The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In order to extend our considerations and link on to what was said last week, let us bring to mind some of the things already known to us. When we consider man as he lives between birth and death we see his life divided into sections which can be studied from various aspects. Attention has often been drawn to the alternating states of waking and sleeping and we know that dreaming is a state between these two. Thus, we have three states of consciousness in ordinary life—waking, dreaming and sleeping. Human nature itself can be divided correspondingly. When we trace the content of ordinary consciousness we experience thinking—i.e., forming mental pictures. I have often pointed out that only in this state, or to the extent that we are in this state, are we really awake. Anyone who observes himself without prejudice will acknowledge that feeling presents a much duller state of consciousness than thinking. Feelings surge through the soul and, unlike mental pictures, we cannot relate them so definitely either to something in the external world or to something remembered. And we are conscious, or at least could become conscious, that as soon as we are awake, feelings come and go very much the way dreams come and go in the intermediate state between waking and sleeping. Anyone who has a sense for comparing different states of consciousness must say to himself: Dreams have a pictorial quality; feelings are more like indefinite forces surging within us. But apart from their content, dreams come and go just as feelings come and go. Furthermore, dreams emerge from a general darkness and dullness of consciousness just as feelings emerge and again submerge within a general inner existence.

When we consider the will we find that what takes place within us when we have a will impulse remains as unknown to us as that which we sleep through. The only aspect that is clear in a will impulse is the thought that initiated it. What next comes into consciousness is the movement of our limbs or the event taking place in the external world through our will. But what takes place in the legs when walking or in the arms when we lift them remains as unconscious as that which takes place between falling asleep and waking. So we can say that while we are awake we experience all three conditions of waking, dreaming and sleeping.

However, we shall only arrive at a comprehensive knowledge of man if we use discernment when comparing what is given us, on the one hand, as sleeping, dreaming and waking; and, on the other, as willing, feeling and thinking. Let us consider sleeping man, on the one hand, and, on the other, man engaged in an act of will. The characteristic feature of sleeping man is that the very factor that makes us human—the experience of the I or ego—is absent. This situation is usually described by saying that the I, between falling asleep and waking up, is outside of what is present before us as physical man.

Let us now compare dreaming man with man experiencing feelings. By means of ordinary self-observation you will immediately recognize that dream pictures come before the soul in a, so to speak, neutral fashion. When we dream, either on waking or before falling asleep, we cannot really say that the pictures come before the soul like a tapestry, rather do they surge and weave within the soul. Thus, what then takes place in the soul differs from what occurs when fully awake. When awake we know that we take hold of the pictures which we then have; we grasp them in our inner being. They are not so nebulous and indefinite as dreams.

Let me illustrate what has just been described (left hand drawing). Let us imagine man schematically (white lines) and draw what we imagine to be weaving dreams (red lines). One must imagine the red part as a tissue of dreams experienced by the soul which continually withdraws and again approaches the soul.

The moment he wakes up man does not experience such a tissue of weaving pictures. He now has the pictures of whatever he is experiencing firmly within him (right hand drawing). The weaving pictures which were formerly outside are now within him; he lays hold of them with his body and because he does so they are no longer undefined weaving pictures but something which he controls inwardly.

When man is fully awake then what weaves and hovers as dreams become thoughts within him. He is then in control of what now lives in his soul as mental pictures. In this relationship you can see that the soul is taking hold of something which from outside draws into man. What has just been described is in fact the entry of what we call the astral body into man's inner being. To ordinary consciousness it is that which before entry weaves and hovers as dreams. The astral body is, therefore, within us when after waking we begin to think. We then form mental pictures and we know that we do so, for these mental pictures are under our control. As long as they are dreams they hover outside. You need only imagine a kind of cloud that hovers near you in which dreams are weaving. You then draw in this cloud, you now control it from within. Because it is no longer outside you cease to dream. Just as you grasp objects with your hands so do you grasp dreams with your inner being; which means that you have drawn in the astral body.

We must ask: What precisely is it that we now have within us? We can perhaps find a point of reference by looking at certain dreams which are not just pictures but begin also to become indefinite feelings. Just think how often dreams can be quite unpleasant. Many dreams are connected with anxiety. You wake up feeling anxious. In this undefined state of anxiety—less often it may be a state of joy—you have the first glimmer of something which as it further develops becomes fully present as you wake up. What is it that glimmers forth when a dream causes, for example, anxiety?

Such dreams are interwoven with feelings; anxiety is a feeling. The feeling is undefined because the dream is still partly outside the organism; yet it is far enough within to intermingle with feeling. It interweaves with what already lives in the soul as feeling. Only when the astral body has entered completely do you have definite feelings. These are conditioned by the physical organization and can now be penetrated by mental pictures present in the astral body.

When we consider certain nightmares and anxiety dreams in the right light we draw near to what actually takes place when the astral body enters man's physical body. You will always find that it is some disorder in the breathing which causes the state of anxiety of some dreams. From this you can see clearly that the astral body draws in and again draws out through the breath. It is really possible to observe these things if only the observation is thorough enough and free from prejudice. Something can be seen here that enables us to recognize that what weaves in dreams is in fact the astral body and that it draws into our organism by taking hold of the breath as we wake up.

This leads to the recognition of something else that is not normally taken into account but is of great significance. The human being is usually regarded as if he were simply a physical organism, a body built up of solid matter. That is just not true. The least part of the human body is solid, less than ten percent. For the rest it is a water organism, an organism of liquid, so that in reality we must think of this organism built up in such a way that one tenth is solid (see drawing, white lines) and the solid saturated with water (blue lines). You only represent the human organism truly when you see it as a column of liquid in which the solid is deposited.

However, there is more to it. We must also picture the human organism as an organism of air. The air is outside, we breathe it in; a part of the outside air is now within us and we breathe it out again. So we are also an air organism. Let us draw that, too (red lines). It is just this air organism which is taken hold of by the astral body as we wake up. We breathe in the air, it goes through transformations the effect of which pours through the whole organism. The oxygen takes up the carbon and transforms it into carbonic acid. Thus, an air process continually takes place within us.

As we wake up the air process is permeated by the astral body. The movement of the astral body follows the same path as the air through the organism. The air process consists solely of air when we sleep; when we are awake then the movements of the astral body, as it were, swim along within what lives in us as air processes. But now depict to yourselves the following: the astral body draws into that which I have schematically drawn in red and carries out its movements, in fact, carries out its general activity, within the air organism. This all takes place within the watery organism, which is represented in the blue lines. When we are awake, these air processes are in reality processes of the astral body and they continually push against the watery organism. Man's etheric body is within the watery organism both night and day. So you have simultaneously a reciprocal effect between the etheric body and the astral body, as well as between their physical counterparts which are the air processes and the water processes. Thus, you can visualize these processes running their course within man between his breathing and the movements of all the bodily fluids. Yet that is again merely a copy of what takes place between the astral and etheric bodies.

The whole organism consisting of solid, fluid and air is also permeated with warmth (see drawing, yellow lines, page 38). The whole organism has its own warmth—i.e., its own warmth ether. On the gaseous waves moves astrality and in the warmth flowing through the body moves the actual I or ego of man.

So you have the physical body as such, then the fluid body, which is also physical but differentiated from the solid physical body. The fluid physical body has an intimate connection with the etheric body. Then the gaseous organism which has an intimate connection with the astral body, and finally all the warmth processes—that is, the warmth ether in man, which has an intimate connection with the human I. Thus, one can say that in the various physical constituents of man we have a picture of the whole man. The solid part, so to speak, exists by itself; the fluid within the organism cannot exist by itself. Within the head we have very little solid and what there is swims in the cerebral fluid. Within this fluid is the etheric part of the head.

In the breathing process the following takes place: As we breathe in, the breath pushes inwards up through the spinal fluid towards the brain. In our waking state the astral also moves along this thrusting movement towards the etheric part of the head. We have then, on the one hand, an interaction of the movement of the cerebral fluid with the movement of the breath, and, on the other, an interaction of the etheric part of the head—of which what takes place in the cerebral fluid is only an image—with the breathing process, which is again only an image of the astrality in man. We also have a continuous interplay of warmth; the movement of the blood mediates the warmth. On the waves of this sea of warmth our I also moves.

To become clear about these interactions within man's bodily nature it is essential that we represent them vividly to ourselves. Only the solid organism can be observed by itself. The fluid organism does not have the possibility of moving

in waves the way water moves in the external world. The play of movement in the fluid organism is an image of what takes place in the etheric body. Again, what takes place in the delicate processes of breathing is an image of what takes place in man's astral body. Keeping this in mind let us once more look at the cerebral fluid: within it certain movements take place copying movements of the etheric body. Man acquires the etheric body when he descends from spiritual worlds into the physical world. Within the spiritual world he does not yet possess it. But as man takes hold of his physical body he also takes possession of his etheric body; he, as it were, draws out the ether from the cosmos. He can unite with the physical body, which he receives through heredity, only when he has drawn the ether from the cosmos. So that all that lives in the etheric body of man we bring with us when we take hold of the physical body.

The human embryo develops within the maternal body. Let us consider the fluid within the embryo. In general physiology only the solid components, or what appear to be solid components, are examined, not the fluid. Were this to be investigated it would be found that the cerebral fluid, in particular, contains an image of all that which was present already in the ether body, as the ether was drawn together, and which then slips into physical man.

If this is the physical body (see drawing) in which the physical human embryo develops—I do not draw the solid, only the fluid embryo (red lines)—then what as astral and `I' is present descends from the spiritual world; what has been drawn together from the ether slips in (yellow lines). In fact, as he dives down into his physical body the fluid part of the organism absorbs what man brings with him. Therefore, if the movements within the cerebral fluid of the child were to be investigated they would be found to be like a photograph of what the human being had been before he united with the physical body. You see, it is very significant to realize that a photograph is to be found in the cerebral fluid, that is to say in the movements of the cerebral fluid, of what has taken place before conception.

It is fairly easy to understand that a kind of photograph of what existed before conception is to be found in the cerebral fluid. But let us now consider the process of breathing. Breathing appears to be an out and out physical process because of the way our lungs function. Air is drawn in and, under the influence of the external world, the breathing takes place even when we are asleep—that is, even when the eternal part of our being is not united with the temporal part. Our breathing is not affected by whether we are awake or asleep. When we sleep the wave movements of the breath go through the organism; when we are awake they, in addition, carry the astral body. In other words, they are able to carry the astral body but it is not incumbent on them to do so, for when we are asleep they do not.

What follows from this? It follows that the reason the cerebral fluid can carry on by itself is because it is isolated within man's inner being. It constitutes a kind of continuation of what existed before. On the other hand, nothing of what existed before can be continued in this intimate way within our breath. When we consider the human head, we find within the cerebral fluid, that is, within the physical body itself, the actual continuation of pre-natal spiritual man; whereas when we consider the organization of the chest and the process of breathing we find a different situation. The physical breath takes place by itself (see drawing, yellow lines); the spiritual is less strongly connected with the physical process (red lines). Therefore, one must say that in the head, spiritual man, the man of soul and spirit, is closely connected with physical man; they have become a unity. In the chest that is not the case—there the two are more apart; the physical organism is more by itself and so, too, the soul-spiritual.

Let us now compare this with the state of dreaming. When we dream the I and astral body are outside, they are separated from the sleeping body. However, for the chest man, that is to some extent always the case. The chest man—that is, the man of breath and heart, in short, rhythmic man—is the organism for feeling. Feelings run their course like dreams because the soul-spiritual is not so firmly connected with the physical organism, is not so completely within physical man. So you see, if one wants to consider the whole man one must take into account these different interactions of what pertains to the soul and what pertains to the body.

In our materialistic age the human being is considered only in the most external way. This is evident from the way modern science looks upon man as if he were nothing but a solid organism within which the soul is somehow active. On this basis it is impossible to visualize how, for example, an impulse of will, experienced purely within the soul, can lead to the lifting of the arms or legs. In fact, from the point of view of what we experience as the soul's part in an act of will, the human organism, as conceived by modern anatomy and physiology, is like a piece of wood, as alien to the soul as a piece of wood. What in physiology today is described as human legs is like a description of two pieces of wood. They are related to the soul as if they were wooden legs. As little as the soul could have any relationship with two pieces of wood lying about, just as little could it have any relationship with legs as described by modern physiology. However, human legs are penetrated by liquid. Here we already come upon something in which it is easier to understand that the spiritual can be active within it. Yet, it is still difficult.

Once we come to the gaseous, the airy element, then we are in a physical material so fine that it is much easier to visualize the soul element to be within it, and easier still when we come to warmth. Just think how close a connection can come about between the warmth of the physical organism and the soul. You may at some time have had a terrible fright and grown quite hot. There you have an inner experience of the connection between the soul and the warmth in the physical organism. In fact, when we examine the solid, fluid, gaseous and warmth components of the whole organism, we gradually arrive at the soul.

It can be said that the 'I' takes hold of the inner warmth; the astral body of the gaseous; the ether body of the fluid and only the solid remains untouched; in the solid nothing enters. Picture to yourselves the way the human organism functions: You have the human brain (see drawing, page 46) that has fluid in it and also solid parts into which, as I said, the soul does not enter. The solid parts are, in reality, salt deposits; whatever solid we have within us is always salt-like deposit. Our bones consist solely of such deposits. In the brain very fine deposits continually occur and again dissolve. There is always a tendency in our brain to bone formation. The brain has a tendency to become quite bony. But it does not become bony because everything is in movement and is continually dissolved. When we examine the organism, especially the brain, we first find within it a condition of warmth, and within the warmth the air which is the bearer of the astral body and is continually playing into the cerebral fluid while being breathed in and out. We then have the cerebral fluid in which the ether body lives. Then we come to the solid into which the soul cannot enter because it consists of deposited salt. Because of this salt formation, which is less than ten percent of the total organism, we have within us something into which the soul cannot enter.

As human beings we have an organism; within this organism there are warmth, gaseous and fluid elements, all of which the soul can penetrate. But there is something which the soul cannot penetrate. This is comparable to having objects on which light falls but cannot penetrate and is therefore thrown back. Let us say we have a mirror; light cannot go through it and is therefore reflected. Similarly, the soul cannot penetrate the solid salt organism and is, therefore, continually reflected.

If this were not the case, there would be no consciousness at all. Your consciousness consists of soul experiences reflected from the salt organism. You are not aware of the soul life as it is absorbed by the warmth, gaseous and fluid organism; you experience it only because the soul life within the warmth, gaseous and fluid, is reflected everywhere by salt, just as sunbeams are reflected by a mirror. The outcome of this reflection is our mental pictures.

When someone deposits too much salt—salt always takes on forms—then he produces a lot of mental pictures; he becomes rich in thoughts. If too little salt is secreted the thoughts have vague outlines, like reflections from a faulty mirror. Or, said differently, when too much salt is secreted thoughts predominate and become very precise, and he who has them becomes pedantic. He is convinced of the rightness of his thoughts because they arise from so much solid, he becomes materialistic. When too little salt is secreted, or perhaps too much in the rest of the organism but too little in the head, then the thoughts become indefinite and the person becomes fanciful or perhaps he becomes a mystic. Our soul life is dependent on the material processes taking place within us.

It may be necessary, when someone is too prone to fanciful ideas, to administer some remedy that will enable him to deposit more salt or else give better form to the salt he does deposit. He will then escape from his fantasies. However, one should not make too great an effort to cure a human being by physical means of his fantasies or pedantry; not much can be done anyway. To do something different is more important and can be of great value—someone who knows how to observe human beings in regard to both soul and body will notice if there is too much sediment, whether in the head, or in the organs of the rhythmic or metabolic systems. He will notice it because the whole thought configuration becomes different. The manner in which a person alters his thoughts can contribute significantly to a diagnosis. But such delicate reactions are not often noticed. For example, someone may suddenly make mistakes repeatedly when speaking. He does not normally do so, but suddenly he makes mistakes again and again. It may last a few days and then cease. He has suffered a slight ailment, and the mistakes in speaking are merely a symptom. Such instances can often be described quite exactly.

For example, someone may for a few days secrete too much gastric acid. Now what occurs? This gastric acid dissolves certain substances in the stomach, which ought to pass on beyond the stomach. This means that the organism is deprived of these substances with the result that the person's inner mirror pictures lack the necessary sharpness. His thoughts become vague and he makes mistakes in speaking. You will have realized what must be done: One must provide a remedy that will ensure less acidity in the stomach, then the person's thoughts will again become ordered. His digestion is now in order and he ceases to make mistakes when speaking.

Or take the example of someone who absorbs gastric acid too intensely. This can occur if the spleen is abnormally active. When this happens the gastric acid is distributed throughout the body; the body, as it were, becomes all stomach. Such acid sediments are, in fact, the cause of many illnesses. A specific pricking pain may be felt or, if the head is affected, a feeling of dullness. When you look at such a person with insight it will often be found that the absorption of all the acidity has created in him a certain greediness. When someone is permeated with acidity his eyes may lose their friendly expression. If someone is suffering from too much acidity his eyes will reveal it. It is sometimes possible to restore his friendly expression by administering an acid that can be digested in the stomach because it is of a kind that has no tendency to spread throughout the organism.

The reason I am saying all this is to show you that the science of the spirit meant here does not simply contemplate the human soul in a nebulous way. It recognizes the soul as the ruler and builder of the body, active within it everywhere.

The human organism is described nowadays as if it were solid through and through; the solid alone is taken into account. It is impossible to arrive at any conception of how the soul actually exists within the body unless one also considers the fluid, gaseous and warmth elements of the organism. The soul does not live in the solid part of the organism; it does not enter the solid any more than light penetrates a mirror. Light is thrown back from the mirror, the soul retreats everywhere from the salt.

The peculiarity of the soul is that it is deflected from the bones (see drawing, red lines). We carry our bones within us empty of soul. The soul is not within them but is rayed back into the organism.

The bones in the skull are really ingeniously arranged. The soul rays out in all directions and is reflected into our inner being. We do exist within the skull bones but only as solid physical man. If we would make a comprehensive sketch of the head we would have to depict the soul as raying out within the head (see drawing, red lines). If nothing else happened, we would be in a dull unconscious condition. However, as the soul cannot enter the bones of the skull it is rayed back into our inner being (arrows, short red lines).

We experience the soul only when it is reflected into our inner being. So, you see how matters stand: The reality is that you have the soul within you rayed back from the mirror of the skull bones.

Spiritual science does not exclude what is material; on the contrary, recognition of how the soul controls matter makes it, at last, comprehensible. After all one does not come to know that someone is a baker by the fact that he makes certain movements, but from knowing that the movements he makes shape the rolls and croissants. Neither does one come to know the soul through abstract considerations but by knowing that a reflection of the soul's activity is to be found in the physical organism. It is a question of understanding the organism rightly and recognizing that it is an image of the soul. If we cannot make the effort to understand even man's physical nature we shall never learn to know the soul. We must have the goodwill to understand how human nature comes to expression through the physical. What is usually spoken of as soul, by those who will not approach the physical with spiritual insight, is something utterly unreal. It is as unreal as if you had a tasty meal before you and, instead of eating it, tried to eat its reflection in a mirror standing beside it. One can become knowledgeable about the soul only by observing her creative activity and not by persisting to regard it as a mere abstraction. And one should certainly not adopt the view that to be a conscientious spiritual scientist one must scorn the material. Rather should the material be understood spiritually; it will then reveal itself as spirit through and through. To do otherwise is to live in intellectual abstractions, and they obscure rather than enlighten.

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

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

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

Let us now turn to the phenomenon of the dream.

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

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

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

Examples of dreams provoked by physical and bodily causes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will speak further on these matters tomorrow.

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

My dear Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As human beings, we can only know the deeper mysteries of the soul if we consider the totality of a person's experience. This totality of a person's experience is divided into the time during which the person is on the earth, the time between waking up and falling asleep, that is, the ordinary waking state during the day, and the time between falling asleep and waking up, the life that a person spends in a dark state of consciousness, from which the waves of dream life initially arise for the ordinary consciousness.

It is now a matter of really considering this state of transition between sleeping and waking from the most diverse points of view from which it can be observed. If we start from the usual way of looking at life, we can say: In the dream state there is a transition from waking to sleeping. And if we examine the course of dream life, we must make a significant distinction between the content of the images, so to speak, the content of the ideas in the dream, and the course of the dreaming. I have often pointed this out as well.

We can dream this or that according to the content. But we must also see what the inner course of the dream is. Let us say that it unfolds with a certain drama, that we initially have a kind of state of tension in the dream, which becomes ever greater or ever stronger and stronger, and that then a certain resolution comes, or even that such a resolution does not arise in the end, but that the tension gives rise to waking. We must distinguish this dramatic process from the actual content of the dream.

Let us say, for example, we dreamt that we are going on a journey. We come to a mountain cave. We enter the mountain cave. It becomes more and more eerie and eerie for us because it gets darker and darker. Finally, we are overcome by a real state of fear, and then, although we know we have to go on, we come up against some obstacle. The state of fear grows and grows. We see how tension builds up. But the content, the content of the dream, is something quite different. For example, we can also dream the following: We see something approaching in the distance that threatens us. It comes closer and closer, and the individual details become clearer and clearer, and with that our anxiety grows, finally discharging in a mighty state of fear. In terms of the drama of the dream, the same is present in both cases: that which builds up internally as tension. The images in which the dream is clothed according to our imagination are somewhat different.

Now, if we go further, we will often find that, at least for most of our dream life, the imaginative nature of dreaming is in some way taken from our experiences during our earthly existence. Of course, some things may have been transformed, some things may appear in a very disguised form, but in some way or other we will still be able to understand how the conditions on earth that we have experienced come into the dream as images.

What actually takes place during such dreams, let us say, when we dream while waking? Well, during the time from falling asleep to waking up, we are, with our soul-spiritual part – we also call it the astral body and the I - outside of our physical body and the etheric body. We dwell with our ego and our astral body in this world, in which, at first, we cannot perceive as our consciousness is in our earthly existence, because the astral body and the ego in which we are are somewhat indefinite and its organs of perception are not developed. But that is not to say that something is not constantly happening in what is outside the physical body during sleep. In fact, between falling asleep and waking up, a richer life takes place in the astral body and in the I than during waking hours. We just cannot become aware of it. And what we experience in dreams as states of tension, as states of discharge, as fear, perhaps also as anger, rage and so on – all this can play into the dream, clothe it in the most diverse images, and this goes on with us from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up.

In these extra-bodily states, we live in a world whose movements we participate in, just as we participate in the processes of the physical external world through our senses during the waking hours. When we now return to our physical body with our soul-spiritual, that is, with the astral body and the I, when we wake up, we take hold of the organs of our physical body. We sink into these organs. In this moment we are again able to perceive an external world, the external world of the nature kingdoms, minerals, plants, animals, the physical human being. We permeate these organs, which organize the physical body, with our soul. Thus we are in relationship to this external world.

If we do not immediately submerge ourselves completely in our physical body, but if we penetrate the etheric body for a moment before we take hold of the whole physical body, then the forces that form the images of the 'dream' come to us from this etheric body. These images are carried by the forces of the etheric body. They are reminiscences of life, memories of life.

When we dream as we fall asleep, it may be that we leave our physical body and, due to some abnormality, do not immediately leave the etheric body as well. Then, before we enter into a state of complete unconsciousness, we live in the images of the etheric body. But the surging of the astral body and the ego, which takes place during the state between falling asleep and waking up, is already beginning. So we have to strictly separate the images contained in the dream and the dynamic, the flow of energy of the dream, the drama of the dream. We must keep the two strictly separate. And when we are able, through soul exercises, to carry out this separation in practice, as I have just described to you in theory, when one is able to make one's astral body and one's ego so strong through exercises that one does not passively into the etheric body and then into the physical body, but if you learn to make use of the general cosmic ether outside of the body, then you can perceive things that you would otherwise not be able to perceive.

The ether that is secreted and forms our etheric body is, after all, only a part of the general cosmic ether. Ether is everywhere. Some time before our birth, we separate some of the general ether to form our etheric body, which we then carry within us between birth and death. The general cosmic ether remains imperceptible. It only becomes perceptible when we are able to strengthen our astral body and our ego to such an extent that we can hold them outside our physical body, even when we are not sleeping, but we do not merely receive the kinds of dream impressions that we have when falling asleep and otherwise for the ordinary consciousness, but we can perceive in the external etheric. Then the following is present:

The physical world is spread out around us. At first, it is of no concern to us. It remains available to us when we do the right exercises, just as memories remain available. We can survey it; we do not step out of it like a hallucinator, but at first it is of no concern to us. We have strengthened our astral body and our ego. We perceive what takes place in the etheric world, not in the physical world. And what now takes place in the etheric world, that is, what is now perceptible to us, is actually nothing other than what you find, of course only partially, at least in terms of nature, in my book “Occult Science”.

Seen in this light, one sees with the strengthened astral body and I, which now, instead of using the eyes and ears to perceive physically outside the body, perceive ethereally. This ethereal quality presents itself in such images, which can then be described in the same way as I have described in my “Occult Science”.

I would therefore like to say: If one is able to bring the astral body and the I into the body-free state, as they are otherwise every night in sleep, but if one has strengthened them through exercises so that one perceives in the cosmic ether, then one initially has the world in imaginations, in pictures, before oneself. What one otherwise sees only as a small part of the physical world is so expanded that one can depict the existence of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, and so on, in addition to the earthly existence. This is the first thing that can be perceived from the supersensible world.

But now everything that can become the content of the imaginative world lies in this. We are already emerging from the world of ether when, through what I have described as empty consciousness, we no longer merely live in imaginations that arise, but when we learn to dispel the imaginations in turn, when we are able to both, let us say, receive an imagination in the soul and also to let it fall.

This results in a state of mind that can be controlled completely at will, a state of mind in which one lives in the image, then suppresses the image, and lives in the image again, suppressing the image. This is the state of inspired experience of the world. But here one experiences a world that is not completely foreign to man either. He experiences it every night in dreamless sleep. He is just not able to grasp with his consciousness what is going on in it. In this world, one does not just perceive images, but as the images flood in, flood out, arise, pass away, as it becomes still even in the flooding image, and in the flooding-out image a kind of inner so that the world also becomes manifold in relation to our perceptions, we perceive in this inspired world, if I may say so, the actions and deeds of real spiritual beings. In the description I have given in Occult Science, these deeds of spiritual beings are already implied, although essentially the pictures of the evolution of the world are given there. But attention is drawn to the beings of the higher hierarchies, angels, archangels and so on, which appear in this surge of the world, of arising and passing imaginations. I would like to say that on the waves that one experiences in inspired life, those beings who are the beings of the higher hierarchies weave at the same time.

Now one realizes how one's own existence, but that part of existence that only actually becomes free in the time between falling asleep and waking up during physical life on earth, how this essential part of the human being is integrated into a world of supersensible entities. Indeed, between falling asleep and waking up, we are indeed members of this world. As souls, we move among beings.

In imaginative consciousness, it is the case that one really only has an idea of what these beings do. I would like to say that the first stage of supersensible consciousness presents itself in such a way that these beings, so to speak, sketch out their images for us. These are the imaginations. Then one comes to the point where one is not only confronted with images, but images arise and flood in, and in this arising and flooding the deeds of the beings take place. But we ourselves are now in this world of spiritual events. When consciousness breaks through, we are in a state in which we are as free from the body as we otherwise are for ordinary consciousness in dreamless sleep; we actually belong to such a world in which spiritual deeds occur. This world, in which spiritual deeds take place, and in which we ourselves are interwoven, makes clear to us that from which we come out when we hurry towards birth on earth to begin another earthly existence after having lived for some time in the spiritual-soul world.

In fact, the onset of earthly existence at birth is the extinction of this world. Man returns to this world every time he falls asleep, but the inner activity of the astral and the ego within him has become so weak in the course of life between death and a new birth that he is compelled to have the deepest desire, the deepest longing, that something will come to his aid, for he would have to die in the spiritual idleness when birth approaches again and something would not come to his aid.

Let us assume, then, that man has developed from death through spiritual events. At first, his consciousness is very much alive, even reminiscent of earthly consciousness in the early days. Then he rises more and more, as his consciousness takes part in spiritual deeds. But this consciousness later weakens. When the time for an earthly birth approaches again, the person comes into a state as a spiritual being that can only be compared, if we want to characterize it by something that exists on earth, to someone who begins to suffer from amnesia, who thus, so to speak, grabs for his memories and cannot find them. So when earthly life approaches again, the person reaches for reality, for being filled with reality. For at this moment his emotional and volitional life is strong, but the perceptions are dull and he has no inner content. He reaches, as it were, for the perceptions, which become duller and duller, while the will becomes more and more powerful. And this desire now drives him to earthly embodiment, to an earthly organism that is given to him through the current of inheritance. He can now use this as a tool, it gives him the opportunity to think again, although now only about a physical external world, but it does allow the development of the life of imagination, which has become dull. It is through this desire to be able to think again that man enters into physical embodiment on earth. And there he passes through the state of sleep, in which he slowly develops to be able to live again as a spiritual being when he passes through the gate of death, and to begin the cycle anew.

What one experiences now, by rising in the body-free state to this perception of the world, which presents itself in inspiration, that is the whole secret of how man lives in a supersensible world between death and a new birth: how this supersensible world really is.

Some of it, how man in turn comes to an earthly embodiment, I have indeed described in the Vienna cycle of 1914, “Inner Being of Man and Life between Death and Rebirth”. If one rises even further, then what is actually not known in the ordinary consciousness of man arises. In the waking state, we have three distinctly different states of soul: thinking, feeling, and willing. We also have three such states in sleep. But usually only two are distinguished, the one where sleep is so thin, I would say, that we can dream, the lightest sleep, and the dreamless sleep. But very few people know that if you can compare the light sleep of dreaming with the thinking of waking, and the dreamless sleep with the feeling of waking, then there is still a deep sleep. This difference between the middle state of sleep and that deep sleep, which can then be compared with the will of the waking state, is simply overlooked. But this state of deep sleep also exists.

Some people will certainly notice a certain difference, at least when waking up. It does happen that a person goes through nights in which they only experience the two sleep states, dream sleep and dreamless sleep, but not the deeper sleep, which is clearly different from the mere dreamless sleep. When waking up, I said, some people will already notice when they sometimes emerge from sleep, by feeling quite as if they are new, that they are already rising from deeper regions of being than is usually the case. It is necessary to indicate this difference, which, as I said, is not taken into account in ordinary consciousness. It is like this: When we are in a state of dream sleep, then we actually live in a world - we are, after all, outside our physical and our etheric bodies - which can certainly be compared to that world which otherwise takes place invisibly in the earth's environment, where the flowers of the plants unfold, interacting with the sunlight. This weaving and living of the flowering plants escapes ordinary consciousness. But it is into this world that man first plunges. It is, after all, the world that is nearest to the ordinary world of the day. It is everywhere, and by plunging into this world, he lives in the dream sleep.

The deeper, dreamless sleep is the one in which man submerges himself in a world that would be around us in the interior of plants. We are completely in such a world when we sleep dreamlessly, as we would be if we could creep as ghosts into the interior of plants.

But when we are in that deeper sleep, which is a third state of sleep, then we are completely immersed in the mineral kingdom. Then the mineral processes - the earlier alchemy called them the salination processes - also take place most strongly in the human organism. Then, in a sense, the human being is not only given over to the plant kingdom, but also to the mineral kingdom.

For those who can consciously enter this world, in which the human being is otherwise in this deepest state of sleep, it really becomes clear what lives inside the minerals. And when the human being lives in a world like that inside the minerals, it is as if he is now looking at a mineral from the inside, whereas he otherwise always looks at it from the outside. You will understand that this is what I wanted to say in a certain description of the spirit world in my Theosophy. You will find this reversal in this description of the spirit world. And by living into this reversal, man lives into that world in which he can take part not only in the deeds of the higher hierarchies, but in the beings of the higher hierarchies, where he can get to know the beings of the higher hierarchies in the same way as he perceives the soul qualities of people in the physical world. There we are no longer in the inspired world, there we are in the world of intuition. There we not only devote ourselves to the actions, the spiritual actions of the spiritual entities, but to the essence of these entities themselves.

But then we are also in the world in which karma becomes a reality for us. Every time a person enters this third state of sleep, if he were suddenly able to become conscious, he would perceive his karma. He would perceive how past earthly lives play a part in the present earthly life. Man experiences his karma in deep sleep, and he also carries the results of this experience into the physical body. But the physical body is not suited to perceive something like that. It has no organs for that at first. Just as he develops eyes to see outwardly and ears to hear outwardly, so he would have to develop organs of perception inwardly.

These inward organs of perception, however, would kill him if he developed them, if he had to look inward physically, because the human organism cannot live if it sends the forces that lead to the formation of sensory organs inward. If he were to send them inward, he would be able to see his karma with physical organs, so to speak. One can only see it with spiritual organs, precisely in intuitive recognition.

But we see from this that during his life on earth, man lives both in the forces that form his environment in the time between death and a new birth, which work in him in order to then incorporate him into a physical earthly body, and in the world in which his destiny unfolds from life to life. This fate is veiled from our ordinary consciousness because, if a person were to perceive his fate unprepared, he would enter into a very special state.

If a person could perceive his destiny without practising for it – it may not happen, but I will hypothetically assume it – then the desire would immediately arise in him from this perceptibility to develop organs that perceive inwardly, so to speak. He would want to develop eyes and ears that see and hear inwardly. But this would mean forces for his organism. He would not only wake up as he does now, but he would bring with him from his sleep the strength to rebuild his organism inwards. That is, he would kill his organism.

The human organism is designed in such a way that the soul and spirit, the astral body and the I, can only submerge in the etheric body for a moment; then they must immediately submerge in the physical body, after dream images have arisen from submerging in the etheric body. But even there, the etheric body must give what the images are about. A person cannot take in what he otherwise experiences outside. Then he must delve into his physical body, which he must leave as it is, to which he must devote himself, having decided to use it when he descended from the spiritual-soul world, precisely in order to make use of a physical body and its organs. That which lies beyond the threshold, which is imperceptible but is still experienced, is in a sense a reflection of what we go through between death and a new birth.

Only through such a contemplation does the image of the complete human being emerge. And at the same time it emerges that man, as he is in physical life on earth, is so weak spiritually that he would drift through the world in a dull sleep, if I may say so, without perceiving anything at all, if he did not use his physical body to perceive. Between birth and death, man can actually only be seen to live in a dull state and to only inwardly enlighten himself when he makes use of the body. This is the relative justification of materialism, which is quite relatively justified for life on earth, because that which is actually spiritual-soul remains dull for life on earth.

Now we can ask: Is there perhaps a way to look even more sharply at what lives as spiritual-soul and participates in the world as I have described it to you, participates in a world of flowing images, dying away and dying up again, dying up and dying away again, but into which — as you know from my description in Occult Science — there also mingles what can be compared to taste perceptions and so on in the physical world. In this world, man lives from falling asleep to waking up. From this world, he can also become aware of how his karma lies, what his destiny is, how it unfolds from one earth life to the next, when his consciousness is strengthened.

But how one can see more precisely into this world can be seen when one first looks at those beings who, in earthly life, essentially have the astral body, not a distinct ego in earthly life. These are the animals. These animals also have sleeping and waking. If we now look at sleeping in animals, the following emerges. So let us take a sleeping animal. The astral body moves out. This astral body, by moving out of the animal, is immediately absorbed into a world that then presents itself to the senses as this floating world of approaching and disappearing imaginations, of colorations. Then again, when waking up, it withdraws into the animal. But if we observe more closely, this flooding life of imagination with the tints does move in the earthly air while the animal sleeps. From the moment the animal wakes up, the soul moves on the waves of the breathing process, through the respiratory organs in the broadest sense, back into the animal body again. Then it stimulates the senses so that they take part in this life. But when it awakens, it is essentially a flooding in of the soul, whereby skin breathing must of course be taken into account, but one has the exit through the breathing processes, and then the entrance again through the respiratory organs. Once this has been seen, one begins to understand how the astral body unites with the animal in its embryonic life when the animal first comes into being. It unites in such a way that one might say: it is the reverse of the process by which the astral body goes outwards on the waves of breathing. It goes inwards and first builds itself plastically within the body.

If you bear in mind that the animal actually takes its form from its respiratory organs, you will learn a great deal about the formations of the animal. Look at animals and how they are the result of their respiratory organs in the broader sense. But it is only the way in which the soul of the animals lives in them. Compare, say, a proboscis animal with any animal whose head organs are more mouth-shaped than proboscis-shaped. The rest of the animal's form is shaped accordingly, and the way the animal can breathe is decisive for its form. The soul lives on the waves of the air-like substance taken in by the animal.

When we look at a human being, something else comes into play. Even if a child cannot yet speak, it has the ability to speak. Its respiratory organs are already prepared for this. They are different from the respiratory organs of an animal. These respiratory organs enable the air to enter in such a way that not only an astral body but also an ego can envelop the human being and take possession of him.

Anyone who sees through this, however, comes to know the truth: the animal is formed by its respiratory organs in the broadest sense to its shape, but the human being is formed by breathing, modified into speech, into words, to his shape. In man the word becomes flesh in the most literal sense, his form is a result of the word. I have already described how human souls move between the beings of the supersensible worlds. Between death and a new birth, between falling asleep and waking up, human souls belong to the same worlds as the higher spiritual beings. When we observe human souls, we find that they move in a way that can then be transferred to the waves of the air. The same thing that a person unfolds when he speaks, this kind of air movement that he unfolds when he speaks, is also unfolded in his inhalation, which shapes him when it enters him. In a sense, one can see human souls in this way, floating on the waves of air. This is because the I does not merely grasp the air. In the case of an animal, the astral body is there, it grasps the air and grasps the air with its states of warmth. The human astral body takes hold of the air and is able to move on the waves of the air, but it also takes hold of the warmth, the warmth ether. As the I streams through the world on the waves of the warmth ether, it colors breathing, becomes speech from the inside out, human form from the outside in. If we grasp the concrete reality of speech life, we learn to recognize in the speech life, in the cosmic formation of words, what enters the human being as formative, what works plastically, especially in the embryo and then in the child, in that the human being gives himself his form through inner forces, working plastically. And this connection between the word and the human form is something that can be spoken of as something absolutely real, because it can be seen in the way I have described it to you now.

One can also note the following. When you fall asleep, your astral body moves on the waves of the air and remains within the airspace; your ego goes into the indefinite, so to speak, disappears into the warmth of the outside world. The soul is already able to live in the warmth of the ether and the air during the time when a person is between falling asleep and waking up. And so we have the physical body of the human being, which actually belongs entirely to the earth, the etheric body of man, which belongs to the watery, liquid element of the earth, which has a special relationship to it, the astral body, which belongs to the airy element, and the I, which belongs to the warm element, the fire element. And this is what can be perceived when the word of the world enters the human being and brings together the forces of air and warmth, connecting them with the forces of water and earth. All of this interplay of forces is then unfolded by the inner soul when the human being descends from the spiritual and soul world to an earthly existence.

These things can, of course, only be seen inwardly, but they can really be seen inwardly. And one would like to say: It is indeed difficult because today's language is actually formed entirely for materialism and for a materialistic world view, to express oneself in the words of the present languages, but by succeeding more and more in what is seen there, to clothe it in words in such a way that clear thoughts can settle into the human soul, it will become comprehensible to everyone what can be said about the higher worlds through the science of initiation. It is indeed the case that these things can only be found through supersensible research, but supersensible research is not necessary to understand these things.

I have often compared it to saying that you can judge a picture aesthetically without being a painter yourself. In the same way, one can also judge spiritual science, anthroposophy, without being a researcher oneself, although today, to a certain extent, anyone can become one through the instructions in “How to Know Higher Worlds” and so on, so that one can already come to the point of checking the results of spiritual scientific research. But the real value for life is not gained from the content of spiritual truths by researching the facts, but by understanding them, by absorbing them.

Those who truly absorb the ideas clothed in true spiritual research can be said to have the ability to absorb these things within themselves, even if they only have ordinary common sense, just as those who have not learned the chemical composition of sugar also have a taste for it. What one should get from sugar is independent of whether one knows its chemical composition or not. It is the same with supersensible truths. What one should get from them is through their being clothed in the world of ideas, that is how one takes them in. The other is something that has to be done to attain them, but it is of as little help as if I were to say to a child: I will not give you sugar, but I will give you instructions so that you can understand the chemical composition of sugar. The child would not be satisfied. Nor can people be satisfied with mere research into the spiritual worlds; rather, the spiritual results must be translated into formulable ideas. For it is only through these that our soul nature can be so enlivened that a real meaning of life arises from the results of anthroposophy.

When a person takes in what is given through anthroposophy – to begin with, they can take in, let us say, what is described in imagination – they are already doing their common sense a great service, because their personality becomes freer, more independent within. In this way they acquire something that will be very useful for the present and the near future. People today are really quite, quite dependent on uncontrollable ideas and so on that they absorb.

I just want to remind you how the people who attend political or other meetings today are actually just a flock of sheep that fall for the slogans thrown at them by the speakers and then follow them. In this respect, humanity today is terribly dependent. It is also dependent in that it simply absorbs what has been set. As a result, people gradually come to the point where they can no longer think in reality at all, but only seemingly think, because their thinking can no longer, I might say, be seen in the spiritual light. One experiences strange things.

For example, after a eurythmy performance in Berlin, a witty critic recently said: First they presented serious pieces and then humorous pieces. You can see that eurythmy is impossible just from the fact that the humorous pieces are performed with the same movements as the serious pieces.

Now it had first been explained that eurythmy is a visible language, so it really does matter to grasp the content that the eurythmy gives as language. What would be the consequence of what such a witty critic says? The consequence would be that he would have to say: If, for example, a declaimer uses ordinary spoken language, then he must not present serious poems with the same sounds that he uses for comic poems, for example in the German language. In this he would find just as much contradiction as if the same movements occurred in visible speech for comic and serious, for reputable poems. So it is absolute nonsense. People read this, but do not even realize that these are no longer thoughts at all, but that it is just a rolling out of brain processes that are reflected as thoughts but are no longer thoughts; it is the most absolute folly. This shows how people have lost their inner activity. Real life in thoughts must come precisely from people living in the imaginative life and pursuing what comes from the imaginative life with common sense. This makes a person more active, he becomes a personality again in the fullest sense of the word.

But it is of particular importance to engage with what is revealed from the inspired consciousness. If one follows with one's common sense what is described as inspiration, then gradually — as I have already indicated in various ways in other contexts — what is true and false is transformed into healthy and unhealthy judgment. One has the feeling that something that is untrue is morbid. With what is true, one has the feeling: it is something healthy. The logic of truth and falsehood actually only has a meaning for the physical world. As soon as we enter into the spiritual world, we perceive what is true as something healthy and what is false, an error, as something morbid.

But by acquiring a sense of healthy and unhealthy judgment through the study of the truths of inspiration, we prepare the way to understand the Christ event. For the Christ event entered the world because the evolution of humanity was in danger of becoming diseased. From the Christ-event, from the Mystery of Golgotha, there proceeds the power that man may turn again to the Truth, to healing. Through the inspired truths, we really do acquire the possibility of gaining a sense of religious truths again, especially the truths of Christianity. We learn to understand again why the being of Christ was celebrated as a savior, as one who truly heals, has healed and continues to heal humanity. The word really originated in this context. Because at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the old clairvoyant abilities were still there, which then faded away in the fourth century after the Mystery of Golgotha, and only existed in concept, that is why people at that time still understood what the Mystery of Golgotha meant.

Today we must first struggle to come to this realization. Christ lived in the world until the Mystery of Golgotha, which we contemplate in dream sleep, so that the Christ was perceptible to every person in dream sleep before the Mystery of Golgotha. But no human being was allowed to think – this was something that was made absolutely clear to people in the mystery schools – that the being that lives in Christ could be reached with earthly thoughts, that it could also be found in the waking state. This only became possible through the Mystery of Golgotha, through Christ's death. Since that time He may be remembered as an entity belonging to earthly life itself. A real conception of the God who has come out of the land of dreams into the physical land was created.

This is a real process: the God who has come to know that which the gods otherwise do not know, who has learned to die, who has incorporated the fact of dying into himself, that is the Christ, the God who enters into the world where there is birth and death, the descent of the God into human nature. God becomes man. This is precisely the formula in which what the Christ has become can be expressed: for the earth, the archetype of humanity; for the earth, that through which humanity acquires meaning. And if the other had taken place, if at the same time that God became man, a human being had also felt the urge to become God, that is, to no longer die, to no longer be subject to the laws of earthly life, then, while God became the most perfect human being by descending, he would naturally have become the most miserable God. This polar opposite you have! It is not without reason that, alongside the Christ who ascends to Golgotha, stands Ahasver, the man who becomes God, but a bungling God who loses the possibility of dying, who now walks the world but cannot die, the God who remains on the physical plane but develops on the physical plane the same peculiarities that were actually only allowed to be developed in the realm of dreams.

It is a tremendous, spiritual thing that is presented to our souls: that the God has been given the man who has become God, but, as is to be expected, in a way that makes him miserable. The man who has become God also maintains within the evolution of the earth the principle that the Godhead should not descend to the physical plane: Judaism, the Old Testament world view.

Here we already have a mystery. Those who know these things know that Ahasver is a real entity and the Ahasver legends are based on real impressions of perceptions of Ahasver, which have occurred here and there, for Ahasver exists and is the custodian of Judaism after the Mystery of Golgotha has occurred. He is the man who has become God. We must be quite clear that we can only arrive at a complete knowledge of history by including the spiritual.

On the one hand, we look at the incarnation of God in the event of Golgotha; we look at the incarnation of man in Ahasverus. And the initiate can know that Ahasuerus is really wandering. Of course, he cannot be seen as a human being. After all, he has become a god. But he wanders around. He is present in earthly existence. And real historical representations, which grasp the full reality, make it necessary to look at what also passes as a spiritual reality through the historical becoming of human development.

Of course, many things only exist in images. It is only important to know that these images correspond to realities. It is foolish to say that one should not express oneself in such images. After all, we always express ourselves in images when we speak. Take the Sanskrit word 'Manas'. Whoever understands 'Manas' has before him in sound the picturesque image of the bowl that carries the moon and the sun, because when one pronounced 'Manas' in primeval Sanskrit, one felt the human being in his will-nature as the bowl that was then carried by the thinking being. All words can also be traced back to images, only they are more elementary, simple images. What is expressed through words is not contained in them. When there are more complicated entities that cannot be expressed in words, then images have to be formed. When we speak of Ahasver and the legends of Ahasver, as we otherwise speak of images, these are only more complicated forms of expression that point to the spiritual side.

Anyone who rails against mythology in this sense should also rail against the fact that humans have developed a language through which they want to express a content. He should order them to become mute, because the next step after forbidding them to develop a mythology would be to forbid people to speak. For it is the very same process of visualization in ordinary language as in the higher visualization, when one posits something like the Ahasver, who goes through the evolution of the world as a being, but precisely as a spirit being, and continually prevents man from returning to the spiritual world in the way that is in his evolution, through the Christ, back to the spiritual world from which he went out when he lost atavistic clairvoyance.

That is what I wanted to say today, on the one hand to point out man's true place in the spiritual world, through a correct characterization of the state of sleep and dreams, and on the other hand to point out that spiritual beings live in history that only make the full course of history understandable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These, then, are the three stages of consciousness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ 1 ] In the last lecture I told you that contemporary humanity cannot know anything because our thinking nowadays does not lead to real knowledge. In earlier times, say a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago, whoever wanted to learn anything had to undergo special training in thinking. People did not believe that they could understand anything of the spiritual world with their ordinary, everyday thinking, and therefore there existed a kind of schooling of thinking. Today, on the other hand, none of the education we receive enables us to educate our thinking in any real way.

[ 1 ] This means that we are quite unable to think. I will give you an example that you probably saw in the newspaper a few days ago.⁶ There was an article on a very common dream, a recurrent dream of flying. We can all remember dreams of flying, floating, or falling. Such dreams often occur soon after we go to bed. But you know all this. In this article a writer, versed only in today's natural scientific thinking, attempts to explain this kind of dream. You will see that this kind of thinking leads nowhere in such matters. He says: "This dream of flying, according to Dr. Richard Traugott, is actually induced or triggered by a contraction of the body." What is the writer saying here, what does he believe? He thinks that at the time of going to sleep the body contracts or twitches. But, I ask you, has it not happened to you that you have had this same experience when you are awake? And when does it happen to you? As far as my own experience goes, this kind of sudden jolt or start happens when you are afraid. It is when you experience something startling or frightening that you experience that kind of bodily jerking or contracting. The same thing can happen if, let's say, you go out onto the street and you see a man whom you believed to be in America. At the moment you notice him, your body is jolted—because you are surprised. Now you could not imagine that starting with what has just been described you would feel yourself flying! The problem is that people can invent all kinds of ideas, but those ideas do not particularly fit the observation. The thoughts seem to fit as long as one makes experiments in the laboratory with lifeless matter; but the minute one tries to explain something real, they don't fit anymore.

[ 1 ] Let us continue with this writer. He says: "The cause of this contraction resides in the difference of muscle tension in sleeping and in waking. In the waking state there is a constant flow of energy from the central nervous system to the muscles." He assumes that in the waking state there are constant electric currents moving between the muscles and the nerves. "These energy currents create the muscle tension necessary for the maintenance of the bodily balance that the harmonious interplay of the musculature requires. In sleep this muscle tension largely disappears. During the period of going to sleep the reflexivity of the spinal cord actually increases, and thus the relaxation of the muscle tension, or rather the stimulus that this process exerts on the spinal cord, easily leads to this twitching reflex." So presumably, in the nervous system of the spinal cord there is a stimulus that is continuous and that increases the muscle tension. The writer goes on: "Other sensations that exist in our organs, particularly the rising and falling movements of the chest musculature and the rib cage, may even more directly influence the development of this feeling of flying, floating in the air, or swimming." In other words, muscle tension increases, contracting the body to such an extent that finally, when we are asleep, we experience a condition like that of flying or swimming.

[ 1 ] Now, after all this, just think back in your own experience to when you were breathless (panting) and your chest was tight. Did it ever occur to you that you were having a swimming sensation—not to mention the sensation of flying? On the contrary, in such moments you feel particularly heavy. The article goes on to say other things. For instance, attention is called to the amount of pressure and resistance we feel, when awake, on our bodies where they rest on something. Then, supposedly, when we fall asleep, we become aware of the lack of pressure and resistance. But really, gentlemen, this doesn't make sense. After all, when we are awake and walk, we actually are supported only on a very small surface! We feel that we are walking on the soles of our feet. Of course, when we sit down, we are resting on a larger surface than the soles of our feet. But even if you were to add the surface area of both these places where the body contacts the outside world, this still does not compare to the surface we need when we are asleep. So, as you can see, this kind of thinking really leads one to talk nonsense. This kind of thinking is what passes for science today. Our same scientist tells us that the electric currents in the nerves are stronger when we are asleep; they stimulate the muscles, and they cause the sensation of flying—so that one believes one is flying. Or he tells us that the support disappears when we sleep! One can hardly believe what he goes on to say, for he speaks of: "the disappearance of the perception of pressure and resistance, that in the waking state is present in all the parts of the body that need a support . ." It is not to be believed that he could fail to take into account that there is a much larger surface being used in sleep. But he doesn't care about this, because contemporary thinking never really reaches any real explanations or clarifies what really happens when we go to sleep.

[ 1 ] Let me now clarify what really happens when we go to sleep. From this you will see how one can really achieve insight into the higher, spiritual world. First I will show you this in an image. Remember that this is only an image! Let's assume you have here someone's physical body. (He draws it on the blackboard, left) Within it, there is an etheric, supersensible body—I will draw it in yellow. This fills out the physical body and is invisible. When we are asleep, these two bodies remain behind in the bed. When we are awake, the astral body is also within those two bodies—I will draw the astral body in red here. Within the astral body there is the ego, the fourth member—I will show it in violet. This, then, is the human being when awake: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego—inserted one within the other.

[ 1 ] Let us now look at our sleeper: when he is in bed, he has only a physical body and an etheric body (drawing, center). Outside these are his astral body and ego (drawing, right). What lies in the bed therefore may be compared to a plant, for the plant also has a physical body and an etheric body. If a plant had no etheric body it would be a stone, and it would not be alive and could not grow. So what is lying in bed is like a plant—the plant does not think, and what lies in bed does not think in the sense of conscious thought. But it is also true that thoughts are in there somewhere, as I have already explained to you; and sometimes these thoughts are even more clever than those we use when we are conscious. However, there are no daytime thoughts such as we are used to, and in this respect what lies in bed is like a plant.

[ 1 ] But when we describe what lives outside that which lies in bed, this feels no boundaries. You can start to have an explanation of this, if you notice that when you leave the boundaries of your body, your consciousness disappears. When you are in your physical body, your astral body has to be as big as it is; but when you leave it, then your astral body suddenly grows—it grows to gigantic dimensions, because the physical body no longer contains it and makes it small. At the moment you go to sleep, at the moment you move out of your physical body, you feel as if you were growing larger and larger.

[ 1 ] Now, let's say you drink a glass of something. I guess I'd better not talk about a glass of alcohol, or else the word would be spread that I speak in favor of alcohol. As you know this is a rather unpleasant issue in Switzerland these days. So let us say you drink a glass of water with a little raspberry juice. If you put some raspberry juice in a glass of water, you can taste the raspberry juice easily. If, however, instead of a glass, you take a small bucket containing the equivalent of five bottles of water, and if you put only the same amount of raspberry juice in it as you put earlier in your glass, the raspberry juice is diluted—spread out over a much larger amount of water. You have much less of the raspberry taste. When I was a little boy, I grew up in the vicinity of a winery. There were big cellars with barrels of 400 buckets of wine. If we had filled one of these with water instead of wine and had added a little raspberry juice and stirred it, you could have drunk the water without at all realizing there was raspberry juice present. This is clear, I am sure. Now, gentlemen, as long as the astral body is as small as the physical body it is like the raspberry juice in the glass of water; your astral body expands only to the limit of your physical body. But when you leave the physical body in sleep, it no longer contains the astral. The astral body spreads out, just as the raspberry juice spreads out in the 400 buckets of water. Therefore in your astral body you have no consciousness. Consciousness is created through the fact that the astral body is concentrated or contracted.

[ 1 ] Here you have a true explanation for what actually happens when you go to sleep. As long as we are awake, our astral body is in our fingers and our toes, in all our muscles. When we feel the astral body in our muscles, we have the feeling of being dependent on our physical body. The physical body is heavy. We feel the heaviness of the physical body. In the moment we leave the physical body, we leave behind its heaviness. In this brief moment before consciousness has completely disappeared in sleep, we no longer feel the heaviness. We do not feel that we are falling, for in fact we are rising; we feel, rather, that we are floating into the air. This sense of not being bound to a physical body, this sense of enlargement, is what we experience as flying or swimming. We can feel ourselves moving freely until consciousness disappears and we go to sleep completely. In contrast to what has just been described, all the natural scientist can say is: our muscles twitch. And, as you well know, when our muscles twitch we feel them more than we usually do, and when that happens, it does not make us feel that we are flying—on the contrary, that is when we feel most narrowly tied to the physical. Another example is that when someone is surprised—Wow!—his mouth gapes open. This is because he is then so much connected with his muscles that he can no longer control them. The experiences of one's muscles twitching in surprise, or loosing control when "wowed," are the opposite of those prevailing when we go to sleep. When we go to sleep, we leave behind our muscles; therefore there cannot be a contraction of the muscles. When we lie down and rest on a larger surface of our bodies, there is rather a relaxation of the muscles. We do not need to hold our muscles together by means of our astral body. They relax, they do not become tenser. Because we no longer need to exert an influence on them, we believe that we are free of our muscles, and because of this we fly away with our lighter astral body.

[ 1 ] Now consider for a moment what I told you last time about learning to think in a way opposite to our everyday thinking. Here you can see how today's ordinary thinking, when trying to explain the human being, results in the opposite of the truth. Therefore the first thing you must do is to think correctly—which really means being able to think the opposite of what holds true in the physical world.

[ 1 ] People have lost the habit of thinking correctly. They can no longer think in such a way that they can reach the spiritual world through thinking.

[ 1 ] There are many people today who speak our language, and this language contains the word "spirit," so they use it. The problem is that they no longer have any real picture of what the word "spirit" means. They can make mental pictures only of physical things. But if we want to think of the spiritual, we come to something without physical characteristics, and therefore to something that you cannot perceive in the physical world. But thinking nowadays is so tainted that people actually wish to see the spiritual world in a physical way. As a result of this, they become what we call spiritists. They say to themselves: If a physical body can move a table, the fact that I can do this means I exist. Then they continue: If a spirit exists, it must also be able to move a table. And this is how the practice of "table-tapping" originated. People rely on table-tapping for signals from the spiritual world. This is because their thinking has become twisted or warped. Their thinking is materialistic in nature. It says: I must have the spiritual, but I must have it in a physical guise. Spiritism is the most materialistic concept of all, and it is very important to understand that.

[ 1 ] Now perhaps someone will say: But I have been present where people sat around a table and linked hands in a chain, and the table started to move and hop around, and all kinds of things of that sort. The external facts are true. It is quite possible to sit around a table, to make a chain of hands, and at some point the table will be set in motion. But this is the case when any small motion in some way starts a larger motion. If we have a railroad train with a locomotive and an engineer, the driver does not get out of his engine and go to the back of the train and start pushing it when he wants to start moving. In fact, he would not be able to do that. He would never be able to set a train into fast motion in this way. As you well know, the engineer makes a very small motion, and the train soon starts to move very fast and pull many cars. Why? Because the connections are established in the right way so as to result in the train moving. In this way, physically, a very small motion starts a larger motion.

[ 1 ] This is the case in the purely physical process of people creating a chain of hands around a table. They then start to twitch very slightly and, lo, and behold! from these small motions a larger motion results. This motion is transferred through the material plane. But this is really a very ordinary physical event.

[ 1 ] Now, if there is one person among those present at the table-tapping who has any thoughts in his subconscious, then these thoughts are translated into the twitching of the finger tips, causing a response, which forms letters which we can then read. However, what we read as an answer in such cases was always present somewhere in the subconscious of one of the people there. This is true, no matter how clever the answers seem to be. I have explained to you that when a person enters into the subconscious, he is entering something much more profound than his ordinary consciousness. This is can be seen in the practice of table-tapping. Nevertheless, the fact of people turning to spiritism is proof of the strength of materialism in our time.

[ 1 ] Ordinary thinking does not bring us to any true explanation of what a human being is. That was obvious from the newspaper article I mentioned here today wherein there was an attempt simply to explain a flying dream. The author of the article explains it in exactly the opposite way to which it should be explained. People no longer seem able to study things of real interest. I have often talked to you about dreams. Let me now repeat a few important facts.

[ 1 ] Let's say someone dreams he is in Basel in some town square. Suddenly—in dreams everything is possible—he finds himself standing in front of a fence.

[ 1 ] The fence has pickets: here one, there another; and here one is missing and there is a gap; and then another picket, and another gap. Now he dreams that he wants to jump over the fence, and he impales himself on one of the pickets, and this hurts—hurts so much that he wakes up and notices that he has not been impaled, but rather that he has a terrible toothache. He has a toothache and it wakes him up. He has a missing tooth in his upper jaw and he also has another missing tooth and this is what he saw in his dream picture as missing pickets in a fence. There was an exact correspondence to his upper jaw and its missing teeth. He then touches one of his teeth and he finds out which one hurts him. There is a cavity, and it hurts. One can certainly have such a dream.

[ 1 ] What is really happening here? This whole episode was actually played out in the dreamer's waking life. You can really say: So long as I was asleep, I was happy; I did not feel my awful toothache. Why not? It is because the astral body was outside the physical body, and the etheric body does not feel the toothache. You can hit a stone as much as you want, and even break little pieces off it, but the stone as such does not feel it. You can tear a plant and the plant will not feel it, because it does not have an astral body—it has only an etheric body. You would soon stop picking roses and other flowers in the meadows, if the plants were to hiss like snakes because it hurt them. However, it does not hurt the plant, and a human being, when asleep, is like a plant. As long as we are asleep, the tooth does not hurt. But when the astral body slips back into the physical body, as soon as this happens, we 'inhabit' our teeth. Then, you see, the astral body is in the teeth. Only when we are completely in our body do we feel what hurts our body. When we are not quite within our body, what hurts appears to us as an external object.

[ 1 ] Say, for instance, I burn a match: when looked at from without I will see it burning white. But if I had somehow lived within that match with my conscious astral body, I would not have only seen it externally. I would have felt it as a pain! In the case of the teeth, until I am fully in my body, when I first slip in, I feel them as if they were external objects, and I therefore make an external picture of them for myself that in some way resembles some aspect of them. Since I cannot make quite the right picture, which I could do only through spiritual science, I make a picture of a row of pickets instead of a row of teeth. Where there are gaps in my row of teeth, I have gaps in the row of pickets. As you can see, as a result of the confused picture that arises as a consequence of not quite being fully in the body, there is an error. Because when we are asleep we are outside our bodies, the inner is interpreted as the outer. I have been able to study what happens in such cases when observing little children as I taught them. They have no feeling as yet for the correct use of speech and I have often experienced that a child who has just started to write "Zahn," the word for tooth, will instead write "Zaun," the German word for fence. Such a child has to be told that this is false, wrong. Somehow the child was scared entering his body—not leaving it, but entering it. This does not cause a flying dream but a fearful dream, a nightmare. The child has a nightmare and somehow expresses this in the form of the fence dream. There is a connection between the child's misuse of words and the images of the dream. The images of the dream come into existence through words. There are always verbal connections. These help us to see more clearly what is really happening.

[ 1 ] The man I referred to before—Richard Traugott—has written a great deal about dreams, most of it is as absurd as what he wrote about the flying dream.⁷ When he speaks, equipped with ordinary science, he says exactly the opposite of what is actually the case. He does not understand that because the astral body grows larger when leaving the physical body it perceives itself as flying, and that when it is forced to shrink on reentering it pictures itself as someone (or something) who is squeezed somehow. The muscles tighten, causing an anxiety dream. The anxiety dream occurs precisely when the man who wrote the article would claim that there should be a flying dream. It is also possible to have anxiety dreams when the process of going to sleep does not proceed properly. Let's say, for example, that you are lying down and you have the sensation that you are being strangled by someone. This can happen if you are in the process of going to sleep and somewhere there is a disturbance, so that you cannot go to sleep, but you keep trying to do so anyway. You pass in and out of sleep, and returning into your body correctly is not quite possible because you are still tired. This can be felt as a strangling sensation, because the astral body is being forced in some way, and cannot quite enter correctly. Knowing this kind of thing, you can explain all these matters much better.

[ 1 ] This brings us to the fact that one more thing is necessary if we really want to know the spiritual world. One must be absolutely clear about the fact that the physical body is not involved here. One must be able to live in the astral body alone, in a way that does not involve the physical body at all. If one wants to know the spiritual world, one must induce a sleeplike condition in oneself. In ordinary life this occurs only when one slips out of one's physical body, which is viewed externally as the condition of sleep. But as I mentioned in my example of the raspberry juice in the large casks of water, in sleep the astral body (or juice) normally becomes gigantic and this must not be allowed to happen. The astral body must be held together through an inner effort of another body. Do not think now about the astral body and the human ego, just think again about the image of the drops of raspberry juice. Create a vivid image of a glass of water with only one drop of raspberry juice in it. The raspberry juice expands in the water to the limit of the glass, but it is still perceptible. But if you assume a container a hundred thousand times larger, then you would not be able to perceive anything of the juice, and this is comparable to our normal inner experience in sleep. Now, imagine for a moment that this drop of raspberry juice takes on an impish character. I put this impish drop in a cask with four hundred buckets of water; it has a real temper and says to itself: I am not going to let myself get mixed up in all this water, I am going to remain myself. Were this to happen, you would then have a huge casket with one drop of raspberry juice in it; and if you reached this drop with the tip of your tongue, if you went through all that water to the exact spot where the raspberry juice held itself together, then you would actually taste the sweetness of that single drop.

[ 1 ] I must stress here that I am speaking only metaphorically about the raspberry juice with its impish character. The opponents of Anthroposophy can be quite funny at times. There was once an article in a Hamburg newspaper in which Anthroposophy was insulted from all possible sides; and there, it is true, I was actually seen as an imp or devil, and in that case indeed it was meant very seriously, as if I myself were not just an imp but the devil's own helper—as if I were the very devil come into the world. To return therefore to the image I gave you: the drop of raspberry juice is only a devil's imp insofar as it can keep itself quite small when it is put into the water.

[ 1 ] In the case of the astral body, it is possible for it to stay as small when it leaves the physical body as it is when it is within the physical body; but it can develop the forces necessary to do this only by learning to think sharp, well-honed thoughts. I told you we must develop independent thinking. This independent thinking is much stronger than the weak thinking possessed by most people.

[ 1 ] The first requirement for knowledge of the spiritual world is very sharp and well-honed thinking. The second requirement is the ability to think backward. The outer physical world proceeds forward, therefore one needs to learn to think in reverse. This strengthens one's thinking. One must learn that truth which I told you about last time: the part is greater than the whole. This once again is something that contradicts what the physical world seems to indicate; but if one can do this one can put oneself into the spiritual world. All these things I have mentioned cause the astral body to remain small in spite of the fact it is not contained in the physical body—so that it does not simply flow out into the common astral ocean.

[ 1 ] All these requirements fit together, but you must be careful that all these things are taken with the same sobriety and the same scientific attitude with which the physical world is ordinarily examined. The moment we slip into fantasy, we are finished with the scientific. Our clear and definite approach must never be allowed to turn into fantasy.

[ 1 ] Let's take the case when one has a pain in one's big toe. You feel this pain through your astral body. If we had only a physical body, we would not feel the pain; and likewise if we had only an etheric body, we would not feel the pain. If this were not true, the plant would squeal when it was plucked! But we squeal when we have a pain in our big toe—of course, we don't actually squeal, but you know what I mean. We all feel like making a noise when we experience a pain of this kind. Why is this?

[ 1 ] Our astral body is spread throughout our whole physical body, and when our astral body reaches the spot where something in our big toe is out of order, this is brought up to the brain by the astral body, and we have a mental picture of our pain. But let's assume someone has a sick brain that does not allow him to register the pain in his big toe in that certain spot in the brain where it is normally felt. One needs a healthy place in one's brain to be able to register the pain in one's big toe. Assuming this spot in the brain is sick, and remembering what I have told you—that neither the soul nor the astral body can become sick—the pain in your big toe cannot be registered. What happens under these conditions? The specific place in the individual's physical brain is sick, but this still leaves the etheric aspect of the brain. The etheric aspect of the brain that remains is not properly supported by the physical part, and we may therefore ask: What will the etheric body do in such a case? The etheric body makes a great deal of this toe; not only does it notice it, it makes a mountain of it. The pain to the etheric body will appear to us as little beings, little mountain-climbing beings sitting in this mountain. So here we have the big toe transferred into a spatial picture, into a large space—just because the brain is sick. If this were to happen to you, you would swear that there was a mountain in front of you. In actuality this mountain is only your big toe, and it is clear that this is a delusion. It is very important to protect oneself from such sick delusions when one penetrates into the spiritual world, or else one can slip into total fantasy. How can we avoid these delusions? This has to be done through real schooling. We must learn what can result when the physical body becomes sick in any way, so that we will not be confused when merely physical manifestations appear to be real spiritual occurrences! For this reason we must learn truly active thinking, thinking backwards, thinking such as I described last time—a thinking very different from our ordinary thinking in the physical world. In this way one will be protected against delusion, and one will recognize the physical origin of what we have just described. In earlier times people were prepared so to penetrate safely into the spiritual world. There was a real method or art of preparation, which was called dialectic. This meant that people really had to learn to think. Nowadays, if one were to suggest to people that they must first learn to think, they would pull our hair out—for everyone is convinced that they already know how to think. But if one looks back to earlier times, it is actually true that there was a real schooling of thinking, or a dialectic. One had to be able to think both forward and backward, and one had to be able to form concepts in the right way.

[ 1 ] How, we might ask, did this training take place? It took place through the activity of speaking, and at the same time as one spoke, one learned to think. I have just given you an example of this, when I talked of children first learning to speak and then learning to think. But of course such thinking is at first entirely childlike. Nowadays this childlike thinking is preserved by people throughout life, although it is worthless in later life. If one were to continue to learn thinking through speaking this way, then one would have to ensure that with each in-breath and each out-breath the air moved correctly in and out for correct speaking is connected with correct breathing. For speaking to be rightly connected to the breathing process the air must come in and go out in the proper manner.

[ 1 ] Much depends on one's being prepared for correct speaking, because correct speaking prepares one for correct breathing. Whoever knows how to breathe correctly can also speak for a long time without becoming tired. Through the art of dialectic, one once learned how to speak and breathe correctly, and therefore how to think properly. These days, however, people are no longer able to think properly, for their breath keeps bumping into the organ of their breathing at every moment. Just listen to some academics when they speak. First of all, they do not speak very much in general; they usually read, and they use their eyes very much for support. But if you listen to an academic speaking, for the most part it is as if the person were short of breath. It is as if he were constantly bumping into his own body.

[ 1 ] For this reason everything that is said becomes a picture of the physical body. Whether one has a sick spot in one's brain, and consequently makes a mountain, with mountain spirits, out of a painful big toe; or whether one keeps bumping into oneself with one's breath whenever one thinks, with the result that true thinking cannot emerge—it is all the same. Because your breath is constantly bumping into your physical body, you will perceive the whole world as a physical phenomenon. Now, what really is the source of this materialism? Materialism comes from two facts: people do not know how to think correctly, and they do not breathe out correctly. It seems to them as if the whole world were made up of pressure and thrust—which they have in themselves—because they have not been prepared through right thinking. Therefore we can say: A person is a materialist because he cannot get out of himself; inwardly, he keeps bumping into himself.

[ 1 ] Let us return for a moment to Mr. Traugott. What he should really say is that the flying dream is caused by the fact that we go out of ourselves, and the astral body starts to grow larger. However, he does not conclude this. He thinks, indeed he thinks a great deal. And what happens if someone wants to think, and think some more, when in fact he is unable to think? What really happens? First of all, you will see him frown, and if this doesn't help he will hit his forehead and thus tighten his muscles, and then he tightens them some more, and he may even hit himself again so that his muscles are really tight. What is Mr. Traugott really doing when he is thinking about dreams. Instead of looking at things as they really are, he tightens his own muscles, and what he finds is what he himself is doing—muscle tension. I've got it he says: the dream is caused by muscle tension! He confuses his own attempt at thinking about dreams with reality. We can all learn something from Mr. Traugott. We can learn what is happening to him when he thinks about things, and when you yourself read the story. What happens today when we read what people print is that we learn what they themselves imagine is true. Whenever we read the newspapers today, we have to say we really learn very little about what is really happening in the world, but we do learn what the people who sit in the editorial rooms would like to be happening in the world.

[ 1 ] The same is true of today's materialistic science. Through it you will not learn what the world is; rather, you will learn what materialist professors think about the world. If you penetrate this a little, you will see that Anthroposophy has no intention of deceiving the world, but in fact it wants to put honesty in the place of deception and illusion, and in place of what is often untrue, very often consciously so.

[ 1 ] You may see from this discussion that honesty, inner honesty, is the fourth quality that must be present if we are to be able to reach into the spiritual world. If you contemplate the world in this way, you will see there is very little honesty operating in the world, and it is no surprise that not much of it can be seen in science.

[ 1 ] We have therefore seen four required qualities: independent thinking, thinking not linked to the outer world, thinking whose quality is completely different from the physical world, and thinking honestly. We will look at other characteristics next time.

• 6. The report appeared in the Basler Nachrichten, July 5, 1923.
• 7. For example: The Dream, Psychologically and Cultural-Historically Viewed, Würzburg, 1913.

[ 1 ] In his addresses on The Basic Characteristics of Our Present Age and To the German Nation, Johann Gottlieb Fichte seeks to portray the spiritual forces working in the evolution of mankind. Through the thoughts he brings to expression in these addresses, he imbues himself with the feeling that the motive force of his world view streams from the innermost being of the German people (Volksart). Fichte believes he is expressing the thoughts that the soul of the German people must express if it wants to reveal itself from the core of its spirituality. The way in which Fichte struggled for his world view shows how this feeling could live in his soul. It must seem important to someone observing a thinker to investigate the roots from which the fruit of his thoughts have sprung; these roots work in the depths of his soul and are not expressed directly in his thought-worlds, yet they live as the motive forces within these thought-worlds.

[ 2 ] Fichte once expressed his conviction that the kind of world view one has depends upon the kind of person one is. He did so out of his awareness that all the life forces of his own personality had to bring forth—as its natural and obvious fruit—the conceptually strong heights of his world view. Not many people want to get to the heart of this world view because they consider what they find there to be thoughts—estranged from the world—into which only “professional” thinkers need penetrate. This feeling is understandable in someone without philosophical training who approaches Fichte's thoughts as they appear in his works. Still, for someone who has the possibility of entering into the full life of these thoughts, it is not strange to imagine that a time will come when one will be able to recast Fichte's ideas into a form comprehensible to anyone who wants, out of life itself, to think about the meaning of this life. These ideas could then be accessible even to the simplest human heart (Gemüt), however far removed from so-called “philosophical thinking.” For, these ideas have in fact received their philosophical form from the character assumed by the evolution of thought in thinking circles at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century; but these ideas get their life from experiences that are present in the soul of every human being, To be sure, the time has not yet arrived when it is fully possible to recast Fichte's thoughts from the language of the philosophy of his time into a universally human form of expression. Such things become possible only through the gradual progress made by certain ways of picturing things in man's spiritual life. Just as Fichte himself was obliged to carry his soul experiences to the heights of what one usually calls “abstract thinking”—and finds cold and estranged from life—so today also it is only possible to a very limited degree to carry these soul experiences down from those heights.

[ 3 ] From his early youth until his sudden death while still in the prime of life, Fichte struggled for ever new forms of expression for these soul experiences. In all his struggles, one basic cognitive impulse is evident. Within man's own soul Fichte wishes to find a living element in which the human being grasps not only the basic force of his own existence, but in which there can also be known—in its essential being—what weaves and works in nature and in everything else outside him. In a drop of water, relative to the ocean, one has only a tiny sphere. But if one knows this little sphere in its character as water, then in this knowledge one also knows the whole ocean in its character as water. If something can be discovered in the being of man that can be experienced as a revelation of the innermost weaving of the world, then one may hope, through deepened self-knowledge, to advance to world knowledge.

[ 4 ] Long before Fichte's time, the development of mankind's view of the world had already taken the path that proceeds from this feeling and this hope. But Fichte was placed at a significant point in this evolution. One can read in many places how he received Ws most direct impetus from the world views of Spinoza and Kant. But the way he finally acted in understanding the world through the essential nature of his personality becomes most visible when he is contrasted with the thinker who came forth just as much from the thinking of the Romance peoples as Fichte did from the German: Descartes (1596–1650). In Descartes there already comes to light—out of the feeling and hope described above—the way a thinker seeks certainty in world knowledge by discovering a solid point in self-knowledge. Descartes takes doubt in all world knowledge as his starting point. He says to himself: The world in which I live reveals itself within my soul, and from its phenomena I form mental pictures for myself about the course of things. But what is my guarantee that these mental pictures of mine really tell me anything about the working and weaving of the world in its course? Could it not be the case that my soul does indeed receive certain impressions from the things of the world, but that these impressions are so far removed from the things themselves that in these impressions nothing of the meaning of the world is revealed to me? In the face of this possibility can I say that I know this or that about the world? One sees how, for a thinker in this ocean of doubt, all knowledge can come to seem like a subjective dream, and how only one conviction can force itself upon him: that man can know nothing. But in the case of a person for whom the motive force of thinking has become as alive as the motive force of hunger is in the body: for him the conviction that man can know nothing means for the soul what starvation means for the body. All the innermost impressions about the health of one's soul, in a higher sense, right up to feeling the salvation of one's soul (Seelenheil) are connected with this.

[ 5 ] It is within the soul itself that Descartes finds the point upon which he can base conviction: The mental pictures form for myself of the world's course are no dream; they live a life that is a part in the life of the whole world. Even though I can doubt everything, there is one thing I cannot doubt, for to express doubt in it would belie my own words. For is it not certain that when I give myself over to doubt I am thinking? I could not doubt if I did not think. Therefore I cannot possibly doubt my own experience in thinking. If I wanted, through doubt, to kill thinking: it would just rise up living again out of the doubt. My thinking lives, therefore; it does not stand in some dream world; it stands in the world of being (Sein). If I could believe that everything else, even my own body, gave me only the illusion of being, still my thinking does not deceive me. Just as true as it is that I think, it is true that I am, insofar as I think. It was from sentiments such as these that Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito ergo sum) rang out into the world. And whoever has an ear for such things will also hear the power of this statement resounding in all subsequent thinkers until Kant.

[ 6 ] Only with Fichte do its reverberations cease. If one enters deeply into his thought-world, if one seeks to experience with him his struggles for a world view, then one feels how he too is seeking world knowledge in self-knowledge; but one has the feeling that Descartes' statement, “I think, therefore I am” could not be the rock upon which Fichte, in his struggles, could believe himself secure against the waves of doubt that can turn man's mental pictures into an ocean of dreams. Looking at what Fichte wrote in his book The Vocation of Man (published in 1800), one feels how his ability to doubt lives in a very different part of the soul than with Descartes: “Nowhere is there anything enduring, neither outside me nor within me; there is only unceasing change. Nowhere do I know of any being, not even my own. There is no being. I myself do not know at all and do not exist. Pictures exist: they are all that there is, and they know about themselves in the manner of pictures—pictures that float past without anything there for them float past; pictures that relate to each other through pictures of pictures; pictures without anything pictured in them, without significance and purpose. I myself am one of these pictures; no, I am not even that; I am only a confused picture of the pictures.—All reality transforms itself into a strange dream, without a life that is dreamed about, and without a spirit who is dreaming; transforms itself into a dream that is connected with a dream about itself, My perceiving is the dream; my thinking—the source of all being and all reality that I imagine to myself, the source of my being, my power, my aims—is a dream about that dream,” These thoughts do not arise in Fichte's soul as the ultimate truth about existence, He does not wish, as one might suppose, really to regard the world as a dream configuration, He wants only to show that all the usual arguments for the certainty of knowledge cannot withstand penetrating examination, and that these arguments do not give one the right to regard the ideas one forms about the world as anything other than dream configurations. And Fichte cannot allow that any kind of certainty about being is present within thinking. Why should I say, “I think, therefore I am” since, after all, if I am living in an ocean of dreams, my thinking can be nothing more than “a dream about a dream”? For Fichte, what penetrates and gives reality to my thoughts about the world must come from a completely different source than mere thinking about the world.

[ 7 ] Fichte claims that the distinctive spirit (Art) of the German people lives in his world view. This thought makes sense when one brings before one's soul precisely his picture of that path to self-knowledge which he seeks in contradistinction to Descartes. This path is what Fichte felt to be German; and as a traveler on this path, he differs from Descartes, who takes the spiritual path of the Romance peoples. Descartes seeks a sound basis for self-knowledge; he expects to find this sound basis somewhere. In thinking he believes he has found it. Fichte expects nothing from this kind of search. For, no matter what he might find, why should it afford a greater certainty than anything already found? No, along this path of investigation there is absolutely nothing to be found. For, this path can lead only from picture to picture; and no picture one encounters can guarantee, out of itself, its being. Therefore, to begin with, one must entirely abandon the path through pictures, and return to it again only after gaining certainty from some other direction.

[ 8 ] With respect to the statement “I think, therefore I am,” one need only say something that seems quite simple if one wants to refute it. This is after all the way with so many thoughts a person incorporates into his world view: they are not dispelled by elaborate objections but rather by noting simple facts. One does not undervalue the thinking power of a personality like Descartes by confronting him with a simple fact. The fable of the egg of Columbus is true forever.¹ And it is also true that the statement “I think, therefore I am” simply shatters upon the fact of human sleep. Every sleep, which interrupts thinking, shows—not, indeed, that there is no being in thinking—but that in any case “I am, even when I am not thinking.” Therefore, if only thinking is the source for being, then nothing could guarantee the being of soul states in which thinking has ceased. Although Fichte did not express this train of thought in this form, one can still definitely say: The power lying within these simple facts worked—unconsciously—in his soul and kept him from taking a path like that taken by Descartes.

[ 9 ] Fichte was led onto a completely different path by the basic character of his sense of things. His life reveals this basic character from childhood on. One need only let some pictures from his life arise before one's soul to see that this is so. One significant picture that rises up vividly from his childhood is this. Johann Gottlieb is seven years old. Until this time he was a good student. In order to reward the boy's industriousness, his father gives him a book of legends, The Horned Siegfried. The boy is completely taken with this book. He neglects his duties somewhat. He becomes aware of this about himself. One day his father sees him throwing The Horned Siegfried into the brook. The boy is attached to the book with his whole heart; but how can the heart be allowed to keep something that diverts one from one's duty? Thus the feeling is already living unconsciously in the young Fichte that the human being is in the world as an expression of a higher order, which descends into his soul not through his interest in one thing or another, but through the path by which he acknowledges duty. Here one can see the impulse behind Fichte's stance toward certainty about reality. Perceptual experiences are not what is certain for man, but rather what rises up livingly in the soul in the same way that duty reveals itself.

[ 10 ] Another picture from Fichte's life: The boy is nine years old. A landowner near his father's village comes into town one Sunday to hear the minister's sermon. He arrives too late. The sermon is over. People remember that nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb retains sermons in his soul so well that he can completely reproduce them. They fetch him. The boy, in his little farmer's smock, appears. He is awkward at first; but then presents the sermon in such a way that one can see that what lived in the sermon had utterly filled his soul; he does not merely repeat words; he speaks out of the spirit of the sermon that lives within him entirely as his own experience. This ability lived in the boy: to let light up in one's own self what approaches this self from the world. This was, after all, the ability to experience the spirit of the outer world in one's own self. This was the ability to find within the strengthened self the power to uphold a world view. A brightly-lit, evolving stream of personality leads from such boyhood experiences to a lecture by Fichte—then professor in Jena—heard and described by the gifted scientist Steffens. In the course of his lecture Fichte calls upon his listeners: “Think about the wall,” His listeners made every effort to think about the wall. After they had done this for a while, Fichte's next demand follows: “And now think about the one who thought about the wall,” What striving for a direct and living relationship between one's own soul life and that of one's listeners! What pointing toward an inner soul activity to be undertaken immediately—not merely to stimulate reflection on verbal communications, but rather to awaken a life element slumbering in the souls of his listeners so that these souls will attain a state that changes their previous relationship to the course of the world.

[ 11 ] Such actions reflect Fichte's whole way of clearing the path for a world view. Unlike Descartes, he does not seek an experience of thinking that will establish certainty. He knows that in such seeking there is no finding. In such seeking one cannot know whether one's discovery is dream or reality. Therefore do not launch forth in such seeking. Strengthen yourself instead, by waking up. What the soul experiences when it wants to press forward out of the field of ordinary reality into that of true reality must be like an awakening. Thinking does not guarantee the being of the human “I.” But within this “I” there lies the power to awaken itself to being. Every time the soul senses itself as “I”—in full consciousness of the inner power that becomes active in doing so—a process occurs that presents itself as the soul awakening itself. This self-awakening is the fundamental being (Grundwesenheit) of the soul. And in this power to awaken itself there lies the certainty of the being (Sein) of the human soul. Let the soul go through dream states and states of sleep: one grasps the power of the soul to awaken itself out of every dream and every sleep by transforming the mental picture of its awakening into the image of the soul's fundamental power. Fichte felt that the eternity of the human soul lies in its becoming aware of its power to awaken itself. From this awareness came statements like these: “The world I was just marveling at disappears before my gaze and sinks away. In all the fullness of life, order, and growth that I see in it, this world is still only the curtain—by which an infinitely more perfect world is hidden from me—and the seed from which this more perfect world is to evolve. My belief goes behind this curtain and warms and enlivens this seed. My belief does not see anything definite, but expects more than it can grasp here below or will ever be able to grasp in the realm of time.—This is how I live and this is how I am; this is how I am unchangeably—firm and complete for all eternity; for, this being is not taken on from outside; it is my own one true being and existence.” (Vocation of Man)

[ 12 ] When one looks at the whole way Fichte approaches life and at how permeated all his actions and thinking are with an attitude friendly to life and fostering of life, one will not be tempted to regard a passage like this as proof of a direction in thought hostile to life, that turns away from immediate and vigorous life on this earth. In a letter from the year 1790 there is a sentence that sheds significant light on Fichte's positive attitude toward life, precisely in relation to his thoughts about immortality: “The surest means of convincing oneself of a life after death is to lead one's present life in such a way that one can wish an afterlife:”

[ 13 ] For Fichte, within the self-awakening inner activity of the human soul there lies the power of self-knowledge. And within this activity he also finds the place in the soul where the spirit of the world reveals itself in the spirit of the soul. In Fichte's world view the world-will weaves and works in all existence; and within the willing of its own being the soul can live this world-will within itself. The grasping of life's duties—which are experienced differently in the soul than are the perceptions of the senses and of one's thoughts—is the most immediate example of how the world-will pulses through the soul. True reality must be grasped in this way; and all other reality, even that of thinking, receives its certainty through the light shed upon it by the reality of the world-will revealing itself within the soul. This world-will drives the human being to his activity and deeds. As a sense-perceptible being, man must translate into reality in a sense-perceptible way what the world-will demands of him. But how could the deeds of one's will have a real existence if they had to seek this existence in a dream world? No, the world cannot be a dream, because in this world the deeds of one's will must not merely be dreamed; they must be translated into reality.

Insofar as the “I” awakens itself in its experience of the world-will, it attains firm supports for certainty about its being. Fichte expressed himself on this point in his Vocation of Man: “Without any instrument weakening its expression, within a sphere completely similar in nature to itself, my will must work absolutely in and through itself: as reason it must work upon reason and as something spiritual upon something spiritual; it must work in a sphere for which my will nevertheless does not provide the laws of life, activity, and continuity; this sphere has them in itself; my will has therefore to work upon self-active reason. But self-active reason is will. The laws of the supersensible world, accordingly, would be a will ... That lofty will, accordingly, does not separated from the rest of the world of reason—take a path all its own. There is a spiritual bond between this will and all finite reasonable beings, and this will itself is the spiritual bond of the world of reason ... I hide my face before you and lay my hand on my mouth. I can never see how you are for yourself nor how you appear to yourself, just as certainly as I can never become yourself. After living through a thousand times a thousand spiritual worlds, I will still grasp you just as little as now, within this hut of the earth.—What I grasp, through my mere grasping of it, becomes something finite; and this, even through infinite intensification and enhancement, can never be transformed into something infinite. You are different from the finite not in degree but in kind. Through that intensification they make you only into a greater and ever great man; but never into God, the Infinite, Who cannot be measured.”

[ 14 ] Fichte strove for a world view that pursues all being into the very roots of what lives in the world, and that learns to know the meaning of what lives in the world: learns to know it through the human soul's living with the world-will that pulses through everything and that creates nature for the purpose, in nature, of translating into reality a spiritually moral order as though in an outer body. Such a world view seemed to Fichte to spring from the character of the German people. To him a world view seemed un-German that did not “believe in spirituality and in the freedom of this spirituality,” and that did not “want the eternal further development of this spirituality and freedom.” In his view, “Whoever believes in a standstill, a regression, or a circle dance, or even sets a dead nature at the helm of world rulership” goes not only against any more deeply penetrating knowledge, but also against the essential nature of what is truly German.

• 1. The problem was to stand an egg on end. Columbus's table companions tried to do this without breaking the egg and of course failed. Columbus was more realistic. He flattened one end of the egg. – Ed.

Our contemporaries assess the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science mostly cursorily. One says that it offends the serious, conscientious method, the research way of the scientific worldview.

Indeed if spiritual science were not able to justify itself to the scientific worldview, one would have to condemn it. That is why this is one of the questions which must come up for discussion here today: how can the spiritual-scientific worldview be justified towards the present natural sciences?

Another similar prejudice that is connected, actually, intimately with the just mentioned one is that spiritual science leads to a dark mystic spiritual condition and worldview. From the today's considerations should arise that both prejudices are unfounded.

The whole way, which that research has to go through which leads to spiritual science, has to pass through two gates of knowledge above all. One cannot get into that what I mean here if one has not passed these two gates. One gate is that the spiritual researcher must really have experienced the complete scientific mindset and that he has had important experiences with this research. To most people who deal with natural sciences they are something that one has as knowledge with which one believes to be able to penetrate into these or those areas of existence.

For the spiritual researcher knowledge of nature must not remain this. For him it concerns that he has tried internally: which suitable or useless instruments are the scientific mental pictures if one wants to penetrate into the undergrounds of existence? He must have learnt as it were the handling of the scientific thinking and must have tried to apply this scientific thinking conscientiously in the most different directions whether it is good or not for penetrating into the outer nature.

Now one may say that in the area of natural sciences are personalities who dealt more or less consciously with the question: how far does the scientific research lead the human being with reference to the big riddles of knowledge?—I had repeatedly to remind of the famous speech of the great naturalist Du Bois-Reymond, to the famous speech about the limits of the knowledge of nature which he held in the seventies years and by which he wanted to demonstrate that just knowledge of nature must arrive at a certain border. Du Bois-Reymond explained in those days that, indeed, natural sciences can summarise the natural phenomena in certain laws and can find connections in the atomistic world behind these laws that, however, even if one imagined the ideal of this physical knowledge as fulfilled, one could never answer two boundary questions with it: what is matter?—and the other: what is even the simplest sensation, the simplest soul experience?

At these two questions, Du Bois-Reymond meant in those days, scientific consideration has to stop. Because he was of the view that scientific consideration is the only real academic one, he thought that the human being can never get to any knowledge concerning both questions, so also not to a knowledge of the human soul life and about that what is, actually, behind nature, that there are not only limits of the knowledge of nature but also limits of the human knowledge generally.

That what formed as judgement with Du Bois-Reymond and many others from a certain logical speculation the spiritual researcher has to transfer to life. The spiritual researcher must have experienced, as it were, all hopes and disappointments with the knowledge of nature. He must have opened himself to the knowledge of nature so that he attempted to overcome the obstacles of spiritual striving with it. He must have gone through the bitter experience that one just approaches, as strict and as conscientious this research is, certain points beyond which this knowledge of nature does not get. This experience must exist in the soul of the spiritual researcher.

He must have learnt to stumble against certain cornerstones with the scientific concepts that exist in nature. I could bring in many of such cornerstones. I could say the same what can be said about the concepts of energy and matter, for example. One recognises that one does not penetrate with the same methods, with the same way of thinking with which one penetrates successfully into the chemical side of nature into that which as matter and energy causes the phenomena and processes of nature. One stumbles, so to speak, against energy and matter. Finally, one has to confess: the more suitable the scientific mental pictures are in the accessible areas, the more they become unsuitable for these cornerstones.

I would like to say if one has experienced enough with these attempts, one gets to a certain questioning. Then one asks himself, why do you get to such cornerstones with the knowledge of nature?—There arises that the basic condition of stumbling against such cornerstones is located in the human organisation, in the human being himself. One notices at last: nature does not allow solving certain riddles because we ourselves have to be different if we should deserve such solutions. The line of thought that I develop here is quite different from the Kantian one. It would lead too far if I explained this difference in detail, I refer only to my Philosophy of Freedom in this context.

The spiritual researcher wants to recognise by real introspection what prevents us in the human organisation to pass those cornerstones. The same force that prevents the human being from passing these cornerstones is the force that enables us to love. This is the significant discovery, which one does on such ways, as I have characterised them yesterday. As spiritual researcher, one has to put the question hypothetically: how would a being have to be constituted—it would not be a human being—that developed such scientific views that these cornerstones would become transparent as it were to the imagining?

Such a human being would have to have a mental organisation that would not be penetrated with the force of love. Since if one investigates this peculiar soul force of love, its character is just that it suppresses the active imagining, at first instinctively, in the human being that must appear in the observation of natural phenomena or in the arrangement of experiments.

Love and scientific research must be two oppose activities of the soul life. However, the ability of loving must be in the human nature. He cannot put aside as it were the ability of loving while he is scientifically active. He can form scientific mental pictures on one side. However, that what enables him to love is also in him. It is that which reduces the imagining activity at those cornerstones as it were.

This is the first significant experience that the spiritual researcher has to get on his way. Indeed, one may say, prove this logically.—This question immediately suggests itself. The reflection, in which cases one can put such a question, actually, is less obvious. You can also not ask, why does the bull have horns or the fish fins for logical reasons? These things are still results of observation at first. The spiritual researcher can also point only to the observation that arises on the suggested way from the experiences of scientific research.

One may say, I do not want to develop my spiritual condition in such a way that I get to such experiences.—Well, you can refrain from this, of course. However, then you cannot arrogate for yourself that you have to decide anything in the area of truth. Since somebody can penetrate into truth only who has really found such cliffs and has circumnavigated them.

One has the second experience that leads to the second inner spiritual-scientific discovery if one has attained, for example, the result that I have just explained. Indeed, one does not express that on another field what I have outlined now as modern spiritual science does it in such a way. Nevertheless, people have instinctively found out for themselves that the view of nature is a useless instrument as it were to penetrate into the secrets of existence. Then they have attempted to investigate these secrets in another way, namely in the mystic way, on the way of self-experience.

Just as the spiritual researcher has well to know that which one can experience with scientific view, he has to know that well which arises from mystic contemplation. He must also have tried there whether it is possible to reach the origins of existence mystically. Those origins with which, nevertheless, the human being must be connected in any way if they concern him generally. The spiritual researcher will also experience hopes and disappointments and gets, finally, to the important result that one can attain the secrets of existence just as little on this mystic way, as on the way of the outer view of nature. He also stumbles there against a wall that is in his inside, in the mental. Again, he has the task to investigate why one does not reach the origins of existence with mystic contemplation.

To get to clearness in this area, one has to apply scientific disposition wholeheartedly. It does not come easy to anybody who strives for clearness to investigate this inside of the human being. Since this inside of the human being often proves to be rather complex to the own view. I would like to bring in an example from the scientific literature that may show this.

I would like to bring in the book The Subconscious Ego, Its Relationship to Health and Education by Louis Waldstein (1853-1915, American pathologist). This example shows like many others, how much you have to take care if you want to investigate the own soul life, and how easily you deceive yourself in this area of research.

The author tells the following. One day he stood before a bookstore. His glance fell on a book about mollusks. While reading the title, he must smile and even laugh. He has no notion at first, why. Nevertheless, this is strange that a serious naturalist sees a scientific book in a bookstore—and must laugh. Lo and behold, it comes into his head: maybe I get on why I laugh if I close my eyes.—He closes his eyes and listens. Far away, he hears quite soft tones of a melody that he had heard before decades and with which he learnt dancing.

He has not heard these tones since decades. He did also not perceive them consciously, while reading the title; but they passed his soul as it were and made him to smile. In subconscious way, his soul was induced to cherish the impressions that he had decades ago and that were rather indistinct. Since he has to admit to himself that he paid more attention at that time to the fact that he did his steps correctly while learning dancing, than that he took care of the melody itself. His thoughts were still directed upon something unimportant because he had a partner. However, all that had a lasting effect in the subconscious, and he had to smile.

However, now we take the example seriously. It is determinative of countless experiences which show how little, actually, the human being is connected in his consciousness with that what proceeds below in the soul life, how things which were forgotten for a long time sound from below but also things which one had not consciously perceived. We do not need to have looked at that what was there and still it did a certain impression and comes up at the right moment!

The conscientious spiritual researcher develops the way that is indicated here with a first step. He investigates what exists in the depths of the soul life, and then he recognises that credulous, naive mystics often fall victim to such things. These are engrossed in their inside, bring up from their inside all kinds of what they call a feeling of being one with the primeval origin of existence, but maybe these are only the transformed tones of a barrel organ! Nevertheless, maybe it comes about on the same way, as that about which I have spoken. Since the peculiar appears in the soul life that such things, which have made impressions once and continue to have an effect then, not only come up as those but in changed form as something different. Still they are nothing but a pictorial fact of that what we have experienced in such a way.

Some people believe to be able to hand down deep mysticism from their introspection, but one deals only with transformed youth impressions or as the case may be. Just in this way, spiritual science has to go forward most carefully because it should be just the clearest and not the most confused. I have already noted this repeatedly.

Thus, the spiritual researcher gets around to studying just that in the soul by which that what one has in the usual fully conscious reminiscent life is associated with all kinds of subconscious memories, transformed recollections et cetera. While the spiritual researcher advances with scientific disposition on this way, he gets to the answer of the second question: how is the mystic experience? Why does one get to something unsatisfactory only on the way of the usual mysticism?

There it becomes obvious that anything must be in the human being: as well as the force of loving must be there which delivers the scientific border, there must be something that prevents the human being from submerging in the undergrounds of his being, as the mystic wants it, with the usual consciousness. If the human being had the ability to descend completely, to pursue everything that is to be found on the way about which I have spoken, and what the mystic believes to be able to find in the human inside, then the human being would not need the other ability for life: the power of memory. The impressions, the mental pictures of life have to accumulate as it were. They are not allowed to penetrate into our core. We must have the veil before our inside which works like a mirror and from which our experiences are reflected as memories. As little as we see if we stand before a mirror what is behind the mirror, as little we see the human inside that is behind that mirror which gives rise, actually, to our memories. Thus, someone who has this second experience recognises at last that the spiritual researcher cannot use what one can attain with the usual mysticism because it proves to be transformed memories in any way if it is processed only in the usual consciousness.

Hence, there are two starting points, two experiences that must be gone through if one wants to be a spiritual researcher: the experience with the view of nature and the experience with the memories, with the transformed memories. From these experiences, one receives a certain way of knowledge. If these experiences are done seriously with all disappointments that are connected with both experiences, then such experience stands for the production of an inner force at the same time. Someone gets this force to pursue the path of knowledge in another way than one pursues it with the usual consciousness. What I have just explained is the base on which the spiritual researcher goes on working in order to develop another consciousness and to penetrate with it into the supersensible world.

I have just indicated here that it is necessary to get to another state of consciousness beyond the consciousness of the usual life and science. However, most people shrink from this demand. They prefer considering this demand as something fantastic, as something enthusiastic, and, hence, they reject the possibility of the knowledge of the higher truth or they want to approach it with the usual consciousness. It is clear from the said that one cannot arrive at any goal on both ways.

Now the nature of the way that one has to take will result from these experiences. What does one prevent from descending with the usual consciousness to the own inside? It is the memory; it is the power of memory. If one investigates everything that forms the basis of the ability to remember something, then one finds that the ability of memory is bound to the physical body.

It is a gigantic error of Bergson (Henri B., 1859-1942, French philosopher) that he means that memory, at least a part of memory, is not engaged in the human organism. Spiritual science just shows that the process of sense perception that we penetrate with thinking is integrated into the physiological so that it pushes to memory. The fact that we can remember is already in the process of sense perception that is penetrated with thinking.

However, not everything that tends to memory, to the view of nature can lead into the human inside. The question arises: is it possible to develop such an inner soul activity of imagining which does not deal with memory, which is lifted out as it were from the everyday scientific life?

Maybe because here the personal, subjective may have an objective value, I would like to interpose how I was led to the first most elementary steps some decades ago which induced me to investigate the nature of memory spiritual-scientifically.

This experience of my childhood may appear to you very insignificant. I had to observe at myself during the school hours that I did the very best progress in mathematics or geometry that I had, however, no talent to keep mathematical formulae in mind. I could also say, it was not because I could not have kept them in mind, but I had no tendency to appropriate them. If, for example, an algebra exam was done, the others did their calculations with the mathematical formulae that they had kept in mind. Against it, I had to develop these mathematical formulae ad hoc from the basic principle. That means I had always to deduce the formulae completely, and then I calculated with the formulae. Because I could not keep the formulae in mind, I had always to keep the mental pictures in mind that led to the formula so to develop something in the mental pictures that did not appeal to memory.

This was to me the starting point on that way which must induce every spiritual researcher to cultivate such inner soul work that leads then really to a changed state of consciousness, to contemplative meditation to remaining in the imagining. However, this imagining work must be in such a way that if the same should appear again it originates from the same impulse, does not repeat memories.

Perhaps you know that I hold ten, twenty, thirty talks about the same subjects sometimes at different places, but I could never hold a talk in the same way. Every talk is different because I do not keep something in mind, but because when I speak about the things they generate themselves. I do not reflect on my memory.

Do not misunderstand me; it does not come into my mind to state that spiritual research wants to blank out memories. One would make the human being useless for life of course if one removed his memory from him. One does also not remove anything from him if he develops his thinking in such a way that he carries out such a soul activity that must be generated repeatedly anew, and that does not reflect on the power of memory.

I have explained this in details in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, in my Occult Science. An Outline and in other books. However, it always results in the following: to that thinking which accompanies, actually, the outer view and must lead then to memory something else is added that does not intend to produce memories but such a thinking, which must always be produced anew.

The human being thereby associates himself emotionally with another element, than if he accepts memories only. He thereby develops an imagining activity gradually which is now really not only a concomitant of the usual life or the usual science, but is strengthened gradually by practising such mental pictures in such a way, as usually only our soul life is if we have sense-percepts.

You get to a mere imagining which is as powerful, as usually only the soul life is if it faces the outer sense-perceptible world: a thinking that is like looking, an internally produced looking that is like thinking. This can only inform you about the nature of the human life. Since now if you can have such vivid imagining, you can only compare this imagining to the usual imagining.

Then you recognise only which nature the latter has. Then you get on to say to yourself, natural sciences use such mental pictures only which are organised by their own being towards memory; they never use those mental pictures which are developed in such a way in the human being as I have characterised it.

However, if you develop such vivid thinking, you also get to that experience which breaks through as it were the mirror of which I have comparatively spoken just now, which really penetrates behind the memory and can penetrate into the human inside.

However, there it becomes obvious: if you get to that region which the mirror of memory blankets, otherwise, then you face something that affects the unprepared consciousness strangely at first. You go through an experience that you can only compare with the experience of oversaturation. You recognise that in the human being something lives that you can find only on the intimated way, which gives him an unaware antipathy to himself. Repelling forces must be there as the reflecting mirror coating reflects light. You can compare the mirror coating as it were with that subconscious antipathy or sensation of oversaturation. You do not notice that with the usual consciousness because you experience that in memory that has been reflected.

With the new developed imagining life, you penetrate down, and you have to overcome that antipathy behind the mirror of memory. You overcome it only if you still add other experiences if you not only try to develop such imagining in yourself which does not use the memory, but if you try to develop that power in yourself which exists as something useless. I mean the dreams. The spiritual researcher has to study the dreams very intensely, because the soul lives also in dreams, in an unreality, of course. Dreams have always caused the human beings to put certain questions of life.

The spiritual researcher cannot investigate the dreams as one did once after the pattern of dream books or as the modern psychoanalysis does because both do not lead to the cognition of that force which is, actually, behind the dream. If you can pursue the dreams, it always becomes obvious that the inside of the human body is involved in every dream. Anyhow, these are always bodily processes that are associated with the dreams that in a way exceed the quiet sleeping life, and express themselves in any pictorial ambiguity.

The spiritual researcher does not at all regard these dreams as they present themselves in their pictures. A psychoanalyst said to me once after a talk, anthroposophy looks at the dreams with reference to their immediate contents. We psychoanalysts take the dreams, while we want to investigate from their pictures what rumbles about there in the subconscious.—Well, I do not want to explain the thing further, but one has to answer: as the psychoanalyst does not take the dreams immediately in their pictorial nature, but wants to investigate something behind them, the spiritual researcher does it all the more, but not with inadequate means. He is clear in his mind that the same what goes forward in the soul inside can dress in quite different visions. I want to say, one climbs up a mountain in a dream and falls down on the other side, the same could happen if you dream, you have a paper before yourself in which you make a hole. The pictures that appear in the dream are only an outer disguise. Someone who looks for the picture contents of the dream will never discover the secret of that force in the human soul, which is contained in the dream.

Only somebody can figure the force out which is in the dreams who can pursue the dream how tension and relaxation or persisting tensions appear in the soul life. Then they can dress in the most different pictures. Only such a thinking, as I have described it, can penetrate into those regions of the soul life from which the confused dreams enter into the usual consciousness. Since the dreams which are behind the mirror belong to that region in the human organisation.

One submerges in the area which is behind the mirror if one submerges with the developed imagining which does not appeal to memories in the human inside. Since there you encounter the force which is, otherwise, only embryonic or imperfect in dreams in its true figure. However, the subconscious nature of the human being is something that appears in the consciousness as unaware antipathy and just causes the reflection of the memory.

Now one submerges. Only that which I have described and not the mental pictures that are associated with memories can submerge in such a way that the antipathy is overcome. The antipathy weakens our consciousness towards our inside that prevents us from crushing the mirror and from penetrating into a region that turns out, otherwise, to be unaware antipathy.

Thereby we develop a force that exists in other ways as well in life. I have already called it the capacity for love today. We learn this ability to recognise in its rudiments how it expresses itself in the usual life. If we penetrate, however, on the intimated way down into our own inside, just the force of the capacity for love increases. This is the second side of the soul life that the spiritual researcher has to develop.

He gets to the first force while he develops an imagining which is not based on memory. The other is that he develops such an inner life—and it soon appears as a will life which increases the capacity for love. While one must almost exclude the memory in the area in which one wants to investigate the spirit, the capacity for love must be increased to such a degrees about which the usual consciousness does not have any idea because it only develops love to outer beings and things as a rule but not to the spiritual that is found on the way which leads into the human inside by breaking the human memory .

Thus, the paradoxical appearing fact comes to light that that which is inevitable for the usual naturalist and the usual life, the ability of memory and the capacity for love, develops on the way of spiritual research in such a way that on the one side the imagining has to discharge into a region where it cannot count on memory, the will life, however, must discharge into a region where the capacity for love is increased.

The human being thereby penetrates into those areas that are, otherwise, behind the scientific limits. If he develops that of which I have spoken just to two sides of the human nature, he gets beyond those cliffs that exist at the cornerstones.

That what only appears, otherwise, as phenomena of nature is figured out as it were. Then, however, one does not get to atoms, to the hypothetical matter, but to the supersensible, to the spirit. You get to the spirit, which lives behind nature and in nature because one wakes up as it were. Since it is an awakening with reference to the usual consciousness what I have described.

In particular, with reference to one thing I would like to extend the comparison. Everybody with a healthy consciousness considers the dream as a sum of pictures and he knows: while he enters into the usual reality from his dreams, he leaves the imagery of dreams and enters into the sphere of existence. Thus, the spiritual researcher starts facing the world that he experiences in the supersensible consciousness. He knows: this usual sense-perceptible world becomes an imagery of the supersensible experience. The whole nature becomes an imagery of the supersensible experience as the dream world, otherwise, is an imagery of the usual sensory existence. There it becomes obvious that, actually, the development of the recent natural sciences with all their great achievements has become great only because they confined themselves to giving pictures and do not want to penetrate with their means into that what is as a secret behind the pictures.

I would like to illustrate again with a simple comparison how you get to that will which is an increased capacity for love. Then, however, one can develop this comparison further. One normally does not know that writing contains two quite different activities. Only very few people do such subtler psychological observations. If one writes, this writing does not need to be completely the same after its inner nature with reference to a certain point as with another human being. There are in particular—and this applies to the most people—such persons who write, while they form the letters in such a way that the letter is completely formed from the wrist. He has his writing this way, but it is in his organisation, it does not break away from his organisation.

I know other people who write in such a way that their writing breaks away from their organisation; they paint as it were. It is very interesting if one finds out for himself that there are such persons who paint, actually, while they write who have, actually, always a view of the letter form who draw it who live much more objectively in the letter. They do not have the forms of writing in the wrist but they draw the letters.

Usually they are such people who displayed a big capacity for love in their youth and have shown the characteristic: if they had once seen a person whom they estimated, they have also written as he did, have copied his writing. If they have started cherishing another person, they copied his writing. Thus, this ability remained to them for life that writing is, actually, like painting.

There one notices that another elementary activity of the human being can break away from him, can penetrate more into the object, and that this penetrating is just associated with the capacity for love. One will find that the capacity for love of which I have spoken just now as a development of the will for the spirit is mainly developed with such persons who have, actually, no writing conditioned by their organisation who can always write, as they want who can form the letters one way or the other. This is connected with the ability of submerging affectionately in the objective world.

Well, that what I have explained here about the elementary activity of writing can become for the human being in such a way that it also leads to higher activities. This is on the way that I have meant, while I showed that to the imagining which does not appeal to the memories those will impulses must be added which as it were grow together with the outer objectivity. That is again something that the spiritual researcher has to develop to a high degree. Then the world becomes picture to him which works otherwise robustly on the usual consciousness, while it manifests its truth, and then he breaks through to the supersensible.

Thus, something arises that I would like to characterise in the following way: there is a philosopher today whom I estimate very much from a certain side, although I can agree, actually, with nothing that he says. However, this philosopher has dealt intensely with the question, what can the scientific attitude know about the world?—He has answered this question from the most different sides. He is the philosopher Richard Wahle (1857-1937, Austrian philosopher and psychologist). He is a representative not only how many people think but also of the way to which generally the thinking of our time tends.

Richard Wahle tried to ask the modern worldviews: what can one learn from them about reality?—He got around to saying, if we look at the world after scientific pattern, we can nowhere recognise the powerful what causes the processes; but we learn only to recognise the succession of processes, one process emerging from the other. However, one does not get to know that what comes together in an event, so that the other can originate, the powerful, the primal factors, as Wahle calls them. Thus, Richard Wahle gets to the view that this modern view of nature gives no true picture of the outer world but a ghostly one. The more the ideal of natural sciences is fulfilled, the mare ghostly that becomes which exists now in the picture of nature. Richard Wahle says in his book On the Mechanism of the Spiritual Life (1906) that one can generally get to nothing but to such ghostly view.

Well, this induces him to condemn almost any philosophical pursuit. He is a philosopher, and he has a peculiar judgement not only of the present philosophy but also of the past one. However, it is a strange fact that the official representative of philosophy at a university gets to the judgement that I immediately want to state.

Richard Wahle considers what philosophy what he himself has performed in the philosophical area, and says approximately, once philosophy resembled a restaurant in which cooks and waiters dished up inedible dishes to the guests; and now philosophy is a restaurant in which cooks and waiters stand around and generally have nothing to do.—He refers to these waiters, I will say to the philosophers, in this strange restaurant of the present, and takes his starting point from the question: what can natural sciences do?—He realises the borders of natural sciences, while he looks at their ghostly being that must stick to the outside only.

He recognises the pictorial nature of any knowledge of nature. This is generally a significant phenomenon in the present spiritual life. Natural sciences are inclined to recognise more and more that they deliver, actually, pictures only that that which they call nature is only picture of something.

A conscientious scientific thinker does not get to the brainless monism, but he has to acknowledge the pictorial nature of nature. One could bring in countless documents, while one takes those considerations that try to answer the question: to what extent natural sciences are a suited instrument to recognise truth and reality.—There it is on one side in such a way that natural sciences get to their borders. The more they develop, the more their ideal is fulfilled, the more they will get just by themselves to acknowledging its pictorial nature.

From other side we have the course of spiritual research that wants to develop such a cognition, which enters the reality beyond the picture. Natural sciences show, what you can find is picture.—Spiritual science shows: while you develop a higher consciousness, you show that that what exists for the usual consciousness and for the usual science has picture nature and that you only find reality if you take your starting point from the picture nature.

How could one justify spiritual science better towards natural sciences than by the fact that spiritual science moves the human development of its own accord to acknowledge that what natural sciences have to find as result on their own terms.

Not the words, but the facts which spiritual science produces in the human soul will comply with that what originates from natural sciences. Spiritual science will thereby be justified completely while co-operating with natural sciences.

Today I just wanted to indicate this with some explanations and considerations: That which justifies spiritual science towards natural sciences is the well understood natural sciences themselves. If natural sciences get themselves right, they discharge into a point where they have to say to themselves, here we are at our borders, here something else is demanded.

Well, spiritual science will give this something else. With it, it will be justified not of its own accord, but by natural sciences towards natural sciences.

Yesterday we tried to gain a conception of the importance in human life of what may be termed the super-sensible revelation of our age. We indicated that this was to be reckoned the third revelation in the most recent cycle of mankind, and should, in a certain sense, be regarded as in sequence to the Sinai revelation and the revelation at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. We ought not to look upon this feature of our age as something affecting us merely theoretically or scientifically; as Anthroposophists we must rise to an ever fuller realisation that men, in their evolution, are neglecting something essential if they hold aloof from all that is being announced to us now and will be announced in the future. It is quite appropriate that at first the external world should pass this by, or even treat it as sheer fantasy; and quite natural also that, to begin with, many people should not pay attention to the harmful consequences of disregarding what is here in question. But Anthroposophists should be clear that the souls in human bodies to-day, irrespective of what they absorb at present, are approaching an ineluctable future. What I shall have to say concerns every soul, for it is part of the whole trend of change in our time.

The souls incorporated to-day have only recently advanced to the stage of that genuine ego-consciousness which has been in preparation during the course of evolution ever since the old Atlantean period. But for the people of those ancient days, up to the time when the great change was intimated by the Mystery of Golgotha, this ego-consciousness was gradually freeing itself from a consciousness of which present-day people no longer have any real knowledge. To-day modern men generally distinguish only between our ordinary condition of being awake and the state of sleep, when consciousness is in complete abeyance. Between these states they recognise also the intermediate one of dreaming, but from the present-day standpoint they can regard it only as a kind of aberration, a departure from the normal. Through dream-pictures certain events from the depths of the soul-life rise into consciousness; but in ordinary dreaming they emerge in such an obscure form that the dreamer is scarcely ever able to interpret rightly their very real bearing on deep super-sensible processes in his life of soul.

In order to grasp one characteristic feature of this intermediate state—a state well understood in earlier times—let us take an ordinary dream of which a scientific modern investigator of dreams, able to interpret it only superficially and in a materialistic way, has made a regular conundrum. A highly significant dream! You see, I am taking my example from the science of dreams, which—as I have mentioned before—has to-day been given a place, little understood though it is, among sciences such as chemistry and physics. The following dream, a characteristic one, has been recorded. I might easily have taken my example from similar, unpublished, dreams; but I would like to deal with one which raises certain problems for present-day commentators, who have no key to such matters.

Now the case is this. A married couple had a much beloved son, who was growing up to the joy of his parents. One day he fell ill, and his condition worsened in a few hours to such a degree that, at the end of this one day, he passed through the gate of death. Thus for the ordinary experience of this couple, their son was abruptly snatched from them, and the son himself torn from a life full of promise. The parents, naturally, mourned their son. During the months following there was a great deal in the dreams of both husband and wife to remind them of him. But, quite a long time—many, many months—after his death, there came a night when his father and mother had exactly the same dream. They dreamed that their son appeared to them saying he had been buried alive, having only been in a trance, and that they merely had to look into the matter to be convinced that this was true.

The parents told each other what they had thus dreamed on the same night, and such was their attitude to life that they immediately asked the authorities for permission to have their son's body disinterred. In such matters, however—conditions being as they are—authorities are not easily persuaded; the request was refused. The parents had this further cause for grieving.

Now the investigator who gave his account of the dream, and could think of it only in a materialistic way, was faced with great difficulties. To begin with it is very easy to say: Yes, this is quite intelligible. The parents were thinking so much about their son that it is obvious they would both have dreamt of him. But the puzzling thing was that they should have had the same dream on the same night. The investigator finally explained it in a remarkable way which is bound to seem very forced to anyone reading it. He said: We can only assume that one parent had the dream, and the other, hearing it when awake, got the idea that he (or she) had dreamt it also. To present-day consciousness this interpretation at first seems fairly obvious, but it doesn't go very deep. I have expressly mentioned that for anyone well-versed in dream-experiences there is nothing unusual in several people having the same dream at the same time.

Let us try now to look into this dream-experience from the point of view of Spiritual Science. The results of spiritual investigation show how a man who has gone through the gate of death lives on as an individuality in the spiritual world. We know, too, that there are definite connections between every thing and every being in the world, and that this is evident in the link that unites those who have departed with people still on earth, when the latter lovingly concentrate thoughts on their dead. There is no question of there not being a connection between those on the physical plane and those who have left it for the super-sensible world. There is always a connection when thoughts are turned at all to the dead by those left on the physical plane—a connection that may continue even when their thoughts are directed elsewhere. But the point is that human beings, organised as they are now for life on the physical plane, are unable when awake to become conscious of these bonds. Having no knowledge of a thing, however, does not justify denying its existence; that would be a very superficial conclusion. On that basis, those now sitting in this room and not seeing Nuremberg could easily prove there is no such place. So we must be clear that it is only because of their present-day organisation that men know nothing of their connection with the dead; it exists all the same.

However, knowledge of what is going on in the depths of the soul can occasionally be conjured up into consciousness, and this happens in dreams. It is one thing we have to reckon with when considering dream-experiences. Another thing is the knowledge that passing through death is not the sudden leap imagined by those knowing nothing about it; it is a gradual transition. What occupies a soul here on earth does not then vanish in a moment. What a man loves, he continues to love after his death. But there is no possibility of satisfying a feeling which depends for its satisfaction on a physical body. The wishes and desires of the soul, its joys, sorrows, the particular tendencies it has during incorporation in a physical body—these naturally continue even when the gate of death has been passed. We can therefore understand how strong was the feeling in this young man, meeting with death when quite unprepared, that he would like to be still on earth, and how keen was his longing to be in a physical body. This desire, working as a force in the soul, lasted on for a long, long time during his Kamaloka.

Now picture to yourselves vividly the parents, with their thoughts engrossed by this beloved dead son. Even in sleep the connecting links were there. Just at the moment when both father and mother began to dream, the son, in accordance with the state of his soul, had a particularly keen desire that we may perhaps clothe in these words: “Oh! If only I were still on earth in a physical body.” This thought on the part of the dead son sank deep into his parents' soul, but they had no special faculty for understanding what lay behind the dream. Thus the imprint of the thought on their life of soul was transformed into familiar images. Whereas, if they could have clearly perceived what the son was pouring into their souls, their interpretation would have been: “Our son is longing just now for a physical body.” In fact, the dream-image clothed itself in words they understood—“He has been buried alive!”—which hid the truth from them.

Thus, in dream-pictures of this kind we should not look for an exact replica of what is real in the spiritual worlds; we must expect the actual objective occurrence to be veiled in accordance with the dreamer's degree of understanding. To-day it is the peculiar feature of the dream-world that—if we are unable to go into these matters more deeply—we can no longer regard its pictures as faithful copies of what underlies them. We are obliged to say: Something is always living in our soul behind the dream-picture, and this picture can be looked upon only as a still greater illusion than the external world confronting us when we are awake.

It is only in our time that dreams are appearing to people in this guise; strictly speaking only since the events in Palestine, when ego-consciousness took on the form it has now. Before then, the pictures appeared while men were in a state different from either waking or sleeping—a third state, more like the one prevailing in the super-sensible world. Human beings lived with the dead in spirit far more than is feasible nowadays. There is no need to look back many centuries before the Christian era to realise what a countless number of people were then able to say: “The dead are certainly not dead; they are living in the super-sensible world. I can perceive what they are feeling and seeing, what they now actually are. This holds good also for the other Beings in the super-sensible world; those, for instance, whom we know as the Hierarchies.”

Thus, for human beings in certain states between waking and sleeping, these were experiences of which the last degenerate echoes linger on in dreams. Hence it was very important that men should then feel this disappearance of something they once possessed. In that traditional epoch of human evolution, when the great events were taking place in Palestine, there was indeed cause for saying: “Change your mood of soul; quite different times are coming for mankind.” And among the changes was this—that the old possibility of seeing into the spiritual world, of personally experiencing how matters stood with the dead and with all other spiritual beings, was going to pass away.

The history of those olden days offers ample evidence of this living with the dead—notably in the religious veneration arising everywhere in the form of ancestor-worship. This was founded on belief in the reality and activity of those who had died. And whereas it continued almost everywhere during the transitional period, men's experience was this, though perhaps not put clearly into words: “Formerly our souls could rise to the world we call that of the spirit, and we were able to dwell among the higher Beings and with the dead. But now our dead leave us in quite another sense; they disappear from our consciousness and the old vivid contact is no more.”

We come here to something exceptionally difficult to grasp, but the intelligent mind, the intelligent soul, can learn to do so. It was the early Christians who felt most vividly the loss of direct psychical contact with the dead, and it was this that made their worship of God so full of meaning, so infinitely deep and holy. They compensated for what was lost by the reverent feeling they brought to their religious ceremonies; when, for instance, they sacrificed at the graves of their dead or celebrated the Mass, or observed any other religious rite. In fact, it was during this period of transition, when consciousness of the dead was seen to be wanting, that altars took the shape of coffins. Thus it was with a feeling for mortal remains of this kind—unlike that of the ancient Egyptians—that the service of God, the service of the spirit, was reverently performed. As I have said, this is something not easy to understand. We need, however, only observe the form of an altar, and allow our hearts to respond to this gradual change in men's whole outlook, and feeling and understanding will then arise for the change and its consequences.

We see, therefore, that slowly, gradually, the present state of the human soul was brought about. From indications given yesterday it can be gathered that what has thus come into being will again be succeeded by a different state, for which people are already developing faculties. The example I gave you yesterday of how a man will see, in a kind of dream picture, his future karmic compensation for some deed, means the re-awakening of faculties that will lead the soul once more to the spiritual worlds. In relation to earthly evolution as a whole, the intermediate state when the soul has been cut off from the super-sensible world, will prove to be comparatively short. It had to come about for men to be able to acquire the strongest possible forces for their freedom. But something else of which I have spoken was bound up with the whole progress of human evolution—that only in this way was a man able to acquire a feeling of the ego within him; to have, that is, the right ego-consciousness. The farther men advance into the future, the more firmly will this ego-consciousness establish itself within them, always increasing in significance. In other words, the force and self-sufficiency of men's individuality will be increasingly accentuated, so that it becomes necessary for them to find in themselves their own effective support.

Thus we see that the ego-consciousness men have to-day does not go back as far as is usually imagined. Only a few incarnations ago, men had no ego-feeling such as is characteristic of them to-day. And as the ego-feeling is intimately connected with memory, we need not be surprised that many people should not have begun, as yet, to look back on their previous incarnations. Because of the undeveloped state of this feeling for his ego during early childhood, a man does not even remember what happened to him then; so it seems quite comprehensible that, for the same reason, he is unable yet to remember his earlier incarnations. But now we have come to the point when man has developed a feeling for his ego, and the forces are unfolding which will make it necessary in our coming incarnations to remember those that have gone before. The days are drawing near when people will feel bound to admit: “We have strange glimpses into the past, when we were already on the earth but living in another bodily form. We look back and have to say that we were already then on earth.” And among the faculties appearing more and more in human beings will be one which arouses the feeling: It can only be that I am looking back on earlier incarnations of my own.

Just think how in the human souls now on earth the inner force is already arising which will enable them, in their next incarnations, to look back and to recognise themselves. But for those who have not become familiar with the idea of reincarnation this looking back will be a veritable torment. Ignorance of the mysteries of repeated earthly lives will be actually painful for these human beings; forces in them are striving to rise and bear witness to earlier times, but this cannot happen because all knowledge of these forces is refused. Not to learn of the truths now being proclaimed through Spiritual Science does not mean neglecting—let us say—mere theories; it is on the way to making a torment of life in future incarnations. In these times of transition, accordingly, something is happening; the slow preparation for it can be gathered from our second Mystery Play, “The Soul's Probation,” where we are shown earlier incarnations of the characters portrayed—incarnations of only a few centuries before. The event was then already in preparation; and now, thanks to the wisdom of cosmic guidance, human beings will be given positive opportunities of making themselves familiar with the truths of the Mysteries.

At present comparatively few find their way to Spiritual Science; their number is modest compared with that of the rest of mankind. It may be said that interest in Anthroposophy is not yet very wide-spread. But, in our age, the law of reincarnation is such that those now going through the world apathetically, ignoring what experience can tell about the need for exploring the riddles of life, will incarnate again in a relatively short time, and thus have ample opportunity for absorbing the truths of Spiritual Science. That is how it stands. So that when perhaps we see around us people we esteem, people we love, who will have nothing to do with Anthroposophy, are even hostile towards it, we ought not to take it too much to heart. It is perfectly true, and should be realised by Anthroposophists, that refusing to look into Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy, means preparing a life of torment for future incarnations on earth. That is true, and should not be treated lightly. On the other hand, those who see friends and acquaintances they care for showing no inclination towards Anthroposophy can say: “If I become a good Anthroposophist myself, I shall find an early opportunity, with the forces remaining to me after death, to prove helpful to these souls”—provided the living link we have spoken of is there. And because the interval between death and rebirth is becoming shorter, these souls, too, will have the opportunity of absorbing the Mystery-truths that must be absorbed if torment is to be avoided in men's coming incarnations. All is not yet lost.

We have, therefore, to look upon Anthroposophy as a real power; while on the other hand we must not be unduly grieved or pessimistic about the matter. It would be mistaken optimism to say: “If that is how things are, I need not accept the truths of Spiritual Science till my next incarnation” If everyone were to say that, when gradually the next incarnations come, there would be too few opportunities for effective aid to be given. Even if those wishing for Anthroposophy can now receive its truths from only quite a few people, the situation will be different for the countless hosts of those who, in a comparatively short time, will be eagerly turning to Anthroposophy. A countless number of Anthroposophists will then be needed to make these truths known, either here on the physical plane, or—if they are not incarnated—from higher planes.

That is one thing we must learn from the whole character of the great change now taking place. The other is that all this has to be experienced by the ego so that it should rely increasingly upon itself, becoming more and more independent. The self-reliance of the ego must come for all souls; but it will mean disaster for those who make no effort to learn about the great spiritual truths, for the increasing individualism will be felt by them as isolation. On the other hand, those who have made themselves familiar with the deep mysteries of the spiritual world will thereby find a way to forge ever stronger spiritual bands between souls. Old bonds will be loosened, new ones formed. All this is imminent, but it will be gradual.

We are living at present in the fifth post-Atlantean period, which will be followed by a sixth and then by a seventh, when a catastrophe will come upon us, just as one came between the Atlantean and post-Atlantean periods. When the lectures on the Apocalypse were given here in Nuremberg, you heard a description of this coming catastrophe, of how it will resemble and how it will differ from the one in old Atlantis.

If we observe life around us, we might express the particular feature of our age in this way: The most active element in human beings to-day is their intellectualism, their intellectual conception of the world. We are living altogether in an age of intellectualism. It has been brought about through quite special circumstances, and we shall come to understand these if we look back to the time before our present fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch, the Graeco-Latin, as it is called. That was the remarkable period when human beings had not reached their present state of detachment from the outer manifestations of nature and knowledge of the world. But at the same time it was the epoch in which the ego descended among men. The Christ-event had also to happen in that epoch, because, with Him, the ego made its descent in a special way.

What then is our present experience? It is not just of the entering-in of the ego; we now experience how one of our sheaths casts a kind of reflection upon the soul. The sheath to which yesterday we gave the name of “faith-body” throws its reflection on to the human soul, in this fifth epoch. Thus it is a feature of present-day man that he has something in his soul which is, as it were, a reflection of the nature of faith of the astral body. In the sixth post-Atlantean epoch there will be a reflection within man of the love-nature of the etheric body, and in the seventh, before the great catastrophe, the reflection of the nature of hope of the physical body.

For those who have heard lectures I am giving in various places just now, I would note that these gradual happenings have been described from a different point of view both in Munich and in Stuttgart; the theme, however, is always the same. What is now being portrayed in connection with the three great human forces, Faith, Love, Hope, was there represented in direct relation to the elements in a man's life of soul; but it is all the same thing. I have done this intentionally, so that Anthroposophists may grew accustomed to get the gist of a matter without strict adherence to special words. When we realise that things can be described from many different sides, we shall no longer pin so much faith on words but focus our efforts on the matter itself, knowing that any description amounts only to an approximation of the whole truth. This adherence to the original words is the last thing that can help us to get to the heart of a matter. The one helpful means is to harmonise what has been said in successive epochs, just as we learn about a tree by studying it not from one direction only but from many different aspects.

Thus at present it is essentially the force of faith of the astral body which, shining into the soul, is characteristic of our time. Someone might say: “That is rather strange. You are telling us now that the ruling force of the age is faith. We might admit this in the case of those who hold to old beliefs, but to-day so many people are too mature for that, and they look down on such old beliefs as belonging to the childish stage of human evolution.” It may well be that people who say they are monists believe they do not believe, but actually they are more ready to do so than those calling themselves believers. For, though monists are not conscious of it, all that we see in the various forms of monism is belief of the blindest kind, believed by the monists to be knowledge. We cannot describe their doings at all without mentioning belief. And, apart from the belief of those who believe they do not believe, we find that, strictly speaking, an endless amount of what is most important to-day is connected with the reflection the astral body throws into the soul, giving it thereby the character of ardent faith. We have only to call to mind lives of the great men of our age, Richard Wagner's for example, and how even as an artist he was rising all his life to a definite faith; it is fascinating to watch this in the development of his personality. Everywhere we look to-day, the lights and shadows can be interpreted as the reflection of faith in what we may call the ego-soul of man.

Our age will be followed by one in which the need for love will cast its light. Love in the sixth culture-epoch will show itself in a very different form—different even from that which can be called Christian love. Slowly we draw nearer to that epoch; and by making those in the Anthroposophical Movement familiar with the mysteries of the cosmos, with the nature of the various individualities both on the physical plane and on the higher planes, we try to kindle love for everything in existence. This is not done so much by talking of love, as by feeling that what is able to kindle love in the soul is prepared for the sixth epoch by Anthroposophy. Through Anthroposophy the forces of love are specially aroused in the whole human soul, and that is prepared which a man needs for gradually acquiring a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. For it is indeed true that the Mystery of Golgotha came to pass; and the Gospels have evoked something which yesterday was likened to how children learn to speak. But the deepest lesson—the mission of earthly love in its connection with the Mystery of Golgotha—has not yet been grasped. Full understanding of this will be possible only in the sixth post-Atlantean culture-epoch, when people grow to realise more and more that the foundations for it are actually within them, and out of their innermost being—in other words, out of love—do what should be done. Then the guidance of the Commandments will have been outlived and the stage reached that is described in Goethe's words: “Duty—when one loves the commands one gives to oneself.” When forces wake in our souls which impel us to do what we should through love alone, we then discover in us something that must gradually become widespread in the sixth culture-epoch. Then in a man's nature quite special forces of the etheric body will make themselves known.

To understand what it is that must come about increasingly in this way, we have to consider it from two sides. One side has certainly not come yet and is only dreamt of by the most advanced in spirit; it is a well-defined relation between custom, morals, ethics and the understanding, intellectuality. To-day a man may be to a certain extent a rascal, yet at the same time intelligent and clever. He may even use his very cleverness to further his knavery. At present it is not required of people to combine their intelligence with an equal degree of morality. To all that we have been anticipating for the future this must be added—that as we advance, it will no longer be possible for these two qualities of the human soul to be kept apart, or to exist in unequal measure. A man who, according to the reckoning-up of his previous incarnation, has become particularly intelligent without being moral, will in his new incarnation possess only a stunted intelligence. Thus, to have equal amounts of intelligence and morality in future incarnations he will be obliged, as a consequence of universal cosmic law, to enter his new incarnation with an intelligence that is crippled, so that immorality and stupidity coincide. For immorality has a crippling effect upon intelligence. In other words, we are approaching the age when morality and what has now been described for the sixth post-Atlantean epoch as the shining into the ego-soul of the love-forces of the etheric body, point essentially to forces having to do with harmonising those of intelligence and morality. That is the one side to be considered.

The other side is this—that it is solely through harmony of this kind, between morality, custom, and intelligence, that the whole depth of the Mystery of Golgotha is to be grasped. This will come about only through the individuality who before Christ-Jesus came to earth prepared men for that Mystery, developing in his successive inearnations ever greater powers as teacher of the greatest of all earthly events This individuality, whom in his rank as Bodhisatva we call the successor of Gautama Buddha, was incarnated in the personality living about a hundred years before Christ under the name of Jeshu ben Pandira. Among his many students was one who had at that time already, in a certain sense, written down a prophetic version of the Matthew Gospel, and this, after the Mystery of Golgotha had been enacted, needed only to be given a new form.

There have been, and will continue to be, frequent incorporations of the individuality who appeared as Jeshu ben Pandira, until he rises from the rank of Bodhisatva to that of Buddha. According to our reckoning of time this will be in about 3,000 years, when a sufficient number of people will possess the above-mentioned faculties, and when, in the course of a remarkable incarnation of the individual who was once Jeshu ben Pandira, this great teacher of mankind will have become able to act as interpreter of the Mystery of Golgotha in a very different way from what is possible to-day. It is true that even to-day a seer into the super-sensible worlds can gain some idea of what is to happen then; but the ordinary earthly organisation of man cannot yet provide a physical body capable of doing what that teacher will be able to do approximately 3,000 years hence. There is, as yet, no human language through which verbal teaching could exert the magical effects that will spring from the words of that great teacher of humanity. His words will flow directly to men's hearts, into their souls, like a healing medicine; nothing in those words will be merely theoretical. At the same time the teaching will contain—to an extent far greater than it is possible to conceive to-day—a magical moral force carrying to hearts and souls a full conviction of the eternal, deeply significant brotherhood of intellect and morality.

This great teacher, who will be able to give to men ripe for it the profoundest instruction concerning the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha, will fulfil what Oriental prophets have always said—that the true successor of Buddha would be, for all mankind, the greatest teacher of the good. For that reason he has been called in oriental tradition the Maitreya Buddha. His task will be to enlighten human beings concerning the Mystery of Golgotha, and for this he will draw ideas and words of the deepest significance from the very language he will use. No human language to-day can evoke any conception of it. His words will imprint into men's souls directly, magically, the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence in this connection also we are approaching what we may call the future moral age of man; in a certain sense we could designate it as a coming Golden Age.

Even to-day, however, speaking from the ground of Anthroposophy, we point in full consciousness to what is destined to come about—how the Christ will gradually reveal Himself to ever-higher powers in human beings, and how the teachers, who up to now have taught only individual peoples and individual men, will become the interpreters of the great Christ-event for all who are willing to listen. And we can point out how, through the dawning of the age of love, conditions for the age of morality are prepared.

Then will come the last epoch, during which human souls will receive the reflection of what we call hope; when, strengthened through the force flowing from the Mystery of Golgotha and from the age of morality, men will take into themselves forces of hope. This is the most important gift they need in order to face the next catastrophe and to begin a new life, just as was done in this present post-Atlantean age.

When in the final post-Atlantean epoch our external culture, with its tendency to calculation, will have come to a climax, bringing no feeling of satisfaction but leaving those who have not developed the spiritual within them to confront their culture in utter desolation—then out of spirituality the seed of hope will be sown, and in the next period of human evolution this will grow to maturity. If the spirit is denied all possibility of imparting to men's souls what it can give, and what the Anthroposophical Movement has the will to convey, this external culture might for a short while be able to hold its own. Ultimately, however, people would ask themselves what they had gained and say: “We have wireless installations—undreamt of by our ancestors—to transmit our thoughts all over the earth, and what good does it do us? The most trivial, unproductive thoughts are sent hither and thither, and human ingenuity has to be strained to the utmost to enable us to transport from some far distant region, by means of all kinds of perfected appliances, something for us to eat; or to travel at high speeds round the globe. But in our heads there is nothing worth sending from place to place, for our thoughts are cheerless; more-over, since we have had our present means of communication, they have become even more cheerless than when they were conveyed in the old snail-like fashion.”

In short, despair and desolation are all that our civilisation can spread over the earth. But, in the last culture-epoch, souls who have accepted the spiritual in life will have become enriched, as if on the ruins of the external life of culture. Their surety that this acceptance of the spiritual has not been in vain will be the strong force of hope within them—hope that after a great catastrophe a new age will come for human beings, when there will appear in external life, in a new culture, what has already been prepared spiritually within the soul.

Thus, if we permeate our whole being with Spiritual Science, we advance step by step, in full consciousness, from our age of faith, through the age of love and that of hope, to what we can see approaching us as the highest, truest, most beautiful, of all human souls.