The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the lecture yesterday I gave certain indications in connection with the understanding of human destiny, and I said that an inkling of the power of destiny may come to a man from experiences which have had a significant effect upon his life. Suppose that at a certain age a man meets another human being; after the meeting their destinies run a similar course but the lives they both led hitherto have completely changed. An event like this meeting would have no rhyme or reason if it were entirely unconnected with previous happenings in their lives. Nor is this the case. Unprejudiced observation of the past reveals that practically every step taken in life was leading in the direction of this event. We may look right back into our childhood and we shall invariably find that some deed far removed in time from this event, that indeed the whole course of our life, led up to it as surely as if we had consciously and deliberately taken the path to it.

Such matters direct attention again and again to what in Anthroposophy we must call ‘karmic relationships.’

I also said that acquaintanceships differ in character and as examples I quoted two extreme cases. We meet someone and form a bond with him, no matter what outward impression he makes upon our senses or aesthetic feelings. We do not think about his individual traits; our attraction to him is caused by something that wells up from within us. When we meet other human beings, we are not inwardly stirred in this way; we are more conscious of the appearance they present to our senses, our mental life, our aesthetic feelings. I said that this difference comes to expression even in the life of dream. We make acquaintanceships of the first kind and during the night, while we are living in the Ego and astral body outside the physical and etheric bodies, we immediately begin to be aware of the persons in question; we dream about them. The dreams are a sign that something within us has been set astir by the meeting. We meet others of whom we do not dream because they have not stirred us inwardly and nothing wells up from within. We may be quite near to them in life but we never dream about them because nothing that reaches into our astral body and Ego organisation has been set astir.

We heard that such happenings are related to the extra earthly forces with which man is connected and of which modern thought takes no account—the forces working in upon the Earth from the surrounding, super terrestrial Universe. We learned that the forces proceeding from the spiritual Moon Beings are connected with the whole of a man's past. For the past is in very truth working in us when immediately we meet a human being we are impelled towards him by something that wells up from within.

Speculation and dim feelings must, however, be replaced by Initiation science which can actually bring to light the inner connections of these things. The Initiate before whom the spiritual world lies open, has both kinds of experiences, but in far greater intensity than is possible to ordinary consciousness. In the one case, where something rises up from within into the ordinary consciousness, a definite picture or a whole series of pictures filled with living reality rise up from within the Initiate when he meets the other human being and are there before him like a script he is able to read. The experience is quite clear to him; he himself is there within the picture which rises up in this way—it is as if an artist were painting a picture but instead of standing in front of the canvas were weaving in the canvas itself, living in every colour, experiencing the very essence of the colour. The Initiate knows that the picture arising in this way has something to do with the human being he meets. And through an experience resembling that of meeting a person again after the lapse of many years, he recognises in the human being standing physically before him, the replica of the picture that has risen up in him. As he compares this inner picture with the man before him, he knows that it is the picture of experiences shared in common with him in earlier earthly lives. He looks back consciously into an earlier epoch when these experiences were shared between them. And as a result of what he has undergone in preparation for Initiation science, he experiences in a living picture—not in dim feeling as in ordinary consciousness—what he and the man he now meets passed through together in a previous earthly life or a number of previous lives. Initiation science enables us to see a picture of experiences shared with a man with whom we are karmically connected; it rises up with such intensity that it is as if he were to break away from his present identity and stand before us in his earlier form, coming to meet himself in the form he now bears. The impression is actually as vivid as that. And because the experience has such intense reality, we are able to relate it to its underlying forces and so to discover how and why this picture rose up from within us.

When man is descending to earthly life from the existence he spends in worlds of soul and spirit between death and a new birth, he passes through the different cosmic regions the last being the Moon-sphere. As he passes through the Moon-sphere he encounters those Beings of whom I spoke yesterday, saying that they were once the primeval Teachers of humanity. He meets these Beings out yonder in the Universe, before he comes down to the Earth, and it is they who inscribe everything that has happened in life between one human being and another, into that delicate substance which, as opposed to earthly substances, the oriental sages have called ‘Akasha.' It is really the case that whatever happens in life, whatever experiences come to men, everything is observed by those Beings who, as Spirit Beings not incarnate in the flesh, once peopled the Earth together with men. Everything is observed and inscribed into the Akasha substance as living reality, not in the form of an abstract script. These spiritual Moon Beings who were the great Teachers during the age of primeval cosmic wisdom, are the recorders of the experiences of mankind. And when in his life between death and a new birth a man is once again drawing near the Earth in order to unite with the seed provided by the parents, he passes through the region where the Moon Beings have recorded what he had experienced on the Earth in earlier incarnations. Whereas these Moon Beings, when they were living on the Earth, brought men a wisdom relating especially to the past of the Universe, in their present cosmic existence they preserve the past. And as man descends to earthly existence, everything they have preserved is engraved into his astral body. It is so easy to say that man consists of an Ego organisation, an astral body, an etheric body, and so forth. The Ego organisation is most akin to the Earth; it comprises what we learn and experience in earthly existence; the more deeply lying members of man's being are of a different character. Even the astral body is quite different; it is full of inscriptions, full of pictures. What is known simply as the ‘unconscious' discloses a wealth of content when it is illumined by real knowledge. And Initiation makes it possible to penetrate into the astral body and to bring within the range of vision all that the Moon Beings have inscribed into it as, for example, the experiences shared with other human beings. Initiation science enables us to fathom the secret of how the whole past rests within man and how ‘destiny' is shaped through the fact that in the Moon-existence there are Beings who preserve the past so that it lies within us when we again set foot upon the Earth.

And now another case. When the Initiate meets a man in connection with whom the ordinary consciousness simply receives an aesthetic or mental impression unaccompanied by dreams, no picture rises up in him, to begin with. In this case the gaze of the Initiate is directed to the Sun, not to the Moon. I have told you of the Beings who are connected with the Moon—in the same way, the Sun is not merely the gaseous body of which modern physicists speak. The physicists would be highly astonished if they were able to make an expedition to the region which they surmise to be full of incandescent gases and which they take to be the Sun; at the place where they have conjectured the presence of incandescent gases, they would find a condition that is not even space, that is less than a void a vacuum in cosmic space. What is space? Men do not really know—least of all the philosophers who give a great deal of thought to it. Just think: if there is a chair here and I walk towards it without noticing its presence, I hit against it—it is solid, impenetrable. If there is no chair I walk through space unhindered.

But there is a third possibility. I might go to the spot without being held up or knocked, but I might be sucked up and disappear: here there is no space, but the antithesis of space. And this antithesis of space is the condition in the Sun, The Sun is negative space.² And just because of this, the Sun is the abode, the habitual abode, of the Beings who rank immediately above man: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. In the case of which I am speaking, the gaze of the Initiate is directed towards these Beings in the Sun, the spiritual Beings of the Sun. In other words: a meeting of this kind that is not part of a karmic past, but is quite new, is for the Initiate a means of coming into connection with these Beings. And the presence is revealed of certain Beings with some of whom man has a close connection, whereas with others the connection is more remote. The way in which these Beings approach the Initiate reveals to him—not in detail but in broad outline—what kind of karma is about to take shape; in this case it is not old karma but karma that is coming to him for the first time. He perceives that these Beings who are connected with the Sun have to do with the future, just as the Moon Beings have to do with the past.

Even if a man is not an Initiate, his whole life of feeling will be deepened if he grasps what Initiation science is able to draw in this way from the depths of spirit-existence. For these things are in themselves a source of enlightenment. A comparison I have often used is that just as a picture can be understood by a man who is not himself a painter, so these truths can be understood by one who is not himself an Initiate. But if a man allows these truths to work upon him, his whole relationship to the Universe is immeasurably deepened. When man looks up to the Universe and its structure to-day, how abstract, how prosaic and barren are his conceptions! When he looks at the Earth he is still interested to a certain extent; he looks at the animals in the wood with a certain interest. If he is cultured, he takes pleasure in the slender gazelle, the nimble deer; if his tastes are less refined, these animals interest him as game; he can eat them. He is interested in the plants and vegetables, for all these things are directly related to his own life. But just as his feelings and emotions are stirred by his relationship with the earthly world, so his life of feeling can be stirred by the relationship he unfolds to the Cosmos beyond the Earth. And everything that comes over as destiny from the past—if it makes an impression upon us—impels us in heart and soul to look up to the Moon Beings, saying to ourselves: “Here on the Earth men have their habitations; on the Moon there are Beings who once were together with us on the Earth. They have chosen a different dwelling place but we are still connected with them. They record our past; their deeds are living reality within us when the past works over into our earthly existence.”

We look upwards with reverence and awe, knowing that the silvery moon is but the sign and token of these Beings who are so intimately connected with our own past. And through what we experience as men, we enter into relationship with these cosmic, super earthly Powers whose images are the stars, just as through our carnal existence we are related with everything that lives on the Earth. Looking with expectation towards the future and living on into that future with our hopes and strivings, we no longer feel isolated within our own life of soul but united with what is radiating to us from the Sun. We know that the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai are Sun Beings who go with us from the present on into the future. When we look up into the Cosmos, perceiving how the radiance of the Moon is dependent upon the radiance of the Sun and how these heavenly bodies are interrelated, then out yonder in the Cosmos we behold a picture of what is living within our very selves. For just as Sun and Moon are related to one another in the world of stars, so is our past—which has to do with the Moon—related to our future—which has to do with the Sun. Destiny is that in man which flows out of the past, through the present, on into the future. Woven into the Cosmos, into the courses of the stars and the mutual interplay of the stars, we behold the picture—now infinitely magnified—of what lives within our own being.

Our vision is thereby widened and penetrates deeply into the cosmic spheres. When a man passes through death he is released, to begin with, from his physical body only. He is living in his Ego organisation, his astral body, his ether body. But after a few days his ether body has released itself from the astral body and from the ‘I.' That which he now experiences is something that emerges as it were from himself; to begin with it is not large, but then it expands and expands—it is his ether body. This ether body expands into cosmic space, out into the very world of the stars—thus it appears to him. But as it expands the ether body becomes so fine, is so rarefied, that after a few days it vanishes from him. But something else is connected with this. While our ether body is being given over to the Cosmos, while it is expanding and becoming finer and more rarefied, it is as though we were reaching out to the secrets of the stars, penetrating into the secrets of the stars.

As we pass upwards through the Moon-sphere after death, the Moon Beings read from our astral body what we experienced in earthly existence. After our departure from earthly existence we are received by those Moon Beings, and our astral body in which we are now living is for them like a book in which they read. And they make an unerring record of what they read, in order that it may be inscribed into the new astral body when the time comes for us to descend to the Earth again.

We pass from the Moon-sphere through the Mercury-sphere, the Venus-sphere and then into the Sun-sphere. In the Sun-sphere, everything we have lived through, everything we have brought about and achieved in earlier incarnations becomes living reality within us. We enter into communion with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, participating in their deeds, and we are now right within the Cosmos. Just as during earthly existence we move about on the Earth, are confined as it were within earthly conditions, we are now living in the cosmic expanse. We live in the infinite expanse, whereas on the Earth we lived in a state of confinement. As we pass through our existence between death and a new birth, it seems to us as though on the Earth we had been imprisoned ... for everything has now widened into infinitudes. We experience the secrets of the Cosmos, but not as if they were in any way governed by laws of physical nature: these laws of nature seem to us then to be insignificant productions of the human mind. We experience what is happening in the stars as the deeds of the Divine Spiritual Beings and we unite ourselves with these deeds: as far as in us lies we act among and together with these Beings. And from the Cosmos itself we prepare for our next earthly existence.

What we must realise in all its profound significance is that during his life in the Cosmos between death and a new birth, man himself fashions and shapes what he bears within him. In external life man perceives little, very little, of his own make up and organisation. An organ can only really be understood when there is knowledge of its cosmic origin. Think of the noblest organ of all—the human heart. Scientists to-day dissect the embryo, observe how the heart gradually takes shape and give no further thought to the matter. But this outer, plastic structure, the human heart, is in truth the product of what each individual, in cooperation with the Gods, has elaborated between death and a new birth. In the life between death and a new birth man must work, to begin with, in the direction leading from the Earth towards the zodiacal constellation of Leo. This stream which flows from the Earth towards the constellation of Leo teems with forces and it is along this direction that the human being must work in order that when the time comes he may project the germinal beginnings of the heart—a vessel in which cosmic forces are contained. Then, having passed through this region in the far spaces of the Universe, man comes to regions nearer the Earth; he passes into the Sun-sphere. Here again forces are at work which bring the heart to a further stage of development. And then man enters the region where he is already in contact with what may be called the Earth warmth. Out yonder in cosmic space there is no Earth warmth, but something altogether different. In the region of the Earth warmth the preparation of the human heart reaches the third stage. The forces streaming in the direction of Leo out of which the human heart is fashioned are purely moral and religious forces; in its initial stages of development the heart contains only moral and religious forces. To anyone who realises this it seems outrageous that modern natural science should regard the stars merely as neutral, physical masses, ignoring the moral element altogether. When man is passing through the Sun region, these moral forces are taken hold of by the etheric forces. And it is not until man comes still nearer to the Earth, to the warmth, that the final stages of preparation are reached; it is then that the forces which shape the physical seed for the being of soul and spirit who is descending, begin to be active.

Each organ is produced and shaped by cosmic forces; it is a product of these cosmic forces. In very truth man bears the stars of heaven within him. He is connected with the forces of the whole Cosmos, not only with the plant world through the substances which he takes into his stomach and which are then absorbed into his organism. These things can, of course, only be understood by those who have the gift of true observation. A time will come when the macroscopic aspect of things will be considered as well as the microscopic—which has really become a cult nowadays. People try to discover the secrets of the animal organism, of the human organism, by deliberately shutting off the Cosmos. They peer down a tube and call this microscopic investigation; they dissect a minute fragment, put it on a glass plate and try to eliminate the world and life as much as ever they possibly can. A tiny fragment is separated and studied by means of an instrument that cuts off any vista of the world surrounding it. There is, of course, no reason to belittle this kind of investigation for it brings wonderful things to light. But no real knowledge of man can be obtained in this way.

When we look from the Earth out into the Cosmos beyond the Earth, then, for the first time, part of the world is revealed. For after all it is only a part that becomes visibly manifest. The stars are not what they present to the physical eye—what the eye beholds is merely the sense image—but to this extent they are, after all, visible. The whole world through which we pass between death and a new birth is invisible, super-sensible. There are regions which lie above and beyond the world that is revealed to the senses. Man belongs to these realms of super-sensible existence just as surely as he belongs to the world of sense. We can have no real knowledge of the being of man until we consider the life he has spent in the vast cosmic expanse. And then it dawns upon us that when, having passed through the gate of death into the Cosmos, we have returned to the Earth once again, the connections with this cosmic life are still alive within us. There is within us a being who once dwelt on the Earth, ascended into the Cosmos, passed through the cosmic realms and has again come down into a restricted existence on Earth. Gradually we learn to perceive what we were in an earlier existence on Earth; our gaze is carried away from the physical, transported into the spiritual. For when we look back into earlier earthly lives the power inherent in Initiation science takes from us all desire for materialistic pictures.

In this connection, too, many strange things have happened. At one period there were certain theosophists who knew from oriental teachings that man passes through many earthly lives, but they wanted a materialistic picture although they deceived themselves to the contrary. It was said at that time that the physical organism of man disintegrates at death but that an atom remains and passes over in some miraculous way to the next earthly life. It was called the ‘permanent atom.' This was simply a way of providing a materialistic picture. But all inclination for materialistic thinking of this kind vanishes when one realises that in very truth the human heart is woven and shaped by the Cosmos.

The liver, on the other hand, forms in the near neighbourhood of the Earth; the liver has only little direct connection with the cosmic expanse. The knowledge gradually acquired from Initiation science makes us realise that the heart could not exist at all if it had not been prepared and inwardly formed by the Cosmos. But an organ like the liver or the lung only begins to form in the neighbourhood of the Earth. Viewed from the Cosmos, man is akin to the Earth in respect of the lungs and liver; in respect of the heart he is a cosmic being. In man we begin to discern the whole Universe. According to spiritual anatomy, the lungs and certain other organs might be depicted by sketching the Earth; the forces contained in these organs operate in a realm near the Earth. But for the heart one would have to make a sketch of the whole Universe. The whole Universe is concentrated, compressed, in man. Man is in truth a microcosm, a stupendous mystery. But knowledge of the macrocosm into which man is transformed after death is free from every element of materiality. We now learn to recognise the true connections between the spiritual and the physical, between one quality of soul and another.

For example, there are people who have an innate understanding of their environment, of the human beings around them in the world. If we observe life we shall find individuals who come into contact with numbers and numbers of others, but they never really get to know them. What they say about these other people is invariably uninteresting and tells one nothing essential. Such individuals are incapable of really sinking into the being of others, they have no understanding of them. But there are other individuals who possess this gift of understanding. When they speak of another person their words are so graphic and explicit that one knows at once what the man is like without ever having met him; he is there before one. The description need not be detailed. A man who can sink himself in the being of another is able to convey a complete picture of him quite briefly. Nor need it necessarily be another individual; it may be something in nature. Many people try to describe a mountain, or a tree, but one despairs of getting any real picture; everything is empty and one feels parched. Other individuals again have the gift of immediate understanding; one could easily paint what they describe. Such a gift or defect—understanding of the world or obtuseness—has not come from the blue but is the result of an earlier earthly existence. If with Initiation science one observes a man who has a deep understanding of his human and non human environment, and then investigates his preceding earthly life—I shall have much to say on this subject—one discovers the particular qualities of his character in that earlier life and how they were transformed between death and a new birth into this understanding of the world around. And one finds that a man who understands the world around him was by nature capable of great joy, great happiness, in the preceding life. That is very interesting: men who in their previous life were incapable of feelings of joy are incapable, now, of understanding human beings or the world around them. A man who has such understanding was one who in an earlier life took delight in his environment. But this quality, too, was acquired in a still earlier life. How does a man come to have this joyousness, this gift of taking delight in his environment? He has it if in a still earlier earthly life he knew how to love. Love in one earthly life is transformed into joy, happiness; the joy of the next earthly life is transformed into warm understanding of the surrounding world in the third life.

In perceiving the sequence of earthly lives one also learns to understand what streams from the present into the future. Men who are capable of intense hatred carry over into the next earthly life as the result of this hatred the disposition to be hurt by everything that happens. If one studies a man who goes through life with a perpetual grudge because everything hurts him, makes him suffer, that is what one finds. Naturally one must have compassion for such a man but this trait in the character invariably leads back to a previous incarnation when he gave way to hatred. Please do not misunderstand me here. When hatred is mentioned it is natural for everyone to say: “I do not hate, I love everybody.” But let them try to discover how much hidden hatred lurks in the soul! This becomes only too evident when one hears human beings talking about each other. Just think about it and you will realise that the derogatory things that are said about an individual far outweigh what is ever said in his praise. And if one were to go into the true statistics it would be found that there is a hundred times—really a hundred times—more hatred than love among human beings. This is a fact although it is not generally acknowledged; people always believe that their hatred is justified and excusable. But hatred is transformed in the next earthly life into hypersensitiveness to suffering and in the third life into lack of understanding, obtuseness traits which make a man hard and indifferent, incapable of taking a real interest in anything.

Thus it is possible to survey three consecutive incarnations through which a law is operating: love is transformed into joy, joy is transformed in the third life into understanding of the environment. Hatred is transformed into hypersensitiveness to suffering and this again, in the third life, into obtuseness and lack of understanding of the world around. Such are the connections in the life of soul which lead over from one incarnation to another.

But now let us consider a different side of life. There are individuals—it is perhaps for this very reason that they are as they are—who have no interest at all in anything except themselves. Now whether a man takes real interest in something or takes no interest at all has great significance in life. In this respect, too, odd things come to light. I have known men who had been talking to a lady in the morning but in the afternoon had not the slightest idea of what kind of hat or brooch she was wearing, or the colour of her clothes! There are people who simply do not observe such things. It is often regarded as a very excusable trait but in reality it is anything but that. It is really lack of interest, often going to such lengths that a man simply does not know if the person he met was wearing a black or a light coat. There was no inner connection with what stood before his very eyes. This is a somewhat radical example. I do not suggest that a man falls into the clutches of Ahriman or Lucifer when he does not know whether the lady he was talking to had fair or dark hair, but I merely want to indicate that individuals either have or have not a certain amount of interest in their environment. This is of great importance for the soul. If a man is interested in what is around him, the soul is invariably stimulated by it, lives with the environment. But whatever is experienced with lively interest, with real sympathy, is carried through the gate of death into the whole cosmic expanse. And just as man must have eyes in order to see colours on the Earth, so in his earthly existence he must be stimulated by interest, in order that it may be possible for him between death and a new birth to behold spiritually all that is experienced in the Cosmos. If a man goes through life without interest, if nothing captivates his eyes or his attention, then between death and a new birth he has no real connection with the Cosmos, he is as it were blind in soul, he cannot work with the cosmic forces. But when this is the case, the organism and the bodily organs for the next life are not being rightly prepared. When such a man enters the sphere of forces streaming in the direction of Leo, the rudimentary preparations for the heart cannot be made; he comes into the Sun region and is unable to work at its further development; then, in the region of terrestrial warmth, the Earth warmth, he is again unable to complete the preparation; finally he comes down to the Earth with a tendency to heart trouble.

Thus does lack of interest—which is an attribute of the life of soul—work over into the present earthly life. The nature of illness can only become fully clear when one is able to perceive these connections, when one perceives how the physical disability from which an individual is now suffering arose from something appertaining to the life of soul in a previous incarnation and has been transformed in the present incarnation into a physical characteristic. Physical sufferings in one incarnation are connected with experiences of a previous incarnation. Generally speaking, human beings who are said to be ‘bursting with health,' who never get ill, who are always robust and healthy, lead one's gaze back from their present existence to earlier lives when they took the deepest interest in everything around them, observed everything with keen and lively attention.

Naturally, things appertaining to the spiritual life must never be pressed too far. A stream of karma may also begin. Lack of interest may begin in the present life; and then the future will point back to it. It is not a question only of going back from the present to the past. Hence when karma is at work one can only say, as a rule it is the case that certain illnesses are connected with a particular trait or quality of soul.

Speaking generally, then, it may be said that qualities of soul in one earthly life are transformed into bodily traits in another earthly life; bodily traits in one earthly life are transformed into qualities of soul in another life. Now it is the case that anyone who wants to perceive karmic connections must often pay attention to what seem to be insignificant details. It is very important that the gaze should not be riveted on things that in the ordinary way are considered to be of outstanding significance. In order to recognise how one earthly life leads back to an earlier life, the gaze will frequently have to be directed to traits that seem of secondary importance. For example, I have tried—in all seriousness of course, not in the way that such investigations are often made—to discover the karmic relationships of various figures in history and in the sphere of learning, and my attention fell upon a personality whose inner life expressed itself so radically and remarkably that he ended by coining unusual forms of words. He has written a number of books in which the strangest forms of words occur. He was a very severe critic of social conditions, of men and their dealings with one another. He also deplored the jealousy shown by many learned men in their behaviour to their colleagues. He quotes examples to illustrate the tricks and intrigues of certain scholars in an effort to down their fellows, and the chapter in question is headed: Schlichologisches in der wissenschaftlichen Welt (underhand ways in the scientific world). Now when a man coins an expression like Schlichologisches, one feels that it is characteristic. And an alert, inner perception of what lies behind such expressions leads to the discovery that in a previous incarnation this personality had to do with all kinds of warlike undertakings, often calling for a great deal of manoeuvring and camouflaged actions. This was transformed, karmically, into a flair for coining such expressions for intrigues, disputes, quarrels. In the word pictures used for facts now under his observation, his head was describing that which in an earlier life he had carried out with feet and hands. And so in connection with this particular person I was able to give illustrations of how the physical had in a certain way been transformed into traits of soul.

• 2. ‘Negative space.’ See Physical and Ethereal Spaces, by George Adams; also Plant, Sun, Earth, by George Adams and Olive Whicher.

Yesterday I tried to give you a picture of the states undergone by the human being after he passes through the portal of death and arrives in the spiritual world. Let us briefly summon before our soul the picture of the most essential stages. Immediately after passing through the portal of death, the human being first experiences the withdrawing of his ideational world. The ideas, the powers of thought, become objects, become something like active forces spreading out into the universe. Thus man feels at first the withdrawal from him of all the experiences he has consciously undergone during his earth-life between birth and death. But whereas earth-life, as experienced through thinking, withdraws from the human being and goes out into the vast cosmos (a process that occurs a few days after death [See: Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York.]), man's inner depths send forth a consciousness of all that he has undergone unconsciously during earth-life while asleep. This stage takes shape in such a way that he goes backward and recapitulates his earth-life in a period of one third of its actual duration.

During this time, the human being is intensely wrapt up in his own self. It might be said that he is still intensely connected with his own earthly affairs. He is thoroughly interwoven with what he passed through, while asleep, during the successive nights of his earthly life.

You will realize that the human being, while continuously occupied with his nightly experiences, must necessarily be led back to his self. Just consider the dreams, the only element in man's earth-life that surges up from the sleeping state. These dreams are the least part of his experiences while asleep. Everything else, however, remains unconscious. Only the dreams surge up into consciousness. Yet it could be said that the dreams, be they ever so interesting, ever so manifold, ever so rich in many-hued colors, represent something that restricts the human being completely to his own self. If a number of persons sleep in the same room, each of them has, nevertheless, his own dream world. And, when they tell their dreams to one another, these persons will speak of things that seem to have happened in entirely different worlds. For in sleep, each person is alone within himself. And only by inserting our will into our organism do we occupy the same world situated in the same space as is occupied by others. If we were always asleep, each of us would live in a world of his own.

But this world of our own which we pass through every night between falling asleep and awaking is the world we pass through in reverse, after death, during a period encompassing one third of our life-span.

If people possessed nothing but this world, they would be occupied for two or three decades after death (if they die at an old age) exclusively with themselves. This, however, is not the case. What we experience as our own affairs nevertheless connects us with the whole world. For the world through which each of us passes by himself is interwoven with relations to all those human beings with whom we were associated in life.

This interweaving of relations is caused by the fact that, when looking down from the soul world on the earthly experiences of those persons with whom we were associated in some way, we experience together with them what occurs on earth. Hence anyone willing to try may perceive, if he acquaints himself with spiritual-scientific methods, [See: Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Anthroposophic Press, New York.] how the dead, immediately after their transition, are helped to participate intensively in earthly events by those of their former companions who are still alive. And so we find that the dead, in the measure in which they shared this or that interest with others, underwent common destinies with others, remain connected with all these earthly interests; are still interested in earthly events. And, being no longer hindered by the physical body, they judge earthly events much more lucidly and sagaciously than men who are still alive. By attaining a conscious relation to the dead, we are enabled to gain, by means of their judgment, an extraordinary lucidity concerning earthly events.

Furthermore, something else must be considered. We can see that certain things existing within earthly relations will be preserved in the spiritual world. Thus an eternal element is intermingled, as it were, with our terrestrial experiences.

Descriptions of the spiritual world often sound almost absurd. Nonetheless, since I am addressing myself presumably to anthroposophists of long standing, I may venture to speak frankly of these matters. In looking for a way to communicate with the dead, it is even possible to use earthly words: ask questions, and receive answers. And now a peculiar fact is to be noticed: The ability lost first by the dead is that of using nouns; whereas verbs are retained by them for a long time. Their favorite forms of expression, however, are exclamatory words; all that is connected with emotion and heart. An Oh!, an Ah!, as expressions of amazement, of surprise, and so forth, are often used by the dead in their language. We must, as it were, first learn the language of the dead.

These things are not at all as the spiritists imagine. These people believe that they can communicate with the dead, by means of a medium, in ordinary earthly language. The character of these communications immediately indicates that we are concerned here with subconscious states of living persons, and not with actual, direct utterances of the dead transmitted through a medium. For the dead outgrow ordinary human language by degrees. After the passing of several years, we can communicate with the dead only by acquiring their language—which can best be done by suggesting, through simple symbolic drawings, what we want to express. Then the answers will be given by means of similar symbolic forms necessarily received by us in shadowy outlines.

All this is described by me for the purpose of indicating that the dead, although dwelling in an element akin to sleep, yet have a vast range of interests and sweep the whole world with their glance. And we ourselves can greatly assist them. This may be done by thinking of the dead as vividly as possible; especially by sending thoughts to them which bring to life, in the most striking way, what we experienced in their company. Abstract concepts are not understood by the dead. Hence I must send out such thoughts as the following: Here is the road between Kristiania and a near-by place. Here we two walked together. The other person, who is now dead, walked at my side. I can still hear him speaking. I hear the sound of his voice. I try to recall how he moved his arms, how he moved his head.—By visualizing, as vividly as possible, what we experienced together with the dead; by sending out our thoughts to the dead whom we conjure up before our soul in a familiar image, we can make these thoughts, as it were, soar or stream towards the dead. Thus we provide the dead with something like a window, through which they can look at the world. Not only the thought sent by us to the dead comes forth within them, but a whole world. They can gaze at our world as if through a window.

Conversely, the dead can experience their present spiritual environment only to the degree in which they formerly reflected, as much as earthly men are capable of doing, on the spiritual world.

You know how many people are saying now-a-days: Why should I worry about life after death? We might as well wait. Once we are dead, we shall see what is going to happen.—This thought, however, is completely misleading. People who have not reflected, while still alive, on the spiritual world, who have lived in a purely materialistic way, will see absolutely nothing after death.

Here I have outlined to you how the dead are living during the period in which—commensurate with their experiences in the sleeping state—they pass through their life in reverse. The human being who has now discarded his physical and etheric body, feels himself to be at this time in the realm of spiritual moon forces. We must realize that all the world organisms—moon, sun and stars—inasmuch as they are visible to physical eyes, actually represent only physical formations of a spiritual element.

Just as the single man, who is sitting here on a chair, consists not only of flesh and blood (which can be regarded as matter), but also of soul and spirit, so the whole universe, the whole cosmos, is indwelled by soul and spirit. And not only one unified spiritual entity dwells therein, but many, innumerably many spiritual entities dwell therein. Thus numerous spiritual entities are connected with the moon, which is seen only externally as a silver disk by our physical eye. We are in the realm of these entities while retracing our earth-life, as has been described, until we arrive again at the starting point. Thus it might be said: Until then we dwell in the realm of the moon.

While we are in the midst of this going backward, our whole life becomes intermingled with certain things, which are brought to an approximate conclusion after we have left the moon realm.

Immediately after the etheric body has been discarded by us in the wake of death, a moral judgment on our worth as human beings emerges from the nightly experiences. Then we cannot do otherwise than judge, in a moral sense, the events through which we pass in reverse. And it is very strange how things develop from this point.

Here on earth we carry a body made of bones, muscles, arteries, and so forth. Then, after death, we acquire a spiritual body, formed out of our moral qualities. A good man acquires a moral body radiating with beauty; a depraved man a moral body radiating with evil. This is formed while we are living backward. Our spirit-body, however, is only partly formed out of that which is now joined to us. Whereas one part of the spirit-body received by us in the spiritual world is formed out of our moral qualities, the other part is simply put on us as a garment woven from the substances of the spiritual world.

Now, after finishing our reverse course and arriving again at the starting-point, we must find the transition to which I alluded in my Theosophy as the transition from the soul world into the spirit realm. This is connected with the necessity of leaving the moon sphere and entering the sun sphere of the cosmos. We become gradually acquainted with the all-encompassing entities dwelling, in the form of spirit and soul, within the sun sphere. This we must enter. In the next few days, I shall discuss to what degree the Christ plays a leading role in helping the human being to make this transition from the moon sphere to the sun sphere. (This role is different after the Mystery of Golgotha from the role He played before the Mystery of Golgotha.) Today we shall describe the passage through this world in a more objective way.—What ensues at this point is the necessity of depositing in the moon sphere all that was woven for us, as it were, out of our moral qualities. This represents something like a small package, which we must deposit in the moon sphere in order that we may enter, as purely spiritual beings, into the pure sun sphere. Then we see the sun in its real aspect: not from the side turned towards earth but from the reverse side, where it is completely filled with spiritual entities; where we can fully see that it is a spiritual realm.

It is here that we give as nourishment to the universe everything that does not belong to our moral qualities, but which has been granted to us by the gods in the form of earthly experiences. We give to the universe whatever it can use for maintaining the world's course. These things are actually true. If I compared the universe to a machine—you know that I do this merely in a pictorial sense, for I am certainly not inclined to designate the universe a machine—then everything brought by us into the sun sphere after depositing our small package in the moon sphere would be something like fuel, apportioned by us to the cosmos as fuel is apportioned to a machine.

Thus we enter the realm of the spiritual world. For it does not matter whether we call our new abode the sun sphere, in its spiritual aspect, or the spiritual world.

Here we dwell as a spirit among spirits, just as we dwelled on earth as a physical man among the entities of the various natural kingdoms. Now we dwell among those entities which I described and named in my Occult Science; and we also dwell among those souls which have died before us, or are still awaiting their coming earth-life. For we are dwelling as a spirit among spirits.

These spiritual entities may belong to the higher Hierarchies or be incorporeal men dwelling in the spiritual world. And now the question arises: What is our next stage?

Here on earth we stand at a certain point of the physical universe. Looking around in every direction, we see what lies outside the human being. That which lies inside him we are utterly unable to see.

Now you will say: What you tell us is foolish. It may be granted that ordinary people cannot see man's inside; but the learned anatomists, who cut up dead people in hospitals, are certainly familiar with it.—They are not familiar with it in the least! For what can be learned about a man in this way is only something external. After all, if we regard a human being merely from the outside, it does not matter whether we investigate his outer skin or his insides. What lies inside the human skin is not that which anatomists discover in an external way, but what lies inside the human skin are whole worlds. In the human lung, for instance, in every human organ, whole universes are compressed to miniature forms.

We see marvelous sights when admiring a beautiful landscape; marvelous sights when admiring at night the starry sky in all its splendor. Yet if viewing a human lung, a human liver, not with the anatomist's physical eye, but with the eye of the spirit, we see whole worlds compressed into a small space. Apart from the splendor and glory of all the rivers and mountains on the surface of the earth, a still more exalted splendor adorns what lies inside of man's skin, even in its merely physical aspect. It is irrelevant that all this is of smaller scale than the seemingly vast world of space. If you survey what lies in a single pulmonary vesicle, it will appear as more grandiose than the whole range of the mighty Alps. For what lies inside of man is the whole spiritual cosmos in condensed form. In man's inner organism we have an image of the entire cosmos.

We can visualize these things also in a somewhat different way. Imagine that you are thirty years old and, looking into yourself with a glance of the soul, remember something which you experienced between your tenth and twentieth year. Here the outer event has been transformed into an inner soul-image. In a single moment, you may survey widely spread experiences undergone by you in the course of years. A world has been woven into an ideational image. Only think of what you experience when brief memory-images of widely spread events passed through by you come forth in your soul-life. Here you have the soul-essence of what you experienced on earth. Now, if viewing your brain, the inside of your eye—the inside of the eye alone represents a whole world—your lung, your other organs in the same way as your memory-images; then these organs are not images of events passed through by you but images—even if appearing in material form—of the whole spiritual cosmos.

Let us suppose that man could solve the riddle of what is contained in his brain, in the inside of his eye, in the inside of his lung; just as he can solve the riddle of the memories contained in his soul-life. Then the whole spiritual cosmos would be opened up to him; just as a series of events undergone in life are opened up to man by a single memory-image. As human beings, we incorporate the whole memory of the world. If you consider these things in the right way, you will understand the following: The human being, who has undergone after death all the states described by me previously, now becomes manifest to the vision of man himself. The human being is a spirit among spirits. Yet, what he sees now as his world is the marvel of the human organism itself in the form of the universe, the whole cosmos. Just as mountains, rivers, stars, and clouds form our surroundings here on earth; so, when dwelling as spirit among spirits, we find our surroundings, our world, in man's wonderful organism. We look around in the spiritual world; we look—if I may express myself pictorially—to the right and to the left: as here we found rocks, river, mountains on all sides, so there above we find the human being, MAN, on all sides. Man is the world. And we are working for this world which is fundamentally man. Just as, on earth, we build machines, keep books, sew clothes, make shoes, or write books, thus weaving together what is called the content of civilization, of culture, so above, together with the spirits of the higher Hierarchies and incorporeal human beings, we weave the woof and weft of mankind. We weave mankind out of the cosmos. Here on earth we appear as finished products. There we lay down the spiritual germ of earthly man.

This is the great mystery: that man's heavenly occupation consists in weaving, in cooperation with the spirits of the higher Hierarchies, the great spiritual germ of the future terrestrial human being. Inside the spiritual cosmos, all of us are weaving, in magnificent spiritual grandeur, the woof and weft of our own earthly existence, which will be attained by us after descending again into earthly life. Our work, performed in cooperation with the gods, is the fashioning of the earthly human being.

When we speak of germs here on earth, we think of something small which becomes big. If we speak, however, of the germ of the physical human being as it exists in the spiritual world—for the physical germ maturing in the mother's body is only an image of the spiritual germ—we must think of it as immense, enormous. It is a universe; and all other human beings are interlinked with this universe. It might be said: all human beings are in the same “place,” yet numerically differentiated. And then the spiritual germ diminishes more and more. What we undergo in the time between death and a new birth is the experience of fashioning a spiritual germ, as large as the universe, of our coming earthly existence. Then this spiritual germ begins to shrink. More and more its essence becomes convoluted. Finally it produces its own image in the mother's body.

Materialistic physiology has entirely wrong conceptions of these things. It assumes that man, whose marvelous form I have tried to sketch for you, came forth from a merely physical human germ. This science considers the ovum to be a highly complicated matter; and physiological chemists investigate the fact that molecules or atoms, becoming more and more complicated, produce the germ, the most complicated phenomenon of all.

All this, however, is not true. In reality, the ovum consists of chaotic matter. Matter, when transformed into a germ, is dissolved; it becomes completely pulverized. The nature of the physical germ, and the human germ particularly, is characterized by being composed of completely pulverized matter, which wants nothing for itself.

Because this matter is completely pulverized and wants nothing for itself, it enables the spiritual germ, which has been prepared for a long time, to enter into it. And this pulverization of the physical germ is brought about by conception. Physical matter is completely destroyed in order that the spiritual germ may be sunk into it and make the physical matter into an image of the spiritual germ woven out of the cosmos.

It is doubtless justified to sing the praises of all that human beings are doing for civilization, for culture, on earth. Far from condemning this singing of praises, I declare myself, once and for all, in favor of it when it is done in a reasonable way. But a much more encompassing, a much more exalted, a much more magnificent work than all earthly cultural activity is performed by heavenly civilization, as it might be called, between death and a new birth: the spiritual preparation, the spiritual weaving of the human body. For nothing more exalted exists in the world order than the weaving of the human being out of the world's ingredients. With the help of the gods, the human being is woven during the important period between death and a new birth.

If yesterday I had to say that, in a certain sense, all the experience and knowledge acquired by us on earth provide nourishment for the cosmos, it must be said again today: After offering to the cosmos, as nourishment or fuel, all the earthly experiences that could be of use to it, we receive, from the fullness of the cosmos, all the substances out of which we are able to weave again the new human being into whom we shall enter at a later time.

The human being, now devoting himself wholly to a spiritual world, lives as a spirit. His entire weaving and being is spiritual work, spiritual essence. This stage lasts for a long time. For it must be repeated again and again: to weave something like the human being is a mighty and grandiose task. Not without justification did the ancient Mysteries call the human physical body a temple. The greater the insight we gain into the science of initiation, into what takes place between death and a new birth, the deeper do we feel the significance of this word. Our life between death and a new birth is of such a nature that we, as spiritual beings, become directly aware of other spiritual beings. This condition lasts for some time. Then a new stage sets in.

What took place previously was of such a nature that the single spiritual beings could really be viewed as individualities. The spiritual beings with whom one worked were met face to face, as it were. At a later stage, however, these spiritual entities—to express it pictorially, because such things can be suggested only in images—become less and less distinct, finally being merged into an aggregation of spirits. This can be expressed in the following way: A certain period between death and a new birth is spent in immediate proximity to spiritual beings. Then comes a time when one experiences only the revelation of these spiritual beings; when they become manifest to us as a whole. I want to use a very trivial metaphor. On seeing what seems to be a tiny gray cloud in the distance, you would be sure that this was just a tiny gray cloud. But, by coming closer, you would recognize it to be a swarm of flies. Now you can see each single fly. In the case of the spiritual beings, the opposite took place. First you behold the divine-spiritual beings, with whom you are working, as single individualities. Then, after living with them more intensively, you behold their general spiritual atmosphere, just as you beheld the swarm of flies in the shape of a cloud. Here, where the single individualities disappear more and more, you live—I might say—in pantheistic fashion in the midst of a general spiritual world.

Although we live now in a general spiritual world, we feel arising out of our inner depth a stronger sense of self-consciousness than we experienced before. Formerly your self was constituted in such a way that you seemed to be at one with the spiritual world, which you experienced by means of its individualities. Now you perceive the spiritual world only as a general spiritual atmosphere. Your own self-consciousness, however, is perceived in greater degree. It awakens with heightened intensity. And thus, slowly and gradually, the desire of returning to earth again arises in the human being. This desire must be described in the following way:

During the entire period which I have described and which lasts for centuries, the human being—except in the first stage when he was still connected with the earth and returned to his starting point—is fundamentally interested in nothing but the spiritual world. He weaves, in the large scale that I have described, the fabric of mankind.

At the moment when the individualities of the spiritual world are merged together, as it were, and man perceives the spiritual world in a general way, there arises in him a renewed interest in earth-life. This interest for earth-life appears in a certain specialized manner, in a certain concrete manner. The human beings begin to be interested in definite persons living below on earth, and again in their children, and again in their children's children. Whereas the human beings were formerly interested only in heavenly events, they now become, after beholding the spiritual world as a revelation, strangely interested in certain successive generations. These are the generations leading to our own parents, who will bear us on our return to earth. Yet we are interested, a long time before, in our parents' ancestors. We follow the line of generations until reaching our parents. Not only do we follow each generation as it passes through time; but—once the spiritual world has been manifested to us as a revelation—we also foresee, as if prophetically, the whole span of generations. Across the succession of great-great-great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers, great-grandfathers, grandfathers, and so forth, we can foresee the path on which we shall descend again to earth. Having first grown into the cosmos, we grow later into real, concrete human history. And thus comes the moment when we gradually (in regard to our consciousness) leave the sun sphere.

Of course, we still remain within the sun sphere; but the distinct, clear, conscious relation to it becomes dim and we are drawn back into the moon sphere. And here, in the moon sphere, we find the “small package” deposited by us (I can describe it only by means of this image); we find again what represents the worth of our moral qualities. And this package must be retrieved.

It will be seen in the course of the next days what a significant part is played in this connection by the Christ-impulse. We must embody within us this package of destiny. But while embodying within us the package of destiny and entering the moon sphere, while gaining a stronger and stronger feeling of self-consciousness and transforming ourselves inwardly more and more into soul-beings, we gradually lose the tissue woven by us out of our physical body. The spiritual germ woven by ourselves is lost at the moment when the physical germ, which we shall have to assume on earth, is engendered through the act of conception.

The spiritual germ of the physical body has already descended to earth; whereas we still dwell in the spiritual world. And now a vehement feeling of bereavement sets in. We have lost the spiritual germ of the physical body. This has already arrived below and united itself with the last of those successive generations which we have watched. We ourselves, however, are still above. The feeling of bereavement becomes violent. And now this feeling of bereavement draws out of the universe the needful ingredients of the world-ether. Having sent the spiritual germ of the physical body down to earth and remained behind as a soul (ego and astral body), we draw etheric substance out of the world-ether and form our own etheric body. And to this etheric body, formed by ourselves, is joined—approximately three weeks after the fecundation has taken place on earth—the physical germ which formed itself out of the spiritual germ, as I have previously described.

It was said that we form our etheric body before uniting ourselves with our own physical germ. And into this etheric body is woven the small package containing our moral worth. We weave this package into our ego, our astral body, and also into our etheric body. Thus it is joined to the physical body. In this way, we bring our karma down to earth. First, it was left behind in the moon sphere; for, had we taken it with us into the sun sphere, we would have formed a diseased, a disfigured physical body.

The human physical body acquires individuality only through the circumstance of its being permeated by the etheric body. Otherwise, all physical bodies would be exactly alike; for human beings, while dwelling in the spiritual world, weave identical spiritual germs for their physical body. We become individualities only by means of our karma, by means of the small package interwoven by us with our etheric body which shapes, constitutes and pervades our physical body already during the embryonic stage.

Of course, I shall have to enlarge during the next days on this sketch concerning the human being's transition between death and a new birth. Yet you will have realized what a wealth of experiences is undergone by us: the great experience of how we are first merged into the cosmos and then, out of the cosmos, again are shaped in order to attain a new human earth-life.

Fundamentally, we pass through three stages. First, we dwell as spirit-soul among spirit-souls. This is a genuine experiencing of the spiritual world. Secondly, we are given a revelation of the spiritual world. The individualities of the single spiritual entities become blurred as it were. The spiritual world is revealed to us as a whole. Now we approach again the moon sphere. Within ourselves the feeling of self-consciousness awakens; this is a preparation for earthly self-consciousness. Whereas we did not desire earth-life while being conscious of our spiritual self within the spiritual world, we now begin, during the period of revelation, to desire earth-life and develop a vigorous self-consciousness directed towards the earth.

In the third stage, we enter the moon sphere; and, having yielded our spiritual germ to the physical world, draw together out of all the heaven worlds the etheric substance needed for our own etheric body. Three successive stages: A genuine life within the spiritual world; a life amidst the revelations of the spiritual world, in which we feel ourselves already as an egoistic self; a life devoted to the drawing together of the world ether.

The counterparts of these stages are produced after the human being has moved again into his physical body. These counterparts are of a most surprising nature. We see the child. We see it before us in its physical body. The child develops. This development of the child is the most wonderful thing to behold in the physical world. We see how it first crawls, and then assumes a state of balance with regard to the world. We observe how the child learns to walk. Immeasurably great things are connected with this learning to walk. It represents an entrance of the child's whole being into the state of equilibrium of the world. It represents a genuine orientation of the whole cosmos towards the world's three spatial dimensions. And the child's wonderful achievement consists in the fact that it finds the correct human state of equilibrium within the world.

These things are a modest, terrestrial counterpart of all that the human being, while dwelling as a spirit among spirits, underwent in the course of long centuries. We feel great reverence for the world if we look at it in such wise that we observe a child: how it first kicks its limbs awkwardly in every direction, then gradually learns to control itself. This is the aftereffect of the movements which we executed, during centuries, as a spiritual being among spiritual beings. It is really wonderful to discover in the child's single movements, in its search for a state of equilibrium, the terrestrial after-effects of those heavenly movements executed, in a purely spiritual sense, as spirit among spirits.

Every child—unless some abnormal condition changes the sequence—should first learn to walk (attain a state of equilibrium) and then learn to speak.

Now again the child, by an imitative process, adjusts itself through the use of language to its environment. But in every sound, every word formation shaping itself in the child, we find a modest, terrestrial echo of the experience undergone by us when our knowledge of the spiritual world becomes revelation; when this knowledge is compressed, as it were, into a uniform haze. Then the World Logos is formed out of the world's single being, which we experienced previously in an individualized way. And when the child utters one word after the other, this is the audible terrestrial counterpart of a marvelous world tableau experienced by us during the time of revelation, before we return again to the moon sphere.

And when the child, having learned to walk and speak, gradually develops its thoughts—for learning to think should be the third step in a normal human development—this is a counterpart of the work performed by man while forming his own etheric body out of the world ether gathered from every part of the universe.

Thus, in looking at the child as it enters the world, we see in the three modest faculties needed to gain a dynamic static relationship to the world—learning to maintain equilibrium (what we call learning to walk), learning to speak, learning to think—the compressed, modest, terrestrial counterparts of that which, spread out into grandiose cosmic dimensions, represents the stages passed through by us between death and a new birth.

Only by gaining a knowledge of the spiritual life between death and a new birth, do we gain a knowledge of the mystery coming forth from man's innermost depth when the child, having been born in a uniform state, becomes increasingly differentiated. Hence, by pointing to every single being as a revelation of the divine, we learn to understand the world as a revelation of the divine.

Ever and again I have to ask myself the question: what is the basis for the widespread impact of some of Shakespeare's plays? "Hamlet", "Othello", "The Merchant of Venice", "Romeo and Juliet" make an equally deep impression on the educated and the uneducated, the classical and the modern-minded, the idealist and the bon vivant. And we have the feeling that we present-day people are confronted with this poet of a relatively bygone era as if he were living among us today. One need only think of the effects of poems such as Goethe's "Iphigenia" and "Tasso" to realize the difference with perfect clarity. And as far as the changeability of the influence of dramatic works of art over time is concerned, I would like to draw attention to the decline in enthusiasm for Schiller's creations in the course of our century. Only Shakespeare's dramas seem to elicit the same appreciation from every degree and type of education, and no less from every age.

I believe that one must go into the basic causes of the effects of works of art if one wants to solve the question just touched upon.

In our time, this is not easy. For in the branch of human thought known today as aesthetics, there is an abundance of prejudices that virtually rule out an understanding among our contemporaries on certain fundamental questions of art.

In saying this, I am thinking above all of certain critics who regard anything that looks like a world view or philosophy within the view of art as a red rag to the bull. How the poet thinks about the things that provide the content for his works should be completely irrelevant. Indeed, these critics are even of the opinion that the artist is all the greater the less he thinks at all. They like to call a poet who they believe does not think at all "naïve", and are enthusiastic about his creations, whose fair "unconsciousness" is praised in every key. And one immediately becomes suspicious when one realizes that a poet has a world view which he helps to express in his works. One believes that the naivety, the unconsciousness of creation is thereby lost. Some art observers go so far as to say that the poet who does not live like a child in a dream state that obscures and hides the clarity of his thoughts is not a true poet at all. I have often heard and read that Goethe's greatness is based on the fact that he did not think about his artistic achievements, that he lived as if in dreams, and that Schiller, the more conscious one, first had to interpret his dreams for him.

I have often wondered why people turn the facts upside down for the sake of such a prejudice. For it is precisely in Goethe's case that it can be shown that the entire nature of his artistic work follows from a clear, sharply defined world view. Goethe was a man of knowledge. He could see nothing around him without forming a view of it that could be clearly formulated in concepts. When Duke Karl August summoned him to Weimar and induced him to engage in all kinds of practical activities, the things he had to deal with in practice became sources from which he constantly enriched his knowledge of the world and of people. His involvement with mining in Ilmenau led him to study the geological conditions of the earth's crust in detail and, on the basis of these studies, to form a comprehensive view of the formation of the earth. Nor could he indulge in the enjoyment of nature as a mere pleasure-seeker. The duke gave him a garden. He could not merely enjoy flowers and plants; he soon began to search for the basic laws of plant life. And this search led him to the epoch-making ideas that he set down in his morphological works. These studies, in conjunction with the observation of works of art in Italy, formed a world view in him that had sharp, conceptual contours and from which his artistic style necessarily flowed.

One must know this world view; one must have imbued his entire intellectual life with it if one wants to receive the right impression from Goethe's works of art. Goethe is, if one still wants to use the word badly abused by the present: a naturalist. He wanted to recognize nature in its purity and reproduce it in his works. Anything that resorted to things not to be found in nature itself to explain nature was contrary to his way of thinking. He rejected all forms of otherworldly, transcendent, divine powers. A God who only works from the outside, who does not move the world in its innermost being, was of no concern to him. Any kind of revelation and metaphysics was an abomination to him. Anyone who looks impartially at real, natural things must reveal their deepest secrets to them of their own accord. But he was not like our modern fanatics of facts, who can only see the surface of things and call "natural only that which can be seen with the eyes, grasped with the hands and weighed with the scales". For him, this superficial reality is only one side, the outside of nature. He wants to see deeper into the workings; he seeks the higher nature within nature. He is not satisfied with looking at the abundance of plants and putting them into a system; he wants to discover in them a primal form, the original plant, which underlies them all; which cannot be seen, but which must be grasped in the idea. He does this in all areas. He also looks at people and their mutual relationships in this way. He tries to reduce the confusion of human beings, their manifold characters, to a few typical basic forms. And it is these basic forms, these types, not the phenomena of everyday reality, that he seeks to embody in his poetry. His Iphigenia and his Tasso represent the higher human nature in nature. And the possibility of depicting higher natures came to him because he had arrived at a certain view, a clear world of ideas, through restless cognitive work. Only those who have his basic view can depict people and their coexistence in the way he did. And this view can only be understood by those who have made Goethe's world view their own. This fact shows the dependence of Goethe's poetic technique on his world view. A fanatic of facts works out his figures in such a way that they appear to us like phenomena of everyday life. To do this he must also use technical means that give the impression of low naturalness. Goethe must use other artistic means. He must draw in lines and colors that go beyond the superficiality of things, that are supra-real and yet affect us with the magic that the necessity of natural existence has.

I would like to cite other examples that illustrate the dependence of artistic technique on worldview. Schiller is a supporter of the so-called moral world view. For him, world history is a world judgment. Anyone who suffers evil in the world must have a certain guilt; he must deserve his fate. Now I do not want to claim that Schiller saw the real world as if every guilt was followed by just punishment. But he took the view that this is how it should be, and that any other way of relating things leaves us morally unsatisfied. That is why he constructs his dramas in such a way that they reflect a world context that meets this moral requirement. He has his heroes end tragically because they have brought guilt upon themselves. That there is a harmonious connection between fate and guilt: this is the basic condition of his dramatic technique. Mary Stuart, the. Maid of Orleans, Wallenstein must become guilty in order for us to be satisfied by their tragic end.

Compare this with Henrik Ibsen's dramatic technique in his last period. He no longer speaks of guilt and atonement. For him, the fact that a person perishes has entirely different causes than moral ones. His Oswald in "Ghosts" is as innocent as a child and yet he perishes. A person with a moral view of the world can only be disgusted by this course of events. Ibsen, however, does not have a moral world view. He knows only an extra-moral natural context; a cold, unfeeling necessity. Just as the stone cannot help it if it shatters when it falls to the hard earth, an Ibsenian hero cannot help it if he meets an evil fate.

We can visualize the same fact in Maeterlinck. He believes in subtle, soul-like, mysterious connections in all phenomena. When two people speak to each other, he not only hears the common content of their speeches, but also perceives deeper relationships, unspoken relationships. And he tries to work this unspoken, mysterious quality into the things and people he portrays. Indeed, he regards everything external and visible as merely a means of hinting at the deeper, hidden soul. His technique is a result of this striving and thus of his world view. Anyone who is unable to sense the deeper essences implied in the things and people he brings to the stage cannot understand Maeterlinck. Every gesture, every movement, every word on stage is an expression of the underlying world view.

Whoever keeps these truths in mind will realize that Goethe, Schiller, Ibsen, Maeterlinck can only have an effect on a certain circle of people, on those who can empathize with the world view of these poets, who can think and feel like them. This is why the impact of these artists must have limits.

Why is it different with Shakespeare? Does Shakespeare have no world view? And does he have such a general effect because the effect does not flow from one and is therefore not limited by it?

The latter cannot be admitted by anyone who considers the circumstances more thoroughly. Shakespeare, too, has a certain view of the world.

For Goethe, the world is the expression of typical basic beings; for Schiller, of a moral order; for Ibsen, of a purely natural order; for Maeterlinck, of a spiritual, mysterious connection between things. What is it for Shakespeare?

I think the most appropriate word to express Shakespeare's view of the world is to say that the world is a play to him. He looks at all things for a certain theatrical effect by virtue of their nature. He is indifferent to whether they reflect typical basic forms, whether they are morally connected, whether they express something mysterious. He asks: what is there in them that, when we look at them, satisfies our satisfaction in pure contemplation, in harmless observation? If he finds that the desire to look at a person is most satisfied when we look at what is typical about him, he directs his gaze to this typical. If he believes that harmless contemplation is most satisfied when it is offered the mysterious, he places this in the foreground. But the desire to look is the most widespread, the most general desire. Whoever meets it will have the largest audience. He who directs his gaze to one thing can only count on the approval of people whose basic feelings are likewise directed towards that one thing. Only very few people's souls are so focused on a single thing, even if these few are the best, those who are able to draw the deepest things from the world. In order to exhaust the depths of the world, one must think and feel intensely. But that means not getting attached to everything possible, but savoring one thing in every way. But Shakespeare is not aiming for depth.

An appeal to all directions of thought and feeling can be found in every human being. Even the most superficial person can feel what is typical, moral, mysterious, cruel and natural in the world. But none of this touches him intensely. He flits over it and soon wants to move on to another impression. And so he is interested in everything, but only a few things all the time. Such a person is the real onlooker. He wants to be touched by everything, but not completely absorbed by anything. Again, however, it may be said that there is something of this curiosity in everyone, even in those who generally - even fanatically - devote themselves entirely to one basic emotion. The wide impact of Shakespeare's drama is connected with this general disposition of people. Because it is not one-sided, it has an all-round effect.

I don't want these remarks of mine to be interpreted as if I were accusing Shakespeare of a certain superficiality. He penetrates all one-sidedness with an ingenious intuition; but he is not committed to any one-sidedness. He transforms himself from one character into another. He is an actor by nature. And that is why he is also the most effective playwright.

A person with a pronounced, sharp disposition, in whom all things he touches immediately take on a certain, individual color, cannot be a good playwright. A person who doesn't care about the individual characters, who transforms himself into each one with the same devotion because he loves them all equally and none in particular, is a born dramatist. A certain unkindness must be inherent in the playwright, a universal sense. And Shakespeare has this.

Note to the reader:

The text of this lecture is not to be regarded as literally spoken that way. It is rather a more or less extensive summary based on two incomplete transcripts.

In this lecture, I want to give a picture of the theosophical world view that is completely free of any dogmatism, while I want to show its characteristics with the help of some phenomena of our Central European cultural life. It is not a matter of importing any foreign oriental world view but of showing that theosophy is life and must become life. It is no new Gospel, but the renewal of sensations deeply rooted in the human soul.

We have to be interested most of all how geniuses, affiliated to us, are filled with the theosophical world view. Thus Lessing believed in reincarnation. In Herder's writings, we find ideas of reincarnation. We find them with Schiller in his Philosophical Letters (1786), in the Letters from Raphael to Julius (Christian Gottfried Körner in Schiller's Thalia) and in On the Aesthetic Education of the Man in a Series of Letters (1793/94). Novalis also believed in it. In particular, we find a theosophical world view in the later works of Goethe. Indeed, this can surprise at first, but who occupies himself with the study of Goethe, especially with the profound Faust drama, immerses himself more and more into that which I try to explain. What I try to tell now has arisen very easily to me.

Goethe was a theosophist according to his whole nature, to the innermost sense of his life, because he did never accept any limit of his knowledge and work. Goethe was determined by his whole disposition to the world view we represent here. He was convinced that the human being is deeply connected with the world, and that this world is nothing material, but active, creative spirit; his world view was not an uncertain pantheism, but he believed that we can attain a living relation to God.

As a seven-year-old boy he collected the sunbeams and enkindled a little candle; he wanted to enkindle a sacrificial service by the fire of nature. In Poetry and Truth he says: if we oversee the different religions, we find a common core of truth in them. The sages of all times always showed the swing of a pendulum between the higher and lower self,

When Goethe had returned home after his Leipzig study and after a severe illness, he devoted himself to mystic studies. He decided to express what took place in him, the whole urging, in the Faust drama; in the legend in which the Middle Ages wanted to describe the fight between the old and the new world views.

The 16th century did not think that one could progress to redemption by the own soul force; it let Faust perish. However, Goethe did it. After he had represented Faust as a striving human being, in the first version of Faust, he put him on a new basis in the nineties of the 18th century. In his Faust Goethe shows the development of the human being from the lower to the higher soul forces and as we will still see also in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

His view was: only somebody who has passed the stages of development, who has felt attracted to the divine, who has passed doubts, has the full conviction, has gained the confidence and has brought himself from disharmony to harmony. His Faust is a song of human perfection. We need not to seek for the way to perfection in the Bhagavad Gita. We find the big problem also in the Faust. Goethe sets himself the task in his Faust to uncover the secret of evil.

Goethe uses the Prologue in Heaven to show the intention of his drama. The physical world is a reflection of force relations of the super-sensible world. With the words of the Prologue in Heaven Goethe describes the world of devachan, the sounding world. He represents it in the picture of the Pythagorean music of the spheres:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
The sun still sings its glorious song...

Who says there that it concerns a superficial picture only says something superficial.

He also says at the end of the Ariel scene:

Hearken! Hear the onrush of the Horae!
In these sounds we spirits hear
The new day already born.

Goethe always speaks of the sounding of the spiritual world.

Theosophy speaks of three worlds: of the dream world, of the astral or soul world and of the mental or spiritual world. The emergence of the spiritual eye produces immense changes in the dream life first. If the new beholding, the new world becomes accessible, it is very regular. Of course, one must not found any science on what the human being experiences there. The student or chela has to learn to take this consciousness of the astral world along with him from the dream into his day consciousness. Later then he experiences the spiritual world in the dreamless sleep.

The consciousness of the astral world expresses itself in pictures, the consciousness of the spiritual world in spiritual hearing. The Pythagoreans called it the music of the spheres.

Still an important principle of the human being appears in the Prologue: the principle of karma. Who knows that Goethe knew the mystics of the Middle Ages thoroughly, does not speak of external pictures if Goethe says:

The spirit world is not sealed off
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Go, neophyte, and boldly bathe
Your mortal breast in roseate dawn!

Dawn or “aurora” is an expression which is familiar to the mystics. Jacob Böhme's first work was called: Aurora or the Rising of Dawn.

From the start, Faust strives beyond the limits of the physical life. The portrayal of the earth spirit is completely given in technical-mystic terms, a wonderful portrayal of the astral body of the earth, of the imperishable soul cover spiritually created from the fruits of life. The earth spirit is no symbol; Goethe considers him as a real being. He supposed that in the planet planetary beings are and have their bodies, like we have our bodies of flesh. Goethe's creed was: the earth spirit taught him not only to consider but to feel and sense the uniform being of stone, plant, and animal up to the human being. He taught him the brotherliness of everything created up to the human being, the crown of creation. He also expressed his creed as 35-, 36-year-old man in The Secrets. A pilgrim walks to a cloister. He sees a rose cross at the gate. The rose cross is the symbol of the realms of nature; stone, plant, animal = cross, roses = love. Goethe himself says later that each of the twelve personalities represents a great world view or world religion in The Secrets. The aim of the pilgrim was to seek for the true core of the world religions.

In the first part, we see the young Faust being full of sensation and disharmony. With the help of the tempter Faust has to lead his lower self through all mistakes. In Mephistopheles Goethe created the picture of an ancient idea that is included in any profound wisdom. He tried to solve the problem of evil. Evil is the sum of those forces which oppose the progress of human perfection. If truth consists of the further development, any obstacle is a lie. Mephistopheles is called the spoiler, mephiz, the liar tophel in Hebrew. He leads through all kinds of experience of the lower self.

At the end of the first part, Faust stands differently before the earth spirit; he attains the insight that it is possible to really recognise the self. After he has finished the errors, he gets to the spiritual world by purification.

Faust dies at an old age, and there he becomes a mystic. In the conversations with Eckermann (Johann Peter E., 1792–1854) Goethe says: for the initiate will be soon evident that a lot of profound is to be found in this Faust.

The descent to the mothers: in any mysticism the highest psychic is female; cognition is a conception process. The fire on the tripod is the primary matter. The realm of the mothers is the primary source of all things; the spirit comes from there. A moral qualification is necessary to enter the spiritual world devachan in the language of theosophy. The aim of theosophy is to lead the human beings upward. The human being must make himself appropriate and worthy of that. When Faust leads Helena upward for the first time, he breaks out in consuming passion and, hence, Helena disperses.

Faust should fathom the profound secret of the human nature, how body, soul and spirit combine.

Spirit is the eternal; it was before birth and will be after death; soul is the connection between spirit and body; it tends more to the body first then to the spirit in the course of development, and with the latter to the everlasting. The development of the spiritual eye supports that.

In Faust you are now led into the laboratory in which Homunculus is generated; Homunculus becomes wonderfully understandable if he is understood as a soul that has not yet incarnated. Homunculus has to receive a body. Goethe shows the gradual development of the bodily in a magnificent picture at the Classical Walpurgisnight. Proteus is the sage who knows how the physical metamorphoses proceed. Homunculus has to start with the mineral, and then the realm of plants follows. For going through the plant realm Goethe uses the expression “es grünelt so.” [ Note 1 ]

Sexuality appears only on a certain stage. Eros combines with Homunculus: The human being comes into being from the connection of the male aspect of the soul and the female one.

Faust's loss of sight shows: the physical world dies for him; the internal vision rises in him. A magnificent picture of this process: “And as long you do not have this dying and becoming ...” The mystics express it in such a way: “for death is the root of all life.” And: “who does not die, before he dies perishes, before he dies.”

In the final picture of Faust the Chorus mysticus says:

All that is transitory
is only a symbol;
what seems unachievable
here is seen done;
what's indescribable,
here becomes fact:
The eternal-female
shows us the way.

In any mysticism the striving human soul is female. The connection of the soul with the world secret: the spiritual connection is expressed with the mystics as a wedding of the lamb. Goethe expressed this view even deeper in The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

Goethe himself said of the last passages of Faust in the conversations with Eckermann that he wanted to show Faust ascending the Montserrat. In the poem The Secrets it is indicated. Parzival, the traveller through the valley. When Faust lost his eyesight, he got the possibility to quickly develop. There he came to the higher regions, to the devachan, we would say. However, Goethe also needed Catholic ideas. Thus he let Doctor Marianus appear in the “neatest cell.” This indicated: the release from anything sexual, being above man and woman. That is why he also added the female name with masculine ending to him. Now asexuality takes the place of uni-sexuality. He had completely awoken in buddhi. Buddhi, the sixth member, had got the upper hand over all the other members.

Note:

Es grünelt so: the verb “grüneln” is a nonce word: being or becoming something that reminds of green; the translation of this sentence reads: “the air smells fresh and green.”

Let us take a look at the short life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Novalis is more a memory of a past life than a life in itself, a fine personality, an individuality who, from the very beginning, had the most profound spirituality as an inclination within him. One is always amazed at how Novalis combines the highest intellectuality, the sharpest thinking, with a wonderful spirituality.

He was a trained mining engineer who had a complete mastery of mathematics and the physical sciences, who combined mathematical thinking with a fine, delicate, and yet fiery, ether-like spirituality, who lived this harmoniously in a way that is perhaps unparalleled in life. You have to be able to empathize with what is contained in Novalis' sayings and fragments to realize how deeply he penetrated into the inner structure of the world. You also have to be able to empathize with his enthusiasm for mathematics. For him, it is a great poem that introduces us to the secrets of the world. Man ponders the connections between space and time. If he can imbibe the harmony of the stars, which revolve around the sun according to eternal laws, with the formative forces that work within the earth in ore veins, crystal formations and so on, then he can sense the living essence of the world.

Novalis is filled with true enthusiasm for mathematics. He calls mathematics, which can show such paths of understanding, a sublime religion. It is wonderful how he is able to embrace this seemingly dry science with fervent devotion. For him, the sensory world existed only as a reflection of eternally living spiritual facts, which reveal themselves to earthly perception in natural laws.

Novalis fell deeply in love with a thirteen-year-old girl who died soon after their engagement. The shock he experienced was tremendous. It opened the gates of the spiritual world to him. Novalis speaks with the deceased as with a living person; he called his own further life a 'her-after-death'. She is always present to him. The friendship that later united him with another girl can be called a supersensible one. She is like an emblem for the spiritual being that hovers above and with whom he will completely merge.

There was a power of spirituality in him that stands unparalleled in the modern age.

In earlier lives, Novalis had undergone profound initiations. Thus, he entered this life with a predisposition for a true, real understanding of world events. He appeared in the spiritual sky like a meteor, scattering spirit everywhere in a way rarely found in the expressions of newer spirits.

The fresh, youthful nature of Novalis was characterized by two poles: a great intellectuality and a deep spirituality. The whole wealth of his manifold creative thinking converged in him into an all-embracing sense of totality, which had its source of life in a divine source. He sensed the source everywhere as spirit. Novalis called this consciousness “magic”. The creative imagination, the feeling of the soul was for him a reproduction of the great cosmic feeling; it became for him “magical idealism”. He experienced his ego as related to the ego of all other beings, and he felt that all beings were related to each other. Thus Novalis merged with the spiritual weaving and life of nature.

In the “Apprentices of Sais” you will find the story of the young man “Hyacinth”, who has an intimate relationship with the creatures of nature. He and the girl “Rosenblüte” are bound by a warm friendship. The animals of the forest and the flowers of the fields are his companions in his secrets. It is told how he meets a man with a long beard who has a book from which Hyacinth learns a great deal. Now he is driven to seek out what constitutes the innermost being of man. This, what man must seek, Novalis called “the blue flower”. It is the seeking of the higher self in man.

We also find this significant symbol in oriental mysticism as the lotus flower. It is a symbol of the higher self, of chaste, purified humanity, in which the self can unfold. It is still enclosed as if by petals – later it will bear fruit and seeds. Novalis had brought such knowledge with him from his previous incarnations.

We are now told how Hyacinth wanders to the land of secrets, always searching, until he finds a veiled figure. When he removes the veil, he sees little roses.

In Novalis's “Hymns to the Night”, his experience of cosmic-human unity is expressed lyrically. This is also the case in the “Spiritual Songs”, this harrowing document of merging with Christ.

Everything he wanted to say to the world, Novalis set out in the novel “Heinrich von Ofterdingen”. But he died before he could finish it. Let us recall in our minds what he intended to accomplish.

We are transported back to the time of the Wartburg Singers' Contest when Heinrich was young. But the course of events takes us out of the world of the present and into a fairytale world. We have to transport ourselves back to the time when the area of the Atlantic Ocean was still land. There was once a lively life there, people whose activities would indeed seem like a fairytale to present-day people. It was a land where rain and sunshine were not distributed as they are now. The sun was hidden by fog, the air was watery. It is not for nothing that the Nordic sagas called Atlantis 'Niflheim', that is, Mistheim. There was no distinction between rain and sunshine, only a gradual transition from water to air. A rainbow would not have been possible there. The events of those ancient times are preserved in the legends of the flood, the ark, the rainbow, and one stands amazed at the infinitely deep truths contained in the ancient religious records. At first glance, the biblical account of the rainbow seems allegorical. But here we are faced with a fact: a rainbow would not have been possible in ancient Atlantis. It is one of those sacred moments that overwhelm the occult researcher when he is transported back in time to these older times.

Novalis's seer's eye looked into this ancient realm, which one can truly speak of as a fairytale realm. Man did not yet have his reasoning mind back then; he lived life with nature. He built his house in such a way that it grew out of the rocks and plants. There were no myths back then. What are the myths that our peoples tell each other? The gift of shaping worlds in poetry is only peculiar to our post-Atlantic race; the Atlanteans did not have it. But the Atlanteans still had the gift of transforming plants, even animals and humans. The metamorphic powers of Circe in the Odyssey point to such metamorphic powers of humans. Everything that humans bring forth from within as myth, the people of Atlantis had experienced and seen with their own eyes. The great poets of our time have preserved the images of their poetry from what they had seen on Atlantis itself.

Novalis interweaves his own memories with the story of “Heinrich von Ofterdingen” and brings the ancient Atlantis to life in his tales. He then takes us to more recent times, to the period of city foundations. This time brings with it the emergence of the bourgeoisie and material culture. The rise of the bourgeoisie is linked to external, material culture. What was previously poetry becomes something else.

The origin of our poetry points to the mysteries. We have to go back to the time when the sacred mysteries were the source of inspiration for the poetry of Homer or Aeschylus and Sophocles, when ancient culture laid the foundation for what worked as a spiritual force in Homer and Aeschylus. Only after long trials were the purified admitted to the higher mysteries, the primeval mysteries, which took place in the supersensible, in the astral world. But there was a reflection of this in later times, for example in the Eleusinian mysteries. There the so-called primal drama was enacted. It was depicted how God, the soul of the world, descended into matter and how the descending, suffering and resurrecting God shows the way of redemption. It was the choir that, as in an echo, expressed the language of cosmic events in the ancient Greek mystery drama.

In Aeschylus we experience the transition of the ancient sacred primal drama into the secular drama. It blossoms from a branch that has grown out of the mystery being. The other branch was philosophy, and the third branch was religion.

In the mystery centers, the ancients possessed the unity of religion, poetry and science. There, science was vividly demonstrated. As three branches from one root, these areas worked side by side and into each other. It was only later that they diverged. This separation of the three areas was necessary so that each could become perfect in its own way. So they had to go their separate ways for a while. Great minds seek to reunite what has had to separate in this way. Therefore, we find the striving for the unification of the arts in such phenomena as, for example, in the musical drama of Bayreuth. The aim is to create a total work of art that encompasses the three areas of intellectual life on earth.

Poetry arose out of truth. Originally, poetry was nothing other than the garment of truth. Novalis looks back to primeval times, when poets strove to express the highest truth in their works. If we turn our gaze to the primal poems of humanity, we do indeed find this expression in them. In Atlantis, man was still at one with nature, with his God, and the mysteries presented a picture of reality as it was experienced. Later, memories of these times were revived in the myths. These memories were something sacred and real for Novalis. He said to himself: In the future, what people still carry hidden within them as memories will become reality again. What we create out of our imagination as poets and thus bring into consciousness will one day become fact. The present world is growing into a new spiritual reality. As people carry the seeds of poetry into material life, something very special also grows out of material life. The guide on the way to this new world is Sophia, wisdom.

Novalis sets the events of his story in the time of the rising city culture, in that time when the outer life begins to become material, when it passes into the civil element of the physical plan. For him, the bearers of the future are the poets. The seed of poetry is placed in material culture. Novalis lets Heinrich von Ofterdingen be a kind of seer. He dreams of the blue flower, dreams that are not like other dreams, but a reflection of spiritual reality. He lets him experience different things: legends and historical events come to life, for example, the time of the Crusades shines in, the spiritual that flowed from the Orient into Europe, in the description of the prisoners in the castle.

The most important thing for Henry is his encounter with a miner who has spent almost his entire life underground. It is described what one can feel when working in the shafts under the earth. The stars of heaven shine towards him like the future. In the depths of the earth, he finds his past, as it were. The metals are wondrously related to man. What has developed down there over the millennia, the secret of the divine world order, is brought up by the miner, thrusts itself towards the miner. The selflessness in the work is brought home to us when it is described how the gold is brought to the surface. The miner is only interested in how the gold comes out of the earth: in it he recognizes the creative divinity. It is a beautiful, moral description of the selfless interest in what would otherwise inflame people's selfishness. The miner, who always works in the dark, only has the right idea of the magnificence of light.

Heinrich then meets the old hermit in the cave. The hermit has a wealth of life experience behind him and records it in a book. He talks about how only he who sees in all that is mortal a parable of the immortal is a true historian. This encounter deepens Heinrich's experiences again.

Then, in Augsburg, Heinrich meets Master Klingsor, who is a seer. In a fairy tale, we learn from him what the future will be for all of humanity: a higher world will be born out of this world. There is a poetic magic in the story of the young man's love for Mathilde, who later turns out to be Cyane again – a reference to the fact that the ephemeral is a symbol of the eternal. He knows that out of what is now a hard, stony reality, another world will grow in the future.

Then the absorption into the astral world is described: the land of Astralis symbolizes evolution, development. Poetry becomes a magical force that transforms people. Novalis believes in the magical power of the imagination, where it does not flow licentiously, but rather places itself under the guidance of Sophia and permeates the whole world with the power of creative Eros.

We may see a reincarnated Pythagorean in Novalis.

Today I would like to continue looking at certain elementary issues on which to build the more comprehensive view to be discussed today and in the next lecture.

It is natural that a person, who during his life begins to sense his I, begins as it were to awaken consciously in his I, should want to reach insight and clarity about it and its relation to the world. There is at the present time a strong longing and also a widespread striving to attain such insight. As people experience this longing for clarity about their own self, they encounter the many pitfalls and hazards bound up with the quest for self-knowledge. People tend to assume that they are seeking a more or less simple entity. The assumption that the human I is fairly uncomplicated has caused much disillusionment and made people turn to the kind of guidance to be found in the writings of Ralph Waldo Trine and others, a guidance sought by many today because of the belief that by delving into their inner being they will come to know themselves better and gain more insight and security in life.¹ What they actually experience is that self-knowledge is diminished rather than enhanced by embarking on such a path. If they endure this disillusionment which is already hard to bear, the pitfalls and hazards become all the greater.

It is well to be clear, at least in principle, why self-knowledge is so difficult to attain. There is no simple straightforward path along which self-knowledge can be sought. The self, the I, can be discovered, or at least sought, through thinking, through feeling, and through the will. In each case something is discovered which one can claim as the I. Whether the attempt is made to reach the experience in the realm of thought, in the realm of feeling, or else to attempt it through the will, one always gets the impression that through these soul powers one must be approaching one's inner being.

A person may at first try a path by means of his life of thought, i.e., attempt to depict the I to himself. Especially people who are philosophically inclined have in recent years become convinced that this is a secure path. They will say: That which I look upon as I remains from birth to death the same entity. If I look back in memory over my life, I find that I am always the same. However, this statement is contradicted daily for every normal human being, as I have often pointed out. Between going to sleep and waking the ordinary person has no means of knowing how things concerning the I really are. He has no external observation of the I during sleep. The I he depicts to himself he can only relate to the times he was awake; during sleep the chain of his life's external events is broken. This is easy enough to see. Therefore, he who believes that the I lives in his thoughts, in such a way that he can actually find it there, must recognize that it is blotted out every time he sleeps, at least as far as his consciousness is concerned. Something which plunges into darkness and becomes imperceptible every night cannot be regarded as having a secure existence.

Thus the person who seeks his I along the path of thought may, in a philosophical sense, have a clear enough picture of his I, but it will not offer him much satisfaction. Even if he fails, through simple reflection, to recognize that the mental picture of his I vanishes every night, it cannot give him any feeling of real security. His inner being as a whole, appearing more substantial than mere ideation, soon makes him aware of the unsatisfactory nature of the merely depicted I. What is found along this path in one's search for the I is, so to speak, too rarefied. But why is that the case?

You must realize that it is by no means easy to find the kind of ideas that will truly express and illumine the facts of spiritual life. The reason is simply that our speech, our language causes the greatest difficulty. One often feels as if entangled in a linguistic web when pondering and struggling to find adequate words. The drawback of the merely philosophical approach is the difficulty one has in getting free of the restrictions imposed by language. And quite apart from that struggle there is the feeling of dissatisfaction with what speech is able to convey, particularly when seeking the I through the mental activity of forming thought pictures. You will soon experience this when you study philosophers who have much to say about the I. You get the feeling that their thoughts are too rarefied, too thin, and you are left with a feeling of unreality and insecurity. There are people who believe that because one is able to think the I, this thought is in itself a guarantee that the I will go through the portal of death into the spiritual world. But one's life of feeling tells one that if the I is extinguished every night, then it is feasible that it is also extinguished at death. This feeling is one of the pitfalls that leaves one feeling insecure. But what causes it?

One learns to know the true nature of the I that is merely glimpsed in ordinary thought life when one becomes able to compare it with the I that can be discovered through spiritual science. This I is not extinguished in sleep even if ordinary consciousness is. It must be conceded that from a certain aspect—please note, only from a certain aspect—there is a measure of truth in what is said by 'some philosophers such as Ernst Mach: that the I cannot be saved for it is something unreal.² They maintain that all the many experiences we have our whole life long string together like pearls, and because they do we derive from them the picture of the I, but this is not a reality. Such philosophers regard the I as a mere thought and see no reason why a thought should be regarded as having real existence. Yet in our mental life we know of no other I than the rarefied entity which is extinguished every time we fall asleep. This I is only like a picture in the mind. The question we must ask is: In the light of spiritual science just what is this mental picture of the I?

Spiritual science reveals that the mental picture we commonly have of our I is not at all identical with the one we find through spiritual science. This discovery is of the greatest significance. The I of which we form a mental picture is deprived in the present incarnation of inner effective life. Purely on the basis of this I we could not in truth say, I exist now, at this moment in time. The mental picture we have of our I is no guarantee that we exist now, in the present. There is a constant danger that somehow a combination of mental pictures is conjuring up the I. That is the uncertainty; that is why we feel that what we are faced with is a mere picture and no reality. Why do we experience our inner self in this way? Because the I of which we form a mental picture contains already forces for our next incarnation. In this life it must necessarily exist in the form in which we encounter it. When we depict the I, we are dealing with a force belonging not to this life, but a force that will only evolve in our next incarnation. It is comparable to a plant which, if it could sense the seed within would say, This seed is in reality not me; it is the plant that will grow only next spring. In a similar way there lives in what we depict as our I the force that will evolve in our next incarnation. It has to exist the way it does, for if we wanted it to become more in the present incarnation, then it would unfold too soon and could not remain seed-like till our next life. Thus, the I we depict in thoughts must remain weak; it cannot be active now, for it has to retain the seed-like forces for the next incarnation.

You will realize the significance of this fact. When spoken of in this abstract manner, its immense importance may not be immediately evident. What we are talking about is something shadowy, belonging to the next incarnation. While it cannot develop in this life, it can be enriched so that it loses its shadowy character; otherwise it remains unsatisfactory and is experienced as a mere point, as it were, beyond which no progress is possible. However, the problem is how one sets about enriching this I that is felt to be no more than a point.

Nothing is achieved by merely brooding within oneself, for all we arrive at is what in this incarnation is a mere point, a seed for the next life. No matter how forcefully, how mystically one broods inwardly, or what beautiful precepts one sets oneself, the I is not reached. In the way in which this I that we depict in thought lives within us in this incarnation, it does not really belong to us. For the duration of this incarnation it actually belongs to the world. From what we see inwardly as a thought picture of our I, the world will prepare for our next incarnation what will then be active within us. That is why this I can become enriched only through our experiences of the world. When asked by our friends to write something in their album, I have often, in cases where it was appropriate, written: “To find yourself, seek in the world; to find the world, seek in yourself.”

In order to find oneself; i.e., in order to provide one's thought life with a richer, more living content than is possible in ordinary life, one must widen one's observation, and deepen one's experience of the world. However, in this respect ordinary sensory observations are of no help, for they also belong to the present incarnation. They are also dependent on the physical body whiCh is laid aside at death. We must make observations of a different kind, must become able to enter into the. more subtle aspects of life. We can enrich the thought picture of our I only by being aware of more than the obvious aspects of life. We must cease to think in the abstract manner so much preferred nowadays. To enrich the I one must make efforts to seek out the more hidden connections in life. I beg you not to misunderstand this remark. To seek out life's hidden connections would today be regarded as a useless pursuit because people are not striving to enrich the I. All modern people are concerned about are the kinds of thoughts that either depict external events or are useful for some action. But these things have a connection only with the present incarnation. In order to enrich the I we must make it an end in itself to seek out life's hidden connections. It must become an intimate pursuit of which we expect no other result than that it should enrich our inner life; i.e., enrich the thought picture of our I.

Certain things are expected of man at the present time and it is important that he should concern himself with events in life which, though seemingly remote and unconnected, nevertheless belong together. It is important that we ponder the kind of deeper connections that must be sought, as it were, beneath the surface of life's events. To someone who is concerned only with superficial aspects, such connections will seem strange. Yet it will be found that we enrich the thought picture of our I the more we succeed in discovering riddles in life which, though remote, speak strongly to our life of soul. Such connections are not as easy to explain or point out as it is to point out and explain the obvious reason a stone becomes warm when a sunbeam falls on it. But the more we contemplate life's hidden connections, the stronger becomes the feeling that we are growing together with the thought picture of our I, that we are growing together with the inner life that will carry it over to the next incarnation.

What kind of connections do I mean? I mean quite real, concrete ones, except that we normally pay them no attention. I will give you an example: A clergyman once met a gypsy woman with her child, which was dirty and unkempt. Since the outbreak of the World War gypsies have practically disappeared but those who know them will also know that they are people who care very little about many things, one of which is cleanliness. Gypsy children are usually covered in layers of dirt, but apart from cleanliness these children are deprived of a great many other things. The clergyman, being a kind person, wanted to save this forlorn child. He told the mother that he would set aside a sum of money for the child's care and education so that he could grow up into a respectable person. The clergyman's intention was really the very best. The gypsy woman, whose normal life was one of beggary, would naturally gladly have accepted a gift. Nevertheless, her answer was not only significant but a refusal. Her exact words were that she would neither educate her child nor allow him to be educated, because her way of life made for more happiness than all scientific knowledge, all the repute and mutual esteem and all other so-called advantages of culture. This incident was reported by the man who met the gypsy woman himself, Fercher von Steinwand.³ You will know of him from my book The Riddle of Man.⁴ In his fine article about gypsies he describes the event. And it is something which those who like myself know gypsies and how they live can well believe. Many gypsies do hold such views. They really are convinced, as the gypsy woman said, that all culture, all education and learning, all the respect and esteem sought by other people, make one far less happy than the basic elementary life of the gypsy, the life of a child of nature.

The gypsy woman's answer is most revealing. One can, of course, accept it as simply a fact of life; most people do. But one can also discover in such opinions the kind of hidden connections in life of which I spoke. It may occur to someone—as it did to Fercher von Steinwand—that someone else's opinion is in a strange way related to that of the gypsy woman. This someone is a man from a background of culture and learning who nevertheless posed the question whether culture makes human beings happy or less happy in life. He submitted his answer in a long, learned treatise, but in essence it was the same as the one given by the gypsy. The man was Rousseau and the treatise in which he voices the same opinion as the gypsy was awarded a prize by the Academy of Science in Paris.⁵ Here you see a strange connection between widely disparate phenomena. The conviction felt by the gypsy Rousseau elaborates in a scientific paper that made him famous and influential. The sentiment, the viewpoint, was the same in both cases, the only difference being that the gypsy woman did not write a scientific treatise about it and was not awarded a prize by the Academy of Science.

This kind of thing happens quite often in life but is not noticed. If a habit is made of examining, from different points of view, issues normally looked at from one standpoint only, one discovers surprising points of reference as in the case of Rousseau and the gypsy. Life is extraordinarily many-sided, and entering into its various aspects means enrichment and strength for the I, in the sense that has been explained. If one seeks out such connections which are not normally noticed, then the I which we have only as a picture grows stronger. To be aware of this fact is of immense importance. In one's search for such hidden connections in life one is contemplating the world rather than brooding within oneself. Furthermore, it will be discovered that one's thinking, i.e., forming mental pictures—an activity connected with the I—becomes more mobile, more alive. As a consequence many more things occur to one than before, which is of great importance, because much dissatisfaction with life, and even ill health, is caused by the fact that so few things occur to us. We draw our thoughts as it were into a rather narrow circle, whereas if we attain the ability to view our experiences in life from many vantage points, seeking connecting threads between distant events, we strengthen our I and become better able to cope with life. That is why all education that introduces only one-sided thoughts and views is harmful. I will give you an example which comes into the same category as the previous one.

Many people embrace so-called pantheism, which as you know I have always rejected. Such people will say: We seek the spirit everywhere. Spirit! Spirit! Everything is spirit and with that they are satisfied. Nowadays this is often called panpsychism because people will have nothing to do with theism. I have often commented on it by pointing out that one would not get very far if this approach was applied to the physical world. It corresponds to someone walking through a meadow and instead of naming the individual flowers as lilies or tulips and so on, just saying “flowers, flowers,” which is an abstraction of them all. So too is it an abstraction to speak of nothing but spirit, spirit and ever more spirit, and yet reject knowledge of real individual spirits. When one speaks about Angels, Archangels and Archai as of individual beings with their own defined spiritual existence just as one speaks of individual beings in the physical world, it is rejected. However, there is a tendency in man to think in a pantheistic way, to simplify everything, always to seek abstractions. That is why the example connected with the gypsy is so interesting, for it illustrates that looking everywhere for abstractions is in a way a gypsy-like trait.

The person who had the experience with the gypsy woman came across another gypsy who, with good appetite, was eating meat from an animal he had found lying dead in a field. Gypsies think nothing of eating dead animals they happen to find, nor do they suffer any ill effects. The person who found the gypsy eating, wanted to impress upon him that one does not eat animals that are found dead, only animals that have been slaughtered. And here the gypsy showed his inclination for abstractions saying: Well, the animal I am eating was slaughtered by God.—So you see, like pantheists he applies the concept of God to everything. Naturally if one's view, one's thinking is pantheistic it must be assumed that an animal found dead must have been slaughtered by God, and there can be no objection to eating what God has slaughtered.

Wider, less obvious connections can be found between one's experiences in life; they vitalize the thought picture of our I. There are, of course, those who will say: Surely, all that is required is the ability to combine facts. Yet, that is very abstract. What I mean is something much more alive, something that relates to the ability to combine facts as a living organism relates to a machine.

When we make the effort to enrich our I by bringing together and relating disparate events, we become aware of a force which lives in us already but belongs to our next incarnation. It is easy to be deluded into thinking that the I is enriched by brooding within oneself. That is an illusion. We enrich it by entering into aspects of life that lie beneath the surface, and by truly fostering the ability to ponder and reflect about life, instead of being merely engrossed in ourselves. One must take hold of life lovingly and be willing to seek out the relation between remote events for no other purpose than to enrich the I and make it stronger. The attempt can be made with the most ordinary situations in life; opportunities are there all the time. Try to let everyday experiences reverberate in such hidden connections. One must of course remain realistic and not read into such connections things they do not contain or try to become more knowledgeable through them. That is not the purpose; what matters is their effect on us, enabling us to experience a force which lives in us in this life in the form of a thought, whose reality will become evident only in our next incarnation.

When we become conscious of such hidden connections the possibility arises for us to become aware not only of the fact that the thought picture of our I is the foundation of our next incarnation, but also of how it exists between death and new birth. This requires a greater awareness of how we adapt to life, indeed of how people in general adapt to and deal with life. Here again, the more obvious aspects are not the most important for the attainment of the inner sensitivity that enables us to become aware of the way we exist between death and new birth. The insight one seeks to attain of the beings and events of the spiritual world must be sought in subtler ways than is customary today. Life in the physical world is completely different from life in the spiritual world. It is not really surprising that, just as they are, our ordinary thoughts, feelings and will impulses cannot be applied to the spiritual world, which requires a much more delicate approach.

To strengthen and enrich our life of thought, efforts must be made to discover hidden connections between events, as I have described. But for the awareness of the I as it lives between death and new birth; in fact, for awareness of the realm in which we are between death and new birth, it is necessary that these connections are related to human beings themselves. Indeed, life provides plenty of opportunity for such hidden connections to be discovered. And if they are noticed and treated with the necessary sensitivity, one will soon find one is on the right path. Unfortunately, because the words one must of necessity use are too often taken in a materialistic sense, a certain difficulty arises when the attempt is made to explain things of this nature. I shall illustrate what is meant by an example.

What I want to explain can best be observed in the case of people who through their whole disposition have what could be said to be a dreamlike inner life; not that they are complete dreamers, but their soul life has a dreamlike quality. This quality is more pronounced in people living in countries towards the eastern hemisphere. The further west one goes, the less do human beings reveal in themselves those subtle connections which point to the hidden spiritual realm I have indicated. That is why the Western Europeans, who have to resort to connections of a cruder nature, find it so extraordinarily difficult to understand the soul characteristics of the Russians. And such understanding is more essential now than ever before. It could be said that Russians are a fraction less awake than Western or even Central Europeans. That is why what we are now speaking about is easier to relate to the inner life of a Russian than to the inner life of a Western European. It does of course relate to people in the West, but it is not so easy to detect there.⁶

A German writer, Eduard Bernstein, has an interesting description of an incident which I would like to use as an example of what I want to illustrate.⁷ He will surely not be pleased to know that I regard the experience he describes as mystical. Nevertheless it is a good example of those hidden connections in life which materialists regard as mere chance. Eduard Bernstein relates that, in London, he used to be a frequent guest at the house of Engels, the friend of Karl Marx.⁸ Engels' household was a hospitable one, where many people often met, where in fact an international group would frequently gather. It was here that Bernstein met Sergius Kratschinsky, a writer who had adopted the name Stepniak, by which he is quite well known. Bernstein's description of Stepniak is most interesting; to begin with, he mainly describes the more external aspects saying that Stepniak was

a powerfully built man with an impressive head; in looks he corresponded exactly to the picture we normally have of a Slay. He was sensitive, of a somewhat dreamy disposition. Yet in Russia he had been very much a man of action, not only prominently involved in the liberation from prison of Peter Krapotkius, but also in the successful attack on Msenzow, the police dictator of St. Petersburg. In England he was the soul of the society “Free Russia,” founded for the purpose of collecting money to support Russian freedom fighters. On their behalf, he had repeatedly undertaken lecture tours in England and one across America, where he had been particularly befriended by the American humorist Mark Twain. Stepniak was a respected figure in certain literary circles in England having made a name also as a novelist.

At Engels' parties or at any other gathering he was usually quiet and seldom spoke unless one addressed him directly. However, it was obvious that he greatly appreciated his friendship with Engels and like coming to his parties. A friendship also sprang up between Stepniak and myself.

It so happened that at a meeting of the society “Free Russia,” attended by both Bernstein and Stepniak, a quarrel broke out. It was one of those quarrels that easily breaks out among people with a deep emotional commitment to life's greater issues. The quarrel concerned the relationship between Russians and Poles. In such a situation it is a safe bet that the average Central European will side with the Poles. A fierce disagreement ensued in which Bernstein and others spoke up for the Poles, Bernstein defending them against the Russians. As a consequence of this quarrel Stepniak no longer came to the society. And for many years Bernstein heard nothing of Stepniak, who had severed all connection with people in the society. Then after a long time Bernstein received a letter from someone not connected with the society, inviting him to a party on one of the following evenings. The writer of the invitation said he was aware that Bernstein was not on good terms with Stepniak, so he was to come only if he did not mind meeting the latter. Bernstein did not mind; in fact, he welcomed the opportunity to meet Stepniak again. And so the two men met once more.

One may, of course, not find it so remarkable that two people who used to like seeing one another meet again after several years. It may be regarded as a mere chance meeting, and it is only natural that materialists should do so. However, Bernstein's whole description of the mood in which the meeting took place that evening makes it clear that, especially for Stepniak, it was an occasion of very great significance. They spent the evening in a happy mood. Before parting Stepniak said how pleased he was that they had found one another again and how much he looked forward to them spending time together. Two days later Bernstein read in the paper that Stepniak was dead. It appeared that on the day after their meeting he had been reading a book while out walking, had crossed a railway line and been hit by a train. It was absolutely clear that it was an accident; there was no question of suicide.

Thus another chance! But you see, such events are in reality no mere chance. I have chosen a striking example to illustrate the kind of connection one must look for in life. If one is to discover links that are less obvious, one must seek the kind of event in which connections are hidden and which involved the inner life of human beings. Once it has been recognized that there is a deeper aspect of our life of soul which is prophetic, then one can no longer consider such events as mere chance. This aspect comes to expression chiefly in our mental life when tinged with feeling, and when it is somewhat dreamy. In such instances it points to the future to a remarkable degree. All dreams are in fact prophetic; when you dream you always dream the future. But because you cannot formulate mental pictures of future events you clothe the dream in pictures of past ones, and draw them like a veil over the inner experience. There is a deep connection between what we dream of the future and the clothes we put on it when we awake. This is because of karma, and because the future is linked to the past. What we become conscious of, we clothe in pictures from the past, i.e., in images with which we are familiar. Though we are aware of only a fraction of our dreams, we dream the whole time between falling asleep and waking. When someone is in a dreamy state during waking life, it is not without effect on his karma.

Anyone who really understands what I have indicated concerning life's hidden connections will recognize in this incidence a definite picture of how karma works. Had Stepniak not been the sensitive and dreamy person he was, then the effect produced by the connection between his conscious life and the hidden current of his karma would have been less effective. It would not have been strong enough to bring about, on the last evening, practically at the last hour, the meeting I have described. The more our ordinary abstract mental pictures are obscured by a state of dreaminess the stronger our power to attract karmic connections. Naturally, it is also possible in ordinary life to take note of things and adjust one's actions accordingly. But here we are concerned with a person of a dreamy disposition who, not in full consciousness, but while in a dreamy state brings about—just before going through the portal of death—the opportunity that enables him to meet the other person once more.

Such fine, more delicate connections must be recognized for what they are—namely, a source of enrichment for man's inner life, an enrichment that provides the striving human being with a perspective on life between death and new birth. One must become more attentive to finer details in the present life and seek out threads between events in which human beings themselves are involved. Certainly these things must not be understood materialistically. What I have said must not be taken to mean that Stepniak brought about the meeting with Bernstein through some kind of inner force of attraction. That would be a materialistic and completely wrong interpretation. These things must not be regarded in such a crude manner as though they could be proved by natural-scientific means. When dealing with such delicate issues one must not expect to be able to pin them down as if they were something material, but be satisfied if one thing or another becomes clearer through the description of such hidden connections. To become accustomed to observe life in accordance with such delicate relationships is to enrich the life of soul. All relationships dealt with in spiritual science are basically of this delicate nature. That is why the study of spiritual science enriches life.

Thus, when we seek out the kind of connections I described earlier, in which human beings are less directly involved, we enrich and strengthen the shadow-like I, which we bear within us as a seed that will evolve only in our next incarnation, whereas connections in which human beings are directly involved, enrich life by awakening sensitivity and awareness for the region we pass through between death and new birth. It is a strange fact that many a person who is well able to seek out such connections fails to notice them because they are interpreted materialistically. Many important passages in Goethe's works can be understood only if it is recognized that Goethe does not want to be pinned down in a materialistic sense. One has to realize that his style when writing such passages was his way of describing events which, as it were, take their course beneath the surface of life.

It is a mistake to believe that the I can be enriched in a way that leads to enhanced self-knowledge by delving into oneself in the crude manner described, for example, by Waldo Trine. The opposite is true; to become strong one must strive to become free from oneself. That is why those who advise people to seek within themselves instead of leading them away from themselves are basically bad guides to self-knowledge. The aim should rather be to seek within the world those hidden connections between events which must be sought with effort, as they are not the kind one is apt to stumble across.

Just as one encounters pitfalls in regard to the I that lives in us as thought picture, so are there pitfalls in regard to the I that lives in the will. In ordinary life we know it no better than the I we depict in our thinking. That such is the case is shown by the fact that people, for example Theodor Ziehen, to whom I referred recently, simply ignore the will.⁹ They cannot discover the will in modern man, and this has a certain justification in the sense I have indicated in public lectures at various places. Franz Brentano ruled out the will altogether and differentiated in the soul the activity of forming mental pictures, the making of judgments, and the feelings fluctuating between love and hate.¹⁰ Consequently he did not deal with the will, not even in his work on psychology. And it is true to say that when one looks at the human being as he is in his present incarnation, one does not find the will as such. According to the modern view the will is what brings man satisfaction or disappointment, pleasure or pain and so on. In other words, all that one finds in place of the will are moods and feelings; the will itself remains hidden.

Let us say you lift your hand; you may be aware of a certain mental picture or a feeling in so doing, but what actually occurs within the body when the hand lifts, of that you are completely unaware. Nowhere can one find the will in man today. But why? Because the will is not in him. The I that lives in the will is not within present-day man. What is effective in him is something that works across from his previous incarnation. What comes from the I of his previous life acts in him now, as will. When I say, I am, I live within the seed of my next incarnation; when I say, I will, I live in what acts across from my previous incarnation.

It is of great importance to become aware of these facts, not least because they explain why it is so easy to be misled in this area. When a person says, I will this or that, and carries out an action, will flows into him from his previous incarnation, whereas his satisfaction or dissatisfaction in life depend upon himself as he is now, and the circumstances of his present incarnation. You will realize what mysterious connections we are dealing with. However, in ordinary life they are felt as if they were jumbled together. People believe the I is a kind of substantial something hidden in their inner being and that they express this something at different times variously as: “I think,” “I was,” “I am,” “I will.” But things are not like that. When I say, “I am,” I rely on a force which I have within me, the way this year's plant has within it the seed that will develop only next year. Thus when I say, “I am,” I am within a force which becomes a human being in a future incarnation. When I say, “I will,” I act out of a force that was in me in a former life on earth.

When this has been grasped one realizes that it is only as far as our life of feeling is concerned that we are—as the philosophers express it—in modus praesens, in the actual present. The only soul force that is fully real in our present life is that of feeling. Our being is interwoven with time in a threefold manner; there exists in us something that works across from the previous incarnation, what we feel now, and something whose effect carries over into the next incarnation. Just as this year's plant grows from the dried seed of the previous year, so does our will, which gradually flows into the world, issue from the I that was the dried seed in the previous incarnation, whereas the seed for the incarnation to come is what we now think of as the I. That is why I could write in the article that appeared in the April 1916 issue of the Bern periodical The Realm: “Our path through the spiritual world can be traversed when we discover what thinking and willing encompass,” because neither thinking nor willing live in us as something belonging exclusively to the present life.¹¹ Rather, they point through their spiritual connection from a former life on earth across to a future one. Feeling, on the other hand, we experience now directly in its spiritual reality, which is why feeling cannot be developed through inner initiative; we can only guide it, whereas thinking and will can be transformed through concentration and meditation.

Many people will ask: How do I attain a closer relationship with the being we speak of as the Christ? One cannot give a simple formula as answer. The whole of spiritual science deals with issues which, through their very nature, lead to the realm in which Christ lives. As you all know, only once, at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, did Christ walk on the earth as a physical human being. Only then was it possible to know Him as one can know a physical person in physical surroundings. If today one wants to draw near to Christ one must seek Him in the form in which He now lives within the earthly sphere. He must be sought in life's finer, more intimate connections like those of which we have spoken today. Schooling oneself to seek out such delicate connections between remote events enables one to raise oneself into that region of consciousness in which the Christ can be truly experienced. What I have just said can of course also be taken in a crude materialistic sense. Someone could say I am implying that one cannot comprehend the Christ with the ordinary thinking that one applies to physical objects. People who speak like that are really expressing the opinion that things only qualify if they can be depicted in one's mind the way one depicts natural objects. This is the attitude of the materialist; no possibility exists to kindle in him awareness of the spiritual.

Let us for a moment imagine a being so constituted that it could be detected only in dreams. No physical sense could perceive it, nor could it be grasped by ordinary thinking. A person who wanted to gain knowledge of such a being would have to develop the art of dreaming, otherwise the being would not exist for him. It would not be the being's fault if he could not perceive it but his own, due to his inability to do so. People make arbitrary demands concerning the qualities something should possess, and if they are lacking, it is dismissed as unreal. It must be realized that in order to be able to be aware of and perceive things which are not of the same nature as external objects, a different thinking must be developed; in fact, an altogether different inner attitude. The important thing is to recognize that we must adapt ourselves to approach such beings, not the other way round.

One could wish that the words could be found which would enable people to overcome their materialistic outlook and discover the subtler aspect of life. Even the most worthwhile people do not find it easy to enter into the kinds of things I have explained today. Such matters are ridiculed and regarded as the product of fantasy, to which we could reply, Very well, regard it as fantasy, but the point is that the beings and things of which we are talking are so constituted that, unless you have the power of fantasy, you cannot become aware of them. They reveal their true reality only to those who possess fantasy. As I said one wishes the words could be found that make clear how necessary it is, especially in our time, to entertain such subtle thoughts in one's mind. Such concepts may be subtle, but they make the soul strong, so strong that it becomes able to comprehend the true essence of things. The soul discovers that it can penetrate far deeper into the real connections of things than is possible with a thinking that is schooled solely on the mental pictures derived from today's materialistic, natural-scientific outlook.

Today one finds that even those with eminent minds have forgotten how to engender the necessary subtlety. In the last lecture I made it clear that I have the highest regard for Franz Brentano, not least because he did, through his study of Aristotle, develop subtlety of thinking up to a point. As I said he could not accept spiritual science. This was due to many things, but principally it was because he still lacked the necessary mobility of thinking to penetrate to the spiritual aspect of things. One must at least strive to attain it. When people read my Theosophy or the second part of Occult Science, one can often discover from what emerges just why their thinking stumbles.¹²¹³ The same can be said in regard to Brentano. I would indeed have found it incomprehensible that a sensitive and astute thinker like Brentano should be unable to find the way, had I not succeeded in discovering an exact instance that reveals just where the difficulty lies. There are others, of course, but let me give you an example.

Brentano said: Whatever the soul consists of, as far as the substance in which it lives is concerned, it must be capable of individualization, for one can divide certain lower creatures, and each part will continue life with the same characteristics the creature had before being divided. You will know that this is possible with certain lower worms; they are unaffected if divided, and live on as two separate worms. From this Brentano concluded that an independent soul must be present in each separate piece. In other words, if a worm is divided in two and both parts continue to live, there must be a soul in each. He further concluded from this that the soul and the body must be one unity. He made a comparison which convinced him that his view was right. He compared the event of the worm with a triangle saying that the triangle divides into two triangles if a line is drawn through it. So he compared two concepts: that of dividing a worm in two and that of dividing a triangle in two, and let one explain the other. He considered the two concepts to be of equal simplicity and able to explain one another. But is it a valid comparison? For Brentano it was an important issue. But does it stand up to scrutiny? It does not. Let us say you have here a triangle; if you draw a line through it in a certain way, it does indeed divide into two triangles. Each half is a triangle just as the worm when divided becomes two worms. However, if you divide the, triangle differently, one of the parts becomes not a triangle but a quadrangle. In other words, only under certain circumstances do you get two triangles.

An intelligent, astute man makes a comparison, but it is invalid; his thinking is not sufficiently mobile, not sufficiently alive to find a valid one; he stumbles, with serious consequence. Had he not been misled into thinking that dividing a worm in two could be compared to dividing a triangle in two, he would have stayed on the right course. Dividing a worm into two parts has nothing whatever to do with two souls. One and the same group is effective in both parts. One could compare it with someone looking at his image in a mirror. If the mirror is broken in two, he has two images; yet he himself remains whole. Not the person but the mirror has become divided. Likewise the worm soul cannot be divided; it endures as does the person who sees two images of himself in the mirrors. Thus one and the same soul is present in the two parts of the worm; that is the true concept corresponding to the reality. That concept Brentano could not reach; his thinking was not mobile enough and had become deluded by a false comparison. Had he made the comparison correctly, he would have noticed as he divided the triangle that the mere act of dividing does not guarantee that the result will be two triangles. In order to get that result something else must be added, namely, the concept triangle, which is to be applicable to both parts after the division. Without the concept the result may require two different concepts; i.e., that of quadrangle as well as that of triangle. The comparison could have been valid if it had occurred to him that he had to use one and the same concept for both parts, and that it was this concept that guaranteed the division would result in two triangles. It did not occur to him, consequently he did not recognize that one and the same worm soul was effective in both pieces of worm, effective in the sense that it looked into the parts from outside, like someone looking into two mirrors.

The need for greater subtlety of thinking is evident in all spheres of life. We shall not progress unless thinking becomes more alive and mobile so that it will cease to cling to crude externalities. There never have been more obstacles to making thinking more alive. For that very reason it is all the more necessary to promote science of one spirit. Only by working with subtler concepts does thinking become active and mobile. Through their very nature, the concepts of spiritual science have the power to strengthen the human I. What is longed for today may be satisfied by other means. But only spiritual science can give the human being real inner strength by awakening in him lucid concepts that are not so readily available, concepts which, just because they do not depict life's external aspects, make us inwardly strong, which means capable of recognizing the reality, the essence of things.

We shall continue next time to look at important issues from a wider perspective.

• 1. Ralph Waldo Trine, 1866–1958. In Harmonie mit dem Unendlichen, 1897.
• 2 . Ernst Mach, 1838–1916, Austrian physicist and epistemologist, belonged to the school of empirical positivism, Beitrage zur Analyse der Empfindungen, Jena, 1886.
• 3 . Johann Fercher von Steinwand (actually Johann Kleinfercher), 1828–1902. Zigeuner. Begegnisse and Betrachtungen, 1859 in Gesamtausgabe seiner Werke, Vienna 1903, third volume, page 365ff.
• 4 . Rudolf Steiner, Vom Menschenrätsel (Verlag der Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach), 1984, GA20.
• 5 . Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1778, French philosopher. The prize-winning work for the Academy in Paris is entitled, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, 1750.
• 6 . See Lecture III, p.
• 7 . Eduard Bernstein, 1850–1932, Memoirs of a Socialist Part 1: From the Years of my Exile, Berlin, 1918, published in German.
• 8 . Karl Marx, 1818–1883, German socialist, founded dialectical materialism with Friedrich Engels, 1820-1895.
• 9 . Theodor Ziehen, 1863–1950, philosopher and psychologist.
• 10. Franz Brentano, see note 2 to Lecture I.
• 11. In the April edition of 1916, the first volumes of Reich (Realm), a journal founded by Alexander Freiherr von Bernus (Lindau 1880), a quarterly produced in Munich and Heidelberg. 1st vol, 1st edition (April 1916), pp. 106-123; and, vol. 1, 3rd edition (October 1916), pp. 420-432.
• 12. Theosophy, see note 3 to Lecture IV.
• 13. Occult Science, see note 7 to Lecture IV.

My dear friends! We have seen what sorts of transformation a person goes through when he becomes acquainted with the being of the Guardian of the Threshold. And the perception of the Guardian of the Threshold certainly hinges on whether the person approaches the spiritual world in a certain manner, and whether he is able to develop an appreciation of the spiritual world. We have seen that what in human inner nature normally consists of thinking, feeling, and willing, in the domains of the Guardian of the Threshold undergoes an intrinsic alteration. And here in the last class hour, it was made especially clear to us that thinking, feeling, and willing take essentially different paths on entry into the spiritual world, that they work in a way very different than they do customarily in people's earth-consciousness.

We have seen how a person is strongly drawn by his willing into earthly inter-connectedness. In the blink of an eye, on a person’s entering the spiritual world, thinking, feeling, and willing simply disconnect in the soul from a definite relationship. And willing, which then lives in the soul a great deal more autonomously than previously, willing proves itself for a person in the highest degree to be related to those forces that drag a person down to earth. Feeling proves itself to be related to those forces that hold a person in the periphery of the earth, in that periphery of the earth, so to speak, within which light dwells, emerging on one side in the morning, brilliant all day long, and fading on the other side for the gaze of man in the evening. Thinking, however, is the force that directs a person upward towards the heavenly heights. And so, in the very same blink of an eye in which a person arrives before the Guardian of the Threshold, this Guardian makes him take note of his belonging to the entire world. He belongs through his willing to the earth, through his feeling to the periphery, and through his thinking to the higher powers.

But my friends, this is indeed just what must become clear to a person on entering spiritual life. A growing together with the whole world enters through the life of the spirit. For customary awareness we stand there in the world just so, so that there outside, external to us, powers are ruling, are active in plant-realms, in animal-realms, in mineral-realms, in physical human-realms, the powers have dominion which we have access to through our senses and which actually show no relationship to human beings initially. And so we stand there apart as humans, gazing within ourselves, becoming aware of our thinking, feeling, and willing, becoming aware that our thinking, feeling, and willing are to some extent dissociated from external nature, are to some extent standing on their own. And we feel a deep rift between our humanity and the natural world spread out around.

However, this rift must be bridged. For this rift, which for the most part we become aware of only in its external aspects in the course of customary awareness, this rift is precisely the Threshold. And becoming aware of the Threshold really rests on this: that we simply stop accepting whatever unconsciously turns us away from ourselves when we look simultaneously into our inner being and out upon an external natural world foreign to humans. When we direct our gaze externally the rift simply needs to become visible for us, then it emerges in its whole immensity and significance, not only for human life, but also for the life of the world.

Now please take note, that the moment someone enters the esoteric, a bridge must be constructed over this rift, over this abyss. To some extent we must grow together with nature. We must cease saying to ourselves: that out there is nature, where moral life certainly does not take place. We must cease saying that we don’t share with minerals the search for morality, for which in soul we have the highest interest, and that we don’t share in the search with plants, that we don’t share in search with animals. And we have even ceased in sharing our search with other people in this materialistic era, because a person enters into relationship with another only with his physical being.

And on the other hand, when one looks within a person, one finds in customary awareness merely passive thinking, by means of which the person misrepresents the world as an imagination, an enervated imagination. A thought living in us is merely our momentary property, through which we become acquainted with things of the world. It has, as a thought, initially no power. Our life of feeling is our innermost life. But remaining within it we are somehow separated, sundered from the world. And although we direct our will onto things outside of us, directly in this manner, in imparting our will onto external things, the external things take on the aspect of being foreign to us.

Something grand must confront a person, when he becomes aware of the abyss between nature and himself, when he comes into proximity with the Guardian of the Threshold, something grand. And this grandeur is just that, already inscribed in words in ancient times, words moreover, which must be understood in new ways in each and every era, and these words are, that nature must appear divine, and a human must be able to persevere, must be able to exist in this enchantment. What does it mean, that nature must be able to appear divine?

Nature must be able to appear divine. This means that as we initially acquire a sense of it, comprehend it with understanding, it most certainly is not godlike. One might say that godliness, that divinity conceals itself in nature. Nature appears in its externality. At first, seeing nature in a sort of relationship to the inner life of a man may occur only in dreams. We may be aware that an irregularity in our breathing indicates a dream full of joy and excitement, or quite the opposite a dream laden with fear and anger. We may become aware of how a clean room suffused by warmth comes to the forefront in certain dreams that have a sort of soulful moral quality. The dream carries such things on its back, nature laden with the psyche.

We ourselves know that consciousness is submerged in our dreams, and so the spirit cannot impart things to us directly in dreams. We must begin to see much more, as inspiration comes to us, much more than what nature displays in the awareness of sleep.

Well then, in the natural world we have at first, my friends, a relationship of our human physical body with what is fixed in nature, with all that carries the essential nature of earth. And we have a relationship of the human etheric body with all that carries within itself an essential nature that is watery. The relationship of the human physical body with the earth lies submerged, in solitude. And the relationship of the human etheric body with all that freely flows and fluxes with watery formative force, this also lies deeply in solitude under whatever man initially experiences.

Something that is first and foremost quite close to a person is his process of breathing, his ruler-ship over the shaping of air. And so one may start from the breathing process, and then continue upward. On approaching the spiritual in this specific region, one may begin to feel one’s relationship to nature.

In considering the breathing process, we have the shaping of formative forces of air, in which we live and move,

air [The word was written on the board.]

We then have, over the shaping of air, the containing or embracing nature of warmth,

warmth [This second word was written over "air."],

and over the containing nature of warmth, the embrace of the beings of light. So, warmth-ether, light-ether.

light [Over "warmth" this third word was written.]

If we rise up higher, we reach the region about which we must speak later, for initially it does not lie overly close to a person.

That a person lives and moves in the element of air, this much can certainly be obvious for totally external observation. For a person needs merely to reflect on dreams, on how constrained they are in certain self-contained processes of irregularity, certain abnormalities of the breathing processes. When the breathing process plays out in waking life, we do not pay much attention to it, because as a rule we do not pay attention to processes that just occur in normal life as if by themselves.

What the element of warmth signifies, life understood more or less through warmth, can be clarified in turn through a superficial observation. When we come into contact with a cold object, colder than our own body, when, for instance, we are startled by the chill of two cold metal rods, such as knitting needles, we may be aware of the disconnectedness of the cold rods, even if they are held fairly close to one another, for we are very susceptible to the cold. When we come into contact with some object or substance that is warmer than our own body, however, we don't notice the difference so starkly. If we were to hold two cold knitting needles close together, we would still notice which is the colder of the two. If we were to hold two knitting needles that had become warm, however, the close contact would flow together in a flash, and we would have to separate them quite a bit in order to form any distinct impression of their being separate. We are just much more sensitive to cold than to warmth. And why is this? We bear warmth with more ease, for we are warm-blooded creatures. The warmth is of our own nature, for we live and move in the warmth. As the cold is alien to us, we are extraordinarily and starkly sensitive to it.

Please take note, it is more difficult to deal with light in customary awareness. Now we will certainly delve into these things more fully, with the esoteric in tow, but just now it may be enough to have taken into consideration from the viewpoint of customary awareness the formative forces of air and the behavior of warmth. Even so, in customary experience, a person feels that even the air is something external, is something belonging to nature. He feels that warmth is something that touches him from outside in some sort of way, and he feels that light is something that comes to him from outside.

The very moment a person makes the jump of his life, bringing himself into proximity with the Guardian of the Threshold, in that very moment he becomes aware of just how inwardly and intimately he is related to all that he previously confronted as external to himself.

I have certainly often drawn attention to how at every moment of our lives, even for customary awareness, we may become aware on a basic level of the relationship we have with the world, directly through our relationship with air. There outside is the air. This selfsame air, that is just now out there, somewhat later I will draw into myself. Still later the air in me, this same air, will again be outside. We simply do not become aware of it, for our muscles and bones constantly support us, and their arrival and passing becomes known only in embryonic life and in death. But as beings of air we constantly carry air in us and then again release it to the outside, once again to be taken up by the world external to us, so that we become one with the whole movement, life, and being of air, and all that pertains to air, in that we are men of earth.

The moment we enter the spiritual realm it no longer remains the same. At this moment we feel that we are inexorably drawn along with every outward breath, with every outward movement of breath. We are carried on the wings of the out-breathing air out into the far-off spaces of existence, into which the out-breathed air is dispersed. And then on breathing in, we take in spiritual beings, the spirits that live in the circling currents of air. We take them back into us. The spiritual world flows into us as we breathe in, and our own being is carried on the tide of our breathing out.

Of course, it is not this way merely with all that pertains to air. It is the same, but to a still higher degree, with all that pertains to warmth. As we exist within the encircling air, in turn encircled by the earth [This was illustrated on the board with two white circles.], a creature transformed thereby into a man of air, it is also just so, but to a still higher degree, with the essence of warmth that encircles and pervades the earth, [Red was added.] with which we are one.

And when, as we approach the spiritual world, we have the specific experience of spirituality flowing into us with the in-breath, and of our own essence dispersing out into the breadth of the world with the out-breath, thereby engaging in spiritual motion with in-breathing and out-breathing, we have just such an experience with the being of warmth, although felt much more intensively. For as we step up into the warmth, insofar as we ourselves are in the warmth element, we become more human. If we fall away from the warmth, we become less human. Whatever else drops out of the warmth, becoming something merely bounded by nature, we perceive it to be in such a place, as we say to ourselves, discerning it with inner soul filled with warmth, with the effective working spirit of warmth, we perceive it as inwardly related to our humanity. Then we feel that the climb up into the warmth is accompanied by a working spirit emplaced in the element of warmth, who addresses us so: “Through the element of warmth I give you your humanity. Through the element of cold I take away from you your humanity."

And now let us bravely progress on to light, for we also move and live in light. We don't normally take note of it, because in customary awareness we have no idea that the inner movement of light is contained in our own thoughts, that each thought is collected light, collected light both for those physically able to see, and also collected light for those who are physically blind. The light is objective. The light is taken up not only by those physically able to see. The light is also taken up by those who are physically blind, when they think. The thought held fast within, the thought to which we are inwardly attached, is ever-present light within.

And so, we may say, as we approach the Guardian of the Threshold, forewarned just so by the Guardian of the Threshold himself: "Human being, in your thinking, your existence is not in you, it is in the light; human being, in your feeling, your existence is not in you, it is in the warmth; human being, in your willing, your existence is not in you, it is in the air.” Think about it, that your thinking is none other than your experience of light welling up and interconnecting with the world. Think also, that your feeling is none other than the coming-into-effect of the warmth-element of all that is interwoven and is alive. And think finally, that your willing is none other than the coming into effect in the air-element of all that is interwoven and is alive.

All this must be taken seriously in full awareness, that before the Guardian of the Threshold one's world elements will be split apart, that one will no longer be able to self-assuredly hold one's essence together, as one holds it together, dark and chaotic, in customary awareness. And this is the great experience, and leads to the introductory insight, the insight that you may cease your serious holding of the idea that you are encased in your head. Certainly, it is merely an indication of what we are as human beings. But it is most certainly an illusion, in the light of spiritual awareness, that all seems to be concentrated inside the head, for a human being is as large as the entire surrounding world. One's thoughts are as wide as the light; one's feelings are as wide as the warmth; one's willing is as wide as the air.

And if a highly developed being, highly developed in the area of awareness, were to descend from some other celestial body, it would speak to a person in quite a different way than people on the earth remaining in customary awareness speak with one another. Such a being would say that the light interwoven about the earth is differentiated. [Around the air and warmth circles, an envelope of light was drawn in gold.] Many individual differentiated beings at the summit of inter-connectivity dwell there within the light. One must picture it in such a way, that within the light of the earth, surrounding the earth, interwoven and vibrant upon the earth, all in a space, many such interconnected beings have their existence, as many as there are people upon the earth. They are all arrayed in the realm of the light of earth. And for such a being, all thoughts that come down to earth into the lonely heads of earth, all the thoughts of mankind, are in this envelope of light, they dwell within the interwoven light of the earth. And all feelings dwell within the envelope of warmth, and all willing dwells within the atmosphere, in the envelope of air.

Then such a being would say: that just there, purely, qualitatively, I have sorted out a being. That it is there, is shown to me through a body, “body A," and another, again within the entire surrounding envelope, is shown to me through another body, “body B," and so forth. [In the gold were drawn two compact inclusions "A" and "B."] These are the outward markings, indicating that something is there. The human reality is to put it all together, an intertwining encirclement of the earth in light, warmth, and air.

For those who really come before the Guardian of the Threshold, this is not speculation, but experience. And therein lies spiritual progression, in a person's being awake in uniting with the encircling world. A person needs to do it and not just talk about it theoretically. It is certainly not some sort of deep mystical speculation, speaking about becoming one with the world. A person may have his eye only on the thought, and not begin to actually become inwardly aware of the experience, but in actuality when he thinks, he literally lives in the entire light of the earth, he becomes one with the entire light of the earth, and he thereby, in becoming one with the entire light of the earth, rises as a human being into a godlike-spiritual existence. He effectively reaches out through all the pores of his skin to become one with the being of earth itself, and in like manner with other parts of his corporeal body. This is certainly, of all that will really lead to a relationship with the spiritual world, this is certainly what must be grasped in a completely sincere manner.

Now please take note, at first the light must work with moral effect. And a person must become aware of his situation concerning the light, for the light becomes related to him in esoterically experiencing the world. But then stepping forth quite clearly for a person, in the blink of the eye the moment a person steps up to the Threshold, is the awareness that light is locked into the nature of being, and also that it has to engage in a pitched battle with the dark powers. Light and darkness there will be real. And something makes its appearance there, confronting a person, by means of which he says to himself, "When I go out with my thinking fully into the light, then I am lost in the light.” For the moment that I go out into the light with my thinking, the beings of light gather me up, and say to me: "Human being, we will no longer let you go, we will hold you within our midst." This applies to the will of these beings of light. Through a person's thinking, the beings of light wish to draw the person into themselves, to make the person one with the light, to tear him away from all the powers of earth, and to interweave him into the light. Around us there are most certainly beings of light, which in their own way wish to carry a person off and away from the earth, and wish to interweave him with the sunlight welling up around the earth. They are living there, these beings of light, in the circumference of the earth, and are saying: "Human, you should not remain with your soul in your body. In the morning with the first rays of the sun you should shine out radiant with the light of the earth. With the evening's glow you should also set, and so as light you should encircle the earth!"

Ever and again, we feel the allurement of these beings of light. The moment one approaches the Threshold, he will be aware there of the allurement of these beings of light and of their wish to draw him out and away from the earth. It will be clear to him that it is not worthy of a person to remain within the fetters of earth, through heaviness to be fettered to the earth. They wish to take him up into the brilliance of the sun. For customary awareness, the sun certainly shines overhead, and we stand down here as men and women and allow the sun to shine upon us. For developed awareness, the sun stands in the heavens as the great allurer, which wishes us always to become one with its light, which wishes to rip us loose from the earth, and which forever whispers in our ear, "O Man, you need not remain upon the earth, you yourself are able to have your being in the radiance of light. Then you will shine upon and be able to bring joy to the earth. Then you will no longer need the earth to shine upon you and bring you joy."

Such is the nature of being, entered upon by our encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold, that the natural world, previously resting outside us, and in customary awareness making no demands on us, this natural world achieves the ability to speak to us in tones of morality. The natural world bursts upon the scene, and even as the sun, bursts upon us as an allurer. What was just now peaceful shining sunlight, well, it becomes alluring speech, becomes ensnarement, becomes temptation. And this first characterization, as we become aware of sunlight, of the spirituality that is woven into and living in sunlight, this first characterization is that within the light of the sun appear to us the allurers, the temptation-beings, who wish to carry us out and away from the earth. And these legions of beings are in continual battle with the others, with those constituted within the earth, within darkness.

And when we are caught up in the extreme of the moment, as without doubt we will be, for experiences before the Guardian of the Threshold are without doubt absolutely serious, deeply penetrating, and soul-gripping, when we are caught up in this and become aware of how alluring the sunlight is through its beings of light, then we will draw back from it, that is if we remember that we should still be human beings. And we cannot afford to lose this memory. If we lose it, then as we continue to live out our physical life upon the earth, in a certain way, we will be partially lame in our souls. When we become aware of the allurement of the sunlight, however, and correspondingly turn to the other side, in turning away from this allurement we will find peace in the darkness, the darkness with which the light forever fights. And were we to swing out of the light into the darkness, then we would fall into the opposite extreme. This self of darkness threatens us, would carry us down and out of the bright shining sunlight on the one side of existence-awareness. This self of darkness threatens to make us solitary, severed from all the rest of existence. As human beings, we can live only in equilibrium between the light and the darkness.

That is the great experience before the Guardian of the Threshold, that we are confronted on one side by the allurement of light, and on the other side by the power of darkness to induce in a person a loss of self. Light and darkness become moral powers, and have moral authority over us. And we humans must say to ourselves, that it is perilous to look upon the pure light, and also perilous to look upon the pure darkness. And we reach an inner state of calmness at the Threshold, we see how the instrumental gods, the good gods, the gods of normal progression, reveal the light in brilliant yellows and brilliant reds, and then we know that we can no longer be lost to the earth. We will become aware of the light, we will not be lured into blindness, but rather we will become aware of spirit-colors in the revealed light.

It is just as perilous giving in to pure darkness. And we will become inwardly free if we do not merely confront the pure black darkness in the land of spirits, but rather if we confront the illuminated darkness in shades of violet and blue. Shades of yellow and gold say to us in the land of spirits: "Through allurement the light will not be able to lift your soul away from the earth.” Shades of violet and blue say to us: "The darkness will not be able to overwhelm your soul. You will be able to hold yourself firm against the effects of the heaviness of earth."These are the experiences as nature and morality grow together as one, when light and darkness become bound into the nature of being. And without light and darkness becoming bound into the nature of being, we would not become aware of the true nature of thinking. That is what we should hear in the words that the Guardian of the Threshold speaks, as we encounter him with our thinking that has become independent and separate in our soul-life.

There battles light with powers dark
In that realm, where your thinking
In spirit-presence¹ would like to be.²
You’ll find,³ striving toward the light,
Your self by spirit being taken from you;
You can, if darkness lures you,
In matter lose the self.

In this we become aware of the duality, within which one is placed and amidst which one must find the balance, the harmony, in thinking. [This stanza was now written on the blackboard.]

There battles light with powers dark
In that realm, where your thinking
In spirit-presence would like to be.
You’ll find, striving toward the light,
Your self by spirit being taken from you;
You can, if darkness lures you,
In matter lose the self.

One must with vigor take up the sort of impulse which can emerge from such words. With vigorous thinking, a person must learn from the surrounding light, must take to heart the surrounding darkness. The light will most certainly be arrayed, suffused with colors. A person must seek a balanced unity in spiritual beholding, as thinking shifts in this fight between light and darkness, for when it comes to the light, it will effectively be taken outward, will be taken up, will be interwoven within the light, and when it comes to the darkness, it will disappear.

And in order to experience such a thing, my friends, have courage, inner courage. If a person does not yet say to himself that he needs courage, and so denies his need for courage, then without doubt he does not know what it entails. For he thinks he would need courage to allow his finger to be cut off, but he needs no courage to allow his disconnected thinking to stream about, within the maelstrom with which he is gripped, when it is stretched out in the fight between light and darkness. And in this arena, it will always be so. Only in this way is knowledge gained, of that which always is, and that a person can become aware of.

In every waking moment a person’s thinking is certainly in danger, due to certain spiritual beings surrounding our corporeality. It has been known in each era, in each century, that for humanity it is possible for light to prevail over darkness, or for darkness to prevail over light.

Yes, my friends, for human beings in customary awareness, life appears as danger-free as for the sleepwalker, whose time has not yet been called, and so never falls down. The person who really observes life, however, is aware of the struggle, and he really can't say in all certainty, whether light or darkness will have prevailed in victory in a hundred years, or whether future generations of men and women upon the earth will even consciously exist in a human-worthy existence-awareness. And he may come to know why such catastrophes in the prior development of mankind on earth have not come to completion.

I can utilize yet another analogy. If you see a tightrope walker on a rope, then you are aware that at any moment he may fall down to the right or to the left. That you walk on such a rope in your soul, and that everyone can crash down to the left or to the right in soul, of this there is no awareness in customary life, because one does not see the abyss to the right and to the left. But it is there.

That is the good granted to people by the Guardian of the Threshold, that he does not allow this abyss to be visible, until by means of his own admonitions various people are ready for it. Moreover, this was always the secret of all mystery schools of all times, that someone would be made aware of this abyss, and would thereby become enabled to acquire the initial forces that are necessary for knowledge of the real world.

As it is with light in respect to thinking, so is it with warmth in respect to feeling. Whoever comes before the Guardian of the Threshold with respect to feeling, that person will become aware that he enters into a battle between warmth and cold, that the warmth continually is an allurement to our feelings, for it would like to soak these feelings up into itself. As the beings of light, the Luciferic beings, in a certain sense would have us fly away from the earth to the light, so will the Luciferic beings of warmth soak up our feelings in the general universal warmth. All the feelings of mankind would drop away from mankind and become soaked up in the general universal warmth.

And it is alluring on the basis of being right at hand, which the recipient of this introductory knowledge becomes aware of when he arrives with his feelings at the Threshold, and as the beings of warmth appear, and in overabundance of exuberance would give to a person what is certainly his element, in which he lives, namely warmth. Insofar as one becomes aware of it, however, as he steps bravely up to the Threshold, and these beings of warmth appear, he becomes warm, warm, warm, he becomes fully the warmth himself, he flies up into the warmth, he rises into the throes of lust, and that is the allurement. All this gushes forth through a person, without end. A person must know all about this. For without a person knowing that the warmth-lust allurement is there, it is unlikely that he will attain a clear view of the land of spirits.

And the enemies of these Luciferic beings of warmth are the Ahrimanic beings of cold. These Ahrimanic beings of cold, they draw a person on, until an awareness has been acquired of how dangerous it is to float within the limbo of lust-warmth. The person would like to dive into the healing of the cold ones, and so he is propelled into the other extreme, where the cold ones harden him. And then arises, when the cold ones bring a person into this situation, into this condition, then arises unending pain, which is at the same time physical pain. The physical and the psychic, the material and the spiritual become a unity. The human experiences the cold taking claim to his whole being, as if being torn to pieces in immeasurable pain.

That this stands behind a person, that a person certainly lives continuing on within this struggle between warmth and cold, that is what a person should in turn make clear to himself by means of the admonition of the Guardian, in regard to his feelings.

[The second stanza was written on the blackboard at this time.]

There battles warmth with cold
In that realm, where your feelings
In spirit- weave would like to live.
You’ll find, loving the warmth,
Your self in spirit-bliss blowing away;
You can, if coldness hardens you,
In sorrow waste the self.

Concerning the will, a person plunges into a world that seems to lie right near to us. It really is near. It is the world of the air, the world that supports our process of breathing. A person does not suspect how inwardly changed the human will is with this air, for our willing depends on our breathing. And within the air, my friends, lies life and death, lies enlivened oxygen, and lies death-embracing nitrogen. There we have it, I would like to say, fast in hand. And the chemist says, in dreadfully untruthful abstraction, that the air consists of oxygen and nitrogen. And yes, so long as a person abides in customary awareness, he may say just oxygen and nitrogen. Should a person step before the Guardian of the Threshold, however, one thing will be clear to him, that oxygen is the offering of spiritual beings of clarion calling, the very spiritual beings who have given life to mankind. Nitrogen, moreover, is also the external offering of spiritual beings of clarion calling, of the spiritual beings who have given mankind death, the death, also, which, at every waking moment of our lives when we are thinking, when we are developing our lives of soul, is partially held at bay, and is overcome in us.

In the air a battle rages. The Luciferic oxygen-spirits battle there with the Ahrimanic nitrogen-spirits. If the Threshold is approached abstractly, as abstractly as a chemist, then the air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. But as one approaches the Threshold in reality, it is composed of Ahriman and Lucifer, for the oxygen is the external face of Lucifer, and the nitrogen is the external face of Ahriman. And a battle is being fought in the air. This battle is concealed from customary illusory awareness. One comes to it as one approaches the Threshold.

And just there, at all times, when one ought to join that which lives in the oxygen-spirits, that which lives in the life-elements, when one should bind his will to the creativity of gods, when one should be moved by the oxygen-spirits to valor, just then the danger appears, for a person may be taken away, taken away with his whole creativity from the creativity of the gods, so that a person might cease to be human, and that what one has as force of will from the spiritual world will be taken into the service of the Luciferic world.

And if a person now turns to the contralateral side, then the enticement of the nitrogenous Ahrimanic powers appears. Then what rules as death in airy elemental forces allures a person. Positioned there is not merely the death that a person confronts purely in the physical, bearing no real relationship to a person, but if a person were to come into a relationship with this death, he would begin by holding onto this death as something to be observed, then as something to be in union with, and then as something never again to be parted from. Whenever with elementary force of life the spirits wish to descend upon someone, so that their deeds are carried over as the deeds of the person, one will be thrown, in accordance with the contralateral side, the side of the Ahrimanic nitrogenous spirits, one will be thrown into the nothingness of life. One is cramped, and instead of being able to act, one is cramped within oneself.

Ever again a person is positioned between these two opposites, which he must become aware of in regard to his will. [The third stanza was now written on the blackboard.]

There battles life with death
In that realm, where your willing
In spirit-work would like to rule.
You’ll find, holding on to life,
Your self in spirit-power to vanish;
You can, if death-power binds you,
In nothingness confine the self.

My friends, if a person would now say, "I would certainly rather avoid this awareness altogether! Why should I take this on, this standing before the Guardian of the Threshold, when such things are paraded before me, such things that encase a person in a way that hardly seems beneficial. Can it be fruitful for a person to become aware of these frightful truths?" It is obvious that a person raises this objection in complacency, specifically when he asks, "Why should someone get caught up in such truths?" If a person says this in this way, he is certainly saying just what he would rather not want to know about.

But my dear friends, the challenge of the present time is this, that a person should penetrate to true reality, that a person should not cower in fright before true reality, that he should penetrate to true reality, so that he can thereby come into union with those who in certainty have accounted for his being. For although we could, so long as we travel in this short life upon the earth, hold our heads in the sand and know nothing of these truths, we really may no longer do this, as we would have done in another era of time, in which a person would flourish after death, even if in life on earth he were not to acquire any awareness of what he will experience after death.

And how will it be after death? When a person walks through the portal of death, with his awareness still intact, looks back, and the retrospection begins to come into his awareness, various high spiritual beings whisper gently within this retrospection, as if there in muted overtones. One looks back, in the couple of days past one's death, during the etheric body's dispersal out into the general etheric realm; as one looks back, looking upon the pictures of the life spent on earth, certain spirits whisper there within.

There battles life with death
In that realm, where your willing
In spirit-work would like to rule.
You’ll find, holding on to life,
Your self in spirit-power to vanish;
You can, if death-power binds you,
In nothingness confine the self.

And just then a person knows, that this is a reality, that one thing or another can happen, if one does not find a course through the middle, but instead finds a course to the right or to the left.

And always, having completed the time of sleep after death, which does not linger very long, when a person enters into the region of awareness wherein he wanders for a time equal to a third of his life on earth, wandering through the life he has just lived on earth, as has been described in general anthroposophical dissertations, then approaching a person, there where the awareness of this life-retrospection begins, is this actual experience. But always, ever and ever again, as I may say, in walking past the milestones of this experience, the admonishing spirits loom and speak to us.

There battles warmth with cold
In that realm, where your feelings
In spirit-weave would like to live.
You’ll find, loving the warmth,
Your self in spirit-bliss blowing away;
You can, if coldness hardens you,
In sorrow waste the self.

This has been referred to quite often, what is asked here, in regard to the deceased who have stood near you, as to the attitude you should have in thoughts of the deceased, which for instance might convey the sense of, "I send my love to you, it will warm your chill, and ease your heat," because throughout the backward viewing of the linked events of life, warmth and cold play just this role. But it is also being pointed out to us, that this selfsame role continually directs the time there. These things are absolute complete realities.

And when we pass beyond this experience of backward-looking, into the experience of being free in the land of spirits, preparing for the next earthly life, then ever and again along the milestones of this experience the admonishing spirits appear and call out to us without end.

There battles light with powers dark
In that realm, where your thinking
In spirit-presence would like to be.
You’ll find, striving toward the light,

There the striving is an obvious reality, one can veer right, or left.

Your self by spirit being taken from you;
You can, if darkness lures you,
In matter lose the self.

My dear friends, when the human being still possessed an instinctive clairvoyance, then it was true, that when he passed through the portal of death, then straightaway, through this instinctive clairvoyance, he could also understand the words so spoken to him in the three partitions of his life after death. During the era of time through which he has had to pass in order to gain freedom for himself, it became less and less possible for him to understand the things that were being addressed to him there. And now we live in an era in which human beings, if they have not been made aware of the sense of these words during earthly life, will come upon these words addressed to them in the language of the spirits, and will not understand them.

This is how it is, this may happen to a person, when he is engaged in living the future, and is going through the world he must traverse, where these words will be addressed to him, and he cannot understand them, and must live through the agony of this lack of understanding. And all the agonies of this lack of understanding, what do they indicate? They indicate the ever-growing undercurrent of fear within one's soul that the connection to the spiritual powers of creation will be lost, and at the end of one's days the powers will not be there to which one owes his existence, but rather among unknown powers the wellsprings of his humanity will be lost.

Delineated and flowing through and through the esoteric, my friends, is not mere instruction, not mere theory, but as delineated herein one comes to confront and deal with the really serious concerns of life. And whoever immerses himself in the esoteric immerses not in lessons, not in theory, but immerses in life. Becoming aware of the meaning of life is only the external revelation, for behind every hour of study is the spiritual world. We do not penetrate so far when we chafe within what lies within such words themselves. As we become deeply engrossed in such words in meditation however, then our thinking, feeling, and willing will grow strong, then our thinking, feeling, and willing will be in position to seize the spirit, which we must undertake as human beings, to really seize the spirit.

• 1. Geistesdasein refers to a realm in which spirit has existence-awareness, or presence, and so spirit-existence or spirit-being just do not seem to be enough, but “spirit-presence” will do.
• 2. dringen in the third line means “to seek, to insist, to badly be in need of,” and should not be translated as “to penetrate,” which is the translation of either drängen (to rush into) or durchdringen (to infuse into, to prevail). If translated “like to be” it is complementary with the other two stanzas.
• 3. findest in all three stanzas may be indicative or subjunctive in German, but the context clearly leans toward the subjunctive, so should be translated into English in the subjunctive “You’ll find.”

As in the previous lesson, we will first hear resounding towards us the words that are spoken to human beings like an eternal admonition, like an admonition of eternity resounding in the past, in the present, and in the future, calling out to a human being that he should become self-aware, in order to find his proper relationship to the world and to himself.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.
Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?
Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?
Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

My dear brothers and sisters! A harrowing admonition was spoken by the Guardian of the Threshold to the human being in the first Lesson. This first admonition shows a person how willing, feeling, and thinking, as they live in a human being in this materialistic age, continue to live in him when endeavoring to rise above materialism. It shows how willing, feeling, and thinking appear in the imaginations of the three beasts, which can be very harrowing indeed if felt deeply enough. They show us how little of all that is at work near the surface of one’s soul life really accords with the actual intentions buried deep within the soul.

This is how it is with all esoteric life, as described last time, that wants to speak to us directly out of the spiritual world. There we are shown on one side all the depths, the moral depths in our soul through which we shall have to pass in order to find our way to the true being of the world and to ourselves. On the other side, we are shown the heights to which a person should ascend.

There is no true esoteric pathway to self-awareness if the person will not be carried both down and under into the depths, and also will not be carried out and into the heights. Only if we develop the courage to go to the depths as well as to the heights, only then will the stark strong impulse come into our souls, the impulse which is necessary for esoteric development.

For the sake of our esoteric development, a person has to stop feeling cut off from our cosmic environment. Let us ask about the relationship of our day life to our surrounding cosmic world. Around us a person perceives the mineral, plant, and animal world. Yet he feels separate from this world in his body. This isolated existence in body was good for his own development. But today there is a tendency to separate oneself too much from the world, really, not merely in thoughts. Every night we enter the realm of sleep from which only chaotic dreams well up to the surface. Instead of being among animals and plants there, we are surrounded at best by shadow images of them. We are infinitely alone with ourselves there. Our dream life is filled with infinite loneliness and this continues to work on in our daytime consciousness. We continue to dream on in our illusions, and out of this arise all the things that are rooted in our egoism. On our way to the godlike spiritual we have to overcome this egoism. This proper feeling, this attitude of mind must give rise to the beginning of an esoteric path. Whomever is not willing in a certain way to break with all that has formed itself in his ordinary self will not get far along an esoteric path, for we are concerned here with a genuine turning point in development. For the world, much depends on how many human beings will find their way on to a truly esoteric path.

We must begin by trying to experience the elements that surround us. After having shattered us with the appearance of the three beasts, the Guardian in turn instructs us to look into the world of the elements, for on the path to the spirit we have to grow into the different elements. There is the earth below… There is fluidity. We must feel how they are united with us, how they are united inwardly and externally. So it is also with air, which is within us, which is again external to us. So it is with warmth, so it is with all the elements. The issue is for us to summon up the necessary attentiveness through an intimate melding into the advice, the teachings that we here receive and sustain.

Think, my dear friends, imagine touching something, imagine feeling something. It is just the same, however, when you observe, when you hear… Imagine, you are a single great sense organ, you remain on the floor of the earth, while the earth below bears you up. It is just the same as touching something with your finger, just so you touch the earth with your entire body as you stand and walk. It is only because it has become so habitual that a person doesn’t say it this way. What is customary, habitual a person must in turn emerge from in esoteric development. A person must learn to find himself to be a sort of finger touching, tasting the earth. The entire person himself becomes a sensory organ.

O Man, touch inwardly in your body’s whole existence,
How earth forces for you in existence-awareness¹ are pillars.

As a whole human being you must feel like a finger feeling and touching something. You will then feel how earthly forces are your supports within existence so that you don't sink down into the heaviness. With these words the Guardian is telling us that we should feel as the godhead tasting on the earth with this finger, this finger which we are as whole human being.

Now we come to a second aspect. As we continue, we no longer only feel the earth supporting us with our feet, but we also feel how the blood … in this finger of the godhood that we are… how the blood lives and moves. One feels for instance blood living in a finger, that for example is sick or injured in some way. In this way a person becomes aware of the watery element. This is how we feel the watery element within ourselves.

O Man, live inwardly in your touching’s whole sphere,
How water ways for you in existence-awareness are sculptors.

Water beings … in our own blood, in our blood vessels … a sculpting. Outside, in the cosmos, the water, the fluid element, it tosses waves and wavelets on its surface which a person finds beautiful. But in occult development a person must experience how this same water element also lives in us, molding and sculpting us. Earth for us is merely like supporting pillars. Water sculpts us inwardly. Whereas earlier it was unknown, a person should become aware of inner touching: O Man, live inwardly in your touching’s whole sphere. …

My dear friends, please note in all these mantras the exact choice and position of each word. We must take the words as god-given, inspired, inspired out of the spiritual world. It is just this way for every single word, from the progression of pillars to sculptors, of something lower to something higher, to what not merely supports us outwardly, but rather chisels, plastically molds us inwardly.

Now we come to the third stage. The Guardian instructs us to look up to the air element. A person breathes in and out. The movement is initially automatic, unconscious, but it moves in him nevertheless. When there is something wrong with his breathing, he notices that in it is something that is moralistic, soulful. If a person breathes wrongly while asleep, for example, fear and anxiety live in the dream. Here the person is not merely sculpted. He becomes built by water going out into all organs. All that is fully formed first built itself out of fluidity. Blood contains the formative forces. … In seven years, the material parts of the organs are offloaded and newly formed out of the blood. All the material substance you have in your body now was not there eight years ago. All of you sitting here have been essentially rebuilt out of your blood stream during the course of the last seven or eight years. Whereas the fluid element is our sculptor, air is something we sense in our soul, so that fear arises if we breathe too much carbon dioxide and faintness occurs if we have too much oxygen, which is like being dissolved into the cosmos.

O Man, feel inwardly in your living’s whole weave,
How air powers for you in existence-awareness are nurturers.

In this way we proceed upwards into a realm where a moral aspect begins to appear. We have progressed from support to etheric sculptor and then on to nurturer.

In the fourth stage we ascend to fire, the element of warmth. The earth is scarcely felt by us. The formative, sculpting process is perhaps felt in childhood, if at all. As regards the air, the nurturers take care not to let us feel them. But warmth, whether it is cold or hot, a person feels the warmth element of the cosmos as belonging to himself. Yes, he would totally feel, by means of the admonition of the Guardian, passing by the three beasts and coming up into the cosmos altruistically not egoistically, that he will be carried out and beyond into the realm of the living moving warmth. …

Viewed occultly it is as follows: When a person thinks, he inwardly grasps the fire element of the cosmos. He does not think only in his head. The thinking ability goes far, far out into the cosmos. In the summer he feels the Fire Spirits, the Dynamis, Archai, and Seraphim. In the winter he lives into the cold element with thinking, his thoughts rise up in ice and snow, into the sun-resplendent air. … The fire element is smoothy intimately bound together with the human being. And the human being then says to himself, “If you climb high up a mountain, then it gets colder and colder, and just so you come upon the Exusiai, the Kyriotetes, the Archangels, and the Cherubim, on such a world in which wisdom rules. If you descend from the mountain, or if you come into warm, summer-like times, you come out of the realm of the Cherubim with their wisdom into the realm of the Seraphim’s love, out of the realm of the light-filled wisdom of the Kyriotetes and the Exusiai, into the realm of the fire wielding Dynamis, … who forge in fire … out of the realm of the Archangels, who transform in the water weaving wisdom world into the realm of the Archai and Angeloi. …

O Man, think inwardly in your feeling’s whole stream,
How fire-mights for you in existence-awareness are helpers.

Here it rises up into morality. The nurturers, … they nurture still from the outside. The fire-mights are not merely nurturers, they help us, they help us inwardly.

After a person takes up this admonition, he once again fastens the whole together with the words, as a summary of the previous:

O Man, look within yourself into the elemental realm.

And so, after we were shattered down, we now receive from the Guardian's earnest countenance the instruction to enter, thinking, into the elemental world, to take up within us the existence of the elements...

So, the Guardian admonishes us to live ourselves into earth, water, air and fire. We do that with our physical and etheric body. But the soul cannot simply penetrate the realm of the elements, it must expand into the realm of the planets. The wandering stars, depending on how they face the Earth, they express in their mutual relationships what rules in our souls. Our physical and etheric body ... familiarize themselves ... in the realm of the elements. Our souls expand into the circling of the wandering stars,... of fast-moving Mercury, of nearby Moon, of Venus as she carries cosmic love out into the world’s far reaches, of the forceful craft of Mars, of the wisdom spewing forth from Jupiter, of the maturity of Saturn as he drives all that bears essence with fire-nature. ... It is our soul that therefore expands out into the cosmos. The Guardian says:

O Man, just so let rule in the depths of your soul
The wandering stars' world-guiding might.

And he fastens this once more together, as the many circles of the planets become fastened together as a single circling:

O Man, bring yourself into being, into motion through world’s circling.

So far, we have only accounted for the physical and etheric body, and for the soul, but not yet for the spirit. Out to the spirit moving and weaving within the “I” we must gush, not merely to the planets, but rather out to the fixed stars. The “I”, that forever and ever wields authority, we must carry out to the realm of the fixed stars.

O Man, hold inwardly in the work of your spirit
The resting stars’ heaven-heralding words.

And once again, the Guardian fastens these two lines together. ...with might surging and seething in us... in the words:

O Man, fashion yourself through heavens’ wisdom.

When we feel such a word, sounding together as a whole through earth, water, air, fire, planets, and fixed stars, when we feel it in its entirety, while we hearken to the words, which come to us from the Guardian, then the might of Michael wields authority in this present time through the school. And we may feel this might of Michael in his sign, and feel how Michael, who since the year 1879 and beyond to our time has marshalled his leadership, has accepted all that was grounded since the fifteenth century in the emblem of the Rosae et Crucis. And we may feel the demeanor of the Rose Cross in the three-part word I honor the Father, I love the Son, I unite with the Spirit. This will not be spoken, but accompanies in gesture the threefold word Ex Deo nascimur, In Christo morimur, Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

We must now understand as three-sided what the Guardian gives to us as he accompanies us across the abyss of existence, not with earth-feet but with soul-wings.

We think in customary life. In our thoughts live simply the felt shadow in reality of the embrace of essential being. We ask, what are our thoughts? They are a corpse. Just as soul and spirit depart from a physical corpse, and the body is given over to the earth, that is what god-like spiritual beings make of the body of our thoughts. Between death and rebirth living thoughts were fully alive. Then it descended into the physical body where it lives as if in a coffin. The human physical body is the coffin of living thoughts. We should feel this as the truth, with which we are guided by the spiritual world. So, the Guardian says to us: Your thoughts are mere semblance, but you can dive into this illusory appearance and then behind it feel true selfhood … as a godliness. … In the interweaving etheric, there within feel the spirit-beings, that weave, move throughout …

The Guardian speaks to the human being:

Look upon your web of thoughts:
World of semblance you experience,
Self-awareness hides from you;
Plunge beneath appearance:
Ether being whirls in you;
Self-awareness, it should honor
Your own spirit’s guiding beings.

There is a rhythm in this, as though we were climbing down a mountain … In the trochaic rhythm of macron then breve, stressed then unstressed, we connect in meditation with the pulse of living world thoughts in which we were before descending down to earth.

But not only thinking, we also bear feeling within us. This is not only semblance but also substance. Thoughts are semblance. In feelings semblance and substance mingle ... The powers of the world rule in us. We are expected not only to honor but also to consider that objective world forces wield and weave authority in us:

Embrace your stream of feelings:
Where semblance and substance mingle,
Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:
And world soul forces are in you;
Aware-self should consider well
Inherent in soul the powers of life.

In this verse we swing up in turn to existence. The rhythm of breve then macron, unstressed then stressed, is quite different. We should live in this cosmic rhythm, in which the soul rises up to existence, after it has lost existence in thoughts. Here it progresses from honoring to considering. It becomes more intimate. We honor, indicating that the beings guide us more from the outside. We consider how the powers of life rule in our own inner being.

Then we go down to greater depths. The Guardian points out how the cosmos lives and weaves in our will. The power of existence rises up in us. We are to lay hold of the power within us, the might of world creating:

Let reign in you the thrust of will:
It climbs from all apparent being
With autonomous existence well-equipped;
Turn to this throughout your life:
Filled it is with world-spirit-might;
Your autonomous existence, it should grasp
World-maker-might into spirit-I.

Here we become aware how existence, newly made, rises up out of all that is semblance-being. It needs another rhythm, the spondaic, macron, macron, stressed, stressed. The two stressed syllables express how the mighty beat of existence thrusts into soul and spirit.

Note the intensification from honor, to the more intimate consider, and then to the going-entirely-into-the-thing grasp. Similarly guiding beings outside us in the cosmos), powers of life within us, world-maker-might in the cosmos as well as within us. Here, in the last line of the third verse, the corresponding word world-maker- might comes at the beginning of the line, not at the end. This is also important. The rhythm is therefore spondaic, stressed, stressed, stressed, and stressed.

When this threefold mantra resounds from the Guardian of the Threshold to the human soul, waiting to fly over the abyss, then may the soul feel how the magic might of Michael surges and seethes through the room. … And how, since the beginning of the new age, Michael is coalesced, is amalgamated, is confederated² with the stream of Rosae et Crucis... In Michael’s Sign we receive what comes to us here in this way with the three-sided countenance of the Rose Cross...

Both the mantras and also anything about the content of the Lessons may only be passed on to members of the esoteric School, that is, those who possess the blue membership card. Those who have been unable to attend may receive the mantras from those who were here. But in every case, it is the one who wishes to pass on the mantras who must ask either Dr. Wegman or myself. It is part of the esoteric guidance that in every single case there must be a concrete request. Taking notes is not authorized. If notes were taken, one is duty bound to burn them within a week.

• 1. Dasein
• 2. vereinigt

Ahriman's Kingdom. No sky is visible. A dark en-closure like a mountain gorge whose black masses of rock tower up in fantastic forms, divided by streams of fire. Skeletons are visible everywhere; they appear to be crystallized out of the mountain, but are white. Their attitude suggests the habitual egoism of their last life. Prominent on one side is a miser and on the other a massive glutton, etc., etc. Ahriman is seated on a rock. Hilary, Frederick Trustworthy, then the Twelve who were gathered together in the first scene; then Strader; later on Thomasius and Maria; last of all Thomasius' Double.

Trustworthy:
How often have I trod this realm before.—
And yet how horrible it seems to me
That e'en from here we must so often fetch
The wise direction for full many a plan
Which is important for us and our league,
And points significantly to our aims.

Hilary:
The grain of corn must fall to earth and die
Before the life within it can return.
All that in earthly life hath run to waste
Shall here unto new being be transformed.
And when our league desires to plant the seeds
Of human acts, to ripen in due course,
'Tis from the dead that we must fetch the grain.

Trustworthy:
Uncanny is the lord who here bears rule;
And if it were not written in our books,
Which are the greatest treasures of our shrine,
That he whom here we often meet, is good,
One would indeed as evil reckon him.

Hilary:
Not only books, but e'en my spirit-sight
Declares that what is here revealed is good.

Ahriman (in a feigned voice, sardonically):

I know why ye are gathered here again.
Ye would discover from me how 'twere best
To guide the soul of him who oft before
Hath stood upon the threshold of your shrine.
Because ye think Thomasius is lost
Ye now believe that Strader is the man
To do you service in the mystic league.
What he hath won for progress of mankind
By use of powers which follow nature's laws,
For this he oweth thanks to me, since I
Hold sway where powers mechanical obtain
Strength for themselves from their creative founts.
So all that he may do to help mankind
It needs must turn itself unto my realm.
But this time I myself will see to it
That what I wish shall happen to this man
Since ye can only bring me loss on loss
By all your influence with Thomasius.
If ye desire to serve the spirit-powers
Ye first must conquer for yourselves those powers
Which in this case ye tried to cast aside.

(Ahriman becomes invisible.)

Trustworthy (after a pause, during which he has with-drawn into himself):
Exalted Master, care oppresseth me
Though I have striven long to banish it,
For this is laid upon me by strict rules
Which have been ordered for us by our league.
But much that shows the life of this same league
Hath made the struggle in my soul severe;
Yet would I ever thankfully submit
My darkness to the spirit-light, which thou
Art capable of giving through thy powers.
But when I must full often clearly see
Thou wert a victim of delusion's snare
And how thy words, e'en as events fell out,
Did often prove so grievously at fault,
Then have I felt as though a grievous weight
Were resting painfully upon my soul.—
And this time also were thy words at fault:
How couldst thou with such firm assurance think
That from this spirit we should hear good things?

Hilary:
'Tis hard to understand the cosmic ways.—
My brother, we are well-advised to wait
Until the spirit indicates the way
Which is ordained for that which we create.

(Exeunt Hilary and Trustworthy.)

Ahriman (who has re-appeared):
They see, but do not recognize me yet;
For had they known who rules within this place
They certainly would not have ventured here
To seek direction; and they would condemn
To age-long pains of hell that human soul
Of whom, they heard, that it did visit me.

(All the persons who at the beginning of the play were assembled in the ante-room of the mystic league now appear on the scene; they are blindfolded to show their ignorance of the fact that they are in Ahriman's kingdom. The words they speak live in their souls, but they know nothing of them. They are experiencing during sleep unconscious dreams which are audible in Ahriman's kingdom. Strader, who also appears, is however semi-conscious with regard to all that he experiences, so that later on he will be able to recollect it.)

Strader:
The hint that Benedictus gave to me
That I should cultivate my power of thought,
Hath led me to this kingdom of the dead.
Although I hoped that raised to spirit-realms
I should find truth on wisdom's sun-clad heights.

Ahriman:
What thou canst learn of wisdom in this place
Thou wilt find all-sufficient for long time,
If here thou dost comport thyself aright.

Strader:
Before what spirit doth my soul then stand?

Ahriman:
That shalt thou know when memory presently.
Can call again to thee what here thou see'st.

Strader:
And all these folk, why do I find them here
Within thy darksome realm?

Ahriman:
'Tis but as souls
That they are in this place: they do not know
Aught of themselves when here, since in their homes
Sunk now in deepest sleep they would be found.
But here quite clearly all will be revealed
That lives within their souls, though they would scarce
On waking think such thoughts could be their own.
So too, they cannot hear us when we speak.

Louisa Fear-God:
The soul should not in blind devotion think
That it can raise itself in haughty pride
Up to the light, or that it can unfold
Unto its full extent its own true self.
I will but recognize what I do know.

Ahriman (audible only to Strader):
And dost not know how bluntly thou dost lead
In haughty pride thyself into the dark.
She too will serve thee, Strader, in the work
That thou hast wrung so boldly from my powers.
She doth not need for that the spirit-faith
Which seems so ill-accorded with her pride.

Frederick Clear-Mind:
Entrancing are indeed these mystic paths;
Nor will I henceforth fail in diligence,
But give myself completely to the lore
That I can gather from the Temple's words.

Michael Nobleman:
The impulse after truth within my soul
Is drawing me toward the spirit-light;
The noble teaching which now shines so clear
In human life, will surely find that I
Am the best pupil that it ever had.

George Candid:
I ever have been deeply moved by all
That hath revealed itself from many a source
Of noble mystic spirit-treasuries.
With all my heart would I yet further strive.

Ahriman (audible only to Strader):
Such men mean well: yet doth their striving stay
But in the upper layers of their souls.
And so can I make use for many years
Of all these mighty treasures which lie hid
Unconsciously within their spirits' depths.
They too seem useful to my constant aim
That Strader's work in mankind's life on earth
Shall with proud brilliance unfold itself.

Mary Steadfast:
A healthy view of life will of itself
Bring to the soul the fruits of spirit-realms
When men join reverence for the universe
To a clear view of sense-reality.

Ahriman (audible only to Strader):
She speaks in dreams of this reality;
She'll dream so much the better when she wakes.
Yet she will be of little service now.
Perchance in her next life she'll help me more,
For then she will appear as occultist
And as need may arise will teach mankind
About their life since first the Earth began.
And yet she scarce will treasure truth aright;
In former lives she oft did Strader chide
And now she praiseth him: so doth she change,
And Lucifer will be more glad of her.

Francesca Humble:
The sacred mystic realm shall one day make
Man's being truly a harmonious whole,
When thought through feeling shall express itself
And feeling let itself be led by thought.

Katharine Counsel:
Unkind, 'tis true, doth strive to see the light;
But strange indeed the methods he pursues,
For first he quencheth it, and is surprised
That he can find it nowhere in the dark.

Ahriman (audible only to Strader):
So too with souls: they find it good to talk
As voicing the well-being of their mind,
But underneath they fail in constancy.
Such are for me quite unapproachable,
And yet they will in future much achieve
From which I'll reap a harvest of good fruit.
They are by no means what they think themselves.

Bernard Straight:
If knowledge is not gained through cautious search
Then fantasy brings nought but airy forms
To solve the riddle of the universe,
Which only can be mastered by strict thought.

Erminia Stay-at-Home:
The cosmic substance must for ever change
That all existence may unfold itself;
And he who fain would keep all things the same
Will lack the power to understand life's aims.

Casper Hotspur:
To live in fantasy, doth only mean
To rob men's souls of every power in life
Through which they can grow strong to serve themselves
And do true service to their fellow men.

Mary Dauntless:
Souls that would stunt their own inherent strength
May let external powers mould their life
True man will only seek development
From his own deepest personality.

Ahriman (audible only to Strader):
It is but human what these souls conceal.
One cannot tell what they may yet achieve;
For Lucifer may try his power on them,
And make them think they are but working out
Each his own powers of soul with steadfast aim;
And so perchance he hath not lost them yet.

Ferdinand Fox:
He who would cosmic riddles rightly read
Must wait till understanding and right thought
Reveal themselves through powers within his life,
And he who fain would find his way aright
Must seize all he can use that gives him joy.
Above all else the search for wisdom's lore
To give high aims to weak humanity—
This leads to nothing on this Earth of ours.

Ahriman (audible only to Strader):
He hath been chosen as philosopher,
And such he will appear in his next life—
With him I do but balance my account.
Seven of twelve I ever need myself
And five I give to Brother Lucifer.
From time to time I take account of men
And see both what they are and what they do.
And when I once have chosen out my twelve
I do not need to search for any more.
For if I come in number to thirteen
The last is just exactly like the first.
When I have got these twelve within my realm
And can through their soul-nature fashion them,
Then others too must ever follow them.

(To himself holding his hands over Strader's ears so that he shall not hear.)

True, none of this have I achieved as yet,
Since Earth refused to give herself to me.
But I shall strive throughout eternity,
Until—perchance—I gain the victory.¹
One must make use of what is not yet lost.

(The following so that it is again audible to Strader):
Thou seest I do not flatter with fine words,
Indeed I do not wish to please mankind.
He who would inspiration seek for lofty aims
In speech well-regulated and arranged,
Needs must betake himself to other worlds.
But, who with reason and a sense for truth
Perceives the things which here I bring to pass,
He can acknowledge that it is with me
The powers are found, without which human souls
Must lose themselves whilst living on the Earth.
The very worlds of gods make use of me,
And only seek to draw souls from my grasp
When I grow active in their own domain.
And then if my Opponent doth succeed
In leading men astray with this belief
That my existence hath been proved to be
Unnecessary for the universe,
Then souls may dream indeed of higher worlds,
And strength and power decay in earthly life.

Strader:
Thou seest in me one who would follow thee
And give his powers to thee to use at will.
What I have witnessed here doth seem to show
That all that makes mankind thine enemy
Is lack of reason's power and strength of mind.
In truth thou didst not flatter with fine words;
For thou didst well-nigh mock these poor weak men
When it did please thee to portray their fate.

I must confess that it seems good to me
What thou wouldst give unto the souls of men,
For they will only be enriched with strength
For what is good through thee; they will but gain
The bad from thee if they were bad before.
If only men did better know themselves
They must for certain feel with all their hearts
The bitter scorn that thou dost cast on them.

But what is here wrung forth from out my soul?
I speak such words as would destroy my life
If on the Earth I found that they were true.

Thou must so think; I cannot otherwise
Than find that what thou hast just said is true;
Yet 'tis but truth when in this realm of thine
It would be error for the world of Earth
If it prove there to be what it seems here.
I must no further trace my human thoughts
Within this place-they now must have an end.
In thy rough words there soundeth pain for thee,
And they are painful too in mine own soul.
I can--whilst facing thee—but weep—and cry—

(Exit quickly.)

(Enter Maria and Thomasius both fully conscious, so that they can hear and understand all that goes on, and speak about it.)

Thomasius:
Maria, terror reigns on every side,
It closeth in and presseth on my soul;
Whence shall come inward strength to conquer it?

Maria:
My holy, earnest vow doth ray out power:
And thou canst bear this pressure on thy soul
If thou wilt feel the healing power it gives.

Ahriman (to himself):
'Tis Benedictus who hath sent them here;
He guided them that they might recognize
And know me, when they feel me in my realm.

(He speaks the rest so that Thomasius and Maria can hear.)

Thomasius, the Guardian did direct
Thy footsteps first of all toward my realm
Since they will lead thee to the very light
Thou seekest in the depths of thine own self.
Here I can give thee truth although with pain,
As I have suffered many thousand years;
For though the truth can penetrate to me,
It must first separate itself from joy
Before it dares to venture though my porch.

Thomasius:
So must I joylessly behold the soul
Whom I so ardently desire to see?

Ahriman:
A wish doth only lead to happiness
When warmth of soul can cherish it; but here
All wishes freeze, and needs must live in cold.

Maria:
E'en in the ever empty fields of ice
I may go with my friend, where from his soul
The light will surge which spirits must create,
When darkness wounds and maims the powers of life.
Thomasius, feel now thy soul's full strength.

(The Guardian appears upon the Threshold.)

Ahriman:
The Guardian himself must bring the light
That thou dost now so ardently desire.

Thomasius:
'Tis Theodora whom I wish to see.

The Guardian:
The soul that on my threshold clothed itself
In that same veil which many years ago
It wore on earth, hath kindled in the depths
Of thine own soul in solemn hours of life
The strongest love which was concealed in thee.
While thou wert standing yet outside this realm
And first didst beg from me an entrance here,
It stood before thee in a pictured form,
And, being thus conceived by inward wish,
Can only show delusion's vain conceits.
But now thou shalt in very truth behold
The soul that in a life of long ago
Was dwelling in that old man whom thou saw'st.

Thomasius:
I see him now again in his long cloak,
That worthy ancient with his earnest brow;
0 soul, who dwelt within this covering
Why dost thou hide thyself so long from me?
It must—it can—but Theodora be.
Ah, see—now from the covered picture, comes
Reality: 'tis Theo ... 'tis myself

(As Thomasius begins the name Theodora, his Double appears.)

His Double (coming close up to Thomasius)

Perceive me—and then know thyself in me.

Maria:
And I may follow thee to cosmic depths
Where souls can win perception e'en as gods
By conquest that destroyeth, yet acquires
By bold persistence life from seeming death.

(Peals of thunder, and increasing darkness.)

Curtain

• 1. Very solemn and slow.

[ 1 ] While the war of arms was raging, one could see how leading personalities in Central Europe repeatedly turned their political acumen to finding out that there was disagreement here and there among their opponents. They wanted to build on such disagreements in order to ensure the favorable progress of their own "state business". This kind of diplomatic thinking gradually made it impossible to see how almost the whole world agreed to overcome Central Europe.

[ 2 ] Like so many other things, this kind of "diplomacy" is now being perpetuated by people who do not want to learn from events. One can see how England does not want to respond to France's desire for a precisely defined military alliance treaty; one notices how London is not inclined to meet the economic and financial demands emanating from Paris without further ado, and how England does not treat France's request regarding the Rhine border with unconditional benevolence. One turns one's attention to Wilson's political behavior after the conclusion of peace and to similar things more.

[ 3 ] They now want to let these disagreements show them a way forward for what they have to do in Central Europe. You are again so wise that you cannot see how united the others will be when you yourself are preparing to follow the path that you think is marked out by their disagreement.

[ 4 ] How long will it take to see through the fruitlessness of such a way of thinking? In the depths of European humanity, forces are at work that make it impossible to continue this way of thinking. In the countries of the West, the provisional outcome of the war has created conditions that allow leading personalities there to keep their thinking on the old lines for a while longer. It will be some time before these areas are confronted with the demands of human development which are already pressing in Central Europe. It will still be possible to keep economic life linked to state life there for a short time.

[ 5 ] In Central Europe, only one thing can lead to a salutary progress: the insight into the reorganization of the entire social organization. Through their union and their victory, the Western countries have won the possibility of preserving the old social organization for a time. This preservation is tied to their victory. The countries of Central Europe are in a situation that makes such preservation impossible. Here it must be recognized that the old social formations have no institutions that can lead out of chaos.

[ 6 ] Social structures become obsolete; from the depths of human souls must come the driving forces for new forms. Without trust in what is at work in these depths, no progress can be made. We should not count on those who present this trust as an outgrowth of a fantastic idealism and preach as the practical only what they have become accustomed to thinking as the usual. If today in London the French government's request for a military alliance is not received with an open mind because of British traditions, if England does not quite willingly open its coffers to French economic needs, these are things that only the "clever" disciples or followers of the old diplomatic way of thinking look at. Those who understand the "signs of the times" should realize that there is as little to be gained from these things for the progress of Central European relations as there was to be gained before the war by the fact that it was "incompatible" with England's customs to enter into a military alliance treaty with France. The eyes of those who, according to Czernin's views, were to sit in the palaces of ambassadors of the world with a "European education" were focused on this. But this "European education" has resulted in the horrors of recent years. This "European education" has researched "moods" in salons and noticed nothing of how the world is collapsing while it is making policy. For certain people, these old mood-listeners have been dismissed, but their method should not give way to a new way of thinking. If we do not stop paying attention to such "practitioners", we will continue to dream about what Central Europe should do at the moment when a "deep gulf" opens up in the West between the need for credit on the one hand and the willingness to borrow on the other. All that will be achieved is that the dream will one day lead to the awakening that will show how we ourselves have fallen into the "deep chasm".

[ 7 ] The idea of the "threefold structure of the social organism" is addressed to people who recognize with an impartial eye how the world catastrophe has emerged from views of the kind described above. Those who hold these views believe today that the world war would have been avoidable if the relationship between Germany and England had developed according to their ideas before 1914. They only forget that this relationship could not have developed in this way in a world that was dominated by their habits of thought. The world has now listened to this kind of "practitioners" long enough; they have also been allowed long enough to decry as "utopian" and "fantastic" anything that attempted to break with their habits of thought. The time should have come to see through the fantasy that lives in such practitioners and turn to the real, which reckons with the demands of the world-historical moment.