The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! If you advance in the course of the development of today's science, you can make your way from this or that branch of knowledge to the other, to which you are led by certain external or internal necessities. But basically, all this comes from a deeper human essence. You have to say: this path is traversed with a certain inner indifference. Of course, there are exam nerves, and these can lead to inner psychological catastrophes. But these psychological catastrophes – especially those who have gone through them will be able to testify to this – are not really connected with the content of what one is approaching, let us say in mathematics, in medicine, in biology. A researcher can also experience inner joy when he has discovered something. But what is experienced inwardly by the soul is outwardly linked to the content of what has come before the soul in knowledge.

This is certainly a radical way of expressing a phenomenon that does not always occur so radically; but if we contrast it with the opposite that arises when studying, that is, at the same time as inwardly experiencing anthroposophical spiritual science, the validity of what has been said will emerge.

When studying and inwardly experiencing anthroposophical spiritual science, one really does experience inner fateful events. One experiences psychological catastrophes and peripeteia. On the one hand, these experiences are closely and intensely connected with the content of the person approached in knowledge. On the other hand, we experience something that takes hold of human nature in many ways, transforms it, brings it to other levels of soul development, and so on. This fact, which at first glance might appear to be an external one, is in fact intrinsically connected with the nature of anthroposophical spiritual science; it is connected with the fact that, while one rises objectively out of today's scientific spirit into a world picture in a justified way, one does not actually find the human being in this world picture. Of course, one can also construct him out of it; but the human being who can be constructed out of the present evolutionary doctrine, who can be constructed out of present-day biology or physiology, does not present himself in an image that evokes inner tremors and liberations in the soul; he presents himself in an image that leaves the soul cold.

But, dear attendees, is not the essence of the human soul in everyday life that we go through inner turmoil, pain, suffering, joy and satisfaction? Do we not go through catastrophes and peripeteia through our external lives? Can we therefore hope that we can grasp this human being, who is internally changeable and so close to us in his changeability, through a science that, on the one hand, provides us with an image of the human being that must actually leave us indifferent, yes, that must see its perfection in a certain relationship precisely in the fact that it leaves us indifferent? Anyone who sees this fact in the right light will initially be emotionally drawn to the essence of anthroposophical knowledge of man. This essence of anthroposophical knowledge of man — I have tried to describe it in part according to its method in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds?” I have tried to describe it by name in my book “Theosophy” and then in the ” Secret Science. I have tried to show how the striving for knowledge must ascend if it is to arrive at genuine anthroposophical knowledge of man, through three degrees of knowledge, through Imagination, through Inspiration, through Intuition understood in the deeper sense. And I believe I have made it clear in my description of what a person can experience in imaginative, inspired, intuitive life, that going through such a path of knowledge means that a series of inner experiences of destiny take place at the same time. , so that not only the content of knowledge approaches the human being in abstraction, but the image of the human being approaches direct human experience, that which sits within us as the experienced essence of our human dignity.

Imagination is the first step in penetrating the essence of the world as well as the essence of the human being. I have described how imagination can be cultivated through a kind of meditative life and a kind of concentration of the power of thought, in a completely healthy way that is the opposite of a pathological one. Now I would like to draw attention to what actually happens within a person when they strive for this imaginative level of knowledge. It is the case that through this meditative inner experience, through this methodically disciplined inner experience of concentrating thoughts and feelings, the soul forces are, as it were, gathered together, and they are permeated by consciousness more intensely than is otherwise the case. If we then observe what is actually growing when we meditate and concentrate in this way, we find that it is the same thing — only in its continuation — that has brought us to actual self-awareness in our ordinary experience, that has brought us to composure, to calm personality and which has brought us, if I may use the expression, to the actual egoity of the human being, to that in which the human being must find himself so that he can detach himself from the world in a level-headed way, so that he can come to self-awareness in the right way.

This is also the dangerous thing about this path, that first of all this egoity of the human being must be strengthened. That which has led people to egoity must be taken further. Therefore, what is striven for here can basically only be properly achieved if it is preceded by a corresponding preparation, the preparation that I have described truthfully in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”. There you will find a certain method for attaining true inner modesty, that inner modesty which may not always be openly displayed in outer life, owing to outer circumstances, but which must penetrate the life of the soul in depth. If this modesty is not thoroughly developed as an inner strength of the soul experience, then there is indeed the danger of human megalomania on the path to imagination, not pathological megalomania, but psychological, moral megalomania. Those who apply anthroposophical methods correctly cannot lapse into pathology because these methods run directly counter to what can lead people out of their natural state into pathological conditions. However, they may certainly face psychological dangers such as the megalomania referred to here. A certain inner stability, rooted in modesty and unpretentiousness, is necessary for the individual who aspires to that elevation and intensification of egoism which is necessary to achieve imaginative knowledge. In ordinary life and in ordinary cognition, our concepts are too pale, our highest ideas too abstract, to move from their own full saturation to the inner experience of that which actually pushes man towards egoity. That which otherwise lives in the power of forming concepts and shaping ideas must be elevated, must be intensified. Then, indeed, an experience occurs, and by the occurrence of this experience the one striving toward imagination can actually gauge the correctness of his striving. One has done exercises to increase one's egoism, one has done such exercises that one's pale concepts and ideas have been raised to the intensity one experiences when one has a sensory image before one's eyes or ears. One has thereby increased that power which, by its concentration, produces our composure, our sense of personality, our egoism. The experience one has is that from a certain point on, an increase in egoity no longer occurs, that from a certain point on, precisely because of the increase in egoity, in a sense because of the arrival of egoity at a point of culmination, this egoity actually dissolves. That is the significant thing, that our egoity, when it is increased, is increased correctly, does not increase into the excessive as egoity, but that it basically dissolves.

From this alone it can be seen that the experience we have as human beings in the outer physical world, and which, through its own nature, carries us to egoity, is necessary as a transition, that egoity in a healthy way the physical world and through sensory perceptions must be attained before one can turn to that increase that I mean here, which then leads to a dissolution, so to speak, of egoity, or rather, to an outflow of egoity.

Where does our egoity flow into first? In ordinary life, my dear audience, our egoity is actually banished into the moment. We can only say “I” to ourselves by feeling that we are a being experiencing the moment. That which we already experienced yesterday, which was intimately connected with our egoity yesterday, what we were immersed in yesterday, has become objective for us today in this moment. And to a certain extent, we see what we experienced yesterday, in contrast to our sense of self, as something external through memory, just as we see any external experience as external. One time, something objective rises from the depths of our own organization in memory; the other time, it approaches us by announcing itself to us through the external senses.

Of course, we distinguish the remembered experience from the external sensory experience; but at the same time there is something very similar between the two in the way they approach the ego, which can only be fully grasped in the moment. In the endeavor to advance to imagination, the I actually gradually flows out over our physical life on earth between birth and death, and we learn to be immersed in a past experience as we are immersed in the experience of the present moment. We learn to feel ourselves as I in the long-past experience as well as we otherwise do in the present moment. I draw your attention to the fact that you have certainly already experienced in a dream – which I certainly do not regard as some kind of valid source of knowledge, but only use here for clarification – that you have certainly already experienced in a dream that you felt like a person 20 years in the past , as a person 20 years younger, that you imagined your image from 20 years ago and behaved in the dream as if you were only 20 years old, that you did the same things as you did 20 years ago. I would like to remind you that in this dream image you actually objectify yourself in such a way that you feel yourself at the age you were at a distant point in time.

What appears in dreams in a semi-pathological way can be attained by the human being in full consciousness through imaginative knowledge, and can be developed in full consciousness. Then the human being experiences what he has ever experienced in this earthly life – he does not just experience it as an ordinary memory, which is contrasted with the experience of the present moment, he experiences it in such a way that his I, his egoity, fills the entire stream of his experience in this earthly life. He steps out of the moment and into the stream of his experience of time. The I does not flow out in a nebulous way; the I flows out into the stream of real experiences of this earthly life. But in this outpouring one grasps something different than in the ordinary consciousness of the moment, which, according to ordinary logic, must be filled with intellectual images in abstractions. In this outpouring of the life stream, one grasps images, images of the vitality of the life of the senses. That which otherwise stands before the soul as a memory of life becomes inwardly saturated and intense; one learns the nature of imaginative knowledge in oneself. At the same time, one penetrates into the essence of the human being by advancing in knowledge. But from this moment on, one knows that one has submerged with the ego not in a stream of abstract memories, but in a stream of real life forces, the same life forces that, from our birth, or let us say from our conception, are the forces that constitute our organism, that shape our organs, that work on us internally, in growth, in nourishment, in reproduction.

We now become immersed in the stream of those forces that otherwise only have to do with the mediation of our nourishment, that make us grow, and that make our reproduction possible. And now, instead of living in an abstraction, we are living with full consciousness in a concrete reality, and we are learning what the etheric body is. We are learning that our physical body, in which we normally live in our ordinary lives, is based on a body that is an inner formation of forces and that can only be seen in such imaginative knowledge. One becomes familiar with that which has been repeatedly sought by hypothesis by physical and biological science in recent decades, and which is even denied by others today in its existence. One becomes familiar with the real ether world in contrast to the ponderable physical world and learns to recognize how that which underlies our physical human form is really such an ether human being. But in grasping oneself as such an etheric human being, the ego of the earthly human being dissolves in an even higher sense. One cannot grasp this etheric human being without simultaneously seeing in all its individual parts and aspects what the cosmos, what the world, is. At the same time, one is led out of oneself by grasping oneself as an etheric human being, because that which works within us as an organizing etheric human being throws its rays in currents out into the cosmos, bringing us a connection between these or those inner organs, between this or that limb of our physical organism and the cosmos.

What is experienced does not appear in the form of abstract concepts, but in the saturated form of imagery, of imagination. But in that we have, in a sense, surrendered our egoity in the process of knowing, as I have described it, we grasp at the same time that which is now etherically outside of us in the world. We penetrate through our own etheric body into the etheric of the great world, from which we are, after all, born as human beings.

But then a new task arises. The world we now experience is quite different [from the physical one]; it does not have certain things that we rightly consider to be the defining characteristics of our physical world. It initially presents itself to us in a pictorial way, while we recognize our physical world in its true objectivity when we strip away the pictoriality. But when we now ascend from the grasp of our own etheric body to the ethericity of the world, we notice that precisely those senses that otherwise convey the external world to us in the most beautiful way lag behind in their effectiveness. We owe what we have of the physical external world to the eye, the ear and so on. These senses, as it were, recede at first, and the very senses that are ignored in ordinary physical life come to the fore in human experience as we become so attuned to the etheric world: the sense of balance, the sense of movement, the sense of life. These come to the fore. We are freed, as it were, from our own heaviness. We enter into an experience of the world's own equilibrium, into which we find our way. The movements observed through the eyes or those detected by instruments cease. But what can be inwardly experienced in the movement when the human being is in this movement is experienced in the imagination through the resting human being, in that the movement first increases. This is a living penetration into the etheric world. And here I would like to draw your attention, ladies and gentlemen, to the fact that it is really as I characterized it in my introductory words today, when I said that the path of anthroposophical knowledge means a series of inner soul experiences of destiny. For what occurs, so to speak, as a damping of the higher senses and as a spiritualization and strengthening at the same time of the senses usually regarded as low, is connected with such a fate. And, although I know what one is exposed to in such a description, I would like to mention what I want to say here with an example: I was once occupied with the internal mental processing of what a person actually experiences when they profess their soul to these or those worldviews, when they become a materialist, idealist, realist, spiritualist, positivist, skeptic, and so on. These things cannot be exhausted by what ordinary life and ordinary contemporary science produce about them, if one really strives to recognize them from within. Ordinary life and ordinary contemporary science are actually exhausted in the fact that the idealist rails against the realist, criticizes him, and that he refutes what the realist puts forward; the spiritualist becomes haughty, and nevertheless he is often a complete layman in that which can only be recognized in the material world, he indulges in the most disparaging criticisms of materialism, which nevertheless was a cosmic side effect of our modern, justly so praised scientificness. These things, why the human mind leans towards materialism on the one hand, and on the other, for example, towards spiritualism or idealism, these things lie deeper than one usually thinks.

When one seriously engages with these things, then one carries out an inner soul work that is connected with the thought process in a healthy, but also comprehensive sense. One experiences something at the same time as one thinks. If you think abstractly, you experience nothing. But if you experience what becomes an experience for the human being, whether you are a materialist or a spiritualist, a realist or an idealist, then you are led, as it were, into the direct existence of the human soul. In a completely different way, this human soul is grasped by a kind of thinking that I would call deeply introspective, than is the case with the ordinary sciences.

What one can experience in such thinking, which must be meditative and concentrated thinking, leads one further, releases certain powers of the imagination, and leads to the appearance of an inner image for individual concrete things, , but with the complete character of this thought-experience, an inner pictorial experience arises, which, however, is not a dreamt or fantasized pictorial experience, but which is connected with the cosmic, supersensible facts underlying external phenomena.

And so I lived at that time, after I had gone through this concentration, this meditation on what I have just described to you. I lived myself into the imaginative world in such a way that the whole person who emerged in the imagination suddenly became something that stood before the inner eye in a concrete world fact. It was formed out of what one had grasped as the essence of man, as an image of the cosmic, the zodiac, the zodiakus; but not as one has it in mind in its abstract form, but in such a way that the individual formations of the zodiac became truly essential, so that the spiritual essence of the zodiacal constellation emerged and revealed how it now came together with the individual elements of human nature: the world as an image, within a certain sphere as an image, the living out of inner thoughts, striving towards cosmic imagery.

The I not only flows out into this stream of one's own personal experiences for this earthly life, the I flows out into the cosmos. One learns to recognize what is really there in the undulating, surging ether of the cosmos. One does not enter into this undulating, surging life of the cosmos other than by increasing one's egoity to the point where it reaches its culmination, then dissolving oneself in the comprehension of the world and pouring out into the objective existence of the world.

What I am describing to you is basically the character of the etheric world. Experiencing yourself in this etheric world — you will now understand why I call it a destiny experience. Experiencing knowledge is at the same time a destiny experience. In this etheric world one can experience that which cannot be described in any other way than as I have described it in my “Occult Science”. It is the etheric experience of the world that has been presented in this “Occult Science”.

But at the same time, one's inner destiny takes such a turn that one feels the egotism into which one is placed in ordinary life between birth and death, I might say, continually expanding. The point then is that through the continuation of such exercises, as I have indicated in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science” in its second part, that through the continuation of such exercises the I, which one has actually lost in a certain psychological sense, that this I is found again.

If you develop - everyone can develop this - you develop the power to carry your thoughts into the pictorial experience, and if you practice this carrying of your thought power into the etheric pictorial experience long enough - for the individual person it is so long, for the other person differently long - if you practice this long enough, one practices it so to speak until it has the necessary strength to fight against the persistent addiction to lose one's thoughts in images, one maintains the upper hand with one's composure, with the imbuing of one's etheric image experiences with the power of thought. Then the I-experience arises again. But it now appears in a completely transformed form, it now appears before the fully collected soul, before the soul that is as collected as one can only be in the solution of some mathematical problem. The experience of the I emerges from the world of ethereal images, but it emerges in such a way that we see it, so to speak, not as something that dwells in our physical corporeality, but as emerging from the cosmic etheric world, to the contemplation of which we have risen. One would like to say: While otherwise our ego, when it emerges, experiences and is viewed as if it came from the physical body, as if it came from a human center, we now experience it as if our ego radiates from the indeterminate periphery of the universe, as if it wants to converge in a center instead of diverging. And we notice: the world in which we are now placed with full inner reflection, with full inner power of knowledge, the world we actually only dream of in our ordinary life between birth and death when we apply a force that cannot initially be a force of knowledge, when we apply the power of feeling.

What we experience in our ordinary human life through feeling is not imbued with the power of thought to the same extent as our imaginative life. In reality, as I have often discussed, it is only imbued with the power of thought to the extent that our dreams are imbued with the power of thought. What we experience, so to speak, in the shadow of the world of personal feeling, we now experience in its true form: the I, as it descends from the periphery of the world, from the world of etheric substance, as it, instead of dissolving into the indefinite, pushes towards the center of its own being. And in this comprehension, which transforms the ordinary emotional experience into a real thought experience and thus into a real cognitive experience, in this experience we grasp what is called the astral body in anthroposophical knowledge of man. The astral body appears to us as given to us by the world when we look out from our center. We discover how, as it were, what is our astral body is exuded from the etheric force arrangements. It is as if we were suddenly not living in ourselves, but living in the air we breathe in — as if our body were standing there objectively and we were not in this body, but in the air we breathe in — and it is as if we felt that our external physicality was merely this body of air that penetrates into the human interior. It is as if we were looking into the human organs, as if we were approaching the human form in its externality.

Ascending from this breathing experience, Indian yoga philosophy aimed to achieve the experience that I have just described to you as the experience of the astral world. We in the West are not allowed to imitate this yoga experience in the East, due to the nature of our organization. But everything that we can experience in the immediate future, in which we actually experience ourselves outside our body in this way, presents itself in the same way as the world soul in the etheric body of the world. In fact, we never have a physical world body before us in a concrete realization, but in real realization we only reach an etheric world body in the way described, and in this etheric world body we experience the world soul in its configurations, one of which is our own soul, our own astral body, if I may put it this way.

In the same way as I have described in my “Occult Science” what one can see in the ether world, the surging and nature of this ether world in its concreteness, one can also describe the soul-like becoming and weaving of the cosmos. Perhaps it will be incumbent upon me, if it is to come to pass in this life, to show that what has been described in my “Occult Science” as the ether world can also be described as the astral world. It will be seen that then one must speak from quite a different spirit, that then something must be added to the descriptions of this “Occult Science”, which in its description, in its characterizations, must be quite different from the descriptions, the characterizations of this “Occult Science”. And I say to those who approach my writings in this way, that instead of having the will to penetrate into the matter, they quibble over words and look for contradictions. I predict that they will find will find between the book, which is created in this way through the description of the astral in relation to the etheric, that they will find an even greater portion of what they will state as contradictions in their way. These are the contradictions of life, and the one who wants to penetrate life objectively must familiarize himself with these contradictions in a living way, not in abstract logic.

But when what we come to know as our own astral, as our own soul, approaches us in this world, we actually feel like cosmic human beings, and we feel our own astral body, our own soul, only as a part of the cosmos. But we feel it as a member not of the etheric cosmos, but of the soul cosmos, and we now know: the cosmos has a soul. And by being able to present the astral body to our soul as something other than what appears to us only through our outer physical corporeality and through the etheric, a life that precedes our birth or our conception , a life accomplished in the spirit, in the soul world, is placed before this soul of ours, and a life that we enter as a spiritual-soul being when we pass through the gate of death. That which is called immortality, and also that which our civilization has lost and which should be called unbornness, becomes a fact, for one gets to know oneself from the whole world that outlasts the individual human life. One does not just grasp the part of the human being that is embodied in the body between birth and death, but one grasps the human essence that precedes birth and follows death; one grasps oneself as a link in the eternal spiritual world.

And still further can be continued that inner concentration, that inner meditation, whereby one must only see to it that the power one has attained to penetrate the world of images with thoughts is fully maintained with the power of reflection. One can penetrate even further in this penetration of the imagination with thought-content, and the penetration of inspiration with thought-content; one can always intensify that which is the level-headed thought-experience in imagination, in inspiration, and then one comes to the experience of the true form of the central human ego. Then one penetrates through the human astral body, which actually presents itself as developing from the periphery of the world towards our human center, and presents itself as a member of the entire astral cosmos. From there, one arrives at the true self, of which one has only a shadow in ordinary life, to which one says “I”; one arrives at that which one now objectively sees as one's self, in the same way that one otherwise objectively sees external things. For that which one undergoes on the path of knowledge has brought one out of one's own corporeality, and what now moves back into one's own corporeality is not the ego that one has in ordinary life, but a real ego.

This real self initially has nothing to do with much of what shapes us as a human organism from the cosmos, what works in us and lives from the world that we have gone through in the spiritual and soul realm before birth or before conception. This I presents itself as an objective reality, as that which, so to speak, represents the sum of all the I's we have lived through in our past earthly lives.

This is achieved at the level of the intuitive, the truly intuitive. There, that which can be described in anthroposophical knowledge of man as repeated earthly lives becomes wisdom. In fact, anthroposophical knowledge does not consist of formulating abstract insights based on existing facts, which are images of the facts, but rather consists of gradually and truly living one's way into the human essence. What one experiences of this human being, after one has first poured out one's I, one's egoity, into the stream of life between birth and death in the etheric realm, now stands as the subject opposite the I that has become objective on the path from our previous life to our present life. It is from such a path of knowledge that the one speaks who, from inner vision, not from theory, speaks about the existence of repeated human lives on earth. This view of repeated human lives on earth is not a theory, but something that arises as a realization at the same time as the view of the true self, which in our ordinary life we have before us in the same way as we have our soul life before us between falling asleep and waking up. Just as we are between falling asleep and waking up in a state that we do not see into, that is given to us only negatively as an empty part of our experience, so we must, as it were, leave out in our life stream what we have experienced while sleeping. When we look back and let our life appear before us, how for ordinary consciousness we actually only have those stretches of life that run from waking to falling asleep, how these are always interrupted by empty lengths of stream, stream members, so in ordinary life we look down into our ego, into our organization. We see, by experiencing the surging, weaving soul life, a kind of empty space that we oversleep as we oversleep our state of sleep, and to this empty space we say I, not to something really fulfilled. Anthroposophical knowledge of the human being, ladies and gentlemen, can indicate how it arrives at its content, can describe step by step how it advances inwardly to grasp that which it must present to the world as a teaching. And because true anthroposophical knowledge of man carries the thought everywhere - for you have seen that I had to place the main emphasis on this in the description of this anthroposophical method of knowing man, that in imagination, in inspiration, the thought experience has been carried into it with all its sharpness, that this thought experience also appears in the intuitive experience in the end; you have seen that I had to place the special emphasis on this must attach to this, and because the thought experience is everywhere within, because that which man has in the abstract thought experience, which he uses for ordinary science, is everywhere within in all that the spiritual researcher directs his soul and his spirit, his I, therefore everything that the spiritual researcher presents to the world can be relived and also verified by the mere thought experience. The human being must only have the opportunity to follow the spiritual researcher to the thought experience. He must not lose the thought experience immediately when he leaves the sphere of sensory experience. He must have the strength to develop the inner capacity for growth and reproduction that can still have the self-generating thought when the thought stimulated by the external sensory experience ceases to bear its actual character. This intense inner experience can be appropriated at first; then one will find: the spiritual researcher describes things that he has essentially experienced by carrying the thought into imagination, inspiration and intuition.

The thoughts that he incorporates into it can be followed and tested. For the thoughts that he forms in imaginative, inspired and intuitive life can be tested for accuracy by their very nature and essence when you hold them up to yourself. One must only not cling to the human prejudice, which in recent times has become all too strong, that a thought can only be verified if one can have an external sensual fact as proof. One must recognize that the thought itself, the same thought that is used in external science, has an inner life, that it can shape its inner organization. If one experiences only this inner self-fashioning of the power of thought, if one experiences it in a way that Hegel in his time could not yet experience — hence he only unravelled abstract thoughts in his philosophy — if one experiences this living movement of the thought, which I first tried to present in its form in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, then one can really examine every single thought that the spiritual researcher expresses. Those who do not undertake this examination will generally do so because they feel compelled to do so out of an inadequate will: 'I do not follow what you are thinking there, because what I know so far gives me no reason to do so.

Anyone who takes this view is simply not open to discussion about anthroposophy, and in particular about anthroposophical knowledge of the human being. It is not necessary to ascend to imagination, inspiration, and intuition oneself; it is only necessary to bring the thought life, which one already develops in ordinary science, vividly into the whole inner soul life, and from this living grasp of the thought, to follow what the spiritual researcher brings out of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But, ladies and gentlemen, one must be determined to break away from dead thinking, which only arranges concepts in a linear fashion, just as the external sense world unfolds. This dead thinking proceeds in such a way that I form this concept from one piece of the external sense world, then I stick it to the concept that I gain from the other piece of the sense world, and so on. Only those who adhere to this method of gluing for a system of concepts will say that, from the point of view of ordinary thinking, they cannot verify what is given in anthroposophy. But anyone who grasps that the human being really carries within himself, within himself experiences thinking as a living organism — it is only overshadowed, it is only overshadowed by an illusion —, anyone who grasps this thinking that is alive in life, can verify from this thinking everything that the spiritual researcher presents about man and the world.

Thus you see from the whole meaning of what I have taken the liberty of presenting to you that when the spiritual researcher attempts to penetrate to knowledge of man, at the same time as he strives for this knowledge of man, knowledge of the world results. Knowledge of the true human being leads us beyond ourselves into the objective world. Real knowledge of the true objective world gives us, within its content, the human being, the truly outwardly and inwardly living human being, who can feel at home in the world, which he discovers in this way. And so it may be said: Just as it can already be sensed that world and human being must belong together in the most intimate way, as I have already emphasized in my Philosophy of Freedom, so spiritual science presents knowledge to the world that world knowledge must be attained through knowledge of the human being, because world existence can be experienced can be experienced in the innermost human being, that human nature can be recognized from knowledge of the world, because the human being with his innermost nature comes from the objective, true world; that knowledge of the world must be attained through knowledge of the human being [and knowledge of the human being through knowledge of the world].

In this, however, a contradiction or even a paradox can be found, for one might ask: Where should we begin? Should we start with knowledge of the world in order to gain knowledge of the human being from knowledge of the world , as the pantheist or some other philosophically or materialistically minded person would undertake, or should we, as the mystic often does, soar from knowledge of man to knowledge of the world?

But this is dead, this is not alive thought. Knowledge of man and knowledge of the world do not belong together like two dead limbs of an organism, so that one can start with one and move on to the other, but knowledge of man and knowledge of the world belong together like the living limbs of a being itself. And just as little as one can say that the head lives through the limbs or the limbs live through the head, so little can one say that one can start with knowledge of the world in order to arrive at the human being, or start with knowledge of the human being in order to arrive at knowledge of the world. Rather, one must say that both must arise in living unity, and both must mutually illuminate each other in living unity. And in this sense, in the sense of a living realization, a world knowledge gained from spiritual research through true knowledge of man, a true knowledge of man through true world knowledge, must arise for the great questions of our time.

In our survey of the world we have now carried a difficult aspect of it far enough to discover to some extent the spiritual behind the phenomena of the external sense-world. Concerning such phenomena, at first outwardly revealing little of the fact that the spiritual in its own peculiar form stands behind them, as we experience this spiritual in our own soul-life—concerning such phenomena we have recognised that nevertheless spiritual qualities and properties do stand behind them. For example, in ordinary life we recognise the properties of heat or fire, and we have learnt to see in these the expression of sacrifice. In what meets us as air and at any rate, to our ideas, seems to reveal so little of its spiritual nature, we have recognised the bestowing virtue of certain Spiritual Beings. And we have learnt to perceive in water what might be called resignation. It may just be mentioned here, that in earlier conceptions of the world there was naturally a greater sense of the spiritual behind the outer material element, and the fact that specially volatile substances have been designated “Spirits” may be looked upon as proving this, for we make a peculiar use of the word ‘Spirit’ to-day. Even in saying “Spiritual”; and indeed in the outer world it may often occur that people use this word with very little application to spiritual things, on one occasion (as some here present are aware) a letter was addressed to a spiritualist union at Munich, and so little did the postman know what a spiritualistic circle was, that the letter was delivered to the Central Committee of Wine and Spirit merchants!

But to-day, when we wish to study that significant transition in the evolution of the Earth planet which took place in the passing from ancient Sun to ancient Moon, we must bear in mind a different kind of development of the spiritual. We must now start from that point which we reached in the last lecture, when we came to the subject of “renunciation.” This, as we have seen, consisted essentially in the refusal of Beings of exalted Spiritual rank to accept the sacrifice, which as we were told, consisted for the most part of will or will-substance. If we represent this to our minds in such a way that we picture certain Beings desirous of offering the substance of their will in sacrifice which through the renunciation of yet higher Beings was rejected, it will be easy to rise to the conception that this substance was compelled to remain with the Beings desirous of sacrificing; who were prevented from doing so. Thus we are introduced to Beings in the Cosmic scheme ready to contribute with fervour what dwells within them—but who are not able to do this, are obliged to retain this substance within them. The Beings whose sacrifice was rejected were unable to establish a particular connection with still higher Beings, which might have been established had their offering been accepted. What we must understand by this is symbolically expressed in the world's history by the figure of Cain confronting Abel, though there the contrast is more sharply emphasised. Cain too wished to offer sacrifice to his God. But it was not pleasing unto God and He would not accept it. The sacrifice offered by Abel was accepted. What we must bear in mind in this story is the inner experience which came to Cain through the rejection of his sacrifice.

If we wish to raise ourselves to the height necessary for the comprehension of what is now under consideration, we must clearly realise that in speaking of the regions referred to, both conceptions and ideas slip into use regarding them which only have meaning in our ordinary life. It will be incorrect to speak of ‘Sin’ or ‘wrong-doing’ as coming into being by the rejection of the sacrifice. Guilt or atonement as we know it in our ordinary life, could not as yet be spoken of in those regions. Rather must we think of these Beings in such a way, that on the part of those Higher Ones who rejected the proffered sacrifice, there is renunciation or resignation. In the soul described in the last lecture there is nothing of guilt or omission; on the contrary, it contains all the greatness and significance to be found in resignation. None the less the fact remains that in those other Beings who wished to contribute their sacrifice there arose a feeling, though very faint, which was the beginning of an opposition to those who rejected it. So that when at a much later epoch, the story of Cain is brought to our notice our feeling is represented in an accentuated form. Hence we do not find in those Beings who continued to evolve from the Sun and to pass over to the Moon, the same disposition of mind as in Cain; in them the mood is different in degree. We only really become acquainted with this if we look into our own souls as we did in the last lecture, trying to find its counterpart there, and thus get a hint of that feeling which was developed in the Individualities whose sacrificial gifts were rejected.

Coming nearer and nearer to the earthly life of man, we find this mood in ourselves—everyone knows it—as uncertainty and at the same time as torment in the domain which can well be included in the hidden depths of Soul-life. This feeling with which we are all acquainted holds sway in the secret depth of our Soul-life, and sometimes pushes its way up to the surface; and then perhaps its torment is least. We often go about with these feelings without being aware of them in our superficial consciousness; yet there they are within us. We might recall the words of the poet: ‘He alone who longing knows, knows what I suffer,’ if we wish to convey an idea of the tormenting nature of this mood with which is connected a certain degree of pain. The longing to be found in the souls of men, is what is here meant.

In order to transport ourselves into what went on spiritually in the evolutionary phases of ancient Saturn and Sun, it was necessary to raise our vision to peculiar states of the soul which only appear, so to speak, when the human soul begins to aspire and prepares for higher striving. We saw this when we tried to understand the nature of sacrifice by referring to our own Soul-life, when we tried to comprehend the nature of the wisdom man can acquire, which we saw trickling in, and which has its origin in what may be called: ‘readiness to bestow,’ ‘readiness to give’, even to giving oneself, so to speak. When we come on to the more earthly conditions which have evolved out of the earlier ones, we encounter a Soul-mood resembling in many respects what a man may even yet experience at the present day. But we must quite clearly realise, that although our Soul-life is fitted into our earth-body, an upper layer exists over this hidden Soul-life in the depths. Who could fail to know that there is such a hidden life of the Soul? Life itself amply teaches us this.

Now in order to make clear to ourselves something of this hidden life of the Soul, let us take the case of a child who in his seventh or eighth year, or at some other age may have experienced some injustice, to which children are particularly sensitive. He perhaps may have been blamed for something which he really had not done, but it suited to convenience of those around him to throw the blame on the child, so as to have an end of the matter. Now children are very specially sensitive to unjust accusation; but as life now is, although such an experience may have bitten deeply into the childish life, the later Soul-life put another layer of existence over it, and as far as everyday life is concerned the child forgot it. And indeed it may very well never crop up again. But suppose that in his fifteenth or sixteenth year this boy should experience fresh injustice, perhaps at school; then that which has lain dormant in the depths below the superficial waves of his soul, begins to stir. The boy need not know that a memory of what he had formerly endured is rising to the surface, he may have different concepts and ideas on the subject. But if his earlier experience had not occurred he would simply have gone home, perhaps grumbled and complained, and shed a few tears, and that would have been the end of the matter. The first injustice had however been experienced, and although, as I make a point of saying, the boy need have no recollection of it, yet it works! It becomes active beneath the surface of the Soul-life just as there may be movements beneath the surface of a calm and glassy sea, and what might have ended in a few grumblings and tears now becomes the suicide of a schoolboy! Thus do the hidden depths of the Soul-life play their part on the surface. The most important of all the forces ruling below in these depths one which governs every Soul and occasionally emerges in, its original form, is—longing. We also know the names by which this force is known to the outer world, but they are only metaphoric and indefinite, for they express very complicated connections and thus do not enter a man's consciousness at all.

Take as an example a phenomenon with which we are all well acquainted; perhaps a man who lives in great cities is less affected by it, but he will have seen it in others:—I refer to what is known as ‘home-sickness’. If you investigate into the true nature of home-sickness you will find it differs fundamentally in every one. Sometimes it takes one form and sometimes another. One person may long for the homely stories of the family circle; he does not know that he is longing for home, he only feels an undefined craving, an undefined want. Another longs for his mountain, or for the river on whose banks he used to play, watching the movement of the rippling water. He is seldom aware of what it is that is working within him. All these diverse characteristics we include in the term ‘home-sickness,’ expressing something that may be active in a thousand forms, and would be more accurately defined as a kind of longing. And what is this longing? We have just said that it is a kind of willing, and whenever we investigate this longing, we find that is of this nature. What kind of willing? It is a will towards an inclination which in its immediate form cannot be satisfied; for were it satisfied, the longing would cease. What we described as longing is an unattainable wish.

So must we define the frame of mind of those Beings whose sacrifice was rejected, it was somewhat of this nature. What we may discover in the depths of our Soul-life is a heritage coming to us from those primeval times of which we are now speaking. Just as we have inherited other things from that ancient stage of evolution, so do we inherit all kinds of longings, all kinds of repressed wishes impossible to fulfil. It is in this way we must also conjecture that through the rejection of the sacrifice during the phase of evolution there came into existence beings whom we may designate as: Beings with wishes which are repressed. Now because they were obliged to exercise this repression they were in a very special position. And as we can hardly rise into these conditions by means of thought, we must once again turn to certain conditions in our own Soul, if we wish to feel, to sense the reflection of them.

A being able to sacrifice its own will, passes in a certain sense, into the being of the other. We can feel this even in our human life, we live and move in one for whom we sacrifice ourselves, we feel glad and satisfied when in that person's presence. And as we are now speaking of the sacrifice offered to highest Beings, to more widely-extending, universal Beings, by others who found their greatest bliss in gazing up at them, what remains behind as repressed longings and wishes can never create the same inner disposition of Soul as would have been theirs if they had been allowed to complete their sacrifice. For if they had been able to do this what they offered would have passed over into the other Beings. We might, by way of example suggest, that if the earth and the other planets could have made sacrifice to the Sun—they would be with the Sun. But if they were not allowed to do this, if they had been forced to withhold what they were preparing to offer up, they would then have been driven back into themselves. If we can understand what has just been said in these few words, we observe that at this stage something new enters the universe. It must be clearly understood that it is impossible to express this in any other way than by saying that the Beings who were ready to offer to others all that dwelt within them, were compelled on the rejection of their sacrifice, to draw all this into themselves. Do you not guess what now flashed up—that this was what is called ego-nature which comes out in every form? It is thus that we must look upon what lives on in the Beings as a heritage—which later on was poured into evolution, so to speak. We see egoism flashing up in the weakest form, as longing, but we can also see it slipping into the evolution of the Cosmos. Thus we see how Beings devoted to themselves, to their own Ego-nature, would in a certain respect have been condemned to a one-sided development, to living only in themselves, if something else had not occurred.

Let us picture a Being, permitted to make sacrifice; such a one lives in the other Being, and does so for all time. One not allowed to made sacrifice can only live within itself. It is thereby shut off from what it would have experienced in another, in this case a higher Being. Thus from the outset it is condemned and exiled by evolution to a one-sided existence, were it not that something here enters evolution to redress the balance. This is the arrival on the scene of new Beings who prevent the one-sidedness. Just as on Saturn there were the Spirits of Will, and on ancient Sun Spirits of Wisdom, so, on ancient Moon the Spirits of Movement make their appearance; we must not, however, think of movement in space, but movement rather more like the nature of thought. Every one knows the expression “thought-vibrations” though this only refers to the fluidic movement of our own thought; yet this expression may serve, if we want to acquire a more comprehensive conception of movement, to show us that we think of something more than the mere movement from one place to another, for that is only one of the many forms of movement. If a number of persons devote themselves to a higher Being who is expressive of all that is within them, and who accepts all the sacrifices they offer Him, these people live in that Being as a plurality in unity, and find full satisfaction in so doing. But if their sacrifices are rejected, the plurality is driven back upon itself and is never satisfied. Then came the Spirits of Movement and in a sense they guide the Beings who would have simply been driven back upon themselves and bring them into relation with all other Beings. The Spirits of Movement should not be thought of as merely bringing about changes of place; they are Beings able to bring forth something whereby one Being is constantly brought into new relation with others.

We can form an idea of what was attained in the Cosmos at this stage if we once more reflect upon a corresponding disposition of the Soul. Who does not know the longing when a condition of Soul approaches in which a man is at a standstill, when he can experience no change! Who does not know the torment of it, how it drives a man into a state of mind which becomes unendurable, and which in a merely superficial person takes the form of boredom? But between the boredom which is as a rule only ascribed to a shallow-pated person, and that which is an attribute of noble character in whom dwells what is generated by their own natures as longing and cannot be satisfied in this world, there are many intermediate states—what better method is there of quieting longing than by change? This is proved by the fact that persons who suffer from it incessantly seek to form relationships to new Beings. The torment of longing can often be overcome by changing the conditions to ever new beings.

Thus we see that while the earth was passing through her Moon-phase, the Spirits of Movement brought into the lives of those Beings who were filled with longing and would otherwise have been desolate--for boredom is also a kind of desolation—the change which is brought about by movement, a constantly renewed relation to ever new Beings and new conditions. Movement in space, movement from one place to another, is but one form of the more comprehensive movement which has just been mentioned. When in the morning we have a definite train of thought in our Soul, not necessarily to be kept to ourselves, but passed on to others—a ‘movement’ takes place. We can then overcome one-sidedness of longing by means of variety, by change and the movement of the things experienced. In outer space there is only one particular form of change. In this connection let us imagine a planet in relation to a Sun: if it always occupied the same position to the Sun, if it never moved, it would be subject to that one-sidedness, which can only accrue when it presents invariably the same aspect to the Sun. Then the Spirits of Movement turn the planet round so as to bring about a change in its conditions. Change of place is but one of the many forms of change. And the Spirits of Movement, by bringing change of place into the Cosmos, merely introduce one specific part of Movement in general.

But as the Spirits of Movement introduce change and movement into the Universe as we know it up to the present, something else must follow. We know that in the whole Cosmic multiplicity in the upward course of development during this evolution, besides the Spirits of Movement, of Personality, of Wisdom, and of Will—there is also what we have called ‘Bestowing Virtue,’ which is radiated forth as Wisdom, and Spirituality behind air and gas. This then combines with the Will now transformed into longing, and within these Beings it becomes what is known to man hardly yet as ‘thoughts’ but as ideas. We can best picture these to ourselves by the ideas that a man has when he dreams; the fluidic ideas that succeeding one another in a dream may evoke a conception of what takes place in a Being in whom the volition of longing dwells, and is guided by the Spirits of Movement into relation with other Beings. But when this is thus guided into a relation with the other Beings, it cannot completely surrender itself—the egotism within it prevents that; but it is able to take in the transitory idea of the other Beings, which lives in him like a dream-picture. This is the origin of what we call the ‘arising’ of pictures of the other world. At this phase of development we see the arising of the picture-consciousness. And as we human Beings our selves passed through this phase of evolution without then possessing our present earthly ego-consciousness, we must think of ourselves at that time without that which we can now acquire through our ego, but living and weaving in the universe, while within us lived something which we can compare with the present feelings of longing. We can in a certain fashion realise, if we do not regard these conditions of suffering as earthly that they could not possibly be so, by reflecting on the following:—Sorrow and suffering—naturally in its Soul-form, came at that time into our being and that of other entities connected with our evolution; through the activity of the Spirits of Movement the inner nature which would otherwise have been barren and empty, suffering the tortures of longing, was filled with the balm which flowed into these Beings in the form of picture-consciousness, otherwise these Beings would have been empty-Souled, empty of everything not to be called longing. But the balm of the pictures was slowly poured in, filling the desolate void with variety, and thus the Beings were led away from exile and condemnation. If we take what is here said seriously, it gives us both the spiritual basis of what developed during the Moon-phase of our Earth, and of what we now have in the deep subsoil of our consciousness, for that has stretched over to the earth-stage of our nature. And this is so imbedded in the subsoil of our Soul, that, as the disturbance beneath the surface of the sea drives up the waves, it can influence us, without our being aware of the cause of what enters our consciousness. Beneath the surface of our ordinary ego-consciousness we have a Soul-life which can play its part. And when it does so, what does the Soul-life say? If we bear in mind the Cosmic subject of this subconscious Soul-life, we can say that what we can thus trace back to the subsoil of the soul is a bursting-forth within that which we have acquired through our earth-phase, of what has moved across from the Moon-phase of evolution. If we clearly grasp what it is that has come into our nature here on the Earth, we really have an explanation of what has been spiritually brought over from the ancient Moon into our Earth-existence.

If we just grasp the fact that it was necessary, as has just been described, that pictures should continually arise to assuage the feeling of desolation, we obtain a conception which is of very great importance and weight: that of the longing human Soul, in all its yearning emptiness. By the constant succession of pictures, arising one after the other, the yearning is satisfied and brought into harmony; but should a picture remain any length of time the old longing begins to glimmer faintly afresh in the background—and the Spirits of Movement call up new pictures. When these have been there for some little time the longing pushes up again, demanding fresh ones. Now with respect to the Soul-life such as this the momentous sentence must be pronounced: that if this longing can only be satisfied by a continual flow of pictures following one after the other, there would be no end to the infinite flow. The only thing that can supervene on this is what must come if the endless flow of pictures is to be replaced by something else, something that is able to redeem it by something other than mere pictures—namely, by realities! In other words, the planetary embodiment of our earth through which we have passed, when pictures were brought to us by the activity of the Spirits of Movement, must be replaced by that planetary phase of the earth's embodiment which we can the phase of redemption. We shall see presently that the earth is to be called the ‘Planet of Redemption,’ just as her last embodiment—that of the Moon-existence may be called the ‘Planet of Longing’; longing capable of satisfaction yet flowing on endlessly. And while we live in the consciousness belonging to this earth, in which as we know redemption comes to us through the Mystery of Golgotha—there arises continually within us from the subsoil of our soul, a never-ceasing craving for redemption. It is as though, on the surface, we had the waves of our ordinary consciousness—while below, in the depths of the ocean of the Soul-life, is longing, which is the ocean-bed of our Soul. This strives continually to ascend to one who accomplishes the sacrifice, the Universal Being, Who is able to satisfy the longing once and for all time—not in a never-ceasing succession of pictures.

The earth-man already feels moods such as these, and they are the very best he is capable of feeling. The citizens of earth of our time who feel this longing—which belongs to this particular age of ours—are those who enter our own movement of Spiritual Science. In external life people have become acquainted with all that can satisfy the ordinary superficial individual consciousness; but from the subconsciousness pushes up that which in its individuality can never be satisfied, but yearns for the central basis of life. This basis can only be provided by a universal science which occupies itself with the totality rather than with the individuality. That which rises from the subconsciousness must in the mind of to-day be brought into touch with application to the study of universal Being living in the world; otherwise that which ascends from the subsoil of the Soul will be further longing for something which can never be attained. In this sense anthroposophy is a response to those longings which dwell in the depths of the Soul. As everything that happens in the world has had a prelude, we need not wonder at a man who at the present day longs through spiritual science for satisfaction for the powers of his Soul, above all, when the unconscious Soul-forces akin to longings, burn up ardently as longing. Suppose that he, through living in an earlier age, in which this spiritual wisdom had not been given, had been unable to have it, and had come to long for it, to have a persistent longing for it, unable to grasp the meaning of life, just because he was an eminently great Soul. If only something could have flowed into his Soul, drowning, silencing the longing for ideas while he yearned for an end to this search for ideas—the greater the yearning, the more intense the search. And is it not like a voice expressing itself to us, the utterance of a spirit living at a time when it could not yet have the Spiritual wisdom which, like balsam, is shed forth into the longing Soul, when we hear Heinrich Von Kleist writing to a friend. In the following words we seem to hear him say:—‘Who would desire to be happy in this world! I could almost say, shame on you if you wished to be. Would it not be short-sighted, noble man, to strive for anything here below, where all ends in death! We meet here, three Springs long we love, and then we shun each other for an eternity. And what is worth striving for, if love be not? Oh! There must be something more than love, happiness, fame, and so on; something of which our Souls do not even dream. It can be no evil spirit at the head of the world, He is only not understood. Do not we smile too when children cry? Just think of the endless continuity! Myriads of ages, each having its own life, and to each a manifested existence like this world of ours! What is the name of the little star we see in the sky when the night is clear and we gaze at Sirius? All this immense firmament but a speck of dust compared with infinity! Tell me, is this nothing but a dream? At night when we are reposing between our linen sheets, we have a wider aspect, richer in intuition than thoughts can grasp or words describe. Come, let us do something good, and die in doing it! One of the million deaths we have already died, and shall yet die. It is as though we pass from one room to another. Lo! The world to me appears enclosed in a nest of boxes, the smallest exactly like the biggest!’—(From a letter written by Heinrich Von Kleist, in 1806.)

The longing expressed in these words was felt by a man who could not then find anything able to satisfy it—such as a modern thinker may find if he studies Anthroposophy in the right way. The writer of these words took his own life 100 years ago, shooting first his friend, Henriette Vogel and then himself, and now he rests on the banks of Lake Vann in that lonely grave which for a century has closed over his remains.

In speaking of the frame of mind which best illustrates what we are endeavouring to grasp, when we speak of the combined action of the sacrifice of will held back in longing, of the satisfaction of this longing, which could only come through the Spirits of Motion, and the urge towards its ultimate satisfaction, only to come on the planet of redemption—a singular Karmic link has caused us to speak here, in accordance with our ordinary programme, on the very day which reminds us of how a great mind expressed this undefined longing in the grandest of words, and finally poured it forth in the most tragic act in which longing could be embodied. How can we fail to recognise that this man's spirit in its entirety as he stands before us, is an actual living embodiment of that which dwells in the depths of the Soul, which we must trace back to something other than the life of earth if we wish to recognise it? Has not Heinrich Von Kleist described in the most significant manner what may live within a man (a description of which you will find at the very beginning of The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind), as something transcending him and driving him, and which he will only understand later on if he does not snap the threads of his life before! Think of his ‘Penthesilea’; how much more there is in her than she can span with her earthly consciousness! We should not be able to describe her at all, did we not take for granted that her Soul was immeasurably further advanced than the narrow little soul (although it was a great one) which she could span with her earthly consciousness. Hence a situation must arise which artistically introduces the whole process of the Drama. Indeed, it was necessary to prevent the whole transaction—which Kleist introduces with Achilles—from being grasped with the higher consciousness; otherwise the whole tragedy could not be perceived. Hence Achilles is called ‘her’ Achilles. What lies in the higher consciousness must be plunged into the non-conscious. Again, what part does this subconsciousness play in Katchen Von Heilbronn, especially in the remarkable relation between her and Wetter Von Strahl, which plays no part in the higher consciousness, but in the deeper strata of the Soul where dwells the forces of which man knows nothing, which pass from one to another. When we have this before us we can trace the spiritual nature of the world's forces of gravity and attraction. For instance, in the scene where Katchen stands before her admirers, do we not feel what lives in the subconsciousness, and how it is related to what is outside in the world which has been dryly called the forces of our planet's attractions? Yet only 100 years ago a truly penetrating and striving mind was not able to find his way into that subconsciousness. But it must be done to-day. And the tragedy of a Prince of Homburg strikes us in a very different way now. I should like to know how an abstract thinker, one who accounts for everything by reason alone, could account for a figure such as the Prince of Homburg, who carried out all his great deeds in a kind of dream-state, even those leading finally to victory. Kleist indicates very clearly that he could not possibly gain the victory by means of his higher consciousness, for as far as that was concerned he was not a particularly great man, for he whines and whimpers over everything he has to do. Only when by a special effort of the will, he brings up what dwells in the depths of his Soul, does he play the man.

What still belongs to a man as heritage of the old Moon consciousness cannot be brought to the surface by abstract science, but by that science which has many sides, and can lay hold in a delicate and subtle way of spiritual contours: that is, Spiritual Science. The greatest unites itself with the mediocre and the ordinary.

Thus we see that Anthroposophy shows that the conditions we are experiencing in our Souls to-day are connected with the Cosmos, with the Universe. We see also, however, how that which we experience in the Soul to-day can alone provide us with an understanding of the spiritual foundation of things. We see, too, that our era had to come to satisfy what was yearned for in the age preceding our own, when men longed for what cannot be given until our age. We feel a kind of veneration for such men, who could not find their bearings as regards what they longed for in their hearts, and what the world could not give them. When we recollect that all human life is linked together, and that the man of to-day can devote his life to those spiritual movements which—as their destiny shows bygone men have so long desired—we cannot but feel a veneration for them. So, on the centenary of the tragic death of one who was consumed by that longing, we may in a sense point to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science as being the redemption of mankind from that longing. This day may serve to remind us how tragically and stormily that which Anthroposophy is able to give us, has been desired and longed for. This is a thought that we may well take hold of, which perhaps is also theosophical, on the centenary of the death of one of the greatest German poets.

In our survey of the world we have now carried a difficult aspect of it far enough to discover to some extent the spiritual behind the phenomena of the external sense-world. Concerning such phenomena, at first outwardly revealing little of the fact that the spiritual in its own peculiar form stands behind them, as we experience this spiritual in our own soul-life—concerning such phenomena we have recognised that nevertheless spiritual qualities and properties do stand behind them. For example, in ordinary life we recognise the properties of heat or fire, and we have learnt to see in these the expression of sacrifice. In what meets us as air and at any rate, to our ideas, seems to reveal so little of its spiritual nature, we have recognised the bestowing virtue of certain Spiritual Beings. And we have learnt to perceive in water what might be called resignation. It may just be mentioned here, that in earlier conceptions of the world there was naturally a greater sense of the spiritual behind the outer material element, and the fact that specially volatile substances have been designated “spirit” may be looked upon as proving this, for we make a peculiar use of the word “spirit” to-day. Indeed in the outer world it may often occur that people use the word “spiritual” with very little application to spiritual things. On one occasion (as some here present are aware) a letter was addressed to a spiritualist union at Munich, and so little did one know what a spiritualistic circle was, that the letter was delivered to the Central Committee of Wine and Spirit merchants!

But to-day, when we wish to study that significant transition in the evolution of the Earth planet which took place in the passing from ancient Sun to ancient Moon, we must bear in mind a different kind of development of the spiritual. We must now start from that point which we reached in the last lecture, when we came to the subject of “renunciation.” This, as we have seen, consisted essentially in the refusal of Beings of exalted Spiritual rank to accept the sacrifice, which as we were told, consisted for the most part of will or will-substance. If we represent this to our minds in such a way that we picture certain Beings desirous of offering the substance of their will in sacrifice which through the renunciation of yet higher Beings was rejected, it will be easy to rise to the conception that this substance must remain with the Beings desirous of sacrificing, who were prevented from doing so. Thus we are introduced to Beings in the Cosmic scheme ready to contribute with fervour what dwells within them—but who are not able to do this, are obliged to retain this substance within them. The Beings whose sacrifice was rejected were unable to establish a particular connection with still higher Beings, which might have been established had their offering been accepted. What we must understand by this is symbolically expressed in the world's history by the figure of Cain confronting Abel, though there the contrast is more sharply emphasised. Cain too wished to offer sacrifice to his God. But it was not pleasing unto God and He would not accept it. The sacrifice offered by Abel was accepted. What we must bear in mind in this story is the inner experience which came to Cain through the rejection of his sacrifice.

If we wish to raise ourselves to the height necessary for the comprehension of what is now under consideration, we must clearly realise that in speaking of the regions referred to, both conceptions and ideas slip into use regarding them which only have meaning in our ordinary life. It would be incorrect to speak of “sin” or “wrong-doing” as coming into being by the rejection of the sacrifice. Guilt or atonement as we know it in our ordinary life, could not as yet be spoken of in those regions.

Rather must we think of these Beings in such a way, that on the part of those Higher Ones who rejected the proffered sacrifice, there is renunciation or resignation. In the mood of soul described in the last lecture there is nothing of guilt or omission; on the contrary, it contains all the greatness and significance to be found in resignation. None the less the fact remains that in those other Beings who wished to contribute their sacrifice there arose a feeling, though very faint, which was the beginning of an opposition to those who rejected it. So that when at a much later epoch, the story of Cain is brought to our notice this feeling is represented in an accentuated form. Hence we do not find in those Beings who continued to evolve from the Sun and to pass over to the Moon, the same disposition of mind as in Cain; in them the mood is different in degree. We only really become acquainted with this if we look into our own souls as we did in the last lecture, trying to find its counterpart there, and thus get a hint of that feeling which was developed in the Individualities whose sacrificial gifts were rejected.

Coming nearer and nearer to the earthly life of man, we find this mood in ourselves—everyone knows it—as uncertainty and at the same time as torment in the domain which can be included in the hidden depths of soul-life. This feeling with which we are all acquainted holds sway in the secret depth of our soul-life, and sometimes pushes its way up to the surface; and then perhaps its torment is least. We often go about with these feelings without being aware of them in our superficial consciousness; yet there they are within us. We might recall the words of the poet: “He alone who longing knows, knows what I suffer,” if we wish to convey an idea of the tormenting nature of this mood with which is connected a certain degree of pain. The longing to be found in the souls of men, is what is here meant.

In order to transport ourselves into what went on spiritually in the evolutionary phases of ancient Saturn and Sun, it was necessary to raise our vision to peculiar states of the soul which only appear, so to speak, when the human soul begins to aspire and prepares for higher striving. We saw this when we tried to understand the nature of sacrifice by referring to our own soul-life, when we tried to comprehend the nature of the wisdom man can acquire, which we saw trickling in, and which has its origin in what may be called: “readiness to bestow,” “readiness to give,” even to giving oneself; so to speak. When we come on to the more earthly conditions which have evolved out of the earlier ones, we encounter a soul-mood resembling in many respects what a man may even yet experience at the present day. But we must quite clearly realise, that although the whole of our soul-life is inserted into our earth-body, an upper layer lies over the hidden soul-life in the depths. Who could fail to know that there is such a hidden life of the soul? Life itself amply teaches us this.

Now in order to make clear to ourselves something of this hidden life of the soul, let us take the case of a child who in his seventh or eighth year, or at some other age may have experienced some injustice, to which children are particularly sensitive. He perhaps may have been blamed for something which he really had not done, but it suited the convenience of those around him to throw the blame on the child, so as to have an end of the matter. Now children are very specially sensitive to unjust accusation; but as life now is, although such an experience may have bitten deeply into the childish life, the later soul-life put another layer of existence over it, and as far as everyday life is concerned the, child forgot it. And indeed it may very well never crop up again. But suppose that in his fifteenth or sixteenth year this boy should experience fresh injustice, perhaps at school; then that which has lain dormant below in the surging waves of his soul, begins to stir. The boy need not know that a memory of what he had formerly endured is rising to the surface, he may have different concepts and ideas on the subject. But if his earlier experience had not occurred he might simply have gone home, perhaps grumbled and complained, and shed a few tears, and that would have been the end of the matter. The first injustice had, however, been experienced, and although, as I make a point of saying, the boy need have no recollection of it, yet it works! It becomes active beneath the surface of the soul-life just as there may be movements beneath the surface of a calm and glassy sea, and what might have ended in a few grumblings and tears now becomes the suicide of a schoolboy! Thus do the hidden depths of the soul-life play their part on the surface. The most important of all the forces ruling below in these depths, one which governs every soul and occasionally emerges in its original form, is—longing. We also know the names by which this force is known to the outer world, but they are only metaphoric and indefinite, for they express very complicated connections and thus do not enter a man's consciousness at all.

Take as an example a phenomenon with which we are all well acquainted: perhaps a man who lives in great cities is less affected by it, but he will have seen it in others:—I refer to what is known as “home-sickness.” If you investigate into the true nature of home-sickness you will find it differs fundamentally in every one. Sometimes it takes one form and sometimes another. One person may long for the homely stories of the family circle; he does not know that he is longing for home, he only feels an undefined craving, an undefined want. Another longs for his mountain, or for the river on whose banks he used to play, watching the movement of the rippling water. He is seldom aware of what it is that is working within him. All these diverse characteristics we include in the term “home-sickness,” expressing something that may be active in a thousand forms, and would be most accurately defined as a kind of longing. And what is this longing? We have just said that it is a kind of willing, and whenever we investigate this longing, we find that it is of this nature. What kind of willing? It is a will which in its immediate form cannot be satisfied; for were it satisfied, the longing would cease. What we described as longing is an unattainable desire of the will.

So must we define the frame of mind of those Beings whose sacrifice was rejected, it was somewhat of this nature. What we may discover in the depths of our soul-life is a heritage coming to us from those primeval times of which we are now speaking. Just as we have inherited other things from that ancient stage of evolution, so do we inherit all kinds of longings, all kinds of repressed wishes impossible to fulfil. It is in this way we must also conjecture that through the rejection of the sacrifice during the phase of evolution there came into existence beings whom we may designate as: Beings with wishes which are repressed. Now because they were obliged to suffer this repression they were in a very special position. And as we can hardly rise into these conditions by means of thought, we must once again turn to certain conditions in our own soul, if we wish to feel, to sense the reflection of them.

A being able to sacrifice its own will passes, in a certain sense, into the being of the other. We can feel this even in our human life, we live and move in one for whom we sacrifice ourselves, we feel glad and satisfied when in that person's presence. And as we are now speaking of the sacrifice offered to higher Beings, to more widely-extending, universal Beings, by others who found their greatest bliss in gazing up at them, what remains behind as repressed longings and wishes can never create the same inner disposition of soul as would have been theirs if they had been allowed to complete their sacrifice. For if they had been able to do this what they offered would have passed over into the other Beings. We might, by way of example suggest, that if the earth and the other planets could have made sacrifice to the Sun—they would be with the Sun. But if they were not allowed to do this, if they had to withhold what they were preparing to offer up, they would then have been driven back into themselves. If we can understand what has just been said in these few words, we observe that at this stage something new enters the universe. It must be clearly understood that it is impossible to express this in any other way than by saying that the Beings who were ready to offer to another all that dwelt within them, were compelled on the rejection of their sacrifice, to draw all this unto themselves. Do you not guess what now flashed up—that this was what is called egoity which comes out in every form? It is thus that we must look upon what lives on in the Beings as a heritage—which later on was poured into evolution, so to speak. We see egoism flashing up in the weakest form, as longing, but we can also see it slipping into the evolution of the Cosmos. Thus we see how Beings devoted to themselves, to their egoity, would in a certain respect have been condemned to a one-sided development, to living only in themselves, if something else had not occurred.

Let us picture a being, permitted to make sacrifice; such a one lives in the other being, and does so for all time. One not allowed to make sacrifice can only live within itself. It is thereby shut off from what it would have experienced in another, in this case a higher Being. Thus from the outset it is condemned and exiled by evolution to a one-sided existence, were it not that something here enters evolution to redress the balance. This is the arrival on the scene of new Beings who prevent the one-sidedness. Just as on Saturn there were the Spirits of Will, and on ancient Sun Spirits of Wisdom, so, on ancient Moon the Spirits of Movement make their appearance; we must not, however, think of movement in space, but movement rather more like the nature of thought. Every one knows the expression “thought-vibrations,” though this only refers to the fluidic movement of our own thought; yet this expression may serve, if we want to acquire a more comprehensive conception of movement, to show us that we think of something more than the mere movement from one place to another, for that is only one of the many forms of movement. If a number of persons devote themselves to a higher Being who is expressive of all that is within them, and who accepts all the sacrifices they offer him, these people live in that Being as a plurality in unity, and find full satisfaction in so doing. But if their sacrifices are rejected, the plurality is driven back upon itself and is never satisfied. Then came the Spirits of Movement and in a sense they guide the Beings who would have simply been driven back upon themselves and bring them into relation with all other Beings. The Spirits of Movement should not be thought of as merely bringing about changes of place; they are Beings able to bring forth something whereby one Being is constantly brought into new relation with others.

We can form an idea of what was attained in the Cosmos at this stage if we once more reflect upon a corresponding disposition of the soul. Who does not know the longing when a condition of soul approaches in which a man is at a standstill, when he can experience no change! Who does not know the torment of it, how it drives a man into a state of mind which becomes unendurable, and which in a merely superficial person takes the form of boredom? But of this boredom which is as a rule only ascribed to a shallow-pated person, there are all manner of in-between stages up to that which is an attribute of noble characters in whom dwells what is generated by their own natures as longing and cannot be satisfied in this world. And what better method is there of quieting longing than by change? This is proved by the fact that persons who suffer from it incessantly seek to form relationships to new beings. The torment of longing can often be overcome by changing the conditions to ever new beings.

Thus we see that while the earth was passing through her Moon-phase, the Spirits of Movement brought into the lives of those beings who were filled with longing and would otherwise have been desolate—for boredom is also a kind of desolation—the change which is brought about by movement, a constantly renewed relation to ever new beings and new conditions. Movement in space, movement from one place to another, is but one form of the more comprehensive movement which has just been mentioned. When in the morning we have a definite train of thought in our soul, not necessarily to be kept to ourselves, but passed on to others—a “movement” takes place. We can then overcome one-sidedness of longing by means of variety, by change and the movement of the things experienced. In outer space there is only a particular form of change. In this connection let us imagine a planet in relation to a Sun: if it always occupied the same position to the Sun, if it never moved, it would be subject to that one-sidedness, which can only result when it presents invariably the same side to the Sun. Then the Spirits of Movement turn the planet round so as to bring about a change in its conditions. Change of place is but one of the many forms of change. And the Spirits of Movement, by bringing change of place into the Cosmos, merely introduce one specific part of movement in general.

But as the Spirits of Movement introduce change and movement into the Universe as we have learnt to know up to the present, something else must follow. We know that during this evolution, in the whole Cosmic multiplicity that evolves upwards as the Spirits of Movement, of Personality, of Wisdom, and of Will—there is also what we have called “Bestowing Virtue,” which is radiated forth as Wisdom, and is the spiritual element behind air and gas. This then combines with the Will now transformed into longing, and within these Beings it becomes what is known to man hardly yet as “thoughts” but as “picture.” We can best realise this in the picture that a man has when he dreams; the fluidic pictures that succeed one another in a dream may evoke a conception of what takes place in a being in whom the volition of longing dwells, and is guided by the Spirits of Movement into relation with other beings. But when it is thus guided into a relation with the other beings, it cannot completely surrender itself—the egotism within it prevents that; but it is able to take in the transitory picture of the other being, which lives in him like a dream-picture. This is the origin of what we call the “arising” of pictures of the other world. At this phase of development we see the arising of the picture-consciousness. And as we human beings ourselves passed through this phase of evolution without then possessing our present earthly ego-consciousness, we must think of ourselves at that time without that which we can now acquire through our ego, but living and weaving in the universe, while within us lived something which we can compare with the present feelings of longing.

We could in a certain fashion imagine, if we do not remember such conditions of suffering as we know on earth, that they could not possibly exist, by reflecting on the following:—Sorrow and suffering—naturally in its soul-form, came at that time into our being and that of other entities connected with our evolution; through the activity of the Spirits of Movement the inner nature which would otherwise have been barren and empty, suffering the tortures of longing, was filled with the balm which flowed into these beings in the form of picture-consciousness, otherwise these beings would have been empty-souled, empty of everything not to be called longing. But the balm of the pictures was slowly poured in, filling the desolate void with variety, and thus the beings were led away from exile and condemnation. If we take what is here said seriously, it gives us both the spiritual basis of what developed during the Moon-phase of our Earth, and of what we now have in the deep subsoil of our consciousness, for it has been covered over by the earth-stage of our nature. And it is so embedded in the subsoil of our soul, that, as the disturbance beneath the surface of the sea drives up the waves, it can influence us, without our being aware of the cause of what enters our consciousness. Beneath the surface of our ordinary ego-consciousness we have such a soul-life as can play up into it. And when it does so, what does the soul-life say? If we bear in mind the cosmic subsoil of this subconscious soul-life, we can say that what we can sense arising from the depths of the soul is a bursting-forth within what we have acquired through our earth-phase, of what has come over from the Moon-phase of evolution. If we clearly grasp what it is that has come into our nature here on the Earth, we have a true explanation of what has been spiritually brought over from the ancient Moon into our Earth-existence.

If you grasp the fact that it was necessary, as has just been described, that pictures should continually arise to assuage the feeling of desolation, you obtain a conception which is of very great importance and weight: that of the longing human soul, in all its yearning emptiness. By the constant succession of pictures, arising one after the other, the yearning is satisfied and brought into harmony; but should the pictures remain any length of time the old longing begins to glimmer faintly up from the depths and the Spirits of Movement call up new pictures. And when these have been there for a little time the longing arises again, demanding fresh ones. Now with respect to a soul-life such as this the momentous sentence must be pronounced: if this longing can only be satisfied by a continual flow of pictures following one after the other, there would be no end to the infinite flow. The only thing that can supervene on this is what must come if the endless flow of pictures is to be replaced by something that is able to redeem it otherwise than by mere pictures—namely, by realities! In other words, the planetary embodiment of our earth through which we have passed, when pictures were brought to us by the activity of the Spirits of Movement, must be replaced by that planetary phase of the earth's embodiment which we call the phase of redemption. We shall see presently that the earth is to be called the “Planet of Redemption,” just as her last embodiment—that of the Moon-existence—may be called the “Planet of Longing”; longing capable of satisfaction yet flowing on endlessly. And while we live in the consciousness belonging to this earth, in which as we know redemption comes to us through the Mystery of Golgotha—there arises continually within us from the subsoil of our soul, a never-ceasing craving for redemption. It is as though, on the surface, we had the waves of our ordinary consciousness—while below, in the depths of the ocean of the soul-life, lives longing, which is the ocean-bed of our soul. This strives continually to ascend to the One who accomplishes the sacrifice, the Universal Being, Who is able to satisfy the longing once and for all time—not in a never-ceasing succession of pictures.

The earth-man already feels moods such as these, and they are the very very best for him to feel. The citizens of earth of our time who feel this longing—which belongs to this particular age of ours—are those who enter our own movement of Spiritual Science. In external life people have learnt to know all the separate things that can satisfy the ordinary superficial consciousness; but from the subconsciousness pushes up that which can never be satisfied in details but yearns for the central basis of life. This basis can only be provided by a universal science which occupies itself with the totality of life rather than with details. That which rises from the subconsciousness must in the sense of to-day be brought into touch with the study of the universal existence living in the world; otherwise that which ascends from the subsoil of the soul will be further longing for something which can never be attained. In this sense anthroposophy is a response to those longings which dwell in the depths of the soul. As everything that happens in the world has had a prelude, we need not wonder at a man who at the present day longs through spiritual science for satisfaction for the powers of his soul, above all, when the unconscious soul-forces akin to longings, would consume themselves as longing. Suppose that he, through living in an earlier age, in which this spiritual wisdom had not been given, had been unable to have it, and had come to long for it, to have a persistent longing for it, unable to grasp the meaning of life, just because he was an eminently great soul. If only something could have flowed into his soul, drowning, silencing the longing for pictures while he yearned for an end to this search for pictures—the greater the yearning, the more intense the search. And is it not like a voice expressing itself to us, the utterance of a spirit living at a time when it could not yet have the spiritual wisdom which, like balsam, is shed forth into the longing soul, when we hear Heinrich Von Kleist writing to a friend. In the following words we seem to hear him say:—“Who would desire to be happy in this world!” I could almost say, shame on you if you wished to be. Would it not be short-sighted, noble man, to strive for anything here below, where all ends in death! We meet here, three Springs long we love, and then we flee apart for an eternity. And what is worth striving for, if love be not? Oh! there must be something more than love, happiness, fame, and so on; something of which our souls do not even dream. It can be no evil spirit at the head of the world, it is merely not understood. Do not we smile too when children cry? Just think of the endless continuity! Myriads of ages, each having its own life, and to each a manifested existence like this world of ours! What is the name of the little star we see in the sky when the night is clear and we gaze at Sirius? All this immense firmament but a speck of dust compared with infinity! Tell me, is this nothing but a dream? At night when we are reposing between our linen sheets, we have a wider aspect, richer in intuition than thoughts can grasp or words describe. Come, let us do something good, and die in doing it! One of the million deaths we have already died, and shall yet die. It is as though we pass from one room to another. Lo! The world to me appears enclosed in a nest of boxes, the smallest exactly like the biggest!”—(From a letter written by Heinrich Von Kleist, in 1806.)

The longing expressed in these words was felt by a man who could not then find anything able to satisfy it—such as a modern thinker may find if he studies anthroposophy in the right way. The writer of these words took his own life a hundred years ago, shooting first his friend, Henriette Vogel and then himself, and now he rests on the banks of Lake Vann in that lonely grave which for a century has closed over his remains.

In speaking of the frame of mind which best illustrates what we are endeavouring to grasp, when we speak of the combined action of the sacrifice of will held back in longing, of the satisfaction of this longing, which could only come through the Spirits of Motion, and the urge towards its ultimate satisfaction, only to come on the Planet of Redemption—a singular Karmic link has caused us to speak here, in accordance with our ordinary programme, on the very day which reminds us of how a great mind expressed this undefined longing in the grandest of words, and finally poured it forth in the most tragic act in which longing could be embodied. How can we fail to recognise that this man's spirit in its entirety as he stands before us, is an actual living embodiment of that which dwells in the depths of the soul, which we must trace back to something other than the life of earth if we wish to recognise it? Has not Heinrich Von Kleist described in the most significant manner what may live within a man (a description of which you will find at the very beginning of The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind), as something transcending him and driving him, and which he will only understand later on if he does not snap the threads of his life before! Think of his “Penthesilea”; how much more there is in her than she can span with her earthly consciousness! We should not be able to describe her at all, did we not take for granted that her soul was immeasurably further advanced than the narrow little soul (although it was a great one) which she could span with her earthly consciousness. Hence a situation must arise which artistically introduces the whole process of the Drama. Indeed, it was necessary to prevent the whole transaction—which Kleist introduces with Achilles—from being grasped with the higher consciousness; otherwise the whole tragedy could not be perceived. Hence Achilles is called “her” Achilles. What lies in the higher consciousness must be plunged into the non-conscious. Again, what part does this subconsciousness play in Kätchen Von Heilbronn, especially in the remarkable relation between her and Wetter Von Strahl, which plays no part in the higher consciousness, but in the deeper strata of the soul where dwell the forces of which man knows nothing, which pass from one to another. When we have this before us we can feel the spiritual nature of the world's forces of gravity and attraction. For instance, in the scene where Kätchen stands before her admirers, do we not feel what lives in the subconsciousness, and how it is related to what is outside in the world which has been drily called the planet's force of attraction? Yet only one hundred years ago a truly penetrating and striving mind was not able to find his way into that subconsciousness. But it must be done today. And the tragedy of a Prince of Homburg strikes us in a very different way now. I should like to know how an abstract thinker, one who accounts for everything by reason alone, could account for a figure such as the Prince of Homburg, who carried out all his great deeds in a kind of dream-state, even those leading finally to victory. Kleist indicates very clearly that he could not possibly gain the victory by means of his higher consciousness, for as far as that was concerned he was not a particularly great man, for he whines and whimpers over everything he has to do. Only when by a special effort of the will, he brings up what dwells in the depths of his soul, does he play the man.

What still belongs to a man as heritage of the old Moon consciousness must not be brought to the surface by abstract science, but by that science which has many sides, and can lay hold in a delicate and subtle way of spiritual contours: that is, Spiritual Science. The greatest unites itself with the mediocre and the ordinary.

Thus we see that Anthroposophy shows that the conditions we are experiencing in our souls to-day are connected with the Cosmos, with the Universe. We see also, however, how that which we experience in the soul to-day can alone provide us with an understanding of the spiritual foundation of things. We see, too, that our era had to come to satisfy what was yearned for in the age preceding our own, when men longed for what cannot be given until our age. We feel a kind of veneration for such men, who could not find their bearings as regards what they longed for in their hearts, and what the world could not give them. When we recollect that all human life is linked together, and that the man of to-day can devote his life to those spiritual movements which—as their destiny shows—bygone men have so long desired we cannot but feel a veneration for them. So, on the centenary of the tragic death of one who was consumed by that longing, we may in a sense point to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science as being the redemption of mankind from that longing. This day may serve to remind us how tragically and stormily that which Anthroposophy is able to give us, has been desired and longed for. This is a thought that we may well take hold of, which perhaps is also anthroposophical, on the centenary of the death of one of the greatest German poets.

Considering the kind of deliberations you are engaged in at the moment, my friends, I must assume that your minds would be less than ready to take in a continuation of yesterday's lecture. For those of you who want to hear it, that lecture will be given tomorrow, but today I would like to speak about something that will relate in some way to things you all must necessarily have in mind at the moment.

First of all, and from a very specific point of view, I would like to address the question of what is really confronting us in the Goesch-Sprengel case. In recent lectures I have often said that it is important to arrive at the appropriate perspective from which to try to resolve any given issue. How, then, can we arrive at the right perspective on this particular matter through objective study of the case?

In order to deal with a case like this objectively, we must first of all remove it from its personal context and insert it into a larger one. If, as I believe, this larger context turns out to be what is most important for our anthroposophical movement, we will find ourselves obliged to study this case for our own edification and for the sake of spiritual science itself. And in fact there is a larger context to the case, as will become apparent if we look at Mr. Goesch's letter of August 19 with an eye for his main motives and arguments.

Since you have important deliberations ahead of you, I will not detain you too long, but will only select a few essential points for your consideration. The first is Goesch's claim that promises have not been kept. If you listened to the letter carefully, you will have noticed that the emphasis in his reproach is not on the alleged making and not keeping of promises. His primary accusation is that I looked for and systematically applied a means of making promises to members and not keeping them, and that once the members noticed that these promises were not being kept, they were put into a state of mind that forced them into a particular relationship to the one who had made and not kept the promises. As a result, forces accumulated in their souls that eventually made them lose their sound judgment.

So the first hypothesis Goesch presents is that systematic attempts were made to stifle the members' good sense, that deliberately making and breaking promises was a means of dulling their normal state of consciousness, resulting in a kind of stupefaction that turned them into zombies. That is the first point his letter addresses.

His second point has to do with one of the means of carrying this out. To put it briefly, through handshakes and friendly conversations and the like, I am supposed to have initiated a kind of contact with members that was suited, because of its very nature and the influence it allowed me to exert, to bringing about the above-mentioned effect on their souls.

A third thing we must keep in mind as a red thread running through Goesch's whole letter is the nature of his relationship to Miss Sprengel. We could add to these three points, but let us deal with them first.

To begin with, how does Goesch manage to construct such a systematic theory, based on his first two points, about how steps were taken to undermine the members' state of consciousness? We need to go into this thoroughly and try to find out where it comes from. In Goesch's case, we are led to his long involvement with Dr. Freud's so-called theory of psychoanalysis.¹ If you study this theory, you will begin to see that it is intimately related to how the pathological picture presented in the letter develops. Certain connections can be drawn between this pathological picture, as it relates to Goesch's first two points, and his involvement with the Freudian psychoanalytic point of view.

Of course, I am not in a position to give you a comprehensive picture of Freudian psychoanalytic theory in brief—my intent is only to present a few points that will help clarify the Goesch-Sprengel case. However, in a certain sense I do feel qualified to talk about psychoanalysis, because in my earlier years I was friends with one of the medical experts involved in its very beginnings.² This person eventually abandoned the theory of psychoanalysis after it degenerated later on in Freud's life. In any case, please do not take what I am going to say now as a comprehensive characterization of Freudian theory; I only want to highlight a few points.

Freudian psychoanalysts start from the assumption that an unconscious inner life exists alongside our conscious soul-activity—that is, in addition to the soul-activity we are conscious of, there is also an unconscious inner life we are usually not aware of. An important component of psychoanalysis is the doctrine that certain experiences people have in the course of their life can make impressions on them, but these impressions disappear from their conscious awareness and work on in their subconscious. According to the psychoanalysts, we do not necessarily become fully conscious of these experiences before they sink down into the unconscious—for example, something can make an impression on a person during childhood without ever coming to full consciousness, and still have such an effect on that person's psyche that it sinks down into the unconscious and goes on working there. Its effects are lasting, and in some cases lead to psychological disturbances later on. I am skipping a lot of links in the chain of reasoning and jumping right to the outcome of the whole process. In other words, we are to imagine in the soul's subconscious depths a kind of island of childhood and youthful experiences gone rampant. Through questioning during psychoanalysis, these subconscious proliferating islands in the soul can be lifted up into consciousness and incorporated into the structure of conscious awareness. In the process, the person in question can be cured of psychological defects in that particular area.

During the early years of the psychoanalytic movement, it was the practice of Dr. Breuer in particular to carry out this questioning with the patient under hypnosis.³ Later on, this practice was discontinued, and now the Freudian school conducts this analysis with the patient in a normal waking state of consciousness. In any case, the underlying assumption is that there are unhealthy, proliferating islands present in the psyche below the level of consciousness.

This psychoanalytic outlook has gradually spread to incorporate and try to explain all kinds of phenomena of ordinary life, particularly with regard to how they appear in people's dreams. As I already explained once in a lecture to our friends in another city, it is at this point that the Freudian school really goes out on a limb in saying that unfulfilled desires play a primary role in dreams.⁴ Freudians say that it is typical for people to experience unfulfilled desires in their dreams, desires that cannot be satisfied in real life. It can sometimes happen—and from the point of view of psychoanalytic theorists, it is significant when it does—that one of these desires present on an unconscious island in the psyche is lifted up in a dream and reveals in disguised form an impulse that had an effect on the person in question during his or her childhood.

Please note the peculiarity of this train of thought. It is assumed that as young boys or girls, people have experiences that sink down into subconsciousness and work on as fantasy experiences, clouding their consciousness. The pattern, then, is this: experiences of waking life are repressed and continue to work on the subconscious, leading to a weakened state of consciousness. This is exactly the same pattern Goesch constructs with regard to promises being given and broken and working on in the subconscious—all with the intention to create the same effect in the subconscious as the “islands” in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. According to Goesch, this was done cunningly and deliberately and resulted in a state of stupefaction analogous to what occurs when experiences of waking life have sunk into subconsciousness and are brought up again in a dream.

Psychoanalytic theory is a very tricky business, and if you dwell on it long enough, it gives rise to certain forms of thought that spread and affect all your thinking. As you can see, this has something to do with why Goesch came up with such a crazy idea.

In addition, as I have said before, the concept of physical contact plays an important part. I am now going to read certain passages from one of Dr. Freud's books, a collection of essays from the Freudian magazine Imago, and I ask you to pay close attention to them.⁵ But I must precede that with something else concerning the Goesch-Sprengel case. Those of you who have known Miss Sprengel for some time will recall that she was always very concerned about protecting herself from other people's influence on her aura—she lived in horror of having to shake hands and things like that. Even before Goesch arrived on the scene, she had already gotten the idea that shaking hands is a criminal act in our esoteric circles. The following incident is absolutely typical: I had business to do in Dr. Schmiedel's laboratory and happened to meet Miss Sprengel there.⁶ I extended my hand to her, which gave her grounds for saying, “That's how he always does it—he does whatever he wants to you and then shakes hands, and then you forget all about it.” There you have the origin of that theory about handshaking. Yesterday you all heard what this theory became in Miss Sprengel's confused mind with the help of Goesch. He contributed his understanding of Freud's theories and combined things systematically with Freudian ideas.

The following passage is from page 29 of the above-mentioned book by Freud:

The principal characteristic of the psychological constellation which becomes fixed in this way is what might be described as the subject's ambivalent attitude (to borrow the apt term coined by Bleuler) towards a single object, or rather towards one act in connection with that object. He is constantly wishing to perform this act (the touching), [and looks on it as his supreme enjoyment, but he must not perform it] and detests it as well. The conflict between these two currents cannot be promptly settled because—there is no other way of putting it—they are localized in the subject's mind in such a manner that they cannot come up against each other. The prohibition is noisily conscious, while the persistent desire to touch is unconscious and the subject knows nothing of it. If it were not for this psychological factor, an ambivalence like this could neither last so long nor lead to such consequences.⁷

This is followed by a long discussion of the role fear of physical contact plays in cases of neurosis:

In our clinical history of a case we have insisted that the imposition of the prohibition in very early childhood is the determining point; a similar importance attaches in the subsequent developments to the mechanism of repression at the same early age. As a result of the repression which has been enforced and which involves a loss of memory—an amnesia—the motives for the prohibition (which is conscious) remain unknown; and all attempts at disposing of it by intellectual processes must fail, since they cannot find any base of attack. The prohibition owes its strength and its obsessive character precisely to its unconscious opponent, the concealed and undiminished desire—that is to say, to an internal necessity inaccessible to conscious inspection. The ease with which the prohibition can be transferred and extended reflects a process which falls in with the unconscious desire and is greatly facilitated by the psychological conditions that prevail in the unconscious. The instinctual desire is constantly shifting in order to escape from the impasse and endeavours to find substitutes—substitute objects and substitute acts—in place of the prohibited ones. In consequence of this, the prohibition itself shifts about as well, and extends to any new aims which the forbidden impulse may adopt. Any fresh advance made by the repressed libido is answered by a fresh sharpening of the prohibition. The mutual inhibition of the two conflicting forces produces a need for discharge, for reducing the prevailing tension; and to this may be attributed the reason for the performance of obsessive acts. In the case of a neurosis these are clearly compromise actions: from one point of view they are evidences of remorse, efforts at expiation, and so on, while on the other hand they are at the same time substitutive acts to compensate the instinct for what has been prohibited. It is a law of neurotic illness that these obsessive acts fall more and more under the sway of the instinct and approach nearer and nearer to the activity which was originally prohibited.⁸

Considering the obsessions involved in fear of physical contact, you can well imagine how it would have been if Miss Sprengel, as a person suffering from this fear, had ever been seen by a psychoanalyst who, in line with usual psychoanalytic practice, would have questioned her about her fear of contact and tried to discover what caused it.

A third factor I want to emphasize is the relationship of Miss Sprengel to Mr. Goesch. According to psychoanalytic theory, this relationship would of course be characterized by the presence of repressed erotic thoughts. I mean that quite objectively...⁹

At this point, my friends, we must look a bit more closely at the whole system of psychoanalysis. As I have just outlined for you, psychoanalysis lifts up into consciousness certain “islands” in the unconscious psyche, and it assumes that the majority of these islands are sexual in nature. The psychoanalyst's task, then, is to reach down to the level of these early experiences that have sunk into subconsciousness and lift them up again for purposes of healing. According to Freudian theory, healing is brought about by lifting hidden sexual complexes up from the depths of the subconscious and making the person aware of them again. Whether this method is very successful is a matter of much discussion in books on the subject.

As you can see, psychoanalysts' thinking is often colored by an underlying pervasive sexuality, and this is taken to extremes when psychoanalysis is applied to any and all possible phenomena of human life. For example, Freud and his disciples go so far as to interpret myths and legends psychoanalytically, tracing them to repressed sexuality. Consider, for example, how they interpret the story of Oedipus.¹⁰ In brief, the content of this legend is that Oedipus is led to kill his father and marry his mother. When psychoanalysts ask what this story is based on, they conclude that such things always rest on unconscious, repressed sexual complexes usually involving sexual experiences in earliest childhood. The Freudians are firmly convinced that a child's relationship to his or her father and mother is a sexual one right from birth, so if the child is a boy, he must be unconsciously in love with his mother and thus unconsciously or subconsciously jealous of his father.

At this point, my friends, we might be tempted to say that these psychoanalysts, if they actually believe in their own theory, should apply it to themselves first and foremost, and admit that their own destiny and outlook stem from an excess of repressed sexual processes experienced in childhood. Freud and his disciples should apply this theory to themselves first. They derive the Oedipus legend, for instance, from their assumption that most little boys have an illicit emotional relationship to their mother right from birth, and are thus jealous of their father. Thus, the boys' father becomes their enemy and works on as such in their troubled imagination. Later, however, they realize rationally that this relationship to their mother is not permissible, and so it is repressed and becomes subconscious. The boys then live out their lives without becoming aware of their forbidden relationship to their mother and their adversarial relationship to their father, whom they experience as a rival.

According to psychoanalytic theory, then, what we need to do in cases of defective psyches is to look for psychological complexes, and we will find that if these are lifted up into consciousness, a cure can be effected. It's too bad that I can't present these things in greater detail, but I will try to give you as exact an outline of them as possible. On page 16 of the above-mentioned book, for instance, you can read the following:

There has been little opportunity in the preceding pages for showing how new light can be thrown upon the facts of social psychology by the adoption of a psycho-analytic method of approach: for the horror of incest displayed by savages has long been recognized as such and stands in need of no further interpretation.¹¹

This essay explains why primitive peoples so strictly enforce the ban on marrying one's mother or sister and why relationships of this type are punished. “Incest” is love for a blood-relative, and one of the first essays in this book is entitled “The Horror of Incest.” This fear is explained by assuming the existence of a tendency to incest on the part of each male individual in the form of a forbidden relationship to his mother.

All that I have been able to add to our understanding of it is to emphasize the fact that it is essentially an infantile feature [that is, primitive people retain this for a lifetime, while in civilized children it is repressed into the subconscious] and that it reveals a striking agreement with the mental life of neurotic patients. Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones—his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psycho-sexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them—two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression. Thus incestuous fixations of libido continue to play (or begin once more to play) the principal part in his unconscious mental life. We have arrived at the point of regarding a child's relation to his parents, dominated as it is by incestuous longings, as the nuclear complex of neurosis.

Thus, according to psychoanalytic theory, the central complex involved in neurosis is a boy's forbidden sexual attraction for his mother and sister.

This revelation of the importance of incest in neurosis is naturally received with universal skepticism by adults and normal people. Similar expressions of disbelief, for instance, inevitably greet the writings of Otto Rank, which have brought more and more evidence to show the extent to which the interest of creative writers centres round the theme of incest and how the same theme, in countless variations and distortions, provides the subject-matter of poetry. We are driven to believe that this rejection is principally a product of the distaste which human beings feel for their early incestuous wishes, now overtaken by repression. It is therefore of no small importance that we are able to show that these same incestuous wishes, which are later destined to become unconscious, are still regarded by savage peoples as immediate perils against which the most severe measures of defence must be enforced.¹²

From this point of departure, an atmosphere of sexuality spreads until it pervades the psychoanalysts' whole field of activity. Their whole life is spent working with ideas about sexuality. That is why psychoanalysis has been the biggest contributing factor in making an unbelievable mockery of something quite natural in human life. This has crept into our life gradually, without people noticing it. I can sympathize deeply with an old gentleman by the name of Moritz Benedikt (who spent his life trying to bring morality into medicine) when he says that if you look around, you'll find that the physicians of thirty years ago knew less about certain sexual abnormalities than eighteen-year-old girls in boarding school do today.¹³ This is the truth, and you can really empathize with this man. I mention it in particular because it is really extremely important to regard certain processes in children's lives as simply natural, without having to see them in terms of sexuality right away.

Nowadays, these complicated psychoanalytic theories lead us to label a lot of what children do as sexually deviant, although most of it is totally innocent. In most cases, it would be enough to regard these things as nothing more than childish mischievousness that could be quite adequately treated with a couple of smacks on a certain part of the anatomy. The worst possible way of dealing with it, however, is to talk a lot about these things, especially with the children themselves, and to put all kinds of theoretical ideas in their heads. It is hard enough to talk about these things with grownups with any degree of clarity. Unfortunately for people who are often called upon to provide counseling, parents frequently come with all kinds of complaints, including some really dumb ones, about how their children suffer from sexual deviance. Their only basis for these complaints is that the children scratch themselves. Now, there is no more sexuality involved in scratching yourself anywhere else than there is in scratching your arm. Dr. Freud, however, upholds the idea that any scratching or touching, or even a baby's sucking a pacifier, is a sexual activity. He spreads a mantle of sexuality over all aspects of human life.

It would be good for us to look more closely at Freudian psychoanalysis in order to become aware of the excesses of materialistic science; specifically, of those of psychoanalysis in seeing everything in terms of sexuality. In a book introduced by Dr. Freud, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Ferenczi writes about the case of a five-year-old boy named Arpad.¹⁴ There is no doubt in his mind as to the sources of Arpad's interest in the goings-on in the chicken run:

The continual sexual activity between the cock and hens, the laying of eggs and the hatching out of the young brood gratified his sexual curiosity, the real object of which was human family life. He showed that he had formed his own choice of sexual objects on the model of life in the hen-run, for he said one day to the neighbour's wife: “I'll marry you and your sister and my three cousins and the cook; no, not the cook, I'll marry my mother instead.” ¹⁵

We could wish for a return of the days when it was possible to hear children say things like this without immediately having to resort to such awkward sexual explanations. I can only touch on this subject today, but I will discuss it at greater length sometime in the near future in order to reassure all you fathers and mothers.¹⁶ But of course, Freud's theory, which is spreading widely without people noticing it, is only a symptom of a worldwide tendency. And when parents come with the complaint that their four- or five-year-old sons or daughters are suffering from sexual deviance, in most cases the appropriate response is, “The only deviant thing in this case is your way of thinking about it!” In most instances, that is really what's wrong.

My intention in telling you all this has been to point out the kind of atmosphere Freudian psychoanalysis is swimming in. I am well aware that the Freudians would take issue with this brief characterization. But we are fully justified in saying that psychoanalysis as a whole is positively dripping with this psychosexual stuff, as its professional literature reveals.

Suppose the assumption that psychosexual islands exist in the human subconscious actually proves to be true in the case of a certain individual. A Freudian theorist might subject that person to questioning and be able to add a new case history to the annals of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. In the case concerning us, Goesch might have undertaken this line of questioning and made some discoveries among those psychosexual islands that would have served to verify Freud's theories. But to do that, Goesch would have needed to be stronger in his own soul. As it was, however, he succumbed to a certain type of relationship to his new lady friend. The material in our possession supplies ample evidence of this relationship and will allow anyone who applies it in the right way to describe their relationship with clinical, objective precision.

Since what can be learned from a specific case is often of greater significance than the actual case itself, let me point out that this case can lead us to the same conclusions I presented in my essay, published in the Vienna Clinical Review in 1900, entitled “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as a Psychopathological Problem.” ¹⁷ Notwithstanding all the contributions Nietzsche's genius made to the world, it was necessary to point out that Nietzsche would be misunderstood if the psychopathological factor in him were not taken into account. It is important for our Society that psychopathological elements not gain the upper hand, that they be eradicated from our minds and seen in the right light so that psychopaths are not looked upon as some kind of higher beings. That is why it is also important to see the current case in the right light and assess what is actually involved from the right standpoint.

It is already too late for me to describe now at length how the storm developed. When I was in Vienna in May of this year, one of our members wrote me a letter I had to tear up on returning here, since taking letters across the border is no longer allowed. This letter contained accusations very similar to those raised by Goesch under the influence of Miss Sprengel and showing a similar involvement in Freudian psychoanalysis. They came from the same quarter; the same wind was blowing in both sets of accusations. In fact, if I could have read you some sentences from that letter, they would have sounded remarkably like what Miss Sprengel inspired in Goesch.

What, then, was actually going on in the Goesch-Sprengel case? Goesch could not really function as a psychoanalyst, because to do that his relationship to Miss Sprengel would have had to be an objective one like that of a doctor to a patient. Her influence on him was too overwhelming, however, and thus his involvement in the examination was not fully conscious and objective. In Freudian terms, everything at work in the psyche of his friend, the “keeper of the seal,” came out, but since it sank down into Goesch's unconscious, it was masked by the whole theory that came to light in his letter.

The Goesch-Sprengel case grew out of one of the greatest mistakes and worst materialistic theories of our time, and we can only deal with it by realizing that both people involved threw a mantle of secrecy over their human, all-too-human relationships. In essence, this consisted of shrouding their relationship in Freudian psychoanalytic theories, as the documents very clearly reveal.

When we attempt to help people who come to us in such a confused psychological state, they are often fawning, enthusiastic supporters to begin with, but later on their adulation changes into enmity. That, too, can be explained in psychoanalytic terms. However, our most urgent concern at the moment is our relationship to the rest of the world. Just as we are now experiencing hostility coming from the direction of psychoanalysis, steeped as it is in sexuality, we can expect to encounter at any moment new opposition from all kinds of aberrations resulting from other all-too-human impulses.

This shows us that we must study such cases; they should be of great interest to us precisely because our Society represents a spiritual movement. I could speak at much greater length on this subject, but I must stop for today because you need to get on with your deliberations. I simply wanted to point out the first tentative steps we must take in seeing where the dangers for our movement lie and how urgent it is that we all do as much as we can to help the world out there learn that we are not chicken-livered. We know how to stand up for ourselves. When things come up in disguise as they did in this letter, we must rip off the mask and expose where they come from. Their origins lie much deeper than we usually think; they originate in the materialistic outlook of our times, which has not only become the dominant view in science but has contaminated our life as a whole. Combating it is our movement's very reason for existence, but we must keep our eyes wide open and see what is going on in the world. We must recognize what the people coming to us have learned out in the world and what they bring with them when they come to us.

• 1. Sigmund Freud, 1856–1939. Psychiatrist, founder of psychoanalysis.
• 2. Joseph Breuer, 1842–1925. Rudolf Steiner met Breuer in the home of the Specht family, where Steiner was a tutor from 1884–1890. See Steiner's The Course of My Life, GA 28, Chapter XIII, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986). See also Karl Konig, “Die Schicksale Sigmund Freuds and Joseph Breuers” (“The Destiny of Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer”), Stuttgart 1962.
• 3. In Joseph Breuer's therapy, hysteric patients were put under hypnosis and their symptoms traced back to the point when they first appeared; as a rule, on recreating this condition, the symptoms intensified, but usually disappeared afterward. In their Studies on Hysteria, (Leipzig and Vienna, 1895) Breuer and Freud described this form of therapy on the basis of five individual cases.
• 4. Berlin, November 4, 1910, included in Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit, GA 115, (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1971). Also Munich, November 18, 1911, in Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz, GA 130, 2nd ed., rev., (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1984).
• 5. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, tr. James Strachey, copyright 1950 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company). In the magazine Imago, vols. I and II (1912 and 1913), these articles appeared under the title, “Some Correspondences in the Inner Life of Savages and Neurotics.”
• 6. Dr. Oskar Schmiedel, 1887–1959, a chemist, was head of the laboratory producing the plant pigments needed in building the first Goetheanum.
• 7. Freud, op.cit., p. 29.
• 8. Ibid., p. 30.
• 9. Apparently, the next few lines dealt with the connection between the Goesch-Sprengel case and psychoanalysis, but the stenographer only caught the words, “It is important how the connection is drawn… with disguised drives like these… especially between two personalities of this sort...”
• 10. Sigmund Freud dealt with the Oedipus complex for the first time in The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. James Strachey, Chapter V, Section D, (New York: Avon, 1965).
• 11. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 16.
• 12. Ibid., p. 17.
• 13. Moritz Benedikt, 1835–1920, physician and criminal anthropologist. The exact quotation reads, “Nowadays we find that students at the best finishing schools are more informed on the topic of sexual perversions than we young doctors used to be, and I often wish beating could be instituted as a punishment for the 'liberated' women teachers who encourage this kind of knowledge.” Aus Meinem Leben. Erinnerungen and Erörterungen, Vienna, 1906, vol. II, p. 162.
• 14. Sandor Ferenczi, 1873–1933, a favorite pupil of Freud's who later went his own way in psychoanalysis.
• 15. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 131. Ferenczi's report appeared in English as “A Little Chanticleer” in Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, 1916, p. 270.
• 16. It has not been possible to determine whether or not this actually happened.
• 17. “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as a Psychopathological Problem,” in Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom, GA 5, (Englewood, NJ: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1960).

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.

My dear sisters and brothers,

Since the Christmas Conference an esoteric breath flows through the whole Anthroposophical Society. And those members of the Anthroposophical Society who have taken part in the general members' lectures will have noted how this esoteric breath flows through all the work within the anthroposophical movement now, and should do so in the future.

This was a necessity which, above all, flows from the spiritual world, from where the revelations come which should live in the anthroposophical movement.

Therefore, the necessity arose to create a certain nucleus for anthroposophical esoteric life, to create real esoteric life, and therewith the necessity arose to build a bridge to the spiritual world itself.

In a certain sense the spiritual world had to manifest the will for the creation of such a School. For an esoteric school cannot be created by human arbitrariness, nor from that human arbitrariness called “human ideals”; rather must this esoteric school be the body for something which flows out of spiritual life, so that everything that occurs in such a school presents the outer expression of an activity which in reality occurs in the spiritual world itself. Therefore, this esoteric school could not have been created without first asking the will of Michael, which since the last third of the nineteenth century has been guiding human affairs - something which I have often mentioned here in members' lectures.

In the course of time this will of Michael again and again cyclically intervenes in human affairs from the spiritual world. And when we look back in the evolution of time, we find that this same Michael-Will - which we can also call the Michael Reign - was active in the spiritual affairs of humanity, in the great questions of civilization before the Mystery of Golgotha, in the time of Alexander in Greece through the Chthonian and Celestial mysteries, and which was to spread to Asia and Africa. Where the Michael-Will reigns, there is always cosmopolitanism. What differentiates people on earth is overcome during the Michael age.

The most important influence, related to Aristotle and to Alexander, which was under the impulse of Michael, was followed by that of Oriphiel, and after Oriphiel came the Anael impulse, the Zachariel impulse, then the Raphael impulse, then the Samael impulse, then the Gabriel impulse, which extended into the 19^th century. And since the seventies of the nineteenth century we are again under the sign of Michael's reign. It is in its beginnings. But Michael's impulses must flow into all legitimate esoteric activities in a conscious manner - what can be clear to you, my sisters and brothers, through the general lectures for members.

And everything connected with the Christmas Conference leads to what is constituted as the basis of the anthroposophical movement's formation of this Esoteric School inspired and guided by Michael. It therefore rightfully exists in our times as a spiritual institution. All those who want to be rightful members of this School must accept this in their lives with the deepest sincerity. They must feel that they don't merely belong to an earthly community, but to a supersensible community, whose guide and leader is Michael himself. Therefore, everything communicated here is not to be understood as my words, insofar as they are the content of the lessons, but rather as what Michael communicates in an esoteric manner to those who feel they belong with him in this age. Therefore, what these lessons contain will be Michael's message for our age.

And it is because of this that the anthroposophical movement will receive its true spiritual strength. For this it is necessary that what membership in this School means be taken with the utmost earnestness. It is really necessary, my dear sisters and brothers, truly and deeply necessary, that it be indicated in the utmost earnest manner the sacred earnestness with which the School must be taken.

And here within the School it must be repeatedly said: in anthroposophical circles there is much too little earnestness for what really flows through the anthroposophical movement, and at least the esoteric members of the Esoteric School must be in the forefront of what humanity can gradually develop as the necessary earnestness. Therefore, it is necessary that the leadership of the School retain for itself the right to allow only those to enter as rightful, worthy members of the School who, in every aspect of their lives, want to be worthy representatives of anthroposophy; and the decision about whether this is the case or not must lie with the School's leadership.

Do not consider this, my sisters and brothers, as a limitation of freedom. The School's leadership must also have its freedom and be able to recognize who belongs to the School and who does not, just as each one is free to decide whether to belong to the School or not. So, a free, ideal-spiritual contract, so to speak, between each member of the School and the leadership must be agreed upon. In no other way could esoteric development be called healthy, especially not one which is worthy of the fact that this Esoteric School exists under the direct force of the Michael impulse itself.

Conscientious care of the mantric verses so that they do not fall into unauthorized hands is the first requisite; but also, to really be a worthy representative of the anthroposophical cause.

I only need to mention a few things to show how little the anthroposophical movement is still grasped with complete earnestness. It has happened that members of the School have reserved their seats by placing on them the blue membership certificates, which gives them the right to participate in the School. [1] It has happened in the Anthroposophical Society that whole piles of the News Sheets, only intended for members, have been found on the trolley cars that run from Dornach to Basel. And I could add many other examples to this list. And amazing things happen as a result of this lack of earnestness. Even with things that in everyday life are taken seriously, at the moment when those within the anthroposophical movement are expected to do so, they do not take them seriously.

These are things which must be considered in connection with the firm structure that this School must have. Therefore, these things must be said, because if they are not observed, one cannot worthily receive what is given here in the School as revelations from the spiritual world. At the end of each lesson, your attention is expressly drawn to the fact that the being of Michael is present while the revelations from the spiritual world are given, and are confirmed by Michael's sign and seal.

All these things must live in the members' hearts. And worthiness, profound worthiness must reign in all that is bound even in thought to the School. For only in this way what today is to be carried through the world as an esoteric stream can live. And that includes the duties incumbent on each individual.

The mantric verses written here on the blackboard can only be possessed, in the strictest sense of the word, by those who have the right to be present. And if a member of the School is unable to attend a lesson during which mantric verses are given, another member, who has the verses, may give them to him; but it must be for each individual case, that is, for each person to whom the verses are to be given, that permission must be requested, either from Dr. Wegman or from me. Once permission is granted in respect to a person, it remains valid. But permission must again be requested for each other individual. This is not an administrative rule, it is an occult rule that must be strictly adhered to. For every act of the School must be connected to the School's leadership: and that begins with having to request permission from the School's leadership for acts having to do with the School. Not the one who is to receive the mantras may ask, but only the one who is to give them, using the modality that I have just described. If someone takes notes on what is said here, except for the mantras, he is obliged to keep them for only one week, and then to burn them.

All these things are not arbitrary rules, but they relate to the occult fact that esoteric matters are only effective if they are embraced by the School members' attitude. The mantras lose their effectiveness if they fall into the wrong hands. And it is a rule so firmly inscribed in the cosmic order, that the following once happened and a whole group of mantras, which had been in effect within the anthroposophical movement, have been rendered ineffective.

I was able to give mantric verses to a number of people; I also gave them to a certain person, who had a friend. The friend was somewhat clairvoyant. And it happened that while the two friends were sleeping in the same room, the clairvoyant friend, when the other one merely repeated the mantra in thought, surreptitiously copied it and then did mischief with it by giving it to others as coming from himself. It was necessary to look into the matter, which revealed why the mantra became ineffective for all those who possessed it.

Therefore, my dear sisters and brothers, you must not take these things lightly, for esoteric rules are strict; and when someone has made such an error, he should not excuse himself by claiming that he was unable to avoid it. Of course, if someone runs through a mantra in his mind, and someone else copies it clairvoyantly, he certainly can do nothing about it. Nevertheless, the rules are applied with an iron necessity. [2]

I mention this so that you can see how little arbitrariness is involved, and how these things are being read from the spiritual world and that the practices of the spiritual world apply. Nothing is arbitrary in what occurs in a rightly existing esoteric school. And the earnestness from this esoteric school should stream out to the whole anthroposophical movement. For only then will this School be what it should be for the anthroposophical movement. But when something is done which only springs from personal motives and then it is pretended that it is because of devotion to the anthroposophical movement- well, I don't mean to say that it should not happen, because obviously, people today must be personal - but then it is also necessary that truth lives in what is personal, that for instance if someone comes here to Dornach for personal pleasure he should admit it and not pretend otherwise. There's nothing wrong with coming to Dornach for personal pleasure, in fact it is good. But one should admit it and not sidestep it by declaring pure dedication to spiritual life.

I mention this; I could just as well mention another example, which is more real, for it is really the case that when most of our friends come to Dornach, a will to sacrifice is involved, and that only in the least of cases is untruthfulness involved. But I've chosen this example because it is the least applicable and thus the least harmful. If I had mentioned other examples, what I would like to have as a calm prevailing mood in the hearts and souls of all who are sitting here now could not exist in the necessary degree.

After that introduction, I would like to start with the verse that is the beginning and end of Michael's proclamation to all unbiased human beings, and which contains what all entities in the world are saying, if one listens to them with the soul. For from all that lives in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, what sparkles down from the stars, what acts into our souls from the domains of the hierarchies, from all that crawls under and on the earth as worm-life, from what speaks in rocks and springs and fields and thunder and clouds and lightning; all these spoke to unbiased human beings in the past, speak at the present and will speak in the future:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,
The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

The previous lesson ended, my dear sisters and brothers, with the Guardian of the Threshold giving the last admonitions before one passes over the yawning abyss of being; the Guardian of the Threshold spoke the weighty, moving words:

Come in,
The gate has opened;
You will become
A true human being.

Our souls and hearts have been exposed to the important, weighty, meaningful words spoken by the Guardian of the Threshold on behalf of Michael. And everything he said was to prepare us for the attitude we must have when we come over after the gate has been opened - over the yawning abyss of being, where one does not come walking with earthly feet, where one flies with the spiritual wings that grow when the soul is imbued with a spiritual attitude, with spiritual love, with spiritual feeling.

And now, now, my dear sisters and brothers, will be described what the human being experiences when he stands on the other side of the yawning abyss of being. The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to him: turn around and look back! Until now you have been looking at what appeared to you as black, night-cloaked gloom, about which you had to say that it will become inner light and will illumine your own Self. With the last admonitions—the Guardian of the Threshold says—I let it become lighter, at first most gently. You feel now the first light around you. But turn around, look back!

And now, when he who has crossed over the yawning abyss of being and turns around and looks back, he sees himself as an earthly human being, what he is during his physical incarnation, over there in the part of his being that he has left behind and which now lies in the earthly sphere. He observes his own human self there. He has embodied himself in spiritual being with his spirit-soul. The earthly environment is over there now. He stands there in the region, in which we first were with all our humanity, where we saw what crawls beneath and flies above, where we saw the sparkling stars, the warmth-giving sun, where we saw what lives in the wind and weather, and where, knowing that despite all its majesty, how the sun blazes and illumines, despite all the beauty and greatness accessible to the senses, we said to ourselves: our own humanity is not here; we must seek it on the other side of the yawning abyss of being, in what seems at first, to the senses, to be black, night-cloaked gloom.

The Guardian of the Threshold has shown, by the three beasts, what we actually are. Now will be described how in the gloom that is beginning to be light, we should begin to look back on what we as humans are in the sensory world, together with what was our only world in sensory earthly existence.

And now the Guardian of the Threshold points directly back there to the earthly man, which we ourselves also are during earthly existence, and to which we must continually return, into which we must always penetrate when we leave the spiritual world and return to our earthly duty. For we may not become dreamers and go into raptures, we must return completely to earth life. Therefore the Guardian of the Threshold directs us to look at the person who stands over there, who we ourselves are, in a way that at first draws our attention to what this person is. [An outline of a human being is drawn on the blackboard.]

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He knows that he perceives the outer world through the senses, which are mostly situated in the head, and that he perceives his thinking through the impulse of the head.

But the Guardian of the Threshold now says: Look into this head. It is like looking into a dark cell, for you do not see the creative light within it. The truth is that what you had as thinking over there in the sensory world is mere seeming, mere images, not much more than mirror-images.

The Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us to be very aware of this, but also to be aware that what is only appearance in earthly thinking is the corpse - as we have heard in previous lessons - of a living thinking in which we were immersed in the soul-spiritual world before we descended to this earthly life. There thinking lived! Now thinking rests as dead thinking, as seeming thinking in the coffin of our bodies. And all the thinking we use in the sensory world is dead thinking. It was alive before we descended.

And what has this thinking accomplished? It has created everything that is within the head, within this dark cell - as it appears to the senses - that is light-creating essence. The brain, which rests within as thinking's support, has been created by living thinking. [The interior of the head, yellow, is drawn on the blackboard.] It is living thinking that creates the support for our earthly semblance of thinking.

Observe the brain's convolutions, observe what you carry within the dark cell that enables you to think, my sisters and brothers, observe the semblance of thinking in the dark cell, then you will find in what is felt above as thinking [drawing: red arrows] from out of which streams the force of will into thinking, so that each thought is streamed through with will. How the will streams into thinking can be sensed.

And now we look back from the other side of the threshold at how that other person, who we ourselves are, has waves of will streaming out of his body into the head, which create the will, and finally, when we follow them back to the turning points of time which lead to our previous incarnations, how they create the waves of thought from worlds past into our present incarnation and form our heads, all of which makes the semblance of thinking in this incarnation possible.

Therefore, we must be strong, the Guardian of the Threshold tells us, and imagine dead thinking being cast out into the cosmic nothingness, for it is only seeming. And the willing that then arises we should consider as what comes over from previous incarnations and interweaves and works, making us thinkers. Within [drawing: yellow] are the creating cosmic thoughts. These creating cosmic thoughts enable us to have human thoughts.

Therefore, the first words the Guardian of the Threshold speaks after he has let us cross the threshold, and after he has announced that the gate has opened, that we can become true human beings, the first words he speaks are:

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

The first words we hear on the other side, as we look back at the figure, which we ourselves are:

[The first mantra is written on the blackboard, together with a heading. Blackboard writing is always in italics.]

The Guardian is heard in the brightening darkness:

I

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

And then the Guardian of the Threshold adds - and one must strain to hear him: Now imagine that you are observing that figure on the other side who you yourself are; you turn around again and look into the darkness and try with all your inner imaginative force of remembrance - as one does when retaining a physical after-image in the eye. Try with all your strength to draw before you something like a gray outline of what you saw over there, but avoid drawing anything except the outline of the figure. [It is drawn.]

Then, if one succeeds in seeing this gray outline of a figure, behind it appears an image of the moon [a sickle moon, yellow, is drawn], the gray figure before it.

If one is able to keep inner calm, one sees the moon in the distance. The gray figure outline is also there, but it is active in us. And if we practice this over and over, we feel we have arrived at the spiritual figure of the head that we had over there, not the physical human figure, but at the spiritual figure of the head that we had over there, if we can feel what karma brings to us from previous earthly incarnations. [yellow arrow at the right of the sickle moon.]

Therefore, you should meditate on this picture that I have drawn here, the sickle moon with this arrow; let the mantra unfold, with this picture as the marker for the gradual familiarization with what forcefully comes over from previous earthly existences.

And secondly, the Guardian of the Threshold points with a stronger gesture to what feeling is to the person over there, who we ourselves are, and he admonishes that we are to see this feeling as a dim dream. In fact, we see feeling - which makes the person over there more real than thinking, for thinking is illusion, whereas feeling is half reality - we see the person's feeling enfold in numerous dream-pictures during the day. We learn by observing it that feeling, for the spirit and in the spirit, is dreaming.

But what kind of dreaming is feeling? In this feeling, not only the individual dreams, but within it the whole surrounding world dreams. Our thinking is our own. That's why it's illusion. The world lives in our feeling. The world's existence is within it.

Now we must achieve, to the extent possible, tranquility of heart, the Guardian warns, so that we can extinguish what lives and interweaves as feeling in the dream-pictures, just as dreams are extinguished in deep sleep. Then we can reach the truth of feeling, and we can see human feeling interwoven with the cosmic life that is present in spirit in all our surroundings. And then the real spiritual human being appears to us, who in his body lives at first in his half-existence. The human being appears to us from out of sleeping feeling. We feel ourselves to be on the other side of the threshold, on the other side of the yawning abyss of being, for feeling has fallen asleep and the cosmic creative powers, which live in feeling, have appeared around us.

See in feeling's weaving in the soul,
How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;
Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;
And cosmic life spiritualizes
As the human being's power.

[This second part is written on the blackboard.]

II

See in

(Before it was “behind”, here it is “in”; all the words in a mantric verse are important.)

feeling's weaving in the soul,

(Before it was “thinking”, here “feeling”; there “sensory light”, here “weaving in the soul”; “weaving” is much more real than merely semblance of light.)

[In the first part “thinking” and “sensory light”, and in the second part “feeling's” are underlined.

How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;

(There it was “Willing arises from the body's depths;”, here “Life streams in from cosmic distance;”)

[In the third line of the first part “Willing” is underlined, and in the second part “Life”.]

Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;

It is enhanced: Here [in the first part] it involved letting flow through the soul's force; here [in the second part] one must waft away human feeling. [the word “waft” is underlined.]

And cosmic life spiritualizes

—here [in the first part] it was the willing that is still in the human being; here it is cosmic

As the human being's power.

—the enhancement relative to cosmic thought's creation.—

[In the first part “cosmic thought's creation” and in the second part “human being's power” are underlined.]

The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to us that we should look back once again at the gray figure that stands over there, which we are ourselves in earthly life, but this time after having turned away, in our minds we turn it around in a circle. We will find, when we rotate the figure, that the sun appears behind it and rotates with it. [It is drawn - left, red]. And we will realize that at the moment we are brought into physical existence from the spiritual world, our etheric body has been compressed from the cosmic ether. Therefore, just as the first verse belongs to this [the drawing of the gray figure and the first verse are numbered “I”], this second verse belongs to this. [The drawing of the red rotating form and the second verse are numbered “II”.]

Then the Guardian of the Threshold refers us to our will, which is active in our limbs. And he strongly draws our attention to the fact that whatever relates to the will is in a sleeping state, even when we are awake. He explains how as the thought works downward - I explained it last time, so may say it now -, how as the thought carries warmth downward into our limbs' movement so that it becomes will: this becomes clear in spiritual cognition and spiritual seeing. Normal consciousness hides this when we are sleeping, as it hides life in general during sleep. Now we should observe the will in the limbs as though sunken in deep sleep. The will is asleep. The limbs are asleep. We should see this as a firm mental image. Then, when it is firm, we realize how thinking, the source of willing in earthly man, sinks down into the limbs. Then it becomes light in him. The will becomes bright. It wakes up. When we first see it in its sleeping state, we find that it wakes up when thinking sinks downward and light from below streams upward, which is the force of gravity. Feel the force of gravity in your legs and arms when you let them relax: that is what streams upward, and which meets with the downward streaming thinking. We observe human will transformed into its reality and thinking appearing as what ignites the will in man in an enchanting, magical way. That is the truly magical effect of thinking on the will. It is magic. Now we become aware of it. The Guardian of the Threshold says:

See above the bodily effects of will,
—in the aura—
How into sleeping fields of activity
Thinking sinks down from head forces;
Let through the soul's vision of light
human will transform itself;
And thinking, it appears
As the magical essence of will.

[This third verse, with underlining, is written on the blackboard.]

III

See above the bodily effects of will,

Now we imagine that the Guardian of the Threshold again points to the person over there, who we are ourselves, telling us to look and retain the picture, but not to turn around, but to let this picture sink below the surface of the earth beneath where the figure is standing. We look over there. There stands the one who we ourselves are. We make the picture and develop the strong force to look below, as though a lake were there and we were looking at this image as now being within the earth, but not as a mirror-image, but as an upright figure. [Draws.]

We imagine this picture: the earth [A white arc is drawn.] belonging to the third verse [This drawing and the third verse are given the number III.] We imagine: how the earth's gravitational forces rise, how the gravitational forces illuminate the limbs, feet and arms [white arrows]. In later observation, we acquire an idea of how gods and humans cooperate between death and a new birth to arrange karma.

That is what the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us about when he speaks to us for the first time after we have crossed over the yawning abyss of being.

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

See in feeling's weaving in the soul,
How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;
Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;
And cosmic life spiritualizes
As the human being's power.

See above the bodily effects of will,
How into sleeping fields of activity
Thinking sinks down from head forces;
Let through the soul's vision of light
human will transform itself;
And thinking, it appears
As the magical essence of will.

The circle always closes. We are looking again at the starting point, listening to all the beings and all the processes of the world:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,
The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

By this affirmation, Michael is present in this, his rightfully existing School. His presence is confirmed by his sign, which should loom over everything given in this School:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

It is confirmed by his seal, that he has impressed on the esoteric striving of the Rosicrucian School, and which lives on symbolically in the threefold verse:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

And as Michael impresses his seal, the first sentence is spoken with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the lower seal gesture, yellow]

The second sentence with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the middle seal gesture, yellow]

The third sentence with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the upper seal gesture]

The first gesture means:[3]

I esteem the Father

It lives mutely as we say: “Ex deo nascimur”.

[lower seal gesture]

The second gesture means:

I love the Son

It lives mutely as we say: “In Christo morimur”.

[middle seal gesture]

The third gesture means:

I unite with the Spirit

It lives mutely in the Sign, which is Michael's Seal, as we speak: “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus”.

[upper seal gesture]

Thus, today's Michael affirmation is confirmed by means of his Sign and Seals:

[Michael's Sign]

[spoken with the seal gestures:]

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Translator's notes:

[1] It is a fairly common practice in Germany and Switzerland for people who come early to a function to place a paper, notebook, or hat on a chair to reserve their places.

[2] It seems to me, although the editors of the German original say nothing about it, that Rudolf Steiner was being ironic here, that a School member gave the mantra to his unauthorized friend, who then passed it on to others, and that the member then used the “clairvoyant” story as an excuse.

[3] The Michael Sign and Seals: From the stenographic notes of the seven recapitulation lessons, it is not possible to determine when Rudolf Steiner only wrote the words on the blackboard or when he spoke the words and wrote them, or only spoke them.

---

This was the last Lesson for the Esoteric School. Rudolf Steiner was unable to continue because of illness. He died on March 30, 1925.

We have spoken on intimate questions concerning the life of the human soul, questions calculated to prepare us for concepts which extend to the relations of the so-called living—that is, those inhabiting physical bodies—to the disembodied souls, those living between death and rebirth. The chief point in reviewing such a theme is to make ourselves acquainted with certain fundamental concepts which psychically indicate in the proper way how man should and can think in such connections; for the reality of these relations does not depend upon whether man living here on earth is conscious of any relations with the dead, or with any being in the spiritual world at all. This is obvious to anyone who thinks on these things; but it is only right to make the ‘obvious’ clear, even in the sphere of Spiritual Science.

Man always stands in relation to the spiritual world; he is always in a certain connection with those of the dead who are united with him by karma. It is most emphatically one thing to speak of the ‘reality’ of this relationship, and another to speak of the stronger or weaker consciousness we may have of it. It is important for each one—even for those who can only believe that such consciousness is utterly remote from them—to learn what such consciousness says; for it tells each one of realities in the midst of which he always stands. Precisely in regard to the relations of the so-called living to the so-called dead we must be clear, that this relation is in certain connections more difficult to bring to consciousness than our relation to other beings of the spiritual world. To attain, through seeing and perceiving, a consciousness of the beings of the higher Hierarchies, to receive a distinct revelation of them, is comparatively easier than to become aware of a quite distinct relation to the dead, that is, to become aware of them in the true, genuine way. This is for the following reasons.

In the time spent between death and rebirth, man passes through conditions very different from the life-relations of the physical world. We need but refer to the course of lectures on the life between death and rebirth to learn that the ideas and thoughts must be entirely different from those we must employ in speaking of the life in the physical world. Why are the concepts we must then use so different from those customary in ordinary consciousness? It is because in a sense man anticipates between death and rebirth, certain conditions which will only become Life-conditions during the next Earth-embodiment,—that of Jupiter; man lives in such a way that what he now experiences between death and rebirth anticipates—albeit in a subtler, more spiritual form—the life-conditions of the Jupiter-evolution. Since in his earth-life man has, in a sense, retained something from the earlier embodiments of Moon, Sun and Saturn, so also he receives something belonging to the future during his life between death and rebirth. On the other hand, the beings of the higher Hierarchies in so far as man can examine them with human perception, are all united—united in an immediate, present way—with the whole spiritual world, of course, but with the spiritual world in so far as it is coming to fruition in some form at the present time. They will, in coming ages, reveal the future. Paradoxical as this may sound, yet it is true. It sounds paradoxical, because the question may arise as to how the beings of the higher world would exercise their activity on the dead, if the dead already carry the future within them. Of course the beings of the higher Hierarchies also carry the future within them and are able to form it; but they do not do so without also forming something which is distinctly, or directly characteristic of the present; what has been said, however, is the case in respect of the dead. For this reason the perception of what the higher Hierarchies accomplish, forms as it were a preparation for becoming conscious of intercourse with the dead. Not until man has brought about a more or less conscious perception of the beings of the higher Hierarchies in his soul will it be possible for him gradually to attain the power, through his faculties of perception and feeling, of perceiving consciously anything concerning intercourse with the dead. I do not mean by this that man must grasp the higher Hierarchies clairvoyantly; but in so far as Spiritual Science offers the possibility, man must understand what flows into existence from the higher Hierarchies. In all these things the understanding is the chief thing. If a man takes the trouble to understand them by means of Spiritual Science, those conditions of existence can certainly arise which call up something of a union of the so-called living with the so-called dead. For the understanding of this it is necessary to hear in mind the following:

The spiritual world in which man dwells between death and rebirth has its own special conditions of existence; conditions which we can scarcely observe in our ordinary earth-life, and which sound paradoxical when they are given to us as a conception of life. Above all, it must be borne in mind that a man who wishes to experience such things consciously, must acquire what might be called a feeling of unity in common with all things in existence. It is one of the necessary demands for the continuation of man's spiritual evolution from the present time, from this disastrous present time, that he should gradually develop this feeling. In the subconsciousness of man this feeling, although of a lower kind, is thoroughly established; but we must not become pantheistic, prattling of a ‘Universal Spirit;’ we must not speak in general of this feeling of unity,—but we must be clear in concrete detail as to how we can speak of it, how it is gradually built up in the soul; for it is a life-experience. Then the following comes into consideration:

We have often heard that when criminals, in whom instinctive subconsciousness works very strongly, have committed some particular crime, they have a peculiar instinct; they are drawn back to the place where they did it; an indefinable feeling drives them back. Such things only express in special cases what is common to man in respect of many things. When we have done something, accomplished something, however seemingly unimportant, something of it remains in us, something of what we have grasped in the doing of it; a certain force remains in us from the thing we have done, from the forces with which we have done it something remains connected with the ego. This cannot be otherwise expressed, although of course it is expressed as a kind of imagination. A man cannot avoid forming certain connections with all the beings he meets, and the things he grasps (not, of course, physical things only), the things with which he has something to do in life. We leave our own distinctive mark on all things, and a feeling of being bound up with the things with which we have come in touch by our deeds, remains in our subconsciousness. In the case of criminals this comes to expression in an abnormal way, because there the unconsciousness flashes up very instinctively into the ordinary consciousness; but in his sub-consciousness every man has the feeling that he must return to the place with which he has come in touch by his deeds.

This also takes part in forming our karma; our karma arises from this. From this subconscious feeling, which at first presses into existence in a nebulous way, we have the general feeling of unity with the whole world. Because everywhere we leave our mark, we have this feeling. We can lay hold of it, sense it, perceive it. For this, however, we must call to mind certain intimacies of life. We must try, for instance, really to enter into the idea: ‘I will go now across the street;’ we then walk across, and afterwards we still imagine ourselves walking. By continued exercises of this kind we call forth from the depths of our soul the general feeling of unity with the world. And for one who grows conscious of this feeling of unity, in the more concrete sense, it so develops that he ultimately says to himself: There is after all a connection, though an invisible one, between all things, as between the members of a single organism. As each finger, each lobe of the ear, all belonging to our organism, stands in connection the one with the other, so there is a connection between all things and all that happens, in so far as the occurrences take place in our world.

The earth-men of to-day have as yet no fully valid consciousness of this feeling of unity with all things, this organic penetration into things, it remains in the unconscious. In the Jupiter evolution this feeling will be the fundamental one, and as we gradually pass from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, we prepare for the formation of such a feeling; so that the formation of this, which becomes necessary from our own time on into the near future, must supply a special ethical and moral foundation for mankind, which must be much more living than is the case to-day. This is meant as follows:

To-day many think nothing of enriching themselves at the expense of others. Not only do they live thus without any moral self-criticism, they simply do not think about it at all. Were they to reflect upon it, they would find that a man lives far more at the cost of others than they had ever realised. Indeed every man lives at the expense of others. Now the consciousness will develop that a life lived at the expense of others, signifies the same to the community as when any particular organ develops at the expense of another organ, in an unlawful way, and that the happiness of the individual is not really possible apart from that of the community. That, of course, people do not yet divine, but it must gradually become the fundamental principle of true human ethics. People strive to-day, each one for his own prosperity, not thinking that individual prosperity is fundamentally only possible in common with that of all the rest. Thus there is a connection between the feeling of community and the feeling that the life of the whole community is an organism. That feeling can greatly increase, it can develop an intimate perception for the feeling of unity with all things around. If a man increases this intimate feeling, he gradually becomes able to receive a perception of what I described as the ‘light’ which is thrown out beyond death into our evolution between death and rebirth, which we perceive and from which we build our karma. I only just wish to hint at this. When a man forms this feeling of unity he is able to do yet another thing, namely, to live with the idiosyncracies, situations, thoughts and actions of another as though they were his own. This is connected in the soul-life with a certain difficulty in so thinking into another that what the other does, thinks and feels is felt as his own. Only, however, when a man thinks back profitably to what he had in common with someone who has died, to whom he was karmically united, is he ready to reach the discarnate man; only when able to experience what he experienced in common with him—even to the slightest detail—and to think as one thinks when having this ‘feeling of unity.’ We picture it to ourselves in this way. We think of something which took place between ourselves and one who is dead; how we sat at table with him, or anything else, however small; but it is only possible for the soul to place itself rightly in this attitude for the attaining of reality if we really have the feeling of unity, otherwise the force in the soul is insufficient. We must understand that only from a place over which we can thus throw this ‘feeling of unity’ (speaking metaphorically), can the dead bring himself to our consciousness. We can imagine it quite ‘spatially;’ we must of course preserve in our consciousness the fact that we are only forming a picture of it; but it is a picture of a true reality. We come back to what was said before; that we visualise a situation with the dead, how we sat at table with him, walked with him, and then we turn our whole soul-life in the direction of this thought. If we can but develop in the thought a communion of soul with the dead that is in accordance with the ‘feeling of unity,’ then his gaze from the spiritual world can find the reality from these thoughts, just as our thoughts can find the reality to which they are directed. If we allow these thoughts of the dead to be present in the soul, to the degree that they are filled with love, the psychic gaze of the soul encounters the psychic gaze of the dead. Through that, the dead can speak to us. He can only speak from the place upon which the direction of our ‘feeling of unity’ falls. So are these things connected. We learn, as it were, to feel our karma when we gain an idea of how we leave behind everywhere the stamp of our thought; we learn to identify ourselves with these things and thus we develop the feeling that brings us into increasingly conscious union with the dead. In this way it becomes possible for them to speak to us.

The other requirement is that we can hear, that we can really perceive it at the time of happening. For this we must above all pay heed to what, so to say, lies as ‘air’ between us and the dead, so that he can speak to us across it. Comparing it with something physical, if there were an airless space between us, we should not be able to hear what is said; air must act as an intermediary. There must be something between us and the dead if they are to approach us. There must, as it were, be a ‘spiritual air,’ and we can now speak of the nature of this spiritual air in which we live together with the dead. Of what does it consist?

To understand this we must remember what I have said in other connections of how the human memory comes about; for these things are all connected. Ordinary psychology says of human memory: I have now an impression from the outer world, it calls forth a concept within me; this concept goes somehow into my subconsciousness and is forgotten, but when any special occasion arises, it comes back from the subconsciousness—and I remember. Almost all psychologists, as far as the memory is concerned, are of opinion that the reason why a concept arises in man is because he receives an impression—quickly forgotten—which sinks down into the subconsciousness, until some incident brings it back into the consciousness. Man ‘remembers’ and thinks he has the same concept that he first formed. This is an absolute error,—an error taught in almost all psychology, but an error nevertheless, for what is thus taught does not take place at all. When through an outer experience we receive an impression which later we remember, it is not at all the same concept we first formed that rises within us, but while we are in the act of forming the concept, a second subconscious process is going on. It does not come into consciousness during the outer experience, but it takes place none the less. Through processes of which we shall not speak just now, that which takes place in our organism to-day, but remains unconscious, takes place again tomorrow; and as to-day the outer impressions called forth the concept, so tomorrow, what has been occasioned below, calls forth a new concept. A concept I have to-day passes away and is gone; it no longer moves in my subconsciousness; but if tomorrow the same concept rises from my memory, it is because there is that within me which calls forth this same concept; only it was subconsciously generated. Anyone who supposes that concepts are taken up by the subconsciousness, move about therein, and finally arise again from the soul—if he wishes to remember after three days anything that came to him, and which he has written down in order not to forget—ought at once to realise that what he wishes to remember is also in what he has written, and three days later arises to him from the note-book. Just as there are only ‘signs’ in the note-book, so too in the memory there are only signs which call forth again in a weaker degree what had been experienced by him.

Anyone who commits to memory, or in some other way tries to instil something into his mind which he wishes to retain, anyone who crams—as we say when young—knows quite well that perception alone is not sufficient; and he will sometimes have recourse to very external aids to incorporate something into the memory. Let us observe someone who wishes to ‘cram;’ let us see what efforts he makes to help this unconscious activity which plays its part; he wishes somehow to assist the subconscious. These are two very different things; one, to incorporate something in the memory; the other, to call it forth. If we can study men and observe their characters, we soon find that even this shows that we have to do with two different kinds of people. We find there are those who grasp things quickly, but have a terribly bad memory; and others whose comprehension is slow but who have a good memory, that is, a good imaginative faculty and power of judgment. These two things are to be found side by side, and Spiritual Science must make the matter clear.

When in life we perceive something—and from early morning, from waking to falling asleep we are always perceiving something of the world,—we are more or less conscious of sympathy or antipathy with what we perceive; and, as a rule, we are quite satisfied when we have grasped a matter. The activity which leads to memory, however, is far more extensive than that needed to grasp the impression. It takes place far more subconsciously in the soul, and this subconscious process taking place of itself, often contradicts in a noteworthy way what takes place in us consciously. Often we may feel an antipathy towards an impression made upon us. The subconsciousness does not feel this antipathy; it generally feels quite differently from the ordinary consciousness. The subconsciousness develops a remarkable feeling towards all impressions. Although an expression taken from the physical world and applied to the spiritual can only be figurative, here it is quite suitable to say that the subconsciousness develops a certain feeling of gratitude towards every impression—irrespective of its nature. It is not inaccurate to say that while we might see someone concerning whom our conscious impression may be very unpleasant—he might insult us to our very face—the subconscious impression would still be a certain feeling of gratitude. The simple reason for this feeling is that everything in life which approaches the deeper element of our being enriches our life, really enriches it, including all unpleasant experiences. This has no connection with the manner in which we must consciously conduct ourselves towards our outer impressions. The way in which we must consciously respond to anything, has nothing to do with what takes place subconsciously; in the subconsciousness everything leads to a certain feeling of thankfulness; there we receive every impression as a gift for which we must be grateful.

It is specially important to keep in mind this fact which is taking place below the threshold of consciousness. What works there and breaks into a feeling of thankfulness, works in a similar way within us as does the impression of the outer world which is to be remembered; it goes side by side with the concept, and only the man who has a distinct feeling that he dreams from waking to falling asleep, can be aware of these things. I have shown in the public lecture on ‘The Historical Life of Man and its Problems’ that as regards our feeling and will we continue to sleep and dream even in waking life. If we allow the world to work upon us in this way, our impressions and concepts take place incessantly, but beneath this we dream about everything and this dream-life is far richer than we think. It is only eclipsed by our conscious concepts as is a weak light by a stronger. We can, as it were, by experiment, acquire an explanation of such relations by paying attention to various intimacies of life. Let us try to make the following experiment in ourselves. Suppose we are lying on a sofa and wake up. Of course a man does not then observe himself, because immediately afterwards the world makes various impressions upon him; but it may happen that he lies quiet for a time after waking. Then he may observe what he perceived before he awoke, and this he can specially notice if someone has knocked at the door and not repeated the knock; he can recall this, and when he wakes he knows that something has happened; this is clear from the whole situation.

When a man observes something in this way, he is not far from the recognition of what spiritual science has to verify—that we perceive unconsciously a far wider range of our environment than is possible consciously. It is quite true that if, on going into a street, we meet someone just coming round the corner—whom therefore we could not have seen before he appeared—we may feel that we had seen him before he appeared; it frequently happens that we have a feeling that we had seen something happening before it actually does happen. It is true that first we have a psychic spiritual connection with what we perceive later. It is actually so; only we are ‘deafened’ by the later sense-perceptions and do not observe what takes place in the intimacies of the soul-life.

This again is something which takes place of itself subconsciously, like the formation of memory or the feeling of thankfulness in regard to all surrounding phenomena. The dead can only speak to us through the element which passes through the dreams interwoven with our life. The dead speak into these intimate subconscious perceptions which take place of themselves. If we are in a position to do so, we can share with them the same spiritual psychic air; for if they wish to speak to us, it is necessary that we take into our consciousness something of the feeling of gratitude for all that reveals itself to us. If there is none of this feeling within us, if we are not able to thank the world for enabling us to live, for enriching our life continually with new impressions, if we cannot deepen our soul by often realising that our life is absolutely a gift, the dead do not find a common air with us; for they can only speak with us through this feeling of gratitude; otherwise there is a wall between us and them.

We shall see how many obstacles there are in regard to intercourse with the dead, for, as we have seen from other connections, it is dependent on our being karmically united with them. We cannot arouse in ourselves this feeling of gratitude if having lost them, we wish them back in life; we should be thankful we did have them with us quite irrespective of the fact that we have them no longer. Thus if we have not this feeling of gratitude with regard to the beings whom we wish to approach, they do not find us; or, at any rate, they cannot speak to us. The very feelings we so frequently have towards our nearest dead are a hindrance to their speaking to us. Other dead, who are not karmically united to us, usually have more difficulty in speaking to us; but with those nearest to us, we have too little of the feeling of thankfulness that they have been something to us in life. We should not hold fast to the idea that we have them no more, for that is an ungrateful feeling, considered in the wider sense of life. If we clearly understand that the feeling of having lost them weighs them down, we shall keep in mind the whole bearing of this. If we have lost someone we love, we must be able to raise ourselves to a feeling of thankfulness that we have had him; we must be able to think selflessly of what he was to us until his death, and not upon what we feel, now we have him no more. The better we can feel what he was to us during his life, the sooner will it be possible for him to speak to us, to speak to us by means of the common air of gratitude.

In order to enter more and more consciously into the world out of which this comes, many other things are necessary. Suppose we have lost a child. The necessary feeling of gratitude can be brought about by picturing to ourselves how we sat with him and played with him in such a way that the game was as interesting as the child himself. When we can do this, we have the appropriate feeling of companionship—as there is only sense in playing with a child if one is as wholly a playfellow as the child himself. That gives the necessary atmosphere for the feeling of companionship. Thus, if we picture ourselves playing with the child in a truly living way, the place is created upon which our gaze and his can fall. If I am able to grasp what the dead says, I am in conscious union with him. This can be brought about by many things.

To many people thought is specially easy. Some will say that that is not true. Still there are some to whom thought is very easy; if it be found difficult then it is really something different which they feel. The very people who take it most easily, find it most difficult. This is because they are too lazy to think. What is meant by saying this is that most people take their thinking easily (one cannot say how easily because it is so very easy to think), one can only say that they just think, they acquire no concepts at all, that too would be ‘difficult.’ They just think, they grasp their ideas—they have them and live in them. Then other things approach—for example, spiritual science. Spiritual science is not avoided by so many because it is difficult to understand, but because a certain effort is needed to accept its ideas. People avoid effort. Anyone who progresses in spiritual science gradually observes that it necessitates an application of will to comprehend the thoughts; that there is an expenditure of will in grasping thoughts as well as in lifting a hundredweight, but people do not want to do this; they think ‘easily.’ Anyone who makes a greater effort with his thinking by thinking harder and harder, thinks with more difficulty as it were, because he realises more and more that for a thought to anchor itself within him, he must make efforts. There is nothing more favourable for penetration to the spiritual world than the fact that it becomes ever more difficult to grasp thoughts—and he is the most fortunate in his progress in spiritual science who can no longer apply the standard of easy thinking used in ordinary life, but will say to himself: This thinking is really a harrying undertaking! One must exert one's strength as though thrashing with a flail. Such feelings can only be indicated, but they can develop; it is favourable when they do. Much else is connected with this, for instance, the fact that what many possess gradually withdraws. Many are so quick with their thinking that it is only necessary to mention one thought-complex and they grasp the connection of the whole; they always have an answer ready. What would conversations in drawing-rooms betoken, if thinking were difficult! We can, however, observe that as we gradually become acquainted with the inner relation of things, it becomes more difficult to chatter and be ready with an answer; for that comes from easy thinking. With advance in knowledge man becomes more Socratic, so that he must strain every nerve to attain the right to express an opinion.

This feeling, this effort of will, is part of the comprehension of thought. It is related to another feeling which we often have when we commit something to memory and have to ‘cram’—and cannot take in what we should. We can experience the relationship between these two things—the difficulty of retaining anything in the memory and the difficulty of exerting an effort of will in order to understand anything. Man can, however, exercise himself in this; he can apply what may be called conscientiousness, a feeling of responsibility in regard to his thinking. The following is to be found in many people. When from a certain experience of life, a person says, for instance: ‘So-and-so is a good man,’ the other instantly retorts, ‘An awfully good man.’ How frequently an answer is in the superlative. There is, of course, not the slightest reason why it should be in the superlative, it is only the absolute lack of how we ought to think; we have the feeling that we ought to have experienced something, and we wish to express this. Of course such demands of life should not be driven too far, otherwise in many drawing-rooms the ‘great silence’ would commence.

This feeling, however, when awakened from a feeling of responsibility towards thinking, from the feeling that thinking is difficult, this is the basis of the possibility and capacity to experience inspiration, for an inspiration does not come as thoughts spring to most people; an inspiration comes when it is as difficult as anything else which we feel to be difficult. We must first learn to feel thoughts as ‘difficult,’ to feel the retention of memory as something different from mere thinking; then we shall be able to experience a feeling for that weak, dream-like rise of thought in the soul which does not really wish to cling, but to vanish, when thoughts arise which are difficult to grasp. We can reinforce ourselves by developing a feeling of really living with the thoughts. Just let us realise what goes on in our souls in order to accomplish our purpose when we intend to go anywhere. As a rule a man does not usually think about this, but he should reflect on what has taken place in the world as a consequence of his having accomplished his purpose and attained what he had in view. He should reflect upon what has taken place in his soul. In reality a reaction has taken place there. Often this may be even strikingly expressed; when a mountain climber has to exert himself strenuously to reach the summit of a mountain, and arriving at the top, breathing laboriously, exclaims: ‘Thank God I am here!’ one feels that a certain reaction has taken place in his feelings. In this direction one can acquire an even finer perception, which continues in the intimate life of the soul. This resembles the following feeling. One who begins to call to mind a situation shared, with a dead friend, and who begins to essay a common interest with the dead, uniting himself with the thoughts and feelings of the dead, will feel himself as being on a journey; and then comes a moment when he feels as though coming to rest in his thought. He can first be active in thought—then reaches a state of equipoise, he feels as though he had stopped for a rest after having walked for a long time. This is a great help towards the inspiration which such a thought can give. He can also provide for inspiration through thought by making use of the whole man instead of the higher consciousness only. This of course leads to closer intimacies as regards this experience.

Anyone who succeeds in drawing into his consciousness that feeling of gratitude which would in an ordinary way remain unconscious will at once observe that, unlike the ordinary consciousness it works in such a way that one is able to unite it with the whole man—at least as far as the arms and hands. Here I must remind you of what I have already said about this side of the human perception; how ordinary ideas are grasped by the brain, but intimate ideas pass through it as through a sieve, into the hands and arms which are really the organs for their reception. This can really be felt. A man need not, of course, outwardly express all this, but he can have the conviction that certain experiences of life such as wonder and awe, can only be expressed through the arms and hands. Fragmentary expressions of this experience—e.g., that the unconscious impulse to take part in these expressions quivers in the hands and arms—are revealed when a man clasps his hands over the beauty of nature or many other things that enter into his consciousness. Everything that subconsciously happens to us comes partially to expression in life. As regards what may be called ‘the desire of the hands and arms to take their part in external expression,’ a man can keep still; it is only necessary to move his etheric hands and arms. The more we are conscious of this, the more we are able to feel outer impressions sympathetically with our arm-organism, the more we develop a feeling which can be expressed in this way: ‘When I see the colour red I am inclined to make certain movements of the hands, for they are appropriate; when I see blue I incline to other movements!’ The more a man is conscious of this, the more he develops the feeling for inspiration for what should develop in the soul, for what he should retain as impressions. When we give ourselves up to playing with children, we lose ourselves in the impression, but we find ourselves. Then comes inspiration, if we have qualified ourselves and prepared the whole man to receive the impression—when even in the case of plunging into our own thoughts, the very fact of this submersion unites us in the feeling in-common with the dead, so that when we awake, we can remain united with the reality of the experience with the whole man, as just described, and this unity is experienced in the feeling of gratitude quivering into the hands and arms. Then the real spiritual existence in which the dead live between death and rebirth, holds intercourse with the living in such a way that we may say: We find our dead when we can meet in a common spiritual place with a common thought which he also perceives, when we can meet in this ‘thought-in-common,’ in a feeling of full companionship. We have the material for this through the medium of the feeling of gratitude; for the dead speak to the living out of the space woven by the ‘feeling-in-common,’ through the air which is created from the feeling of general gratitude common to the world.

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.

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