The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It is still considered in many circles today to be a sign of a particularly enlightened mind to reject the possibility of penetrating into the spiritual, into the supersensible world, through human knowledge. It can be said that in some circles, especially in the scientific way of thinking, a front is already being made against this so-called enlightenment. But however much may be said from this side about spirit and the supersensible world from this or that point of view, it cannot be said that a really satisfactory way into the world of spirit is already being tried or striven for in wider circles.

That there is the possibility of penetrating into the supersensible world, not merely through an indefinite, scholastic belief, but through a genuine and true continuation of that way of thinking which has made modern scientific thinking so great, to penetrate into the supersensible world, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks, which - as I already said here a few weeks ago - is to find its external representation through the Goetheanum in Dornach, as a proof to be presented to the world, to be fathomed through the experience of the spirit.

If I am to explain the path of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science from a different perspective than the one I have already presented in numerous lectures here, I would like to begin today by talking about something that seems rather abstract and perhaps far-fetched to some.

It is no coincidence that the Goetheanum takes its name from Goethe. In a certain respect, Goethe's entire world view, his entire way of thinking, forms the starting point for a more recent spiritual-scientific endeavor. And even if one can say that what one finds in Goethe still presents itself as a beginning, it is perhaps best to illustrate the fundamental principles by starting from certain simple thoughts or ideas of Goethe's. Well known in wider circles, but unfortunately still too little appreciated today, is what Goethe called his metamorphosis doctrine, in which we also find his idea of the primal plant.

By this archetypal plant, Goethe does not mean a simple, tangible plant structure, as a modern natural scientist would say, but rather something that can only be grasped and experienced in the mind. At the same time, however, he means by this archetypal plant something that is not found in any single plant, but that can be found in every single plant in the wide plant kingdom of the earth. He therefore assumes that, I would say, within every plant that can be perceived by the senses there is a primal plant that can be grasped supernaturally and experienced in the spirit.

He also imagines the same, although he has not explained it so clearly, for the others, for the non-plant organisms. And even if Goethe, partly out of his artistic attitude, developed this idea of the primal plant, it must be said that his main aim was to find something scientific in the very best sense through something like the primal plant, something that can be a guide for man as an idea, a spiritual guide through the whole vast world of plants.

When Goethe traveled through Italy to clarify and mature his world view, he once wrote to his friends in Weimar, who were well aware of what he actually wanted with his primal plant, that the image of the primal plant had emerged for him again, particularly in the rich, abundant plant world of Italy. To begin with, in abstract terms – we need not, as we shall see in a moment, adhere to the abstract – to begin with, in abstract terms, he says: such a primal plant must exist, for how else could one find in the whole manifold plant kingdom that each individual being is really a whole plant? – As I said, that is expressed in abstract terms, but Goethe expresses himself about this primal plant in much more definite, much more forceful terms. For example, he says: “When one has grasped this primal plant in one's mind, then one can, from the living image of this primal plant, create images of individual real plants that have the possibility of existing.”

One must only look in the right sense at what is actually being said with such words. Goethe wants to arrive at an idea of the nature of plants in his mind, and he wants to be able to form a spiritual image of a plant from his Primordial Plant. This plant is a single plant, not like a plant that he sees with his senses, but rather, he invents a plant that is added to the plants that exist in the senses. This plant does not exist in the senses, but it would have the possibility of existing in the senses if the conditions were right. What does this actually point to? It points to the fact that man, through his soul, can become so immersed in the sensual reality and, in this immersion in the sensual reality, can experience the spiritual that is within the sensual reality in such a way that he grows completely together with this spirit, which lives and weaves everywhere in nature, creating.

The greatness of Goethe's world view is that it aims at this immersion in reality, and that it is convinced that, to the extent that one immerses in this reality, one comes upon the spiritual reality, so that one spirit of reality, which can then be one's guide through the entire confusing diversity of the sensual world itself.

Now, what Goethe strove for can be extended to the entire world surrounding man and to man himself. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has set itself the task of extending this way of thinking to everything that confronts man from outside and from within. It is thus the opposite of all unclear obscurantism, the opposite of all unclear mysticism. It strives for what Goethe claimed for his world view: to delve into the spiritual world with mathematical clarity and transparency.

This spiritual science now feels completely in harmony with modern science, although it goes far beyond the science of modern times. One has only to have passed through this natural science to realize how this spiritual science must spring from this natural science itself. Let us take a look at what this newer natural science is actually striving for. It sees its real goal as finding a knowledge of the things surrounding man, of the mineral, vegetable and animal world, and even of man himself, in which nothing is said about any subjective feelings or ideas of man himself. This natural science, in particular, from its newer point of view, that of experiment, to which it has rightly placed itself as a natural science, seeks to explore nature in such a way that the individual phenomena and processes of nature themselves reveal their essence, their laws, so that man does not weave anything into what he calls knowledge of nature, from what he finds within himself.

This is how what has been presented as natural science for three to four centuries, but particularly in the 19th century, differs from the knowledge of nature in earlier times. Anyone who has studied the way in which nature was understood in earlier times knows that people took what they formed in their imaginations and projected it onto natural phenomena, and to a certain extent they extracted from natural phenomena what they had first projected into them. That this does not happen, that man allows nature to speak to him quite impartially, that is the endeavor of modern natural science.

But one cannot help but let the spirit do the research when researching nature. One cannot help but apply that which one has within oneself as a life of thoughts and ideas, and which is of a spiritual nature, to the context of natural phenomena. Now one can take one of two paths. The ordinary scientific worldview of recent times has taken one path; but anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to take the other.

When science develops its ideas, these ideas, which pure as I have described them, are to be gained from nature, then with these ideas, I might say, science can contemplate itself; then it can ask itself: What is the nature, what is the value of the ideas that we apply to external nature? – This is not done by the newer natural science. Modern natural science is limited to discovering everything about nature that does not answer the question: What is the human being actually? That is the characteristic feature of all, one might say, insightful natural scientists, the emphasized point, that they say: Yes, we can explore much about the physical world outside and within us - but this does not answer the question: What is the human being itself? And again and again we must emphasize: in its efforts to understand nature, natural science sets up a picture of the world in which the human being is not included as soul and spirit. Natural science, honestly based on the present standpoint, has no answer to the question of soul and spirit.

The question as to why this is so must be answered historically. Natural science itself does not know why it does not advance to the knowledge of soul and spirit, why it stops despite its admirable results on the outer nature before soul and spirit, why again and again natural scientists arise who say: Yes, if natural science were to speak of soul and spirit, it would transgress its limits. - One believes to speak about nature without prejudice. One does not speak without prejudice, because what has become established over the centuries as a certain way of thinking weighs heavily on natural science, actually on the way of thinking of modern natural science. And this pressure consists in the fact that certain confessional currents have claimed a monopoly on the truths of soul and spirit.

If we go back a few centuries, we find precisely in the period in which modern science had its early days, how religious denominations claim their monopoly on dictating the truths about soul and spirit. In the face of this claim to monopoly, modern science recoiled. Natural science of modern times has penetrated with magnificence into the outer nature; but not because one would have recognized through this penetration into the outer nature that one could not ascend to soul and spirit, one has refrained from this ascent, but because it was so firmly rooted in the unconscious human views that the monopoly claim of the confessional religions must be taken into account. That is why this belief was transformed into an apparent proof that it is impossible to penetrate the soul and spirit.

Anyone who has seriously studied the scientific research methods of modern times, and who has then inwardly processed that that arises as ideas about external nature with the exception of the actual essence of man, knows that the other path, which is taken by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, must be further pursued into the future of humanity. If natural science understood itself, if it did not live under the pressure hinted at, then, precisely because it strives to be a natural science that disregards the subjective element of the human being, it would come to the Goethean principle of growing together with the spirit that is spread out in the phenomena and facts and beings of nature. And if it understood itself, modern natural science would choose of its own accord precisely that which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as a continuation of the natural science direction, must claim for itself.

Indeed, what must be essentially supported is that which can be cultivated through natural science in terms of inner imagination, of thinking power, through careful inner spiritual methods. And it is on the training of such inner spiritual methods that everything through which the spiritual science referred to here wants to find its way into the supersensible, into the spiritual world at all, is based.

Today, people perhaps imagine far too lightly what is meant here by this path into the supersensible world. One thinks that it means something like an inner spinning, a surrender to all sorts of ideas, through which one weaves out all sorts of things that the nature of things should be. One might imagine that this is easy compared to the difficulty of the experimental method or compared to the methods used in observatories and clinics. But if you read something like I have tried to present in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in my “Occult Science”, you will see that it is not just any kind of spinning around in inner ideas, but a strictly lawful, inner soul work of the spirit into the spirit. For true spiritual science can never be the view that one can penetrate into the spirit through external methods of experimentation, but true spiritual science must uphold the view that only the spirit in man can find the spirit of the world.

What man has to accomplish in his inner being, I have often referred to here in these lectures and in my books as meditation, as concentration. Today I would just like to point out that this work of concentration, this meditation work, is a purely inner soul work. But what is the goal of this inner soul work? What is the goal of this work with only the inner soul forces, this devotion to the pure workings of the soul and spirit in the inner being of man?

You know that we perceive the world through our senses as we live in it, and then we process this world. This is also how science works. We then process this world by reflecting on it, by revealing its laws, by forming ideas about it. But you also know that this process of forming ideas leads to something else, to something that is intimately connected with the health of our personal human being. This process of forming ideas about the world is connected with the fact that we can retain impressions of the world, as we say, through our memory, through our power of recollection. People so easily overlook this power of memory, this memory of the human being, because it is something so everyday for them. But that is precisely the peculiar thing about the real pursuit of knowledge: that which is often everyday for people must be understood precisely as that in relation to which the most important, the most significant questions must be raised.

When we perceive the world of the senses, form ideas about it, and after some time seemingly bring these forth from our inner being again, so that we remember events we have experienced, then there is much that is unconscious in these memories, in this memory process. Just think how little you are actually in control of your memory with your will, how little you can command, so to speak, your power of remembrance. Consider above all how little you are able to think of this memory while you are perceiving outwardly. Or is it the case that when a person looks out into the world with his eye, when he hears sounds with his ear, he simultaneously ensures that representations are present that make reminiscence possible? No, for that to happen the human being would have to consciously exercise another power alongside perception and the inner workings of the senses. In reality, this does not happen in ordinary life. I would like to say that memory with its power runs alongside the outer life. But it is the one that works subconsciously, so to speak, that helps determine all life in the outer world of the senses, so that we support this life through our memory through life. This power must be brought up from the unconscious. In other words, we cannot bring up from the depths of our soul what we unconsciously practise in our power of remembrance by merely remembering our experiences, but by trying to bring the power, which we otherwise do not know at all, which, as I said, runs alongside, I have said, to such a conscious clarity as otherwise only the external sensory perception is, by bringing this power up from the subconscious depths and weaving and living in what is otherwise in the subconscious of memory. If we use the power of recollection not for memory, not for remembering, but to make ideas and images that are otherwise only kept alive by the power of recollection consciously present in our mind, we strengthen something in our mind that, when the necessary time comes, allows us to experience a very different awakening from the one we experience every morning. If you consciously work again and again in the way that otherwise only memory works, then you experience something of a new awakening in the soul. One experiences something like the appearance in the soul of a completely different person than the one who otherwise walks through the world of the senses. One cannot reach the spirit through theorizing. Every philosophical argument that wants to reach the spirit through mere reasoning has nothing else in mind than the word or words about the spirit. The spirit wants to be experienced. And it can only be experienced by our raising up what would otherwise remain in the subconscious, in the deeper layers of our human soul, so that it lives in us with the same luminous clarity as what we see through our eyes, what we hear with our ears, and that in this brought-up conscious will lives in such a way as the conscious will lives when I direct the eye from this wall over to that wall, in order to turn the gaze away from what I see here and to look at what I can see there. By availing myself of my senses, the conscious will lives in this availing of the senses. This will must fully penetrate

this inner soul work, then one comes to something that is a continuation of the ordinary soul activity of man, which relates to the ordinary soul activity of man just as the waking day life relates to the life of sleep, from which at most the dream speaks .

That there is something in human nature that can be brought up and becomes a new organ of knowledge, that becomes what Goethe calls the soul eye, the spiritual eye, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to demonstrate through gradual familiarization with such inner soul work. In this way it will express what natural science is unable to express because it lives under the pressure I have indicated. But this pressure must, because humanity longs for it - one can notice this longing if one is only unbiased enough to do so - this pressure must fall away from the knowledge of humanity.

So you see that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not want to be some kind of false mysticism, some kind of obscurity, but a truly genuine continuation of what is known in natural science. And especially those who have enjoyed a scientific education will find it easier to concentrate and meditate on thoughts, because they are accustomed to methods and ways of research that disregard the subjective side of the human being and enter completely into the objective. If we now apply what we have been trained in to natural science, especially to meditation, then we eliminate all human arbitrariness, then we bring something into meditation, into the inner work of the soul, which is an objective lawfulness, like that of nature itself. It is precisely by taking the way of thinking and imagining of natural science into the human being that the chaotic, unclear self-knowledge, which is striven for with many a complicated and wrong mysticism, where one only wants to brood over one's own inner being, is overcome. Working in one's own inner being, which proceeds in every step of this work in the same way that only the most conscientious natural scientist proceeds, by extending his power of judgment over that which unfolds before his eyes or before his instruments, stands in opposition to this uneducated brooding into one's own inner being.

That is one side of it. I would like to say that it is the side that points to the awakening of special powers of knowledge. The ordinary power of memory will certainly not be there in those moments when one wants to explore the spiritual directly, because this power of memory itself has undergone a metamorphosis. It has become a spiritual eye that can perceive the spirit. With the usual conclusions that today's popular logic has, one cannot penetrate to the real spirit. Whoever wants to speak of a real penetration to the spirit must point to the real existing forces that lead to this spirit. And one such real existing force is the power of remembrance. But this power of remembering must be transformed, it must become something quite different. Every other penetration into the spirit leads at the same time into the dark, because human will is thereby eliminated, and with it the most important part of the human being itself. Just as we regard as fantastic what arises from, I might say, organic foundations of our mind, and as we do not call what we have no control over a true memory, so the true spiritual researcher will accept no soul-content for his spiritual research that he does not completely permeate with the light of his will.

So much for one side, the life of imagination, as used in spiritual research. But something else in man can be used and must be used if one really wants to find the way into the supersensible, into the spiritual world. And just as spiritual science has been challenged by the spirit of natural science through the way of thinking of modern times, so on the other hand spiritual science has been challenged by human life in modern times. Anyone who follows the development of the human soul through the last few centuries without prejudice, not with the preconceptions of today's historian, but just without prejudice, can see that a tremendous change occurred in the state of human souls around the middle of the 15th century, admittedly only within the civilized world, but just within this civilized world. It is a mere prejudice to believe, merely by looking at the external historical facts, that a human soul in the civilized world in the 8th or 9th century A.D. had the same inner makeup as the human souls of today. Of course, there are still backward human souls today who more or less still stand on the standpoint of the 8th or 9th century; but they are instructive precisely because they also lead us outwardly back to that time. But on the whole we can say: One need only look at human life in accordance with experience. A tremendous change has taken place, which has become ever more pronounced since the mid-15th century. If we want to describe it in more detail, we have to say that if we go back to that point in time, we find that people's relationship to one another was very different from what it is today and from what unconscious human forces are striving for in the future of humanity. Whatever may be said against it out of certain prejudices, something is being striven for in relation to the relationship between human beings that has its beginning at the time referred to. In earlier times, people were close to one another through blood ties, through tribal ties, through everything that made them related to other people through their organism, or what made them related to other people through the organic connection that manifests itself, for example, in sexual love. Do we not see, if we only want to see, that in place of the old blood relationship, in place of the old clan relationship, the old family relationship, the old tribe relationship, there is more and more that works from person to person in such a way that it passes from the soul, from the willing soul of one person to the willing soul of another person? Do we not see that the development of modern times makes it more and more necessary for man to approach another human being through something quite different from his mere physical organism? We see that since the time indicated, the sense of personality has grown, that the human being has become more and more inward-looking and inward-looking, and thus also more and more lonely and lonely. Since that time, I would say that the human being lives more and more isolated in himself with his soul life. The soul life closes itself off from the outside world. The blood no longer speaks when we are face to face with our neighbor. We must make our inner life active. We must live ourselves over into the other. We must merge spiritually into the other. What may be called the social principle, the social impulse of modern times, is very much misunderstood, especially in those circles that today rightly believe themselves to be socialist. One sees the social impulse emerging, but even today only a few circles know what it actually consists of.

It consists in the fact that more and more in the lonely human being the impulse awakens to live himself over into other people, spiritually and inwardly through his will, so that the neighbor becomes the one who becomes it through our consciousness, not through our blood, not through our organic connection. There we stand face to face with people and have the necessity to live ourselves into them. What we call goodwill today, what we call love today, is different from what was called by that name in times gone by. But by living ourselves into other people in this way, it is as if everything that pulsates in us, that lives in us as will, would take up the will of the other. We enter completely into the other with our soul. We go out of our body, as it were, and enter into the body of the other. When this feeling increasingly takes over, when this feeling, permeated by love, I would say, as modern love of one's neighbor, spreads among people, then something arises from this shared experience of the will, of the entire soul life of the other person, which is a real life experience. Today, many people could already have this life experience if they did not allow it to be clouded by prejudices. Where it occurs, it is rejected with truly unsound reasons. One need only remember a person like Lessing. At the end of his life, when everything that he could produce in the way of human greatness had passed through his soul, he still wrote his “Education of the Human Race,” which culminates in the acknowledgment of the fact of repeated human lives on earth. There are higher philistines, as there are higher daughters, and they have their judgment ready for such a thing. They say: Yes, Lessing was clever all his life; but then he became decrepit and came up with such complicated ideas as those of repeated lives.

But these repeated lives are not a fanciful not a fanciful idea; they are what we experience when we do not stand before another human being merely by virtue of blood relationship or organic belonging, but when we can truly live our way into what lives in his soul. There, in response to what is approaching us, the spirit of one person meets the spirit of another person, and from this arises, as we know from experience, that which can be said: what is forming a bond here for your soul, for your spirit, with the other person, did not come about through this life. What arises in the blood has come about through this life. But what arises in the spirit as a necessity has come about through something that preceded this life. Anyone who really follows the development of modern human life since the middle of the 15th century – it is still shrouded in mystery for the widest circles of humanity – will come to the idea of repeated earthly lives through living with people. And what comes to light then occurs, I might say, like a dream. I say “like a dream” for the following reason: When we fall asleep, we fall asleep into an unconscious. Then, out of this unconscious, this or that emerges as a dream. One can compare this falling asleep into the unconscious with submerging into the souls of our fellow human beings, as I have just characterized it. Then, out of this immersion, I would like to say, not figuratively, but very literally, out of this sleeping into our fellow human beings, something also emerges at first, like the dream of repeated earthly lives, and draws our attention to the fact that something like this must be sought in order to understand life, in order to find the way through the world of the senses. And what shines out like a dream from our social life becomes a complete certainty when we train the human will in the same way as I have described for memory. But just as memory must become a fully conscious power, so the will must, on the other hand, discard what completely directs it in ordinary life.

What then directs our will, our desires, our longings in ordinary life? If our desires did not arise out of the organic life of our body, the will would, so to speak, have nothing to do with them. He who, through experience, has penetrated to the will, knows that this will is based on desire. But we can also detach that which is the actual power of the will from our desires. To a certain extent we do detach it in our social life. But that only draws our attention to what is actually important. We detach it in social life by loving our neighbor, by being absorbed in our neighbor, not desiring him like a piece of meat. We do not love our neighbor out of our desires, but rather it is an application of a desireless will. But this disinterested will can also be developed through a special training. This happens when we do not merely want what can be achieved in the outer world, what one or the other desire is after, but when we apply the will to our human being and his development itself. We can do that. We all too often abandon ourselves to the way life carries us. But even after we have outgrown school, that is, when others are no longer providing the education, we can still practice continuous self-education and self-discipline. We can take our own spiritual being into our own hands, we can set out to achieve this and that. One can resolve, if life has led one in a certain direction up to a certain point, to become knowledgeable in this or that area of life, to transfer one's judgment to another area of life. In short, one can turn one's will around. While otherwise the will always works from the inside out, as desire dominates the outside, the will can be turned around, turned inward. By practising self-discipline through our will, by trying to make ourselves better and better in one direction or another, we apply the actual dispassionate willpower. And what you find in my book How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science, aims, in addition to the other thing I have already characterized, to show that man applies such a culture of the will to himself, so that he penetrates more and more, I might say, with his will into himself. But then, when these two forces work together, the power of remembrance brought out of the unconscious, which then seizes the human will, then the human being knows himself inwardly as spirit, then he knows that he has seized the spirit inwardly in a purely spiritual way, then he knows that he does not do this through the organs of the body. Then he knows what spiritual action in the spirit is like, then he knows what it means: soul and spirit are independent of the body.

One cannot prove that the soul and the spirit are independent of the body, because in ordinary life they are not. In ordinary life, the spirit and soul are entirely dependent on the body. But there lives in us another human being who is independent, and we can bring him up from his depths. Only then does that which reigns in man as the eternal reveal itself to us.

You see, there is nothing wrong or complicated about mysticism in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It is in it thoroughly that which can be expressed in a completely clear way, but which one only comes to when one really explains it inwardly and does not just say: You shall develop your inner being, you shall look into yourself, you shall find the God in your own nature. In anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, reference is made to very specific forces that are to be disciplined in a very specific way. That is what is important here. In this respect, however, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is a continuation of modern scientific and social endeavors. In the field of science, one can no longer completely ignore the spirit. And so it has come about that, because one did not want to eliminate the pressure that I characterized at the beginning, one wants to use the same methods with which one, I might say, ducks under the characterized pressure, to also prove today that there is something in man like a spirit, like a soul. And that is what has occurred in those who do not see the whole situation in the cultural development of the present.

We owe all the hopes that are based on certain justified grounds to this striving for the spirit, but which moves in the wrong direction. that are based on certain legitimate grounds, the hopes that many a naturalist has with regard to hypnotism, with regard to the possibility that one human being may suggest some idea to another when their consciousness is dulled. We owe to this quest the hopes that many place in the study of the dream life and the like, and we owe to this quest, to get to the spirit – because man cannot help but seek the spirit after all – the whole error of spiritualism.

What is actually being sought in this area? Well, take something like what happens in the case of hypnotism or mediumship. What actually happens there? There, that which is normal human consciousness, through which man is firmly grounded in ordinary life, is subdued. When a person is hypnotized, that which is his conscious ability in ordinary life is subdued. In a sense, other forces then take effect on the unconscious or semi-conscious or quarter-conscious person, which may come from the person next to him or from others. There, without doubt, all kinds of interesting things come to light. Of course, all kinds of interesting things also come to light through mediumship; but what comes to light is achieved on the basis of a dimming, a lulling of the ordinary consciousness. This is never the aim of the research methods of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The research method of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science says: Man has advanced in his development to the consciousness that he has in ordinary life through his senses in the waking state; if one wants to recognize something new about man that is beneficial, one should not paralyze this consciousness, one should not dampen it down, but on the contrary, one should develop it further, as I have indicated. One should increase clarity, guide sensory perceptions into the power of memory by applying the will, which otherwise arises only from dull desire, to self-discipline. Because one does not go this way, because one has not the courage and the perseverance for this way, one belittles the will and believes that in this way one will arrive at a knowledge of the soul, of the spiritual in man.

But what does one arrive at by taking away man's other abilities? By putting people to sleep, one arrives at an external way of looking at people that does not show them as spiritual-soul beings, but shows them precisely in their subhumanity, in that which makes them more like animals than they are in ordinary life. It must be strictly emphasized that through all these sometimes well-intentioned research methods, the human being is led down into the subhuman. If I hypnotize someone and give him a potato, but by the power of suggestion make it clear to him that it is a pear, and he bites into the potato with the consciousness of biting into a pear, then I darken his higher consciousness in such a way, I act on him in such a way as is done to the instinct of the animal. The only difference is that even in his subhuman aspects, man is not entirely an animal, but that his animal nature expresses itself in a different way. That is the essential point. And if one seeks to find any kind of thought-transference in a state of sopor or in a diminished consciousness, then one is dealing with an instinctive activity that has been translated into the human, that is to say with something subhuman. Anyone who lumps together what wants to be anthroposophically oriented spiritual science with these things defames anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For here it is not a matter of leading man down from his ordinary state of consciousness into something subhuman, but of leading him beyond himself, so that the ordinary consciousness continues to have an effect and a higher consciousness is added to this ordinary consciousness.

This is precisely what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science shows through its research method: that the human being we have here in the sense world is based on an animal, subhuman instinct; and this can be evoked and demonstrated by putting ordinary consciousness to sleep. When it expresses itself differently than in ordinary consciousness, the spiritual science just meant here can follow this other expression. It characterizes this other expression, which always takes place in hypnosis, in the mediumistic state, as a subhuman, as a descent into animality. But at the same time it shows that what lives in man as animality is not the same as in the ordinary animal. The method of research of which I have spoken here, as of the spiritual science meant here, knows that what comes to light through such experiments as in hypnotism and mediumship is something that still lives in man today from earlier human conditions. It is precisely because this spiritual science does not arrive at a subjectively colored, but at an objective self-knowledge, that it can gain a judgment about what it actually is that occurs through hypnosis and through mediumship. This is something that does not belong to this earthly world.

If we follow the development of the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms in the earthly world with the means of spiritual science, and follow it in its relation to man, then we find that man, as he is now, is adapted to the earth precisely because he has his present consciousness. The states of consciousness that occur in sleep, in hypnosis, and in mediumship are not states of consciousness, are not human powers that could arise from man being adapted to the earth; that arises from such an adaptation that was peculiar to man before the earth became earth. And it is precisely through such states that research into the conditions of the earth itself is rejected, but these preceded the present state of the earth.

If one now investigates further how the present state of the earth is connected with the animal and plant world, one sees that man carries something within himself that does not make him appear adapted to today's earthly existence, but that the animal and plant world is adapted to today's earthly existence. From this we can see that man certainly existed in primitive conditions, which, if brought about today, would have nothing but a deadening effect on his consciousness, before the present-day animals existed in their present form. So that we have to say: Man did not ascend from the animal world, but man was, albeit with such states of soul and spirit as we bring up, as they occur in animal-like ways in the characterized states, present before the earth came to this present planetary state.

I cannot go into the details for you today, which you can read about in my books. But I wanted to at least hint that precisely by observing certain things on which hopes are pinned today for knowledge of the present nature of man, a way is shown to gain insight into pre-earthly times and into the nature of man in such times. But in the same way, the fact that we can evoke states of consciousness that lie above the present state of consciousness adapted to the earth indicates how we will live in these higher states of consciousness when the earth is no longer our dwelling place.

These things open up to the inner eye. One cannot say: These things cannot be proved, just as little as you can prove that camels exist. You must have seen them, or someone must have seen them, and then you know that camels exist. In this way one cannot prove the supersensible with the ordinary power of judgment, which is valid only for the ordinary world. One must show how one comes to see the supersensible. From this vision of the supersensible, that which indeed has an effect on the sense world but can never be seen in the sense world itself, arises.

So, of course, it could now be said: Yes, you show us how some people succeed in making the spirit their guide through a supersensible vision through the sense world and into the supersensible world. But can all people see into the supersensible world in this way? The situation is as follows: if you allow the inner training and inner development that I have described in the books already mentioned to take effect in you, and which you undertake for your soul, you will inevitably come to recognize, through your own powers of judgment and your own healthy human understanding, which is then developed, what spiritual researchers can discover in the spiritual world. But just as there are individual researchers in the physical world who investigate one thing or another, and we have to accept what they have found, so in the future development of humanity there will be individual spiritual researchers who investigate this or that in the spiritual world. Whether they can research something depends on whether, in certain moments of life, for which they have been waiting, without their having done anything to bring it about (for one can only become a waiting being through the development of the soul), that which presents itself as a spiritual fact becomes recognizable. One could say, using a religious expression, that this must come about through grace. This grace will intervene for the man as a spiritual researcher just as, let us say, this or that experience in the material world intervenes for one person and not for another. It will be so, because certain facts will always bring individual people from the spiritual world.

In order to bring these facts to light, various things are necessary; it is not only necessary to have gone through what is written in the books mentioned, to be able to fully understand what the spiritual researcher expresses, but something is needed that can be described as a quality of the human being as “fearless” to a very high degree in the face of the spiritual world. People are so reluctant to enter the spiritual world because they are actually afraid of the unknown, as a person is always afraid of the unknown. The spiritual researcher must become fearless. And on the other hand, he must acquire the quality of being able to suffer, to feel pain; because a real discovery from the spiritual world cannot be achieved without a certain pain, without a certain suffering. You will understand that this must be so if you simply imagine that the state of spiritual vision is not adapted to ordinary earthly conditions, is basically just as little adapted as our soul is adapted to our diseased organism, which hurts. If one really places oneself with the developed soul in the facts of the spiritual world, then one is in a world for which one is not initially organized. One penetrates into a world that cuts, that burns. This must be experienced. And one only penetrates to the facts if one really approaches them with the attitude that consists in applying everything that the soul can develop, but that one then waits until, in certain, I would like to say once more, gracious moments, the spiritual facts approach

This should not be imagined as something that approaches one like a fantasy idea, but rather as an experience of a profound intensity in relation to the inner being of the human being. I will just take this simple fact, which I have already mentioned, which can actually only arise through spiritual research today before the human soul, the fact that in the middle of the 15th century the whole human race in the civilized world experienced a turnaround – a simple fact. That it may be stated as a scientific fact can only come from the fact that one has worked on one's soul, diligently worked, not wanting to conquer the spirit by arbitrariness, but by working one has put oneself in an expectant state, until that which reveals itself as such an apparently simple truth has come.

Then something else is necessary. There are people, I am just mentioning the philosopher Schelling or others, who, through special moments of grace, received one or the other impression from the spiritual world. What did they do? They could not be quick enough to build up a worldview when they received an impression from the spiritual world. They draw conclusions from some impression they receive from the spiritual world. They have received an impression, then they make a whole system out of it, a whole worldview. This is what the real spiritual researcher must completely refrain from doing. The real spiritual researcher must stop at this single fact that is revealed to him, and he must wait to see if another fact is revealed to him. For example, if one has become acquainted with the fact that the earth was preceded by pre-earthly conditions in which man already lived, one must not derive a whole scientific system from it about the evolution of the Earth, but must accept such a fact as an isolated, individual fact and allow other equally isolated, individual facts to be approached, so that fact after fact presents itself, more or less comprehensive. But one must wait for each individual fact; that is what matters. Even though spiritual revelations are definitely what underlies spiritual research, these spiritual revelations only occur when the destiny of man predestines him to them. Just as one must not draw conclusions from the northern hemisphere of the earth about what is in the southern hemisphere of the earth, but must research separately what is in the southern hemisphere of the earth, so one must not draw conclusions from one corner of the spiritual world to the other, but must learn to wander around in the spiritual world, to grasp the details in their isolation. From this you can see that people will be given what they can research from the spiritual world; they can indeed learn many things.

Now you could say: Yes, but isn't there a danger that those to whom such spiritual facts are revealed will now become haughty among people, that they will consider themselves special creatures that stand out above the rest of humanity? That is already taken care of. The first thing that must precede real spiritual research is absolute modesty, especially intellectual modesty. Without developing this modesty towards all of humanity, one cannot progress in the field of spiritual research. The spiritual researcher may indeed know how to communicate individual facts from the spiritual world to his fellow human beings, but the fact that he has the grace to communicate something that is revealed to him is at the same time due to the way he approaches his fellow human beings. The spiritual researcher is one who treats even the smallest child with true reverence when it babbles something from the spirit and the soul hidden within man, even if it only asserts itself screaming from a child's throat. The spiritual researcher is glad when he hears this or that from the experience of the individual person. The experiences that people share with him are his school. He completely subordinates himself to it. He knows only one thing: he knows that what people experience, even if they are at the most primitive levels of education, is infinitely valuable, that only what is usually man's power of judgment does not follow from it. If people would judge what they have experienced correctly, they would bring forth treasures of soul and spirit from their inner being and from the depths of their being. It is these that the spiritual researcher looks for. For him, every person is an equal being with sacred mysteries in the soul, except that the consciousness, the power of judgment, sometimes does not correspond to what is in the depths of the soul. Thus the spiritual researcher in particular becomes a modest person because he always has the spiritual equality of people in mind in this regard, and because he knows that he only has what he researches in the spiritual world because he is a human being among humans. Thus he is predestined to work in the spirit for other people, who in turn can develop their souls through meditation and concentration to such an extent that they can receive what the spiritual researcher says.

You may reply that it is not very well organized that people should live side by side in such a way that they should learn from individuals what they can understand but cannot discover for themselves. I can answer that in two ways. One is that this is a fact that has to be accepted like many other facts of life, even if some people might wish otherwise. That is the first thing I can say. But the other thing is that anyone who foresees such a future for humanity, a future in which there are people among us who can see into the spiritual world and reveal intimate matters to people from this spiritual world, so that in this way other people can experience from their own understanding what they can gain in the way suggested, also knows that the most intimate relationships will develop from person to person. And he also knows that it is precisely through this that the social impulses pass from soul to soul and that the real social life is brought about in the spirit, which today one believes can only be achieved through external means. Just think how people will be brought together, how they will present a social structure in their living together, when people will face each other in such a way that one person accepts what the other is investigating as a most important, intimate matter for him. It is precisely in this way that people in the future will come close to each other in the desirable way, that spirit will work in the soul of the next person in the way that has been indicated. Those who can explore the spirit will be felt to be a necessity for other people. On the other hand, the spiritual researcher will also feel that the whole of humanity is rooted in it, without which he cannot live, without which he himself would not have the slightest meaning with his spiritual research.

Even if today the social question has been made into something that is merely understood in an outwardly materialistic way, what is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, when viewed inwardly, shows that when the spirit becomes the guide through the world of the senses and out of the world of the senses into the supersensible world, the structure is thereby also brought about in the social life of people, through which the human being can become for the human being in the future what he is actually meant to become.

In this way, I have tried to characterize to you today, from a different point of view than in the numerous previous lectures, how anthroposophy attempts to penetrate the spirit and how this penetration is based on developing the inherent powers of the human soul. I have been trying to do this for almost two decades in what I call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It is still said in many circles that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science represents something of a striving for Buddhism or something similar. In my last lecture here, I already hinted at how precisely this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which works from the essence of the human being, from the present essence of the human being himself, abhores that weakness of people who do not want to strive from what is there, not from what we have acquired in modern natural science, but who want to go to the Orient, to India, for my sake, and take there that which was adapted for a completely different age and no longer fits into our present. We experience it again and again. A few days ago, here in Switzerland, it could be experienced again that people say: Anthroposophism, as they express themselves, also represents some kind of escape to India. When this is said in particular by people who call themselves 'Christian', then I would like to remind these Christians of something that they may know: 'You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor'. Because it is nothing less than bearing false witness against one's neighbor when one speaks of what is meant here as anthroposophical spiritual science, as if it were something obscure, as if it were something for humanity that has become purely passive and the like. Because humanity has become passive, because humanity can no longer come to action through what has been traditionally imparted to it through the centuries, a new spirit must be sought as a guide through the world of the senses and into the supersensible world.

Those who always only speak of warming up the old spirit and loathing, as one loathed natural science at the time of Galilei, that which appears as spiritual science, to them should be said above all, especially when they want to speak from the Christian spirit: Those who take Christianity seriously need have no fear that the Christ Impulse in its true significance, the religious worship of man, will suffer any impairment through any discovery, even if it be a spiritual discovery. On the contrary, religious life will be given a higher radiance by the fact that people will once more know what spirit and soul are, that they will not allow themselves to be dictated to about what spirit and soul are, that they will seek within the soul the way to experience the spirit and the soul. But this is what is striven for in the movement that has its external representation outside in Dornach at the Goetheanum.

The movement strives for that which lives unconsciously as a longing in numerous souls without their knowing it. It will not be possible to extract it from these souls by mere decree or dictate, but it will live in the souls as a striving, even if one were to bring about the actual representation of this striving. For just as man would die if he ceased to absorb new life forces at the age of thirty-five, just as he could not continue to live from that point on if he did not supply himself with new material life forces, so humanity cannot continue to live if it only only wants to assimilate what is old and traditional, if a new spirit does not arise in due time, weaving itself into the evolution of mankind.

For that is what this spiritual science wants to make clear and unambiguous, not obscurantism, not complicated mysticism. That is what it wants to make clear and unambiguous: that the spirit is the living element, the true guide through the world of the senses and into the supersensible world. Without the spirit we become directionless in the world of the senses. But if we develop the spirit as a guide through the world of the senses, then it proves not to be an abstract spirit of ideas alone, but to be the living spirit in us. And then we would have to clip its wings, through which it wants to strive into its actual homeland, into the homeland of the spirit, if we, after having chosen it as a guide through the world of the senses, do not want to ascend through it, through its guidance, into the supersensible world. For the spirit is alive. And if the belief can spread that the spirit, in contrast to matter, is not an independent living entity, what is the cause of this? The only cause is that man has deadened the spirit within him through his will, and so the dead spirit cannot grasp the living spirit. But if the spirit in man is quickened, then the living spirit in man grasps the living spirit in the world.

When I last had the honor of speaking here a few weeks ago about spiritual science, I tried to explain the general character and the nature of the research of this spiritual science and also to point out the extent to which this spiritual science is not only in full agreement with scientific research and its discoveries, but also that it must necessarily fit into the aims of the time as a humanities today through the aspects that this natural scientific research has acquired for our general world view, that it must be taken up by the aims of our time.

This evening I will take the liberty of speaking about the mood that can evoke opposition and hostility in the soul towards this spiritual science. But so that we understand each other, so that those who were not present among today's esteemed audience at the last lecture can also follow the remarks, please allow me to say a few words in introduction to what was the subject of the last lecture and what is intended to characterize the general character of spiritual science.

Just as it is true that, on the one hand, spiritual science is a kind of continuation of scientific thinking, of the scientific world view for the spiritual realm, it is equally true, on the other hand, that this spiritual science, because it extends to the realm of spiritual life, of the spirit, of spiritual beings, needs different research methods, a different kind of world view, than the natural science directed towards the outer material existence. The natural scientist uses external instruments and external methods of observation for his research and to obtain his results. He has, so to speak, before him what the objects of his research give him and what the laws of his research allow him to gain. The spiritual researcher is different: he must find the connection to a world that, as the source, as the spiritual source of our existence, underlies all external reality, but which eludes the senses and also the mind, which relies on the statements of the senses, on external perception. The spiritual researcher must penetrate into a realm that is initially not accessible to external perception, to external observation. And the only instrument that is initially available to him, in the sense of true spiritual science, to penetrate into the spiritual world, is only his own soul.

But this own soul, as it is initially found in everyday life and also for external science, is not suitable for penetrating into the spiritual world. This human soul is so arranged for external life that it must make use of the organs, the instruments of the body. Through the sense organs, through the intellect, which is connected to the brain, the external world becomes accessible to it. The fact that the senses and also the intellect, which is connected to the brain, can only penetrate to the physical-sensory existence, was explained in more detail here last time, so it should not concern us today.

Let us first deal with the fact that this human soul, as it is in everyday life, must be transformed in order to penetrate into the spiritual world. It must first become that through which it can penetrate into the spiritual world, and it can only become this through the fact that the human being himself makes it so. And not external events, not experiences that are in the physical world, can advance the soul so that it can penetrate into the realm of the spirit, but only intimate, inner processes of the soul itself. These essentially consist of the soul practicing concentration of thought and meditation, as these things are called. You can find more details in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'.

When the soul, under certain conditions, erases and extinguishes the perceptions of the senses and the thoughts of the ordinary mind, and yet remains aware of itself as a soul, then it is in the state in which it gradually develops into the spiritual world. This state can be compared to the ordinary state of sleep in which a person finds themselves. When the ordinary senses gradually become silent as a person falls asleep, when ordinary thinking, the ordinary impulses of perception, feeling and will cease, then the human soul is indeed no longer using its body as an instrument. But at the same time it becomes unconscious. The darkness of unconsciousness spreads around it. Everything that is silent in sleep must also be silent in the spiritual researcher. But through inner strengthening of the soul life, through the spiritual researcher energetically and patiently over many years often concentrating a soul activity, even if only for a short time, just for minutes, on certain ideas — you can find more details in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'? — by means of which the soul is enabled to contract in inner power so that this soul can develop a life that is not mediated by the body, not by the sense organs.

One can indeed bring the soul into the same state in which it is otherwise only in normal sleep, but which differs from this state in that one is awake, although one does not think and perceive as in the ordinary waking state. One can detach this soul - the expression has already been used here - from the body as if by spiritual chemistry. If one strengthens one's thinking and feeling in the appropriate way, if one makes it increasingly stronger, one attains something in the instrument of one's own human being that can be compared to the separation of hydrogen from water in external chemistry. Just as water reveals nothing of the properties of hydrogen as such, so man, facing everyday life, reveals nothing of the actual properties of his soul.

But when this soul is strengthened by appropriate reinforcement of its inner powers, then it comes to experience itself not unconsciously, but fully aware outside of its body, so that its own body and its otherwise everyday destiny, its everyday experiences, face it like the outside world. Like the table or the chair as an object, the powerfully strengthened soul can face its own body. It expresses itself out of the body through the increased power that it acquires through meditation and concentration, as these exercises to strengthen the soul are called. In this way we can look inside when our soul has been strengthened; we see, as it were, ourselves in the world, but our soul is outside the body, which is very vivid through the method that really makes the soul go out of the body.

The possibility of penetrating into the spiritual world essentially rests on the human soul being able to become alive and perceptive outside the body. The strictest proof of the soul's independence also rests on the fact that the soul can experience and perceive outside the body through the spiritual-scientific method. One could deny that the soul is something outside the body, for example, when the person is asleep. One could say that the soul is nothing other than what is brought about by the machine of the body; when the machine of the body comes to a standstill, no expressions of life are shown. One could claim that when the machine of the body comes to a standstill in death, all soul activity ceases.

But when spiritual science shows that the soul can experience itself and perceive itself when it is outside the body, when it has the body before it, then at the same time proof of the independence of the soul is brought. This proof is possible. It is possible through the strengthening of the same inner powers that we otherwise also exercise in life, but only apply to all external events of life, and through the detachment of these powers from the external events of the day and the strengthening of these powers through meditation and concentration. These proofs — as far as they can be discussed, they were in the last lecture.

When the spiritual researcher has arrived at this kind of body-free perception, when he experiences himself in his soul, so that this soul is outside his body, then he is in fact in the spiritual world exactly as he is in the everyday life in the material world, when he has immersed himself with his soul in his body and makes use of the senses and the ordinary mind. In a spiritual world, the spiritual researcher then knows himself, and he knows himself in the spiritual world in such a way that he not only surveys the life between birth or, let us say, between conception and death, but he also surveys the life after he has passed through the gate of death to a new life. Because one of the most important criteria is the prospect of repeated lives on earth, in which the whole of life on earth is such that a person lives between death and rebirth and between birth and death.

What we experience in our present life is the consequence of previous lives on earth. But between two lives on earth, we spend time in the pure spiritual, in that spiritual in which the spiritual researcher immerses when he brings his soul to experience free of the body. Thus, the overview of human life is expanded through spiritual research. And the subject matter that has just been discussed, together with broader and broader aspects of these connections in the world and their creation, of the source of human life, of that which brings security, hope and purpose to human life, is precisely what spiritual research seeks to encompass and to add to what natural science has to give for the external world.

Now, in our time, there are opponents of spiritual research – but there have been opponents at all times – people who view spiritual research with outright hostility. Today, we will not go into the individual attacks of possible opponents of spiritual science. Something else should be shown. It should be shown where hostility against spiritual science can come from in human nature, what is present in human nature, normally, one would like to say, which, when it occurs particularly intensified and developed in this or that personality, must lead to a real hostility towards the research of spiritual life, towards the methods of the spirit. Spiritual science is, in the true sense, in the genuine sense, that which, where the words are understood, has been called Theosophy. That spiritual science has been called Theosophy does not mean that spiritual research, as represented here, wants to identify with all that is called Theosophy. For today, quite dubious teachings are summarized under the name of Theosophy. If one understands it honestly and righteously, the word theosophy means nothing more than that man can become aware that he carries within himself a soul-spiritual source through which he is connected to the divine-spiritual sources that spring and work through the world, that man can feel within himself what is present through the whole world as the divine-spiritual source. That he can experience it in himself, that he can not only suspect and believe in a divine within himself, but also bring it to realization. This gives the theosophical mood. An anti-theosophical mood would arise if man either completely denied that he can grasp something in the depths of his soul, or that what he grasps is connected with a divine spiritual life that surges through the world. Or an anti-Sophian mood would arise if he at least denied that he recognizes these connections with the divine-spiritual through the powers of human nature.

One can say: the human soul can develop a theosophical and an antisophical mood. And because spiritual science shows, as it were, through the soul's experiment, through soul chemistry: one can experience the soul if one first brings it to the point of view where it is free of the body —, spiritual science must stand on the theosophical point of view and surrender to it. That which can be made free of the body is, when it is free of the body, immersed in a world of spiritual facts and spiritual entities. The life with the spiritual worlds and the spiritual entities is theosophy, is spiritual science. But it will, precisely because it is able to go into the sources of existence, differ from other world views in that it can never become narrow-minded. We experience it in the other worldviews that their adherents simply want to understand and grasp what they themselves assert, and often blindly fight everything else, almost like a folly, and say that it should not be there. Spiritual science, because it tries to penetrate into the very sources of the human soul, can understand, fully understand, where other moods come from than its own, yes, it can even, as we want to show today, fully understand the anti-Socratic mood. Today's reflection is precisely about the fact that the anti-Sophian mood is not only forgivable, so to speak, when it occurs among the enemies and opponents of spiritual science, but that to a certain extent it even corresponds to human nature and its inclinations.

The spiritual researcher is not at all surprised that opponents and enemies of his line of research arise, because he recognizes that this antagonism is basically rooted in human nature. Let us cite a fact from the field of this spiritual research itself, which will also immediately show what is meant by the naturally given anti-philosophical mood.

How should spiritual science view human beings? It has already been stated in earlier lectures that for the spiritual researcher, the entry of human beings into the earthly world is a wonderful mystery. It is clear to the spiritual researcher that when a person enters earthly life through birth, they establish their earthly life on the basis of previous earthly lives that they have gone through. Before birth, he was a spiritual being in the spiritual world. In addition to what the person inherits from his father and mother, from his ancestors, and what he receives through the hereditary substance, the spiritual soul comes from the spiritual world. What comes from the father and mother combines with what comes from the spiritual world. We see first how that which comes from the spiritual world slowly works its way into that which comes through the hereditary tendency. We see first how even the child's facial features are indeterminate, but that they become more and more distinct as the child's soul-spiritual element comes to the fore. The spiritual researcher knows that the soul and spirit are only loosely connected to the physical body at first. So with each step towards a more definite facial appearance, with the emergence of abilities and talents, we see the soul and spirit becoming more deeply embedded in the physical body. If time allowed, I could cite evidence that the soul gradually disappears into the growing physical body, that the soul gives the physical body its three-dimensional shape, that it takes possession of the physical body's movements and skills.

Perhaps I may draw the attention of some of the honored listeners who have already taken a closer look at something like this, to the way children often look when they first enter the world through birth, so that one does not know who they resemble, that they only grow into the similarity over time. This is because two currents oppose each other: that which is predisposed in the physical body, which, so to speak, works its way up as physical strength, and that which comes from the soul and spirit, which permeates the physical body and gradually asserts itself. These currents determine the reasons why a person should be born into this or that family. One is not born into a family for no reason, but because what one brings with one from the spiritual and soul world feels a certain affinity to what is often in the family in question. Even if there is misfortune in the family in question, the soul needs precisely that for its further development, which can happen to it as misfortune. The attraction of the soul and spirit and the attraction of heredity interact. The soul and spirit only gradually grow into what the outside world brings them. Therefore, a balance with what is given in the line of inheritance only takes place gradually.

Spiritual science cannot participate in the discussion of these matters in the brutal way in which the physical experimental method does so. One must be able to look more closely and intimately at the living conditions if one wants to understand them from a spiritual scientific point of view. And so we see the soul and spiritual aspects of the human being descending and connecting with the physical and bodily aspects. We see that in the early stages of a child's development, the body is almost dream-like. Not only does the child have to sleep through a large part of its existence in order to stay healthy, but there is something dream-like about its life. Then comes the time – it is the point up to which one remembers – when self-awareness clearly emerges, when the child learns to feel itself as an ego, to express its self-awareness clearly.

What is this based on? In the early days, before this happens, the spiritual and soul forces are first at work to make the body a suitable tool for the mission, the sending forth. When a person is born, the brain and the finer organs, which are still quite undetermined at first, still have a long way to go. The spiritual soul must immerse itself, must increasingly take possession of the physical body, and grow into the physical body. The forces that descend from the spiritual world do this, they shape the brain plastically, they “organize” the individual members of the human body so that it has an instrument for acting and perceiving in the outside world. This inner work that the soul performs in the body is infinitely significant and important. As long as this inner work lasts, the child must live a kind of dream life, especially as long as this work is still focused on the physical development of the brain and the finer limbs of the nervous system. Then there comes a point, which we remember later. At this point, the inner work is completed to a certain extent. It is difficult to express such things precisely in the ordinary language of everyday life, because our speech is made for the outer world, not for the spiritual world. Therefore, one must try to coin the words in such a way that they point to what underlies them. When, I would like to say, that which the spiritual soul has to do with the physical body is so far worked out that the physical body is condensed and prepared as the human being needs it for his later life, then the forces that used to work within are released. They no longer sink into the physical body, they will be there for themselves. And what is the result of this? I would like to express what the result is by means of a comparison. The parable is not to be used as an analogy to explain anything, but it should only make it clear what is meant here: if we think we have a glass plate and a mass in front of us and we look through the glass, we see what is behind it. If we now take the mass and shape it so that we can place it on the glass plate as a covering, we gradually turn what was a transparent glass plate into a mirror. If we now look into the glass, we seem to be looking at ourselves. What is presented here as a parable, thought out accordingly, makes it clear to us what happens in the first years of a child in a human being.

The child's soul and spirit work together to shape the body, to mold it plastically. We can say that they make it so dense that it no longer takes in spiritual and soul activity and works itself into the body. We can compare this to the fact that you can no longer see through a glass that has a mirror coating. The body will now reflect the spiritual-soul activity, will reflect it back; self-awareness begins. From the moment the spiritual-soul activity is complete, the body becomes a mirror, the nervous system becomes a mirror. And just as you see yourself in a finished mirror, so from that moment on, you experience yourself as an independent I, as a child, using the spiritual and soul forces to make your physical body a mirror. So, just as you perceive yourself in your mirror image, self-awareness begins to feel itself as an I. This is the point to which one later remembers going back. This is the awakening of self-awareness, this is the appearance of the ego in the child. And at the same time, we know from this that the forces that were previously used to organize the body, that brought the body to the density whereby it became a mirroring apparatus, that these are now used for everyday life, for feeling, imagining and thinking. What else comes into play here? This will be shown by the development that the spiritual researcher must undergo. When the spiritual researcher truly forms his soul free of the body, when he truly comes to a body-free experience and perception through the means mentioned in the last lecture and described in Occult Science, then he makes use, precisely in his soul, of the means that the child uses to shape the body plastically. He must reintroduce the means that ceased to be used when the relationship with the outside world began to become conscious. What the spiritual researcher needs for his spiritual method had to be stemmed by the bodily views and ideas.

One can use a precise way of expressing oneself that makes use of a word that is already frequently used today. One can say: That which the spiritual researcher must bring to consciousness is the same as what would be present in the ordinary person if consciousness were to suddenly arise in a state of sleep and the person would still be asleep. The spiritual and soul life in the ordinary person lies in the subconscious, it does not come to consciousness. For what comes to consciousness in everyday life? Not the soul-spiritual itself, but its reflection in the body, just as the person standing in front of the mirror does not see himself standing there, but his image, his reflection. So too, everyday consciousness is not one in which the soul-spiritual perceives itself, but rather what is reflected back from life as a mirror image from the moment self-awareness is awakened.

From this particular point in time onwards, what has ceased to be part of ordinary human experience, and been pushed down into the subconscious, so that the human being can focus his attention during physical life on the mirror image, must be retrieved by the spiritual researcher. This is done by the spiritual researcher in what is a fragment of the human organization itself, which is first worked out during the embryonic period and later during the time after the human being is born, up to the moment when self-awareness occurs. Two things are juxtaposed: everyday life, where man only has to do with the mirror image, while in the subconscious remains the truly real experience of the spiritual and soul. What the spiritual researcher has to do is to bring up that of which one otherwise has only a mirror image in daily experience.

Now we must bear in mind that it is in the nature of man that he is so placed in everyday life that he sends the forces into his body only in the first, most tender childhood, until the moment when the dream life transforms into the fully conscious ordinary day life, when man perceives the reflection of his soul life. Everything by which man is capable in the outer life, by which he stands firm in the social life, by which he accomplishes ordinary science, is based on the fact that he no longer uses the forces for the outer life from the characterized childhood standpoint, which can only be reflected, that he used before this point in time for the development of the physical body.

The forces that a person needs for their external physical body must therefore have the tendency to push back, to push down into the unconscious, everything that the spiritual researcher needs for their spiritual research, but that is there and that shapes the person from the spiritual world, that makes them in the image of the spiritual world. The mood must necessarily develop through this, especially in the person who is immersed in the outer physical life, who is aware of the fact that I have become capable of the outer world through what I have acquired as a human being – and who does not know that there are other forces, namely the forces that have so far worked on his inner being, for him the mood must arise to hold on to the forces that are opposed to the forces of spiritual research. This mood easily gets out of hand in ordinary life. It produces an aversion, an antipathy, to all spiritual research. One instinctively feels that one should apply those powers in the physical body that one needs for physical life. These powers have nothing to do with the powers that the spiritual researcher wants to talk about.

If one wants to state the matter forcefully, it can be characterized in the following way. One can say: Yes, the human being feels within himself the consciousness that he is capable in the physical sense of being through the powers of his body, when he forgets the other power, the spiritual-soul power, which, without his intervention, without him making an effort, has prepared the body in the first years of his childhood, on which the soul then reflects. Man pays no attention to the fact that the forces are alive that have made him what he is and that enable him to be capable. He takes for granted the instruments that he has prepared without effort. He does not think that they are formed out of the soul-spiritual world. He perceives this instrument when it is ready so that it makes him capable in the outer, physical world.

If a person is tuned in this way, if he says to himself, 'How they came into being is not my concern, I just want to use this tool', then he can enter into an anti-Sophian mood. He wants to know nothing of the forces that have formed this tool and that the spiritual researcher must bring forth and bring to consciousness. Do you realize that just at a time when material life makes so many demands on people, at a time when there are such rich and flourishing fields of knowledge, when people are so proud of material progress, that in such a time the anti-spiritual mood must get out of hand? Will you understand that there is antipathy towards Theosophy, towards the power that reigns in secret and must be brought forth by the spiritual researcher, that there is resentment? But these powers lie hidden in the depths of the soul and are brought out through spiritual research. And when they are brought up, these powers become the means by which we are introduced to the real facts and entities of the spiritual world.

Now the anti-sophical mood can be ignited a second time because the path of spiritual research is not particularly easy. What happens when a person comes to release the soul and spirit from the body, to slip out of the physical and bodily as it were? Then perceptions arise in his soul that are no longer the perceptions of the outer senses, thoughts that are no longer thoughts of his ordinary mind. Then, just as in falling asleep, the everyday world of the senses sinks away. So the outer world fades into the indefinite. But not the darkness of sleep emerges, but a new world, a world that must be understood in the right sense if it is not to be misunderstood.

When the spiritual researcher has practiced patience and energy long enough to free his soul, so to speak, to set it apart from the body, then the first thing that happens is not that he is immediately confronted with a multitude of spiritual facts and entities. But he does feel that he is in a different world. From a certain moment on, one knows what it means to be outside one's body in a spiritual-soul state. It occurs when one begins to have dream-like images with a kind of inner soul activity, just as dreams can interrupt the night's sleep, intermingling with it, and we know that they are not caused by external things in the usual way. Images arise that someone who does not understand them will consider to be fantasies, but that the spiritual researcher knows: if his spiritual-soul is developed in the right way, not as today's humanity understands evolution, but in such a way that the soul develops from the depth of its natural being, then he is in a new world. There are images that one has never seen, impressions that one has never had.

Lest I be misunderstood, I must now immediately point out something. Of course, when the soul has emerged from the body and sees a world around it, reminiscent of color images flitting back and forth, a world of sounds. But basically, not everything in this new world is the same as in the physical world. If everything were only a memory, a reminiscence of the sensory world, one could be under the impression that Plato's disciple made when he said, “Socrates knew nothing but what other people also know. Every schoolboy knows that too. Why should Socrates know more than a schoolboy? Certainly, the individual color pictures remind us of the outer purpose in life, but just as the letters of a book convey something completely new to us, even though we know all the individual letters, so the experiences of the soul introduce us to the spiritual world, even though they appear like reminiscences of the outer physical life.

There is only one point that must be overcome. What first appears, what fills our soul's field of perception, is something that the materialist can call images of the imagination, if he does not know that these images are not initially a real perception of something external, but the first manifestation of the spiritual organism. Just as we learn in the course of childhood to form our organs, to feel things in the right way, to see, and only through this do we become aware of our body, so we must, if I may use the expression, become aware of our spiritual body. What these people see as a spiritual world is only what we have to develop like a spiritual body. And in this spiritual body we have to feel, as it were, the real spiritual world. And indeed, what we perceive first is ourselves. In this sense, one can speak of visions, of hallucinations. The materialistic researcher gets to know nothing but this. And because he cannot get to know anything else, he cannot believe that the time will come when the real spiritual researcher needs them. Just as the material scientist needs his hands to perceive the physical, so the spiritual scientist needs what is produced by the senses free from the body, in order to grasp and perceive the spiritual world. First we train the mind's eye and mind's ear, and when we make use of them, we enter through them into the spiritual world.

There, on this threshold of the spiritual world, two things arise that, to a certain extent, make people shy away from really entering the spiritual world. What arises is as follows: First of all, the world of the spirit that we enter is quite different from the physical world. We cannot simply use our concepts, ideas and notions from the physical world to penetrate into this spiritual world. In our ordinary everyday life, we are accustomed to perceiving realities that we perceive with our bodies, that we perceive through our eyes and ears. We are accustomed to calling real that which we can touch with our hands, which we can understand in its laws through our mind, which is bound to the physical brain.

But we have shed this body when we enter the spiritual world as spiritual researchers. There is nothing in it that can be perceived through the body. At first, one experiences oneself in one's soul in such a way that one knows: the body is gone, one is only in the spiritual world with one's soul. What asserts itself is what one can call a complete unfamiliarity with the new situation. While you were used to being surrounded by the body in the world, you now stand there with only your soul and no inner experience. And the same strong feeling arises that can only be compared to what you experienced when you dreamed. You suddenly feel undressed in a place where many people are, full of shame because you feel you don't belong in this world. This dream gives a blurred image, somewhat like a premonition, of what happens with infinite amplification when you enter the spiritual world and feel out of place, so that you say: You stand opposed to that which you have called reality differently, you cannot see or feel what the real world has meant to you so far. What is the point of trying to enter a world that is stripped of what you have really perceived? As soon as you enter the spiritual world and are in a world that contains completely different entities, which are merely spiritual-soul, between which actions take place that lie only in the spiritual world, as soon as you enter, you must first preserve your ego with all your might. If you do not preserve your ego, you will be immersed in this entire spiritual world. Therefore, when you read the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” you will see that all the exercises recommended there are aimed at carrying the ego into the spiritual world more strongly than it is experienced in the outer world. When I see a blue color in the sensory world, I say: I see it. I think it is outside of me. When one enters the spiritual world, one takes on its properties. When one submerges into the spiritual world, one must become one with the spiritual world. The entire inner being spreads out into the spiritual world, flows out into the spiritual world. And the thoughts – one does not feel as though one is thinking them, but rather they think themselves. You are really in this spiritual world so much so that you are like Erl King and his son at the same time: the father full of worries, the son with all kinds of visions surging through his soul. You are both at the same time. You perceive a new world, but you feel as if you are drawn to every thing, to every deed by some indeterminate forces. You feel as if you have been torn out of yourself. This creates a feeling in the soul that one must get to know well. A feeling of fear of being taken from what has so far guaranteed reality.

Both feelings, the feeling of being unaccustomed to the spiritual world and of being exposed in it, the feeling of fear of it, are found in the depths of the human soul. Both feelings would arise and suddenly seize the person if he were to awaken, as the spiritual researcher must awaken when he awakens from his everyday sleep; he would be seized by an infinite fear of being unfamiliar and exposed. But the ordinary sleep immediately corrects these feelings. They do not express themselves. Man numbs himself by the will arising in him to withdraw into his body and thereby wake up. That is why man feels as if he is being pushed by a will impulse towards his body when he wakes up, as long as the body can take him, that is, until death, because the body numbs the feeling of being exposed. Man numbs his feelings of fear by not allowing himself to penetrate into the spiritual world at all at first.

At the moment when man begins to penetrate into the spiritual world through exercises advised by the spiritual researcher, this fear quietly approaches his soul. Man tries to deaden it by keeping away from the spiritual world, by being materialistic, in other words, by developing to the highest degree that which is in him an anti-sophical mood, because man must deaden himself to what would fill him if he wanted to penetrate into the spiritual world. Through the feeling of fear, the soul is anti-sophically tuned. In order not to be anti-Sophian, man must do such exercises that enable him above all not to feel exposed, but to feel clothed by a spiritual body, as he is clothed here by a physical body. To overcome the feeling of fear, man must do exercises that enable him to approach the spiritual world fearlessly and boldly.

Therefore, many people are anti-philosophical. But this is basically not ill will, not something that can be strongly attributed to people, but rather it is the human desire to numb themselves to fear. This is what drives them to anti-philosophical sentiment. It is not a figure of speech when a building is erected for spiritual science somewhere and the opposition asserts itself in the whole environment and continues to do so everywhere. Therefore, the anti-sophistic mood arises from the fact that people want to numb themselves from their own abilities to enter the spiritual world. Because people cannot overcome this fear, they become anti-sophical. Just as people persuade themselves of something in order to avoid facing something else, not to let it enter their consciousness, so too, to put it frankly, they would have to say what is in their subconscious: we are afraid of the spiritual world, therefore the spiritual world must not exist for us. The consequence of this is that the person declares spiritual science to be nonsense, fantasy, dreaming, unnecessary, that he invents all kinds of things to denigrate it. These are means to numb the fear - the fear that one naturally does not understand when one speaks.

We can use the methods of spiritual science to draw particular attention to this fear in the present day and also to point out that it is not admitted, but something is invented to numb it. I would like to draw your attention to a characteristic phenomenon.

A very important physiologist who died some time ago pointed out something that only needs to be looked at in the right way to corroborate the fact just mentioned. However, I would like to point out that when I cite something that is anti-Sophistic, I am not willing to attack opponents whom I do not belittle, but whom I hold in the highest esteem in their own fields. I appreciate Du Bois-Reymond, who gave a famous, spirited speech at a famous natural science conference in the 1870s. The brilliant, outstanding explanations of a person grounded in current natural science find evidence for what he is explaining everywhere, he produces reasons everywhere. Then he approaches the conclusion.

What did he come to? He showed that natural science can only lead to an understanding of the world in which it understands motion of the smallest parts, and that it traces everything back to motion. But as much as all natural science is based on the investigation of the motion of atoms and so forth, it is also true that natural science can never grasp the soul. The naturalist can say that the red color arises from certain movements, but he cannot say how the consciousness of the red color arises in us. No natural science could ever comprehend anything of the soul from movement. If one wanted to comprehend the soul from what is solely justified in natural science, then what he calls supernaturalism would begin. And so Du Bois-Reymond concludes his speech: Natural science must stop at external movement; it can never grasp even the simplest part of the human soul. This soul could only be grasped where supernaturalism begins and natural science ends.

We can go through Du Bois-Reymond's speech and find the most beautiful reasons for what he says everywhere. Only the last assertion is like a shot from a pistol. He does not provide any evidence for it. We have the feeling – and we must have it, because it is justified – that Du Bois-Reymond, in moving from what is the justified field of his science to supernaturalism, no longer presents reasons, but antipathy. The feeling of dislike shoots out of his subconscious, making him look at supernaturalism with antipathy, but he has no reasons for his assertion. Du Bois-Reymond is not alone; I have only mentioned him as a typical representative of this tendency. Wherever there is antipathy towards the communication of spiritual science, i.e., wherever anti-Socratic sentiment arises, we see people everywhere, whether we call them materialists or monists, who give the most beautiful reasons for what they say in the way of positive arguments.

But you see, a hundred and a hundred proofs could be brought for this; where people express their antipathy towards spiritual science, the reasons stop. This antipathy comes from the subconscious, from what has nothing to do with what they know how to justify. To see what arises, we must shine a light into the human soul organization with the means of spiritual science, and here external natural science actually meets spiritual science halfway, as natural science always does when the latter understands itself and does not want to found a comprehensive world view on misunderstood knowledge.

One can examine how his organization works under the influence of thinking, which is directed only at the outer world of sense perceptions and the intellect, through the particular way in which the purely external, purely fact-based scholar, who otherwise only relies on what his thinking gives him about the outer world, investigates. You can see that the nerves are put in the same position as when a person is in a state of fear, only that in the case of a state of fear caused by a sudden shock, can be disturbed in its circulation; it can be drawn from the outer parts of the body and directed to the heart and brain, so that fainting can occur as a result of sudden fright. The scholar attributes what suddenly causes the fear to a long life. He dissolves the states of fear, as it were. When he encounters the world, he is overcome by fear in his entire soul, then he dissolves this fear into the anti-Sophian mood.

The Danish researcher Lange has written a book about the emotions, in which the states of fear are also characterized in psychological terms. But spiritual science can also do this with its means. The whole vascular system is put into a different mood when a person experiences fear or shock. When fear arises in the human soul, even the fluids are put into a different mood. This could be described in detail. It would take up too much of our time, but there is one thing you will all know: when a person is overcome by terror or fear, they suddenly feel insecure. They have the urge to hold on to something, and may even faint. Physically, they seek to hold on.

What one produces through an activity directed purely towards the external world of observation is a fear and terror spread over the years. Slowly and gradually fear is poured into the soul and into the organism that which is the state of fear when one only experiences that which relates to the external sense world. When people are in this state of fear, then that which expresses itself in them, in their field, is what expresses itself in a person who is in fear and terror and says: I am falling over, give me something to hold on to. This is what the person who is so inclined that he rejects the supernatural world says. I will reject the spiritual world, give me something to hold on to. Physical observation, the theory of atoms, is what those who are seized by a subconscious sense of fear hold on to.

This is the answer that science, which is directed towards the external, must produce, which wants to know nothing of this spiritual science, of the conditions that one is supposed to experience without being able to hold on to external knowledge, to physical laws. Just as the fearful want to hold on to the table or chair, so those who are afraid of the spiritual world want to hold on to matter, because they are afraid of sinking into a spiritual powerlessness if they cannot hold on to matter. He numbs himself with this fear by imagining: there is nothing supernatural.

From these remarks, we see how anti-Sophian sentiment must be generated in a natural way, we see how anti-Sophian sentiment must be generated precisely in the forms that this external science takes. You will find all the more anti-Sophian sentiment the more man lets himself be inwardly infected by the sentiment that this science generates, which is directed outwards. Thus, it can be said that something is given to man entirely in his natural disposition, which can be described as an antisophical mood. And the more man places himself in the outer life - be it in practice or in science - the more antisophical mood is stored.

But just as a pendulum, when it swings to one side, must also swing to the other side, so too, when external form swings to the anti-Socratic mood, man must also swing to the other side - theosophical. Man cannot stand there in spiritual peace, just as the pendulum cannot be at rest when it has swung to one side. Man could only then keep his soul at peace if he were to remain completely dull in a spiritual twilight. It can happen, precisely because of the mood of the present, that the soul is carried away by the antisophical mood. All the more reason to note, in the depths of the human soul, for those who can look at it more intimately, that the pendulum wants to swing to the other side, that the theosophical mood is also in numerous human souls. It is a matter of this theosophy being guided in the right direction for spiritual science in particular. It does not have the task of creating the theosophical mood; this mood will arise of its own accord, like the opposite swing of the pendulum. The more we approach the future, the more the theosophical mood will arise in all human souls that understand each other, in contrast to the anti-sophical mood. But the theosophical mood, however little it needs to be created, needs to be guided and directed by spiritual science. It must find the right path through spiritual science, just as the anti-theosophical mood must find its right path. Otherwise, what I want to suggest by way of a comparison could easily happen.

Tasso is known not only through his own poetry but also through the work of Goethe. Tasso spoke of a spirit with whom he converses. He did not speak as the spiritual researcher speaks. The spiritual researcher who brings himself to consciousness and knows what kind of being it is, who can maintain his consciousness, must speak differently than the poet who dresses what he feels in fantasy. The spiritual researcher of the present holds on to the ego and does not allow fear to arise. Tasso did not yet live in the age in which spiritual research began to educate about the spiritual world. Tasso spoke of a spirit with whom he conversed and to whom he owed his best thoughts. Manso, who had written a life of Tasso, always laughed at this strange spirit with whom Tasso conversed. He sees nothing, they say. So Tasso once said to him: “I will make you see and hear him for once.” And once, after they had been hunting together, Tasso suddenly looked towards the window where he was standing with Manso. Manso saw how Tasso began to speak as if to a foreign being. Tasso was holding a conversation with him. And Manso could not content himself with saying that Tasso might have invented it. He spoke in such a way that he gave answers that he could not have given of his own accord. When the conversation was over, Tasso said to him: 'Do you now have proof of the spirit to which I am speaking?' 'Yes,' said Manso, 'I heard you talking to a spirit, but I saw nothing.' Then Tasso said: 'You have seen and heard enough. If you had seen more, then – he broke off. You could not have borne it, we could complete his words in this way.

This is how it could be for souls if they did not, as is natural, have to develop the theosophical mood as a response, as a counterbalance, to the antisophical mood. They could necessarily perceive the spiritual, but one must doubt whether they could bear it. Spiritual science must guide these souls in the right direction. As long as people indulge in anti-sophical moods, it will be there that anti-sophists are, so to speak, the images of Mephisto, the original anti-sophist of modern times. He is the original anti-sophist. When he gives Faust the key to the realm of mothers, he explains that Faust will enter into nothingness. Faust, the theosophist, declares: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” He has overcome fear, he does not need to anesthetize himself in the face of fear.

If we develop this, which leads from the anti-theosophical to the theosophical mood, then again the case is that one can say: With spiritual science, one feels in harmony with all those people who, over time, even if they have not yet been able to embrace spiritual science – for spiritual science can only in our time grasp the soul and stand alongside natural science – with all those who, out of true, genuine spiritual research, represent the progress of humanity, with all those one feels in harmony.

When we consider the human soul with its anti- and theosophical moods, both of which must necessarily be present in the human soul, as we have done today, then we can say that we are fully understanding of all opponents and enemies of spiritual science. We have to defend ourselves against them, but we understand them. And this understanding can even lead to compassion, because in most cases, opposition is nothing more than an anaesthetic for the fear that overcomes a person when they first want to penetrate into the spiritual world and are not prepared. The anti-Sophist does not feel this fear, but it is present in his subconscious. And he places himself on the side of the person who, in the eighteenth century, responded as a philosopher to the antisophical trend. Haller, the great sage, who is also well known here in Switzerland. He is mentioned here, just as other people are mentioned, rather than lesser opponents, because he was one of the greatest in his field. Because in his soul, precisely in order to achieve that in which he had become great, namely as a natural scientist in the external fields, the anti-Sophian mood grew ever greater, he says:

Into the innermost nature
No created spirit penetrates.
Happy he to whom she only
The outer shell rejects.

This is the anti-Sophian sentiment, which cannot penetrate, recognize that man has an inner source of existence, and cannot approach this source scientifically. Goethe opposes this with his theosophical sentiment. He does not speak of theosophical or anti-Sophian sentiment. But he says, with regard to Haller's words:

I have heard this said for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and willingly,
Nature has neither core
nor shell,
She is everything at once;
She only tests you most of all
Whether you are the core or the shell.

Man can develop an anti-Sophistic mood within himself. He can come to the frame of mind of saying: I want to get to the core, to that which guarantees my reality when I am only in my shell. What underlies what life hides from me, its core, may remain hidden. This is expressed in the sentence:

No created spirit
Can penetrate the innermost nature.
Happy the man to whom she
Only the outer shell shows.

The theosophist says: Man is, in the innermost part of his being, that which is spiritual and soul-like in him. The spiritual and soul-like triumphs over the body, [it is that] which conquers the body in death and passes through death into the spiritual world, in order to experience the spiritual world through death and to come back to the body again through a new birth for further development! A person can live in their core, and when they live in their core and only experience it, then they experience the spiritual and soul life that flows and surges through the world. Just as we are present in the entire physical world through our body as instruments and forces, so we are present in the spiritual and soul life of the world by experiencing the innermost part of our soul. And even if not everyone can become a spiritual researcher, the soul of man is predisposed to the knowledge of truth. Only a few people need become spiritual researchers. But even if one is not a spiritual researcher oneself, if one only examines one's own ordinary human thinking, one is able to understand everything that the spiritual researcher says, if one applies what has been indicated about soul development.

The spiritual researcher is not limited to speaking only to spiritual researchers. He knows that he speaks to the innermost core that is in every soul. And if external prejudices do not prevent it, every soul can feel the truth of what the spiritual researcher says. This theosophical mood will become more and more a part of life, will increasingly embrace the goals of spiritual life, especially as people come to ever more glorious and fruitful spiritual life. Then the human soul will defend itself against the anti-theosophical mood in its quiet hours, in the moments when it feels, when it becomes aware of how it is connected with the core of all existence. Then the soul will try to awaken such a theosophical mood, which expresses itself in saying more and more in the face of all anti-theosophical sentiment:

Nature has neither core
nor shell;
All at once it is everything;
— Nothing is inside, nothing is outside.
Because what is inside is also outside. —
You, most of all, test yourself
Whether you are core or shell.

The considerations we are currently undertaking concern matters that are treated as mysteries by many people who know something about them in one form or another. And for certain reasons, knowledge of these things is kept away from the world from many sides, because it is believed that the things in question are parts of a comprehensive knowledge of supersensible matters that should not yet be communicated to mankind. I do not consider this view to be correct with regard to certain things that are being discussed here. On the contrary, it seems to me necessary for humanity to make the courageous decision to enter into a real consideration of the supersensible worlds. And one cannot do that otherwise than by directly grasping what is specifically considered in relation to the question in question.

Today, I would like to deal with a preliminary question first. Yesterday we spoke about the stages a person goes through between death and a new birth. A very common objection to discussing these things, not on the part of the initiated, but on the part of the uninitiated, is that one simply says: Yes, why is it necessary to know something about these things? One could indeed wait until one passes through the gate of death, and then one will see what it is actually like in the spiritual world. It is something that is said very often. Now, the thing is that we can never answer such questions from a so-called absolute point of view when we talk about reality, but that we, from a spiritual-scientific point of view, must always answer them from the point of view of the time in which we live. We live in the fifth post-Atlantic period, which began in the 15th century of our calendar. It concluded the fourth post-Atlantic period, which, as we know, began in the 8th century BC and came to an end in the 15th century AD. There are seven such cultural periods. From this, however, it can be seen that we have passed the midpoint of the cultural development of the earth, which was in the fourth post-Atlantic period, and that we are simply entering – we are, after all, also in the fifth great earth period – the time when the earth is in a descending development.

The considerations we have been making in these days can already draw your attention to the fact that it is important to look at the descending development, at that which is, so to speak, not in evolution but in devolution, which is in retrogression. Our whole evolution on earth is in retrogression. Certain abilities and powers that were present in the previous period of ascending development cease to exist, and others have to take the place of these ceasing powers and abilities. This is particularly the case with certain inner psychic abilities of the human being. It can be said that until the fourth post-Atlantic period, until around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, people still had the ability to have a certain connection with the supersensible world. We know that these abilities have disappeared in the most diverse ways. They no longer exist as elementary abilities; they have, so to speak, dwindled away. Not only has the life of man on earth changed between birth and death with regard to such abilities, but actually, and even more radically, has the life of man changed between death and a new birth. And it must be said that for this period of time, from death to a new birth, in the present cycle of mankind, which thus already belongs to the descending ones, it is so that men, when they go through the gate of death , they must have certain memories of what they have acquired here in the physical body if they want to find the right attitude and the right relationship to the events to which they are exposed between death and a new birth. It is one of the necessary prerequisites for a right life after death that people here before death acquire more and more certain ideas about life after death, because only when they remember these ideas, which they have acquired here, can they orient themselves in the time between death and a new birth. It is factually incorrect to claim that one can wait until death to have such ideas about the life between death and a new birth. If people continued to live in these prejudices, if they persistently refused to want to gain insights here already about life between death and a new birth, then this life, this life free of the body, would become a dark one for them, one in which they would be disoriented; they would not be able to penetrate their spiritual surroundings in the right way through everything that I described to you yesterday. Until almost the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the case that people brought abilities into their physical life here that originated in the spiritual world. That is why they had atavistic clairvoyance. This atavistic clairvoyance came from the fact that certain spiritual abilities extended from the pre-birth state into this life. That stopped. People no longer have abilities here in physical life that extend from the prenatal life. You know that. But the other thing must be done instead: people must acquire more and more ideas here on earth about the post-mortem life, the life after death, so that they can remember after death, so that they can carry something through the gates of death.

That is what I want to comment on in particular regarding this preliminary question. So the comfortable notion that one can wait until death to form such ideas does not apply if one considers in concrete terms at what point in time of the development of the earth we actually are. And this must always be borne in mind. For views that are absolutely valid, that apply at all times, do not exist; there are only views that can guide people for a certain period of time. This is what one must acquire in such an eminent sense through spiritual science.

And now I would like to discuss a few things that can bring our considerations to a preliminary conclusion. We started from the assumption that the present human being feels a gulf between what he calls ideals, be they moral or other ideals, which he also calls ideas, and what he feels to be his views on the purely natural order of the world. The concepts and views that man forms about the natural order of the world do not enable him to assume that what he carries in his heart as ideals has real power and can actually be realized like a natural force.

The essential thing to consider in this question is now the following: We now know how it is with the structure of the human being here on the physical earth. We also know how it is with the structure of the human being in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Some time ago I raised a question which actually already comes before the human soul as a concrete question when the human being looks at life, but which is precisely a question to which one cannot say anything when one is faced with the gap just characterized between idealism and realism between idealism and realism, that is the question: How is it that in our world order some people die very young, as children or young people or in middle age, while others only die when they have grown old? What is the connection with the order of the world? Neither idealism on the one hand nor realism on the other, which cannot regard ideals as real powers, can shed any light on such questions, which are, however, questions of life. These questions can only be approached if one has something very definite in mind. And that is to realize that the present human being, as he will one day stand before us as an earthly human being, can cope relatively easily with space, but he does not cope in the same way with time. In this respect, the sum of all existing philosophical views does not really offer any significant insight, and the question of the nature of time has so far only been treated in the narrowest human circles. It is not that easy to speak about time and its essence in a way that is accessible to the general public, but perhaps I can succeed in giving you an idea of what I mean by bringing time into discussion in analogy to space. I will have to tax your patience a little, because the brief consideration I want to give to this subject seems to have a somewhat abstract character.

If you simply overlook a piece of the room, you know that what you overlook reveals itself to you in a perspective character. You have to take into account the perspective of the room when you overlook a piece of it. If you now bring the piece of room that you overlook and to which you instinctively ascribe a perspective character onto a surface, then you take the perspective into account. If you look down an avenue, you see the distant trees of the avenue as smaller and closer together. You can express this in perspective, and you can, in a sense, express in perspective on a surface what you see in space.

Now it is clear that what you see in space is juxtaposed in a flat surface. In space, it is not juxtaposed; there are two trees in front (see drawing on p. 164), and two trees are far away. But by bringing the visible space into the flat surface, you place what is behind one another next to one another. You have the instinctive ability to transpose what you have painted or drawn on a surface into three dimensions. That you have this ability is due to the fact that man, as he is now as an earthly man, has become relatively detached from space as such.

Man has not detached himself from time in the same way. And that is something tremendously important and significant, but something that unfortunately is hardly noticed, hardly noticed by science. Man believes that when he develops in time, he has time. But in reality he does not have real time. He does not have real time at all, but what you experience as time is actually, in relation to real time, something that can be called an image. Just as this image (see drawing) in the plane relates to space, so what the ordinary person calls time relates to real time. The ordinary person does not experience real time, but rather experiences an image of time. And that is very difficult to imagine.

For example, it is extremely difficult for you to imagine that something that is effective today does not need to be present at the present moment in time, but is real at a much earlier point in time and is not real at the present moment in time. You can, so to speak, project that which is present in a very early period of time into your own time.

What I have just said has a very significant consequence. It has the consequence that everything we call nature has a completely different character than everything we have to regard as a certain part of the human being itself. For example, Ahriman also works in nature outside, or rather the Ahrimanic powers work; but the Ahrimanic powers never work in nature outside at the present time. If you look at nature as a whole, Ahriman is at work in nature, but he is working from a distant time. Ahriman works from the past. And whether you look at the mineral, the vegetable or the animal kingdom, you must never say that there is something in what is currently unfolding before your eyes in which Ahriman is active. And yet Ahriman is active in it; but from the past. If I were to describe the matter, I would have to say: Here is the line of development from the past into the future, and here you survey nature.

Yes, now you have to imagine looking into it. What you see before you in the present contains no ahrimanic powers, but Ahriman works through nature from the past, from a particular past.

And to you, Ahriman appears in nature, when you become aware of him there, in perspective. If you were to say: Ahriman is at work in the present — then you would be making the same mistake in relation to nature as if you were to say: When I survey a room, the distant trees stand beside the near trees (see drawing on page 164) because they can be placed in perspective within the space.

A fundamental requirement for a real view into the spiritual world is this: that one learns to see in perspective in time, that one learns to place every being at its correct point in time.

If I said yesterday that after death the I is, as it were, transferred from a fluid state into a kind of solid state, that is not all there is to it. Suppose you lived here on earth with your I from 1850 to 1920, and in 1920 you became aware of your I. I mean: you will become aware of it earlier, but now you look back, with the spirit self through the hierarchies you look back at your ego; there you see your ego always as it was from 1850 to 1920. The ego stays there, stays put. This means that your experiences do not go with you soon after your death, but you look back on them. You now look back from a temporally distant perspective and you see into the length of time, just as you see into the length of space here in the physical world. I can also express it this way: when you die, say, in 1920, you live with all that I described to you yesterday as the members of your being, but then you look back on the stretch of time in which you lived here on earth with your ego. And that stretch of time remains there, and you always see it as you continue to live in perspective, at the point in time where it was. And so you have to imagine that Ahriman is active outside in nature, but from an earlier point in time.

This is very important. It is something that is given very little consideration. If one wants to understand the world, if one wants to speak spiritually of time, then one must absolutely imagine time in a spatial way and must consider this connection of the spiritual substance with time. This is very important.

Now, what I said to you about the Ahrimanic powers, that they work from the past, is true for nature. But with human beings it is different. For the human being, while he lives here between birth and death, it is different precisely because everything that comes to an end in time becomes maya, deception, for him. While he lives here, the human being lives within the course of time itself, and by living through a certain number of years, he lives through the course of time. As time passes, he himself passes with time. That is not the case with space. When you walk down an avenue, the trees remain behind and you move forward, and you do not take the trees, which are left behind, and your impressions with you in such a way that you would have the impression that the tree image is moving with you when you take a step. You do that with the image of time. Here in the physical body you actually do this – because you yourself continue to develop in time – by allowing yourself to be deceived about time in relation to its perspective. You do not notice the perspective of time. And in particular, the subconscious mind does not notice it. The subconscious mind does not notice this living with time at all, and gives itself over to a complete deception with regard to the perspective of time. But this has a very definite consequence. It has the consequence that Ahrimanic powers can now work as present powers in what happens in man. Ahrimanic powers work in the life of the human soul as present powers. So that man stands in relation to nature in this way: when he looks out into nature, there is nothing Ahrimanic in the present. The Ahrimanic works in him as a presence, precisely as Maja, as deception. But the human being is given over to this deception about the things that I have explained to you, so that through the human being the Ahrimanic powers gain the possibility of creeping into the present, of walking into the present. We can say that the Ahrimanic forces – and the same applies to the Luciferic forces, albeit from a somewhat different point of view, which we will discuss in a moment – work in nature in such a way that they actually have nothing to do with the present, but extend their effects from prehistoric times. These Ahrimanic forces are currently at work in the human being.

What are the consequences? The consequence is that, in his deepest soul, man cannot feel related to nature in relation to the point just discussed. He looks at his being, or rather feels himself in his being, senses the nature-based being. Because ahrimanic powers are countervailing powers in him, and ahrimanic powers are past powers in nature, everything that is natural appears to him differently from that which develops within himself. Man does not unravel the difference he perceives between himself and nature in the right way. If he unraveled it in the right way, it would be as I have just explained. He would say: Outside in nature, Ahriman works from the past; in me, Ahriman works as a present power. But because of this, even if he does not know the difference, he behaves in the sense of this difference and perceives nature as spiritless. He does perceive that in the present the Ahrimanic powers are not directly active in nature, but he perceives nature as spiritless because he does not say to himself: Ahriman works from the past – instead, he only looks at present-day nature. Ahriman does not work in it.

But Ahriman, however strange it may sound, is the power that the general creation of the world uses to bring forth nature. When one speaks of the spirit of nature, when one speaks of the pure spirit of nature, one should actually speak of the ahrimanic spirit. There it is fully justified, the ahrimanic spirit. The beings of the normal hierarchies make use of the ahrimanic spirit to bring forth what extends around us as nature. The fact that we do not perceive nature in a spiritualized way is precisely because in the present life of nature the spirit is not contained, but works from the past. And that is the secret, I would say, of the world-creative powers, that they make use of a spirit that they have left at an earlier stage to work at a later stage, but let it work from the past.

When we speak of nature, we should not speak of matter, nor of forces; we should speak of ahrimanic entities. But then we would have to place these ahrimanic entities in the past. The result is a strange one: suppose some natural philosopher ponders, ponders what is behind the phenomena of nature. Well, he comes up with all sorts of theories and hypotheses about atomic connections and the like. But that is not the case. Behind what is spread out around us in a way that appeals to the senses, there is not actually what the natural philosophers usually assume, but behind all of this there is the sum of the Ahrimanic powers, but not as a presence. So if the natural philosopher is compelled to assume, let us say, that there are some atomic structures behind the chemical elements, then that is wrong; behind the chemical elements there are Ahrimanic powers. But if you could detach what you see from the chemical elements and look beyond, you would see nothing behind them in the present: it would be hollow where you look for atoms, and what is at work there comes from the past and works in this hollow space. That is how it is in reality. Hence the many unsuccessful theories about what the “thing in itself” is; for this “thing in itself” is not there at all in the present. Rather, where the “thing in itself” is sought, there is nothing; but the effect is there from the past. So that one could say that if Kart had sought his “thing in itself,” he would have had to say: Where I want to approach the 'thing in itself', there I cannot approach. — That is what he said. But he did not realize that in the beginning he would have found nothing there at all, and that if he had gone behind the veil of things, he would have had to go far back; then he would have found Ahrimanic powers.

In man himself it is different. It is precisely because man is vividly placed in time that it has been possible for the Ahrimanic powers to enter our world through the gateway of humanity and to work within man as such. And the consequence of the Ahrimanic powers working in man is that man detaches what he sees in the present from the spiritual, that man detaches his present existence from the spiritual. This is the consequence of our carrying the Ahrimanic powers within the Maja in us. So that one can say: Just as we view the world materially, detached from the spirit, as a mere natural order that believes it has reached its peak in the law of the conservation of energy and matter — which is an illusion — what we see as a natural order is merely brought about by the fact that we carry the Ahrimanic powers within us, and that they are not present as powers in nature outside us. Therefore, what we think about nature, in that we think of it merely materially, does not correspond to nature, but only to present nature. But this present nature is precisely an abstraction, because the past Ahriman always works in it.

Now, not only the Ahrimanic but also the Luciferic is at work in people. This Luciferic, however, has, so to speak, a different tendency in the universe than the Ahrimanic. Let us visualize the tendency of the Ahrimanic as we have now expressed it. The tendency of the Ahrimanic in us is to present the world in materialistic terms. That we conceive the world materialistically, that we think of a mere natural order, is the consequence of the fact that we carry Ahrimanic in us. That we carry ideals within us, which detach themselves from the general nature, according to which we want to orient ourselves in our mutual behavior, but which must appear to us only like dreams within the present world view, which are dreamed out when, according to the natural order, the earth has arrived at its final state , that is the consequence of the fact that the luciferic powers, which, like the ahrimanic ones, live in us, are constantly striving to tear the part of us that is accessible to them completely out of the natural order and to spiritualize it completely. The main tendency of the luciferic powers, insofar as they live in us, is to make us as spiritual as possible, to tear us away from all material life if possible. That is why they present us with ideals that are not natural powers, but that are powerless in the present natural order. And if, in the course of the future period of the earth, man were to fall entirely prey to the influence of Lucifer, so that he would believe that ideals are just imagined things towards which the mind can be directed, then this man would follow the luciferic powers. The material earth, to which we belong, would decay, scatter in the universe, would not fulfill its purpose, and the luciferic powers would lead man into another spiritual world to which he does not belong. To do this, they need the trick of making us believe in ideals that are actually mere dreams. Just as Ahriman, on the one hand, presents us with a world that is a mere natural order, so Lucifer, on the other hand, presents us with a world that consists purely of imagined ideals.

This is something very significant. And at present, I would say, a balance is only being struck in those areas that still lie in the human unconscious. But people must become more and more aware of this, otherwise they will not get out of this dilemma, they will not be able to build a bridge between idealism and realism, but this bridge is necessary.

What currently still creates a kind of balance is the following. When very young people die, for example children, these children – and the same applies to young people – have just looked into the world; they have not fully lived out their existence here on the physical plane. With a life unlived on the physical plane, they pass over into the other world, which is lived between death and a new birth, as I described yesterday. Because they have only lived part of their earthly life, they bring something of earthly life with them into the spiritual world that cannot be brought across when one has grown old. You arrive differently in the spiritual world if you have grown old than if you die young. If you die young, you have lived your life in such a way that you still have a lot of strength in you from your prenatal life. As a child and as a young person, you have lived your physical life in such a way that you still have a lot of the strength in you that you had in the spiritual world before you were born. In this way, a close connection has been created between the spiritual part that one has brought with one and the physical part that one has experienced here. And through this close connection, one can take something that one acquires on earth with one into the spiritual world. Children or people who have died young take something from earthly life with them into the spiritual world that cannot be taken at all if one dies as an older person. That which is taken along is then over there in the spiritual world, and what is carried over by children and young people gives the spiritual world a certain heaviness that it would not otherwise have, the spiritual world in which people then live together, gives a certain heaviness to the spiritual world and prevents the luciferic powers from completely separating the spiritual world from the physical one.

So you see, we are looking at an enormous secret! When children and young people die, they take something with them from here, which the luciferic powers use to prevent us from completely detaching ourselves from earthly life. It is extremely important to realize this.

If you get older here on earth, you cannot thwart the luciferic powers in the way described, because after a certain age you no longer have that intimate connection between what you brought with you at birth and physical life on earth. When one has grown old, this inner connection is dissolved and just the opposite occurs. From a certain age onwards we instill our own nature in a certain way into the spiritual substance within the physical earth. We make the physical earth more spiritual than it would otherwise be. So from a certain age onwards we spiritualize the physical earth in a certain way, which cannot be perceived by the outer senses. We carry spiritual into the physical earth, as we carry physical up into the spiritual world when we die young; we squeeze out, so to speak, spiritual when we grow old, I cannot say it any other way. Growing old consists in the spiritual sense from a certain aspect of squeezing out spiritual here on earth. This in turn prevents the reckoning of Ahriman. As a result, Ahriman cannot, in the long run, have such an intense effect on people that the opinion that ideals do have a certain meaning could completely die out. But in today's time frame, we are already very, very close to people falling into the most terrible errors precisely with regard to what has been said. Even well-meaning people easily fall into such errors with regard to what has been said. And these errors will become ever greater and greater and, with increasing earth development, can become enormous.

To give you an example: a very ingenious philosopher, Robert Zimmermann, wrote an “Anthroposophy” in 1882. I have already mentioned this in a context. This “Anthroposophy” is not what we now call Anthroposophy, it is more or less a concept jungle. But that is because Robert Zimmermann was not able to see into the spiritual world, he was only a Herbartian philosopher. Now he has written this “Anthroposophy”. But it is precisely in this “Anthroposophy” that Robert Zimmermann deals with the question that I have placed at the top of our considerations these days from his point of view. On the one hand, he sees ideas: logical ideas, aesthetic ideas, ethical ideas; on the other hand, he sees the order of nature. And he cannot somehow find a bridge between the logical, the aesthetic, the ethical ideas and the order of nature, but he does stop at it: on the one hand, there is the order of nature, and on the other hand, there are the ideas. And the conclusion he comes to is extremely interesting, because it is actually typical of a person in the present day. He comes to the conclusion that it is forbidden to man once and for all to populate nature with ideas and to ascribe to ideas the power of nature. The two worlds can actually only be connected in the mind of man. So he says. And so he means at one point, where he summarizes almost everything he says and thinks: “The realization of ideas is neither a fact of the past nor a fact of the present, but a task whose fulfillment lies in the future and in the hands of man. The dream of a “golden age”, of which a sober rationalist like Kant as of that of “eternal peace, as an extreme positivist like Comte as the ‘état positif’, raved about, will be fulfilled when the entire world of ideas has become real and the entire reality is permeated by the ideas, that is to say, when that which Schiller called “the secret of the master's art,” the “consumption” of matter by form, becomes manifest, or, as Schleiermacher put it, “when ethics become physics and physics become ethics.”

Yes, but that can never be! It can only be that people realize ideas in their social order. But when the earth has reached its end, the whole dream of ideas will have been dreamt. Nothing else is possible according to such a philosophy. Therefore such a philosophy always remains abstract and must finally confess: “A philosophy which, like the one above, neither takes the theocentric point of view, inaccessible to human knowledge, as in theosophy, and regards the ‘dream of reason’ as a reality that has long since been created, nor, like anthropology, takes the anthropocentric but uncritical standpoint of common experience, in order to view from there a reality filled with ideas as a 'dream of reason', which thus simultaneously wants to be anthropocentric, that is, starting from human experience, and yet philosophical, that is, going beyond it, at the hand of logical thinking, is Arihroposophie.” “Anthroposophy” is therefore here the admission that one can never cross this chasm between unreal ideas and idea-less reality.

But in man himself there is a natural being, which thus belongs to the natural order, connected with a spiritual being that can absorb the spiritual. This is not denied by an anthroposophist like Robert Zimmermann. But man cannot be regarded by contemporary science either in such a way that the riddle would be solved through man, through this microcosm.

Let us now look back at something we have already mentioned during this stay. We have said that we actually have to divide the human being into three parts, not as conveniently as the skeleton, of course, as I have already explained. But I have also spoken about this in the final notes to my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul). We can divide the human being into three parts: the head, the trunk and the extremities, with everything that belongs to the extremities belonging to the extremities, including everything sexual. If we divide the human being in this way and now apply what we already know: that the formation of the head, the shape of the head points to forces of the previous incarnation, the limb man points to the future incarnation and actually only the trunk belongs to the present. So, after what I have explained today, you will no longer find it very incomprehensible when I tell you: insofar as the human being carries his head, this head points back to the earlier incarnation, into the past. The forces of the past, Ahrimanic forces, are at work in the head, and what applies to Ahrimanic forces in general applies to the human head in particular. Everything that is actually formed in the human head does not actually belong to the present, but the forces of the previous incarnation have an effect on the head; and the creative powers make use of the ahrimanic powers to shape our head, to give our head its actual form. If the creative powers did not make use of the ahrimanic spirits to shape our heads, then we would all – forgive me, but it is so – wear a much softer head, but we would all have an animal head: one who is bullish in character would have a bull's head, another who is lamb-like in character would have a lamb's head, and so on. It is due to the influence of the Ahrimanic powers, which the creative forces use to shape us, that this animal head, which we would otherwise wear, does not really sit on us, as the Egyptians drew it on some of their figures; that we do not go around like these Egyptian figures, who have good reasons for this, because in the Egyptian mysteries, too, though from an atavistic point of view, things were taught that can be taught again now. We also do not go around like that, as in the Rosicrucian pictures, where every woman is painted with a lion's head and every man with an ox's head. That is the Rosicrucian painting of man. The Rosicrucians chose a more average animal and therefore gave the women the head of the animal that most resembles them, the lion, and the man the head of the animal that most resembles him, the ox, the bull. That is why in Rosicrucian figures you see man and woman placed side by side: the woman with the most beautiful lion's head, the man with a bull's head. But this is absolutely correct. That metamorphosis – to use a Goethean term – can take place, that our head, which tends towards the animalistic in its form, can be shaped so that it is a human head, comes from the influence of the Ahrimanic powers. If the deities did not make use of Ahriman to shape our bony heads, then we would walk around with animal heads.

But the divine powers also make use of the luciferic spirits. If they did not make use of these luciferic spirits, our limbless man would not be able to transform from the present to the next incarnation. The luciferic beings are necessary for this. And it is to the luciferic entities that we again owe the fact that, by dying, the form that the man of the extremities still has now is gradually transformed into the broader form that he is to have in the next incarnation. Then, in the middle of the path between death and a new birth, Ahriman must intervene to take on the other task: to reshape the head in the appropriate way. Just as we would go around with animal heads if we did not owe it to Ahriman that we get a human head, so our nature of the extremities would not metamorphose into the human until the next incarnation, but would pass over into the demonic. We lose our head, as we now have it, under all circumstances through death, not only as matter that unites with the earth, but also as form; in the next incarnation we carry over what will become the head from the extremity of man. But this would become a demonic being if we did not have the luciferic powers, who are connected with us, to thank for the fact that the transformation can take place from a demon, which is merely a spiritual soul, into the human form of the next incarnation.

Thus, Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers must participate in our becoming human, and the human cannot be understood without calling upon the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic for help. Humanity cannot be spared the task of truly understanding the activity of Ahriman and Lucifer in the future. The Bible quite rightly says that the Deity of whom it speaks at the beginning breathed the living spirit into man. But the living spirit works in the trunk of the human being. Insofar as we are dealing with the normally functioning divine entities, we are dealing only with the trunk of the human being. Insofar as we are dealing with the head man, we are dealing with an opponent of the powers of Yahweh, and thus also with an opponent of the Christ. And insofar as we are dealing with the man of the extremities, we are dealing with the Luciferic opponent.

Therefore, one will only understand the human being if one presents him under these three aspects. In our central group for our building, we therefore have this trinity: the representative of humanity, who is trained in such a way that the forces of breathing, of the trunk, of heart activity and so on are primarily active in him – this is the middle figure; then the figure in which everything main, head-related is active: Ahriman; and the figure in which everything extremity-related is active: Lucifer.

We must dissect the human being in this way if we want to understand the human being, because in the human being, the human being as such is united with Ahriman and Lucifer. At the same time, this is an indication that everything that is more or less connected with human thinking, which, after all, is bound to the head in relation to

its physical connection to the head — human thinking flows on the basis of perceptions as something external and obvious — that all this has an Ahrimanic character. Through the senses of the head we perceive nature primarily, and we build up an image of nature with the ahrimanic character just described, because we ourselves carry the ahrimanic in the formation, in the shaping of our head.

Ideals, on the other hand, have a great deal to do with love, with everything that belongs to the man of the extremities, inwardly, psychologically. I shall come back to this in the near future. That is why the Luciferic power has special access to ideals. Ahriman takes hold of us through our head, Lucifer through our extremities. Through our head Ahriman tempts us to conceive of nature without spirit; through our extremity man Lucifer tempts us to conceive of ideals without the power of nature.

But it is the task of the present human being, by surveying such things, to arrive at a correct overview. For you see, there is a certain boundary within us, precisely in our chest-humanity, in our trunk-humanity, whereby the forces of the head, which are Ahrimanic forces, are separated from the luciferic forces that belong to the extremity-humanity. If we were able to see ourselves completely by looking mystically into ourselves, then we would indeed comprehend the natural order through the head, but we would also see into ourselves through the natural order. And if the luciferic powers were to decide in us, then the luciferic powers would also enlighten us about the ahrimanic powers, and in this way we would come to a connection between the natural order and the spiritual order. But for a certain reason we cannot do this, and that is because we have a memory. What we absorb from nature in the way of ideas and concepts, of impressions, we store in our memory. And if here (see diagram on page 179) we have only schematically drawn the head human being, the trunk and torso human being, and the extremities human being, then in the trunk human being there is the septum, which leads to that which we take in through the head, in the natural order, coming back to us as memory material. As a result, we do not see down to the Luciferic, and thus we do not notice the Ahrimanic, as we do not see what is behind a mirror, but rather what is reflected. Here the natural order is reflected in what at the same time separates our Ahrimanic from our Luciferic, and what is the basis for the forming memory, for the forming power of recollection. If we could not remember the things we have experienced, if this partition were not there, if, looking into ourselves, we could see through ourselves, we would look down into ourselves as far as the Luciferic. Then we would also perceive the Ahrimanic.

But now consider: what appears to us in this mirror is what we live through in the course of our lives, what we look back on after death, what becomes a solid ego from a fluid ego. This is what we look back on. That is what we live with. And Ahriman and Lucifer work with us, working with us in such a way that Ahriman brings us to wearing a human head, and Lucifer brings us to not becoming a demon, but to having the possibility of coming to a next incarnation.

I have perhaps tried your patience a little with things that are perhaps a little more difficult to understand, but I wanted to at least evoke a feeling for what actually creates the gap between idealism and realism. It arises from the fact that the Luciferic in us arouses idealism, which is powerless in nature, that the Ahrimanic in us evokes the mere natural order, which appears spiritless to us. Thus idealists, abstract idealists, are actually under the influence of Lucifer, while materialists are under the influence of Ahriman. It is necessary to engage with these things, not just to engage in so-called theosophy in a schematic way, but to engage with these more precise things. For it is necessary that man should become conscious of the fact that he must do something to remain united with the spirit for the rest of his development on earth. It is an uncomfortable truth, one might say, even a hated truth, truly a hated truth, for it contradicts so much that is pleasant to man, that is pleasant to him out of laziness. Nothing is more difficult for people today than when they are told: If you want to maintain your connection with the spirit in the future, you have to do something about it. Most people would like the Mystery of Golgotha to have dissolved into the ground, so that they have nothing to do with their own affairs, so that they can be redeemed from their sins through Christ and go to heaven without having to do anything. And that is why most theologians get so angry about anthroposophy, because the anthroposophical side can never admit that man has nothing to do to maintain his connection with the spirit, that this can also happen in the future of the development of the earth without any action on his part. The connection between the physical and the spiritual, between what the members of man are between birth and death, and what the members of man are between death and new birth, this connection is called into question by the future development of the earth, and it will only not come into disorder if men will really occupy themselves with the spiritual towards the future. Spiritual scientific evidence for this already exists today. This spiritual scientific evidence is highly, highly inconvenient truth, but it sheds light on important and significant matters.

I would like to say that the connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical-etheric in the human being of the counterweight has already become very loose, and it is necessary for the human being to be more and more alert to himself, so that nothing happens in the connection between his physical-etheric and soul-spiritual that could, so to speak, suck him dry, that could suck him dry soul-spiritually. For when such prejudices become more and more active, when one does not need to know anything about what happens after death in life, or when the gulf between so-called idealism and pure natural order becomes ever greater, then people are in danger of losing their soul more and more. Today, I might say, this loss is still held in check by the fact that when young people die, a certain heaviness is given to the spiritual world and Lucifer is thwarted, and when old people die, so much spirituality is poured into the physical world that Ahriman is thwarted. But one must not forget that as a result of people turning away from the spiritual realm, the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers become more and more powerful, and that little by little, as the devolution of the earth goes on and on, this dam could no longer be fully effective.

That is what I would like to see emerging from our deliberations as a kind of bottom line, a feeling – and feelings are always the most important thing that can arise from spiritual scientific life – of the necessity of dealing with the spiritual from the present earth cycle onwards. I have emphasized this from the most diverse points of view, that it is necessary from the present point of view that people occupy themselves with the spiritual. And there will be no other way of dealing with spiritual matters in the future than by acquiring understanding and not resisting the process of really absorbing even the more difficult considerations such as we have been discussing in recent days and particularly today. People must come to understand the perspectivity of time. When this understanding of the perspectivity of time comes among people, then they will no longer say: Here is idealism, but it is only a mere dream that has no force of nature, and on the other side lies the natural order. Instead, people will come to recognize that what lives in us as ideals is the germ for the future, and that what is the natural order is the fruit of the past.

This sentence is a golden rule: every ideal is the germ of a future natural event; every natural event is the fruit of a past spiritual event. Only by this rule can one find the bridge between idealism and realism. But for this one thing is necessary: any ideal could never become the germ of a future natural event if this future natural event were prevented by the present natural event. We can put any hypothesis before our eyes. Let us assume the possibility that applies today, that through the so-called law of entropy, the evolution of the earth will one day pass into a kind of general warming, and that all other natural forces will cease, then within this final state, of course, all ideals would have died out. This final state follows quite well if one assumes that, according to pure causality, the present physical states will simply continue. If one thinks as present-day physics does, that such a final state will one day exist according to the law of conservation of energy and matter, then there is no room in this final state for an ideal to arise in it as a future natural event, because the future will simply be the consequence of the present natural event. But that is not how it is, that is not how it presents itself to the present study of nature, but it presents itself differently. All the substances and forces that exist today will no longer be there in the future. The law of conservation of matter and energy does not exist. Where we look for substance, we find nothing but the influence of something Ahrimanic that has passed away. And what surrounds us in the world of the senses will no longer be there in the future. And then, when nothing of what is physical now remains, when all this has been completely dissolved, the time will have come when the present ideals will join the natural process of what is now perishing.

This is how it is in the great universe. And for the individual human being, it is the case that he will be incarnated again in the next world incarnation when everything that he has grown into with the present incarnation has been partially overcome, when, that is, an environment can be created for him that is different from the present environment, when everything that is keeping him here on earth can be removed from the present environment. If all this has changed so that he can experience new things, then he will be incarnated again. The present ideals that can form in man will be nature, when all that is now nature will no longer be there, but something new will have emerged. But the new that arises is nothing other than the spiritual that has become nature.

Behind appearances and ideals we must seek that which forms the bridge over the abyss. But one must discover it. Today one can only discover it if one is not afraid to develop the concepts so powerfully that they themselves can penetrate reality. Therefore, the present time really has the necessity to engage very much in everything that can be experienced spiritually. But — let me add this as a postscript — it will be necessary for people to be able to develop ever greater and greater impartiality towards spiritual considerations. The day before yesterday, I ended by pointing out, as it might seem unnecessary to do for some people, but I do not like to do it, it is never unnecessary, a number of things that stand in the way of fruitful spiritual scientific work, including on the part of the Anthroposophical Society. Above all, what is needed here is real impartiality. Time and again, we see that the dissolving power that actually brought about materialism and destroyed the old spirituality is penetrating into human thinking, especially into the spiritual, into the willed spiritual. I have pointed out how materialistic some theosophical views are. Of course, it is not easy to find the right words when discussing spiritual-scientific matters, because our language today is no longer suitable for the spiritual, because we first have to search again for such a connection between language and the subject that is suitable for the spiritual. But it is necessary that the spiritual-scientific movement is not always corrupted by what is most harmful. One must characterize impartially what takes place in the spirit. Again and again I experience that I am asked: There is someone, there is someone who has spiritual experiences. — The meaning of the questions, which are often asked in this way, is that the actual question is: Is it now possible to surrender to what this or that person sees with blind faith in the truth? And if the answer is in the affirmative, then blind devotion arises; if it is in the negative, then the person in question is immediately denounced as a heretic and it is said: Well, that is atavistic clairvoyance, you don't give anything to that. — Yes, this either-or must be taken quite differently in this field. We must really face up to the statements about the spiritual with all our healthy reason. But if we want to become dogmatists, we cannot become spiritual scientists. If we want to either idolize or condemn, we cannot become spiritual scientists. There will also be infinitely valuable contributions to the characterization of the spiritual world from sides that one does not necessarily want to swear by.

On the other hand, there are times when people swear by some esoteric personality. Then it can be shown that this seer personality has at some point – well, maybe even once – retouched a little, or retouched a lot; then that personality is finished. Before, the same people swore by them, and now they have been undone.

Yes, you don't get ahead within humanity in this way. You don't get ahead within humanity with the either/or of deification or demonization, but only by facing things with your common sense. For example, it may also be the case that someone, of whom one even knows: Well, he does not disdain to tell a tall tale now and then – something quite true, important, essential comes out of the spiritual world.

We would not have the either/or that I am talking about if we wanted to introduce dogmatics, but if we wanted to place ourselves with common sense, precisely within this anthroposophical movement. That is one thing. The other is this: it is extremely difficult, because of the way things are often handled within our circle, to place the Anthroposophical Society in the cultural movement of the present day. This requires discernment on the part of those who are already members of this society. Once you are a member, you have a certain obligation to exercise this discernment. For we will go completely wrong with this Anthroposophical Society if we do not seek to connect with the general spiritual culture of the present, if we repeatedly and repeatedly fall back into the error of being sectarian. That will be the death of our movement if we become sectarian. Just consider that things like the ones we have discussed these days will not seem particularly strange to someone who is currently involved in science and cultural life, if he or she only acquires the necessary lack of prejudice. But in order to achieve something in this way, it is necessary to have the will to distinguish. With us it can easily happen that a question is asked in a stereotyped way when it is a matter of: should someone listen to anthroposophical lectures or should he be given a cycle? So the question is asked in a stereotyped way, without taking into account the level of education, the whole world position of the person concerned. But the stereotyped way is what is absolutely harmful to us. It is the schematic that makes it possible for a person like the one in Holland, around whom a whole bunch of nonsense has crystallized, to swim into the Anthroposophical Society and find protectors there, while people who are capable of judgment are often repelled by it.

To mention a specific example: some time ago, Mr. von Bernus appeared within the Anthroposophical Society with the clear aim — which one may find a little better, a little worse, as common sense may speak — of building a bridge between the general cultural life, the literary and scientific life of the present, and our anthroposophical life. Now, Mr. von Bernus, in his own way, has poetically reworked and brought out into the world a number of things, some of which are in my books and some of which are in cycles. He showed me himself: he has received a pile of letters, letters of criticism, because a truly contemporary attempt has been made here! One would not be surprised if someone who perhaps has a lot at stake could be repelled by such behavior as was perpetrated against him by the Anthroposophical Society in the past. Nevertheless, the journal he founded will be of tremendous service to the Anthroposophical Movement. He had, after all, managed to get the Anthroposophical Society represented in Munich in his art gallery. But everywhere one could see certain resistances to something that was as justified as possible! And if one looks at Bernus' experiences, they give a good picture of how the Anthroposophical Society should learn to be a real society.

In so far as the Dornach structure came into being, it is a society. But much else, in particular, is left undone, clearly showing that the Anthroposophical Society does not see itself as a society at all, but as a sum of individual sectarian little circles. But we must get beyond this stage of sectarianism. And we will not get beyond it unless some thought is given to the matter.

It is so difficult, and it is true that one does not like to say such things, but after all, many things are necessarily said to me because I am personally so closely involved with this anthroposophical movement. If the Anthroposophical Society should gradually develop more and more into a society with an expressed tendency to keep me completely quiet — which is what it is actually developing into and what it has always had as a tendency — then it is not a matter of personal vanity when I emphasize this. It makes me very uncomfortable that I have to emphasize it, but in the Anthroposophical Society there is a tendency to keep quiet about me, and there the personal is linked to the factual. Because of this – because everything that a society otherwise does is not being done – only the venomous words that the apostate members have created bubble to the surface.

Yes, these are things that I sometimes have to point out and that must not remain unspoken. I have raised them in the places where I have been able to speak recently, because I really believe that in these catastrophic times it is very important that anthroposophy is represented in the world in the right way. But it is so difficult to get people to reflect more deeply on how one should actually proceed in the anthroposophical field in order to make this Anthroposophical Society a real society. — Individuals have indeed made a start, but as a rule everything gets stuck in the starting blocks. Now, I think that perhaps, by drawing attention to the matter a second time, it will be given a little thought. I am not saying this for personal reasons, but because of certain necessities of the time, as you will indeed gather from what I have just said, from which you will be able to discern many seeds that can serve to help you understand our catastrophic times.

[Blackboard writing] September 2, 1918

Every ideal is a germ for a future natural event.

Every natural event is the fruit of past spiritual events.

Dear attendees! First of all, I would like to apologize for not giving this lecture in the language of your country. However, since I do not use this language, I must ask you to allow me to make the following comments in the language I do use.

Anyone who wants to talk about the spiritual nature of man and how we can get to know it today will indeed meet with a certain interest within our contemporary educated society. The fate has befallen wide areas of modern civilized life that people today can often be thrown into confusion and a sense of loss when faced with what the external world throws at them. And so many people today seek that which was once sought in the external world in the inner human soul itself, seeking the strength to sustain themselves, seeking the security that the human soul needs for a strong life. On the other hand, if one wishes to speak in the spirit of the present age about the realization of the supersensible human being, as I intend to do today, then one immediately encounters resistance from precisely that world and world view that should actually be the most valuable to us today must be the most valuable to us. We meet with the opposition of the scientific world, which, from the most diverse foundations of its own mode of knowledge, must assert that ascent into the supersensible, into the spiritual worlds, is not possible by means of the methods which are habitually employed in scientific life.

Nevertheless, modern civilization has approached man in such a way that he has become accustomed to viewing everything in the light that comes to him in some way from scientific knowledge. And so it is that in the sense of today's education, people no longer want to seek satisfaction for their spiritual life in the sense of old traditional beliefs, but they do have the need to strive for such knowledge with regard to the spiritual world, which can still be justified in the face of the scientific needs of the present. And it is this kind of knowledge of the spiritual essence of the human being that is sought by the anthroposophical world view, which I would like to speak about today and next Friday, today more about the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the human being, and next Friday about the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the world.

When one speaks of the spiritual essence of the human being as the deepest mystery of existence, what does one actually mean, dear ladies and gentlemen? Actually, one does not think that there can be any doubt about the spirit and its activity in the human being; because anyone who reflects on himself, even a little, will see precisely in what is spiritual in him that which gives man his actual dignity, which elevates him above the other beings in the world. And it can be said that not even the convinced materialist will actually doubt the value and the existence of the spiritual life in man. He will only raise objections against the independence, against the own entity of this spiritual life within human nature. He will say: That which you acknowledge as human being as your spiritual entity, that goes out of the physical, like the flame from the candle; that arises out of this physical; that extinguishes with this physical-physical.

Is it then, as one should believe, since man must once see the spiritual as his actual, peculiar dignity, is it then really grounded in ordinary life, that man, if not about the existence and the existence of the spiritual, so can be driven into deep doubt about the fate of his spiritual being? Yes, he can. He can do it through everyday life. And basically there are no other doubts in the science of the spiritual than those that unconsciously exist in the everyday life of man, that confuse man, that make man uncertain when he wants to have clarification about the nature of his own spirit.

And these doubts come from the most diverse sides. They are particularly strong in those who receive a scientific education in the present day. Of the various doubts that arise in a person, I will mention the two main ones, which a person does not really realize in everyday life, but there is indeed much, my dear audience, that sits unconsciously or subconsciously in the depths of the human soul, which surfaces into consciousness, not as clear concepts and not as clear doubts either, but as uncertainties, as something that, from the very bottom up, constitutes a person's inner happiness or inner instability. The one thing that — I emphasize it again —, not with complete clarity, but all the more strongly emotionally, gives rise to doubts about the fate of the spiritual, we actually encounter as human beings in every course of fate.

With each passing day, we sink into the life of sleep, through which the spiritual life, which is active during the day, gradually fades and finally extinguishes completely, until it arises again when we wake up and fills our consciousness. It is this extinguishing, this everyday disappearance of spiritual life, that repeatedly makes people uncertain when they ask themselves: Does the spirit have an independent existence? Doesn't it arise, this spirit, in the human physical life, just as it develops from childhood from the dull to the brighter more and more, like the flame from the candle when it is lit? Does it not go out again, this spirit, does it not go out, this soul life, when the body passes through death, as the flame goes out when the fuel is exhausted?

From this [night experience] everything that one seeks to eliminate and solve deep doubts and life's riddles actually emerges. But basically, and this will be the other side of the matter that I have to emphasize, basically it is no different in the waking life of the day. If we see the spirit extinguished in our sleep, then in our waking life we see it, as it were, immersed in the darkness of our own body in relation to its activity.

What is it then that we entertain in clear consciousness as our thoughts? Certainly, we have them. But if we only ask ourselves how our soul works in the simple movement of the hand when this primitive expression of the will comes about, we can only say to ourselves: Yes, we grasp the thought; the hand is to be raised. But the thought disappears into the darkness of our own organism. In our everyday consciousness we have no idea what our soul accomplishes within our organism in order to send its power through muscles and tendons in a flash, as it were, to actually bring about the act of will. We see, finally, how the hand moves – so again a mental image – and we see an external action as a result of going from mental image to mental image. But how the soul and spirit descend into our own body, that actually remains in darkness for us.

This darkness and this extinguishing, as I have just characterized them, is what anthroposophy, as a modern spiritual knowledge, now seeks to overcome, just as these doubts have been overcome at all times in the development of the human soul. What Anthroposophy strives for, ladies and gentlemen, is, I would say, exact clairvoyance, and by this term I would distinguish the knowledge of Anthroposophy from all the nebulous mystical views to which people in our time of uncertainties so often turn. It is this exact clairvoyance, this exact seeing-through, that aims to take full account of the requirements of modern science.

What, then, are these requirements of modern science? Well, they are that one can, with an inner clarity in observation and experiment, survey that which presents itself to the senses, and the genuine, as he calls himself, the exact modern scientist, in pursuing that which his senses observe, that which he wants to achieve through the experiment, he wants to have such clarity, such inner necessity in it, as he has in mathematics. That is why mathematical thinking is so readily applied to the natural sciences. One would actually like to apply this mathematical thinking everywhere, because it brings about exactness, that is, transparency, inner necessity. Now, anyone who speaks of exact science in this sense today seeks to bring this exactness into the way he follows external things and processes, or, for that matter, if he wants to be a psychologist, into the way he follows his own soul processes.

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, also applies this exactitude. But it does not apply it to the external world, not to the observation of sensual things and to external sensual experiment. It applies this exactness to something that is not initially available to human consciousness. It applies this exactness to the development of soul forces that are initially hidden in the human being, but that can be evoked in it. Anthroposophical spiritual science has certainly learned from natural science how, through external sensory observation, through external experiment, through the methods by which natural science has achieved such triumphs, as they are also fully recognized by spiritual science, that through all this one cannot penetrate into a spiritual, not into a supersensible world, that the soul forces of man, as they are in everyday life and also in ordinary science, are unsuitable for penetrating into the supersensible. The human soul must first be made suitable for this, and the hidden powers deep within it must be brought forth. In doing so, one can proceed in an inward, mystically unclear way. Anthroposophical spiritual science specifically rejects this. But it wants to bring hidden soul forces out of the nature of man. And by adhering to this bringing forth, it observes a method that is as clear and inwardly necessary in the same sense as the research of external science in sensory observation and in experiment.

What exact science does to the finished outer nature by introducing clarity and exactness, that is what anthroposophy does to the development of the human soul forces. Nothing is done in the human soul that is not done with the same inner clarity, comprehensibility and necessity as the strict mathematician does with his investigations. In this way, the method of this exact clairvoyance seeks to develop the human soul in such a way that, to a certain extent, one's own development initially becomes a mathematical problem. I wanted to start by characterizing how the anthroposophical spiritual science that we are talking about here does not believe that one can research the spirit in the same way that one conducts external research in the natural sciences. Rather, it carries the scientific spirit that is present in the natural sciences into spiritual research in the truest sense. So the first step in anthroposophy is to work on oneself, on those forces of one's soul that then lead to insight into the supersensible world.

From this you can see, my dear attendees, that the person who wants to penetrate to the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the human being, let us call him a spiritual researcher, must, so to speak, turn back to himself in order to, first of all, I would say, illuminate his soul inwardly. It is a process of illumination and strengthening.

We shall most easily be able to understand what this modern way of observing the soul is to become if I remind you, my dear audience, of how such spiritual knowledge was sought in the more ancient times of human spiritual development. They were, I might say, striven for in a somewhat more material way. And since that which I have to describe to you later as today's method is more spiritual and soul-like, we shall be able to present this spiritual and soul-like more easily if we start, I might say, from the coarser, more material older methods.

But to do this, we must first take a look at how, in earlier periods of human development, people related to their environment. It is easy to believe that the human race has always been the same in its state of mind as it is today, since historical times. But this is not correct. Those who have an inner view of the human soul life will find that, even if they go back only a few centuries, people thought, felt and wanted quite differently, indeed, their whole soul mood, their whole soul condition was different than it is today. And if we go back thousands of years in human development, it becomes significantly different. The external historical monuments can only tell us a little about this, because, firstly, even if we look at the oldest times, for example, Egyptian monuments, they do not go back very far. Secondly, however, it depends on how the present-day person interprets these monuments. And according to that, he then finds one thing or another, which is basically only a reflection of his own state of mind, which he dreams into the souls of older humanity.

The spiritual science itself, of which I want to speak to you today and next Friday, sees the soul life of an older humanity in a different way than ordinary history. It looks at what has been preserved in significant, let us say, poetic or other monuments and can form an idea of how what is preserved in such monuments basically breathes from a completely different kind of spirit than that of today's human beings and she gradually comes to recognize that primitive humanity already had a kind of clairvoyance, a clairvoyance that was, however, dreamy, a clairvoyance that, compared to today's demands for clarity of consciousness, must appear to us as something foggy, as something dreamy. But this dreamy clairvoyance of ancient times looked deeper into the inner structure of the world, into the spirituality of the world, than today's sensory consciousness can. Fundamentally, the older person's relationship to the world was quite different.

It is easy to say that this older person saw all kinds of things in the things around him, that he saw a spiritual being in every plant, in every tree and bush, in every wave and ripple, and that he dreamt spiritual entities into clouds and winds. Yes, his consciousness was dream-like. But he did not simply project his own imagination onto the spiritual and soul-like beings he saw in water, in the spring, in the clouds, in the rain and in the wind. Rather, his state of soul was such that he saw all the spiritual beings in the world so naturally, with such elementary power, as we see the red or yellow color in the environment today, as we hear the sound in the environment, as we feel the warmth. We only perceive the senses and their contents; the older person experienced a spiritual element in the whole natural environment through the same elementary world, but in return he did not feel such an I, such a distinct self-reliant I as the modern person.

This feeling of a solid ego only developed over time in the course of human development, and only with it did the experience of human freedom arise. For this experience of freedom, this ego experience, to come about, the older dream-like, clairvoyant way has faded away. Man has been limited to the external sense world. In it he acquired his freedom. But today we have again reached a point where we, in our position as humanity within the sense world, must long to find the connection with the spiritual world again, where we are dependent on regaining a kind of clairvoyance. For the reasons already mentioned, however, this cannot be an old, dream-like clairvoyance; it can only be an exact clairvoyance, a clairvoyance that is modeled on modern scientific requirements. The older person had a dream-like clairvoyance; but just as we cannot be satisfied with external science today, so he was just as little satisfied with his clairvoyance, even though he found everywhere in the plant, in the bush, in the tree, in the cloud, in the wind , in the wind, he found a spiritual essence everywhere. He was not satisfied with this, and he turned his gaze to those personalities who, in those older times, represented what scholars represent today, what priests represent today. He directed his gaze to those personalities in older times who can be called initiates, initiates, for they were perceived as such, and who, through the development of special soul powers, but in a more material way than we are to do today, came to a kind of spiritual knowledge of man.

Yes, this kind was more material than our present-day one may be. I would like to describe such a kind of ancient spiritual knowledge first. I would like to describe to you what has actually come down to us, more or less distorted, in the external literature from the ancient Orient, and was practiced in the oldest times of the Orient by individual personalities in order to gain knowledge of a higher, spiritual world and to be able to communicate it to the broad masses of humanity, who lived with their state of soul as I have characterized it.

I know, esteemed attendees, that what I am about to describe as the so-called yoga method of that oldest oriental spiritual development has then come into decadence, that it has fallen into decay, and that even in many descriptions of that yoga method, because they actually describe periods of decay of this kind of spiritual research, something very bad is given.

But I would like to give you a little description of the genuine ancient yoga method, so that we can then get some orientation about what modern man can strive for as exact clairvoyance. It was a special kind of breathing that was aimed for through that yoga method. How does breathing actually work in the ordinary person? He doesn't really know much about it. He breathes in, he breathes out. Only when our breathing becomes irregular during illness do we actually feel our breathing. We do not pay attention to it in ordinary life. It fulfills our corporeality, but it fulfills our corporeality in such a way that its activity basically remains unconscious. Nevertheless, this breath plays - we can also prove this physiologically today, I can only hint at it in this lecture - but this breath nevertheless plays a significant role in our entire human life.

We breathe in. The breath does not just take the path into the inner cavities of our body, only to be exhaled again in a different form, but, for example, it passes through our spinal canal, flows into our brain, and we have , within our brain, while we are awake, we do not merely have nervous activity, but we have this nervous activity continually vibrated, radiated, and permeated by the breaths, by the rhythm of the breathing process. And we can say that even in our thinking, in our imagination, the breathing process has the greatest conceivable share.

But just as we pay little attention to the breathing process in the rest of our organism, we are just as unaware of it in our head organization. The ancient yogi changed the breathing, that is, he shifted the breathing into a different respiratory rhythm than the usual one. The ordinary breathing is not noticed. By breathing in differently, slower or faster, holding it longer or shorter than one does in ordinary life, breathing out longer or shorter, the yogi brought himself into a different rhythm. This made him aware of the breathing process. This allowed him to follow the course of the respiratory flow from inhalation through the lungs, how it spread throughout the entire organism, and how it ran through the spinal canal into the brain. In this way, the person pervaded the organism with his consciousness. He followed the respiratory flow everywhere. In this way he got to know his own organism. And this getting to know one's own organism, my dear ladies and gentlemen, means that all mere material experience comes to an end. In ancient times of human spiritual development, anyone who consciously radiated through their own humanity with an altered breathing rhythm would have seemed foolish if they had said that only material things were circulating through their body. No, the breathing current appeared to those old yogis, so to speak, as an internal scanning of the organism. And what arose for them through this scanning was the inner soul and spiritual being of the person. The method was material. What was discovered was the inner soul and spiritual being. What was discovered was how one feels, how one thinks. They proceeded materially and discovered a spiritual being. They examined themselves inwardly, so to speak, feeling their way. And what the ancient yogi strove for on the one hand was precisely the sense of self that he did not yet have through his natural knowledge, which he tried to acquire in this way.

You just have to look at such things not with the dry, philistine way that is often applied today, you have to put yourself with all the full human feeling in that, what is one, so if you scan his inner human.

Then, my dear audience, you feel what is described in the wonderful Bhagavad Gita as the true human self, which flows into the spiritual and soul world as the eternal in man. One feels that what is described as the ego in a wonderful world poem is the result of a process such as I have just described as yoga breathing.

Now, my dear attendees, we cannot proceed in this way as modern people, because after all, it is the case that the one who, on this path, through the change of breathing, or also because one wanted to support all of this wanted to support this by means of special postures, by means of the position of the person in relation to the physical body, because by doing so they made the physical body particularly intense, because they made themselves hypersensitive as a person in general, it happened that they had to withdraw from life. But that was entirely in keeping with the old habits of knowledge of mankind. Those who, in this way, made themselves overly sensitive as seekers of the spiritual world sought solitude, for it was not appropriate for them to always be in relation to the harsh rest of the world, to come into contact with it. But on the other hand, those who wanted to know something about the fate of human souls sought out such lonely personalities. People trusted these hermits. They were considered to be able to give sound advice on the temporal fate of the human soul in relation to the eternal.

We cannot proceed in the same way today, because humanity has come to a point in its development that it can no longer trust the one who, in order to explore the truth, to explore the spiritual, withdraws from life, but that it can only trust the one who fully cooperates with life, who, like every other person, engages in the practice of life, in the needs and demands of the day. Today we need methods that do not make the human body overly sensitive, but that strengthen the human soul. These methods can be attained, and they can lead to a truly exact clairvoyance.

First of all, there are intimate processes of the human soul life to which one must devote oneself: meditation, concentration of the life of imagination. In a similar way, I have described in my books, for example in “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in my “Occult Science”, what the human being must devote himself to. I have pointed out what today's modern man must do in order to enter the spiritual world in a similar way, but now according to his needs, as was given to the ancient yogi.

Shall I now give you a brief definition of meditation? Meditation is a specific training of the life of thought, which is not present in ordinary existence. And through this training of the life of thought, one first comes to the development of such soul powers that lead into the spiritual world, into the supersensible. But what is this meditation?

Now, dear audience, you will find more detailed descriptions in the books mentioned above of what this meditation is, what these modern methods of clairvoyance are. But you will also find more detailed descriptions there of how the modern person must undertake, what the modern person must undertake to achieve such exact clairvoyance. But here I can only state the principles.

And if I were to describe to you in a single word what the soul has to do, I would put it like this: when we develop our imaginative life in other ways, we are immersed in our ideas with a certain indifference; in our ordinary lives we are often immersed in intense warmth or deep antipathy. Our whole inner being can be stirred up in hot passion or wild repulsion when we are immersed in ordinary life. But the images, they are, I would like to say, a cold current in our everyday life; they accompany this everyday life.

However, anyone who wants to progress to meditation must do something other than the coldness of the imaginative life that one otherwise deals with in ordinary daily life. One must be able to call thoughts into one's soul, thoughts that one may have guessed at from someone who is already a spiritual researcher, or thoughts that one otherwise finds out in the world, but which should work in the soul in such a way that they calmly fill the soul life. One tries to distract one's soul life from everything else in the world. One seeks to direct one's attention to such images and to dwell on such images; one seeks to devote oneself entirely to the imagination, to individual images. But there is something necessary in this devotion to the images: that we can love these images at the moment when we thus devote ourselves, when we disregard all the rest of the world and live in complete inner peace in one image or one complex of images.

Yes, my dear attendees, the development of inner love, the development of inner warmth of soul when resting on ideas – ideas that we ourselves have first placed in the life of the soul – these are what make it possible for ordinary imagining to become meditation. When we can love our own thinking with the same inner love with which we love our objects or fellow human beings, when we can love our own thinking universally, when we can merge completely in it with love, when we can remain in him, then this life of imagination receives that inner power which is indeed something quite different from yogic breathing, but which works in the same way, only producing somewhat different results than yogic breathing. While yogic breathing attempts to send the breathing process into the head in order to scan and illuminate the whole person inwardly and to recognize their spiritual and soul essence, we gradually develop gradually develop an inner, true power of thought, by means of which we can scan and examine ourselves inwardly, not in the same way as with the modified breath, but still to a certain extent.

And so, in modern man, exact clairvoyance can be evoked by strengthening and energizing the soul life, while in more physical terms, dreamy clairvoyance was sought in the earlier periods of human development.

But then, when we really come to examine ourselves inwardly in this way, through intensified, strengthened thinking, we become aware of something different from what we have in ordinary life; then, my dear audience, we have developed a power of knowledge in us that leads us out, initially, beyond the ordinary life of memory. What do we have in this memory life? We look back from the present moment of our existence on earth to some time after our birth. Thoughts of experiences emerge from memory. There is a continuous stream, but it remains in the subconscious; memories arise, either freely, as they are said to do, or evoked by ourselves. These memories are abstract thoughts of experiences that we may have gone through in all the heat of life. These abstract thoughts remain with us. But then, when we apply meditation or concentration, loving thoughts and repeatedly thinking loving thoughts to our soul life – whether it takes a short time or many years for each person depends on their destiny, depending on the nature of their destiny, can attain such exact clairvoyance. When we use it to illuminate our inner life, our past soul life since birth lies before our spiritual gaze like a unified, temporal panorama. But not as memories, but as creatively active in us what can be called an ethereal human existence.

We do not just look at how we have had external experiences that have remained in us in abstract thoughts, we look at our previous life, how we ourselves have worked on our organs from a spiritual and soul perspective since our childhood. We look at how we have shaped our still untrained brain in a plastic way in our early childhood. We look at how we have taken in external substances into our organism, how they have worked in us in terms of growth force, how we still work on ourselves daily in the forces of nutrition. We look at the outer organism as that which we ourselves are working on. After all, we do not have a spatial organism, a spatial body, in front of us, but we do have a temporal body in front of us.

All at once there stands that which is our whole life, but which only underlies the external appearances, which works on our outer organism, a time body - anthroposophy calls it the etheric body - a time body that cannot be drawn or painted, just as a flash of lightning cannot be drawn or painted, but can only be captured for a moment.

That is the first thing that one discovers through this exact clairvoyance: a time body that we carry within us, which is a unity like our spatial body, just as –– in our physical spatial body a unity is to be thought with the arms or with the hand, a unity is to be thought with the head, how the one is not to be thought without the other, how the one stands in reciprocal interaction with the other – we look at our time body when we turn 50 years old, just as we formed our physical body out of our etheric soul at the age of 30, we look back at our 28th year, we look back at our 18th year, we look back at that which is as interconnected as the individual limbs of our physical body. We look at an etheric element that underlies us. This etheric element remains in us throughout our entire life on earth, from birth to death. While we remove the substances that make up our body from our physical body after a relatively short time and replace them with others, what we see as the time body is a unity from our birth or conception to our death , a unity that is continually active within us, which, like a vast panorama of time, now stands before the soul life as that which we have acquired through meditation, through concentration, through the loving life of thought.

But we can go further. Those who remain for weeks or months, or for years in such meditative, that is, loving thought, even if only for a very short time each day, will eventually come to see how their thought life is strengthened. And because it is strengthened, it works in them as forces of growth, as realities, not just as abstract thoughts. He takes hold of those forces in his thoughts that have brought about his growth, that bring about his nourishment, that work in his inner being as nourishing forces. He transfers himself, so to speak, from the passive, abstract, dead life of thought into the world of living thoughts. And he first learns to recognize in this world of living thoughts his own etheric body, which has been building him up since his birth or conception and which is still working on him today.

Oh, it is as if, one day, something happened in our inner being through this loving introduction, through this loving thinking, through the attainment of this exact clairvoyance, as if something arose in our inner being which seems to us, as when we have gone through a dark night and see the morning sun come up and see it light up around us; so we experience for a moment in our inner being something like an inner soul sunrise. Our inner being, which was previously dark and we had to say to ourselves, we do not penetrate down to where our soul works on our body, we do not even penetrate down to those depths where, as I said before, the soul twitches like lightning through the muscle to move the arm through the thought, to raise the arm. Now we look into our organism through loving imagination. What we otherwise have only when we look into ourselves, thoughts, we now have as living forces; these are we ourselves as we have been in every hour of our earthly existence since our birth.

But by continuing our meditations, we come to the point – I have described it again in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in my “Occult Science” or in other books – we finally come to the point of perceiving other exercises as necessary, because we learn to recognize that even if we always work on our soul life with the same inner awareness as we otherwise only have in mathematical work, when we work with such inner awareness, with absolute inner clarity and lucidity on our soul life, we come to see that it is now becoming more difficult to remove from our consciousness those thoughts that are now living forces, yes, that are ultimately what we recognize as ourselves, these living thoughts. It is as if they become fixed, because in the end we ourselves are what these living thoughts are. But just as we first learned to live lovingly in these ideas, so now we must turn to something else with all our inner effort. To do this, we must be able to remove the ideas from our consciousness of our own free will.

This is more difficult for us than in ordinary life, especially when we have previously lovingly placed them there. Therefore, as a rule, someone who has meditated for a while and is then advised by the spiritual researcher to move on to removing the ideas will say: Oh, the thoughts rush in like swarms of bees; I can't get rid of them. But the effort must be made to bring about an artificial forgetting within, a suppression of thoughts. And one can actually achieve this by making an effort, practising inner self-discipline, suppressing thoughts again, and finally, after first strengthening and reinforcing thoughts, creating an empty consciousness. One can then rest in this empty consciousness. One is actually now in a state that is only awake. One is awake, but one has no content of waking.

That this is difficult, my dear audience, you will see from the fact that most people immediately fall asleep when they have no content in their everyday consciousness. But that is precisely what must now be developed for the purpose of gaining knowledge of the higher worlds: to have a completely empty consciousness at the same time as an alert consciousness. If one really succeeds in this, then, as light and color effects stream into the eye and sounds stream into the ear from the physical world, so, when this has been prepared, the spiritual worlds stream into the empty consciousness. And now, for the first time, one becomes aware not only of what I have described before, seeing one's own life as an ethereal-spiritual world, but one now becomes aware of a spiritual world around oneself. I will say more about this next Friday, but now I want to talk about the spiritual essence of man and show that one can go further.

In the same way that one can come to discard ideas that one previously sought to gain with all one's strength, one can, by increasing one's strength of this discarding, come to finally discard the whole overview of one's own life. Everything that one sees there, what works inwardly on one's own organism, what growth and nutrition brings about, what allows us to develop from small children into fully grown adults, everything that is at work within, what stands before us like a spiritual panorama, one can remove it; just as one can abstract from one's own perception, one gradually learns to disregard one's own life. Just as it is otherwise difficult to achieve an empty consciousness, so now one can achieve an empty consciousness by having removed one's own consciousness in life. Then one stands there with an empty consciousness in full wakefulness. One stands beyond one's own life.

Now, a spiritual life flows into this soul, which has removed its own life between birth and death from consciousness. We learn to recognize this spiritual life by seeing it more and more as our pre-earthly existence. And now we are looking into a spiritual world that has nothing of what is otherwise around us in the material world, which is a purely spiritual world. But in this spiritual world we ourselves are in it, we are in it as we were before we descended as spiritual-soul beings into the physical-sensual world and united with what was given to us by father and mother as our physical body. Now we do not need to believe; now we have acquired, through the appropriate exercises, a real, exact knowledge, an exact observation of what we were in the spiritual and soul world before our birth or conception. How we worked, thought and willed in the spiritual world, how we work after we have clothed ourselves with our physical body between birth and death in earthly existence, how we bring about everything in earthly existence through our bodily organization , and even the thought we conceive can only be conceived through the medium of the nervous system, so we see ourselves in our spiritual-soul existence through a truly exact clairvoyance before we descended to our earth.

We see ourselves surrounded by spiritual beings, just as we see ourselves surrounded by physical beings here in the physical world. What leads us back a little in the physical world, but not out of the physical world, is our memory. We have abstract thoughts in the present moment. They bring into our soul the experiences we had years ago; but now, through the processes I have described, we not only have before us the ordinary experience on the physical earth, now we have before us – albeit in an image, but in an image of a reality – we have before us our pre-earthly existence with all its essence, with all its activity.

I could only describe to you, dear audience, the paths that the soul must take to penetrate the transitory, which the soul has as thinking, feeling and willing, to that which was creatively at work in the human body, what was there before this human body united with it, what belongs to a spiritual world, what does not come into being with the body, but rather first takes place in the body and actually makes its existence as a human body possible. Through such exact clairvoyance, we gradually advance from the physical existence into the super-physical, into the spiritual. We do not speculate, we do not philosophize in abstract terms, we seek experiences of the spiritual world, and seek to come to an understanding of the spiritual nature of man through experience.

In this way we arrive at discovering the eternity of the human soul. On the other hand, we can now train in a modern form for an exact clairvoyance, which an older time, which had more of a dreamy clairvoyance, trained in so-called asceticism. Let us again make clear in asceticism what was sought in a more material way, while we must seek it in a more spiritual way in modern times: the ascetic tried to paralyze his body, to kill it, even to make it ill in a certain way. Now, as a modern person, I will certainly not advocate the weakening or mortification of the body in any way; but in those older times, people knew exactly what they were doing when they systematically mortified their bodies. What happened to the person in the process? To the same extent that people systematically mortified their bodies, to the same extent did their soul come to life. It is precisely through this mortification that the body became, I would say, more and more transparent and more and more transparent. It was an experience of these ancient ascetics that by paralyzing the body, the soul became more and more alive and more and more alive. And in this way they attained a knowledge of that which man experiences unconsciously during the ordinary state of sleep.

In this way I have described to you, in the one way, in the yoga philosophy, and in the other way, in the modern way, through modern meditation, how man can consciously, that is, clairvoyantly, penetrate into that which is otherwise in the darkness of his own organism. I said that this is what touches us most closely in relation to the fate of our own spirit: that we cannot see how the soul and spirit work down there in the human organism, that we move, as it were, into the darkness of the human body while keeping watch, that we do not even know what the soul is doing by moving a hand.

The ancient yogi got to know this inner realm by scanning it with his breath, as it were. The clairvoyant person of today x-rays himself with exact thinking that has become clairvoyant, and in so doing penetrates into the darkness of his own body. This brings certainty instead of the insecurity that arises because otherwise, in ordinary daily life, one only plunges into the darkness of one's own body. But on the other hand, doubt arises from the fact that one sees the spiritual-soul dawning down in the process of falling asleep and finally one sees that it only dawns again when one wakes up. One must ask oneself: Can this soul then exist independently if it can be extinguished every day in this way by the needs of the body?

That was precisely what the old ascetic achieved: To the same extent that he systematically weakened his body, tuned it down, and in some respects even made it sick and weak, to that same extent his soul became more conscious, no longer completely permeating his life between falling asleep and waking up, but sinking down into the unconscious during sleep, experiencing dreams that were realities, more and more certain things coming up. To the same extent that the body was subdued, a soul life shone forth that was similar to the sleeping soul life, but which was conscious, and thus in turn opposite to the sleeping soul life. One had to say to oneself: You can therefore also live with this soul in the way you otherwise only live during sleep. So this soul can maintain itself in relation to the body even when it is not in this body. By reducing the life of the body, the ancient ascetic, as it were, drew out the independent life of the soul, and from that, in those ancient times, knowledge came to him, albeit in a dream-like way. When your body finally falls away from you, when it has reached the highest degree of dullness, which you have achieved to a small degree during your asceticism, when it falls away from you in death, then the highest moment will occur, which you have already experienced in a diminished way here in earthly life. And from the practice of ancient asceticism, the old clairvoyant person gained that knowledge, which he was also able to communicate in a different way: that the soul has eternal life in the spirit, even in the face of death. In ancient times, through a kind of exercise, yoga exercises, and today through meditation exercises, one saw into the pre-earthly existence, thus into the eternity of the soul on one side. The old clairvoyant person sees through the gate of death, sees how the soul overcomes death, precisely through the mortification, the paralysis of the body.

Again, this is something that we modern people cannot do, because again it turned out that the old ascetic was not up to life: his body, which had been weakened for asceticism, that is, for higher knowledge, could not meet the demands of everyday life. In those ancient times, people had confidence in such hermits and sought knowledge from them that they did not want to have themselves. Today one would not have it. But just as the yoga exercises can be modified for today's life, for today's sense of time, so too can the ascetic exercises be modified. The ancient ascetic attuned his body to awaken the soul life, as it was in the face of eternity, in his death. He thus weakened the body in order to allow the unaltered soul life to become relatively stronger in relation to the weaker body, so that he might recognize it. The modern person must take the opposite path. He leaves the body as it is and strengthens the soul life. This is achieved in a special way through exercises.

I will highlight some of the things I have described in detail in the books mentioned. One exercise is particularly effective. We are so immersed in our ordinary lives that we let our thinking, our inner soul life, passively follow the events of the outer world every day. We think about things that happen earlier in the day earlier, and think about things that happen later later. And when we follow life in reverse, as we do in legal, logical thought, we do nothing but imagine the correct course of events in our minds. Those who want to systematically strengthen their inner life must work day after day, even if only for a few minutes, but if they want to achieve something serious, they must work as diligently as in a laboratory or an observatory or a clinic; but what they have to do are intimate inner processes. Let us say, for example, that he first reviews his day in reverse order, for example, from seven o'clock; he reviews what happened first between seven and six o'clock, then between six o'clock and five o'clock, and thus follows his day backwards. It is best to follow the events of the day in full detail. Let us say, for example, that one went up a staircase. First you were on the bottom step, then on the next one, and so on. In this reconstruction, which should not be a mere reminiscence but a reconstruction, you are first on the top step, imagine how you go down to the penultimate, last step and so on. You do the whole process again. The same applies to other things. You can also do this with other years of your life, going back from the age of eighteen to the age of fifteen, but preferably in great detail. This is more difficult than is generally believed. In doing so, you actively resist the external course of events within yourself. You no longer merely surrender to the external course of events. You oppose it. In doing so, you tear your thinking away from the succession of the external sense world. By tearing one's thinking away from the succession of the outer sense world, one gets accustomed to a completely different inner hold on thinking. Thinking must become more powerful, more independent, by tearing itself away from the outer world.

Likewise, one can do other exercises. You know, my dear audience, that life is constantly changing. Anyone who is honest in their self-examination will have to admit that they are now quite a different person than they were ten or twenty years ago. But how did we become this way? Yes, we have actually only surrendered to life, we have become what life has made of us, what heredity, upbringing and so on has made of us.

Anyone who wants to become a spiritual scientist in the way meant here must take their own life into their own hands, must put as much inner energy into it as they have put into strengthening their thoughts in meditation, and must do the same in terms of strengthening their will. For example, at a certain point in his life, he must say: “For the next three years, you set yourself the task of equipping your soul life with inner habits in a certain way. You take into your own hands what life would otherwise have done to you. Life makes you different with each passing year. Now you take this power of the life stream into your own hands. You consciously change certain habits within you that life would otherwise have changed. It will be seen that especially small habits that have crept into life, when they are done with ever more conscious and conscious soul practice, work wonders in inner self-education – for example, someone who has had a certain handwriting up to this moment in their life, who now changes this handwriting out of this power. And so you can imagine that there are countless smaller or larger habits that one can take in hand, so that one can become, as it were, one's own inner guide, that one can become the director of one's will more and more.

And anyone who then continues the exercises related to the will from “How to Know Higher Worlds” and other books, anyone who continues these exercises, in other words, practices that which can be practiced both through that backward and by this self-discipline; anyone who practices self-conquest strengthens the life of the soul, just as the old ascetic weakened his body and left the life of the soul, so that it became relatively stronger than the weakened body. The body remains as it is, but the soul life is strengthened in this way. And we see something peculiar in our own human existence. I can describe it to you by using a comparison.

Take the human eye. How does the human eye see? Well, because it is transparent itself, because it allows light to pass through it. In the moment when the eye, let us say, becomes clouded, asserts its own materiality, in that same moment, vision ceases. The eye, so to speak, completely forgets itself. Thereby it becomes the servant of the human organism in relation to seeing. By not asserting its own materiality, it becomes the sense organ for the external physical world.

Our soul life, when we strengthen it in the manner described by overcoming ourselves, will ultimately prevail over the human organism in such a way that the latter is not only illuminated from within by meditation exercises, but that the body, like the eye in relation to sensory light, becomes transparent to the soul and spirit. Just as we do not see the eye, but the objects outside, so we learn through our body, which is now not physically but spiritually transparent, and which now does not drive out any desires, longings or passions, in the moments when we want to use it as a higher spiritual sense organ, through this organism we learn about the spiritual world as through a soul transparency. And in this way we attain the possibility of saying to ourselves: We see into a spiritual world through our organism. It has become our soul eye, our spirit eye. Now, like the ancient ascetic, we gain knowledge of the eternal nature of the human soul beyond death.

And by learning to live with the spiritual world around us, after our own organism has become a selfless sense organ, a life of the soul outside the physical body becomes clear to us. And we now have the opportunity to leave the body untouched by our soul life, as it is during sleep. But we have strengthened our soul life. We can separate the soul from the physical body and from the etheric body in the same way as it is separated during sleep. We experience a state similar to sleep, but which is in fact the opposite of sleep. We learn to recognize that we have not extinguished our soul life with sleep, that our soul life was just too weak to develop consciousness from falling asleep to waking up. Through the intensified soul life, we shine through an artificially induced sleep, we illuminate it. We know that we can develop a spiritual-soul life without the body. We therefore know, through the fact that this image is before us, this image of dying, of life after death, we know that the soul, beyond death, that is, on the other side from the one I described earlier, is endowed with eternal life.

Thus, through our meditations, we learn to think of our soul life, for our pre-earthly existence, the one side of eternity, and through the training of our will, through self-transcendence, through the strengthening of our soul life, we come to know eternity as extending beyond death, and we gain a vivid sense of the eternity of the human soul, of the spiritual essence of the human being.

You see how this is attempted. It is not attempted, as the spiritualist does, by means of experiments that are the same as those in the external world, no, but rather, the human soul life itself is developed in such a way that the muscles grow up to this soul life in order to look into the spiritual world. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to sin against the spirit of modern exact science. But it cannot initially research an external environment exactly, because it is not there at all, just as colors are not there for the blind, but the spiritual eye, the power of vision, must first be developed. This happens through meditation, through willpower.

But by proceeding with this meditation, with this discipline of the will, in the same way that the scientist otherwise proceeds with the external world, we can speak of bringing the spirit, the meaning of modern scientific civilization, into those areas where, ultimately, our scientific life merges into religious experience, where we ultimately recognize what the spiritual essence of man is. And this spiritual essence of man, my dear audience, lives just as much as the physical human being here with a physical world, lives with a spiritual world.

And how man can find his way into this spiritual world, how he can find the spiritual essence of the world, will be the subject of next Friday's lecture, so that we can understand not only the spiritual essence of man through the method of supersensible knowledge, but also the spiritual essence of the world. But then it will become clear to us how, through the intimate coexistence of the spiritual essence of man with the spiritual essence of the world, a deepening of religious life can arise out of real modern clairvoyance, how man can perhaps what he has lost through modern science, can regain in such a way that he can now combine the deepest religion with strict science.

That is what modern civilization is actually striving for. Because modern civilization has lost the spirit, it has also come to such bitter outer destinies. Perhaps it will also be possible to show what exactly the present dire fate of the times is when we next look at the spiritual essence of the world. Today, I just wanted to show, by way of preparation, how man recognizes himself as a spirit, so that he can then also find the spirit within the world and connect with it in a religious way, in bright, clear clarity. For perhaps it will emerge from the discussions that I have allowed myself to engage in before you today, my dear audience, that what is here called exact clairvoyance and which should lead to a knowledge of the eternal essence of human nature, that this should not conflict with the spirit of modern science, whose triumphs within modern civilization are to be and can be fully recognized by anthroposophy.

But something must be sought that this modern science, as it develops in external observation and external experiment, cannot give. This modern science is no more denied or criticized away in its justification by anthroposophical spiritual science than it is a criticism of human existence when we stand before people and say: There we have the physiognomy of the face, the person's gestures, their forms, the color of their skin; but in all that we see with our outer senses, there is something soulful, spiritual. And only when we see the soul speaking through the incarnate parts – through the skin color – through the gestures, through the whole form of the human being, when we see the soul speaking through the gaze, only then do we have the whole human being. And in just the same sense, when we know the outer world through the outer science of observation and experiment, we have, as it were, the outer gesture of the world, the outer physiognomy of the world, but not yet the soul, not yet the spirit of the world. But just as we only know people half way and cannot gain a proper relationship with them if we only look at the outside, at their color and form, we can only gain a relationship if the soul and spirit speak to us through all of this, so we can only recognize the world in the great and the essence of people if all that true, genuine natural science gives us — especially when it keeps within its limits — gives us of the world's physiognomy and gestures, if we allow all this to be valid, even recognized, and if we progress from this to an exact clairvoyance, to an exact seeing of the world's soul through the outer physical gestures of the world, and to an exact seeing of the human spirit through the outer physical gestures of the human being, so that we may recognize the spirit of the human being.

In this way, anthroposophy does not seek to rebel against science; on the contrary, it seeks to bring science into a realm that modern science cannot enter. It does not want to become something that seeks spirituality in a combative way, I might say; it wants to become something through full recognition of natural science, yes, through a higher evaluation of natural science than is often possible for the latter itself; it wants to become something in relation to what we know as soul and spirit in the world of materialism, in the world of physiology; it wants to become this anthroposophy itself, soul and spirit of modern science. And this modern scientific approach needs soul and spirit to complement the science, it needs warmth of the human soul, the inner light of the human soul, the true religious need. Only in this way can the modern human being revive in a new way from his soul, from his spirit, and move towards a more hopeful future than would otherwise be possible with a more materialistic world view.

[What we are dealing with today has been called the question of all questions. What could touch man more deeply, if the question is only framed broadly enough – touch him more deeply, from a certain point of view – than reflecting on his origin, on his descent, because] everyone probably has an inkling that this question includes much of what alone can enlighten man about his true nature, about his destiny and about the nature of his life in general.

Now, however, from the point of view from which we are to speak to you today about human descent, it is difficult to make ourselves understood even to our contemporaries, if they are not already somehow prepared for it through spiritual science, because compared to what is being put forward from many sides today about the descent or origin of man, what we have to say in this our meditation will seem as if it were spoken in a completely, completely different language; and given the great interest that is shown in this question today, and given the public suggestion — we may perhaps call it that — which is not true science, but many of the catchwords that have been taken from this science and which today dominate many minds, with all this, much of what is presented today will perhaps seem to some even more than what was already said in the last three lectures [of this series] much more like a mere reverie, like a fantasy. When two such fundamentally different things confront each other as what a world view that is more materialistically colored — the word does not need to be pressed — has to say about the origin of man and what spiritual science, as we are considering it here, has to present, when two such different things confront each other, then, then, above all, one must first of all bring one thing to mind. Anyone who has familiarized themselves with the concepts and ideas that dominate our popular literature when the origin of man is discussed and it is claimed that this origin of man is spoken of in the way it must be according to scientific facts; [if you are confronted with this] when you have read your way into popular [or, for that matter, more or less scientific literature, one must still bear in mind that the concepts and ideas that someone adopts are not always based entirely on real contemplation, on real observation, but on authority, which is adopted in a, one might say, mysterious, mystical way – and this word is used in the worst sense – [by what is once popular], by what once has prestige.

And it must be realized that it is extremely difficult for those who have become accustomed to thinking in the direction that confronts them to bring the ideas they have once accepted into any kind of acceptable relationship with ideas of a different nature [that are put forward, for example, from the perspective of spiritual science]. Therefore, anyone who speaks about this question from the point of view of spiritual science today has no illusions about the fact that he could easily be understood by all those who have surrendered their habitual ways of thinking, by what is commonly accepted and seemingly based on the solid facts of science. That would certainly be an illusion. Nevertheless, from this spiritual-scientific point of view, what is to be said must be said, especially today, for little by little these ideas will find their way into the minds of all those who can free themselves from the [thought habits] just mentioned. This should be stated in advance so that it is not believed that the humanities scholar only indulges in such illusions, that he can conquer those who live in strict scientific ideas in flight, or that it cannot happen, [that one confronts such ideas], and say from their point of view, that what he has presented is pure nonsense, [pure folly]. As a rule, he is able to present the arguments put forward by the opponents of the former very easily himself. The deception then mostly lies with those who approach it from a spiritual scientific point of view and believe that its arguments could contain anything new for him.

Thus, we may well consider this subject [from the standpoint of spiritual science] without prejudice, given this assumption. Monistic thinking takes the easy way out by posing the question in materialistic terms, using a curious logic... Our natural science, which has been equipped with such admirable progress in the course of the 19th century – and no one but the humanities scholar can marvel at this progress in natural science – our natural science has, among many other things, also broadened the human view of the sum of living beings that live around us today and that lived on this earth in earlier epochs of the earth's development. We find their remains more or less preserved in the layers of our earth, where we once found creatures that were little like us. And a kind of religion, a kind of belief, that has been built on this scientific fact, has concluded from the contemplation, from the appropriate contemplation of what the world shows around us today, if we look at the layers of the earth to search for pre-worldly beings. This confession has turned it into a kind of theory of evolution that contains an extraordinary amount of interesting, important and also correct information.

But we can characterize the logical error that this theory of evolution makes with a few words – and we must characterize it [in this way] – and it is precisely when we start from this point that we will gather the material for thought in order to present that [being] to our minds, which can be said from the point of view of spiritual science. Science shows us [today] the perfect being alongside imperfect life. If we examine the layers of our earth, science shows us a series of [apparently] imperfect living creatures [to seemingly perfect beings], so that we can say: It is obvious to the human eye that one living creature is imperfect and the other is perfect.

Now, due to circumstances and facts [that we do not want to explain here], a remarkable logical conclusion has been drawn from this.

Let us consider this conclusion in its simplest, logical, sober form: the perfect has arisen from the imperfect. By making a comparison, we can make this conclusion clear to ourselves and then ask ourselves whether it is possible. Let us assume that we see two people next to each other, one with a genius for hard work, who has developed great diligence in life and has achieved something respectable. If we take another person next to him, we see a different person who has few abilities, who was also lazy and lethargic and has achieved nothing of note. Now we hear that these two are related. How they are related is something we should think about first, because that is the question in relation to the so-called developmental problem. When we look at the beings around us, we see that humans, with their various organs, are similar to lower forms of life, so-called imperfect ones. We see that humans have a slightly different structure, but basically the same bones as lower creatures. We could cite numerous other reasons that could lead us to the conclusion that we must assume a relationship. But what this relationship is like has not been established by facts, but inferred. No one should entertain the belief that the origin of the higher from the lower has been established; it has been inferred.

So if we know that they [the two people standing opposite each other] are related, [if we] can determine that from something, can we then conclude that [the one who has the genius and who was hardworking and achieved something decent comes] from [the other who was lazy and careless and did not improve]? Anyone who reflects a little will be able to realize how unnatural such a conclusion would be, and how easily he could be set right in his thinking if it were shown to him that the one as well as the other person descended from the same parents, that the one has only developed upward to his industriousness, but the other has declined, has developed downward. It is extremely trivial, [what I see], and it could seem as if an admirable theory that prevails in the world today should be refuted [by an /illegible/ triviality].

Unfortunately, however, [if we look closely] this logical blunder is [made] because it is known that the higher organism is related, [and it is] concluded that the higher one descends from the lower one – [by thinking that one could say that the more highly developed human descends from the lower, lazy human].

Now let us expand this little reflection to include, say, different peoples living side by side, a lower-developed people and a higher-developed people. Today, we have become accustomed to thinking that a higher-developed people with significant spiritual education [and cultural achievements] has developed from a state in which a lower-developed people finds itself today. Exactly the same conclusion as one would draw if one were to place these two people next to each other today. It is possible that one could be corrected if one were to research the facts, just as spiritual science is able to show that it is not the case that the spiritually higher educated people descend from the lower, but that] on the contrary, there is a common descent [of the two], that one that is spiritually more highly developed has developed in one direction and the other in the direction of decline. So that when we examine the ancestry, we are led up to a common primal people, not to the one that lives next to the other today, but to a common one. Since both live side by side, [they descend equally from the primal people]. Only one has developed upwards, the other downwards [in a certain respect].

Let us look at this in a little more detail, [so that our minds can form certain concrete ideas in the process]. You all know that when the European immigrants first moved to the American continent, they encountered an indigenous people [there], a people who are believed [in natural historical thinking] to represent earlier stages of the present peoples. From a European point of view, they were certainly at a low level of civilization back then, but if you take such an absolute point of view, you can go very wrong in your judgment. Let's imagine a scene to illustrate this. The Europeans have not always managed things so well. They have not always chosen the best means to exterminate the free man. One of the last chiefs [of the free people] who came from the areas from which [the Native Americans] were expelled in North America [was one of the last] to face a European conqueror, a leader of a European culture. The inhabitants of America had been deprived of their lands, including the tribe to which that Indian chief belonged. [The scene took place not so long ago.] The people had been promised land for what was taken from them, and it had not been kept.

The leader of the “redskins” stood opposite the leader of the Europeans. We have preserved a speech that the leader of the Native Americans addressed to the Europeans who had defeated his tribe and had not given them any land. I cannot even give you a literal translation of this speech, only the gist of it, what it contains. This is roughly what the chief said to the European: “Yes, you Europeans, you promised us other land for the land whose soil is covered by the corpses of our free brothers, you did not give us other land. That is because the pale man believes in different things than the free man. The pale man has strange magic tools, where little magic creatures are on them, he looks into them and sees what is right for him, he sees what is true and what is false. - The chief once saw the books and thought the letters were such magic creatures, [magic spirits that cause the Europeans to take such measures]. The free man does not believe in such spirits; the free man does not read what is written in such books of spells; the free man goes out and hears how the water rushes and how the trees rustle in the forest and he understands that. Because the Great Spirit speaks to him through the rushing of the water and the rustling of the trees. He always speaks the truth, and because you do not know the Great Spirit, who speaks the truth in the rushing of the water and the rustling of the trees, that is why you behave in this way. The pale man can never understand the free man, otherwise he would not trample with his weapons on the earth, which covers the bones of our brothers and which will one day take revenge on the pale ones!

What interests us about this strange speech by the free man, however, is the reference to the Great Spirit, whom he suspected everywhere. In the rustling of the trees, [in the trickling of the springs], even in thunder and lightning, [in all natural phenomena] the [divine] great spirit spoke to him. What is remarkable about this “savage” population is [this monotheistic religion], this remoteness from all superstition in their fundamental religious belief, which shines through the many superstitions that were present. You really don't need to go very far with your logic before you can see that those who were conquered by the Europeans, from whom the Europeans do not descend, but both [the European and the American population] descend from a common people, who must have had a wonderful natural religion. That will be a hypothesis if one stands on the standpoint of the sense-physical facts; that is a certainty if one [researches spiritually with the methods that we will talk about in the next lectures, especially in the second-next one, which is about initiation]. The American population, which had declined in certain respects, had lost its original purity and developed in another direction [towards a lower level]; the European, from his point of view, developed in the opposite direction. This gives us a concept of development that shows us very, very different perspectives than the simple concept of development that people are so keen to present to us as the only possible one. We see how this development is not at all simple, how we must assume earlier states of existence from which today's emerged, how that which today lives as imperfect in the imperfect appears to be a branch-off that develops towards imperfection. If we could go back in time to the distant past, we would find peoples who are the ancestors of the European [population] as well as those of the conquered American Indians. The path of development went so that a straight development [direction] led to the present-day developed population. But those who did not keep up, who did not absorb what could have led to perfection, came to a decline. The others are not descended from them, but descended from a common ancestor, others have progressed. [They are not merely /uncertain reading] lagging behind on a different point of view, but] because they lagged behind, they now show a state that was never present in ancient times. Because [they were] unable to develop further, [they] regressed.

We can now extend this concept to all living things. If we extend it in this way, we go back to the mammals that are closer to humans. Any simple theory of evolution would assume that the higher mammals were the ancestors of man. Today, this notion of man's very brutal descent from apes has been somewhat dropped, but the line of thought is still based on what appears to be different. If we imagine the relationship between humans and higher apes using this concept, we will say: Today's apes may descend from that original being that existed in the distant past and to which humans have evolved, but they have remained at [an older point of view], and therefore, in their present state, [in their present form] do not represent the ancestors of mankind, but the degenerate creation [that has wanted to hold on to an old form; that has corrupted itself]. Therefore, when today's man looks at this ape, he sees it with the mind, [then] it appears to him as a caricature of his own being, not at all as an ancestor, [and anyone with such feelings experiences it] as a kind of embarrassment... [illegible] when the original characteristics of man are corrupted.

[And so, step by step, we descend from higher to much lower creatures. In the remote past, we come to ancestors of man, whom we must not seek in creatures similar to present-day humans – the further back we go, the more dissimilar they become to the creatures that exist today. They are quite differently shaped]; from those ancestors of man, as a retarded and therefore declining entity, the lower mammals and other lower creatures descend. If we go back to the simplest creatures, [those that live today, consisting of one cell, from which one would also like to derive man,] then we would have to say that, yes, these creatures are undoubtedly related to man. But in the distant past, when man had an ancestor [from whom even these simple single-celled organisms descended, man looked quite different, his ancestor was a completely different being: The simplest organisms are the ones that are furthest behind and therefore the furthest from the original form of [the human being]. This is because they branched off earliest and, since humans have perfected themselves, have undergone a decline, [taken a direction of decline, and are the ones that are furthest from the original form].

Now let us look at this original form of man himself from the point of view of spiritual science. [There we have to take a look at the essence of man, as we have already frequently done.] We cannot look at [man] from the point of view of spiritual science in the simple way that we look at the physical body in material science.

[In what material science regards as the only thing, the human body, only one limb of the human being is based – this is only briefly hinted at – which has the same forces and materials as the seemingly inanimate matter – but science sees this body only be composed of these substances and forces in such an implicit way that these substances and forces could not maintain their form, as the material maintains its form], if the human physical body were not permeated and imbued with the second part of its being, the etheric or life body. This etheric or life body is for the spiritual scientist - [as already shown here last week] - a reality, a higher reality than the physical body, for it is the shaper and creator of the physical body. This etheric body or life body, which is a constant fighter against the dissolution of the physical body, because the moment the etheric body separates from the physical body, death occurs, and the physical body becomes a corpse. This etheric or life body is shared by humans and all other living beings, plants and animals. The third [link is called the astral body in spiritual science for good reasons]. The astral body is the carrier of lust and suffering, of joy and pain, of all instincts, drives, passions, ideas and feelings, of all that lives in the human being. This astral body is the third link of the human being. It has more in common only with the animal world, no longer with the plant world. [Then we already mentioned eight days ago] the fourth link of the human being, through which man is the crown of earthly creation, that which we could say is designated in the German language by the only name that differs from all other names, the name of our ego. The ego name, when you think about it, indicates the essence of the [ego]. [But first turn to] Fichte, [who said]:

Most people would much rather consider themselves a
piece of lava in the moon than an ego.

This ego can only be called from within itself. The name 'I' can never reach my ear if it denotes my own self; that can only be designated by the name 'I' from within. This has been discovered and recognized by those who study spiritual science: here is the actual sanctuary, the innermost link of human nature, to which nothing else of earthly things has access, but where human divine essence penetrates to one. [Man's divine essence announces itself in the ego.] By letting the little word “I” sound to itself, the soul speaks to itself what [religion] refers to as the God in man. This fourth link [of the human essence] is no longer shared by man with other beings, but is for himself and is thus the crown of earthly creation. ... /Illegible words]

[Thus, we initially have the human being as a tetrad before us, and anyone who speaks from a so-called monistic point of view would therefore not only want to accuse this spiritual-scientific view of dualism, which has been used to is done with it, but] then he should also reproach the dualism of the person who says that water consists of oxygen and hydrogen. If it is a mistake to look for light in its primary colors, only the one who does not think of dissecting the thing into its individual parts, or who claims of the individual that it is the comprehensive one, is a monist.]

Only he is a monist who does not think of dissecting the thing into its own members or of claiming that a single member is the whole. Then the word monism becomes a buzzword that does not take into account the facts. [But after all, people work with buzzwords today, not with facts.]

Now we can only understand the origin and descent of man if we consider the relationships between these elements of human beings in the present-day individual. We must distinguish between the two essentially different states in which we encounter man, waking and sleeping. These are two fundamentally different states. It was a remarkable fact when Du Bois-Reymond, [the naturalist], said [and it has already been pointed out in the first of these lectures] at the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly: 'If one were to examine everything that goes on in the human physical body, all these [complicated movements and] processes, one could indeed investigate how hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and nitrogen [move in such a way, but one could examine all this], but one would never be able to explain the simplest fact of consciousness from these movements: “I feel red”, “I smell the scent of roses”. And likewise, even if someone were to see all the movements with the most wonderful instruments, he would only see movement, but not the soul processes, “I see red and feel the scent of roses”.

It is the worst materialistic superstition, and basically very interesting, that even on scientific ground it has been pointed out [although he has made significant blunders] that the fact of consciousness of the simplest sensation can never be explained from the facts of the physical body. We can understand the sleeping person, but never the waking one. Why? When a person sleeps, all these facts seem to sink into an indeterminate abyss, and because that is missing, we can understand what remains. Du Bois-Reymond, who is himself a materialist, rightly found the fact of life inexplicable.

To make this clear, let us consider the difference between the waking and the sleeping human being. In the waking body, we have the astral human being connected to the physical and etheric bodies. In the sleeping person, on the other hand, we have separated the astral body, detached it from the physical body [and from the etheric body. The difference between being awake and sleeping is that the astral body is separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, but is connected to the physical and etheric bodies when we are awake.]

However, if you imagine purely in material and spatial terms that a kind of material cloud [as the astral body] emerges from the physical body, you still have a rather materialistic idea.

The human being, as he is today in his development, is just not able to perceive his physical organs [during sleep]; when the astral body reconnects with the physical body in the morning upon waking, [he can then perceive the physical surroundings through the eyes and ears]. What perceives is not your physical body, but the I with the astral body, which moves into its physical body in the morning. Physical organs are the instruments of this I equipped with a physical body. Therefore, no one would think of saying, “my brain feels a color, sees a friend,” but rather, everyone correctly says, “I see a friend,” “I perceive a color,” and so on.

When we consider the fact that today, when we are asleep, the human being, his I and his astral body are outside the physical and etheric body, then those who ask – [then we have to ask ourselves]: Where is the I [with the astral body] then? That is also somewhere in another world, in a world that belongs to the supersensible worlds. What does that mean? Where is this supersensible world? Those who oppose spiritual science imagine that spiritual science imagines this supersensible world to be in a beyond. Here it is, all around us!

And how does spiritual science imagine this supersensible world? Not any differently than [one has to imagine] colors and light for the blind. Imagine that you have a congenitally blind person below you. That which is around you, colors and light, is also around him, but he does not see it. For him, the world is what he can feel; for him, the world is [as for you, the world is the world of light and colors]. But if we could operate on this man born blind at this moment, so that he would see, out of the darkness that was around him, the lights and colors would light up, [and the world that was not there for him before. Why is it there now? We see that he has now formed it out of the physical.]

There are as many worlds in infinity as a being has organs to perceive them. [We will see in later lectures that] man, as he once had the disposition in primeval times to the eyes, which at that time could not yet see, but became seeing in the course of development, that all men have the disposition to what is called in spiritual science with Goethe, “the spiritual ears, the spiritual eyes”. Spiritual eyes and ears are present in man as a predisposition and can be developed. This is the purpose of spiritual science, that it gives people the methods to be able to enter the state that is related to the blind-born, [who can be] operated on, [to the world of colors and light, and] of course someone who knows nothing about it should not decide anything about such a world, [but] the only thing that can be said is that this is there, what can be perceived. And it is not only people of the future who can perceive these higher worlds that are around us, but these methods can be applied to people of the present.

People of the present know as a fact, as a primal form, that one can relate to the [higher] worlds as the blind are born [to the world of colors and light]. By awakening the spiritual ears and eyes, new worlds can arise that are around us. In this world and in no other is the human ego and the astral body when they are separated at night from the physical and etheric bodies. As long as a person's spiritual ears and eyes are not awakened, he cannot see [in this spiritual world], so consciousness fades away. But then, when spiritual eyes and ears are awakened, he can see.

But never can [may] perception decide on existence. [Otherwise a blind man could say to a seeing man who says he sees color and light: You are a fool, I see nothing at all]. Existence does not coincide with truth.

Now we ask ourselves the further question: What does this astral body do during the night and what is its business? [Is it unemployed?] This astral body is indeed busy during the night. When you work from morning till evening or let impressions of the outside world affect you through your senses, then something is going on [continually within you], and that is the fatigue, the wearing down of the forces of the physical body. Why is a healthy sleep so healthy? Because the astral body works [during the night on the removal of fatigue, of worn-out substances], on the restoration of the worn-out forces. What the astral body has done, you feel [in the morning as] a refreshment [even if you do not know how it works].

So this astral body works throughout the night, but how is it able to work in the physical body? It is able to do so because it is now not within but outside the physical body. An astral human body that is outside the physical body can work on that body. The one that is in the body has to make use of the organs of the physical body [to perceive the physical environment] and cannot restore [the worn physical body] from within it. Therefore, for all beings that have their astral body within them during wakefulness, it is necessary that the waking state alternates with the sleeping state.

When death occurs, what happens then? What does not happen during our entire life. Then not only the astral separates from the physical, but also the etheric body from the physical. [When you have the sleeping body in front of you, the physical and etheric bodies are in perfect connection in bed, the astral body is lifted out.] If you have the corpse in front of you, then the etheric body has been lifted out. Therefore, the physical and chemical substances now follow their own laws, [the body can no longer hold together] - and here we have set out the fact of death and the fact of sleeping and waking. Only when we know these are we able to understand the primitive conditions of man, then we can take a look at the origin of man.

Let us now take up our concept again. [I cannot talk about all the details today, but only give a sketch of human origin]. Let us go back to a distant past. We find a human ancestor.

But what did he look like? Quite different from today's man. Everything, absolutely everything in humanity has developed, including the conditions of sleeping and waking. They have only become what they are today, were quite different in times gone by. Spiritual science indicates that the distribution of sleep and waking as it is today only occurred relatively late [in the development of the earth]; the rule of sleep was quite different in the distant past. Man slept much longer, [was in an unconscious state, that is,] his astral body was much longer outside the physical body than it is today. And because it had the opportunity to be out longer and the waking state was shorter, this astral body had little to do with mending [the physical body]. The fatigue was not so great.

Today the night state is filled with mending [the physical body]. We only see something in our dreams, like fragments from the unconscious state. In ancient times of the distant past, not all of the work of the [astral body] had to be used to repair the physical body. Therefore, [even if it was dull and dim], this [astral] body [with the ego] was clairvoyant to a certain extent. In a way, this astral body, which was not so intimately connected to the physical and etheric bodies, could see into its surroundings. It saw what was around it in the spiritual world. However, what was it like, [looking into the world here? What is left behind?] There is dreaming. But dreaming is something that is only a very weak, [corrupted] echo of an [ancient], dim clairvoyance of all humanity, just as we have certain organs in us that used to have their function, [for example, certain] muscles near the ear. [Those beings in the animal kingdom that have remained at this level still have these muscles to move their ears.] Such organs, [which today have no function but which had a function in earlier stages of development], are called atavisms. One such atavism is dreaming. In the distant past, in the distant past of humanity, it was not what it is today, but something that brought man into real contact with his surroundings. As strange as it may seem to materialistic thinkers, I would like to give you an [unreadable] and describe a little [how it was] back then. In those ancient times, when man was in that half-asleep state, he could not perceive man in the way that he [could perceive the external natures, but he perceived] what lived in the soul of [other] people. When he – [the other] – was awake and thinking bad thoughts, then he [perceived this evil feeling, it] rose [like a kind of luminous body] for the consciousness at that time as a process of perception, a color image for the state of mind of the other.

In this way, people perceived the spiritual in their environment. [Of course, for materialistic thinkers this is something quite foolish. But the reasons that can be given against it are well known to the spiritual researchers themselves. So: Man was predisposed to be able to perceive in dreams. But it does not matter what one dreams; if a dream reflects reality, then it is real perception. [But if it is perceived in a dream, it is not yet bad. ... We have to imagine these ancient dreams as a much more vital state, showing a spiritual world around man that also exists today, but which he can no longer see because he has lost the ancient clairvoyance, but will learn to see again in the future.

Now we have described this person from the distant past. His astral body was essentially [more powerful], more substantial, more alive than it is now. Man has acquired this [external sensory] perception through his prolonged dwelling in the physical body. [But there is an original state of man in which the astral body was more outside the physical and etheric bodies than it is today.]

Let us realize what the astral body can still do in the physical body under certain circumstances, even today. It cannot do much today, but it can do something. When you feel a sense of shame in your soul and you blush, the blushing is a purely physical process, and what is it the result of? Of a process in the astral body.

The impression that caused the feeling of shame – [a reality of the imagination, an emotional reality] – has caused a feeling in the astral body [and] this feeling [has driven the blood to the surface, causing the blush of shame to appear here]. You can see how the blood could be set in motion by processes in the astral body through one process or another. [Today, there is very little that the astral body can do, but in the past it had great power.] In ancient times, the relationship between the astral body and the physical body was quite different. Not only could the astral body control the physical body in the minor way in which it [illegible] encountered the blood, but it had the ability to transform this physical body itself in terms of its form. At that time, when the astral body was still outside, [he had] not only the task of [removing the physical substances of] fatigue, but [illegible] that clairvoyant ability could [re-form the physical body].

Today [man] has a different forehead. [Certain animals still have that forehead formation and [illegible] formation corrupted. Man] has pushed it forward through forces that were in this astral body. [We can visualize what pushed this human forehead forward.] It was only when man learned to walk upright and move upright that he learned to imagine and feel the starry sky, that which is above, in a certain way. The animal, with its eyes directed downwards or straight ahead, does not have these impressions. When [humans] began to measure the space between the stars, namely at the time when humans had clairvoyant vision, [what was absorbed there] pushed the forehead forward, causing the brain to develop into the kind of convolutions that humans have today in terms of their abilities. This astral body is the creator of our forebrain and helped create [the anterior brain] [in adaptation to the external world]. Thus we can literally see how the astral body helped create the physical body.

Just as the astral body today transforms only a pale face into a red face [when shame is driven into the face], so in ancient times it shaped [the brain] out of this [primordial form] [into its present form]. Those beings in our line of ancestors who acquired this ability ascend to humans. Those who did not acquire this ability do not ascend to humanity, but condense. [Thus] an earlier stage of development ossified, corrupted, [and shows itself to us in a corrupted state]. Man must never be derived from today's ape, which has never been able to let these powers of the astral body take effect on it. But now we ask, if we go back even further, then we come to an even looser connection [to the physical and ether body]. There is less and less of it [the physical and etheric body], therefore the astral body [in the etheric body] is more and more powerful [and more and more powerful] and more and more able to transform the physical body. [At that time, man was gelatinous, like the animal, which is even more gelatinous today.] When man was in a soft state, the astral body could work on him in a powerful way.

[And] so we can go further and further back, to the state where the entire astral body was outside [the physical body], [where the physical body] related to the ether body as [ the body of the snail to the physical house [of the snail] relates, where the astral body /illegible] it, as it were, switches and reworks it, like the snail on the house - the snail does not live in the fabric of the house. [So it belongs to the physical and etheric bodies, but it does not yet live in them; it works on them from the outside; and we find] states, if we go back even further, [where even] the etheric body is not yet in this intimate connection with this physical body, the etheric body is still outside the physical body, and here we come to realize that the members of human nature, [which today in the waking human being are inwardly linked together], in ancient times have joined together. They certainly have a common origin, but despite the fact that they originate from the unified primal being and the unity they form in man is a remarkable one, [they are multi-faceted]. And if we ascribe to the astral body the ability to transform the physical body, what qualities can we ascribe to the [originally] free etheric body? ... /illegible]

[The further we go back in this respect to the original properties of this body, the better we get to know the mysterious workings in development]; if we can ascribe to the astral body the [shaping and reshaping, the] transformation [and reworking of the physical body], then we must ascribe to the ether body the material creation of the physical body. What is our physical body around us today, how did it come into being? We can visualize this with an image.

[The] humanities scholar [is not able to present everything with [illegible] through images. Today, what is tangible can be presented to everyone with the help of an image, which is something that arouses more associations from a physical-materialistic point of view.

By means of comparison, we can realize how the physical body of man came into being. Today, people believe so easily that what they know as physical contains the origin of the living, but this is again [such a] habit of thought, in truth it is not so. If you [once] deal with the prejudices that today [are said to come from science but do not come from it] ... /gap] If you examine how things are, [and we then only learn the method of how to examine], then you can make clear to yourself by the following comparison how the physical body comes into being.

Take coal, it is a mineral substance today. But long ago it was plants. What is now coal was once present as [graphite-containing] plants [in mighty forests]; the organic has transformed into the inorganic, the plant has become stone, the living has become physical. If you are able to do spiritual scientific research, you can see how all stones were originally living beings. We can investigate and prove that stones, rock crystal, were plants in primeval times, just like stone coal. Just as the mineral part of us originally came to life, so too was the human physical body once separated from the etheric body. As you see today] the many coral animals that build the coral reef, the physical, [you see how they grow out of it], see how the living creatures work this physical reef out of their own body. So in a time of man [ancestor] only this etheric body was present, [the astral body, and the] physical body is out of the etheric body [through a process] like ice from the water; the etheric body is a condensation, in condensed, other form, and there we come back to the original state of humanity.

Where only the etheric body existed, there was no physical human being at all. How did the physical human being begin? There was the astral and the etheric human being, who preceded the [physical] human being. The first physical human being was a small physical inclusion, like when chalk balls split off from [an animal, you see the animal and then a small chalk ball], or [you have] a container of water here: first [a small grain of ice forms], then it increases in size [little by little].

So man's entire physical nature was not there at all. It formed in the first place [as a small, tiny thing] within the spiritual, etheric [and astral], and] what now detached itself from the etheric and astral and back, was doomed, it began to develop in a descending direction, [and became the lowest living creatures]. But what was seized by the forces of the etheric and astral bodies developed higher. [Something detached itself from the animal], step by step, until [the stage was reached where] today's man was present; he left beings everywhere in his wake, as a result of the [developmental] steps he has taken. The simplest being that one sees today, which is said to be the progenitor [of humanity], is only a side branch [of human development].

But man [as a spiritual being], as an astral being, precedes all living beings. He is the firstborn as a spiritual being. [The other beings, the imperfect beings, descend] from him [as a spiritual being], who [from the very beginning] has all the potential for the highest perfection [within himself]. So man was there as a spiritual being before he was there as a physical [being]. [So where do we come from? From the world that man does not see]; man does not see the world in which the astral, etheric bodies are at home. In there is the world from which man really comes. Therefore, what is the highest link in man originally comes from him in a mysterious way, [the astral body, the etheric body and] as the last link, the physical body. Man descends from the Divine-Spiritual, [from the spiritual man descends. Only] then do we consider the appearance and descent of man in the right light, when [we] truly [elevate ourselves to spiritual-scientific contemplation. These spiritual-scientific insights can be explained in detail in the course of winter. What now appears as a program will become clear in its details. That will become clear... The physical is born out of the spiritual. The spiritual is something that permeates everything. This has always been felt above all by those who, through their good disposition and insight, had no materialistic mind and no materialistic habits of thought. From the laws that permeate and resound through the whole world as spiritual, from such laws, man appears to spiritual researchers as originating. Thus spiritual research is based on no other point of view than Goethe's, which we have recognized as a genuine spiritual researcher and which he has expressed in the most diverse forms, including in that wonderful series of poems entitled “God and the World” [is entitled], in which there is a beautiful poem, ‘Orphic Primal Words’, of which today we are particularly interested in the first stanza, because it shows us how Goethe was aware of the facts we have been talking about today. He wants to show us how that which is spiritual in man, which comes from higher laws [than from physical laws, which are explained by external sensory facts], cannot be fragmented by the powers of the temporal, cannot be fragmented by the forces of the sensual. [This is what he wants to express when he] connects an ancient, sacred idea to [his own dismemberment]: I and spiritual people are not bound to the physical laws of the body, which they themselves have produced, built, transformed, they are eternal and unchanging in their essence, in that they transform and remodel that which they themselves [as the ego and astral body] have produced.

As on the day when you were given to the world
the sun stood in greeting of the planets
You are as ever present and eternal
[according to the law by which you came into being].
You must be so, you cannot escape it,
So said the Sibyls and the seers of old.
And no power and no time dismember
The molded form that lives and develops.

My dear Friends,

The attainment of occult knowledge—it is necessary we should remind ourselves of the fact now and again—is no child's play; and if anyone approaches it with the idea that it will offer him theories to which he can either remain indifferent or, if they are not so remote as all that, still theories that require no more than the intellect to grasp them, he will find he is very much mistaken.

We have been considering the human form—to all appearances something quite external. And yet I have told you that it is this human form, as we have described it in its three members, which the student in occultism must take for his starting-point. He must—in most cases—begin with the feelings and impressions that come to him from a study of the human form, because in so doing he takes his start from something that is as independent as possible of the inner life.

There is as a matter of fact another possibility, and it is sometimes even desirable, not only for the theosophist, but also for the occultist,—namely, to start from the inner life of soul. We are, however, then brought face to face with an almost insurmountable obstacle. As you know, we have in our inner man not only what was already present there when Earth evolution began, but throughout our incarnations upon Earth spiritual beings and forces have contributed all the time to its upbuilding and development. Ever since primeval times, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces have had their part in all the work that has been done upon our inner man. If you take this into consideration—and you must do so, for it is true—then you will see that were we to take our start from the inner man, there would be some uncertainty as to whether we should get free of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, or whether we should not rather remain entangled in their influences and these then find their way into our occult vision. Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces can easily penetrate into the soul without man's being aware of it. Many things that go to make up the content of our life of soul,—we may think them to be exceedingly good, and yet they may not be so at all, so mixed up are they with the influences exerted upon us by Lucifer and Ahriman.

The surest and safest way for the pupil is therefore to take his start from the human form or figure. Upon the human form Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces have had least influence. Please note, I say “least” influence. They have had influence on the human form, but there least of all; a far greater influence has been exerted on the inner life of soul. The human form always remains, therefore, the most healthy starting-point if the pupil will hold firmly to the ancient occult saying that man in respect of his form is an image of the Godhead. The pupil does well to follow this course; for he links himself on to the Divine, choosing for his point of departure the picture or image of the Godhead,—and that is good and important.

Nevertheless this path has its difficulties. If you start from inner soul experiences and by means of occult development succeed in looking out from these inner soul experiences into the spiritual world, then the impressions of the spiritual world last for a comparatively long time. The consequence is that when by means of inner soul experiences alone someone succeeds in crossing the Threshold and entering the spiritual world, then he experiences spiritual vision and can as it were take time to look at the things before him; they do not pass quickly, they continue for a considerable length of time. Herein lies, we might say, the advantage, the convenience of starting from inner soul experiences. It has, however, the drawback already indicated, that one is quite unprotected and cannot recognise or estimate rightly Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences. It is, in fact, true to say that at no time are people less aware of Lucifer and the devil than when they set out on the occult path from the inner life of soul. The other starting-point has the drawback that the vision to which we attain, the Imaginations that present themselves, last only a very little while, they do not stay; so that we require to develop a certain presence of mind, if we want to catch them.

Let me now give you a picture of what happens when a pupil in occultism, taking his start from the human form, penetrates into the super-sensible world. I do not know whether any of you will have observed in himself a remarkable experience that happens every day but has to be quite consciously observed if one wants to gain knowledge from it. I mean the experience that when you have directed your gaze upon a bright object, the impression remains in the eye long after the eye has ceased to gaze upon the object. Goethe made a very special study, as he tells us repeatedly in his Theory of Colours, of these after-images that remain behind in the organism,—that is, inside the human form. When, for example, you lie down in bed and put out the light and shut your eyes, then you can have before you for a long time a picture or image of the light—as it were, echoing on. As a rule, the impression from without is exhausted when we have had this “echoing” experience. The vibration, the movement caused by the external impression has finished, and for most persons that is the end of the matter. This is, however, where the pupil must take his start, proceeding, as we said, from the human form,—that is to say, from what we know the human form to be on the physical plane in ordinary life. So long as he continues to observe only the after-images, nothing of any importance will happen. The interest begins when something is still left after the image of the object has disappeared. For what then remains does not come from the eye at all, it is a process, an experience that is given us by the ether body. Anyone who has himself carried out this experiment will not bring forward the otherwise perfectly reasonable suggestion that what we have here can still only be an after-image of the physical body. People say this who have not had the experience. Once they have had the experience, they say it no more. For what remains afterwards is something totally different from anything that has relation to an external impression.

Generally speaking, what remains, for example, after an impression of colour or of light is by no means an appearance of colour or light. Indeed, we can say that if it is colour or light, then it is illusion! It is a tone, of which one is quite certain that it has not been heard with the ear, that the ear has had no part in its reaching us. What remains can also be some other impression, but it is always different from the external impression. The occultist has to learn completely to overcome external impressions, for occultism is there for the blind, for example, who have never in their life seen an external object, never once had any external impression of light by means of the eye. Most of the ghostlike figures that people see are merely memory pictures of sense impressions that have been changed by the play of fancy. Occult experience is not dependent on whether a person can use some particular sense organ or not, it occurs quite independently of the sense organs.

Having now made himself an accurate picture of the complete human figure, the pupil must hold it firmly before him. It must live before him as an Imagination. With which of the senses or in what manner he fixes the human form is of no account. What is important is that in some way or other he fixes this human form—that is to say, through the human form a picture, an Imagination, is evoked in him, a living picture. The pupil may now take for his starting-point the external picture of the human form. It is, however, also possible for him to start from the inner feeling of the body, the feeling he has of being within the form.

When the occultist succeeds in experiencing in this way something like an after-image in respect of the human form—when, that is to say, having first comprehended this human form as he finds it in the physical world, he allows it then to “echo on” in him in the way that an after-image echoes on—when he is able to have this experience and afterwards to wait until the image of the human form is past and gone, he will obtain a picture of the human form which is no longer an image of the physical form but is experienced in the ether body.

You see, for the pupil in occultism it is a question of experiencing himself in the ether body. And when the pupil has come to the point of experiencing himself in this way in the ether body, then this experience is indeed a profound one! It falls at once into two distinct experiences. It does not remain whole and single. And these two experiences have to be expressed by two words. We have to say that the pupil experiences first, death and second, Lucifer.

Since the experiences of which we are now speaking are not of the senses, but are in their very essence and nature higher experiences, it is naturally not altogether easy to describe them. Words are for the most part taken from the world of the senses and they remind us always, in their application, of the world of the senses. But these are experiences that we feel to be inward rather than outward; and if we make use of words to describe them, it is rather for the purpose of evoking some conception, some picture only of what is in very truth experienced.

The experience of death is somewhat as follows. The pupil knows that the human form, which he has first perceived and then taken as his starting-point, has no continuance outside Earth existence. It is bound up with Earth existence. Whoever wants to go beyond Earth existence, whoever wants to reckon at all with a super-sensible life, must realise that this human figure can be experienced as such only on Earth; it must go to pieces—it does so before his eyes—the moment he passes beyond Earth existence, and show itself as death. In the ether body the human form can show itself in no other way than as given over to death.

This, then, must be the first impression, and here the pupil may easily founder; for the impression made by the shattered and destroyed human form is one that sinks very deeply into the soul. It is a fact that many who have aspired to be occultists have not been able to surmount this first impression and have said to themselves: “Fear of what may be still to come stops me from going any further.” It is necessary for the pupil to behold death, for the simple reason that only so can he know in all certainty that in the Earth body it is impossible to experience the higher world; one must come right out of the body, one must leave it.

That is actually the next impression the pupil receives. I do not mean to imply that the higher world can never be experienced while in the Earth body. But the pupil in occultism must inevitably come at this point to the experience and knowledge that I have described. It may be expressed in the words: He experiences Lucifer.

Lucifer is there before him, and directs his attention to a fact which carries with it for the pupil a very great temptation, If we had to put into words what is experienced in making the acquaintance of Lucifer, we might express it in the following way. Lucifer makes the pupil attentive to the frailty and destructibility of the human form He says: “Look at this human form. See how destructible it is; a destructible form have the Gods given you—the Gods who are my enemies.” That is what Lucifer tells him, and he points out to him that the Higher Gods were placed under the necessity of making man destructible in his form; he shows the pupil that They could not do otherwise, owing to certain conditions of which we shall speak later. And then he shows him what he, Lucifer, wanted to make of man, what man would have become if he had been given the handling of him,—alone, unhindered by his opponents.

There is something extraordinarily seductive in the picture Lucifer gives of what man would have become if he, Lucifer, alone had had the making of him. For Lucifer says, “Look around you and see what remains of you when your human form has gone to pieces.” When the human form has been destroyed, when man turns round, as it were, and sees himself flayed—spiritually speaking—, when his form has been taken from him, then he beholds two things. In the first place, he sees that what remains is in fact conformable to the super-sensible world, is in a certain respect immortal, whilst the body is mortal. This fact puts a powerful argument in the hands of Lucifer, wherewith he may tempt man. Man's attention has first been directed to the image of God which he has, which, however, is destructible and bound to the Earth. Then Lucifer directs him to something else in him that is immortal, not subject to death. Therein lies the temptation. But when man comes to consider and observe that which is immortal in him, when he contemplates that which shakes off the external form after it has broken up into the three parts of which we have discovered it to be composed, then man sees himself and sees at what cost Lucifer has made him immortal. For man, when he looks back upon himself, discovers he is no longer man. Threefold man, as we have described him, has always been expressed in occult symbolism in certain pictures. These pictures, these Imaginations, have throughout the ages had something to say to man. Very few, however, have understood their wonderful significance. The upper man, as man sees him when he turns back to look upon himself, is different in different people. The picture that presents itself here is also more or less transient. It gives nevertheless an approximate idea of the impression man experiences. There is no longer a human countenance; the countenance is suggestive of a bull, or else of a lion. Experiences in the super-sensible world have often a quite grotesque appearance; and it transpires that, although not always, yet generally speaking, a woman who looks back in this way perceives herself more like a lion, a man more like a bull. There is no getting away from it, it is really so! And connected with these two pictures—which are intermingled, for the man is not entirely devoid of lion, nor the woman entirely devoid of bull, the two merge into one another—blended in at the same time with these is the picture of a bird, which has always been called the eagle and which belongs in the whole picture.

Nor has the worst yet been told! Many a man might be ready to make up his mind to be a bull, a lion or an eagle as a price for immortality. That is, however, only the upper man. The continuation down below is a wild, savage dragon. Here you have the source of all the numerous sagas and stories of the dragon. Traditional religious symbolism has always given man the four pictures,—Man, Lion, Bull, Eagle; but it has given no more than indications, as, e.g., in the account of the Fall, that a wild Dragon also belongs to man. The dragon, however, has its place in the totality of man, it is to be found there; and man has to say to himself: Lucifer is indeed able to promise you immortality—it is a sure and well-founded promise—but only at the cost of your form and figure, so that you go on living in the form you have become under the influence of Lucifer. And now we can see how it has come about that we have received such an inner form; it is because of the influence of Lucifer in Earth evolution. We perceive also that this Earth evolution has under the influence of Lucifer given to man super-sensible gifts one after another. Wisdom and everything connected with wisdom comes to man by many and manifold paths from Lucifer. Lucifer can show man, when he meets him, how much man really owes to him. But what I described just now has also to be reckoned among the things man owes to Lucifer.

The question is bound to arise: “Is there then no ray of comfort in this self-knowledge?” For, when all is said, it is not exactly comforting if this new insight only leads to a description of how man is degraded to the rank of an animal. The animal is, moreover, tripartite and does not belong to the “higher” animals; rather is man debased to the animal stage that exists on the Earth in the picture of an amphibian. No, such a conception can hardly be called comforting!

This is the experience which I described to you before as being so extraordinarily fleeting and transient. One needs great presence of mind to grasp the impression at all, to get a view of it, as it were. It goes past one so swiftly. That is the disadvantage of starting from the human form. People do not as a rule have sufficient presence of mind to grasp death and Lucifer and then turn round, spiritually, and survey themselves. Nothing we see brings any comfort, for ultimately we have only two courses to choose from. We can hold to what is mortal and destructible in us and comes from the Gods, the opponents of Lucifer; or we can choose immortality and along with it the degradation of the human form.

The presence of all these things, the impression made by them, is in the first moment terrible and paralysing. For this reason a great part of the task of the occult teacher consists in warning people not to pay too much heed to such impressions, or indeed to any first super-sensible impressions, because these impressions, whether they are of a kind to occasion joy or pain, can never be trusted as guides. The right course is to wait patiently, very patiently. It may well be that when one has carried out the experiment described, a feeling of absolute hopelessness comes over one; to persevere then in calling forth the impression again and again requires courage. But this is what we must do if we would make practical progress in occultism, and a time will come when we find, as it were, ground for our feet.

What the present moment affords—on that can man most assuredly not rely. Everything he achieves in life is seen now to be destructible, impermanent. Lucifer promises something eternal. But not to that either can man hold. A moment comes, however, when there is one thing of which he can take firm hold; it is not anything of the present, but a memory that can remain with him from ordinary life on Earth. This memory must stay with him like a thought out of Earth life, and intermingle in the meeting with death and Lucifer It streams over from Earth life, and is suddenly there, this memory, this thought, which alone can give man support and stay. But it is singularly feeble, and great energy is required to hold it. This one and only thing in life which man can recall as something sure and certain is the thought of Self, of “ I.” It is the thought: Over there I have been a Self. There is, as we said, extreme difficulty in holding this thought. Many of you will know how difficult it is to bring over a dream from the other state of consciousness into the present moment. And it can happen all too easily that when man has entered the super-sensible world, this “ I” thought is like a dream that he has had in the Earth world and does not remember. Like a forgotten dream is this “ I ” thought, when he has come into the other consciousness; and the difficulty of holding it has even increased for man in the course of evolution. In ancient times, in times that lie far back in the remote past, it was comparatively easy to carry over the “ I ” picture from here on Earth to the Beyond, but in the course of the evolution of mankind it has become more and more difficult.

When I say, “The thought of the I comes,” you must think of it in the following way. For the present-day pupil in occultism, the thought often does indeed come. It does not merely remain with man as a dream picture,—no, it can flash up in him beyond as a sudden memory. For this to happen, however, help is needed. It can happen, but not without help,—an important point. When the pupil enters the super-sensible world, then under present day conditions of evolution the I would almost certainly remain behind like a forgotten dream, if help were not forthcoming.

If I am to give a name to the help that the pupil in occultism needs today in order that he may not forget the thought of the I when he ascends into the super-sensible world, there is but one expression I can use, and that is being together with the Christ Impulse on Earth. That is what helps! In present-day conditions of Earth evolution everything depends at this point on what sort of a relation man has had with the Christ Impulse during his life on Earth, and in what measure he has let It become alive in him. On this depends whether the thought of the I is lost in forgetfulness when man ascends into the super-sensible world, or whether it remains with him as the one and only sure support that he can take over with him from Earth into the super-sensible world.

The Christian of today has many remarkable and beautiful things to say about the Christ Impulse. But one who consciously in the Christian sense enters the higher worlds knows still more of the Christ Impulse. And this more that he knows is exceedingly important and significant. He knows that the Christ Impulse is the one and only thing that can come to our help when we are in danger of forgetting the I of Earth evolution. How is it that in addition to all that the Christ Impulse has already been able to be for man on Earth, in addition to the untold blessings that man has received and is still receiving from It, for his comfort, for his goodness of heart and mind, for his education and culture, there is also this,—that the Christ Impulse in the measure in which It works in man, can bring it about that the I of Earth does not need to be forgotten? Where can we look for the explanation of this?

If I am to give you an answer to this question, I must draw your attention to facts which, although you may not know them from occultism, you can yet acquaint yourselves with by an intelligent study of the Gospels. For there are two ways of coming to a knowledge of the reasons why the Christ Impulse can give this help. The first is the path of occultism,—an occultism such as rightly belongs to the stage of evolution reached by man in our times. And the second is the path of a thoroughly intelligent and deep study of the Gospels. The Gospels have one remarkable and unique feature, as compared with other religious records. People do not always notice it, but it is there, none the less. Take all that you can find in the external history of religions, take the whole content of the religions founded even in Post-Christian times, and compare with this what you read in the Christian records, the Gospels. If you look into the history of the founder of any religion and take pains to understand him, you will find you can only do so by learning to know and understand the super-sensible inspirations or intuitions which he received. Enquire of the Pre-Christian founders of religion whence came their wisdom and you will be told,—in the case of Buddha, for example, how he acquired under the Bodhi tree that great and high enlightenment which enabled him to proclaim what he called the “holy doctrine.” You are directed, that is to say, if you want to know the ground and source of Buddha's teaching, to a super-sensible enlightenment.

Nor is it any different in Post-Christian times. Take Mohammed. You must look to the visions, the revelations Mohammed received from super-sensible worlds, in order to explain why this or that was spoken in such and such a way. It is the same with all founders of religions; and not only with founders of religions, but with all who have given authentic revelations. We are directed to their divine inspiration, to the super-sensible that shone into them. We have quite exact knowledge of this in the case of Pythagoras. And in Plato's writings we can find everywhere indications that while he did not give all he knew, for what he did communicate he received inspiration through the Mysteries,—that is to say, he underwent evolution into higher worlds. Even in the case of Socrates we read of a “Daimon,” and indeed it would be absurd to leave out the Daimon in speaking of Socrates. What Socrates developed for man on the foundation of pure intelligence, he received through his Daimon. Look where you will, everywhere you will find the same.

Now let me ask; you to turn from these examples to the Gospels. Go through them carefully and you will find but one single occasion in the whole three years of His sojourn on Earth when, in the sense of initiation-experience, Christ Jesus looked into, or had to look into, the super-sensible world. The only time that you will find anything of this kind is in the scene of the Temptation, and even there you are not told that Christ had to learn to hold fast to a super-sensible good God, but only that He had a meeting with that which was for Him the “evil,”—with Satan, with Lucifer.

We are told that this Temptation was for Him from its very beginning no temptation. Read the passages through for yourselves and you will see how unique is the picture given us in the Gospels. Christ passed through what the initiators have always had to pass through, but from the beginning He holds steadfastly to His God, withstands the attacks and utters the word: “Get thee hence, Satan! For it is written, Thou shalt worship God, thy Lord, and Him only shalt thou serve.” Lucifer cannot tempt Him any further and leaves Him. In all the other scenes and events that follow the Temptation, in everything else the Gospels have to tell, we can discover nothing at all to be compared with the accounts that have to be given of the life of initiates, where we read a description of how and in what manner they learned in the course of their life to penetrate into the spiritual worlds.

We can speak of the Christ, right from the very beginning, as of an “initiate”—that is, one who has direct and immediate connection with the super-sensible world. I have done this in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact and continually in lectures. But one cannot in the case of the Christ speak of His “initiation,” one cannot speak in His case of progress through initiations. We can say that He is an “initiated” one, but we can say nothing at all about how He became “initiated.” That is a profound distinction.

Compare all that is told of the life of the “initiated” with the account you have in the Gospels. Perhaps you will observe—I have shown it in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact—that the writers of the Gospels needed only to take the ancient ritual in accordance with which initiation was carried out, in order to describe the life of Christ. In relating the ritual they were relating the events of the life of Christ Jesus. But they could never say that He actually underwent what they were describing. Take such a scene—pregnant with deep meaning—as the Transfiguration, or the Prayer on the Mount of Olives. These are events which if you had set out to relate them of some other initiated person you would have had to describe in quite a different way. You could not merely say that he went up to the Mount of Olives and that there drops of sweat fell from him like blood; in the case of another initiated person you would have to tell what he experienced there, how he was changed on the Mount of Olives. Christ was not changed. The meeting with His God on the Mount of Olives was not of such a character that we can feel He has anything to learn there. Similarly, what He passed through at the Transfiguration was not for Himself an enlightenment. For the others, for His companions, it was an enlightenment, but not for Him. For Him it was perfectly natural and comprehensible; He could not learn anything new from it.

What on the other hand should we expect to be told concerning any other initiated person? We must be shown how he advanced step by step on the path of knowledge. In the case of higher initiates we may expect to be told of how they brought a great deal with them from earlier incarnations and perhaps only needed still to pass through the very last stage. We find nothing of all this with the Christ. We have the story of the Temptation, and that is all. What we find in the Christ is that He was permeated through and through in the very highest degree with Divine Self-consciousness. This marks the opening scene of the three-year life of Christ. And then we have before us this wonderful picture,—the picture of highly exalted divine revelations proceeding directly and immediately from One who is Earth Man. In the case of any other initiated person we have to tell how he first attained to this or that stage of initiation and was then able to make this or that revelation. With Christ Jesus on the other hand it all wells up freely in Him from the very beginning, and we are not told that in the course of the three years of His life this or that stage of initiation was passed. If anyone were to treat the description of the Death and Resurrection of Christ Jesus as though they were such stages, it would only demonstrate his failure to perceive the fact that the Resurrection took place by virtue of the power that was already there in the living Christ. The Resurrection is not an act of initiation. Christ Jesus was not awakened to life by some other initiate but by the Divine Power that comes from beyond the Earth, the Power that was communicated to Him through the Baptism. The Resurrection was given at the time of the Baptism, it was already there in that moment; whereas the act which in the case of other initiated persons is called “Resurrection” has to be brought about by the deeds and instructions of an elder initiate.

This is the reason why I had to describe the Christ Event as I did in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact,—which was written more than ten years ago and appeared shortly after. We have to see it somewhat in the following way Christ lived His life on Earth. In this life many events and processes took place. How do we describe these events and processes? We describe them best by relating what an initiated one of olden time had to pass through. What the initiated in olden time passed through in his Mystery School, that unfolded itself in the case of Christ as historical fact. Therefore, the Evangelists could use the ancient books of initiation, not in order to describe an initiation of Christ but to write a biography of Him. That is the gist of the argument in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact.

It is evidence of the very deepest misunderstanding of the life of Christ if we speak of Him not as one already initiated but as one who had during Earth evolution to undergo initiation. Anyone who wants to explain the life of Christ as an initiation is making a very great mistake in regard to the Spirit of Christianity. He would understand Christianity as though its Founder were not already an Initiated One, but had first to be initiated, as though in describing the life of Christ one were describing processes of His initiation.

It is accordingly necessary, in speaking of the life of Christ, to make it perfectly clear that the expressions which are used cannot be applied in the same sense as they are applied to the ancient—or any other—initiation, but that they are used in an absolutely physical earthly sense, that they refer to a history, to an event in history that lies outside initiation.

The importance of this cannot be over-emphasised. No graver mistake could be made than to overlook what has just been explained and speak of an “initiation of Christ,”—not in the sense that it is spoken of in my lectures “At the Gates of Theosophy” or in those on “The St. John Gospel,” but clothing the life of Christ in the garb of an account of an initiation. In doing so, one would from the very outset be placing oneself in contradiction to every reasonable interpretation of the Gospels. It would be impossible to find the way to the heart and kernel of these, or to understand what occultism has to say concerning Christ Jesus. Let us never forget that when we speak of other founders of religion, we have to speak of them as men who have become initiated and we are justified and right in understanding their life as comprising within it an initiation, but that the life of Christ has to be described differently. Although this life of Christ, as it takes its course on Earth, had indeed to make divine revelations, we are not to conceive of any process of initiation shining as it were into this life of Christ and enlightening it. No, Christ was Himself an initiator. Read in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact the passage concerning the true meaning of the miracle of the Raising of Lazarus. You will find it was an initiation that Christ then performed. He Himself was able to initiate; but we can by no means say that Christ was initiated on Earth in the same sense as we have to say Lazarus was initiated by Christ.

In the place of initiation we have the Baptism by John in Jordan. If, however, the Baptism had been the corresponding act of initiation, it would have been described differently. We would have been told how Christ stood there as one awaiting initiation while a far more exalted initiator performed the act of initiation. The other, however, who stands at His side as the instrument for the act is no higher initiator, but is John the Baptist who cannot, in accordance with the facts, be placed higher than Christ Jesus Himself.

It has frequently happened that men have made this mistake. But for a right relation to Christianity, for a true understanding of Christianity, such a mistake is always fatal. We must, therefore, beware of speaking as though Christ had passed through various stages—Birth, Childhood, or again, Baptism or Transfiguration or Resurrection—in the sense in which some initiated person may be said to pass through such stages. The moment we apply to the Christ in the same manner the expressions: Birth, Baptism, Transfiguration, Ascension, we show a complete misunderstanding of Christianity.

All this needs to be clearly understood if we would answer the question: How has it come about that the Christ Impulse is what enables man to carry the memory of his I from ordinary life on Earth into the life of the super-sensible worlds?

Let me ask you to call up a picture before you of what I have tried to show you today, how man meets with death and with Lucifer and how the pupil in occultism comes into a hopeless and desolate situation from which he can only be released if he is able to retain a memory of the thought of the I. And remember then what I said further that the greatest help for the retention of the I thought consists, for a man of the present day, in having placed himself during life on Earth in a relation to the Christ Impulse. Recall too, how in order to establish this fact I set out to explain wherein the life of Christ is different from the life of any other initiated person. Christ comes before us from the outset as One of Whom we are certainly told that He performed deeds on Earth, but of Whom we are not told that He was influenced by a Daimon—like Socrates, or that He sat under a Bodhi tree—like Buddha, or that He had visions—like Mohammed. To imagine any of these would make it impossible to understand the Christ. How the Christ Impulse becomes the means for the pupil to let the I thought live on over into the spiritual world, so that he does not instead have only thoughts that have died, and how the super-sensible world then appears to him,—of this we will speak tomorrow.

As the result of an impulse which I have lately had, let us consider one of the most important subjects in Anthroposophy. Anthroposophists are often reproached for their inclination towards the study of far-distant cosmic developments; and it is said that they lift themselves into spiritual worlds, too frequently only considering the far-distant events of the past and the far-reaching perspective of the future, disregarding a sphere which is of more immediate interest—the sphere of human morals and human ethics.

It is true that this, the realm of human morals, must be looked upon as the most essential of all. But what must be said in answer to the reproach that we are less concerned with this important field of man's soul-life and social life than with more distant spheres, is that when we realise the significance and range of anthroposophical life and feeling we are only able to approach this subject with the deepest reverence, for it concerns man very closely indeed; and we realise that, if it is to be considered in the right way, it requires the most earnest and serious preparation. The above reproach might perhaps be stated in the following words: What is the use of making deep studies of the universe? Why talk about numerous reincarnations, or the complicated conditions of karma, when surely the most important thing in life is what a certain wise man after he had attained the summit of this life, and when after a life of rich wisdom he had grown so weak and ill that he had to be carried about, repeated again and again to his followers: “Children, love one another!”

These words were uttered by John the Evangelist when he was an old man, and it has often been said that in these four words, “Children, love one another!” is contained the extract of the deepest and most practical moral wisdom. Hence many might say: “What more is wanted, provided these good, sublime and moral ideals can be so simply fulfilled as in the sense of the words of the Evangelist John?”

When to the above statement one adds that it is sufficient for people to know that they ought to love one another, one thing is lost sight of, namely, the circumstance that he who uttered these words did so at the close of a long life of wisdom, a life which included the writing of the most profound and important of the Gospels. A man is only justified in saying anything so simple at the end of a rich life of wisdom. But one who is not in that position must first, by going deeply into the foundations of the secrets of the world, earn the right to utter the highest moral truths in such a simple manner.

Trivial as is the oft-repeated assertion, “If the same thing is said by two persons it never is the same,” it is especially applicable to the words we have quoted. When someone who simply declines to know or understand anything about the mysteries of the Cosmos says: “It is quite a simple matter to describe the highest moral life,” and uses the words: “Children, love one another,” it is quite different from when the evangelist John utters these words, at the close of such a rich life of wisdom. For this reason, he who understands these words of St. John ought to draw from them quite a different conclusion from that usually drawn. The conclusion should be that one has first of all to be silent about such profoundly significant words, and that they may only be uttered when one has gone through the necessary preparation and reached the necessary maturity.

Now after we have made this statement—which it is quite certain many will take earnestly to heart—something quite different, which is of the deepest importance will come to our mind. Someone might say: ‘It may be the case that the deep significance of moral principles can only be understood when the goal of all wisdom is reached, man uses them, nevertheless, all the time. How could some moral community or social work be carried on if one had to wait for a knowledge of the highest moral principles till the end of a life of striving for wisdom? Morals are most necessary for human social life; and now it is asserted that moral principles can only be obtained at the end of long striving after wisdom.’ A person might therefore reasonably say that he would doubt the wise arrangement of the world if this were so; if that which is most necessary could only be gained after the goal of human effort had been attained.

Life itself gives us, the true answer to what has just been said. You need only compare two facts which, in one form or another, are no doubt well known to you and you will at once perceive that the one can be right as well as the other; firstly, that we attain to the, highest moral principles and their understanding only at the conclusion of the effort after wisdom, and secondly, that moral and social communities and activities cannot exist without ethics or morals. You see this at once if you bear in mind two facts with which you are most certainly acquainted in one form or another. You may have known a man who was highly developed intellectually, he may have possessed not only a clear intellectual grasp of natural science, but he may also have understood many occult and spiritual truths both theoretically and practically and yet you may have known that such a person was not particularly moral. Who has not seen people clever and highly intellectual, going morally astray? And who has not also experienced the other fact, from which much may be learned! You, doubtless have known someone with a very restricted outlook, with limited intellect and knowing but little, who being in service brought up not her own but other people's children. From their earliest days she has probably assisted with their education and development and perhaps to the day of her death sacrificed to these children all she had in a selfless loving way and with the utmost devotion; yet if one had brought to her the moral principles that one had gained from the highest sources of wisdom, she would not, in all probability, have been particularly interested; she would probably have found them useless and incomprehensible. On the other hand her moral actions had accomplished more than mere recognition of moral principles. In such cases we feel that we must bow in reverence before that which streams out of the heart into life and creates an infinite amount of good.

Facts of such a nature often answer the riddles of life far more clearly than theoretical explanations, for we say to ourselves that a wise Providence, in order to impart to the world moral actions, moral activities, has not waited until people have discovered moral principles. There is in fact, to begin with—if we disregard immoral actions, the basis of which we shall get to know in these lectures—something contained in the human soul as a divine heritage, something given to us as original morality which may be called “instinctive morality” and it is this which makes it possible for humanity to wait until it can fathom moral principles.

But perhaps it is quite unnecessary to trouble much about investigating moral principles! Might it not be said that it is best if people trust to their original moral instincts and do not perplex themselves with theoretical explanations about morals? These lectures are to show that this is not the case. They are to show that, at least in the present epoch of humanity, we must seek for anthroposophical morals and that these morals must be exercised as a duty which comes as the fruit of all our anthroposophical science and practice.

The philosopher, Schopenhauer, in spite of much that is entirely erroneous in his philosophy, made this very true statement regarding the principles of morality. “To preach morals is easy, but to give them a foundation is difficult.” This statement is very true, for there is scarcely anything easier than to pronounce in a manner appealing to the commonest principles of human feeling and perception, what a person ought to do or leave undone in order that he may be a good man. Many people no doubt are offended when it is asserted that this is easy, but it is easy, and one who knows life, and knows the world, will not doubt that scarcely anything has been spoken about so much as the right principles of ethical action, and the man who speaks upon general ethical principles meets with almost universal approval. One might say it pleases listening minds, for they feel they can agree in an unqualified manner with what the speaker says when he discourses on the very commonest principles of human morality.

Notwithstanding this, morals are certainly not established by ethical teachings or moral sermons. Truly not. If morals could thus be founded there would be no immorality at the present day, for one might say that the whole of humanity would be overflowing with moral activities. For undoubtedly everyone has the opportunity of hearing the finest moral principles, since people are so fond of preaching them. But to know what one ought to do and what is morally right is of least importance compared with the fact that there should be within us impulses which, through their inward strength, their inward power, are themselves converted into moral actions, and thus express themselves externally. It is well known that ethical sermons do not produce this result. A moral foundation is laid when a man is guided to the source whence he must draw the impulses which shall supply him with forces leading to ethical activity.

How difficult these forces are to find, is shown by the simple fact that innumerable attempts have been made, for example, from the philosophic side, to found a system of ethics, a code of morals. How many different answers exist in the world to the questions: “What is goodness?” -- “What is virtue?” Put together what the philosophers have said, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and passing on through the Epicureans, the Stoics, the NeoPlatonists, the whole series down to modern philosophical opinions; put together all that has been said from Plato to Herbert Spencer upon the nature of Goodness and Virtue and you will see how many different attempts have been made to penetrate to the sources of moral life and impulse.

I hope in these lectures to show that it is only by delving into the occult secrets of life that it becomes possible, to penetrate not only to moral teachings, but to moral impulses, to the moral sources of life itself.

A single glance will show us that this moral principle in the world is by no means such a simple matter as might be supposed from a certain convenient standpoint. Let us for the moment take no notice of what is usually spoken of as “moral,” but consider certain spheres of human life from which we may perhaps be able to obtain a great deal towards a moral conception of life.

Not the least among the many things learned from spiritual science is the knowledge that most manifold conceptions and impulses have held good among various peoples in different parts of the earth. In comparing two sections of humanity which at first seem separated, one can consider the sacred life of ancient India, and observe how it has gradually developed up to the present day. One knows that what was characteristic of the India of primeval times is still true at the present day. The feelings, the thoughts and conceptions have been maintained that we find in this region in ancient times. It is remarkable that in these civilisations there has been preserved an image of primeval times, and when we consider what has been maintained up to our own day we are looking, so to say, at the same time into the remote past.

Now we do not progress very far in our understanding of the different peoples on earth if we begin by only applying our own moral standards. For this reason let us for the moment exclude what might be said about the moral things of those times and only inquire: What has developed from these characteristics of venerable ancient Indian civilisation?

We find, to begin with, that what was most highly honoured and held sacred may be described as “devotion to the spiritual”. This devotion to the spiritual was the more highly valued and counted sacred, the more the human being was able to sink into himself, to live quietly within himself, and, apart from all that man can attain on the physical plane—to direct the best in him to the spiritual worlds. We find this cultivation, this dedication of the soul to the foundations of existence as the highest duty of those who belonged or belong to the highest caste of Indian life, the Brahmins.

Nothing impresses the moral feelings of the Indian people more than this turning to the Divine-Spiritual with a devotion which forgets everything physical; an intensely deep introspection and renunciation of self. The moral life of this people is permeated by a devotion which controls every thought and action. This is apparent from the fact that those who belonged to other castes looked upon it as natural, especially in ancient times, that the caste of religious life and devotion and the life of ritual should be considered as something apart and worthy of reverence. That which underlies this cannot be understood by means of the common principles of morality laid down by philosophy, for at the period when these feelings and impulses developed in ancient India they were impossible among other peoples. In order that these tendencies could develop with such intensity both the temperament and fundamental character of the Indian people were required. As civilisation proceeded, emanating from India they spread abroad over the rest of the earth. If we wish to understand what is meant by the Divine-Spiritual we must go to this original source.

Let us now turn our attention away from this people and direct it towards Europe. Let us consider the peoples of Europe before Christianity had affected European culture very much, when it had only begun to spread in the West. You all know that Christianity spreading into Europe from the East and South was confronted by the peoples of Europe, who possessed certain tendencies, a definite inner worth and definite forces. One who studies with spiritual means the history of the introduction of Christianity into Central Europe and also here in the North, knows at what cost the balance was struck between this or that Christian impulse and what was brought to meet it from Northern and Central Europe.

And now let us inquire—as we have already done in the case of the Indian people—“What were the most characteristic moral forces brought to Christianity as a moral possession, a moral heritage, by the peoples whose successors form the present European population, especially the population of the North, Central Europe and England?” We need only mention a single one of the principal virtues, and we know at once that we are expressing something which is truly characteristic of these Northern and Mid-European peoples.—With the word “valour,” or “bravery,” we have named the chief virtue brought by the Europeans to Christianity; and the whole of the personal human force was exercised in order to actualise in the physical world what the human being intends from his innermost impulse. Intrinsically the further we go back to ancient times the more we find this to be the case—the other virtues are consequent upon this.

If we examine real valour in its fundamental quality, we find that it consists of an inner fullness of life which is practically inexhaustible, and this fullness of life was the most salient characteristic among the ancient peoples of Europe. Ancient Europeans possessed within them more valour than they could use for themselves. Quite instinctively, they followed the impulse to spend that of which they had a superabundance. One might even say that they were wasteful in pouring out their moral wealth, their fitness, and ability into the physical world. It was really as if among the ancient people of Northern Europe each one had brought with him a superfluity of force which was more than he needed for his own personal use; this he was therefore able to pour forth in an excess of prodigality and to use it for his warlike deeds. Modern ideas now consider these self-same warlike deeds, which were the outcome of ancient virtue, to be a relic of the past, and in fact they are classed as vices; but the man of ancient Europe used them in a chivalrous, magnanimous manner. Generous actions were characteristic of the peoples of ancient Europe, just as actions springing from devotion were characteristic of the people of ancient India.

Principles, theoretical moral axioms, would have been useless to the peoples of ancient Europe, for they would have evinced little understanding for them. Preaching moral sermons to a man of ancient Europe would have been like giving one who does not like reckoning, the advice that he ought to write down his receipts and expenditures with great accuracy. If he does not like this, the simple fact remains that he need not keep accounts, for he possesses enough for his expenditure, and can do without careful book-keeping if he has an inexhaustible supply. This circumstance is not unimportant. Theoretically it holds good with regard to what the human being considers of value in life, regarding personal energy and ability, and it also applies to the moral feelings of the inhabitants of ancient Europe. Each one had brought with him a divine legacy, as it were; he felt himself to be full of it, and spent it in the service of his family, his clan or his people. That was their mode of active trading and working.

We have now characterised two great sections of humanity which, were quite different from one another, for the feeling of contemplation natural to the Indians did not exist among Europeans. For, this reason it was difficult for Christianity to bring a feeling of devotion to the latter people, for their character and predispositions were entirely different. And now after considering these things—putting aside all the objections which might be raised from the standpoint of a moral concept—let us enquire into the moral effect. It does not require much reflection to know that this moral effect was extremely great when these two ways of looking at the world, these two trends of feeling met in their purest form. The world has gained infinitely much by that which could only be obtained through the existence of a people like the ancient Indians, among whom all feeling was directed to devotion to the Highest. Infinitely much it has also gained from the valiant deeds, of the European peoples of early pre-Christian times. Both these qualities had to co-operate, and together they yielded a certain moral effect. We shall see how the effect of the ancient Indian virtue as well as that of the ancient Germanic peoples can still be found to-day; how it has benefited not only a part but the whole of humanity, and we shall see how it still exists in all that men look up to as the highest.

So without further discussion, we may assert that something which produces this moral effect for humanity is good. Doubtless, in both streams of civilisation it must be so. But if, we were to ask: what is “goodness”? we are confronted once more by a puzzling question. What is the “good” which has been active in each of these cases? I do not wish to give you moral sermons, for this I do not consider my task. It is much more my task to bring before you the facts which lead us to an anthroposophical morality. For this reason I have thus far brought before you two systems of known facts, concerning which I ask nothing except that you should note that the fact of devotion and the fact of bravery produce definite moral effects in the evolution of humanity.

Let us now turn our attention to other ages. If you look at the life of the present day with its moral impulses you will naturally say: “We cannot practise to-day—at least not in Europe—what the purest ideal of India demands, for European civilisation cannot be carried on with Indian devotionalism”; but just as 1ittle would it be possible to attain to our present civilisation, with the ancient praiseworthy valour of the people of Europe. It at once becomes evident that deep in the innermost part of the ethical, feelings of the European peoples there is something else. We must therefore search out that something more in order to be able to answer the question: What is goodness? What is virtue?

I have often pointed out that we have to distinguish between the period we call the Graeco-Latin or fourth post-Atlantean age of civilisation and the one we call the fifth, in which we live at the present time. What I have now to say regarding the nature of morality is really intended to characterise the origin of the fifth post-Atlantean age. Let us begin with something which, as it is taken from poetry and legend you may consider open to dispute; but still it is significant of the way in which fresh moral impulses became active and how they flowed into mankind when the development of the fifth age gradually set in.

There was a poet who lived at the end of the 12th century and beginning of 13th century. He died in the year 1213, and was called Hartmann von Aue. He wrote his most important poem, entitled “Poor Henry,” in accordance with the way of thinking and feeling prevalent in his day. This poem particularly addresses what was thought about certain moral impulses among certain peoples in certain circles. Its substance is as follows:—Poor Henry once lived as a rich knight—for originally he was not poor Henry but a duly installed knight—who did not take into account that the things of the physical world decay and are temporary; he lived only for the day and thereby rapidly produced bad karma. He was thus stricken with a form of leprosy; he went to the most celebrated physicians in the world but none of them could help him, so considering his life at an end he sold all his worldly possessions; His disease preventing intercourse with his fellows he lived apart on a solitary farm, well taken care of by an old devoted servant and daughter. One day the daughter and the whole household heard that one thing alone could help the knight who had this destiny. No physician, no medicines could help him, only when a pure virgin out of pure love sacrificed her life for him would his health be restored. In spite of all the exhortations of her parents and of the knight Henry himself, something came over the daughter which made her feel that it was imperative she should sacrifice herself. She went with the knight to Salerno, the most celebrated school of medicine of the day. She did not fear what the physicians required of her; she was ready to sacrifice her life. But at the last moment the knight refused to allow it, he prevented it and returned home with her. The poem then tells us that when the knight returned home, he actually began. to recover and that he lived for a long time and spent a happy old age with the one who had determined to save him.

Well, to begin with, you may say that this is a poem, and we need not take literally the things here spoken of. But the matter becomes different when we compare what Hartmann von Aue, the poet of the Middle Ages, wrote at that time in his Poor Henry" with something that really happened, as is well known. We may compare what Hartmann wrote with the life of Francis of Assisi, who was born in the year 1182 and lived in Italy.

In order to describe, the moral nature contained in the personality of Francis of Assisi, let us consider the matter as it appears to the spiritual investigator or occultist, even though we may be looked upon as foolish and superstitious. These things must be taken seriously, because at that period of transition they were producing such momentous effects.

We know that Francis of Assisi was the son of the Italian merchant Bernardone, and his wife. Bernardone travelled a great deal in France, where he carried on his business. We also know that the father of Francis of Assisi was a man who set great store on outer appearances. His mother was a woman possessing the virtue of piety, having fine qualities of heart, and living devoutly according to her religious feelings. Now the things recounted in the form of legends about the birth and life of Francis of Assisi are entirely in agreement with occult facts. Although occult facts are frequently hidden by history in pictures and legends, these legends still correspond with them. Thus it is quite true that before the birth of Francis of Assisi quite a number of persons knew through revelation that an important personality was about to be born. Historical records show that one of the many people who dreamt—that is, who saw in prophetic vision—that an important personality was about to be born, was Saint Hildegarde. At this point I must emphasise once more the truth of these facts, which can be corroborated by investigations into the Akashic Record. She dreamt that there appeared to her a woman whose face was smeared and covered with blood, and this woman said to her: “The birds have their nests here upon earth, the foxes too have their holes, but at the present time I have nothing, not even a stick upon which I can lean.” When Hildegarde awakened from this dream, she knew this personality represented the true form of Christianity. And many other persons dreamt in a similar manner. From the knowledge at their disposal they saw that the outer order and institution of the church was unfitted to be a receptacle, a covering, for the true Christianity.

One day, while Francis of Assisi's father was on business in France—this, again, is a fact—a pilgrim went to Pica's house, to the mother of Francis of Assisi, and said to her: “The child you are expecting must not be brought into the world in this house, where there is abundance; you must bring him to birth in the stable, for he must lie upon straw and so follow after his Master!” This was actually said to the mother of Francis of Assisi; and it is not legend but truth that as the father was in France on business the mother was able to carry this out, so that the birth of Francis of Assisi actually took place in a stable and upon straw.

Another thing is also true: Some time after the child was born a remarkable man came into the little town, a man who had never been seen in that neighbourhood before and was never seen there again. He went through the streets again and again saying “An important person has been born in this town.” And those whose visionary life was still active also heard the ringing of bells at the time of the birth of Francis of Assisi.

Besides these few details a whole series of phenomena might be adduced, but we shall content ourselves with the above, which are only mentioned in order to show how significantly everything was concentrated from the spiritual world, regarding the advent of a single personality in that age.

All this becomes especially interesting when in addition we consider something else. The mother had the peculiar impression that the child ought to be called “John” and he was therefore given this name. However, when the father returned from France where he had done good business, he changed it and gave his son the name of Francis, as he wished to commemorate his successful journey. But originally the child was called John.

Now we need only draw attention to a few details from the life of this, remarkable man, especially from his youth. What sort of a person was Francis of Assisi as a youth? He was one who conducted himself like a descendant of the old Germanic knights, and this need not appear remarkable when we consider how peoples had intermingled after the immigrations from the North. Brave, warlike, filled with the ideal of winning honour and fame with the weapons of war; it was this which existed as a heritage, as a racial characteristic in the personality of Francis of Assisi.

There appeared in him more externally, one might say, the qualities which existed more as an inward quality of soul in the ancient Germans, for Francis of Assisi was a “spendthrift.” He squandered the possessions of his father, who was at that time a rich man. He gave freely to all his comrades and playfellows. No wonder that on all the childish warlike expeditions he was chosen as leader by his comrades, and that he was looked upon as a truly warlike boy, for he was known as such throughout the whole town. Now there were all sorts of quarrels between the youths of the towns of Assisi and Perugia; he also took part in these and it came about that on one occasion he and his comrades were taken prisoners. He not only bore his captivity patiently and in a knightly way, but he encouraged all the others to do the same until a year later they were able to return home.

Afterwards, when in the service of chivalry, a necessary expedition was going to be undertaken against Naples, he had a vision in a dream. He saw a great palace and everywhere weapons and shields. Up to the time of his dream he had only seen all kinds of cloth in his father's house and place of business. So he said to himself, this is a summons for me to become a soldier, and he thereupon decided to join the expedition. On the way there and still more distinctly after he had joined the expedition, he had spiritual impressions. He heard something like a voice which said “Go no further, you have wrongly interpreted the dream picture which is very important to you. Go back to Assisi and you shall there hear the right interpretation!”

He obeyed these words, went back to Assisi, and behold, he had something like an inner dialogue with a being who spoke to him spiritually and said, “Not in external service have you to seek your knighthood. You are destined to transform all the forces at your disposal into powers of the soul, into weapons forged for your use. All the weapons you saw in the palace signify the spiritual weapons of mercy, compassion and love. The shields signify the reasoning powers which you have to exercise to stand firmly in the trials of a life spent in deeds of mercy, compassion and love.” Then followed a short though dangerous illness, from which, however, he recovered. After that he passed through something like a retrospection of the whole of his life and in this he lived, for several days. The young knight who in his boldest dreams had only longed to become a great warrior was transformed into a man who now most earnestly sought all the impulses of mercy, compassion and love. All the forces he had thought of using in the service of the physical world were transformed into moral impulses of the inner life.

Here we see how a moral impulse evolves in a single personality. It is important that we should study a great moral impulse, for though the individual cannot always raise himself to the greatest ethical heights, yet he can only learn of them where he sees them most radically expressed and acting with the greatest forcefulness. It is precisely by turning our attention to the greatest and most characteristic manifestations of moral impulses, and then by considering the lesser ones in their light that we can attain to a correct view of moral impulses active in life.

But what happened next to Francis of Assisi? It is not necessary to describe the disputes with his father when he became prodigal in an entirely different manner. His father's home was well known for its lavish hospitality and wastefulness—for that reason his father could understand his son's extravagance, but he could not understand him after the radical change he had undergone, when he laid aside his best clothes and even his necessities and gave them to those in need. Nor could he understand his son's frame of mind, when he said, “How remarkable it is that those through whom in the West Christianity has received so much are so little respected,” and then Francis of Assisi made a pilgrimage to Rome and laid a large sum of money on the graves of the Apostles Peter and Paul. These things his father did not understand. I need not describe the discussions which then took place; I need only point out that in them were concentrated all the moral impulses of Francis of Assisi. These concentrated impulses had then transformed his bravery into soul-forces, they had developed in such a manner that in his meditations they produced a special conception, and appeared to him as the Cross and upon it the Saviour. Under these conditions he felt an inner personal relationship to the Cross and the Christ, and from this there came to him the forces through which he could immeasurably increase the moral impulses which now flowed through him.

He found a remarkable use for that which now developed in him. At that time the horrors of leprosy had invaded many parts of Europe. The church had discovered a strange cure for these lepers who were then so numerous. The priests would call the lepers and say to them: “ You are stricken with this disease in this life, but inasmuch as you are lost to this life, you have been won for God, you are dedicated to God.” And the lepers were then sent away to places far removed from mankind, where, lonely and shunned, they had to spend the remainder of their lives.

I do not blame this kind of cure. They knew no better. But Francis of Assisi knew a better one. I mention this, because from actual experience it will lead us to moral sources. You will see in our next lectures why we are now mentioning these things. These moral impulses led Francis of Assisi to search out lepers everywhere, and not to be afraid of going about among them. And actually the leprosy which none of the remedial agents at that time could cure, which made it necessary that these people should be thrust out of human society, this leprosy was healed in numberless cases by Francis of Assisi, because he went to these people with the power which he possessed through moral impulses, which made him fear nothing; it rather gave him courage not only carefully to cleanse their wounds, but to live with the lepers, to nurse them conscientiously, yea, to kiss them and permeate them with his love.

The healing of Poor Henry by the daughter of his faithful servant, is not merely a poetic story, it expresses what actually occurred in a great number of cases at that time through the historically well-known personality of Francis of Assisi. Observe what really took place. In a human being, in Francis of Assisi, there was a tremendous store of psychic life, in the shape of something which we have found in the ancient peoples of Europe as bravery and valour, which had been transformed into soul and spirit, and afterwards acted psychically and spiritually. Just as in ancient times that which had expressed itself as courage and valour led to personal expenditure of force, and manifested itself in Francis of Assisi in his younger days as extravagance, so it now led him to become prodigal of moral forces. He was full to overflowing with moral force, and this actually passed over to those to whom he turned his love.

Now try to realise that this moral force is a reality, just as much a reality as the air we breathe and without which we cannot live. It is a reality which flooded the whole being of Francis of Assisi, and streamed from him into all hearts to which he dedicated himself, for Francis of Assisi was prodigal of abundance of force which streamed forth from him, and this is something which has streamed into and intermingled with the whole of the mature life of Europe, which has changed into a soul force, and thus worked, as it were, in the world of external reality.

Try to reflect upon these facts which at first may apparently have nothing to do with the actual question of morality; try to grasp what is contained in the devotion of the Indian and the valour of the Norseman; reflect upon the healing effect of such moral forces as were exercised by Francis of Assisi and then in our next lecture we shall be able to speak about real, moral impulses and we shall see that it is not merely words which give rise to morality, but realities working in the soul.

We have to consider in these coming days one of the most important and significant fields of our Anthroposophical study of life. We are often reproached for our inclination towards the study of far-distant cosmic developments in their connection with man; it is said that we like to lift ourselves into spiritual worlds, too frequently only considering the far-distant events of the past and the far-reaching perspective of the future, and that we disregard a sphere which concerns man most intimately—the sphere of human morals and human ethics.

It is true that this, the realm of human morals, must be looked upon as the most essential of all. But what must be said in answer to the reproach that we are less concerned with this important field of man's soul-life and social life than with more distant spheres, is that when we realise the significance and range of anthroposophical life and feeling we are only able to approach this subject with the deepest reverence, for it concerns man very closely indeed; and we realise that, if it is to be considered in the right way, it requires the most earnest and serious preparation. The above reproach might perhaps be stated in the following words: What is the use of making deep studies of the universe? Why talk about numerous reincarnations, or the complicated conditions of karma, when surely the most important thing in life is what a certain wise man after he had attained the summit of this life, and when after a life of rich wisdom he had grown so weak and ill that he had to be carried about, repeated again and again to his followers: “Children, love one another!”

These words were uttered by John the Evangelist when he was an old man, and it has often been said that in these four words, “Children, love one another!” is contained the extract of the deepest and most practical moral wisdom. Hence many might say: “What more is wanted, provided these good, sublime and moral ideals can be so simply fulfilled as in the sense of the words of the Evangelist John?”

When to the above statement one adds that it is sufficient for people to know that they ought to love one another, one thing is lost sight of, namely, the circumstance that he who uttered these words did so at the close of a long life of wisdom, a life which included the writing of the most profound and important of the Gospels. A man is only justified in saying anything so simple at the end of a rich life of wisdom. But one who is not in that position must first, by going deeply into the foundations of the secrets of the world, earn the right to utter the highest moral truths in such a simple manner.

Trivial as is the oft-repeated assertion, “If the same thing is said by two persons it never is the same,” it is especially applicable to the words we have quoted. When someone who simply declines to know or understand anything about the mysteries of the Cosmos says: “It is quite a simple matter to describe the highest moral life,” and uses the words: “Children, love one another,” it is quite different from when the evangelist John utters these words, at the close of such a rich life of wisdom. For this reason, he who understands these words of St. John ought to draw from them quite a different conclusion from that usually drawn. The conclusion should be that one has first of all to be silent about such profoundly significant words, and that they may only be uttered when one has gone through the necessary preparation and reached the necessary maturity.

Now after we have made this statement—which it is quite certain many will take earnestly to heart—something quite different, which is of the deepest importance will come to our mind. Someone might say: “It may be the case that the deep significance of moral principles can only be understood when the goal of all wisdom is reached, man uses them, nevertheless, all the time. How could some moral community or social work be carried on if one had to wait for a knowledge of the highest moral principles till the end of a life of striving for wisdom? Morals are most necessary for human social life; and now it is asserted that moral principles can only be obtained at the end of long striving after wisdom.” A person might therefore reasonably say that he would doubt the wise arrangement of the world if this were so; if that which is most necessary could only be gained after the goal of human effort had been attained.

Life itself gives us, the true answer to what has just been said. You need only compare two facts which, in one form or another, are no doubt well known to you and you will at once perceive that the one can be right as well as the other; firstly, that we attain to the, highest moral principles and their understanding only at the conclusion of the effort after wisdom, and secondly, that moral and social communities and activities cannot exist without ethics or morals. You see this at once if you bear in mind two facts with which you are most certainly acquainted in one form or another. You may have known a man who was highly developed intellectually, he may have possessed not only a clear intellectual grasp of natural science, but he may also have understood many occult and spiritual truths both theoretically and practically and yet you may have known that such a person was not particularly moral. Who has not seen people clever and highly intellectual, going morally astray? And who has not also experienced the other fact, from which much may be learned! You, doubtless have known someone with a very restricted outlook, with limited intellect and knowing but little, who being in service brought up not her own but other people's children. From their earliest days she has probably assisted with their education and development and perhaps to the day of her death sacrificed to these children all she had in a selfless loving way and with the utmost devotion; yet if one had brought to her the moral principles that one had gained from the highest sources of wisdom, she would not, in all probability, have been particularly interested; she would probably have found them useless and incomprehensible. On the other hand her moral actions had accomplished more than mere recognition of moral principles. In such cases we feel that we must bow in reverence before that which streams out of the heart into life and creates an infinite amount of good.

Facts of such a nature often answer the riddles of life far more clearly than theoretical explanations, for we say to ourselves that a wise Providence, in order to impart to the world moral actions, moral activities, has not waited until people have discovered moral principles. There is in fact, to begin with—if we disregard unmoral actions, the basis of which we shall get to know in these lectures—something contained in the human soul as a divine heritage, something given to us as original morality which may be called “instinctive morality” and it is this which makes it possible for humanity to wait until it can fathom moral principles.

But perhaps it is quite unnecessary to trouble much about investigating moral principles! Might it not be said that it is best if people trust to their original moral instincts and do not perplex themselves with theoretical explanations about morals? These lectures are to show that this is not the case. They are to show that, at least in the present epoch of humanity, we must seek for anthroposophical morals and that these morals must be exercised as a duty which comes as the fruit of all our anthroposophical science and practice.

The philosopher, Schopenhauer, in spite of much that is entirely erroneous in his philosophy, made this very true statement regarding the principles of morality. “To preach morals is easy, but to give them a foundation is difficult.” This statement is very true, for there is scarcely anything easier than to pronounce in a manner appealing to the commonest principles of human feeling and perception, what a person ought to do or leave undone in order that he may be a good man. Many people no doubt are offended when it is asserted that this is easy, but it is easy, and one who knows life, and knows the world, will not doubt that scarcely anything has been spoken about so much as the right principles of ethical action, and the man who speaks upon general ethical principles meets with almost universal approval. One might say it pleases listening minds, for they feel they can agree in an unqualified manner with what the speaker says when he discourses on the very commonest principles of human morality.

Notwithstanding this, morals are certainly not established by ethical teachings or moral sermons. Truly not. If morals could thus be founded there would be no immorality at the present day, for one might say that the whole of humanity would be overflowing with moral activities. For undoubtedly everyone has the opportunity of hearing the finest moral principles, since people are so fond of preaching them. But to know what one ought to do and what is morally right is of least importance compared with the fact that there should be within us impulses which, through their inward strength, their inward power, are themselves converted into moral actions, and thus express themselves externally. It is well known that ethical sermons do not produce this result. A moral foundation is laid when a man is guided to the source whence he must draw the impulses which shall supply him with forces leading to ethical activity.

How difficult these forces are to find, is shown by the simple fact that innumerable attempts have been made, for example, from the philosophic side, to found a system of ethics, a code of morals. How many different answers exist in the world to the questions: “What is goodness?”——“What is virtue?” Put together what the philosophers have said, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and passing on through the Epicureans, the Stoics, the NeoPlatonists, the whole series down to modern philosophical opinions; put together all that has been said from Plato to Herbert Spencer upon the nature of Goodness and Virtue and you will see how many different attempts have been made to penetrate to the sources of moral life and impulse.

I hope in these lectures to show that it is only by delving into the occult secrets of life that it becomes possible, to penetrate not only to moral teachings, but to moral impulses, to the moral sources of life itself.

A single glance will show us that this moral principle in the world is by no means such a simple matter as might be supposed from a certain convenient standpoint. Let us for the moment take no notice of what is usually spoken of as “moral,” but consider certain spheres of human life from which we may perhaps be able to obtain a great deal towards a moral conception of life.

Not the least among the many things learned from spiritual science is the knowledge that most manifold conceptions and impulses have held good among various peoples in different parts of the earth. In comparing two sections of humanity which at first seem separated, one can consider the sacred life of ancient India, and observe how it has gradually developed up to the present day. One knows that what was characteristic of the India of primeval times is still true at the present day. The feelings, the thoughts and conceptions have been maintained that we find in this region in ancient times. It is remarkable that in these civilisations there have been preserved an image of primeval times, and when we consider what has been maintained up to our own day we are looking, so to say, at the same time into the remote past.

Now we do not progress very far in our understanding of the different peoples on earth if we begin by only applying our own moral standards. For this reason let us for the moment exclude what might be said about the moral things of those times and only inquire: What has developed from these characteristics of venerable ancient Indian civilisation?

We find, to begin with, what may be described as “devotion to the spiritual,” most highly honoured and held sacred. This devotion to the spiritual was the more highly valued and counted sacred, the more the human being was able to, sink into himself, to live quietly within himself, and, apart from all that man can attain on the physical plane—to direct the best in him to the spiritual worlds. We find this cultivation, this dedication of the soul to the foundations of existence as the highest duty of those who belonged or belong to the highest caste of Indian life, the Brahmins.

Nothing impresses the moral feelings of the Indian people more than this turning to the Divine-Spiritual with a devotion which forgets everything physical; an intensely deep introspection and renunciation of self. The moral life of this people is permeated by a devotion which controls every thought and action. This is apparent from the fact that those who belonged to other castes looked upon it as natural, especially in ancient times, that the caste of religious life and devotion and the life of ritual should be considered as something apart and worthy of reverence. That which underlies this cannot be understood by means of the common principles of morality laid down by philosophy, for at the period when these feelings and impulses developed in ancient India they were impossible among other peoples. In order that these tendencies could develop with such intensity both the temperament and fundamental character of the Indian people were required. As civilisation proceeded, emanating from India they spread abroad over the rest of the earth. If we wish to understand what is meant by the Divine-Spiritual we must go to this original source.

Let us now turn our attention away from this people and direct it towards Europe. Let us consider the peoples of Europe before Christianity had affected European culture very much, when it had only begun to spread in the West. You all know that Christianity spreading into Europe from the East and South was confronted by the peoples of Europe, who possessed certain tendencies, a definite inner worth and definite forces. One who studies with spiritual means the history of the introduction of Christianity into Central Europe and also here in the North, knows at what cost the balance was struck between this or that Christian impulse and what was brought to meet it from Northern and Central Europe.

And now let us inquire—as we have already done in the case of the Indian people—“What were the most characteristic moral forces brought to Christianity as a moral possession, a moral heritage, by the peoples whose successors form the present European population, especially the population of the North, Central Europe and England?” We need only mention a single one of the principal virtues, and we know at once that we are expressing something which is truly characteristic of these Northern and Mid-European peoples.—With the word “valour,” or “bravery,” we have named the chief virtue brought by the Europeans to Christianity; and the whole of the personal human force was exercised in order to actualise in the physical world what the human being intends from his innermost impulse. Intrinsically the further we go back to ancient times the more we find this to be the case—the other virtues are consequent upon this.

If we examine real valour in its fundamental quality, we find that it consists of an inner fullness of life which is practically inexhaustible, and this fullness of life was the most salient characteristic among the ancient peoples of Europe. Ancient Europeans possessed within them more valour than they could use for themselves. Quite instinctively, they followed the impulse to spend that of which they had a superabundance. One might even say that they were wasteful in pouring out their moral wealth, their fitness, and ability into the physical world. It was really as if among the ancient people of Northern Europe each one had brought with him a superfluity of force which was more than he needed for his own personal use; this he was therefore able to pour forth in an excess of prodigality and to use it for his warlike deeds. Modern ideas now consider these self-same warlike deeds, which were the outcome of ancient virtue, to be a relic of the past, and in fact they are classed as vices; but the man of ancient Europe used them in a chivalrous, magnanimous manner. Generous actions were characteristic of the peoples of ancient Europe, just as actions springing from devotion were characteristic of the people of ancient India.

Principles, theoretical moral axioms, would have been useless to the peoples of ancient Europe, for they would have evinced little understanding for them. Preaching moral sermons to a man of ancient Europe would have been like giving one who does not like reckoning, the advice that he ought to write down his receipts and expenditures with great accuracy. If he does not like this, the simple fact remains that he need not keep accounts, for he possesses enough for his expenditure, and can do without careful book-keeping if he has an inexhaustible supply. This circumstance is not unimportant. Theoretically it holds good with regard to what the human being considers of value in life, regarding personal energy and ability, and it also applies to the moral feelings of the inhabitants of ancient Europe. Each one had brought with him a divine legacy, as it were; he felt himself to be full of it, and spent it in the service of his family, his clan or his people. That was their mode of active trading and working.

We have now characterised two great sections of humanity which, were quite different from one another, for the feeling of contemplation natural to the Indians did not exist among Europeans. For, this reason it was difficult for Christianity to bring a feeling of devotion to the latter people, for their character and predispositions were entirely different. And now after considering these things—putting aside all the objections which might be raised from the standpoint of a moral concept—let us enquire into the moral effect. It does not require much reflection to know that this moral effect was extremely great when these two ways of looking at the world, these two trends of feeling met in their purest form. The world has gained infinitely much by that which could only be obtained through the existence of a people like the ancient Indians, among whom all feeling was directed to devotion to the Highest. Infinitely much it has also gained from the valiant deeds, of the European peoples of early pre-Christian times. Both these qualities had to co-operate, and together they yielded a certain moral effect. We shall see how the effect of the ancient Indian virtue as well as that of the ancient Germanic peoples can still be found to-day; how it has benefited not only a part but the whole of humanity, and we shall see how it still exists in all that men look up to as the highest.

So without further discussion, we may assert that something which produces this moral effect for humanity is good. Doubtless, in both streams of civilisation it must be so. But if, we were to ask: what is “goodness”? we are confronted once more by a puzzling question. What is the “good” which has been active in each of these cases? I do not wish to give you moral sermons, for this I do not consider my task. It is much more my task to bring before you the facts which lead us to an anthroposophical morality. For this reason I have thus far brought before you two systems of known facts, concerning which I ask nothing except that you should note that the fact of devotion and the fact of bravery produce definite moral effects in the evolution of humanity. Let us now turn our attention to other ages. If you look at the life of the present day with its moral impulses you will naturally say: “We cannot practise to-day—at least not in Europe—what the purest ideal of India demands, for European civilisation cannot be carried on with Indian devotionalism”; but just as little would it be possible to attain to our present civilisation, with the ancient praiseworthy valour of the people of Europe. It at once becomes evident that deep in the innermost part of the ethical, feelings of the European peoples there is something else. We must therefore search out that something more in order to be able to answer the question: What is goodness? What is virtue?

I have often pointed out that we have to distinguish between the period we call the Graeco-Latin or fourth post-Atlantean age of civilisation and the one we call the fifth, in which we live at the present time. What I have now to say regarding the nature of morality is really intended to characterise the origin of the fifth post-Atlantean age. Let us begin with something which, as it is taken from poetry and legend you may consider open to dispute; but still it is significant of the way in which fresh moral impulses became active and how they flowed into mankind when the development of the fifth age gradually set in.

There was a poet who lived at the end of the 12th century and beginning of 13th century. He died in the year 1213, and was called Hartmann von Aue. He wrote his most important poem, entitled “Poor Henry,” in accordance with the way of thinking and feeling prevalent in his day. This poem particularly addresses what was thought about certain moral impulses among certain peoples in certain circles. Its substance is as follows:—Poor Henry once lived as a rich knight—for originally he was not poor Henry but a duly installed knight—who did not take into account that the things of the physical world decay and are temporary; he lived only for the day and thereby rapidly produced bad karma. He was thus stricken with a form of leprosy; he went to the most celebrated physicians in the world but none of them could help him, so considering his life at an end he sold all his worldly possessions; His disease preventing intercourse with his fellows he lived apart on a solitary farm, well taken care of by an old devoted servant and daughter. One day the daughter and the whole household heard that one thing alone could help the knight who had this destiny. No physician, no medicines could help him, only when a pure virgin out of pure love sacrificed her life for him would his health be restored. In spite of all the exhortations of her parents and of the knight Henry himself, something came over the daughter which made her feel that it was imperative she should sacrifice herself. She went with the knight to Salerno, the most celebrated school of medicine of the day. She did not fear what the physicians required of her; she was ready to sacrifice her life. But at the last moment the knight refused to allow it, he prevented it and returned home with her. The poem then tells us that when the knight returned home, he actually began to recover and that he lived for a long time and spent a happy old age with the one who had determined to save him.

Well, to begin with, you may say that this is a poem, and we need not take literally the things here spoken of. But the matter becomes different when we compare what Hartmann von Aue, the poet of the Middle Ages, wrote at that time in his Poor Henry" with something that really happened, as is well known. We may compare what Hartmann wrote with the life of Francis of Assisi, who was born in the year 1182 and lived in Italy.

In order to describe, the moral nature contained in the personality of Francis of Assisi, let us consider the matter as it appears to the spiritual investigator or occultist, even though we may be looked upon as foolish and superstitious. These things must be taken seriously, because at that period of transition they were producing such momentous effects.

We know that Francis of Assisi was the son of the Italian merchant Bernardone, and his wife. Bernardone travelled a great deal in France, where he carried on his business. We also know that the father of Francis of Assisi was a man who set great store on outer appearances. His mother was a woman possessing the virtue of piety, having fine qualities of heart, and living devoutly according to her religious feelings. Now the things recounted in the form of legends about the birth and life of Francis of Assisi are entirely in agreement with occult facts. Although occult facts are frequently hidden by history in pictures and legends, these legends still correspond with them. Thus it is quite true that before the birth of Francis of Assisi quite a number of persons knew through revelation that an important personality was about to be born. Historical records show that one of the many people who dreamt—that is, who saw in prophetic vision—that an important personality was about to be born, was Saint Hildegarde. At this point I must emphasise once more the truth of these facts, which can be corroborated by investigations into the Akashic Record. She dreamt that there appeared to her a woman whose face was smeared and covered with blood, and this woman said to her: "The birds have their nests here upon earth, the foxes too have their holes, but at the present time I have nothing, not even a stick upon which I can lean." When Hildegarde awakened from this dream, she knew this personality represented the true form of Christianity. And many other persons dreamt in a similar manner. From the knowledge at their disposal they saw that the outer order and institution of the church was unfitted to be a receptacle, a covering, for the true Christianity.

One day, while Francis of Assisi's father was on business in France—this, again, is a fact—a pilgrim went to Pica's house, to the mother of Francis of Assisi, and said to her: “The child you are expecting must not be brought into the world in this house, where there is abundance; you must bring him to birth in the stable, for he must lie upon straw and so follow after his Master!” This was actually said to the mother of Francis of Assisi; and it is not legend but truth that as the father was in France on business the mother was able to carry this out, so that the birth of Francis of Assisi actually took place in a stable and upon straw.

Another thing is also true: Some time after the child was born a remarkable man came into the little town, a man who had never been seen in that neighbourhood before and was never seen there again. He went through the streets again and again saying "An important person has been born in this town." And those whose visionary life was still active also heard the ringing of bells at the time of the birth of Francis of Assisi.

Besides these few details a whole series of phenomena might be adduced, but we shall content ourselves with the above, which are only mentioned in order to show how significantly everything was concentrated from the spiritual world, regarding the advent of a single personality in that age.

All this becomes especially interesting when in addition we consider something else. The mother had the peculiar impression that the child ought to be called “John” and he was therefore given this name. However, when the father returned from France where he had done good business, he changed it and gave his son the name of Francis, as he wished to commemorate his successful journey. But originally the child was called John.

Now we need only draw attention to a few details from the life of this, remarkable man, especially from his youth. What sort of a person was Francis of Assisi as a youth? He was one who conducted himself like a descendant of the old Germanic knights, and this need not appear remarkable when we consider how peoples had intermingled after the immigrations from the North. Brave, warlike, filled with the ideal of winning honour and fame with the weapons of war; it was this which existed as a heritage, as a racial characteristic in the personality of Francis of Assisi.

There appeared in him more externally, one might say, the qualities which existed more as an inward quality of soul in the ancient Germans, for Francis of Assisi was a “spendthrift.” He squandered the possessions of his father, who was at that time a rich man. He gave freely to all his comrades and playfellows. No wonder that on all the childish warlike expeditions he was chosen as leader by his comrades, and that he was looked upon as a truly warlike boy, for he was known as such throughout the whole town. Now there were all sorts of quarrels between the youths of the towns of Assisi and Perugia; he also took part in these and it came about that on one occasion he and his comrades were taken prisoners. He not only bore his captivity patiently and in a knightly way, but he encouraged all the others to do the same until a year later they were able to return home.

Afterwards, when in the service of chivalry, a necessary expedition was going to be undertaken against Naples, he had a vision in a dream. He saw a great palace and everywhere weapons and shields. Up to the time of his dream he had only seen all kinds of cloth in his father's house and place of business. So he said to himself, this is a summons for me to become a soldier, and he thereupon decided to join the expedition. On the way there and still more distinctly after he had joined the expedition, he had spiritual impressions. He heard something like a voice which said “Go no further, you have wrongly interpreted the dream picture which is very important to you. Go back to Assisi and you shall there hear the right interpretation!”

He obeyed these words, went back to Assisi, and behold, he had something like an inner dialogue with a being who spoke to him spiritually and said, “Not in external service have you to seek your knighthood. You are destined to transform all the forces at your disposal into powers of the soul, into weapons forged for your use. All the weapons you saw in the palace signify the spiritual weapons of mercy, compassion and love. The shields signify the reasoning powers which you have to exercise to stand firmly in the trials of a life spent in deeds of mercy, compassion and love.” Then followed a short though dangerous illness, from which, however, he recovered. After that he passed through something like a retrospection of the whole of his life and in this he lived, for several days. The young knight who in his boldest dreams had only longed to become a great warrior was transformed into a man who now most earnestly sought all the impulses of mercy, compassion and love. All the forces he had thought of using in the service of the physical world were transformed into moral impulses of the inner life.

Here we see how a moral impulse evolves in a single personality. It is important that we should study a great moral impulse, for though the individual cannot always raise himself to the greatest ethical heights, yet he can only learn of them where he sees them most radically expressed and acting with the greatest forcefulness. It is precisely by turning our attention to the greatest and most characteristic manifestations of moral impulses, and then by considering the lesser ones in their light that we can attain to a correct view of moral impulses active in life.

But what happened next to Francis of Assisi? It is not necessary to describe the disputes with his father when he became prodigal in an entirely different manner. His father's home was well known for its lavish hospitality and wastefulness—for that reason his father could understand his son's extravagance, but he could not understand him after the radical change he had undergone, when he laid aside his best clothes and even his necessities and gave them to those in need. Nor could he understand his son's frame of mind, when he said, “How remarkable it is that those through whom in the West Christianity has received so much are so little respected,” and then Francis of Assisi made a pilgrimage to Rome and laid a large sum of money on the graves of the Apostles Peter and Paul. These things his father did not understand. I need not describe the discussions which then took place; I need only point out that in them were concentrated all the moral impulses of Francis of Assisi. These concentrated impulses had then transformed his bravery into soul-forces, they had developed in such a manner that in his meditations they produced a special conception, and appeared to him as the Cross and upon it the Saviour. Under these conditions he felt an inner personal relationship to the Cross and the Christ, and from this there came to him the forces through which he could immeasurably increase the moral impulses which now flowed through him.

He found a remarkable use for that which now developed in him. At that time the horrors of leprosy had invaded many parts of Europe. The church had discovered a strange cure for these lepers who were then so numerous. The priests would call the lepers and say to them: " You are stricken with this disease in this life, but inasmuch as you are lost to this life, you have been won for God, you are dedicated to God." And the lepers were then sent away to places far removed from mankind, where, lonely and shunned, they had to spend the remainder of their lives.

I do not blame this kind of cure. They knew no better. But Francis of Assisi knew a better one. I mention this, because from actual experience it will lead us to moral sources. You will see in our next lectures why we are now mentioning these things. These moral impulses led Francis of Assisi to search out lepers everywhere, and not to be afraid of going about among them. And actually the leprosy which none of the remedial agents at that time could cure, which made it necessary that these people should be thrust out of human society, this leprosy was healed in numberless cases by Francis of Assisi, because he went to these people with the power which he possessed through moral impulses, which made him fear nothing; it rather gave him courage not only carefully to cleanse their wounds, but to live with the lepers, to nurse them conscientiously, yea, to kiss them and permeate them with his love.

The healing of Poor Henry by the daughter of his faithful servant, is not merely a poetic story, it expresses what actually occurred in a great number of cases at that time through the historically well-known personality of Francis of Assisi. Observe what really took place. In a human being, in Francis of Assisi, there was a tremendous store of psychic life, in the shape of something which we have found in the ancient peoples of Europe as bravery and valour, which had been transformed into soul and spirit, and afterwards acted psychically and spiritually. Just as in ancient times that which had expressed itself as courage and valour led to personal expenditure of force, and manifested itself in Francis of Assisi in his younger days as extravagance, so it now led him to become prodigal of moral forces. He was full to overflowing with moral force, and this actually passed over to those to whom he turned his love.

Now try to realise that this moral force is a reality, just as much a reality as the air we breathe and without which we cannot live. It is a reality which flooded the whole being of Francis of Assisi, and streamed from him into all hearts to which he dedicated himself, for Francis of Assisi was prodigal of abundance of force which streamed forth from him, and this is something which has streamed into and intermingled with the whole of the mature life of Europe, which has changed into a soul force, and thus worked, as it were, in the world of external reality.

Try to reflect upon these facts which at first may apparently have nothing to do with the actual question of morality; try to grasp what is contained in the devotion of the Indian and the valour of the Norseman; reflect upon the healing effect of such moral forces as were exercised by Francis of Assisi and then in our next lecture we shall be able to speak about real, moral impulses and we shall see that it is not merely words which give rise to morality, but realities working in the soul.

Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform.

Dear friends, the points we shall consider today will once again be aphoristic. They may serve to round off one or another of the things I have spoken of before. The first point I want to refer to is the way we find the facts, the real nature, of the spiritual worlds when we ascend to those spiritual worlds and have taken the first steps Within them. Let me start by considering the problems we meet in our efforts to attain to the spiritual worlds. They are indeed considerable, and although it is certain that the path we take when we meditate, With all the work we do in the inner soul, must lead to the spiritual world—certain as this may be—it is also very easy to fail to recognize the particular kind of soul experience that takes the soul up into the spiritual worlds.

First of all there is the problem that we are in the habit of judging everything our soul comes upon on the basis of experiences we have gained in the world accessible to the outer senses. We could say that we really know nothing but what we have made our own out of the sense-perceptible world. Now we enter the spiritual world and find that everything is entirely different from the sense-perceptible world. Everything being different, the main problem is to extend the range of our attention to the things we are supposed to be seeing. The situation is that the whole of the spiritual world might lie spread out before us but we would see nothing. The reason is that whilst we are awake and in our earth bodies we are not in a position to withdraw our spiritual organs from this earth body, to draw them away from their union with the earth body.

Let me use a comparison I have used on a number of occasions to present an image of the soul element separating from the body. I have often said that it is just as impossible to recognize the immortal part of man from what he is here in ordinary life as it is to recognize the properties of hydrogen and oxygen by looking at water. Hydrogen is present in water, forming a compound with oxygen, the way our immortal part is present in the body. It will reveal nothing of its qualities until it is separated out of the water. It hides all those qualities. In the same way the soul hides its qualities when it is united with the body.

Our ordinary life between birth and death trains us to relate to the sense-perceptible world in such a way that whilst we are awake the organs of the mind and spirit are always tied up with the body in the same way as hydrogen is tied up with oxygen in water. The soul is therefore unable to depart from the body during the time between birth and death, except for the time between going to sleep and waking up again when it is in the spiritual worlds. During the time between going to sleep and waking up the soul really enters the spiritual worlds. It is there in those worlds. It gains new strength for the daily round out of the spiritual worlds. It retains the habit, however, of perceiving lily with the physical organs, and the moment it reaches the point where it has gained the strength that would enable it to achieve perception within the spiritual sphere it wakes up. The soul is joined to the body through the powers within it; because of it ability to feel desire the soul is connected with the body. The moment its powers have been recharged and it is again able to be active it desires to return to the body as long as the body is still capable of life. In the first place it will therefore be necessary for us gradually to get our bearings after death.

In one of my public lectures I referred to the ability to remember as the ultimate soul activity⁵³ Let us compare this with what happens when man learns to look into the spiritual world. It is something which to some extent does make us free of the bodily element. Modern science, as it continues to develop, will actually show that looking back to an earlier experience is a process occurring in mind and spirit. This process is however given enormous assistance, assistance provided by the body.

It happens like this. When our soul dwells in the body, anything we entrust to our power of memory has the nature of an image to begin with; it is very similar to what we call imaginative perception. In ordinary life, however, we proceed to imprint everything that is to be memory into the bodily element. When we have an experience we first of all encounter the experience with our senses; we form an image of it. This image first of all imprints itself in the body; an imprint is left in the body, an imprint we could compare with the imprint left by a seal. It is important to understand that such an imprint is left. Conventional science takes rather a naive view of this. According to some authors, one idea is recorded in one part of the brain, another idea in another, and so on. That is not how it happens. The imprint a memory leaves in our physical body is really very dissimilar to what may later come up as a memory. To the clairvoyant eye it is a kind of image taking the form of the human head and a bit more, continuing on into the rest of the human being. Irrespective of the nature of the experience, the imprint will be of that kind; such an imprint is made into the ether body. If we were able to take this imprint out we would indeed have a thin, shadowy spectre of the head and its continuation. Another memory would also take the form of a shadow image of a head and its continuation. These images are certainly quite different from what we experience as a memory. There is such a shadowy spectre within us for every single memory we have. They all merge into each other, they interpenetrate. What remains would from the outside appear as such a shadow picture and all one could say would be that one of them looks like this, another like that.

If memory is to arise the soul of man must first of all focus on the imprint left in the body and decipher it the way we decipher the peculiar symbols on a page when we are reading—symbols entirely different from what the soul experiences after reading them. The soul has to apply a subconscious reading process in order to convert those imprints into the actual memory we experience. Let us assume you are today recalling an event you experienced in your eighth year. The actual process consists in something making you focus your soul on this little head with its continuation that was imprinted at the time; your soul will now decipher it. As to the experience, as little remains of it in the body as the book you have read retains of what you experienced in the reading. When you read the book again you need to recreate the whole thing in your soul. All this happens without our noticing it. But someone who has not learned to read will be unable to tell from the symbols what they represent. The same applies to the memory process; it is an inner reading process. There is much that goes on below the threshold of consciousness in the human soul and is never considered by man. When we give ourselves up to memory, an infinitely complex process takes place in the human being. All the time, etheric seal imprints rise up from the dim twilight where all else in life is darkness and the inner process man experiences as memory consists in these imprints arising and being deciphered.

I am not telling you something I have thought up but a genuine fact discovered through occult investigation.

When we begin to strengthen the inner powers of the soul through meditation and concentration the process I have already mentioned will come about. The process which develops is not the one we have to call memory. We develop inner powers but an imprint also forms and is left upon the ether that is alive and present everywhere in the world outside us, it is objectively imprinted into the world. As we meditate, as we concentrate, we leave an imprint in the objective cosmic process. Basically the same thing happens when we devote our studies to what spiritual science has to give, for spiritual science has to do with supersensible, nonphysical, things. When we really take hold of the thougts coming to us from spiritual science we are already coming away from ourselves to such an extent that our mental effort has us working with the cosmic ether: when we think ordinary thoughts we merely imprint them within ourselves.

You realize, of course, that it is important for anyone wishing to make progress in soul development to put enormous emphasis on what we must call repetition of the same thought process. If we concentrate just once on some thought or other, it will merely leave a fleeting impression within the world ether. If however we nurture the same thought in our soul day after day, over and over again, the impression will also be made over and over again.

Here we must ask ourselves the following question. If we repeatedly make an impression in the world ether, repeating a meditation over and over again, what actually happens? Where is the impression made?

To answer this question, something else has to be considered first. If someone is genuinely looking for the way to the spiritual world and begins to be clairvoyant, he will find that his clairvoyant experiences take a very strange form. He will be very much aware that what he finds there is something which is experienced but, fundamentally speaking, there is something lacking in those experiences. I am presupposing that the person has reached the point where he has clairvoyant experiences. Afterwards, when we are no longer in those clairvoyant experiences but remember those clairvoyant experiences, we say to ourselves: It may be that I have nothing whatsoever to do with all those things. The impression is that the things experienced in clairvoyance are quite separate from us. Above all, it is impossible to find out how far we ourselves have anything to do with those experiences. That is the important point. Because of this it is easy to consider such experiences mere dreams. We only realize that we have something to do with it when we come to see that our own self has been confronting us there in another form. We come to realize that what we have experienced there is really very similar to our personal experiences and we could not have experienced what we did in clairvoyance if we did not exist.

To make it even clearer let me put it like this. Let us assume you have a dream which brings back something you experienced when very young. When you wake from the dream you only realize that those were dream experiences because among the mass of images you encountered there was also that childhood experience. Then you knew that the dream must have something to do with you. That is how it is with our first clairvoyant experiences. You gradually come to realize that really it is someone else who is dreaming there and yet at the same time it is also you yourself. We come to recognize ourselves within the mass of clairvoyant experiences.

It is indeed an experience of some significance to learn that we have been within a great body of experiences yet it was we ourselves who were within it. One must first of all discover oneself within those clairvoyant experiences. We then come to realize that we are not only inside our bodies but also in the world outside. It is an experience of tremendous significance which shows us that we have something which the spirits of the higher hierarchies hold and support, nurture and cherish. Here I am, we say to ourselves, in my body. I inhabit the enveloping form of the body and I am at the same time also in the spiritual world, held and supported by the spirits of the higher hierarchies. We must not allow ourselves to be distracted by the law which says that a particular entity cannot be in two places at one and the same time, for laws of this kind no longer apply in the spiritual world. I am inside me and at the same time I am also someone Who lets experiences arise within him in the spiritual world. We find ourselves held secure within the higher hierarchies. We know we have this kind of dual nature and we gradually come to realize that what we are in essence in the spirit does not really lie within the sense-perceptible world at all. It lies in the spiritual world and what exists in the sense-perceptible world is a shadow cast from the spiritual world. We slip into a spiritual ‘body’ existence and with this are outside ourselves, looking at ourselves from outside. Anyone not prepared to make himself familiar with such apparent contradictions will never arrive at concepts that can make the spiritual world explicable to him. The important thing is that in as far as we are part of the world of the senses we discover that we are beyond ourselves.

We have now reached the point where we can consider the question as to where our meditations are inscribed. Our ordinary memories are imprinted in ourselves. A seal imprint is always made which represents the upper part of the human being, the head and a few appendages. When we meditate or consider in our mind the ideas presented in spiritual science, we also produce imprints but these go to the other one I have just described, the one who is another self. These ideas go to the other one. We may experience something in Berlin or in Nuremberg; the imprint of this will be made in the same body. Everything we experience in the spirit, however, goes to the one who is another self. Everything is imprinted there. If our attitude is truly in accord with what is thought or felt or experienced in spiritual science, we are working on the supersensible human being whom we also are, just as we work on the physical human being we are when facing everyday experiences.

You will now understand that it needs great inner strength to work on the supersensible human being. It clearly is easier to recall things that had an external effect on us through their colour, sound and so on, because we are in that case supported by the body. When a colour makes an impression on us this triggers a physical process within us. When it is our aim to enter into a purely spiritual idea we have to do without all those physcial props; inner effort has to be made in the soul and the soul must gain greater and greater powers, growing so strong in itself that it really can make an impression on the cosmic ether outside.

If we look for union in this way with the human being we really are, the human being who is always there, we establish a relationship with our individual human identity, with what we really are as human beings. And what we really are as human beings, this lives among the forms of being that are the higher hierarchies the way our body lives among sense-perceptible processes in nature. We are part of earthly existence and in the same way we also partake of existence in the spirit, within all that takes place in the world of the higher hierarchies.

There is something else I want to mention. Being thus related to the spiritual world, we are related to many different spirits in the higher hierarchies. Among them are the spirits we only relate to as human individuals—they are not destined to have any kind of cosmic function. On the other hand we also belong to spirits that do have a cosmic function. We all belong to a folk spirit for instance. In the processes that belong entirely to the world of the senses we are connected with sense-perceptible nature. Reaching upwards we are connected with all those spirits which in a supersensible way reach down into the world of the physical senses. Here, we relate to things outside us and have thoughts and ideas about them. In the same way the different spirits in the higher hierarchies develop thoughts and ideas on the basis of the fact the we are objects to them. We are objects to the spirits in the higher hierarchies, we are the realm they have thoughts about. These thoughts are more will-like by nature.

The spiritual entities are different in kind because of the way the hierarchies relate to us. An important distinction will clearly emerge if we note how the evolution of such spirits in the higher hierarchies progresses, for instance in the case of the folk spirits. We also progress between birth and death here on earth, for our ego grows more and more mature, gaining experiences about the world. A young Person cannot have learned as much as someone who is older. The same applies to the spirits of the higher hierarchies, except that their evolution proceeds somewhat differently from our own.

We are referring to a spirit belonging to the higher hierarchies when we speak of the Italian folk spirit. This Italian folk spirit goes through its evolution and we are actually able to pinpoint a particular time when this folk spirit passed a major stage in evolution. We know the relationship between the Italian folk spirit and individual Italians to be such that the Italian folk spirit acts through the sentient soul of individual Italians. The way this happens is that to begin with the folk spirit is, as it were, only acting on the soul element. It is only later, in the course of its further development, that the folk spirit, using its will, intervenes more and more in the way the soul comes to expres- sion through the element of the physical body. If you consider Italian history you come to a very important year, around 1530. That is the year when the Italian folk spirit grew so powerful that it was then able to begin to work also on the physical body. From that time it started to develop very specific national characteristics. In occult terms this means that the folk spirit developed a much more powerful will; it began to engrave itself also into the physical element, developing national characteristics even at the physical level. Whilst our ego is becoming more and more independent of the body the folk spirit is evolving in the opposite direction. Having influenced the soul element for a time it is now beginning to influence the physical.

We find the same thing happened with the French folk spirit around the year 1600, and about 1650 for the English folk spirit. Before, the folk spirit had more or less only taken hold of the soul element but from then on it also intervened in the physical. Its will grew more powerful and the soul was less able to put up resistance against being given a configuration that had national characteristics. It was therefore at this time that national characteristics began to emerge more clearly. This happened because the folk spirit descended. It is higher up when it acts more on the soul sphere; it descends to act more on the physical aspect. The folk spirit of the Italian peninsula therefore descended around the year 1530. In France this happened at the beginning of the 17th century and in England in the middle of the 17th century. Shakespeare wrote his works before the folk spirit had passed this stage. This is what is so significant. It is the reason for the strange rupture which occurred in the way the English regard Shakespeare, with the result that Shakespeare is actually more appreciated in Germany than in England. We are speaking of the way the folk spirit descends more and more into individual human beings.

If we now come to consider the evolution of the German folk spirit we can see something similar happening during the period between about 1750 and 1850. Yet oddly enough we have to say that in this case the folk spirit descended but then ascended again. This is what is so significant. We are able to observe a process in which the folk spirits of Western European peoples descended and took hold of those peoples. In the case of the German people we can also observe the folk spirit descending around the middle of the 18th century, but we then find it ascending again around the middle of the 19th century. The situation is therefore quite a different one. A beginning was made to develop the German character into an eminently national one, but it was only done for a while. When some of this had been done the folk spirit ascended again, once again to act only on the soul element.

German cultural life had its flowering period at the time when the folk spirit had descended to the lowest level. The folk spirit will of course always remain with these people, but it is now again in spiritual heights. That is the peculiar thing about the German folk spiny It did descend at an earlier time but it then stopped before the people became too strongly national. The Western European peoples have become very much crystallized in their national characteristics, but in the case of the German people this cannot happen because of the peculiar nature of the German folk spirit. The result is that German attitudes will always have to remain more universal than those of other peoples. These things relate to profound realities in the spiritual world. If we had been looking for the German folk spirit in Goethe's time we would have found it at about the same level as the English, French or Italian folk spirit. If we want to look for it today we have to go higher up. There will be times when it descends again and others when it ascends again. It is this to-and-fro movement which is so characteristic of the German folk spirit.

The Russian folk spirit does not descend at all to achieve full crystallization of the people. It always remains something like a cloud hovering above the national character. We shall always have to 10°k for it up above, and the Russian people will only enter into spiritual development when they make the effort to combine the fruits of the work done in the West of Europe with their own essential nature. They must develop their culture in conjunction with the West for they will never develop a culture out of their own resources.

All this has to be understood in this way. The flexibility in German attitudes is due to the fact that the German has not united with his folk spirit the way this has happened in the West of Europe. This is also why it is so tremendously difficult to understand the Germans. They can only be understood if we are able to admit that it is possible to have a people whose folk spirit only comes in sporadically to intervene in their evolution. This is one of the most difficult chapters in historical development and you should not despair if it seems to be full of contradictions. We are, however, living in an age when we must try and really understand the origins of the enmity which shows itself so clearly now during these fateful days within Europe. With anything we experience, if you look more closely you'll always find that there is something coming in which might indeed be called incomprehensible and only becomes clear when we look more closely. Yes, of course, the Germans will be aware that fundamentally there is a tremendous hatred felt towards them. Looking at it more closely we shall find that this hatred is directed towards what in fact are the best qualities of the Germans. No particular hatred is directed towards their less desirable qualities.

Anyone wishing to penetrate these mysteries will have to consider these things more in their context. You might say that it is a case of German chauvinism if someone says such things now in Germany. Why should a German speak with appreciation and in praise of the German character? Yet if that were the case, these lectures would not be given and I would not speak in this way about the German people. It really does not need German chauvinism to characterize the nature of the German people in such a way that it is evident that it differs from the nature of other European peoples, and not to its disadvantage. To demonstrate this let me read to you a characterization of the nature of the German people given in a letter Ernest Renan wrote to David Friedrich Strauss.

It was around 1843. when I was at the St Sulpice Seminary, that I started to learn something about Germany through the works of Goethe and Herder. I felt I was entering a temple, and from that moment onwards everything I had formerly considered magnificent and worthy of the deity appeared merely as tired and faded paper flowers… Germany has the most perfect legal title, because of a historical role of the utmost significance, a soul, I would say, a literature, men of genius, a unique view of things divine and human. Germany produced the most important revolution in recent times, the Reformation; what is more, over the last century one of the most marvellous developments of intellectual and spiritual life known in history has occurred in Germany, a development which—if I dare put it like this—has taken the human mind and spirit one step further in depth and breadth. People who have not been touched by this new development are to those who have gone through it as someone who only knows elementary arithmetic is in relation to someone well versed in differential calculus.⁵⁴

So that is what Ernest Renan wrote to David Friedrich Strauss in 1870. I am not going to go into the details of their correspondence, but let me just mention that Renan also wrote that there were only two alternatives. The first would be to take away French territory-The outcome would be revenge unto death against all that is German and alliance with all kinds of confederates. The other alternative would be to leave France untouched, and then the Peace Party would gain the upper hand and say: 'We have been extremely foolish, we want to make good where we have gone wrong, and the good of mankind will be preserved.’

I mention this in order to show you that when Renan wrote the letter, part of which I have just read to you, his mood was not exactly a conciliatory one with regard to the German character which had evolved in the course of human evolution. On the other hand he was prepared to represent the qualities mankind had gained through the German character in relation to everything else as being like higher mathematics in comparison to elementary arithmetic. There is no question, then, of being a chauvinist; one merely has to repeat what Renan wrote in 1870.

In thus speaking of man's relationship to the higher worlds we must realize that in concrete terms, in reality, man is able to have these relations because he bears this other one within him, because this other one is alive in him who has the same relationship to the higher world of the spirit as we have to the sense-perceptible world here in our body•;

The supersensible, intangible part of us gives us a certain relationship to all that is supersensible. And it is a truly living development we undergo—nothing theoretical—when our heart and mind enters into the experience I have described as the process of meditation. The soul is really inscribing something into the spiritual worlds. It inscribes it into what fundamentally speaking is we ourselves. If we really think about this, the idea of 'being within the living stream of spiritual science" links up with the idea of ‘human responsibilty’. This idea of 'human responsibility' really must arise in the soul of anyone pursuing spiritual science. We know that mankind is going through things in the course of historical development, that it undergoes change. Clairvoyance has been gradually disappearing and today we know that it will be necessary to regain the connection with the spiritual world that existed in the past. and that spiritual science is the path by which it can be regained. In the past, man's natural relationship to his body was such that part of him was always within the spiritual worlds. Today he is so much more closely bound up with his body that he must see to it that he gains understanding of the spiritual world independent of his body. We may say that man had a hereditary trait that gradually grew weaker and weaker and disappeared altogether in the present age. It is in our time, therefore, that work has to start that will take the soul up into the spiritual world.

Can you envisage the way the German folk spirit is again and again coming down to the German peoples and then going up again into the higher world? Why does it do this with just one particular people? It is because it is intended to evoke in this particular culture the powers that will lead to spiritual science in the truest sense of the word. When the folk spirit descends it firmly establishes the folk characteristics. When it recedes again, leaving the national characteristics in a state of fluidity, the people will have to go through that upsurge and regression of the folk spirit again and again in their own bodies, and they will learn how all 'beingness' is a state of flux between the sense-perceptible and the supersensible world.

You will recall my saying a week ago that the whole history of literature for recent decades will have to be rewritten. This is because certain individuals with spiritual insight have been forgotten, though they are of much greater significance than literary figures known to us today. That relates to the period when the folk spirit was once again ascending. It will now be necessary for us to unite ourselves in the greatest possible degree with spiritual science so that we may find the folk spirit in its ascent. In other words, Germans must come to understand their essential nature not just in the physical world but also in the supersensible world. It is to be found in both these worlds. This is another reason why I have said—even in public lectures—that there is a certain inner relationship between the culture of the German spirit and the striving for spiritual science. Fichte⁵⁵ could only develop his views at a time when the folk spirit had descended. Because of this his philosophy can only be imperfectly understood and must indeed be misunderstood. All that busy activity in concepts and ideas where egoic nature had entered the way it had in Fichte's philosophy was possible only at a time when the folk spirit had descended to a lower level. Today we have to look for it at a higher level and we can only find it with the aid of spiritual science. This is due to the relationship of the folk spirit to the German people. It is entirely part of the nature of German cultural development that there is a profound relationship between German cultural life and the path which leads to spiritual science. It is much to be hoped that these things will gradually come to be understood more and more clearly.

It really has to be said that if you consider the events of the present time, the enormous sacrifices that have to be made, all the difficulties people have to live through because of present events, it should be obvious that what is coming to expression here is something far, far beyond anything we are able to comprehend by taking an external view. And we might paraphrase the words written by St Paul: ‘And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain.’⁵⁶ Paul found affirmation for what he had to give to the world in the reality of the Resurrection. His words have been much misunderstood. With regard to what is happening now, we have to say: ‘These deaths give expression to the belief, to the firm avowal, that man relates to more than merely the things existing in the world accessible to the senses.’ It is not only that religious feeling is growing more profound, but it is possible to see that in these very times we live in souls are forcefully protesting against the whole of materialism, and they do this by the way in which they enter into death. We have to say that whatever else these events represent they also contribute to the overcoming of materialistic ways of thinking and the materialistic way of life which has gradually evolved. Out of a profound awareness of current developments, the human soul has to say to itself: ‘If it were to happen that materialistic attitudes, materialistic ways of thinking were to prevail on earth once the sun of peace is shining again, would we not have to say that all these deaths must have been in vain—unless a spiritual way of thinking develops on the plane that lies open to the gaze of the dead?’ We might therefore paraphrase the words of St Paul as follows: ‘All the infinite suffering would be in vain, and all the many individuals would have gone through death in vain at such a young physical age if a materialistic way of thinking and a materialistic way of life were to spread in the fields of peace.’ These days will have to be like a great warning beacon for those who live through them, a light entering deeply into human hearts and minds and souls, that man shall develop a genuine desire to live in the sphere of the spirit. We cannot concern ourselves deeply enough with the events of our time. And this is also why one hopes that vision will broaden among those who profess themselves anthroposophists to extend beyond the narrow horizon that tends to limit it, towards an ever-expanding horizon. We really must come to understand the way everything happening here on earth is connected with events taking place in the spiritual world. This will give us a feeling for the tasks set for us in the difficult times of the present.

Some people have a facile way of saying that present events need not have anything to do with the spiritual development individual nations are undergoing. To anyone able to see through these things and discern their true course, everything happening in the external world is an expression of something spiritual. Let us hold on to this more and more, let us try more and more to use the very experiences that can come to us through spiritual science to take our self out of those narrower confines and to unite this self, a self freed by spiritual science, with the great events now taking place. Let us forget purely personal concerns and grow together with the profoundly disturbing events mankind as a whole must now experience.

This is the note I wanted to strike in your hearts with the things put forward in these lectures. I very much hope that they will be pondered before we meet again in April. An element put through the test of the great events of our time is now ascending into the spiritual world and bringing an influence to bear from up there. It must be met with the kind of understanding that can be won through spiritual insight, for only then will it be possible to achieve what these events are challenging us to achieve. It is true that:

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 53. Berlin, 26 February 1915: ‘Was ist am Menschen sterblicht?’ in Aus schicksahragender Zeit (GA 64). In English. 'Etheric Man within Physical Man' typescript Z185 (tr. not mentioned).
• 54. Letter of 13 September 1870 in Strauss D. Gesammelte Schrifien, (Bonn 1876 –78) Vol. I, p.311f.
• 55. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814), German idealist philosopher.
• 56. I Corinthians 15: 14.

The lectures thus far given in this cycle should have made it abundantly clear that spiritual-scientific research reveals the Christ event as the most supremely vital one in the entire evolution of mankind, that we must recognize it as having introduced a wholly new strain into the totality of Earth evolution. We learned that something completely new entered this evolution of mankind through the Mystery of Golgotha, through the event of Palestine and everything connected with it before and after, and that human evolution must needs have taken a totally different course had the Christ event not intervened.—If we are to understand the Mystery of Golgotha we must further examine some of the intimate details of the gradual approach of the Christ Being itself; but naturally, even fourteen lectures do not suffice to tell all there is to be told about a subject embracing the whole world. The author of the John Gospel pointed this out when he said that there was much more to be told, but that the world could not produce enough books to tell it. So you will not expect fourteen lectures to mention everything connected with the Christ event and with its narration in the Gospel of St. John and in the other, related ones.

Yesterday and the day before we learned how the dwelling of the Christ Spirit, the Christ Individuality, in the threefold sheath of Jesus of Nazareth gradually made possible all that is described in the John Gospel up to and including the chapter on the Raising of Lazarus. Thus we saw that Christ's task was the gradual development of the threefold corporeality—the physical, the etheric, and the astral body—that had been offered up to Him by the lofty initiate Jesus of Nazareth. But in order to understand exactly what Christ wrought in this threefold sheath we must first get a clear picture of the interrelationship, in man, of the three principles of his being. Hitherto we have only indicated in rough outline that in the waking state the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body, and the ego are seen by clairvoyant conciousness as interpenetrating each other, forming an interpermeating whole, and that at night the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while the astral body and the ego are withdrawn. Today, in order to describe the Mystery of Golgotha more closely, we must enquire more fully into the exact nature of this inter-permeation of the four principles of the human being during day consciousness; that is, in just what manner the ego and astral body enter the etheric and physical bodies upon awakening in the morning. I can best make this clear by means of a diagram.

Suppose that in this drawing we had, down here, the physical body, and above it, the etheric body. In the morning, when the astral body and the ego re-enter the physical bodies from the spiritual world, this comes about in such a way that in the main (I beg you to take this qualification seriously) the astral body enters the etheric body, and the ego the physical body. In this drawing, then, the horizontal lines stand for the astral and etheric bodies, the vertical lines for the ego and the physical body.

I said “in the main” because naturally everything in the human being is interpenetrative: the ego, for example, is in the etheric body as well as elsewhere, and so on; but what is referred to here is the principal, the essential interpenetration, and the manner in which the latter prevails most completely can be represented by the diagram.

Next we must enquire, What, exactly, occurred at the Baptism? We have said that the ego of Jesus of Nazareth abandoned His physical, etheric, and astral bodies, leaving this threefold sheath for the Christ Being; so what remained of Jesus of Nazareth we can show in diagram as His physical, etheric, and astral bodies. The ego abandoned the physical body, and in place of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth there entered into this threefold sheath—occupying principally the physical body, though again not exclusively—the Christ Being.

Here we indeed touch the fringe of a deep mystery; for if we consider what really took place at this point we realize that it bears on all the immense complexities of mankind which we have indicated in the last lectures. I told you that everything people have in common, the generic factor, so to speak, in man within a certain group, is to be found in the female element of heredity. I said that the outer facial resemblance among members of the same people is carried down through the generations by woman. The male element, on the other hand, passes on the distinguishing features in man: it is the factor that makes him an individual entity here on earth, that places his ego upon a footing of its own. Great minds who are in touch with the spiritual world have always felt this in the right way, and we can really learn to know and appreciate the utterances of great men who were close to the spiritual world only by penetrating to these depths of cosmic truths.

Look once more at our first diagram and reflect as follows: We have an etheric body, and in it lives the astral body. The astral body is the vehicle of our conceptions, ideas, thoughts, sensations, feelings, and it dwells in the etheric body. But we have learned that it is specifically the task of the etheric body to work upon the physical body effectively, so to say, containing as it does the forces that form it. We must therefore conclude that this etheric body, permeated as it is by the astral body, contains all that makes man a man, all that imprints in him a definite form from within, as it were, proceeding from the spiritual elements. So that whatever produces resemblance among men derives from what works within, and is not merely external; in other words, not from anything bound to his physical body, but from elements associated with his etheric and astral bodies, for these are the inner principles.

For this reason, anyone who can see into such matters will sense that what permeates his etheric and astral bodies comes from the maternal element, whereas all that gives his physical body its peculiar form, imprinted by his ego—the ego dwelling in the physical body—is a paternal heritage.

“My father gave my build to me,
Toward life my sober bearing;
From mother comes my cheerful heart,
My joy in storytelling.”¹

These words spoken by Goethe are an interpretation of what I showed you in diagram. “From my father I have my stature” refers to what develops from the ego; and the imagination, the gift of storytelling, inherited from the mother, has its being in the etheric and astral bodies. The utterances of great minds are by no means grasped by those who believe to have understood them by means of trivial human concepts.

But now we must apply all this to the Christ event; and from this point of view we must ask, What would have happened to mankind if it had not taken place? If the Christ event had not occurred, the course of human development would have continued as we saw it commence with the post-Atlantean time. We learned that in very old times civilization rested upon a form of love closely linked with tribal relationship, with consanguinity. Those whom people loved were their blood relatives. And we saw how this blood bond kept fraying as humanity progressed.

Now let us pass from the earliest days of human evolution to the time of Christ Jesus' appearance. While in most ancient epochs marriage was always consummated within one and the same tribe, you will find that during the Roman dominion—and that is the time of the Christ event—the custom of endogamy was increasingly ignored, that a great variety of peoples were thrown together as a result of the Roman expeditions, and that the “close marriage” had very largely to give way to exogamy, the “distant marriage.” It was necessary for blood ties to lose their strength in the evolution of mankind because men were destined to take their stand upon their own ego.

Assuming, now, that Christ had not come to provide new forces, to replace the old love engendered by blood ties with a new spiritual love, we ask again, what would have happened? In that case love, the factor that unites men, would gradually have vanished from the face of the earth: that which brings men together in love would have perished in man's nature. Without the Christ the human race would have lived to see the dying out of love for each other: men would have been driven back into their own segregated individualities. Looked at only from the point of view of external science, these things do not disclose the profound truths underlying them. If you were to examine—not chemically, but by the means at the disposal of spiritual research—the blood of present-day man and compare it with that of people who lived several thousand years before the appearance of Christ, you would find that it had changed, had taken on a character tending to make it less and less a vehicle capable of bearing love. Imagine, in ancient times, a man of insight who could see deep into the course of human development, who could foretell what would needs come to pass should only the one antiquated tendency persist without the intervention of the Christ event: how would the course of future evolution present itself to an initiate of that sort? What images would he have to evoke in the human soul to indicate what would happen in the future if love in the soul, the Christ love, failed to replace the love arising from blood ties in the same measure as the latter disappeared? He had to say: If men become ever more isolated, more hardened in their own ego; if the lines separating souls become ever more marked so that souls understand each other less and less, then men of the outer world will fall increasingly into discord and contention, and the war of all against all will usurp the place of love on earth.

And this is indeed what would have ensued if evolution had proceeded on the basis of blood relationship without the intervention of Christ. All men would inevitably have been involved in the war of all against all. This war will come to pass in any case, but only for those who have not become imbued in the right way with the Christ principle. That is what a prophetic seer beheld as the end of the Earth evolution, and well could it fill his soul with terror: souls no longer understand each other, hence they must rage, soul against soul.

I have explained that only gradually can men become united through the Christ principle. In Tolstoi and Solovyev I gave you an example showing how two noble spirits, each thinking to proclaim the real Christ, can hold such contradictory views that one of them considers the other the Antichrist—for that is what Solovyev believed Tolstoi to be. The conflict of beliefs at first present in the souls of men would gradually come to expression in the outer world, that is, men would rage against each other. That would be the inevitable consequence of the development of the blood principle.—It would be pointless to object here that in spite of the Christ event we still see discord and contention on all sides, that we are still far from any realization of Christian love: I have told you that we are only at the beginning of Christian evolution. The great impulse has been given which enabled the Christ to imbue ever more the souls of men in the further course of earth development, and to unite them in a spiritual way. What still exists today in the way of discord and contention—and this will lead to even greater excesses—is a result of the fact that hitherto mankind has become permeated with the real Christ principle only to the most negligible extent: conditions that have existed among men from time immemorial still hold sway and can be overcome only by degrees, inasmuch as the Christ impulse will flow into mankind but slowly and gradually.

That, then, is a picture of what would have been foreseen in pre-Christian times by one who had clairvoyantly penetrated the future course of human evolution. He could have put it this way: I have been vouchsafed a remnant of the old power of clairvoyance. In primeval times all men were able to see into the spiritual world by means of a dim, dull clairvoyance, which has gradually vanished. But the possibility still exists, like a heritage from those ancient times, to penetrate the spiritual world in an abnormal, dreamlike state. In this way there can be seen something of what lies beneath the outer surface of things.

All the old legends, fairy stories, and myths, which truly are fraught with a wisdom deeper than is to be found in modern science, tell us that in the olden times the capacity for entering exceptional states was very wide-spread. Call such states dreams, if you like: they nevertheless heralded events; but they did not provide sufficient wisdom to protect men from the conflict of all against all. The sage of old emphasized this in the strongest possible terms, saying, We are heir to a primeval wisdom which people of the Atlantean era were able to perceive in abnormal states, and even now there are isolated men who can discern it under the same conditions; and what is heralded there is the course the near future will take. But the revelations of those dreams inspired no confidence: they were deceptive and destined to become ever more so. That was the wisdom taught in pre-Christian times, and in that form did the teacher proclaim it to the people.

That is why it is significant that an appreciation of the whole intensity and power of the Christ impulse leads us to the comprehension of a certain great truth: In a world lacking the Christ impulse the isolation and segregation of men, their mutual antagonism, something like a struggle for existence, would be brought about—similar to the materialistic-Darwinistic theory foisted upon us today—a struggle for existence such as reigns in the animal kingdom, but which should have no place in the world of men. Somewhat grotesquely we might say, when the earth has run its course it will present the picture of humanity painted by certain materialists in line with a Darwinistic theory borrowed from the animal world; but today this theory, when applied to mankind, is wrong. It is true in the animal kingdom because there no impulse governs which could transform discord into love. Christ, as a spiritual force in humanity, will confound all materialistic Darwinism.

But in order to grasp this, one must understand that in the outer sense world men can eliminate the antagonistic attitude arising from their differences of opinion, feelings, and actions only by combatting and adjusting within themselves all that would otherwise flow out into the external world. No one is going to quarrel with a different opinion in the soul of another if he first fights against all that must be combatted in himself, if he establishes harmony among the various principles of his being. He will confront the outer world as one who loves, not as one who quarrels. It is all a matter of diverting the conflict from the outer world to the inner man: the forces holding sway in human nature must battle each other within man.

Two conflicting opinions must be looked at as follows: This is one opinion—it is tenable; that is the other—it is also tenable. But if I recognize only the one and consider justifiable only what I want, resisting the other, then I shall be involved in a struggle on the physical plane. To insist on my opinion is to be selfish; to consider my action the only justifiable one means being egotistical. But if I consider the other man's opinion and endeavor to create harmony within myself, my attitude toward the other will then be a very different one; and only then will I begin to understand him. Diverting external strife into another channel—the harmonizing of inner human forces—that would be another way of expressing the idea of progress in the evolution of mankind. The possibility of inner concord, of finding the way to harmonize the resisting forces within, this had to be bestowed upon man by the Christ. Christ gives man the power first of all to eliminate the discord within himself, and without Christ this could never be achieved. In respect of outer strife the ancient, pre-Christian people rightly looked upon one special form of it as the ultimate horror: the child's strife against father and mother. Also, in the days when men knew what course evolution would take lacking the Christ-Impulse, parricide was considered the most terrible and abhorrent of all crimes. That was made very clear by those wise men of old who foresaw the coming of Christ. But they also knew what the inevitable result would be in the outer world if the battle were not first waged in every man's own soul.

Let us examine our own inner nature. We have learned that where the etheric and astral bodies interpenetrate the mother holds sway, while the father comes to expression in the ego-permeated physical body. In other words, the mother, the female element, governs in all that pertains to the traits we share with others, to the generic, to all that constitutes our inner life in so far as it expresses itself in wisdom and in conceptions; whereas every quality arising from a union of the ego and the physical body, in the externally differentiated form—all that makes man an ego—derives from the father, the male element. What is it, then, above all things that the ancient sages who thought along these lines had to demand of men? They had to insist on a clear understanding of the relation of the physical body and the ego to the etheric and astral bodies: on a mental grasp of the maternal and paternal elements. By reason of having an etheric and an astral body man has the mother principle in him: in addition to his outer mother, the mother of the physical plane, he has, so to speak, the maternal element within him—the Mother, and besides his physical father he has within him the paternal element—the Father. The proper adjustment of the relation between this inner father and inner mother is something that was held up to men as a lofty ideal to strive for. Failure to harmonize these two elements inevitably results in spreading discord within men out into the physical world—with devastating consequences. Therefore, said the old sage: Man's task is to bring about harmony within himself between the paternal and the maternal elements. If he does not succeed, there will appear in the world what we must recognize as the ultimate horror.

What we have just expressed in anthroposophical phraseology, so to say, was proclaimed to mankind by the ancient sages somewhat as follows: In primeval times we inherited a primordial wisdom, and even today men can participate in it when in an abnormal state. But the possibility of entering this state is becoming ever more remote, and even the old initiation cannot lead beyond a certain point in human evolution.

Let us once more consider this old initiation as we described it in the last lectures: what occurred there? Out of the complex composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, the etheric and astral bodies were withdrawn, but the ego remained. Hence there could be no question of self-consciousness during the three and a half days of initiation: it was extinguished; and it was replaced by a form of consciousness from the higher spiritual world, instilled by the priest-initiator who guided the candidate throughout and placed his own ego at the latter's disposal. Now, what exactly was the result of this? Something occurred that was expressed in a formula which will strike you as strange; but when you have understood it, it will no longer seem so. It was expressed as follows: When a man was initiated in the old sense the maternal element withdrew and the paternal element remained; that is, the candidate killed the paternal element and united with the mother element. In other words, he killed his father within him and wedded his mother. So when the old initiate had lain three and a half days in the lethargic state he had united with his mother and had killed the father within himself. He had become fatherless; and that had to occur, because he had to renounce his individuality and dwell in a higher spiritual world. He became one with his people; but the factor inherent in a people was precisely that which was provided by the maternal element. He became one with the entire organism of his people; he became exactly that which Nathanael was, which was always designated by the name of the people in question—in Jewry, an “Israelite,” among Persians a “Persian.”

There can never be any wisdom in the world other than the wisdom proceeding from the Mysteries—no other is possible. Those who learn in the Mysteries what these reveal become messengers, and the outer world learns from them what is beheld in the Mysteries. One of the things acquired in line with the old wisdom was the exact knowledge of what had been achieved by uniting with the inner mother and killing the father. But this hereditary wisdom cannot help man past a certain point in evolution. Something different, something wholly new, had to replace the old wisdom. Had mankind continued indefinitely to receive the old wisdom gained in this way, it would have been driven, as already stated, into the war of all against all. Opinion would be arrayed against opinion, feeling against feeling, will against will; and that terrifying, gruesome image of the future, where man would unite with his mother and kill his father, would come true. All this was portrayed in pregnant pictures, in great and mighty images, by the old initiates who, though initiated, looked for the coming of Christ; and the imprint of this wisdom of the pre-Christian sages has been preserved in the legends and myths.

We need only recall the name of Oedipus and we are in touch with a myth expressing what the ancient sages had to say on this subject. The old Greek legend, presented in so mighty and grandiose a way by the Greek tragedians, runs as follows: There was a king in Thebes, and his name was Laios. His spouse was Iokaste. For a long time they had no progeny. Then Laios enquired of the Oracle of Delphi whether he could not be vouchsafed a son; and the Oracle gave him the answer: If thou wilt have a son it will be one who shall kill thee.—In a state of intoxication—that is, in a state of dimmed consciousness—Laios begot a son. Oedipus was born; and Laios knew that this was the son who would kill him. He therefore resolved to abandon the child; and in order to insure his complete annihilation he caused his feet to be pierced. Then he was left to die; but a shepherd found the child and took pity on him. He brought him to Corinth, and there Oedipus was reared in the royal household. When he was grown he learned of the Oracle's prophesy: that he would kill his father and wed his mother; but there was no escaping it. On account of being taken for the king's son he had to leave the place where he was reared. On his way he met his real father and, without recognizing him, killed him. He came to Thebes; and because he was able to answer the Sphinx' questions and solve the riddle of the grisly monster that led so many to their death, the Sphinx had to kill itself. Thus, for the time being, Oedipus was his country's benefactor. He was made king and received the queen's hand in marriage—his mother's hand! Without knowing it, he had killed his father and united with his mother. He now ruled as king; but by reason of having acquired his rule in this way and of all the dreadful misfortune that clung to him, he brought untold misery upon his country.—In Sophocles' drama we finally encounter him as blinded, as one who has destroyed his own eyesight.

That is a story whose imagery originated in the old temples of wisdom; and what it intended to tell was that in a certain respect Oedipus could still make contact, in the old sense, with the spiritual world. His father had consulted the Oracle. Those oracles were the last heritage of the old clairvoyance, but they were powerless to establish peace in the outer world. They could not provide that harmony of the paternal and the maternal elements which was to be striven for and achieved.

The circumstance that Oedipus solved the Sphinx' riddle indicates that he was intended to represent the sort of man who had acquired a certain old type of clairvoyance simply through heredity; that is, he knew the nature of man to the extent to which the last remnants of the old primordial wisdom could provide such cognition. But never could it suffice to stem the raging of man against man, as symbolized by the parricide and the union with the mother. Although in touch with primordial wisdom, Oedipus is unable, by its means, to see through its complexity. This old wisdom no longer induced seership—that is what the old sages wanted to proclaim. Had it been attended by clairvoyance as in the old way of consanguinity, the blood would have spoken when Oedipus confronted first his father, and later, his mother; but the blood was silent. That is a graphic presentation of the disintegration of primordial wisdom.

What had to happen in order that once and for all the inner harmonious compensation might be found between the maternal and paternal elements, between man's own ego that is of the father, and the mother principle? The Christ impulse had to come.—And now we can peer from still another angle into certain depths of the Marriage in Cana of Galilee. We are told:

The mother of Jesus was there: And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage.

Jesus—or better, Christ—was to be the great example for humanity of a being who had achieved the inner concord between himself—that is, his ego—and the mother principle. At the Marriage in Cana of Galilee He indicated:

Something passeth from me to thee.

That was a new sort of passing from one to another: it was no longer as it had been, but implied a renewal of the whole relationship. It meant the lofty and enduring ideal of inner compensation achieved without first killing the father—without withdrawing from the physical body; it meant finding agreement with the maternal principle in the ego. Now the time had come when the human being learned to combat within himself the excessive power of egotism, of the ego principle; when he learned to correlate it with the maternal principle holding sway in the etheric and astral bodies.

So we find in the Marriage in Cana a beautiful image of the relation of the ego, the paternal principle, to the mother principle: it represents the inner harmony, the love, obtained in the outer world between Christ Jesus and His Mother. It was intended as an image of the harmonious compensation between the ego and the maternal principle, achieved inwardly. Such a possibility had not existed previously: it was created by the deed of Christ Jesus. But inasmuch as it came about through the deed of Christ, it brought with it the only possible refutation—that is, through the deed—of all that would inevitably have come to pass under the influence of those remnants of the ancient wisdom which would have led to the killing of the father and the uniting of the mother with her son.

Let us see just what it is that the Christ principle combats. The old sage, contemplating the Christ and comparing the old way with the new, could put it this way: If the union with the mother is sought in the old way, no good can result for humanity. But if sought in the new way, as shown in the Marriage at Cana—if man unites with the astral and etheric bodies dwelling within him—then salvation and peace and fraternity will spread among men more and more as time passes; and the old principle of killing the father and wedding the mother will be resisted.—So the antagonistic element which the Christ had to eradicate was not the ancient wisdom: the latter did not need to be combatted, for it was gradually losing its power and would eventually dry up of itself; and we see how people like Oedipus fall victim to discord precisely by putting their faith in it. On the other hand, the evil would not cease of itself if the new wisdom were ignored; that is, if people clung rigidly to the old principle and remained insensible to the manner in which the Christ impulse acts. Not to ding to the obsolete principle, not to follow the old lines rigidly, but to learn what had come into the world through Christ—that is what was felt to be the greatest step forward.

Do we find this, too, suggested anywhere? We do: legends and myths are indeed fraught with the deepest wisdom. There is a legend you will not find in the Gospels, but it is none the less a Christian legend as well as a Christian truth. It runs this way: Once upon a time there was a married couple, and for a long time this couple had no son. Then it was revealed to the mother in a dream—note this well—that she would have a son, but that this son would first kill his father and then unite with his mother, and that he would bring frightful disaster upon his whole tribe.

Again we have a dream, corresponding to the oracle in the case of Oedipus; that is, we are again dealing with what had come down from primeval clairvoyance. What was to happen was revealed to the mother in the old way. But did this revelation suffice to make her see clearly the conditions governing in the world? to avert the disaster? Let us ask the legend, which informs us further:

Under the influence of the wisdom gleaned in her dream, the mother took the child she had borne to the island of Kariot and there abandoned him. But he was found by the queen of a neighboring realm, who being childless, reared him herself. Later the royal couple had a child of their own, and the foundling soon felt himself discriminated against; and being of a passionate temperament he slew the son of the royal pair. Now he could no longer re-main: he had to flee, and he came to the court of Pilate, the Governor, where he was soon made overseer in the household. But one day he came to blows with his neighbor; and in the struggle he killed him, knowing not that it was his own father. Circumstances later led to his wedding his neighbor's wife, who, unbeknownst to him, was his mother.

This foundling was Judas Iscariot. When he became aware of his terrible position he Red again. And nowhere did he find compassion save in Him Who had mercy for all who approached Him, Who not only sat at the table with publicans and sinners but Who, though seeing all, took unto Himself even this great sinner; for it was His mission to work not only for the righteous, but for all men, and to lead them out of sin to salvation. In this way Judas Iscariot came into the environment of Christ Jesus and to cause the calamity which had been foretold, and which was destined to be fulfilled in the sphere of Christ Jesus. Schiller says:

“An evil deed its own curse bears within:
It multiplies, begetting evil brood.”²

Judas became the betrayer of Christ Jesus. True, everything that was destined to come about through him had already been fulfilled in the murder of his father and the wedding of his mother; but he survived, so to speak, as a tool, because he was to be the evil instrument for bringing about good, thereby performing an act of supererogation.

The individuality presented to us in the figure of Oedipus loses his sight, as a result of the evil he has wrought, the moment he realizes what he has done. But the other, whose identical destiny originated in his connection with the inherited primordial wisdom, does not become blind: he was chosen to fulfill destiny, to do the deed that would lead to the Mystery of Golgotha, that would bring about the physical death of Him Who is “the Light of the World” and Who enkindles the Light of the World in healing the man born blind. Oedipus had to lose his sight; to the blind man, Christ gave sight. Yet He died at the hands of one who, like Oedipus, was chosen to exemplify the gradual extinction of the ancient wisdom in mankind, to expose its insufficiency in the matter of bringing salvation and peace and love. For these to come, the Christ-Impulse was indispensable, and the event of Golgotha had to take place. There had first to come about something whose outer reflection is shown us in the relation between the Jesus-Christ Ego and His Mother at the Marriage in Cana of Galilee.

And one thing more was needed as well. The writer of the John Gospel describes it as follows: There beneath the Cross stood the Mother, and there stood the disciple “whom the Lord loved”, Lazarus-John, whom He Himself had initiated and through whom the wisdom of Christianity was to be handed down to posterity; he through whom man's astral body was to be so powerfully influenced as to render it capable of harboring the Christ principle. There in the human astral body the Christ principle was to live, and it was John's mission to pour the Christ principle into this astral body. But in order that this might come to pass, this Christ principle, raying down from the Cross, had still to unite with the etheric principle, with the Mother. That is why from the Cross Christ called down the words:

From this hour forth, this is thy mother—and this is thy son.

That means, He unites His wisdom with the maternal principle.

Thus we see the profundity, not only of the Gospels, but of all the interrelationships in the Mysteries. Truly, the old legends are related to the prophesies and Gospels of more recent times as is presage to fulfillment. In the legends of Oedipus and of Judas we are clearly shown that once upon a time there was a divine, primordial wisdom; that this wisdom vanished; and that a new wisdom had to come. And this new wisdom will carry men forward to a point that would never have been attainable through the old wisdom. The Oedipus legend tells us what must have occurred without the intervention of the Christ impulse; and the nature of the opposition to the Christ, the rigid clinging to the ancient wisdom, is made clear in the Judas legend. But the principle which even the old legends and myths had declared inadequate is brought to us in a new light through the new revelation, through the Gospel. The Gospel gives us the answer to what the old legends expressed in images of the old wisdom. In legends we were told that nevermore can the old wisdom provide what humanity needs for the future; but the Gospel, the new wisdom, says: I bring tidings of what mankind needs, of what could never have come without the influence of the Christ principle, without the event of Golgotha.

• 1. “Vom Vater hab'ich die Satur,
  Des Lebens ernstes Führen,
  Vom Mütterchen die Frohnatur,
  Und Lust am Fabulieren.”
• 2. “Das eben ist der Fluch der bösen Tat,
  Dass sie, fortzeugend, Böses muss gebären.”