The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

There is a phenomenon of physical life which has never been explained by exoteric thought—the chaotic life bound up with sleep and called the life of dream.

What is the dream? It is an activity which has survived from prehistoric times. To understand it by analogy, let us consider certain phenomena which do not any longer belong, properly speaking, to physical life—organs which have now become useless, rudimentary organisms of which the naturalist can make nothing. Such are the motor organs of the ear and eye which function no longer, the appendix and,—notably, the pineal gland in the brain which has the form of a tiny pine cone. Naturalists explain it as a product of degeneration, as a parasitic growth in the brain. This is not correct. In the lasting creations of Nature, nothing is without its use. The pineal gland is the surviving remnant of an organ of great significance in primitive man, an organ of perception which served simultaneously as antenna, eye and ear. This organ existed in man during his rudimentary period of development, in days when the semi-fluid, semi-vaporous Earth was still united with the Moon. Man moved through the semi-fluid, semi-gaseous element like a fish, guiding his way by means of this organ. His perceptions were of a visionary, allegoric nature. Currents of warmth evoked in him the impression of dazzling red and of powerful sound. Currents of cold evoked the impression of shades of green and blue, silvery, rippling sounds.

The rôle played by the pineal gland was thus of great significance. But with the mineralisation of the Earth, other organs of sense made their appearance, and with us the pineal gland has no apparent purpose.

Let us now turn to the phenomenon of the dream.

The dream is a rudimentary function of our life—seemingly without use or purpose. In reality it represents an atrophied function—a function which in days of yore gave rise to a very different mode of perception.

Before the Earth became metallic, it was only perceptible in the astral sense. All perceptions are relative; they are merely symbolic. The central core of truth is ineffable and divine. This is wonderfully expressed in the words of Goethe: “All things transitory are but symbols.”

Astral vision (which is still present in the dream) is allegoric and symbolic.

Examples of dreams provoked by physical and bodily causes:

A student dreams that a companion gives him a blow, whereupon a duel is fought and he himself is wounded. He wakes up to find that the cause of the dream is a chair that has fallen over. Again someone may dream of a trotting horse but the sound is really caused by the ticking of a watch.

The bodily nature of man lies at the root of certain dreams but others are directly related to the astral and spiritual worlds. This latter class of dreams are the origin of myths.

In the opinion of modern scholars, the myths are poetic interpretations of the phenomena of Nature. If, however, we study certain folk-legends, we shall find that they are more than this. Myths and legends are based upon astral visions which have been travestied, changed and added to by tradition.

Think of the Slavonic legend of the ‘Woman of Noonday.’ If peasants who are labouring at the harvest in the oppressive heat of summer lie down to rest on the ground at midday instead of going to their homes, the figure of a woman appears and places a number of enigmas before them. If the sleeper can solve these enigmas, he is saved; if not, the woman slays and cuts him in two with a scythe. The legend goes on to say that this phantom can be exorcised by reciting the verses of the Lord's Prayer in backward order. Occultism teaches us that the Woman of Noonday is an astral figure, an incubus who appears and oppresses man during his sleep. The reversed Lord's Prayer indicates that in the astral world everything is reflected as in a mirror (inversion). In The Riddle of the Sphinx, Ludwig Laistner says that the origin of the legend of the sphinx is to be found among all races. He also proves that all legends have been conceived in a condition of higher sleep where realities are perceived, and that the sphinx is in truth a daemonic figure.

A state of dream-consciousness, or perception of a real world in astral symbols-this, then, is the origin of all the myths. Myths describe the astral world seen in symbolic visions.

In the course of history we find that the creation of myths ceases when the life of logic and intellectuality begins to develop.

A law known to occultism is that with every new stage of evolution, an element from the past makes its appearance. Ancient faculties, survivals from past epochs which have atrophied in the being of man, act as ferments for subsequent development; they are like the yeast which makes the dough rise. Man's present faculty of dreaming will beget a new kind of vision, a perception of the astral and spiritual world.

The man of today lives only in his senses and intellect which elaborates what the senses tell him. The intellect of man of the future will awaken to the full light of consciousness and he will live consciously in the astral world.

The trance of the hypnotised subject and of the medium is an atavistic phenomenon, bound up with lowered consciousness. The initiated clairvoyant is not an unbalanced visionary; he possesses, in advance, the consciousness which will be possessed by all men in future ages; he has his feet on solid ground just as firmly as the most matter-of-fact human being; his reason is just as clear and certain but he sees in two worlds.

It is a law of evolution that certain organs atrophy, subsequently to take on new functions.

The pineal gland has a certain physiological relation with the lymphatic system. In olden times this gland was the organ of perception of the outer world and it is still to be seen near the top of the head of newly-born babes where the soft matter recalls the nature of man's body in olden times.

In our life of intellect, the dream plays a rôle similar to that of the pineal gland in the physiology of the human body.

Why is there a descending and an ascending process in evolution? What is the purpose of evil? These are weighty questions which have never been solved by science or religion. Yet the whole problem of education depends upon their solution.

We cannot speak of evil in the absolute sense. Evil, indeed, plays a part in the development of beings and the unfolding of freedom.

The materialist will not admit that the thoughts stimulated in us by Nature are, in fact, already contained in her being. He imagines that we infuse our thoughts into Nature.

The Rosicrucians in the Middle Ages were wont to place a glass of water before the neophyte and say to him: ‘This water would not be in the glass if some being had not put it there.’ Thus it is in regard to the ideas we find expressed in Nature. They must have been implanted there by divine Intelligences, by servants of the Logos.

The thoughts we derive from the universe are actually there. All that we create is contained somewhere in the universe.

It is a false idea on the part of certain mystics to disparage the value of the physical body. It has just as much value as the astral body; its mission is to become the temple of the soul.

Think of the marvelous structure of the femur, of the bone which bears the whole body. Its construction is such that the maximum amount of strength is produced with the minimum amount of substance. No engineer could create such a wonder-structure. In comparison with the physical body, the astral body—the seat of passions and desires—is rudimentary and crude.

The physical world is the expression of wisdom incarnate, divine wisdom.

The Rosicrucians taught that the Earth, in primeval times, was an Earth of wisdom. Today we may call it an Earth of love. The mission of man is to accomplish for the imperfect part of his being what divine wisdom once accomplished for his physical body. He must ennoble his astral body and therewith the world around him.

All that has entered into us without our conscious will under the influence of divine wisdom—that is Involution. All that we must bring out of ourselves by dint of conscious will—that is Evolution.

The pyramids will perish in the course of the centuries but the ideas which gave them birth will develop onwards. The cathedral of today will take another form. Raphael's pictures will fall into dust but the soul of Raphael and the ideas which his creations represent will be living powers forever. The Art of today will be the Nature of tomorrow and will blossom again in her. Thus does Involution become Evolution.

Here we have the point of intersection between the divine and the human, the twofold power which brings God to man and raises man to God.

We began these lectures with an enquiry into our normal dream life and from here we moved on to a consideration of further states of consciousness which enable us to enter into worlds other than the one we inhabit between birth and death. Finally we discussed mediumistic consciousness, the consciousness which man experiences in a somnambulistic condition, for the mediumistic state is always of this nature.

Now both kinds of experience, those of the dream and of somnambulism, are conditions of the soul which are also found in their true form in normal life. It is only when they are intensified that they lead into true or false channels.

Today we will examine our dream life once again. We have seen that when man in normal consciousness passes over from the waking state into sleep, he is subject to dreams and that his astral body registers during the latter state an after-vibration of his experiences in the etheric and physical bodies. Then follow the chaotic, indeed extraordinary dream-experiences which only an Initiate can rightly interpret, because the man who does not penetrate more deeply into the nature of the spiritual world is simply bewildered by these normally chaotic experiences.

But we have also seen how, through exercises in meditation and concentration, the weft of dream life can be interwoven with the woof of higher consciousness. We therefore envisage man transplanted into the chaotic and wondrous world of dream; but he remains fully conscious in this dream life which is as real to him as ordinary life. Then he gains insight into another world where he can accompany the dead in their after-death existence. He feels that a world of much greater reality than our present world envelops him. The question now is: what is the real nature of the world he now contacts? I have already spoken about this, but today I would like to touch upon this question from a different angle.

I described how there once lived on Earth illustrious teachers who did not inhabit physical bodies, but only subtle etheric bodies, and were able therefore to incarnate in the ether surrounding the Earth. They instructed men through Inspiration and laid the foundations of the primordial culture on Earth. When we look back into these ancient times with the appropriate condition of consciousness, we find these primeval spiritual teachers sharing the life of mankind. Then they withdrew to the Moon sphere and today are only to be found in this sphere where they have subjected to their purposes all manner of beings who have never lived on Earth. They live amongst these elementary beings and work upon human beings who have passed through the gates of death, instructing them how to acquit themselves in relation to their karma. These are the Beings with whom we are concerned when we first enter the spiritual world. Just as we cannot ignore society and social relationships in our life on Earth, so we must cooperate with these other Beings in order to attain higher knowledge. And it is with the help of these Moon Beings who were once the primeval teachers of humanity on Earth and the beings whom they have taken into their service, that we investigate the spiritual world immediately adjacent to our own. It is there that we find the key to earlier Earth epochs and to the earlier incarnations of human beings. We can then discover personalities who once lived on Earth and with whom we either had, or had not, karmic connections. In order to illustrate this, I pointed out how, by further developing this level of consciousness, we gradually contact earthly beings such as Brunetto Latini, Dante, Alanus ab Insulis and others who are no longer incarnated on Earth today.

This state of consciousness is therefore an illumination, a translucence of the dream state. In ordinary life the dream state represents, so to speak, only the rudimentary beginnings of this state. Now it is very easy to show the difference between the Initiate and the man living at the ordinary level of consciousness.

Under normal conditions of sleep man's physical and etheric bodies are left behind, whilst his astral body and Ego are outside his body. In the dream state experience is solely the province of the Ego. The occurrences experienced in the dream belong, it is true, to the astral body which is still outside the physical and etheric bodies, but in terms of ordinary consciousness only the Ego can experience the dream.

The Initiate, however, experiences with his Ego and especially with his astral body. The difference, therefore, between the Initiate and the ordinary dreamer is that the latter only experiences with his Ego when he is outside his physical and etheric bodies, whilst the Initiate experiences with his astral body as well.

Now this mode of perception was developed to a high degree, especially in the ancient Mysteries, for the purpose of investigating the super-sensible worlds. It was further developed in a decadent form throughout the Middle Ages and later epochs. In modern times it has virtually disappeared. Isolated individuals, either by spiritual means or through tradition, have always received instruction from the ancient teachers in the Mysteries how to remain fully conscious in ordinary dream life. Individuals have at all times been able to penetrate into these worlds, but the attempt is fraught with danger. When the Initiate with Imaginative Knowledge is immersed in the normal dream world, he immediately has the feeling that he is losing touch with the physical world, that he is losing consciousness and sinking into a void. He feels as if solid ground were slipping from under his feet, as if he were no longer subject to the force of gravity. He experiences a feeling of inner release, a feeling that he is being swept away into a cosmic ocean, that he might easily lose control over himself because he is no longer firmly anchored.

The purpose of the spiritual exercises described in my book, >Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, is to obviate this danger. Whoever undertakes these meditations in the right way will find that he develops “wings” of the soul and that, having overcome gravity, he can now take wing. When the Initiate loses the physical and etheric ground beneath his feet and has not yet developed the “wings” of the astral body and Ego, a dangerous situation arises. Though I express myself figuratively you will understand my meaning. The dangers are real enough. If we prepare ourselves assiduously for the world we enter as a result of these exercises, all possibility of danger is excluded. We can gradually participate in these worlds just as we participate in the physical world through our physical and etheric bodies.

This was more or less the condition of man in earliest times. Today we have to achieve this condition through the practice of spiritual exercises. The make-up of primordial man was such that, in contrast to our waking consciousness, he enjoyed a natural condition of spiritual vision such as I have described amongst the Chaldeans and a condition that could not be equated with our dream state, but was a form of Imaginative perception. When confronted by another human being a man perceived not only his physical contours, but had a dreamlike impression of the aura around him. It was the true aura, not merely a subjective illusion. In addition to this gift for perceiving the aura of the physical body, he also possessed another faculty—for both are related to each other—which enabled him to perceive the aura of a spiritual being who is not incarnated in a physical body. And then he dreamed the form of the spiritual being.

Note the difference: if, in ancient times, a man looked at his physical counterpart, he imagined in a true dream the aura around him. If he met with a spiritual being, an Angel or an elementary being, he had, from the first, a spiritual perception of the aura and ‘dreamed’ the form belonging to it.

This is how the earliest painters worked, but we are unaware of it today. These painters saw the spiritual beings and ‘dreamed’ the corresponding forms. They depicted the Beings of the hierarchy of the Angels almost in the likeness of human beings, the Archangels with unsubstantial bodies, but with clearly defined wings and head; and the Archai solely with a winged head because this was the form they ‘dreamed.’ These insights were as natural to men of ancient times as it is natural to us today to see another's physical features. Since man has gradually lost his clairvoyance, he must reacquire it through spiritual training. But as clairvoyance was natural to primitive man, and relatively easy to regain through spiritual training, it has been the subject of extensive investigation over the years. There has always been an active interest in the world ruled by the Moon Beings and the Initiates of the ancient Mysteries, who were the true investigators, have much to say of this world, of their encounter with the dead, of the investigation into the Moon sphere and how the world appears from the perspective of the Moon sphere.

Copernicus established his heliocentric system from the point of view of the terrestrial consciousness only. The old Ptolemaic system is not erroneous; seen from the perspective of the consciousness of the Moon sphere its findings are correct. Now it is a characteristic of these investigators, i.e. the Initiates of the Moon sphere, that their activities are restricted to that sphere.

It is common knowledge to all of you that the present Anthroposophical Society was formerly a part of the Theosophical Society. The Theosophical Society which is similar to many societies of a kindred nature that have been founded in the course of recent years, has accumulated an abundant literature. If you refer to this literature you will find—whether rightly or wrongly is immaterial for the moment—that it describes the world of which I am now speaking, the Moon sphere, the world that we investigate in conjunction with the Moon Beings. When it was proposed that I should work in the Theosophical Society it had important implications for me—although I was faced with certain difficulties at first, for in the Theosophical Society I found investigations and a literature which were limited solely to this Moon sphere. Undoubtedly this material contains much that is incorrect, but much that is highly important and unique, especially in the writings of H. P. Blavatsky. But everything to be found in the writings of H. P. Blavatsky is determined by her association with the Moon sphere and her relationship with Initiates who elected to stay behind in this Moon sphere as an act of sacrifice.

I can assure you that I have come to know many of these Initiates and how such spirits penetrate into the Moon sphere but are indifferent to man's desire to develop further.

When I wrote my book, Occult Science—an Outline, in the years between 1906 and 1909, I described the Earth in its earlier incarnations of Moon, Sun and Saturn. [See Chapter IV: Man and the Evolution of the World.] My description did not end with the Moon incarnation; I traced the Earth incarnation as far back as the Saturn incarnation, whereas all the Initiates who spoke of these matters concluded their account between Moon and Sun; in reality, they traced the Earth incarnation only as far back as to the Moon sphere. Any suggestion that they should look back to still earlier incarnations of the Earth was met with indifference, sometimes even with a sense of disquiet. They declared this to be impossible, for the path was blocked by an insuperable barrier. It was of course, most important and not without interest to understand the reason for this. It soon became apparent on closer acquaintance that these Initiates had an aversion, an antipathy to the modern scientific outlook. When these Initiates were introduced to the ideas of Darwin, Haeckel and their followers they became most indignant and regarded them as childish and stupid and refused to have any truck with them. They were less antipathetic to the ideas of Goethe at first, but ultimately they found that he too spoke the language of the modern scientist and then they dismissed the whole affair.

In short, one could not appeal to the Initiates with such ideas. And it was in the years 1906 to 1909 when I first steeped myself in modern scientific ideas in order to impregnate them with Imaginations that I found it possible to penetrate to the Sun and Saturn spheres. I did not use these scientific concepts as a method of cognition after the fashion of Haeckel or Huxley, but as an inner motivation in order to overcome the limitations to which the Initiates were subject at a time when the modern scientific outlook did not yet exist and when therefore one could achieve higher consciousness only by impregnating the dream-world with Imaginations. In writing my Occult Science I attempted to imbue with inner meaning the fully conscious scientific outlook of Huxley and others which normally is only associated with the external world, and to impregnate the Imaginative world with it. Then it was possible to understand this whole sequence of Saturn, Sun and Moon and to investigate on Earth the old Initiate-knowledge.

I am describing this path to knowledge in order that you may understand how these things arise. You may perhaps say that this is a personal interpretation. But in this case the personal element is, in fact, wholly objective. The criticism directed against my book Occult Science is that it is written like a mathematical text-book, that I sought to avoid subjective interpretation and that I described with mathematical detachment the whole path of development I have been discussing. None the less this path is precisely as I have described it. Its origin lay in the circumstance that the modality of thought which has existed since the time of Copernicus and Galileo and which was enriched by Goethe was combined with the same disposition of soul that is normally present in Imagination. Thus it was possible to trace back this sphere that had always been accessible to the Initiates, to its origin in Saturn.

From this example you will appreciate perhaps how important it is to approach these matters not in a vague, haphazard fashion, but with clear and conscious deliberation, to introduce a note of caution where thoughtlessness so easily takes over. Under normal conditions the dream life is in contact with the Ego only, but here we have an example where it contacts the astral body also.

To the question: what is the difference between modern natural science and the information I have given in Occult Science? I would reply: the modern scientist can only appeal to the Ego and begins to dream the moment he surrenders his Ego, whilst I was able to take over into the dream life the concepts of natural science, to direct the astral body into the worlds I had to describe.

This is a path which can be described to you exactly and will serve as an example to indicate perhaps more precisely how the true paths differ from the false.

The condition diametrically opposed to the dream state is that of somnambulism and mediumism. The dreamer lives wholly in his Ego and astral body. Even though he has no conscious perceptions in the astral body, he nevertheless lives within it. He lives wholly in his Ego and astral body outside his physical and etheric bodies. He is thrust down into, immersed in his own being, and his own being is then affiliated to other worlds. Thus the dreamer is submerged, so to speak, in his own being and hence is immersed in the Cosmos and, to a certain extent also in his physical organism.

The precise opposite is the case with the medium and somnambulist. Man is only in a mediumistic or somnambulistic condition when his Ego and astral body are outside his physical and etheric bodies; but in this case, as I have pointed out, his Ego and astral body are possessed by an alien being.

Thus we have the medium or somnambulist with his physical being, but the Ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies. The Ego and astral body are suppressed, for another being takes them over. Consequently the medium cannot influence the physical and etheric bodies in the right way. Even when we are in dreamless sleep, for instance, we exert an effect upon the physical and etheric bodies. In waking life we permeate our physical and etheric bodies from within; in sleep we protect them from incursions from without.

This no longer applies to the somnambulist. The medium or somnambulist has no control over his physical and etheric bodies; they are, so to speak, deserted territory.

When a man is endowed with the constitution of soul that is normal for our time, it is the forces of the plants and minerals alone that have an influence upon his physical and etheric bodies. If the forces of the minerals, i.e. of the mineral Earth, did not influence our physical body, we should be unable to walk or move around, because we are dependent upon these forces. It is permissible to share the world of the mineral forces; that is the normal condition, but they must not enter into the etheric body.

The same applies to the plants. It is permissible for the forces of the plants still to work to a certain extent upon the etheric body, although not too strongly. But the forces that stimulate sensation in the animal and the forces of another human being should no longer be permitted to influence the physical body of man, and especially his etheric body. Because the physical and etheric bodies of the medium or somnambulist are deserted, the animal and terrestrial human forces work upon the medium or somnambulist. The physical and etheric bodies become influenced by suggestion. Just as thought passes from the dream into the environment, so in this case the will is detached from the human being and merges into the environment. We can suggest to the medium or somnambulist that he should stand up and walk; if we offer him a potato we can suggest that it is a tasty pear and so on. As human beings when we suggestionize the medium or somnambulist we make direct contact with the physical body, and hence with the etheric body. The medium and somnambulist bear within them in their etheric body their physical environment which should be reflected only in the physical body, as is the case with normal man. Normal man therefore surrenders himself in a dreamlike state to his inner spiritual world, the medium to the external world of nature.

Now mediumism or somnambulism is a normal condition in so far as the condition itself is normal. For the ability to move about, to seize hold of objects, to be able to perform any kind of external action is a magico-somnambulistic achievement on the part of everyone. But this activity must be limited to the physical body; it must not find its way into the etheric body, otherwise the normal passes over into the abnormal.

And so the dreamer lives entirely within his own being; the medium or somnambulist is outside his being. The physical and etheric bodies of the medium or somnambulist function somewhat after the fashion of automata and we can work upon them because his own Ego and astral body fail to provide for them. Consequently, just as in the dreamer an inner spiritual world is created, so in the medium or somnambulist there comes into being a union with the external world of nature, with the world of form and its origin, with all that is perceptible and all that is related to space and time.

When we sink down into the world of dream, we are immersed in the formless, in that which is in a state of constant transformation. When we penetrate with our physical and etheric bodies into the world where the somnambulist or medium is exercising his will under the influence of suggestion, everything is sharply defined; all that supervenes as the result of external influence is carried out with extraordinary precision.

This world is the exact antithesis of the normal world of dream; in the somnambulist it is a dream activity, a natural creation externalized. It is dreaming in action, activity in a dreamlike state, in place of dreaming in inner experience only.

From the standpoint of Initiation this antithesis is most interesting and significant. When the Initiate sinks down into the world of dreams in order to permeate it with Imaginations he meets with difficulties. I have already spoken of this. He feels that he is no longer subject to gravity, that he no longer has firm ground beneath his feet. When the Initiate enters into this world he must gain access to it consciously, whilst the somnambulist finds his way into it unconsciously—he feels that he may at any moment lose consciousness. He is always faced with this possibility, and he must take himself firmly in hand so that he maintains full consciousness. If, as Initiates, we penetrate more deeply into this world, we must proceed here as sensibly and intelligently as normal beings in the visible and tangible world. The Initiate must not betray the fact that, whilst he is living a normal life, he is at the same time living with full consciousness in a spiritual world. For were he to imagine for a single moment that he was detached from the physical world, he would begin to give himself airs and his fellow men would think him rather odd. And they would say: what madman is this! This may happen if he does not keep a tight hold on himself in order to preserve full consciousness as he passes through the spiritual world which is omnipresent just as the sensible world is omnipresent.

This opens up a sphere that has not been dealt with by the Theosophical Society, but which the “big guns” among the natural scientists have seized upon, namely, the sphere of psychical research. These researches are carried out by men with a scientific background and of limited potentialities who undertake statistical surveys and who experiment with mediums in order to ascertain the nature of the spiritual world. In all kinds of societies, and from different points of view, attempts are now being made to investigate objectively what processes are involved when a man moves his limbs or reacts, not with his normal consciousness, but with a diminished or totally obliterated consciousness, at a time when other beings have taken possession of his soul. The reactions of those whose consciousness has been damped down in this way are thus recorded.

The suggestion has even been made by enthusiasts for this kind of investigation that I, together with the fruits of my investigations, should put myself at their disposal in their laboratories in order that they may be able to investigate objectively the phenomena of the inner world. This is about as sensible as if someone were to come along and say: I understand nothing about mathematics so I cannot say whether the statements of mathematicians are true or false. The best thing for him to do would be to come to me in my psychical laboratory and I will make experiments with him to show whether he is a great mathematician or not.—That is approximately the situation. I am here speaking of a field of investigation at the present time in which no real attempt is being made to penetrate to the inner being of man, but simply to investigate somnambulism and mediumism from outside by methods that are a caricature of the scientific method. For if people really penetrated to the inner being of man they would realize that in mediumism and somnambulism they are faced by the external vehicle, an automaton consisting of physical and etheric bodies; that they are not investigating the spiritual reality, but that what they wish to investigate has deserted the external vehicle. They simply refuse to look into the more subtle aspects of the spiritual world. They often want to perceive the spiritual, not only through inner experience, but also in visible and tangible form.

This approach sometimes assumes other forms as, for example, in the Theosophical Society, at the very time when I had already described this path. They were looking for the spiritual figure of Christ in a physical body. They wanted to find a direct manifestation of the spiritual in the external world.

We must accept the physical world as it is and seek the spiritual where it really exists—in the physical world of course, but essentially in the spiritual spheres that permeate the physical world.

Here lies yet another region. Man in a healthy state feels impelled to bridge the gap between the region of inner experience and external perception, between the chaotic world of the dreamer and the abnormal world of the medium and somnambulist. Art is born of the union of these two worlds and their mutual fructification. For in art the external form is imbued with spirit and the spiritual content is clothed in external form.

Whilst the Theosophical Society was busy proclaiming an ordinary human being to be a spiritual entity, we in the Anthroposophical Society were impelled to direct the occult stream into art. The Mystery Plays and Eurythmy were born, and the art of Speech Formation was developed. [See list of literature] These and similar developments in the Anthroposophical Society were the fruits of the impulse to bridge the gap between the spiritual and the physical, so that consciousness bridges the chaotic world of dream and the chaotic world of the medium or somnambulist. In art these two worlds are consciously merged.

Some day this will be understood. People will understand the purpose of our endeavours when Speech Formation, as practised by Frau Marie Steiner, shall be restored to the level it once enjoyed when men were still instinctively spiritual. For them rhythm and measure in speech were more important than empty, abstract diction. These must be revived again. And Eurythmy restores to us again man unfolding before us through movement, man as he really is as a being of soul and spirit. This is what we learn from Eurythmy.

In art, therefore, we have had first of all to build a bridge from the world in which the dreamer wanders aimlessly to the world in which the medium or somnambulist blindly stumbles around. In our present materialistic age the dreamer is left to his solitary reflections and knows nothing of configurations and material forms which express and reveal the spiritual. And the somnambulist lives his life caring little whether he enjoys a medium's fame or whether he invents theories of an ideal State like the Bolshevists and, like the medium, projects all kinds of manifestations into the world around. Both dreamer and somnambulist share the life of the contemporary world without the slightest suspicion of the existence of the spiritual.

It is essential to find once again the bridge leading from the spirit into matter and from matter to the spirit. In the sphere of art we must first build this bridge so that we no longer stumble and drift along in a semi-conscious state, but develop a sense for art through spiritual movements which are not of the normal kind. Thus Eurythmy has its true, inner source in an impulse arising out of Initiation and all that we practise in the art of Speech Formation stems from the same source. And when the forthcoming Course on Dramatic Art¹ is held at Dornach we shall try to restore once again the spiritual image of dramatic art. For a long time attention has been focussed on how to present the actor on the stage with a maximum of realism. In the nineties discussions on this subject were simply comic. The question was discussed—and naturalism finally won the day—whether Schiller's characters should declaim their heroic lines with their hands in their trouser pockets because that was the contemporary fashion. There is every reason therefore for finding the right way to explore the spiritual world. It is a sound principle to follow the path of art.

It is most important to transcend the ancient Initiation-Science that was steeped in the Moon mysteries and everything pertaining to them and to develop that inner condition of soul that can only be reached when the achievements of natural science—I am referring in this context to the intellectual conquests of natural science—can be used to fructify the occult knowledge of the Initiate. On the other hand, it is equally important to make a special field of research the confused, dilettante experiments which are undertaken in order to ascertain what takes place in the ectoplasmic forms when, in trance condition, the somnambulist or medium is possessed by elementary beings. For these two paths are really one and the same, namely, the emergence from within the dream into conscious dreaming and the conscious apprehension of the external world which natural science knows only in its mineral properties—these, so-called psychical research proposes to explore in its dilettante fashion. Since we live in a scientific age it is important to pursue this path of spiritual investigation and also to explore spiritually that other realm which is the polar opposite of the world of dreams.

The somnambulist or medium produces phenomena to which we are not accustomed in ordinary life. His handwriting, movements, speech and sense of taste are not those of the normal man because his astral body and Ego are outside the physical and etheric bodies and we are dealing with a physical and etheric body which are deserted and are given up to the influence of the Cosmos. We are confronted with physical and etheric manifestations which do not reflect the normal workings of nature, but which proceed from the spiritual world. For after all it is immaterial whether we suggestionize the medium or whether the medium is subject to some stellar, climatic or metallic influence which he assimilates into his etheric body.

We must bear in mind that the vehicles of the medium are at the service of the spiritual for magical ends. We cannot study these manifestations without knowledge of the spiritual as the Society for Psychical Research would like to do by means of external experiments. We must look into their spiritual relationship. We must observe the phenomena produced by the medium or somnambulist and the spiritual basis behind them.

All these phenomena manifested through the medium or somnambulist are associated with other mediumistic phenomena. When in trance condition a medium performs some act under human or cosmic influence, i.e. when a physical and etheric body perform some act, then this is temporarily the same as the process which takes place, though determined by other factors, in the poisonous plants which are the source of disease in man. It is only the external, transient mask of disease that is revealed in the mediumistic, somnambulistic state. From a certain point of view—and we shall have to discuss this in greater detail in the course of the next lectures—we can see in the phenomena of mediumism and somnambulism (there is no necessity to do so, but it is always possible) what is happening in the person who is ill, because his Ego and astral body have withdrawn in some abnormal way from an organ, or from the whole organism, and have been replaced by other spiritual influences.

Since men were aware of this relationship in ancient times the Mysteries were always associated with medicine. And because people were not so inquisitive as today, they never felt the need to be interested in mediums and somnambulists, for they were familiar with their activities just as they were familiar with the conditions of disease. They approached these matters more from the medical point of view. It is a standpoint that we must acquire once again.

And the other path which approaches the spiritual through natural phenomena, through natural science, in dilettante fashion must be pursued in the right way. All phenomena and particularly everything that is expressed through the pathological states of men and animals must be reviewed again in the right perspective. Only then shall we be in a position to investigate the phenomena which the Society for Psychical Research would like to explore.

And this field of investigation has now been opened up by the Anthroposophical Society. We have been able to study pathological phenomena in such a way that through them the door to the spiritual world has been opened. This has become possible because Dr. Ita Wegman and I endeavoured to develop along the right lines this field of investigation that had been ignored by psychical research; and also because Ita Wegman possesses not only the knowledge of a qualified doctor, but also those intuitive therapeutic gifts which lead directly from observation of the clinical picture to spiritual insight and thence to genuine therapy.

Here, then, lies the path that must be followed in order to explore the region that I have indicated. Through our efforts we hope to develop a genuine Initiation-medicine, which itself is an Initiation-natural science. Thus the true path, in contradistinction to the many false paths, will be demonstrated to all. And the first volume of the book written by Dr. Wegman and myself will indicate the steps that must be undertaken. [See list of literature]

In this connection it would be well to point out perhaps that the differences between the true and false paths can best be illustrated by examples.

I said previously that a path to art must be found that will link once again the sphere of the spiritual with the sphere of natural science. I must now add that it appears to inhere in the conditions of modern civilization that we shall only find the right path to art when we have first explored the right path in relation to the investigation of natural phenomena, the path of spiritual science. For in the sphere of art today mankind is so far removed from building the bridge of which I have spoken that it can only be persuaded of the active permeation of art by the spirit when it can be finally convinced of the activity of the spiritual that can be seen especially in the genesis of the pathological; when there is clear evidence of how the spirit operates and reveals itself in matter. When mankind becomes aware of the activity of the spiritual in the kingdom of nature, then it may perhaps be possible to arouse sufficient wholehearted enthusiasm for the idea that the spiritual can be presented directly to the world in the form of works of art.

I will speak further on these matters tomorrow.

• 1. Speech and Drama, 19 lectures, Dornach, 5th to 23rd September, 1924.

My dear Friends,

Yesterday we touched upon one part or aspect of the Mysterium Magnum, and some of you will perhaps have felt a certain difficulty in approaching it from the standpoint that we were obliged to take in order to make the matter clear in detail. But the world is complicated,—let us admit that, once for all! And if we really have the desire to rise to the knowledge of higher truths, there is nothing for it but we must be ready to put up with some difficulties on the way.

Let us once more gather up for our consideration what we have to understand by the Mysterium Magnum. We saw on the one hand how it reveals man in his three members—or rather, reveals him as composed of three men each having seven members—so that we can distinguish an upper man, a middle man and a lower man. As we go through the world and have our experiences, these three men seem to be closely and intimately united; everyday consciousness does not distinguish one from another. That was one aspect of the Mystery. The other consists in this,—that the moment man lifts himself out of his ordinary Earth consciousness and attains a consciousness of a higher kind, he is at once faced with the event that I have described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, where I said how man must then expect his consciousness to be torn into three, his whole being to be rent asunder, so that he is divided into a thinking man, a feeling man and a willing man. Split up, as it were, into these three soul beings,—that is how man feels when he sets out on the path to a higher consciousness. We have thus on the one hand the three times seven-membered man, and on the other hand, as soon as we take a step beyond ordinary consciousness, we have at once a division of this consciousness into three, which means that every aspirant after occultism who becomes clairvoyant must, as you will know from the book; already quoted, strive with all his might to hold together the three members of his consciousness, that he may not fall to pieces in his inner life of soul. It were indeed a tragic destiny for his inner being if that were to happen. Whilst in ordinary life we are continually tempted to bring together the whole nature of man—which is threefold—into a unity and see it as a single and whole human form, for our inner life of soul on the other hand, the moment we step beyond ordinary consciousness, we are immediately made aware that we are in reality a threefold being, and are in imminent danger of being torn into three in our inner life of soul.

We shall best understand how matters really are in this connection if we take our start once again in quite an elementary way from certain facts of everyday life which manifest themselves in full clarity to the occult pupil, but are not at all generally observed. For it is indeed so that already in ordinary life the three soul powers of man—or rather, the several qualities of consciousness that correspond to them and that we are quite accustomed to distinguish one from another—do themselves direct our attention to what we learned to understand yesterday as the three-membered human being.

Look at man as he stands before you in everyday life! What has to take place in him for everyday consciousness to come about? For everyday consciousness to be there—the consciousness that you carry round with you as thinking Earth man—impressions from without must work upon your senses. The senses, in so far as they give us information of Earth life, are principally situated in the head, and the content of consciousness is in the main derived from these senses. Of the three men whom we learned to recognise yesterday in the human being, it is especially the head man, the upper man, that receives the daytime impressions,—the impressions of ordinary consciousness. They make themselves felt inasmuch as man is able to bring to meet them the instrument of his brain, indeed of his whole head.

A little reflection will quickly show you that man as Earth man cannot possibly be a head man alone. We saw yesterday that for occult consideration man falls into three parts, quite distinct from one another; and for man to stand before us as Earth man, the head must obviously be maintained in life by substances and forces which are continually being sent up into it from the second (middle) man. By means of the circulation of the blood, nourishment must flow for the sustenance of the brain. Then the brain is able to meet the external sense impressions in such a way that by means of the instrument of the brain thoughts and ideas arise in man as a result of these sense impressions. Man experiences in ordinary consciousness what arises in this way through the instrumentality of the brain. You know also that this ordinary consciousness ceases when man is asleep; the external sense impressions are not there any more, they have no longer any influence upon him. When man is asleep and the external sense impressions no longer work upon the brain that is sustained by the middle man, naturally the influences that work from the middle man upon the upper man, from the second man upon the first—influences, that is, upon the brain—still go on. For in this middle man breathing is maintained, even during sleep, and the other activities of the middle man continue. Blood is carried up into the brain when man is asleep as well as when he is awake,—though with a difference; for the way in which the instrument of everyday consciousness is sustained by the middle man is not quite the same in waking and in sleep. The difference finds expression in the fact that during sleep the number of breaths we take is considerably less in proportion than when we are awake, and the quantity of carbonic acid gas in our breath is reduced by about one fourth; the manner and method of nourishment also changes during sleep. When, under certain circumstances, the process of nourishment does continue to work in the same way during sleep, it can have very bad results. This is well known from the fact that after an excellent meal one does not generally sleep well; the brain is disturbed in its rest if a heavy meal is taken immediately before going to sleep. There is, therefore, a difference between the conditions of sleep and waking even in the way the middle man works up into the upper man.

Can we see, in ordinary Earth man, any result of this difference? The fact that man shuts himself off from the external world, and that only inside his body—wholly within what we have described as the form or figure of man—an influence is exerted by the forces of the middle man in the direction of the upper man, has the result that ordinary daytime consciousness is extinguished; so that, although during sleep man still has his brain, he does not perceive the influences that are at work from the middle man upon this brain. The influences go on just the same, but they are only present to what we generally term dream consciousness.

This dream consciousness is very complicated. You will, however, have no difficulty in recognising that a particular class of dreams is wholly connected with what takes place in the middle man, and owes its origin to the fact that the brain is able not only to perceive the external world when the sense impressions work upon it, but able also in some way to perceive influences proceeding from the middle man, beholding them in the form of dream pictures that make use of all kinds of symbols. If something is wrong with the heart, it can easily happen that one dreams of it in the symbol of a burning hot fire. If all is not in order in the intestines it may happen that one dreams of snakes. The character and condition of man's inside will often determine the dream, which can then be an indication of what is going on there. Whoever will take the trouble to observe this remarkable connection and study it with the help of external science, will come to the conclusion that irregularities in the middle man are perceived symbolically in dream pictures.

There are also, as you will know, people who have much more far-reaching experiences with dreams of this kind, people who are able to perceive in definite symbolic pictures the oncoming of certain illnesses. A clear connection can frequently be traced in such cases between dream pictures of a symbolic character recurring with absolute regularity and a disease of the lungs or heart or stomach which makes its appearance later.

As it is possible very often to establish, by means of accurate examination on awaking, that when one has dreamed of a burning stove one's heart is beating more quickly than usual, similarly it is possible for diseases of the lung or disorders of the stomach—in fact, for all manner of illnesses that have not yet shown themselves outwardly—to announce their approach symbolically in dream pictures. The human brain, or rather the human soul, is not sensitive only to external impressions that are communicated through the senses but also to the bodily inside,—with this difference, that in the latter case it does not receive correct and true ideas but builds up for itself imaginary and symbolical ideas of what is going forward in the middle man.

The explanation that has been given enables us to recognise the fact that in dreaming man perceives himself. We can truly say: In my dreams I behold myself. We are not, however, aware of this during the dream. We perceive our heart, but we do not know that it is our heart we perceive. We perceive instead a burning hot fire,—that is to say, an object outside ourselves. Something that is inside us is projected outwards and stands there, outside, for our perception. In dream consciousness, therefore, man has to do with the interior of his own body; this means that in dream consciousness he is divided, he is rent asunder. As you know, in the ordinary run of everyday life, we concern ourselves as a rule only with waking and sleeping.

Now, it is not only conditions of the middle man that are perceived in dreams, but also conditions of the upper man, the head man. There are, to begin with, the dreams that owe their origin to some disorder in the head itself. Through what is perceived as a disorder in the head, the brain—or I, should rather say the soul—perceives itself by means of the instrument of the brain. The upper man perceives himself. Such dreams are always extraordinarily characteristic. You have a dream and wake up with a pain in your head; the dream is in this case a symbolical and fanciful reflection of the headache. As a rule such dreams will take the form that they lead you out into vast distances, or you find yourself in a great vault or cave. Especially characteristic of these headache dreams is the experience of an immense vault above one. Something is creeping or crawling in the roof of the cave, or perhaps spiders' webs or some dirt or dust is clinging to it. Or you may dream you are in a great arched palace! In such cases you perceive yourself as upper man,—but again you transpose what you perceive into the world outside you. You go out of yourself and place outside you what is in you, in your head. So here once more we have a kind of division of the human being; he is, as it were, split asunder, he loses himself, extinguishes himself.

The conditions I have been describing are dream conditions, and they show us quite clearly that in dream consciousness man falls asunder; his ego consciousness, his unity of consciousness, does not remain intact, and his dream is in reality always a reflection, a symbolical reflection of what is going on inside his bodily nature.

For the disciple of occultism it is by no means merely a question of passing from ordinary waking consciousness to dream consciousness—there would be nothing unusual in that, No, he must make the transition to a totally different condition of consciousness. By practising the exercises outlined in earlier lectures of this course—through suppression, that is, of the intellect, the will and the memory—he has to get free of himself and attain to a completely new consciousness.

Although, as I have said, this new consciousness is not a dream consciousness, yet if one has no knowledge of clairvoyant consciousness, dream consciousness can help one to come to a fairly good understanding of it. For we can approach it in the following manner. Suppose we ask ourselves: What is it within him that man perceives in dream? then we must answer: Whatever is painful or out of order. A moment's reflection will show us that ordinary normal conditions are not perceived by dream consciousness, If a man is perfectly healthy in his upper and middle man, if everything is in order there, then he sleeps a normal healthy sleep; one cannot in ordinary circumstances—observe, I say advisedly, in ordinary circumstances—expect that his peaceful sleep will be forcibly interrupted with dreams. Now the path that has to be taken by clairvoyant consciousness is one that leads through stages and conditions that are similar to those of dream consciousness. Only, these stages are attained instead by occult training, and it is actually the case that in clairvoyance man does not merely come to a knowledge of the ordinary external painful conditions of his inside, but succeeds in perceiving also its normal conditions, which usually disappear from our consciousness in peaceful sleep. The pupil in clairvoyance comes to a knowledge of these conditions. In other words, he learns to know his brain, his head man, by learning to perceive it inwardly. Similarly, he comes to know his middle man. In the same way as in certain dreams man perceives when asleep his head and middle man, so has the pupil in clairvoyance to attain in the course of his training to a knowledge of his middle and upper man.

Let us now give our special attention to this middle man. If you consider a little, you will have to acknowledge that you find nothing in the middle man that can be immediately and specifically referred to the external world. In the head we have the eyes and the other sense organs that are in direct connection with the external world. Through the sense of touch the middle man has of course the possibility of coming into connection with the external world, for the sense of touch is, as we know, extended over the whole skin. The perception of the external world by the middle man is nevertheless slight and insignificant in comparison with the knowledge of the external world that we acquire through the head man. Even the perception the middle man receives of warmth affects in the main only his own inner experience, his inner sense of well-being. The middle man seems therefore to be a self-enclosed entity, with inner processes that are of very great importance for himself but have little bearing on his relationship to the outside world.

If, however, we go on to enquire whether this inner man has not perhaps some connection with the outside world that is not so obvious to ordinary consciousness, we shall discover that this inner, middle man has, after all, a connection of no little importance with the outside world. Everything depends on the fact that the middle man is adapted to Earth conditions. He has to breathe the air of the Earth, he needs for his nourishment the substances that are produced on the Earth. From this point of view the middle man and the Earth belong together. Were the substances that are necessary to maintain his life not present in his Earthly surroundings, then this middle man could not be as he is. So you see, we are obliged to look upon the middle man as part and parcel of what Earth existence gives to us, we must reckon him as belonging definitely to our existence here on Earth.

Nor is this all. For it is not a question only of what the Earth can give to man. The Earth could be there for a long time, and yet no middle man come into being! If the Sun did not come to the help of the Earth and cause to flourish and ripen upon it what the middle man needs, then the middle man could not exist. This middle man takes the substances he requires for nourishment, and these substances—apart from the air which is of course essential for his sustenance in life, all these substances that nourish him are dependent on the working of the Sun upon the Earth. Whatever man receives into himself as nourishment is produced by the Sun in man's Earthly environment. This means, in effect, that when we study the middle man we have to take account not only of a direct influence of the Earth upon man but also of an indirect influence of the Sun. Were it not for the physical sunlight that illumines the Earth, the middle man would not exist. All that is to be found in the middle man has come into him through the influence of the light of the Sun upon the Earth.

This remarkable fact—that the middle man is a product of the light of the Sun—comes to expression in the following way. When the pupil in occultism becomes clairvoyant, when he develops, that is, a clairvoyant consciousness, then, whereas in dreams pictures arise which are the expression of some disorder in man's inner organs, in the case of clairvoyant consciousness the pictures the pupil receives express what the Sun is doing in the middle man, they show the regular normal activity of the Sun in the middle man. When the pupil becomes clairvoyant and a perception arises in him of his own inner being in its healthy normal state, then he has before him the flowing light; all around him he sees the flowing light. As the dreamer is surrounded by pictures of disorders in his inner man, so is the aspirant after occultism surrounded by phenomena of flowing light. He has, to begin with, this perception of the activity of the Sun in his own inner being.

Compare for a moment ordinary external consciousness with this special consciousness that arises in the clairvoyant. When man, as upper man, directs his gaze to some object of Earth, he looks at it—it is, as you know, generally speaking, the sense of sight that predominates in perception—by means of the sunlight that is thrown back from the external Earth. External, everyday consciousness perceives what the external sunlight does to the things of the Earth; But now it is what the sunlight does to him, what it does in making possible his own middle man, how it penetrates the middle man with its activity,—this it is that reveals itself to man as flowing light when he becomes a pupil of occultism. He beholds the Sun in himself, in the very same way that he sees the Sun outside him from the time when the day begins for as long as it lasts And as he sees objects around him through the fact that sunlight is thrown back from them, so now he sees, when he has reached a certain stage of clairvoyance, something that is of the nature of Sun reflected back from his own inner being. It is the form of the middle man that shows itself thus illuminated. That is, then, one experience.

If you were to go back into olden times and study what was done and experienced in the ancient Mystery Schools, you would find that the aspirant after occultism learned to perceive the Sun in its reflection in his own middle man,—learned, that is, to perceive the workings of the Sun that continue even when man is asleep, and that escape him during waking consciousness because his attention is entirely claimed by the external consciousness. Man as a Sun being,—that was what the pupil came to perceive at a particular stage of initiation in the Mysteries. He learned to recognise the Sun being in himself, in his very own being, he learned how the Sun works not only outwardly in the objects, in the reflected light, but works also within the bodily form of man.

But now the pupil, who is beginning to be clairvoyant, has to learn something else. He has to discover something that is comparable with the dreams of the brain, those dreams that reflect back disordered conditions of the brain, where, as I told you, in typical cases man always perceives symbols, imagining, for example, that he is in a cave or a palace, having over him a great vaulted roof into which he is gazing. When the pupil in occultism is led on to perceive not only the conditions of his middle man but also the conditions of his upper man (in so far as the latter has form and figure), the conditions of the interior of the head man, then he never has the same experience as he has in his perception of the middle man. Instead he has now before him—I am simply relating the facts—what appears like a perfectly well-ordered and regular extension of the dream that is connected with excitement or irritation of the brain. Only, it is experienced in full consciousness. What man perceives when he has closed all his sense organs and has no external perception, when he directs all his attention in clairvoyant consciousness upon himself inwardly—upon the upper man, the brain man—is in very fact the starry heavens. He beholds the great vault of heaven with the stars.

It was a great moment in the life of the pupil, especially in the more ancient Mysteries—we shall hear later to what extent it underwent change in the later Mysteries—it was a great moment when the pupil perceived his own inner being, in so far as this inner being comes to expression in the human form. When he saw the upper man, it was as though he saw the heavens with all the shining stars; he looked out into the wide world—in spite of the fact that he had no physical senses open. The picture of the starry heavens stood before him. And then came the greatest moment of all when this pupil of occultism observed not what is, so to speak, on the upper surface of his head, but when he looked down from the upper man, from the head, to the middle man, when he perceived, without opening any of his senses, the lower surface of his brain and from it saw the middle man irradiated with light. Himself in total darkness (for his senses were closed, and to outward appearance he was like a man who is asleep), he perceived, looking downwards inwardly, the Sun in the night, in the midst of the dark surface of the heavens. This is what was called in the ancient Mysteries “Seeing the Sun at Midnight,”—seeing, that is, the flowing sunlight within the stars, whose influence in relation to the Sun seems so small. These experiences were important milestones in the life of every aspirant after occultism.

Having come so far, the pupil was then able to apprehend a truth of great significance, He could say: “In the same way as I perceive through the medium of myself, by beholding my middle man, the flowing sunlight, the true and real working of the Sun, so now can I perceive through the medium of the upper man the heavenly spaces with their stars. That I can see the stars, that all is not wrapped in darkness, is due to the fact that the brain is adapted to the stars, as the middle man is adapted to the Sun.” Thus did the pupil come to the knowledge that even as the middle man is sustained by the Sun, even as its whole being depends on the Sun and belongs to the Sun, so does the upper man, the brain man, belong to the whole world and its stars.

When the pupil had had this experience, then he could go to those who possessed only a day consciousness but who, nevertheless, felt an impulse—springing from a deep inner need, from a longing of their soul—to find relationship with a consciousness that should reach out beyond Earth man. In other words, the pupil in occultism could go to men who were religiously inclined, who were able in some way to feel their connection with the great world, and say to them: “Man as he stands on Earth, is not merely a being belonging to this Earth, he is a being that belongs in part, namely in breast and trunk, to the Sun,—and belongs also, as head man, to the whole of cosmic space.” This was what the pupil could tell the religious man, imparting it to him as information; and in the religious man it turned into prayer, into worship.

The disciples of occultism came in this way among men as founders of religion, and according as was the relation of the people to whom they came to the one or other part of man's nature, so they were able to speak more of the one or the other. To people who were more particularly disposed to experience a certain happiness in the sense of well-being in the inner man—people, that is, who were inclined to make their whole mood in life depend on the bodily well-being of the middle man—to such the pupils in occultism could come as founders of religion and say: “Your sense of well-being depends on the Sun.” These people then became, through the influence of the pupils in occultism, followers of a Sun religion. You may be quite sure that all over the Earth, wherever lived people of the kind I have described, for whom it mattered above all that they should have their attention drawn to the source of their sense of well-being, there a Sun worship arose.

To think that men just happened to become Sun worshippers without any deeper reason for it is a mere flight of imagination on the part of all obstinately materialistic science. When the scholar:, of our time speak of how this or that section of mankind came to be Sun worshippers, they are really only demonstrating their own powers of imagination and fantasy. The materialists of today are quite mistaken when they accuse theosophists of an inclination to be fantastic, implying that they themselves are the true realists. Taken as a whole, materialism is certainly not lacking in a tendency to be fantastic, as we can see in this case when it sets out to explain how certain peoples became Sun worshippers. For it builds up an imaginary picture and comes to the conclusion that through the working of certain external conditions or circumstances the people, moved by some unaccountable impulse, hit upon the idea of worshipping the Sun; whereas the truth of the matter is that the initiates, the aspirants after occultism, knew in the case of certain peoples:—We have here a people who manifest especially the virtue of courage, a people in whom one can see a striking development of the middle man; we must teach this people how in the super-sensible one can behold the fact that this middle-man is a product of the working of the Sun. And the initiates in occultism then led such people, in whom the middle man was of greatest importance, away from the mere sense of well-being, the mere living within themselves, to prayer and worship, teaching them to look up in religious devotion to the Being who was the source of this middle man. Thus did they guide these people to a worship of the Sun.

This one example can serve to show the tendency there is in materialism to build up fantastic theories. Other striking examples could be brought forward. We have, for instance, had perforce to read—for they have been thrust under our very eyes—all manner of descriptions of our Munich Building.¹ Through an indiscretion it came about that the project found its way into the newspapers, and the materialistic man of today has formed his own idea of what the Building is and what its purpose. A profusion of fantastic information has been spread abroad, quite enough to demonstrate that fantasy is a quality of present-day thinking. When it is a matter of speaking or writing about things of which he knows absolutely nothing, the man of today does not hesitate to have recourse to the wildest fancies in order to construct an explanation. This is so in ordinary everyday life, and it is so too in the realm of science. The majority of the explanations put forward by the scholars of today are sheer fantasy; and the attempt to describe or account for Sun worship is certainly no exception.

Other peoples on the Earth had less inclination to develop the middle man and were more disposed to think, to have ideas,—that is, to develop the upper man; and to them another kind of appeal had to be made. The occultists who went forth into the world as founders of religion turned the attention of these peoples to seek the source of the instrument whereby they were able to produce thoughts, to live in thoughts and in ideas. The occultists said to them: “If you want to have knowledge of the source of your life of thought, then—since you are not able to gaze into the super-sensible worlds of the heavens (of course the initiates did not say this, I am adding it)—you will have an external reflection of this source if you remain awake during the night and look up in prayer to the star-strewn heavens.”

A genuine Star worship—a worship, one can also say, of the Night, for the truth was often clothed in such a way that instead of speaking of the starry heavens the night was substituted—such a Star or Night Worship prevailed among peoples who were more given to thought. Peoples of ancient times who were fond of thinking and pondering and delving deep into things,—for them religions were founded that pointed them to the source of the instrument of their thinking, the source, that is, of their upper man. And many of the names borne by the most ancient Gods of certain peoples have to be rendered in modern languages by the word “Night.” The Night was the object of worship, the Night in all the mystery of her appearance as the Mother of the Stars, who brings them forth that they may shine in the heavens. For the initiates in occultism knew that the instrument of the brain is really and truly a product of the Star-strewn Night.

Similarly, we will often find that the people who were Sun worshippers were not only guided to look to the Sun; but as man was led from the Stars to the Mother Night and many old-time words for the ancient Gods are to be interpreted as meaning Night, so in the case of the Sun man's attention was drawn to the fact that the Sun gave rise to the Day, that the Sun made Day. In consequence, many words used for Sun worship among peoples who specifically worshipped the Sun as the highest divine Power, are to be translated with the word “Day.”

Speaking generally, we can say that where peoples felt themselves strong and courageous and ready for war, we find them to be in the main Sun worshippers or Day worshippers, because their initiates directed them to the Sun, to the Day, for their object of worship. The more thoughtful and enquiring peoples on the other hand are Night or Star worshippers, because they have been guided that way by their initiates.

We come, finally, to still another kind of people. For there are peoples who do not experience in so characteristic a manner the sharp division between Day consciousness and Night consciousness. When we go back into olden times, we find many peoples who had preserved middle or in-between conditions of consciousness, who did not merely alternate in their life between Day and Night, between consciousness and unconsciousness, but who had an old clairvoyant consciousness which came about through the merging of Day with Night consciousness into a kind of semi-consciousness. We find therefore this third condition of consciousness.

These people also divined through their condition of consciousness a connection between man and something outside the Earth. How was it they came to have such a feeling? To answer this question we must realise that they were possessed of a peculiar faculty or quality in the very form of their bodily nature. They were, as we have said, endowed,—as in olden times almost all men were endowed, the world over—with an ancient clairvoyance, and they had the peculiar faculty of being able to perceive in certain conditions of consciousness their “symmetry” man,—not, however, as symmetry man, but they could perceive this middle man in its working upon the upper man.

If you want to form a picture of what took place in such a person, then you must imagine a picture of the middle man in the brain. In ordinary normal life on Earth, the sense impressions from without work upon the brain and the brain throws back pictures; it places, that is, its own being in the way and holds up the pictures that come from outside. Our idea of the world comes about in this way as a reflected picture thrown back by the brain. For that is what all ideas of the outside world really are,—pictures thrown back, reflected by the brain. When you look at the world, then the outer impressions pass through the eye up to a certain place in the brain and are there caught. That an idea can come into being is due to the fact that the impressions are caught up at a certain point, not allowed to pass through—not, at all events, in their entirety—but reflected back. And when a man becomes clairvoyant, it is no longer external objects alone that make impressions on the brain, impressions are made from the middle man, which can then be reflected back by the brain.

What I have just now described—the impressions made by the middle man upon the brain and the reflection by the latter of these impressions—is still very far from the process I described as taking place in the true aspirant after occultism. The latter has direct and immediate perception of his middle man, he does not merely perceive it through the brain. He looks into himself and sees there what belongs to the Sun, sees too in his brain what belongs to the Stars. The clairvoyant state, on the other hand, of which we are now speaking, where the processes inside man, the Sun nature in the middle man, are reflected by the brain—even as the outer impressions that come through the senses are reflected by the brain,—is characteristic of the old clairvoyance of men in ancient time. For them, perception took place by way of the middle man. They did not, to begin with, perceive external things at all. They perceived only the Sun-like that was present in themselves and they perceived it in reflection, for it was held up by the brain and they perceived it as an idea of the Sun nature within them.

There have been peoples of this character, who in certain naturally clairvoyant states caught hold, as it were, with their brain of the Sun nature within them and made of the perception an idea. How did it then appear to them? It was projected outwards, but was not perceived like the ideas to which we are accustomed, and which have their source in the world outside; it appeared like inner Sunlight,—yet as coming from without. And when investigation was made into the source of the appearance, when the aspirants after occultism set out to learn how it was that they found themselves in such conditions, then they were made clearly aware of the Sun nature that is in the middle man. Man has this Sun-like element in him, because he is himself a Sun being. That which manifests in the instrument of the brain is connected with the fact that man is a Star being, that he is in very truth formed and shaped from out of the whole of Cosmic space. What he now perceives, however, has relation to the fact that the Earth has revolving around it the Moon, and that the Moon in her revolution round the Earth has a powerful influence on the being of man.

In those olden times man was so constituted that the Moon had a particularly strong influence on his brain. The consequence was that the ancient clairvoyance was very dependent on the phases of the Moon, and showed itself for the most part in connections that found expression in the phases of the Moon. For a space of fourteen days clairvoyance increased, and then for fourteen days it decreased again. Its influence was thus greatest in the middle of such a Moon period. There were times when men knew: We are Sun beings. They knew it because they could perceive the Sun through the inner idea formed in the brain. But this came about through the influence of the Moon. The old clairvoyance often worked in the way I indicated. Man gave himself up throughout the whole twenty-eight days to the waxing and waning of the Moon. There were days when the influence of the Moon was particularly strong and when in consequence clairvoyance was present in everyone; inner clairvoyant consciousness made itself felt in all men. When initiates in occultism came to people of this kind with the mission of determining for them the character of their religion, then for the same reason that other peoples were made Sun (or Day) worshippers and Star (or Night) worshippers, the initiates made this third kind of people Moon worshippers. Hence the worship of the Moon, that is to be found among many ancient peoples.

Moses learned to know this Moon worship in its original form from the Egyptian initiates, and was himself one of the greatest of those who made Moon worship into the religion of a people. For Moses made it the religion of the ancient Hebrew people. The Jahve worship of the ancient Hebrew people is a highly spiritualised Moon worship. And it enabled the Hebrew people to retain into later times the consciousness that man is connected with what is outside and beyond the Earth, that his being is not confined to the Earth.

Now it was so with the Moon worshippers of very olden times, as it was also with the Sun and Star worshippers, that there was very little knowledge among the people themselves of how Stars, Sun and Moon appeared to the clairvoyant—spiritualised, that is, and not at all as objects that are seen with external organs. The people of olden times would not have understood if they had been told: “Pray to what is the source and origin of your middle man, but do not imagine it like the picture of the Sun that can be perceived with the senses; think of it as something super-sensible that is behind the Sun.” Just as little would the Star worshippers have understood if they had been told that the organ of their thinking had its origin in the far Cosmic spaces, but that they were not to imagine that this meant, in the picture of the starry heavens as it can be perceived with the outer eye, they were to think rather of the invisible that is behind the starry heavens, the multitude of spiritual Beings that are in the Stars. This was known to the initiates, but it could not be said to the Sun and Star worshippers. Similarly it would have been of no use at all to say to the Moon peoples: “Imagine to yourselves an invisible Being who has as it were his outer body in the Moon.” It was, however, possible to say something else, and this is what Moses did say to the Hebrew people. It could not have been said to the more ancient Moon worshippers but only to the ancient Hebrew people. For Moses did not direct his people to the visible Moon, but to the Being in whom lay the origin of the ancient clairvoyance of all peoples. This clairvoyance had been given to man,—as a kind of compensation, when he was placed into the condition of having to alternate with his consciousness between day and night; and it brought him a knowledge of the world, that resembled what comes to expression in the reflected rays of the Sun. The reflection of the Sun could only be something external for man, could only give him an Earth consciousness—a day consciousness, and a night consciousness that at most was aware only of the external visible world of stars—and so a clairvoyance was given to the man of ancient times as a compensation; it was given him through the possibility of alternation in this day and night consciousness,—an old clairvoyance that is derived from the spiritual Being of the Moon and has also relation, locally, with the Moon.

When in the course of evolution the time came for this clairvoyant consciousness gradually to grow dim and fade away, a more spiritual substitute was created for the ancient Hebrew folk in the invisible Moon Being Jahve or Jehovah of whom Moses taught, and who, he said, must never be confused with anything that can be seen outwardly nor with any picture that is made of Him for outward vision. Therefore did Moses categorically forbid the Hebrew people to regard any picture in the outside world as a picture of Jahve; he forbade them any picture or image whatsoever that might represent something which is not a product of the outside world, forbade them also to make any picture taken from the outside world, of the invisible, super-sensible God.

The Jahve religion is thus seen to stand in a remarkable relation to a Moon religion that was given by the old clairvoyance in the very earliest days of mankind. For the sake of those to whom it is of interest, we may here mention that it was H. P. Blavatsky who, on absolutely authentic grounds, pointed out that the Jahve religion was in a certain respect a kind of revival of the old Moon religion. H. P. Blavatsky, however, did not come so far in her research as we are able to do today, consequently the connection that has here been set forth was not fully clear to her. The knowledge that the Jahve religion is a Moon religion rather suggested to H. P. Blavatsky that this old Jahve religion was a little less worthy on that account. This is, however, not the case at all. When one knows that the Jahve religion of the ancient Hebrew people has its origin in the old clairvoyance and preserves, so to speak, the memory of the old clairvoyance, then one is able to perceive and appreciate the sacredness and depth of this Jahve religion.

Our study has brought us to an understanding of certain important experiences of the aspirants after occultism, who in a higher consciousness are able to learn by real experience that man belongs in his being to the entire world, perceiving how the middle man is in reality a Sun man, and the upper man a Star man. And we have also seen what occultism is able to recognise in the external religions, namely, that they were in great measure given to mankind as very ancient religions and even as ancient theosophies. For when the man of olden times developed a need for worship and prayer, in that moment something of the old clairvoyance began to stir within him, so that he had no need merely to believe what the old initiates told him but was able to comprehend it even though he could not actually see it. The ancient religions are thus to a great extent theosophies. And the theosophical teachings that were given by the occultists were determined according to the section of the earth which that particular people was destined to inhabit.

As you will have seen, we have for the moment had to leave out the lower man,—the third seven-membered man. We shall return to it, and we shall find in what a remarkable manner the “Great Mystery” was brought before the pupil, and how the pupil undergoes still further development by means of the initiation which alone can lead to an understanding of the true nature of man.

• 1. It was at first intended to erect a Building for Anthroposophy in Munich. The project had, however, to be abandoned in 1914. (Note by Translator.)

Today I would like to report to you on the second lecture I gave in Stuttgart. It will not be so much a verbatim account of what was said there as a fresh discussion of the matters dealt with in that lecture, and I shall also want to include some comment on the Stuttgart conference itself.

The purpose of the second lecture was to show the reasons why certain things that ought never to happen, particularly in a Society like ours, do nevertheless so easily occur and are such a familiar phenomenon to those acquainted with the history of societies based on a spiritual view of life. As you know, there have always been societies of this kind, and they were always adapted to their period. In earlier ages, the kind of consciousness required for entrance into the spiritual world was different from the kind we need today. As a rule people who joined forces to establish some form of cognition based on higher, super-sensible insight included among their goals the cultivation of a brotherly spirit in the membership. But you know, too, as do all those familiar with the history of these societies, that brotherliness all too easily came to grief, that it has been especially in societies built on spiritual foundations that the greatest disharmony and the worst offenses against brotherliness burgeoned.

Now if anthroposophy is properly conceived, the Anthroposophical Society is thoroughly insured against such unbrotherly developments. But it is by no means always properly conceived. Perhaps it will help toward its fuller comprehension if light is thrown on the reasons for the breakdown of brotherly behavior.

Let us, to start with, review the matters brought up yesterday. I pointed out that we distinguish between three levels of consciousness: that of ordinary waking life, that of dreams, and finally that of dreamless sleep. Man's dream pictures are experienced as a world he inhabits. While he is dreaming, it is perfectly possible for him to mistake his dreams for reality, for events just as real as those that take place in the physical world where he finds himself during his waking life.

But as I said yesterday, there is a tremendous difference between dream experiences and those of waking. A dreamer is isolated in his dream experiences. And I pointed out that someone else can be asleep beside him and have quite different dreams, hence be living in a different world. Neither can communicate anything about his world of dreams to his fellow dreamer. Even if ten people are sleeping in a single room, each has only his own world before him. This does not seem at all surprising to one who is able to enter the often marvelous dream world as a spiritual scientist, for the world in which a dreamer lives is also real. But the pictures it presents derive in every case from factors of purely individual concern. To be sure, dreams do clothe the experiences they convey in pictures borrowed from the physical plane. But as I have often pointed out, these pictures are merely outer coverings. The reality—and there is indeed reality in dreams—hides behind the pictures, which express it only superficially.

A person who explores dreams in a spiritual-scientific sense with the purpose of discovering their meaning studies not the pictures but the dramatic element running through them. One person may be seeing one dream scene, another an entirely different one. But for both there may be an experience of climbing or of standing on the edge of an abyss or of confronting some danger, and finally a release of tension. The essential thing is the dream's dramatic course, which it merely clothes in pictorial elements. This unfolding drama often has its source in past earth lives, or it may point to future incarnations. It is the unwinding thread of destiny in human life—running, perhaps, through many incarnations—that plays into dreams. Man's individual core is what is involved here. He is outside his body with his ego and astrality. That is to say, he is outside his body with the ego that he takes from one incarnation to another, and he is in his astral body, which means that he is living in the world that embraces experience of all the surrounding processes and beings in the midst of which we live before we descend to earth and find again when we return to live in a world beyond the senses after death.

But in sleep we are also isolated from our physical and etheric bodies. Dreams clothe themselves in pictures when the astral body is either just coming back into contact with the ether body or just separating from it, that is, on awakening and on falling asleep. But the dreams are there, even though one has no inkling of their presence when in an ordinary state of consciousness. Man dreams straight through the time he is sleeping. This means that he is occupied solely with his own concerns during that period. But when he wakes, he returns to a world that he shares in common with the people about him. It is then no longer possible for ten individuals to be in one room with each living in a world apart; the room's interior becomes the common world of all. When people are together on the physical plane, they experience a world in common.

I called attention yesterday to the fact that a shift in consciousness, a further awakening is necessary to enter those worlds from which we draw genuine knowledge of the super-sensible, knowledge of man's true being, such as anthroposophy is there to make available.

These, then, are the three stages of consciousness.

But now let us suppose that the kind of picture consciousness that is normally developed by a sleeping person is carried over into the ordinary day-waking state, into situations on the physical plane. There are such cases. Due to disturbances in the human organism, a person may conceive the physical world as it is normally conceived in dream life only. In other words, he lives in pictures that have significance for him alone. This is the case in what is called an abnormal mental state, and it is due to some illness in the physical or etheric organism. A person suffering from it can shut himself off from experiencing the outer world, as he does in sleep. His sick organism then causes pictures to rise up in him such as ordinarily present themselves only in dreams. Of course, there are many degrees of this affliction, ranging all the way from trifling disturbances of normal soul life to conditions of real mental illness.

Now what happens when a person carries over a dream conditioned state of mind into ordinary physical earth life? In that case, his relationship to his fellowman is just what it would be if he were sleeping next to him. He is isolated from him, his consciousness absorbed by something that he cannot share. This gives rise to a special egotism for which he cannot be held wholly responsible. He is aware only of what is going on in his own soul, knowing nothing of what goes on in any other's. We human beings are drawn into a common life by having common sense impressions about which we then form common thoughts. But when someone projects a dreaming state of mind into ordinary earth life, he isolates himself, becomes an egotist, and lives alongside his fellowman making assertions about things to which the other can have no access in his experience. You must all have had personal experience of the degree of egotism to which this carrying over of dream life into everyday life can mislead human beings.

There can be a similar straying from a wholesome path, however, in cases where people join others in, say, a group where anthroposophical truths are being studied, but where the situation I was characterizing yesterday fails to develop, namely, that one soul wakes up in the encounter with the other to a certain higher state, not of consciousness, perhaps, but of feeling awakened to a higher, more intense experiencing. Then the degree of self-seeking that it is right to have in the physical world is projected into one's conceiving of the spiritual world. Just as someone becomes an egotist when he projects his dream consciousness into the physical world, so does a person who introduces into his approach to higher realms a soul-mood or state of mind appropriate to the physical world become to some degree an egotist in his relationship to the spiritual world.

But this is true of many people. A desire for sensation gives them an interest in the fact that man has a physical, an etheric and an astral body, lives repeated earth lives, has a karma, etc. They inform themselves about such things in the same way they would in the case of any other fact or truth of physical reality. Indeed, we see this evidenced every day in the way anthroposophy is presently combatted. Scientists of the ordinary kind, for example, turn up insisting that anthroposophy prove itself by ordinary means. This is exactly as though one were to seek proof from dream pictures about things going on in the physical world. How ridiculous it would be for someone to say, “I will only believe that so and so many people are gathered in this room and than an anthroposophical lecture is being given here if I dream about it afterwards.” Just think how absurd that would be! But it is just as absurd for someone who hears anthroposophical truths to say that he will only believe them if ordinary science, which has application only on the physical plane, proves them. One need only enter into things seriously and objectively for them to become perfectly transparent.

Just as one becomes an egotist when one projects dream conceptions into physical situations, so does a person who projects into the conceptions he needs to have of higher realms views such as apply only to things of ordinary life, becomes the more isolated, withdrawn, insistent that he alone is right. But that is what people actually do. Indeed, most individuals are looking for some special aspect of anthroposophy. Something in their view of life draws them in sympathetic feeling to this or that element found in it, and they would be happy to have it true. So they accept it, and since it cannot be proved on the physical plane they look to anthroposophy to prove it.

Thus a state of consciousness applicable to the ordinary physical world is carried over into an approach to higher realms. So, despite all one's brotherly precepts, an unbrotherly element is brought into the picture, just as a person dreaming on the physical plane can behave in a most unbrotherly fashion toward his neighbor. Even though that neighbor may be acting sensibly, it is possible for a dreamer under the influence of his dream pictures to say to him, “You are a stupid fellow. I know better than you do.” Similarly, someone who forms his conceptions of the higher world with pretensions carried over from life on the physical plane can say to an associate who has a different view of things, “You are a stupid fellow,” or a bad man, or the like. The point is that one has to develop an entirely different attitude, an entirely different way of feeling in relation to the spiritual world, which eradicates an unbrotherly spirit and gives brotherliness a chance to develop. The nature of anthroposophy is such as to bring this about in fullest measure, but it needs to be conceived with avoidance of sectarianism and other similar elements, which really derive from the physical world.

If one knows the reasons why an unbrotherly spirit can so easily crop up in just those societies built on a spiritual foundation, one also knows how such a danger can be avoided by undertaking to transform one's soul orientation when one joins with others in cultivating knowledge of the higher worlds.

This is also the reason why those who say, “I'll believe what I've seen there after I've dreamed it,” and behave accordingly toward anthroposophy, are so alienated by the language in which anthrosophy is presented. How many people say that they cannot bear the language used in presenting anthroposophy, as for example in my books! The point is that where it is a case of presenting knowledge of the super-sensible, not only are the matters under discussion different; they have to be spoken of in a different way. This must be taken into account. If one is really deeply convinced that understanding anthroposophy involves a shift from one level of consciousness to another, anthroposophy will become as fruitful in life as it ought to be. For even though it has to be experienced in a soul condition different from the ordinary, nevertheless what one gains from it for one's whole soul development and character will in turn have a moral, religious, artistic and cognitive effect on the physical world in the same sense that the physical world affects the dream world. We need only be clear as to what level of reality we are dealing with.

When we are dreaming, we do not need to be communicating with or standing in any particular relationship to other human beings, for as dreamers we are really working on our ongoing egos. What we are doing behind the façade of our dream pictures concerns only ourselves. We are working on our karma there. No matter what scene a dream may be picturing, one's soul, one's ego are working behind it on one's karma.

Here on the physical plane we work at matters of concern to a physically embodied human race. We have to work with other people to make our contributions to mankind's overall development. In the spiritual world we work with intelligences that are beings like ourselves, except that instead of living in physical bodies they live in a spiritual element, in spiritual substance. It is a different world, that world from which super-sensible truth is gleaned, and each of us has to adapt himself to it.

That is the key point I have stressed in so many lectures given here: Anthroposophical cognition cannot be absorbed in the way we take in other learning. It must above all be approached with a different feeling—the feeling that it gives one a sudden jolt of awakening such as one experiences at hand of colors pouring into one's eyes, of tones pouring into one's ears, waking one out of the self-begotten pictures of the dream world.

Just as knowing where there is a weak place in an icy surface enables a person to avoid breaking through it, so can someone who knows the danger of developing egotism through a wrong approach to spiritual truth avoid creating unbrotherly conditions. In relating to spiritual truth, one has constantly to develop to the maximum a quality that may be called tolerance in the best sense of the word. Tolerance must characterize the relationships of human beings pursuing anthroposophical spiritual science together. Looking from this angle at the beauty of human tolerance, one is immediately aware how essential it is to educate oneself to it in this particular period. It is the most extraordinary thing that nobody nowadays really ever listens to anybody else. Is it ever possible to start a sentence without someone interrupting to state his own view of the matter, with a resultant clash of opinion? It is a fundamental characteristic of modern civilization that nobody listens, that nobody respects anyone's opinion but his own, and that those who do not share his opinions are looked upon as dunces.

But when a person expresses an opinion, my dear friends, it is a human being's opinion, no matter how foolish we may think it, and we must be able to accept it, to listen to it.

I am going to make a highly paradoxical statement. A person whose soul is attuned to the intellectual outlook of the day has no difficulty being clever. Every single person knows the clever thing, and I am not saying that it isn't clever; it usually is, in fact. But that works only up to a certain point, and up to that point a smart person considers everyone who isn't yet of his opinion stupid. We encounter this attitude all the time, and in ordinary life situations it can be justified. A person who has developed a sound judgment about various matters really finds it a dreadful trial to have to listen to someone else's foolish views about them, and he can hardly be blamed for feeling that way.

But that is true only up to a point. One can become cleverer than clever by developing something further. Supersensible insight can endow cleverness with a different quality. Then the strange thing is that one's interest in foolishness increases rather than decreases. If one has acquired a little wisdom, one even takes pleasure in hearing people say something foolish, if you will forgive my putting it so bluntly. One sometimes finds such stupidities cleverer than the things people of an average degree of cleverness say, because they often issue from a far greater humanness than underlies the average cleverness of the average of clever people. An ever deepening insight into the world increases one's interest in human foolishness, for these things look different at differing world levels. The stupidities of a person who may seem a fool to clever people in the ordinary physical world can, under certain circumstances, reveal things that are wisdom in a different world, even though the form they take may be twisted and caricatured. To borrow one of Nietzsche's sayings, the world is really “deeper than the day would credit.”

Our world of feeling must be founded on such recognitions if the Anthroposophical Society—or, in other words, the union of those who pursue anthroposophy—is to be put on a healthy basis. Then a person who knows that one has to relate differently to the spiritual world than one does to the physical will bring things of the spiritual world into the physical in the proper way. Such a person becomes a practical man in the physical world rather than a dreamer, and that is what is so vitally necessary. It is really essential that one not be rendered useless for the physical world by becoming an anthroposophist. This must be stressed over and over again.

That is what I wanted to set forth in my second Stuttgart lecture in order to throw light on the way individual members of the Society need to conceive the proper fostering of its life. For that life is not a matter of cognition, but of the heart, and this fact must be recognized.

Of course, the circumstances of a person's life may necessitate his traveling a lonely path apart. That can be done too. But our concern in Stuttgart was with the life-requirements of the Anthroposophical Society; these had to be brought up for discussion there. If the Society is to continue, those who want to be part of it will have to take an interest in what its life-requirements are.

But that will have to include taking an interest in problems occasioned by a constantly increasing enmity toward the Society. I had to go into this too in Stuttgart. I said that many enterprises have been launched in the Society since 1919, and that though this was good in itself, the right way of incorporating them into the Anthroposophical Movement—in other words, of making them the common concern of the membership—had not been found. New members should not be reproached for taking no interest in something launched before their time and simply seeking anthroposophy in a narrower sense, as the young people do. But it is these new enterprises that have really been responsible for the growing enmity toward our Movement. There was hostility before, to be sure, but we did not have to pay any attention to it.

Now in this context I had to say something on the subject of our opponents that needs to be known in the Anthroposophical Society. I have talked to you, my dear friends, about the three phases of the Society's development and called attention to the fact that in the last or third phase, from 1916 or 1917 to the present, the fruits of a great deal of anthroposophical research into the super-sensible world have been conveyed to you in lectures. That required a lot of work in the form of genuine spiritual research. Anyone who looks dispassionately at the facts can discern the great increase in the amount of material gleaned from the spiritual world in recent years and put before you in lectures.

Now we certainly have any number of opponents who simply do not know why they adopt a hostile stand; they just go along with others, finding it comfortable to be vague about their reasons. But there are a few leading figures among them who know full well what they are up to and who are interested in suppressing and stamping out truths about the spiritual world such as can alone raise the level of human dignity and restore peace on earth. The rest of the opponents go along with these, but the leaders do not want to have anthroposophical truth made available. Their opposition is absolutely conscious, and so is their effort to stimulate it in their followers.

What are they really intent on achieving? If I may refer to myself in this connection, they are trying to keep me so preoccupied with their attacks that I cannot find time for actual anthroposophical research. One has to have a certain quiet to pursue it, a kind of inner activity that is far removed from the sort of thing one would have to be doing if one were to undertake a defense against our opponents' often ridiculous attacks.

Now in a truly brilliant lecture that he gave in Stuttgart, Herr Werbeck called attention to the large number of hostile books written by theologians alone. I think he listed a dozen or more—so many, at any rate, that it would take all one's time just to read them. Imagine what refuting them would entail! One would never get to any research, and this is only one field among many. At least as many books have been written by people in various other fields. One is actually bombarded with hostile writings intended to keep one from the real work of anthroposophy. That is the quite deliberate intention. But it is possible, if one has what one needs to balance it, to foster anthroposophy and push these books aside. I do not even know many of their titles. Those I have I usually just throw in a pile, since one cannot carry on true spiritual research and simultaneously concern oneself with such attacks. Then our opponents say, “He is not answering us himself.” But others can deal with their assertions, and since the enterprises launched since 1919 were started on others' initiative, the Society should take over its responsibility in this area. It should take on the battle with opponents, for otherwise it will prove impossible really to keep up anthroposophical research.

That is exactly what our opponents want. Indeed, they would like best of all to find grounds for lawsuits. There is every indication that they are looking for such opportunities. For they know that this would require a shift in the direction of one's attention and a change of soul mood that would interfere with true anthroposophical activity.

Yes, my dear friends, most of our opponents know very well indeed what they are about, and they are well organized. But these facts should be known in the Anthroposophical Society too. If the right attention is paid to them, action will follow.

I have given you a report on what we accomplished in Stuttgart in the direction of enabling the Society to go on working for awhile. But there was a moment when I really should have said that I would have to withdraw from the Society because of what happened. There are other reasons now, of course, why that cannot be, since the Society has recently admitted new elements from which one may not withdraw. But if I had made my decision on the basis of what happened at a certain moment there in the assembly hall in Stuttgart, I would have been fully justified in saying that I would have to withdraw from the Society and try to make anthroposophy known to the world in some other way.

The moment I refer to was that in which the following incident occurred. The Committee of Nine had scheduled a number of reports on activities in various areas of the Society. These were to include reports on the Waldorf School, the Union for a Free Spiritual Life, Der Kommende Tag, the journals Anthroposophy and Die Drei, and so on, and there was also to be a discussion of our opponents and ways of handling them.

Now as I said, Werbeck, who has been occupying himself with the problem of opponents, gave a brilliant lecture on how to handle them from the literary angle. But concrete details of the matter were still to be discussed. What happened? Right in the middle of Werbeck's report there was a motion to cut it off and cancel the reports in favor of going on with the discussion. Without knowing anything of what had been happening in the Society, it was proposed that the discussion continue. There was a motion to omit reports right in the middle of the report on opponents! And the motion was carried.

A further grotesque event occurred. Very late on the previous evening, Dr. Stein had given a report on the youth movement. Herr Leinhas, who was chairman of the meeting, was hardly to be envied, for as I told you two days ago, he was literally bombarded with motions on agenda items. As soon as one such motion was made, another followed on its heels, until nobody could see how the debate was to be handled.

Now the people who had come to attend the delegates' convention were not as good at sitting endlessly as those who had done the preparatory work. In Stuttgart everyone is used to sitting. We have often had meetings there that began no later than 9:30 or 10 p.m. and went on until six o'clock in the morning. But as I said, the delegates hadn't had that training. So it was late before Dr. Stein began his report on the youth movement, on the young people's wishes, and due to some mistake or other no one was certain whether he would give it, with the result that a lot of people left the hall. He did give his report, however, and when people returned the following day and found that he had given it in their absence, a motion was made to have him give it again. Nothing came of this because he wasn't there. But when he did arrive to give a report on our opponents, events turned in the direction of people's not only not wanting to hear his report twice over but not even wanting to hear it once; a motion to that effect was passed. So he gave his report on a later occasion.

But this report should have culminated in a discussion of specific opposition. To my surprise, Stein had mentioned none of the specifics, but instead developed a kind of metaphysics of enmity toward anthroposophy, so that it was impossible to make out what the situation really was. His report was very ingenious, but restricted itself to the metaphysics of enmity instead of supplying specific material on the actual enemies. The occasion served to show that the whole Society—for the delegates were representing the whole German Anthroposophical Society—simply did not want to hear about opponents!

This is perfectly understandable, of course. But to be informed about these matters is so vital to any insight into what life-conditions the Society requires that a person who turns down an ideal opportunity to become acquainted with them cannot mean seriously by the Society. The way anthroposophy is represented before the world depends above all else on how the Society's members relate to the enmity that is growing stronger every day.

This, then, was the moment when the way the meeting was going should really have resulted in my saying that I couldn't go on participating if the members were solely interested in repeating slogans like, “Humanness must encounter humanness” and other such platitudes. They were paraphrased more than abundantly in Stuttgart—not discussed, just paraphrased. But of course one can't withdraw from something that exists not just in one's imagination but in reality; one can't withdraw from the Anthroposophical Society! So these matters too had to be overlooked in favor of searching for a solution such as I described to you on Saturday: On the one hand the old Society going on in all its reality, and on the other a loose confederation coming into being, eventuating in the forming of communities in the sense reported, with some bridging group to relate the two opposite elements.

For we must be absolutely clear that anthroposophy is something for eternity. Every individual can therefore study it all by himself, and he has every right to do so, without taking the least interest in the Anthroposophical Society. It would be quite possible—and until 1918 this was actually the way things were—to spread anthroposophy entirely by means of books or by giving lectures to those interested in hearing them. Until 1918 the Society was just what such a society should be, because it could have stopped existing any day without affecting anthroposophy itself. Non-members genuinely interested in anthroposophy had every bit as much access to everything as they would have had through the Society. The Society merely provided opportunities for members to work actively together and for human souls to be awakened by their fellow souls. But on the initiative of this and that individual, activities going on in the Society developed into projects that are now binding upon us. They exist, and cannot be arbitrarily dissolved. The old Society must go on seeing to their welfare. No matter how little one may care for the bureaucratic, cataloguing ways and general orientation of the old Committee, it must go on looking after things it has started. No one else can do this for it. It is very mistaken to believe that someone who is only interested in anthroposophy in general—a situation such as also prevailed in 1902—can be asked to take on any responsibility for the various projects. One has to have grown identified with them, to know them from the inside out.

So the old Society must go on existing; it is an absolutely real entity. But others who simply want anthroposophy as such also have every right to have access to it. For their satisfaction we created the loose confederation I spoke of yesterday, and it too will have its board of trustees, made up of those whose names I mentioned. So now we have two sets of trustees, who will in turn select smaller committees to handle matters of common concern, so that the Society will remain one entity. That the loose confederation does take an interest in what develops out of the Society was borne out by the motion to re-establish it, which was immediately made by the very youngest members of the youth movement, the students. So it has now been re-established and will have a fully legitimate function. Indeed, this was one of the most pressing, vital issues for the Anthroposophical Movement and the Society.

An especially interesting motion was made by the pupils of the upper classes of the Waldorf School. I read it aloud myself, since it had been sent to me. These upper-class students of the Waldorf School made a motion more or less to the following effect. They said, “We have been developing along lines laid down in the basic precepts of the Waldorf School. Next year we are supposed to take our university examinations. Perhaps difficulties of some sort will prevent it. But in any case, how will things work out for us in an ordinary university after having been educated according to the right principles of the Waldorf School?” These students went on to give a nice description of universities, and in conclusion moved that a university be established where erstwhile pupils of the Waldorf School could continue their studies.

This was really quite insightful and right. The motion was immediately adopted by the representatives of the academic youth movement, and in order to get some capital together to start such an institution they even collected a fund amounting, I believe, to some twenty-five million marks, which, though it may not be a great deal of money under present inflationary conditions, is nevertheless a quite respectable sum. These days, of course, one cannot set up a university on twenty-five million marks. But if one could find an American to donate a billion marks or more for such a purpose, a beginning could be made. Otherwise, of course, it couldn't be done, and even a billion marks might not be enough; I can't immediately calculate what would be needed.

But if such a possibility did exist, we would really be embarrassed, frightfully embarrassed, even if there were a prospect of obtaining official recognition in the matter of diplomas and examinations. The problem would be the staffing of such an institution. Should it be done with Waldorf faculty, or with members of our research institutions? That could certainly be done, but then we would have no Waldorf School and no research institutions. The way the Anthroposophical Society has been developing in recent years has tended to keep out people who might otherwise have joined it. It has become incredibly difficult, when a teacher is needed for a new class being added to the Waldorf School, to find one among the membership. In spite of all the outstanding congresses and other accomplishments we have to our credit, the Society's orientation has made people feel that though anthroposophy pleased them well enough, they did not want to become members.

We are going to have to work at the task of restoring the Society to its true function. For there are many people in the world pre-destined to make anthroposophy the most vital content of their hearts and souls. But the Society must do its part in making this possible. As we face this challenge, it is immediately obvious that we must change our course and start bringing anthroposophy to the world's attention so that mankind has a chance to become acquainted with it.

Our opponents are projecting a caricature of anthroposophy, and they are working hard at the job. Their writings contain unacknowledged material from anthroposophical cycles. Nowadays there are lending libraries where the cycles can be borrowed, and so on. The old way of thinking about these things no longer fits the situation. There are second-hand bookshops that lend cycles for a fee, so that anybody who wants to read them can now do so. We show ourselves ignorant of modern social life if we think that things like cycles can be kept secret; that is no longer possible today. Our time has become democratic even in matters of the spirit. We should realize that anthroposophy has to be made known.

That is the impulse motivating the loosely federated section. The people who have come together in it are interested first and foremost in making anthroposophy widely known. I am fully aware that this will open new outlets through which much that members think should be kept within the Society will flow out into the world. But we have to adjust ourselves to the time's needs, and anthroposophists must develop a sense of what it is demanding. That is why anthroposophy must be looked upon now especially as something that can become the content of people's lives, as I indicated yesterday.

So, my dear friends, we made the reported attempt to set up looser ties between the two streams in the Society. I hope that if this effort is rightly understood and rightly handled, we can continue on the new basis for awhile. I have no illusions that it will be for long, but in that case we will have to try some other arrangement. But I said when I went to Stuttgart for this general meeting of the German Anthroposophical Society that since anthroposophy had its start in Germany and the world knows and accepts that fact, it was necessary to create some kind of order in the German Society first, but that this should only be the first step in creating order in other groups too. I picture the societies in all the other language areas also feeling themselves obligated to do their part in either a similar or different way toward consolidating the Society, so that an effort is made on every hand so to shape the life of the Society that anthroposophy can become what it should be to the world at large.