The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The fundamental nature and construction of the Universe cannot be conceived in its reality without continual reference to Man. Again and again we must try to find in the Universe outside, what exists in one way or another in Man. We will use these next three lectures for the purpose of obtaining, from just this point of view, a kind of plastically formed picture of the world, which can then lead on to the answer of the question: What is the relation between morality and natural law in Man?

When we study Man (I am here only repeating things that have already been spoken and written of from various standpoints) we find him first of all organised into what we may call higher Man and lower Man; and then we have what forms the connection between the two—the rhythmic Man, equalising or balancing the other two parts.

We have to observe first of all that a complete difference exists in the laws governing the upper and lower parts of man. We can realise this difference when we consider the fact that the ‘upper man’, who is regulated by the head, is in its origin the outcome of entirely different laws, belonging as it does to a different world from the world of the senses.

That part of us which in our last incarnation was a result of forces of the sense world, namely the limb man, has become what it now is, the head man, through a metamorphosis which takes place between death and a new birth—not in relation, of course, to the outer form, but in regard to the forces of formation. What is now the limb man becomes entirely transformed in its forces—transmuted in its super-sensible constitution between death and a new birth, and appears in our new Earth-life incorporated out of the Universe into our constitution. On to this is suspended, as it were, the rest of man—formed out of the world of sense. This fact we can find already proved clearly from Embryology, if we would only think rationally about embryonic facts. And thereby we have in our head organisation a system of laws not belonging to this world at all, save only at its origin—that is, in so far as it was present in a previous incarnation. But all that which has caused the transformation of limb man to head man is active in an entirely different world—the world wherein we live, in the interval between death and a new birth. Here, then, another world penetrates the world of the senses. Another world is manifested in the head organism of Man. In a certain sense the external world is brought into correspondence with this other world, in that the head projects the principal sense-organs outwards. The world that is extended in space and that runs its course in time, is perceived by man through his senses; it penetrates into man through his senses, and so it too belongs in a certain sense to the head organism. In relation to our limb man on the other hand, we are in a state of sleep. I have often spoken of this sleep-state of man in relation to his Will nature, in relation to all that exists in the limb man. We do not know how we move our limbs, how the will causes the movement; we only examine the movement afterwards as an outer phenomenon through our senses. We are asleep in our limb organisation, in the same sense as we are asleep in the Universe between going to sleep and awaking.

So here we have before us an entirely different world. We can say: we have a world which outwardly manifests all that speaks to our senses—all that we perceive through eyes, ears, etc. To this world we belong through that portion of ourselves which we have called the head man. Our connection with the world that lies behind this one is brought about by the limb man, but in it we are unconscious; we sleep into this world, whether we do so in the domain of our Will, or whether we sleep into the Universe between our going to sleep and our waking.

These two worlds are actually so constituted that the one is turned towards us, and the other away from us, as it were; it lies behind the world of sense although we have our origin in it. Man felt in olden times—and the East still feels it—that a reconciliation between the two is possible. As you know, we in the West search for the reconciliation in a different way; but the Easterns, even today, a line (sketch) still attempt to find it in a relatively conscious way, although their methods are already antiquated for the present humanity. The act of eating is symbolised by a line (sketch), for when we take food, the process following takes place in the sphere of sleep (unconsciously). We are not aware of what is really happening when we eat an egg or a cabbage; it takes place in the unconscious like the happenings of sleep. The cabbage and the egg manifest their exterior to our sense-perception. But the eating really belongs to the completely different world. The reconciliation however, is to be found in our breathing.

Although the latter is to a certain extent unconscious, it is not so in so great a degree as our eating. In spite of the fact that our breathing is not so conscious as our hearing and seeing, it is more conscious than the process of digestion for example; and while in the East today, the attempt to make the digestive process a conscious one has, as a rule, ceased (this used to be done in olden times), the breathing process is still in a certain sense brought up into consciousness. (The snake raises the process of digestion into consciousness, but the consciousness of the snake is of course not to be compared with human consciousness). There is a certain training of the breathing, where the inhaling and exhaling are regulated in such a way that the process is transformed into a sense-perception. Thus we find respiration inserted, as it were, between conscious sense-perception and the complete unconsciousness of assimilation and transmutation of physical matter. Man in fact dwells in three worlds; the one sensible to his consciousness, the other of which he remains entirely unconscious, and the third (breathing) acting as a connecting link or mediator between the two.

Now it is a fact that the process of breathing is also a kind of assimilation; at all events, it is a material process, though taking place in a more rarefied manner; it is an intermediate state between actual transmutation of matter assimilation and the process of sense-perception, the completely conscious experience of the external world.

In the state in which we find ourselves between falling asleep and awaking, we experience in the environment which then surrounds us, events which only enter into our every-day consciousness as dreams. Here man steps across into the world which is marked in our sketch, and the dreams reveal through their very nature how Man steps across. Consider for a moment how nearly related are dreams to the process of respiration—the rhythm of breathing—how often you can trace this rhythm in its after-workings when you dream. Man steps across the border, as it were, of the world of consciousness, when he dips ever so slightly into this other world in which he is when he sleeps or when he dreams. There lies also the world of ‘Imaginations’. In ‘Imaginations’ it is for us a fully conscious world, we have conscious perception in that world, which we merely sip, as it were, in our dreams.

We shall now have to consider a correspondence that is found to exist, an absolute correspondence, in respect of Number. I have already often drawn your attention to this correspondence between Man and the world in which he evolves. I have pointed to the fact that Man, in his rhythm of breathing—18 per minute—manifests something that is in remarkable accord with other processes of the Universe. We make 18 respirations per minute, which gives when calculated for the day, 25,920 respirations. And we arrive at the same number when we calculate how many days are contained in a normal life term of 72 years. That also gives about 25,920 days; so that something may be said to exhale our astral body and Ego, on falling asleep and inhale them again upon waking—always in conformity with the same number rhythm.

And again, when we consider how the Sun moves—whether apparently or really, does not matter—advancing a little each year in what we call the precession of the equinoxes, when we consider the number of years it takes the Sun to make this journey round the whole Zodiac, once more we get 25,920 years—the Platonic year.

The fact is, this human life of ours, within the boundaries set by birth and death, is indeed fashioned, down to its most infinitesimal processes—as we have seen in the breathing—in accordance with the laws of the Universe. But in the correspondence we have observed up to now between the Macrocosm and Man the Microcosm, we have made our observations in a realm where the correspondence is obvious and evident. There are however, other very important correspondences. For example, consider the following. I want to lead you through Number to something else I have to bring before you. Take the 18 respirations per minute, making 1,080 per hour and in 24 hours 25,920 respirations; that is, we must multiply: 18 X 60 X 24 in order to arrive at 25,920.

Taking this as the cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, and dividing it by 6o and again by 24, we would naturally get 18 years. And what do these 18 years really mean? Consider—these 25,920 respirations correspond to a human day of 24 hours; in other words, this 24 hour day is the day of the Microcosm. 18 respirations may serve as the unit of rhythm.

And now take the complete circle described by the precession of the equinoxes, and call it, not a Platonic year, but a great Day of the Heavens, a Macrocosmic day. How long would one respiration on this scale have to occupy to correspond with the human respiration? Its duration would have to be 18 years—a respiration made by the Being corresponding to the Macrocosm.

If we take the statements of modern astronomy—we need not interpret them here, we shall speak of their meaning later—we shall find that it is a matter of indifference whether we assume that the motion of the Sun is apparent, or the motion of the Earth; that does not concern us—but let us now take that which the Astronomer of today calls Nutation of the Earth's Axis.

You are aware that the Earth's axis lies obliquely upon the Ecliptic, and that the Astronomers speak of an oscillation of the Earth's axis around this point and they call this ‘Nutation’. The axis completes one revolution around this point in just about 18 years (it is really 18 years, 7 months, but we need not consider the fraction, although it is quite possible to calculate this too with exactitude.) But with these 18 years something else is intimately connected. For it is not merely on the fact of ‘Nutation’—this ‘trembling’, this rotation of the Earth's axis in a double cone around the Earth's centre, and the period of 18 years for its completion—it is not only on this fact that we have to fix our minds, but we find that simultaneously with it another process takes place. The Moon appears each year in a different position because, like the Sun, she ascends and descends from the ecliptic, proceeding in a kind of oscillating motion again and again towards the Equator ecliptic. And every 18 years she appears once more in the same position she occupied 18 years before. You see there is a connection between this Nutation and the path of the Moon. Nutation in truth indicates nothing else than the Moon's path. It is the projection of the motion of the Moon. So that we can in actual reality observe the “breathing” of the Macrocosm. We only need notice the path of the Moon in 18 years or, in other words, the Nutation of the Earth's axis. The Earth dances, and she dances in such a manner as to describe a cone, a double cone, in 18 years, and this dancing is a reflection of the macrocosmic breathing. This takes place just as many times in the macrocosmic year as the 18 human respirations during the microcosmic day of 24 hours.

So we really have one macrocosmic respiration per minute in this Nutation movement. In other words, we look into this breathing of the Macrocosm through this Nutation movement of the Moon, and we have before us what corresponds to respiration in man. And now, what is the purport of all this? The meaning of it is that as we pass from waking to sleep, or only from the wholly conscious to the dream state, we enter another world, and over against the ordinary laws of day, years, etc., and also the Platonic year, we find in this insertion of a Moon rhythm, something that has the same relationship in the Macrocosm, as breathing, the semiconscious process of respiration, has to our full consciousness. We have therefore not only to consider a world which is spread out before us, but another world which projects into, and permeates our own.

Just as we have before us a second part of the human organism, when observing the breathing process, namely the rhythmic man, as opposed to the perceptive or head man, so we have in what appears as the yearly Moon motion, or rather the 18-year motion of the Moon, the identity between one year and one human respiration; we have this second world interpenetrating our own.

There can therefore be no question of having only one world in our environment. We have that world that we can follow as the world of the senses; but then we have a world, whose foundations are laid within the laws of another, and which stands in exactly the same relationship to the world of the senses, as our breathing does to our consciousness; and this other world is revealed to us as soon as we interpret in the right way this Moon movement, this Nutation of the Earth's axis.

These considerations should enable you to realise the impossibility of investigating in a one-sided way the laws manifesting in the world. The modern materialistic thinker is in quest of a single system of natural laws. In this he deludes himself; what he should say is rather as follows. “The world of the senses is certainly a world in which I find myself embedded and to which I belong; it is that world which is explained by natural science in terms of Cause and Effect. But another world interpenetrates this one, and is regulated by different laws. Each world is subject to its own system of laws.” As long as we are of the opinion that one kind of system of laws could suffice for our world, and that all hangs upon the thread of Cause and Effect, so long shall we remain victims of complete illusions.

Only when we can perceive from facts such as the Moon's motion and nutation of the Earth's axis that another world extends into this one—only then are we upon the right path.

And now, you see, these are the things in which the spiritual and material (so-called) touch each other, or let us say the psychical and material. He who can faithfully observe what is contained within his own self will find the following. These things must gradually be brought to the attention of humanity. There are many among you, who have already passed the 18 years and about 7 months period in age. That was an important period. Others will have passed twice that number of years—37 years and 2 months—again an important time. After that we have a third very momentous period 18 years and seven months later, at the age of 55 years and 9 months. Few can notice as yet, not having been trained to do so, the effects and important changes taking place within the individual soul at these times. The nights passed during these periods are the most important nights in the life of the individual. It is here where the Macrocosm completes its 18 respirations, completes one minute—and Man as it were, opens a window facing quite another world. But as I said, man cannot yet watch for these points in his life. Everyone, however, could try to let his mental eye look back over the years he has passed, and if he is over 55 years old to recognise three such important epochs; others two, and most of you at any rate one! In these epochs events take place, which rush up into this world of ours out of quite a different one. Our world opens at these moments to another world.

If we wish to describe this happening more clearly, we can say that our world is at these times penetrated anew by astral streams; they flow in and out. Of course this really happens every year, but we are here concerned with the 18 years, as they correspond to the 18 respirations per minute. In short, our attention is drawn through the cosmic clock to the breathing of the Macrocosm, in which we are embedded. This correspondence with another world, which is manifested through the motion of the Moon, is exceptionally important. Because, you see, the world which at these times projects into our own, is the very world into which we pass during our sleep, when the Ego and the astral body leave our physical and etheric bodies. It must not be thought that the world composing our every-day environment is merely permeated in an abstract way by the astral world; rather should we say, it breathes in the astral world, and we can observe the astral in this breathing process through the Moon's motion or nutation. You will realise that we have here come to something of great significance. If you remember what I said recently, we may put it in the following way. We have, on the one hand, our world as it is generally observed; and we have in addition, the materialistic superstition that, for instance, if we gaze upwards, we see the Sun, a ball of gas, as it is described in books. This is nonsense. The Sun is not a ball of gas; but in that place where the Sun is, there is something less than empty space—a sucking, absorbing body, in fact, while all around it is that which exerts pressure. Consequently in that which comes to us from the Sun we have not to do with anything constituting a product of combustion in the Sun; but all that has been transmitted to the Sun from the Universe is rayed back.

Where the Sun is, is emptier than empty space. This can be said of all parts of the Universe where we find Ether. For this reason it is so difficult for the physicist to speak of Ether, for he thinks that Ether is also matter, though more rarefied than ordinary matter. Materialism is still very busy with this perpetual ‘rarefying’, both the materialism of natural science as well as the materialism of Theosophy. It distinguishes first, dense matter; then etheric matter—more rarefied; then astral matter—still more rarefied; and then there is the ‘mental’ and I do not know what else—always more and more rarefied!

The only difference (in this theory of rarefying) between the two forms of materialism is that the one recognises more degrees of rarefaction than the other. But in the transition from ponderable matter to Ether we have nothing to do with rarefaction. Anyone who believes that in Ether we have to do merely with a ‘rarefying’ process is like a man who says: ‘I have here a purse full of money; I repeatedly take from it and the money becomes less and less. I take away still more till at last none remains.’ Nothing is left—but yet he can go on! The ‘nothing’ can become less still; for if he gets into debt, his money becomes less than nothing. In the same way not only does matter become empty space, but it becomes negative, less than nothing—emptier than emptiness; it assumes a ‘sucking’ nature. Ether is sucking, absorbing. Matter presses. Ether absorbs. The Sun is an absorbing, sucking ball, and wherever Ether is present we have this absorbent force.

Here we step over into the other side, the other aspect of three-dimensional space—we pass from pressure to suction. That which immediately surrounds us in this world, that of which we are constituted as physical man and ether man, is both pressing and sucking or absorbing. We are a combination of both; whereas the Sun possesses the power of suction only, being nothing but ether, nothing but suction. It is the undulating wave of pressure and suction, ponderable matter and ether, that forms in its alternation a living organisation. And the living organism continually breathes in the astral; the breathing expresses itself through the Moon's motion or nutation. And here we begin to divine a second member or principle of the world's construction; the one member—pressure and suction, physical and etheric; the other, the second—astral. The astral is neither physical nor etheric but is continually inhaled and exhaled; and the nutation demonstrates this process.

Now a certain astronomical fact was observed even in the most ancient times. Many thousands of years before the Christian era, the Egyptians knew that after a period of 72 years the fixed stars in their apparent course gain one day on the Sun. It seems to us, does it not, that the fixed stars revolve and the Sun too revolves, but that the latter revolves more slowly, so that after 72 years the stars are appreciably ahead. This is the reason of the movement of the Vernal Point (the Spring Equinoctial point); namely, that the stars go faster. The Spring Equinox moves further and further away, the fixed star has altered its place in relation to the Sun. Briefly, the facts are that if we notice the path of a fixed star and notice the point where the Sun stands over it, we find that at the end of 72 years the star occupies the same position on the 30th December, while the Sun only reaches that point again on the 31st December. The Sun has lost a day. After a lapse of 25,920 years this loss is so great, that the Sun has described a complete revolution and once again is back upon the place we noted. We see therefore that in 72 years the Sun is one day behind the fixed stars. Now these 72 years are approximately the normal life period of Man, and they are composed of 25,920 days.

Thus when we multiply 72 years by 360, and consider the human span of life as one day, we have the human life as one day of the Macrocosm. Man is breathed out, as it were, from the Macrocosm; his life is one day in the macrocosmic year.

So that this revolution, this circle described by the precession of the Equinoxes, indicating the macrocosmic year, as already known to the Egyptians thousands of years ago (for they looked upon this period of 72 years as very important), this apparent revolution of the Vernal point is connected with the life and death of Man in the Universe—with the life and death, that is, of the Macrocosm. And the laws of the life and death of Man are something that we are compelled to follow. We have already found how nutation points to another world; as our sense-perception world points to one world, so nutation points to another, the breathing world. And now through what present-day astronomy calls ‘precession’, we have something we may again call a transition, a transition this time to a state of deep sleep, a transition to still another, a third world. We have thus three worlds, interpenetrating one another, inter-related; but we must not attempt simply to combine these worlds from the point of view of causality. Three worlds, a three-fold world, as Man is a three-fold being; one, the world of sense surrounding us, the world we perceive; a second world whose presence is indicated by the motions of the Moon; and a third which makes itself known to us by the motion of the equinoctial point, or we might say, by the path of the Sun. This third world indeed remains about as unknown to us as the world of our own Will is unknown to our ordinary consciousness.

It is important therefore to search everywhere for correspondences between the human Microcosm and the Macrocosm. And when today the Oriental, if only in a decadent way, seeks to acquire breathing consciousness, as was done in the ancient Oriental wisdom, it is the manifestation of the desire to stray across into this other world which otherwise he could only recognise through what the Moon, so to speak, wills in our world. But in those times when there was still an ancient wisdom coming to man in a different way from that by which we have today to seek wisdom—in those times man also knew how to see this working of inner law in other connections and correspondences.

In the Old Testament the Initiates, who were familiar with these matters, used always a certain image or picture—the picture, namely, of the relation between Moon-light and Sun-light. This we can find also in a certain sense in the Gospels, as I have recently shown you.

We generally speak of the Moon-light being reflected Sunlight. I am speaking now in the sense of physics, and I shall have to show later on that these expressions are really very inaccurate. The Moon-light represented in the Old Testament the Jahve or Jehovah power. This power was conceived as a reflected power, and the Initiates—though not of course the orthodox Rabbis of the Old Testament—knew: The Messiah, the Christ will come, and He will be the direct Sun-light. Jahve is only His advance reflection. Jahve is the Sun-light, but not the direct Sun-light. Of course, here we are speaking not of physical sunlight, but of the spiritual reality.

Christ entered into human evolution, He who had been present previously only in reflection, in an indirect way in the form of Jehovah. And there arose the necessity to think of the Christ, who lived in Jesus, as the result of a different set of laws from those appertaining to ordinary natural science. But if we do not admit this other set of laws, if we believe that the world exists only as the result of cause and effect, then there is no place for That which is the Christ. His place must be prepared for Him by our recognition of three interpenetrating worlds. Then there is created the possibility of being able to say: It may be that in this world of sense everything is related through the law of cause and effect as maintained by natural science, but another world permeates this one, and to this other world belongs everything that has happened in the world that has connection with the Mystery of Golgotha.

In our times, when the desire for an understanding of these matters is becoming more and more manifest, it is important to realise that this understanding must be sought through the recognition of these three interpenetrating worlds, which exist simultaneously and are entirely different one from another. This means that we must seek not for one system of laws only, but for three; and we must seek for them within Man himself.

If you consider well what I have just said, you will see that it will not do to adopt the methods of the Copernican system, and simply draw ellipses intended to show the path of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury and lastly of the Sun. That is not what is wanted at all. What is wanted is rather to look at the laws that are active in the worlds that are physically perceptible and see how these laws are cut across by an altogether different set of laws; and that especially the present Moon, in her motion, presents something that is in no way causally connected with the rest of the Stellar System, such as would be the case were the Moon a member of that System, like the other planets. The Moon however is to be referred to quite another world, which is, as it were, inserted into ours, and which indicates the breathing process of our Universe, as the Sun indicates the interpenetration of our Universe by the Ether.

Before one engages in Astronomy, one must educate oneself in a qualitative sense concerning that which moves in space, concerning the things that are interdependent in space. For one must be quite clear that Sun matter and any other matter—Earth matter for instance—can under no circumstances be brought into a simple relationship; because the matter of the Sun is, in comparison with the matter of the Earth, something absorbing and sucking, while the latter exerts pressure. The motions which express themselves in nutation are motions proceeding from the astral world, and not from anything that can be found in Newton's principles. It is just this Newtonism that has driven us so far into materialism, because it seizes on the uttermost abstractions. It speaks of a force of gravitation. The Sun, it says, attracts the Earth, or the Earth attracts the Moon; a force of attraction exists between these bodies, like some invisible cable. But if really nothing but this force of attraction existed, there would be no cause for the Moon to revolve round the Earth, or the Earth round the Sun; the Moon would simply fall on to the Earth. This would indeed have happened ages ago, if gravitation alone were acting; or the Earth would have fallen into the Sun. It is therefore quite impossible for us to look to gravitation alone for the means of explaining the imagined or actual motions of celestial bodies. So what do they do? Let us see! Here we have a Planet imbued with a constant desire to fall into the Sun—supposing we were to have the law of gravitation alone. But now we will suppose that this planet has at some time or other been given another force, a tangential force. This impetus acts with such and such a power, and the force of gravitation acts at the same time with such and such a power, so that eventually the planet does not fall into the Sun, but has to move along a line resulting from both forces.

You see that Newton's theory finds it necessary to assume some kind of original impetus, some kind of first push in the case of each planet, of each moving celestial body. There must always be some extra-mundane God somewhere, who gives this impetus, who imparts this tangential force. This is always presupposed; and remember, this assumption was made at a time when we had lost all idea of bringing the material and the spiritual into any kind of connection, when we were incapable of conceiving of anything but a perfectly external ‘push’.

Here we have an instance of the inability of materialism to understand matter. I have repeatedly drawn your attention to this of late. It follows, that therefore materialism is also unable to understand the motions of matter, and is compelled to give quite an anthropomorphic explanation of them, picturing God as a being with wholly human attributes, who simply gives the Moon a push and the Earth a push. The Earth and Moon then ‘attract’ each other—and behold, from these two forces, the push and the attraction, we have their movements in the heavens.

It is from ideas of this kind that the Solar system is constructed today. But to get a real understanding of the Universe it is absolutely necessary to look for the connection between that which lives in Man, and that which lives in the Macrocosm. For Man is an actual Microcosm in the Macrocosm. Of this we will speak further tomorrow.

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

We also studied consciousness at its different levels. As I said yesterday, it is usual to take account only of the consciousness known to us in waking life from the moment of waking to the moment of falling asleep. We perceive the objects around us, reason about these perceptions with our intellect; we also have feelings in connection with these perceptions, and we have our will-impulses. But we experience this whole nexus of consciousness as something which, in its qualities, differs completely from the physical which alone is taken account of by ordinary science. It is not possible, without further ado, to build a bridge from these imponderable, incorporeal experiences in the domain of consciousness to the other objects of perception studied in physiology or physical anatomy. But in regard to consciousness too, we know from ordinary life that in addition to the waking consciousness, there is dream-consciousness, and we heard yesterday that dreams are essentially pictures or symbols of inner organic processes. Something is going on within us all the time, and in our dreams it comes to expression in pictures. I said that we may dream of coiling snakes when we have some intestinal disorder, or we may dream of an excessively hot stove and wake up with palpitations of the heart. The overheated stove symbolized irregular beating of the heart, the snakes symbolized the intestines, and so forth. Dreams point us to our organism; the consciousness of dreamless sleep is, as it were, an experience of nullity, of the void. But I explained that this experience of the void is necessary in order that man shall feel himself connected with his bodily nature. As an Ego he would feel no connection with his body if he did not leave it during sleep and seek for it again on waking. It is through the deprivation undergone between falling asleep and waking that he is able to feel himself united with the body. So from the ordinary consciousness which has really nothing to do with our own essential being beyond the fact that it enables us to have perceptions and ideas, we are led to the dream-consciousness which has to do with actual bodily processes. We are therefore led to the body. And we are led to the body even more strongly when we pass into the consciousness of dreamless sleep. Thus we can say: On the one hand our conception of the life of soul is such that it leads us to the body. And our conception of the bodily constitution, comprising as it does the fluid organism, the aeriform organism, the warmth-organism and thus becoming by degrees more rarefied, leads us to the realm of soul. It is absolutely necessary to take these things into consideration if we are to reach a view of the world that can really satisfy us.

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

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

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

Taking this as an example, we may say: Moral ideals come to expression in an enhancement of warmth in the warmth-organism. Not only is man warmed in soul through what he experiences in the way of moral ideals, but he becomes organically warmer as well—though this is not so easy to prove with physical instruments. Moral ideals, then, have a stimulating, invigorating effect upon the warmth-organism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we come to the point where he who is initiated into the secrets of the universe cannot speak, as so many speak today, of the conservation of energy or the conservation of matter. [e.Ed: The law propounded by Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878)]. It is simply not true that matter is conserved forever. Matter dies to the point of nullity, to a zero-point. In our own organism, energy dies to the point of nullity through the fact that we formulate theoretical thoughts. But if we did not do so, if the universe did not continually die in us, we should not be man in the true sense. Because the universe dies in us, we are endowed with self-consciousness and are able to think about the universe. But these thoughts are the corpse of the universe. We become conscious of the universe as a corpse only, and it is this that makes us Man.

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

Moral Ideals:

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

Theoretical thoughts:

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

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

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

However many treatises on psychology may be written—if they are based upon what is studied today in anatomy and physiology it will not be possible to find any transition to the life of soul from this solid, or solid-fluid bodily constitution. The life of soul will not be revealed as such. But if the bodily substance is traced back to warmth, a bridge can be built from what exists in the body as warmth to what works from out of the soul into the warmth in the human organism. There is warmth both without and within the human organism. As we have heard, in man's constitution warmth is an organism; the soul, the soul-and-spirit, takes hold of this warmth-organism and by way of the warmth all that becomes active which we inwardly experience as the moral. By the ‘moral’ I do not of course mean what philistines mean by it, but I mean the moral in its totality, that is to say, all those impulses that come to us, for example when we contemplate the majesty of the universe, when we say to ourselves: We are born out of the cosmos and we are responsible for what goes on in the world.—I mean the impulses that come to us when the knowledge yielded by Spiritual Science inspires us to work for the sake of the future. When we regard Spiritual Science itself as a source of the moral, this, more than anything else, can fill us with enthusiasm for the moral, and this enthusiasm, born of spiritual-scientific knowledge, becomes in itself a source of morality in the higher sense. But what is generally called ‘moral’ represents no more than a subordinate sphere of the moral in the universal sense.—All the ideas we evolve about the external world, about Nature in her finished array, are theoretical ideas. No matter with what exactitude we envisage a machine in terms of mathematics and the principles of mechanics, or the universe in the sense of the Copernican system—this is nothing but theoretical thinking, and the ideas thus formulated constitute a force of death within us; a corpse of the universe is within us in the form of thoughts, of ideas.

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

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

What is this Copernican picture of the universe?—It is in reality a picture built up purely on the basis of mathematical principles, mathematical-mechanical principles. The rudiments of it began, very gradually, to be unfolded in Greece, [e.Ed: Particularly by Aristarchos of Samos, the Greek astronomer, circa 250 B.C.] where, however, echoes of earlier thought—for example in the Ptolemaic view of the universe—still persisted. And in course of time this developed into the Copernican system that is taught nowadays to every child.

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

Entirely false ideas prevail today of how an earlier humanity acquired its astronomical-astrological knowledge. This was acquired through an instinctive-clairvoyant vision of the universe. The earliest Post-Atlantean peoples saw the heavenly bodies as spirit forms, spirit entities, whereas we today regard them merely as physical structures. When the ancient peoples spoke of the celestial bodies, of the planets or of the fixed stars, they were speaking of spiritual beings. Today, the sun is pictured as a globe of burning gas which radiates light into the universe. But for the men of ancient times the sun was a living Being and they regarded the sun, which their eyes beheld, simply as the outward manifestation of this Spirit Being at the place where the sun stands in the universe; and it was the same in regard to the other heavenly bodies—they were seen as Spirit Beings. We must think of an age which came to an end long before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, when the sun out yonder in the universe and everything in the stars was conceived of as living spirit reality, living Being. Then came an intermediary period when people no longer had this vision, when they regarded the planets, at any rate, as physical, but still thought of them as pervaded by living souls. In times when it was no longer known how the physical passes over by stages into what is of the soul, how what is of the soul passes over by stages into the physical, how in reality the two are united, men postulated physical existence on the one side and soul existence on the other. They thought of the correspondences between these two realms just as most psychologists today—if they admit the existence of a soul at all—still think, namely that the soul and the physical nature of the man are identical. This, of course, leads thought to absurdity; or there is the so-called ‘psycho-physical parallelism,’ which again is nothing else than a stupid way of formulating something that is not understood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In an introductory way, I will touch shortly upon a few facts that have already been considered, because we shall need them in the further course of our considerations. I have said that what we may call the threshold between the usual physical world of the senses and the soul-spiritual world lies in man himself, also psychically. It lies in him in such a way that in the usual everyday consciousness with which man is endowed between birth and death, he is really awake only as far as his sense-perceptions, or his perceptive activity, are concerned; he is awake in all that comes to him in the form of ideas—ideas concerning that which he perceives through his senses, or ideas arising out of his own inner being; they make the world intelligible and alive for him. Even a very ordinary self-recollection teaches us (clairvoyant endowment is in no way necessary for this) that when usual human consciousness is fully awake it cannot embrace more than the sphere of the life of ideas and the sphere of sense perceptions. However, we experience in our soul also the world of our feelings and the world of our will. But we have said that we live through this world of our feelings only as we live through a dream; the life of dream enters the ordinary waking consciousness and, inasmuch as we are feeling human beings, we are, in reality, mere dreamers of life. Things occur in the depths of our feeling life, of which our waking consciousness, contained in our ideas and sense perceptions, knows nothing at all. The waking consciousness knows less still concerning the real processes of the life of our will. Man dreams away his feeling life in his usual consciousness, and he sleeps away the life of his will.

Consequently, beneath the life of our thoughts lives a realm in which we ourselves are embedded, and which is only partly known to us; it is only known to us through the waves that break up through the surface.

We have emphasized further, that in this realm, which we dream and sleep away, we live together with human souls that are passing through the existence between death and a new birth. We are only separated from the so-called dead through the fact that we are not in a position to perceive with our ordinary consciousness how the forces of the dead, the life of the dead, the actions of the dead, play into our own life. These forces, these actions of the dead, continually permeate the life of our feeling and the life of our will. Therefore we can live with the dead. And it is indeed important to realize at the present time that the task of Anthroposophy is to develop this consciousness—that we are in touch with the souls of the dead.

The earth will not continue to evolve in the direction of the welfare of humanity unless humanity develops this living feeling of being together with the dead. For the life of the dead plays into the life of the so-called living in many ways.

During the course of these public lectures I have purposely drawn your attention to the historical course of life—what man lives through historically, what he lives through socially, what he lives through in the ethical relationships between people. All this really has the value of a dream, of sleep; the impulses which man develops when he surpasses his personal existence and is active within the community, are impulses of dream and sleep.

People will consider history in quite another way when this has reached their living consciousness; they will no longer consider as history the fable convenue that is usually called history today; but they will realize that historical life can only be understood when that which is dreamed and slept away in usual consciousness, and contains the influences of the deeds, impulses and activities of the so-called dead, is sought in this historical life. The deeds of the dead are interwoven with the impulses of feeling and will of the so-called living. And this is real history.

When the human being has gone through the Gate of Death, he does not cease to be active
within the human community. He continues to be active, although his activity is of another kind. We live under the illusion that our actions are our own, because they flow out of our feelings, out of our impulses of will; in reality they flow out of the deeds of those who have departed, even in the very moment in which we are carrying out our actions.

In the future development of man it will be of great importance to know that when we do something connected with our life in common with other men, we do this together with the dead. But of course, such a consciousness, which is related essentially to the life of the feeling and of the will, must be grasped also by the feeling and by the will. Abstract and dried-out ideas will never be able to grasp this. But ideas that have been taken from the sphere of spiritual science will be able to grasp this. Indeed, people will have to accustom themselves to form quite different conceptions about many things.

You all know that he who is firmly rooted in the comprehension of spiritual-scientific impulses may undertake to remain connected with those who have passed through the Gate of Death. The thoughts of spiritual science, the ideas that we form about the events in the spiritual world, are thoughts that are intelligible to us on earth, but are also intelligible to the souls of the dead. This may result in what we may call “reading to the dead.” When we think of the dead, and in doing so read to them, especially the contents of spiritual science, this is a real intercourse with the dead. For spiritual science speaks a language common to both the souls of the living and of the dead. But what is essential is to approach these things more and more, particularly with the life of feeling, with the illuminated life of feeling.

Man lives, between death and a new birth in an environment which is essentially permeated through and through, not only with living forces, but with living forces full of feeling. This is his lowest sphere. As the insensible mineral kingdom surrounds us during our sense life, so a realm surrounds the dead, which is of such a nature that, when he comes in contact with anything within it, he calls forth pain or joy. Thus, with the dead it is as if we were forced to realize, during life, that as soon as we touch a stone, or the leaf of a tree, we call forth feelings. The departed one can do nothing that does not call forth feelings of joy, feelings of pain, feelings of tension, relaxation, etc., in his surroundings. When we come into contact with the departed human being—this is the case when we read to him—he himself experiences this communion as already mentioned; he becomes aware of this when we read to him; he experiences it in this particular case. In this way the departed one comes in connection with that soul who reads to him, that soul with whom he is in some way related through Karma. The dead is connected with his lowest realm (which we had to bring in connection with the animal kingdom) in such a way that everything he does calls forth joy, pain, etc; he is connected with all that calls forth a relationship with human souls (whether they are human souls living here on the earth, or souls already disembodied and living between death and a new birth) in such a way that his feeling for life is either increased or diminished through what takes place in other souls.

Please realize this clearly. When you read to a so-called living person, you know that he understands what you read to him, in the sense in which we speak of human understanding; but the departed one lives in the contents, the departed one lives in each word that you read to him. He enters into that which passes through your own soul. The departed one lives with you. He lives with you more intensely than was ever possible for him in the life between birth and death. When this companionship with the dead is sought, it is really a very intimate one, and a consciousness endowed with insight intensifies this existence in common with the dead.

If man enters consciously into the realm that we inhabit together with the dead, the intercourse with the dead is such that when you read or speak to the departed one, you hear from him, like a spiritual echo, what you yourself are reading. You see, we must become acquainted with such ideas as these if we wish to gain a real conception of the concrete spiritual world. In the spiritual world things are not the same as here. Here you can hear yourself speak when you are speaking, or you know that you are thinking when you think. If you speak to the dead, or if you enter into a relationship with the dead, your words, or the thoughts you send to him, come to you out of the departed one himself, if you consciously perceive your connection with the dead.

And when you send a message to the dead, you feel as if you were intimately connected with him. If he replies to this message, it seems at first as if you were dimly conscious that the departed one is speaking. You are dimly conscious that the departed one has spoken, and you must now draw out of your own soul what he has spoken. This will make you realize how necessary it is for a real spiritual intercourse to hear from the other one what you yourself think and conceive, to hear out of yourself what the other one says. This is a kind of inversion of the entire relationship between one being and another being. But this inversion takes place when we really enter the spiritual world.

Because the spiritual world is so entirely different from the physical, and because—since about the fifteenth century—people only wish to form conceptions based on the physical world, they displace and obstruct their entrance to the spiritual world. If people would only realize that a world can exist which is, in certain respects—not in all—the direct opposite of what we call the true world; if people would be willing to form ideas which, perhaps, appear most absurd to those who insist upon living only in a materialistic world—then they will transform their souls and attain the possibility of seeing into the spiritual world, which is always around us. It is not that human beings, through their nature, are separated from the spiritual world; but that through habit, through the circumstances of inheritance, they have become entirely unaccustomed, since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to forming other ideas than those borrowed from the physical world. This applies even to art. What other scope has modern art than to copy, from the model, what Nature forms outside? Even in art people no longer attach value to what arises freely out of the spiritual life of the soul, and is also something real. But in the free reality that thus arises, people cannot efface what is effective and active in historical events, in the ethical, moral and social life of the community—except that they dream and sleep away this active element. As soon as man goes beyond his own personal concerns, even in the smallest measure—and in every moment of life he goes beyond these—the spiritual world, the world—I must emphasize this again and again—which we share with the dead works through his arm, through his hand, his word, his glance.

As the departed one grows familiar with the realm I have already spoken of, with the lowest one connected with the animal kingdom (just as we become familiar with the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human physical world in the life between birth and death during our gradual growth)—as the departed one continues to develop in the second region, where companionship with all those souls arises, with whom he is karmically connected either directly or indirectly, he evolves to the point of becoming familiar with the kingdom of the Beings who stand above man, if I may use this expression, although it is merely figurative—with the kingdom beginning with the Angeloi and Archangeloi.

Here in the physical world man is, as it were, the crown of creation—many like to emphasize this; he feels himself as the highest of all beings. The minerals are the lowest, then the plants, then the animals, and then man himself He feels that he belongs to the highest kingdom. It is not thus with the dead in the spiritual realm; the dead feels himself connected with the Hierarchies above him, the Hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, etc. As man here in the physical world feels, in a certain sense, that the physical kingdom of man evolves and grows out of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, so the departed one feels himself sustained and carried by the Hierarchies above him, in the life between death and a new birth.

The way in which the human being gradually becomes familiar with this kingdom of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, etc., can be described as follows:—It is like a liberation from Self. Again we must acquire a conception of these things that cannot be won in the physical world of the senses. In this world of the senses, as we grow up from childhood, we gradually become acquainted with things, first with our nearest surroundings, then with what is to be our life experience in a wider sense, etc. We become acquainted with things in such a way that we know—they approach us little by little. This is not the case between death and a new birth. From the moment on, in which we know that we are connected with the Angeloi, we feel as if we had been united with them since eternity, as if we belonged to them, were one with them; yet we are only able to develop our consciousness by reaching the point of separating the idea of the Angeloi from ourselves. Here in the physical world we make our experiences by taking up ideas. In the spiritual world we make our experiences by separating the ideas from ourselves. We know that we carry them within us—and we know that we are entirely filled by them, but we must separate them from ourselves in order to bring them to consciousness. And so we set free the ideas of Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

In the lowest kingdom, man is, as it were, connected with the animalic, which he must strive to conquer, as I have already explained. Then he is connected with the kingdom immediately above this one—the kingdom of the souls with whom he is directly or indirectly linked up through Karma. In this kingdom man experiences his relationship with the Angeloi. His relationship with the kingdom of the Angeloi gives rise, at first, to a great deal of that which creates a right connection with the kingdom of human souls. Hence, in the life between death and a new birth, it is difficult to distinguish between the experiences which man has in common with other human souls and those with the Beings belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi. There are many links between human beings and the Beings belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi. Although we can speak of these things merely in comparison, and although we can only allude briefly to them, we may however say:—Just as here, in our physical life, memory leads us back again to some event which we have experienced, so does a Being belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi lead us to something which we must experience in our life between death and a new birth. Beings belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi are really the mediators for everything that arises in the life of the so-called dead. And the Angeloi help man in everything that he must do between death and a new birth in connection with the conquest of the animalic (he must raise his animal nature into the spiritual part of his being in order to prepare himself for his next incarnation). If you grasp this in its right meaning you will say:—Because man associates with the Angeloi between death and a new birth, he can form the right kind of relationships in connection with the souls with whom he must come into touch. And because man is in contact with the kingdom of the Angeloi, he can prepare rightly the things that must take place during his next incarnation. The tasks of the Archai, or the Beings belonging to the Spirits of the Time, are common both to the dead and to the living. My explanations will show you that the departed one has more to do with the Angeloi, who regulate his connection to other souls, and with the Archangeloi, who regulate his successive incarnations. But in his association with the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Archai, the dead works together with the so-called living, with those who are incarnated here in the physical body. The dead who is passing through the life between death and a new birth, and the so-called living, in his life between birth and death, are embedded alike in something which the Spirits of the Time weave as an unceasing stream of universal wisdom and universal activity of the will. What the Spirits of the Time thus weave is history, is the ethical-moral life of an age, the social life of an age.

We might say that we can look into the spiritual kingdom and realize:—The so-called dead are there; what they experience in this kingdom—inasmuch as these experiences are their own—is regulated by the Angeloi and Archangeloi; what they experience in common with the so-called living is woven by the Beings who belong to the Hierarchy of the Archai. We cannot fulfill any fruitful work in the social, historical, and ethical-moral life unless we realize this work must come from an element that we share with the dead—the element of the Archai, or Spirits of the Time.

These Spirits of the Time do their work alternately. We have often spoken of this. Through several centuries, one of the Time Spirits weaves the events contained in the stream of historical and social life and in the ethical-moral stream of human events; then another Time Spirit relieves him. The moment in which a Time Spirit relieves another one is most important of all, if we wish to observe what really takes place within the evolution of mankind. We cannot understand this evolution unless we bear in mind the living active influence of the Time Spirits and, in general, of the entire spiritual world. We cannot understand what takes place between man and man unless we consider the kingdom of the Spirit.

Very abstract are man's thoughts concerning that which is social, ethical-moral and historical. He thinks that history, or the stream of events taking place in the course of time, is a continuous current, where one event follows upon the other. He asks:—Why did certain events happen at the beginning of the twentieth century?—Because they were caused by events at the end of the nineteenth century.—Why did certain events happen at the end of the nineteenth century?—Because they were caused by events in the middle of the nineteenth century. And events in the middle of the nineteenth century were caused again by events at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and so on.

This way of considering historical events as the result of immediately preceding events is just the same as if a peasant were to say:—The wheat that I shall harvest this year is the result of the wheat of last year. The seeds remained, and the wheat of last year is again the result of the wheat of the year before last. One thing depends on the other—cause and effect. Except that the peasant does not really follow this rule: he must of course interfere personally in the growth of the wheat. He must first sow the seeds in order that an effect may follow the cause. The effect does not come of itself. From a certain point of view this is one of the most terrible illusions of our materialistic age, for people believe that the effect is the result of the cause; they do not wish to form the simplest thoughts concerning the real truth of these things.

I have already given you an example, by relating to you a sensational event in the life of a human being. It is indeed so, that people prefer to contemplate sensational events rather than consider the other events, which are of exactly the same kind and take place every hour and every moment of our life. I have told you how such an event can occur: A man is accustomed to take his daily walk to a mountainside. He takes this walk every day for a long time. But one day during his walk, on reaching a certain spot, he hears a voice calling out to him:—Why do you go along this path? Is it necessary that you should do this? The voice says more or less these words. On hearing them he becomes thoughtful, steps aside and thinks for a while about the curious thing that has happened to him. Suddenly a piece of rock falls down, which would have killed him had he not stepped aside after hearing the voice. This is a sensational event. But one who considers the world calmly, yet spiritually, will see in this event one of the many which take place every moment of our life. In every moment of our life something else, too, might happen, if this or that would occur.

A very clever man—we know that especially modern people are very clever—would say: Why was this man spared? Because he went away. This is the cause. Very well—but suppose he had not gone away; in this case he would have been killed, and a very clever modern man would argue:--the falling stone is the cause of the man's death. Indeed—seen from outside and in an abstract and formal way—it is true that the falling stone is the cause, and the man's death the effect: but the cause has nothing to do with the effect; it is quite an indifferent matter to the falling stone, where the man was standing. This cause has nothing whatever to do with the effect. Ponder this matter and try to understand what is really contained in all this talk of cause and effect. The so-called cause need not have anything to do with the effect.

The stone would have taken exactly the same course had the man been standing elsewhere. As far as the stone is concerned, nothing has been changed owing to the fact that the man was warned and went away. I gave you an example that, even in outer quite formal things, the so-called cause need have nothing to do with the so-called effect. The whole way of looking at cause and effect is based entirely on abstraction. It is only possible to speak of cause and effect within certain limits. Take this example, for instance: Here you have a tree with its roots. What takes place in the roots can certainly be considered, in certain respects, as the cause of the growing tree; what takes place in the branches can, to a certain extent, be designated as the cause of the growing leaves. You see, the tree is, to a certain extent, a whole; and a concrete way of looking at life considers totalities and the aspect of the whole; an abstract way of looking at life always links up one thing with another, without considering the complete whole. But for a spiritual way of looking at things it is important to bear in mind the whole. You see, where the outer leaves end, the tree ceases to exist, as well as the inner causes of its growth. Where the leaves end, also the forces of their growth end; but something else begins there. Where these forces end, the spiritual eye can see spiritual beings playing around the tree, spiritual elementary beings. Here begins, if I may say so, a negative tree, which stretches out into infinity, but only apparently so, because after a while it disappears. An elementary existence meets what comes out of the tree; where the tree ceases, it comes into contact with the elementary existence, which grows toward it. It is thus in Nature.

The plant ceases to exist when it grows out of the soil, and the causes of its growth cease when the plant ceases. But an elementary existence from the universe grows toward the plant.

In the lecture on human life from the aspect of spiritual science, I have mentioned some of these things. The plants grow out of the soil from below. A spiritual element grows toward the plant from above. It is thus with all beings. What you observe in Nature is contained in all existence. Above all, there is a stream of social, ethical-moral and historical life. Events do not consist in a continuous stream, but a Time Spirit reigns for a while; another one replaces him; a third one replaces him; a fourth one replaces him; and so on. When a Time Spirit replaces another one, there is a difference also in the stream of continuous events. When such a new period begins, it is not possible to say that its events are the immediate effect of preceding events. They are not the effect of the preceding ones, in the sense in which we imagine this.

There is indeed an order of law in the successive course of events, but what we generally call necessity is an illusion, if we look upon it as it is often looked upon today. In the course of continuous events, we have something similar to what we find when we look at the tree—where the tree ceases, the elementary tree begins; but in Nature, a being belonging to the visible kingdom of the senses touches a being that remains invisible to the senses, a super-sensible being; the world of the senses and the super-sensible world touch. There is something similar also in the course of Time. Just as the physical tree ceases and an elementary tree begins, so also in the course of Time, something ceases and something new begins. There are epochs in which old events and old impulses cease, as it were, and are replaced by new ones. At such points of time, people like to keep to Lucifer and Ahriman, who help them to maintain what is really dead. It is possible to keep alive in human consciousness impulses and forces that are, in reality, dead. This is not possible in Nature. If someone cultivates exactly the same kind of ideas in 1914 that were justified in 1876, he can do so of course. He can do this because, in the continuous stream of human events, which is seized by Ahriman and Lucifer, the old can be maintained even if it is already dead. It is the same as if someone were to make a tree grow on and on without ceasing, after it had reached its natural limits. In the course of history we generally find that people cannot face a new epoch rightly; in other words, that they cannot place themselves at the service of the new Time Spirit.

In our age this is particularly important. During the last weeks we have spoken of the spiritual events of 1879. This was the end of an epoch. Something died and ceased to exist, just as the tree ceases. From 1879 onward it became necessary (this is of course still necessary today and will be so for a long time) that people should open themselves to the ideas and impulses coming from the spiritual world. Otherwise the old impulses become Ahrimanic or Luciferic.

These remarks contain something very important. The last third of the nineteenth century was an important time in the evolution of humanity. It was necessary, and it is still necessary, that people should become accessible to the influence of inspired ideas. People must open themselves to these. But looked upon from outside (we shall not only look upon this from outside, but study the deeper inner meaning), looked upon from outside, things have a very hopeless aspect. Impulses did come from the spiritual world. They came streaming in and worked in order that men might be led beyond this point, beyond the year 1879, and in order that they might open themselves to inspired ideas. They were impulses that could give men thoughts enabling them to become conscious, even at the end of the nineteenth century, that whenever we fulfill actions of a historical, social or ethical-moral value within the life of the community, we fulfill them together with our dead, and with the Archangeloi, Angeloi, and Archai. These impulses were there; they were there, but went past many people without leaving a trace. I have said that today I will first consider these things from an outer aspect, and it is good if you realize how apparently everything went past without leaving a trace. In the second half of the nineteenth century important things and important impulses already existed, and there were people who proclaimed and wrote significant thoughts. If we look at these thoughts today they may seem abstract. This is indeed so. But they are not abstract thoughts and they should not remain as they were then. (I repeat once more that this is looked upon from outside, tomorrow we shall consider these things from an inner aspect.) This was the case more or less in all spheres of modern civilized life. For instance—who studies the life of this country, Switzerland, in such a way as to say: In the fifties of the nineteenth century a man lived here in Switzerland, a man with great ideas, that were indeed of a philosophical kind. But had they been accepted by two or three, had they been popularized, would they not have had a very fruitful, spiritualizing influence on the entire history of Switzerland? Who considers, for instance, that in the middle of the nineteenth century a high spirit lived in Otto Heinrich Jäger? He is one of the greatest men of Switzerland. But who knows his name now, and who names him? Who is aware of the fact that although his thoughts had an abstract appearance they were only apparently abstract. They might have become concrete, they might have blossomed and borne fruit, because something very great was in this man, who taught at the Zurich University and wrote books on great thoughts, thoughts that should enter the life of the present. He wrote on the idea of human liberty and its connection with the entire spiritual world. Otto Heinrich Jager wrote, here in Switzerland, a kind of “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,” from another point of view than my own The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, which arose in the nineties.

Innumerable examples like this one could be given. The most fruitful ideas germinated and greened, but what is recounted today as the spiritual history of the nineteenth century leading into the twentieth century is the least significant part of all that really took place, and the most important part, that influenced it most of all, has not been considered at all.

This is how matter stand, from an exterior aspect, to begin with. Perhaps they will look more hopeful when we shall look at them from an inner standpoint.

In the course of lectures on the life between death and a new birth which I gave in 1914, you will find many indications that may be regarded as a complement to what I have explained to you during the past days and weeks. To-day I want to speak in particular of the change which takes place in the conditions of life between death and a new birth, which greatly resembles the alternating states of waking and sleeping during the life between birth and death.

When we are awake we have our normal consciousness, and it is this which really gives us our human character between birth and death; and when we are asleep our consciousness is, as it were, dulled. Our consciousness then lies below the threshold of our waking life and we experience the processes in which we live from the moment of falling asleep to that of waking up, only in a blunt state of consciousness, either quite bluntly, quite asleep, or so that certain life-reminiscences or inner organic processes rise out of our sleep in form of pictures. A similar alternation may also be found in the life between death and a new birth, except that there, as you have seen, everything is, as it were, reversed in comparison with the conditions of our earthly life. I have described to you how radically different are man’s experiences between death and a new birth to his experiences on earth. This also applies to the alternating states of consciousness. As described in my last lecture, between death and a new birth our experiences show us the deeds, the will-impulses of our Ego. This state of consciousness in which our Ego then lives, is, as it were, the normal one, even as here, the waking state of consciousness is the normal one. We have seen that here we are built up, as it were, of our physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, and there, of the Ego, the Spirit-Self, the Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man, which exist, to begin with, as a preliminary foundation. Between death and a new birth, the Ego is therefore the lowest member. But even as here we are inward1y conscious of our Ego through our waking consciousness, so there, through the corresponding state of consciousness, we grow aware of our Ego as an outer experience; we are conscious of our Ego by looking back upon our past deeds and volitional impulses, which, as already described, we experience as if they were reflected to us from the earth. This condition alternates with another; here on earth we may speak of a waking and of a sleeping consciousness, to which we may add a sub-conscious state, whereas between death and a new birth we must speak of the state of consciousness described above and of a kind of super-consciousness, where higher Beings grow conscious within us, that is to say, where higher Beings are the vehicles of our consciousness.

During our earthly condition of sleep we sink down to a kind of plant existence, but in the super-conscious state between death and a new birth we rise up to a kind of Archangel-consciousness, to one which lies above our own. I said that when we are in a normal condition we have behind us, as it were, the Hierarchies of the higher Spiritual Beings. In this super-conscious condition we positively move back towards them. And then we live within them. From them we learn more than we could know as human beings. If between death and a new birth we only experienced what we can experience through our Ego, that sends its rays after us and yet belongs to us, if we were limited to this, we could not experience, as already described, all the processes through which we must pass in order to build up our organism anew, for a new earthly life. We can do this only because our normal states of consciousness alternate with states of existence in which the knowledge (Wissens-zustände) of the Archangeloi and even of the Archai penetrate into our human being, also into our normal consciousness, where they rise up like memories, in the same way in which here on earth dreams enter our consciousness from the sub-conscious spheres. Between death and a new birth we thus live in such a way as to have the consciousness described above, but in between there are always super-conscious conditions, in which we also acquire a super-human knowledge which enables us to build up our existence exactly as required for our next earthly life. Consequently there are analogies between the earthly life from birth to death and the other life from death to a new birth. But we should bear in mind the strong, radical difference between these two conditions of life.

It is possible to see still more clearly into such things by perceiving also the uniting element between the two, by becoming acquainted with what penetrates as an essence of a higher kind into both states of existence—into our earthly life, and into the life between death and a new birth. As we pass through our earthly life, we have, to begin with, the external sensory impressions. We have seen that volitional impulses and actions interweave with these external sensory impressions. But let us now envisage first of all the external sensory impressions.

Try for a moment to set before your soul the fact that throughout your earthly life all the human senses give you a whole complex of sensory impressions, out of which is woven the web of sensory impressions. Generally these sensory impressions are viewed in such a way as to say that they form part of the objects, that the single objects or beings appear, for example, in colours which leave an impression upon the eye, whereas other beings emit sounds and leave an impression upon the organ of hearing. But let us now consider the whole world of sensory impressions and ask what they really are.

I have often drawn your attention to the following: It is out of the question that behind the sensory impressions there should be that fantastic world of atoms dreamed of by the physicists; behind the sensory world there is instead a spiritual world. The spiritual thus exists also in the physical world, but, to begin with, it cannot be perceived by our ordinary consciousness. The ordinary consciousness has before it this web of sensory impressions. But what does it contain? In reality, it contains Beings described in my “Occult Science” as the Spirits of Form. Everything that appears to us in space has a certain form, an object even obtains form through the colour-surface. The Spirits of Form live in everything which we experience through the senses in space. In it live the same Beings named “Elohim” in the Old Testament. For the Elohim are the Spirits of Form. We rightly call this world of physical manifestations a world which manifests itself, a world of phenomena. But this is correct only because with our ordinary consciousness we human beings at first perceive in this world nothing but phenomena, manifestations, the external appearance and semblance, or—as Orientals say—Maya. But when our consciousness awakens and becomes imaginative this whole world of semblance becomes filled with images, or rather transforms itself into a world of weaving images.

This world of weaving images immediately reveals that the world of the Angeloi or Angels is woven into it. And when we reach the stage of inspiration, we obtain inspirations which come to us from everywhere in this world, for it has changed into a world of inspiration. Into this inspiration are interwoven the Beings of the Archangeloi or Archangels.

The world which we experience afterwards is that of intuitions. There we advance to the world of the Archai, whereas ordinarily we only have before us the physical world.

To be sure, when in the world around us we have advanced to the world of the Archai, it is the world of the Archai which also enables us to look back upon what we have already experienced through the higher Hierarchies in former lives between death and a new birth. In the intuitive world we perceive that the Beings whom the Bible calls Elohim, the Beings that are described in my “Occult Science” as Spirits of Form, lie behind the Archai.

We may therefore say: By looking out into the world through our senses we really look into the world of the Spirits of Form, into the physical world.

When we have thus set the physical world before our soul by saying that there we move in the world of the Spirits of Form, we may return to our inner self, but to that inner being that is still very intimately connected with the external world and has to depict for us inwardly the external world in such a way that we can bear it within us in the form of memories. In other words: We may advance from the sensory world to our inner being, to our world of thought.

The thought-world is, to begin with, given to us as a world of picture-thoughts. You will not be tempted to consider as a reality the thoughts that ordinarily live in you, the thoughts that arise in your ordinary consciousness. But in the same way in which realities conceal themselves in the physical world, namely the realities of the Spirits of Form, so there are also realities in the thought-world. Thoughts first appear to our ordinary consciousness as the fleeting inner forms we know; but even as spiritual beings may be discovered in the web of the physical world when we ascend, in the manner described, to higher knowledge through imagination and inspiration, so it is also possible to perceive the activity of spiritual beings in the world of thought. These spiritual beings live in the accompanying phenomena of thought which take place when we think.

From former lectures you know what happens when we think. Processes are then continually taking place within us which may be described by using a comparison, namely as if salt were to dissolve completely in a glass of water leaving it transparent. But if the water cools off a little it gets dim; for the salt crystallizes. Similar processes, which are processes of densification, take place within us when we think. A kind of mineralization process really takes place within us when we think. This mineralization process within us is connected with spiritual Beings that weave through the element of thought. They are the Beings we have always called Archai. We are thus able to know that when we live in our thoughts the Archai live in our life of thought, even as the Elohim, or Spirits of Form, live in our sensory perceptions. In the external world, these Spirits of Form can only be perceived through imaginative knowledge.

When we study the external world with the consciousness which is the normal one to-day, we come to the so-called laws of Nature. These laws of Nature are abstractions. As soon as we proceed to imaginative knowledge we do not have abstract laws of Nature formulated in sentences, but we have pictures, imaginative life. These pictures are not the same as those I have mentioned before, but images which penetrate in a condensed form into the pictures which we obtain when beholding the Elohim, and they penetrate into them as a dimming, tinging element, as it were. This is the influence of the Archai in the external world. We may trace it in the outer and in the inner world.

Perhaps it is now good to turn our gaze away from man’s inner being and to envisage one of life’s manifestations. Thought first lives within us, although thought connects us with the external world; the secrets of the external world are revealed to us through thought, yet, to begin with, thought lives within us. But thought comes to expression when we communicate it to other people. In human life speech is the element through which we give expression to our thoughts, through which thought can manifest itself outwardly.

After having considered the world of thought, let us now consider the world of speech. I have often drawn attention to the fact that the human being of course has more experiences in connection with his world of speech than with his world of thought. Although the will also streams into the element of thought, man’s ordinary consciousness only notices this very slightly. But into speech the human will flows in a way which is quite noticeable to the ordinary consciousness. Yet ordinary consciousness only grasps very little of what really lives in speech. What lives in sound is perceived in the present intellectual age at the most as a sign denoting something. For modern man the inner life of sound is something which has to a great extent withdrawn to the background of consciousness. In regard to modern man we can only point out that sound, the resounding of speech, contains something which can be grasped as a life-element of its own.

Take, for example, a word containing two E (pronounced A in German), the word “gehen”, to walk. If we have a feeling for such things, we may well experience in these two sounds of “gehen” a tranquil way of walking that does not excite us. But when the A-sound (German E) is replaced by an OW-sound (German AU), as in “laufen”, to run, you will feel in it something which you do not experience when you are not walking calmly, but when greater claims are made on your breathing. You feel what takes place when you breathe more quickly, and this is expressed in the OW-sound (German AU). You could not experience the calm way of walking, “gehen”, better than by the two A-sounds (German E), which convey the experience of calm and tranquillity, whereas the running movement, “laufen” is expressend in the OW-sound (German AU) which it contains. There is a spiritual essence in language and many examples which I have given you draw attention to the inner genius undoubtedly contained in speech. Modern men hardly know of its existence, but in past times, when the inner essence of sound could still be experienced, men felt in speech, more consciously than through sensory observation and thought, something which may indeed be felt as a spiritual weaving, a spiritual life.

In this element of speech, in this world of speech, live the Archangeloi, the Archangels, even as the Archai live in the world of thoughts. And because the Archangeloi live in the genius of speech, they are at the same time the Folk-Spirits, the leading spirits of the nations, a fact which I have often described in connection with the Archangels. They live in the element of speech. More than we suppose, man himself is the product of speech, in the same way in which he is, on the other hand, the product of his thought-world. We derive our form completely from the external world, and through our will we again pour form into the external world. What constitutes our life comes from the same region as our thoughts. The Archai live in it. What comes to expression in our language, through which we belong to a nation, brings to expression physical qualities which limit us far more as human beings than that which comes from the thought-element. People have the same thoughts, yet different languages. In regard to language they differ, yet it is nevertheless something which they have in common with others, for man belongs to a small or large nation.

Let us now descend to the sphere of the Angeloi. As often explained, also in this lecture, man has an individual connection with his Angel. This comes to expression in two ways. It expresses itself inwardly. Man may submit to his inner life in such a way as to transcend his inner self. In ordinary life, a Luciferic element will immediately enter because this is an intimate experience; nevertheless man may transcend himself inwardly and experience, as it were, an objective element in phantasy. In many respects, his phantasy is a creative force, but individually creative, like speech. And in reality, the force of phantasy lies at the foundation of speech. Through speech, man only experiences something abstract, he cannot always feel the Archangel, who is the genius of speech, unfolding his wings in speech; similarly man cannot perceive in his phantasy—which becomes a play of fancy when pervaded by Luciferic elements—that an Angel is slipping through his individual life; whenever he lives in his phantasy, an Angel passes through him. A genuine poet, a genuine artist, who has not become cynical, frivolous or superficial, knows that a higher spirituality pervades him whenever he is artistically creative. It is the same higher spirituality that carries him from life to life, as our individual guardian spirit, as his Angelos, his Angel. It is the Angel that enters sound human phantasy. In some of Goethe’s mottoes we can recognise that Goethe was aware of an unconscious element working in him, the one that is really active in phantasy.

When the human being does not inwardly transcend himself, but is outside himself during sleep, and in sleep enters the sphere which is the source of phantasy during his waking life, then the same forces which openly manifest themselves in his phantasy come to expression more sub-consciously in the form of dreams. Phantasy may degenerate into an empty play of fancy when it is pervaded by Luciferic forces, and in the same way dreams may degenerate, become abnormal, and man may take them for realities when they are pervaded by Ahrimanic influences. Dreams as such enter the Luciferic sphere, but they may be pervaded by Ahrimanic influences. When, however, our dreams are innocent and purely human, they also contain the Being whom we call our Angelos, the same that lives in our phantasy when we transcend ourselves inwardly, as it were.

The world of speech, ruled by the Archangel, is shaded off inwardly to a world which exists between feeling and thought, to a world of representations—we might also say, to a world of feeling representations. Phantasy and dreaming are shaded off to a world of feeling and to the element of feeling contained in the will—we might also say, to volitional feeling. But when we descend still further, below the Angeloi, what sphere do we reach? We reach our own sphere, we come to the human Ego. There we must transcend ourselves more intensively than when the Angel lives in us. This occurs when we transform impulses of the will into external actions, as explained yesterday.

Elohim—Spirits of Form World of the Senses.
Archai—World of Thought.
Archangeloi—World of Speech – Feeling Representation.
Angeloi—Phantasy—Dreaming—Volitional Feeling.
Human Ego—Volitional Action—Will.

When we dream, we are completely outside ourselves, but we go out of ourselves only spiritually. When we do something through our will, we do not of course go out of ourselves physically, but we move our physical body, and these impulses of the will are really the foundation of our Ego. We may therefore say: The will lives in our volitional actions, the will digs itself, as it were, into the external world.

We have descended as far as the physical world. In the physical world we develop ourselves in an independent way only through our will-actions, only in what remains to us as the sum-total of our actions when we pass through death. Our Ego, upon which we look back after death, lives in our actions. In everything else, in our phantasy and dreams, in world of speech, in our world of thought and in what we obtain through the senses, live higher spiritual Beings that constantly pervade us.

We have now been able to conclude from ordinary life how we are connected with the spiritual cosmos. But the following consideration will lead us to the results which spiritual science can reach through these concepts. Let us take human life in the physical-sensory world. You pass through this world, you derive certain impressions from it. Perhaps you may still remember these impressions on the following day. I do not say that tomorrow all the people who are now sitting in this hall will have an inner experience of the lecture they are now hearing. But as a rule we may say that the things which we perceive in our surroundings continue to live within us.

I will now make a schematic drawing, in order that we may continue along this line of thought. Here is the surrounding world and at this point let us imagine man. What constitutes the surrounding world continues to live in him, for what you experience in connection with your environment continues to live within you physically. The external world, which we can only perceive through the senses, continues to live in the soul in the form of abstract experiences, in thoughts and feelings which stimulate our will impu1ses. You may now say: What lives within me, what I thus carry about with me (let us envisage this very exactly!), is the result of my ex-periences between birth and death, or between birth and the present moment.

But let us now turn our gaze to something which we do not carry within our soul in such an abstract, picture-like form, but which lives within us—I might say—in a concretely material way: the organs that lie under our skin, the lungs, the heart, the liver, and so forth. This too is something which we carry within us. A true mystic will say: This does not interest me in the least! I am only interested in the spiritual, in the soul. I am content to have within me soul-impressions which come from the surrounding world. Material things are far too low for me. But the mystic shows by this how deeply materialistic he really is, because he does not yet know that what apparently reveals itself materially is in reality spiritual. Spiritual is not only what we bear within us abstractly, the soul-experiences which are echoes of external experiences between birth and death, but spiritual are also our lungs, our liver, etc. Only to our ordinary consciousness do they appear in a material form, but they are altogether products of the spirit. When you are sitting in your study you may have the thought that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. This thought is your inner property. But once it lived outside. It may first have approached you through a book or a lecture; that is to say, from the outside world. But you also bear within you materially the lungs, the heart, the liver, the brain, etc. Also these are the result of experiences. These inner organs that live in you were of course not produced by the physical substance which only comes through conception and birth, but their inner form, their inner structure is the result of experiences between death and birth. You now hear what I am saying and my words will become a soul-experience; similarly your heart, your lungs, your liver, are the result of experiences made between death and a new birth. We may therefore say:

“What I carry with me psychically within my inner being is the result of my experiences between birth and death.”

“What I carry within me as my bodily organisation is the result of my life between death and birth.”

Materialists will of course object that all the organs which live in man were inherited physically from the forefathers. But this is quite mistaken; it is not so. Certainly, the physical substance is transmitted by the ancestors, but the germ is generally viewed quite wrongly. It must be viewed wrongly if it is only considered from the material aspect. Conception does not consist therein that the human being is drawn down materially through the generations, but there arises, as it were, a vacuum, substance is destroyed in man, and in this vacuum the whole universe begins to work, to build up man. Physical structure penetrates into the spiritual structure, for the lungs, the heart, the liver, etc. are altogether spiritual in their structure. But all the organising forces come from the whole universe, and they are formed by our experiences between death and a new birth. This is what we experience through a super wakeful consciousness when we rise up into the sphere of the Archangeloi and of the Archai. Between death and new birth we experience consciously, indeed we must say super-consciously, our organic structure, the way in which we build up our organs.

Our organs are built up in a way which is entirely in keeping with our Karma; they correspond with what we bring with us from a former earthly life. The merely physical processes which apparently take place in the line of the generations are therefore not only physical processes, but they are brought about by the whole cosmos.

When ordinary, superficial materialists come along and say: “Do not explain man’s origin and development in his mother’s womb by drawing in the whole cosmos, do not lead us out into the whole cosmos, for we can explain all this by describing the continuity of the germ’s plasma throughout the generations”—when these materialists come along, the following picture I have used has often been of help: You have a magnetic needle pointing north and south. Now a person may say: Certain mad physicists declare that the whole earth is a magnet and that the needle’s south-pole is attracted by the earth’s soul-pole. But the reason why the needle points to the south must be sought in the needle itself. What does the magnetic needle matter to the earth?—Our biologists talk more or less in the same way when they speak of the human germ. They see nothing but this germ. But even as the whole earth is active in the magnetic needle, so the whole universe is active in the development of the germ. Except that man’s share in it lies further back, in the unconscious sphere.

You see, if things are considered in this light, man and his whole existence are linked up with a material and with a spiritual universe. We say to ourselves: Whenever we think or cognise something through our ordinary consciousness we change the outer world into an inner world. Yesterday I explained to you from a certain aspect that when the human being passes through the portal of death his inner world becomes his outer world, and his outer world his inner. To-day I explained to you from another aspect that everything which lies before birth, i.e. before conception, should be regarded in such a way that the processes which prepare our inner bodily structure should be sought in the life between death and a new birth. Outer life becomes inner life. Our experiences which lie spread out, as it were, in the whole cosmos, quietly and unconsciously change into inner experiences and become our organs.

The organs within us indeed contain a whole universe. If we only bear in mind the ordinary descriptions of our organs in anatomy and physiology we have before as an illusion, a Maya, which is far stronger than the one which faces us in the external world.

I have told you that when we look out into the sensory world we look as far as the sphere of the Elohim. But when we look down into our inner bodily structure we must rise still higher in regard to that which lives within us and forms our organs. From my “Occult Science” you also know that there are Beings above the Spirits of Form. They do not only live outside man, but work within him. We learn something about them between death and a new birth, when we rise to the sphere of the Archai, but with our own consciousness. Through the Archai we learn to know these higher Beings. In this super-conscious state they show us what we pour into our organism. Throughout our life we really carry the world of the Hierarchies within our organic structure.

Now it is again possible to investigate such things. In past epochs they were known through a certain instinctive clairvoyant consciousness. People still spoke of the fact that the human organism is a temple of the gods, and knowledge of the whole cosmos was sought within man’s being, the microcosm; it was sought by interpreting the microcosm.

Do we not remember everything by drawing it out of our memory, in connection with the world which we have experienced since we gained consciousness in our earthly existence? We look into our inner self, and there we find the world which we experienced outside; it lives within us and we can, as it were, look upon the pictures which we carry within our soul in such a way that the life outside has entered these pictures. We understand our earthly life anew by looking back upon these pictures of memory. And when we consider our bodily organisation and understand it, then we understand cosmic processes. Our inner memories enable us to understand our experiences. And if we know how to consider our whole human organisation, we grasp the cosmic processes. To understand man through and through is Anthroposophy.

Anthroposophy is therefore also a cosmosophy. Our life rises up before us when we remember; similarly Anthroposophy is a cosmic memory that sets before us the whole world-process: Cosmosophy. It is impossible to think of these two things apart. Cosmosophy and Anthroposophy are one. Man is to be found in the cosmos and the cosmos in man. Consequently my “Occult Science” is still anthropomorphic when it describes the evolution through Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, etc., for it is at the same time the evolution of mankind. It gives the evolution of the cosmos and that of man. The further we penetrate into the mysteries of life, the more cosmos and man flow together, and the more evident it becomes that the separation between man and cosmos which exists in earthly life is only an illusion, for man belongs to the cosmos and the cosmos to man; man is to be found in the cosmos and the cosmos in man.

You will have seen how we are trying in these lectures to prepare the ground for an adequate World-picture. As I have pointed out again and again, the astronomical phenomena themselves impel us to advance from the merely quantitative to the qualitative aspect. Under the influence of Natural Science there is a tendency, in modern scholarship altogether, to neglect the qualitative side and to translate what is really qualitative into quantitative terms, or at least into rigid forms. For when we study things from a formal aspect we tend to pass quite involuntarily into rigid forms, even if we went to keep them mobile. But the question is, whether an adequate understanding of the phenomena of the Universe is possible at all in terms of rigid, formal concepts. We cannot build an astronomical World-picture until this question has been answered.

This proneness to the quantitative, abstracting from the qualitative aspect, has led to a downright mania for abstraction which is doing no little harm in scientific life, for it leads right away from reality. People will calculate for instance under what conditions, if two sound-waves are emitted one after the other, the sound omitted later will be heard before the other. All that is necessary is the trifling detail that we ourselves should be moving with a velocity greater than that of sound. But anyone who thinks in keeping with real life instead of letting his thoughts and concepts run away from the reality, will, when he finds them incompatible with the conditions of man's co-existence with his environment, stop forming concepts in this direction. He cannot but do so. There is no sense whatever in formulating concepts for situations in which one can never be.

To be a spiritual scientist one must educate oneself to look at things in this way. The spiritual scientist will always want his concepts to be united with reality. He does not want to form concepts remote from reality, going off at a tangent,—or at least not for long. He brings them back to reality again and again. The harm that is done by the wrong kinds of hypothesis in modern time is due above all to the deficient feeling for the reality in which one lives. A conception of the world free of hypotheses, for which we strive and ought to strive, would be achieved far more quickly if we could only permeate ourselves with this sense of reality. And we should then be prepared, really to see what the phenomenal world presents. In point of fact this is not done today. If the phenomena were looked at without prejudice, quite another world-picture would arise than the world-pictures of contemporary science, from which far-fetched conclusions are deduced to no real purpose, piling one unreality upon another in merely hypothetical thought-structures.

Starting from this and from what was given yesterday, I must again introduce certain concepts which may not seem at first to be connected with our subject, though in the further course you will see that they too are necessary for the building of a true World-picture. I shall again refer to what was said yesterday in connection with the Ice-ages and with the evolution of the Earth altogether. To begin with however, we will take our start from another direction.

Our life of knowledge is made up of the sense-impressions we receive and of what comes into being when we assimilate the sense-impressions in our inner mental life. Rightly and naturally, we distinguish in our cognitional life the sense-perceptions as such and the inner life of ‘ideas’—mental pictures. To approach the reality of this domain we must being by forming these two concepts: That of the sense-perception pure and simple, and of the sense-perception transformed and assimilated into a mental picture.

It is important to see without prejudice, what is the real difference between our cognitional life insofar as this is permeated with actual sense-perceptions and insofar as it consists of mere mental picture. We need to see these things not merely side by side in an indifferent way; we need to recognize the subtle differences of quality and intensity with which they come into our inner life.

If we compare the realm of our sense-perceptions—the way in which we experience them—with our dream-life, we shall of course observe an essential qualitative difference between the two. But it is not the same as regards our inner life of ideas and mental pictures. I am referring now, not to their content but to their inner quality. Concerning this, the content—permeated as it is with reminiscences of sense-perceptions—easily deludes us. Leaving aside the actual content and looking only at its inner quality and character—the whole way we experience it,—there is no qualitative difference between our inner life in ideas and mental pictures and our life of dreams. Think of our waking life by day, or all that is present in the field of our consciousness in that we open our senses to the outer world and are thereby active in our inner life, forming mental pictures and ideas. In all this forming of mental pictures we have precisely the same kind of inner activity as in our dream-life; the only thing that is added to it is the content determined by sense-perception.

This also helps us realize that man's life of ideation—his forming of mental pictures—is a more inward process than sense-perception. Even the structure of our sense-organs—the way they are built into the body—shows it. The processes in which we live by virtue of these organs are not a little detached from the rest of the bodily organic life. As a pure matter of fact, it is far truer to describe the life of our senses as a gulf-like penetration of the outer world into our body (Fig. 1) than as something primarily contained within the latter. Once more, it is truer to the facts to say that through the eye, for instance, we experience a gulf-like entry of the outer world. The relative detachment of the sense-organs enables us consciously to share in the domain of the outer world. Our most characteristic organs of sense are precisely the part of us which is least closely bound to the inner life and organization of the body. Our inner life of ideation on the other hand—our forming of mental pictures—is very closely bound to it. Ideation therefore is quite another element in our cognitional life than sense-perception as such. (Remember always that I am thinking of these processes such as they are at the present stage in human evolution.)

Now think again of what I spoke of yesterday—the evolution of the life of knowledge from one Ice-Age to another. Looking back in time, you will observe that the whole interplay of sense-perceptions with the inner life of ideation—the forming of mental pictures—has undergone a change since the last Ice-Age. If you perceive the very essence of that metamorphosis in the life of knowledge which I was describing yesterday, then you will realize that in the times immediately after the decline of the Ice-Age the human life of cognition took its start from quite another quality of experience than we have today. To describe it more definitely; whilst our cognitional life has become more permeated and determined by the senses and all that we receive from them, what we do not receive from the senses—what we received long, long ago through quite another way of living with the outer world—has faded out and vanished, ever more as time went on. This other quality—this other way of living with the world—belongs however to this day to our ideas and mental pictures. In quality they are like dreams. Fro in our dreams we have a feeling of being given up to, surrendered to the world around us. We have the same kind of experience in our mental pictures. While forming mental pictures we do not really differentiate between ourselves and the world that then surrounds us; we are quite given up to the latter. Only in the act of sense-perception do we separate ourselves from the surrounding world. Now this is just what happened to the whole character of man's cognitional life since the last Ice-Age. Self-consciousness was kindled. Again and again the feeling of the “I” lit up, and this became ever more so.

What do we come to therefore, as we go back in evolution beyond the last Ice-Age? (We are not making hypotheses; we are observing what really happened.) We come to a human life of soul, not only more dream-like than that of today, but akin to our present life of ideation rather than to our life in actual sense-perception. Now ideation—once again, the forming of mental pictures—is more closely bound to the bodily nature than is the life of the senses. Therefore what lives and works in this realm will find expression rather within the bodily nature than independently of the latter. Remembering what was said in the last few lectures, this will then lead you from the daily to the yearly influences of the surrounding world. The daily influences, as I showed, are those which tend to form our conscious picture of the world, whereas the yearly influences affect our bodily nature as such. Hence if we trace what has been going on in man's inner life, as we go back in time we are led from the conscious life of soul deeper and deeper into the bodily organic life.

In other works; before the last Ice-Age the course of the year and the seasons had a far greater influence on man than after. Man, once again, is the reagent whereby we can discern the cosmic influences which surround the Earth. Only when this is seen can we form true ideas of the relations—including even those of movement—between the Earth and the surrounding heavenly bodies. To penetrate the phenomena of movement in the Heavens, we have to take our start from man—man, the most sensitive of instruments, if I may call him so. And to this end we need to know man; we must be able to discern what belongs to the one realm, namely the influences of the day, and to the other, the influences of the year.

Those who have made a more intensive study of Anthroposophical Science may be reminded here of what I have often described from spiritual perception; the conditions of life in old Atlantis, that is before the last Ice-Age. For I was there describing from another aspect—namely from direct spiritual sight—the very same things which we are here approaching more by the light of reason, taking our start from the facts of the external world.

We are led back then to a kind of interplay between the Earth and its celestial environment which gave men an inner life of ideation—mental pictures—and which was afterwards transmuted in such a way as to give rise to the life of sense-perception in its present form. (The life of the senses as such is of course a much wider concept; we are here referring to the form it takes in present time.)

But we must make a yet more subtle distinction. It is true that self-consciousness or Ego-consciousness, such as we have it in our ordinary life today, is only kindled in us in the moment of awakening. Self-consciousness trikes in upon us the moment we awaken. It is our relation to the outer world—that relation to it, into which we enter by the use of our senses—to which we owe our self-consciousness. But if we really analyze what it is that thus strikes in upon us, we shall perceive the following. If our inner life in mental pictures retained its dream-like quality and only the life of the senses were added to it, something would still be lacking. Our concepts would remain like the concepts of fantasy or fancy (I do not say identical with these, but like them). We should not get the sharply outlined concepts which we need for outer life. Simultaneously therefore with the life of the senses, something flows into us from the outer world which gives sharp outlines and contours to the mental pictures of our every-day cognitional life. This too is given to us by the outer world. Were it not for this, the mere interplay of sensory effects with the forming of ideas and mental pictures would bring about in us a life of fantasy or fancy and nothing more; we should never achieve the sharp precision of every-day waking life.

Now let us look at the different phenomena quite simply in Goethe's way, or—as has since been said, rather more abstractly—in Kizchhoff's way. Before doing so I must however make another incidental remark, Scientists nowadays speak of a “physiology of the senses”, and even try to build on this foundation a “psychology of the senses”, of which there are different schools. But if you see things as they are, you will find little reality under these headings. In effect, our senses are so radically different from one-another that a “Physiology of the senses”, claiming to treat them all together, can at more be highly abstract. All that emerges, in the last resort, is a rather scanty and even then very questionable physiology and psychology of the sense of touch, which is transferred by analogy to the other senses. If you look for what is real, you will require a distinct physiology and a distinct psychology for every one of the senses.

Provided we remember this, we may proceed. With all the necessary qualifications, we can then say the following. Look at the human eye. (I cannot now repeat the elementary details which you can find in any scientific text-book.) Look at the human eye, one of the organs giving us impressions of the outer world,—sense-impressions and also what gives them form and contour. These impressions, received through the eye, are—once again—connected with all the mental pictures which we then make of them in our inner life.

Let us now make the clear distinction, so as to perceive what underlies the sharp outline and configuration which makes our mental images more than mere pictures of fancy, giving them clear and precise outline. We will distinguish this from the whole realm of imagery where this clarity and sharpness is not to be found,—where in effect we should be living in fantasies. Even through what we experience with the help of our sense-organs—and what our inner faculty of ideation makes of it—we should still be floating in a realm of fancies. It is through the outer world that all this imagery receives clear outline, finished contours. It is through something from the outer world, which in a certain way comes into a definite relation to our eye.

And now look around. Transfer, what we have thus recognized as regards the human eye, to the human being as a whole. Look for it, simply and empirically, in the human being as a whole. Where do we find—though in a metamorphosed form—what makes a similar impression? We find it in the process of fertilization. The relation of the human being as a whole—the female human body—to the environment is, in a metamorphosed form, the same as the relation of the eye to the environment. To one who is ready to enter into these things it will be fully clear. Only translated, one might say, into the material domain, the female life is the life of fantasy or fancy of the Universe, whereas the male is that which forms the contours and sharp outlines. It is the male which transforms the undetermined life of fancy into a life of determined form and outline. Seen in the way we have described in today's lecture, the process of sight is none other than a direct metamorphosis of that of fertilization; and vice-versa.

We cannot reach workable ideas about the Universe without entering into such things as these. I am only sorry that I can do no more than indicate them, but after all, these lectures are meant as a stimulus to further work. This I conceive to be the purpose of such lectures; as an outcome, every one of you should be able to go on working in one or other of the directions indicated. I only want to show the directions; they can be followed up in diverse ways. There are indeed countless possibilities in our time, to carry scientific methods of research into new directions. Only we need to lay more stress on the qualitative aspects, even in those domains where one has grown accustomed to a mere quantitative treatment.

What do we do, in quantitative treatment? Mathematics is the obvious example; ‘Phoronomy’ (Kinematics) is another. We ourselves first develop such a science, and we then look to find its truths in the external, empirical reality. But in approaching the empirical reality in its completeness we need more than this. We need a richer content to approach it with, than merely mathematical and phoronomical ideas. Approach the world with the premises of Phoronomy and Mathematics, and we shall naturally find starry worlds, or developmental mechanisms as the case may be, phoronomically and mathematically ordered. We shall find other contents in the world if once we take our start from other realms than the mathematical and phoronomical. Even in experimental research we shall do so.

The clear differentiation between the life of the senses and the organic life of the human being as a whole had not yet taken place in the time preceding the last Ice-Age. The human being still enjoyed a more synthetic, more ‘single’ organic life. Since the last Ice-Age man's organic life has undergone, as one might say, a very real ‘analysis’. This too is an indication that the relation of the Earth to the Sun was different before the last Ice-Age from what it afterwards became. This is the kind of premise from which we have to take our start, so as to reach genuine pictures and ideas about the Universe in its relation to the Earth and man.

Moreover our attention is here drawn to another question, my dear Friends. To what extent is ‘Euclidean space’—the name, of course, does not matter—I mean the space which is characterized by three rigid directions at right angles to each other. This, surely, is a rough and ready definition of Euclidean space. I might also call it ‘Kantian space’, for Kant's arguments are based on this assumption. Now as regards this Euclidean—or, if you will, Kantian—space we have to put the question: Does it correspond to a reality, or is it only a thought-picture, an abstraction? After all, it might well be that there is really no such thing as this rigid space. Now you will have to admit; when we do analytical geometry we start with the assumption that the X-, Y- and Z-axes may be taken in this immobile way. We assume that this inner rigidity of the X, Y and Z has something to do with the real world. What if there were nothing after all, in the realms of reality, to justify our setting up the three coordinate axes of analytical geometry in this rigid way? Then too the whole of our Euclidean Mathematics would be at most a kind of approximation to the reality—an approximation which we ourselves develop in our inner life,—convenient framework with which to approach it in the first place. It would not hold out any promise, when applied to the real world, to give us real information.

The question now is, are there any indications pointing in this direction,—suggesting, in effect, that this rigidity of space can not, after all, be maintained? I know, what I am here approaching will cause great difficulty to many people of today, for the simple reason that they do not keep step with reality in their thinking. They think you can rely upon an endless chain of concepts, deducing one thing logically from another, drawing logical and mathematical conclusions without limit. In contrast to this tendency in science nowadays, we have to learn to think with the reality,—not to permit ourselves merely to entertain a thought-picture without at least looking to see whether or not it is in accord with reality. So in this instance, we should investigate. Perhaps after all, by looking into the world of concrete things, there is some way of reaching a more qualitative determination of space.

I am aware, my dear Friends, that the ideas I shall now set forth will meet with great resistance. Yet it is necessary to draw attention to such things. The theory of evolution has entered ever more into the different fields of science. They even began applying it to Astronomy. (This phase, perhaps, is over now, but it was so a little while ago.) They began to speak of a kind of natural selection. Then as the radical Darwinians would do for living organisms, so they began to attribute the genesis of heavenly bodies to a kind of natural selection, as though the eventual form of our solar system had arisen by selection from among all the bodies that had first been ejected. Even this theory was once put forward. There is this p to the whole Universe the leading ideas that have once been gaining some particular domain of science.

So too it came about that man was simply placed at the latter end of the evolutionary series of the animal kingdom. Human morphology, physiology etc. were thus interpreted. But the question is whether this kind of investigation can do justice to man's organization in its totality. For, to begin with, it omits what is most striking and essential even from a purely empirical point of view. One saw the evolutionists of Haechel's school simply counting how many bones, muscles and so on man and the higher animals respectively possess. Counting in that way, one can hardly do otherwise than put man at the end of the animal kingdom. Yet it is quite another matter when you envisage what is evident for all eyes to see, namely that the spine of man is vertical while that of the animal is mainly horizontal. Approximate though this may be, it is definite and evident. The deviations in certain animals—looked into empirically—will prove to be of definite significance in each single case. Where the direction of the spine is turned towards the vertical, corresponding changes are called forth in the animal as a whole. But the essential thing is to observe this very characteristic difference between man and animal. The human spine follows the vertical direction of the radius of the Earth, whereas the animal spine is parallel to the Earth's surface. Here you have purely spatial phenomena with a quite evident inner differentiation, inasmuch as they apply to the whole figure and formation of the animal and man. Taking our start from the realities of the world, we cannot treat the horizontal in the same way as the vertical. Enter into the reality of space—see what is happening in space, such as it really is,—you cannot possibly regard the horizontal as though it were equivalent or interchangeable with the vertical dimension.

Now there is a further consequence of this. Look at the animal form and at the form of man. We will take our start from the animal, and please fill in for yourselves on some convenient occasion what I shall now be indicating. I mean, observe and contemplate for yourselves the skeleton of an mammal. The usual reflections in this realm are not nearly concrete enough; they do not enter thoroughly enough into the details.

Consider then the skeleton of an animal. I will go no farther than the skeleton, but what I say of this is true in an even higher degree of the other parts and systems in the human and animal body. Look at the obvious differentiation, comparing the skull with the opposite end of the animal. If you do this with morphological insight, you will perceive characteristic harmonies or agreements, and also characteristic diversities. Here is a line of research which should be followed in far greater detail. Here is something to be seen and recognized, which will lead far more deeply into realty than scientists today are wont to go.

It lies in the very nature of these lectures that I can only hint at such things, leaving out many an intervening link. I must appeal to your own intuition, trusting you to think it out and fill in what is missing between one lecture and the next. You will then see how all these things are connected. If I did otherwise in these few lectures, we should not reach the desired end.

Diagrammatically now (Fig. 2), let this be the animal form. If after going into an untold number of intervening links in the investigation, you put the question: ‘What is the characteristic difference of the front and the back, the head and the tail end due to?’, you will reach a very interesting conclusion. Namely you will connect the differentiation of the front end with the influences of the Sun. Here is the Earth (Fig. 3). You have an animal on the side of the Earth exposed to the Sun. Now take the side of the Earth that is turned away from the Sun. In one way or another it will come about that the animal is on this other side. Here too the Sun's rays will be influencing the animal, but the earth is now between. In the one case the rays of the Sun are working on the animal directly; in the other case indirectly, inasmuch as the Earth is between and the Sun's rays first have to pass through the Earth (Fig. 3).

Expose the animal form to the direct influence of the Sun and you get the head. Expose the animal to those rays of the Sun which have first gone through the Earth and you get the opposite pole to the head. Study the skull, so as to recognize in it the direct outcome of the influences of the Sun. Study the forms, the whole morphology of the opposite pole, so as to recognize the working of the Sun's rays before which the Earth is interposed—the indirect rays of the Sun. Thus the morphology of the animal itself draws our attention to a certain interrelation between Earth and Sun. For a true knowledge of the mutual relations of Earth and Sun we must create the requisite conditions, not by the mere visual appearance (even though the eye be armed with telescopes), but by perceiving also how the animal is formed—how the whole animal form comes into being.

Now think again of how the human spine is displaced through right angle in relation to the animal. All the effects which we have been describing will undergo further modification where man is concerned. The influences of the Sun will therefore be different in man than in the animal. The way it works in man will be like a resultant (Fig. 4). That is to say, if we symbolize the horizontal line—whether it represent the direct or the indirect influence of the Sun—by this length, we shall have to say; here is a vertical line; this also will be acting. And we shall only get what really works in man by forming the resultant of the two.

Suppose in other words that we are led to relate animal formation quite fundamentally to some form of cosmic movement—say, a rotation of the Sun about the Earth, or a rotation of the Earth about its own axis. If then this movement underlies animal formation, we shall be led inevitably to attribute to the Earth or to the Sun yet another movement, related to the forming of man himself,—a movement which, for its ultimate effect, unites to a resultant with the first. From what emerges in man and in the animal we must derive the basis for a true recognition of the mutual movements among the heavenly bodies.

The study of Astronomy will thus be lifted right out of its present limited domain, where one merely takes the outward visual appearance, even if calling in the aid of telescopes, mathematical calculations and mechanics. It will be lifted into what finds expression in this most sensitive of instruments, the living body. The forming forces working in the animal, and then again in man, are a clear indication of the real movements in celestial space.

This is indeed a kind of qualitative Mathematics. How, then, shall we metamorphose the idea when we pass on from the animal to the plant? We can no longer make use of either of the two directions we have hitherto been using. Admittedly, it might appear as though the vertical direction of the plant coincided with that of the human spine. From the aspect of Euclidean space it does, no doubt (Euclidean space, that is to say, not with respect to detailed configuration but simply with respect to its rigidity.) But it will not be the same in an inherently mobile space. I mean a space, the dimensions of which are so inherently mobile that in the relevant equations, for example, we cannot merely equate the \(x\)- and the \(y\)-dimensions: \(y = ƒ(x)\). (The equation might be written very differently from this. You will see what I intend more from the words I use than from the symbols; it is by no means easy to express in mathematical form.) In a co-ordinate system answering to what I now intend, it would no longer be permissible to measure the ordinates with the same inherent measures as the abscissae. We could not keep the measures rigid when passing from the one to the other. We should be led in this way from the rigid co-ordinate system of Euclidean space to a co-ordinate system that is inherently mobile.

And if we now once more ask the question: How are the vertical directions of plant growth and of human growth respectively related?—we shall be led to differentiate one vertical from another. The question is, then, how to find the way to a different idea of space from the rigid one of Euclid. For it may well be that the celestial phenomena can only be understood in terms of quite another kind of space—neither Euclidean, nor any abstractly conceived space of modern Mathematics, but a form of space derived from the reality itself. if this is so, then there is no alternative; it is in such a space and not in the rigid space of Euclid that we shall have to understand them.

Thus we are led into quite other realms, namely to the Ice-Age on the one hand and on the other to a much needed reform of the Euclidean idea of space. But this reform will be in a different spirit than in the work of Minkowski and others. Simply in contemplating the given facts and trying to build up a science free of hypotheses, we are confronted with the need for a thoroughgoing revision of the concept of space itself. Of these things we shall speak again tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral Ideals

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

Theoretical thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 1. Supplementary Notes section.

In the last lecture we retraced the past of man more particularly from the point of view of his form and his body. We will now consider the past as regards his states of consciousness.

The following questions often arise before the mind: Is man the only being upon Earth who possesses self consciousness? Or again: What is the relation between the consciousness of man and that of the animals, plants and metals? Have these lower kingdoms of life any consciousness at all?

Imagine that a tiny insect crawling on the body of a man could see only his finger. It could have no conception whatever of the organism as a whole, nor of the soul. We ourselves are in exactly the same position as regards the Earth and other beings indwelling it. A materialist has no conception of the soul of the Earth and, as a natural result, he is not aware of the existence of his own soul. Similarly, if a tiny insect is unaware of the soul of man, this is because it has no soul with which to perceive.

The Earth-soul is much more sublime than the soul of man and man knows nothing of it. In reality, all beings have consciousness but man's consciousness is quite different, inasmuch as in our age it is perfectly attuned to the physical world.

As well as the waking state (corresponding to the physical world), man passes through other conditions of consciousness. During dreamless sleep, his consciousness lives in the devachanic world. The consciousness of the plant is always devachanic. If a plant ‘suffers,’ the suffering brings about a change in devachanic consciousness. The animal has astral consciousness, corresponding to the dream-life of man.

These three states of consciousness are very different. In the physical world we evolve ideas simply by means of the sense organs and the outer realities with which these organs put us into touch. In the astral world, we perceive the surrounding milieu only in the form of pictures, feeling at the same time as if we were part of them.

Why does man, who is conscious in the physical world, feel himself separate from all that is not himself? It is because he receives all his impressions from a milieu which he perceives very distinctly outside his body. In the astral world, on the contrary, we do not perceive by means of the senses but by the sympathy which makes us penetrate to the heart of everything we encounter. Astral consciousness is not confined within a relatively limited field; in a certain sense it is liquid, fluidic. In the devachanic world, consciousness is as diffused as a gas might be. There is no resemblance whatever with physical consciousness, into which nothing penetrates except by way of the senses.

What was the object of this shutting-off of consciousness which followed the stage of imaginative consciousness? If such a shutting-off had not taken place, man could never have said ‘I’ of himself. The divine germ could not have penetrated into his being in the course of evolution if it had not been for the crystallisation of his physical body. Where, then, was this divine Spirit before the solidification of the Earth and of consciousness? Genesis tells us: “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The divine Spirit, the spark of the Ego, was still in the astral world.

In higher Devachan, beyond the fourth degree, referred to in occultism as Arupa (without body), where Akasha (negative substance) has its rise—there is the home of the consciousness of the minerals. We must try to reach a deep and true understanding of the mineral kingdom and discover our moral link with it. The Rosicrucians in the Middle Ages taught their disciples to revere the chastity of the mineral,—“Imagine,” they said, “that while retaining his faculties of thinking and feeling, a man becomes as pure and free from desire as the mineral,—He then possesses an infallible power—a spiritual power.”—If we can say that the spirits of the several minerals are living in Devachan, we can say equally correctly that the spirit of the minerals is like a man who might live only with devachanic consciousness.

In other beings, then, the existence of consciousness must not be denied. Man has traversed all these degrees of consciousness on the descending curve of evolution. Originally he resembled the minerals, in this sense, that his Ego lived in a higher world and guided him from above. But the aim of evolution is to free man from being subject to beings endowed with a consciousness higher than his own and to bear him to a point where he himself is fully conscious in higher worlds.

All these levels of consciousness are contained within man today:

1. The consciousness of the mineral-corresponding to deep sleep.
2. The consciousness of the plant-ordinary sleep.
3. Animal consciousness-dream-life.
4. Physical, objective consciousness-the normal waking state. The two former states are atavistic survivals.
5. A consciousness which repeats the third stage but retains the acquired quality of objectivity. Images have definite colours and are realised as being quite distinct from the perceiver. The subjective sense of attraction or repulsion vanishes. In this new imaginative consciousness, the faculty of reason that has been acquired in the physical world retains its own powers.
6. Sleep itself—not the dream—here becomes a conscious state. We do not only behold images but we enter into the living essence of beings and hear their inner tones. In the physical world we give names to things but the names are merely outer appellations. Only man can express his own being from within by saying ‘I’—the ineffable name of conscious individuality. By this word we distinguish our own personality from the rest of the universe. But when we become conscious of the world of sound, each being, each thing communicates its own true name; in clairaudience we hear the sound which expresses its innermost being and rings forth as a tone in the universe that is distinct from all others.
7. One stage further and deep sleep becomes a conscious state. Description is impossible, for this condition passes beyond the limits of comparison. All that can be said is that it exists.

Such are the seven states of consciousness through which man passes, and he will pass through others too. There is always one central state, with three beneath and three above. The three higher states reproduce, in a higher sense, the three lower. A traveler is always at the centre of the horizon. Each state of consciousness develops through seven states of life, and each state of life through seven states of form. Thus seven states of form always constitute one state of life; seven states of life compose one whole period of planetary evolution, for example that of our Earth.

The seven states of life culminate in the formation of seven kingdoms, of which four are actually visible: the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms. In each state of consciousness, therefore, man passes through 7 x 7 states of form this brings us to 7 x 7 x 7 metamorphoses (343).

If we could envisage in one single tableau the 343 states of form, we should have a picture of the third Logos.

If we could envisage the 49 states of life, we should have a picture of the second Logos.

If we could envisage the 7 states of consciousness, we should have a conception of the first Logos.

Evolution consists in the mutual interaction of all these seven forms. In order to pass from one form to the other, a new spirit is necessary (the action of the Holy Spirit). In order to pass from one state of life to another, a new power is necessary (the action of the Son). In order to pass from one state of consciousness to another, a new consciousness is necessary (the action of the Father).

Christ Jesus brought a new state of life and was in very truth the Word made Flesh. With the coming of the Christ, a new force entered into the world, preparing a new Earth in a new relationship with the heavens.