The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Drama by Wolfgang Kirchbach
Performance of the "Verein für historisch-moderne Fesispiele" at the Neues Theater, Berlin

Wolfgang Kirchbach has dramatized the fate of the "last human couple" in the form of a poet's dream and had this dream drama performed on 19 February as part of the "historical-modern festival" series. A lot seems to be allowed in dreams; and when someone appears and tells us: "I dreamt this", he disarms us to a certain extent. We are quite helpless in the face of what the Lord gives us in our sleep. But after all, we want to be able to believe in a poet's dream. We want to have a sense that there is a human necessity to dream in this way. And that someone can dream about the universe in the way Wolfgang Kirchbach pretends to have dreamed, we never believe. Modern science teaches us that the world will gradually freeze over and bury all existence in eternal rest. Kirchbach shows us the time before this glaciation. Sirens, nymphs, fauns, Proteus, Pan and similar mythical creatures live in this time. The fact that humans once lived is initially unknown to them. Then the last man appears. He comes from an Eskimo. The mythical creatures want to destroy him. For what is to become of them when man establishes a new kingdom? They live without restraint, without morality and law. Man could only destroy this life. - It is completely pointless to describe the battles between the mythical creatures of nature and man, as Kirchbach does. Suffice it to say that the last man believes himself to be the first, because he sees no beings of his kind around him. Strangely enough, the last woman is also still there. Love develops between the two. Man feels the joy of life. He wants to defeat the gods of nature and establish a new kingdom. The woman also forces the great Pan into the magic circle of her love. He puts on human clothes to please her. She spurns him. He dies of a broken heart. And with the death of the great Pan, the end of the world is sealed. Even the last man dies last. And that is because Proteus takes away his belief that he is the first of his race and shows him that no new life can arise from the womb of man.

After all, Wolfgang Kirchbach can dream like that. That is his business. Our hearts remain as icy as the end of the world he depicts throughout the whole process. Everything sounds hollow. We do not have the feeling that here a poet has solved a task that he has experienced in his deepest depths. We are only dealing with a man who has a completely external relationship to the great questions which he draws into the circle of his art. Everything is done with levers and screws. Not for a moment does inner warmth flow from the poet to us. It is quite possible in dreams, for example, that fauns nine hundred billion years old do not know what a bootjack is, which they dig out of the ruins of the world at the end of existence; it is also possible in dreams that within the desolate time that precedes the end of the world, a well-formed human couple still emerges. But we smile at such a dream when we remember it after a good night's sleep. Wolfgang Kirchbach, however, records it and seems to believe that we could dream along with him. No, we only smile there too. And then comes the anger, the perhaps unreasonable anger that Wolfgang Kirchbach has brought it upon himself to show us what the Lord taught him in his sleep about the end of the world. Poets should live through their Faust problem while awake. They may then have no excuse for their fantastic improbabilities, but they will remain artistically honest. And being artistically honest means above all: keeping quiet about things you have nothing to say about.

A significant folk tale is to be presented: It is about the young Olaf Åsteson, who lives in the saga of the Norwegian people. A dream of this Olaf Åsteson is told in a truly folksy poetic form. A dream that the people imagined filled a long sleep of thirteen days and nights, those thirteen nights and days that lie between Christmas Eve and Epiphany, on January 6. These thirteen days play a role in many folk traditions. To understand what is expressed in such traditions, one must imagine how, relatively recently, people in rural and mountainous areas felt an intimate connection with the course of nature. They felt differently when the plants sprouted out of the earth in spring than when the ground stretched bare in autumn; differently when the sun burned hot in the sky at Midsummer, and differently when the snow clouds hid all the sun's rays in December. In summer, the soul lived with nature; in winter, it withdrew into itself, lived within itself. This withdrawal of the soul became particularly intense towards Christmas time, when the nights are longest. And then it was so for the soul that it withdrew from the outside world as in falling asleep, when the eyes no longer see and the ears no longer hear. A brooding of the soul occupied with itself occurred, which became like a dream in particularly predisposed people. Then some souls experienced their immersion in the spiritual world particularly vividly. Everything they felt, about guilt and sin, about hope in life and worries of the soul, came before them. And just as dreams take on special forms when morning approaches and the first ray of sunshine falls on the dreamer's still sleeping face, so the brooding and dreaming of the soul takes on a special form when, from Christmas onwards, the sun begins to appear earlier in the day, when the approach of the new dawn is felt. Anyone who has ever lived with mountain or rural people is familiar with the dream experiences that we are considering here, which introduce the folk soul to other worlds. Nowadays, however, such experiences are no longer common. They are actually disappearing as locomotives and factory chimneys invade the landscape. In many areas, even the legends of those old dream worlds have already faded away. In areas that have been less influenced by modern industrial and transportation culture, such as certain areas of Norway, beautiful parts of that mythology have been preserved, as in our song about Olaf Åsteson. It comes from ancient times, but was recently rediscovered by the Norwegian people and is spreading quickly, so that many people know it again today, after it was long lost.

It tells of a long dream that Olaf Åsteson dreams in which he experiences the fate of souls after death. The idea behind it is that after death the soul wanders among the stars, that it comes, for example, to areas where the constellations of Taurus, the Serpent, and Canis Major are close, that it comes into the spiritual proximity of the moon. The soul enters these worlds by crossing the Gjallarbridge, which connects the earthly world with the spiritual. In many folk tales, the rainbow is presented as this bridge. Part of this spiritual world is Brooksvalin, where the deeds of the souls are weighed and retribution is meted out to them. The way the song presents the experience points to the time in which it was formed through folk poetry. The ideas about life after death are not yet entirely Christian; they are partly those that were still formed in the old pagan times. However, the time in which Olaf experiences his dream is already presented as Christian. This is evident not only from the fact that he tells his dream at the church door, but also from the fact that Christian ideas of Michael and Christ play into the pagan ideas of the Gjallarbridge and Brooksvalin. Indeed, one can immediately recognize the penetration of Christianity into Norway from the south in the approach of Christ from the south. We are dealing with a folk tale that is probably eight to nine centuries old, because that is how long ago Christianity entered Norway.

By presenting this poetry, we would like to draw your attention to the life of the folk soul, which, through the formation of legends such as that of Olaf Åsteson, shows that it was aware of its connection to the spiritual world, which inwardly experienced images of this connection that gave it the certainty that the spiritual world exists. For anyone who approached Olaf Åsteson and said, “There is no such thing, science has proven that,” would have been looked at quite sympathetically by Olaf Åsteson, who would then have smiled sympathetically and said, “There are more things in heaven and on earth than you can dream of in your school wisdom.

Today we will go somewhat further into what we considered here last Friday and Saturday, and I would like to draw your attention particularly to the life of the soul and what we discover when this soul life is viewed from the viewpoint of Imaginative cognition. You are familiar with Imaginative cognition from my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. You know that we distinguish four stages of cognition, ascending from our ordinary consciousness, the stage of cognition that is adapted to our daily normal life, to ordinary modern science, and that constitutes the actual consciousness of the time. This stage of consciousness is called “objective cognition” in the sense of what is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Then one comes into the realm of the super-sensible through the stages of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. With ordinary objective cognition it is impossible to observe the soul element. What pertains to the soul must be experienced, and in experiencing it one develops objective cognition. Real cognition can be gained, however, only when one can place the thing to be known objectively before one. It is impossible to do this with the soul life in ordinary consciousness; to understand the life of the soul, one must draw back a stage, as it were,so that the life of the soul comes to stand outside one; then it can be observed. This is precisely what is brought about through Imaginative cognition, and today I would like simply to describe for you what is then brought into view.

You know that if we survey the human being, confining ourselves to what exists in the human being today, we distinguish the physical body, the etheric body or body of formative forces, which is really a sum of activities, the astral body, and the I or ego. If we now bring the soul experience not into cognition but into consciousness, we distinguish in its fluctuating life thinking, feeling, and willing. It is true that thinking, feeling, and willing play into one another in the ordinary life of the soul; you can picture no train of thought without picturing the role played in this train of thought by the will. How we combine one thought with another, how we separate a thought from another, is most definitely an act of will striving into the life of thought .Though the process may at first remain shrouded, as I have often explained, we nevertheless know that when we as human beings use our will, our thoughts play into our will as impulses. In the ordinary soul life, therefore, our will is not isolated in itself but is permeated by thought. Even more do thoughts, will impulses, and the actual feelings flow into feeling. Thus we have throughout the soul life a flowing together, yet by reason of things we cannot go into today we must distinguish, within this flowing life of soul,thinking, feeling, and willing. If you refer to my Philosophy of Freedom, you will see how one is obliged to loosen thinking purely from feeling and willing, because one comes to a vis ion of human freedom only by means of such a loosened thinking.

Inasmuch as we livingly grasp thinking, feeling, and willing we grasp at the same time the flowing, weaving life of soul. Then, when we compare what we grasp there in immediate vitality with what an anthroposophical spiritual science teaches us of the connection among the individual members of the human being—physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I—what presents itself to Imaginative cognition is the following.

We know that during waking life the physical, etheric,astral bodies, and the I are in a certain intimate connection. We know further that in the sleeping state we have a separation of the physical and etheric bodies on the one hand from the astral body and I on the other. Although it is only approximately correct to say that the I and astral body separate from the physical body and etheric body, one arrives there by at a valid mental image. The I with the astral body is outside the physical and etheric bodies from the time we fall asleep to the moment of awakening.

As soon as the human being advances to Imaginative cognition he becomes more and more able to apprehend exactly in inner vision, with the eye of the soul, what is experienced as transitory, in status nascendi. The transitory is there, and one must seize it quickly, but it can be seized. One has something before one that can be observed most clearly at the moments of awaking and falling asleep. These moments of falling asleep and awaking can be observed by Imaginative cognition. Among the preparations necessary to attain higher levels of cognition you will remember that mention was made in the books already referred to of the cultivation of a certain presence of mind [Geistesgegenwart]. One hears so little said in ordinary life of the observations that may be made of the spiritual world, because people lack this presence of mind. Were this presence of mind actively cultivated among human beings, all people would be able to talk of spiritual, super-sensible impressions, for such impressions actually crowd in upon us to the greatest extent as we fall asleep or awake, particularly as we awake. It is only because this presence of mind is cultivated so little that people do not notice these impressions. At the moment of awaking a whole world appears before the soul. As quickly as it arises, however, it fades again, and before people think to grasp it, it is gone. Hence they can speak little of this whole world that appears before the soul and that is indeed of particular significance in comprehending the inner being of man.

When one is actually able to grasp the moment of awaking with this presence of mind, what confronts the soul is a whole world of flowing thoughts. There need be nothing of fantasy; one can observe this world with the same calm and self-possession with which one observes in a chemical laboratory. Nevertheless, this flowing thought world is there and is quite distinct from mere dreams. The mere dream is filled with reminiscences of life, whereas what takes place at the moment of awaking is not concerned with reminiscences. These flowing thoughts are clearly to be distinguished from reminiscences. One can translate them into the language of ordinary consciousness, but fundamentally they are foreign thoughts, thoughts we cannot experience if we do not grasp them in the moment made possible for us by spiritual scientific training, or even in the moment of awaking.

What is it that we actually grasp at such a moment? We have penetrated into the etheric body and physical body with our I and astral body. What is experienced in the etheric body is experienced, however, as dreamlike. One learns, in observing this subtly in presence of mind, to distinguish clearly between this passing through the etheric body, when life reminiscences appear dreamlike, and the state—before fully awaking, before the impressions that the senses have after awaking—of being placed in a world that is thoroughly a world of weaving thoughts. These thoughts are not experienced, however, as dream thoughts, such as one knows are in oneself subjectively. The thoughts that I mean now confront the penetrating I and astral body of man entirely objectively; one realizes distinctly that one must pass right through the etheric body, for as long as one is passing through the etheric body, everything remains dreamlike. One must also pass through the abyss, the intermediate space—to express myself figuratively and perhaps therefore more clearly—the space between etheric body and physical body. Then one slips fully into the etheric-physical on awaking and receives the outer physical impressions of the senses. As soon as one has slipped into the physical body, the outer physical sense impressions are simply there. What we experience as a thought-weaving of an objective nature takes place completely between the etheric body and the physical body. We must therefore see in it an interplay of the etheric and physical bodies. If we present this pictorially (see drawing), we can say that if this represents the physical body (orange) and this the etheric body (green), we have the living weaving of physical body and etheric body in the thoughts that we grasp there. Through this observation one comes to know that whether we are asleep or awake processes are always taking place between our physical body and etheric body, processes that actually consist of the weaving thought-existence between our physical and etheric bodies (yellow). We have now grasped objectively the first element of the life of the soul; we see in it a weaving between the etheric body and the physical body.

This weaving life of thought does not actually come into our consciousness as it is in the waking state. It must be grasped in the way I have described. When we awake we slip with our I and astral body into our physical body. I and astral body within our physical body, permeated by the etheric body, take part in the life of sense perception. By having within you the life of sense perception, you become permeated with the thoughts of the outer world, which can form in you from the sense perceptions and have then the strength to drown this objective thought-weaving. In the place where otherwise the objective thoughts are weaving, we form out of the substance of this thought-weaving, as it were, our everyday thoughts, which we develop in our association with the sense world. I can say that into this objective weaving of thought there plays the subjective thought-weaving (bright) that drowns the other and that also takes place between the etheric body and the physical body. In fact, when we weave thoughts with the soul itself we live in what I have called the space between the etheric and physical bodies—as I said, this expression is figurative, but to make this understandable I must designate it as the space between the etheric and physical bodies. We drown the objective thoughts, which are always present in the sleeping and waking states, with our subjective weaving of thought. Both, however, are present in the same region, as it were, of our human nature: the objective weaving of thought and the subjective thought-weaving.

What is the significance of the objective thought-weaving? When the objective thought-weaving is perceived, when the moment of awaking is actually grasped with the presence of mind I have described, it is grasped not merely as being of the nature of thought but as what lives in us as forces of growth, as forces of life in general. These life forces are united with the thought-weaving; they permeate the etheric or life body inwardly and shape the physical body outwardly. What we perceive as objective weaving of thought when we can seize the moment of awaking with presence of mind, we perceive as thought-weaving on the one hand and as activity of growth and nutrition on the other. What is within us in this way we perceive as an inner weaving, but one that is fully living. Thinking loses its picture-nature and abstractness, it loses all that had been sharp contours. It becomes a fluctuating thinking but is clearly recognizable as thinking nevertheless. Cosmic thinking weaves in us, and we experience how this cosmic thinking weaves in us and how we plunge into this cosmic thinking with our subjective thinking. We have thus grasped the soul element in a certain realm.

When we now go further in grasping the waking moment in presence of mind we find the following. When we are able to experience the dreamlike element in passing through the etheric body with the I and astral body, we can bring to mind pictorially the dreamlike element in us. These dream pictures must cease the moment we awake, however, for otherwise we would take the dream into the ordinary, conscious waking life and be daydreamers, thus losing our self-possession. Dreams as such must cease. The usual experience of the dream is an experience of reminiscing, is actually a later memory of the dream; the ordinary experiencing of the dream is actually first grasped as a reminiscence after the dream departs. It may be grasped while it exists, however, while it actually is, if one carries the presence of mind right back to the experience of the dream. If it is thus grasped directly, during the actual penetration of the etheric body, then the dream is revealed as something mobile, something that one experiences as substantial, within which one feels oneself. The picture-nature ceases to be merely pictorial; one has the experience that one is within the picture. Through this feeling that one is within the picture, one is in movement with the soul element; as in waking life one's body is in movement through various movements of the legs and hand, so actually does the dream become active. It is thus experienced in the same way as one experiences the movement of an arm, leg, or head; when one experiences the grasping of the dream as something substantial, then in the further progress toward awakening yet another experience is added. One feels that the activity experienced in the dream, when one stands as if within something real, dives down into our bodily nature. Just as in thinking we feel that we penetrate to the boundary of our physical body, where the sense organs are, and perceive the sense impressions with the thinking, so we now feel that we plunge into ourselves with what we experience in the dream as inner activity. What is experienced at the moment of awaking, or rather just before the moment of awaking, when one is within the dream, still completely outside the physical body but already within the etheric body, or passing through it—is submerged into our organization. And if one is so advanced that one has this submerging as an experience, then one knows, too, what becomes of what has been submerged—it radiates back into our waking consciousness, and it radiates back as a feeling, as feeling. The feelings are dreams that have been submerged into our organization.

When we perceive what is weaving in the outer world in this dreamlike state, it is in the form of dreams. When dreams dive down into our organization and become conscious from within outward, we experience them as feelings. We thus experience feeling through the fact that what is in our astral body dives down into our etheric body and then further into our physical organization, not as far as the senses and therefore not to the periphery, but only into the inner organization. Then, when one has grasped this, has beheld it first through Imaginative cognition, particularly clearly at the moment of awaking, one also receives the inner strength to behold it continuously. We do indeed dream continuously throughout waking life. It is only that we overpower the dream with the light of our thinking consciousness, our conceptual life [Vorstellungsleben]. One who can gaze beneath the surface of the conceptual life—and one trains oneself for this by grasping the moment of the dream itself with presence of mind—whoever has so trained himself that on awaking he can grasp what I have described, can then also, beneath the surface of the light-filled conceptual life, experience the dreaming that continues throughout the day. This is not experienced as dreams, however, for it immediately dives down into our organization and rays back as the world of feeling. What feeling is takes place between the astral body (bright in last drawing) and the etheric body. This naturally expresses itself in the physical body. The actual source of feeling, however, lies between the astral body and the etheric body (red). Just as for the thought life the physical and etheric bodies must cooperate in a living interplay, so must etheric body and astral body be in living interplay for the life of feeling. When we are awake we experience this living interplay of our mingled etheric and astral bodies as our feeling. When we are asleep we experience what takes place in the astral body, now living outside the etheric body, as the pictures of the dream. These dream pictures now are present throughout the period of sleep but are not perceptible to the ordinary consciousness; they are remembered in those fragments that form the ordinary life of dream.

You see from this that if we wish to grasp the life of the soul we must look between the members of the human organization. We think of the life of the soul as flowing thinking, feeling, and willing. We grasp it objectively, however, by looking into the spaces between these four members, between the physical body and the etheric body and between the etheric body and the astral body.

I have often explained here from other viewpoints how what is expressed in willing is withdrawn entirely from ordinary waking consciousness. This ordinary consciousness is aware of the mental images by which we direct our willing. It is also aware of the feelings that we develop in reference to the mental images as motives for our willing and of how what lies clear in our consciousness as the conceptual content of our willing plays downward when I move an arm in obedience to my will. What actually goes on to produce the movement does not come into ordinary consciousness. As soon as the spiritual investigator makes use of Imagination and discovers the nature of thinking and feeling he can also come to a consciousness of man's experiences between falling asleep and awaking. By the exercises leading to Imagination, the I and astral body are strengthened; they become stronger in themselves and learn to experience themselves. In ordinary consciousness one does not have the true I. What do we have as the I in our ordinary consciousness? This must be explained by a comparison I have made repeatedly. You see, when one looks back upon life in the memory, it appears as a continuous stream, but it is definitely not that. We look back over the day to the moment of awaking, then we have an empty space, then the memory of the events of the previous day links itself on, and so forth. What we observe in this reminiscence bears in itself also those states that we have not lived through consciously, that are therefore not within the present content of our consciousness. They are there, however, in another form. The reminiscing of a person who never slept at all—if I may cite such a hypothetical case—would be completely destroyed. The reminiscence would in a way blind him. All that he would bring to his consciousness in reminiscence would seem quite foreign to him, dazzling and blinding him. He would be overpowered by it and would have to eliminate himself entirely. He would not be able to feel himself within himself at all. Only because of the intervals of sleep is reminiscence dimmed so that we are able to endure it. Then it becomes possible to assert our own self in our remembering. We owe it solely to the intervals of sleep that we have our self-assertion in memory. What I am now saying could well be, confirmed through a comparative observation of the course of different human lives.

In the same way that we feel the inner activity in reminiscence, we actually feel our I from our entire organism. We feel it in the way we perceive the sleeping conditions as the darkest spaces in the progress of memory. We do not perceive the I directly in ordinary consciousness; we perceive it only as we perceive the sleeping condition. When we attain Imaginative cognition, however, this I really appears, and it is of the nature of will. We notice that what creates a feeling inclining us to feel sympathy or antipathy with the world, or whatever activates willing in us, then comes about in a process similar to that taking place between being awake and falling asleep. This again can be observed with presence of mind if one develops the same capacities for observation of the process of going to sleep as those I have described for awaking. Then one notices that on going to sleep one carries into the sleeping condition what streams as activity out of our feeling life, streaming into the outer world. One then learns to recognize how every time one actually brings one's will into action one dives into a state similar to the sleeping state. One dives into an inner sleep. What takes place once when one falls asleep, when the I and astral body draw themselves out of the physical body and the etheric body, goes on inwardly every time we use our will.

You must be clear, of course, that what I am now describing is far more difficult to grasp than what I described before, for the moment of going to sleep is generally still harder to grasp with presence of mind than that of awaking. After awaking we are awake and have at least the support of reminiscing. If we wish to observe the moment of falling asleep we must continue the waking state right into sleep. A person generally goes straight to sleep, however; he does not bring the activity of feeling into the sleeping state. If he can continue it, however—and this is actually possible through training—then in Imaginative cognition one notices that in willing there is in fact a diving into the same element into which we dive when we fall asleep. In willing we actually become free of our organization; we unite ourselves with real objectivity. In waking we enter our etheric and physical bodies and pass right up to the region of the senses, thus coming to the periphery of the body, taking possession of it, saturating it entirely. Similarly, in feeling we send our dreams back into the body, inasmuch as we immerse ourselves inwardly; the dreams, in fact, become feelings. If now we do not remain in the body but instead, without going to the periphery of the body, leave the body inwardly, spiritually, then we come to willing. Willing, therefore, is actually accomplished independently of the body. I know that much is implied in saying this, but I must present it, because it is a reality. In grasping it we come to see that—if we have the I here (see last drawing, blue)—willing takes place between the astral body and the I (lilac).

We can therefore say that we divide the human being into physical body, etheric body or body of formative forces, astral body, and I. Between the physical body and the etheric body thinking takes place in the soul element. Between the etheric body and the astral body feeling takes place in the soul element, and between the astral body and the I, willing takes place in the soul element. When we come to the periphery of the physical body we have sense perception. Inasmuch as by way of our I we emerge out of ourselves, placing our whole organization into the outer world, willing becomes action, the other pole of sense perception (see last drawing).

In this way one comes to an objective grasp of what is experienced subjectively in flowing thinking, feeling, and willing. Experience metamorphoses into cognition. Any psychology that tries to grasp the flowing thinking, feeling, and willing in another way remains formal, because it does not penetrate to reality. Only Imaginative cognition can penetrate to reality in the experience of the soul.

Let us now turn our gaze to a phenomenon that has accompanied us, as it were, in our whole study. We said that through observation with presence of mind at the moment of awaking, when one has slipped through the etheric body, one can see a weaving of thoughts that is objective. One at first perceives this objective thought-weaving. I said that it can be distinguished clearly from dreams and also from the everyday life of thought, from the subjective life of thought, for it is connected with growth, with becoming. It is actually a real organization. If one grasps what is weaving there, however, what, if one penetrates it, one perceives as thought-weaving; if one inwardly feels it, touches it, I would like to say, then one is aware of it as force of growth, as force of nutrition, as the human being in the process of becoming. It seems at first something foreign, but it is a world of thought. If one can study it more accurately it is seen to be the inner weaving of thoughts in ourselves. We grasp it at the periphery of our physical body; before we arrive at sense perception we grasp it. When we learn to understand it more exactly, when we have accustomed ourselves to its foreignness compared with our subjective thinking, then we recognize it. We recognize it as what we have brought with us through our birth from earlier experiences, from experiences lying before birth or conception. For us it becomes something of the spiritual, objectively present, that brings our whole organism together. Pre-existent thought gains objectivity, becomes objectively visible. We can say with an inner grasp that we are woven out of the world of spirit through thought. The subjective thoughts that we add stand in the sphere of our freedom. Those thoughts that we behold there form us, they build up our body from the weaving of thought. They are our past karma (see next diagram). Before we arrive at sense perceptions, therefore, we perceive our past karma.

When we go to sleep, one who lives in objective cognition sees something in this process of falling asleep that is akin to willing. When willing is brought to complete consciousness one notices quite clearly that one sleeps in one's own organism. Just as dreams sink down, so do the motives of the will pass into our organization. One sleeps into the organism. One learns to distinguish this sleeping into the organism, which first comes to life in our ordinary actions. These indeed are accomplished outwardly; we accomplish them between awaking and going to sleep, but not everything that lives within our life of feeling lives into these actions. We go through life also between falling asleep and awaking. What we would otherwise press into the actions, we press out of ourselves through the same process in going to sleep. We press a whole sum of will impulses out into the purely spiritual world in which we find ourselves between going to sleep and awaking. If through Imaginative cognition we learn to observe the will impulses that pass over into our spiritual being, which we shelter only between falling asleep and awaking, we perceive in them the tendency to action that exists beyond death, that passes over with us beyond death.

Willing is developed between the astral body and the I. Willing becomes deed when it goes far enough toward the outer world to come to the place to which otherwise the sense impressions come. In going to sleep, however, a large quantity goes out that would like to become deed but in fact does not become deed, remaining bound to the I and passing with it through death into the spiritual world.

You see, we experience, here on the other side (see diagram below) our future karma. Our future karma is experienced between willing and the deed. In Imaginative consciousness both are united, past and future karma, what weaves and lives within us, weaving on beneath the threshold above which lie the free deeds we can accomplish between birth and death. Between birth and death we live in freedom. Below this region of free willing, however, which actually has an existence only between birth and death, there weaves and lives karma. We perceive its effects out of the past if we can maintain our consciousness in our I and astral body in penetrating through the etheric body as far as to the physical body. On the other hand, we perceive our future karma if we can maintain ourselves in the region that lies between willing and the deed, if we can develop so much self-discipline through exercises that inwardly we can be as active in a feeling as, with the help of the body, we can be in a deed, if we can be active in spirit in feeling, if we therefore hold fast to the deed in the I.

Picture this vividly; one can be as enthusiastic, as inwardly enamored by something that springs from feeling as that which otherwise passes over into action; but one must withhold it: then it lights up in Imagination as future karma.

What I have described to you here is of course always present in the human being. Every morning on awaking man passes the region of his past karma; every evening on falling asleep he passes that of his future karma. Through a certain attentive awareness and without special training, the human being can grasp with presence of mind the past objectively, without, it is true, recognizing it as plainly as I have now described it. He can perceive it, however; it is there. There, too, is all that he bears within him as moral impulses of good and evil. Through this the human being actually learns to know himself better than when he becomes aware in the moment of awaking of the weaving of thought that forms him.

More difficult to grasp, however, is the perception of what lies between willing and the deed, of what one can withhold. There one learns to know oneself insofar as one has made oneself during his life. One learns to know the inner formation that one carries through death as future karma.

I wished to show you today how these things can be spoken about out of a living comprehension, how anthroposophy is not in the least exhausted in its images. Things can be described in a living way, and tomorrow I will go further in this study, going on to a still deeper grasp of the human being on the basis of what we have studied today.

What yesterday I particularly wanted to make clear in connection with Goethe's is “Faust” was that more goes to the making of man's being than can be known or fathomed either by the understanding or by other forces of the human soul. Goethe himself felt deeply that the spiritual forces,that can be developed today in man's conscious life, cannot go so far as man by nature reaches. Those who believe that what is today called science needs only to be extended in order to know, to a certain measure, the possible and the impossible, simply say: It is true that, with what science offers today, one gains only a very limited knowledge of man. But this science will be widened, it will press on over further and further, and then we shall come increasingly near to the knowledge of man.

This is a very short-sighted outlook and is untrue. Knowledge of man does not depend upon whether the scientific outlook accepted today extends more and more widely, but to our having recourse to forces and faculties for knowledge different from any of those applied by modern science. However far modern science may advance on its own lines, what Goethe felt to be unknowable within the being of man can, in no case, ever be penetrated by it.

All science, my dear friends, all officially accepted science that deals with the spiritual, in reality relates only to earthly being—what has being on the earth-planet. What is called science today can never pronounce judgment on anything beyond the processes of the earth-planet. But man is not earthly man alone. As earth-man he has behind him the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and within him is the germinal basis of the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolutions. Science can know nothing of the different planetary life-forms beyond the earthly; for the laws of science apply only to what is earthly. Man in his entirety, therefore, cannot be known by these laws; he can only be know if knowledge, be extended beyond what is earthly.

Now yesterday I pointed out how man exists in states of consciousness lying, as it were, both below and above the threshold of ordinary consciousness. Below the threshold of ordinary consciousness lies much from the regions of which dream experiences spring. But beneath this threshold of consciousness there also lies a very great deal of what a men experiences in waking, life, between waking and falling asleep. For even a little reflection will show you that men would know far more about their dreams if they exerted themselves to know a little more about waking. If they would make an effort to know something about being awake, they would find that, during this waking time, they do a great more dreaming then they suppose. The fixed and solid boundary between waking and sleeping is really only apparent. We might say that not only do men dream during their waking hours, they sleep too—sleep as regards a very great many things. As we all know, we are in a genuinely waking condition only as regards our ideas and part of our feelings, while the greater part of our life of feeling, and above all of our life of will, is wrapped in dreams and sleep. Sleep-life projects itself into waking life. We could be far clearer about dream-life, if we tried to perceive the distinction between those ideas that surge to and fro, evoking all kinds of images as they come and go, ideas that might easily be mistaken for dreams, and those other ideas, in which man is active with his whole will. Only in a small part of the whole world of human ideas does a man find that he uses his will to connect one idea with another; whereas, in his waking life, very often there are moments when he abandons himself to the flow and the caprice of his ideas. Consider how, when you give yourself up in this way to the flow of your ideas, one idea calls up another, how you recall things long forgotten. You begin with an idea which has to do with the present, and this evokes long-forgotten experiences. That is a process often not very distinct from dreaming. Because men have so little inner, technical thinking power, with which rightly to follow their daily waking life, few are able to set the right value on sleep-life and the dream-life arising from it. Nevertheless, my dear friends, we know there are scientifically conceived theories about dreams that maintain something like the following. Freud's school and others, mostly, though not all disciples of the psycho-analysts, say of dreams that they are images evoked in man by certain wishes in his life not having been fulfilled. A man goes throughout life wishing all kinds of things, but—say these people—it is undeniable that many of our wishes are not fulfilled. Then, when consciousness is dimmed, these wishes appear before the soul, and because they cannot be fulfilled in reality, they are fulfilled in idea. So that in the opinion of many people today dreams are wishes fulfilled in phantasy. I should like the people who maintain this just to consider how they manage to dream they have been beheaded. All such things, so often today forming the content of theories, are terribly one-sided. And men's heads are bound to be full of this one-sidedness unless they turn to the investigations of Spiritual Science—investigations into worlds unknown both to the external world of the senses and to external intellectual thinking, and yielding conclusions beyond the grasp of human senses or human intellect.

From what was said yesterday, however, you can gather one thing concerning dreams with the utmost surety, namely, that in them something is living and weaving which is connected with our human past, with the past when we had an existence still associated with earth-fire and water-air. While unconscious in sleep, to a certain extent we call back our past. Today with our brain consciousness and our ordinary free-will, we are not in the position consciously to transport ourselves into that world. While passing through the earlier stages of our evolution we were indeed unconscious or subconscious. Yet relatively it is not particularly difficult to have this experience. If you follow up your dream life, you will certainly find it extraordinarily difficult to give a clear interpretation of your dream pictures. The way they follow one after another is generally completely chaotic. But this chaotic character is only superficial; below the surface man is living in an element that is by no means chaotic, it is merely different, totally different, from the experiences of waking life. We shall immediately see the profound difference if we are clear in just one case as to how far dream-life differs from waking life. It would be very unpleasant if our relations with other people were the same in waking life as they are in dreams. For in dreams we are aware of a bond uniting us with almost all those karmically connected with us; we experience a link with all the human beings with whom we have any karmic connection. From the moment you begin to fall asleep till you wake, a force goes forth from you to innumerable people, and from innumerable people forces come to you. I cannot say that you speak, for speaking is only learnt in waking day life, but if you will not misunderstand me, if you will apply what I am going to say to the communications we have in sleep, then you will know what I mean by saying: In sleep you speak to innumerable people and they speak to you. And what you experience in your soul during your sleep is imparted to you by innumerable people; and what you do during your sleep is to send thoughts to innumerable people. The union between men in sleep is very intimate. It would be highly distressing if this were continued into waking life. You see, it is the beneficent act of the Guardian of the Threshold that he hides from man what is beneath the level of human consciousness. In sleep, as a rule, you know if anyone is lying, you know as a rule if anyone has evil thoughts about you. On the whole, men know one another in sleep comparatively well, but with dimmed consciousness. That is all covered up in waking consciousness, and it must be so, for the simple reason that man would never attain the ego-conscious thinking he is to learn during his earth-mission, nor be able to manage the free will he is to acquire, if he were to continue to live as he lived during the periods of Saturn, Sun, and especially the Moon period. Then, in his external life, he lived as he now lives from falling asleep to waking.

But now we come to something else significant. Out of the unconscious life between falling asleep and waking, dreams emerge. Why then are they not a true picture of life below the threshold of consciousness? Ah! were these dreams direct and true reflections, they would be every possible thing. In the first place they would impart significant knowledge concerning our relation to the world and to men; they would also be stern monitors. They would speak dreadfully severely to our conscience about the various things in life about which we are so willing to give ourselves up to illusion. I might almost say that we are protected from the effect these dreams might have upon us if they were true reflections of life below the threshold of consciousness—we are protected by our waking life permeating us with forces so strongly that a shadow is cast over the whole life of dreams. Thus, we carry the ideas, the images, of waking life into our dream-life, into the life of sleep, and through this dreams arise. Suppose, for instance, you were to dream of some personality who took it upon himself to impress upon you that you had done something really tactless—unfitting. That happens sometimes. Others, too, might admonish us during sleep, and might speak to our conscience. The experiences and customs of waking life have given you the wish—I might even say the strong desire—not to listen to this; during sleep you don't want to hear anything this person says to you. Well then, the wish is transformed into a darkening of experience. But if at the same time, there is such intense activity of the soul that the picture surges up, then something else from waking life is superimposed upon what you were to have experienced as a picture, something said by a kind friend to whom you would rather listen than to the admonisher—What a splendid fellow you are, always ready to will and do what is best and most pleasant!—Sometimes, from waking life and its reminiscences, the very opposite can be hung over what is being experienced. Actually, waking life is the cause of all the illusions and deceptions arising during the life of dreams.

Furthermore it is possible for a man today, in the present cycle of evolution, to come to a knowledge of Spiritual Science. There are, I know, many who do so and say: I have been studying Spiritual Science for many years, and yet am no whit advanced. I am told that I can achieve this or that through Spiritual Science, but it does not help me forward.—I have often emphasized that this thought is not the right one. Spiritual Science brings progress to everyone, even when it does not develop an esoteric life. The thoughts of Spiritual Science on themselves bring progress. But we must be careful about subjective experiences that take place really in the soul, for it is strange that what springs up as new, in the path of anyone beginning to study Spiritual Science, in its picture character is, at first, no different from the world of dreams. What we experience, my dear friends, when we become anthroposophists, appears to differ very little from the world of dreams. But a more subtle differentiation shows a most important distinction between ordinary dreams and those perceptions that flow through spiritual life, when consciously admitted into thought.

Much that is chaotic may also appear in the dream-pictures experienced in the soul of a spiritual scientist. But if these pictures are analysed according to the guidance Spiritual Science can give, they will be found to become, especially as they progress ever truer reflections of man's inner experience. And we must pay heed to this layer of experience, hidden as it is from ordinary understanding and from the ordinary life of the senses. This experience runs its course like a meditation, a meditative dream, yet is full of meaning and, rightly regarded, throws much light on spiritual secrets. We must mark how it gradually creeps into the life of ordinary ideas—this layer of life that closely resembles dreams, but that can lead us into the spiritual world. But we must not merely look at its single pictures, we must look at the meaningful course these pictures take. If we pay attention to such things, we come to the differentiation of the three layers of consciousness which I showed you yesterday. Goethe divined it in a beautiful way. One of these layers of consciousness appears, without any help of ours, when we dream in the ordinary way; if we are not interpreters of dreams, if we are not superstitious but try honestly to find what lies behind the dream-pictures, then this dream-world will be able to reveal that, before these earth-lives, as men we passed through earlier stages of evolution.

And then we have the ordinary waking day consciousness we know, or at least think we know. We know the fact of its existence, we do not always venture to explain it fully but we know it exists.

The third layer is where supersensible knowledge enters in. For the reasons already mentioned, supersensible knowledge is of course something for which man has to strive, both now and into the future.

I pointed out to you yesterday how, in the first half of the scene in the scene in the second part of Faust, which we are now to consider, Goethe embodies the characteristic features of dream-life. And the moment the Oread begins to speak to Mephistopheles, and the philosophers appear, we have to do with the world of ordinary daytime reality. The moment the Dryads point out the Phorkyads to Mephistopheles, we are dealing with a reference to conscious supersensible knowledge. Goethe is directing his thoughts and ideas to the three layers of consciousness when he asks himself the question: How will Homunculus, to whom human knowledge is accessible, become a Homo?—Not through the ordinary knowledge of the understanding of the senses, but only by having recourse to other layers of consciousness. For man in his being is wider than the earth, and intelligence and the senses are adapted only to earthly things. But we explained yesterday how the equilibrium of the Sphinx fails when man plunges into the world of antiquity, how man really feels insecure in it, how Homunculus feels himself insecure. For man knows little more about himself—forgive me but this is true—he knows little more about himself than he does about a Homunculus; and about a Homo he knows nothing. And Homunculus, as Goethe pictures him, does not enter into all the whirl of the Sirens, the Seismos, and so on, because he is afraid of the stormy, surging element into which man dives when he forsakes the world of the senses to enter the world from which dreams arise. Homunculus does not dare to enter there, but wants to find an easier way to become Homo. He is on the track of two philosophers, Anaxagoras and Thales, from whom he hopes to learn how it is possible to put more into his human nature that can't be given him in a laboratoryby a Wagner. This is what he wants. We already know that Goethe had little hope of what could be experienced through the new philosophers, and had no wish at all to test people's patience by, perhaps, taking Homunculus to Königsberg to get information from Kant on how to become a complete human being, how to widen human nature. But Goethe sought to live himself into the world of the Greeks, believing that by so living in their more pliable and flexible ideas, he could grasp human life out of another layer of consciousness better than through what the more recent philosophers could produce out of understanding and the consciousness of the senses. Thus, he does not introduce Homunculus into the society of Kant, or of Leibnitz, Hume or Locke, but brings him into the company of those philosophers who came nearer the older outlook, the outlook of the ancient Mysteries, where something of man's nature could be known, if not with such clearly experienced consciousness as today, yet with a more all-embracing consciousness. But, at heart, Anaxagoras and Thales our only imitators of the old Mystery wisdom. Everything said by Anaxagoras in this scene, however, goes to show that it is he who has the more knowledge of ancient Mystery wisdom. Thales is really the inaugurator, the initiator, the beginner, of the new tendency in science, and knows but little of the old secrets. Naturally he knows more than his later philistine followers because he lived nearer the time of the ancient Mysteries, but he knows less than Anaxagoras. From what he says we can gather that Thales can only give information about what occurs in the world of the senses around him, how mountain ranges and such physical features were formed by slow and gradual processes. You might think it was Lyell, the modern geologist, speaking. Anaxagoras would explain the present out of the past, explain the earthly from what went before, when earth was not yet earth. He wants to find his explanation in those times to which, in their nature, the ants, the comets, and also the Pigmies belonged. I referred to this yesterday. Anaxagoras lives entirely in that world which today is a supersensible, or if you like, subsensible world, without knowledge of which, however, we cannot understand what has to do with the senses. Anaxagoras here reflects one of Goethe's deep convictions. For Goethe has put this point beautifully into one of his aphorisms, where he says: “What no longer arises, we cannot think of as arising. What has already arisen, we cannot understand”. And in another place: “Reason as applied to what is becoming, understanding to what has become”.

What Thales sees around him is what has become. Anaxagoras enters into all that has gone before the becoming—the actual arising. Hence Goethe distinguishes strictly between understanding that is directed to what is nowadays regarded as the object of science, and reason that extends beyond the obvious and intellectual, to the supersensible, even the supersensible that held sway before the existing conditions of the earth. In Anaxagoras, Goethe sees the representative of a knowledge, a science, that devotes itself to what is still coming into being, and is at home and all that is done by Pigmies, that is to say, at home in all that such beings do that certainly today develop a physical existence, but like the emmets, for example, really belonged by nature to a previous age.

So when Anaxagoras meets with Homunculus' request, he would like to give him the opportunity to enrich human nature through his own (Anaxagoras') knowledge; he wants to take Homunculus into the world of the Pigmies, the emmets, and so forth, and even wants to make him king there. It is already clear to Anaxagoras that the world of which Thales speaks, the world of present conditions, cannot be much help in changing Homunculus into Homo. Could entrance be made into the world of becoming, however, into the world preceding ours, something might be achieved towards that end. But Homunculus is undecided: “What says my Thales?” He still thinks he will not venture into that world. When he encountered it as a dream-world, he dared not enter it, and now it confronts him as the thought of Anaxagoras he still does not summon up sufficient courage, or at least he would first have Thales' advice. And Thales deters him from plunging into the world of Anaxagoras' thought. What kind of world is this? Fundamentally, it is the world of the ancient Mysteries, but flattened, levelled down, for human understanding. It is the shadow form of the concepts of the ancient Mysteries. That is why they cannot hold their own against the world. If we have real, living concepts of becoming, we can arrive at an understanding of this world—grow into it. But Anaxagoras' shadow concepts are no match for Thales' objections, for these come from the present sense-world. And just as fleeting dreams, that are reflections of higher spiritual worlds, fade away from man when a cock crows or a door slams, so everything in the thought-world of Anaxagoras fades when it meets other thoughts drawn from the present world of the senses. Thales has only to draw attention to the presence of the sense-world, and he does this very forcibly. As the present world kills the preceding world that arises before us in dreams, so do the cranes strike dead the Pigmies and the emmets. This is merely an image. Anaxagoras first turns to the world that re-appears in the vague experience of dreams. When he is obliged to realise that this world will be of no advantage to Homunculus, he then turns to the higher world. To begin with, in wonderful words, he invokes among heavenly phenomena, all that has remained of a previous period of he earth—he invokes the Moon. After he has widened his thoughts and ideas concerning what is left over from the Moon period—emmets, pigmies, creatures of a lower kind, and all this has proved useless to Homunculus, he looks upward to where the Moon has still remained from the old Moon period.

Think how clearly in this scene Goethe actually points to all these secrets lying at the basis of earthly evolution. He even makes Anaxagoras address an invocation to the Moon, out of the ancient Mystery-wisdom. It is a wonderful passage in which Anaxagoras turns toward the Moon. It shows most distinctly how, in Anaxagoras, Goethe was wishing to portray a personality standing within the spiritual world but only with his understanding, the understanding that only studying the present can never reach the spiritual at all, but, in Anaxagoras, still preserves the spiritual out of the old Mysteries. Anaxagoras says:

“The powers subterene erstwhile adoring,
This crisis in, I turn above, imploring,
O Thou, that agest not eternally,
Three-named, three-formed, enthroned supernally,
Thee in my people's woe I call on Thee!
Diana, Luna, Hecate!
Thou bosom-lightener [or bosom-widener], deeply pensive one!
Thou tranquil brightener, mighty intensive one!
Open thy shadows' awful gulf alone!
Thine ancient might without a spell make known.”

But he has still only shadows; instead of achieving anything for Homunculus, he perceives how from the Moon desolation falls upon the earth, and how all the life still left there is destroyed by a phenomenon of the elements. As being characteristic of Anaxagoras it is significant that he addresses the Moon, this remnant of a previous period of the earth, as “Luna, Diana, Hecate ...”

For Anaxagoras, therefore, the Moon is not a unity but a trinity. In so far as it fulfils its course above in the heavens, it is Luna. In so far as it is active in the earth itself, it is Diana. The forces working cosmically through the Moon as it circles the heavens, have—one might say—for brothers and sisters the earthly forces; the Moon is not only present cosmically, it exists also in an earthly way. The same forces that are cosmically associated with the circling Moon in the heavens, also live and weave through what is earthly, and belong to significant subconscious forces in man. They work in man's nature and belong to forces in him that are subconscious but important. What works within the earth through man having a certain relation to Nature out of his subconscious, that never comes to complete consciousness, was called by the Greeks Diana. Diana is generally said to be the goddess of the chase. Certainly she is that too, because this subconscious holds sway in the pleasures of the chase; it does so, however, in countless other human feelings and will-impulses. Diana is not only goddess of the chase, she is the working, creating goddess of all half unconscious, half subconscious striving, such as is gratified in hunting. Man does much of this kind in life, and this is one of the ways.

Then there dwells in man, but also especially in the earth, a third figure, the figure of Hecate, the sub-earthly state of the Moon. It is from within the earth, from what is sub-earthly in it, that those forces work upwards, which—so far as the Moon is a heavenly body, work in her from above downwards. All that the man of today knows of this Moon is the abstract mineral ball he believes to revolve out there, round the earth in four weeks. The Greeks knew a threefold Moon—Luna, Diana, Hecate. And being a microcosm is an image of every trinity, and image of Luna, Diana, Hecate, as the threefold Moon. And we have learnt to know the threefold man. We know the man of the head; this man of the head, since he is the product of the periods of Saturn, Sun, and Moon, the product of all previous ages, can be brought into relation with the heavenly survival, with Luna. So that the head in man would, as a microcosm, correspond to the macrocosm Luna. The man of the centre, the breast, would correspond to Diana; it is in the heart that those subconscious impulses arise of which Diana is the goddess. And all that plays out of the extremity-man and is continued into the sex-man, all the dark, purely organic, bodily feelings and impulses, prevailing in the human being, come from the sub-earthly power of Hecate. And Goethe lets all this sound forth, making it all quite clear for those who wish to hear. To the realm of Hecate belongs, for instance, Empusa who appears in this scene among the Lamiae around Mephistopheles. The Lamiae express rather what belongs to Diana, whereas, in Empusa, all that belongs to the sub-earthly is working, all that dwells microcosmically in the lower nature of man, and is to be awakened in Mephistopheles. This is what Goethe makes ring out for us.

Anaxagoras wishes to show his science to better advantage than he did when alluding to the earthly, to earthly survivals, to the emmets, his myrmidons as he calls them. He turns to the threefold Moon that as macrocosm is the same as man as microcosm. And we ask: Had Goethe a presentiment that, in the threefold Moon, the head-man, chest-man, and limb-man were microcosmically present? Well, my dear friends, read the following lines:

“Thou bosom-widener, (Diana)
Profoundly pensive one, (Luna)
Thou tranquil brightener, mighty, intensive one!” (Hecate)

Here you have, fully expressed by Goethe and made obvious by his description of the middle one as “breast-widener”, the three qualities of Luna, Diana, and Hecate, in so far as these three also apply to threefold man.

You see, my dear friends, there are good grounds for maintaining that Goethe's foreseeing knowledge penetrated deeply in the truths on Spiritual Science. What, however, is written in a work like Goethe's Faust has to be taken in its true character. It when you consider Goethe's characteristic attitude with its foreseeing perception of the truths of Spiritual Science, that you can understand how in a certain sense he repeatedly felt the spiritual, the supersensible—but never the less as something uncanny. As I said yesterday, he lived within his northern world, and felt in sympathy with what this environment offered him in the way on ideas and concepts. However great a genius a man may be, he con only have the same concepts as his fellows; he can combine them differently but he cannot have different concepts. The two layers of consciousness, the subconscious and the superconscious, cannot be approached in this way. The ordinary philistine, my dear friends, can make nothing of all this, and is glad if he is not obliged to deal with the other layers of consciousness. But Goethe, who strove with every fibre of his soul, to penetrate the being of man, often felt it a grievous human limitation that he should have no ideas, no concepts, with which he could see into the would whence man arises, into which, however, no one can look with his understanding or his ordinary knowledge. And then, from all he had felt through his natural ability, or that he had experienced in other ways, and through what he had particularly noticed in Grecian art in Italy, there arose in Goethe the thought that, were man to steep himself in the ideas and life of Greece, he would come nearer to the supersensible than with modern ideas. This was so deeply rooted in Goethe that, from the year 1780 onwards he continually strove to make his ideas as supple as were those of the Greeks. He hoped in this way to reach the supersensible world. But what arose out of this? There arose his strenuous endeavour to come to knowledge of the supersensible world not from the outlook of Greek life, but by gaining ideas through which he would be able to grasp the supersensible world in the life of soul. It is interesting how, while he was writing this scene, Goethe was steeping himself in everything possible to bring Greek life vividly before his soul. Today we are no nearer to Greek life than men were in Goethe's days. And yet such a work as Schlosser's Universal Survey of the History of the Ancient World and its Culture, published in 1826, and immediately read by Goethe among many other works transplanting him into the life of Greece, enabled him, by his sympathetic attitude towards Greek life, to bring it vividly before his soul. But what idea had he in all this? Just think! he writes: We are called upon to look back on what is most universal, but utterly past, in ancient history—what cannot be brought back; and from there to let the different peoples gradually surge up beneath out gaze.

In the last twenty years of the eighteenth century during which these scenes of Faust were being created, Goethe occupied himself intensively with studies that should bring vividly before his spirit the far distant past and show him how it flows into the present. Goethe is not one of those who make poems by a turn of the hand; he plunges deeply into the world leading to the supersensible, so that as a poet he can give tidings of it. And his belief in the Greek world changed to a certain extent his way of representation. Because in his very soul he sought Greek life, the concept of truth, the concept of good, drew near the concept of beauty. And the concept of evil approached the concept of ugliness. That is difficult for present-day man to understand. In Greek thought it was different. Cosmos is a word meaning beautiful world-order, as well as true world-order. Today men no longer think, as did the Greeks, that beauty is so closely allied to truth, and ugliness to evil. For the Greeks, beauty melted into truth, ugliness into error and evil. Through his attitude to the Greek world Goethe acquired the feeling that anyone organised like the Greeks, who stood in such close relation to the supersensible world, would experience the untrue and evil as ugly, and would turn away from this because of his experience of beauty, while he would feel truth to be beautiful. This feeling was developed by Goethe. And he believed he might perhaps draw nearer the supersensible by saturating himself with feeling for the beauty of the world. But just as one can only know light by its shadow, one must also be saturated with feeling for the ugliness of the world. And that too Goethe sought.

For this reason he sets Mephistopheles, who is of course only another side of Faust's life, among the prototypes of gliness, the Phorkyads, who are in very truth the prototypes of what is hideous. And in so doing, my dear friends, Goethe touches on a great mystery of existence. You will have realised, from the lectures I have given here from time to time, that even today there are people in possession of certain secrets. Particularly the leaders of Roman Catholicism, for example, the leaders, are in possession of certain secrets. What matters is how these secrets are used. But certain initiates of the English-speaking peoples are also acquainted with mysteries. Out of a profound misunderstanding, does not only the Roman Church—that is, its leaders—keep these secrets from its adherents, but certain esoteric initiates of the English-speaking peoples do the same. They have various reasons for this, and of one of these I will now speak.

You see, my dear friends, the earth has a past, the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon; it has a present, the earth-period; it has a future, the periods of Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. In evolution there is both good and evil. Out of the cosmos, out of cosmic evolution, good can only be recognised from the past, from the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and half the earth-period. Wisdom and goodness are associated, in this looking back into the past. Wisdom and goodness were implanted into human nature by those members of the higher hierarchies who belong to man, at a time when this human nature was not yet awakened to full consciousness, as it is on the earth. For the coming time, the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods, and at present on the earth, for the coming half of the earth-period—it is already beginning—man must preserve goodness if he wishes to attain it; he must develop the impulse for goodness out of his own nature. For in his environment,in what is new that approaches him, the forces of evil are revealed. Were these forces for evil not revealed, man could not arrive at free-will. And those initiates to whom I refer know this important secret, my dear friends, and will not impart it because they do not wish to help mankind to maturity. They know this secret. If what arose as human nature on ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon, and still continues further—if what was evolved for us men on Saturn, and possesses a past, were to arise now out of earth-conditions, it would be fundamentally evil, it would only be able to absorb evil. It is only possible to receive evil from external conditions. That man can acquire freedom of will is due to this exposure to evil and his being able to choose between the evil that approaches him, and the good he can develop out of his own nature. This is if he has confidence in what was planted there in previous ages. Hence these initiates say to those wishing to be initiated: There are three layers of consciousness, (that is the formula always used in these English-speaking schools os initiation) three layers of consciousness. When a man plunges into the subconscious, from which dreams spring up, he experiences an intimate relation with other beings (I have described this to you before) also with other men; these beings do not appear in the present world. When, as is the case today, man is living in his day-consciousness in the perceptible, rational world, he is in the world where he goes through birth and death. And when he raises himself to the world—that he will enter as physical man in the future—to which he attains through supersensible knowledge, then that is the world where he first experiences evil. For it is then that a man must find strength to be a match for evil, to hold his own against it. He must learn to know evil.

The natural consequence of this is the necessity for men of the present to shed light on the past, so that they may be prepared for the inevitable encounter with evil; and this can be done only through Spiritual Science. To these three layers of consciousness, the initiates of the English-speaking peoples continually draw attention. This will be the basis of that conflict that is of the utmost importance, though the present age has little external knowledge of it. This conflict will be between those who want what is a necessity to take place, and secrets of this kind to be imparted, and those who wish to keep mankind in immaturity. So far the latter have had the upper hand. It is most important that these things should be known. You can see from this, my dear friends, what mischief will be set on foot if the truths of Spiritual Science are withheld. For man will be exposed to the forces of evil, and he will only be protected from it by giving himself up to the spiritual life of the good. To withhold the spiritual life of goodness from men is to be no friend to humanity. Whoever does this, be he Freemason or Jesuit, is no friend to humanity. For it means handing men over to the forces of evil. And there may be a purpose in doing so. This purpose may be to confine goodness to a small circle, in order by the help of this goodness to dominate the helpless humanity who are thus led by evil into the follies of life.

You can imagine, my dear friends, that anyone like Goethe, who has a presentiment of all these things, will have some hesitation in approaching them. From many things I have said in your presence about Goethe's particular kind of spirituality, you will be able to form a concept of how he would approach these subtle, but world-shattering matters with only really relevant ideas. Hence, in conceiving his Faust, he did not wish to be thought that man, wanting to make progress in culture, must fearlessly expose himself to the forces of evil; instead, he clothes this too, in Greek ideas, by confronting Mephistopheles with primeval ugliness, with the trinity of Phorkyads, the three prototypes of ugliness. Instead of pointing men unreservedly to the reality of evil, as Spiritual Science must do, Goethe points to the reality of ugliness as contrasted with beauty. Hence the characteristic behaviour of Mephistopheles towards the Phorkyads. Had Mephistopheles remained in his northern home, that is to say in a world that has certainly advanced beyond that of the Greeks in the world-order, he would have been obliged to meet with the bitter, but essential world, from which future evil flows. Instead of this, Goethe makes him meet in the world of antiquity the prototypes of ugliness, the Phorkyads. So that he places him, as it were, in prehistoric times before the history of evil. By employing Greek concepts, he places most solemn truth before men in a way that could still arouse their sympathy. And here too Goethe shows his deep knowledge of the matter. We know—you may read this in my Occult Science—that the future is in a sense the reproduction of the past on a higher level. Jupiter is a kind of repetition of the Moon; Venus of the Sun; and Vulcan of Saturn. On a higher level, the earlier appears in the later. It is the same as regards evil. Evil appears in order that man may develop goodness out of his own nature with all possible strength. But this evil will show distorted pictures, caricatures, of the forms of the primeval age.

You see, what we now are is largely because we are constructed symmetrically, the left-man and the right-man working together. Physicists and physiologists wonder why it is we have two eyes, what use we have for two eyes. If they knew why we have two hands, and of what use they are to us, they would also know why we have two eyes and of what use these are. If, for instance, we could not touch the left hand with the right, we could never arrive at ego-consciousness. By being able to grasp the right-man with the left, by gaining knowledge of the right-man by means of the left, we arrive at consciousness of ourselves, at consciousness of the presence of the ego. To look at an object a man must have more than one eye. If, by birth or accident, he has only one eye, that does not matter: it is not the external apparatus but the faculty, the forces, that are of importance. When we look at a man the axes of the eyes are crossed. In this way the ego is associated with sight; through the crossing the left direction is associated with the right. And the farther we go back the closer is the relation, in common with the consciousness. This is why Goethe gives the three Phorkyads one eye and one tooth between them, a representation that shows his deep knowledge. Thus the three have but one eye and one tooth. This implies that the senses are not meant to be working together, they are still isolated from one another. On the one hand relationship is expressed, on the other we are told that the elements are not yet working in collaboration, that what arises through the right-man and the left-man cannot yet appear. Thus accurately does Goethe express what he wishes to say, and he suggests infinitely much.

Now, if you think over what you know from Occult Science namely, that the present bi-sexual-sexual human being has sprung from the uni-sexual being, and that male and female have only been developed in the course of evolution, you will see that a retrograde evolution takes place when Mephistopheles meets with evil in the form of ugliness, joins with it in going with the Phorkyads: “Done! here stand I” (after he has thrown in his lot with the Phorkyads) ...

“Here stand I, Chaos' well-beloved son!”
Phorkyads: “And Chaos' true-born daughters, we, undoubted.”

To which Mephistopheles replies:

“O fie! Hermaphrodite must I be flouted?”

He becomes ‘hermaphrodite’ when it is intended to show the condition preceding the bi-sexual, the condition to which I have just referred. Truly Goethe gives his descriptions from inside knowledge! In this scene we may recognise how deeply he had divined and entered into the truths of Spiritual Science.

Now, remember now not long ago I said that no one can ever arrive at a satisfying conception of the world who, misled by what man is now, what he has of necessity to be, comes on the one hand to abstract ideals, ideals having no forces. (Forces such as those in nature that cannot fit into the physical world-order, but have to disperse like mist when the earth reaches her goal, that is, her grave). No one can find a satisfying world-outlook who is either an abstract idealist of this kind, or a materialist. As I said, man must be both. He must be able to rise to ideas in conformity with the age in which he lives, and also look at material things in a material way and form materialistic ideas about them. Thus, he must be able to form both a materialistic and an idealistic conception of the world, and not set up a unity with abstract concepts. Having on the one hand scientific concepts, on the other idealistic concepts, we must then let them interpenetrate each other just as spirit and matter do. As I have told you, in processes of cognition the ideal must permeate and illumine the material, the material must permeate and illumine the ideal.

And Goethe found this out. It occurred to him how one-sided it is when, in abstract concepts, men seek a world-outlook inclining more to matter or more to spirit. Hence he was drawn to seek his world-conception not in abstract ideas but in a different way. And this he describes as follows:

“Since so much of our experience does not admit of being openly expressed and directly imparted, long ago I chose this method, namely, to reveal the hidden meaning to the observant by dint of contrasted images playing into one another.”

Now, can anyone express more clearly that he is neither idealist nor realist, but both idealist and realist, letting the two world-outlooks play into one another. Goethe seeks to approach the world from the most diverse directions, and to come to truth by means of mutually reflected concepts. Thus, in Goethe's impulses there is already concealed the way that must be taken by Spiritual Science in order to lead mankind towards the future—the health-giving future.

One would like, my dear friends, what Goethe began to be continued; but then it would be essential for such works as Faust to be really read. Man has, however, more or less lost the habit of reading. At best, men would say when they read:

“Diana, Luna, Hecate!
Thou bosom widener, profoundly pensive one!”

Oh! poetry. Then there is no need to go deeper into it, no need to meditate over every word! Thus men console themselves today when offered anything they are not actually bound to believe; for they like to take things superficially. But the universe does not permit that. When you consider the deep truth I have just shown in connection with the meeting of Mephistopheles with the Phorkyads—a truth that has been preserved in many occult schools of the present day—then you have the opportunity of understanding, together with much else that enables you to realise it, the intense seriousness of our striving after Spiritual Science, the seriousness that must underlie our endeavours. It may be said that there sometimes escapes, half consciously, from those who have come into contact with what is essential for man in the future, an pious ejaculation, like Nietzsche's, in his Midnight Song: “The world is deep, Yea, deeper than the day e'er dreamed”.

We must indeed say that the day gives man day-consciousness; but, so long as he clings only to what the day brings, man of himself becomes simply Homunculus, not Homo. For “the world is deep, yea, deeper than the day e'er dreamed”. And since Goethe does not wish to lead Faust into merely what the day brings, but into all that conceals the eternal, he has to let him take his way in the company of Homunculus, and of Mephistopheles who confronts the supersensible. Goethe thought he could do this by steeping himself in Greek ideas, and by bringing them to life within himself.

You will have been able to realize from the lecture yesterday that a certain state of consciousness, which was an actual experience to men of earlier times, has to some extent been lost. I told you that the special sort of waking consciousness we have today, which consists predominantly in more or less abstract ideas or at the best in shadowy pictures, did not then exist in the same form, and that in its place there was a kind of waking-dreaming, or dreaming-waking. This was not experienced as we experience dreams but as a living picture which corresponded pretty well with spiritual reality. There was a condition of sleep which, though it was dreamless, left an after-effect of the kind described, and there was a third state of consciousness beyond this which was experienced as a resting in the surging Moon-forces, forces which, reaching under the Earth, lift man out of earthly gravity and allow him to experience his cosmic existence. The essential point about these older conditions of soul was that they allowed man to experience his cosmic existence. In our ordinary everyday consciousness there is only a shadowy image left of that older state of consciousness—a shadowy image that is noticed by very few and is mostly entirely unheeded.

I will try to describe this survival of a primeval state of consciousness. When we observe our dreams—chaotic as they are—we find that all sorts of experiences drawn from earthly existence flow into them. Things long forgotten crop up altered in many ways, even things which passed unnoticed at the time. The times, too, at which events took place may be thoroughly confused. But if you look more closely into the details of a dream, you will discover the remarkable fact that in essence practically everything which crops up in it is related to the happenings of the last three days. You may perhaps have a dream about something that happened to you twenty-five years before; you may dream of it in all its vividness, though somewhat altered in detail. But if you study it closely you will always discover something of the following sort: in this dream about an event of twenty-five years before, a character appears whom we will call Edward, and you will find that you have somewhere heard the name casually in passing, or your eye has caught it as you were reading. In the details of a dream, even the remotest, there is always some relation, however insignificant, to something which has happened during the last three days. The reason is that we bear within ourselves the events of the last two, three or four days—the period is of course approximate—in a quite different way from those which occurred earlier.

Our perceptions are, as you know, taken up into our astral organism and our ego-organism, and the events thus perceived do at first live in direct connection with our consciousness. What we have experienced in the course of three days—that is, when at least three days have passed—goes more intensively into our feelings. Ordinarily we do not notice these things, but they are realities all the same. The reason is that all we perceive or think, which is taken up into the astral organism and the ego-organism, has also to be somehow imprinted upon the etheric body, the body of formative forces, and at least to some extent even upon the physical body. This process takes two to four days, so that we have to sleep two or three times on anything we experience before it is imprinted on the etheric and physical bodies. Only then is it firmly fixed in the etheric body so that it may be a permanent memory. Thus in man there is a perpetual inner reciprocity, a sort of struggle, between the astral and etheric bodies, and the result is always that what we have experienced consciously is imprinted into the denser, more material elements of our being. After three or four days, what was at first only a transitory sense-experience is transferred into the body of formative forces and into the physical body.

But how little of what I have been describing actually comes into men's consciousness nowadays! Yet it is something which is perpetually taking place in the life of the human body and soul. Every experience of which we have been aware has to wait three or four days before it is fully our own. It fluctuates between the astral and etheric bodies, and cannot decide—one might say—whether it has really been impressed into the etheric and into the physical body.

This is something of extraordinary significance. Remember that basically our true being is only our ego and astral body. We cannot really claim that the etheric body is our own property. In this materialistic age people talk as though the etheric and physical bodies were their, whereas actually they belong to the whole Cosmos. And so when in the course of three or four days, what our ego and astral body have experienced is passed on to the etheric and physical bodies, it is then part, not only of ourselves but of the Cosmos. It is only for three days that we can claim any action of ours in the world as significant for ourselves alone. After that we have, as it were, imprinted it on the Universe, and it rests within the whole Universe and belongs not only to us but also to the gods.

In very early periods of human evolution, as a result of that state of consciousness which is now lost and which has deeper than sleep, men had a definite impression of this remarkable fact, and the Initiates were able to give information about what lay behind it. Particularly in the epoch of which I spoke yesterday, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, it was only a vague feeling that men had. But the priests were initiated into the real nature of the fact. Whereas nowadays Initiation must be a purely inner experience of soul and spirit, at the most with symbols and rites of a physical nature only, in those earlier days Initiation was an external process and the effects of that external process passed over into man's inner being. To take one example: when a man was to be initiated, for three or four days he was put by the Hierophant who was initiating him, into this state of consciousness which we have now lost. The purpose of this was to enable him to see for himself what happens during these three days in the world external to him, and how it finds entrance into the real being of man. The Initiate was enabled to see what happens to an idea, to an experience or a feeling, before it becomes a man's own property.

Our materialistic attitude to the world today affords us no conception at all of the extraordinary significance of the wisdom that lay within this condition that is so deeply concealed from us. I can perhaps best explain to you what was accomplished in the three days of this Initiation during that dim condition of consciousness if I remind you first of our ordinary dream-life with an attitude based purely on what we might call scientific method, there is still something extraordinarily profound involved.

How is this dream-life really revealed? There are of course many kinds of dreams, but let us keep for the moment to what consists largely in the recollection of past experiences. Pictures of these experiences arise in dreams. How do they arise? You are aware that they appear radically transformed. This transformation may go a very long way; for instance, we may take the case of a tailor who in his ordinary life has never had the occasion of making a Minister's state robes; he may have made a number of coats and been very proud of them, but for all that he has not the slightest chance of making such a robe as he now dreams he makes. In a dream like this there may be a number of different influences at work. For instance, the man may in a former life have been the attendant of a Roman magistrate and among his duties had to help him on with his toga. A dim feeling of all this survives and what a man experiences in this life may be colored by what streams over from a previous one.

This is just an example of how the content of dreams may be altered; the important fact is that they undergo the intense transformations we all know. One must really ask what is contained in these dreams, what is at work in them. It is external events which give the occasion for this type of dream, but the external events make their appearance in a wholly altered form.

The reason for this is quite beyond the conception of our ordinary scientific ideas. The sort of law which we should recognize as scientific, the laws we look for in the external world by our method of observation and experiment, cease to be valid as soon as we pass inside the skin of a human being. We should be very much mistaken were we to assume that the natural laws laid down in the laboratory were valid within the human being. Not only are the substances transformed within our organism when we consume them in the ordinary course of nourishment, but the laws of the substances are also changed, down to the smallest atoms. What appears in our dreams is not just the abstract reflection of some reality; in our dreams we see the weaving of the organic laws within which man has his being. Dreams are much closer to us than is our normal abstract thinking; they show the way in which external substances act within man. Our dreams are a protest against the part of reality that is shackled within the laws of Nature. From the time you go to sleep until the time you wake, you live in a world where according to the scientist everything is controlled by these laws. Actually the moment you enter, even to the slightest degree, into the spiritual world through your dreams, your dream-experience arises as a protest against the laws of Nature. Dreams cannot run their course in the way of external events, or they would be very much like actual waking life. Dreams which emerge from real sleep are in their make-up a protest against the laws of Nature, and they concern us much more intimately.

In this regard modern investigators of a materialistic turn of mind have made some interesting discoveries. Some of you will know a book by a man called Staudenmaier, entitled Experimental Magic, which appeared a good many years ago and is typical of the spiritual constitution of many modern scientific thinkers. Staudenmaier wanted to find out if there is any reality in the spiritual world. Of Anthroposophy he admitted that he knew only what its opponents had written. People don't like studying Anthroposophy; they find it difficult, particularly if they are typical scientific thinkers of today.

Staudenmaier attempted, by spiritualistic methods, to get into the spiritual world. He dulled his consciousness until he was in a sort of mediumistic state; then he began automatic writing and was surprised that he wrote a lot of nonsense which did not at all agree with what he knew about reality. In particular, the fact that spirits seemed to be speaking to him did not agree with it! He knew that was impossible and yet what he wrote assured him that spirits were speaking. He was appalled by the lies that these non-existent spirits told him. You should read in his book all the incredible lies which flowed into his writing. He became—to use no worse a word—a medium, and he did not know what to make of it all. A friend advised him to give the whole thing up and to lead a normal, sensible life and go out shooting. So he did, and he went out after magpies; but even there he found that whatever it was he had stirred up inside himself continued its activity, and he could not rid himself of it. If he looked up at a tree, he saw, not a magpie but a fearful dragon with terrible fangs, which looked at him with horrifying eyes. The same things happened everywhere, and he lived in an inner struggle to get himself back into a normal condition.

I mention all this because here we have experimental evidence that there is an immediate protest against the external order of Nature as soon as we are not merely dreaming while awake but are using this device to contact and arouse the inner being of man. Obviously we regard it all as lies. When we have thought of a man as a friend and as a decent fellow, and if after he has got into this mediumistic condition we see him putting out his tongue at us or making long noses, then inevitably we say that the spiritual world is lying and that this experience is simply that of a dream. Now there is something in this. Whenever man approaches the spiritual world inside himself, within which everything inside his skin is enclosed, there is an immediate protest from this sphere against the natural order. It is not surprising that when a man enters it with underdeveloped faculties of judgment, all kinds of elemental beings appear and create delusion. But there is always this protest against the natural order when we approach the spiritual; and ordinary dreams make this clear.

We ought to realize that we then enter a quite different order of being, and, even though it appears only in the fleeting form of the dream, it is all the same a protest against those admirable laws of Nature which we establish by laboratory experiments. This is the first step into the spiritual world where we immediately find the protest against natural laws, which are, as it were, robbed of their dignity as soon as we penetrate a little into man's inner being.

The old Initiates knew very well through their three days' Initiation that there is not only a natural order, but that within and behind that natural order there is a spiritual one. It is moreover still possible for anyone who has acquired some knowledge of Initiation to penetrate with modern methods into these things and to pass through the experiences a really fearful torment of the soul. When dreams begin to weave their forms we actually enter a world where the laws of Nature collapse, and just because the ordinary laws no longer hold good, their interrelations change, however many recollections of ordinary life may still be effective. If we have come to regard natural laws as the last word, we find ourselves face to face with nothingness. It is painful, almost tragic, for a modern man, as he passes through Initiation, to experience entry into a sphere of being where this protest against the laws of Nature is encountered; he feels that everything he had got from his intellect, and which was determined by the laws of Nature is swamped. His soul can no longer breathe because he has been too much accustomed to the natural order. He finally realizes that an altogether different world is pressing in from a quite different direction. This is no longer a natural but a spiritual order, which is throughout permeated with what in the depths of our present-day human conscience we experience as a moral world-order. He gradually learns that on the one hand there is the order of Nature perceived by the senses, for which the laws have been established by natural science; on the other hand, if he moves out of this natural order, he moves into a world that protests against the natural order. As he experiences this protest, a sort of luminous water of life pours round him and he can once again breathe—this is the moral order which ultimately expands into the spiritual.

The highest knowledge gained by the ancient Initiates was when they discovered the protest against the physical world-order and saw the true moral world-order extend into the physical. It is indeed experienced in a much weaker degree during the three days described: whatever we experience in the external world, whether actions or feelings, takes three or four days to be imprinted on our organism. But when the process is completed, the imprinted form is not like that which we experienced externally; it becomes an impulse demanding a moral expression very different from the natural order. If we could see how our experiences have changed in our inner being during those three of our days, we should see that what we experienced in its natural form during our earthly existence has been imprinted in our external being and is no less real than it was in the external world. But now it lives within us as the impulse of a moral world-order by means of which we may move further over the ocean of life. Thus we carry the results of what we have experienced naturally as the moral foundation for our later life.

In recent periods of human evolution, however, when men plunged into that “lower sleep,” if I may call it so, that Earth-embraced sphere, he plunged into the outer ether. There his experiences find their compensation. He is not merely set within the moral world-order as regards the direction of his inner life; in that lower sleep he is set within the moral order of the Cosmos. Since this deep sleep has been lost to our forms of consciousness and we now have only a very faint echo of it in the three-days' experience described, this contact with the Cosmos has been lost also. Indeed, we should have been gradually thrust out of the self-subsisting moral world-order if a particular event had not occurred in the course of Earth-evolution. The experience undergone by the older Initiates so as to be able to tell men what happens during those three days, was undergone as a unique world-event, as an event in world-history, by the Christ Being who descended from spiritual worlds into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and, though a God, lived a truly human life. That experience of the three days now became available for all mankind. What could previously be discovered in the sleep of deep consciousness, taking place in man not consciously but at least subconsciously, in a natural way, had to be gone through in order that man might find his connection with what was brought about for earthly humanity by Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha. This was the vicarious deed of a God. Man was to take a step upwards in his evolution and to experience in moral form through Christianity what had previously come to him naturally. The Mystery of Golgotha is therefore closely related to the whole meaning of earthly evolution, because of its relation to the evolution of man's consciousness. We can understand what was to be accomplished by the Mystery of Golgotha only if we can look back on what had once occurred naturally and was now to occur morally.

In this respect, however, our modern consciousness, which runs its course between waking, sleeping and dreaming, has not yet attained inner harmony. Since the fifteenth century, when this modern consciousness first received its imprint, it has looked on Nature one-sidedly and has claimed to understand the order of Nature, considering that what is found there constitutes reality. Beyond this reality men will not look; they will not press forward to that strengthened form of human knowledge to which the spiritual reveals itself just as the natural order does. Thus it has become customary to speak of the moral order as of unknown origin. To do this was not strictly honest, since the common view of Nature cannot admit any reality in the moral order. One could, even if a little dishonestly, get over this difficulty by saying that on the one side we have knowledge, on the other, faith; and that the moral order belongs to the realm of faith; that knowledge cannot become faith nor faith, knowledge; and that the moral order belongs to the realm of faith. Such is the convenient formula which has become customary. The distinction has even come to be regarded as something specifically Christian, though even five or six hundred years ago no genuine Christianity, and certainly not original Christianity, would have admitted the distinction. Even today it is not yet Catholic dogma, however much it may be Catholic custom, to distinguish in this way between faith and knowledge.

We cannot get a proper notion of the relation between the natural and the moral-spiritual order because we are not aware of the transition between them; because the dream is not understood which leads out of the natural order and protests against it, thus preparing the way. If we have gone through this preparatory stage, we can make contact with the moral order of the world.

Only an honest view of the past of mankind, and of something which modern man does not yet possess, can lead to a satisfying picture of all this. Failing that, even historical documents of ancient times remain just things which can be studied but convey no real meaning. Now we spoke this morning a good deal about the opponents of Anthroposophy. I could say much that would be for their good, though certainly not in their favor. The comments of our opponents ... I often have to recall an anecdote supposed to be based on truth which the famous Professor Kuno Fischer was fond of telling. He used to relate how he had had two schoolfellows—they may have been brothers—with an uncle who was a thorough simpleton. The boys got to the stage of learning logarithms and having to buy log tables. The uncle caught sight of these tables and when he saw the mass of figures he asked his nephews what they were. The boys were completely at a loss to explain, but at last the young rascals conceived the idea of telling him they were the house-numbers of all Europe. The uncle believed them and finally thought it an excellent idea to be able to know at a glance all the house-numbers of London, Paris, and so on. Now people who are unable to see with insight into the meaning of the ancient documents are like the old uncle with his log tables. Our modern historians who edit these ancient documents do not tell us much more about them than the uncle did about logarithms when he took them to be the house-numbers of Europe. We must make it clear to ourselves how far their interpretation, based on present-day abstract thought, is removed from the real spiritual facts. We must have the determination to do that, or we shall never be able to see how man has developed into the present out of a past when he was very different.

We are living at a time when all sorts of inner conflicts must arise from our present-day experience of sleeping, waking and dreaming, if we are in the least capable of real self-observation. Just as men lost the real knowledge of that deep sleep which was so significant for them that the Initiates had to explain its nature to them, so in modern times our ordinary sleep tends to crumble to pieces. I do not mean that in the future men will dream the whole night through, but rather that their dreams will be dulled. Just as man has passed since olden times from that “waking dreaming” to our modern abstract thinking, our present-day chaotic dreams will be dulled, and that duller kind of sleep will become normal. Dreams will no longer extend into our consciousness, which will be overlaid entirely by our present-day form of abstract logical thinking. But then a super-consciousness will emerge, already apparent to anyone who can understand these things. This super-consciousness is concerned with the human will and with the effects of the will when it acts on the nervous system. If with the help of Initiation-knowledge you observe the unrestrained way in which human will is developing, you will be able to see how various psychological manifestations, sometimes going as far as actual physical illness, are really the herald of a form of consciousness higher than our present waking consciousness.

But there is something beyond this which men will not yet be able to experience unless they can actually acquire spiritual science: a science, that is, which needs a quite different sort of thinking from the normal and is in reality far more practical than the theoretical attitude to life, which is in fact completely unpractical. This spiritual science adds an inner living power of thinking to ordinary abstract thinking. Yet this is not something we can arbitrarily add or neglect; it occurs because an organism is coming into being within man which did not exist in earlier times and of which only the first foundations have so far emerged. The way in which the blood circulates through man's limbs, his arms, legs, hands and feet, is continually changing. What we often call “nervousness” (a nervous state) nowadays is an expression of the fact that a higher condition is striving to make its way into man, but that he is unwilling to accept it because of its strangeness, and this produces a restlessness which will cease only when he makes the new consciousness his own.

Thus we can visualize three further states of consciousness towards which man is making his way: a dulled dream life, waking, and a heightened state of waking. All the turmoil and upheaval which show themselves even in external conditions today are due to the fact that men are trying, for the most part quite unconsciously, to fight against something that is approaching humanity from the spiritual worlds. It is struggling to make its way especially into the human will. We shall have to understand—as nowadays we do not—that as soon as the spiritual comes into action, we pass at once into a sphere where a protest is uttered against natural laws. We shall also not properly understand the Mystery of Golgotha unless we can rise to the realization that the full import of that Mystery cannot be attained by our ordinary knowledge. To grasp its full meaning we have to develop a new faculty; we have to pass with right understanding beyond mere dreaming, which indicates a natural process, and penetrate to an understanding of the other side of being. It is from the side of the spirit that we have to acquire the elements of understanding adequate for future comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. What we must do is to set our experience of the present in this way between the past and the future, and so feel ourselves as a sort of bridge between them. Thus we shall increasingly achieve the understanding required for the use of spiritual truths alongside the natural.

It is easy to understand our ordinary illusions, just because the things that are false are so uncommonly logical. We do not suspect that falsehood can be so logical. What could be more logical than to argue as follows: first observe how long it takes some particular geological stratum to reach a particular thickness, then, if we are dealing with another stratum, divide the smaller into the greater thickness and multiply it by the time taken by that stratum to form, and so reach the conclusion that some epoch, the Silurian or Devonian for instance, was twenty or 200 million years ago. The arithmetical calculation is quite correct and there is nothing to be said against it. It is only ordinary logic that is here deceiving us.

This sort of logic always reminds me of the logic one of the greatest mathematicians of all times applied to his own life. When he had already reached a considerable age he suddenly became ill with some kind of lung trouble; and seeing that he had had a good deal to do with doctors, he had the idea of calculating how many tiny abscesses would have to be got rid of in order to shake off the lung trouble. His calculations about the further development of the illness showed him that it would take fifteen years, and then he would be cured. But ... he died two years later. That was the reality; the other was only logic.

The same sort of thing applies to the relationship between reality in the Cosmos and our ordinary logic. Things are very easily proved by logic, and the logic is perfectly sound. It is just as sound as if we calculated as follows: Our heart goes through certain phases of development; in a definite period it will have reached a definite condition; then we calculate how long it would take to reach that condition and the answer is 300 years. Then we can calculate backwards 300 years and see what our heart looked like 300 years ago. Unfortunately we were not alive, at least as physical beings, 300 years ago, and we shall not be alive 300 years hence. Equally the Earth did not exist in those past ages that are worked out by the geologists. The destinies undergone by the Earth can be known only in spiritual terms. That is the distressing thing about modern science: it can prove so logically what is really an illusion, and its proofs tell us nothing about reality.

Human beings today, though people do not realize it consciously because they refuse to be aware of it, are living with the unconscious fear that they are on the way to losing touch with truth. We can see this fear manifesting itself in various forms. Fundamentally, the people who base their philosophy of life on materialism are very ill at ease. They are always harassed by anxiety about the limits they have set themselves, for their cherished limits create appalling obstacles to living a fully human life. People already feel intuitively that if they have nothing more than the natural order to rely on, they cannot draw life from it; above all, that the ideas derived from this natural order cannot lead them to any genuine artistic and religious experience or ideas.

We must always remember that our existing religious systems originated in the times when men were dependent on that deep sleep I have described for their understanding of the Cosmos. All our religious institutions derive from those times: the religious institutions, yes, but not the Mystery of Golgotha. That is independent of any religious view; it stands grasped by those conditions of consciousness that are still in course of preparation. For centuries now, even millennia, the religiously creative side of man has lain barren and the same is true of real artistic capacity. With rare exceptions we have to live on what we can get from various cultural revivals. We do not possess any original power of creation. But that is what is seeking to make its way into this age, and the general unrest typical of our civilization today is something like the birthpangs of a new age, a new age in the scientific and artistic spheres but also in the social, religious, and moral spheres. The future of mankind—that is what we must strive to take to heart. There has never been a time when humanity has been less disposed to listen to Initiation-knowledge and yet never a time when humanity has been in greater need of it.

That is why I wished particularly to speak to you about the past, present and future of humanity from the point of view of the evolution of consciousness. Of course, in three lectures I could do it only in outline, but you can work out within your own hearts what I have told you. Because our consciousness lies closest to our own being, it is there that men can become most easily fruitful and be stirred towards spiritual experience. In order that present-day man may develop into a man of the future, what we need is not any materialistic experience but spiritual experience. Ever since we have been victims of abstract thinking and ideas, our inner habit is really such that anyone participating in our present culture must have the same sort of impression from any talk of the spirit as the simple old uncle in the story about the log. tables, and will interpret all the powerful evidence for the entry of the spiritual as if it were like the house-numbers of Europe. The analogy is a little far-fetched but if you remember what I have told you, you will understand what it means. Our normal attitude to life, or rather our ordinary judgments about life, penetrate into all our scientific thinking and produce there a philistinism and banality raised to the nth degree, even a moral hypocrisy claiming scientific validity. If there is any, even the slightest, sign of the entry of the spiritual, it is assumed to be something which intelligent human reason, according to this materialistic view, can only call “mad.”

There is a good story, founded on fact, which also illustrates this attitude. At the beginning of the forties of the nineteenth century the old philosopher Schelling was called from Munich to Berlin. He had held his peace for several years, but a high reputation had preceded him. People looked forward to lectures on philosophy of a more positive kind, as opposed to those he himself called negative. Anyway, in these lectures at Berlin University he was to deal with the spiritual development of man, the essence of religion and the Mysteries, in a much deeper fashion than anyone had done hitherto.

When Schelling began his lectures, the front rows were occupied by the most brilliant intelligences, the professors of various subjects, the heads of the teaching departments and the most distinguished representatives of spiritual life—certainly not mere callow students, who had to sit at the back. They were all waiting—as far as they were able to wait—to see what Schelling's great reputation would accomplish. As the lecture proceeded, the faces of the audience grew longer and longer. Schelling did in fact speak in a remarkable way about the spirit; just at the moment when materialism was reaching its climax and coming to its fullest flower, he spoke of the spirit. As he spoke, the faces grew appreciably longer because the audience had no idea what he was after. Trendelenburg, well-known later on as a philosopher, who was sitting in one of the front rows, said he thought he had understood a little, though most of it was beyond him; but he was not even sure he had understood that little!

Then, some days later, two of the people who had been present at the lecture happened to meet. There had been a good deal of discussion among Schelling's hearers, and these two had taken part in it, wondering why on earth he had been called to Berlin, since not a word of what he had said was intelligible. But one of them now had the answer: Schelling's daughter had got engaged to the son of the Minister of Education! So everyone could understand why Schelling had been willing to come to Berlin. The whole thing was explained!

It may seem strange to tell you these things, but I am obliged to talk to you in this way. For the form of thinking characteristic of the present day is so far removed from the sort of thinking proper to Anthroposophy, which is moreover not just a whim of ours but an absolute necessity for man's future unless he is to fall into decadence. Only this new form of spirituality will be able to experience fully the three stages of consciousness which will emerge in the future: namely, a damped-down dream-sleep, ordinary waking, and a heightened consciousness. Otherwise man will never be able to experience his humanity properly in future lives on Earth. For the gods wish out of present threefold man to form the threefold man of the future, as they have formed the present threefold man, the dreaming, sleeping and waking man, out of the former threefold man who dreamt in pictures, slept, and on waking experienced the after-effects of his sleep, and also slept deeply. In this present age of freedom, as I have so often explained to anthroposophists, we must resolve by our own free knowledge to live towards the goal laid down for us by the divine Powers of the world. If we do that we shall not only think, we shall above all feel, in the right way about the past, present and future. Then we shall also have the right will with regard to this life on Earth, in accordance with the divine-spiritual ordering of the world—from the past, through the present, into the future.

This is what I wished to talk about, and with these words I will bring our studies to a close, not however without expressing a wish that tomorrow a discussion may begin here which will show that in the Anthroposophical Society some desire exists to promote a fully living consciousness in this Society of what man in his fullness is to be—the whole man who must be comprehended as including man of the past, man of the present, and man of the future. For these three are also one. What man has been in the past, what he is in the present, and what he is to be in the future, will embrace in face of the divine World-Order the whole being—anthropos. But in order to strive for this there must be an enthusiastic, heart-felt grasping of Anthroposophy to lead us to the true anthropos, the whole man, man in his fullness.

Today I should like to continue the theme which we have studied in the last two lectures. Firstly, it is a question of realising those impulses in evolution which have led to the spiritual life of our present age, so that we can see on the one side the Anthroposophical view of the world as a necessity, but on the other hand can fully understand that this Anthroposophical view of the world must find its enemies. Naturally I shall not now enter into the special characteristics of this or that opponent, perhaps that is comprehensible at the present time. Indeed, I want to deal with our theme as generally as possible because it is not essential for the moment to fix our minds on our opponents. Rather it is essential for us at present to understand that if the Anthroposophical Society is to exist as a Society, it must become fully aware of its position in the spiritual life of the day. Also, the Society itself must contribute something towards its own consolidation. Therefore, I am not going to say anything particularly new today. Only a few weeks ago I emphasised the fact that consolidation of the Anthroposophical Society is an absolute necessity.

So first of all, it has to become clear to us how Anthroposophy is placed in modern civilisation, a civilisation which, as regards Europe and America, really only goes back to the time which we have so often, discussed, the time of the 4th Post-Christian century. Now this 4th Post-Christian century lies right in the middle of the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch of time, and I have often pointed out that the spreading of Christianity,—the whole mood by which Christianity was grasped in the early years of the first three or four centuries of Christian evolution—was essentially different to the mood later on in time.

Today we think that following history backwards, we can study the previous epoch, that we can go back to the Middle Ages, then to the events we call the Wanderings of the Peoples. Further back we come to the Roman Empire, passing through that we come to Greece, and then we imagine that we can feel the same atmosphere in this Greece as we can feel in the time of the Roman Emperors or in later European history.

But that is not the case. In reality there lies a deep cleft between that which can still be placed with a certain vividness before the consciousness of modern man, namely, his journey back to Rome; but a deep cleft exists between this and that which took place as life in ancient Greece. Let us bring an outline of this before our souls. If we study the Greece of Pericles or Plato, or of Phidias, or even the Greece of Sophocles and Aeschylus, we find that their basic mood of soul goes back to a Mystery civilisation, to an ancient spirituality. And, above all things, this Greece had still much in itself of what I characterised yesterday as a living experience of absolutely real processes in man's inner being, and which I described as the salt, sulphur and mercury processes. We must be quite clear that Greek thought and Greek feeling came close to the feeling of man, whereas that later age,—from the 4th Post-Christian century onwards—already began to get ready for that which came about in the way described in my last two lectures, in which I showed how Man himself was lost for human nature, for human consciousness.

I also told you that these three personalities, Bruno, Jacob Boehme and, in a certain connection also Lord Bacon, struggled for a knowledge of man's nature, but that it was impossible for their striving really to approach the Being of Man. If, however, we go further back, from Rome to Greece, then this alienation of man's nature—any talk or an alienation of man's nature—ceased to have any sense, because the ancient Greek knew himself as a human being standing in the cosmos. The Greek had no idea of that concept of nature which came about later, that concept of nature which finally culminated in the seizing of the mechanism of nature. One might say of the ancient Greek:—That he saw the clouds, the rain falling, the clouds ascending and all that comes out of the world as fluid; then when with especial vividness looking into himself with his still sharply concrete vision, he saw the circulation of his blood, he did not feel a very great distinction between the rising and falling of water in Nature and the movement of his own blood. The Greek could still grasp something of `the world in man and man in the world.'

These things cannot be taken too deeply, because they lead into a mood of soul which only exists in fragments of the external history. One should not forget how, in the 4th Post-Christian century, evolution took the form of destroying everything which remained of the ancient clairvoyant civilisation. Certainly, modern humanity knows something of this, because of all the information which has been dug up, but one should not forget how that which later gave the impulse to Western civilisation really arose on the relics of ancient Hellenism, of that widespread Hellenism which not only existed in the South of Europe, but even passed over into Asia.

Again, one should not forget that between the middle of the 4th and middle of the 5th centuries after Christ, countless temples were burnt, having an infinitely significant pictorial content, a precious content with reference to everything developed by Hellenism. Our modern humanity, proceeding only according to external documents, does not realise this anymore. But one should recall the words of an author of that time, when he wrote in one of his letters:—“This age is passing to its downfall. All those holy places to be found in the open country, and for the sake of which the labourers worked in every field, are being destroyed. Where can the countrymen now find joy for their work?” One can hardly conceive today how much was destroyed between the middle of the 4th and the middle of the 5th century after Christ,

Now the destruction of those external monuments was part of the effort to exterminate spiritual life in Greece, and this, as you know, was given its most bitter blow by the closing of the Schools of Philosophy in Athens in the year 529. Yes, one can look back into ancient Rome, but one cannot look back into ancient Greece through external history. And it is indeed true that very many things in Western civilisation have come down to us, through the Benedictine Orders, but we must not forget that even the holy Benedict himself founded the Mother Church of the Benedictine Order on the site of an old heathen Temple which had been destroyed. All that had to disappear first, and it did disappear.

Now, with normal human feelings, it is difficult to understand why such an impulse for destruction passed over the whole of the South of Europe, Asia Minor and North Africa at that time. It only becomes comprehensible when one is convinced that the consciousness of mankind in that age was entirely different. I have often mentioned a sentence which is quite incorrect:—“Nature,—or one may say, the world, makes no leaps,” but in history such leaps do occur and the soul mood of civilised humanity in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries after Christ was quite different to the soul mood of today.

But now I should like to draw your attention to something which may make it clearer to you as to how this transformation really occurred. You see, today we must say when we speak of the interchange between waking and sleeping, that the physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed, while the ego and astral bodies go outside. The soul and spirit go out of the physical and etheric bodies.

Now at a certain time in ancient India this was not true; just the opposite would have been correct. Then one would have said that in sleep the soul and spirit of man go deeper into his physical body, more into his physical body.

Now this fact is almost unnoticed, and I must point out to you how, for instance, when the Theosophical Society was founded, the people who founded it had heard some of the spiritual truths from India, and what they heard they made their own property. Now they heard this fact, of the ego and astral body going out. Of course, because the Indians said it then, (i.e. when the Theosophical Society was founded) naturally that was in the 19th century, and in India what is real can be often observed. But when these same people of the Theosophical Society tell us that this is primeval Indian wisdom, it is pure nonsense, because the ancient Indian would have said just the opposite: That the soul and spirit go deeper into the physical body when man sleeps. Which was the case in ancient times.

Now in a certain sense a consciousness of this was existing in Greece, a consciousness of the fact that in sleep the soul and spirit seize the physical body more than in waking, and that this lies in the evolution of mankind.

Now today, because we have to describe things out of our direct spiritual perception, we must describe the following as correct:—The ancient Wise Men, and even the people of Greece, had an instinctive dreamy clairvoyance. And we can describe it so from our modern standpoint, but for those people it was not dreamy. They felt in their condition of clairvoyance as if they were just waking up, they felt themselves especially awake. And so, their consciousness existed with a greater intensity when they perceived the world in those magnificent pictures which I described to you in my last lectures. But they knew that when they pressed down into the inner part of their being and at the same time saw that which occurs in man, that that which they beheld were world processes, because man is in the world. And they knew then that in their time man dived still deeper into his physical body, and in deep sleep their consciousness became dim twilight, even unconsciousness. And these people ascribed to the Influence of their physical body that which embraces the soul and leads it over into sin.

And it was just from this point of view that the ancient consciousness of sin arose. If we exclude the Jewish form of sin, the consciousness of sin leads back into heathendom, and it proceeded from the consciousness of the diving down into the physical body which does not leave the soul free enough to live in the spiritual world. But considering all that I am describing to you, it must be said:—that ancient humanity had a consciousness of the fact that he was a spiritual being, and as a spiritual being, lived in a physical body, but it never occurred to him. to call that MAN which he saw as physical body.

Why, the very word MAN itself leads back to some such meaning as “The Thinker.” Not to something which is to be seen with a more or less red or white face, with two arms and two legs. That was not a man! Man was a being who dwelt as a spiritual soul in that dwelling house of the physical body. And a consciousness of this spiritual psychic man, existing in the wonderful, plastic, artistic forms in Greece, passed over into the sphere of Art, and into the general Greek civilisation.

And even if the external temples, even if the cult became infinitely decadent in many connections, one must still say that in all the divine images and temples which were destroyed, much existed that points to this ancient soul mood. And I might add that the ancient spiritual psychic consciousness of humanity was shown with tremendous power in the form of everything destroyed in those centuries. Now if with that consciousness—not of the following incarnation when the consciousness was changed—but if a Mystery Initiate of that early Greek age came to us with the same consciousness which he then had, he would say:—”You modern human beings, you are all asleep,” Indeed he would say:—“You modern men are sleeping through everything. We were awake, we woke up in our bodies. We woke up as spiritual beings in our bodies; we knew that we were human beings, because in our bodies we could distinguish ourselves from the body. What you call waking, for us is sleeping, because whereas you wake up and direct your attention to the external world and explain something about the external world, all the time you are asleep with regard to your own human nature. You are asleep, we were awake.” That is what he would say, and from a certain point of view he should be quite right. We wake up from our moment of waking until we go to sleep, as we say, when we are in our physical bodies as spiritual human beings. But then we know nothing of ourselves, we are asleep with regard to ourselves. When, however, we are in the world outside us, we are asleep—and that is the time from sleeping to waking up. Thus, it is that we must learn to wake with the same intensity as that with which the ancient humanity were awake in their bodies. That is, modern man must learn to be awake outside his body when he is really in the external world.

From this you can see that we are dealing with a transition. As humanity, we have all gone to sleep compared with the ancient waking condition, but now we are in just that period when we have to be wakened up into a new waking state. What is the aim of Anthroposophy in this connection? Anthroposophy wants to be, Anthroposophy is nothing else than something which points out to you that man must learn to wake up outside of himself. And so, Anthroposophy comes along and shakes up modern humanity, the modern humanity which that ancient Initiate would have called a sleeping humanity, Anthroposophy shakes it up, hut they do not want to wake.

Anthroposophy often feels like Gallus beside the sleeper Stickl. (A reference to the Christmas Play just performed). Anthroposophy points out that the birds in the forest are singing. “Let them sing” says the present generation, “the birds have tiny heads and have soon had their ration of sleep.” Then Gallus goes on: “But the heavens are creaking,” Stickl (who is half asleep), “Let them go on creaking, they are old enough.” Of course, it is not said in the same words, but Anthroposophy says:—“The spiritual world wants to break through! Get up while the light of the spirit is shining.” The answer is:—“Let it go on shining, it is old enough.”

My dear friends, really it is so. Anthroposophy wants to awaken the sleepers, because that is just what is demanded of modern civilisation—an awakening—but humanity wants to sleep, and to go on sleeping!

I might say of Jacob Boehme—because he went right into the racial wisdom, and of Giordano Bruno, because he stands in a spiritual community which at that time had preserved so much from ancient times—that in them there lived a memory of the ancient waking condition.

In Lord Bacon there really lived the impulse for the justification of this new sleeping. That is, as I might put it, a still deeper explanation than we were able to give in the two preceding lectures and is the characteristic of our age.

Now with reference to the grasping of his own human nature, man of the present day cannot be awake as was humanity in ancient times, because man today does not press deep down into his physical body as ancient humanity did when asleep; because today when man goes to sleep he goes out of himself, but he must learn to come out of his physical body in a waking condition, for only thereby will he be in a position to realise himself again in his human nature.

But this impulse to continue asleep is still growing. “Stickl, the carters are cracking their whips in the street.” “Well, let them go on cracking, they have not far to go.”

It is du Bois Raymond, not Gallus, who says;—“Man has limits of knowledge, he cannot enter into the phenomena, the secrets of nature, he must limit himself.” But Anthroposophy says;—“We must strive yet further and further; the call for spirituality is already resounding.” “Well” says du Bois Raymond, “let it go on sounding, it won't be so very long before Natural Science will have come to the end of earthly days and therewith to the end of the discovery of all the secrets of nature.”

My dear friends, in many a relationship one thus finds a justification for the sleep of humanity today, because all talk of the limit of knowledge is a justification for sleep instead of a justification for a penetration into one's knowledge of human nature. And our present humanity can find ways enough of going to sleep. Even of this we have often spoken in our lectures. Today people only want to listen to things which can be put before them in images, in pictures. That is why the cinema is liked so much., but it is not popular when the listeners are asked to work with their heads. And so it is today that people want to go on dreaming of world secrets, but do not want to co-operate actively with those world secrets by means of energetic thinking. But that is just the path of awakening—one begins to wake up in one's thinking, because it is thought which first of all seeks to evolve into activity. That is the reason why in my “Philosophie der Freiheit” decades ago I pointed to this kind of thinking with such energy.

And now I should like to remind you of something else. I should like you to call to mind many a dream which you have had, and I should like to ask you whether you have never had a dream in which you have done something of which you would have been ashamed if you had done it in the daytime,—if you ever did by day what you did in the dream. Well, perhaps there are many sitting here who have never had such a dream, but at any rate they could let other people tell them of such an experience, because many people have dreamt of things they would never repeat in their waking lives, because they would be ashamed. My dear friends, apply that to our great sleep today—which we call the great sleep of present civilisation—where people really are letting themselves dream of all kinds of cosmic secrets, Anthroposophy comes along and says:—“Stickl, get up!” Anthroposophy wants to wake the people, they ought to wake! I can give you this assurance,—Many of the things that have been done in this civilisation would never have been done if humanity had been awake. That really is the case. You will say:—Who is going to believe that? Well, the dreamer pursuing his little business in his dreams, does not bother himself as to how that is really going to look when he is awake, but unconsciously the feeling exists somewhere in his soul that one really dare not do such things if one were awake. I do not mean this in a pedantic or a commonplace way, I just mean that many of the things which one considers today as being quite in order would look differently if one were really awake in one's soul.

And an unholy anxiety prevails in the soul because of this, especially in science. (If one were awake one could no longer comfortably dissect first a liver and next a brain.) One would be terribly ashamed of many methods of investigation if one were awake Anthroposophically. How can one ask people using such methods to wake up without any further reason? One notices many extraordinary apologies which exist for sleeping.

And now I want you to think of something else_. What an immense pleasure a dreamer has when he dreams something which actually happens, say a couple of days later. You must have noticed yourselves the tremendous joy of a superstitious dreamer when his dream actually happens; and it often happens, and they all have this tremendous joy. In our present civilisation dreamers calculate by Newton's laws of gravitation, by formulae which have been worked out by mathematicians, and they have calculated that Uranus has a definite path in the heavens. But that path does not agree with the formulae and therefore they go on dreaming; certain disturbances must exist owing to a planet as yet undiscovered. When this did happen, and when Dr. Gall really discovered Neptune, the vision was fulfilled. Now this is just what is so often brought forward today as a justification of the methods of Natural Science.

The existence of Neptune was calculated in a dream and later the dream really happened. It is just like a person dreaming of something which later on takes place. Then there is the case of Mendaleff, who even calculated elements out of his periodic system. But this dream of a curse is not quite so difficult, because when such a periodical system is discovered and one place in it is empty, then it is easy enough to fill up that place and to mention a few properties. Here we have the fulfilment of a vision by the same methods as when a sleeper dreams of something which actually takes place a couple of days later, and which, he then calls a verification of the fact. And today people say that in this way the affair can be proved.

One has to understand how radically our modern civilisation has become the civilisation of sleepers and how necessary an awakening is for humanity. At the same time this tendency to sleep in our present age has to be seen very clearly by those who have received an urge from Spiritual Science towards waking. Such a moment must occur as sometimes in a dream when the dreamer knows “I am dreaming,” and in the same way humanity ought to have a special feeling for a strong expression which was once used by that energetic philosopher J.G. Fichte. Fichte said “The world which is spread out before mankind is a dream and all that man thinks about the world is a dream about a dream,” Of course one must not fall into anything like the philosophy of Schopenhauer, because, after all you are not doing very much for a human being when you characterise everything in front of him as a dream. It is not one's task merely to say:—“one dreams,” that is not quite enough. But that is all that many people of the present want to prove:—Man dreams and cannot do anything else but dream. Then in one's dream one comes to the limit of one's dream. And beyond the dream is what Kant calls the “Thing in itself,” and one cannot approach the thing in its reality. Edouard von Hartmann, that acute thinker, often spoke of this kind of dreaming with relation to reality. And Edouard von Hartmann makes it clear that everything which man has in his consciousness is a dream by the side of the Thing in Itself, of which man knows nothing, but which lies at the basis of his dream. So that Hartmann, who drives everything to extremes, speaks of the `real' table, in contrast to the table which we have before us in our sensations. The table we have in our consciousness is a dream, and behind that stands the table in its reality. Hartmann distinguishes between the table as appearance and the table in itself; between the chair in appearance and the chair in itself. But he is not fully conscious that finally the chair of which he is speaking had something to do with the chair in itself, because if you take the chair as appearance one cannot very well sit down on it. Even a dreamer has to have a bed to lie on. And so all this talk of “the Thing in Itself” can only be a preparation for something else. For what? For waking up, my dear friends.

And so it is not a question of seeing the world as a dream, but, as soon as we have the idea:—That is a dream!—we must do something we must wake up; and this waking up already begins with an energetic grasping of one's own thinking. It begins with active thinking, and from that point one comes to other things.

Now you see, what I have characterised—this impulse for awakening—is a necessary impulse for the present time. Certainly that which as Anthroposophy can be presented to the world; but however, when an Anthroposophical Society becomes a Society, then that Society must represent a reality. Then every single person who lives in the Anthroposophical Society should feel it as a reality, and he must be deeply permeated by the will to awake, and not, as is so often the case, feel insulted if one says to him:—“Stickl, stand up.” This is very necessary. And it is something which I should like to repeat in a few words.

The misfortune (i.e. the burning of the Bau) which has met us should above all be an awakening call to the Anthroposophical Society to do something that is a reality. This real Being—which I have characterised at the end of the Christmas Congress—this real Being (Wesen) which one can feel since that time as “the living stream from man to man within the Anthroposophical Society” that must exist, a living stream from one to the other. A certain lack of love has often appeared in the newest phases of our Society instead of a mutual trust, and if this lack of love gets the upper hand then the Anthroposophical Society must crumble. You see, our building brought many wonderfully beautiful qualities in the different Anthroposophists to the surface, but side by side with them there had to be an invigoration of the Society itself. Many of these beautiful qualities were named during our course of lectures which were given during the building of the Bau, and on the night of the burning of the Bau, but those beautiful qualities require guidance, and above all things this is necessary:—That anyone who has anything to do within the Society should not carry into it those things, which today are so customary outside it. And above all things, that each one who does anything for the Society should do it with real personal interest and participation. It is this personal interest, this personal share that one misses when people do one thing or another for our Society.

My dear friends, no service for the Society—and that means anything done in the Society by one person for another—nothing can be trivial. The tiniest service rendered becomes valuable through its standing in the service of something great. That is so often forgotten, and the Society must really see this with the greatest and highest satisfaction, at a time when such a staggering blow demands the cultivation of these most beautiful qualities in the members. But at the same time, it should not be forgotten that in the industrious and patient accomplishment of everyday things, much which is necessary is overlooked. These are things which must not be undervalued when one sees Anthroposophy finding its enemies in the world around it. The fact that an enemy (Gegenschaft} is there, must not be overlooked, rather must it be grasped out of the very objective course of evolution itself. And I have often been astonished, and have said so publicly, at the lack of interest when opposition, taking its roots in objective untruth, develops around us. We must really place ourselves as positive defenders of Anthroposophy when it comes to a question of objective untruth. And at the same time, we must be able to raise ourselves to an understanding of the fact that Anthroposophy can only exist in an atmosphere of truth. We must develop a feeling of what it really means when so much untruth and so much objective calumny is brought against Anthroposophy. And for this we also need a real inner life. So you see, my dear friends we have a splendid opportunity for awakening ourselves. And if we can only reach the awakening in this sphere, then the impulse for awakening will spread itself out over other things.

But if we see everyone asleep while the flames of untruth are making themselves felt everywhere, then we must not be surprised when even Stickl goes on sleeping?

So that which I should like to characterise today, both in great things and also in tiny things is:—“Think, feel and meditate about this awakening.” So many today long for esotericism while these calumniations are hailing on our windows. Well, my dear friends, esotericism is there. Take hold of it. But, above all things, the will to awake is esoteric in our Society, and this will to awake must take its place within the Anthroposophical Society. Then the will to awake within the Society will be a point from which the awakening of the whole present civilisation will radiate.

Today I should like to look back, drawing together and amplifying what has been said here in the past. In this way I want to lay a foundation for: carrying certain essential themes to a conclusion in the present lectures.

In spiritual-scientific inquiries we encounter besides the two forms of consciousness known to everybody—dreaming and ordinary day-time life from waking to sleeping—a third form, best described perhaps as “higher perceptive consciousness”. Dream-consciousness we reckon in ordinary life as merely a sort of interruption of ordinary consciousness, but that is because we recall only a small part of our dreams. We are really dreaming all the time from falling asleep to waking, and what we commonly describe as the content of our dream-consciousness is merely such fragments of dreaming experience as we are able to remember when we are awake. From the standpoint of Spiritual Science, therefore we must say: We know three stages or kinds of consciousness; that of dreams, that of waking life, and the consciousness in which the spiritual world is open to higher perception.

You will have no difficulty in recognising that each type of consciousness has a certain quality in common with the one next above it in rank. For instance, dream-consciousness gives us pictures—we know that our dream-experiences are pictures. When you recall them you are unable to fit then into the sequence of Cause and Effect in daily life. To try to do that would mean confusing dream life and day-life, and you would become visionaries. Dream-experiences consist of pictures in contrast to realities, by which we mean the events experienced in waking life.

If we now compare our ordinary waking-experiences with those of the higher perceptive consciousness, we find an exactly similar relationship. Here, compared with what is experienced by this higher consciousness as spiritual, super-sensible reality, the experiences of the day-time from waking to falling asleep, are pictures. Therefore, to the degree in which the awakened, higher perceptive consciousness is experienced, it is possible to say (this must be done with prudence): “I experience in this consciousness a genuine reality, compared with which ordinary so-called reality is only a set of pictures”.

Put in this abstract way, the statement has little value. Of course, many people are quite content with these abstract phrases, believing that thereby the riddles of the world can be solved. This is not so. Such a statement has value only when it is applied directly to the actual practice of life. Hence it has to be made relevant to certain definite realms of experience.

There is a realm to which I have already drawn attention from time to time, one which we needs must contemplate if we would make progress in Spiritual Science. It lies nearest to us, yet it is often quite beyond our ken—the realm of man himself. The common opinion is that though we are ignorant of the super-sensible man, we do know the physical man, but this is true only up to a certain point. Anatomy and physiology, as usually understood, are woven out of countless illusions. To-day let us start, if only apparently, from the outer form of man as a physical being and proceed on the lines of the threefold division of his organism to which I have often referred.

If he is viewed in relation to the super-sensible world, and thus as a picture—not as the reality which ordinary anatomy and physiology take him to be—he falls into three markedly different divisions, even as regards his outer physical form: the man of head, chiefly concentrated there; the breast-man; and the man of the extremities or limbs. It must be understood however, that this third man does not consist only of arms and legs, but that these limbs have terminations within the body, as contrasted with the outside, and that all these together make up the whole third man. These three divisions must be kept in mind.

Without sinning against the reality of the super-sensible world, we cannot actually speak of three “men”: for, as regards the super-sensible being of man, a fundamental distinction exists between these three parts. The different forces, or streams of force, which went to build into the structure of these different bodily parts, come from widely different sources. If the human form is examined with super-sensible faculties, the structure of the head is seen to be derived from forces operative before birth or conception. One must go back to the spiritual world, not to the stream of physical heredity. In the formation of the head one can trace—admittedly in its finer details—a share of what belongs, in the spiritual world, to the forces of the human soul before it unites itself with the physical stream of heredity through birth or conception. The chief shore in the formation of the head, belongs not so much to the outer configuration of what a man lived through in his previous earth-life, but to his behaviour, the character of his actions, and to some extent his feelings. When super-sensible perception has so far advanced as to awaken a sense for this kind of form, it is possible to see, through the formation of the head, into what we call the preceding incarnation. Here we touch an extremely significant mystery of human development. More than is usually supposed by initiates of a lower grade, the form of the head is linked with a man's karma—with his karma as it comes over from the previous into the present incarnation.

Leaving aside the breast-man, let us focus our attention on the limb-man (or “man-of-extremities”), with the inner terminations I have mentioned. Here we find by no means so decided, so individual a form as in the head. Each person has his own individual form of head, pointing back to an earlier earth-life. The limb-system, with which the sex- organisation is essentially connected, points forward to future earth-lives. Everything there is still undifferentiated and what corresponds in the soul to this organisation points forward towards lives still to come.

To consider the breast man attentively is specially important. This part of his organism is the combined work of the forces which play their part in man's spiritual life before conception and after death between death and the next birth. What has been the soul's environment between the last death and this conception or birth, acts together with what will surround it between the next death and birth, (or conception). The two interweave. This interweaving of the two sets of forces works itself out in man's breast-organisation, and is principally noticeable in its most conspicuous activity, the process of breathing. Out-breathing gives a picture—here again we must use this word—of what took place in the soul between the last death and this birth; while in-breathing gives a picture of what will operate in and around the soul between death and the next conception or birth.

Here is a concrete fact. The procedure of ordinary anatomy and physiology is to put things down in a row:—head, breast, limbs, and in the same way a collection of nerves and blood vessels. Supersensible perception discriminates between them, realising the essential differences of these members of the human form. Ordinary anatomy and physiology see merely the immediate realities. Spiritual Science sees in the shape of the head a picture of the deeds and feelings of the last incarnation: in the out-breathing, with its distinct individual form in each person (differing in each one according to the particular formation of his head) a picture of the forces surrounding the soul between the last death and rebirth; in the in-breathing, the forces to be met with by the soul between the present death and the next birth. The life of the limbs presents a picture of the next earth-life. Thus the vast panorama of super-sensible life which lies open to spiritual consciousness is interwoven with pictures, even as daytime-life is in dreams. But these pictures represent the reality of our daily life. We arrive at the conclusion that each successive world of phenomena, viewed from the point of view of spiritual consciousness, presents the next to us in pictures. Our prosaic reality is a picture of super-sensible reality, and in dreams we have in picture-form the ordinary realities grasped in everyday life.

Spiritual consciousness is needed to make all this clear, simply because the contemplation of the outer form alone is not sufficient for the purpose. Suppose there were a person possessing a low degree of clairvoyance, of the kind in which there is more “sensing” than full perception—that might lead him, through the head, breast and limbs, to a dim idea of what has just been said, and this would not be at all difficult even to a quite low grade of clairvoyance. But there would be no certainty about it. Conviction of its accuracy could hardly be possible without the searching proof acquired through clairvoyance endowed with the states of consciousness connected with those three members of the human organism. For the head not only shows by its outer form that it points back to a former life; it is clearly marked out by its own soul-qualities, as well as by its inner construction, from the other parts of nan's being. Ordinary consciousness is blind to this fact. For either it dreams, or is occupied with daily realities and fails to notice something which “underlies”, so to speak, the activity of the head. By this I mean the following.—We go through our daily experiences in waking consciousness, we fill our minds, through the medium of the head, with outer perceptions, with the pictures brought to us by the senses, and the mental conceptions we form about the sense-pictures. For the ordinary consciousness, all this is so vivid, so intensely real, that a subtle undercurrent of finer consciousness, a low-toned background as it were, is overlooked.

The truth is that the head is dreaming all the time we are awake. This is the remarkable fact, that behind our waking: consciousness the head has a continual flow of dreams. This we can easily discover for ourselves; no very extensive training is needed, only an endeavour to attain the stage in which consciousness is “empty”—awake, but devoid of perceptions, even of thoughts. In ordinary life we are in some way or other busy with the world of outer perceptions, with memories of them, or with thoughts arising from them. Oftener than we think we are given up to a pure waking consciousness, unknowingly. It is dim. When we endeavour to attain to the soul-state which can be described as “nothing but waking”—outer perceptions, memories, and thoughts all banished, so that we are trying solely to be awake—perceptions will at once arise which are not to be clothed in ordinary ideas. They have, as they emerge, something of the nature of dim feeling—picture-like, yet lacking; the substantial character of pictures. One frequently meets people who are familiar with this state. They speak of it, perhaps, as a state of soul in which they perceive something that defies description; they perceive it, but it is not like a perception of the outer world. It is not unusual to find people speaking in this way, and there are many more than we suppose who, if we get, to know them well, will tell us about such things.

The source of these perceptions is the weaving of the “underlying” consciousness which I have mentioned, and this is itself a kind of dream. But what is the dream about? It is actually about the former incarnation, the last earth-life. The interpretation is the difficulty. Latent in the consciousness of the head lies this dream of a former life on earth. In this subjective fashion it is possible to arrive at such a dream, although it may be hard to interpret. We shall return to this question.

Hence you will see that what I have described as the human head is, in terms of soul-life, somewhat complex, inasmuch as two forms of consciousness belong to it, closely interwoven: the ordinary waking day-consciousness and the underlying dream-consciousness, which is a kind of reflection of the former incarnation. Another interesting characteristic of the life of soul concerns the other pole in man, the man of limbs, or extremities. This limb-man, too, is extremely complicated psychically—that is, in terms of the corresponding part of the soul. I have often pointed out that we are “asleep” as regards this limb-man, although “awake” as regards the head; and our will really acts as though asleep. All that we are able to bring into clear consciousness is what the will accomplishes. Nobody carrying out the idea, “I move my hand”, perceives how all the bodily apparatus comes into it. This goes on as unconsciously as do the bodily processes during sleep. Sleep continually pervades the daytime consciousness of this man of limbs, inasmuch as the will of man is sunk in sleep.

The curious thing is that this “third man” wakes in a sense at night, when, during sleep, man is outside the physical and etheric bodies, and neither consciousness nor self-consciousness function, or only very dimly. Man at his present stage cannot penetrate behind the scenes with his ordinary consciousness, because this sleep-dimness prevents him from following up the activity of the limb-man in the night, when self-consciousness is detached from the physical body. This activity is also a sort of dream. The limb-man actually “dreams” in the night. So, as the head dreams by day, below the clear day-consciousness, so the limb-man dreams in the night, below the dim sleep-consciousness—parallel with it. What does he dream? He dreams of the next earth-incarnation. In truth, we not only bear the past and future in our outer physical form, but we have within us, as soul-life, in the form of usually unrecognised dreams, an ever-present, underlying consciousness of our past and future earth-lives.

Then, as to the breast-man. Although the processes of out-breathing and in-breathing are not followed with any , distinctness by the ordinary consciousness, our organic functions are closely bound to them. In the East, the processes of out-breathing and in-breathing are so attentively followed as to be lifted into consciousness. This procedure is no longer suitable for us; we must attain spiritual consciousness in a different way. The Eastern seeker tries to dim or suppress the head-consciousness, and to stimulate, to clarify the breast-consciousness. He really tries to perform the breathing processes so as to arouse a distinctive type of breath-consciousness. Tracing the inhaled air, as it pervades his organism, and the exhaled air as it leaves the body, and streams out, he raises to consciousness what would otherwise remain unconscious. In this way he attains to a state in which he has a distinct consciousness of the reality pictured in the breathing-process—that is, of the life in the spiritual world between death and birth. This clear knowledge, of which the West has no conception at all, still Persists in the East to a much greater extent than is supposed, and is one reason why understanding between East and West is so difficult. In the East it is no theory that a life of spirit and soul lies before birth and after death, but as clear a certainty as that the road extends before and behind a traveler on the physical plane. Just as it is an obvious fact that the road in front and the road behind possess such and such features, so, for the Oriental, what lies before birth or conception and after death is not a theory, not a result of forming ideas about it; but something perceptible to him through the breathing process raised to consciousness. This breast-part of man never ceases dreaming. It does not entirely wake with our waking, or sleep with our sleeping; but there is a difference between these two states. The breast-man's dream-consciousness by day is dimmer than in the sleeping-state, when it is rather clearer; the difference is not so very great, but there is a slight variation.

This all shows us that we have not only a threefold man in our outer form, but complicated states of consciousness within us. They compose our soul-life, as they interweave and reflect each other. Through the waking-day consciousness of the head, what we know as the life of perception and thought is made possible; through the unbroken dream-consciousness of the breast-man, what we call the life of feeling; and through the limb-man's consciousness—asleep by day, but awake at night—what we call our will.

One thing more. When we consider merely the outer aspect of man, we have to do with more than a visible physical organism, for we bear a fine etheric, super-sensible organism in us—to which in the later issues of the magazine “Das Reich”, I have applied, to avoid misunderstanding, the term “body of formative forces”. It is less differentiated, compared with the physical organism; approaching nearer to a unity: only crude observation will ascribe unity to man's outer form. Man's proper unity lies in his etheric body, which can be divided into parts like the physical body, but not into limbs side by side. The parts of the etheric body call rather for the approach that we have used in speaking of states of consciousness. The etheric body also is in a constantly varying state of consciousness—a different state between waking and falling asleep from that which prevails between falling asleep and waking. Here again, with this super-sensible body, we carry something very significant in ourselves. Some theosophical theorists may think they have accomplished something important in dividing man's being into physical body, etheric body, astral body, etc., but they delude themselves. That is reducing it to a kind of system, and systematising is never any good.

The only way to gain insight is to examine what is happening in the etheric body. If anyone merely says, “We have an etheric body,” that is no more than a phrase, calling up a picture of the thinnest kind of mist, and to take this for the real thing is self-deception. The point is that in the etheric body we have something very real and substantial, though it is not perceptible in ordinary life. Living and weaving in the etheric body, ceaselessly from waking to falling asleep, is the karma of earlier earth-lives. In truth, the etheric body weaves in our subconscious, and through its weaving brings to view our karma from previous incarnations. The clairvoyant knows something of karma because he can make use of his etheric body as he does at other tires of his physical body. Anyone who has learnt to do this cannot help seeing that karma is a reality. The etheric body as concrete reality means this—from waking to falling asleep, it has the vision of karma from earlier earth-lives, and during sleep, of karma in the making. I am again describing it from a clairvoyant's point of view.

The dreams of the breast-man accordingly, are not only about experiences between the last death and birth; we look also at what the past has laid upon our shoulders as karma—at what is spread out below our normal consciousness by the functioning of the lower body, and viewed by the etheric body, although by a spiritual eye, as the karma of the past. Neither do we perceive through the consciousness of our extremities, as we breathe in, only what is bound up with the incarnation to come; for the etheric body becomes the eye of the spirit, giving us, in a fashion unknown to ordinary life, a vision of karma in the making. It is not easy for present-day man to bring the training of his soul to such a point, although it is necessary for everybody to envisage truly all that I have described. (There are certain difficulties, discussed in the book “Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.”) It was far easier in bygone ages. Even in historical times life has undergone more changes than we think, and one momentous point in human history (described in “Occult Science” and other writings of mine) is the transition from the third to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation, the inception of the Graeco-Latin age. It was at this point that it became so intensely difficult for civilised humanity to penetrate into the worlds I have just described. Before this, it had been comparatively easy, and Orientals still retain something of this facility. The Western man doss not possess it; therefore he cannot do the same exercises, but must resort to those described in “Knowledge of Higher Worlds.” The period which began about 700 to 600 B.C. marks a deeper descent of man into the physical world. Another period will dawn, approximately at the beginning of the third millennium after the Mystery of Golgotha, and preparation must be made for it. Something indefinable will arise in every soul—inexplicable save through occult science. It is not merely a subjective ideal or tendency which Spiritual Science has to prepare and establish in readiness for the next millennium; it answers to a need in mankind's development. The middle of the third millennium will be a critical moment in the development of civilisation, for then a point will be reached when human nature will have progressed so far that it will be thrown back into decay unless it has acquired the vision of repeated earth-lives and karma, lost since the seventh or eighth century before Christ. In earlier times, human nature had a healthy power of response; knowledge came naturally to it. In future it will become diseased unless it takes this teaching into itself. We understand our age only if we keep in mind that it lies between two poles. One pole lies far back, beyond the seventh or eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha. Those were the times when knowledge of the soul's super-sensible experience was given by human nature itself. The other pole will be in the third millennium, when (as described in “Knowledge of Higher Worlds”) man must acquire super-sensible knowledge in spiritual ways, so that health, and not sickness, may stream into the body. Our age can be understood in both its inner and its outer aspects only if we keep this in mind. Naturally the change will be slow and gradual. But anyone who does not want to dream through the most important things of our age in a dull, sleepy way, but wishes to live in conscious wakefulness—it behooves him to mark what is seeking entry into human life. It will not enter completely until the middle of the third millennium; but little by little it will make its presence felt, and humanity must now consciously be alive to and prepare for its inevitable advent. Learn to study life, and even outer phenomena—especially those of human life—will yield a superficial perception of this truth. With a brain of the coarse development normal for most people to-day, it is certainly not easy to acquire what has to be taken intelligently into the mind, as Spiritual Science depicts it. But I would like to add this: it is tragic to see what unknown powers (I shall speak of them in the next lecture) are trying to make of mankind. At the present day there are certain sick natures—that is why I use the word ‘tragic’—which are abnormal for their time; yet they receive intimations of much that men will encounter normally in the future. I have often mentioned a very well-known contemporary whose life ran its course in alternating health and sickness: Otto Weininger, who wrote the remarkable book, “Sex and Character”. Weininger was altogether an extraordinary man. Picture someone who in his very early twenties presented the first chapter of his book as a University thesis—this book which has roused as much enthusiasm in some quarters as fury in others—both ill-founded. But something else might well have been noted. For he came to live more and more into the problems raised in his book. He travelled in Italy, jotted down his experiences, seeing very different things from other travellers in that country. I find much that is remarkable in Weiniger's Italian diary. As you know, I describe much that can be described only in Imaginations: concerning the Atlantean and Lemurian periods, and the appearance of things in times which to-day can no longer be followed with ordinary consciousness or by historical research. Certain concepts and ideas are necessary in order to present such descriptions to human consciousness. When I read Weininger's notes, something in then strikes me as a fine, artistic caricature of the truth. His life is certainly remarkable. He was only 23 when a thought struck him which puzzled him terribly: that he would have to commit suicide lest he should kill somebody else; he thought that a murderer, a criminal, was latent in his soul—a symptom easily to be explained by occultism. Equally mingled in his life were greatness, punctiliousness and affectation. He left his parents' house, took a room in Beethoven's house in Vienna, stayed there one night—and in the morning shot himself.

The characteristic of this soul was that its union with the body was never quite complete. For external psychology, Weininger was merely a case of hysteria; but for anyone who appreciates the facts it was obvious that an irregular union between his spiritual -psychic and his physical-bodily principles must have existed. With normal present-day people, the former principles leave the latter at the moment of falling asleep, rejoining it on awaking; but with Weininger it was different. I could show you passages from which it is evident that at times his spiritual-psychic part was just a little outside his physical-bodily part and then suddenly dived down into it: as this occurred, a thought flashed through him, which he wrote down often in quite a dry fashion: but of course in diving down he acted imaginatively—and very strangely. To anybody who understands the matter it is clear that an irregular union of these principles brings in a remarkable and peculiar way a knowledge which humanity will have in the future. Think—in a man labeled “hysterical” by a clumsy psychology, there arises a knowledge which all humanity must possess in times to come—only it is caricatured. From what I have said you can quite understand that through such abnormalities something like pioneers of the future appear amongst us, (just as there are “stragglers” from the past): a future in which humanity will inevitably know about recurrent earth-lives, about karma and the dreams of karma. And because such people appear as the pioneers of the future, the knowledge makes them ill. So, by means of an unhealthy organism, there comes out in caricature what is some day to be the wisdom of humanity. Look for instance at a paragraph in Weininger's “Last Things”, (printed by his friend Rappaport): “Perhaps no memory is possible of the state before birth, because we have sunk so deeply through birth itself; we have lost the consciousness and chosen to be born through impulse alone, without rational decision or knowledge, and that is why we know nothing of such a past.”

One thing is clear—although the knowledge shining forth in this utterance is a caricature, yet someone writes as though absolutely convinced: “Through my birth I passed from a state, a spiritual life, in which I previously lived.” If that had been written ten or twelve centuries before the birth of Christ, or at the time of Origen, it would not have been surprising, but here in our time is a man who has set such a thing down in a fashion of his own, full of passionate feeling, as a direct illumination of consciousness, not as a theory.

I could adduce many such instances. What do they mean? They are presages of the super-sensible knowledge which is coming to mankind, and because it is not sought on the path of anthroposophical spiritual science, it comes convulsively, shattering human nature, making it sick, as in the case of Weininger. I say “sick”, not in the common sense of the word, but surely the outer facts show that there is something really abnormal when a man of twenty-three shoots himself because he finds a hidden murderer concealed within him, and saves himself from becoming a murderer by committing suicide.

A hundred,—nay, a thousand,—examples could be given; this knowledge must inevitably come; and it be well if as many souls as possible could be awakened to the fact. In the subconscious of mankind the longing for such knowledge is extraordinarily widespread. External powers, which I have often described, hold it back. We must very carefully keep in mind what is implied in the close of my article on Christian Rosenkreutz, in “Das Reich.” We must remember that what became evident in the seventeenth century had been noticeable since the fifteenth, Growing steadily stronger. In speaking of it now to people of our own time, the customary scientific formulae must be used. I described in the last number of “Das Reich” how it was manifested in the writing of the “Chemical Marriage” of Christian Rosenkreuz by Johann Valentin Andreae. Philologists have racked their brains about this: Johann Valentin Andreae wrote down the “Chemical Marriage”, in which really deep occult knowledge was hidden, but behaved afterwards in a very remarkable fashion, Not only was he unable to explain certain words he had spoken in connection with writings which he had produced at the same time as the “Chemical Marriage”, but in spite of having transcribed this great work, he appeared to be entirely without understanding of it. This bigoted Pastor, who afterwards wrote all kinds of other things, does not understand anything of the “Chemical Marriage”, nor of the other works composed by him at the same period. He was only seventeen when he wrote it. He never altered; he remained just the same person; but a totally different power had spoken through him. Philologists cudgelled their brains, and corresponded about it. His hand wrote it; his body was present, assisting; but through his human equipment a spiritual power, not then in earthly incarnation, wished to make it known to mankind, in the style of those days.

Then came the Thirty Years War, the tomb of much which should then have come to mankind. What should have been then understood, was not understood, was even consigned to oblivion. The “Chemical Marriage” was written down about 1603, ostensibly by one who signed himself Johann Valentin Andreae; little notice was taken of it because in 1613 the Thirty Years War began. Such things often happen before a war. Then one can truly read in the signs of the times: “What is now planted as a seed, must one day bear flowers and fruit”.

This is all part of what I am now pointing out—what is to be read in the signs of the times, in our own catastrophic century.

Dreams, of which I have already said something, pointing out that they should not be given too much importance in ordinary life on earth, are nevertheless of immeasurable significance to those wishing to gain knowledge of man's relation to the super-sensible world. They do indeed lead to that realm of experience where a man comes in contact with the super-sensible world, and the laws of nature cease to hold good. Thus the world of dream-pictures is really like a veil concealing the spiritual world, and we can say: Here we have a man, and there a dream-veil behind which lies the spiritual world. It makes a great difference, however, whether we enter the spiritual world unconsciously, as we do in dreams, or consciously through Imagination and Inspiration. For if we enter it consciously, everything there appears different from the physical world of nature. Behind the veil of the dream, behind what the Greeks called “chaos”, the moral world is found to be just as real as is the world of nature here in the sense-world, where the laws of nature rule. But the chaotic quality of the dream, its whirling confusion, show that its connection with the world lying behind the veil of chaos is a very special one.

It is really possible to speak of this world only when one's studies have reached the point to which these lectures have brought us. All that in his ordinary state of consciousness a man sees of the external world is merely its outward manifestation; in reality this is a great illusion. For behind it all is that spiritual reality which is active in it. When a man dreams, he actually sinks down into this spiritual reality, though without being properly prepared, so that what he meets appears to him in this whirling confusion. Thus, to begin with, our chief task is to learn why in dreams a man enters a world which, compared with that of nature, is so disorganised, so chaotic.

To help us on, therefore, in our study of dreams, I must now tell you something of what Imagination and Inspiration can perceive in the spiritual world.

We find above all that when through Imagination and Inspiration we enter the spiritual world in full consciousness, it immediately appears to us to be threefold. Hence we can speak of the world, and of our theme, the evolution of the world and of man, only when we have come to the point we have now reached. Only now can I speak of how a man, confronted by the external world, by all that manifests itself to the senses, is really facing the spiritual world in its threefold nature—facing actually three worlds. Once the veil has been lifted which creates the chaos, we no longer have one world only before us, but three worlds, and each of the three has its definite connection with the human being.

When we succeed in penetrating this veil of chaos—later I shall be showing how we can also describe this as crossing the threshold of the spiritual world—we perceive the three worlds. The first of the three is really the world we have just left, somewhat transformed but still there for spiritual existence. When the veil of chaos has been thrust aside, this world appears as though it were a memory. We have passed over into the spiritual world; and just as here we remember certain things, so in the spiritual world we remember what constitutes the physical world of the senses. Here, then, is the first of the three worlds.

The second world we encounter is the one I have called in my book, Theosophy, the soul-world.

And the third world, the highest of the three, is the true spiritual world, the world of the spirit.

To begin with, I shall give you only a schematic account of all this, but from the way these three worlds are related to man you will gather many things about them. To these three worlds as they appear in three ascending stages—the lowest, the middle one, and the highest—I will then relate man's three members—the head; then the breast-organisation embracing all that is rhythmical, the breathing system and blood circulation; thirdly, the metabolic-limb system, which includes nutrition, digestion and the distribution throughout the body of the products of digestion, all of which engender movement. All this has to do with the metabolic-limb system. If this scheme were drawn, there would have to be a closed circle for the breast; for the head a circle left open, and open also for the limb system. When perceived physically, man's head appears to be closed above and would have to be drawn so, but perceived spiritually, it is open. The part of a man which does not belong at all to the realm of the spirit is the bony system, which is entirely of a physical nature; and when spiritually you study the human head, its thick skull is not seen. Only the skin is visible where the hair grows.

When this is looked at spiritually, however, something else appears. Ordinary hair is not there at all, but purely spiritual hair; in other words, rays which penetrate into the human organism and are held back, to some extent, only by the physical hair. But it is just where there is bone in the organism that the spirit can enter most easily, and this it does in the form of rays. So, on first looking at a man with your physical eyes, you see his physical form with the head above, and on his head—if he is not already bald—there is hair. But then, where the dome of the skull comes, spiritually you see nothing of the physical man; you see rays, sun-like rays, pouring into him from the spiritual worlds.

Thus the reason for the circle not being closed for the head is that the surrounding bony vault of the skull enables the spirit to have continual access there.

Nothing in a man is without purpose. By deliberate intent of the ruling powers—one might say—he has been given a head thus closed above, for here the spirit has the easiest access to his inner being because of the very thickness of the bone.

When we are in a position to observe man spiritually, we are astonished to discover how empty his head is of anything drawn from his own inner being. As regards the spiritual, he has almost nothing in him to fill the hollow globe sitting on his shoulders. Everything spiritual has to enter it from outside.

It is not thus with the other members of the human organism; as we shall soon hear, these are by their very nature spiritual. We can distinguish in man three members—head, or nerves and senses system, rhythmic system, metabolic-limb system, and they have a quite definite relation to the three worlds: the physical world, the soul-world, and the spiritual world. I will now go further into this.

First of all, it will be well to distinguish, in each of the three worlds, substance from activity. In reality, substance and activity are one, but they work in different ways in the world. You gain a clear idea of this from the substance of your own being. You have substance in your arm, and when this substance is out of order you will feel pain of some kind; it is obvious that something within the substance of the arm has gone wrong. If the activity of the arm is not properly controlled, you may perhaps hit your neighbour and he feels pain. This shows that the activity is out of gear. Nevertheless, though manifesting outwardly in different ways, the substance and activity in your arm are one.

If now we turn to the human head, we find its substance derived entirely from the physical world. During the formation of the human embryo the substance of the head comes from the parents; and the subsequent development of the head, and of the whole head and nerve-senses system, depends for its substance entirely on the earthly-material world. On the other hand, all the activity that has to do with the plastic forming of a man's head, the activity by means of which its substance is given shape, comes entirely from the spiritual world. So that in respect of activity, the head is entirely a spiritual formation. Therefore the head has to be left open—in a spiritual sense—so that activity can play into it.

At any time of life you can thus say: The substance of my head comes entirely from the Earth, but it is put together and plastically formed in such a way that it cannot be the work of earthly forces. The forms of this human head are shaped entirely from the spiritual world; they might be called a heavenly creation. Anyone who contemplates spiritually the human head, in relation to the world, has to go far and deep.

Now in the same way he turns his gaze to a plant. He says to himself: The plant has a definite form. Its substance is drawn from the earth, but its form comes from the etheric world—hence still from the spatial world.

Then he looks at an animal. The animal—he will say to himself—derives the substance of its head entirely from the world of space, but something spiritual certainly flows into its activity.

When we come to the human head, however, we find for the first time that something of the highest spirituality, something that can be called heavenly, is playing in. We see that the human head could never arise from earthly forces, though its substance is taken from earthly materials. So in the human head, which is itself a kind of miniature Cosmos, the spiritual world builds up a form out of earthly substance.

It is precisely the reverse with the metabolic-limb system, which embraces the organs for external movement—legs, arms—and the extension of these within the body—the digestive system.

For the present I am leaving out the middle system—the rhythmical system which embraces breathing and the circulation of the blood. I will deal now with the system which brings together the processes of digestion and nourishment, and the inner combustion which enables a man to move.

Now the substance of this metabolic-limb system is not derived from the Earth. Improbable as it may sound, you bear within your metabolic-limb man something which is not of earthly origin but consists wholly of substance from the third world, the world of the spirit. You may say: But I can see my legs; they are physically perceptible, which they would not be if they consisted of spiritual substance. This objection is quite justified, but there is something more to be considered.

Your real legs are indeed spiritual throughout; your real arms too; but the material for them is provided by your head. The head is the organ which fills spirit arms, spirit hands, spirit legs, spirit feet, with substance; and this substance penetrates into the spirituality of the limbs and of the digestive organs. So that something which in reality belongs entirely to the spiritual world is permeated, flooded, with physical matter by the head. That is why it is so difficult to grasp with the ideas of physical science that a man consists of head-breast-limbs-digestive organs. People think of the head as being there at the top, and they assume that when a man is decapitated he has no head left. It is not so, however; a man is substantially head all over. Even right to the end of his big toe he is head, for his head sends down its substance there. It is only the substance of the head that is earthly in origin, and the head gives its earthly-material character to the other substances; while the substance of the metabolic-limb organs comes from the spiritual world.

If through vigorous auto-suggestion of a negative kind we can suggest away the head of a man, so that in appearance he is headless, and if we can do this not only in thought but so that we really see the man as headless, then the rest of his organism also disappears; with the head goes the whole of the man as a being perceptible to the senses. And if the head is then to be there for us at all, the rest of the man has to be perceived spiritually. For in reality we go about under the imprint of higher worlds, with spirit legs, spirit arms, and it is only the head that fills them with physical matter.

On the other hand the forces, the activity, for all that makes up the metabolic-limb man are drawn from the physical world. If you make a step forward or lift an arm, the mechanism involved, and even the chemical processes that take place in moving an arm or leg, or the chemical processes in the digestive organs—all this activity is earthly. So that in your limbs you bear invisible substance, but forces drawn from earthly life. Hence we are built up as regards our head and its substance out of the Earth, but this same head is permeated with heavenly forces. In our limbs we are built up entirely from heavenly substance; but the forces playing into this heavenly substance during our life on Earth are earthly forces—gravitation and other physical and chemical forces all belonging to the Earth.

You see, therefore, that head and limbs are opposites. The head consists of earthly matter and is given plastic form by heavenly activity. The limbs and the digestive system are formed wholly of heavenly substance, and would not be visible were they not saturated with earthly substance by the head. But when anyone walks, or grasps something, or digests food, the heavenly substance makes use of earthly forces in order that life on Earth, from birth to death, may be carried on.

In this complicated way does a man stand in relation to the three worlds. The spiritual world participates with its activity in the head; with its substance it participates in a man's third organisation, his metabolic-limb system. The lowest world, the world most dominated by the senses, participates through its activity in the metabolism and the movement of the limbs, and through its substance in the head; whereas the substance in a man's third system is wholly spiritual.

In the middle system, which embraces the breathing and the circulation of the blood, spiritual activity and material substance work into each other. The spiritual activity, flowing through the movement of our breathing and the beating of our heart, is always accompanied to some extent by substantiality. And, in the same way, the substantiality of earthly existence, inasmuch as oxygen streams into the breathing, is to some extent accompanied by earthly activity. So you see that in the middle man, in man's second system, everything flows together—heavenly substance and activity flow in here; earthly activity and substance flow in there. By this means we are made receptive both to the activity of the middle world and to its substantiality.

So in this middle man there is a great deal of intermingling and for this reason we need our wonderfully perfect rhythmical system—the rhythm of the heart, the rhythm of the lungs in breathing. All the intermingling of activity and substance is balanced, harmonised, melodised, through these rhythms, and this can happen because man is organised for it.

In the head system and the limb system, activity and substantiality come from quite different sources, but in the middle system they come from all three worlds and in a variety of ways—at one place activity accompanied by substance, in another place substance accompanied by activity; here pure activity, there pure substance—all these variations flow through the middle man. If as a doctor you take a man's pulse, you can really feel there the balancing of the heavenly nature of the soul against earthly activity and substantiality. Again, if you observe the breathing, you can feel a man's inner striving for balance between the various agencies which relate him to the middle world.

All this is very complicated, you will say. It is true that a lecture-course is generally easy to understand up to a certain stage, but when it comes to the point where man's relation to the world has to be grasped, people often say: “This is becoming very difficult—we can't keep up with it.”

But look—with really flexible thinking, free from prejudice, you will be able to keep up. And for anyone who thinks in this way, with healthy human understanding, there is a certain consolation. As I said before, the actual thrusting aside of the veil of chaos and the entry into the threefold world, which sends its activity and substance into the physical world in so vastly complicated a way—this experience is so bewildering that full warning of it is given before the threshold is crossed. I will put it pictorially, but in full accord with the facts. The warning is: “If you are not willing to forgo what you have regarded as ordinary naturalistic logic and as the customary connections between things, if you are reluctant to leave behind this physical cloak, it is better that you should not enter the spiritual world, for there you will be obliged to make use of other associations of ideas, other orderings, and a completely different logic. If you want to take anything of your physical logic with you into the spiritual world, you will quite certainly get confused.” And among the matters that have to do with preparing ourselves for meditation and concentration, we have to remember the warning never to carry over the logic of the sense-world into the logic of the spiritual world.

This is the important warning given by that power we may call the Guardian of the Threshold—of whom we shall hear more in later lectures—to those who wish to pierce behind the veil.

But when we wish to return to the physical world, we receive from the Guardian another warning, clear and forcible. So long as we are men of Earth we return, or we should never get away from happenings in the spiritual world, and our deserted physical body would die. We must always return. In accordance with naturalistic logic we have to eat, drink, and adapt ourselves every day to customary activities. We are obliged to re-enter the world where things follow a naturalistic course—where, for example, we are called to meals at the usual hours. So, when we are returning from the spiritual world to the physical world, we must—to avoid an impossible situation—pay heed to the second warning given by the Guardian who stands where the veil of chaos separates the physical sense-world from the spiritual world. This, then, is the warning: “During your life on Earth, never for a moment forget that you have been in the spiritual world; then and only then, during the times you have to spend in the physical world, will you be able to guide your steps with certainty.”

Thus at the threshold of this threefold spiritual world, to which a man is related through his three members in the way described, he is warned to lay aside all naturalistic logic, to leave behind this cloak of the senses and to go forward prepared to adapt himself to a spiritual logic, spiritual thinking and the spiritual association of ideas. On his return he is given a second warning, just as stern, even sterner than the first: never for a moment to forget his experience in the spiritual world—in other words, not to confine himself in ordinary consciousness merely to the impulses of the sense-world, and so on, but always to be conscious that to his physical world he has to be a bearer of the spiritual.

You will see that the two warnings differ considerably from one another. At the entrance to the spiritual world the Guardian of the Threshold says: Forget the physical world of the senses while here you are acquiring knowledge of the spiritual. But on your return to the physical world the Guardian's warning is: Never forget, even in the physical world on Earth, your experiences in the heavenly world of the spirit; keep your memory of them alive.

With reference to what I said last time, there is another considerable difference between the men of an older evolutionary epoch and those of the present time. In the case of those I pictured coming to the Mystery centres as inspired pupils, or just as ordinary folk, the transition from sleeping to waking and from waking to sleeping was not made without their being instinctively aware of the Guardian of the Threshold. Three or four thousand years ago, as men were entering sleep, there arose in their souls like a dream a picture of the Guardian. They passed him by. And as they were returning from sleep to ordinary life, once again this picture appeared. The warnings they received on entering and leaving the spiritual world were not so clear as the warnings which I have said are given to those entering the spiritual world through Inspiration and Imagination. But as they fell asleep, and again as they awoke, they had a dreamlike experience of passing the Guardian of the Threshold, not unlike their other instinctive perceptions of the spiritual world. Further progress in the evolution of humanity—as we shall see in later lectures—required that man should gain his freedom by losing his spiritual vision, and he had to forfeit that half-sleeping, half-waking state during which he was able to behold, at least in a kind of dream, the majestic figure of the Guardian of the Threshold.

Nowadays, between going to sleep and waking, a man passes the Guardian but does not know it. He is blind and deaf to the Guardian, and that is why he finds himself in a dream-world which is so completely disorganised.

Now consider quite impartially the different way in which the people of older epochs knew how to speak of their dreams. Because of ignoring the Guardian every morning, every evening, and twice every time he takes an afternoon nap, a man to-day experiences this utter disorder and chaos in his dream-world. This can be seen in the form taken by any dream.

Only think: when we cross the Threshold—and we do so each time we go to sleep—there stands the majestic Guardian. He cannot be ignored without everything we meet in the spiritual world becoming disordered. How this happens is best seen in the metamorphosis undergone by the orderly thinking proper to the physical, naturalistic world when this passes into the imagery of dreams. Individual dreams can show this very clearly.

In the physical, naturalistic world people behave as they learn to do in accordance with its conditions. We will take a case in point. Someone goes for a walk. Now in a town to-day, you will agree, certain walks are taken particularly for the experiences they offer. For example, during a walk people meet friends; they can show off their clothes if so inclined, both to those they know and to strangers. All this can be experienced during a walk and the point of it is that it gives occasion for us to have thoughts, ideas, so that we are able—only our head-organisation is here concerned—to say: “I think.” By virtue of this “I think” it is possible to experience in the outside world the kind of thing I have just been describing. One meets other people, and it is an experience for them too. One displays one's clothes, perhaps a pretty face into the bargain. What matters is the experience. In this seeing other people, however, in this exhibiting to them our outward appearance, feeling also plays its part. One thing pleases us, another does not. Sympathies and antipathies are aroused. We like it when the people we meet say what is agreeable to us, and we don't like it when they say the opposite. Hence what is experienced on such walks is closely connected with what the head conceives by means of this “I think.” It is connected through the “I feel” of the rhythmical man—that is, with feelings of sympathy and antipathy. Because with this second member of our being we can say “I feel”, we are able to enlarge the experiences that come to us in thought during a walk.

But the third member of man also plays a part on this walk, if we are fully awake. Here we must turn to certain intimate details of human experience. There is a general feeling that civilised people to-day do not show themselves in public without clothes, do not go for walks without them; there is a general antipathy towards nudity and sympathy towards being properly clad. This goes right into our impulses of will. We clothe ourselves—even doing so in a specified way. Here the will comes into its own, the third member of the human organisation. Clothing ourselves is thus connected with the part of us that enables us to say “I will”.

I think

I feel

I will

So, through being able to say “I will,” we go for our walks clothed. When we are awake in the physical world, all this is regulated by the logic of this world. Either we are brought up to it, or we learn to conform to the outer conditions prescribed by the physical world and its logic. If we do not conform, but go for a walk without our clothes, then something within us is out of order. The ordering of the physical world, the logic of the physical world, go together in all this. It never occurs to us on a walk to wish to meet people without clothes. Here, our soul-experience is determined by the ordering of the world. And this shows how the three—I think, I feel, I will—are all connected with one another. It is the world that does this; the external world leads us to form this connection between thinking, feeling and willing.

When, ignoring the Guardian, we cross the Threshold, we confront three worlds, and we can make nothing of them because we partly carry over into the world of spirit the outlook we are familiar with in the waking world. The spiritual world, however, asserts its own order to a certain extent. Then the following may come about. Imagine you are asleep in bed. At first with your feeling, with the middle part of your being, you are entirely under the influence of sleep. Then the coverlet slips; part of your body gets chilled, and it enters your dream consciousness that some part of you is unclothed. Now, because you are all at sea in the spiritual world and do not connect the sensation with any particular part of yourself, this feeling spreads, and you fancy you are without any clothes at all. It may be only a bit of your body that is exposed, but that bit becoming cold makes you feel bare all over.

Now in your dream you are still concerned with an impulse of will holding good when you are awake—which is to put on clothes when bare. In your sleep, however, you feel: I cannot put them on, something is preventing me. You are unable to move your limbs and you become conscious of this in your dream.

You see how it is. These two things, I feel I've nothing on, and I cannot put on my clothes—the physical world being no longer there to combine the two, one of which belongs to world II, the other to world I—are wrongly combined in your dream. And because in that same night you had thought about going for a walk, this also enters the course of the dream. Three separate conditions arise: I am going for a walk; I am horrified to find I have nothing on; I cannot put my clothes on.

Now just think. These three things, which in our ordinary materialistic life can be logically combined, fall asunder when, in passing by, you ignore the Guardian of the Threshold.

In world I: the walk

In world II: being without clothes

In world III: the experience of not being able to put on clothes. In this situation you feel yourself in three parts, among strangers, exposed to view on all sides without clothes and without power to put them on. That is your dream experience. What is connected for you in ordinary life through natural logic is separated in your dream and connected, chaotically, in conformity with the custom you take with you across the Threshold. You connect it as if in the spiritual world, too, one has to concern oneself with garments. Because of ignoring the Guardian of the Threshold, you carry over into the spiritual world a custom suited to the physical world. You connect the three worlds chaotically, according to the laws of the physical world, and you feel yourself to be in this situation.

In countless dreams the essential thing is that when we pass the Threshold without heeding the Guardian's warning, what we perceive here in the physical, naturalistic world as a harmonious unity falls apart, and we are confronted by three different worlds. By faithfully observing the warning given by the Guardian of the Threshold, we must find the way to unite these three worlds. To-day, a man in his dreams finds himself faced by these three worlds—it was not so to the same extent for anyone in older epochs, as can be seen from the dreams recorded in the Old Testament—and he then tries to connect the three worlds in accordance with laws valid in physical life. That is the reason for the chaotic connections in the three worlds, as they are experienced by a man of to-day.

You will see, therefore, that dreams can show us this serious fact—that when we cross the Threshold to the spiritual world we are at once faced with three worlds, and that we have both to enter them and to leave them in the right way. Dreams can teach us a very great deal about the physical world of the senses, as it is to-day, and also about that other world—the world of soul and spirit.

Yesterday I tried to look at the essence of man and the essence of human life from the point of view that arises when human life in its completeness is placed before the soul. I said that this human life does not only flow during the waking hours, but that about one third of the entire human life flows during sleep. And initially, if we consider only the ordinary human consciousness, we stand before this human life in such a way that when we look back into our earthly existence in terms of memory, we actually only ever remember the days, those times of our life that we spend awake. We always overlook, so to speak, that which takes place in the time that we have slept through. Now, however, it must be said: For what we have to create outwardly for earth culture, earth life, our waking day life comes into consideration; but it is a question of whether only those ideas come into consideration that take place in the waking day life before the ordinary consciousness.

That this is not the case can already be taught by a superficial consideration. Only those considerations which I want to make today and in the last days of this week will show that the events which the human soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up remain hidden, but that these events are still incomparably more important for the inner being of the human being on earth than the events which take place during the day.

Today, in continuation of what was said yesterday, we first want to consider some things which again result from a comparison of the sleeping life and the ordinary waking life. The life of sleep takes place partly in complete dreamless sleep. The time we spend with our earthly life during this dreamless sleep, if it contains events for our life, is completely unconscious. From this unconsciousness, from this complete darkness of consciousness, dreams then emerge, and from dreams we either wake up to ordinary consciousness, in that earthly reality is given to us through sensory perception and through the combination of the intellect, or we also sleep from this reality through the dream into dreamless consciousness.

Let us once again make it clear to ordinary external observation what the difference is between dreaming and external sensory observation, which lives in images and concepts of the mind.

We can say that for many people dreams often contain a more vivid reality than that which takes place in waking daily life. But this is a pictorial reality that we do not follow with our will, but inevitably with our soul. And we can precisely indicate the difference between following these dream images and following the ordinary reality images of waking daily life. We do not want to get involved in particular philosophical speculations. These could also be made, but we will refrain from them now. We only want to look at what the very popular consciousness gives us. We can say that the dream images are such that we live in them. We live in the images themselves. We live with the images. In waking daytime life we naturally have color images, sound images and so on before us in the same way as in dreaming experience. But we are compelled to relate these images, be they facial images, sound images, thermal images, tactile images and so on, to a certain extent to hard reality. We see everywhere in day-to-day reality the need to come up against what the image shows us with our will, so to speak.

This is not the case with, well, let's say dream reality. Dream reality is, if I may put it crudely, to be penetrated everywhere. We can only find the point of view from which we judge the significance of dream reality within waking daily life. As long as we dream, we consider the dream to be reality, and if we were to dream our whole life, dream reality would be the only reality for us. We need not imagine that outer life would then be different from what it is now. We could imagine that individual human beings would not meet in life through their own will, but would be pushed towards each other as if automatically by natural forces or pushed towards each other by some higher being. We could also imagine that people are driven to their work, pushed by higher beings or by forces of nature. In short, everything that happens to us in waking life could happen. We don't need to know anything about it. If we were only dreaming, we would have a dream reality before us. It would not occur to us to want to somehow break through this reality to another reality. We wake up through the natural organization of our organism and then gain the viewpoint within sensory reality to judge the other relative reality value of the dream.

So it is only when we go through this life-jolt from dreaming to waking that we gain the point of view to judge the relative reality value of the dream.

But we must now ask ourselves: Is everything that we experience during daytime waking really a waking state? Well, yesterday I explained in detail that this is not the case. I explained in detail that actually only our imaginations, but these only in so far as they depict external reality, bring us into wakefulness. So that we are actually only awake in our imaginations. In our feelings we have no other reality before us with regard to the state of the soul than in dreams; only that the dream appears to us in images, the feelings in that indeterminacy with which they emerge from the depths of the life of the soul.

However, if one is not an ordinary psychologist who forges everything according to some preconceptions, but if one approaches the emotional content of the soul with impartial observation, one sees how the feelings, which, if I may put it this way, shoot up against the life of imagination, show a blurring, a fluctuating merging like the dream images. We also dream with feeling when we are awake. Only because, I would like to say, the substance in which the dream images appear is different from the substance of the feelings, we do not come to the conclusion that actually all feeling has only the meaning of reality that the dream also has. So that, while we are really imagining while awake, our imaginations are continually flooded with the indeterminate subjective contents of feeling.

Imagine vividly how, on waking, the dream images play into the waking consciousness of the day, how in the dream images everything is fluctuatingly enlarged, diminished - as the case may be - so you will be able to say to yourself: Something comes, seemingly naturally, to the human being in images, which otherwise comes to the human being in the emotional life, again blurred, subjectively enlarging, reducing things, from within.

And with regard to our volition, we are also in deep sleep when awake. We only know the intentions of our will. But these are thoughts, ideas. If I want to go for a walk, I first have the idea of going for this walk. This is my intention. Ordinary consciousness shows just as little of how this intention constantly enters my organism as it shows what passes from falling asleep to waking up. Again, I can only measure the success by the movement that I make, by the change in the aspects that appear before me when I take the walk - in other words, again by ideas. What actually takes place in the organism between the idea of the intention and the idea of success, I sleep through for the ordinary consciousness just as I sleep through what takes place from falling asleep to waking up.

So we can say that man is willing, even when he is awake, in a deep dreamless sleep, that he is sentiently dreaming, even when he is awake, and that he is only awake in a certain way when he lives in ideas. But if man really looks honestly within himself, he realizes that these ideas are only awake in relation to external nature, not in relation to their own life. In relation to his own life of imagination, man cannot come to a real wakefulness. One only has to be clear about the fact that for most people, if they cannot imagine anything external, imaginative activity no longer exists at all. But that is actually only because, especially in today's culture, man is devoted to the outside world, so that we can compare this devotion to being in a roaring, roaring world.

Imagine someone here playing the piano or some instrument, and out there the machines are roaring in a quite extraordinary way. You would hear the machines. You would hardly be able to hear the piano, especially if you were a little further away from it. Basically, it is the same with what actually lives inside the human being from the activity of thinking. But we have to use the comparison correctly. When we learn external natural science today, when we absorb all the concepts that are brought to man in the external theory of evolution, then it is basically a din of thought, a noise of thought. And this noise of thinking, which today's man indulges in, especially if he is a scientist, disturbs his finer perception of inner thinking activity. That is why he sleeps through the inner activity of thinking.

In my “Philosophy of Freedom” I referred to this pure thinking, which does not think something external, but which runs entirely within the human being. But I am also aware that with this pure thinking I have actually described something of which many of our contemporaries say that it does not exist; just as someone who hears the roar of machines out there and not the piano would say that it does not exist.

But if this is so, we can see something extraordinarily important from it, namely that we are actually only awake for thinking, insofar as it has an external natural content, but that we are at most dreaming with regard to the inner activity that we accomplish there. Moreover, we dream the feelings and sleep through the will. Thus the activity of the soul, that which lives within us, is basically not awakened when we are awake to the sense world. We continue to sleep, even during daytime waking, for our thinking activity, for feeling, for willing. We only wake up for external nature. And this waking up is something we are still developing through instruments, through experimental methods, and thereby arrive at the meaningful natural science of the present. This must come into being by reflecting the external processes in our ideas, so to speak. But we do not wake up to the same extent for our thinking, feeling and willing. And whoever can observe impartially how the dream actually differs from the outer physical-sensual world of perception, will not find the life of the soul according to thinking, feeling and willing similar to that which outer sensual perceptual impressions are, but will at most find this life of the soul similar to its most significant element, dreaming. With regard to the content of our soul, we are actually dreaming and sleeping all the time. We only wake up to the content of nature. We do not wake up at all to the content of our soul in ordinary consciousness, we sleep gently away. And as we said, the dream images are, so to speak, such that one can penetrate them, that they do not rest on a hard external reality that is subject to the will. But our soul content is also like that. It lives in images. And anyone who has the ability to compare qualities, not just quantities, will find that if he attributes pictorial character to the dream content, which initially does not point to a reality, he must also attribute pictorial character to the content of his own soul.

But then a meaningful question arises from this. If I live in dreams, I wake up to physical reality, then feel connected to physical reality as a reality by the fact that I am switched on with my will in my body, and from the point of view of this physical reality I attribute to the dream at most a relative, a completely different reality.

Can I now - so the question is - wake up to the life of the soul in the same way as I wake up to nature? Can I switch myself on, just as I switch the dream images into what is the structure of reality through my will, which I press into my body, can I also switch thinking, feeling and willing into a corresponding reality through a higher awakening? This, you see, is the question: Can I wake up to the life of the soul in the same way as I wake up to nature? The content of nature, which I experience as a human being during my earthly existence with the outer physical-sensual reality, appears to me pictorially in my dreams. But the whole life of the soul also only appears to me pictorially as in a dream. So, can I wake up to the life of the soul?

Yes, you can wake up. One can awaken by first sharpening and internalizing one's thinking through such exercises as I have given in the book “How to Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and in my “Secret Science”, by not merely allowing oneself to be stimulated to a thought content from outside, but by giving oneself a manageable thought content, which is not suggested to one, from within, then resting on this thought content, concentrating on such a thought content actively given to the soul from within. In this way, one gradually arrives at the real consciousness of thinking.

You do not have the consciousness of thinking at all if you only allow yourself to be stimulated for the ideas from the outside. Only if one stimulates oneself to think from within again and again through meditation, through concentration on the content of thought, then one becomes aware of oneself within thinking. Then you realize that you actually live in this thinking, but that you only don't know it when you allow yourself to be stimulated from the outside. Thinking becomes alive in this way, whereas otherwise it is abstract and dead. Thinking becomes something that does not merely exist in the shadows of thought that we receive from outside, but something that stirs inwardly like the blood of the soul. One becomes as if filled with a second humanity.

The thoughts become living forces, image forces, as I have also called them in my book “Theosophy”. And one becomes aware that one actually carries thinking within oneself as a second body, as the etheric body, as the body of formative forces; for one becomes aware that that which otherwise exists only shadowed in thoughts is actually the same forces that bring about our growth. One withdraws into the growth of one's human being, and one comes to realize how that which would otherwise proceed merely chemically as processes according to the peculiarities of the substances we absorb is processed through the same inner spiritual corporeality, etheric corporeality, which forms our thoughts, how we become a unified inner human being through these inwardly living, stimulating thoughts. In this way, we get to know a second person within ourselves.

But you also come to something else. This second person, whom we get to know, is not merely a cloud that fills the physical body in a vague way. This second person is actually in constant motion, and it is not possible to hold him in one moment. You see, it is actually like this: if we have the physical body of the human being in a certain point of life, then we can draw what we experience in this way, and what is identical with our thinking - only that in ordinary thinking we have the shadows of thoughts, not the living thoughts themselves - for a moment there (see drawing). What pervades the human being as such a second etheric or visual force body can only be captured for a moment. In the previous moment it was quite different; in the next moment it will be different again, and so on backwards and forwards.

But this leads to the conclusion, if one comes to it in the inner, contemplative experience, that this body of formative forces, which for the ordinary consciousness expresses itself as the shadowy abstract thoughts, is nothing spatial at all, that it is something that runs in time. This leads us back as a living tableau to a certain moment of our first childhood. I will now draw this schematically. \

Imagine that we are already an older person in this time; but this pictorial body of forces is not limited to one time, but leads back to our childhood. We do not view our life in terms of memories, but like a tableau all at once. What I am drawing here spatially is temporal. This now leads back to our childhood, to the time in our childhood up to which we usually remember.

There is now also this etheric body, this body of imagery. But if, through careful practice, you acquire the ability to look back to that point, then you reach the point where you learned to think as a small child. It is as if one reaches a limit with thinking, at first with ordinary thinking. For ordinary consciousness, for ordinary memory, you reach this limit. In the imagination you come further back to the other side. One looks into the soul content of the child that one had when one was not yet able to think, when one dreamed oneself into the world as a child. For it was only at a certain moment that thinking occurred, namely after speaking.

Now you can see into time, see what it was like in the soul before you had the shadowy abstract thoughts. Then we still had living thinking. And living thinking had a powerful plasticizing effect on the human brain, on the entire human organization. Later, when much of this thinking is taken into the abstract, into the dead, there are only remnants left to work on the human physical organization. While one is dreaming as a child, not yet able to think, thinking is active. Precisely because in later life one cannot look at such thinking through the noise of the world, it does not happen at all that one looks back into the thinking that was still active. Now one can look back. And then this thinking appears as the sum of the forces that actually built you up as a human being, as forces of growth, as forces of nourishment and so on. One notices how the human organization is built out of the ether of the world, for these forces lie within it. You get closer and closer to the etheric body. One knows how this etheric body is most active from the outside into the child in the very first years, when the child cannot yet think, when it still spends its life dreaming. This is how one advances to the imagination.

But something can remain. You don't realize it if you don't do the exercises I've mentioned in the books I've mentioned in the face of today's culture, which is roaring with scientificity. But then you realize that something has remained of this thinking from the other side, as you had it as a small child. This thinking, which is constructive, formative for the organism, to which one owes one's outer physical organism in the first place, this lively thinking I have called imaginative thinking in my books. But something of this imaginative thinking remains with you, and through practice you can also explore it again in later life, so that you can approach the etheric body.

I already drew attention to this yesterday, but since not everyone was there, I would like to point it out again: Take the human eye, the optic nerve of the human eye, which goes inwards, spreads out in the eye. If you go so far with the visual force body (purple-red), which essentially follows the outer physical nerve processes (yellow), that you come close to those processes (red) where the outer world is reflected through the eye, then you have perception of the outer world. And what then establishes itself in the nerve - I will now only describe this approximately, it would take too much time if I were to describe the exact process - that which establishes itself through the nerve in the body of visual forces can then always be stimulated to activity again. With the activity of the body of visual forces, the nervous system, one reaches the point where the nerves end (yellow). One does not, so to speak, penetrate the nerve as far as the processes that reflect the outer world, one only gives an impulse to that which lives in them in the formative forces body, pushes this formative forces body to where the nerve stumps end, then one receives the memory impression. The memory impression consists essentially in the fact that one reaches the nerve endings with the inner activity; while for the sensory impressions one pushes through the nerve endings and advances to the processes in the senses that are mainly caused by the blood.

There you see the living activity of the body of formative forces. But everything that you push into memory must have entered the nervous system, so it has only been there since we learned to think as a very small child. What was there before is now so - and if one has now trained the mind through exercises and looks back, one sees this in retrospect through the temporally passing second human being -: There one becomes aware of how, on the same paths on which otherwise the impressions entering from outside turn around again through the memory in the memory faculty, how that which is now also the activity of the body of formative forces comes in from behind, so to speak. We actually have these two activities all the time. But in ordinary consciousness man knows only of the one, of memory. But one has these two activities: That which stems from the external sensory perceptions, which are pushed back and can in turn be pushed forward to the nerve stumps, so that the memory images emerge; but there is also something that pours into the whole nervous system from that side, so to speak, in a human-creative way, where one does not perceive sensually with the same strength as on the front of the body.

The creative forces enter the human being from behind - of course, this is not entirely accurate - but from behind: In early childhood, when one is not yet able to think, quite powerful, later weaker. This is the thinking that is not taken from the sensory world, that is taken from the entire universe, that is taken from the world ether, that we acquire by descending from pre-earthly existence into earthly existence, that we still retain superhumanly until the moment when we learn to think. At the moment when we learn to think, we close the door, so to speak, to this active thinking, to this development of the human formative forces in the formative body, in the etheric body, according to the continuous stream of our life. Learning to think for the outer sense world means closing the gate for the universal world-forming powers of thought.

When we were children, we closed the gate for the world-forming powers of thought. But they remain in us, because we need these formative forces continuously in the first period of our lives, as long as we are growing as growth forces, and later as the processing forces for what we absorb as nourishment and so on. But we do not notice them. We only notice that which is reflected by the formative forces in the body from the impressions we have absorbed, which then reach the nerve endings in the memories.

But through exercises in concentration and meditation we can become aware of that which now forms us from the world etheric. In our self-perception we become aware of processes which also take place in time, which we have not absorbed through external impressions, but which only have a flow to one side. If we then follow these up to the point where the nerves run out, where we otherwise have the memories of external impressions, then we not only get the image of our etheric body, but the image of how we as human beings are contained within the entire world ether. We become aware of ourselves as a second human being. We learn to recognize how the etheric forces move in and out, and how everything that is everywhere outside as a universal play of world forces and moves into us is the same as the weaving of thoughts within us in the shadow image. We become aware of how the thoughts within us are the shadow image of the etheric body, how the etheric body is actually a living thing, how it is a link in the whole world ether. We have reached the first stage of supersensible knowledge.

You could say: What comes to light in thinking is actually formed as if through a mirror (see drawing). There is the coating of the mirror. Thus the mirror is directed forwards, towards the senses (red arrow). That which is taken in through the senses is reflected back and comes to consciousness when it reaches the nerve stumps. But there is also an inner activity which does not proceed in this way, but which passes through the mirror (purple arrows). If we follow this, then we have a body of image forces that is part of the image forces of the whole universe. In this way, however, we have come to the other side, so to speak, for thinking.

What is this practicing that leads to imaginative thinking? It consists in the fact that, whereas otherwise one always sees only as far as the mirror of one's inner being, to that which is reflected from within, but which is nothing other than outer nature, one now acquires the ability to see behind the mirror. There is not the same as in outer nature; there are the human-creative powers. This is the other side of thinking. Here is dead thinking, also called abstract thinking. There is living thinking. And in living thinking, thoughts are forces.

This is precisely the secret of thinking, that what one actually has within oneself in ordinary thinking is only the shadow image of what true thinking is. But true thinking pervades the world, is in the world as a power structure, not just in man.

It is not very clever at all for man to believe that thinking is only in him. It's a bit like drawing water from a stream and drinking it and then thinking: Yes, my tongue, it has continually brought forth the water. We draw water from the entire water supply of the earth. Of course, we are not under the illusion that our tongue produces the water. Only when we think do we do that. There we speak of the brain producing thought, while we merely draw from the total thought that is universally spread out in the world, which we then have within us as a sum of thoughts.

Man indulges in yet another illusion when he thinks of his imagination, an illusion that I can compare with the following. Imagine a path like the one down to Arlesheim and Dornach, such a soft path! I am now walking over it. You will see the tracks of my feet (see drawing, red). Now someone comes from Mars, has never seen anything like it on Earth, sees the tracks. He doesn't know any humans, because he comes from Mars, and it's at a time of day when no one has ever walked before. He sees the tracks. Aha, he thinks, there's the earth, there are the tracks; down there is earth, that's substance - he already knows that from Mars - down there in the earth's substance are all kinds of forces, vibrating forces, or whatever, ions or electrons, whatever it may be. These forces, they play below, and they cause the traces here, and that is why you can see the traces.

But the good inhabitant of Mars is mistaken, he does not notice that I have gone over there and that the earth has done nothing at all, that this earth down to Arlesheim is most innocent of these traces. There are no forces down there that have caused it to be configured, it came from outside.

Man also indulges in these illusions with regard to the brain. Such structures are also there, and he thinks that these structures are caused from within, and that this then appears in the thoughts. But they are traces made from the outside. We really do find a complete imprint of thought in the brain. There is nothing better to do than to follow how a person's thinking is represented down to the smallest detail in the forms of the brain. But just as little as the footprints in the earth have arisen from below, just as little have these formations of the brain arisen from anything other than impressions which the living thinking, which comes from the world ether, which lives and lives in the world ether, has dug into it.

What I am telling you now becomes a living view when one penetrates to this imaginative thinking. And just as you can grasp thinking from the other side, so to speak, you can now grasp another element that you experience somewhat earlier in normal human life, speech, also from behind, so to speak, from the other side.

Imagine that you let the air flow inwards through your lungs, through the larynx and through the other organs of speech. Through the formation of the larynx, the tongue, the palate and so on, the sounds are formed on the outside. If you follow this whole process from a certain point in the organism, you will have outward speech. But imagine that you are not tracing speech outwards from the speech organs, but you are tracing the process backwards (see drawing, red) to speech. Again, you cannot do this with ordinary consciousness, you must achieve this through exercises, that you follow the inner up to the point where the speech of earthly life forms outwards, that you follow the inner up to this point where speech first forms. This is not found in the physical and not in the etheric body, this is now found in an even higher part of the human organism than the etheric body or the body of formative forces, this is found in what I have called the astral body in my books.

What is spoken outwardly is language for earthly life. That which approaches the human being from behind, as it were, that which reaches the organs of speech, that which does not sound outwards as speech, but that which speaks inwards, that which does not emerge from the larynx outwards as earthly audible speech, but that which comes from behind, stops at the larynx, becomes mute there, instead of speech beginning there, which goes out earthly: that is spiritual speech. This is what we can call the spiritual language that is spoken to us from the spiritual world.

The impression that one receives through it, that is the inspiration, now meant in a quite rational sense. This inspiration must be brought about by withdrawing the consciousness, again through the exercises which I have described in the books I have mentioned, from being devoted to the outer words. Again, that which reaches the larynx or the organs of speech was particularly strong, and that which speaks to us from the world, whereas otherwise we speak to the world through our organs of speech - this inspiring was particularly strong in childhood, until we learned to speak. When we learned external language, these forces ceased to work in this way. They are now only present within us, and we attain them when we rise to the gift of inspiration.

Then we become aware of a third element within us, a third person who now does not belong to space and time, but who is strong and formative within us. This is the astral body. It is the astral body in which the processes are inspirations, where we experience what is actually behind our emotional life. The emotional life is the dreaming of that which flows into us in an inspiring way. And this emotional life is intimately connected with the breathing and speaking process.

Therefore, in older times, when people wanted to ascend into the spiritual world in a different way, this breathing process, the inner breathing process, was influenced by exercises. And the old yoga exercises were calculated to direct attention to that which lies behind speech. By putting artificial breathing in the place of natural breathing, one became aware of it, just as one becomes aware of something everywhere when one deviates from the ordinary.

Just think that you perceive the water in a river around you in different ways when you swim with the speed of flowing water, or when you swim slower or faster. If you swim at the speed of flowing water, you do not perceive a certain counter-pressure. If you swim more slowly, you will perceive it. Because the Indian yogi shapes his breathing in a different way than it naturally proceeds, he perceives that which is in the breathing stream as spiritual, that spiritual through which we have our astral body, and through which we in turn project into a higher world than the etheric world.

For us these exercises are the right ones - because humanity is progressing - which I have described in “How do you gain knowledge of the higher worlds?”. But you see, everywhere one can point to the concrete processes that underlie what the outside world finds so fantastic when anthroposophy speaks of man not consisting of the physical body alone, but of the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. We will talk about this next time. But these things have not been pulled out of our fingers, these things have not been speculated, but have come about through careful research, which takes the scientific method further right up to the human being, to the whole being of the human being - albeit research that is dependent on the human cognitive faculties being increased more and more.

So what does the imagination consist of, through which one penetrates into the etheric world and into the actual etheric life? This imagination consists in the fact that one not only pursues into the senses the processes that are first pushed backwards through the senses and can then be pushed forward again to the nerve endings, but that one becomes aware of that which is from the universe, from the cosmos, of the same kind as the sensory perceptions, but now belongs to the supersensible world, that one becomes aware of it as otherwise only the memories do.

If one becomes aware of the world-creating forces, as one otherwise perceives the memories, then one has imaginative being, then one experiences the etheric being of the world. If one becomes aware behind the language of that which now does not go out from the larynx to the front, but speaks in from the other side from the universe, from the cosmos, but falls silent at the larynx, then one becomes aware through inspiration of a further world to which we belong with our third human organism, with the astral body.

However, one thing becomes apparent. Here in the physical-sensory world we have on the one hand the physical processes and on the other the moral impulses that rise from within us. They stand side by side in such a way that even today theology would like the sensory world to be understood only sensually, and for the moral world there would be a completely different kind of knowledge. The moment we advance to inspiration, when we live not only in the world in which we speak from the larynx forward, but when we live in the world which speaks through our whole human being, but falls silent at the larynx, because we push the gate forward when we learn the outer language, so that we experience the outer language as a substitute for the heavenly language - the moment we live into this world, when we live into this world, which now ends at the larynx, then we experience the inspirational content of the world, then we experience the secrets of the world, and then we do not merely experience a nature which moral impulses cannot approach, but we experience a world behind the natural existence where natural impulses, natural laws and moral laws are interwoven, where they are one. We have lifted the veil and found a world in which the moral and the physical resonate with each other. And we shall see that this is the world in which we were in the pre-earthly existence before we descended to earth, into which we enter again after we have passed through the gate of death.

In order to extend our considerations and link on to what was said last week, let us bring to mind some of the things already known to us. When we consider man as he lives between birth and death we see his life divided into sections which can be studied from various aspects. Attention has often been drawn to the alternating states of waking and sleeping and we know that dreaming is a state between these two. Thus, we have three states of consciousness in ordinary life—waking, dreaming and sleeping. Human nature itself can be divided correspondingly. When we trace the content of ordinary consciousness we experience thinking—i.e., forming mental pictures. I have often pointed out that only in this state, or to the extent that we are in this state, are we really awake. Anyone who observes himself without prejudice will acknowledge that feeling presents a much duller state of consciousness than thinking. Feelings surge through the soul and, unlike mental pictures, we cannot relate them so definitely either to something in the external world or to something remembered. And we are conscious, or at least could become conscious, that as soon as we are awake, feelings come and go very much the way dreams come and go in the intermediate state between waking and sleeping. Anyone who has a sense for comparing different states of consciousness must say to himself: Dreams have a pictorial quality; feelings are more like indefinite forces surging within us. But apart from their content, dreams come and go just as feelings come and go. Furthermore, dreams emerge from a general darkness and dullness of consciousness just as feelings emerge and again submerge within a general inner existence.

When we consider the will we find that what takes place within us when we have a will impulse remains as unknown to us as that which we sleep through. The only aspect that is clear in a will impulse is the thought that initiated it. What next comes into consciousness is the movement of our limbs or the event taking place in the external world through our will. But what takes place in the legs when walking or in the arms when we lift them remains as unconscious as that which takes place between falling asleep and waking. So we can say that while we are awake we experience all three conditions of waking, dreaming and sleeping.

However, we shall only arrive at a comprehensive knowledge of man if we use discernment when comparing what is given us, on the one hand, as sleeping, dreaming and waking; and, on the other, as willing, feeling and thinking. Let us consider sleeping man, on the one hand, and, on the other, man engaged in an act of will. The characteristic feature of sleeping man is that the very factor that makes us human—the experience of the I or ego—is absent. This situation is usually described by saying that the I, between falling asleep and waking up, is outside of what is present before us as physical man.

Let us now compare dreaming man with man experiencing feelings. By means of ordinary self-observation you will immediately recognize that dream pictures come before the soul in a, so to speak, neutral fashion. When we dream, either on waking or before falling asleep, we cannot really say that the pictures come before the soul like a tapestry, rather do they surge and weave within the soul. Thus, what then takes place in the soul differs from what occurs when fully awake. When awake we know that we take hold of the pictures which we then have; we grasp them in our inner being. They are not so nebulous and indefinite as dreams.

Let me illustrate what has just been described (left hand drawing). Let us imagine man schematically (white lines) and draw what we imagine to be weaving dreams (red lines). One must imagine the red part as a tissue of dreams experienced by the soul which continually withdraws and again approaches the soul.

The moment he wakes up man does not experience such a tissue of weaving pictures. He now has the pictures of whatever he is experiencing firmly within him (right hand drawing). The weaving pictures which were formerly outside are now within him; he lays hold of them with his body and because he does so they are no longer undefined weaving pictures but something which he controls inwardly.

When man is fully awake then what weaves and hovers as dreams become thoughts within him. He is then in control of what now lives in his soul as mental pictures. In this relationship you can see that the soul is taking hold of something which from outside draws into man. What has just been described is in fact the entry of what we call the astral body into man's inner being. To ordinary consciousness it is that which before entry weaves and hovers as dreams. The astral body is, therefore, within us when after waking we begin to think. We then form mental pictures and we know that we do so, for these mental pictures are under our control. As long as they are dreams they hover outside. You need only imagine a kind of cloud that hovers near you in which dreams are weaving. You then draw in this cloud, you now control it from within. Because it is no longer outside you cease to dream. Just as you grasp objects with your hands so do you grasp dreams with your inner being; which means that you have drawn in the astral body.

We must ask: What precisely is it that we now have within us? We can perhaps find a point of reference by looking at certain dreams which are not just pictures but begin also to become indefinite feelings. Just think how often dreams can be quite unpleasant. Many dreams are connected with anxiety. You wake up feeling anxious. In this undefined state of anxiety—less often it may be a state of joy—you have the first glimmer of something which as it further develops becomes fully present as you wake up. What is it that glimmers forth when a dream causes, for example, anxiety?

Such dreams are interwoven with feelings; anxiety is a feeling. The feeling is undefined because the dream is still partly outside the organism; yet it is far enough within to intermingle with feeling. It interweaves with what already lives in the soul as feeling. Only when the astral body has entered completely do you have definite feelings. These are conditioned by the physical organization and can now be penetrated by mental pictures present in the astral body.

When we consider certain nightmares and anxiety dreams in the right light we draw near to what actually takes place when the astral body enters man's physical body. You will always find that it is some disorder in the breathing which causes the state of anxiety of some dreams. From this you can see clearly that the astral body draws in and again draws out through the breath. It is really possible to observe these things if only the observation is thorough enough and free from prejudice. Something can be seen here that enables us to recognize that what weaves in dreams is in fact the astral body and that it draws into our organism by taking hold of the breath as we wake up.

This leads to the recognition of something else that is not normally taken into account but is of great significance. The human being is usually regarded as if he were simply a physical organism, a body built up of solid matter. That is just not true. The least part of the human body is solid, less than ten percent. For the rest it is a water organism, an organism of liquid, so that in reality we must think of this organism built up in such a way that one tenth is solid (see drawing, white lines) and the solid saturated with water (blue lines). You only represent the human organism truly when you see it as a column of liquid in which the solid is deposited.

However, there is more to it. We must also picture the human organism as an organism of air. The air is outside, we breathe it in; a part of the outside air is now within us and we breathe it out again. So we are also an air organism. Let us draw that, too (red lines). It is just this air organism which is taken hold of by the astral body as we wake up. We breathe in the air, it goes through transformations the effect of which pours through the whole organism. The oxygen takes up the carbon and transforms it into carbonic acid. Thus, an air process continually takes place within us.

As we wake up the air process is permeated by the astral body. The movement of the astral body follows the same path as the air through the organism. The air process consists solely of air when we sleep; when we are awake then the movements of the astral body, as it were, swim along within what lives in us as air processes. But now depict to yourselves the following: the astral body draws into that which I have schematically drawn in red and carries out its movements, in fact, carries out its general activity, within the air organism. This all takes place within the watery organism, which is represented in the blue lines. When we are awake, these air processes are in reality processes of the astral body and they continually push against the watery organism. Man's etheric body is within the watery organism both night and day. So you have simultaneously a reciprocal effect between the etheric body and the astral body, as well as between their physical counterparts which are the air processes and the water processes. Thus, you can visualize these processes running their course within man between his breathing and the movements of all the bodily fluids. Yet that is again merely a copy of what takes place between the astral and etheric bodies.

The whole organism consisting of solid, fluid and air is also permeated with warmth (see drawing, yellow lines, page 38). The whole organism has its own warmth—i.e., its own warmth ether. On the gaseous waves moves astrality and in the warmth flowing through the body moves the actual I or ego of man.

So you have the physical body as such, then the fluid body, which is also physical but differentiated from the solid physical body. The fluid physical body has an intimate connection with the etheric body. Then the gaseous organism which has an intimate connection with the astral body, and finally all the warmth processes—that is, the warmth ether in man, which has an intimate connection with the human I. Thus, one can say that in the various physical constituents of man we have a picture of the whole man. The solid part, so to speak, exists by itself; the fluid within the organism cannot exist by itself. Within the head we have very little solid and what there is swims in the cerebral fluid. Within this fluid is the etheric part of the head.

In the breathing process the following takes place: As we breathe in, the breath pushes inwards up through the spinal fluid towards the brain. In our waking state the astral also moves along this thrusting movement towards the etheric part of the head. We have then, on the one hand, an interaction of the movement of the cerebral fluid with the movement of the breath, and, on the other, an interaction of the etheric part of the head—of which what takes place in the cerebral fluid is only an image—with the breathing process, which is again only an image of the astrality in man. We also have a continuous interplay of warmth; the movement of the blood mediates the warmth. On the waves of this sea of warmth our I also moves.

To become clear about these interactions within man's bodily nature it is essential that we represent them vividly to ourselves. Only the solid organism can be observed by itself. The fluid organism does not have the possibility of moving

in waves the way water moves in the external world. The play of movement in the fluid organism is an image of what takes place in the etheric body. Again, what takes place in the delicate processes of breathing is an image of what takes place in man's astral body. Keeping this in mind let us once more look at the cerebral fluid: within it certain movements take place copying movements of the etheric body. Man acquires the etheric body when he descends from spiritual worlds into the physical world. Within the spiritual world he does not yet possess it. But as man takes hold of his physical body he also takes possession of his etheric body; he, as it were, draws out the ether from the cosmos. He can unite with the physical body, which he receives through heredity, only when he has drawn the ether from the cosmos. So that all that lives in the etheric body of man we bring with us when we take hold of the physical body.

The human embryo develops within the maternal body. Let us consider the fluid within the embryo. In general physiology only the solid components, or what appear to be solid components, are examined, not the fluid. Were this to be investigated it would be found that the cerebral fluid, in particular, contains an image of all that which was present already in the ether body, as the ether was drawn together, and which then slips into physical man.

If this is the physical body (see drawing) in which the physical human embryo develops—I do not draw the solid, only the fluid embryo (red lines)—then what as astral and `I' is present descends from the spiritual world; what has been drawn together from the ether slips in (yellow lines). In fact, as he dives down into his physical body the fluid part of the organism absorbs what man brings with him. Therefore, if the movements within the cerebral fluid of the child were to be investigated they would be found to be like a photograph of what the human being had been before he united with the physical body. You see, it is very significant to realize that a photograph is to be found in the cerebral fluid, that is to say in the movements of the cerebral fluid, of what has taken place before conception.

It is fairly easy to understand that a kind of photograph of what existed before conception is to be found in the cerebral fluid. But let us now consider the process of breathing. Breathing appears to be an out and out physical process because of the way our lungs function. Air is drawn in and, under the influence of the external world, the breathing takes place even when we are asleep—that is, even when the eternal part of our being is not united with the temporal part. Our breathing is not affected by whether we are awake or asleep. When we sleep the wave movements of the breath go through the organism; when we are awake they, in addition, carry the astral body. In other words, they are able to carry the astral body but it is not incumbent on them to do so, for when we are asleep they do not.

What follows from this? It follows that the reason the cerebral fluid can carry on by itself is because it is isolated within man's inner being. It constitutes a kind of continuation of what existed before. On the other hand, nothing of what existed before can be continued in this intimate way within our breath. When we consider the human head, we find within the cerebral fluid, that is, within the physical body itself, the actual continuation of pre-natal spiritual man; whereas when we consider the organization of the chest and the process of breathing we find a different situation. The physical breath takes place by itself (see drawing, yellow lines); the spiritual is less strongly connected with the physical process (red lines). Therefore, one must say that in the head, spiritual man, the man of soul and spirit, is closely connected with physical man; they have become a unity. In the chest that is not the case—there the two are more apart; the physical organism is more by itself and so, too, the soul-spiritual.

Let us now compare this with the state of dreaming. When we dream the I and astral body are outside, they are separated from the sleeping body. However, for the chest man, that is to some extent always the case. The chest man—that is, the man of breath and heart, in short, rhythmic man—is the organism for feeling. Feelings run their course like dreams because the soul-spiritual is not so firmly connected with the physical organism, is not so completely within physical man. So you see, if one wants to consider the whole man one must take into account these different interactions of what pertains to the soul and what pertains to the body.

In our materialistic age the human being is considered only in the most external way. This is evident from the way modern science looks upon man as if he were nothing but a solid organism within which the soul is somehow active. On this basis it is impossible to visualize how, for example, an impulse of will, experienced purely within the soul, can lead to the lifting of the arms or legs. In fact, from the point of view of what we experience as the soul's part in an act of will, the human organism, as conceived by modern anatomy and physiology, is like a piece of wood, as alien to the soul as a piece of wood. What in physiology today is described as human legs is like a description of two pieces of wood. They are related to the soul as if they were wooden legs. As little as the soul could have any relationship with two pieces of wood lying about, just as little could it have any relationship with legs as described by modern physiology. However, human legs are penetrated by liquid. Here we already come upon something in which it is easier to understand that the spiritual can be active within it. Yet, it is still difficult.

Once we come to the gaseous, the airy element, then we are in a physical material so fine that it is much easier to visualize the soul element to be within it, and easier still when we come to warmth. Just think how close a connection can come about between the warmth of the physical organism and the soul. You may at some time have had a terrible fright and grown quite hot. There you have an inner experience of the connection between the soul and the warmth in the physical organism. In fact, when we examine the solid, fluid, gaseous and warmth components of the whole organism, we gradually arrive at the soul.

It can be said that the 'I' takes hold of the inner warmth; the astral body of the gaseous; the ether body of the fluid and only the solid remains untouched; in the solid nothing enters. Picture to yourselves the way the human organism functions: You have the human brain (see drawing, page 46) that has fluid in it and also solid parts into which, as I said, the soul does not enter. The solid parts are, in reality, salt deposits; whatever solid we have within us is always salt-like deposit. Our bones consist solely of such deposits. In the brain very fine deposits continually occur and again dissolve. There is always a tendency in our brain to bone formation. The brain has a tendency to become quite bony. But it does not become bony because everything is in movement and is continually dissolved. When we examine the organism, especially the brain, we first find within it a condition of warmth, and within the warmth the air which is the bearer of the astral body and is continually playing into the cerebral fluid while being breathed in and out. We then have the cerebral fluid in which the ether body lives. Then we come to the solid into which the soul cannot enter because it consists of deposited salt. Because of this salt formation, which is less than ten percent of the total organism, we have within us something into which the soul cannot enter.

As human beings we have an organism; within this organism there are warmth, gaseous and fluid elements, all of which the soul can penetrate. But there is something which the soul cannot penetrate. This is comparable to having objects on which light falls but cannot penetrate and is therefore thrown back. Let us say we have a mirror; light cannot go through it and is therefore reflected. Similarly, the soul cannot penetrate the solid salt organism and is, therefore, continually reflected.

If this were not the case, there would be no consciousness at all. Your consciousness consists of soul experiences reflected from the salt organism. You are not aware of the soul life as it is absorbed by the warmth, gaseous and fluid organism; you experience it only because the soul life within the warmth, gaseous and fluid, is reflected everywhere by salt, just as sunbeams are reflected by a mirror. The outcome of this reflection is our mental pictures.

When someone deposits too much salt—salt always takes on forms—then he produces a lot of mental pictures; he becomes rich in thoughts. If too little salt is secreted the thoughts have vague outlines, like reflections from a faulty mirror. Or, said differently, when too much salt is secreted thoughts predominate and become very precise, and he who has them becomes pedantic. He is convinced of the rightness of his thoughts because they arise from so much solid, he becomes materialistic. When too little salt is secreted, or perhaps too much in the rest of the organism but too little in the head, then the thoughts become indefinite and the person becomes fanciful or perhaps he becomes a mystic. Our soul life is dependent on the material processes taking place within us.

It may be necessary, when someone is too prone to fanciful ideas, to administer some remedy that will enable him to deposit more salt or else give better form to the salt he does deposit. He will then escape from his fantasies. However, one should not make too great an effort to cure a human being by physical means of his fantasies or pedantry; not much can be done anyway. To do something different is more important and can be of great value—someone who knows how to observe human beings in regard to both soul and body will notice if there is too much sediment, whether in the head, or in the organs of the rhythmic or metabolic systems. He will notice it because the whole thought configuration becomes different. The manner in which a person alters his thoughts can contribute significantly to a diagnosis. But such delicate reactions are not often noticed. For example, someone may suddenly make mistakes repeatedly when speaking. He does not normally do so, but suddenly he makes mistakes again and again. It may last a few days and then cease. He has suffered a slight ailment, and the mistakes in speaking are merely a symptom. Such instances can often be described quite exactly.

For example, someone may for a few days secrete too much gastric acid. Now what occurs? This gastric acid dissolves certain substances in the stomach, which ought to pass on beyond the stomach. This means that the organism is deprived of these substances with the result that the person's inner mirror pictures lack the necessary sharpness. His thoughts become vague and he makes mistakes in speaking. You will have realized what must be done: One must provide a remedy that will ensure less acidity in the stomach, then the person's thoughts will again become ordered. His digestion is now in order and he ceases to make mistakes when speaking.

Or take the example of someone who absorbs gastric acid too intensely. This can occur if the spleen is abnormally active. When this happens the gastric acid is distributed throughout the body; the body, as it were, becomes all stomach. Such acid sediments are, in fact, the cause of many illnesses. A specific pricking pain may be felt or, if the head is affected, a feeling of dullness. When you look at such a person with insight it will often be found that the absorption of all the acidity has created in him a certain greediness. When someone is permeated with acidity his eyes may lose their friendly expression. If someone is suffering from too much acidity his eyes will reveal it. It is sometimes possible to restore his friendly expression by administering an acid that can be digested in the stomach because it is of a kind that has no tendency to spread throughout the organism.

The reason I am saying all this is to show you that the science of the spirit meant here does not simply contemplate the human soul in a nebulous way. It recognizes the soul as the ruler and builder of the body, active within it everywhere.

The human organism is described nowadays as if it were solid through and through; the solid alone is taken into account. It is impossible to arrive at any conception of how the soul actually exists within the body unless one also considers the fluid, gaseous and warmth elements of the organism. The soul does not live in the solid part of the organism; it does not enter the solid any more than light penetrates a mirror. Light is thrown back from the mirror, the soul retreats everywhere from the salt.

The peculiarity of the soul is that it is deflected from the bones (see drawing, red lines). We carry our bones within us empty of soul. The soul is not within them but is rayed back into the organism.

The bones in the skull are really ingeniously arranged. The soul rays out in all directions and is reflected into our inner being. We do exist within the skull bones but only as solid physical man. If we would make a comprehensive sketch of the head we would have to depict the soul as raying out within the head (see drawing, red lines). If nothing else happened, we would be in a dull unconscious condition. However, as the soul cannot enter the bones of the skull it is rayed back into our inner being (arrows, short red lines).

We experience the soul only when it is reflected into our inner being. So, you see how matters stand: The reality is that you have the soul within you rayed back from the mirror of the skull bones.

Spiritual science does not exclude what is material; on the contrary, recognition of how the soul controls matter makes it, at last, comprehensible. After all one does not come to know that someone is a baker by the fact that he makes certain movements, but from knowing that the movements he makes shape the rolls and croissants. Neither does one come to know the soul through abstract considerations but by knowing that a reflection of the soul's activity is to be found in the physical organism. It is a question of understanding the organism rightly and recognizing that it is an image of the soul. If we cannot make the effort to understand even man's physical nature we shall never learn to know the soul. We must have the goodwill to understand how human nature comes to expression through the physical. What is usually spoken of as soul, by those who will not approach the physical with spiritual insight, is something utterly unreal. It is as unreal as if you had a tasty meal before you and, instead of eating it, tried to eat its reflection in a mirror standing beside it. One can become knowledgeable about the soul only by observing her creative activity and not by persisting to regard it as a mere abstraction. And one should certainly not adopt the view that to be a conscientious spiritual scientist one must scorn the material. Rather should the material be understood spiritually; it will then reveal itself as spirit through and through. To do otherwise is to live in intellectual abstractions, and they obscure rather than enlighten.