through the portal of death.

You will now begin to have an inkling of what the life that permeates the universe really is. Where are the sources of life? They lie in that which quickens those moral ideals which fire us with enthusiasm. We come to the point of saying to ourselves that if today we allow ourselves to be inspired by moral ideals, these will carry forth life, tone and light into the universe and will become world-creative. We carry out into the universe world-creative power, and the source of this power is the moral element.

So when we study the whole human being we find a bridge between moral ideals and what works as life-giving force in the physical world, even in the chemical sense. For tone works in the chemical sense by assembling substances and dispersing them again. Light in the world has its source in the moral stimuli, in the warmth organisms of human beings. Thus we look into the future—new worlds take shape. And as in the case of the plant we must go back to the seed, so in the case of these future worlds that will come into being, we must go back to the seeds which lie in us as moral ideals.

And now think of theoretical ideas in contrast to moral ideals. In the case of theoretical ideas everything is different, no matter how significant these ideas may be, for theoretical ideas produce the very opposite effect to that of moral ideals They cool down the warmth organism—that is the difference.

Moral ideas, or ideas of a moral-religious character, which fire us with enthusiasm and become impulses for deeds, work as world-creative powers. Theoretical ideas and speculations have a cooling, subduing effect upon the warmth organism. Because this is so, they also have a paralyzing effect upon the air organism and upon the source of light within it; they have a deadening effect upon tone, and an extinguishing effect upon life. In our theoretical ideas the creations of the pre-existing world come to their end. When we formulate theoretical ideas a universe dies in them. Thus do we bear within us the death of a universe and the dawn of a universe.

Here we come to the point where he who is initiated into the secrets of the universe cannot speak, as so many speak today, of the conservation of energy or the conservation of matter. It is simply not true that matter is conserved forever.[1] Matter dies to the point of nullity, to a zero-point. In our own organism, energy dies to the point of nullity through the fact that we formulate theoretical thoughts. But if we did not do so, if the universe did not continually die in us, we should not be human in the true sense. Because the universe dies in us, we are endowed with self-consciousness and are able to think about the universe. But these thoughts are the corpse of the universe. We become conscious of the universe as a corpse only, and it is this that makes us human.

A past world dies within us, down to its very matter and energy. It is only because a new universe at once begins to dawn that we do not notice this dying of matter and its immediate rebirth. Through our theoretical thinking, matter—substantiality—is brought to its end; through our pictorial thinking, matter and cosmic energy are imbued with new life. Thus what goes on inside the boundary of the human skin is connected with the dying and birthing of worlds. This is how the moral order and the natural order are connected. The natural world dies away in man; in the realm of the moral a new natural world comes to birth.

Moral Ideals

stimulate the warmth organism.
producing in the air organism—sources of Light.
producing in the fluid organism—sources of Tone.
producing in the solid organism—seeds of Life. (etheric)

Theoretical thoughts

cool down the warmth organism.
paralyze the sources of Light.
deaden the sources of Tone.
extinguish Life.

Because of unwillingness to consider these things, the ideas of the imperishability of matter and energy were invented. If energy were imperishable and matter were imperishable there would be no moral world-order. But today it is desired to keep this truth concealed and modern thought has every reason to do so, because otherwise it would have to eliminate the moral world-order—which in actual fact it does by speaking of the law of the conservation of matter and energy. If matter is conserved, or energy is conserved, the moral world-order is nothing but an illusion, a mirage. We can understand the course of the world's development only if we grasp how out of this 'illusory' moral world order—for so it is when it is grasped in thoughts—new worlds come into being.

Nothing of this can be grasped if we study only the solid component of man's constitution. To understand it we must pass from the solid organism through the fluid and airy organisms to the warmth organism. Our connection with the universe can be understood only if the physical is traced upwards to that rarefied state wherein the soul can be directly active in the rarefied physical element, as for example in warmth. Then it is possible to find the connection between body and soul.

However many treatises on psychology may be written—if they are based upon what is studied today in anatomy and physiology it will not be possible to find any transition to the life of soul from this solid, or solid-fluid bodily constitution. The life of soul will not be revealed as such. But if the bodily substance is traced back to warmth, a bridge can be built from what exists in the body as warmth to what works from out of the soul into the warmth in the human organism.

There is warmth both outside and inside the human organism. As we have heard, in the human constitution warmth is an organism; the soul, the soul and spirit, takes hold of this warmth organism and by way of the warmth all that becomes active which we inwardly experience as the moral. By the ‘moral’ I do not of course mean what Philistines mean by it, but I mean the moral in its totality, that is to say, all those impulses that come to us, for example when we contemplate the majesty of the universe, when we say to ourselves: We are born out of the cosmos and we are responsible for what goes on in the world.—I mean the impulses that come to us when the knowledge yielded by Spiritual Science inspires us to work for the sake of the future. When we regard Spiritual Science itself as a source of the moral, this, more than anything else, can fill us with enthusiasm for the moral, and this enthusiasm, born of spiritual-scientific knowledge, becomes in itself a source of morality in the higher sense. But what is generally called 'moral' represents no more than a subordinate sphere of the moral in the universal sense.

All the ideas we evolve about the external world, about Nature in her finished array, are theoretical ideas. No matter with what exactitude we envisage a machine in terms of mathematics and the principles of mechanics, or the universe in the sense of the Copernican system—this is nothing but theoretical thinking, and the ideas thus formulated constitute a force of death within us; a corpse of the universe is within us in the form of thoughts, of ideas.

These matters create deeper and deeper insight into the universe in its totality. There are not two orders, a natural order and a moral order in juxtaposition, but the two are one. This is a truth that must be realized by us today. Otherwise we must ever and again be asking ourselves: How can any moral impulses take effect in a world in which a natural order alone prevails?—This indeed was the terrible problem that weighed upon thinkers in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century: How is it possible to conceive of any transition from the natural world into the moral world, from the moral world into the natural world?—The fact is that nothing can help to solve this perplexing, fateful problem except spiritual-scientific insight into Nature on the one side and into the Spirit on the other.

With the premises yielded by this knowledge we shall also be able to get to the root of something that is presented as a branch of science today and has already penetrated into the general consciousness of mankind. Our worldview today is based upon Copernicanism. Until the year 1827 the Copernican conception of the universe which was elaborated by Kepler and then diluted into theory by Newton, was tabooed by the Roman Catholic Church. No orthodox Catholic was allowed to believe it. Since that year the prohibition has been lifted and the Copernican view of the universe has taken root so strongly in the general consciousness that anyone who does not base his own worldview upon it is regarded as a fool.

What is this Copernican picture of the universe?—It is in reality a picture built up purely on the basis of mathematical principles, mathematical-mechanical principles. The rudiments of it began, very gradually, to be unfolded in Greece[2] where, however, echoes of earlier thought—for example in the Ptolemaic view of the universe—still persisted. And in the course of time this developed into the Copernican system that is taught nowadays to every child.

We can look back from this world-conception to ancient times when the prevailing picture of the universe was very different. All that has remained of it are those traditions which in the form in which they exist today—in astrology and the like—are sheer dilettantism. That is what has remained of ancient astronomy, and it has also remained, ossified and immobilized, in the symbols of certain secret societies, Masonic societies and the like. There is usually complete ignorance of the fact that these things are relics of an ancient astronomy. This ancient astronomy was quite different from that of today, for it was based, not upon mathematical principles but upon ancient clairvoyant vision.

Entirely false ideas prevail today of how an earlier humanity acquired its astronomical-astrological knowledge. This was acquired through an instinctive-clairvoyant vision of the universe. The earliest Post-Atlantean peoples saw the heavenly bodies as spirit forms, spirit entities, whereas we today regard them merely as physical structures. When the ancient peoples spoke of the celestial bodies, of the planets or of the fixed stars, they were speaking of spiritual beings. Today, the sun is pictured as a globe of burning gas which radiates light into the universe. But for the people of ancient times the sun was a living Being and they regarded the sun, which their eyes beheld, simply as the outward manifestation of this Spirit Being at the place where the sun stands in the universe; and it was the same in regard to the other heavenly bodies—they were seen as Spirit Beings. We must think of an age which came to an end long before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, when the sun out yonder in the universe and everything in the stars was conceived of as living spirit reality, living Being.

Then came an intermediary period when people no longer had this vision, when they regarded the planets, at any rate, as physical, but still thought of them as pervaded by living souls. In times when it was no longer known how the physical passes over by stages into what is of the soul, how what is of the soul passes over by stages into the physical, how in reality the two are united, people postulated physical existence on the one side and soul existence on the other. They thought of the correspondences between these two realms just as most psychologists today—if they admit the existence of a soul at all—still think, namely that the soul and the physical nature of the human being are identical. This, of course, leads thought to absurdity; or there is the so-called ‘psycho-physical parallelism’, which again is nothing else than a stupid way of formulating something that is not understood.

Then came the age when the heavenly bodies were regarded as physical structures, circling or stationary, attracting or repelling one another in accordance with mathematical laws. To be sure, in every epoch there existed a knowledge—in earlier times a more instinctive knowledge—of how things are in reality. But in the present age this instinctive knowledge no longer suffices; what in earlier times was known instinctively must now be acquired by conscious effort. And if we inquire how those who were able to view the universe in its totality—that is to say, in its physical, psychical and spiritual aspects—if we inquire how these people pictured the sun, we must say: They pictured it first and foremost as a Spirit-Being. Those who were initiated conceived of this Spirit-Being as the source of the moral. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have said that 'moral intuitions' are drawn from this source—but drawn from it in the earthly world, for the moral intuitions shine forth from us, from what can live in us as enthusiasm for the moral.

Think of how greatly our responsibility is increased when we realize: If here on the earth there were no soul capable of being fired with enthusiasm for true and genuine morality, for the spiritual moral order in general, nothing could be contributed towards the progress of our world, towards a new creation; our world would be led towards its death.

This force of light that is on the earth (diagram VII) rays out into the universe. This is, to begin with, imperceptible to ordinary vision; we do not perceive how human moral impulses ray out from the earth into the universe. If a grievous age were to dawn over the earth, an age when millions and millions of people would perish through lack of spirituality—spirituality conceived of here as including the moral, which indeed it does—if there were only a dozen people filled with moral enthusiasm, the earth would still ray out a spiritual, sun-like force! This force rays out only to a certain distance. At this point it mirrors itself, as it were, in itself, so that here (diagram VIII) there arises the reflection of what radiates from humans. And in every epoch the initiates regarded this reflection as the sun. For as I have so often said, there is nothing physical here. Where ordinary astronomy speaks of the existence of an incandescent globe of gas, there is merely the reflection of a spiritual reality in physical appearance.

You see, therefore, how great is the distance separating the Copernican view of the world, and even the old astrology, from what was the inmost secret of Initiation. The best illustration of these things is provided by the fact that in an epoch when great power was vested in the hands of groups of people, who, as they declared, considered that such truths were dangerous for the masses and did not wish them to be communicated, one who was an idealist—the Emperor Julian (called for this reason ‘the Apostate’)—wanted to impart these truths to the world and was then brought to his death by cunning means. There are reasons which induce certain occult societies to withhold vital secrets of world-existence, because by so doing they are able to wield a certain power. If in the days of the Emperor Julian certain occult societies guarded their secrets so strictly that they acquiesced in his murder, it need not surprise us if those who are the custodians of certain secrets today do not reveal them but want to withhold them from the masses in order to enhance their power—it need not surprise us if such people hate to realize that at least the beginnings of such secrets are being unveiled. And now you will understand some of the deeper reasons for the bitter hatred that is leveled against Spiritual Science, against what Spiritual Science feels it a duty to bring to mankind at the present time. But we are living in an age when either earthly civilization will be doomed to perish, or certain secrets will be restored to mankind—truths which hitherto have in a certain way been guarded as secrets, which were once revealed to people through instinctive clairvoyance but must now be reacquired by fully conscious vision, not only of the physical but also of the spiritual that is within the physical.

What was the real aim of Julian the Apostate?—He wished to make clear to the people: You are becoming more and more accustomed to look only at the physical sun; but there is a spiritual Sun of which the physical sun is only the mirror-image! In his own way he wished to communicate the Christ-Secret to the world. But in our age it is desired that the connection of Christ, the spiritual Sun, with the physical sun, shall be kept hidden. That is why certain authorities rage most violently of all when we speak of the Christ Mystery in connection with the Sun Mystery. All kinds of calumnies are then spread abroad.—But Spiritual Science is assuredly a matter of importance in the present age, and those alone who regard it as such view it with the earnestness that is its due.

Notes:

1. The law propounded by Julius Robert Mayer (1814–1878).

2. Particularly by Aristarchos of Samos, the Greek astronomer, circa 250 B.C.

The task that has been set here in these reflections over the past few weeks has been to place the human being in the universe in an understanding way. Yesterday I tried to indicate how, on the one hand, the human being is part of the cosmic world of thought, from which he is also formed in terms of his entire organization, so that, on the one hand, by looking at that which is not grasped by ordinary consciousness in his sensory perception, his ordinary experience of himself, the human being in relation to this organization of his, he must think of himself as belonging to the cosmos and only in relation to the ordinary life of thinking, which, as I have shown, is situated between, on the one hand, cosmic thinking and, on the other hand, thinking that can be perceived as an undercurrent of ordinary consciousness, must he think of himself as belonging to himself in the sense of his own self. The latter would now also belong to what man, as it were, has to regard as belonging to his own self. Yesterday we tried to throw some light on man in so far as he has a thought experience or is placed in the world of thought.

The more one rises to this view, the more one will learn to place the human being in all world-becoming, in all that makes him appear as a piece of cosmic becoming. And when we become so attentive to that part of the human being that is composed of the ordinary life of thought and of the undercurrent that I characterized yesterday, then we will also understand how the human being, through the possession of this part that has been so to speak set apart from the cosmos, is a free, self-reliant entity.

This consideration of the human being can be taken even further, and today we want to try to place the human being in the context of the other kingdoms of nature. I need only point out that I have said many times how wrong it is to consider the relationship of the human being to the animal kingdom, for example, merely in terms of today's anatomy and physiology. Of course, if we first consider the human being in terms of his overall form, and how this overall form is composed of the individual organs, then we will notice that the human being has roughly the same number of bones, muscles and so on as the higher animals, and that these organs or organ systems have been transformed, metamorphosed. We will be able to include the human being in the animal series. But something quite different arises – and I have often discussed this – when one considers what places the human being in a very special way in the cosmos. It must be noted that the column of the animal's back, the backbone, lies essentially horizontally, parallel to the earth's surface; the human backbone stands upright on the earth's surface. If one does not believe that everything is based on the coarse material, but if one comes to the view that what exists is based in its essence on the whole being placed in a coherent world system, then one will attach a corresponding importance to this special position of the human backbone. As a result, the human head is placed in a completely different position to the entire organization. And if one has only once risen to the view: The cosmos is interwoven and interwoven by thoughts - then, insofar as the cosmos is to be regarded as spatial, one will see in the currents of thought that go through the cosmos, an essential and one will be able to see that it makes a difference whether the current that runs along the spine in humans is aligned with the radial direction of the earth or whether, as in animals, it runs parallel to the surface of the earth.

This being placed of the human being in a certain way in the cosmos must then be looked at with regard to the overall organization, and thus also for the individual organs. Each organ and each organ system is located differently in relation to the cosmos in humans than in animals. This is not affected by the fact that someone might say that the human backbone is horizontal when sleeping. It does not depend on the individual position, but on how the whole growth is assessed, how an organ system is integrated into the whole organism. And if we bear in mind that we have the animal backbone parallel to the earth's surface and the human backbone perpendicular to it, then we shall be able to appreciate in the right way other processes that can be observed in man. And here I would first like to draw your attention to a different system of the soul than the one we looked at yesterday. Yesterday we looked at the thought system; today we want to look at the will system.

We can also look at this will system by becoming aware that the human being's life rhythmically breaks down into the states of sleeping and waking. During waking hours, the human being is completely devoted to his physicality; during sleep, the I and the astral body are outside of physicality, both the physical and the etheric physicality. When we wake up in the morning, I told you yesterday, we bring with us at most a faint memory from the thoughts of the universe. So that we can become aware: In the whole time from falling asleep to waking up, we were immersed in a surging sea of cosmic thoughts. But what we bring with us when we wake up and what then determines us throughout the day while we are awake is the will, that is, emerging from this nocturnal, or let us say, during our sleep, our element-forming thought-sea of the cosmos. We emerge with the will, which, as I have characterized it, introduces logic into our inner soul life. We may still notice, when we wake up, in the dreams that crowd in, what our soul life would be like if this will, which we bring with us when we wake up, did not penetrate it logically.

In a sense, then, this will strikes into what is surging and swirling in the human organism. Let us take a very close look at this impact of the will. Let us become aware of where the will is striking into: It is precisely the chaotic swirling of dream images and also of those dream textures that we have as undercurrents of our ordinary consciousness. So that we can say: While we sleep, this web of thoughts is released from the organic mechanism within us, completely drowned out by the web of thoughts interwoven with logic in the waking state, from waking to falling asleep. It is this chaotic jumble of dream images and dream ideas that the will strikes, which we bring into our organism from the cosmos when we wake up. Let us see what this will initially brings with it.

This will that strikes in initially has the effect that thoughts do not arise as they are in this dreamy chaos. We would get off badly in life if thoughts arose as they do in this dreamy chaos. What must thoughts be like when they arise in normal mental life? They must somehow be connected with our life. They must be able to remember in some way. That is, in a sense, the first thing that the will, which has made an impact, does with our thoughts. It organizes them in such a way that we carry the right memory image within us. We can therefore say: we have, as it were, the chaotic web of thoughts swirling up out of our organism (see drawing, red). It is something that is particularly strong in dreamy natures, who are often not satisfied with indulging in the normal memories of life, who take pleasure and delight when thoughts come together and separate again after allusions and similarities. Dreamy natures are overwhelmed by this chaotic web of thoughts. But even a person who is well aware of himself will always notice, if he lets himself go just a little during waking life, I would say, that this confusion of thoughts is present in the main, underlying current. The will, which strikes there when one wakes up, it strikes this web of thoughts. Where does it come from?

Now, in bed lay the physical body (blue) and the etheric body (yellow). What I have drawn schematically on the board here is basically what we leave in bed when we fall asleep and what we encounter again in the morning. We allow our will to be woven into it. I will characterize this will that is woven into it through these lines here (see drawing, arrows from above). So the first thing that the will has to do is to reshape this chaotic web of thoughts into our normal memory. We can therefore say that, initially, this will that is woven into it shapes the web of thoughts into normal memory. One might say: the etheric body, the physical body, that is what we encounter in the morning, is still very powerful in our memory. These thoughts are reflected back to us. But it is the will that strikes and really has something to do by striking. You can see that. Just try to remember how, when you wake up in the morning, everything swirls up like currents from the soul like an event you experienced at the age of five, at the age of seven, again at the age of six year, again in the fifteenth year, in the sixty-fifth year for all I care, then in the twenty-first, seventeenth year, again in the eighth year, how it all swirls and tumbles in a colorful mess. The will has to strike into this. Then, in a sense, it organizes it all again so that it is a proper memory, so that an event that took place in the ninth year does not get mixed up with what happened in the eighth year and the like. So the will strikes into it, and it forms memory out of this chaotic web of dreams. In memory, you still notice little of the will. Most people will not want to see the will at all in memory. But it is there, it is just that the impact of the will, in so far as it forms memory, is much more unconscious.

The second is something that a person can already recognize as their will. This is what this will, which we bring with us when we wake up, makes out of this surge of thoughts: this is the imagination, this is the fantasy (see drawing). That is the second element. There you can already see that you can move in it with your arbitrariness. While the memory is being formed, you still have to be constrained by your organism; the physical body and etheric body are very influential. In the imagination, this is less so, and you can move about in it with your will. But there is an enormous difference between a person who is imaginative and a person who dreams, who simply surrenders to the surge of arbitrary thought. A person who lets his imagination run wild knows how his will rules in these interweaving images, and he shapes them according to his will.

But now for the third. The third is something that, on the one hand, is really completely given over to the will and, on the other hand, is such that the will does not move as freely as in imagination. It is logical thinking, on which we depend in life and in science. There, in this logical thinking, our will is certainly active; but it surrenders its own freedom and submits to the laws of logic. Yet it is its doing that it submits to the law of logic. So that is the third thing: logical thinking.

Why is logical thinking, on the one hand, absolutely subject to the will? If we did not form our logical thinking out of our own will, it would be obsessive thoughts. We must form our logical thoughts out of our own will. But we form them in such a way that we orient ourselves to the external world, which, after all, is essentially the great teacher of logic in the first place. We imbue the chaotic world of images with the laws of logic. We thus surrender to these laws of logic through our will; in a sense, we surrender to the arbitrary workings of logic. On the one hand, the will is free in thought; on the other hand, it surrenders its freedom in favor of logic. But in these three stages – memory, imagination, logical thinking – the will is active; that will that from falling asleep to waking up does not work in the human physical and etheric organism and that in the morning when waking up into the physical and etheric organism, and which this, I would like to say, indeterminate fire of the etheric and physical body, kindled in the surge of thought, is divided into memory, imagination, logical thinking.

It is already the case in logical thinking that we are no longer completely in control with our will. We are not. When we let our imagination run free, in which we clearly notice our will, then we know how we are within ourselves; when we let our logical thinking run free, we are no longer completely within ourselves. We know that we adapt ourselves completely to the cosmos, but not only to the extra-human cosmos, but to the whole cosmos, which includes the human being. For it is self-evident that logic applies not only to the extra-human cosmos, but also to the cosmos plus the human being. Logic is neither subjective nor objective, but logic is both at the same time.

In a sense, we can see the part that what we bring with us from the world of sleep into our soul life in the morning plays. And we can also know approximately: when what has entered as will withdraws back into the cosmic world of thought, only what rises up from the physical body and etheric body rules in us again.

Now this is one aspect of the will that rules in us. It is, so to speak, the cosmic side of the will, the side that we take out of us in the evening and bring back into us again in the morning. But self-reflection will indeed teach people that not only this will is present in him, of which I have just spoken, because this will expresses itself essentially in the so-called soul life, in memory, in imagination, in logical thinking. But when we walk, when we grasp, when we somehow use an instrument, the will is also active. In these activities, the will is not only active in the soul, as I have just described it; in these activities, the will takes hold of our physical organization and our etheric organization. Therefore, I cannot characterize the will only in these arrows here, but I must also depict the will permeating the physical and etheric bodies (see drawing on page 157, arrows from below). So I have to say: The will is also present in that which remains in the bed during sleep. The will, which must be characterized in this latter sense, comes, as it were, towards the other will, which is not in the physical body of the person during sleep. And this latter will basically becomes an external activity. So this will, which lives in the organs, which lives in the physical and etheric organization, is called upon by the other will coming to meet it. But when we are active as an awake person, we can clearly distinguish these two spheres of will.

Please note that on the one hand there is a will that counteracts the will coming from the other side. We have, so to speak, the interaction of two currents of will. One of these currents of will swirls through the human organism and the whole context shows you that you have to look at it as swirling from bottom to top. The other current swirls from top to bottom. Here the directions in the cosmos come into play, and we notice that it must be different in animals, in that the main direction of their bodily organization is precisely perpendicular to the main direction of the bodily organization of humans. The directions of will are differently integrated into the cosmos. So, too, when we, I would like to say, go into the differentiations of the human being, when we realize how this human being is composed of individual currents, then we notice the importance of the human being's being placed in the cosmos.

Now let us take a closer look at these two currents of will. As with many things in spiritual science, you will not be able to proceed in such a way that you, I might say, derive one from the other as in mathematical derivation, but in spiritual science the way to arrive at the truths is as follows: one truth is juxtaposed with the other and one must then seek the connection. With superficial simpletons this very easily leads to the objection that one does not “prove”. It is just as if someone, when he sees a horse and a cow standing side by side in a field, and they are certainly standing side by side for some reason, were to demand that someone should prove to him from the horse that the cow is standing beside it. Of course, one cannot prove from the essence of the horse that the cow is standing next to it. This is roughly the content of the objection that many people raise with regard to proof in spiritual science.

I would now like to present you with another fact, in addition to the one I have just mentioned, which you must gradually try to put into the appropriate context, based on what I have just discussed.

Everything that is in the soul of a person is also expressed in the physical body, and is imprinted in the physical body. The human being is organized in such a way that he awakens memory, imagination, and logical thinking by waking up, and that he allows them to rest within him, so to speak, while sleeping. This is a kind of rhythm. This rhythm is juxtaposed with another: the stream of will, which I have indicated here as being located in the organs. What confronts each other as two currents, you can, I would like to say, find it depicted in the human being: you can find it by looking at the system that is given by the human breathing rhythm. A few days ago, I already pointed out how the breathing rhythm can really be thought of in connection with falling asleep and waking up. Even if breathing naturally outlasts sleep, one still recognizes the connection in everything that somehow impairs calm breathing during sleep, for example. This connection between breathing and the rhythm of waking up, falling asleep, waking up, falling asleep is not so obvious, but this connection, this relationship is there nevertheless. And when we consider the human being in relation to his upward striving, we have to consider the breathing rhythm as something essential that is connected with this upward striving, the whole respiratory system, also insofar as it is expressed in the speech system. We breathe, we speak as human beings essentially upwards, even if this is transformed by the position of our throat into speaking forwards. There we have one rhythm, a unified rhythm.

We have another rhythm, we have the rhythm of circulation, the rhythm that is given to us in the pulse, and we know that the pulse rhythm is roughly related to the respiratory rhythm as four to one. You need only reflect a little on the anatomical and physiological aspects to realize that the pulse rhythm, the rhythm of circulation, is intimately connected with the metabolic-limb system of the human being. The actual rhythmic system is, I would say, separated out in the respiratory system. The more one engages with a characteristic of the respiratory system on the one hand and a characteristic of the pulse system on the other, the more one notices that everything that is present as an organ for the formation of memory, imagination, logical and that everything else that is connected with the will that flows through the organs can be related to the pulse rhythm by expressing itself upwards. Just as the will that is in our organs coincides with the will that we bring with us from the cosmos when we wake up, so the respiratory rhythm coincides with the pulse rhythm, with the circulation rhythm. And there we have in the interaction of the respiratory rhythm and the pulse rhythm, in a very physical way, what comes up from below and what strikes down from above, but in such a way that what strikes down from above is four times slower than what comes up from below. If I were to take this stroke as the time consideration for the breathing rhythm, I would have to take four for the pulse rhythm.

In fact, everything that man develops in the way of art, of rhythmic art, is based on this relationship between the pulse rhythm and the respiratory rhythm. I have already said this on the occasion of the discussion about the art of recitation. You can go into more detail. You can think that if you base it more on the pulse rhythm, you get: short syllable, long syllable. If you combine the breathing rhythm with the pulse rhythm, you get, for example, the meter of the hexameter, and so on. All meters are based on these relationships of rhythms that are within the human being itself.

Now, when you look at the blood rhythm, you look, so to speak, more at the physical; when you look more at the breathing rhythm, you look at the soul. The breathing rhythm is much more closely related to the soul than the blood rhythm. The breathing rhythm also opens outwards, just as logic and logical thinking open outwards. Now, irregularities in these rhythms are the cause of irregularities in human life. You can well imagine that if there really is such a ratio of four to one or one to four, then it must mean something if, let us say, the breathing rhythm becomes too long or the pulse rhythm too short. And yet this can be the case with humans. It can even be the case in a very insignificant way; then it manifests itself immediately.

Now I will present the radical cases. Imagine a person gets excited. He begins to become passionate. He starts ranting about something. This can go as far as raving. Or a person gets into the state that is described as follows: the thoughts do not want to, they stand still; one cannot think properly, they stay away. Just as the raving was the most radical expression of the process, from becoming passionate through ranting to becoming raving, it is the same with thoughts standing still, gradually leading to a kind of unconsciousness. The former, becoming passionate, becoming emotional, is based on the pulse rhythm becoming too fast. The stopping of thought and the fainting are due to a slowing of the respiratory rhythm.

So you see, the human being is interwoven with the rhythms of the whole world. And how we are within this world rhythm determines how we appear to us physically and mentally. The emotional life also expresses itself physically: the current that flows through the organism from bottom to top becomes too fast, it shakes the organs, and when it comes to raging, you can see how the organs are shaken. The current that flows from top to bottom becomes too slow; thoughts do not want to go from top to bottom. Here again we see how important it is that we can form a picture of man's place in the whole cosmic context, how he fits into it, and how it is mere childishness to count the bones, muscles, etc., and say: Man is only a higher animal formation — and not to take into account that what matters is this placing in the whole cosmic context.

Now I will tell you something that seems very far removed from what I have just explained, but which, in tomorrow's lecture, will nevertheless be linked to what I have just explained to form a whole. Let us now move from human existence to human development. You know that we are now living in the so-called fifth post-Atlantic period, which began around 1415 or 1413 and will continue. It is preceded by the fourth, which began around 747 BC before the Mystery of Golgotha, and this in turn is preceded by the third, which goes back to the 4th millennium.

Now, if we consider these periods, we can form the following schematic picture of their succession. Please imagine that the Atlantean period was preceded by what I called the Lemurian period in my “Occult Science”. I will assume here only the last phases of this Lemurian period, and now draw the seven successive cultural conditions of the Atlantean period: and now we have, in succession, the primeval Indian, primeval Persian, Egyptian-Chaldean, Greek-Latin, and now our fifth period; that would be the last period. I have schematically presented the successive periods to you.

You now also know from my “Secret Science” and from other presentations that I have given that such a period lasts approximately until the vernal point of the sun has completed the entire passage through the zodiac. It is only approximate, but for what we want to consider now, this approximation will have its good meaning. In 747 BC, before the event of Golgotha, the vernal point entered the zodiacal sign of Aries. It remained in this zodiacal sign until the 15th century. Then it passed over and is now in the zodiacal picture of Pisces. Before 747 the vernal point was in the sign of Taurus, so throughout the entire Egyptian-Chaldean cultural period the sun rose in spring in the constellation of Taurus; hence the bull service. Then came the ancient Persian period; the sun rose in the constellation of Gemini. During the time of ancient India, the sun rose in the constellation of Cancer. Then we come back to the Atlantean time and have the seven cultural periods in the Atlantean time. Now I ask you to consider the following and to visualize it as a question that we are initially presenting today.

Let us draw the sequence of the zodiacal constellations. So we have: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces. We will now schematically draw here how it stands with the successive cultural periods. We know that we are now in the Pisces sign at the vernal equinox, and have the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period. We go back (see drawing, page 165, dark hatched): Aries fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, Taurus third post-Atlantic cultural period, Gemini second post-Atlantic cultural period, Cancer first post-Atlantic cultural period. We are now returning to the Atlantean period. The seven periods of the Atlantean period (light shading): Leo the seventh, Virgo the sixth, Libra the fifth, Scorpio the fourth, Sagittarius the third, Capricorn the second, Aquarius the first; and now we are returning to the Lemurian period and we are back to Pisces.

You see, when you consider the important time of the last culture, the last cultural epoch of the Lemurian period, and when you read about this important period of the development of the earth and humanity in my book “Occult Science”, you will be faced with a big question. If you take what I have presented in my “Occult Science in Outline”, especially in the presentations that appeared separately as “Our Atlantean Ancestors”, then you will see how one can actually speak of humanity, insofar as it is humanity today, only from this period onwards, and this period is the one in which the vernal point was in the same zodiacal constellation as it is now. We have, as humanity, gone through a complete cycle around the heavens and, in a certain sense, have arrived back at the starting point.

What I have just said relates to human becoming. We have often tried to show how the human soul life has changed in the time since the Atlantean period. We know how different this entire human soul life was in the time of the ancient Indians, and how it was still different in the Atlantean period. But if you read my writing about the Atlantean ancestors, you will see that we go back to a time in the Atlantean period when the human configuration manifests itself physically in the same way as the human soul was at that time. While in the post-Atlantean period the soul life works essentially differently, during the Atlantean period the whole body is metamorphosed. We thus come back more and more, I would say, from the region which I characterized above as the soul region, to what is here below the bodily region, which is permeated by the other stream of will. And as we go further back in Atlantis, we come back to the metamorphoses that relate to the shaping of the body. So that we can say that during the passage of the vernal point through Pisces, human beings were scarcely present in the bodily form as it is (light shading). Here it is taking on more and more of a bodily form. And here it is only just beginning to take on a soul form, in order to return to the point from which it once emerged in terms of its bodily form. So that you can say, the zodiac signs of Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, Sagittarius, Scorpio, Libra, up to Virgo (light shading) correspond to the transformation of the human physical form; and only these upper zodiac signs correspond to the transformation of the human soul for us.

These things must first be considered from the point of view of spiritual science, and it will be seen that only then can concepts and ideas be formed about the essence of the human being. On the other hand, however, it may at least cast a light on what I have often said here, that we live in an important age. For while we have developed as humanity on Earth, the vernal point of the Sun has gone around the whole universe and has returned again in our era. We must therefore fulfill tasks that are, so to speak, guided by the fact that humanity has returned to its starting point, that it must undertake something in its soul life that corresponds to this return to the starting point. Today I only wanted to hint at what can be derived from such a consideration of the importance of the present human period of time. What I have said applies to the most advanced members of civilized humanity; but in the end it is they who are actually important for the development of humanity.

We will continue our discussion tomorrow, and focus on how these things relate to the latter.

Last time I tried to give an overview of the processes in the earthly system that are closest to us. I tried this insertion about cosmic processes because we need it to better understand the Apocalypse. Last time, I pointed out that before the beings that populate our Earth today were formed – above all, humans and the other three natural kingdoms that belong to them: the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the mineral kingdom – before these beings were on Earth, they were on other planets.

Now I ask you to understand what I am going to say today in the sense in which I already indicated it for the last lesson, and to take it even more so today. We are entering particularly high realms of supersensible vision, realms about which we are only able to make suggestions. They are not only difficult to understand, but the observation itself and what we can know about it is so subtle that it is quite difficult for those whose thoughts and especially their feelings are still rooted in the materialistic views of our time to get beyond the word “fantastic” when they hear about the things that are to be discussed today. It is not so easy for people in a materialistic age to get away from materialistic ideas. Thoughts can be freed more easily, but feelings still say too much: this is something that I cannot grasp, that is something that lies so far beyond what we call reality. Precisely because our feelings lag slightly behind what our thoughts rise to, I would like to point out that we are dealing with times that lie far behind us and that are very different from what we are accustomed to calling reality today.

To give you an idea of what I want to say, I have to start at the beginning. I have to start from a planet from which, so to speak, man first developed, from a planet from which he actually originated. Before man came into existence on this earth, he passed through three such planets. The last planet we passed through as human beings is called the Moon in the esoteric language. This is not the present Moon; the present Moon is only a cinder. The Moon we are talking about here is the predecessor of our earth, on which, in primitive conditions, what man has today developed. This was preceded by another planet, which we call the “sun” in esoteric language. This old sun is therefore also to be counted among the planets. Today and next time, I will be able to say more about this. We will return to the times when man left the moon again to undergo stages of development on Earth, which we will still get to know.

But now we have to go back to the third or the last - or even the first - planet where man first appeared, so that we have three planets that come into question for us humans, that were really our residences before we came to this earth. I will give you, as far as possible, a description of this first planet. This first planet differs fundamentally not only in terms of its physical nature but in terms of all its nature from everything that today's man is accustomed to imagine. What we are accustomed to seeing today, even what we are accustomed to thinking, did not yet exist at that time. All of this has only developed from that. Therefore, I will only be able to give a figurative and approximate description of this first planetary state in which man was.

Let us take a look at man himself during this first state. During the first state, man had a consciousness that was very different from the consciousness that man has on earth. The consciousness that man had at that time was dull. It was the same consciousness that a stone has today. But you must not compare it with what lives consciously in a stone today. Although it was dull, what lived in consciousness as in the stone at that time, it was all-encompassing at the same time. The whole sphere of development that man recognized as his dwelling place, and also everything around it in the stars that was in contact with this sphere of development, all this could be surveyed by this consciousness. This consciousness can still be produced in certain circumstances in humans today, albeit in very abnormal conditions, when the other states of consciousness of dream consciousness and deep trance are no longer present, but when very abnormal conditions occur. Medicine is also familiar with these conditions. Then a very deep trance occurs, and this deep trance is linked to the fact that these people begin to draw entire planetary systems in a chaotic and disorderly fashion. You can experience, for example, that in sanatoriums where people with such pathological conditions are housed, these patients record entire planetary systems. However, they only vaguely resemble what we speak of in theosophy. But one thing emerges from the state: people have a dull consciousness, and this consciousness not only spreads around the planet on which they live, but also over the neighboring world areas. It can be called all-consciousness. And such an all-consciousness was present in the people who were on the first planet.

All life on this first planet was such that it can only be compared to what you would experience if you were able to imagine the inanimate earth as it is today not only as permeated with stone and rock, but if you could imagine the earth itself as animated , as an animated ball – and, in addition, this entire animated ball is imbued with feeling; so that you would have had a feeling from an impression that someone had made on the planet at that time – for example, if someone had kicked the earth with their foot.

The planet at that time also had the most diverse conditions of growth and life. A mountain arose there, a valley there, and everything was surging with life and was all sensation. The shapes on it can only be compared to successive waves of the sea, with elements that spurt out and then splash back in the most diverse shapes. The whole is a wonderful surge and life. The whole grows and passes away in itself. The planet was in this state in its middle stages. It is difficult to characterize it with expressions taken from present-day things. But the planet was not the same in its first stages either. If you had transferred yourself with eyes, with physical sense organs into space, you would not have been able to see the first state of this planet. In its first state, this planet was in the Arupa state. It is there in a material condition that could not be perceived by the senses, even if such senses had been present. So it was in a highly refined state. In this state, only the highly developed clairaudient could perceive it. The highly developed clairvoyant would see nothing; even the psychic eyes, the clairvoyant eyes, cannot see anything in these first stages. You can only hear the planet. Only a fine clairaudience can perceive it. And all that you hear is a single fundamental tone, which is, however, developed in the most diverse ways. But a single fundamental tone is present; this varies and becomes manifold in itself.

When the planet then enters its second state, you cannot see it yet either, not even with clairvoyant eyes. But then it enters the third state, the astral state, and you can see it. But it is not the astral matter of the earth, it is a higher state, but I can call it that comparatively. In any case, you can already see an interweaving here. Everything that I described earlier as a swirling and surging can be seen here with the mind's eye. You can see billowing and swirling formations, but you cannot see them in a matter that you could grasp, but only in a matter that you see with the psychic eye in masses of colors and plays of colors of extraordinary subtlety - and in a formation that is distinguished by colors that cannot be compared to any of these earthly colors. That is a color picture.

Then we come to the fourth state. There we have a state that we can approximately call the physical state, the physical state. If there were an eye present, it could already see this physical state.

This is the state that I have described as sentient and living – but at the same time also in mineral formation, but not yet even, not yet flat. You have shell-like formations there, and everything is in a perpetual state of formation, as I have described. That is the fourth state. This is actually the first time that what we can call the very first ancestors of man are present. Such is man. He is an indeterminate being, taking on a different form at every moment, metamorphosing at every moment. Then the whole thing regresses again or, through the same states, also ascends again, similar to what I described last time: through the astral, the rupic, to the arupic. We have seen the development go from the arupic through the physical and back to the arupic. Down there in the fourth state, man has become physical for the first time.

We call this process the very first round of our human development. It is this first round that is the most important one that comes into consideration. This brings man on the planet as far as man can go on this first planet at all. The following rounds have no further significance for the further development of man to his perfection. Now, after going through a kind of sleep state, the whole thing starts all over again. The conditions are experienced two, three, four, five, six times. But during these six subsequent rounds or cycles, the actual human being, that which we now call a human being, does not make much further progress. Because what he achieves further is later lost and has no significance for further development. In contrast, higher beings, more exalted beings, who have come from earlier stages of development, develop and reach their perfection. In these following six rounds they reach their significance.

When the person is here, he is in the so-called elementary realm. And by being there, he becomes physical for the first time as a human being. The first elementary realm becomes physical there. It is important to note that we call this the 'first elemental realm'. And the state of consciousness in which he had a kind of omniscience, but in a dull way, is called 'tamas'. This is one of the so-called gunas. There the human being is at the first stage of evolution.

The whole thing is repeated seven times. So that these whole planets have taken on seven different forms seven times. So you could say that we are dealing with 7x7 states, equal to 49 states. These 49 states are referred to as the system of the first planet. These seven states are usually referred to as a planetary chain - but that is a poor description. The planet that I have described in this way is called Saturn in esoteric language - and for a very specific reason.

Anyone who wants to reach this planet at all must be capable of the following. The ordinary person at today's stage of his development has his bright day consciousness. He is with his consciousness on the physical plane, he is in sense consciousness. He ceases to have his consciousness when he sleeps. He either dreams or sleeps dreamlessly.

The dreamer may remember his dreams. During his dream, however, he usually has no consciousness. Now there is a possibility by which man is just as conscious during the dream as he is during his daily physical life. This is another state of consciousness. He is not just dreaming, he is consciously in a world in which he would otherwise only have dreamed, and that is the so-called astral world.

This world makes it possible for him to go back to what we call the development on the moon. There, the person can relive what happened during the lunar epoch.

An even deeper state is when the human being is conscious in dreamless sleep. Then a so-called continuity of consciousness occurs. The person is conscious while sleeping. Consciousness never stops; only the body sleeps, the spirit is awake.

This state of consciousness, when it is attained – that is to say, when a person, even when he falls asleep, nevertheless continues to be conscious, and when he wakes up, likewise consciously enters again into the bright day consciousness – makes it possible for him to transport himself back into the still preceding period. Then the person is able to carry out a real unification with that which is today the sun. He lives on the present sun. For those who have no real conception of the nature of clairvoyance, it is difficult to understand what I am saying. But I must share some experiences here.

Now there is an even higher state that elevates consciousness to yet another level. This is the state that extends beyond what is called the continuity of consciousness. It is a state of special enlightenment of consciousness itself, of this deep dreamless sleep consciousness. This makes it possible to have the experiences of the first planet during this life, and at the same time, when the clairvoyant focuses on the first planet, the fact occurs that he is united with what is currently the physical planet Saturn. But this has nothing to do with the Saturn of that time. So we have transported ourselves back to the 49 states through which man has developed.

Now I would like to continue by showing you how the development continues. I can continue to use the same drawing and can now simply say that a somewhat longer intermediate period, a kind of unconscious state, a state of sleep, now occurs for all beings that were in this planetary state, and then the whole game starts all over again.

Again we have these seven successive states, which means we have another round. This round now has a very specific task, it has the task of repeating everything that happened during the previous 49 states, so that during the first state of the seven states, in short, with sevenfold speed, what happened during the first 49 states is repeated, so that the person changes insignificantly, but now reappears here physically. Only in the second cycle is there a reorganization. And this second round is what matters now.

In this second round, after the Rupa and Arupa spheres have been experienced and we have entered the physical state, we no longer have a living, growing earth, but we have split off one realm and built a second one above it, and in this realm man is embodied. We now have a realm that is not so very unlike our mineral realm; we have a realm that is mineral, but we have growing minerals in it, just like our plants. These are living minerals. But this also gives rise to something dead. Man cannot use this. He would not be able to develop further if he did not excrete this. And he leaves behind the excreted matter as a special mineral kingdom. Man has then developed upwards into a kingdom that rises above the mineral kingdom, the nature of which could be described as plant animals. There are no such beings today. But we can compare them to animals that resemble today's jellyfish. These are very low-level animals, and even they are quite different. The beings that lived here had a much greater density and a completely different kind of substance that cannot even be compared to

what human substance is. You have to imagine these as refined, etherized, not less noble, but more noble than human substance. All the entities have the most diverse forms of stars. They were polyform stars, multifaceted and polygonal figures. All this is connected in a mobile way, structured according to numbers.

It is very important – you must remember this – that human consciousness has developed to a higher degree, to a consciousness that is no longer all-seeing, but has become brighter instead. The whole of the second planet, which we call the Sun, no longer knows everything, but has become brighter instead. This state of consciousness is called rajas. It is a consciousness that permeates all the higher realms. This consciousness is not limited to individuals, for the beings are not yet so strictly separated from each other, they still continually merge into each other. But beings are continually arising and continually passing away. They dissolve and form themselves again. In the first state, we only had to deal with the arising and passing away of dull forms; here we only had to deal with beings in this dull consciousness.

Man does develop further in the next cycles, but this is not particularly relevant for the upward development. What has lasting value for his development is the state he had reached during the second round.

The whole thing now begins again, after going through the same thing seven times – that is, a second time after a kind of sleep state.

Now, in the first cycle, we are dealing with a brief repetition of what happened on Saturn. Man appears once again as a kind of mineral sentient being, except that the sentience is no longer expressed in the same way. The sentience is gone; only growth and life remain. In the second round, man then repeats what happened on the sun. And in the third round, a further development of the human being takes place. There the human being first goes through the old conditions again and then appears in this third round in a physical state. This is the moon state, which we know as the predecessor of our present earth state. As a result, three realms have now formed, which differ from each other to a certain extent.

These three kingdoms are not similar to our three kingdoms, the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, but they are something else. The mineral kingdom is one that still has traces of growth and life, of mobile and growing minerals. The plants are those that still have traces of animality in them. And above that is a third kingdom, one that is higher than even our highest present animal kingdom, but not yet as high as the present human kingdom. But that was all at the same time.

When I say that this third realm was not as highly developed, I am referring to the consciousness and spiritual qualities. Matter is much finer than the matter of the present-day human being. The human being is in an ether-like state, which bears a certain resemblance to that of a jellyfish. The shape of the human being is not very similar to the present-day human shape, especially in these conditions. If you wanted to describe it, you could say that it was a kind of quadruped, but of a special kind. There are four feet and they are all used for some kind of locomotion. They are not used like the feet of today's monkeys, but all four are used for locomotion. The use of the hands was not yet necessary.

These are the three realms that exist here. The consciousness that man has attained is the dream consciousness. Man has lost the ability to see the whole earth, but he still has the ability to perceive astral states. He has a psychic consciousness in the lunar epoch. He sees the people who live with him at the same time, not only in their physical form, but also in their passions and in their emotional life. Man can put himself in their place and perceive it. That is during the third cycle. But now man develops further in the states he goes through in the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh cycles. These are not of such particular importance for his further progress. He does change, but these changes are not so important for man's progress.

So we have added another 49 states to the previous ones and have arrived at the last state that man enters when he has gone through the moon epoch. Now there is another kind of sleepover, and then we come to the development of the earth. There the beginning is made in the same way again. We have another round in which seven states are passed through. In this first round, the human being repeats what was experienced on the first planet. The human being is now in the state of the mineral. The mineral kingdom has now become lifeless, and in this state the earth appears in the first round. In the second round we are dealing with the repetition of the sun existence, in the third round with the repetition of the moon existence, and only in the fourth round does the actual new formation occur, to which our earth development belongs.

This new formation is characterized by the fact that when physical development occurs, a fourth realm is added to the three previous ones. The physical human being appears. Now man on earth becomes physical, and we have the present mineral kingdom, the present plant kingdom, the present animal kingdom and the human kingdom. This is the middle of physical development.

And now the following cycles begin to have a meaning for the further development of the human being. They are no longer shells that are shed, but they begin to have a meaning for the following cycles of the human being. In the middle of this round, where we speak of the Lemurian time, something very special occurs with the human being. A new beginning occurs. Until then, we have observed man, so to speak, developing from an imperfect state to his present human form. Here in the middle of the Lemurian period, he is endowed with what we call spirit, thinking, and later with even higher abilities that we will develop. The spirit begins to move man. This spirit is now undergoing its development, so that the next rounds, the fourth and fifth, are intended to lead this spirit to higher levels. The sixth round then leads even higher, and the seventh even higher.

You can see that from now on we are dealing with something completely new in humanity. Something is entering into man that was not present in him before. Next time we will talk about where this comes from. Today we want to be clear about the fact that man has become physical during this fourth round. I have spoken about how man has developed up to this physical state. Man would have been unable to progress if he had not been endowed with the spark of the spirit in the middle of the development of the earth. This forms a new influence, a seed, a leaven, through which man has been inspired to a new development. Otherwise man would have become only an external form. If the spirit had not reached him, there would have been no upward development of the physical man. Only through the spiritual impact on man has further development become possible. We shall see how this is connected with the whole development. Man would have become more and more external, the soul would have been lost in the external, and man would gradually have become his own petrification. He would have been only a mere outer form, he would have completely passed over into the eighth sphere. He would have ceased to be a being that can develop further. When something ceases to be able to develop further, we say that it has passed over into the eighth sphere. In order to prevent this, the impact with the spirit was intended.

So today we have learned about the fourfold planetary development. We have learned about the development that took place on what we call Saturn - a state that bears a certain similarity to what is happening on Saturn today. But it is not the same as what happened back then.

Seven times seven metamorphoses have taken place. The most important of these is the first round or cycle. During this, the human being developed into a dull consciousness and a kind of living, growing mineral existence. The following states belong to higher beings, which concern us less now. The second planetary state of development begins on the sun. This again goes through seven times seven states of development. We have seven rounds and seven planets or globes – the term 'globe' is rather inappropriate. The second round is the most important one to be considered here. Man develops into a kind of plant animal.

On the third planet, or during the lunar epoch, the first two rounds are repetitions. The third round brings new conditions. It develops and is permeated by a kind of dream consciousness. This is called the Sattva state. This is what the human being goes through. The following four rounds bring further development, but it is not significant. Then, after an intermediate state, the earth epoch begins. In the fourth round of the earth epoch, what is around us develops in the four kingdoms known to us: the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom.

That is what I have to say about the development so far. We must be aware that such things, which are so very different from what man sees around him today, can only be described approximately. It is not possible to describe these things exactly; one has to use auxiliary concepts. Nevertheless, I would prefer to describe them vividly rather than schematically. If you only have the names and a diagram, you will have a certain satisfaction for the mind, but it seems to me that it is more appropriate to describe the things vividly as they really happened in the various metamorphoses. I know that this is difficult, but I hope I have given you an idea of it.

Spiritual consciousness enables perception of the highest tone. Hyperpsychic consciousness enables perception of the lowest tone, and psychic consciousness enables perception of the world of colors. The physical part of the earth does not completely merge into the astral part.

Next time I will talk about Mars and Mercury. What I have told you is written in ordinary documents. You have described the seven conditions in the days of the week: Saturn-Day, Sunday, Monday, Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi. These things have been given by the old sages. Our weekdays are modeled on the planetary system. You have written down in the weekdays what the ancient sages knew. What is written in the sky, they have written in the weekdays.

Answering questions

Do you think that the present moon preceded the physical earth?

The present moon is matter from the earlier earth. The moon [of the lunar epoch] goes into the eighth sphere. Those who look at the moon with the “eye of Dangma” can see that the moon mountains have crystallized and solidified the state of that time.

Was the sun already there then?

It was not present as it is today. It was already luminous itself, but at the same time the light was sounding. Goethe describes the state of the heavens at that time in the 'Prologue in Heaven, Faust, Part One', where he describes the state of the sun, which corresponds to the lower mental plane, as sounding: 'The sun sounds in the brother spheres in the old manner of song-contests...' and so on. Our present sun belonged to the solar body of that time.

What is the difference between astral vision and mental vision?

The astral seer can spread his consciousness to the whole race, to the root race. But the mental seer can spread his consciousness over seven races, thus to the beginning of the first, the polar race. All secret schools initially have 49 degrees.

How do these theosophical findings relate to modern geology?

The periods that are relevant to us here would be the Alluvium, then the Diluvium, and then we come to the Tertiary State, which roughly corresponds to the age of the Atlantic period, so that in essence the surface of the earth in this Tertiary state forms the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. If you were to look for people from that time, you would have to look for them on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This Tertiary period is preceded by the Secondary period; this roughly corresponds to the Lemurian period. In the middle of this period, today's form of man emerged. Even earlier, we are dealing with beings of such “thin” matter that it is impossible to obtain imprints of them. The animals that developed at the same time in the Lemurian period were reptiles, saurian-like creatures and the like. Then, in parallel with the Atlanteans, mammals developed. This would be more or less parallel to the geological periods. Then you also have to parallelize with the remains in question. You will then be able to see that palaeontology is also correct in certain respects. Many of the areas that we are considering are now covered by the sea. That is one reason why we cannot have accurate pictures of them. The Sons of Fire Nebula – the oldest entities – lived in the fiery state. If we go back to the Tertiary Period, we still have reptiles, and in the Primary Period we still have fish. These beings were already present as such at that time, only they were in a different material state. They were such that they have the same imprints. The essential was present. The state of fire gave them plasticity. Through further synthesis, folding was created – that is the state of accumulation.

Anyone who deals with these things occultly should be careful not to start from external things. In a second volume of my book 'Theosophy', I will give hints and references to the relevant parallelization of science. There must be no contradiction between modern science and theosophy. Science has arisen through a necessary evolution and must be brought into absolute agreement with all things that are facts, in all things, with what theosophy is.

How should we visualize the condensation, the solidification of matter?

A good image for this is pieces of ice floating in water. However, it is better not to say that water has the ability to become ice, but to content ourselves with the expression of ice floating in water. It is similar with the matter in space. They are solidified finer matters. The interesting formation of the world nebulae we have to understand as the descent of the lowest astral states. A human astral body looks similar to the Orion Nebula, to a world nebula, to a vortex. An elementary astral body can only be found in the vicinity of the human being, but the developed ones can move further away from him.

Would you like to tell us something else about the chakrams?

The chakrams are also called lotus flowers for comparison. There are sixteen-, twelve-, ten-, six-, four- and two-leaved chakrams or lotus flowers. The two-leaved lotus flower cannot perceive itself, but the sixteen-, twelve-, ten- and six-leaved lotus flowers can perceive themselves, just as the eye can perceive the tip of the nose.

The astral body is only human-like in highly developed people; otherwise it is quite different.

[The two-petalled lotus flower in less developed people:

The inner lotus flower is the twelve-petalled lotus flower in the more highly developed human being. This inner tube is as if the fingers of both hands were intertwined.

“Lotus flower is an expression similar to how we speak of lungs in the physical body.”

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

The purpose of the evening review is to turn the life of the past into lessons for the life of the future. Some say: yes, I do it every day. Self-examination is also a double-edged sword; it is fruitful only when it really detaches the higher self from [the lower]. People do not become strangers enough to themselves, worrying ...

This is not unjustified, theosophy does not say to become hard-hearted; but often we prevent something by worrying and worrying about past things, prevent doing better. The purpose of meditative work is to pull oneself out; during the day one can have sorrow and worry, during the review [one must reject them] as well as the everyday thoughts. It is good to make this day review from backward to forward. For man lives toward the future, and in truth the future is approaching, perfection is at the end. If we extend [the review] not to twelve hours, but to twenty-four hours, we will see that it is good. The dreams will be only confusedly conscious at first, but it is good that one extends one's memory, for thereby the sense of the astral is sharpened, and the consciousness becomes continuous. One learns to understand that the dream life has a higher reality. To man the astral appears in distorted images, because man is not able to see properly. Later comes the moment when during the dream man is fully conscious, and this leads to the continuity of consciousness, so that it becomes indifferent whether we are awake or dreaming. This is also the way in which the masters teach the occult disciples.

One should not care whether one is a valuable personality or not. As for the morning meditation, it is mainly a matter of having a completely sightless consciousness, so that this void is filled with spiritual content ... or scripture. Let's try to bring about this emptiness by imagining the absolute, dark and empty space that has no boundary. The state we have to invoke is just like when we are asleep. To exclude the senses and the memory is the art. Then we imagine the absolute empty and dark space, and then out of this blackest darkness we let rise: "aum mani padme hum" - then the formula and the elevation to the higher self. Again darkness - and then as on a wall the sentence.

Sitting down more often, when there is time and opportunity, and thinking of nothing at all is a good exercise. It is hard to resist the always angry thoughts. This even strengthens the physical organism. Very significant is to get free the brain with present astral body.

A strong reason why the astral body is egoistic is the thoughts; everyone surrounds himself with a shell that is astral. When the thoughts are taken away, this astral stuff dissolves again, and nothing is better than when an organism is left to itself. Man has such a harmonious heart, lungs and so on, because the higher formers have created on it and he could ruin little. One acquires also thereby a certain exercise to scare away thoughts.

With the concentration it is necessary that from it is sharply separated the thinking, the speculating about a [meditation] sentence. We must already be finished with it. Such a sentence comes from higher experience and always contains more than we know. Even the inspired one meditates on his own sentences. So firm is his belief that it is higher revelation.

Patience must be so long, even in failure, that the unconditional belief that things will get better one day does not waver. Not forcing things, not forcing, is necessary. Patience must be there in tremendous measure; it is it that comes over the occult student in the

Meditation must be poured out completely. It is through this that he becomes a disciple. As the plant does not skip a single one to get to the last, crowning one, so the disciple; never skip an intermediate link; detour where necessary; form is adapted to the cleft of the rock. Patience, constancy and steadfastness are the qualities of the divine nature that we have to develop. It is a matter of mind, not of success.

The devotional part then follows.

Phrases: Let us keep in mind the one that basically man is more perfect as a physical being than as astral and mental. Imperfection lies in the fact that man today is a tripartite being and still clumsy in the handling of what are the higher principles and in the free use of the lower principles. For he can never become happy if he abandons himself to the lower principles like the animal, which does not have its mental body on the same plan as its physical and astral. Animals can be trained, but man works through the animal again to the higher plan, which then works down. But only the one who moves freely on the mental plane, only an occultist, is allowed to do that.

Man must keep the balance between his mental and physical nature, oscillate back and forth between both. This is already expressed in the exterior. The animal is horizontal; the human being is imprinted with being torn out of the physical vitality. This uprightness of the head is conditioned by the balancing between the physical and the higher spiritual. Because it is so, the head of man as a sign of his intellectuality is the organ which is pushed in the middle ...

The animal head is only instinctive. In occult relation the human head is quite different from the animal one. With the animal completely ... With man a beginning; the stream is poured out into the animal and has found its end there - dead end. With man there is a new beginning; through all the openings of the head all the streams go on, so that man through his head is a bridge, a connecting link between the higher and lower nature.

The animal eye looks out only to the sensed object; the human eye connects the mental image with the object, and thereby opens to the spirit; while the animal eye forms a cul-de-sac.

The main human openings are related to space by the seven planets, to time by the seven days of the week. The sacred line in the world, the lemniscate, is to be traced here; we recognize in this way the occult placement of man in the world-entirety.

Through the right eye passes the second principle, Budhi; through the left the third principle, Manas; through the right ear the mind soul; through the left the sentient soul; through the right nostril the etheric body; through the left nostril the astral body, Linga sharira. And on the top of the head, in the future, there will be an opening for the outpouring of Atman. Through the mouth flows the Word, which must always be thought through. Through the seven planets these main openings are placed in relationship to space.

The top opening on the head has a connection with Jupiter, the right eye is connected with Mercury, the right ear with Saturn, the right nostril with the Sun, the left nostril with the Moon, the left ear with Mars, the left eye with Venus. Through the seven days of the week they are connected with time. Here it is necessary to notice the Sacred Line of the World. It points us to the occult construction of man in the universe.

Concentration is followed by a prayer part, which should consist of awe and reverence [toward] the great spirits who have penetrated deeply into the mysteries of nature and the universe and who are above ordinary human nature.

When the moon is waning, nothing new should enter into meditation.

Right Eye Second Principle, Budhi Mercury
Left eye Third principle, Manas Venus
Right ear mind soul Saturn
Left ear sentient soul Mars
Right nostril etheric body Sun
Left nostril astral body moon

If I speak about death and immortality today, it may seem, as if at first such a consideration is caused in the personal needs of the human soul, which have little do with knowledge, with science. If you survey the series of spiritual-scientific talks that I have held, you yet realise that I applied a scientific standard to the considered objects already, even if a spiritual-scientific standard. Hence, the today's consideration does also not start from that what we find within our emotional life, within our longings and wishes towards a life that exceeds the life of the physical body. It will rather concern this: how has human knowledge to position itself to the questions of death and immortality completely in the sense, as this knowledge positions itself to other objects of our knowledge? Since if we abstain from the longing for a life which exceeds the bodily if we abstain from that what is to be understood possibly in the sense of concepts like fear of death and the like, we have the question of the nature of our whole human individuality in it as something that remains for the human knowledge regarding death and immortality.

But it may seem today, as if in case of all considerations of spiritual life these important questions of death and immortality are disregarded. Since if one takes one of the official psychologies, you find, indeed, the phenomena of the soul life discussed in detail. However, as far as they face us in the everyday life, for example, the question of the development of concepts, the question of memory, of perception, of attention and the like, but you will look in vain for a discussion about the real being of our soul life. Yes, you can find the prejudice just in most scientific circles this soul life that someone must be a dilettante who wants to put these questions as scientific ones.

But this scientific thinking has now to turn to roads different from the usual ones if it wants to consider issues like death and immortality. There that psychology is no longer enough which one calls “psychology without soul,” a psychology with which only the phenomena of the soul life should be considered, without looking at the real being of that what rests in our own individuality and whose expression the phenomena of the soul experiences are. Now spiritual science or anthroposophy is an unusual point of view regarding these as well as other questions.

Indeed, the questions of death and immortality have emerged like from dark depths of spirit already since more than one century from the Western cultural life. One has interpreted it always as a dream of single persons if it appeared with a great spirit, as for example with Lessing. One regarded it as a meaningless dream if it appeared with such men whose names are called less within the cultural life of the last decades. Concerning the questions of death and immortality spiritual science is also not in any opposition to natural sciences. Only the opinion is often spread, as if natural sciences must reject what spiritual science has to say for its part. Thus, we can experience that whenever something new appears, as it happened, for example, in the last decade with the problems of life, one points to the fact that the assumption of a real spiritual life that exceeds the only bodily, material life must be overcome gradually and completely. Spiritual science is not forced at all to deny something that appears, for example, in such discussions like in that by Jacques Loeb (1859–1924, German-American biologist) at the First Monists' Congress (Hamburg, 1911) about the problem of life. However, spiritual science has to hear repeatedly, as well as at that time, that it is over now with a spiritual-scientific consideration. For one can hope that one will succeed, finally, in the laboratory in producing life under outer material conditions.

Compared to all such matters I would like to remind you of one thing. There were times when one did not doubt really that one could once create life in the laboratory. People who have thought something to themselves with the representation of the Homunculus in the second part of Goethe's Faust and have remembered that this representation of Homunculus was really a kind of dream of the physical research of the Middle Ages and earlier times. That means that the creation not only of subordinated living beings, but also of the highest, the human being in the laboratory was a dream of the naturalists once. People who cherished this dream intended by no means that then the spirit had to be abolished from any consideration of humanity and the world.

No spiritual consideration of life contradicts the hope of producing life from the composition of outer substances. No, only the direction of the habitual ways of thinking matters. The habitual ways of thinking that develop with someone who immerses himself more and more in spiritual science show a view of a certain factor exceeding the material in the development of the human being and humanity.

The purely materialistic view of the human life says: there we see a human being entering the earthly existence, and we observe how the material processes happen this and that way, and we see the human being gradually growing up from a clumsy being to a human being who familiarises himself with life, can accomplish tasks of life. Moreover, we see descending processes after ascending ones as it were which lead gradually to the dissolution of the physical body or to death.

This materialistic consideration of life turns its attention solely to what one can reach with the senses and with methods of thinking and researching which are based on sensory views. There one is probably forced to exceed that what is given with the moment of birth or conception, because one cannot explain everything that appears in the human being if one pays attention only to those factors that prevail between birth or conception and death. Then one speaks of hereditary factors. However, as far as one remains within the purely material approach, one believes that all factors, all elements that should explain the human life consist only of that what one can observe between birth and death, or what comes into the human life by the inherited qualities of the parents or other ancestors.

However, as soon as people investigate this heredity, they realise that it is rather superstitious to lead back everything that the human being can realise in his life possibly to hereditary factors. Just in the last decade a brilliant historian, Ottokar Lorenz (1832–1904), tried once to examine families whose descent relations were known to what extent the qualities of the parents, grandparents and so on can be recognised in the lives of the descendants. However, he could get on this way of the purely experiential observation to nothing but to say, if one looks up in the line of ancestors, one finds that among the twenty to thirty ancestors whom everybody can count upwards human beings are who were either genii or idiots, wise men or fools, musicians or other artists, so that one can find all qualities, which are found with any human being, and that one does not come far in the reality if one clings to the prejudices of scientific theories if one wants to explain these or those hereditary factors, this or that expression of the human character, this or that quality.

Spiritual science adds a spiritual core to that what one can find in the line of heredity as conditions of the human life, which we cannot find in that which we search with the parents, grandparents and so on, but which we have to search within a supersensible spiritual world. So that in the course of the incarnation process something combines with the physical factors that is not physical that is of spiritual kind. This spiritual that one cannot see with physical eyes is that being that we carry in us as the result of our former lives on earth as one says. As it is true that we lead back our physical origin to our ancestors, we have to lead back a spiritual origin to a spiritual lineage, that means, to ourselves. Spiritual science is just forced to speak not only of one life on earth of the human being, but of repeated lives on earth. Indeed, one has to go far back for reasons that may become obvious in the course of these talks if we want to search our being in our previous life. So we say in the spiritual-scientific sense: we bring our essence with us from a former life, we have experienced this former life, and we have gone through death and then through a life between death and our appearance in this life.

Spiritual science is also forced to imagine this essence going through death and a supersensible life between death and a new life on earth. This essence is not a product of the material existence, but collects and forms the matter as it were, so that we receive this physical corporeality. Hence, we speak in spiritual science of repeated lives on earth. This idea of the repeated lives on earth faces us necessarily from the Western thinking first with Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781) in the work which he left as his testament, in the Education of the Human Race. There he says about this teaching: “even if it is the oldest one what the human beings have confessed to, must it not appear again at the summit of the human development?” In his Education of the Human Race Lessing also answers to some questions that can be objected the repeated lives on earth. Indeed, if such things appear with an excellent person, then people who judge this excellent spirit normally say: he performed great achievements, but later he became addicted to this strange dream of the repeated lives on earth, and one has to grant the great Lessing that he could also commit this strange mistake.—Thus, every little spirit feels called to condemn the great spirits with their “terrible mistakes.” Nevertheless, this idea did not let single persons of the nineteenth century rest, and even before the recent Darwinist natural sciences approached, the idea of the repeated lives on earth appears as a necessity of the human thinking again. Thus, it faces us in a book by Drossbach (Maximilian D., 1810–1884) about human rebirth, a somewhat confused book from our standpoint, but an attempt that allows itself just compared with scientific thinking to represent this idea. Soon afterwards, a little community was to be found which put a prize on the best writing about the immortality of the soul, and the prize winning writing by Widemann (Gustav W., 1812–1876) which was published in 1851 dealt with the problem of immortality from the standpoint of reincarnation. Thus, I could still state many a thing how the thinking has gradually induced many persons to consider this idea of reincarnation.

Then the scientific view of the human being came that was based on Darwin. At first, it considered the human being materialistically, and it will consider it still this way for a long. But if you take my book Theosophy or other books which are written in the spirit of spiritual science and natural sciences at the same time, you will realise that the scientific thinking—thought through to the end—imposes the necessity to the human being to think of the idea of incarnation. Nevertheless, it is not only this. I would like to show not only a logical consequence, but also that, indeed, the human being must come to the idea of reincarnation on basis of the same principle which prevails in natural sciences, namely of the principle of experience. However, another question arises there, is anybody able to collect experiences of that what should come in from supersensible worlds what should produce the human body and leave this body at death again?

One can realise cursorily still without spiritual-scientific foundations that something mental works on the outer body of the human being; but one does not like such considerations particularly today. If the human beings looked more exactly at the physiognomy of the human being in its different sculptural forms if one also looked at the facial play, at the gestures, which are individual with every human being, at the creative spirit, one would soon get a sensation how the spirit is internally working on the body.

Observe a human being who has been working on the big questions of life for about ten years, namely in such a way, as one does it in the outer science or philosophy where one reflects on these matters without having to say a lot. On the other side, observe a human being who has dealt with these issues so that they have become inner problems to him, so that they have taken him in states of the highest bliss, but also to the highest pains and the deepest tragedy. Consider a human being who deals with the questions of knowledge, and look at him, after he has led such a soul life for ten years, and you will realise how this work expresses itself in his physiognomy, how, indeed, the humanely mental works into the forms of the body. May one pursue now by certain methods such working on the outer physical body further to that point where not only certain forms of our face are changed in such a way that into them the character of the soul life is pressed, but where the indefinite form which the human being has at first becomes his completely elaborated figure?

It is necessary that the human being leads his soul life beyond the point where it is in the everyday life today. He has to learn to seize the supersensible in himself, that which is accessible to no outer observation. Then every human being can find both points by mere reflection, so to speak, where our life directly finds the supersensible.

These two points are the transitions from the wake state to sleep and again from sleep to the wake state. Since nobody should think so illogically that the human soul life stops with falling asleep and comes again into being with awakening. Our soul life must be in any state of existence in sleep, it must be somewhere to put it another way. The big question emerges which maybe the child puts that is justified for someone who gets involved with the questions of knowledge, namely the question: where does the soul go when the human being falls asleep? We see also other processes stopping, we see, for example, a burning candle going out. May one also ask there, where to does the fire go? Then we say, the fire is a process that stops if the candle goes out, and which begins again if it is kindled again.—May we compare the bodily process of the human being to the candle and say: the soul life is a process that goes out if the human being falls asleep in the evening, and is kindled in the morning when he awakes again? It seems perhaps to be in such a way, as if one could use this comparison. However, this comparison becomes impossible if, indeed, one could prove that not for the usual perception or sensation, but for a sensation to be attained by careful soul preparation that can face us which leaves our body with falling asleep and visits us with awakening again. If this is in such a way that while falling asleep not only a process takes place like a going out flame, but if we can pursue what leaves the body in the evening while falling asleep and visits it in the morning again if we can prove this process in its reality, then a supersensible inside the human being exists. Then one asks us this supersensible: how does it work within the body?

Even the famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond (Emil Du B.-R., 1818–1896) pronounced the thought that one can understand the sleeping human being from the standpoint of natural sciences, but not the waking one in whom impulses, instincts, passions and so on surge up and down. You can read that what I have outlined today only briefly, more in detail in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds

I have described the methods there which we want to touch now briefly by which the human being gets around to getting to know the reality of that what leaves the body in sleep, and what with the awakening goes into him again. At first, we want to ask attentive soul viewers who have got a certain ability to listen to these important moments like falling asleep and awakening.

There we hear them saying what spiritual science can confirm absolutely that at first that changes what exists with sharp contours in the surroundings into something nebulous, into blurred forms. Then the falling asleep feels, as if his whole inner being is extended and does no longer depend on the forms of his skin; this is connected with a certain feeling of bliss. Then a strange moment occurs in which the human being can feel everything like in a brief vision that he has accomplished as satisfying moral things; this faces him vividly, and he knows that these are contents of his soul, he feels being in them. Then a jerk happens as it were, and the human being still feels: oh, this moment could last forever!—Some people just have this sensation who pay attention to the moment of falling asleep. The consciousness has disappeared.

The human being goes over to an inner essentiality at such a moment where the outer body plays no role, because the daily strain tires him. One feels as if the reality of the mental is scurrying. All methods of spiritual science which we can call experimental ones spiritual-scientifically consist in nothing but that the human being receives the inner power to keep that which is disappearing so that he can experience the moment of falling asleep completely consciously. The consciousness is kept. Since why does the consciousness dwindle while falling asleep? Because the human being cannot unfold that inner strength and willpower in the usual life to experience something else when the outer senses leave him. Let us ask ourselves, how much we experience in the usual life within the soul what is not stimulated by the outer impressions? There is a little left with most human beings surely. No wonder that the inner strength does not exist which can penetrate the soul-life and that is left by any outer experience at the moment, when it steps out while falling asleep. Any spiritual development is based on the penetration of our soul with the strength that the soul needs to receive the consciousness unless it receives it from the body. Meditation, concentration, and contemplation are experimental means to advance farther with the soul life than one can come in the usual life. I would like to bring in one example only.

Assuming that a human being can put a thought of benevolence or of something else in the centre of his experience and can exclude all the other thoughts, also those which one can get with the senses, to hold on this one thought only. Since the thoughts fly to the human being at such a moment as the bees fly to the flowers if one stands within the usual life. However, if one can have the strength to exercise concentration of thinking repeatedly, to practice meditative immersion, as soon as one can become free of the mere outer impressions, and delves repeatedly into pictorial thoughts which express something allegorically, then such a thought can startle the human soul-life, so that it becomes a stronger force than the human being normally has. Then such a human being falls asleep consciously, that means he experiences consciously that he grows with his soul life into a spiritual world. This is no dream, also no self-deception or self-suggestion, but something that is accessible, indeed, to every human being, but is to be reached only with care and energy. The human being can free himself completely from his physical corporeality. As he frees himself, otherwise, in sleep unconsciously from it, and as every human being is in sleep beyond the physical body, he will consciously live by such exercises in that what exists usually unconsciously beyond the human being. Briefly, the human being can experience a relief of his soul from the physical corporeality with soul exercises.

Indeed, one can always hold against such a representation that is based on inner experience: this is based on deceit! Nevertheless, whether it is based on deceit or on reality, this can be decided only by experience. Hence, I have to say repeatedly: what the human being believes to experience this way can absolutely be self-suggestion, for how far does the human being go self-deception! He can go so far that if he thinks, for example, only of a soda he already has its taste on the tongue. Something may well give the impression, as if it were perception of a spiritual world, but still it can be self-deceit. Hence, someone who does such exercises and makes his soul the experimenter must take all means to eliminate illusions. Nevertheless, in the end only the experience decides. Certainly, somebody can suggest the taste of a soft drink to himself, but it is another question whether he can quench his thirst with it.

There is the possibility to experience as reality what is in sleep beyond the physical body. How does one experience it? So that the human being makes his soul more and more independent and gets to know a quite new supersensible world. Indeed, he starts getting to know a world of spiritual light. Then something particular turns out there. The human being who otherwise does not consider his thoughts and mental pictures as realities takes them along when he leaves his body with his soul really. He loosens his conceptual life from all materiality, and this conceptual life experiences a transformation when the human being becomes free of his physical body. What I say now appears to materialistic minded people like daydreaming, even so it is reality. Our mere thoughts change into a world which we can compare—but only compare, it is different—with a propagating light with which we find the underlying cause of the things. So you get to the world in which you detach the thinking that is bound, otherwise, to the tool of the brain and submerge with your thinking in a newly appearing world. This expresses itself in the way that you feel more and more enlarged. You get to know a world of which the outer physical-sensory world is only a revelation. Spiritual beings, not atoms, form the basis of the outer sensory world, and we can penetrate as human beings into this spiritual world. So we are accepted by such a spiritual world as it were if we carry out this self-experiment in our soul.

We only attain a complete knowledge of the relation of this spiritual world to us human beings if we can also spiritually experience the moment of awakening. This is possible when the human being contemplates a lot about his inner life in meditation and concentration. For example, he can review that pictorially every morning or evening what he has experienced during the day or the day before to consider it contemplating or he contemplates his moral impulses and takes stock of himself. Then the human being gets around to experiencing the reverse moment consciously by such exercises where we submerge in our bodies that we experience, otherwise, unconsciously while awakening.

Then he experiences something that I can characterise only in the following way. You all may know that a healthy quiet sleep depends on our emotions. If the human being has thought ever so much, has exerted itself ever so much in his thinking, he falls easily asleep. But if anger, shame, remorse, and in particular a troubled conscience gnaw at him, he tosses and turns sleepless in bed. Not our thinking which we can carry over to the big spiritual world but our emotions can drive away the sleep.

Our emotions are associated with our soul life in the narrower sense. We share our thoughts with the world. The way in which our emotions just affect us is something intimately connected with what we ourselves are. Somebody who has learnt now in such a way to free his soul consciously from his body, also gets clear from immediate observation how he carries his emotions into the world into which he enters if he has become free of body. As blissful it makes us on one side to submerge in a world of spiritual light, free of the body, as much we feel chained in this world to our emotions gnawing at us. With it then we go into the spiritual world and have to carry it again into our body. However, by the mentioned exercises we find our emotional world again while submerging in our bodies. It faces us as something strange. We get to know ourselves submerging in our emotional world, and thereby we get to know, while we pursue it now consciously, what works in truth killing on our organism. I note here that I speak about death in a later talk that has a quite different meaning considering it with plants or animals than with the human being. Spiritual science does not take the easy way out to find these phenomena identical in the three realms if we pursue that consciously what has become the possession of our soul that it settles in our physical body and can work destroying in it. Then we get to know how our innermost being really forms the body while it combines with that what comes from father and mother and from the other ancestors as hereditary factors. There we see the human being entering in the physical life, we see him entering clumsily at first. He cannot yet speak; then we see the forms becoming more and more certain and see him becoming an active human being gradually.

Considering the whole development of the human being spiritual-scientifically, we realise how an inner essence develops and this forms the human being working on the body from the spiritual from birth or conception on. We find the same essence that works creatively on the body if we can pursue how it leaves the body and penetrates into a spiritual world. There we find two things: an element that enables us to pour out our own being like in a spiritual world of light; but we also find something in this essence that we must bring into this spiritual world, namely our emotional world, that is everything that we have got to know in life. In these two things we have on one side what is creative in the human being what leaves the body as our spiritual essence, goes through death and appears again in a new body after an interim and on the other side we have our emotions which we get to know by the spiritual-scientific view as a real being as that what destroys our body and leads to death.

Therefore, we realise how our spiritual essence enters in existence, builds up the body gradually, and we see this essence working the strongest in the first months where we do not yet have an inner soul life where we do not yet think. There we see the human being entering existence sleeping as it were. If we try to remember, we can come back to a certain point, not farther. We have slept into existence as it were. Only from the third, fourth years on the human being can feel as an ego. The reason is that the spiritual essence of the human being is busy forming the body at first. Then he comes to a point where the body has to grow only, and from then on the human being can use what flowed once in his body for his soul life which works within the physical body constantly in such a way that we take up the necessity of death at that time, where we start saying “I” to ourselves, up to which we can remember later where we begin an inner life.

What do we receive with this necessity of death? We receive the possibility to take up the outer world, to enrich our inside being perpetually, so that we become richer in life every day. In that part of our being that we carry in sleep into the spiritual world that forms our soul being everything is contained that we get as joys and sorrows, as pleasure and pain. While we live and develop a consciousness, we have the possibility for our inner essence to enrich it perpetually. We take this enrichment along if we go through death, but we can have it only because we had to destroy our bodies throughout life. Our body is built as it has developed from the preceding life. However, we absorb something new perpetually that enriches our soul life. Nevertheless, this new can no longer penetrate completely into our physical body, but only up to a certain degree. That expresses itself by the fact that we feel the fatigue of yesterday removed; but it cannot completely penetrate into our body. What penetrates into our body cannot develop completely in the bodily.

We take the former example once again. A human being works on questions of knowledge for ten years. Thus, his physiognomy has changed after ten years if this activity has been a matter of his heart. However, his body limits this change. The desire to develop internally further may still exist; but, the later absorbed can no longer work into the body. Hence, we see, because the body puts a border, the richer inner life beginning when the soul has poured forth into the body. First, we see the physiognomy of such a human being changing—of a thinker, poet or artist; then only we see the rich spiritual life developing. Not before our outside world limits us, we develop so surely, but we can no longer carry into our physical bodies what we develop in ourselves because our body is built up according to that what we have got in a former life on earth. Therefore, we have to carry through death what we still get internally. This helps us to build up the next body, so that we have built only in a body of the next life what must destroy our present body.

A view presents itself there that fits into the scientific thinking, a view of what death and immortality means what the repeated lives on earth mean. There we realise if we change our physiognomy how the human being has built that into his body what he has got in former lives on earth. We see the results of our former lives in the developing body, and we see in that what we get now what stands in the way of our bodily, so to speak, as a spiritual, the developing elements of our future life.

Spiritual science regards the earthly life as something that is between something former and something following. The later considerations will show how our perspective increases to the times of our existence which the human being spends free of body in the supersensible worlds. In order that such matters would not remain pipe dreams, it is necessary that we look at the methods that enable the soul to perceive even if it lacks the physical brain. Only because the human being enables the soul to perceive that in the supersensible what must remain, otherwise, a mere assertion it becomes a proven reality.

Today we stand strictly speaking only at the beginning of a science that deals with such matters. Just many people consider themselves as the best experts of the matters, as the most enlightened ones and regard these matters as fantasies. I would not be surprised if anybody said, this is daydreaming that completely contradicts any scientific truth!—Nobody will find it more comprehensible than I do if anybody says this. But while the human beings become engrossed more and more in spiritual science, they realise that we can prepare our souls by meditation so that it can know about itself, can develop inner forces by which it can still know, can still perceive if it leaves the body and can no longer perceive with the organs of the body. This has to be found experimentally—one may say, it is to be found spiritual-experimentally—that the soul is something that one can experience if it can no longer use the bodily organs. It goes through births and deaths and works in such a way that it builds up the body that goes through death and collects new forces to build the body during the earthly existence. With the questions of the nature of the human being, you attain answers to the questions of death and immortality at the same time.

Goethe said once in an essay that nature invented death to have much life. Spiritual-scientific research proves such a notion to be true saying, in any life, the human being enriches his soul life; he must die because his respective body is built as an effect of his former lives on earth. While killing his body, he creates the possibility to work into in a new body what now he cannot work into his body and into the world.

Such a worldview influences our lives deeply. If it penetrates our whole being if it remains not only a theory, we feel such a truth only as a truth of life. Since we say to ourselves when we have crossed the middle of our lives when our hairs begin becoming grey and our faces get wrinkles: life is going downhill!—Why is it going downhill? Because that what the soul has got cannot be brought into the body. However, what we have gained internally, and what must destroy our present bodies is worked into a new body. Someone can argue easily: you spiritual researchers state that the human being becomes weak in old age, so you say that just with the body the mind dwindles away!—As this objection is a given, it is a given that one only admits that such a man does not think about that: from what is our present brain built?—It is built from our former lives! We must destroy our bodies and our brains with our thoughts. But the thoughts, which kill the bodies, are those, which use the brain. It is obvious that something must stop that is bound to a tool like the brain. However, our spiritual being does not stop with it. That is why it occurs that we do no longer find the tools in ourselves to realise what we have appropriated in the present life if the human being moves in downward direction. Then this yet works in a soul life which is not bound to the brain, and which cannot be expressed by cerebral thoughts. This prepares itself to act creatively in the next life. One says it not only in Goethe's sense that nature invented death to have much life—but we have also to say, death is there to work out that in new forms what we acquire internally in life. In this sense, we can say if we see the age approaching: thank God, that life can go downward, that death can be! Since if it did not exist, we could not take up what flows towards us from the world in such a way that it forms us. We need death, so that we can make that what we experience the contents of our own being. Hence, we regard death as that by which just life can advance. Hence, there is no better adviser than spiritual science; it is not only a comforter towards the fear of death, but it gives us strength, while we are walking towards death and see the outside dying. Since we know that then the inside grows. Spiritual science will raise the whole life to a higher level at which life seems meaningful and reasonable.

From the following talks will arise that life does not proceed endlessly forward and backward, but that also reincarnation has a beginning and an end. Now I would only like to point to it. From that which spiritual science has to say about death and immortality arises that we have the effects of our present life in a following life.

The complete human existence disintegrates into the existence between birth and death and into that between death and a new birth. There we see what Goethe felt in terms of the simple life extended to the whole life while we look back not only at the little yesterday, but also at the big yesterday where we made our present life. We look there at the joys or pains of life and feel: joy strengthens us for the future; we must experience grief for overcoming obstacles to strengthen ourselves also for the future. There we see a big contrast expanding in the future life and think of the Goethe's verses:

If yesterday is clear and accessible,
If today you work freely and strongly,
Then you can hope for a tomorrow
That is also fortunate.

Happiness and optimism flow to us from the internally conceived spiritual science showing us: indeed, the spirit forms the material and survives while the material life is destroyed to reveal itself always anew, and which applies the newly acquired. I would like to summarise this for the purposes of the today's evening with the words:

While living the spirit shows
Always its power only,
Dying, however, the spirit shows,
How through all deaths
It always survives to higher life.

The challenges presented by our age really have to be faced by every individual human being today. I have made it quite clear on a number of occasions that to understand the way individuals need to face those challenges we must be aware of how human evolution progresses all over the globe. The whole course of human evolution can only be clearly understood if we gain more profound insight into the powers that intervene in the course of earth evolution as a whole and also in human lives.

I have used a number of different approaches to show that as human beings we are part of an ongoing evolution that may be said to be taking its normal course. Spiritual science enables us to follow its progress over extended periods of time. I have also pointed out that there are certain powers that have different goals for mankind than the powers who desire to guide humankind in the normal course of evolution, a course during which the earth repeatedly comes to physical manifestation. Some of those powers we would call luciferic, others ahrimanic. I have spoken of this a number of times. It is necessary to take a very serious view of these things today, but our hearts and minds cannot really achieve this serious mood unless we pay proper attention to the way these luciferic and ahrimanic powers intervene directly in human lives.

As you know, a new era in human evolution started during the 15th century, very different from anything that went before. Thinking of this you will want to be aware of the many ways in which life is different in the present age, which had its beginning in the 15th century, if we compare it to the preceding age. We may say that one particular feature of the present age is that intellectual thinking has developed since the middle of the 15th century. Humankind has to undergo a major process of education in the course of Earth evolution. Part of it is this training of the intellect. Human beings had to find out, as it were, how human life can be lived when the emphasis is on intellectual thinking. They could never have been raised to be truly free individuals if the intellectual principle had not become part of them. We have no clear idea today of the extent to which people differed from us before the middle of the 15th century, particularly in this respect. We tend to take the things we are given for granted, without giving them much thought. We are now generally dealing with the peoples of civilized countries who are inclined to think with the intellect, and we have come to believe that people have always been thinking like this. That is not the case, however, Before the middle of the 15th century people were thinking in a different way. They simply did not think in the abstract terms in which we think today. Their thinking was very much more vivid and concrete, immediately bound up with the objects of the world around them. They were much more bound up with the feelings and will impulses that can be experienced in the human soul. We are living very much in our thoughts, though we are not sufficiently aware of this. We are not even aware of the source from which this way of thinking, the intellectual approach which we take so much for granted, has evolved. We shall have to go a long way back in human evolution to get a real understanding of the origins of this way of thinking, this intellectualism. Another question we must ask ourselves is whether anything still remains of the human activity out of which our thinking has evolved.

You know that older evolutionary forces persist into later ages and continue to be present side by side with those that are normal to the age in question. This also applies to our thinking. Reminders, echoes of thinking, of an activity similar to our thinking are experienced in our dreams, when a whole world of images emerges from our night time sleep. Experience teaches us to distinguish between the world of thoughts we evolve between waking up and going to sleep and the world of dream images which we experience in an entirely passive way. If we go back to earlier times in human evolution we find that the further back we go the more does the life of the soul during waking hours come to resemble the mental activity we know in our dreams today. Present-day thinking is the fruit of later stages of evolution. During earlier stages along this path the human soul developed activities more akin to dreaming. If we follow this dreamlike activity of the human soul a long way back we find ourselves going beyond Earth evolution as we know it. We come to a time when the earth had taken a physical form in the cosmos that preceded the present one. We have got used to calling it the Old Moon evolution. Human beings were part of this as well, but in an entirely different form. During that Moon evolution, i.e. the time when the earth materialized in a form that preceded the present one, the human being, the true ancestor of modern man, was still completely etheric. His soul became active in a way that was definitely dreamlike, consisting of dream images. The peculiar thing about this was that it related to the outer world in a way that is quite different from the soul activity we know as thinking. I would say that when our soul is active in thought we find ourselves rather isolated within the world. The world is outside us, it has its own processes. We reflect on those processes in our minds, but just when we think we are reflecting most profoundly on those external processes we actually feel ourselves entirely outside them. Indeed we often feel that we are best able to think about those external processes if we keep ourselves well isolated from them, withdrawing into ourselves. The human ancestor who was dreamy in his thinking, if I may put it like this, did not have that feeling. Developing in his way in his dreams what we develop in our way when we are thinking, he knew himself to be intimately bound up in everything he experienced with what went on in the world. We see the clouds, we think about them, but we do not feel that the powers alive in the clouds are also alive in our thinking. Our human ancestor did have the feeling that the powers alive in a cloud were also alive in his thinking. This ancestor said—and I must translate what he said into our language, for his language was a silent one compared to ours: The powers that are alive and active in the cloud out there produce images in my mind. He saw himself no more isolated from the great universe in which the cloud revealed its essential nature than my little finger is able to think itself isolated from the rest of me. If I were to cut it off it would wither; it would no longer be my finger. The human ancestor felt that he could not exist apart from the universe that belonged to him. My little finger might well say: The blood which pulses through the whole of the body also pulses within me; the whole of my organic life is governed by the same laws as the organic life of the rest of the body. The human ancestor said: I am part of the universe; the power that pulses within me as I evolve images is the same as the power that is alive and active in the forming of clouds. That is how the human ancestor felt himself to be closely related, intimately bound up, with the whole world.

We need to feel isolated from everything that goes on outside us in our thinking, as though the umbilical cord has been cut and we are separate from the essential origins and causes of the existing world. In ordinary life we are not aware of the pulses beating throughout the universe. Our thinking has grown abstract. Our thinking tells us nothing, as it were, of what is alive and active within it. This provides the actual potential for the freedom of human beings, a freedom where we do not feel that something is thinking in us but that we ourselves do the thinking.

The human ancestor was unable to form ideas independently of the universe as a whole. The human ancestor felt himself to be bound up with the existing world; he knew that this existing world contained more than just abstract forces of nature. He knew that power was also wielded by entities that differed from human beings, entities that did not have a physical body such as the human body, though human beings might feel that they had citizenry of the universe in common with them. The ancestor was not aware of ‘forces of nature’; he felt himself to be in communion with nature spirits. Today we may say that everything that happens in nature follows the laws of nature, and we are part of that nature. For the human ancestor who lived in a far distant past it was natural to say that everything that happened in nature outside himself happened out of will impulses of the spirits of nature. We say the earth attracts the bodies that are on it due to gravity, and according to the law of gravity the gravitational pull decreases at a rate that is proportional to the square of the distance between the two objects. We call this a special case of a law of nature. When we speak of nature we base ourselves on such abstract notions. The human ancestor knew that an essential spiritual element was present in the phenomenon we have made into an abstract gravitational force.

Certain spiritual powers who may be said to be involved in human evolution thus developed a relationship to human beings. This would normally cease the moment Earth evolution proper began for the human being. At that point human beings would be released from the tutelage of those spiritual powers, powers they had felt to be flowing and floating into them during the Old Moon stage. So we must ask ourselves what it was that made human beings grow independent of the guidance of spirits with whom they had felt at one, however dimly. It happened when the mineral kingdom became part of human nature. In those far distant times of which I have just spoken, human beings did not yet have the mineral kingdom within them. Their organization would not have been perceptible to our present-day sense organs, for it did not yet include mineral elements.

To grasp this without getting caught up in preconceived notions we need to consider what it truly means when an organism includes the mineral kingdom. People tend to be superficial in their thinking about such things. We look at a mineral, a stone, and quite rightly consider it to be the way it presents itself to our observation. Then, however, we look at a plant in exactly the same way we look at a stone. In reality it is not the actual plant we see. A plant is really something entirely beyond sensory perception. Consider a system of forces that in a sense has the qualities of an image. Its relationship to the mineral kingdom is that this otherwise invisible organization soaks up the mineral kingdom and the forces that are active between individual component elements in the kingdom. I have a plant before me. It is an invisible system of forces that absorbs mineral principles from the mineral kingdom. The result is that the mineral aspect occupies the space also occupied by the invisible system of forces. I see this mineral aspect, though it is merely something the plant, which is not perceptible to the senses, has absorbed. That is how it is even with a plant. When we talk about plants today we are really talking only of the minerals contained within them and not about the plants themselves. It is important that we clearly understand this in the case of a plant, for it also applies to animals and humans, only more so.

During the Old Moon stage, then, human beings did not have this mineral inclusion. Human beings living on the present earth have been made in such a way that they need the mineral kingdom, having absorbed the mineral kingdom and its forces into them, as it were. What significance does this have for human nature? In the first place human beings acquired a mineral body for thinking in images the way they did at the earlier stage. As evolution progressed the mineral human body provided the basis for intellectual thinking. This happened at a relatively late state, from the middle of the 15th century onwards, having been a long time in preparation.

Modern intellectual thinking is based on the fact that human beings have received a mineral body into them. As human beings we need a mineral body first and foremost to be able to think. The older form of thinking in images had been based on what we call the third elemental kingdom. The mineral kingdom had the function to transform this pre-earthly form of thinking into our earthly way of forming ideas on the basis of thought. Within the great scheme of things the spirits with whom human beings had to feel themselves connected, in forming those ideas that were images in the distant past, were then relieved of their function. We will have to picture those spirits rather differently from the way we are accustomed to picture non-human entities. People, even people of good will who may admit that there is more to life than is apparent to the senses, tend to stick too close to the human form. This anthropomorphism takes over whenever people try and create an image in their minds of anything that is above the human sphere. It is easy to accuse Feuerbach and Buechner¹ of being anthropomorphists. We have seen more than enough of this kind of thing. We have seen the legal way of thinking evolve in the Western world, with earthly misdeeds and crimes judged by earthly judges who impose penalties, and so on. The rewards and punishment meted out for sins, i.e. for something belonging to a sphere beyond this earth and seen more as imperfections in the Christian faith, have gradually come to look more like the proceedings in an earthly court of law. The religious ideas of the West have a great deal of human jurisprudence in them. We let the gods mete out punishments of the kind we know earthly courts of law impose. If we truly wish to get beyond the merely human we must firmly decide not to think in entirely human terms. We must think beyond anything anthropomorphic, and that indeed is what really matters in human life. That is the approach we must use if we want to see clearly that the spirits who influenced the thinking in images which human beings had at the time of the Old Moon lost that function in the normal progress of human evolution but are not prepared to accept this with good grace. We might ask why they do not submit to the will of the gods who guide normal progress. They simply do not. We have to accept that as a fact. The original intention was that they should only influence dreams within the human sphere and everything related to dreaming. In the context of today's lecture we refer to them as luciferic spirits. Their proper sphere would be everything that has to do with dreaming and anything related to this. They are not satisfied with this, however. They haunt the human way of thinking that has evolved out of their own sphere, human thinking now bound to the mineral sphere. When we allow anything that normally rules our dreams, the life of the imagination, to enter into our thinking we fall prey in our thinking to luciferic nature, to the influence of spirits that should only have influenced the old form of thinking in images that belonged to the human ancestors. They have retained their power and instead of limiting themselves to our dreaming, our life of the imagination, our creative artistic work, they are constantly trying to influence our thoughts and make them dependent on impulses similar to those that existed in pre-earthly times. Our thinking is still greatly influenced by elements coming from this source, by the luciferic principle.

It is justifiable to ask in all seriousness what powers are these that have such an influence on our thinking. These influences arise from the sphere where we human beings are still rightfully dreaming and rightfully asleep above all else. They come from the sphere of our feelings and emotions. We experience our feelings the way we normally experience dreams and we experience our will the way we experience sleep. There we are still rightly cocooned in a world which becomes a luciferic world as soon as it evolves in our thinking. We therefore will not manage our evolution as human beings properly unless we make the effort to evolve other thoughts as well, thoughts increasingly independent of mere feelings and emotions, of anything arising in us out of dreamlike inner experience even when we are fully awake. Theoretical principles will not help us achieve this, only life itself can do so. We find, however, that the mental habits humankind has acquired put up great resistance to the cultivation of mind and soul that is needed. We must be on the lookout for this resistance. We find that in the present time in particular people are not prepared to listen to anything that does not arise from their own inner prejudices, their feeling of how things should go, their personal preferences. They are not in the habit of listening to anything which in a way has been decided independently of human beings, requiring merely their consent. I should like to give you a brief example which I used on one occasion to explain to someone that there is an important difference with regard to what human beings are thinking.

Many years ago I gave a lecture in a town in southern Germany—today it is no longer in southern Germany—on the wisdom taught in the Christian faith.² —As you know, it is always necessary to limit the subject matter presented in a particular lecture and one can only speak within that context. When people hear just a single lecture, such a single lecture will impress one person in one way and another in a different way, particularly if one has been objective and dispassionate in presenting the subject. It certainly would not be possible for anyone to get an idea concerning the total philosophy that lies behind a single lecture if they just listened to that one lecture. If the wisdom taught within the Christian faith is the subject for example, it will of course be impossible to conclude from the contents of the lecture what the speaker thinks about the connection between light and electricity, say. It is therefore possible for something to happen the way it did on that occasion. I spoke about the wisdom taught within the Christian faith and two Roman Catholic priests were in the audience. They came up to me afterwards and said: ‘No objection can be raised to what you have been saying’—this by the way was many years ago now—‘but we have to say that whilst it is true that we say the same thing we do say it in such a way the everybody can understand it’. My reply was: ‘Reverend fathers, surely it is like this: You or I may have some kind of inner feeling that we are speaking for everybody, but that is not the point, for that is a subjective feeling. After all it is perfectly natural—if we go entirely by our feeling I, too, must believe that I am speaking for everybody, just as you think you do; that is self-evident; otherwise we would do it differently. But we are now living in an age when our belief that something is justifiable does not count. We need to let the facts speak for themselves. We must learn to look to the facts. Subjectively you believe you are speaking for everybody. But now let me ask you about the facts. Does everybody still come to your church? That would show that you are speaking for everybody. You see, I speak to those who do not come to your church to hear you speak. My words are for those who also have the right to hear of the wisdom taught in Christianity.’ That is how we must take our orientation from what the facts have to tell.

It is necessary for us to tear ourselves away from our subjective feelings. If we do not do so the luciferic element will enter into our thinking. We would not have gone through the truly dreadful campaign of untruthfulness that has gone around the world in the last five years, the final consequence of something that has long been in preparation, if people had learned to pay rightful attention to what the facts have to tell and not to their emotions, with nationalists the worst in stirring up such emotions.

On the one hand there is the absolute necessity today to do something about our thinking and to comply even if something goes against the grain. On the other hand people dislike having to be so true to reality that one looks to the facts for guidance.

We shall not be able to attain to the higher worlds and the knowledge to be gained there if we do no train ourselves in rigid adherence to the facts of the external world. Once you have got at least to some extent into the habit of liking to hear the facts you will often suffer tortures when people of the present age want to tell you something. Very often the kind of thing you hear people say is: ‘Oh, someone said something and that was frightful, quite terrible!’ Terrible in what way? You say is was terrible but that only tells me how you felt about it. I really want to hear exactly what it was. ‘Well, it really was terrible what was said there…’ And these people simply do not understand. All the time they want to describe their subjective feelings concerning the matter, whilst you want to hear an objective report of what they actually saw. It is especially when people tell you something someone else has told them, that it is quite impossible to tell if they are simply passing on what they have heard or if they have actually looked into the matter they are talking about. This is an area where one has to remind people again and again that truthfulness concerning the knowledge to be found in supersensible spheres can only be achieved if we train ourselves as far as possible to adhere closely to the facts in the sense-perceptible world. That is the only way in which human beings can overcome the luciferic elements that stream into their thoughts—by learning to base ourselves on the facts.

On the one hand mankind is open to luciferic influences, on the other to ahrimanic influences. It had to be said that thinking here on earth evolved from earlier stages of human soul life when human beings absorbed a mineral body, as it were. This mineral body is indeed the organ for the earthly way of thinking. It does however bring it predominantly into the sphere of the powers we call ahrimanic.

We can of course become aware of the need to base ourselves on the facts, on a real world that will get us out of the habit of being swayed by our subjective emotions. We must not, however, fall prey to the kind of thinking that is nothing but an inner activity arising from the mineral body. Here we come upon a truth that many people find highly unpalatable.

You know how some are idealists or spiritualists and others are materialists. There is plenty of discussion in the world as to which is the right approach, spiritualism or materialism. All these debates are of no value whatsoever for certain regions of the human organization. Human beings can develop in two ways. We can use the mineral body we have absorbed into ourselves as the instrument for our thinking, and indeed we have to use it, otherwise we would merely be dreaming. But we can also rise beyond this instrument in our thoughts; we can develop a spiritual point of view, spiritual vision. If we do this we will of course have been thinking with the aid of our material organization, but we will have used this to reach a further stage of human development, ascending to the world of the spirit as a result. On the other hand we can stop at the point where as earth beings we let our mineral body do the thinking. It is perfectly able to do so. That in fact is the danger, and materialism cannot be said to be wrong in its views, particularly where thinking is concerned. This mineral body is no mere photographic print. It is able to think for itself, though its thinking is subject to the limits of life on earth. We need to raise the experience our mineral body is able to give us into the spheres that lie beyond sensory perception.

It is therefore possible to say that it may indeed be true that human thoughts are merely something exuded by the human mineral organization. That may indeed be right, but human beings must first do it right.

Human beings have the freedom to develop on earth in such a way that they are merely the product of matter. Animals cannot do this; they do not get to the point where mineral inclusion leads to the development of thinking activity. Animals cannot choose to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view. Human beings are at liberty to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view; all it needs is the will to do so out of a materialistic attitude to life.

Human freedom is such that people are indeed free to make materialism come true for the human kingdom, that is, they can take a course that will lead to human beings on earth concerning themselves only with material things. Fundamentally speaking, therefore, it is a matter of choice if we become materialists. If we are strong enough to bring to realization what people are told is a materialistic attitude then this attitude will be made to come true by human beings.

This influence on human beings comes from ahrimanic powers. They want to keep everything connected with Earth evolution at the point which has been reached for human beings by that very Earth evolution—that is the point of having a mineral organization. They want to make human beings perfect, but only as far as their mineral organization is concerned. The luciferic powers want to keep human beings, who now have acquired a mineral organization, at the earlier stage that was right for them before they acquired a mineral organization. So we have two powers pulling at the traces, luciferic and ahrimanic powers. The luciferic spirits want to get human beings to a point where they finally cast off their mineralized bodies and go through an evolution that has no relevance in earth life and has merely been an episode in earth life. The luciferic spirits aim for the gradual elimination of everything relating to the earth from the whole evolution of mankind. The ahrimanic spirits aim to take firm hold of this earthly, mineral aspect of human beings, isolate it from progressive evolution and let it stand on its own. That is how luciferic and ahrimanic spirits are pulling in different directions.

It is absolutely vital that having presented the large outline we now come to apply this to ordinary everyday life. We do not consider a U-shaped bar of iron to be a horse-shoe when it is in fact a magnet. In the same way we really should not consider human life to be entirely the way it may appear on the outside. If you shoe a horse with magnets you fail to realize that a magnet has more to it than a horse-shoe. Yet it happens quite often nowadays that people speak of human life exactly like someone who shoes his horse with magnets rather than with horse-shoes. People have no hesitation in speaking of positive and negative electricity in the inorganic sphere, or of positive and negative magnetism, yet they hesitate to speak of luciferic and ahrimanic elements in human life. These are just as effective in human life as positive and negative magnetism are in the inorganic sphere. It is just that the idea of positive and negative magnetism is more easily understood. It does not take as much effort to grasp it as it does to grasp the idea that there are luciferic and ahrimanic elements. That is also the reason why we shall only learn to deal with the empty talk one hears today, empty talk that turns into lies, by knowing that it is luciferic by nature.

Similarly we shall only learn to deal with everything that shows itself here and there as the materialistic point of view by knowing that it is ahrimanic by nature. In future mere external characterization will not get us anywhere when we want to understand human life; all we would be doing is talk around the subject and commit the most stupid of errors when we try and apply such ideas to real life. One thing we would not be doing is to see human life in such a way that social impulses can be gained from our knowledge of human institutions. This has a very much to do with the utter seriousness required when looking at everything connected with evolutionary trends where humankind is concerned. We cannot gain understanding of the life we are now living unless we raise our vision from earthly concerns to spheres beyond this earth. There is a particular point to this.

Looking back into earlier stages of human evolution—though not as far back as those I have spoken of earlier—people generally base themselves on such historical documents as are available. There are historians—well-known names—who say that the history of humankind is made up of everything to be found in the written records. If you start from such a definition of history, like the historian Leopold von Ranke, you will obviously arrive at a particular kind of history. The art of writing is itself part of history, however, it has evolved from something else, and in real terms one cannot do anything with this kind of definition.

We need only go back as far as Chaldean-Babylonian times, to ancient Egyptian times, and we shall find that at that period of human evolution human beings still related to the cosmos in a very different way. People today have no real idea of what it meant to connect one's life to the course of the stars, the planets, and their position relative to the fixed stars of the zodiac. These things have become an empty abstraction nowadays. Do you think a modern astrologer delving into ancient astrological writings to compile his horoscopes—if at least he does search through the old writings, and does not produce new ones; the new ones are terrible!—has even the slightest idea of the living connection which the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans felt to exist between human beings and the movements and positions of the stars viewed from the earth? Everything is different today. It has to be said that an important part of human evolution since those times has been the narrowing down of human awareness to the physical world. What did those Egyptians know of the earth? It was the ground under their feet. They knew more about the heavens. They moved in the vertical in gaining their experience. The ancient Greeks did not yet go into the horizontal either; they, too, gained their experience by going vertically. The vertical came to be reduced as the horizontal started to spread. The maximum limitation human beings experienced in their knowledge of the heavens came with the great increase in knowledge of the earth that came when men sailed around the globe and found that having sailed away to the west they would return from the east. It was necessary for human understanding in the vertical direction to become obscured. Human beings had to be isolated from the universe so that they could find within themselves the only power that can lead to human freedom. Moral impulses will arise out of this human freedom in their turn.

Human beings therefore no longer relate to the spheres beyond the earth in the vertical fashion the ancient Greeks and Chaldeans did. We have had the training that only a horizontal surface can give and must now ascend again in moral, ethical terms. We must learn how human life is influenced by powers that do not show themselves in the course taken by the world that exists outside us. Those are the luciferic and ahrimanic powers.

People tend to put their minds to other things, however, and sometimes I also have to tell you something relating to our spiritual movement that takes its orientation in anthroposophy. This has accepted the task of working out of the full seriousness the time demands and listening to the language spoken from the cosmos beyond this earth, as it were, a language which tells us that we must once again come to see the way the human being is connected with the whole cosmos. Again and again, however, things make themselves heard in this work—please forgive the abrupt change of subject—which even today draw attention to some very peculiar points of view taken by people who oppose our aims of furthering the progress of mankind. Let me read you a passage from a letter that is really typical. As I said, please forgive the abrupt change of subject but we are obliged to inform you of all kinds of things that are going on at the present time with the purpose of undermining and destroying this movement which endeavours to take up the challenge of the present age.

There is someone in Norway³ who had made it his task to destroy our movement. To assure himself that he has a right to do so, this man is writing to leading figures—that is how one does these things nowadays. He wrote to a publication called Politisch-anthropologische Monatsschrift [Political Anthropological Monthly]. This journal sent him the following information: ‘Dr Steiner is a Jew of the purest water. He is connected with the Zionists, indeed associated with them, and works for the Entente.’ The editor added that they—i.e. people of this kind—'have had their eye on him for some time.’

I just wanted to tell you this in conclusion, as yet another case among the many one gets today, with a new one coming up almost daily. That is the attitude anthropologists are now taking to the efforts being made in the anthroposophical field.

• 1 . Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, German philosopher. Referring to Feuerbach's anthropomorphism, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly quoted from his book Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), e.g. in a lecture given in Dornach on 15 October 1921 (Anthroposophie als Kosmosophie, GA 207, English title Cosmosophy).
  
  Ludwig Buechner, German physician and materialist philosopher.
• 2 . ‘Die Weisheitslehren des Christentums in Lichte der Theosophie’ (The wisdom taught in the Christian faith in the light of Theosophy),Colmar, 21 November 1905 (no written record in existence).
• 3 . Details not known.

For the subject of these lectures, I have chosen an account of man's development during a particular period of the past, of his situation today, and of the outlook for his future evolution on this Earth-planet. No world-conception which has had any influence upon Western civilization, or its American off-shoot, has been content to deal only with present-day man and to show how the individual fits into the pattern of world-population. The world-conceptions acceptable to Western civilization have always emphasized the place of man in the whole course of human history on Earth. They have always shown the relationship between man of the present and of the past, no matter whether they go back only to a certain point—as the Old Testament does in describing the history of the Earth—or whether they trace man right through the stages of cosmic evolution.

The philosophies of the East, and even the early philosophies of Europe, if they did not belong to our modern civilization, were less concerned with this outlook. They were content to envisage man in terms of space only. The feeling we all have as a result of living within Western evolution makes it quite impossible for us to be satisfied with this spatial picture. There is a sort of psychological instinct in us to see ourselves in a brotherly association not only with men living today but also with men of the past; and unless we include both past and present we do not feel that we have a real notion of mankind.

But we can never have any satisfying idea of the historical development of man, whether in a wider or in a narrower sense, if we are limited to the results of ordinary anthropology. Man is a being whose evolution we cannot comprehend with the aid of nothing but external documents, however brilliantly they may be interpreted. Man is a being of body, soul and spirit; he is a being who has been penetrated, to a lesser or greater extent, by the spirit, in such a way that consciousness has been alive within him. The whole nature and being of man can be seen in the development of his consciousness, just as the being of a plant is finally revealed to the senses in the flower.

Let us therefore go a little more deeply into this most vital aspect of human evolution—the evolution of consciousness. When we consider man's consciousness as it is today we can make certain distinctions. In our ordinary waking condition, as we know it from waking in the morning to the time of falling asleep, we develop a more or less clear and luminous life of ideas which grow out of our life of feeling as the flower grows out of the plant. Over against this clear and luminous life of ideas there is a further condition which never really becomes quite clear, but is more or less unconscious, dark, inwardly surging and weaving. Even deeper than the feelings, which do, after all, quite directly stimulate our life of thought and ideas—much deeper within our being there is our surging will. And I have often described to anthroposophists how in his willing man is strictly speaking, asleep, even during his waking state. We never experience, in the waking conditions of our present-day consciousness, what lives within our willing. We have an idea that we are going to do this or that, but in this there is as yet no willing—only the intention to will clothed in the idea. Then the intention plunges into the depths of the human being, of which his consciousness has no clearer idea than it has of dreamless sleep. It then emerges as the will seen in the action of our arms and hands, legs and feet; in the activity we exercise on objects in the external world.

Whenever we act thus through the will on our own body, or in order to effect some change in the external world, we become aware of it through our ideas—ideas which also have some quality of feeling. Our ordinary consciousness perceives only the beginning and the end of willing, the intention in the form of an idea, and then again, also in the form of an idea, the consciousness observes our own movements or those in the external world which arise out of these intentions. All that lies between—how our intentions transfer themselves, via the soul, into our organism, how the soul arouses the physical warmth, the movement of the blood and muscles which then produce an act of will—of all this we are as unaware as we are of the events in dreamless sleep.

If we really manage to observe what happens, we must say that we are actually awake only in our ideas (our conceptual life); we dream in our feelings and sleep in our willing. Our knowledge of this willing is just like the experience of waking in the morning and noticing that our organism has somehow recuperated and refreshed itself. We perceive the effects of sleep when we wake. Similarly, we have the intention to perform some act of will; we transmit it unconsciously into our organism where, as though in sleep, it passes over into activity and deed; and we wake up again only with our action and see the result of what has been going on within us, of which we have been quite unconscious.

Such in broad outline is man's experience of his own being in waking, dreaming and sleeping. After all, the dreams we have when we are sleeping have very little relation to our ideas. They obey quite other laws than the logical laws of our conceptual life. But if we observe things closely we shall see that the course of our dreaming, with its marvelous dramatic quality that is so often typical of dreams, bears an extra-ordinarily close resemblance to our life of feeling. If in our waking life, we were capable only of feeling, those feelings would not, it is true, be very like the pictures of our dreams. But the dramatic quality, tensions, impulsive wishes and crises of the inner life, with their turmoil of emotion, are displayed in our feelings just as vaguely—or if you like, just as indefinitely—as they are in our dreams.; with this difference, that the basis of a dream lies in its pictures, whereas our feelings live in those peculiar experiences which we describe in terms of our inner life. Thus in the present state of human consciousness we may include our feelings and actual dreaming as part of the dream-state, and in the same way include our willing and actual dreamless sleep as part of the sleeping state.

We must, however, realize that what we are now describing as the basic quality of our present-day consciousness has passed through a process of evolution in a comparatively recent period, though we do not like taking much notice of this in our materialistic age. But you will not understand the surviving documents of human thought, even of the early Christian centuries, unless you realize that the inner activity of men in those days was quite different from what lives within our souls today as the activity of thought. In particular it would be a complete psychological error to seek to understand Scotus Erigena's work, “On the Parts of Nature” (De Divisione Naturae) written in the ninth century, for example, or the older writings on alchemy, with the conceptual intellect which has become normal today. We simply cannot understand what they were driving at if our modern type of thinking is employed. We can read the words, but we shall not grasp the meaning.

Human thinking since the fifteenth century has acquired a particular character which may have developed only slowly but has more or less already reached is culminating point. Yet this way of thinking, which represents the actual waking condition for modern man, is not really capable of giving him any satisfaction. A man can think, and that is the only luminous experience of his waking life. He can think, and that is the only means by which he can draw on his inner powers and establish the marvelous results of the sciences. Yet basically this modern thinking can give man no satisfaction for his inner yearnings. The fact is that he loses his own self in this modern thought. He does of course experience this thinking as the one clear element in his consciousness—much clearer, for instance, than his breathing or blood circulation, which remain obscure in the deeper regions of his consciousness. He feels that these also may contain some reality, but he sleeps through this reality, and it is only in his ideas and thinking that he is awake. But then, especially if he is disposed to a certain amount of self-observation, he comes to feel that although it is only in his thinking that he fulfils his inner being, yet his true self is lost. And I can give you two examples which will enable you—spiritually of course—to lay hands on this loss of self in thought.

There is a famous philosopher of modern times, Descartes, who is the originator of the famous saying, cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. So this philosopher says. But today men do not and cannot say it. For when we merely think something or experience it in thinking, it does not follow that it “is,” nor that I “am” merely because I myself am thinking. For us these thoughts are at most pictures; they may be the most certain thing in us, but we do not grasp any “being” through our thinking. Again, we often say that if we think something, that is “nothing but thinking.” So also in Descartes' case: he wants to “be” and cannot find any other point at which to grasp this “being” of man, and so he seeks it where the common man certainly does not feel it to be—in thought. We do not think in sleep, but does it follow then that we are not? Do we die in the evening and are we reborn each morning? Or do we exist between falling asleep and waking? The simplest truths are in fact not taken into account by present-day views of the world. Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” is not based on something inwardly experienced, but is only a convulsive effort to attach oneself to reality. That is the first point.

The second point I want to make is this. Besides his thinking, of which modern man is very proud, we have the results of natural science, results of observation or experiment. In point of fact these do not help us to see the real being of things, but only the changes that occur in them—that which is transitory. And nowadays people consider a thought to be justified only if it derives from this external actuality, which after all reveals only a manifestation of itself. So we have ceased completely to grasp our real “being” in ourselves; our thought is too much in the air. We have no way of finding anything else in us except by methods that science applies to Nature; and then we seek our real being in that. In consequence, man today believes only in that part of himself which is part of Nature. Nature and the form of existence associated with it thus becomes a sort of Moloch which robs modern man of any real feeling of his own being.

Many people will perhaps retort that they don't notice anything of the sort, and will contradict what I have said. But that is only their opinion. The feelings which modern men have, at least if they have even the elements of self-awareness, are the outcome of the mood I have just described. They are encased, as it were, within this experience of their own being and their relation to the external world, and they then transfer the consequence of this condition to their consciousness of the world. For instance, they may observe the stars with their telescopes, spectroscopes and other instruments. They record what these instruments show and then build up a purely spatial astronomy and astrophysics. They do not notice that they are merely transferring to the heavens what they have observed and calculated about things on the Earth.

Thus, suppose that I have here some source of light. We all admit that if I move thousands of miles away from it, the light will become weaker and perhaps no longer visible. We all know that the strength of the light decreases with distance. Ordinary physics states the law that gravitation, too, decreases with the square of the distance. But people don't pursue this thought further. They can demonstrate that here on Earth, gravity has a particular magnitude and diminishes with the square of the distance, for they live on the Earth and establish laws of Nature and truths valid for the Earth, and build them into a system. Where gravity has a definite magnitude, these laws are true. The force of gravity decreases, but so does truth. What was true for the Earth ceases to be true if we pursue it further outwards into the Universe. We have no more right to regard the findings of physics and chemistry as applicable to the whole Universe than we have to assume that earthly gravity holds good throughout the Cosmos. The truths that rule in the heavenly spheres cannot be dealt with in the same way as those that hold on Earth. Of course to say this sort of thing nowadays is considered highly paradoxical—even crazy. But our general consciousness is so solidly encased nowadays that even the slightest remark which might pierce through the case immediately appears strange. Modern men are so wholly tied to the Earth that their knowledge, even sometimes their reflections, never pass beyond what they experience on Earth. And they deal with cosmic time exactly as they deal with cosmic space.

I was particularly impressed with all this recently. (I have often discussed this sort of truth among anthroposophists and what I am saying now is only a repetition based on a particular example.) This struck me with particular force when I was invited by our English anthroposophical friends to give a course of lectures at Penmaenmawr in the second half of August.¹ – 31^st August, 1923. (Revised edition in preparation, 1966.) The title of the German text in the Complete Centenary Edition is: Initiations-Erkenntnis. Die geistig und physische Welt- und Menschheitsentwicklung in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft vom Gesichtspunkte der Anthroposophie Penmaenmawr is in Wales, where the island of Anglesey lies over against the West coast of Britain. It is really an extraordinary region which shows that there are quite different geographies over the Earth's surface from those you will find discussed in textbooks, even for the most advanced students. Ordinarily we think it more than enough if a geographical description includes the character of the vegetation, flora and fauna, and I in addition we base it on the geological and palaeontological nature of the region. But the Earth displays differentiations of a much more inward nature than any you will ordinarily find in geographical works. Thus in Penmaenmawr, where these lectures were held, you have only to go a short distance, a mile or so into the mountains, and all over the place you can find the remains of the old Druid cults, fallen stone circles of a simple sort. For instance, stones are put together to enclose a small space and covered with another stone so as to form a little chamber, where the light of the sun could be cut off, leaving the chamber in darkness. I do not dispute that such cromlechs had also to serve as burial places, for at all times the most important centers of worship have been set up over the graves of fellow-men. But here, even with these simple cromlechs, we have something further, as indeed indicated by the so-called Druid circles.

It was a wonderful experience when I went with a friend one day to one of these mountains at Penmaenmawr, on which the scanty remains of two such circles are still to be seen lying very close to each other. Even today it can be seen from the position of the stones that there were once twelve of them, and if one wants to discover their purpose they must be observed closely. Now while the sun follows his course through the Cosmos, whether during a day or during a year, a quite specific shadow is cast beneath each stone; and the path of the sun could be traced by following the shadow as it changed in the course of a day or year. We are still sensitive to light today, especially if light is associated with warmth or warmth with light. Present-day consciousness can naturally also notice the difference between the light of the summer and winter sun, since we are warm in summer and cold in winter; and we may note finer differences too. But, you see the same differences we can notice in so obvious a fashion in the light, when we are either warm or freezing, can be perceived in the shadow as well. There is a difference between the October sun and the July or August sun, not only in the direction but in the quality of the shadow. One of the duties of the Druids was to develop a special faculty for perceiving the quality of the shadow—for perceiving, let us say, the peculiar intermingling of a red tone in the August shadow or a blue one in that of November or December. Thus the Druids were able, by the training they received, to read off the daily and yearly course of the sun in the shadows. We can still see from these remains that one of the tasks they undertook was something of this sort. There were many other things that belonged to this cult: a Sun ritual, which, however, was not a mere abstraction, not even the abstraction we see in devotion and reverence. Without undervaluing devotion and reverence, it would be a complete error to believe that. But devotion and reverence were not in this case the essentials, for the cult included something quite different.

Take the grain of wheat or rye. It must be planted within the Earth at a particular moment of the year, and it is a bad thing for it to be planted at an inappropriate moment. Anyone who has exact knowledge of these things is well aware that it makes a difference whether a seed is planted a few days earlier or later. There are other things of this sort in human life. The people who lived about three thousand years ago in the region where the Druid cult flourished led an extremely simple life. Agriculture and cattle-raising were the chief occupations. But we may ask how they were to know when to sow and harvest in the best way, or when they were to attend to the many other jobs which Nature requires in the course of a year. Nowadays of course we have farmers' calendars which tell the farmer that on such and such a day such and such a job needs to be done, and tell him very intelligently. In our day, with our type of consciousness, this information can be catalogued and read off from the printed page. We think nothing of it, but the fact remains that there was none of that, not even the most primitive form of reading and writing, in the days when the Druid religion was in its prime. On the other hand, the Druids could stand in one of these stone circles and by observing the shadow they could proclaim, for instance, that during the next week farmers must undertake this or that work, or the bulls be introduced to the herd since the moment was right for the mating of the cows. The druids were equipped to read in the Cosmos; they used the signs produced by those monuments of which we have today only such scanty remains, and could read from them the information the sun gave them of what was to be done on Earth.

The constitution of the soul was in fact quite different, and it would be a serious conceit on our part if, just because we are capable of this little bit of reading and writing, we were to undervalue the art which made it possible to lay down the work and activities required on Earth through these revelations of the heavens. In places like Penmaenmawr we are impelled to recollect many other things, too, which Spiritual Science is peculiarly qualified to investigate.

I have often pointed out in anthroposophical circles how ordinary thoughts are inadequate to grasp what Spiritual Science can investigate and how we have to conceive it in Imaginations. I assume you all know what I have said about Imaginations in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. It is these Imaginations and not our ordinary ideas which we must have in our souls when we are describing things on the basis of some immediate spiritual observation and not of external sense-perception. The genuinely spiritual-scientific accounts which are given you in our anthroposophical lectures have their origin in Imaginations of that kind.

Now these Imaginations are much more alive than ordinary abstract thoughts, which can give us no inkling of what reality is, but only pictures of it. Imaginations on the other hand, can be laid hold of by active thinking, in the same way that we can grasp tables and chairs. We are much more vigorously permeated by reality when our knowledge comes from Imaginations and not from abstract concepts. Anyone who speaks on the basis of Imaginations always has them before him as though he were writing something down—writing, however, not with those terribly abstract signs which constitute our writing, but with cosmic pictures.

Now what is the position with regard to these Imaginations in our district here? Anyone who knows them knows also that it is pretty easy to attain them, pretty easy to form them. If he has a sense of responsibility when describing anything through Spiritual Science, he will allow these Imaginations to take effect—that is, to inscribe them in the spirit—only when he has pondered them a good deal and tested them thoroughly. Nobody who speaks out of the spiritual world with a full sense of responsibility has a facile tongue. Nevertheless we can say that in districts like ours here it is relatively easy to inscribe these Imaginations, but they are obliterated equally easy. If in districts like this we create a spiritual content in Imaginations—I cannot put it any other way—we find it is like writing something down and immediately afterwards rubbing it out. But there in Wales, where land and sea meet and the tides ebb and flow each day, where the wind blows through and through you—for instance in the hotel where we were staying you could not only feel the wind blowing in the windows, but when one walked on the carpet it was like walking on a rough sea because of the wind blowing under the carpet—where moreover Nature is so full of life and so joyful in its life that you may get almost hourly alternations of rain and sunshine, then you do really come to see how Nature revealed herself to the Druid priests—or I might say the learned Druids, for it would be the same thing—when they gazed upon her from their mountain height. How then did the Earth appear to the Druid's spiritual eye when the heavens had the character I have just described?

This is very interesting to observe, though you will only realize it fully if you can grasp the particular geographical quality of the place. There you have to exert yourself much more vigorously if you want to construct Imaginations than you do, for instance, here. There, they are much more difficult to inscribe in the astral atmosphere. On the other hand they are more permanent and are not so easily extinguished. You come to realize how these old Druids chose for their most important cult-centers, just such places in which the spiritual as it approaches mankind, expresses itself to some extent in the quality of the place. Those Druid circles we visited—well, if we had gone up on a balloon and looked down from above on the larger and the smaller circles, for though they are some distance apart you would not notice that when you are a certain height above them—the circles would have appeared like the ground-plan of the Goetheanum which has been destroyed by fire. It is a wonderfully situated spot! As you climb the heights, you have wide views over land and sea. Then you reach the top and the Druid circles lie before you—there where the hill is hollowed out, so that you find yourself in a ring of hills, and within this ring of hills are the Druid circles. It was there that the Druid sought his science, his knowledge, his wisdom; there that he sought his Sun-wisdom but also his Nature-wisdom.

As the Druid penetrated into the relationship between what he saw on Earth and what streamed down from the heavens, he saw the whole processes of plant-growth and vegetation quite differently from the way in which they appear to our abstract thought of later days. If we can properly grasp the true quality of the sun, on the one hand the physical rays which enter our eyes, on the other the shadow with its various gradations, we come to realize that the spiritual essence of the sun lives on in the various grades of shadow. The shadow prevents only the physical rays of the sun from reaching other bodies, whereas the spiritual penetrates further. In the cromlechs which I have described to you, a small dark place is separated off. But it is only the physical sunlight which cannot penetrate there; its activity penetrates, and the Druid, as gradually through this activity he came to be permeated by the secret forces of cosmic existence, entered into the secrets of the world. Thus, for instance, the actions of the sun on plants was revealed to him; he could see that a particular kind of plant-life flourishes at a particular time when the sun is active in a particular way. He could trace the spiritual activity of the sun and see how it pours and streams into flower, leaf and root; and it was the same with animals. And while he was thus able inwardly to recognize the activity of the sun he also began to see how other activities from the Cosmos, for example, those of the moon, pour into it. He could see that the effect of the sun was to promote sprouting growth, with an upward tendency, and so he knew that if a plant as it grows out from the soil were exposed only to the sun, it would grow unendingly. The sun brings forth burgeoning, luxuriant life. If this life is checked and reduced to form, if leaves, blossom, seed and fruit assume a specific shape, if what strives towards the infinite is variously limited—all this has its origin in the activities of the moon. And these are to be found not only in the reflected light of the sun, for the moon reflects all influences, and these in their turn can be seen in the growth of the plant out of its root and also in what lives in the propagation of animals, and so on.

Let us take a particular instance. The Druid observed the growing plant; he observed in a more living way what, later on, Goethe observed more abstractly in his idea of metamorphosis. The Druid saw the downward streaming sun-forces, but he saw also the reflected sun-forces in everything that gives the plant its form. In his natural science he saw the combined activity of sun and moon on the root, which is wholly within the Earth and has the function of absorbing the salts of the Earth in a particular way. He could see that the action of sun and moon was quite different on the leaf, which, wrests itself out of the Earth and presses forward into the air. Again, he saw a different action on the flower, which pushes onwards to the light of the sun. He could see as a unity the activity of the Earth; to him, plant-growth and the being of the animal were also a unity.

Of course his life there was just what we experienced, with the winds raging around, which can reveal so much about the structure of the region, with the peculiar weather conditions which manifest themselves so vividly in that district. Thus, for example, at the beginning of one of our Eurythmy performances, which took place in a wooden hall, the audience sat with their umbrellas up, because just before the performance there had been a heavy downpour which was still going on when the performance began. The curtains were quite wet! This intimate association with Nature which can still be experienced today was of course also experienced by the Druids. Nature there is not so hard; she almost embraces one. It really is a delightful experience. I might almost say that one is drawn on and accompanied by the activity of Nature; one seems to be part of it. I even met people who maintained that one need not really eat there, that one can be fed by this very activity of Nature.

The Druid, then, lived with his Sun-Initiation within this activity of Nature, and he saw as the unity I have described the sun and moon mediated through the activity of the Earth, the growth of the plant, the growth of root, leaf and flower; and all this not in the form of abstract laws as today, but of living elemental beings. Different elemental beings of sun and moon were active in the root, in the leaf and in the flower. He could also pursue in the wider realms of Nature what is so beneficially differentiated in root, leaf and flower. Through his imaginative gifts he could see the small elemental beings restricted to narrow limits in the root, and he knew that what lives in beneficial form in the root can free itself and expand to the gigantic. Thus he saw the large-scale activities of Nature as the small activities of the plant raise dot a gigantic power. Just as he had spoken of the elemental beings in the root of the plant, he could also speak of these root-beings as having expanded in a cosmically irregular way and manifesting in the formation of frost, dew and hail. On the one hand he spoke of the root-beings who were beneficially active, and of the giants of frost and ice which are these root-beings grown to gigantic size.

Again, he spoke of the elemental activities in the leaf of the plant, which permeate themselves with the forces of the air; he traced them into the distant spaces of Nature, and he then saw that, if what lives in the leaf frees itself and strives beyond its proper limits into the distances of Nature, it manifests in the surging of winds. The giants of wind and storm are the elemental beings of the plant grown beyond their size. And the element which is distilled in the flower the etheric oils with their phosphoric quality—if that is freed, it manifests itself as the giants of fire, among whom, for instance, Loki belongs. In this science of sun and moon, therefore, the Druid saw as a unity both that which lives in the narrowly restricted space of the plant and that which frees itself and lives in wind and weather.

But he went further. He said to himself: When that which lives in root, leaf and flower is contained within the desirable limits set by the good gods, normal plant-growth results. If it appears in hoar frost, that is the work of opposing beings: for the elemental beings growing into powers of opposition, create the harmful, devastating aspects of Nature. Now as a human being I can make use of the devastating activities of the beings who are the opponents of the gods; I can gather the hoar frost in appropriate ways, and the products of the storm and whatever is caught up in the surging of wind and rain. I can make use of the giant forces for my own purposes by burning the plant, for instance, and reducing it to ashes, to charcoal and so on. I can take these forces, and by using frost, hail and rain and other such things, or what the giants of fire control—things which are the expression of forces that have grown to harmful vastness—I can protect the normal growth of the plant. I can rob these giants of all this and can treat normal plants with it, and by applying these forces of the opposing powers I can make healing medicines out of the good elemental forces which have remained within their proper limits. And this was in fact one of the ways of making medicines out of plants, by employing frost and snow and ice and by the use of burning and calcinations. The Druid felt it to be his work to take whatever was harmful from the opposing giant powers and restore it to the service of the good gods. We can trace these things in many different ways.

Now why am I spending time on this? I want to use it as an example—and I quote this particular one because I do indeed think that the Penmaenmawr lecture-course was a very important event in the history for the Anthroposophical Movement—to show how man's consciousness and his whole constitution of soul were quite different at a time not so very far removed from the present. With his present-day consciousness man cannot realize what lived in the consciousness of this ancient humanity. And what I have said of that ancient humanity could also be said of other peoples. There we catch glimpses of a quite different constitution of soul. Men in those days had no idea of what we experience as abstract thoughts. All their thinking was more dreamlike, and they did not live within such sharply outlined ideas and concepts as we do today. They lived in dreams which were much more vivid and alive, more full of substance; and indeed their waking life was really a sort of continuation of their dreaming. Just as nowadays we live in an alternation of dreaming or dreamless sleep and the abstract ideas of our waking life, so they alternated between this dreamlike everyday life and a dreamless sleep which was not wholly like ours. When they woke they felt that there was still something remaining over from sleep—something which afforded a sort of nourishment for the soul, which they had absorbed during sleep and which could still be felt the after-taste of sleep in their whole organism. There was a third condition which no longer occurs in human consciousness, a feeling of being surrounded by the Earth, and when a man woke up he felt not only that he had been asleep—of which he retained an aftertaste—but that he had been received into a kind of grave by the forces of gravity, that gravity had closed him in, and he was, as it were, within the embrace of the Earth.

Now just as we can describe our present-day states of consciousness as waking, dreaming, and sleeping so we should have to say that at a certain stage of the past there were the three states of dreaming, sleeping and being surrounded by the Earth. Since everything which evolves in the course of history has some sort of relation to the present, we find human souls in whom, during a later earth-life something peculiar appears like a genuine memory of earlier times, something connected with their earlier earth-life. Men like this display what for their own age is abnormal, but which is a living memory of their souls. Examples of this were Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg, and in such spirits something connected with human evolution lights up into contemporary humanity from a very distant past.

Tomorrow I will say more about the special qualities of vision of Boehme and Swedenborg; this will help us to understand the past of humanity and also the three future states of consciousness.

• 1. The Evolution of the World and of Humanity. 13 lectures, 19^th 1