The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Coming Day: Public Limited Company for the Promotion of Economic and Spiritual Values

[ 1 ] The shortest route to the wastepaper basket today is probably the one taken by mailings of this kind. There are so many of them, and we have experienced so often how little they deliver on their promises, that no one can be denied the right to choose this route in order to ward off superfluous literary intrusiveness. Should this announcement of a new publisher for some reason not happen, then - the senders hope - their readers will see that this justification is intended to bring about something that the events of the time really demand.

[ 2 ] The "Kommende Tag Verlag" was not founded out of the need to add to the many books that arise out of the confusion of contemporary intellectual life. Its founders are actually of the opinion, already expressed by Lichtenberg, that ninety-nine percent of the books with which the world is "blessed" are too many.

[ 3 ] But these founders see the declining intellectual life of the present. They see the other disasters of the present, the state and the economy, emerging from the decline of spiritual life. And they must imagine an ascending spiritual life from which the state and the economy must draw in order to recover.

[ 4 ] They want to serve this spiritual life.

[ 5 ] They want to deliver literary works to the world, which provide the ideas and the laws of the humanities for the recovery of the sick social life.

[ 6 ] Unfortunately, all too few people have an adequate idea of the unhealthy state of our intellectual life. They have no idea what devastating consequences for world civilization must result from this state. They therefore have no heart for efforts that are directed towards recovery out of conviction and unbiased observation of life.

[ 7 ] The "Kommende Tag Verlag" would like that.

[ 8 ] It will not serve a fragmenting academicism that only proliferates in books, alienated from life, and which is increasingly severing its ties to reality. He wants to serve a scientific attitude that warms the blood and sheds light on the meaning of human and world existence.

[ 9 ] He will not serve an attitude towards art that is alienated from life, parlor-smelling, or burdened with idleness. It will promote an artistic perception of the world that makes man a co-creator of the mysteries and development of the world through the true shaping of life.

[ 10 ] He will not serve a socially destructive view of life that preaches only moral laws and has no power to penetrate reality. He wants to contribute to the discovery of that moral basis of life that generates powerful will in ideas and gives birth to the impulses for the health of the soul and enthusiasm for action from the knowledge of life.

[ 11 ] He will not serve social fantasies which are beneficial to man if he can dream of their realization, or if he stages social orders which are devoid of human nature and the basis of nature, and which therefore awaken to social misfortune those who dream of them or act under their influence. He wants to allow social views and impulses to appear which are possible, universally human, worthy of existence, but which are drawn from the real human nature, observation of the world and living experience.

[ 12 ] So the "Kommende Tag Verlag" wants to serve social life, the moral shaping of life, the artistic revelation of existence, the scientific understanding of the world.

[ 13 ] It will endeavor not to lapse into one-sided promotion of this or that "point of view", but to deliver the spiritually valuable products of all directions to the judgment of the readers of its books. It is not opinions about this or that that should be favored according to the tastes of the leaders of the "Kommenden Tag Verlag", but those works which these leaders feel can serve the spiritual life demanded by the times. A materialistic book written with spirit will today - against the will of its author - do more to promote the development of spiritual life than a spiritless collection of amateurish slogans about a "spiritual world order". A will determined by these guidelines should permeate all the activities of the "Kommenden Tag Verlag". The many who still believe today that something can be achieved by merely "popularizing" the traditional spiritual life, by founding popular education centres in which what has been cultivated in places alien to the people is popularized: they will find this publishing house highly superfluous. For its justification is based on the conviction that what has led out of the narrow circles, through educational illusions, into the declining phenomena of the present cannot have a fruitful effect in the broad circles of the population.

[ 14 ] The "Kommende Tag Verlag" is a member of the overall enterprise "Der Kommende Tag, Aktiengesellschaft zur Förderung wirtschaftlicher und geistiger Werte, Stuttgart". The other members of this company have the task of developing economic activities that can provide the people with healthy economic forces. They are to participate in the reconstruction of economic life in the spirit of a national economy demanded by the times. They should also support free schools, scientific and medical institutes and the like through economically fruitful activities.

[ 15 ] The affiliation with such enterprises is what characterizes the "Kommender Tag Verlag". Spiritual creation has to be part of the whole circle of human life if it is not to run the risk of becoming a luxury of civilization. The spiritual and the material must support each other if the one is not to be alienated from the other to the detriment of humanity. Rudolf Steiner's book "Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft" ("The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future") is to be one of the main pieces for the initial activities of the "Kommenden Tag Verlag". Over 40,000 copies of this book have already been sold in Germany and it has been translated into almost all cultural languages. From a practical observation of the spiritual, social and state conditions of human existence, it contains the justification of such a will as gives direction to the "Coming Day Publishing House" in a single area of life. In it, its author combines the anthroposophical direction he founded in spiritual science, in which he has published a large number of writings for 35 years, with the realistic observation of social life and will.

[ 16 ] The "Kommende Tag Verlag" thus places itself in the midst of the spiritual, ethical and economic tasks of the present; and it seeks to do justice to these tasks through its connection with the School of Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum in Dornach, in which the anthroposophically deepened way of research, newly fertilizing all branches of life, also erects an artistic building which, although still unfinished, already represents the nurturing place of this way of research and art. In another way, in the field of education, this way of research and life practice has a place of activity in the Stuttgart Waldorf School.

[ 17 ] Through this connection in the most diverse directions, the "Kommende Tag Verlag" presents itself as an enterprise that has its widely ramified roots in the circle of a spiritual, artistic and social movement, which, out of a firm will, makes the necessary reshaping of the collapsing civilization its most serious task.

In December 1920, Der Kommende Tag AG
Stuttgart, Champignystrasse 17, publishing house

The last time I spoke to you we were able to see how a familiar old prayer truly reflects the whole way the human being is seen in the science of the spirit. We realized that the religious streams, religious teachings and rites have come from something which we ourselves have come to know in the course of time through the science of the spirit. The way we should see this is like this. Originally humanity started with a universal, all-embracing basic view which in the religious confessions of different nations finds expression in accord with the differences in national character. You may of course ask how exactly can it be that the basic truths, the basic wisdom of humanity are connected with what people of different nations have been told by the people who founded the different religions.

It really is quite remarkable that we find the basic concepts of spiritual science in the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer. Many of the things we are now able to see through the science of the spirit must seem figments of the imagination to someone who has not given these things much consideration before, and he may easily say: All this has merely been put into knowledge you have obtained from the religious works.

If we are to go a bit more deeply into the question as to how the great wisdom of old originally came to be part of religious beliefs, we need to consider a basic question. We have to understand that anything we are able to know today, the things taught out of the science of the spirit today, were not presented in the same way in the earliest religious belief systems. We have to understand that the way in which such things were presented varied in the course of time. The old religious books you open speak to human beings in images and not ideas. These images, in many ways connected with ideas based on sensory perceptions, have been as far as possible preserved in those religious works. Thus insight is always referred to as a light, wisdom as a kind of fluid element, as water. If you look carefully, you’ll again and again find the same images in those very early times. There is a definite reason for this. Today we’ll bring together some of the things we know already so that we may enter really deeply into the way in which the very first teachers of humanity worked among the nations to which they brought the blessing of religious teachings. To understand how religious teachers worked who came before those whom we call the great initiates—Hermes, Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses and finally the greatest, Christ Jesus—we must once more contemplate the difference which exists between people’s ordinary conscious awareness and their astral or imaginative awareness.

People generally have an object-related awareness from morning till night. This shows things in such a way that they appear to be outside the human being and that their properties are those we perceive with the senses. This is not the only form of conscious awareness. The other forms are, however, hidden from most people today; they lie in the vague darkness which we call dreamless sleep, though for initiates this has a specific meaning. For initiates who know the world behind the physical objects there is a further state of conscious awareness which comes between going to sleep and waking up. In this, they do not perceive the objects that exist here the way they are here, but they perceive a world of its own. For ordinary mortals, dreamless sleep is an unconscious state, but for initiates it is a condition in which they consciously perceive the world of the spirit. To understand how this unconscious state comes to conscious awareness we have to consider the intermediate state which we also know—dream-filled sleep. This shows common, everyday sensory perceptions or the inner states of the soul in allegorical form. But the image quality you have in your dreams is something you’ll also find if you study the conscious mind of an initiate when he is in the world of the spirit. He sees the things of that world in images, though these are not as chaotic as our dream images. The only thing they have in common with dream images is that they are always changing. This table and this chair always look the same once they are where they are. Plants and people, in so far as they are objects outside us, show the form they have at the time. But the more we go towards the realm of conscious life, the more do we find transformation—the plant germinating from its seed and developing stem, leaves, flower and fruit; the animal making voluntary movements, the human being we see in motion as gestures and physiognomy change.

All this does however have permanence compared to the things a human being experiences in the world of devachan when he has reached a higher level of development. There we see continuous change. Anyone who gains access to the world of the spirit by doing the necessary exercises will see how there the colour of a plant rises above the plant like a flame. He comes to see colours as configurations that rise and fall in free space. He will only come to true vision, however, when he is able to see colours and sounds by themselves and make them move towards specific entities. Such entities are always present around us. If you were able to take the violet from the flower so that the colour moved independently in space, this would reflect the life in the plant’s inner spiritual world. The human aura and the astral bodies, as we call them, act in the same way. All human inclinations, feelings of vanity and egoism appear as quite specific streams of colour in their auras, and we are able to say that the inner life of the soul comes to expression in the human aura. The aura is never still, nothing is stationary the way things are stationary here in the world we perceive through the senses. And when an entity in the world of the spirit has a feeling or will impulse, you can always see it reflected in quite specific changes in colour and sound. Constant change is the essential characteristic of the higher worlds.

This is of course confusing for anyone who is entering the higher worlds for the first time. It also happens because everything in these higher worlds shows itself the way it is at the moment. People can hide their inner life from those who are only able to observe them with physical eyes, but not from someone who is able to see with eyes of the spirit. Then all is revealed, and you have to say to yourself: If we want to study someone with the eyes of the senses, we have to draw conclusions as to his soul life from outer signs—the way he smiles or weeps. It is different in the higher world. There no conclusions regarding inner life are drawn from outer appearances. The inner life is openly displayed. We live with the essence of things there. In our time, only an initiate can develop this awareness, for he needs to be able to live in the higher world in conscious awareness. To the level of consciousness we have from waking up to going to sleep he can add another, and this enables him to add the inner to the outer. All people were able to do this in a way in the far distant past. Before the human race reached today’s state of conscious awareness, they had one where they saw things from the inside.

Going back into the far distant past we come to human beings who have less and less of the abilities we have today. Today we are able to count and do sums. In the middle of the Atlantean period you would find people who could not yet count and do sums, and there was no such thing as logic for them. In this respect the least of our schoolchildren today can do more than any Atlantean was ever able to do. But the Atlantean could do something else instead. Studying some life form, a plant, for example, he would have quite a specific feeling rise in him. Every plant had a specific feeling quality for him. Today people walk past plants in a way that is quite indifferent, but an Atlantean would develop lively sensations and feelings. If we go far enough back, to the times of the earliest Atlanteans, we would find that they also did not see the lively colours people do today. If such an Atlantean had walked up to a violet, he would not have seen it the way we have it here before us, but as if a kind of misty form arose before him. Nor would he have seen the red colour of a rose, but a red aura around the rose, with the red colour floating freely in space. If you look at a crystal today, it would be red if it were a ruby. The earliest Atlanteans would not have seen the colour in the crystal. The crystal would have been surrounded by a radiant circle of colour for them, and the ruby would have been like something cut out from this radiant circle. Going back to those times you go to a far distant past where human beings would not have seen the outline of other human beings, nor of a plant or an animal. Approaching someone who was hostile to them they would perceive a browny red colour. If they saw a beautiful blueish colour they would have been able to say to themselves: This person comes to me in peace. The inner life of a human being would show itself to them in such colours. Going even further back we come to the far, far distant past of ancient Lemuria, which lay between Asia, Australia and Africa. Not only did human beings have a different state of consciousness when they perceived things then, but everything we may call will impulse was also different. The will still worked through magic; it had power over other objects; it was like a force of nature that influences other objects. When a Lemurian held his hand above a plant and let his will go down into it, he could make the plant grow rapidly by just using his will.

The forces active in the natural world are exactly those that also exist in the human being. Because man has become a closed-off life form enclosed in a skin, his powers have gradually come to be more removed from and unlike the forces of nature. Human thinking is most unlike the forces of nature. To make mental connections and do sums is quite alien to anything that exists in nature. However, if you were able to go back far enough you’d see that there were life forms once, the mental ancestors of humanity, who would have considered it to be great nonsense, comparatively speaking, to say: 'I am forming an idea of something that is outside me'. They could not have said this, but they would have seen the idea, as it were, seeing it as an activity and even seeing the essence of it as an entity. To get an idea of this today you have to realize that the object was originally produced out of that idea. You get a notion of this if you think of the way something or other is produced by a person. You may think of a finished clock, the mechanism of it, and the way the hands move. You would not be able to do this if there had not been a clock maker earlier on to think the thoughts you are thinking now. You follow the thoughts he has put into the clock.

All ideas human beings are able to have today, everything our thinking does today, existed as a reality in our past, a reality that has been put into the objects. Everything is grasped in its idea. And once upon a time each of them was shaped according to the idea. The situation in the world was no different from the situation we have in the arts today. The ideas people develop today were originally put into the objects. If you were to go even further back you would see that those people could never have said: ‘I develop an idea by looking at things,’ for they truly saw what was happening there, how the idea was put in. They were watching the master craftsmen, as it were.

This gives you the difference between the rational thinking of people today and the intellect of those early times, which we’ll have to call creative. But if you were to meet those who still knew the creative mind from personal experience—very different from modern minds which merely take things in—you would find them to be very different from us. They had not yet incarnated in a human body. The essential human being which today dwells in the enveloping bodies was still in the keeping of divine spirits at that time.

Without noticing it, we have gone past a time in earth evolution that would appear like this, if we were to make the comparison: Physical life already existed on earth; forms had developed down below that were quite different from but in a way similar to today’s minerals, plants and animals, and others that were not yet human beings but were between animals and humans and ripe to be given the human soul. Their organization had reached a point where they would be able to receive the human soul. We can only make an approximation, but we may visualize human beings walking about down on earth who were really still animal-humans. Now think of the human bodies as small individual sponges and the souls as drops of water which at the time were still all united in a common body of water. So you have the physical earth teeming with fife, and enveloping it a soul atmosphere—rather like our air atmosphere today. Within that soul atmosphere everything was still undivided, like the drops of water. And what happened then was just like it would be if you now let the sponges absorb the water, with every sponge receiving a single drop. Common soul substance was absorbed into individual human bodies; it was divided among them. And it was only through this that the human soul came into being. Without this process, the human substance would never have divided into numerous single individuals.

This also began the process in which human beings gradually separated from the environment, and this would give them a distinct awareness of objects around them. Before this they did not develop concepts, for the soul was still wholly within the world soul, receiving the whole of its wisdom from the communal world soul as though it came from within. They did not need to look outside. We might truly say that this communal world soul could still do everything; it created everything that exists on earth today according to common concepts. Human beings received those concepts when that droplet of wisdom was given out by the communal world soul. That is the difference between the ancient knowledge before it was embodied in the flesh, and today’s knowledge which arises when human beings turn to the outside.

The moment we no longer perceive with the senses, our inner life goes down into the indefinite sphere of darkness we call dreamless sleep today. The physical body and the ether body remain lying in the bed during sleep, the astral body goes outside. What is it in the human being which perceives the outside world? The astral body perceives colours and sounds. The astral body experiences pleasure when we enjoy something pleasurable and it feels pain as such. But this astral body cannot do anything in the human being today unless it is in a physical body, for it needs eyes, ears and all the physical tools to perceive the environment and also pleasure, pain, sorrow, joy, and so on. The physical body is just a tool, but it is necessary to today’s astral body. The moment the astral body is outside the physical body it no longer has perceptions.

This is the very astral body which in earlier times was in the common soul substance that surrounded the earth. If you were to separate out all astral bodies and put them together, you would have the astral or soul substance which at that time existed around humanity. If we were able to get all human beings on earth today to fall asleep at the same time, so that the whole human race would be asleep at once, and if we were to lift out all the astral bodies and mix them into the rest of the substance, we would see dreamless sleep come to an end altogether. The souls would no longer perceive colours and sounds with their external tools, but colours would begin to rise on all those astral bodies, and constantly changing colour images would be floating all around, and sound would begin to arise within. All this would then surround the earth again, the way it was in those times before any soul ever came to enter into a body. The dimming of that ancient state of conscious awareness, something you know from your dreamless sleep today, occurred because the common astral substance was divided into individual parts by the world soul and these were absorbed into human bodies. You can go even further. At the time of which we are speaking, night as we know it today, with the human soul going down into an indefinite sphere of darkness, was wholly filled with light; it was day. So you have now been taken to a condition where humanity had astral perceptions, though not in a physical body.

Now let us ask the question as to what humanity has actually gained since those days. What has been added to what human beings had already? What has humanity gained through incarnation? They have gained the ability to say ‘I’ to themselves. The whole level of consciousness, however clairvoyant, was merely a more or less enhanced dream level of consciousness. Human beings had no self awareness at that time, so this is what humanity has gained. It is the gift which God gave them. Religious records such as the Bible tell us that human beings were given self-awareness at the time when they incarnated. They did not know it until then, and this self-awareness will be progressively enhanced in present-day humanity. It is the principle which from the time when we were no longer in a dim or clairvoyant state of consciousness came to be revealed as the ‘I am’, and we can call it by no other name but ‘I am the I am’. This, then, is the word of Jahve: ‘I am he who was, who is, and who shall be.’⁹²

We have thus gone back to a time when this ‘I am’ word was still extinguished. It was not yet in the human being. Human beings had a conscious awareness that had been poured into them and which they did not gain by looking at outside objects. Where did the ‘I am’ awareness reside? Divine spirits had such awareness. Human beings gained it after incarnation in a physical body. There you have the difference between the Holy Spirit, as it is termed among Christians, and the spirit as such. The Holy Spirit is the one which had self awareness up above, before incarnation; the spirit as such had self awareness in the human being. If you were to throw all self awarenesses into one pot, separating them from egoism, you would once again have the Holy Spirit.

You now have the point we started from in its most radical form. We have found our way back to a very strange way of teaching. Today we teach face to face, with the student told: This is how things are. In those times only one thing was possible, a method of teaching that was at the same time also work, doing. Wisdom was poured out into individuals. The wisdom did not come from outside; it came to human beings from inside, a process known only to initiates today. If you were now to move on to our own time from the times I have been speaking of just now, when there was no teaching but only enlightenment from inside, you would pass through an intermediate period where people were half in the one state, we might say, and half in the other. This was the middle of the Atlantean age. People were then able to see definite outlines to things, and would gradually see colour covering the surfaces of objects, see how individual things gained characteristics. But the way they would see it was as if it was all enveloped in a mist of colours. They would still hear sounds that went through the whole world, wise sounds that would tell them something and bring them knowledge of other entities. But everything was still very confused at this intermediate stage. It was also the time when a way of teaching began that gradually changed to become the later way of presenting religious contents to humanity.

If we were able to go back to Atlantean times, we would find a major school for adepts. People are able to take in wisdom today due to the fact that the Turanian adepts of those times had pupils; those pupils then instructed others and so on, until our own time, so that we have a direct tradition going back to Turanian adept schools⁹³

People were put into a trance to teach them wisdom. Something which would be wrong today was perfectly normal then. The individual would be put into a kind of sleep state, and this sleep state was used to enlighten him in the following way. Before the human soul first incarnated in a body there was no night, all human beings were enlightened. Dreamless sleep was the state in vhich they then had sensory perceptions. They no longer had these by this time. The faculty had gone, and instead they had the ability to see objects in general outline. Inner perception was lost to the same degree as external sensory perception increased. But a special skill had been developed among the adepts; they had learned what we would call occult writing today, or we might also call it occult speech. You all know that there are mantras, ancient formulations of prayers, and that the sound of the words has a certain influence. This holds true for the first words in the Gospel of John. When it says: ‘In the original beginning was the word’, the ‘original’ carries a specific value which originally was inherent in those first words in the Gospel of John altogether. All this is but a shadow compared to the sound compositions used in the adept schools. This made up for the capacity for enlightenment which people had lost. They were able to receive this enlightenment in a trance from another individual who was an initiate. The pupils were thus given a kind of artificial enlightenment by their more advanced brethren, so that they would see the spirits at work again, like before, at work in a world that had always been there around them before the human soul had incarnated. Those were the experiences the pupils would have in Turanian times; those were the first religious instructions; this is how they were taught the laws of the cosmos.

Enlightenment of this kind would give the people formulas and line drawings, for drawings, too, would have an influence. A line following a specific law would have the effect of teaching people great secrets of the world. If you drew a vortex for someone, it was something he would not have seen with his eyes open. But if the vortex was shown to him when he was in a trance, or if it was tapped out, this would have evoked quite specific inner responses, for example the way a plant develops until it produces seed and then a new plant grows from the seed. Such formulas and such lines were later handed down from the adept schools and given to the nations by the founders of the different religions.

The further back we go, the more is the soul principle that was distributed among individual human beings a uniform soul. When the individual souls were distributed they were closed off from one another, and they then grew different. In sleep, all astral bodies are still similar to one another today. In the daytime they look fairly different from each other. And that is how it was in this trance state in which the astral bodies that were given instruction were really fairly similar. It was therefore possible to convey a certain original wisdom to them all. But when human beings were no longer able to receive wisdom in this way, the teaching in ancient India had to be the way the Indian body required it, in ancient Persia as the Persian body required it, and different again in Greece, in Egypt and among the ancient Germans. The outer physical bodies required this, according to the different influences that were brought to bear on them. The founders of the original religions had cast their teaching in the forms we now know from tradition as Egyptian Hermetic teaching, the teaching of Zarathustra, and so on.

But in all the basic forms of true religions there still lives the principle out of which they have arisen. The enlightenment given to human beings in earlier times was something very different from what can be done today. Things were conveyed not by teaching but in a living way. A pupil would relate to his teacher in a much more intimate way then. You can imagine perhaps that a vortex would elicit a direct inner response. Today, concepts are conveyed, and our inner responses have to catch fire from those concepts. But the religious formulas arose from exactly this way of influencing people through life itself. The sevenfold nature of man was one of the things that was made known in the Turanian adept school. And it still makes up the hidden thoughts in the Lord’s Prayer today. The Lord’s Prayer reflects the sevenfold nature of man.

This would be made clear to the disciple of the Turanian adepts by letting him hear a scale, the seven sounds of which represented the seven parts of the human being, with certain colours shown and a scale of aromas. The principle that lives in the sevenfold harmony of the scale would become an inner experience; the external things were just a means to this. The founders of the great religions then poured this into a number of formulas, the greatest of them the Lord’s Prayer, and everyone who says the Lord’s Prayer is influenced by it.

The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer and as such is not a mantra. It will still have meaning when thousands and thousands of years will have passed, for it is a thought mantra. The effect of the Lord’s Prayer was poured into the thoughts, and just as we are well able to digest food without having a physiologist tell us how the digestive process works, so will someone who says the Lord’s Prayer feel the effect of it even if he is not told all about it The effect of the Lord’s Prayer is there, for it lies in the power of the thoughts themselves. There is, however, higher knowledge that will give the Lord’s Prayer deeper meaning, and no one should reject this. This, then, is the road that has been taken by the religious truths. Your souls, living in your bodies today, once lived in the common divine spirit substance and were enlightened there in a sleepwalking state. Without self-awareness, they were able to perceive the divine spiritual powers at work. Then the souls were incarnated. The old way of perception became more and more obscured and they finally were also no longer able to produce this state artificially, the way in which it was still done at the Turanian adept school. The religious teachings and formulas which have come down from the original wisdom that once created the world are a mere echo of the inner responses that can be passed on from one individual to another. The wisdom of the Old Testament is like something spoken by the first and original ideas, the original wisdom that is at the bottom of all things, a wisdom which your soul once had. In future, human beings will have this again, this wisdom they originally had in a dim dreamlike consciousness; but they will have it in bright, clear conscious awareness, from the soul. Human beings will have their present bright, clear conscious minds and also enlightenment. Humanity had to give up the original clairvoyance in order to gain self-awareness, and as this clairvoyance grew less and less, inner self-awareness developed more and more. Once this has reached its peak, the human being will have come to his last incarnation, bearing the old clairvoyance within him as the fruit of life that is also an element which has been newly acquired.

A phrase one often hears is that people should gradually lose themselves in a common consciousness, that redemption lies in their losing their present-day conscious awareness and becoming part of a collective mind and spirit. But that is not how it is. Our self-awareness, which once did not exist at all, will continue to exist after our last incarnation. Everything that had separated out from the common spiritual substance will come together again.

You can visualize it like this: Initially you had clear water, and this was absorbed into the many small sponges. During this period of separation, everything in the environment that can be taken up will be taken up. Every droplet gains its own special colouring. When the small sponges are squeezed dry again, each brings its own colour with it. That is a vast variety of colours, shimmering, more beautiful than it could ever have been before. On returning to the collective spirit, every human being brings his own colour note with him. This is his individual conscious awareness, something that can never be lost. The collective consciousness will be a symphony of all individual conscious minds, a harmony. The spirits that have gone through the human stage will freely unite and be one. They will continue to be many individuals, but they will also be one because they want to be one though they are not forced to be so. All have retained the conscious mind, and through their will they all come together in a conscious awareness that is one. This is how we should think of the beginning and end of our present world process.

We must not use phrases but consider things the way they are. To talk of ‘losing oneself in a common consciousness’ is a pantheistic phrase. It is exactly when we speak from the point of view of eternity that we shall have to consider words that will show that humanity has not existed for nothing, that it had significance within the universe. In other words, someone who studies the real facts in this world will finally say to himself that man is destined to contribute, to give meaning to this life. Ultimately he will have to place the piece he has gained for himself on the altar of the godhead. And this creates a fabric, as it has been put so beautifully, which the whole spirit of the earth is weaving. This holds all the human ‘I’s, and Goethe spoke as a true initiate when he described it as a real process:

I ply on my wave
With weaving motion
Birth and the grave,
A boundless ocean,
Ceaselessly giving
Weft of living,
Forms unending,
Glowing and blending,
So work I on the whirring loom of time,
The life that clothes the deity sublime.⁹⁴

The deity will wear the immortal garb when earth will have reached its completion. Individual human beings will have woven the fabric as they moved up through their individual incarnations, always going through birth and death.

• 92. Genesis 3: 14; Rev. 1:8.
• 93. The Turanians were the fourth sub-race on Atlantis. See Steiner R. Cosmic Memory (GA 11), chapter on our Atlantic ancestors. Tr. K. E. Zimmer. New York: Harper and Row 1981
• 94. Goethe, Faust 1, Night scene.

Spiritual science or “theosophy” is widely unknown even today. You may probably hear some judgement and criticism about this spiritual science, but only few people deal really with it. One surely knows a little about it in the circles of our educated people. Those few people deal most seriously and in quite scientific sense with the questions of the spiritual life, take the most elementary phenomena of this spiritual life as starting point and go up then to the highest questions which the human being can put to himself, to the questions of death and life, of the development of the whole humanity, even questions of the evolution of our planet or planetary system. Such questions find a widespread prejudice by which people think to be entitled not to get themselves into such attempts. Since what, they mean, can one suppose behind it? Any sect based mainly on dilettantish ideas.—They know very little that the human beings who belong to this supposed sect study the important questions with scientific seriousness and thoroughness after methods and authorities that are just quite unknown to most of our present educated people. They do not suspect that talking about spiritual science as something sectarian is equally reasonable, as if one considered chemistry or botany as something sectarian.

Since one believes, scientific methods are not at all possible compared with these questions, and believes to be offhand about such attempts. Today, indeed, one admits that one has to do preliminary studies in chemistry or botany, has to go to the resources to understand something of them, but one does not admit that it is necessary or even possible to do that concerning the highest questions of the spiritual life of humanity. Indeed, one is in case of spiritual science still in another situation than compared with chemistry or botany. These sciences treat things and questions that concern special fields of life and one can make use of that which they give within these special relations of life. However, we have to regard that which is done with scientific thoroughness in the area of spiritual science as questions of big significance for the human future, for our whole life praxis, for the firmness and confidence of our whole life.

If one considers the question of the significance of spiritual science for the future, I have to point with some words to the whole being of this spiritual science at first. This is necessary, although I already had the honour several times to speak about these questions and about the method of spiritual science in this city. If there is talk of science today, one has that science in mind which is based on our senses and on everything that one can attain with the reason, which is bound to the outer instrument of the brain. The question always originates concerning the highest areas of existence how far one can penetrate with such a science into these areas which tell something about the questions: how is the nature of life? How is the nature of death? Which is the nature of humanity generally and its development?

Spiritual science argues that there is not only an outer science, which is connected with a particular level of human cognitive faculties, but that these cognitive faculties are capable of development, so that—if we only want it—we can unfold higher cognitive faculties than those are which observe in the sensory-physical world with the senses and understand with the reason bound to the brain. As well as the present science points to the experiment, to attempts with outer, mechanical means, spiritual science points to an attempt which can be done solely with the means of our soul itself. Our soul behaves in the normal life in a particular way. However, one can change this way, so that we can also put questions to the spiritual world as we put them to the phenomena of nature with experiments. Not with outer attempts and tools we can penetrate into the spiritual world, but while we wake slumbering soul forces. There are particular soul exercises—they are discussed in detail in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?—, intimate performances of our soul which can strengthen our will, so that we can perceive contents in our soul or by our soul where we perceive nothing in the so-called normal life. Then we experience moments by such soul exercises that you can compare, on one side, with falling asleep, that are quite different on the other side. What do we experience at first if we fall asleep? We experience if we observe only externally that the outer impressions stop and, finally, unconsciousness spreads out in us.

There that technique to which spiritual science refers shows that we have to talk of unconsciousness in this case of falling asleep only because we cannot develop so strong forces if all outer impressions stop, that the soul feels its own being and that it cannot establish a relationship to its environment in which it is then and which is spiritual. If now the human being opens himself to particular contents of thought and feeling, he can also feel as a being if all outer impressions are quiet. Then he is in the same situation as someone is who sleeps, and, nevertheless, his situation is radically different. He can exclude all outer impressions consciously and by his will and everything that speaks, otherwise, in the wake state to him by the senses and the reason. Then he is not unconscious but lets the full contents of the soul life light up.

I can only indicate the soul exercises. With the usual mental pictures, we can never develop such strong forces. Another kind of mental pictures is necessary to put those forces in motion in our soul; we can call them symbolic ones. We can open ourselves to a picture so that we do not admit outer impressions in our soul, quieten our recollections, and free the soul as it were. I imagine, for example, a rose or something else, and I let this symbol come to life in myself as the only image to which I dedicate myself. This is not appropriate to deliver usual, physical truths; however, it can work like a seed in our soul. As a seed which is planted in the earth stretches its roots in all directions, this image sends out its different ramifications into the whole soul life, and this image grows in us. Indeed, if we want to do such intimate soul exercises, our soul life must have a steady hold; we are not allowed to be dreamy, fantastic, confused people. We have to know for sure what we do and that we have such an image in our soul.

Let us imagine, for example, three cases of actions out of compassion, and from the comparison [of the actions] we try to develop not an entire image of thought but an entire image of feeling of compassion. Now we try to forget everything that actions of compassion are in our world and let this impulse solely be active in our soul. Then we have such a sensation, from which the roots go out to rich, full contents of the soul. Thereby we can reach that moment gradually which can be compared with falling asleep, and which is, nevertheless, quite different from it. The everyday impressions, joy and sorrow, all thoughts have to sink down. Somebody who wants to become a spiritual researcher has to exclude all outer impressions while he has developed his will with such inner experiences. He has to establish that condition which the soul experiences if the body is in the state of unconsciousness. Then soul states are created in which quite different states of consciousness exist where the soul positions itself quite different to the outside world where it is for the soul like for a blind-born who has seen no colours and forms and sees them after an operation. In this clairvoyant state he sees something else than that which surrounds him, otherwise, in the physical world; he receives new impressions from the spiritual world which forms the basis of our physical-sensory world.

Then we may say, if the human being falls asleep in the evening, the whole human being does not exhaust himself in that which lies in the bed, but the core of the human being, the spiritual-mental, has left this outer cover. This core has no organs in the normal consciousness, but it has received spiritual-mental organs by the soul exercises characterised just now by which he feels moved into a new world. The real experience in the spiritual-mental is thereby given; a new world of observation is thereby given, and then from these elementary facts of spiritual experience we ascend to the highest facts. Now there are such single persons who do exercises full of renunciation to develop their souls as tools. If then these persons tell some people who are interested in such matters what they have found out in other states of consciousness, these believe it. With someone who becomes familiar with theosophy only cursorily it is comprehensible if he believes this, because if one knows only that which exists on the surface of life, it is exceptionally difficult to form an idea of how this spiritual science is practised. Hence, it is comprehensible that most people misjudge it. I have to emphasise this. One can understand that such persons only believe those revelations of the spiritual world that one attains in the described way. For most educated people it immediately suggests itself to regard such persons as daydreamers, romanticists, and sectarians.

However, one misjudges a particular fact: the developed soul, the developed other consciousness is necessary to do research in the spiritual world, to discover the spiritual truths. Even if today few people can only develop their souls as tools to behold into the spiritual world with them and then to inform what they have grasped there, it is enough for those who approach the matter with a certain sense of truth and with impartiality.

The trained soul of the spiritual researcher is necessary for discovering such truths; for understanding the facts, only unprejudiced logic is necessary. If such things are informed, they agree for everybody who wants to think in much higher degree with the whole life than any other philosophy does. Hence, everybody can check the probative force of that which the spiritual researcher informs. However, it is not enough to familiarise yourself with the results, because the logic and the whole system of concepts of the soul development to ascend to the higher worlds is subtle and strict. You can say that more strict demands are put on logic and comprehension than in the usual science in any field. However, if one does not want to judge the matters in a breath, but is anxious in the whole soul to settle in the way of this new imagination to understand what arises about the highest questions of existence, then this settling does not possibly work like suggestion, but the soul can pursue it consciously. Every soul can familiarise itself in those areas where the highest questions of human existence, of time and eternity are treated.

Does this proclamation of spiritual science or theosophy have any meaning for the human civilisation of today and the future? One has to put this question. Since one could argue, there can be people who are interested in such things because of certain longings, but they are mavericks who prefer to contemplate in their rooms, but would have nothing to do with the big processes in the human civilisation.—One cannot say this if one surveys the course of human development with understanding so that just the time at which we live now faces our soul after its being.

Our time has developed from that which humanity has experienced from prehistory up to now. From the present developmental level again the experiences of the future human beings develop. If we look back at the human states of consciousness, you realise that you are prejudiced if you believe that the whole soul condition, the way of thinking, the way how he forms ideas and concepts of his environment, that the states of the human consciousness are almost the same at all times. That is not the case. Indeed, one applies the word development to the transformation of the outer forms, but seldom to the human soul life, and just concerning the human soul life, is the concept of development something that points us deeply to the most important questions of humanity.

The spiritual-scientific investigation of the human soul and the conclusions, which you can draw from it, show that. Since at ancient times the human consciousness lagged far behind, it was different from that of today so that we can speak of times of the human development at which the human soul lived even in a kind of clairvoyant state of consciousness. However, it was not in such a way, as it is with the today's trained spiritual researcher. The clairvoyant state of the today's trained spiritual researcher takes place with full consciousness that he also has in the normal life. That was not the case with the old clairvoyant. He had a more dreamy clairvoyance, a dreamlike consciousness. It was in such a way that we can say, what the human being experiences today in his dreams is an atavistic rest of the ancient state of consciousness. While today dream images mostly mean nothing particular for the reality of the outside world, those old states of consciousness were images that you can compare, indeed, to our dream images, nevertheless, they were different from them. The images that were often symbolic were the contents of an old clairvoyant consciousness, which was not penetrated with modern intellectuality. In the soul of the prehistoric human beings, these images surged up and down. The prehistoric human beings possibly did not always have such pictorial consciousness. Wake states and sleeping states also alternated, but while these merge into each other with us and a mostly meaningless dream state is between them, the third state of consciousness existed in ancient times, the state of such a pictorial consciousness, in which our sensory images did not surge up and down in the soul but symbols as art has them at most in weakened form.

These symbols surged up and down with full liveliness in these three states of consciousness, and they were not like our dream images that we must not refer them to a reality, but they were clearly directed upon a reality, so that the outer reality was recognised with them, even if only in symbols. One experienced a spiritual world that was behind the sensory world. Thus, the prehistoric human beings had a picture consciousness, so that they did not need our today's intellectuality and wisdom of the wake consciousness. For it, they beheld into a spiritual world in the pictures of a dreamlike clairvoyance.

Now one may ask, is there anything in the outer world that proves that to some extent what you spiritual researchers behold there, if you look back at prehistory? Is there anything that can deliver a document that once humanity could behold into the spiritual worlds?—Oh, there is such a thing! However, the human beings have to learn to interpret this thing in right way. What is preserved of the prehistoric attempts to penetrate into the inner being of the things? With the prehistoric humanity, we look in vain for a science as we have it today, but legends and myths have been preserved. Now the present enlightened human being says that this corresponds to the childish imagination of the ancient humanity; we have entered into the manhood of science now. However, someone who delves into the myths of the various peoples experiences something else than such a superficial rater, he experiences that these images are associated in miraculous way everywhere [with the spiritual life of humanity]. If one penetrates into these images, deep connections with this spiritual life of humanity and its culture present themselves. One gets more and more respect for the wonderful arrangement of the pictures in the ancient myths and legends, so that you often say to yourself, what are all philosophies of the present compared with the wonderful pictures that the myths have preserved. They agree all over the world and they comply with that which the spiritual researcher can find with his method in the spiritual world, so that we have to ask ourselves, where from do these old images come which can be found all over the world?.

A conscientious research finds the explanation only if it supposes that these things are remains of an ancient clairvoyance. One judges wrong if one says, the myths of the ancient peoples have arisen from childish imagination. No, we can understand them only if we assume that our ancestors beheld with their clairvoyant picture consciousness [into the spiritual world].

Still about 1800 numerous persons had a notion of the fact that there was such pictorial wisdom and that the wonderful spiritual voices from the myths of the various peoples tell of a primeval wisdom. At that time they were still clear in their mind that the peoples which one regards as decadent today have only descended from a higher point of view that, however, everything that humanity has as culture today goes back to primeval times where the knowledge of the spiritual world was still alive.

There were serious researchers who were convinced of this fact. If we ask Aristotle, Plato, and the other Greek philosophers, we find numerous passages where they speak about the fact that any science goes back to the primeval wisdom that the gods had given the human beings. Plato speaks of human beings of the Cronus age who took over the old wisdom directly from the spiritual world. The spiritual researchers do not only say to us that this was in such a way, but also, why this ancient clairvoyance gradually disappeared from humanity.

There we come to the important law that you can also observe in nature that is especially obvious, however, in the spiritual life of humanity: the fact that for the development of a certain force at first another force has to withdraw. The ancient human beings who could behold in certain states of their consciousness into a spiritual world did not yet have our intellect; they had no science, no civilisation in our sense. Intellectuality had only to develop. Development is something that leads us to the deepest questions of the soul life. Our intelligence, the intellectual condition that we have today, where we completely rely on the sensory perception and on the reason bound to the brain could enter in the general human consciousness only while the old clairvoyance withdrew for a while, was drowned by the intellectual consciousness.

Somebody who knows something of the basic character of the Middle Ages knows that the peculiar spiritual development of the Middle Ages can be explained if one knows that the Middle Ages were the time in which gradually the old clairvoyance disappeared. The biggest impulse in the human development, the Christ impulse that will once induce humanity to take up clairvoyance completely had the task to make the old clairvoyance withdraw. Thus, a peculiar phenomenon appears with the advent of the new time: the old clairvoyance withdraws, only the traditional truths remain which one had gained with the old clairvoyance. Thus, the branches of knowledge propagated in the Middle Ages which were gained on the basis of the old clairvoyance. However, one did not know that, one had only understood the ideas which were found in primeval times, yes, one applied them even quite wrong at the end of the Middle Ages.

One example: Aristotle was already at the turning point of the intellectual age, but he still saw back in dark notion at the time in which the human being knew something by clairvoyance, at the processes of human imagining and feeling, at the human evolution, and he describes this. He did no longer have the ancient clairvoyance; he had the tradition only. There he said, if the human being is active in his soul, in his wake state, we deal with the physical body at first, and this has its organs. However, Aristotle would still have been reluctant to regard the material body as the only member of the human being. He pointed to a higher member that has its centre near the heart, and from this supersensible member certain currents originate which go up especially to the brain and spread as supersensible currents in the human body. One still called these currents “cold light” in the Middle Ages that pours forth in particular into the brain to invigorate its physical organs. Still in the Middle Ages people spoke of this cold light which spreads out where the physical heart is.

One can understand Aristotle only if one knows that that which he lets originate from the heart is thought as supersensible currents that he does not mean physical strands, organs, or the like. Now the Middle Ages came. The people lost the understanding of the old clairvoyance. They read Aristotle, and through the Middle Ages the faith in Aristotle was like a faith in the Bible. Aristotle was the basis of natural science, of medicine, of everything. Everything was based on Aristotle. However, people had no idea of that which, actually, Aristotle had meant. Thus, a peculiar mental picture could develop just with the most religious supporters of Aristotle, with those who believed bravely in him, but did no longer understand him. Since—as everybody knows—it is not necessary that everything is understood that one believes. Mental pictures could develop so that one did not mean supersensible currents that originate in the heart but sensory strands. Thus, Aristotle's believers believed that from the heart the nerves originate.

Now the great researchers and thinkers came at the end of the Middle Ages, like Giordano Bruno, Galilei and others who designed a new worldview on the basis of the worldview of Copernicus. However, Aristotle's believers were not inclined to accept this new worldview simply. Galilei and Giordano Bruno pointed to the real world of the senses because now the time began in which the human beings should develop their knowledge by sensory observation and intellect. There it happened that Galilei led a friend who was a good Aristotle believer in front of a corpse and showed him that the nerves originate not from the heart but from the brain. The friend saw this and said, yes, it seems to be in such a way, as if the nerves originate from the brain, but I read something different with Aristotle, and if a contradiction exists, I believe Aristotle.

This time was ripe to dismiss what of the ancient clairvoyance was handed down as tradition, because it was completely misunderstood. At that time, there was a special impetus of the intellectual development. Many physical concepts lead back to the way of thinking of Galilei with which we still work today. The material, mechanical thinking was directed immediately upon the outer sensory world and upon its intellectual understanding. The age of intellect was dawning in scientific areas, and now we can observe from that time up to now repeatedly how the human being wants to conquer this area of the human soul life whose most important part was the conquest of the outer reality with the intellect. The following shows a particularly drastic expression how one could think solely materially in the Middle Ages, but still had the old tradition.

None of the old clairvoyant wise men would have come up with the idea that the spiritual world is “on top,” that there is a blue firmament, which encloses our world. The old clairvoyants did not think this way; one only misunderstood them later. There one pointed to the fixed starry sky as a kind of bowl that surrounds our world. It was a great moment, when Copernicus pulled the rug out from under the feet of the human beings as it were. It was a great moment when Gordano Bruno expanded this “bowl” into the infinity of the physical space. However, Giordano Bruno put something else beside the sensory picture. We need only to call a few words of Giordano Bruno in mind and we realise that he accomplished the great action to put a spiritual picture beside this sensory picture. He said that everything that surrounds us in the sensory world is rooted in the thoughts of the universal spirit, which manifest in the outer forms, in that which we perceive with the senses. If Giordano Bruno points to the endless cosmic space and looks for the being of the things manifest to the senses, this was for him, nevertheless, nothing but the embodiment of the thoughts of the universal spirit. Giordano Bruno calls the human mental pictures shades of the divine thoughts, not shades of the outer things. If Giordano Bruno turns the physical view to the outer world, the idea of the universal spirit enters into his soul mysteriously, and the human concepts are not shades of the outer sensory things but the thoughts of the universal spirit.

It is very important that we face Giordano Bruno as a great spirit who points to the cosmic space but also strongly to that which connects the human soul with the primeval spirit. You can compare this attitude already with the intelligence and the attitude of the today's science which was still fertilised, however, by the traditions of the old clairvoyance. One may say, a shade of the old clairvoyance and of the relationship with the divine-spiritual world still lived in Giordano Bruno. However, to us only the picture remained which he designed of the outer sensory world, and no more that which was still alive in him at that time. The picture of the old clairvoyance that lived in him disappeared. You only need to pursue the development without prejudice up to now, then you realise that more and more the mere intellect spread in the normal consciousness.

Hence, what has one to say about our age? There one may say that we live so surely in the age of intellect, of reason and its application to the sensory world. Now one has to investigate the peculiar effect of the intellect in the sense of spiritual science compared to the clairvoyant knowledge. This differs substantially from the knowledge of the intellect and the sensory observation. The difference consists in the fact that any clairvoyant knowledge that anyhow enables the connection of the human being with the spiritual world works on our mood, and from it, a feeling of the position of the human being in the whole universe arises. The clairvoyant knowledge is powerful, it pours sensations and feelings in our souls, it satisfies our longings, strengthens our hopes, kindles our love. One cannot imagine that the human being participates in the supersensible knowledge without changing it into feeling and sensation. Hence, we realise how the pictorial legends and myths were taken up in the images of ancient peoples not indifferently, but in such a way that the whole soul either could be delighted and given to a supersensible world or be contrite about its own smallness. This also belongs to the nature of intelligence that it darkens any supersensible knowledge in a way. We can observe that in our usual soul life. When any pictorial image which appears, as one says, intuitive or on the way of inspiration is grasped in abstractions, the deep emotional contents disappear which it gives the whole personality and the whole soul life. Intellect brings understanding largely, but extinguishes any immediate soul effect of the supersensible knowledge.

I bring in nothing made-up, nothing that you cannot read in numerous books. There the representatives of intelligence point to Buddha, to Christ, to Zarathustra, to Pythagoras and so on and say, the human soul faces the big world, it grasps the world in different way. The fact that the supersensible knowledge reaches to the soul was connected with strong courage for existence that caused the consciousness of our connection with the spiritual of the world. Indeed, intelligence leads to understanding on the surface of the things, but it cannot evoke a feeling of inner courage. Thus, we see despondence, feebleness toward the penetration of knowledge as a characteristic feature of our time. Our time praises and emphasises that which science accomplishes. They do that rightly. However, where people believe to think deeper they say that the human being does not come to the primal grounds of the things. Neither Pythagoras, nor Christ, nor Zarathustra would have known how to say something about these primal grounds. Nevertheless, this proves very well that instead of the old knowledge and confidence a knowledge of despondence appeared.

There are two forms of resignation. The old clairvoyant could say, as well as in my conditions, in my age the human abilities have developed, they are not sufficient to behold into the primal grounds of the things—- one has to resign.—This was another resignation than that which we find today. Why did the old clairvoyant resign? Because he realised: as I am, I am not yet capable to attain knowledge.—He resigns out of modesty, out of the consciousness that in him, indeed, the highest forces are, but that he cannot unfold them because of his imperfection. This is heroic resignation, full of confidence; this is the human being to whom the gates of the world riddles are not closed.

However, one says today, the human being cannot at all penetrate [into the knowledge of higher worlds]; as well as he is constituted; his cognitive faculties can never be so highly developed.—This is a fundamental resignation. It differs quite substantially from the heroic resignation; it has something arrogant because it declares the level of knowledge to be absolute. What it cannot recognise is generally beyond the human knowledge.

The age of intelligence is fulfilled with other sensations, with sensations of negative kind because it cannot be productive, in contrast to the times of the old clairvoyance. Humanity had to come to this point if it should lose all old mental pictures, also those of faith, and for that, it required the culture of intelligence.

However, the inner life would become banal if only the intelligence should be entitled to illumine the inner life of the human being. Hence, spiritual science or theosophy appears in the present and shows that it is possible again to bring out forces from the depths of the human soul that penetrate the intelligence with a higher cognitive power which leads the human beings again into the spiritual worlds. Thus, the new clairvoyant knowledge wants to be an incentive and a help to the intellectual knowledge, and it gives humanity again that which it needs to possess the light of intelligence not only that leaves the soul empty, but also to possess such a knowledge which again brings strength and confidence and hope in our lives. Numerous human beings long for such knowledge that can be changed into courage and power in our soul. Someone who understands the whole spirit of the new development from the aurora of the intellectual age up to its today's climax will also understand that for the future of humanity the fulfilment of the soul with contents is necessary. Since intelligence only would be able to extinguish the soul, but would not deliver new soul contents. Advanced people of the present criticize the old mental pictures or register them at most as history. One dives, so to speak, back to register the old mental pictures. However, spiritual science will be,—although it is true science—always such a science, which gives the powerful feeling of the coherence with the spiritual worlds. It wants to give our souls contents and to fertilise them with contents.

With it spiritual science points to its future mission. Such a science will again give sensation and feeling in the most natural way. Indeed, intelligence builds the bridge from the ancient times to the future, but the mission of spiritual science is to penetrate this intelligence with the living value of the spiritual life as food for the souls. Because in our time intelligence has reached its highest development, just this time was chosen by those who know how to interpret the spirit of the time to attempt to intervene by spiritual science to conquer [living soul contents for] the soul gradually again.

Thus, spiritual science positions itself not as something arbitrary or as something arbitrarily invented in our age, but as something that has to get to know the real sense, the deepest tasks, and riddles of our age. If the human soul opens itself to spiritual science with complete impartiality, then it will feel that spiritual science copes with any outer science concerning logic and intellect that it develops the logic in such a way that it appears as a force of love, of compassion, of life security in our souls. Any soul will feel the high sense of spiritual science and understand whose nature we can summarise with the words:

The things of cosmic space
Speak to the human senses;
They change in the course of time.
The human soul lives recognising,
Spatially unlimited and not
Confused by the course of time,
In the realm of the eternal spirit.

When we cast a glance back over the discussions of the previous two meetings, allowing the main experience to stand before our souls, we become aware of the fundamentally dual nature of the human being. We have seen how everything that comes to life in a human soul during waking consciousness can be traced back to the influence on man of the heavens and of the universe—to what these, taken in their cosmic significance, have imprinted on humanity. The foundations of certain other, deeper regions of human nature, regions which in a normal life only well up in dream-consciousness, can be traced back to terrestrial influences and impressions that are earthly in a more narrow sense. When the world is observed in the light of spiritual science, everything that is perceived by the senses must be seen as a real expression of the spirit.

The picture a human being presents to the senses reveals his dual nature. That is most easily imagined if you consider the skeleton. There it is most clear, for the skeleton is clearly divided into two distinct parts: the head—the skull—and the remaining parts of the body. And, in principle, the only thing that holds these two together is a thin skeletal cord. The head really has just been set on top of the rest. One can knock it off. This is an outer, pictorial expression of the dual nature of a human being, for the head makes waking consciousness possible. The remaining parts, the parts of the skeleton that hang down from the head, form the basis for the life that plays itself out more or less unconsciously. The unconscious life only wells up in dreams or in the creative fantasy of poets and artists, penetrating normal consciousness with its fire and warmth and light. In that, something of an unquestionably earthly nature is working into usual waking consciousness—the noblest part of earthly nature, perhaps, but earthly all the same. Yesterday, in the awareness of time that was typical of the ancient Hebrew culture we found direct evidence that mankind once possessed knowledge, explicit and fundamental knowledge, of the connections between super-earthly occurrences and human waking consciousness. We saw how that which can be called cosmic thought, and which is expressed in the movements of the stars, creates an image of itself in waking human consciousness. Man has a waking consciousness because, in the first place, he is able to make use of the organs in his head. And we have considered the wonderful way that mankind participates in the whole universe, and includes both its heavenly and its earthly aspects.

If one is going to do justice to everything connected with these weighty and significant facts, one must free oneself from prejudice. One ahrimanic prejudice is particularly common in those who still harbour a longing to be mystics. The prejudice comes to expression in a certain sensibility, and consists in the belief that what is earthly is worthless and absolutely must be overcome—that it is coarse, contemptible stuff that a spiritually striving person does not even mention. That for which one must strive is the spirit! This is the way such people experience things, even if their concept of the spirit is confused and they can only picture it in terms of the physical senses. Therefore I said that this prejudice expresses itself more as a sensibility in a particular direction. But one will never be able to understand the nature of either mankind or of the world as long as one clings to this prejudiced mode of experience. A person who is living on earth in an earthly human body can only preserve such a sensibility by viewing the earth in a one-sided way. Following from this attitude to the earth comes a longing—a partially justified longing—for the super-earthly and for things that should be experienced between death and a new life. But one will never be able to develop any sort of clarity in one's feelings for the life between death and a new birth as long as earthly things are regarded in the manner to which I just alluded. For, paradoxical though it may sound, the following is a true statement—and you will find it clearly expressed in various lecture cycles: the dead, those living in spirit and the soul in the interval between death and a new birth, speak of the earth in the same way that men on earth speak of heaven. The earth is a shimmering vision that hovers in front of them in the way the vision of heaven hovers in the mind's eye of those on earth. Earth is the desired other world for which those living in heaven yearn. They speak of earth in the way we speak of heaven. It is the longed-for land towards which they strive, the land of their approaching incarnation. If one loses sight of this, one forms a false picture of how the dead live.

I have often warned you not to interpret the basic dictum, ‘In the spirit, everything is reversed,’ too pedantically. One cannot obtain a correct picture of the spiritual world simply by turning around all one's pictures of the physical world. Nothing very special comes from applying such a rule abstractly. The particular facts must be considered, even though, as I have told you, this rule about reversal applies to many things. Then, for example, someone who is investigating the spiritual worlds can get to know an extraordinary land, a land where individuals find themselves among other men. The men among whom they find themselves are normal, earthly men like the devout people we meet on earth. I say, specifically, like devout people on earth, for these are people who have a certain feeling for things of the earth and a certain feeling for the things of heaven. Also among the people to be met there are those who totally deny everything earthly. They deny all matter, all substance. They maintain that only spirit exists and that it is a superstition to believe in matter.

The land I am describing is not in the physical world; it belongs to the spirit-region that is revealed when one's gaze is directed towards a particular part of the spiritual world that lies between, say, the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries. All of you were then living in the spiritual world. At least in the first part of this period, we were all still living in the spiritual world. The majority of us were experiencing the heavenly realms which were about us, and also the earthly realm towards which we were striving and which, over there, was the world beyond. But then there were those who viewed all talk of earthly things as superstition. They maintained that only the spirit exists and that the earthly, material realm is just a dream world. And yes, naturally, these men, too, were eventually born. They were known by such names as Ludwig Buchner,⁵ Ernst Haeckel,⁶ Carl Vogt,⁷ and so on. These men, whose lives on earth you are well-enough acquainted with, are the same ones who explained away belief in material things as superstition and who, during the stage when they were approaching their most recent life in the physical world, viewed the spiritual world as the only real world. They did this because the spiritual world was what was around them and they did not want to consider something that was not around them, some world beyond. Why, you will be asking yourselves, would such individuals be born into souls that developed the view that material is all that exists? You may ask yourselves this, but you can nevertheless understand it, when you see that these individuals showed a lack of understanding for the material world before they were born, and that this remained with them. For anyone who sees matter as something absolute, rather than as an expression of the spirit, has completely failed to understand matter. One is not a materialist when one represents materialism in the way the aforementioned personages represented it. Understanding the substantial nature of the material world does not make one a materialist; a person becomes a materialist precisely because he does not understand the substantial nature of matter. Thus, these individuals did not change, they retained their lack of understanding for matter.

So there you have an area in which the spiritual world is a total reversal of what the appearances in the physical world would lead you to expect. But, as I said, this rule should not be abstractly extended to cover everything. I have gone into all this about how the earthly realm becomes the ‘other world’ when we are living between death and a new birth so that you will not misinterpret the contrast that ancient Greek mythology expressed with the words, ‘Uranus’ and ‘Gaia’. Uranus and Gaia were not incompatible, one referring to what is absolutely valuable and the other to what is absolutely worthless. They were conceived as a polarity that exists within a unity: Uranus represents the peripheral, encircling realm whose polar opposite is the point at the centre, Gaia. To begin with, when they spoke of Uranus and Gaia, the Greeks did not limit their thoughts to the narrow confines of human sexuality or earthly life. They were thinking of the contrast we just mentioned—between heaven and earth. This is the contrast they intended.

I must go into this, as otherwise we will not be able to understand what is to follow. As it is these days, it is difficult to make certain truths about humanity accessible. But it is possible to just touch on certain things, which is what we shall do, in so far as that is possible.

As we enter into these considerations, I ask you keep in mind the sense in which human nature is dual, and how this is outwardly expressed in the form of the human body, with its head that is attached to everything else. The whole process of shaping the human head, the whole of the essential process, takes place during the time between the last death and a new birth. The physical head must be produced on earth, of course, but that is not what I am talking about. I mean the form that it acquires; and the way the head is formed depends on forces that go far back in time. The human head is received, ready-shaped, from heaven, for all the powers that are at work between death and a new birth are really concerned with building the head. The human head comes from the heavens, even though it must follow the path of physical birth and physical heredity. The rest of the body is the only part that comes from the earth. So, as regards the form of the body, a human being is a product of Uranus and Gaia: the head originates in heavenly forces, the body originates in earthly forces—Uranus and Gaia.

Now at birth, when a human being makes his appearance, this whole thing is so strongly evident that one can truly say that part of him, his head, has just been introduced into the physical world and still expresses only the forces of the heavenly realm from which it has come—and that another part, the body, is the expression of earthly forces. This is especially evident just after birth. There is a strong contrast between the head and the rest of the body for those whose sight is informed by a deeper knowledge of the human being. With a little child there really is this strong contrast. One has only to learn to observe such things without preconceptions; then one will soon notice what an immense and pronounced contrast there is between the head, which is the Uranus sphere of the human being, and the remaining body, which is the sphere of Gaia.

Lets us consider the first significant phase of life, the phase up to the change of teeth at approximately the seventh year. As you know, this marks the end of the first significant stage of human life. It is a very important time, a time marked also by the appearance of a paradox that it is very important to understand. For, during the period leading to the change of teeth at around the seventh year, those who observe a human being physically are observing falsely. I have frequently alluded to this from other points of view. To put it briefly, people look upon a human being during the first seven years as if it already were male or female. From a higher point of view this is entirely false. But the materialism of today does hold this view. That is why the materialists of today look upon manifestations during the first seven years as if they were already manifestations of sexuality, which is not at all the case. Matters will be in a much healthier state when it is understood that a child is an asexual being during its first seven years, and not a sexual being at all. To use a trivial expression, it only looks as though a child were already male or female during the first seven years. This is because there is no physical distinction between what one calls masculine or feminine during the first seven years and what one calls masculine and feminine later. For materialism, the physical is all that there is, so what comes later seems to be a continuation of what was already there. But that is not the case at all. And I now ask you to really experience what I am saying, to take it into yourselves, so that it is not misunderstood and immediately mixed up with value judgements. What I say is meant objectively, so please do not fall into the pattern so often found in other areas today, whereby one judges on the basis of previously-held values instead of judging objectively.

During the first seven years, what appears to be masculine is not masculine as such—and here I ask you to keep in mind what I have said about Uranus and Gaia; it has the external form that it has in order that the heavenly forces working from the head can continue to influence the individual being and the human form in accordance with what is super-earthly and heavenly. That is why it appears masculine. But it is not male; it is formed by Uranus in accordance with the super-earthly! I said: the head is the part of the human being where the heavenly takes precedence, the earthly takes precedence in the rest of the body. But the earthly radiates into the heavenly, just as the heavenly radiates into the earthly. Mutual relationships connect them; it is only a question of which one predominates. I would like to describe matters by saying that, with one kind of human being, the heavenly aspect is the preponderant influence on the body, including the parts other than the head, with the result that one says he is male. But this still has nothing to do with sexuality, but only with the fact that this particular organisation is more Uranian, whereas in the case of other individuals, their organisation is more terrestrial, Gaian. During the first seven years, the human being is not a sexual being; that is maya. The bodies differ in that some show more how the heavenly side is at work and others show more from the earthly side. In anticipation of value judgements that might insinuate themselves into our discussions, I began by saying that from a universal point of view the earthly sphere has as much value as the heavenly. I did not want anyone to harbour the belief that we were devaluing the feminine, in the style of Weininger, by taking some elevated, mystical standpoint that makes it out to be merely earthly or merely Gaian. Each is the pole of the other, and this has nothing to do with sexuality.

What, then, is going on in the human being, in the human organisation, during the first seven years? You must take what I am going to describe as the predominant circumstances; the opposite is also there, but what I am characterising is the predominant situation. For you see, during the first seven years the head is constantly being worked on by forces that stream to it from the rest of the organism. There are also forces that flow from the head to the rest of the organism, of course, but during this period these are relatively weak in comparison to the forces that stream from the body to the head. If the head grows and continues to develop during the first seven years, this is due to the fact that the body is actually sending its forces into the head; during the first seven years, the body imprints itself into the head and the head adapts to the bodily organisation. With regard to human development, the essential thing during the first seven years is that the head becomes adapted to the bodily organisation. This welling-up of the rest of the organisation into the head is what is behind the distinctive facial metamorphoses that someone with a finely developed sense for it can observe during the first seven years. Just watch once the development of a child's face, and observe how it changes at the time of the change of teeth, when the whole body is more or less poured into the facial expression.

Then comes the period that leads to sexual maturity—roughly from the seventh to the fourteenth year. And now exactly the opposite happens: the forces of the head flow uninterruptedly down into the organism, into the body; now the body adapts to the head. The resultant total revolution in the organism is very interesting to watch: the welling-up of the forces of the body into the head during the first seven years concludes with the change of teeth. Then there is a reversal in the flow of forces, which begin to stream downward. It is these downward-streaming forces that turn a human being into a sexual being. Now, for the first time, the human being becomes a sexual being. To begin with, what turns the organs that are simply heavenly or earthly into sexual organs, comes from the head; and that is spirit. The physical organs are not even intended for sexuality—that is exactly the way to put it—they are only adapted to sexuality later on. And the judgement of those who maintain that they are originally adapted to sexuality is superficial. On the contrary, the organs are adapted to the heavenly sphere in one case, to the earthly sphere in the other. They first acquire a sexual character during the period between the seventh and fourteenth years, when this is introduced into them from without by the forces that stream down from the head. That is when a human being begins to become a sexual being.

It is extraordinarily important to form a precise view of these things, for in practice one is constantly being confronted by people who come with their very small children, complaining about sexual improprieties. But such things are not possible before the seventh year, because nothing sexual is yet present, nothing that has sexual significance. In such cases no healing can come from a medical direction; it needs to come naturally, as people stop calling things by false names and thereby cease to surround them with false concepts. One should recover that holy innocence with which the ancients viewed such matters. Given their atavistic knowledge of the spiritual world, it never would have occurred to them to begin applying sexual terms to those who were still children. I have already alluded to these things in other contexts.

In the light of these important truths about the human being that we have obtained from the spiritual world, truths concerning man's relation to the earthly and heavenly worlds, you can begin to appreciate how the caricature-like ideas of such a man as Weininger do have a certain justification. For if he could have understood matters in the way they have been presented here, he would have been justified in saying: ‘A human being comes into this physical world from the spiritual world in such a way that the head must first develop here in the physical world for seven years before it can produce the masculine out of heavenly forces and the feminine out of earthly forces.’ Later on, it will be our task to look at other currents and forces important to human development. For the moment, it will be helpful to concentrate our attention on the first fourteen years of human development. Only through such things will you begin to see how true it is to say that external life is a life of maya—is the great deception. For it really is a deception that a human being seems to arrive in the world as a male or a female. A human being first becomes a sexual being through what is acquired by the head from the earth during the first seven years there.

Now, those who take these things into their hearts, as well as their heads, are sure to stumble over a question at this point. Nor is it a question that can easily be evaded: How is it that man comes to live in maya, in deception? What is the meaning of this? Is the fact that we live in deception not grounds for an inherent sadness? Surely it would have been better if the Godhead, the gods, had not allowed human beings to live in deception at all? Would it not have been better for man to apprehend the world without being deceived, so that he would not always have to seek truth behind the appearances? Why, why must man live in a world of deception? These questions about why we must live surrounded by deception can lead to a very pessimistic view of the world. But there are good reasons why we must live in the midst of deception; for if we were born into truth to begin with, if truth came at birth without our having to search for it, we would never be able to develop a personality and would never be able to acquire freedom. Only in the sphere of the Earth can a human being achieve freedom. And he can only do so by developing a personality through his earthly striving. Initially he confronts a world of mere appearances whose inner substance has to be sought out. The search releases inner forces that will make him, gradually and through many incarnations, into a free person. Take some worthwhile book like Dante's Divine Comedy. Theoretically, and not only theoretically for it is altogether conceivable, a person of today might come to know Dante's Divine Comedy in an entirely different way from what is usual. Today how does someone become acquainted with The Divine Comedy? Either it is recited and he hears it presented in external sounds that have nothing to do with the content of The Divine Comedy, or else he reads it. If he reads it, in reality he has nothing before him but abstract characters, which do not have the slightest thing to do with the content of The Divine Comedy. Yes, this is how people become acquainted with the contents of a worthwhile work today. One becomes acquainted with it externally through recitation, although speaking has nothing to do with the work as it sprang from Dante's head; it is only an external means of communication. Theoretically—and I say emphatically, not only theoretically—it would be possible for us to approach the contents of The Divine Comedy in a different fashion: it could make its appearance from within us if, at a particular age, the contents were to simply rise up out of our soul and appear in waking consciousness through a dream. This is not just theoretical; it could very easily happen if the world were not organised so that, to begin with, we had to make our way through maya. If it were not that we first had to make our way through maya, there would come one fine day when we would experience, rising up like a dream, everything that has ever been accomplished by the likes of Homer, say, and Dante, and Plato, and so on. We would not have to resort to anything external in order to become acquainted with it. Raphael would not have had to create external pictures. He need only have brought them to life in his spirit, and those that lived after him, without recourse to anything beyond a certain orientation towards Raphael, would have been able to experience the pictures rising up out their own inner being.

What I am telling you is no hypothesis; on the Moon this is how things stood with us, this is how things were passed on. This is how things really were then. On the Moon, one did not have to learn to read; everything arose out of one's own inner being. An event had to happen once; thereafter it rose up from within. But freedom was not possible. One was an automaton, subject to the past. What rose up from within was determined by the past. It was not possible to become a free person. Not there. We do not have to strive for knowledge in order to repeat, pointlessly, what is already there, but in order to become a free person. And we have progressed to the Earth period from the Moon period, from a time when we were not free beings and when everything simply rose up in our imaginations. Now we have to reach out to the external world. Our spiritual experience of the process of reading or listening enables us to be there as a free individual. It is not entirely true to say that man strives for knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Humanity achieves knowledge in order to become free and individual. We do not want to lose sight of this fact.

The other thing we do not want to lose sight of can be introduced with a further question. One can question why the external world should need to be repeated in our concepts and ideas. What, really, is the point of it? Why should we, with our thoughts and ideas, repeat the external world? Surely it is of no concern to the external world that we repeat it!—If you pursue the following train of thought you will get a more exact grasp of this: A man is there. If he had been murdered in his youth, he would not be there. Because he is there, he experiences—in addition to the fact that the world is there—a repetition of that world as a picture within his own inner world. That picture would not exist at all if he had been murdered in his youth. And yet nothing would be different in the outer world. It is a different matter if he intervenes in that world, but as far as the external world is concerned, what lives in our knowledge is pure repetition. If we were robots, and everything we did between birth and death were a reaction to the external world, then our knowledge would be entirely superfluous. We would do all that we had to do, and knowledge would just be a superfluous parallel phenomenon. You could imagine that the knowledge man carries with him is something added to nature and to the universe, but that it makes no difference to nature or to the universe that such a thing is added to it. Nature could just as well have produced robots whose thoughts do not mirror everything that happens. For nothing out there is changed when we accompany events with our thoughts and concepts, creating pictures of them. If you take a picture of some place with a camera, then, in addition to the place, there also is a picture of it, but it is entirely the same to that place whether the picture exists or not. This is how it is with our ideas. They are an addition. So why should nature not be organised like this?—thus one might question. All of us have long since become so accustomed to thinking that we do not ask this question any more; we have grown so fond of thinking. Like eating and drinking, we are used to it, so the question does not arise for us. But you know how many people there are out there who would be quite delighted not to have to think and to be able to function like a machine. Thinking is too heavy a burden to them and they flee from every thought. Now that, too, is contained in the question: Why hasn't nature fashioned man so that thinking is not even included among his possessions? We have answered one part of this question. Man becomes a free individuality by virtue of his thinking. Such a question, however, allows of many kinds of answers. Nor is it the only thing that can help us to understand.

Let us suppose that we had been born with a different organisation. As children, after we had received our head from the heavens, our body from the earth, and had been set down by the beings of the hierarchies, by the angels, the archangels, and so on, suppose that we had proceeded to go about doing what we had to do without our ever having to suffer under the strain of all the pains and torments this so often involves—without our ever developing an inner soul life. If we assume that this were so, then very important consequences would follow. We could only be born once and die once if we were organised like this; we could not live a succession of lives on earth. A plant whose blossoms never develop into fruit only lives once. A plant develops further through its seeds. The seed of our next earthly life develops within our developing soul life. Within it is the seed. If we did not have an unfolding soul life, with its knowledge, our earthly death would be the end of our life. Therefore, the understanding we develop in our inner soul life is not a mere repetition of what is out there; to the extent that our souls are shaped by knowledge, we carry the future within us. And that has great significance. Except for the things related to knowledge, everything we bear in and with us, is more or less the work of the past. The understanding we develop represents the real seed of the future. The real seed of the future develops within the sphere of our knowledge.

Now, in closing, I would like to touch on the leading thought of our next lectures. It will take us into important areas concerned with the cosmic aspects of human nature.

We carry all our knowledge within us, all of it, from the most naive understanding to the most abstract knowledge—and the two are not so terribly different—we just have an incorrect sense of their value. Thus, deep beneath our outer surface we carry this within us. It is super-sensible, for the content of knowledge is, of course, a super-sensible thing. In reality it is a collection of forces that rest within us. And then we pass through the gates of death; what happens then? Now, I have often described what happens then, but I would like to describe it once more from the standpoint of these forces.

A human being consists of head and body. No matter how precious it may seem, our head actually is ‘on the way out’. Here I am referring to forces, not to the outer form. You can let a person's body waste away, or you can burn it, of course, but the forces do not cease to exist. They remain externally present, and the spiritual forces on which the body depends also remain. But the head disappears. As I said, you may well consider it to be a valuable part of your organism, but after death that does not matter—after death it is nothing special. This refers to the outer form of the head, of course, not to its soul content. For, as regards your passage from death to a new birth, what is important to the heavens is the part of your last earthly life that you could only receive from the earth, namely, the rest of the body. That, with its various forces, is what is transformed into the new head during the time between death and a new birth. Here you have the head, there, the rest of the body. This head was the body of your previous incarnation; your present body will be the head of your next incarnation. The forces that you develop by means of your head in this life are what will transform the forces of your body into a head for the next life. The earth gives you a body for that purpose. The head you carry around now is the transformed body of your previous incarnation, for metamorphosis applies to all of life. It is not only there in the transformation of a plant's leaves into the petals of its blossom; metamorphosis does not just affect our subordinate aspects; metamorphosis rules throughout. Your body is a head that is yet to come—your head is a transformed body.

These are the ideas I wanted to touch on. You carry your head about in its present state. Phrenologists study the shapes of the head, but what they do is not worth much unless it is based on initiation, because everyone possesses his own kind of head. The head is nothing other than the inherited body of the previous incarnation. Every person's head is different from the head of anyone else and the characteristic types the phrenologists describe are merely rough observations. Just think what a marvellous connection there is: A human being has a dual nature. But not only does man have a dual nature; in addition to that, his external shape also carries both past and future. The human head gives you reincarnation where you can really put your hands on it, for the shaping of the head is the result of our previous life. The head we bear in the next life will be a transformation of our body. Wherever one looks deeply into the foundations of existence one finds metamorphosis. Someone who understands the things I have just been explaining is enabled to look deep, deep into the nature and origins of world existence and human existence. As I said, I wanted to touch on these ideas because they will provide the leitmotif of the next two lectures. These will be concerned with how one incarnation works on in the next incarnation, and how the previous incarnation works over into the present one, through the metamorphic relationship of man's head-ness to his body-ness, if I may be allowed to use these expressions.

• 5. Ludwig Buchner (1824 – 1899).
• 6. Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919).
• 7. Carl Vogt (1817 – 1895).

In a recent lecture held here I spoke of the possible relations of the incarnate to the discarnate human souls—the so-called dead;—relations not only possible but which really always exist. To-day I shall add a few remarks to what I have already said.

From various facts presented to our souls by Spiritual Science, we know that in course of the earth's evolution, the spirit of man passes through an evolution of its own. We know that man can only understand himself by a fruitful consideration of the question: What is man's attitude in any one incarnation, in his present incarnation, to the spiritual world, to the spiritual realms? To what stage of evolution has mankind in general attained in the time when we ourselves live in a definite incarnation.

We know that outer observation of this general evolution of mankind allows of the opinion that in earlier times, earlier epochs, a certain ‘atavistic clairvoyance’ was poured over mankind, the human soul was then, as it were, nearer to the spiritual worlds. But it was also further from its own freedom, its own freewill, to which in our age we are nearer while more shut off from the spiritual world. Anyone who knows the real nature of man at the present time must say: in the unconscious self, in the really spiritual part of man, there is, of course, the same relation to the whole spiritual world; but in his knowledge, in his consciousness, man in general cannot realise it in the same way as was possible to him in earlier epochs, though there are exceptions. If we enquire into the reason why man cannot bring to consciousness the relation of his soul to the spiritual world,—which is, of course, as strong as ever though of a different kind—we find that it is due to the fact that we have passed the middle of the earth's evolution and are now in the ascending stream of its existence, and our physical organisation (although, of course, this is not perceptible to external anatomy and physiology) has become more ‘physical’ than it was, so that in the time we spend between birth or conception and death, we are no longer organised to bring fully to consciousness our connection with the spiritual world. We must clearly understand that no matter how materialistic we are we actually experience in the subconscious region of the soul much more than the sum of our general conscious knowledge.

This goes even further, and here we come to a very important point in the evolution of present humanity. In general, man is not able to think, perceive and feel all that could really be thought, perceived and felt within him. At the present time he is gifted for far more intensive thoughts and perceptions than are possible through the coarse material components of his organism. This has a certain consequence, namely, that at the present epoch of human evolution we are not in a position to bring our capacities to complete development in our earthly life. Whether we die young or old has very little influence upon that. For both young and old it is the rule that, on account of the coarse substance of his organism, man cannot fully attain to what would be possible were his body more finely organised. Thus, whether we pass through the gate of death old or young, there is a residue of unexercised thoughts, perceptions and feelings which, for the above reason, we could not elaborate. We all die leaving certain thoughts, feelings and perceptions unexercised. These are there, and when we pass through the gate of death, whether young or old, these occasion an intense desire to return to earthly life for further thinking, feeling and perceiving.

Let us reflect upon the bearing of this. We only become free after death to form certain thoughts, feelings and perceptions. We could do much more for the earth if we had been able to bring them to fruition during our physical life, but we cannot do this. It is actually true that every man to-day could do much more for the earth with the capacities within him than he actually does. In earlier epochs of evolution this was not so, for when the organism was finer there was a certain conscious looking into the spiritual world, and man could work from the spirit. Then he could, as a rule, accomplish all for which his gifts fitted him. Although man is now so proud of his talents, the above is true.

Because of this, we can recognise how necessary it is that what is carried through the gate of death unused should not be lost to earth-life. That can only be brought about by cultivating the union with the dead under the guidance of Spiritual Science, in the sense often described, by rightly maintaining the connection with the dead with whom we are united by karmic ties, and endeavouring to make the union a conscious, a fully conscious one. Then these unfulfilled thoughts of the dead pass through our souls into the world, and, through this transmission, we can allow these stronger thoughts—which are possible to the dead because they are free from the body—to work in our souls. Our own thoughts we cannot bring to full development, but these thoughts could work within us.

We see from this that what has brought us materialism should also show us how absolutely necessary at the present time and for the near future is the quest of a true relation to the spirits of the dead. The only question is: How can we draw these thoughts, perceptions and feelings from the realm of the dead into our own souls?

I have already given certain hints as to this, and in the last lecture spoken of the important moments which should be well observed: the moment of falling asleep and that of waking. I shall now describe with more detail a few things connected with this.

The dead cannot directly enter this world of ordinary waking life, which we outwardly perceive, in which we act through our will and which rests upon our desires. It is out of their reach, when they have passed through the gate of death; yet we can have a world in common with them if, spurred on by Spiritual Science, we make the effort—which is difficult in our present materialistic age—to discipline the world of our thinking as well as our outer life, and not to allow our thoughts the customary free course. We can develop certain faculties which introduce us to a ground in common with the spirits who have passed through the gate of death. There are, of course, at the present time a great many hindrances to finding this common ground. The first hindrance is one to which I have but little referred, but what is to be said thereon follows from other considerations already discussed here. The first hindrance is that we are, as a rule, too prodigal with our thoughts, we might even say we are dissipated in our thought-life. What, exactly, is meant by this?

The man of to-day lives almost entirely under the influence of the saying: ‘Thoughts pay no toll.’ That is, one may allow almost anything to flash at will through the mind. Just consider that speech is a reflection of our thought life; and realise what thought-life is allowed free course by the speech of most people, as they chatter and wander from subject to subject, allowing thoughts to flash up at will. This means a dissipation of the force with which our thinking is endowed! We continually indulge in prodigality, we are wholly dissipated in our thought-life. We allow our thoughts to take their own course. We desire something which occurs to us, and we drop that as something else occurs; in short, we are disinclined in some respects to keep our thought under control. How annoying it is, sometimes, for instance, when someone begins to talk; we listen to him for a minute or two, then he turns to quite a different subject, while we feel it necessary to continue the subject he began. It may be important. We must then fix our attention and ask ourselves, ‘Of what did we begin to talk?’ Such things occur every day, when subjects of real earnestness are to be brought into discussion, we have continually to keep in mind the subject begun. This prodigality, this dissipation of thought-force, hinders thoughts which, coming from the depths of our soul-being, are not our own, but which we have in common with the universal ruling spirit. This impulse to fly at will from thought to thought does not allow us to wait in the waking condition for thoughts to come from the depths of our soul-life; it does not allow us to wait for ‘inspirations,’ if we may so express it. That, however should be so cultivated—especially in our time, for the reasons given—that we actually form in our souls the disposition to wait watchfully until thoughts arise, in a sense, from the subsoil, which distinctly proclaim themselves as ‘given,’ not formed by ourselves.

We must not suppose that the formation of such a mood is able to appear on swift wings—it cannot do so. It has to be cultivated; but when it is cultivated, when we really take the trouble to be awake and, having driven out the arbitrary thoughts, wait for what can be received in the mind, this mood gradually develops. Then it becomes possible to receive thoughts from the depths of the soul, from a world wider than our ego-hood. If we really develop this, we shall soon perceive that in the world there is not only what we see, hear and perceive with our outer senses, and combine with our intellect, but there is also an objective thought-texture. Only few possess this to-day as their own innate knowledge. This experience of a universal thought-tissue, in which the soul actually exists, is not some kind of special occult experience; it is something that any man can have if he develops the aforementioned mood. From this experience he can say: In my every-day life I stand in the world which I perceive with my senses and have put together with the intellect; I now find myself in a position in which I am as though standing on the shore, I plunge into the sea and swim in the surging water; so can I, standing on the brink of sense-existence, thus plunge into the surging sea of thought. I am really as though in a surging sea. We can have the feeling of a life—or, at least, we have an inkling of a life, stronger and more intense than the mere dream-life, yet having just such a boundary between it and outer sense-reality as that between dream-life and sense-reality. We can, if we desire, speak of such experience as ‘dreams,’ but they are no dreams! For the world into which we plunge, this world of surging thoughts which are not our own, but those in which we are submerged, is the world out of which our physical sense-world arises, out of which it arises in a condensed form, as it were. Our physical world of sense is like blocks of ice floating in water: the water is there, the ice congeals and floats in it. As the ice consists of the same substance as the water, only raised to a different physical condition, so our physical world of sense arises from this surging, undulating sea of thought. That is its actual origin. Physics speaks only of ‘ether,’ of whirling atoms, because it does not know this actual primordial substance. Shakespeare was nearer to it when he makes one of his characters say: ‘The world of reality is but the fabric of a dream.’ Men lend themselves too easily to all kinds of deception in respect to such things. They wish to find a great atomic world behind physical reality; but if we wish to speak of anything at all behind physical reality, we must speak of the objective thought-tissue, the objective thought-world. We only arrive at this when, by ceasing the prodigality and dissipation of thought, we develop that mood which comes when we can wait for what is popularly called ‘inspiration.’

For those who study Spiritual Science it is not so difficult to develop the mood here described, for the method of thought necessary for the study of anthroposophical Spiritual Science trains the soul for such development. When a man seriously studies Spiritual Science he comes to the need of developing this intimate thought-tissue within. This thought-tissue provides us with the common sphere in which are present we ourselves on the one hand, and on the other hand the so-called dead. This is the common ground on which we can ‘meet with’ them. They cannot come into the world which we perceive with our senses and combine with our intellect, but they can enter the world just described.

A second thing was given in the observation of finer, more intimate life-relationships. I spoke of this last year and gave an example which can be found in psychological literature. Schubert calls attention to it; it is an example taken from old literature, but such examples can still often be found in life. A man was accustomed to take a certain walk daily. One day, when he reached a certain spot, he had a feeling to go to the side and stand still, and the thought came to him whether it was right to waste time over this walk. At that moment a boulder which had split from the rock fell on the road and would certainly have struck him if he had not turned aside from the road on account of his thought.

This is one of the crude experiences we may encounter in life, but those of a more subtle kind daily press into our ordinary life, though as a rule we do not observe them; we only reckon with what actually does happen, not with what might have happened had it not been averted. We reckon with what happens when we are kept at home a quarter of an hour longer than we intended. Often and often, if we did but reflect, we should find that something worthy of remark happened, which would have been quite different if we had not been detained.

Try to observe systematically in your own life what might have happened had you not been delayed a few minutes by somebody coming in, though, perhaps, at the time, you were very angry at being detained. Things are constantly pressed into one's life which might have been very different according to their original intention. We seek a ‘causal connection,’ between events in life. We do not reflect upon life with that subtle refinement which would he in the consideration of the breaking of a probable chain of events, so that, I might say, an atmosphere of possibilities continually surrounds us.

If we give our attention to this, and have been delayed in doing something which we have been accustomed to do at mid-day, we shall have a feeling that what we do at that time is often—it may not always be so—not under the influence of foregoing occurrences only, but also under the influence of the countless things which have not happened, from which we have been held back. By thinking of what is possible in life—not only in the outer reality of sense—we are driven to the surmise that we are so placed in life that to look for the connection of what follows with what has gone before is a very one-sided way of looking at life. If we truly ask ourselves such questions, we rouse something which in our mind would otherwise lie dormant. We come, as it were, to ‘read between the lines’ of life; we come to know it in its many-sidedness. We come to see ourselves, so to speak, in our environment, and we see how it forms us and brings us forward little by little. This we usually observe far too little. At most, we only consider the inner driving forces that lead us from stage to stage. Let us take some simple ordinary instance from which we may gather how we only bring the outer into connection with our inner being, in a very fragmentary way.

Let us turn our attention to the way we usually realise our waking in the morning. At most, we acquire a very meagre idea of how we make ourselves get up; perhaps, even the concept of this is very nebulous. Let us, however, reflect for a while upon the thought which at times drives us out of bed; let us try to make this individual, quite clear and concrete. Thus: yesterday I got up because I heard the coffee being made ready in the next room; this aroused an impulse to get up; to-day something else occurred. That is, let us be quite clear, what was the outer impelling force. Man usually forgets to seek himself in the outer world, hence he finds himself so little there. Anyone who gives even a little attention to such a thought as this will easily develop that mood of which man has a holy—nay, an unholy—terror,—the realisation that there is an undercurrent of thought which does not enter the ordinary life. A man enters a room, for instance or goes to some place, but he seldom asks himself how the place changes when he enters it. Other people have an idea of this at times, but even this notion of it from outside is not very widespread to-day. I do not know how many people have any perception of the fact that when a company is in a room, often one man is twice as strongly there as another; the one is strongly present, the other is weak. That depends on the imponderabilities. We may easily have the following experience: A man is at a meeting, he comes softly in, and glides out again; and one has the feeling that an angel has flitted in and out. Another's presence is so powerful that he is not only present with his two physical feet but, as it were, with all sorts of invisible feet. Others do not, as a rule, notice it, although it is quite perceptible; and the man himself does not notice it at all. A man does not, as a rule, hear that ‘undertone’ which arises from the change called forth by his presence; he keeps to himself, he does not enquire of his surroundings what change his presence produces. He can, however, acquire an inkling, a perception of the echo of his presence in his surroundings. Just think how our outer lives would gain in intimacy if a man not only peopled the place with his presence but had the feeling of what was brought about by his being there, making his influence felt by the change he brings.

That is only one example. Many such can be brought forward for all situations in life. In other words, it is possible in quite a sound way—not by constantly treading on his own toes—for a man so to densify the medium of life that he feels the incision he himself makes in it. In this way he learns to acquire the beginning of a sensitivity to karma; but if he were fully to perceive what comes about through his deeds or presence, if he always saw in his surroundings the reflection of his own deeds and existence, he would have a distinct feeling of his karma; for karma is woven of this joint experience. I shall now only point to the enrichment of life by the addition of such intimacies, when we can thus read between the lines, when we learn to look thus into life and become alive to the fact that we are present, when we are present with our ‘consciousness.’ By such consciousness we also help to create a sphere common to us and to the dead. When we in our consciousness are able to look up to the two pillars just described: a high-principled course of life, and an economy, not prodigality of thought,—when we develop this inner frame of mind it will be accompanied by success, the success that is necessary for the present and the future when, in the way described, we approach the dead. Then, when we form thoughts, which we connect not merely with a union in thought with one of the dead, but with a common life in interest and feeling; when we further spin such thoughts of life-situations with the dead, thoughts of our life with him, so that a tone of feeling plays between us—when we thus unite ourselves, not to a casual meeting with him but to a moment when it interested us to know how he thought, lived, acted, and when what we roused in him interested him,—we can use such moments to continue, as it were, the conversation of the thoughts. If we can then allow these thoughts to lie quiet, so that we pass into a kind of meditation, and the thoughts are, as it were, brought to the altar of the inner spiritual life, a moment comes when we receive an answer from the dead, when he can again make himself understood by us. We only need to build the bridge of what we develop towards him, by which he on his side can come to us. For this coming it will be specially useful to develop in our deepest soul an image of his entity. That is something far from the present time because, as we said, people pass one another by, often coming together in most intimate spheres of life and parting again without knowing one another. This becoming acquainted does not depend on mutual analysis. Any one who feels himself being analysed by those living with him, if he is of a finely organised soul, feels as though he received a blow. It is of no moment to analyse one another. The best knowledge of another is gained by harmony of heart; there is no need to analyse at all.

I started with the statement that cultivation of relations with the so-called dead is specially needed to-day, because not from choice but simply through the evolution of humanity, we live in an epoch of materialism. Because we are not able to mould and fashion all our capacities of thought, feeling and perception before we die, because something of it remains over when we pass through the gate of death, it is necessary for the living to maintain the right intercourse with the dead, that the ordinary life of man may be enriched thereby. If we could but bring to the heart of men to-day the fact that life is impoverished if the dead are forgotten! A right thinking of the dead can only be developed by those in some way connected with them by karma.

When we strive for a similar intercourse with the dead as with the living (as I said before, these things are generally very difficult, because we are not conscious of them, but we are not conscious of all that is true, and not everything of which we are conscious is on that account unreal)—if we cultivate intercourse with the dead in this way, the dead are really present, and their thoughts, not completed in their own life will work into this life. What has been said makes indeed a great demand on our age. Nevertheless, it is said, because we are convinced by spiritual facts, that our social life, our ethical religious life, would experience an infinite enrichment if the living allowed themselves to be ‘advised’ by the dead. To-day man is disinclined to consult even those who have come to a mature age. To-day it is regarded as right for quite a young man to take part in councils of town and state, because while young he is mature enough for everything—in his own opinion. In ages when there was a better knowledge of the being of man, he had to reach a certain age before being in any council. Now people must wait until others are dead in order to receive advice from them! Nevertheless, our age, our epoch, ought to be willing to listen to the counsel of the dead, for welfare can only come about when man is willing to listen to their advice.

Spiritual Science demands energy of man. This must be clearly understood. Spiritual Science demands a certain direction; that man should really aspire to consistency and clearness. There is need to seek for clearness in our disastrous events: the search for it is of the utmost importance. Such things as we have been discussing are connected, more than is supposed, with the great demands of our time. I have tried this winter, and many years before this world-catastrophe, in my lectures on the European Folk-Souls, to point out much which is to be found to-day in the general relations of humanity. A certain understanding of what plays its part in present events can be derived from reading the course of lectures I gave in Christiania on ‘The Mission of the Several Folk Souls.’ It is not too late, and much will still take place in the coming years for which understanding can be gained from that series of lectures.

The mutual relations of man to-day are only really comprehensible to one who can perceive the spiritual impulses. The time is gradually approaching when it will be necessary for man to ask himself: How is the perception and thought of the East related to that of Europe—especially of Mid-Europe? Again, how is this related to that of the West, of America? These questions in all their possible variations ought to arise before the souls of men. Even now man should ask himself: How does the Oriental regard Europe to-day? The Oriental who scrutinises Europe carefully, has the feeling that European civilisation leads to a deadlock, and has led to an abyss. He feels that he dare not lose what he has brought over of spirituality from ancient times when he receives what Europe can give him. He does not disdain European machines, for instance, but he says—and these are the actual words of a renowned Oriental: ‘We will accept the European machines and instruments, but we will keep them in the shops, not in our temples and homes as he does.’ He says that the European has lost the faculty to perceive the spirit in nature, to see the beauty in nature. When the Oriental looks upon what he alone can see—that the European only holds to outer mechanism, to the outer material in his action and thought—he believes that he is called upon to reawaken the old spirituality, to rescue the old spirituality of earthly humanity. The Oriental who speaks in a concrete way of spiritual things says: (as Rabindranath Tagore a short while ago) Europeans have drawn into their civilisation those impulses which could only be drawn in by harnessing Satan to their car of civilisation; they utilise the forces of Satan for progress. The Oriental is called upon—so Rabindranath Tagore believes—to cast out Satan and bring back spirituality to Europe.

This is a phenomenon which, unfortunately, is too easily overlooked. We have experienced much, but in our evolution we have left out of account much that might have been brought in if we had, for instance, a spiritual substance like that of Goethe, livingly in our civilisation. Someone might say: The Oriental can look towards Europe to-day and know that Goethe lived in European life. He can know this. Does he see it? It might be said: The Germans have founded a Society, the ‘Goethe Society’. Let us suppose the Oriental wished to be well-informed about it and to look into the facts. (The question of East and West already plays a part, it ultimately depends on spiritual impulses.) He would say to himself: Goethe worked so powerfully that even in 1879 the opportunity presented itself to make Goethe fruitful to German civilisation in an unusual way, so to say, under favourable circumstances. A Princess, the Grand Duchess Sophia of Weimar, with all those around her, in 1879 took over Goethe's library of writings in order to cultivate it as had never been done for any other writer before. That is so. Let us, however, consider the Goethe Society as an outer instrument. It, too, exists. A few years ago the post of President fell vacant. In the whole realm of intellectual life only one, a former Minister of Finance, was found to be elected as President of the Society! That is what is to be seen outwardly. Such things are more important than is usually supposed. What is more necessary is that the Oriental, aflame with spirituality and wise in it, should come to know that there is in European civilisation a Spiritual Science directed by Anthroposophy; yet he cannot know of this. It cannot reach him, because it cannot get through what exists—because the President of the Goethe Society is a retired Minister of Finance. But, of course, that is only one phenomenon symptomatic of the times.

A third demand, we might say, is an incisive thinking bound up with reality, a thinking in which man does not remain in want of clearness, in vague life-compromises. On my last journey someone put into my hand something concerning a fact with which I was already acquainted. I will only give a short extract from a cutting from a periodical:—

‘To any one who has ever sat on a school bench, the hours when he enjoyed the conversations between Socrates and his friends in “Plato” will ever be memorable; memorable on account of the prodigious tediousness of these speeches. He remembers, perhaps, that he found them absolutely idiotic, but, of course, he did not dare to express this opinion, for the man in question was indeed Socrates, the Greek Philosopher. Alexander Moszkowski's book, “Socrates the Idiot,” (publisher, Eysler and Co., Berlin), duly does away with this wholly unjustifiable estimate of the great Athenian. The multi-historian, Moszkowski, undertakes in this small, entertaining book nothing less than almost entirely to divest Socrates of his dignity as a philosopher. The title “Socrates, the Idiot,” is meant literally. One will not go astray in the assumption that scientific discussions will be attached to this work.’

The first thing which strikes a man when he is made acquainted with such a matter makes him say: How does so extraordinary a thing come about, that a person like Alexander Moszkowski should wish to furnish proof that Socrates was an idiot? This is the first impression; but that is a feeling of compromise which does not arise from a clear, incisive thinking, a confronting of actual reality.

I should like to compare this with something else. There are books written on the life of Jesus from the standpoint of psychiatry. They examine all that Jesus did from the standpoint of modern psychiatry and compare it with various abnormal actions, and the modern psychiatrist proves from the Gospels that Jesus must have been an abnormal man, an epileptic, and that the Gospels can only be understood at all from the Pauline point of view. Full particulars are given on this subject.

It is very simple to lightly overlook these things; but the matter lies somewhat deeper. If we take the stand of modern psychiatry, if we accede to it as officially recognised, on thinking over the life of Jesus, we must come to the same conclusion as the authors of these books. We could not think differently or we should be untrue; in no sense a modern psychiatrist. Nor should we be true modern psychiatrists in the sense of Alexander Moszkowski, if we did not regard Socrates as an idiot. Moszkowski only differs from those who do not regard Socrates as an idiot, in that they are untrue;—he is true—he makes no compromise. It is not possible to be true and to take up the standpoint of Alexander Moszkowski without regarding Socrates as an idiot. If a man wishes to be at the same time an adherent of the philosophy of life held by modern science and yet to esteem Socrates without regarding him as an idiot, he is untrue. So, too, is a modern psychiatrist who holds to the life of Jesus. Modern man, however, does not wish to go so far as this clear standpoint, or he would have to put the question differently. He would have to say to himself: I do not regard Socrates as an idiot, I have learned to know him better; but that demands the rejection of Moszkowski's philosophy of life; in Jesus, too, I see the greatest bearer of ideas who has at any time come in touch with earthly life; but this demands the rejection of modern psychiatry; they cannot agree!

The point in question is: clear thinking in accordance with reality, a thinking that makes none of the ordinary idle compromises which can only be removed when one understands life. It is easy to think—or be filled with indignation, if one is asked to allow that according to Moszkowski, Socrates is an idiot; yet it is consistent with the modern philosophy of life to regard Socrates as an idiot. People of this age, however, do not wish to draw these logical conclusions, they do not wish to relinquish anything like the modern philosophy of life lest they come into a still more troublesome position. One would then have to make compromises, and perhaps admit that Socrates was no idiot; but suppose it then appears that—Moszkowski is an idiot? Well, he is not a great man; but if this were applied to much greater men, many and various untoward things might happen!

To penetrate into the spiritual world, a thinking in accordance with truth is necessary. This requires, on the other hand, a clear recognition of how things stand. Thoughts are real entities, and untrue thoughts are evil, obstructing, destructive entities. To spread a veil of mist over this avails nothing, because man himself is untrue if he wishes to give to Moszkowski's philosophy of life equal weight with that of Socrates. It is an untrue thought to place the two side by side in his soul, as the modern man does.

Man is only true when he brings before his soul the fact that he either stands with Moszkowski, at the standpoint of the pure mechanism of pure natural science, regarding Socrates as an idiot, in which he is then true; or, on the other hand, he knows that Socrates was no idiot, and then in order to think clearly, the other must necessarily be firmly rejected. The ideal, which the man of to-day should set before his soul, is to be true; for thoughts are realities, and true thoughts are beneficial realities. Untrue thoughts—however well they may be enwrapped with the cloak of leniency as regards their own nature,—untrue thoughts received into man's inner being, are realities which retard the world and humanity.

As our studies continue we shall, gradually come to understand what karma may signify in the individual life of man, although I shall constantly be drawing attention to certain karmic connections of personalities known in history. For if we observe the manifestations of karma across the wide perspective of history, light will also be shed upon details of our own karma which cannot fail to interest us. At the very outset let it be said that clairvoyant insight is not essential to the perception, the feeling, of the working of karma. It is quite true that in order to survey the whole range of karmic laws such insight is necessary; and much that I have been telling you during the last few days can, of course, be discovered only by means of clairvoyance. But the feeling, the clear and distinct feeling for karma is a preparation for clairvoyant insight. This feeling and perception can play a part in the life of every individual provided that he is not exclusively concerned with superficialities and outwardly sensational happenings, but unfolds a sensitive understanding of the more intimate experiences of existence and an inkling of certain connections of destiny which by their very nature show that they cannot possibly be rooted in the one earthly life between birth and death.

Let us think of how we meet and become acquainted with other human beings. By far the greatest part of our destiny depends upon these meetings. We meet one person or another and the experiences we share with him have an effect upon our life. And precisely the experiences we share with others in different circumstances of life will make it evident to attentive observation that karma is not irreconcilable with the ingrained feeling of the extent to which our actions are the outcome of free decision. After all, we are sent into existence in an epoch of life when as far as earthly impulses are concerned there can be no question of freedom. A very great deal depends upon how we are placed in existence as children. The faculties that are drawn out of us, the paths along which we are directed—all this is of infinite significance in the destiny of our whole life. Later on, as independent human beings, we can of course take a hand in directing our own existence but even then the place assigned to us in childhood is determinative. And so if we observe closely we shall certainly be able to perceive how destiny plays into our free actions, our free deeds and activities.

Think of the following.—We meet other human beings and there is clearly a difference between one kind of acquaintanceship and another. We may meet someone for the first time and feel at once that there is a bridge leading over from our soul to his. We may well be strongly drawn to him but not nearly as interested in the details of his outward appearance, whether he is handsome or ugly, whether he looks friendly or ill-disposed. What draws us to him is something that wells up from within us; we feel sympathy towards him. In the case of another person we may actually feel antipathy simply when we are near him and conscious of his presence. Our feeling for him does not depend upon the impression he makes through his actions or what he actually says to us. Such experiences stand in earthly existence like question-marks, like far-reaching problems set us by reality. With both these kinds of acquaintanceship we feel no urge at all to ask: what is the individual really like? What does he actually do? Everything that attracts us to him gathers into an aggregate of feelings arising from experiences and components of our soul-life, feelings which there is no need to justify by what he actually does.

But there are acquaintanceships of a different kind, where no such experiences occur. Although there is no feeling of deep-seated sympathy or antipathy, such individuals interest us. We feel an urge to discover whether their attitude is friendly or unfriendly, whether they are gifted or not gifted. Having made such an acquaintanceship it may happen that we meet someone who also knows the person in question and we feel we want to talk about him, to ask about his position in life, who he is, and so forth; we are interested in what he is outwardly. But in connection with an acquaintance of the other category we may find it extremely embarrassing to meet someone who knows him and begins to speak about him. We simply do not want to talk about this person. Now when Spiritual Science endeavours to get to the root of an occurrence of this nature, it turns out that if an inexplicable feeling of affection or dislike wells up in us when we meet a particular person, then we have had some karmic tie with him in the past and this has really guided our whole path in such a way that at a certain moment in life we come across him. Experiences shared in past ages shape and determine the feelings we have about him. And it is these feelings that count—not whether he is good-looking or ugly, kindly or ill-disposed. When such feelings are emphatic and distinct and it is possible for spiritual-scientific investigation to shed light upon them, their explanation is forthcoming from what such investigation has to say about karma that was formed in the past. Moreover we shall find this confirmed in many other ways.

During sleep, when we are outside our physical and etheric bodies, living a spiritual existence in the ‘I’ and astral body, dreams occur. But with rigorous self-observation let us ask ourselves whether it is not the case, when certain acquaintanceships are accompanied by these uprising feelings and experiences, that we at once begin to dream about these people. We dream so readily about certain acquaintances. This indicates that there is a connection between the person in question and our own soul-and-spirit which has shared experiences with him either in many lives or maybe in one life only; our ‘I’ and astral body in which we live during sleep, are connected in some way with this individual. Others whom we may encounter in our profession, business or the like, interest us in the different way I described. It may well happen that we have a great deal to do with them; life throws us together, but we simply cannot dream about them. In such cases the connection belongs only to the present earthly life and the link is made by what binds the soul-and-spiritual part of man to the physical and the etheric. Now it is paramountly the physical and etheric bodies which are involved in interests connected with external activities, outward appearances, and the reason why we cannot dream about these particular people is that the physical and etheric bodies lie there in the bed and the being of soul-and-spirit is not within them. Spiritual Science reveals that although karma is certainly at work here it is only now beginning to form and that not until we look back from spiritual existence upon this earthly life will it be possible to say that karmic connections began in that life. In this case, karma is in process of coming into being.

We have heard how karma takes shape, how all that we experience in communion with spiritual Beings between death and a new birth works for long ages at the weaving of karma. But if you reflect upon what has here been said about the laws of karma, you will say to yourselves: earthly life brings human beings together and a karmic link is formed between them; they pass together through the life between death and rebirth and in cooperation with higher Beings shape their karma for the next earthly life. What, then, is the consequence in the earthly life of man? Broadly speaking this: that individuals who have been together in an earthly life where karma begins to form, will endeavour in the next earthly life to find their way to one another again. Once again they will establish karmic links, will again pass through the life between death and rebirth where a still stronger link is forged between them, and again seek for a common earthly existence. And here the remarkable fact comes to light that as Earth-evolution runs its course, human beings live together in groups. Time flows on: a certain group of human beings living as contemporaries in a particular epoch and karmically connected with one another, appears again on the Earth after the life spent between death and rebirth. A different group of human beings linked together by karmic ties appears on the Earth in a common existence; a third group likewise. As the periods between death and rebirth are by far the longer, it follows that the majority of human beings only meet in the life after death and before birth and that those specially connected with one another by karma pass through evolution in groups, coming together again and again on the Earth. That is the general rule. As a rule it is the case that on Earth we do not encounter those who formerly were not incarnated at the same time as ourselves.

We learn that this is so when with spiritual insight we ponder upon the facts and consequences of human relationships. Provided we reflect without prejudices or preconceptions, spiritual observation will certainly confirm what has here been said.—As you know, for a considerable time in my early life I was engrossed in the study of Goethe. I had this spiritual preoccupation with Goethe so much at heart that I often asked myself: What if I had been a contemporary of Goethe? Outwardly, the prospect would have been entrancing! For when one is strongly drawn to Goethe, loves to steep oneself in his works and devotes part of one's life to elucidating and interpreting him, how could one fail to think of how delightful it would have been to have lived in Weimar at the same time, to have seen him, perhaps even to have been able to converse with him. But that, after all, is a superficial point of view which deeper insight immediately corrects. At all events I realised that the very thought of living as a contemporary of Goethe would be quite unbearable. For one treasured Goethe so highly just because the creations he bequeathed had worked in one for a time and it was then possible to draw it all forth again from spiritual depths of world-existence. To have lived as a contemporary of Goethe would have been unbearable! When it is clear that the relationship was the result of having been born at a later time, when the subtler connections of the life of soul are taken into account in a case like this where one is drawn to a personality with whom karma did not bring one into direct contact, where the karmic relationships are more complicated, it becomes clear to spiritual insight that had one lived at the same time as this personality, he would have acted like poison upon the soul. I know that this is a strong statement, but it is a fact, nevertheless. To have been a contemporary of Goethe would have made it impossible to keep one's own disposition and configuration of soul firmly knit.

From the wider point of view such circumstances sharpen our perception of the inner truths, the inner relationships, of human life. We no longer talk out of the blue nor shall we be tempted to come out with the hackneyed exclamation: ‘Oh, if only I had been alive then!’ When karma is interpreted rightly, it becomes a source of strength in the circumstances of our life, establishes us in earthly existence at the place where we truly belong. That karma is in truth destiny becomes plain when we begin to reflect upon why we were born at a particular time. We come into earthly existence just when we do, because together with other souls who are karmically connected with us we have prepared our karma for the time when we are to descend to physical existence on Earth.

What I have been telling you is the general rule—but in the spiritual world everything is individual. Rules have their significance but this must not be taken to imply that they are to be regarded as principles. A man who is a stickler for rules, who insists that they can have no exceptions, will never find his way into the spiritual world. For in the spiritual world nothing is the same as it is in the physical world. What could be more obvious to a man living in the physical world than the mathematical axiom: the whole is greater than any of its parts—or the straight way is the shortest distance between two points? Only a lunatic would contend that the whole is not greater than any of its parts. Such things are called ‘axioms’ because they are self-evident truths and, as it is said, cannot and need not be proved. The same applies to the formula: the straight way is the shortest distance between any two points. But neither formula holds good in the spiritual world. What actually holds good in the spiritual world is the formula: the whole is always smaller than any one of its parts. And we find confirmation of this in the very being of man. Observed in the spiritual world, the spiritual counterpart of your physical being is about the size—a trifle larger but approximately the same size as it is in the physical world. When, however, you see your lungs or your liver in the spiritual world, they are of gigantic magnitude, and yet they are parts of something small. We have to learn to change our thinking entirely. In the spiritual world the straight way is by no means the shortest but on the contrary the very longest, because in that world to move from one point to another is a different matter altogether. In the physical world it is pedantically correct to say: that way is long, this longer, this—the straight—the shortest. But in the spiritual world the straight way presents such enormous difficulties that any of the winding ways is the shorter. Hence there is no sense in saying: the straight way is the shortest between any two points—because in actual fact it is the longest of all.

We have to recognise that in the spiritual world nothing is the same as in the physical world. The reason why people find it so difficult to reach the spiritual world with the exercises they practise quite faithfully is that they cling to preconceptions such as: the whole is greater than any of its parts, or, the straight way is the shortest between two points. So much for the axioms.

But we must also give up clinging to all other truths which hold good in the physical world if we are to penetrate into the spiritual world. In the spiritual world there can be no all-embracing principles, for everything there is individual. Each fact must be approached as something entirely individual. In the spiritual world there is none of this dreadful, logical assembling of facts, this basing of everything upon general rules. And so the truth of which I have spoken, namely, that human beings pass through their earthly evolution in groups—although it is indeed a truth and holds good in the broad sense—is sometimes broken through. And precisely from those cases where it is broken through we can realise its significance. Let me give an example.

You must forgive these examples being taken from my own life. After all, how can there be closer knowledge of examples of these things than when they are drawn from one's own life? In recounting the story of my life I have mentioned a geometry teacher of mine. Not only had I great affection for this teacher while I was actually his pupil, but afterwards too, and it was interesting for me to investigate his karma and the whole setting of his life. I myself had a personal weakness, as the saying goes, for geometry. Even at the age of nine, a geometry book that fell into my hands brought me sheer delight; it was written by this teacher who thought me far too immature for anything of the kind. To learn that the three angles of a triangle total 180° was sheer joy to me when I was a boy of nine. But later on, when I was about twelve, and for some years after, this man was my geometry teacher. He was a most remarkable and interesting personality, for he was, so to say, the very embodiment of geometry—but of a particular kind: descriptive, constructive geometry. In the higher classes I was obliged to learn analytical geometry—as it is called—from others, because my former teacher simply did not understand it. He was a first-rate constructor and in that branch he was wonderfully impressive. I myself made remarkable progress in geometry just because I loved him so deeply. It was always a happy hour for me when this teacher came into the class and demonstrated geometry in his own characteristic way. Later on—because my interest in him never waned—I realised that it was only natural to investigate the karmic setting of his life. Now when it is a matter of investigating karma, one can get nowhere by focusing attention upon what, at first sight, makes the most striking impression. If I had paid attention only to his excellence as a teacher of geometry, I should certainly never have discovered the threads of his karma. But what made a deep impression upon me in connection with his life was the fact that he had a club-foot. One leg was shorter than the other. These are details which in the ordinary way are thought to have no bearing upon the actual life. The things of really deep interest, however, are those which lead to the karmic connections. They need not necessarily be very striking. One may actually be led to a man's karmic connection by some repeated habit. A trifling habit may form itself into a picture and lead one to the karmic connections in earlier lives of the person concerned. And so in the case of another teacher for whom I had great affection, I was guided to certain karmic connections—of which I do not now propose to speak—through the fact that whenever this teacher came to his class, the first thing he did was to take out his handkerchief and blow his nose! He never by any chance began a lesson without doing this, and the picture into which this habit shaped itself led me back to his earlier earthly lives. And it was the same with the other teacher, the one with the clubfoot. In point of fact it was this club-foot which gave me the first clue to his particular talent. It is usually thought that the ability to construct figures from geometrical lines comes from the head. But that is simply not the case. Man does not experience geometry through his head. You would never be able to think of an angle if you did not walk. It is because you experience the angle in your legs that you know something about it. The head merely looks on, perceives how the arms or the legs form angles. In geometry we actually experience our own will weaving through our limbs. Our limbs teach us geometry. It is only because we have become such creatures of abstraction that we are unaware of this and firmly believe that all geometrising goes on in the head. The head looks on. perceives how we walk, or dance, or whatever it may be. and then evolves the geometrical figures. And now the whole connection, the reason for this characteristic way of presenting geometry, was clear to me as I studied the inner constitution of this man who was obliged to walk about with a club-foot and who because of the deep effect it had upon him became such an excellent geometrician—but in one direction only. Such things belong to the more intimate concatenations of life.

But what led me to further insight? Coupled with this teacher there arose before me the picture of another man, also with a club-foot, namely, the English poet, Lord Byron. The two men with this physical similarity came in a picture before me, side by side, and many things that had played over from earlier karma into the moral and ethical connections of Byron's life but had also come to expression in his club-foot, became clear to me. When perception of karma has reached this point, its range widens and I was now able to discover that these two men had lived as companions in Eastern Europe at a certain time during the Middle Ages; they had shared a similar destiny and the content of their lives at that time was revealed to me.

Neither the earlier life of Byron nor that of my teacher resembled their lives in the nineteenth century. But the two had been associated in destiny of a very intimate kind. During their lives in Eastern Europe they came to know of the significant legend concerning the palladium—the treasure endowed with magical power upon which the might of Troy depended. The palladium had been buried in Troy and was an object of veneration there. Then it was taken across Africa to Rome where it remained for long ages. When he founded Constantinople, the Emperor Constantine caused this palladium—upon which the power, first of Troy and then of Rome was said to depend—to be removed at the cost of great hardships and with tremendous pomp, to Constantinople, where it was sunk in the ground, in order that the power of Constantinople should replace that of Rome. It is said—and with considerable truth—that the Emperor's arrogance had caused him to transfer the palladium from Rome to Constantinople where he erected a massive column over the spot at which it had been sunk and had a statue of Apollo placed upon this column. The task of bringing the column to Constantinople was one of enormous difficulty, entailing the construction of a special road. The column had originally been brought from Egypt to Rome and its weight was so enormous that every road to Constantinople subsided and became dangerous. The column was erected and the palladium safely protected. The Emperor ordered the statue of Apollo to be set in place but let it be known that this statue was a representation of himself. Then, having caused wood and nails from the Cross of Christ to be brought from the East, he had the wood inserted into the statue and the nails moulded into rays around the head of Apollo. Constantine pictured himself standing there aloft, surrounded by rays of glory fashioned from the wood and the nails of the Cross of Christ. Later on, another legend came to be associated with the palladium, a legend which still played a part in the Testament of Peter the Great, to the effect that the palladium would be carried off by men of the East to their capital, that in time to come the power of the Slavs would be founded on its magical power; through the palladium, so it was said, power would pass to the Slavs just as it had passed to Troy, to Rome, to Constantinople. Such things contain deep truths, even though they are presented in the form of legend.

But this much is certain: anyone who understands the history of the palladium will understand very much of the course taken by European history. This legend came to the knowledge of the two men of whom I have spoken—Byron and his contemporary in the early Middle Ages—and they resolved to seize the palladium and take it to the North, to Russia. They did not succeed; the project failed, as indeed it was bound to do. But something of it remained in the two men; in karmic connections, something remained in them in a strange and remarkable way. At a later time, Byron sought for the palladium in a different fashion; he allied himself with the movement for liberty in Greece—it was the search for a spiritual palladium. This was the urge that had remained in him from the time of which I spoke. And it was clear to anyone who observed my teacher closely, that in spite of his relatively unimportant position, in whatever situation he might be, he evinced an inflexible sense for freedom which was deeply connected in his inmost being with the bodily defect—just as in the case of the one who was his earlier contemporary.

What, then, had happened to these two men? Their paths had separated and they did not find one another again. One of them was Lord Byron, the famous poet; the other, who lived at a slightly later time, was the unknown geometry teacher. In that case the rule of which I have spoken was broken through. But in a curious way, life itself brought me confirmation of this. The teacher I loved so deeply, eagerly awaiting him whenever he came to give his geometry lesson, never once gave me an opportunity of a private conversation with him during the whole of the time he was my teacher. He was like a personality of whom I had only read in history. He did not really fit into the times; one got the impression that he was misplaced in his epoch. Later on, when for the purpose of an anthroposophical lecture I visited the town where he was living in retirement, I looked for his name in the directory. I felt that he must be there and now, after such a lapse of time—thirty years or so—I had a desire to talk to him personally, as a friend. By this time he was quite elderly and lived in Graz, the Austrian home of many University pensioners. I went to Graz for the lecture, found his name in the directory and made up my mind to call on him. But visits from others prevented me, even then, from any private talk with him. Although I loved him so dearly, he remained a shadow-personality in my life. When I went to Graz a second time, I again wanted to visit him, but he had since died. And so here I was confronted with a personality who although I felt so near to him, seemed to be like someone I had merely read about, someone who belonged to a quite different epoch. The circumstances were something like this: I was a contemporary of his but had no karmic connection with him. In none of his earlier incarnations had he been a contemporary of mine. This last life was plainly outside the sequence of the karmic groups to which he really belonged. This was also confirmed by the other case. There had been a departure from the sequence of incarnations to which my teacher belonged because in this earthly life he was not connected with the individual with whom he had formerly been associated. Byron and he did not meet. I am telling you these things in order to show you how karma works and how, by deeper observation, precisely through experiences which, to begin with, are bound to be riddles—and life, after all, is full of riddles—one can really perceive the mysterious weaving of karma. But just as certain contemporaries seem to be only pictures because they have moved out of their own karmic sequence, on the other hand one is fully aware that by far the greater majority of human beings are placed in their epoch by strong, inner necessity. This is often very clear in the case of historical personalities.

Here again, let me give an example. Garibaldi, the champion of liberty in Italy, is a well-known figure. His was in truth a remarkable life. As a personality, Garibaldi attracted me as little as the one I mentioned yesterday, whose karma I investigated. It was in the course of research, and not until then, that I began to be more drawn to Garibaldi. Before I had investigated his karmic connections a great deal about him had seemed to me to be unnatural, hollow—which he most certainly was not. This personality, in spite of being intensely active in politics and practical affairs, seems, when one observes him closely, to stand in a strange way outside life—as if he were living in a purely imagined world, as if he were hovering a little above the Earth. Practical as he was, Garibaldi was also an idealist, as is clear even from his external life. We need only think of a few characteristic episodes in Garibaldi's life and this is at once obvious.—I will speak briefly because time is getting on.—It was by no means an everyday occurrence for a young man to sail around the Adriatic Sea in the first half of the nineteenth century—Garibaldi was born in 1807—at a time when its waters were so fraught with danger. He fell more than once into the hands of pirates and freed himself again after perilous adventures. Occasionally, of course, something of the kind may also happen to others, but it certainly does not occur often, as it did to Garibaldi, that when a man has been for a time beyond the reach of newspapers and finally gets hold of one, he reads in it the announcement of his own death sentence! That was what happened to Garibaldi. He had returned from some maritime adventure and without knowing it had been accused of participating in certain political conspiracies. Sentence of death had been passed upon him in his absence and he read this in the newspaper. He seemed through his destiny to stand a little above actual life.

But other events in his life are even more unusual. Thus, for example, it happened that as the ship in which he had sailed to a foreign country in order to share in certain struggles for freedom, was nearing the coast, he looked through a telescope at the land. There he saw a young, attractive girl and forthwith fell in love with her—through the telescope! It is certainly not the normal way of falling in love. People who are firmly grounded in life do not fall in love through a telescope! But Garibaldi fell head over heels in love and brought his ship with all speed to the spot where he had caught sight of the girl. When he arrived she had vanished, but a man standing there took such a liking to him that he invited him to a meal—it turned out that he was the father of the very girl with whom Garibaldi had fallen in love through the telescope! Thus Garibaldi was able to partake of the meal in the girl's company. He could speak only Italian, she only Portuguese, but both of them understood the language of the heart and they became betrothed. Their life together demanded great valiance on the part of the woman. She accompanied him on his campaigns, acting throughout with great heroism. The circumstances are by no means usual! The first child is born while the husband is many leagues distant and while the wife searches for him on the battlefield she has to strap the child round her neck with a rope in order to keep it warm. She hears that her husband has been killed, faces every imaginable danger in search of him, but finally finds him alive. In spite of everything it was a marriage altogether to be admired. Those familiar with Garibaldi's biography will be aware that the wife predeceased him by a long time and a year after her death, as not infrequently happens, he again became betrothed and married another woman, just like any conventional citizen. This marriage, which was an accomplished fact, lasted only one day and the two separated. Quite obviously, Garibaldi's connection with earthly existence was different from that of other men, and it interested me to investigate a life such as this.

The research led me once again to the Irish Mysteries. Garibaldi too was an individuality who had passed through the Mysteries of Hibernia. Having reached a certain degree of Initiation, he journeyed eastwards, actually working together with others, in the Rhineland. But in respect of karma, what interested me particularly in the life of Garibaldi was that here was a personality whose activities are really difficult to explain. For in a certain sense Garibaldi was the very personification of sincerity. In the deepest fibres of his being, in his whole attitude of soul, he was a Republican—yet in spite of this it was actually through him that Victor Emanuel came to sit on the Throne of Italy. Garibaldi championed the Monarchy in the person of Victor Emanuel. To begin with it all seems incredible. What induced this Republican to make Victor Emanuel King of Italy? Look it up in history and you will find that without Garibaldi there would have been no Italian Monarchy. And then again, Garibaldi is associated with other personalities—Cavour, Mazzini—whose outlooks and leanings are poles apart from his own inner attitude. Cavour and Mazzini are men of utterly different mentality. Mazzini, the idealist who takes no part in practical affairs; Garibaldi, invariably the practical, militaristic statesman but for all that seeming to hover a little above the earthly; Cavour, the shrewd, astute politician—how do these men fit together? That was the problem. And precisely here something comes to light that I will put before you as a characteristic feature in karma. It turns out that these other three men had been followers of Garibaldi when he had been an Initiate in Hibernia; they were his pupils. Now it was an essential principle of the old Irish Mysteries that a vital link should be formed between pupil and teacher. They cannot separate from one another, at all events not in certain incarnations. A karmic tie is forged and there can be no separating. In this particular case we find very singular circumstances: about the year 1807, these four men are born again, one in Genoa, two in Turin, the fourth in Nice—that is to say in the same corner of the globe and also approximately at the same time. They are born together—in the same epoch and in the same region. This is a case where men who belong together are brought together again, in spite of their personal leanings. A fervent Republican such as Garibaldi is tied to Victor Emmanuel—a man with such different persuasions and convictions—and the human relationship counts for far more than all the rest. I give this example to show you what human relationships that are based on karma, really signify. The one may believe this, the other that—but the karmic connection is by far the stronger bond. It is these human relationships that take effect in life, not so much the abstract things mediated by the intellect. But it is only by examining karma in characteristic cases that we discover how human beings are connected with one another, and how, if they have shifted away from the stream to which their own karma really belongs, they may pass through life like shadows.

So much for to-day. We shall continue these studies tomorrow.

A hall in a prevailing tone of indigo blue. The ante-chamber to the rooms in which a Mystic League carries on its work. In the centre a large door with curtain. Above it is the Rosy Cross. On each side of the door two pictures which represent, beginning from the right of the stage, the Prophet Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, the poet Novalis. There are present, in lively conversation twelve Persons, who in one way or another take an interest in the activities of the League. Beside them: Felix Balde and Doctor Strader. (see notes)

Ferdinand Fox:
A most unusual summons 'tis indeed,
That draws us here together at this time.
It comes from men, who ever hold that they,
From all Earth's other children separate,
Are honoured with a special spirit-aim.
Yet now, 'tis said, their spirit-eyes behold,
That in the world's plan they must be bound close
With men whose spirit is unconsecrate;
Who face life's fight in their own strength alone.
I ne'er felt drawn towards such spirit-ways
As find their chief resource in secrecy;
I only care to hold fast to sound thought,
And to the commonsense of human minds.
This Spirit-League by which we now are called
Means not through this same call that we should be
Initiated in its higher aims.
It will thro' mystic dim word-portraiture
Keep us but in the Temple's outer courts;
And use our powers but as the people's voice—
A cunning plan to strengthen its own will.
So shall we merely be the helpers blind
Of men who from the spirit heights above,
Look down to lead us on with beckoning hand
They do not hold that we are ready yet
Even to take one step that might lead on
Toward their holy Temple's treasure-house,
Or to the spirit-light in which they dwell.
When I observe the true state of this league
It seems I see but pride and self-deceit
Clothed in a prophet's robe and humble dress.
And so 'twere surely best to shun each thing
That here is offered us in wisdom's garb;
That we at any rate may not appear
To strive without due proof against the work
Which is so highly prized by many men;
So would I counsel you at first to hear
What aim this wisdom-teacher hath in view
And then to follow simple commonsense.
Who takes such sense as guide within himself
Will not be led astray by tempting lures
Which from the Mystic Temple issue forth.

Michael Nobleman:
I do not know, I cannot even guess
With what strange spirit-gift these men are dowered
Who now desire to find a bridge to us.
But still I know well several honest men
Within the ranks of this same Spirit-League.
Strictly they guard the secret of the fount
Whence this their knowledge is supposed to come;
But that the fountain whence they drink is good,
Their life and deeds make manifest to all.
And all that from their circle issues forth
Bears on its face the mark of truest love.
So may we well believe the aim is good
Which leads them in this special way to men,
To whom the mystic path is strange and new,
But in whose souls the instinct for the truth
And honest goals of spirit-life find place.

Bernard Straight:
Caution would seem to me our duty now.
I think the mystics find the time draws nigh
Which brings an ending to their sovereign power.
Reason will scarcely ask in future times
What dreams of truth these holy temples had.
If this league tells of goals of such a kind
As have seemed wise to mankind's general thought
Then it were good to join our lot to theirs.
Yet they had better shun the mystic's robe
If they would truly pass the portal by,
Which, like some barrier of heavenly light,
Conceals their sacred shrine from worlds profane.
For in that world 'twill be of small account
What value each shall put upon himself.
No higher value shall each one receive
Than universal judgment granteth him.

Francesca Humble:
So much that here I needs must listen to
Sounds like the words of those poor blinded men,
Who cannot see the noble spirit-light
Which streams from every consecrated shrine
In rays of wisdom to the outer world
To comfort and to heal the souls of men.
He only in whose heart this light doth shine,
And pierce with warming glow his inmost soul
Can recognize the true worth of this hour,
Which opens up the mystic's solemn realm
Even to those who feel themselves too weak
To reach, through deep soul struggle, to the high
And consecrate abodes of spirit-light.

Mary Steadfast:
Many sure signs show plainly much must change
Within those souls who strive to follow close
The Spirit's guidance, in their daily life.
But little can be said which goes to prove
That mystic ways can lead on to those ends
Which bring strong powers into the souls of men.
It seems to me that what our time requires
Is leaders, who by using nature's powers
Can join dexterity to genius,
And working thus amidst the things of Earth
Fulfil their purpose in. the world of men.
Such men do search for roots of spirit-work
Deep in the mother-earth of truth itself,
And thus are kept from idle wandering
Along the path away from human health.
Feeling myself possessed with this idea
I recognize in Doctor Strader's self
The powers which for such guidance of the soul
Are better suited than the mystics' are.
How long path man with sorrow had to feel
That thro' the great inventions of machinery
Full many a fetter has been riveted
On the free spirit-instinct in his soul.
But now a hope Both rise within the breast
Whereof none heretofore can e'er have dreamed.
In Strader's workshops we can see, in small,
The working of those wonders, which, in great
Shall soon transform the meaning of technique
And free its shoulders from that heavy load
Which in our day Both weigh on many souls.

Strader:
Indeed such words as these are full of hope
About my seemingly successful work.
'Tis true there yet remains the bridge to pass
Between experiment and actual use,
But all that science up till now can show
Proves it is technically possible.
The author of this work may be allowed
To speak here freely of the hopes he bears
As to the service it may render man.
He begs to be forgiven any words
That sound vainglorious to the general ear,
They only shadow forth the feelings whence
The strength for this work flows into his soul.
We see how in man's daily life on earth
The workings of emotion and the soul
Disperse and lapse into a soulless state
The more the spirit masters all the powers
That it can find within the realm of sense.
Each day the work grows more mechanical,
Which makes for worth in life; and through such work
Man's life itself becomes mechanical.
Many have sought with painful diligence,
Devising methods that might prove of use,
So that the arts of cold machinery
Might no more lame the soul-life of mankind
Or prove a hindrance to true spirit-aims.
But little was achieved through all this strife
In which one question only seemed of weight,
How man should act towards his fellow-men.
I have myself spent many a solemn hour
In thinking out this riddle of man's life.
But ever did I find such thought produced
No fruit of any value for real life.
I felt myself draw near the bitter thought
That cosmic fate hath foreordained the lot
That victory in this material realm
Must ever be to spirit-paths a foe.
Release from this bewilderment of thought
Was brought me by a seeming accident.
It was my lot to make experiments
In matters from such questions far removed;
When suddenly there flashed across my mind
A thought which showed me where the right path lay.
Test followed close on test, until at last
Such powers were gathered there in front of me,
As in their full expression shall some day
Through application purely technical
Restore that freedom to humanity
In which the soul may find development.
No more shall men be forced to dream away
Their whole existence plant-like, fashioning
In narrow factory rooms unlovely things.
Industrial powers will be so dispersed
That every man shall have what he may need
To keep him in his work, in his own home
Arranged by him, as he may think it best.
I thought it well to speak first of this hope
So that it may not seem quite out of place
To say, what I must say, about this call
Which now the Rosicrucian Brotherhood
Issues to men who stand outside their league.
'Tis only when a human soul unfolds
And finds its own true being in itself
That those fine instincts, which from endless time
Draw spirits each to each, can have full scope.
And therefore, only he will think aright
Who recognizes that this call conforms
To signs, which we have learned to know full well.
The brotherhood in future will bestow
Its highest treasures freely on mankind
Because all men will learn to long for them.

Felix Balde:
The words just spoken have been wrung from out
A soul, which hath been given to our times
To grace the realms of sense with life's true worth.
And in this field I doubt if any one
With Doctor Strader could compete to-day.
But I myself trod very different paths
To find out what is needful for the soul.
So I, too, beg your leave to speak a word.
Fate hath made clear to me that I must search
Among those treasures, which disclose themselves
To every man within his inmost soul.
Therein I seemed to find true wisdom's light
Which can full well illuminate life's worth.
The mystic pupilship was given me
In solitude and contemplation deep.
And thus I learned that all that makes man lord
Of this strong realm of sense, doth only serve
To blind his being, and condemn mankind
To search in darkness for the way of life.
Aye, e'en those gems of knowledge which the use
Of reason and of sense hath found on earth,
Are but faint gropings in a darkened realm.
I know it is the mystic way alone
That can direct our steps to life's true light.
Myself I stood upon that path of truth
As one who strives without a helping hand;
But all men cannot struggle thus alone.
The knowledge gained by sense and intellect
Seems like a body left without a soul
When it doth set itself defiantly
Against the light that since Earth's dawn hath streamed
From sacred temples of true mystery.
Ye therefore ought in gratitude to grasp
The hand that beckons from the Temple now
Upon whose threshold roses full of light
Girdle significant the sign of death.

Louisa Fear-God:
A man who feels the worth of his own soul
Can but rely upon his own ideas,
If he desire to know the spirit-worlds
And find himself therein in very truth.
Whoe'er can give himself, with blindfold faith,
To outside guidance, first must lose himself.
Aye, e'en that light, which deep within himself
A man may feel as highest wisdom's power
Claims spirit-recognition only when
Its truth admits of proof within itself.
This light may be a danger to a man
If he draws near thereto without such proof.
For often on this path the soul mistakes
For a true picture, of the cosmic depths,
Fancies begotten from its unconscious wish.

Frederick Clear-Mind:
Fully to understand the mystic way
Each man must trace its impulse in himself.
Who, ere he enters on the search, doth form
In his own soul a picture of the goal,
Whereto that search must lead, is sure to find
Instead of truth, delusion's fantasy.
For, we may say, that each true mystic should
Thus hold himself toward the goal of truth
As one who from a mountain-top would gaze
Upon the beauty of a distant view.
He waits till be has gained the utmost height
Before he tries to picture all the scene
Whereto his pilgrimage hath guided him.

Ferdinand Fox:
At such a time as this we should not ask
How men should hold themselves toward the truth.
The brethren of the league will not require
To hear about such things from men like us.
It hath indeed already reached mine ears
That an occurrence of a special sort
Hath forced the league to turn and think of us.
Thomasius, who came some years ago
Beneath the influence of a spirit-stream,
Which sets itself to follow mystic aims,
Hath learned just how to use such forms of thought
As in our time compel men's confidence,
And hang them, as a mantle, round that lore
Which, it is claimed, to seers is revealed.
In this way he was able to succeed,
And gain approval from both far and near
For writings which had borrowed logic's garb
But which, in fact, contained but mystic dreams.
Even inquirers of acknowledged worth
Are with the message of the man inspired
And so lend colour to his present fame,
Which grows, I fear, in dangerous degree.
Initiates did dread this line of thought
Since it must needs destroy the fixed idea
That wisdom is their sole prerogative.
And so they try to shelter 'neath their wing
That which Thomasius is giving forth.
Indeed, they wish it to appear as if
They knew already in the years gone by
That such a message would just now be sent
To serve in building up their own great work.
If they succeed now at this present time
In drawing us with craft into their net,
They will make clear unto the world at large
That powers of destiny did wisely send
Thomasius with his message at this time
So that belief in their significance
Might with the commonsense of man combine.

Casper Hotspur:
This Mystic League is bold to make the claim
That it alone must ever guide mankind:
It proves thereby what small account it takes
Of all that can be won for man's true weal
Just by sound commonsense, for we may say
That 'tis now proved that nature and the soul
Can be explained as things mechanical.
And 'tis indeed a check to all free thought
That Doctor Strader with so clear a brain,
Should countenance this mystic fallacy.
Who thus doth master powers mechanical
Should not indeed lack insight, to perceive
That e'en to gain true knowledge of the soul
All mystic learnings needs must be destroyed.
Yet this false science, which Thomasius
Is giving forth to-day to all the world,
Enables e'en extreme sagacity
To reconcile itself with wildest dreams,
When once it falls a victim to that snare.
If through strict training in the way of thought,
Most natural to man, Thomasius
Had for this work of his prepared himself,
Instead of studying the mystic art,
He might have plucked full many a noble fruit
From wisdom's tree through his own inborn gifts.
Instead of which upon the way he chose
Naught but disastrous error could occur.
No doubt the brotherhood may like to think
Such error can be turned to their account.
It finds acceptance, since it seeks to show
That science now bath giv'n souls strong proof
Of knowledge only found in dreams before.

George Candid:
That it is possible to speak such words
As we have just been forced with pain to hear,
Shows clearly how that insight which flows forth
From spirit-life bath scarce indeed begun
To grow at all 'midst all our modern thoughts.
Turn your eyes backward o'er the flight of time
And see what things lived in the souls of men
Before the science which is now in flower
Was even able to reveal its seed.
Then you will find that this same Mystic League
Doth but to-day fulfil a work which then
Was traced beforehand in the cosmic scheme.
We had to wait until Thomasius
Had finished this great work he had in hand.
The way is new by which the spirit-light
Illuminates through him the souls of men.
And yet this light did ever work in all
That men have dared to make upon the Earth.
But where, then, was the source of all this light
Which, tho' souls knew it not, could shine so clear?
We find all signs point to the mystic art,
Which dwelt in secret consecrated shrines,
Before mankind let reason be its guide.
The Spirit League which now bath called us here
Will gladly let the mystic light stream forth
On that bold work, which out of human thought
Strives to the knowledge of the spirit-world.
And we, who, in this hour so big with fate,
May stay awhile on consecrated ground,
Shall be the first who, uninitiate,
Shall see the torch of God from spirit-heights
Leap down into the depths of human souls.

Mary Dauntless:
Thomasius, indeed, needs not the shield,
The Rose-Cross Brothers have in mind for him,
If in an earnest scientific way
He can portray the pathway of the soul
Through many earthly lives and spirit-realms.
This work kath now revealed the light on high,
To which they say the mystic temples lead,
E'en unto men who erstwhile had to shun
The very threshold of such sacred shrines.
Such recognition doth he well deserve
As he already hath so richly found
Because he gave that freedom unto thought,
Which was denied it by the mystic schools.

Erminia Stay-at-Home:
The Rose-Cross Brothers can in future live
But in the recollection of mankind.
That which they call for, at this very time
Will soon gain consciousness of its own power
And undermine the Temple's fundaments.
They boldly wish to join in future days
Reason and science to their sacred shrine.
Thomasius, therefore, whom so willingly
They now admit into their Temple's midst
Will count hereafter as their conqueror.

Strader:
I have been sorely blamed because I think
That he acts well, who holds himself prepared
To further, in close union with the league,
The work which through Thomasius is fulfilled.
One speaker took objection to my views
And held I ought to know how dangerous
The mystic's true soul-searching may become.
I often felt I best could understand
The spirit-way when I gave up myself
Completely to the influence binding me
To mechanisms which I made myself.
The way in which I stood toward my works
Hath shown the meaning of the sacred shrine.
And while I was at work, I often thought:
‘How do I seem to one who only tries
To understand the working of those powers
Which I put into things mechanical?
And yet what might I be unto a soul
To whom I might reveal myself in love?’
I have to thank such thoughts as these that now
The learning which from mystic circles springs
Reveals itself to me in its true light.
And so, though not initiate, I know
That souls of gods can in the sacred shrine
Reveal themselves in love to human souls.

Katharine Counsel:
The noble words which Doctor Strader speaks
About the sacred shrines must surely find
An echo in those souls which stand outside
The gates through which initiates may pass,
But yet are counted worthy to receive
The lore initiates do strive to teach:
It is not difficult to understand
Why our forefathers held to the belief
That mystics were the enemies of light.
It even was denied their souls to guess
What hidden secrets lay within the shrine.
All this is changed to-day. The Mystic Light
Is not entirely hid, but tells the world
As much as uninitiate folk may know.
And many souls, who have received this light
And been revived thereby, have felt forthwith
A rousing up of soul-powers, which before
Worked in them, as in sleep, unconsciously.

(Three knocks are heard.)

Felix Balde:
The owners of this place will soon approach
And ye will hear what they desire to say.
But if ye wish to understand their words
And to receive through them the light yourselves
Ye must not by pre-judgment blind yourselves.
The power of the initiates will now
Prove itself mighty, wheresoe'er it finds
Good hearts and wills prepared to offer up
Erroneous fancies to the light of truth;
But where the will hath grown through error hard
And thus hath slain the sense of truth itself,
This power will there be proved of none effect.

Ferdinand Fox:
Such words as these might be of use to one
Who through self-contemplation did desire
To find himself within his inmost soul.
But at the first appearance of this league
'Twere better to hold fast to those reports
About this kind of spirit-brotherhood,
Which may be credited historically.
From them we see that very many men
Have been enticed into the holy shrine
By secret words, which led them to believe
That in these temples, step by step, the soul
Could from the lowliest grades of wisdom rise
Up to the heights where spirit-sight is gained.
Who followed such inducements soon perceived
That in the lower grades he could see signs
Whose purport offered him much food for thought.
He dared to hope that in the higher grades
The meaning of these signs would be disclosed,
And wisdom be revealed: but when he reached
Those higher grades himself, he found instead
That masters knew but little of those signs
And did but speak about the world and life—
Nothing but meaningless and barren words.
If he was not deceived by these same words
Nor yet was tricked by their futility,
He turned himself away from such pursuits.
And so at this time 'tis perhaps of use
To listen to the judgment of the past
As well as unto edifying speech.

(Again three knocks are heard.)

(The curtain is drawn back, and there enter the Grand Master of the Mystic League, Hilary True-to-God; after him, Magnus Bellicosus, the Second Preceptor; Albertus Torquatus, the First Master of the Ceremonies; and Frederick Trustworthy, the Second Master of the Ceremonies. The persons who were before assembled group themselves on each side of the hall.)

Frederick Trustworthy:
Dear friends, this moment, when you join us first
At this our temple's ancient holy gates
Is most significant for you and us.
The call which we have given to you now
Was strongly laid upon us by the signs
Which our Grand Master could discern full well
In the wise plan of earth's development.
There it is very plainly shadowed forth
That at this time the service wise and true
Of this our sacred Temple must unite
With universal commonsense of man,
Which seeks for truth far off from mystic paths.
Yet in the plan were also signs to show
That ere this consummation could be reached,
A man must first arise who understood
How to bring knowledge, built on commonsense
And reason only, into such a form
As truly to comprise the spirit-world:
This now bath happened. To Thomasius
The lot has fallen to produce a work
Based on that very science, which to-day
All men demand. This work in their own tongue
Doth bring full proof of spirit-worth, which men
Could only find in mystic paths before,
And in the temples of initiates.
This work will now become the binding link
That you with us unites in spirit-life;
Through it will ye be able to discern
How firm the base on which our teaching rests.
And through it, too, ye will receive the power
To take from us that knowledge with free will
Which is confined to mystic paths alone;
And so, in living fruitfulness, that Life
Can now unfold itself, which doth unite
The universal commonsense of man
With all the customs of the sacred shrine.

Magnus Bellicosus:
Our brother's words have made it clear to you,
That we have been induced by solemn signs
To call you to the Threshold of our Shrine.
The Master soon will speak to you and show
The deeper reasons for thus calling you.
But first I must, so far as may be meet,
Tell you of this great man, whose work hath made
Our present union possible to-day.
Thomasius gave himself to painting's art
Until he felt an inward spirit-call
To take up science as his work in life.
His gifts which were so great and so unique
Within the region of the painter's art,
Were first developed when he passed within
The spheres devoted to true mystic lore;
These led him to the Master, and, through him,
He learnt the first steps in that world of truth
Where wisdom teaches spiritual sight.
Upborne to spirit-heights and thus infilled
With great creative power, he painted then
Pictures, which seem indeed like living men.
That which would soon have driven other men
To strive amain toward the highest goal
Upon the beaten track of art—all this
Was but a fresh incentive to his soul
To use hard-won success in such a way
As might prove best for welfare of mankind.
He saw full well that spirit-science must
First find a firm foundation, and for this
The sense for science and strict reasoning
Must be released from mania for set form
Through contact with an artist mind, and gain
The inward strength to realize the truth
Of world-relationship in life and deed.
And so Thomasius hath offered up,
A willing off'ring to humanity,
The artist-power, he might have used himself.
O friends, read ye aright this man's true soul;
Then will we understand our mystic call
And hesitate no more to follow it.

Hilary True-to-God:
In that same Spirit's Name, which is revealed
To souls within our sacred shrine, we come
To men who until now might never hear
The word which here doth secretly sound forth.
Those Powers which guide the purpose of our Earth
Could not in its beginning be revealed
To all humanity in their full light.
As in the body of a child, the powers
Through which it learns to act and use its mind,
Must gradually ripen, and grow strong
So must humanity unfold itself
As one great whole throughout its earthly course.
The impulse in the soul which later on
Might worthy prove to gaze on spirit-light
In higher worlds, first lived unconsciously.
Yet in the Earth's beginning there were sent
From out the higher kingdoms of real life
Exalted spirit-beings, who might act
As wise instructors of humanity.
In mystic holy shrines did they employ
Those mighty spirit powers, which were poured forth
In secret into souls which could know nought
Of their exalted leaders or their work.
Then later from the ranks of men themselves
These masters wise could choose for pupils those
Who by well-tested lives of self-denial
Had proved that they were ripe to be ordained
Into the mystic aims and wisdom's lore.
And when the pupils of those early seers
Could guard in worthy way the good and. true,
Then those sublime instructors turned their steps
Back to their own especial realms of life.
These pupils of the gods then chose out men
Who might succeed them in the guardianship
Of spirit-treasures; and in such a way
The treasures were passed on from age to age.
Until the present time all mystic schools,
If they are such in truth, have really sprung
Prom that which first was founded from on high.
Humbly we cherish in this very place
That which our fathers handed down to us.
We do not ever speak about the dues,
Which through our office we inherited,
But only of the favour shown to us
By those great spirit-powers, who chose weak men
As mediators, and entrusted them
With treasures which bring forth the spirit-light
In souls of men: and 'tis our lot, dear friends,
To open to you now this treasured store.
For signs which in the plan of all the worlds
Can clearly be discerned by spirit-eyes
Show most propitious at this very time.

Ferdinand Fox:
From distant worlds, it seems, the reasons come
Which should convince us that 'twere meet that we
Should join ourselves to you, and in this way
Should be the first to give the impetus
To this great work Thomasius gives the world.
However grand what thou hast spoken sounds,
It cannot drown in hearts of homely men
The thought that such a work will take effect
Through its own power, if it should prove to hold
Within itself what souls of men require.
If this work prove important, it will be,
Not through the things the mystics offer us,
But since true science comes to the support
Of spirit-knowledge, and doth prove it true.
If this be really so, what use is there,
If mystic approbation paves the way,
And not th' intrinsic merit of the work?

Albertus Torquatus:
The science which is opening on the world
From such foundations as Thomasius laid
Will neither gain nor lose through such applause
As we or ye may choose to render it.
And yet thereby a way can now be found
By which mankind may study mystic lore.
It would accomplish only half its work
If it should show the goal, but not the road.
And now it rests with you to understand
That now at last the moment hath arrived
For reason and the mystic path to join;
And to the spirit-life of this our world
To give thereby the power which can but work
When it reveals itself in season due.

Today I will summarize some truths that will serve us in turn to provide further explanations in a certain direction in the coming days. If we consider our soul life, we can say that towards one pole of this soul life lies the element of thinking, towards the other pole the element of will, and between the two the element of feeling, that which in ordinary life we call feeling, the content of the mind, and so on. In the actual life of the soul, as it takes place in us in our waking state, there is never just one-sided thinking or will, but they are always in connection with each other, they play into each other. Let us assume that we behave very calmly in life, so that we can say, for example, that our will is not active externally. However, when we think during such outwardly directed calmness, we must be aware that will is at work in the thoughts we unfold: in connecting one thought with another, will is at work in this thinking. So even when we are seemingly merely contemplative, merely thinking, at least inwardly the will is present in us, and unless we are raving or sleepwalking, we cannot be willfully active without letting our volitional impulses flow through thoughts. Thoughts always permeate our volition, so that we can say: the will is never present in the life of the soul in isolation. But what is not present in this isolated way can still have different origins. And so the one pole of our soul life, thinking, has a completely different origin than the life of the will.

Even if we only consider everyday life, we will find that thinking always refers to something that is there, that has prerequisites. Thinking is mostly a reflection. Even when we think ahead, when we plan something that we then carry out through the will, such thinking is based on experience, which we then act upon. In a certain respect, this thinking is, of course, also a reflection. The will cannot be directed towards what is already there. In that case, it would always be too late. The will can only be directed towards what is to come, towards the future. In short, if you reflect a little on the inner life of thought, of thinking and of the will, you will find that even in ordinary life, thinking relates more to the past, while the will relates to the future. The inner life of feeling stands between the two. We accompany our thoughts with feeling. Thoughts please us, repel us. Out of our feeling we lead our impulses of will into life. Feeling, the content of the mind, stands between thinking and willing, right in the middle.

But just as it is the case in ordinary life, even if only in a suggestive way, so it is in the great world. And there we have to say: what constitutes our thinking power, what makes up the fact that we can think, that the possibility of thought is in us, we owe it to the life before our birth, or rather before our conception. In the little child that comes to meet us, all the thinking abilities that a person develops are already present in the germ. The child uses thoughts only - as you know from lectures I have already given - as directing forces to build up its body. Especially in the first seven years of life, until the change of teeth, the child uses the powers of thought to build up its body as directing forces. Then they emerge more and more as actual thought forces. But they are thoroughly predisposed in the human being as thought forces when he enters physical, earthly life.

What develops as will forces - an unbiased observation readily reveals this - is actually connected with this thought force only to a small extent in the child. Just observe a wriggling, moving child in the first weeks of life, and you will already realize that this wriggling, this chaotic movement, has only been acquired by the child because his soul and spirit have been clothed with physical corporeality by the physical external world. In this physical body, which we only develop little by little from conception and birth, the will initially lies, and the development of a child's life consists in the fact that gradually the will is, so to speak, captured by the powers of thought that we already bring with us into physical existence through birth. Just observe how the child at first moves its limbs quite senselessly, as it comes out of the activity of the physical body, and how gradually, I might say, thought intrudes into these movements, so that they become meaningful. So there is a pressing and thrusting of thinking into the life of the will, which lives entirely within the shell that surrounds the human being when he is born, or rather, conceived. This life of the will is contained entirely within it.

So that we can draw a schematic picture of a human being, in which we say that he brings his life of thought with him when he descends from the spiritual world. I will indicate this schematically (see drawing, yellow). And he begins his life of will in the physical body that is given to him by his parents (red). The forces of will are within, expressing themselves in a chaotic manner. And within are the powers of thought (arrows), which initially serve as directing forces to spiritualize the will in its corporeality in the right way.

We then perceive these forces of will when we pass through death into the spiritual world. But there they are highly organized. We carry them through the gate of death into spiritual life. The powers of thought that we bring with us from the supersensible life into earthly life, we actually lose in the course of earthly life.

With human beings who die young, it is somewhat different. For now, let us speak first of normal human beings. A normal human being who lives past the age of fifty has basically already lost the real powers of thought that were brought along from the previous life and has just retained the directional powers of the will, which are then carried over through death into the life that we enter when we go through the gate of death.

One can assume that someone is now thinking: Yes, so if you are over fifty years old, you have lost your thinking! - In a sense, this is even the case for most people who are not interested in anything spiritual today. I would just like you to really endeavor to register how much original, inventive thought power is produced by those people today who have reached the age of fifty! As a rule, it is the thoughts of earlier years that have automatically moved on and left an impression on the body, and the body then moves on automatically. After all, the body is a reflection of our mental life, and the person continues in the old rut of thought according to the law of inertia. Today, the only way to protect oneself from continuing in the old rut of thought is to absorb thoughts during one's lifetime that are of a spiritual nature, that are similar to the thought-forces in which we were placed before our birth. So that indeed the time is approaching when old people will be mere automatons if they do not take care to absorb thought-forces from the supersensible world. Of course, man can continue to think automatically; it may appear as if he is thinking. But it is only an automatic movement of the organs in which thoughts have been laid, have been woven in, if the human being is not grasped by that youthful element that comes when we absorb thoughts from spiritual science. This absorption of thoughts from spiritual science is certainly not just any kind of theorizing, but it intervenes quite deeply in human life.

But the matter takes on particular significance when we now consider man's relationship to the surrounding nature. I now understand by nature all that surrounds us for our senses, to which we are thus exposed from waking up to falling asleep. This can be considered in a certain way in the following way. One can visualize what one sees — I mean before spiritual eyes. We call it the sensory carpet. I will draw it schematically. Behind everything that one sees, hears, perceives as warmth, the colors in nature and so on – I draw an eye as a schema for what is perceived there – there is something behind this sensory carpet. Physicists or people of the present world view say: Behind it are atoms and they swirl -, and afterwards, right, as they continue to swirl, there is no sensory carpet at all, but somehow in the eye or in the brain or somewhere or not somewhere, they then evoke the colors and the sounds and so on. Now, please, imagine, quite impartially, that you begin to think about this sensory carpet. If you start thinking and do not assume the illusion that you can observe this huge army of atoms, which the chemists have arranged in such a military way of thinking, let us say, for example, there is Corporal C, then two privates, C, O, O, and then another private as an H; isn't that right, that's how we arranged it militarily: aether, atoms and so on. Now, if, as I said, you do not succumb to this illusion but remain with reality, then you know: the sensory carpet is spread out, the sensory qualities are out there, and what I still grasp with consciousness about what lies in the sensory qualities is just thoughts. In reality, there is nothing behind this sensory carpet but thoughts (blue). I mean, behind what we have in the physical world, there is nothing but thoughts. We will talk about the fact that these are carried by beings. But you can only get behind what we have in our consciousness with thoughts. But the power to think we have from our prenatal life or from the life before our conception. Why is it then that we can penetrate behind the sensory curtain by means of this power?

Just try to familiarize yourself with the idea that I have just mentioned, and try to properly present the question to yourself on the basis of what we have just hinted at, which we have already considered in many contexts. Why is it that we can reach below the sensory level with our thoughts, when our thoughts come from our prenatal life? Very simply, because behind it is that which is not in the present at all, but which is in the past, which belongs to the past. That which is under the carpet of sense is indeed a past, and we only see it correctly when we recognize it as a past. The past has an effect on our present, and out of the past sprouts that which appears to us in the present. Imagine a meadow full of flowers. You see the grass as a green blanket, you see the meadow's floral decoration. That is the present, but it grows out of the past. And if you think through this, then underneath it you do not have an atomistic present, but in reality you have the past as related to what comes from you yourself from the past.

It is interesting: when we begin to reflect on things, it is not the present that is revealed to us, but the past. What is the present? The present has no logical structure at all. The sunbeam falls on some plant, it shines there; in the next moment, when the direction of the sunbeam is different, it shines in a different direction. The image changes every moment. The present is such that we cannot grasp it with mathematics, not with the mere structure of thought. What we can grasp with the mere structure of thought is the past, which continues in the present.

This is something that can reveal itself to man as a great, as a significant truth: When you think, you basically only think the past; when you spin logic, you basically reflect on what has passed. - Anyone who grasps this thought will no longer seek miracles in the past either. For in that the past is woven into the present, it must be in the present as it is in the past. If you think about it, if you ate cherries yesterday, that is a past action; you cannot undo it because it is a past action. But if the cherries had the habit of making a mark somewhere before they disappeared into your mouth, that mark would remain. You could not change this sign. If every cherry had registered its past in your mouth after you had eaten cherries yesterday, and someone came and wanted to cross out five, he could cross them out, but the fact would not change. Nor can you perform any miracle with regard to all natural phenomena, because they are all intrusions from the past. And everything we can grasp with natural laws has already passed, is no longer present. You cannot grasp the present other than through images; that is a fluctuating thing. When a body lights up here, a shadow is created. You have to let the shadow properly define itself, so to speak, and so on. You can construct the shadow. That the shadow really comes into being can only be determined by devotion to the picture. So that one can say: even in ordinary life, limitation, I could also say logical thinking, refers to the past. And the imagination refers to the present. In relation to the present, man always has imaginations.

Just think, if you wanted to live logically in the present! No, to live logically means to draw one concept from another, to move from one concept to another in a lawful manner. Now, just imagine yourself in life. You see some event: is the next one logically connected to it? Can you logically deduce the next event from the previous one? When you look at life, are not its images similar to a dream? The present is similar to a dream, and only that the past is mixed into the present, which causes the present to proceed in a lawful, logical manner. And if you want to divine something in the future in the present, yes, if you just want to think of something you want to do in the future, then that has happened in a completely non-representational way in the first instance. What you will experience tonight is not in your mind as an image, but as something more non-pictorial than an image. At most, it is in your mind as inspiration. Inspiration relates to the future. Logical thinking: past Imagination: present Intuition Inspiration: future.

We can also use a simple diagram to visualize what is involved. When a person – let me characterize him here by this eye (see drawing on page 198) – looks at the tapestry of the senses, he sees it in its transforming images, but he now comes and introduces laws into these images. He develops a natural science out of the changing images of the sensory world. He develops a specialized science. But think about how this natural science is developed. You investigate, you investigate while thinking. You cannot possibly, if you want to develop a science about what spreads out as a carpet of senses, a science that proceeds in logical thoughts, you cannot possibly gain these logical thoughts from the external world. If what is recognized as thoughts and laws of nature were to follow from the external world itself, then it would not be necessary for us to learn anything about the external world. Then the person who, for example, looks at this light would have to know the exact electrical laws and so on, like the other person who has learned it! Equally, if he has not learned it, man knows nothing at all, let us say, about the relationship of an arc to the radius and so on. We bring forth from our inner being the thoughts that we carry into the outer world.

Yes, it is so: what we carry into the outer world as thoughts, we bring forth from our inner being. We are first of all this human being, who is constructed as a head human being. This human being looks at the carpet of senses. Inside the carpet of senses is what we reach through thoughts (see drawing page 198, white) and between this and between what we have inside us, what we do not perceive, there is a connection, so to speak an underground connection. Therefore, what we do not perceive in the external world because it extends into us, we bring out of our inner being in the form of thought life and place it in the external world. This is how it is with counting. The external world does not present anything to us; the laws of counting lie within our own inner being. But that this is true arises from the fact that between these predispositions, which are there in the external world, and our own earthly laws, there is an underground connection, a sub-physical connection, and so we draw the number out of our inner being. It then fits with what is outside. But the path is not through our eyes, not through our senses, but through our organism. And that which we develop as human beings, we develop as whole human beings. It is not true that we grasp some law of nature through the senses; we grasp it as a whole human being.

These things must be considered if we want to properly bring to mind the relationship between man and the environment. We are constantly in imaginations, and one need only compare life with dreams without prejudice. When a dream unfolds, it is certainly very chaotic, but it is much more similar to life than logical thinking. Let us take an extreme case. If you take a conversation between reasonable people of the present day, you listen and you talk yourself. Think about what is said in the course of, say, half an hour, and whether there is more coherence in the succession of thoughts than there is in dreams, or whether there is as much coherence as in logical thinking. If you were to demand that logical thinking develops there, you would probably be greatly disappointed. The present world presents itself to us entirely in images, so that basically we are actually dreaming all the time. We have yet to bring logic into it. We wrest logic from our prenatal existence; we first bring it into the context of things and thereby also encounter the past in things. We embrace the present with imagination.

When we observe this imaginative life that constantly surrounds us in the sensual present, we can say to ourselves: this imaginative life gives itself to us. We do nothing to it. Just think how hard you had to work to arrive at logical thinking! You didn't have to make any effort to enjoy life, to observe life; it reveals its images to you by itself. Now, that's how it is in life with imagining the images of the ordinary world around us. But all one needs is to acquire the ability to make images – but now through one's own activity, as one otherwise does in thinking – and to experience images through inner effort, as one otherwise does in thinking. Then one not only sees the present in images, but one also extends pictorial imagination to life before birth or before conception, and one sees before birth or before conception. And when you look into these images, then thinking is populated with the images, and then prenatal life becomes reality. We just have to be able to think in images by training the abilities that are spoken of in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, without these images coming to us by themselves, as is the case in ordinary life. When we make this life of images, in which we actually always live in ordinary life, into an inner life, then we look into the spiritual world, and then we do see the way in which our life actually unfolds.

Today, it is considered almost exclusively spiritual when someone – I have spoken about this often – truly despises material life and says: I strive towards the spirit, matter remains far beneath me. This is a weakness, because only the one who does not need to leave matter below him, but who understands matter itself in its effectiveness as spirit, who can recognize everything material as spiritual and everything spiritual, even in its manifestation as material, only he truly attains a spiritual life. This becomes especially significant when we look at thinking and willing. At most, language, which contains a secret genius within it, still has something of what leads to knowledge in this field.

Consider the basis of will in everyday life: you know that it arises from desire; even the most ideal will arises from desire. Now take the coarsest form of desire. What is the coarsest form of desire? Hunger. Therefore, everything that arises from desire is basically always related to hunger. From what I am trying to suggest to you today, you can see that thinking is the other pole, and will therefore behave like the opposite of desire. We can say: if we base desire on the will, we have to base thinking on satiation, on being full, not on hunger.

This actually corresponds to the facts in the deepest sense. If you take our head organization as human beings and the other organization that is attached to it, it is indeed the case that we perceive. What does it mean to perceive? We perceive through our senses. As we perceive, something is actually constantly being removed within us. Something passes from the outside into our inner being. The ray of light that enters our eye actually carries something away. In a sense, a hole is drilled into our own matter (see drawing on page 201). There was matter, but now the beam of light has drilled a hole into it, and now there is hunger. This hunger must be satisfied, and it is satisfied from the organism, from the available food; that is, this hole is filled with the food that is inside us (red). Now we have thought, now we have thought what we have perceived: by thinking, we continually fill the holes that sensory perceptions create in us with satiety that arises from our organism.

It is extremely interesting to observe, when we consider the organization of the head, how we fill the holes that arise in our remaining organism through the ears and eyes, through the sensations of warmth; there are holes everywhere. Man fills himself completely by thinking, by filling that which is there, in the holes (red).

And it is similar with us if we want it to be. Only then it does not work from outside in, so that we are hollowed out, but it works from within. If we want, hollows arise everywhere in us; these must in turn be filled with matter. So that we can say, we receive negative effects, hollowing out effects, both from outside and from inside, and constantly push our matter into them.

These are the most intimate effects, these hollowing effects, which actually destroy all earthly existence in us. Because by receiving the ray of light, by hearing the sound, we destroy our earthly existence. But we react to this, we in turn fill this with earthly existence. So we have a life between the destruction of earthly existence and the filling of earthly existence: luciferic, ahrimanic. The Luciferic is actually constantly striving to partially turn us into something non-material, to completely remove us from our earthly existence; for if he could, Lucifer would like to spiritualize us completely, that is, dematerialize us. But Ahriman is his opponent; he works in such a way that what Lucifer excavates is constantly being filled in again. Ahriman is the constant filler. If you form Lucifer plastically and make Ahriman plastically, you could quite well, if the matter went through in confusion, always push Ahriman into the cavity of Lucifer, or put Lucifer over it. But since there are also cavities inside, you also have to push in. Ahriman and Lucifer are the two opposing forces at work in man. He himself is the state of equilibrium. Lucifer, with continuous dematerialization, results in continuous materialization: Ahriman. When we perceive, that is Lucifer. When we think about what we have perceived: Ahriman. When we form the idea, this or that we should want: Lucifer. When we really want on earth: Ahriman. So we are in the middle of the two. We oscillate back and forth between them, and we must be clear about ourselves: as human beings, we are placed in the most intimate way between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. Actually, you only get to know a person when you take these two opposing poles in him into account.

This is an approach that is based neither on an abstract spiritual reality – for this abstract spiritual reality is, after all, nebulous and mystical – nor on a material one, but rather everything that is materially effective is also spiritual at the same time. We are dealing with the spiritual everywhere. And we see through matter in its existence, in its effectiveness, by being able to see the spirit in everything.

I have already told you that imagination comes to us of its own accord in relation to the present. When we develop imagination artificially, we look into the past. When we develop inspiration, we look into the future, just as one calculates into the future by calculating solar or lunar eclipses, not in relation to the details, but to a higher degree in relation to the great laws of the future. And intuition encompasses all three. And we are actually subject to intuition all the time, we just sleep through it. When we sleep, we are completely immersed in the outside world with our ego and our astral body; there we unfold that intuitive activity that one must otherwise consciously unfold in intuition. But in this present organization the human being is too weak to be conscious when he is intuiting; but he does intuit in fact at night. So one can say: Asleep, the human being develops intuition; awake, he develops—to a certain extent, of course—logical thinking; between the two stands inspiration and imagination. When a person comes out of sleep into waking life, his I and his astral body enter into the physical body and the etheric body; what he brings with him is the inspiration to which I have already drawn your attention in previous lectures. We can say: Man is asleep in intuition, awake in logical thinking, when he wakes up he inspires himself, when he falls asleep he imagines. - You can see from this that the activities we mention as the higher activities of knowledge are not alien to ordinary life, but that they are very much present in ordinary life, that they only have to be raised into consciousness if a higher knowledge is to be developed.

It must be pointed out again and again that in the last three to four centuries, external science has summarized a large number of purely material facts and brought them into laws. These facts must first be spiritually penetrated. But it is good - if I may say so, although it sounds paradoxical at first - that materialism was there, otherwise people would have fallen into nebulosity. They would have finally lost all connection with their earthly existence. When materialism began in the 15th century, humanity was in fact in danger of falling prey to Luciferic influences to a high degree, of being hollowed out more and more and more. That is when the Ahrimanic influences came from that time on. And in the last four or five centuries, the Ahrimanic influences have developed to a certain extent. Today they have become very strong and there is a danger that they will overshoot their target if we do not counter them with something that will effectively weaken them: if we do not counter them with the spiritual.

But here it is important to develop the right feeling for the relationship between the spiritual and the material. In the older German way of thinking, there is a poem called “Muspilli”, which was first found in a book dedicated to Louis the German in the 9th century, but which of course dates from a much earlier time. There is something purely Christian in this poem: it presents us with the battle of Elijah with the Antichrist. But the whole way in which this story unfolds, this fight between Elijah and the Antichrist, is reminiscent of the ancient struggles of the sagas, the inhabitants of Asgard with the inhabitants of Jötunheim, the inhabitants of the realm of the giants. It is simply the realm of the Æsir transformed into the realm of Elijah, the realm of the giants into the realm of the Antichrist.

This way of thinking, which we still encounter, conceals the true fact less than the later ways of thinking. The later ways of thinking always talk about duality, about good and evil, about God and the devil, and so on. But these ways of thinking, which were developed in later times, no longer correspond to the earlier ones. Those people who developed the struggle between the Gods' home and the giants' home did not see the same in the Gods as, for example, today's Christian understands in the realm of his God. Instead, these older ideas had, for example, Asgard, the realm of the Gods, above, and Jötunheim, the realm of the giants, below; in the middle, Man unfolds, Midgard. This is nothing other than the same thing in the Germanic-European way that was present in ancient Persia as Ormuzd and Ahriman. There we would have to say in our language: Lucifer and Ahriman. We would have to address Ormuzd as Lucifer and not just as the good God. And that is the great mistake that is made, that one understands this dualism as if Ormuzd were only the good God and his opponent Ahriman the evil God. The relationship is rather like that of Lucifer to Ahriman. And in Middlegard, at the time when this poem “Muspilli” was written, it is still not imagined that The Christ sends his blood down from above – but: Elijah is there, and sends his blood down. And man is placed in the middle. At the time when Louis the German probably wrote this poem into his book, the idea was still more correct than the later one. For later times have committed the strange act of disregarding the Trinity; that is, to understand the upper gods, who are in Asgard, and the lower gods, the giants, who are in the Ahrimanic realm, as the All, and to understand the upper, the Luciferic ones, as the good gods and the others as the evil gods. This was done in later times; in earlier times, this opposition between Lucifer and Ahriman was still properly envisaged, and therefore something like Elijah was placed in the Luciferic realm with his emotional prophecy, with that which he was able to proclaim at that time, because one wanted to place the Christ in Midgard, in that which lies in the middle.

We must go back to these ideas in full consciousness, otherwise we will not come back to the Trinity: to the Luciferic Gods, to the Ahrimanic powers and in between to what the Christ-realm is. Without advancing to this, we will not come to a real understanding of the world.

This is the topic I wanted to broach, and we will continue to discuss it in the coming days in various ways.

Speaking about the problem of immortality and about the riddle of freedom spiritual-scientifically is the task of the whole cycle that I would like to hold in this winter here. These are the two questions that admittedly the scientific worldview cannot approach and in which the only philosophical world consideration will always smash as it arises from my book The Riddles of Philosophy and from an unbiased consideration of the historical development of philosophy.

I would like today to consider a partial question possibly in a concluded whole: the question of the human being as a being of soul and spirit. Already while pronouncing these words, one touches, actually, the question of the human soul in a way that is very far from the present worldview. The present worldview—if it generally gets involved to look at something else than that which experimental psychology, biology, physiology give—speaks of a duality of body and soul. I would like to show that this arrangement of the human being must lead to serious misunderstandings that divert a scientific consideration, actually, from the highest human riddles. One believes today that in the so-called soul riddles the riddle of spirit is already enclosed, and you will find, while you dedicate yourself to this misunderstanding, the applause of some scientific world viewers and also of some soul viewers. Spiritual science generally is in a peculiar relation to the scientific and to the philosophical worldviews.

You know that I have stressed repeatedly that spiritual science stands everywhere completely on the ground of scientific research, and just because it stands more than the scientific worldview on scientific ground, it feels forced to ascend from the mere consideration of nature and her life to the consideration of the real spiritual life. Only the scientific worldview that became ingrained in a big part of our contemporaries also behaves in their choicest representatives in such a way that spiritual science has a rough ride to find understanding anyhow. I would like to say some introductory words about it because they will be necessary in case of our further consideration.

Today one can find that in certain areas the scientific worldview has almost got to a kind of ideal limitation of its field. We have works in the scientific realm that you can regard as exemplary in the way, how they restrict their task with the realisation of single problems. After the unilaterally Darwinian-Haeckel romanticism of the last third of the nineteenth century biology, for example, has advanced so far that we have such an exemplary work as the work of the Berlin researcher Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922) about The Origin of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance (1916). We also have ingenious achievements for such areas, which touch the borders of that what should be regarded here methodically, as for example the Guide to Physiological Psychology (1891) by Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950, German neurologist, psychiatrist). One may say that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science espouses such methodical research where it depends on the consideration of the actually scientific area. I myself always oppose with all that I would like to contribute to spiritual science the sometimes indeed well intentioned, but dilettantish worldview constructions that arise from some inadequate attempts of knowledge.

However, just this methodical scientific worldview gives spiritual science a hard fight to find understanding with our contemporaries. Even in the so exemplary book by Oscar Hertwig we find as it were the scientific conviction that natural sciences can deal only with the finite and cannot consider the infinite. However, natural sciences can explore the finite in all directions. Hertwig repeats Nägeli's (Karl Wilhelm N., 1817-1891, Swiss botanist) words from his scientific point of view rightly, and Theodor Ziehen also says that he wants to look at everything in the human soul life that has parallel phenomena in the human body, so that physiology can give information about these parallel phenomena. One must leave everything else to metaphysics or the like. Then, however, Ziehen says again that that is more important which the present physiological-psychological research puts forward in its details, which are, actually, nothing special which do not say anything particular about the big riddles of soul and spirit, than everything that was tried to perform about the supersensible in the soul life and the like for centuries. If we add the dictum which already before decades the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond (Emil Du B.R., 1818-1896) did that real science is only allowed to deal, actually, with the sensory world because science stops where the supersensible begins, we find that by which the scientific worldview wants to pull the rug out under the feet of any spiritual science. On one side one always says rather benevolently: one has to leave all questions which exceed the sensory consideration to metaphysics or something similar, nevertheless, on the other side one argues again that real science can be performed only in the area of sensory consideration.

Thus, we realise that science blanks out everything mental and spiritual, and it solely claims the character of scientificity for that which is left. Compared with such attempts I would like to stress that spiritual science stands even in the question of the so-called old vitality absolutely on the ground of such researchers like Du Bois-Reymond, Hertwig and others. Since this vitality which haunted in science until the middle, until the end of the second third of the nineteenth century is a product of speculation.

Because one believed that the phenomena in the living organism were not explicable with physical and chemical laws, one speculated on an uncertain vitality to which one ascribed everything that one could not explain chemically or physically. Du Bois-Reymond said in his excellent preface of his Researches on Animal Electricity (1848-1864) already at the middle of the nineteenth century with a certain right that the progress of physiology necessitated, actually, that once somebody would come who banishes this vitality from physiology. Spiritual science can agree even with such a hard condemnation of vitality. Since it can figure everything out that is brought forward from physiological-biological side rightly against such a hypothetical, speculative vitality, and can consider what appears today again as so-called neovitalism only as a reaction which is caused by the fact that one realises sporadically: we cannot already recognise that what lives simply as the only physical and chemical. However, this reaction returns more or less to the old speculation of an uncertain vitality.

Spiritual science represented here can also not agree with this reaction against the purely mechanistic natural sciences. For it, however, it must arrogate something else to itself. With those cognitive forces and abilities which lead just to the big, significant scientific results one cannot exceed the only physical and chemical. Of course, the living beings are subject to physical and chemical laws because they have physical bodies. These must be investigated with physics and chemistry, and one is not allowed to contrive any vitality. But the mere cognitive forces and abilities as natural sciences apply them rightly are not sufficient to understand life, soul and spirit, and one only has the option either to stop in the area of physical and chemical laws and then to renounce understanding life, soul and spirit, or to appeal to quite different cognitive forces.

With it, however, you are confronted again with a widespread prejudice. Most people do not believe that the human soul striving methodically gets to cognitive forces and abilities that are quite different from those of natural sciences. So you face a double possibility only not to comprehend soul and spirit or to cross the Rubicon to familiarise yourself with the advancement of the human souls. It can thereby get to such cognitive forces that are more important to you than that what natural sciences can say, just if they are perfect. You are confronted with a severe prejudice. You must say from the viewpoint of spiritual science, natural sciences behave, actually, to spiritual science in such a way as somebody who can only describe the letters that are printed on any page behaves to that who can read them. Spiritual science tries to read that which natural sciences can only describe. That what it has to say about the phenomena of the world, about its contents and about the significance of the processes behaves like something read to the description of the letters that compose the words. There is the possibility to penetrate really into life, soul, and spirit, while one attains an ability of reading nature. This ability behaves compared with the mere physical consideration like the free ability of reading to the mere description of letters.

Now many contemporaries if such a thing is said remember of course that this is a reference to all kinds of fantastic visionary activities of the soul. However, that does not at all apply. Spiritual science is rather something for which one has to work hard and methodically, as natural sciences have to do it. But spiritual science has a rough ride today to penetrate because since centuries already any human worldview has intended to blank out the spiritual from the soul more or less, to consider the soul as the whole inwardness of the human being, and to think it more or less dependent or also independent of the body, but to search no such relation of the soul to the spirit as it is searched on the other side by the soul to the body. Someone who only with pure soul experiences—even if these would be mystically increased soul experiences—wants to find out something about the real nature of the human being as a spiritual being resembles someone who wants to inform himself because of hunger and thirst of those processes which take place in the human body, and which are the basis of that which the soul experiences as hunger and thirst.

Everybody easily realises that hunger and thirst are the inner experience of something that happens in the body. The scientific worldview says, if the human being feels hunger and thirst, a chemical change has taken place in the blood or as the case may be. It points to the fact that in the body something has happened that expresses itself as the experience of thirst and hunger in the soul. However, one has to look at the soul experiences, if one wants to investigate what goes forward in the body. Of course, you cannot investigate in a living being that has no hunger how the hunger expresses itself bodily, but you can never find out for yourself that you only consider the inner experience of hunger or saturation with which bodily processes this inner experience is associated. Just as little you can get to know something from this mere play about that which forms the basis of the soul as something spiritual, even if you immerse yourself ever so mystically. As well as natural sciences must proceed from the experience of hunger and thirst with their methods to something that is not observed in the usual soul life—for the human being knows nothing of the chemical process in his body, while he suffers from hunger and thirst—, you have to change into something spiritual if you consider everything that can be experienced by imagining, feeling and willing in the soul.

However, how can you find this spiritual being? The sensory places itself before the senses, while the human being faces nature; the spiritual does not do it in the same way. The spiritual confronts the human being only if he rouses the cognitive abilities from his inside that I have called “beholding” in my book The Riddle of Man that slumbers in the usual life as it were. Now I would like to talk not about something abstract, but I would like to show immediately at a concrete example that—as the naturalist can go over by his method from the subjective hunger and thirst to the bodily processes which are unconscious in the usual experience—it is as possible to go over from the soul phenomena to the spiritual phenomena which relate from one side to the soul as from the other side the soul relates to the body. Already with such concrete questions you are confronted straight away with opposition of the common consideration of the soul life. This wants to consider, actually, the passive soul life only because it takes the scientific methods as starting point. You cannot consider the active soul life scientifically that is active in its being from within, and it is often lost generally out of sight. Today natural sciences often consider the mental experience only how mental pictures form a group, how a mental picture is maybe caused by outer perception, how it causes another which is stored in memory, or also many other. One observes how the mental pictures associate with gradations of feeling, with will impulses or the like. One does not attain methods that you can compare concerning the spiritual with the strict methods of the scientific worldview. If you take the Physiological Psychology by Theodor Ziehen, you realise how everything results in the fact that our whole soul life is built up on such associations if it exceeds the mere sensory life. However, this kind of consideration just does not get to the impartial beholding of the soul life.

Such consideration, for example, shows the following: you can realise if you get to a real observation or introspection of the soul, as I will show it after, that we are dependent in the usual life with our soul experience on that what life gives us as mental pictures. If the human being lets his soul life to its own resources, the mental pictures play in it that have come from the impressions of the outside world into his soul. He is a kind of slave of his mental pictures in a way. Theodor Ziehen says with a certain right, we cannot think as we want, but we must think as the just available associations determine it because this or that impression has been done on us that causes another impression. Thus we are given away—after Ziehen—to the play of impressions. We are not so free in the usual life in relation to our imagining as we mean. However, we are also not as dependent as Theodor Ziehen means. Someone who can advance to the soul observation knows that, indeed, the strong dependence on impressions is there, but it lasts for a certain time. This is something to which modern psychology does not give thought at all. However, a mental picture that is caused by an impression tyrannises us. If I have seen a friend, this mental picture pursues me, it causes other mental pictures of other friends, of common experiences with these friends and so on, and you are dependent on these mental pictures, but only for some time. This time can be determined even internally experimentally. This time takes two to three days. However, after this time the power changes with which such an impression works on our soul. Then we can emotionally relate to an impression in such a way as the impression has related to us before.

We were its slaves before; we become its masters after two to three days. You can do this, for example, in the following way. If you have a feeling for the inner soul life, you can ask yourself, which difference exists between being given to the inner soul life, as it takes place by itself for some time, and reading a book? If I read a book, I cannot be carried from one mental picture to another. I would not advance reading if I were carried by mental pictures that an impression has caused in me, I must dedicate myself rather to that what flows from the book as mental pictures. There I come under the control of the author. The author controls the course of my mental pictures. I become similar with my ego to that what happens if my mental pictures are controlled by the mental pictures that come from the book if I have lived with any impression for two to three days, concerning this impression. Then I leave myself not to the association that this impression wants to cause, but I have the inner power to associate this impression with others. An entire change of an image impression proceeds in the human soul if it has lasted for two to three days in the soul.

You can already convince yourself of the truth of the just said without being a spiritual researcher by usual, more intimate observation of the soul life, indeed, in an area that is considered only cursorily nowadays, and that the so-called analytic psychology or psychoanalysis despises. However, I do not want to go into that. However, I would like to point out that someone who can really observe dreams knows that the involuntary appearance of dreams is always associated anyhow with the impressions of the last days, actually, only of the last two to three days. However, do not misunderstand me! Of course, bygone events appear in the dreams as memories.

However, it is something else that evokes these bygone events. If you can observe the dream exactly, you always realise that any mental picture of the last two to three days must be there. That only evokes bygone events. For two to three days, the impressions of the outside world have the power to generate dreams. Then the other things are associated with them. Unless such mental picture can generate the dream, it cannot originate. However, you have really to observe what I have indicated now, because the usual consciousness cannot observe it. This is just so unknown to many people today because it proceeds in the unconscious. As a rule, the human being attains no knowledge how he relates different to a mental picture that is not yet present for two to three days in his soul, and to such which is present already so long. One can observe all these things exactly and properly only as a spiritual researcher. However, he needs a certain strengthening of the usual soul life to the real observation. The imagining applies for the usual soul life, actually, only to that which it repeats and develops in a way what the senses perceive from the outside. This soul life can now be strengthened, so that these pale, uncertain mental pictures of the everyday life can appear in another way in the soul so that its power matches a sense perception. However, this must happen if you want to do researches really in the spiritual area. With the usual cognitive forces, you cannot do these researches. I have described the method in detail in my books How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and Occult Science by which you can lift up imagining and by which you change it into Imagination, into the beholding percipience.

I would like only to emphasise some things of the big wealth of that which the soul has to carry out with itself to strengthen its life. I want to refer to that what I have recently emphasised in my last book The Riddles of the Soul, the continuation of my book The Riddle of Man: the fact that the human being if he activates his usual soul life in science gets to certain so-called limits of knowledge. These limits of knowledge can face you if you familiarise yourself with the worldviews of profound thinkers. If I may bring in something personal here: experiences have led me to this form of spiritual science thirty to 35 years ago which I could gain in the worldviews of such persons to whom knowledge is not an external occupation, but something that constitutes the core of their longing and feeling. If you are confronted, for example, with the thinker Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887) with words which have come to him when he had thought about the connection of body and soul, with words like: the soul cannot be in the body, but it can also not be beyond the body, then you get in living connection with an original, elementary thinker to such limits in which the human soul life must come if it wants to be cognitively active.

The usual thinking just puts limits of knowledge in such points of the soul life. Du Bois-Reymond spoke of “seven world riddles” which cannot be solved; however, one could bring in hundreds of such so-called limits of the human soul life:

• if you do not content yourself with such limits, but if you try to go through everything that the soul has to go through while it says to itself, you have to put questions which the natural outside world cannot answer, also that what comes up from your soul cannot answer them,

• if you combine in your innermost soul life with these questions,

• if you have patience to struggle with them not only logically, but internally,

• if you put them repeatedly to your soul not only to get to know what they say logically, but what they release vividly in the soul,

then something emerges from such questions gradually in the soul. One experiences something emotionally that I want to bring to mind in the following way by a comparison. Just the scientific worldview often thinks that the lowest living beings only have an inner life activity at first, develop it in contact with the outside world and thereby transform their still undifferentiated organisms, so that it touches the outside world not only in an uncertain way, but that this touching is differentiated to the sense of touch, and from the sense of touch the other senses should have gradually developed phylogenetically. That which the being experiences in living matter can be really compared with that which the soul experiences if it is confronted with such limits. If you get to know the mental experience of such limits really, you feel that with it nothing is meant that deals with the origin of outer sensory tools. If you have patience to settle down in such riddles, a sort of mental groping develops, then something arises from it like a differentiation of the soul life. Today most people do not believe in that, of course. However, one will believe in it more and more if one realises that only in such a way one can attain real knowledge of the phenomena of the world and in particular of the riddle of the human being. The human being gradually does not only reach questions of limits, but he develops his soul with it, and thus those higher organs of beholding originate by which the soul learns gradually to penetrate into the spirit. This is only one of those exercises that the soul has to practise to transform the undifferentiated soul life, so that it can really penetrate into the spiritual world.

I would have to bring in a lot of that what you can read in the mentioned books if I wanted to explain how imagining becomes something else than in the usual life. Imagining is something passive that follows the sensory percepts. Because the soul life is invigorated by many exercises, it becomes something else from imagining. The imagining becomes active so that as it were an ego asserts itself which is much more concrete than the usual one, and the human being gets to know that he can really observe the soul phenomena with such increased soul life.

If I now return, after I have developed the nature of real self-knowledge, to that what I have asserted up to now, I have to say, what happens there, actually, while the mental pictures change from that state which they have for two to three days into the other state which they have later, one can figure this out only with such reinforced soul life. Since you get to know then that the human being becomes as free compared with the mental pictures that subjectively prevail for two to three days, after this time, as he is usually free from his usual body. The human being gets to know what he is in his inside what controls the mental pictures in such a way, as we control the hands and legs if we grasp or go with our usual ego. The human being gets to know the higher ego that remains usually unconscious and moves within the mindscape as the usual ego moves in the bodily life. That means we come after two to three days from that which is subjective to the objective of the soul life.

We enter that which outer impressions do not control, and which we learn to recognise as that which carries the outer impressions through the whole life between birth and death. We learn to recognise something second in the human being to which we feel as we feel towards our body in the usual life. We get to know what I have called in one of the last numbers of the magazine Das Reich (The Empire) the body of formative forces, a supersensible body that is there, as well as the usual physical body is there. However, it remains unconscious for the usual soul life. As well as the hand of the physical body is moved by the usual ego, the human being learns to recognise how he works within that which carries the imagination which lives in the imagination and this is only the spirit. The spirit is not the imagination, but what lives in the imagination in such a way as the usual soul lives in the body. However, while the usual psychology considers, actually, the whole soul life only as it prevails for two to three days, calculated from the impressions, it does not get at all from the soul to the spirit, blanks out the spirit. For the usual soul life, it is blanked out in a way.

A self-consideration shows this of which we can speak now, after I have already indicated what its being consists of. You all are clear in your mind that the ego stands in the centre of the soul life. However, today the psychologist is less clear about that in his mind. It is interesting what, for example, such an excellent psychologist like Theodor Ziehen says in his book Physiological Psychology just about the ego. This book contains printed lectures. There he says to his listeners, if you think about that which the ego is, actually, where to do you come there, actually? If you really think about it, at first your body will come into your mind, then everything that you have as relations to the outside world; then everything that you have as relatives and possession, your name and title, your dominating mental pictures and your main inclinations, your past will come into your mind. Indeed, Theodor Ziehen says, the reflective consciousness distinguishes now—except everything that comes into your mind in such a way—the ego as that which prevails inside, which moves and works from the inside imagining. Nevertheless, it is a fiction of epistemology or of speculative psychology. Physiological psychology has nothing to do with that.

This is such a place again by which the ground should be pulled away under the feet of spiritual science. However, can anybody really allow himself for the usual consciousness to think with his ego only of everything that Theodor Ziehen thinks? Does he not feel the inner activity of a central being in his soul life? Does he only think really of his relatives and properties, of his title and name and the like? No, there can be no talk of it! The human being is aware that in his inside something prevails. Still he comes, actually, to nothing if he characterises the ego. The scientific psychology is right in a limited sense if it cannot say much about this ego. How does this ego behave in the usual consciousness? An introspection shows this again.

If this ego becomes something else by the exercises that I have described, then one also notices what the ego is, considered with the usual consciousness. One distinguishes two states in the human life after the outer appearance: sleeping and waking, and thinks, they alternate between day and night. One does not know that for a real consideration of the soul something else arises. We sleep not only at night, but a part of our being also sleeps by day, sleeps perpetually. The invigoration of the ego is in a certain sense a real arousal of the ego that sleeps perpetually. We know nothing about the contents of our sleep; we know only that it interrupts our usual life. If we survey our life from birth to death, we look back, actually, always only at the daily experiences, the night experiences are nothing. If we look at our life in such a way, then is that which we are in sleep as if it were not there. It is excluded from our field of observation. However, that applies also to the ego in the usual soul life. It is not there strictly speaking for the imagining and other consideration; the real ego escapes from the usual soul life because the human being sleeps concerning his ego in his present stage of development also by day.

We know only negatively about our ego, we know about it in such a way as the eye looks with the blind spot that it has inwardly. We know that there is nothing. We know also about the ego as about a black spot on a coloured surface. Although no colour phenomena come from there, we see a black place. Thus, we see that nothing is surrounded by our usual experiences, and thus we have the consciousness of the sleeping ego. It is aroused because the soul forces are increased in such a way as I have described it. Thus, only the real essence appears in the human being gradually. You learn to recognise the connections of the soul life with the spirit, as well as you learn to recognise from natural sciences if we have hunger and thirst that a body is there in which chemical transformations of the blood take place which express themselves in the soul life as hunger and thirst. As there a body is connected with the soul life by certain processes about which the human being knows nothing at first in the usual life, you learn to recognise on the other side that the soul is connected with the spirit. While the body is recognised from without, the spirit is recognised, while you become aware of the sleeping ego.

As well as the ego is crowded together in one point, the human being as a spiritual being is recognised by the usual consciousness. If you strengthen the inner soul force, you realise that this ego really gets contents as you attain the contents of the bodily for the only inner sensations by methodical scientific research. You get to a real investigation of the spirit as you get to know the chemical transformations which take place in the blood or, otherwise, in the body if the human being has hunger or thirst or feels saturation.

Thus, you learn to recognise how a mental picture that lives in you and is a mere mental picture at first is fulfilled with pictorial contents that are not as abstract as the mental picture of the usual consciousness. The spiritual researcher lifts these contents up in the consciousness so that the mental picture becomes like a perception of these pictorial, Imaginative contents. The spiritual researcher beholds Imaginative processes that change. If, for example, a mental picture becomes warmer what proceeds for the usual consciousness in the subconscious, then something else originates from the mental picture. Then something originates from it that is not only a cognitive or perceptual image, but also an image motivating the will.

This is a very significant progress for the spiritual researcher, if he can ascend to such a knowledge by which he realises how the cognitive image changes into a will image because its Imaginative contents change which pass then to that what becomes or can become active in us. There you realise that the spiritual stands behind the mental and is perpetually changing. As we can describe chemical and physical processes in the body, we can describe spiritually how behind imagining, feeling, and will impulses changes are which go from the Imaginative to the Inspirative and to the Intuitive. As from the chemical transformation of the body subjectively hunger and thirst appear, the spiritual appears vice versa subjective, either as a perceptual image or also as an image of feeling which changes then into an image of will. Thus, you become able to describe that which lives behind the soul as a spiritual being as the bodily lives behind the soul towards the other side. Then you recognise that this becomes really concrete in the human being what can appear before the strengthened soul life so that we feel that which I have called “body of formative forces,” as we feel the physical body usually only. Then you also get to know that which lives outdoors in the world beyond the sensory as something supersensible in quite concrete way.

Sometimes I anticipate something in a former talk that I explain more exactly in later talks. Thus, it is also with the following. However, today I already want to point to it. The plant is composed not only of that which physics and chemistry, or biology or physiology can investigate but it contains something else. If we have brought ourselves to the point where we feel the body of formative forces in ourselves as we feel usually in the physical body, we can perceive the supersensible in the remaining world with this body of formative forces. Then we behold the spiritual in any plant, in any animal and in the physical human that is then not anything visionary in trivial sense, but also is there before the strengthened soul like the contents of sensory perception before the not strengthened soul. However, we have to replace the spatial concepts with temporal ones everywhere. In what way do we perceive, actually, the supersensible in the plant? By perceiving our own supersensible in the body of formative forces as if a tone perceives the other in a melody.

The perception of the supersensible in the plant realm is completely based on the fact that the life of our body of formative forces proceeds much slower than the life of the plant body of formative forces. I have more exactly explained this in a small writing The Human Life from the Viewpoint of Spiritual Science (1916, now in Philosophy and Anthroposophy, GA 35). There you will find how everything depends on these different speeds. Because our body of formative forces can interact like a higher, malleable organ with the much faster proceeding life of the plant, we really perceive the other kind of the life in the plants. Thereby something else will face our soul than the old, speculative vitality. We perceive, to put it another way, something supersensible in the sensory.

It is hard to speak impartially of these things already today. Only if one feels obliged in certain sense to the knowledge of truth, one does this. Since many people mean of course that such things are not based on scientific spirit, but on speculative fiction or daydreaming. Only slowly and gradually, humanity will learn that this is no daydreaming, no speculative fiction, but is based on a methodical research of the spiritual. Certain denominations needed up to 1822, until they acknowledged the Copernican worldview as a truth. I hope it will not last so long with the recognition of this spiritual truth, also for social reasons that should be stated in the talk, which I hold in this cycle about the historical life of humanity.

However, the most paradox prejudices exist concerning the whole and concerning the details of spiritual knowledge. I have already mentioned two weeks ago that recently Pastor Rittelmeyer has written a treatise (On Rudolf Steiner's Theosophy) in The Christian World about that which spiritual science intends, and what it can become as a deeper basis of the religious life. One has argued against that: if already the human soul should rise to a spiritual world, it must not happen in such a way that the human being carries his mental into the spiritual world arbitrarily by exercises, but this has to happen spontaneously. One can say nothing more ignorant than this. Since just if this settling in the spiritual world happens by itself if it appears without the involvement of the human being, the human being does not come into the real spiritual world but only in the mania of some mental pictures which are not spiritual because the human being does not behave actively but passively. He gets to a life which is again dependent on the body, on some organic processes in the body, and then it is pathological, or is dependent on mere soul processes, and then it is autosuggestion or as the case may be. The real penetration into the spirit is based just on the fact that one notices that this can be only reached by activity, by the will. This only carries us into the real spiritual world. Someone who says, it is doubtful that exercises are demanded by which the human being should arbitrarily reach what he can only receive like by grace understands nothing at all of the real significance of spiritual science. However, today many people know nothing about the real spirit. Hence, they cannot get to a real consideration of the everlasting, of the immortal and the free in the human soul.

On two ways, you come out from that what either is only inner life in the soul or is dependent from the body. On that way one does not come out on which, for example, the Physiological Psychology by Theodor Ziehen tries it. If Ziehen says, we cannot think what we want, but we must think as the associations determine it, then he just shows that he distracts, actually, from the spirit with his whole consideration. One can say, Ziehen looks at the soul life in such a way that he oversleeps the real spiritual impulses of the soul. Hence, Ziehen can say, the main principle of the human soul life is that a mental picture combines with others either after their inner resemblance or after their temporal succession. If I have seen a friend at a certain place and see the friend later again, the place that was temporally connected with him can associate itself with him again. If the soul life proceeds in such a way, only according to these principles of association, then it proceeds in such a way as the body lets this mental proceed. There just the spirit sleeps. The spirit submerges in the soul life that is only dependent on the body. Since the spiritual begins everywhere where we make ourselves independent from the associations by inner activity. The spiritual begins everywhere where Ziehen stops talking, and where generally scientific psychology stops talking.

In two directions, one comes out from the mere soul life. On one side, we can come out and rise to the spirit, so that we can behold the supersensible in the outer world, after we have become conscious in our real ego, while we feel the body of formative forces, as we feel, otherwise, the physical body. However, we get to an even higher mental picture of our ego, then we realise, why to the usual consciousness this ego is hidden: this ego arises as little from the usual soul life as from the lung the air originates that we breathe. Someone who believes that the true ego is generated anyhow in the body believes the same in this area as someone who believes that the breath is anyhow generated from the lung. No, our true ego is inside the world that we perceive Imaginatively. There on one side we find the ego, while we arouse it, while we get from the mere sensory perception to the supersensible. In this ego, we find one side of the everlasting, that side which shows the seedlings of everything that we become when we go through the gate of death and settle in the spiritual world to return to following lives on earth.

On the other side, we find the ego again. It is the same. The human being oversleeps the real being of his ego in the usual life, however, he also oversleeps the real being of his will. If the body of formative forces dawns on him, that awakes in certain way which lives in the will. What does the human being know about that which lives in the will in the usual life? If he lifts his hand, he knows, it comes from his mental picture. However, the human being oversleeps completely in the usual awake consciousness how this works how it goes over in the physical body. This also wakes gradually, even if not in the body of formative forces.

Then we experience from which deeper impulses our actions put themselves in the world, we experience something supersensible behind our will about which the usual consciousness knows nothing. While on the other side we exceed our usual soul life to the spirit, we experience the spirit in the will, that spirit which was active in us, before we entered by birth or conception into the physical existence by which we have come from the spiritual world in the physical existence. Thus methodically exceeding the usual soul life, the spiritual researcher experiences his everlasting.

I explain in the next talks: how this everlasting is included in the contents of the beholding consciousness how really this everlasting is found because we can hold side by side that to which we come, while we pursue the imagining beyond the only sensory perception in the supersensible, and that to which we come while we pursue the will beyond the only mental-bodily into the spiritual.

With it, I have given something of the program of the next talks at the end of this talk. I hope, spiritual science will get beyond that dictum of Du Bois-Reymond with which he wanted to take away the ground under the feet from any spiritual research, while he asserted the principle that only that which comes from the senses can be, actually, science, and where supra-naturalism starts, science stops. No, it should be just shown by our worldview that in future a general conviction will be there which is based on the fact that where real supra-naturalism, real penetration into the spiritual world stops, science must die away also compared with the view of nature. Thus, we also realise that natural sciences themselves have more and more dead, dying away concepts, because the living contents can come only from the spirit. The spirit is the creator of life, and it can be the only creator of real, lively, scientific concepts if it is recognised.

In our previous studies I have tried to show that a meaning, a wisdom-filled guidance, exists in the historical evolution of mankind that can only be discovered when ones digs deeper into spiritual foundations. I endeavored to bring this especially to your attention yesterday, and for some weeks I have sought to present it with various concrete examples. People in general live within their age in such a way as to let events come upon them, causing happiness or unhappiness, joy or sorrow; they derive their inner experiences from the impulses of the age. In a certain respect, they also reflect upon things. But their meditating upon what happens does not signify much because the spiritual development of our age is not fitted for a full penetration into the causes that hold sway spiritually behind the phenomena.

Now, as I have pointed out to you, he who goes deeply into the events of the time should continually bear in mind that with so-called civilized humanity's present-day thinking and feeling, the social order can only be maintained for a few more decades. A reshaping of sentiment and thinking is essential to mankind, a transformation of many ideas, perceptions, feelings and will impulses; spiritual science is ready to contribute its share toward the comprehension of such a renewal.

Official history today is really of little help in making a man understand why the things that go on around him are as they are. For the most part, official history does not desire to look into the inner growth of things, but instead registers what happens externally and, in what might be called the simplest and most convenient manner, always considers what has happened earlier to be the cause of what follows. But when one traces things back to their causes in the simple, easygoing way that modern history largely employs, one comes to positive absurdities. Ultimately, one would have to come to the opinion that the greatest part—yes, perhaps even the most widespread part of what happens—owes its existence not to sense, but to absurdity. If the full consequences of the views that people are so prone to entertain in our time were examined logically, one would have to admit that there is not sense, but nonsense in history. Let us take an example that everyone who studies ordinary history can see for himself.

Let us consider, for instance, the origin of the orthodox English denomination, the Anglican Church, to which many people belong; let us seek its external historical origin. Well, we shall find that Henry VIII reigned from 1509 to 1547, and that he had six wives. The first, Catherine of Aragon, was divorced from him and, considered quite externally, this divorce played a great historical role. The second, Anne Boleyn, he beheaded. The third, Jane Seymour, died. The fourth, he divorced. The fifth, Katherine Howard, he also beheaded. Only the sixth survived him and, if one investigates history further, it will be found that that was really only through a sort of mistake! A different fate was planned for her, too. I refer to his somewhat complicated matrimonial history of Henry VIII, who, as stated, reigned from 1509 to 1547, less for its historical content than in order to lead up to a consideration of his character. One can really gain some idea of a person's character if one knows that he has had two wives beheaded, been divorced from a certain number, and so on.

Now, taken purely historically, the divorce of the first, Catharine of Argon, played a definitely significant role; one need only look at two events to see this. The first was that Henry VIII, the Defender of the Faith, as he called himself, that is, of the Catholic faith emanating from Rome, became the opponent of the Pope because he refused to annul the marriage. Henry became the opponent of the Pope, of the Catholic Church issuing its orders from Rome, and simply on his own authority and power separated the English Church from the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, a kind of Reformation took place that was of a quite individualistic nature since the old customs, ceremonies and rituals were preserved. It was not the cause, as it was with the Protestants, that a renewal had been sought from a real spiritual basis and spiritual force. Everything of an ecclesiastical nature was preserved, but the Church in England was to be cut off from the Roman Catholic Church simply because the Pope had refused to sanction Henry VIII's divorce. Thus, in order to obtain a different wife, this man founded a new church for his people that has existed ever since.

So we have the outer historical fact that many millions of people have lived throughout a long period in a religious communion because a king's divorce could only be brought about through his creating this religious body! This a fact of external history. Is it not an absurdity? When one looks at the matter more closely, then another absurdity is added, a real inner absurdity, because it cannot be denied that many thousands of people, since the divorce of Henry VIII and the founding of the English Church, have found really deep, inner religious life within the communion that originated in such a questionable manner. This implies that something can arise in history through a most questionable procedure, and the ensuing fruits can bring—and have, in fact, brought—the greatest inner healing of soul to many thousands of people. One must only follow things to a certain conclusion. As a rule, one skims over things in their development but if one will observe their consequences, it will be clear that, when we look at facts from the point of view that is held today, we arrive at all sorts of absurdities.

I have spoken of one fact that emerged, but we must record yet another—the execution of Sir Thomas More, that most significant and gifted pupil of Pico della Mirandola. He it was who wrote Utopia, a wonderful work in which, out of a kind of visionary perception, he created the idea of a social relationship among men. I cannot enlarge on this today but another time it may be pursued further. One sees how this pupil of Pico della Mirandola, Thomas More, created in his book, from a certain atavistic clairvoyance, a picture of the social order. Let the people who are so clever think as they will of the practicality of this picture; ingenuity and impulses of genius live in it.

Although such a picture is not immediately practicable in the outer world, yet it is precisely for such pictures that Johann Gottlieb Fichte's words hold good regarding social and other ideals that have been set up for humanity. He observed how again and again people say, “Well, here come thinkers, preaching all sorts of ideals, but they are impractical men; one cannot make use of their ideals!” In response to such objections, Fichte said, “That these ideals are not directly applicable in real life is known to us, too, just as well as to those who make such objections—perhaps better. But we also know that, if life is truly to advance, it must be continually shaped according to such ideals. People who do not want to know anything of such ideals show nothing more than that in the evolution of humanity they are not to be counted upon. So may the good God grant them rain and sunshine at the right time and, if possible, food and drink and a good digestion also, and, if it can be done, good thoughts, too, from time to time!” So says Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and with justice. It is, after all, mankind's ideals that find realization in the world, although other forces and other impulses work together with them; the ideals do not always work directly, but indirectly.

Through the influence of Henry VIII, however, many charges were brought against Thomas More, and he was executed. It is precisely in such an execution and in the creation of the English Church, that we can see two events that must be observed more closely if we wish to know them in their deeper meaning. One can understand why this particular evolution took the course it did only when one considers outstanding individuals who appeared in the years following the time of Henry VIII and his activities.

Let us first consider the fact that a religious body was created in order to bring about a divorce. As already stated, that need not have any particular consequences for the individual if he be religiously inclined. He can find his salvation, and many have, even within a church so founded. But with regard to the religious question in historical evolution since that time, we see, in fact, that through this external creation of a religious communion something quite extraordinary has been brought about. In order to understand this, we must note what has proceeded by way of spiritual impulse from the civilization into which this religious body has been placed. Viewing matters objectively, we must be clear that after the spiritual influences coming from the southwest began to decline, cultural influences coming from England continually increased. The influence of English spiritual culture became ever stronger, first in the West and then on the entire European continent. If one wishes to speak of the strongest influences working in a spiritual sense in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, one must naturally have in mind the impulses proceeding from England. Certain people appear within English civilization who are inspired by this cultural impulse; persons also appear in France in whom these cultural impulses live.

There arose in England, for example, the extraordinarily influential philosopher, Locke. Today, it is true that not many people know anything about him, but the influences of such men nevertheless go through thousands of cultural channels unknown to external life. Locke had an immense influence on Voltaire, who influenced European thinking greatly. This influence goes back to Locke. How much has directly come to pass under what we may call the Locke-Voltaire influence! How many thoughts would not have spread over Europe if this Locke-Voltaire influence had never existed. What a different part political and social life in Europe would have played if the European soul had not been fed such thoughts. In France, for instance, we see these same impulses live on in the immensely influential Montesquieu. If we then look to wider intellectual influences on the continent, we see how through Hume, and later on through Darwin, human thinking is revolutionized. Again we see, as through Locke and Voltaire, so also through Hume and Darwin, that an immense influence is exercised. And there is Karl Marx, the founder of modern socialism, whose influence cannot as yet be evaluated by the self-styled “cultivated” people because it exists so widely. When Marx began to study and to write his fundamental work, Capital, he went to England. To be sure, Hegelism lived in Marx, but a Hegelism colored by Darwinism. One who studies the constitutions of the different European countries in the nineteenth century and their constitutional conflicts, will realize how profound was the influence of the cultural impulses coming from England. All this can only be indicated here.

If, however, we now turn our minds to the outstanding personalities who give Europe a certain configuration, we find in all of them a specially developed, abstract rationalistic thinking that makes an excellent instrument for research in, and for learning to know and deal with, the physical world. In Locke and Voltaire, in Montesquieu and also in Hume and Darwin, in everything dependent on them, a faculty lives that is transmitted to European thinking and feeling, so that even those who know nothing of it are still deeply influenced by it. This faculty creates a kind of thinking that is peculiarly fitted to understand and deal with the materialistic relations of the world, and to create social orders that arise from materialistic connections.

Now we see a certain concomitant phenomenon that appears in all these thinkers and is emphatically not without significance. They are keen and at times brilliant thinkers, penetrating minds with respect to material matters, but they are all thinkers who take a peculiar stand toward man's religious evolution, definitely refusing to apply thinking to the sphere of religious life. Not one of them—neither Locke, nor Hume, nor Darwin, nor Montesquieu—is willing to apply thinking to what he considers to be concerns of the religious life. But neither do they dispute this religious life. They accept it in the form in which it has developed historically. To them, it was commonly accepted that one is Catholic or Protestant just as one is French or English. This means that one accepts it as something that is there; one does not criticize; one adapts oneself to it and lets it stand. But neither does one allow the subject to be broached in thought. Such energetic and keen thinkers as Hume and Montesquieu feel that the religious life should stand and be recognized in external life, but the discrimination that one employs to the full in material things should not be allowed to enter into matters concerning the spiritual sphere.

This is a direct historical consequence of the callous organization of the religion of England by Henry VIII. That is the inner meaning of the matter. This mood, which is poured out over countless European impulses, is dependent on the fact that a certain religious body was created through a man's desire for a divorce—a matter of indifference to everyone. A matter of indifference, a man's wish to be divorced, stands at the source and results in a mood in which one does not concern oneself with these affairs, but rather lets them stand for generations, centuries. This way of thinking about religious matters could only have come about through such an historical event standing at the beginning. Only when one views things from the inner aspect does one find the right connection.

Now for the other event, the execution of Thomas More that took place in 1535. Here, for various reasons, a man is executed who sees into the spiritual world, although in distorted, caricatured form. He is executed. I cannot go into the inner reasons today, but externally it is because he does not join those who take the Oath of Supremacy; that is, does not recognize the separation of the English Church from Rome. Such a man goes over into the spiritual world. The soul has thus left the physical body after having already had, while still in that physical body, deep insight into the spiritual world. This remains; it lives on further in the world as cause. What Thomas More had perceived of the spiritual world while in the physical body remains so closely united with him when he passes with his soul through the gate of death, that he can, through this circumstance, exercise a great influence upon the age that follows.

So these two streams work together. An external one, which I have described, that is apathetic toward the religious life, though full of an apparently orthodox recognition of it, and a soul that has grown powerful because, in the physical body, it has experienced the super-sensible and allows it to radiate out over succeeding evolution. It streamed into the other spiritual atmosphere I described about eight days ago (Lecture VI). The spiritual atmosphere from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries is, as we know, also permeated by the impulses that have arisen through the persecution and death of the Knights Templar.

Founded in 1119, the Knights Templar were first active in the Crusades. Then they spread out toward Europe, and through special circumstances many of them became victims of the avarice, the gold avarice, of Philip the Fair. I have described this to you, as I said, but let us see once more how these Knights were sacrificed. Let us turn our attention again to what we presented from the actual course of events, namely, that countless numbers of these Knights were tortured after having previously experienced a Christian initiation through the principles and impulses living in the Templar Order. Let calumnies assert what infamous things they please of the Knights Templar; that these were not true can be proved from history. Exceptions, of course, exist everywhere, but in essence the calumnies are not true. What was inculcated in the Templar Order was this, that each member of the Order should realize that his blood did not belong to himself but to the task of familiarizing Western mankind—and to some extent Eastern also—with the Mystery of Golgotha in the spiritual sense. What streamed to the Knights from this devotional mood toward the Mystery of Golgotha changed gradually into a kind of Christian initiation, so that a great number of them could actually see to some extent into the spiritual worlds. Through this power, however, they were exposed to quite special danger when their consciousness was dulled through the agonies of torture, as happened in hundreds of cases. Their consciousness was darkened through the torture; their day-consciousness was crippled and a subconscious was aroused. All the temptations to which one who strives toward such spiritual heights is exposed came to expression on the rack. So it came to pass as Philip the Fair had foreseen; in his own way he had a touch of genius, inspired by avarice and covetousness, as I have described. It came to pass that a great number of Knights admitted, in a subconscious state, not only the extraordinary charge of denying the Christian religion and the Mystery of Golgotha, an admission which, arising from their temptations, was understandable, but they also accused themselves of other crimes. A certain number afterward recanted when they were released from the rack and consciousness returned; others could not recant. In short, fifty-four of them met with a cruel death, including the Head of the Order, Jacques de Molay.

Souls thus passed through the gates of death who had not only looked into the progressive spiritual world in waking consciousness by having attained a Christian initiation and beheld the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha, but who also knew something of evolution and could work into it by having learned to know those forces opposing human effort that spoke through their lips on the rack when they, in innocence, had accused themselves of crimes. These horrible and terrible experiences assumed an appropriate form when these souls were in the spiritual world. I have already related how, after these souls had gone through the gate of death, impulses streamed from them that would then work further in the super-sensible impulses from the fifteenth century on into our time. The inspiration living in different gifted personalities comes, if one observes its real cause, from the fact that souls were carried up into the spiritual world having first experienced what Philip the Fair had subjected them to before they died.

This has all been a preparation for the time in which we are now living. These causes, and many others, would first have to be described if one would fully understand among what thoughts a man born since then has been placed. What flowed out of the events I have recorded lived in everything; one can prove that by actual history. I will only refer to one instance, but I could point to many. In the age of which I speak, a most powerfully effective educational book, Robinson Crusoe, was produced. One need only think how the ideas living in this book become familiar to the tenderest, earliest age of childhood. This book has not only gone through hundreds of editions in its original form and has been translated into all languages, but it has been recreated in every possible tongue. There are not only Bohemian, Hungarian, Spanish, French, German, Polish and Russian, but also other translations. In all these languages there are new creations in the spirit of Defoe. What lives in it, how souls are moulded by it, is generally never considered at all. All of Robinson Crusoe would have been unthinkable if it had not been preceded by those events I have related.

All these things have their inner connections, and this is true down to the actual details. Today, a man walks from one street in the city to another on some business or other. At most, if he thinks of it at all, he only thinks of the immediate cause. The fact that he would not take this walk nor have this business if everything I have just mentioned had not come about before, is not considered at all. In general, inner connections are but little observed. I have often called attention to how seldom people are inclined to turn their minds to inner connections. For instance, a man who looks at things quite externally may perhaps sometimes wonder who built the St. Gotthard tunnel. Tunnels are not built nowadays unless certain calculations are made in differential calculus. The St. Gotthard was not only built by those who laid stone on stone, but without the calculus it would not have been built at all. The solitary thinker, Leibniz, devised the differential calculus; thus, he was a co-builder. All this is part of it. I am only saying this for the purposes of elucidation; the example in itself does not tell us much; it is only to make things clear.

Our age stands under all these influences—the thinking and the entire configuration of our age—that I have sought to characterize. Now one definite peculiarity is to be emphasized for this age. According to prevalent belief, it stands, not only with both feet, but also with hands and, in fact, the whole body, within reality. It is the pride, not to say the arrogance, of our age that people believe they are standing deep in reality. They are immensely proud of it. But as a later age will show, as regards thought, our age is by no means rooted in reality; it is far less so than was an earlier age. What will a later age teach? Well, it will naturally not deny that our age has produced great thoughts and achievements. The Copernican world conception makes its appearance; Galileo creates modern physics; Kepler modern astronomy; we have galvanic, voltaic electricity appearing, with all that grows out of it; we have the steam age, and so forth. Thus, the thoughts that have been formed in this age are striking; they are grand. Over and over again people emphasize, though they may not express it in the same words, how conscious they are that we have made such fine progress, in contrast to the silly superstitions of people in earlier ages. In short, men are entirely convinced that Copernicus, for example, finally established the fact that the sun stands still, or perhaps has a movement of its own. In any case, it does not move around the earth every twenty-four hours, but the earth itself revolves, and also moves around the sun in the course of the year, etc. These things are well known. They are understood today as if man had finally cast off the ancient superstition of the Ptolemaic world conception and had set truth in place of the former error. Earlier humanity believed all sorts of stupid things because it trusted its senses. The men of more recent times, however, have at last arrived at seeing that the sun is in the center and Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn move in ellipses around it—Uranus and Neptune being further out. At last, one knows this. At last, one knows that in the course of the year the earth revolves around the sun, and so on. In fact, one has made wonderfully fine progress!

We are no longer far distant from the time in which we will understand what all this means. The true reality was of no consequence at all to the spiritual powers upon whom Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were dependent; it was rather to bring definite faculties into the human head. What matters is the education of mankind through the education of the earth.

Thus, mankind has to be obliged for a time to think in this way about the cosmos in order to be educated in a certain way through thoughts. It is with this that the wise guidance of the world is concerned. If one should begin to look at the matter spiritually—not merely externally, mathematically or physically as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and especially their successors have done—one would come to yet other remarkable things. One will say, “Good, now we have a physical cosmic system; when we study it we must, as we know, calculate it and treat it geometrically as is taught today in practically every elementary school.” But spiritually, things are otherwise. You see, to an observer able to behold the spiritual, the following is presented, for example. He comes upon a certain movement of the sun; it takes this course.

Seen from a certain point of view, it is the sun's course; but when I draw this line here and bring the sun back again, the point does not fall exactly on the earlier point; it lies somewhat above it. This is a real movement of the sun that can be perceived spiritually.

But the earth, too, makes certain movements in the course of a year. Observed spiritually, it describes this orbit.

You must picture it in three dimensions. If you picture the orbit of the sun lying in a plane, then the orbit of the earth lies in this plane—seen, that is, from the side. If here is the orbit of the sun drawn as a line the earth orbit is so:

But, as you see from this, there is a point in the cosmos, where the sun and the earth are both together, but at not the same time. When the sun is there on its path, or rather has left this point by a quarter of its path, the earth begins its movement at the point that the sun has left. After a certain time we are, in fact, on the spot in cosmic space where the sun was; we follow the sun's path, cross it and are, at a certain time of the year, at the very place where the sun has been. Then the sun and earth go forward and after a time the earth is again practically at the spot where the sun was. Together with the earth, we actually pass in space through the spot where the sun has been. We sail through it. We not only sail through it, however, because the sun leaves behind results of its activity in the space it has traversed, so that the earth enters into the imprints left behind by the sun and crosses them—really crosses them. Space has living content, spiritual content, and the earth enters and crosses, sails through, what the sun has called forth.

You see, this is how the matter looks spiritually. Spiritually one must draw lines like these when one thinks of the orbits of earth and sun. There is a similar relationship with the other planets, too. At certain times we are approximately at the places where Mercury was, etc. The planets carry out quite complicated movements in universal space, and they enter into the imprints of each other. We have now the external picture, the purely geometrical picture. The other picture will be added, and only from a combination of the two will a later humanity attain the concept it must have.

You see, I am now telling you these things, but imagine for a moment that you relate what I have said to an astronomer. He would say, “Someone has lost his senses, has gone mad, to present such things. They are out of the question.” But it was not so long ago that the members of a famous Academy of Science also said, when meteoric stones that fall to the earth were spoken of, “That is a senseless statement!” This happened not at all long ago; many similar things could be recorded. Today, in orthodox physics, one recognizes the so-called law of the conservation of energy as something fundamental. The first to speak of it, Julius Robert Mayer, was confined in a madhouse. One could, of course, relate hundreds of such stories. But the point is this, that you see from what I have told you—I have given it only as an example—how the nature of thinking in astronomical fields, that wonderfully effective thinking from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, has had rather the faculty of bringing men away from reality. Men do not at all stand, as they believe, with both feet, both hands and the body in the real, but they give themselves up to the most fantastic ideas and imagine these to be reality. Men had to be educated like this in these centuries. They had to give themselves up to fantastic ideas about outer nature so that they might not be merged in the external events in the old way, but that, by virtue of these fantastic ideas, they might all the more obtain a feeling of the inner ego. This feeling has been greatly intensified in men during the last few centuries precisely through these fantastic materialistic ideas. That had to happen; the feeling of the ego had at some time to be engendered in the development of mankind's history. I have chosen an astronomical example, but it could be shown in every sphere how human evolution followed a course in the centuries just past that drew man away from true reality.

Now you will ask if men have known of such things as this, that together with the earth we enter the tracks of the sun, that twice in the year we are where the sun has been operative in space. Have men ever known anything of this? Yes, they have known it before, and it can even be easily proved historically that they knew it. Imagine that a man knows, really knows, that at a certain time in the course of the year the earth on its path so crosses the sun's path that the earth enters into the tracks of the sun and follows it. The reverse comes about when the earth turns back again toward the other side. The first time it is as if the sun descended below the earth's path, and the second, as if the sun ascended and the earth's path were underneath. The first time, the human being moves up with the earth above the sun's path, finding the traces of the sun by ascending; the other time, he moves down and passes under the traces of the sun. What can the man say who knows this and who also possesses the means to confirm it? He is able to know that now, at the point where the earth's path crosses the sun's path, he is passing through the place where the sun has stood. What could such a man say? He could say that this is a specially important time for us because we are at the place where the sun has been. This is expressed in the spiritual atmosphere and one meets the picture that the sun has left behind in the ether. Here, at this point in time, one establishes a festival! The ancient mysteries celebrated two such festivals of which but faint memories still remain in those of today, though the connection is no longer known. Please do not understand this as if I wished to give the actual point in time, but in the ancient mysteries it was known when we cross the sun's path and find in the ether the sun's content that has remained behind. In the time of such knowledge it was right for special festivals to be established at definite times of the year.

With the knowledge of today men are separated from these connections. Nor will they respect these things much since they say, “Well, what good is it to me if I do know that I am on the same spot that the sun was on? Of what use is that to me?” That is how modern man would speak. But the ancient Egyptians, for instance, did not speak in that way in their mysteries. On the fifteenth day of that month when they knew that the earth is passing through the point the sun has left, they interrogated the priestess of Isis, who had been prepared in the sanctity of the Temple. They knew that through the special spiritual preparation that this priestess could undertake, she could bring to light what can be experienced when one passes through the aura of the sun, and the priests might write down what they heard from the priestess, for example, “Rainy year, sow seeds at such and such a time...” In short, they were purely practical; that is, things that were important for guiding life in the succeeding year were noted. They lived according to these directions because they knew how the heavens work down into the earth.

This is what they investigated. It was already a time of decline when this science was betrayed by the opponents of the Osiris-Isis cult. The only way they could protect themselves—this external event has again a connection with the Osiris-Isis saga—was henceforth to impart at fourteen different temples what earlier, in ancient Egypt, had been the secret of only one temple. This was the art of living with the course of the year and investigating spiritually the influences on the earth.

The humanity of our age had to break away completely from such a relationship with the heavens because it had the task of finding the path away from the ambiguity of impulses and instincts, and of forming the pure ego. The ego did not act strongly at a time in which men made themselves mere instruments of heavenly activities, nor did it work strongly in the ages when the priest taught his immediate pupils, “There stands the Pleiades. When they are there, we must begin the days of Isis; then we must see that what we learn prophetically is the best way to proceed in the coming year.” They placed themselves as completely within the course of the universe as a cell is incorporated into our organism. Humanity could only become individual, personal, if in a definite epoch it were torn out of this connection, if all these human faculties of spirit that mediated such connections passed into a state of sleep. Thus a sleep regarding the spiritual was prepared, and mankind has slept most deeply in respect of spiritual matters ever since the fourteenth century. It has been a sleeping culture but now the time has come for an awakening.

Do not say, “I wish to criticize Creation and the Creator; why has he let me sleep?” This means putting oneself with one's intellect above cosmic wisdom. During the course of the earth stage, human evolution must go through its sleep periods just as much as the individual man must sleep in the course of twenty-four hours. Spiritual faculties, which is to say, a concept of the world in the sense of these faculties, slept deeply in the centuries indicated. On the other hand, man dreamt of geometrical lines in space; he dreamed the dream of the Copernican, the Galilean and the Darwinian world conception. Man needed this dream, this training, even the illusion of experiencing a special reality through the dream. Ultimately, it is the same with our sleep. In the evening we are tired and we go to sleep. Then we wake up refreshed with an inner feeling of reality. If humanity had developed the ancient spiritual faculties further, if these had not slept, men would have been tired out and would not have reached reality. They came to reality precisely by the fact that in their thinking and reflecting, and also in their social organizations, they had left reality. Because these capacities slept, past centuries have brought renewal and refreshment to mankind. In a certain respect, humanity has even become freer than it was in earlier centuries, and it will have to regain spiritual knowledge—and later spiritual power—in order to progress even further on the path of freedom.

Such things can be known! But again today's true materialist will say, “Well, and what if they are known!” I have, in fact, found materialists who say, “Good gracious, why must I think about the life of the soul after death. I shall see all that when death has arrived. Why need I bother now in the physical body about this life after death?” This seems to be quite plausible, this idea that it would be really unnecessary, here in the physical body, to bother about the super-sensible life. But this is not the case; it was so only in an earlier age when man was not yet ready for freedom. Today, the position is such that certain thoughts can only be grasped by the super-sensible hierarchies if men grasp them here in earthly existence. The gods only think certain thoughts if they live in human bodies. These thoughts must be carried into the spiritual world through the gate of death; only then can they be active. It is truly so; one who will not think about the super-sensible is like a farmer who says to his neighbor, “You are a silly fellow. Every year you put by a certain part of the grain for seed. I only became a farmer this year, but I am not as foolish as you. I shall grind it all, eat it and calmly wait. The grain will certainly grow again by itself.” Such a farmer resembles a person who is not willing to hear that, as well as consuming what we experience in the world, we must also lay aside certain seeds in the soul to guide it along its path in the spiritual worlds. Inasmuch as we pursue the science of the spirit, we are creating the right seeds for the present time. And the science of the spirit must be pursued.

You see from this that our time can become ever more clear to us through the spiritual understanding of its fundamental character and nature. This deepening of our inner faculties that must be striven for in order to come to a more real astronomy, for example, must also be striven for in social thinking. Regarding our thinking, we—or at any rate, most of us—have become as much asleep and dreaming in outer lives as we are in regards to astronomy, for instance, which I chose for an example. In the centuries gone by, and right up to today, very much has become veiled from humanity. Nor will what was present earlier appear again—investigations, for instance, through a priestess of Isis or through the Celtic druidical mysteries in which a priestess was similarly employed. To seek in that way to know about the action here of the spiritual will not recur; much more inward ways will be found, ways much more suited to future humanity. But they must be found.

Now, connect this with something I have already indicated yesterday. Remember that the servant of Osiris prepared the priestess of Isis before the fifteenth of a certain month of the year in order to obtain certain prophetic utterances from her when she traversed the sun-space with her soul. What happened through this Isis cult? What occurred was that actual time—not the abstract time of which we dream today, but actual time, was investigated. The time of year, the point of time, was, in fact, a specially important point, and the point on the return path was again important. How time works—concrete, real time—was expressed through the content of what the Isis priestess had to say. Then, might not the inscription on the Isis image read, “I am the Past, the Present and the Future?” this is the order of time. But only when such prophetic research was penetrated with a noble mood resembling the mood of virginity, when coming near to Isis was symbolized by the fact that Isis wore a veil, only then could one bring forth what was necessary. The whole must be steeped in holiness, in the atmosphere of a sacrifice.

Do not imagine that wisdom was not connected with the practical in those ancient times. What was called wisdom was fully united with practical things. Everything had a practical direction. One investigated the voice of the gods in the Egyptian temples, but the investigations were made in order to know in the right way which days or hours were most suited for sowing. Everything was connected with practical life. One investigated the action of the gods in practical life, and was conscious of how they penetrate it. Indeed, it was necessary that this temple service should be kept holy. What evils could have been committed if it had not been treated as sacred! It must never be asserted that these things that relate to past ages will arise again in the same way. They will arise quite differently. But a knowledge will again be won for humanity that will be directly fitted for entering practical life. A spiritual knowledge—but just because it is spiritual, a practical knowledge—will again appear in which the things around us will be fully mastered. Neither an Isis nor an Osiris cult will appear. Something else will arise that will bear the traces of our having passed through the centuries since the Isis and Osiris cult existed. It will show that the new science of the spirit must be sought with full consciousness and in freedom. But the things that have taken place must be tested a little in their reality. History must be different from what it so often is today, when people merely make researches in documents and records.

One comes, however, upon all sorts of peculiar explanations, like the one I have already given regarding Isis. When there stood as inscription on her image, “I am the Past, the Present and the Future,” one who was initiated knew that this referred to concrete reality and that the veil only expressed a certain attitude of mind. Today, people say of the veiled Isis image at Sais that the veil means that one cannot penetrate behind wisdom, that one will never know who Isis is. But when the inscription, “I am the Past, the Present, and the Future, no mortal hath yet lifted my veil,” stands there, one must explain it as meaning that the veil is not lifted because one only approaches its holiness when veiled as a nun, not because something lies behind it that one cannot know and that cannot be communicated to anyone. If the explanation that people usually give were correct, then one must really compare it with the trivial statement, “I am called Hans Muller, but you will never know my name.” She says indeed who she is—“I am the Past, the Present and the Future”—and this implies that it is for her to impart the Mysteries of Time, while what flows out of Time into Space is to be mediated by the Osiris priest. He is to carry the temporal into the spatial and is to receive in thought what comes from the soul, that is, the Isis revelation that is embedded in the universe and its course.

Today, the science of the spirit is still largely held to be foolish. But when it has really been understood, it will be seen to contain a science much more real than the scientific dream of the past centuries. Quite different practical operations, practical mastery of the outer world, will come to light when the time arrives. It is not yet time today; mankind must first have knowledge and know in the spirit of spiritual science before it can act in the spirit of the science of the spirit.

I wanted to go into this in order to point out precisely at this time how it is only through a true understanding of what has happened that an understanding can also be reached of what has to happen. In the future, humanity must be guided beyond many things with whose karma mankind is heavily burdened in our present grievous and painful times. Today mankind is burdened with the karma of the dream life of the past centuries. This mystery must first be grasped on its depths; then it will be easier to understand our sorrowful present and also to understand how humanity must gradually prepare a different karma for the future.