The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] In sleep man is given up to the Cosmos. He carries out into the Cosmos that which he possesses as a result of former lives on Earth, when he descends from the world of soul-and-spirit into the earthly world. During his waking life he withdraws this content of his human being from the Cosmos.

[ 2 ] In this rhythmic giving-himself-up to the Cosmos and withdrawing from it, man's life between birth and death takes its course.

[ 3 ] While he withdraws it from the Cosmos, the soul-spiritual being of man is at the same time received by the system of nerves and senses. With the physical and life-processes that take place in the nerves-and-senses system, the soul-and-spirit of man combines in waking life, so that they work together unitedly. In this united action, sense-perception, the forming of memory-pictures and the play of fancy are contained. All these activities are bound to the physical body. The conceptions, the thinking experience—in which man becomes conscious of what is taking place half-consciously in perception, fancy and memory—are bound to the thinking system.

[ 4 ] In this thinking Organisation properly speaking, there also lies the region by which man experiences his self-consciousness. The thinking Organisation is an Organisation of the stars. If it lived and expressed itself as such alone, man would bear within him not a consciousness of self but a consciousness of the Gods. The thinking Organisation is, however, lifted out of the Cosmos of the stars and transplanted into the realm of earthly processes. Man becomes a self-conscious being in that he experiences the world of stars within the earthly realm.

[ 5 ] Here, therefore, we have the region of the inner life of man where the Divine-Spiritual world, united with the human being, sets him free in order that he may become Man in the fullest sense.

[ 6 ] But directly beneath the thinking organisation—namely, where sense-perception, the play of fancy and the forming of memory, take place—the Divine-Spiritual world lives on within the life of man. We may say: it is in the unfolding of memory that the Divine-Spiritual lives in the waking state of man. For the other two activities, sense-perception and the play of fancy, are only modifications of the process that goes on in the forming of memory-pictures. In sense-perception we have the forming of a memory-content at the moment of its origin; in the content of fancy there lights up in the soul that of the content of memory which is preserved within the soul's existence.

[ 7 ] Sleep carries over the soul-spiritual being of man into the cosmic world. With the activity of his astral body and his Ego, the sleeping man is steeped in the Divine-Spiritual Cosmos. He is not only outside the physical but outside the world of stars. But he is within the Divine-Spiritual Beings in whom his own existence has its origin.

[ 8 ] In the present moment of cosmic evolution these Divine Spiritual Beings work in such a way as to impress the moral content of the Universe into the astral body and Ego of man during sleep. All the World-processes in sleeping man are really moral processes, and cannot be spoken of as even remotely like the activities of Nature.

[ 9 ] In their after-effects, man carries these processes over from sleeping into waking. But the after-effects remain asleep. For man is awake in that part of his life only which inclines to the sphere of Thought. What actually takes place in his sphere of Will is wrapped in darkness even in the waking state, as the whole life of the soul is wrapped in darkness during sleep. But in this sleeping life of the Will, the Divine-Spiritual works on in the waking life of man. Morally, man is as good or as bad as he can be according to the nearness with which he approaches the Divine-Spiritual Beings when asleep. And he comes nearer to them, or remains farther away from them, according to the moral quality of his former lives on Earth.

[ 10 ] From the depths of the waking being of the soul's existence, that which was able to implant itself in the soul's existence, in community with the Divine-Spiritual world during sleep, sounds forth. This is the voice of conscience.

[ 11 ] We see how the very things which a materialistic view of the world is most inclined to explain merely from the natural side, are found to lie on the moral side of things when seen by spiritual knowledge.

[ 12 ] In Memory the Divine-Spiritual being works directly within the waking man. In Conscience the same Divine-Spiritual being works in the waking man indirectly—as an after-effect.

[ 13 ] The forming of memory takes place in the Organisation of nerves and senses. The forming of conscience takes place—albeit as a pure process of soul and spirit—in the metabolic and limbs-system.

[ 14 ] Between the two there lies the rhythmic Organisation, whose activity is polarised in two directions. In the breathing rhythm it is in intimate relation to sense-perception and to thought. In the breathing of the lung the process is at its coarsest. Thence it grows finer and finer, till, as a highly refined breathing process, it becomes sense-perception and thought.

Sense-perception is still very near to breathing; it is only a breathing through the sense-organs, not through the lungs. Thought, ideation, is farther removed from the lung-breathing, and is upheld by the Thinking system of man. And that which reveals itself in the play of fancy is already very close to the rhythm of blood-circulation. It is a very inward breathing, that comes into connection with the system of metabolism and the limbs. Psychologically, too, the activity of fancy reaches down into the sphere of Will, just as the circulatory system reaches down into the system of metabolism and the limbs.

[ 15 ] In the activity of fancy, the thinking system comes close up to the system of the Will. [ 16 ] The human being dives down into that sphere of his waking life which is asleep—the sphere of Will. Hence, in human beings who are especially developed in this direction, the contents of the soul appear like dreams in the waking state. Such a human Organisation was present in Goethe. Goethe once said that Schiller must interpret to him his own poetic dreams.

[ 17 ] In Schiller himself, a different human system was at work. He lived on the strength of what he brought with him from former lives on Earth. He had a strong life of the Will, and had to seek actively for the corresponding wealth of fancy.

[ 18 ] The Ahrimanic Power, in its world-intentions, counts upon those human beings who are especially developed in the sphere of fancy—whose perception of sense-reality quite naturally transforms into the pictures of fancy. With the help of such human beings, the Ahrimanic Power hopes to be able to cut off the evolution of mankind from the past, and carry it on in the direction of its own, Ahrimanic intentions.

[ 19 ] The Luciferic Power reckons on those human beings who, while naturally more developed in the sphere of Will, are inspired by an inner love for the ideal world-conception to transform their vision of sense-reality actively into pictures of creative fancy. Through such human beings the Luciferic Power would like to keep human evolution entirely within the impulses of the past. It would thus be able to preserve mankind from diving down into the sphere where the Ahrimanic Power must be overcome.

[ 20 ] In this our earthly existence, we stand between two opposite poles. Above us spread the stars. From thence there radiate the forces which are connected with all things calculable and regular in Earth-existence. The regular alternation of day and night, the seasons, the longer cosmic periods, are the earthly reflection of the real process in the stars.

[ 21 ] The other pole radiates out from the interior of the Earth. Irregular activities are at work in it. Wind and weather, thunder and lightning, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, are a reflection of this process of the inner Earth.

[ 22 ] Man himself is an image of this existence of the Stars and Earth. In his Thinking system lives the order of the Stars; in the Willing system of his limbs the chaos of the Earth. In the Rhythmic system he experiences in consciousness his own earthly being, in free balance and interplay between the two.

(March, 1925)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (with regard to the foregoing study on Memory and Conscience)

[ 23 ] 174. Man is organised in spirit and in body from two different sides. First, from the physical-etheric Cosmos. Whatever radiates from the Divine-Spiritual Being into this organisation in man's nature, lives in it as the force of sense-perception, of the faculty of memory and of the play of fancy.

[ 24 ] 175. Secondly, man is organised out of his own past lives on Earth. This Organisation is purely of the soul and spirit, and lives in him through the astral body and the Ego. Whatever enters of the life of Divine-Spiritual Beings into this human nature—its influence lights up in a man as the voice of conscience and all that is akin to this.

[ 25 ] 176. In his rhythmic Organisation man has the constant union of the Divine-Spiritual impulses from the two sides. In life and experience of rhythm the force of memory is carried into the Willing life, and the might of conscience into the life in Ideas.

[ 1 ] If we follow the work of the mind invested by man in his attempts to solve the riddle of world and life, the words, “Know Thyself,” which were inscribed as a motto in the temple of Apollo, will suggest themselves to the soul in its contemplation. The understanding for a world conception rests on the fact that the human soul can be stirred by the contemplation of these words. The nature of a living organism involves the necessity of feeling hunger. The nature of the human soul at a certain stage of its development causes a similar necessity. It is manifest in the need to gain from life a certain spiritual return that, just as food satisfies hunger, satisfies the soul's challenge, “Know Thyself.” This feeling can lay hold on the human soul so powerfully that it can be forced to think, “Only then am I fully human in the true sense of the word when I develop within myself a relation to the world that expresses its fundamental character in the challenge, ‘Know Thyself’.” The soul can reach the point where it considers this feeling as an awakening out of the dream of life that it dreamt before this particular experience.

[ 2 ] During the first period of his life, man develops the power of memory through which he will, in later life, recollect his experiences back to a certain moment of his childhood. What lies before this moment he feels as a dream of life from which he awoke. The human soul would not be what it should be if the power of memory did not grow out of the dim soul life of the child. In a similar way the human soul can, at a more developed stage, think of its experience of the challenge expressed in the words, “Know Thyself.” It can have the feeling that a soul life that does not awake out of its dream of life through this experience does not live up to its inner potentialities.

[ 3 ] Philosophers have often pointed out that they are at a loss when asked about the nature of philosophy in the true sense of the word. One thing, however, is certain, namely, that one must see in philosophy a special form of satisfying the need of the human soul expressed in the challenge, “Know Thyself.” Of this challenge one can know just as distinctly as one can know what hunger is, although one may be at a loss to give an explanation of the phenomenon of hunger that would be satisfactory to everybody.

[ 4 ] It was probably a thought of this kind that motivated Johann Gottlieb Fichte when he stated that the philosophy a man chooses depends on the kind of man he is. Animated by this thought, one can examine the attempts that have been made in the course of history to find solutions for the riddles of philosophy. In these attempts one will find the nature of the human being himself revealed. For although man will try to silence his personal interests entirely when he intends to speak as a philosopher, there will, nevertheless, immediately appear in a philosophy what the human personality can make out of itself by unfolding those forces that are most centrally and most originally its own.

[ 5 ] Seen from this viewpoint, the examination of the philosophical achievements with regard to the world riddles can excite certain expectations.

We can hope that such an examination can yield results concerning the nature of human soul development, and the writer of this book believes that in exploring the philosophical views of the occident he has found such results. Four distinctly discernible epochs in the evolution of the philosophical struggle of mankind presented themselves to his view. He had to recognize the difference of these epochs as distinct as the difference of the species of a realm of nature. This observation led him to acknowledge in the realm of the history of man's philosophical development the existence of objective spiritual impulses following a definite law of evolution of their own, independent of the individual men in whom they are observed. The achievements of these men as philosophers thus appear as the manifestation of these impulses that direct the courses of events under the surface of external history. The conviction is then suggested that such results arise from the unprejudiced observation of the historical facts, much as a natural law rests on the observation of facts of nature. The author of this book believes that he has not been misled by preconceptions to present an arbitrary construction of the historical process, but that the facts force the acknowledgment of results of the kind indicated.

[ 6 ] It can be shown that in the evolutionary course of the philosophical struggle of mankind, periods are distinguishable, each of which lasts between seven and eight centuries. In each of these epochs there is a distinctly different impulse at work, as if it were under the surface of external history, sending its rays into the human personalities and thus causing the evolution of man's mode of philosophizing while taking its own definite course of development.

[ 7 ] The way in which the facts support the distinction of these epochs is to be shown in the present book. Its author would like, as far as possible, to let the facts speak for themselves. At this point, he wants to offer a few guiding lines from which, however, the thoughts expressed in this book did not take their departure; they are the results of this book.

[ 8 ] One can be of the opinion that these guiding lines correctly should have been placed at the end of the book because their truth follows only from the content of the complete presentation. They are, however, to precede the subject matter as a preliminary statement because they justify the inner structure of the book. For although they were the result of the author's research, they were naturally in his mind before he wrote the book and had their effect on its form. For the reader, however, it can be important to learn not only at the end of the book why the author presents his subject in a certain way, but to form his judgment concerning this method of presentation already during the reading. But only so much is to be stated here as is necessary for the understanding of the book's arrangement.

[ 9 ] The first epoch of the development of philosophical views begins in Greek antiquity. It can be distinctly traced back as far as Pherekydes of Syros and Thales of Miletos and it comes to a close in the age of beginning Christianity. The spiritual aspiration of mankind in this age shows an essentially different character from that of earlier times. It is the age of awakening thought life. Prior to this age, the human soul lived in imaginative (symbolic) thought pictures that expressed its relation to the world and existence.

All attempts to find the philosophical thought life developed in pre-Greek times fail upon closer inspection. Genuine philosophy cannot be dated earlier than the Greek civilization. What may at first glance seem to resemble the element of thought in Oriental or Egyptian world contemplation's proves, on closer inspection, to be not real thought but parabolic, symbolic conception. It is in Greece that the aspiration is born to gain knowledge of the world and its laws by means of an element that can be acknowledged as thought also in the present age. As long as the human soul conceives world phenomena through pictures, it feels itself intimately bound up with them. The soul feels itself in this phase to be a member of the world organism; it does not think of itself as an independent entity separated from this organism. As the pure pictureless thought awakens in the human soul, the soul begins to feel its separation from the world. Thought becomes the soul's educator for independence.

But the ancient Greek did not experience thought as modern man does. This is a fact that can be easily overlooked. A genuine insight into the ancient Greek's thought life will reveal the essential difference. The ancient Greek's experience of thought is comparable to our experience of a perception, to our experience of “red” or “yellow.” Just as we today attribute a color or tone percept to a “thing,” so the ancient Greek perceives thought in the world of things and as adhering to them. It is for this reason that thought at that time still is the connecting link between soul and world. The process of separation between soul and world is just beginning; it has not yet been completed. To be sure, the soul feels the thought within itself, but it must be of the opinion to have received it from the world and it can therefore expect the solution of the world riddles from its thought experience. It is in this type of thought experience that the philosophical development proceeds that begins with Pherekydes and Thales, culminates in Plato and Aristotle and then recedes until it ends at the time of the beginning of Christianity. From the undercurrents of the spiritual evolution, thought life streams into the souls of man and produces in these souls philosophies that educate them to feel themselves in their self-dependence independent of the outer world.

[ 10 ] A new period begins with the dawn of the Christian era. The human soul can now no longer experience thought as a perception from the outer world. It now feels thought as the product of its own (inner) being. An impulse much more powerful than the stream of thought life now radiates into the soul from the deeper currents of the spiritual creative process. It is only now that self-consciousness awakes in mankind in a form adequate to the true nature of this self-consciousness. What men had experienced in this respect before that time had really only been harbingers and anticipatory phenomena of what one should in its deepest meaning call inwardly experienced self-consciousness.

It is to be hoped that a future history of spiritual evolution will call this time the “Age of Awakening Self-Consciousness.” Only now does man become in the true sense of the' word aware of the whole scope of his soul life as “Ego.” The full weight of this fact is more instinctively felt than distinctly known by the philosophical spirits of that time. All philosophical aspirations of that epoch retain this general character up to the time of Scotus Erigena. The philosophers of this period are completely submerged in religious conceptions with their philosophical thinking. Through this type of thought formation, the human soul, finding itself in an awakened self-consciousness entirely left to its own resources, strives to gain the consciousness of its submergence in the life of the world organism. Thought becomes a mere means to express the conviction regarding the relation of man's soul to the world that one has gained from religious sources. Steeped in this view, nourished by religious conceptions, thought life grows like the seed of a plant in the soul of the earth, until it breaks forth into the light.

In Greek philosophy the life of thought unfolds its own inner forces. It leads the human soul to the point where it feels its self-dependence. Then from greater depths of spiritual life an element breaks forth into mankind that is fundamentally different from thought life—an element that filled the soul with a new inner experience, with an awareness of being a world in itself, resting on its inner point of gravitation. Thus, self-consciousness is at first experienced, but it is not as yet conceived in the form of thought. The life of thought continues to be developed, concealed and sheltered in the warmth of religious consciousness. In this way pass the first seven or eight hundred years after the foundation of Christianity.

[ 11 ] The next period shows an entirely different character. The leading philosophers feel the reawakening of the energy of thought life. For centuries the human soul had been inwardly consolidated through the experience of its self-dependence. It now begins to search for what it might claim as its innermost self possession. It finds that this is its thought life. Everything else is given from without; thought is felt as something the soul has to produce out of its own depth, that is, the soul is present in full consciousness at this process of production. The urge arises in the soul to gain in thought a knowledge through which it can enlighten itself about its own relation to the world. How can something be expressed in thought life that is not itself merely the soul's own product? This becomes the question of the philosophers of that age. The spiritual trends of Nominalism, Realism, Scholasticism and medieval Mysticism reveal this fundamental character of the philosophy of that age. The human soul attempts to examine its thought life with regard to its content of reality.

[ 12 ] With the close of this third period the character of philosophical endeavor changes. The self-consciousness of the soul has been strengthened through century-long work performed in the examination of the reality of thought life. One has learned to feel the life of thought as something that is deeply related to the soul's own nature and to experience in this union an inner security of existence. As a mark of this stage of development, there shines like a brilliant star in the firmament of the spirit, the words, “I think, therefore I am,” which were spoken by Descartes (1596–1650). One feels the soul flowing in thought life, and in the awareness of this stream one believes one experiences the true nature of the soul itself. The representative of that time feels himself so secure within this existence recognized in thought life that he arrives at the conviction that true knowledge could only be a knowledge that is experienced in the same way as the soul experiences thought life resting on its own foundation. This becomes the viewpoint of Spinoza (1632–1677).

Now philosophies emerge that shape the world picture as it must be imagined when the self-conscious human soul, conceived by the life of thought, can have its adequate position within that world. How must the world be depicted so that within it the human soul can be thought to correspond adequately to the necessary concept of the self-consciousness? This becomes the question that, in an unbiased observation, we find at the bottom of the philosophy of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). It is also distinctly the question for which Leibnitz (1646–1716) seeks the answer.

[ 13 ] With conceptions of a world picture arising from such a question the fourth epoch in the evolution of the philosophical world view begins. Our present age is approximately in the middle of this epoch. This book is to show how far philosophical knowledge has advanced in the conception of a world picture in which the self-conscious soul can find such a secure place, so that it can understand its own meaning and significance within the existing world. When, in the first epoch of philosophical search, philosophy derived its powers from the awakening thought life, the human soul was spurred by the hope of gaining a knowledge of a world to which it belongs with its true nature, which is not limited to the life manifested through the body of the senses.

[ 14 ] In the fourth epoch the emerging natural sciences add a view of nature to the philosophical world picture that gradually senses its own independent ground. As this nature-picture develops, it retains nothing of a world in which the self-conscious ego (the human soul experiencing itself as a self-conscious entity) must recognize itself. In the first epoch the human soul begins to detach itself from the experienced external world and to develop a knowledge concerned with the inner life of the soul. This independent soul life finds its power in the awakening thought element. In the fourth period a picture 'of nature emerges that has detached itself in turn from the inner soul life. The tendency arises to think of nature in such a way that nothing is allowed to be mixed into its conception that has been derived from the soul and not exclusively from nature itself. Thus, the soul is, in this period, expelled from nature, and with its inner experiences confined to its subjective world. The soul is not about to be forced to admit that everything it can gain as knowledge by itself can have a significance only for itself. It cannot find in itself anything to point to a world in which this soul could have its roots with its true being. For in the picture of nature it cannot find any trace of itself.

[ 15 ] The evolution of thought life has proceeded through four epochs. In the first, thought is experienced as a perception coming from without. In this phase the human soul finds its self-dependence through the thought process. In the second period, thought had exhausted its power in this direction. The soul now becomes stronger in the experience of its own entity. Thought itself now lives more in the background and blends into self knowledge. It can no longer be considered as if it were an external perception. The soul becomes used to experiencing it as its own product. It must arrive at the question of what this product of inner soul activity has to do with an external world. The third period passes in the light of this question. The philosophers develop a cognitive life that tests thought itself with regard to its inner power. The philosophical strength of the period manifests itself as a life in the element of thought as such, as a power to work through thought in its own essence. In the course of this epoch the philosophical life increases in its ability to master the element of thought. At the beginning of the fourth period the cognitive self-consciousness, on the basis of its thought possession, proceeds to form a philosophical world picture. This picture is now challenged by a picture of nature that refuses to accept any element of this self-consciousness. The self-conscious soul, confronted with this nature picture, feels as its fundamental question, “How do I gain a world picture in which both the inner world with its true essence and the external nature are securely rooted at the same time?” The impulse caused by this question dominates the philosophical evolution from the beginning of the fourth period; the philosophers themselves may be more or less aware of that fact. This is also the most important impulse of the philosophical life of the present age.

In this book the facts are to be characterized that show the effect of that impulse. The first volume of the book is to present the philosophical development up to the middle of the nineteenth century; the second will follow that development into the present time. It is to show at the end how the philosophical evolution leads the soul to aspects toward a future human life in cognition. Through this, the soul should be able to develop a world picture out of its own self-consciousness in which its true being can be conceived simultaneously with the picture of nature that is the result of the modern scientific development.

[ 6 ] A philosophical future perspective adequate to the present was to be unfolded in this book from the historical evolution of the philosophical world view.

Much that I should like to say regarding the spiritual world has to be hinted at pictorially, or rather half pictorially for the pictures must be taken in a real and active sense.

It is necessary to indicate pictorially such things as I desire to bring before your souls today for further meditation, because if one were not to speak symbolically but in ideas, one would have to speak at very great length. Each one of you can himself reach the depths of that of which I shall speak today, if he holds and ponders over it to a certain extent within his soul.

Every year at this season we pass from one division of time to another. This may at first appear simply a matter of convenience; but it is not so. The men who had to separate time into seasons followed by profound instinct certain great laws regulating the course of time. The festival of the passing of one year into another takes place with us in the depths of winter (naturally, I speak of our part of the world) at the time when all plants have suspended their growth, their blossoming and fruit-bearing. Only certain forest trees remain what is called evergreen through winter. The power of the Sim is then at its lowest.

We know that in all events and occurrences that take place before our senses, spiritual events are interwoven. We know that when we walk through the forest, we have not only the trees about us with their green foliage, but that in the background of existence spiritual and psychic beings are everywhere active. We are already familiar with this thought, which the clever people of our time regard as a childish superstition; we realise it as a true and actual fact.

It is absolutely clear to us that behind all the things of sense, whether they be solid or whether they be happenings which our senses perceive—are spiritual activities, and spiritual life.

Now let us, to begin with, consider what people call our lifeless inorganic Earth, the mineral kingdom of our Earth. This which is apparently lifeless substance, the mineral which to the materialist is merely lifeless, is to us not only endowed with life, but with soul and spirit, so that we speak also of a soul-and-spirit part of our so-called lifeless inorganic, purely mineral Earth. True, when we speak of the consciousness of the Earth, we do not in the first place see in the geological-mineral substance that which may be compared to a man’s muscles and blood, but we see only what may be compared to his bony system, namely, the solid earth; so that when we speak of the consciousness of the Earth, we have to think of it as connected with the whole Earth, not only with its bony system, but with water, air, ether, etc., corresponding to the muscles, blood, and so on.

The whole Earth has consciousness, a consciousness belonging to the mineral kingdom. We shall not occupy ourselves with the differences in this consciousness of the Earth in special regions during the course of the year, but we shall endeavour to evoke in our souls the conception that the whole Earth has consciousness. Let us now turn from the mineral Earth, and direct our attention to all that springs forth and sprouts on Earth, to the plant world.

Looked at in accordance with Spiritual Science, we must regard the plant world, in the first place, as an independent entity in reference to the Earth. That the whole plant world is an independent entity as regards the Earth only comes clearly before us when we consider the consciousness of these two entities or beings. We can speak of a consciousness of the whole mineral Earth, but we can equally speak of a consciousness of the whole plant world which evolves on the Earth. The laws of this consciousness are certainly entirely different from the laws of human consciousness. In speaking of plant consciousness, we must always speak of it as regards certain districts only, because it changes with different regions of the Earth.

As men we are not aware that there really is a certain parallel between our consciousness and the consciousness of the whole plant world, for we are apt to look on our waking consciousness as our complete consciousness, without taking our sleeping consciousness into consideration. To simplify our subject, we say: In the daytime when awake, our ego and astral body are within our physical body. I have, however, often remarked that this in fact refers to our blood and nervous system only, not to the remaining parts of our system. When the ego and astral body withdraw from our head, for instance, they are so much the stronger within other parts of us.

A parallel thing happens on the Earth, when on one part of it there is summer and on the other winter; this also is merely a change of consciousness. The case is the same with ourselves. We are not aware of this, however, because in man the two kinds of consciousness are not of equal clearness; they are of different strength. Night consciousness is beclouded consciousness, for us practically no consciousness at all; while day consciousness is full consciousness of our other side. In the night our lower nature wakes, while with our higher nature we sleep, and it is exactly the same with the Earth, when on the one hemisphere there is winter, on the other there is summer. On one side the consciousness is awake, on the other side it sleeps and vice versa. As I have just said, and as I have often explained, this only holds good in respect to the plant world. We know that the plant world sleeps in the height of summer when there is growth on every side; while it is outwardly unfolding its physical nature—it is asleep. But it wakes to full consciousness during the time when physically, externally, it is going through no development; then the plant world is awake. Thus we speak of all plant life on Earth as a whole; and this plant life, as a whole, has a consciousness.

When speaking of this consciousness which as a second consciousness intermingles with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, we can really say that during the height of summer in our part of the Earth the plant consciousness is asleep, and in depth of winter it is awake. At this season, however, during the time at which we now are, something further takes place.

Now I beg you to note that these two states of consciousness, that is, the general consciousness belonging to the mineral earth, and the general plant consciousness—are always distinct. They are throughout the whole year two separate beings. But these are not only two distinct Beings, for at one season they unite, so that at the present time of year, the one interpenetrates the other. At the time when one year is passing over into the other, the mineral things and events of the Earth and the whole plant world have but one consciousness, which means that these two consciousnesses interpenetrate each other.

What is the nature of the mineral consciousness of the Earth, the varieties of which (as I have said) we shall not study today as we shall those of the plant consciousness, which we realise wakes during winter time and sleeps in summer? What is the peculiar nature of this mineral consciousness, this consciousness of the great Earth-Being?

The man who is limited in his physical senses, and limited to the understanding that he considers appertains to these physical senses, can at first know nothing of this great Earth-consciousness. Spiritual Science, however, can instruct as to what this Earth-consciousness really thinks—thinks as we think of plants, animals, air, rivers, mountains, etc. Just as with our ordinary waking consciousness, we think of the things round about us, so, in like manner does the Earth think. Let us inquire today: of what does the Earth consciously think?

The Earth thinks with its consciousness the whole firmament of heaven nearest to the Earth. As we look with our eyes on trees and stones, so does the Earth consciously look into space and contemplate all that takes place in the stars. The Earth is a being that meditates on the occurrences of the stars.

Thus fundamentally the mineral consciousness contains the secret of the whole Cosmos. While we men move about on the Earth in a superficial way, thinking merely of the stones against which we knock, or of the many things which our senses reveal to us, the Earth thinks with its consciousness—through which we are passing as we move through space—of the whole Cosmos. She has indeed greater, more all-embracing thoughts than we have. In truth, it is an extraordinarily exalting thought, when we realise: ‘I am not simply passing through the air; I am moving through the thoughts of the Earth.’

Now let us again consider the other consciousness, that of the plants. These are not able to think so much as the Earth can. The thinking consciousness of the plants—not of individual plants, but of the whole united plant-world—is a much more restricted consciousness, it embraces a smaller circle of the Earth throughout the year; but this is not the case at the present season. Plant consciousness is now one with the whole consciousness of the Earth, and because the plant consciousness interpenetrates the earth-consciousness, the plant-world at New Year time, knows the secrets of the stars and applies them. Plants are thus able to unfold again in spring in accordance with the secrets of the cosmos, and can bring forth their blossoms and fruit. In this unfoldment the whole mystery of the cosmos is contained, in the way plants bring forth their leaves, blossoms and fruit.

But during the time the plants are producing their leaves, flowers and fruit, they are not able to meditate upon it. It is only at this present season they can think—now—when the plant consciousness is united with the consciousness of the whole mineral world. This is why it is said in Spiritual Science: About the season of the New Year, two cycles interpenetrate each other.

This is the main secret of all existence—that two cycles penetrate each other; then parting, continue separately their further development; again intermingle, and so on. Only think how marvellous this secret of existence is! Plant-consciousness and mineral-consciousness, two streams of evolution—progress apart through the whole year, then at the time when one year passes over into another, they unite. Again they pass through the year apart, uniting once more at the festival of the New Year. The cyclic advance of history is similar to this.

We turn from this mystic event, through which we are now passing, and which fills us with a deep feeling of holy awe in respect of the passing of one year into the other—we turn to a still deeper mystery.

We know that we are now living in that cycle in which the consciousness-soul is unfolding, that this was preceded by that of the unfolding of the rational or intellectual-soul, which was again preceded by the cycle in which the sentient soul was developed, before which again we go back to the time of development of the sentient body. This takes us back 6000 years before our Christian era, to a time when all human thought was evolved within the cycle of the sentient body—of the so-called astral body.

We have now to advance through the cycle of the spiritual or consciousness-soul, and through that of the Spirit-Self, and further still man has to develop.

The consciousness-soul (since 1923 translated by Dr. Steiner as the spiritual-soul) is principally developed at the present time because man chiefly makes use of his physical body alone as an instrument. On this account—as you know already from many lectures—this present age is the high tide of materialism. A time will come, however, when man will not only make use of his physical body, but will again learn to use his etheric body, as in earlier times he used his astral body, in the cycle of evolution when that body was the main element of consciousness.

We can therefore say: Our condition at one time on Earth was such, that our soul experienced a contact of its consciousness with the consciousness of our astral body. Just as at New Year, plant-consciousness penetrates mineral consciousness, so, thousands of years ago, did our soul intermingle with our astral body. At that time our soul was one, in its consciousness, with the astral body. The time of that type of consciousness was six thousand years before our era. When that consciousness came about man celebrated a New Year on Earth; a mighty New Year!

Just as we regard the New Year as the mingling of the plant-consciousness with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, so we must realise that 6,000 years before our era a great, a mighty cosmic New Year of our Earth took place. Our Soul-consciousness then united with—passed through—the astral consciousness of our body.

What was it that then took place?

At that time when our inner soul-consciousness passed through (or intermingled with) the astral consciousness of our body—then our limited human consciousness, the consciousness which we have today, had progressed as far as the present plant-consciousness at New Year. Just as plants gaze abroad into the heavens because their consciousness has been united to the mineral consciousness of theEarth, so did man then see and perceive a wide field of wisdom six thousand years before our era, when his soul was united with his astral body at the time of the cosmic New Year.

From this time originated the knowledge which we have now lost, since the wisdom of the Gnostics has perished. The source of this knowledge must be sought in the earthly and cosmic New Year about 6,000 B.c. This was the knowledge from which Zarathustra gave forth his teaching; the knowledge, whose last great rays still illuminated the Gnostics, but of which only a few fragments remain. It is the winter of the Earth, but the Earth’s New Year to which we here look back.

If we now add four thousand years more to the years we have passed through since the founding of Christianity, we again come to a similar intermingling as that I have just indicated; to the mingling of our soul-consciousness with our astral consciousness, but at a higher stage. Man will once more experience a universal stellar consciousness. For this we endeavour to prepare ourselves through our Spiritual Science, so that there may be men ready to receive it.

We will seek to prepare for this cosmic New Year. If we prepare for it through the keeping of the Christmas Festival, as I indicated in a recent lecture, we are preparing ourselves in the right way. If the birth of spiritual knowledge within us leads to that frame of mind which is in accord with the ‘Christmas Initiation,’ we are preparing ourselves for that new cosmic New Year on which we shall enter twelve thousand years after the previous cosmic New Year.

Twelve months pass by between one union of the plant-consciousness with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, and another. Twelve thousand years pass between one cosmic New Year and another: between one intermingling of the human soul with the Astral World-Soul, and another.

So at this sacred season, we turn from the little New Year to the great cosmic New Year, from the New Year’s Eve of our year, to that for which we are preparing ourselves, by endeavouring—now in this winter tune—to behold the light, which in a normal elemental way flows into man as inhabitant of the Earth, only at the cosmic New Year.

We really only see the world in the true light, when we grasp what is around us, not only as it is presented to our senses,—as materialists do—but when we accept all that is about us in the outer world as a symbol of the great secrets of the universe.

Then when New Year draws near, it seems as if a message from spiritual worlds approaches, and unveils for us the mysteries connected with the birth of the New Year; and declares, ‘Behold, now in the depths of the dark cold winter, the consciousness of the plant world unites with the mineral consciousness of the earth. Let this be to you a sign that the Earth too has its year—the great cosmic year, of which Zarathustra spoke long ago, explaining how the world passed on from one great New Year’s Eve to another; this must be understood by those who really seek to comprehend the course of human evolution.’

Zarathustra spoke of epochs of twelve thousand years. He meant the great cosmic years of which I have spoken to you today. He represented the course of human evolution as being divided into four divisions within the Earth year. This fact is deeply rooted in spiritual mysteries.

So, from a deeper understanding of our Spiritual Science, let us accept a true Christmas attitude of reverence. Let us develop within our hearts that inner warmth which comes, when in the frosty night of winter we receive the first intimation of the dawning of the Sun-Spirit on the Earth, and with it the mystery of the revolving year. The thirteen days are the days in which the plant-consciousness unites with the mineral consciousness. If a man is but able to place himself within the plant consciousness, he can dream of—can gain a conception of—the many mysteries which then crowd into his heart, such as did in the dream of Olaf Oesteson,¹ the description and explanation of which entered into and stirred our souls here, this time last year. When we feel such a mood of initiation, we evoke the proper feelings and the perceptions for the aims and objects of our spiritual knowledge and with such warmth of heart we shall make preparations for the new cosmic New Year. Through it we can worthily expect that day which is to usher in a New Year for the world, Thus; when in succeeding incarnations our souls experience the cosmic New Year under quite new conditions on Earth, we shall be able to pass through it as those can for whom the small New Year’s Eve (which recurs every twelve months instead of every twelve thousand years) becomes a symbol of the great New Year’s Eve of the world.

This is the secret of our existence. Everything is in great as in small, and in small as in great. The small, the yearly cycle, can only be understood aright when it becomes for us a symbol of the mighty events of the cosmos—of the vast cycle of thousands of years. The year is an image of the aeons, and the aeons are the realities of those images which we encounter in the course of a year. When we understand this yearly course aright we are filled, in this important night in which a New Year begins, with thoughts of the great cosmic mysteries. Let our endeavour be, so to attune our souls, that they may look forward to the New Year with this conscious thought: ‘I will accept the year as a symbol of the great cosmic year which contains all mysteries, through which pass and repass the Divine Beings who accompany our souls from aeon to aeon, as the lesser Gods follow the secret development of plant and mineral existence throughout the course of an Earth year.

• 1. Editorial Note: The dream of Olaf Oesteson referred to above, appears in the linotyped course of lectures entitled The Forming of Destiny and Life after Death (Lecture 6.)

Before I begin a new chapter, I will, as I said last time, insert something and add something to the Christmas reflection that I gave in the Monday lectures. You remember how I connected the meaning of Christmas with the whole development of our cultural epochs, and how it is precisely through this that Christmas acquires its meaning in the turn of an era, both backwards and forwards.

Today I would like to talk about a festival that seems to have less significance for newer peoples than Christmas, about the festival of the “Three Kings,” which is celebrated on January 6, about the festival of the Magi who come from the Orient and greet the newly born Jesus of Nazareth. This festival of epiphanies will become more and more important as people come to understand the true, actual symbolism of this festival as well. We are dealing here with something important. You can see this from the fact that a very developed symbolism underlies this festival of the three Magi from the Orient. This symbolism, like all mysteries, was kept very secret until the fifteenth century, and until then no special hints were given. From the fifteenth century onwards, however, some light is shed on this festival of the Magi from the Orient, in that exoteric illustrations have appeared depicting the Three Holy Kings as a Moor - an inhabitant of Africa - that is Balthasar; then a white man - a European - that is Melchior; and an Asian king who has the skin color of the inhabitants of India - that is Caspar. They bring gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Christ Child in Bethlehem as their offerings.

These are three very significant offerings, and that sounds together with the meaningful symbolism of this festival of January 6. Esoterically, however, the festival is a very important one. January 6 is the same date on which the so-called Osiris Festival was celebrated in ancient Egypt, the festival of the rediscovered Osiris. As is well known, Osiris is overcome by his opponent Typhon, he is sought and found by Isis. This rediscovery of Osiris, the son of God, is represented by the festival of January 6. The Feast of the Epiphany is the same festival, only it has become Christian. We also find this festival among the Assyrians, Armenians and Phoenicians. Everywhere it is a festival associated with a kind of general baptism, where rebirth takes place out of the water. This already indicates the connection with the rediscovered Osiris.

What is the missing Osiris anyway? The missing Osiris represents the transition that took place between the times before the middle of the Lemurian race and the times after the middle of the Lemurian race. Before the middle of the Lemurian race, there was no man endowed with Manas. It was only in the middle of the Lemurian period that Manas descended and fertilized man. In every single human being, a tomb is created for the Manas, which is divided into humanity, for Osiris, who is depicted as dismembered. So many graves are shown in Egypt - that is the manasic deity, which has been divided and dwells in man. “Tombs of Osiris are the human bodies in the Egyptian secret language. Manas is not liberated until the re-appearing love can liberate Manas.

What is the re-appearing love? That which came into being with the Manas fertilization in the middle of the Lemurian period - something before and something after - that was the drawing of the passion principle into humanity. Before that time, there was no actual principle of passion. The animals of the preceding times were cold-blooded. And man himself was not yet endowed with warm blood at that time. Comparatively speaking, the people on the moon were like fish, and the people of the third round were the same warmth with their surroundings.

“The Spirit of God brooded over the face of the waters,” says the Bible of this time. The principle of love was not yet within the beings, but outside as manifesting earthly Kama and earthly passion. That is selfish love. The first bringer of love free of selfishness is now Christ, who was to appear in Jesus of Nazareth.

Who then are the Magi? They are the Initiates of the three preceding races, the Initiates of Humanity up to the appearance of the Christ Being, of Love free from selfishness, of the resurrected Osiris. The Initiates were beings endowed with Manas, they are Magi. They offer gold, incense, and myrrh as a sacrifice. And why do they appear in the three colors black, white, and yellow? Black as Africans, white as Europeans, yellow as Indians. This is related to the root races. Blacks are the remnants of the Lemurian race, yellows are the remnants of the Atlantean race, and whites are the representatives of the fifth root race, the Aryans. Thus, in the three kings or magi, we have the representatives of the Lemurians, the Atlanteans and the Aryans. They bring three offerings: the European brings gold, the symbol of wisdom and intelligence, which was expressed primarily in the fifth root race. The initiates of the fourth root race, the Atlanteans, have as their offering that which is most important to them. They no longer had a direct connection with the deity, but rather a kind of suggestive influence, something like a universal hypnosis. This connection with the deity is maintained by sacrifice. The feeling must rise so that God also fertilizes the feeling. This finds its symbolic expression in the incense. This is the general symbol for sacrifice, which has something to do with intuition.

In esoteric language, myrrh is the symbol of self-denial. What does self-denial mean, what does resurrection mean, as in the example of the resurrected Osiris? I would refer you to Goethe, who says:

And as long as you do not have that,
this dying and becoming,
you are only a gloomy guest
on the dark earth.

Jakob Böhme expresses the same idea with the words:

He who does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies.

Myrrh is now the symbol of the dying away of the lower life and the resurrection of the higher life. It is therefore offered by the initiate of the third root race. There is a deep significance in this. Remember who Jesus of Nazareth is. A highly developed chela is born in him. In the thirtieth year of his life, he dedicated his life to the descending Christ, the descending Logos. The Magi foresaw all this. It is a great sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth that he exchanges his ego with the ego of the Second Logos. This occurs for a very specific reason. Only when the sixth sub-race has been reached will the possibility gradually arise for the human being, the human body, to be ready from early childhood to receive something like the Christ principle. Only in the sixth root race will humanity be so fully mature that the bodies do not need to be prepared and prepared for years, but are capable of receiving the Christ principle from the very beginning. In the fourth sub-race of the fifth root race, the body still had to be prepared for thirty years. This is just as it was in the Nordic regions, where Sig's body was prepared so that Sig could and did make his body available to a higher being.

In the sixth root race, it will be possible for man to make his body available to such a high being as Jesus did when founding Christianity. When Christianity was founded, it was still necessary for a chela to sacrifice his ego, to mortify it, to send it up into the astral realm so that the Logos could dwell in the body. This is something that is also illuminated by the last moment on the cross, when you consider the last words: Who else could understand the words:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? [Matthew 27:46]

You will find in this an expression of the fact that it has taken place. At the moment when Christ dies, God has left the body, and the body of Jesus of Nazareth utters those words - the body that was so highly developed that it could express this fact. Therefore, an incredibly great event is expressed in these words. And all this is expressed in the myrrh, which is the symbol of sacrifice, of self-denial, of the sacrifice of the earthly in order to bring forth the higher.

In the middle of the Lemurian period, Osiris had to find his grave, Manas had to enter into people. Under the guidance of the magicians, people had to be educated until the Budhi principle, the principle of love, shone forth in Christ Jesus. Budhi is heavenly love. The lower, sexual principle is ennobled by Christian love. Thus the Kama principle has been glorified and purified in the fire of divine love.

The fact that we are dealing with Melchior, with the principle of wisdom, the intelligence of the fifth root race, is symbolized by the gold – this expresses the sacrifice. The fact that we are dealing with a principle of cult sacrifice is expressed by the incense. This is the principle of the fourth root race, the Atlanteans. This will then be further developed until Christianity will have fulfilled its task in the sixth root race, which will again have a sacramentalism so that it will fulfill the sensual existence with cultic acts, with sacrificial acts. The sacraments have indeed lost most of their meaning today, the sense for them is no longer there. It will be there again for them through what is symbolized by the incense: the higher human being is born. In the Lemurian race, Osiris finds his death; in the seventh root race, he rises again.

So you see that the Feast of the Epiphany, through what it proclaims with its sacrifice, is the story of the third, fourth, fifth and sixth root races.

What guides the Magi and where are they led? They are led by a star and are led to a grotto in Bethlehem. This is something that only someone who is familiar with the so-called lower or astral mysteries can truly understand. To be guided by a star means nothing other than to see the soul itself as a star. But when do you see the soul as a star? You see the soul as a star when you can perceive it as a luminous aura. Then the soul is a star. What kind of aura glows in such a way that it can guide? First you have the aura that only glows, that only has a dull light. It cannot guide. Then you have the higher aura, the intelligence aura. It has a fluid light, a swelling light, but it is not yet guiding. But the bright aura, permeated by Budhi, is truly a star, something radiant and guiding. In Christ, the Budhi star, shining in racial development, rises in the progress of humanity. What shines for the Magi is none other than the soul of Christ Himself. The Second Logos Himself shines for them, and He shines above the grotto in Bethlehem.

The cave is nothing other than the dwelling of the soul: the body. The astral seer sees the body from the inside. For the astral seer, everything is reversed, and everything is seen in reverse. For example, one sees 365 instead of 563. Thus one sees the human body as a grotto, as a cave, and so the star of Christ, the soul of Christ, shines in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This is to be imagined as a reality taking place in the astral. It is a process in the lower mysteries. There the Christ-soul actually shines as an auric star, and it leads the initiated of the three races to Jesus in Bethlehem.

This is a festival that has been celebrated every year on January 6th. It is one of those hinted at in “Light on the Path”. Each year, a number of festivals take place. This is one of them, in which the star of Bethlehem rises for the wise men. The first four sentences from “Light on the Path” are the center of the four celebrations:

Before the Masters can speak the voice, it must unlearn the wound.

This is the preparation for the fifth round. This sentence appears at the entrance to the temple. And then comes the great fact. The festival of the sixth of January will grow more and more. People will understand more and more what a magician is and what the masters are. Then, from the understanding of Christianity, we will arrive at the understanding of Theosophy. These days, on January 6, the festival of the great Magi, the masters, will also take place among the Theosophists. The New Year is the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus, because the Christ had not yet been born. The Jewish New Year is in October. But the festival of the circumcision of Jesus of Nazareth has been taken over into Christianity. The fact that Jesus was also a Jew before that is celebrated with the New Year festival in Christianity.

[Notes presumably from the answering of questions at the lecture on December 30, 1904]

On the next planet, man reaches psychic consciousness, on the following planet, super-psychic consciousness, and on the seventh planet, spiritual consciousness. The adept can artificially place himself in these states of consciousness.

The crucifixion caused pain to the Christ.

On the devachan plane, one does not feel only one's own pain and suffering, but one can perceive and feel the whole pain of humanity. All other suffering is felt, one is above one's own suffering. Of the levels of consciousness:

1. The daytime consciousness.
2. A duller, dream-filled consciousness.
3. Dreamless sleep consciousness, the sleep trance of mediums. 4. Deep trance or [induced] trance; can be achieved by mediums; chains of worlds. 5. Psychic consciousness – this is the consciousness one has when one sees life. 6. Superpsychic consciousness, in which one can make the astral body stand.

The physical body has passed through the seven stages. The astral body will pass through them in the future. Beyond spiritual consciousness stands mastery. Spiritual consciousness is equivalent to chelaship.

Esoterically, the conditions that preceded our development on earth are the old lunar and solar conditions.

What is now our inner life was once around us. The mystic has within himself what was once spread around him on the outside. The teaching that flowed out of Budhi is called esoteric Buddhism.

The consciousness that undergoes 343 stages corresponds to a Pitri development. The planetary chain

Physical states of consciousness.

Kama was first in the air, it was the passion for the good. Atavism is when one lags behind in earlier stages of development.

A distinction is made between states of consciousness, states of life and states of form.

An individuality is a being that is fertilized with manas.

States of consciousness in planetary development:

1. deep trance consciousness
2. dreamless sleep consciousness
3. psychic consciousness
4. waking state
5. archetypal state of consciousness

The states of consciousness in humans:

1. consciousness during a deep trance
2. consciousness during dreamless sleep
3. consciousness during dream-filled sleep
4. waking consciousness
5. psychic state of consciousness
6. super-psychic state of consciousness
7. spiritual state of consciousness

The beings have their form from the mineral kingdom. They are a center only in that life becomes conscious. The soul extends into the body. The lower has life only in that the higher is absorbed into it, spreads into it. Consciousness arises from the higher spreading over life and death. Consciousness means as much as Dhyanic. Substance means as much as balance. Beings of consciousness are something all-encompassing – angels of circulation – planetary Dhyanis. Our Earth also has its Dhyani.

At the end of the seventh round, the Earth will be so far advanced that plants and animals will be given to man. Consciousness and form are in balance when the form is directed by consciousness. The uncontrolled form strives up to consciousness.

Elemental spirits are beings that are more powerful in form than in consciousness and life. The opposite of this are the Dhyanis. The elemental spirits are the inhibiting forces. All parasitic beings are filled with elemental beings, for example mistletoe, then the spider, which spins its matter out of itself. Everything parasitic is an expression of the eighth sphere of the moon. - Nightmare. Sphinx.

In the Atlantean race, the Turanians became familiar with the elemental spirits.

Consciousness, life and form - every being must pass through these in many times - in seven stages each.

States of consciousness:

1. Trance consciousness is the all-consciousness, it is the dullest state of consciousness, it corresponds to the forms of crystals and stars, but not of humans.
2. Dreamless sleep is less dull, but narrower, a plant consciousness is present. It is an extraordinary sign of [...] no world systems are perceived there.
3. Dream-filled sleep – in this state, consciousness is not as comprehensive but it is already present in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms.
4. The waking state – it encompasses mineral, plant, animal and human.
5. Psychic consciousness – it is the consciousness of the astral world. Here one not only sees the sour face, but also has the sour feeling.
6. Superpsychic consciousness.
7. Spiritual consciousness – this is endowed with direct perception of the spiritual.

The seven kingdoms and what is established in them:

1. The first elemental kingdom – existence is established
2. The second elementary realm – life asserts itself
3. The third elementary realm – sensation or consciousness asserts itself outwardly
4. The mineral kingdom – being becomes objective
5. The plant kingdom – life becomes objective
6. The animal kingdom – sensation and consciousness become objective
7. The human kingdom - higher consciousness and the ego have become objective.

Form states:

1. The arupic form
2. The rupic form
3. The astral form
4. The physical form
5. The plastic form - it is not rigid, but from the inside outwards making itself valid.
6. The intellectual form
7. The archetypal form

Life, form and consciousness - the present waking state of the earth. The seven globes - the phase states. We are changing from physical-seeing beings into beings that can also see into the higher realms of being; we are entering the region of permeability. We can now see only a part of the cosmos. When someone says today that a celestial body is visible, it means that it is in the fourth state, in the state of the mineral kingdom. World year - world month - world day.

Consciousness corresponds to the sun, form to the moon, life to the earth.

There are 7 x 7 = 49 metamorphoses of life that give consciousness. These make up one world year. On the higher level, consciousness is form again.

The animals that have the skeleton on the outside belong to the lunar epoch - cancer development.

We have often approached the question that must interest us all: Where does it actually come from that relatively few people today still find access to the spiritual knowledge of the world order? This question can be answered from a wide variety of points of view. Today we want to consider a point of view that can then bring us certain thoughts that may be very important to take in, especially in the present time. When we consider man's relationship to the spiritual world, we are naturally interested in various things in this field. One that interests us most is the relationship that a person can have with those human souls who, from his own circle, from the circle with which he is connected karmically, have passed through the gates of death and are now in the spiritual realm. The relationship with the so-called dead will always be of the greatest interest for the relationship of the human being to the spiritual world. This relationship shows particularly how fundamentally different the view of the spiritual world approached man than the view of the physical-sensual world. I have often mentioned that when man confronts the spiritual world, it very often happens that he has to radically break with the ideas he has formed about physical existence. He has to break radically because the things and processes of the spiritual world often have to be grasped by concepts that are the opposite of those of the physical world. But one must not believe that one can come to a knowledge of the spiritual world by imagining, for example, that one simply has to turn the physical world upside down and reverse everything. That is not the case. Each one must be specially experienced, specially investigated. But just when it concerns the relation of man to the so-called dead, there it is indeed the case, at least for the time being, that we must acquire the ordinary concepts opposed to the physical ones.

The spiritual researcher can initially only relate how things are. What he has to say about the relationship to the so-called dead is more or less present in every person in reality, but only remains in the subconscious if the person is not a spiritual researcher. So I will tell you things that are present for all of you. I will speak about relationships to the so-called dead in which you all find yourselves. Only that this relationship is unconscious at first. Spiritual science has to bring these things into consciousness.

Let us assume that someone to whom the spiritual world has revealed itself is confronted with a particular dead person. It turns out that when we address the dead person in speech, we naturally do so not with physical words but in thought. When we turn to the dead person in thinking and speaking, then, if the relationship with the dead person is a real one, the feeling arises: What we ask the dead person or what we tell them comes from them. We are accustomed to imagining things differently in our physical lives: when we ask someone something or tell them something, we hear ourselves speaking and address the words to them. It is the other way around when we enter into a relationship with the dead. If we want to communicate something to him and the relationship is to be a real one, we have the feeling that we ourselves are inwardly at peace. For when what we have to ask or communicate really reaches him, it seems to us, in contemplation, as if the words, and thus the thoughts, come from him to us. He speaks to us. And what he says to us rises from the depths of our own soul as an answer or a message. The relationship that I have just described, which is quite the opposite of the relationship we have with a person in the physical world, is something that people do not easily notice in ordinary life because it is quite different from what they are used to. If it were not so extraordinarily difficult for people to get used to the unusual, many more people would be able to tell of their relationship with the dead.

Take a particular case. You are always in a relationship with some karmically connected dead person. If you want to make this relationship particularly intimate and particularly real, then you would do well to bear in mind an important rule: abstract thoughts and abstract ideas have the least significance for the spiritual world. Anything that remains abstract does not reach across into the spiritual world. So if you only think in abstracto, let us say, of the dead, if you - one can also say it that way - abstractly love the dead, not much comes across. On the other hand, if you strongly link this relationship to something concrete, then it comes across. I mean it like this: you remember, for example, a certain situation in which you were with the dead person when he was still alive. You imagine it very precisely: how he stood or sat opposite you, how you went for a walk with him. You imagine him in very specific situations, you imagine what it was like, what he said, what you said to him, you imagine the tone of his voice and try – which is the most difficult thing – to let the feelings you had for him become present in your soul again. You tie in with specific experiences you had with him. And then, starting from there, you try to say something to the dead person, something you would say if he were still alive in some situation, something you want to ask him, something you want to tell him. And you do this as if he were still there, again very specifically. That is enough to make the connection. In the moment when you have the feeling: I am now telling the dead person something – or: I am now asking the dead person something – the connection will not be made immediately. You have to allow time for this. Time is really something that has a completely different meaning for the spiritual life than it does for physical existence.

Even if you are not a spiritual scientist yourself, you can still establish a connection with the dead through what I have just characterized, so that it is a reality. But time itself will be waiting, so to speak, so that what you want to send to the dead person really does get through to him. For someone who is not consciously initiated, who does not consciously have a relationship with the spiritual world, the situation will usually be such that one moment seems particularly important for establishing this relationship with the dead: that is the moment of falling asleep. The moment of transition from waking to sleeping is at the same time the moment that usually carries what you have directed to the dead during the day, as I have described it, over to the dead. The path that leads you into the spiritual world when you fall asleep also leads what you have directed to the dead into the realm of the dead. Therefore, you must be careful when interpreting dreams. Dreams are very often only reminiscences, memories of daily life, but they do not have to be; they can also be reflections of realities. And in particular, dreams in which the dead are dreamt do not always, but very often, actually originate in connection with real dead people. But people usually believe what appears to them in the dream, what the dead person communicates to them, as being as direct a reality as it appears in the dream. It is not so, but what you wanted to communicate to the dead person when you fell asleep, that is received by the dead person, and what appears in the dream is how he receives it. So just when the dead person communicates something to you in a dream, it is intended to show you that you were able to communicate something to him. There you have what I characterized: You are much more likely to say, when the dead person appears to you in a dream and says something to you, than to believe that you dreamt of the dead person, that what you said to the dead person has really reached the dead person; by dreaming of him, he shows me that what I wanted to communicate to him has reached him.

For a message from the dead to come back – let's say a reply or something similar – the moment of waking up is again of particular importance. What is transmitted from the spiritual realms is what the dead person has to communicate to us living, as we say, at the moment of waking up. And then it comes up from the depths of one's own soul. It is peculiar to people that they do not like to pay attention to what comes up from the depths of their own soul. In our time, people do not have much sense of paying attention to what comes up from the depths of the soul. People prefer to be impressed only by the outside world, to absorb only what is outside; they would prefer to numb themselves to what rises from the depths of the soul. But when someone becomes aware that something is rising from the depths of the soul, a thought, an idea, they take it for inspiration. That satisfies vanity more. We consider all things that arise from the depths to be our inspiration. They may be, but mostly they are not. Most of the time, the things that arise from our soul as inspiration are the answers that the dead give us. For the dead live with us. What seems to come from you is actually what the dead say. It is only important that we interpret the experience in the right way. I have often mentioned what can be said in detail about our relationship with the dead: reading aloud and so on. The more vividly, the more emotionally, the more pictorially one lives in these things, the more meaningful the connection with the dead will be.

It is not meaningless to have these conditions clearly before one's soul. For our time has a great need to allow the truths that relate to such things as I have just mentioned to come closer together. We live in a time in which, for many long ages, the human organism has actually been in decline. We are all much more spiritual, much wiser than it appears because of the decline of our body. The Greek bodies were still better able to reflect what the person was in spirit. Actually, since the middle of the Atlantean period, the human being has been in decline in relation to his body, and in our age it is becoming particularly pronounced that the body can no longer reflect what the person actually is in spirit. Thus it happens almost incredibly often in our age that when we die - I would like to call it that - we are not yet finished with our development. If only people would understand that! We develop throughout our lives, but we can only become aware of this development to the extent that the body reflects it. We are sometimes so wise as people when we die – only our declining body is not able to bring these things out for us – that we could still do very important work for the earth, not only in the spiritual field, but could do great service to the earth through our insights if they could be applied. These services could be applied if people, as I have indicated, were to establish relationships with the dead. The dead still want to have an influence on physical life, but they can only do so indirectly through human souls, when human souls devote themselves to them in the appropriate way.

I have probably already mentioned here that I can actually express what is personally close to me on this very point: I have never believed that I only process in a literary-historical or historical way that which ties in with Goethe in the fields of world view, but I have always believed that I am not only dealing with the Goethe of 1832, but with the Goethe of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century: with the living Goethe. With the Goethe who in 1832 carried much out of the physical world, but which can still have an effect if one is only willing to grasp it. Therefore, what I have written has not been merely literary-historical research, but the communication of what he has told me. However, our so-called contemporary culture, our contemporary education, works radically against what I have just explained.

It is actually necessary that spiritual science always ties in with life and is made fruitful by life. In our time, I would say, there is an ideal that completely opposes what I have just expressed as a peculiarity of our time. This ideal can be characterized something like this: People are striving more and more to believe in life as little as possible. They actually only believe in life until their twenties. This can already be seen in the practical goals that people set. Even if we go to Greece, we see that people believed that when they got older, they would be wiser than when they were young. The older person can know better things about state and city institutions than a young person. This belief has been completely discarded, because the ideal of most people today is to set the age at which one can be elected to city or state parliaments as early as possible, because people only believe in life until their early twenties. But life really requires us to believe in it as a whole, to believe in the development of all life. Just think how our social life would change through moral impulses if we knew once more that all of life is developing around the human being. How young people would relate to the elderly if this were deeply rooted in the human soul! Imagine what a difference it makes to one's consciousness when one says to oneself again and again: Now I am just a young badger of thirty, thirty-five years old, but I will also get older one day, and growing older means hope for me, an expectation: there will be something that will come when I get older that cannot come while I am young. Do you realize how much joy and strength of life a human being has when he has this consciousness throughout his whole life until death and still says to himself before death: Yes, I cannot get so far as to reflect everything that life offers me into my consciousness; I will carry something through death; then people will believe in the dead and let the dead be co-advisors. Just think how foolish one would be considered if one were to express this, which must become a practical principle today, as such. I am quite serious when I say that our parliaments throughout the world would come up with better ideas than they do today if the dead were also consulted, if we were to ask today: What do not only the young badgers of thirty, thirty-five years say about this? – but: What does Goethe, for example, or what do other dead people say who are a hundred and so and so many years old? – This is something that must immediately become a practical reality for the future.

Today there are certain, well, let's say secret societies; they cultivate all kinds of old symbols. They would do better if they understood the times and made themselves into places where the counsel of the dead is explored. This is so infinitely significant! For humanity will not move forward if it does not imbue itself with the awareness that the divine-spiritual is at work in the development of our entire life; we are not finished in our twenties.

I have already drawn your attention to this here: in the early days of human development, it was the case that people felt their whole life developing, purely through their physical and bodily development, including emotionally and spiritually. Just as today people only feel their soul and spiritual life going along with their physical and bodily life during puberty or otherwise only into their twenties, so in ancient times people felt their soul and spiritual life going along with their physical and bodily life up to their forties or fifties. But from the age of thirty-five onwards, if one remains capable of development, precisely those spiritual powers develop, because the body then declines, which the human being does not come to if he does not allow them to sprout through spiritual science. In the past, people revered the elderly because they knew that something was revealed in them that cannot yet be revealed to young people. I have pointed out that humanity is getting younger and younger. If we go back to the original Indian culture, it was the case that at that time people remained capable of development until their fifties. In the original Persian culture, they remained capable of development until their forties, in the Egyptian-Chaldean culture until the second half of their thirties, and in the Greek-Latin culture until their thirty-fifth year. When Greco-Latin culture came to an end in the 15th century, people were only capable of development until the age of twenty-eight; today it is until the age of twenty-seven. Which person is therefore particularly characteristic of the present time, of this present age of materialistic development? You see, that would be a person who completely rejects being inspired by the soul for a spiritual development, who only absorbs what flows into him from outside, what the present itself offers.

Let us imagine, I would like to say, an idealized figure who is particularly characteristic of the present. It would be a personality who does not go through any of our intellectual high schools – because there one takes in the old, there one already stimulates the soul – but who only absorbs what comes to people from outside. A self-made man, a man who makes himself, who also absorbs everything else that one experiences in reality today in terms of feelings, sensations, emotions. So, from the age of seven, eight, nine, he grows up with a certain social aversion to the privileged classes, who does not tip his hat to anyone who has a title or power or the like, who then does not attend a Greek-Latin school, but learns by living life alone. He then enters a profession similar to that of a lawyer, not by studying law, but by going through the practical experience in a law firm and making his way through it; by the time he is twenty-seven, everything has come to him in this way, but not in the extraordinary way of repeating ancient culture, but what the present can bring to him. In the twenty-seventh year he should get himself elected to Parliament. Then he comes before his contemporaries, and as he has developed by himself until then, he presents himself to people, not believing in further development. One can become a minister from Parliament. Development is no longer good in the opinion of our contemporaries, otherwise people say that one contradicts oneself, one said something completely different earlier, and now one contradicts oneself. If you are elected to parliament, you can no longer say anything different. Is there such a person in the present? Do you know a particularly characteristic person who is the most concentrated expression of the present time? That is Lloyd George. You cannot understand the peculiarity of certain contemporaries today if you do not look at these things, do not really look at the peculiarity of the person in this way. Lloyd George is a self-made man. Up to the age of twenty-seven he has only taken in what the present itself offers; but because he has no inner drive of the soul, it stops at twenty-seven. He is then elected to parliament. Lloyd George is in Parliament, sitting there with his arms folded, his eyes turned inwards towards the axes, speaking aptly everywhere, watching for his opponents' weaknesses. Now came the Campbell-Bannerman Ministry. One wonders: what is to be done with Lloyd George? He criticizes everything the Ministry does! What is to be done? Well, he is taken into the ministry; inside he can do less opposition than outside. He becomes a minister. And it turns out that he quickly finds his feet in this situation too, because he is truly a representative of our time. Now, of course, people are asking themselves: Which portfolio should we give Lloyd George? After all, the important thing is that he is a capable person. So they agreed to give him the portfolio he didn't understand: public works. But lo and behold, in three months he had familiarized himself with the subject and achieved great things as a minister in precisely this field, which he had previously understood nothing about.

That is a characteristically modern figure. There are many of them in one sense or another. You only have to ask: what kind of people are they who, by the age of twenty-seven (which is the cut-off point today), have developed to such an extent that they have absorbed everything their environment has to offer, then immediately entered public life and no longer continued their development?

A personality who is somewhat closer to us is Matthias Erzberger. Study his biography and you will find the same if you look at it in this occult way. It is something that arises in the culture of our time in a very remarkable way. But to look a little into the human heart in an occult way is something that must be included in the history of the development of mankind. You see how the culture of our time reveals itself when we penetrate to its core in this way. Now, however, the culture of our time demands of us that we penetrate more deeply than we are accustomed to doing today. But this will only be possible if we become aware that the dead also have their say. Those who are truly characteristic representatives of our time will, of course, reject this in the most eminent sense.

If you want to study a person in whom you see the continuous striving for further development, this unconscious belief in the lasting reality of the divine-human in the human soul until death, it is Goethe. Goethe is much more characteristic in this respect than is usually thought. Goethe wanted to look back on the age, on the years of life in which he took in from the outside world what the outside world brings in, but he wanted to continue his development. He has described his youth in “Poetry and Truth”. It breaks off with his entry into Weimar. Born in 1749, he came to Weimar in 1775, and so he continued his life story, as he wanted to tell it, until the age of twenty-six. He ended it before the age of twenty-seven because he unconsciously knew that this was an especially significant moment. In the age of thirty-five, a person experiences a moment that today he usually sleeps through. It is the moment when the burgeoning, ascending life passes into the descending life in relation to the body. But then the spirit is driven to reveal itself, and to reveal itself more and more.

The thirty-fifth year of life is an important moment in human life. This is really something where man first truly gives birth to his soul in physical life. Ask yourself how this turns out for a person like Goethe, who remained capable of development throughout his entire life. In 1786, after the thirty-fifth year, just the important time from thirty-five to forty-two years, Goethe goes to Italy. If you look more closely at Goethe's biography, you will see what a turnaround this meant in his life. In an essay that will now appear in a small book, I have shown how Goethe actually personally relates to his Faust in “Goethe's Spiritual Nature as Revealed through his Faust and through the Fairy Tale of the Serpent and the Lily”. I have discussed it with a few hints at least. Precisely with regard to this, one is rather confused than enlightened by what is otherwise written. That is not particularly important, which is what people usually point out complacently, that Faust says right at the beginning:

I have now, alas, thoroughly studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
unfortunately! also theology
with great zeal.
There I stand, I poor fool

And I am no wiser than before... People are complacent and point out: He went through all four faculties and didn't get anywhere, doubts all knowledge. Especially the actors often feel that they have to despise the four faculties. But that is not the characteristic, that is not the specifically Goethean, what matters, that is just a prelude. Many people in Goethe's time said that. When the Goethean element in Faust comes into play, things change. It is when Faust picks up the book of Nostradamus and sees for the first time the sign of the macrocosm. This sign shows how man fits into the whole macrocosm. How his spirit is connected with the spirit of the world, his soul with the soul of the world, his physical body with the physical body of the world, all this is depicted in the great picture of the intermingling buckets of the world - planets and suns, with the hierarchies behind them. But Faust turns away with the words: “What a spectacle! But alas, only a spectacle!” He sees images, a spectacle. Why? Because at this moment, in a moment, he would like to grasp the secret of the world. But this can only happen in the whole of human life, insofar as the physical world exists, the whole of evolution. Knowledge can only give images. Then he turns to the sign of the microcosm. There he does not have the spirit of the macrocosm, but only the spirit of the earth. The earth spirit gives what history, what is human on earth encompasses.

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!

Faust seeks self-knowledge through the earth spirit, he rejects world knowledge. That is the Goethean, that is where the Goethean begins. Before that, there is a prelude. In his youth, Goethe was indeed at a loss, and could say no more than: Everything that relates to the macrocosm gives me only images, we cannot penetrate it. Only from within can the riddle of life be solved. But this earth spirit, that is, the spirit of self-knowledge, said to him:

You resemble the spirit that you comprehend! Not me!

Faust falls to the ground. What spirit does he resemble? You see, here is an opportunity in 'Faust' to get to know a poet who does not theorize! There is nothing theoretical about it, but you have a poet who presents things in living artistic reality. Listen: “You resemble the spirit you comprehend! Not me!” There is a knock at the door: Wagner enters. That is the answer: you resemble Wagner, not me! - Here, we must change our thinking about this point in Faust. It must not be presented on the stage as it usually is: that Faust is only the ideal-striving man who wants to reach the heights of the spirit, who is absolutely right, and then Wagner limps along. I would, if I had to present it, present it in such a way that Wagner wears the mask of Faust, that both stand there in the same form, because Faust should be pointed out: Look at your own image, you are at a standstill! And what Wagner says is a conclusion in itself; what Faust says is actually all just stuff of longing. But the Faust expounders, and people in general, want to make things as comfortable as possible. People like to quote: “Feeling is everything, name is sound and smoke,” even though Faust coins this for a sixteen-year-old girl. So a teenage girl's wisdom is actually always dressed up as a philosopher's wisdom. Wagner confronts Faust with his self-awareness – as I said, I have expanded on this in the little book – but Faust has nevertheless been touched by the spirit. The earth spirit has appeared to him, he has come close to the spiritual world, he must go further and must make up for what he has neglected up to the age of forty. Faust is forty years old when he appears at the beginning of the poem. Yes, he must also make up for what he did not go through: the Bible. He begins a kind of retrospective view of the missed youth. Then another self-knowledge approaches him: Mephisto. After the self-knowledge through Wagner, another self-knowledge.

But now something strange happened. In the nineties, in 1797, Schiller became very urgent: Goethe was to continue his “Faust”. In 1797 Goethe was forty-eight years old. Another important point in time. Seven times seven is forty-nine; that is the point in time when a person comes out of the special development of the spirit self and into the spirit of life. Schiller urged him on. People have made it easy for themselves with the explanation. Minor, who wrote an interesting book about Goethe, says: Goethe is gripped by age, he is no longer really capable of poetry. But just think, if that were true, a “Faust” could never be written! It would be impossible to depict the life of a human being in old age, and Faust was indeed in old age! Goethe is now approaching the age at which the ancient Indians said: Now man enters the age when he can ascend into the realm of the fathers, can gradually ascend into the deeper secrets of spiritual life. - That is when Goethe encounters his Mephisto in a remarkable way.

You know that when one tries to get to know the powers that oppose man, there are two, Ahriman and Lucifer. Goethe has confounded the two, thrown them together. He did not feel this earlier, and so Mephisto has become a contradictory figure. You only need to consider a few aspects to see that Mephisto is not a unified figure: Goethe combined Lucifer and Ahriman. He realized this in 1797, which is why it became so difficult for him to continue Faust. The humanities had not yet reached the point where man's opponent could be split into two opponents; Goethe stopped at one. You can see Goethe's nature when you consider that he should have actually created two figures but threw them together into one. Goethe really went through something inwardly in that he felt Mephisto was a contradictory figure. That “Faust” was created after all and stands tall as a piece of poetry can, of course, be attributed to Goethe's great poetic power. But this, in turn, is something that Goethe found surging within him from the unconscious. You see, a person can be capable of development; in his soul, he can feel in a very elementary way that which works together with the spirit through the whole of life in us, not just into our twenties.

What you know as the “Prologue in Heaven” was not written by Goethe until 1798. What happened in Faust? He did not say it, but it is in his soul: he let Faust reach for the book again, and now he is face to face with the spirit! Now it is no longer a play. Here the spirits are weaving the spheres. Here Faust stands in the midst of the struggle between good and evil in the macrocosm. One should not view Faust from beginning to end in such a way that one sees everything as if it were the same. Goethe broke with the view of his youth and introduced Faust more and more into the spirit of the macrocosm. I just wanted to show you how regularly this developing Goethe life is shaped. In it one can show how the human developmental periods go from seven to seven years until death. One must lift the subconscious more and more into consciousness, according to the meaning and spirit of the present. There is much talk about the subconscious, but it is not viewed in the right way, not viewed deeply enough.

Today there is something called analytical psychology, psychoanalysis. This is, as it were, brought to bear on the subconscious spiritual and soul life in the human being, but with inadequate means; for the adequate means are the spiritual-scientific ones. The classic example, which psychoanalysts cite over and over again, shows precisely how people work with inadequate means. Let us introduce an example from the soul that actually led to the development of psychoanalysis: there is a woman who knows a man. The man is married; she knows him in a way that may have been all right for the husband, but not for the husband's wife. Lo and behold, the husband's wife falls ill for various reasons, one of which may have been this lady herself. She becomes nervous. These days, people get nervous, neurasthenic, so there's no need to be surprised. She has to go to a spa for several months. She is supposed to leave one evening, but before that, supper is organized – a souper, as they say in German – to which the lady, who is well acquainted with the man and with the whole family, is also invited. The supper goes quite well. Then the lady of the house has to go to the train. The company also gradually disperses, as they say. A group of the party is walking on the street with this lady, who is well acquainted with the gentleman of the house. Now, as it happens here and there, not only late at night, people no longer walk on the sidewalk, but in the middle of the street. But lo and behold, a cab, not a car, but a cab, turns the corner, and that lady, who is a friend of the gentleman of the house, does not move aside like the others onto the sidewalk, but she runs in front of the horses. The driver curses, cracks the whip; but she runs in front of the horses, runs and runs until they come to a bridge. Then she has an idea: she must save herself. It is a dangerous situation. So she saves herself by jumping into the water. She is pulled out and saved, and society carries her into the house from which she has just come: into the home of the master of the house. She stays there for the night. The others go home again. And something has been achieved, which I will not characterize further now. The psychoanalyst now studies this case for hidden psychological motives: perhaps the lady has gone through something special with horses in the last seven or eight years, which resounds again from the soul, and at that moment she loses consciousness, it only comes up through the fear of horses. So one searches for “hidden provinces of the soul”. But that is not the truth. The truth is this: there is a subconscious in the soul of a person that can be smarter and more sophisticated than the conscious mind. This lady was a very decent lady, but she was in love with the master of the house. Her conscious mind would not have admitted: I want to stay in this house – but the subconscious does. It considers very carefully: If I run in front of the horses and jump into the water, then they will take me back! – That is what happened. In her conscious mind, the lady would never admit this, but in her subconscious she goes through these things, that is where it is present. Man carries within himself this subconscious, which is much wiser, much more cunning, for good or ill, than the conscious mind. As I said, the present time is becoming somewhat aware of this subconscious, but it seeks it with inadequate means. It must be clear that it can only be found by adequate means through spiritual science if one wants to show that, alongside the ego, which lives through the body, the eternal spiritual lives in us, which is not just an angel and can therefore also be refined, depending on its karma. What this subconscious always is in its revelation through man must be studied in a spiritual scientific way. We must realize that we have to get to know the truth, reality. Today the subconscious is knocking at the consciousness, and we can no longer cope in life if we ignore this, if we do not also follow with our consciousness the paths that the subconscious takes. Many people do not want that, so they do not want to approach spiritual science.

So on the one hand there are certain reasons for not being able to understand spiritual science: people do not want to understand that things are completely reversed when it comes to the dead. One must completely change one's way of thinking. While in ordinary life we are accustomed to our words coming out of our mouths when we speak or ask something, in our intercourse with the dead it is the case that what we say comes out of his soul, what he says comes up out of our own inner being. This is a natural thing.

The other is the antipathy that people have towards the spirit because they do not like to admit how this spiritual strikes at the door of consciousness. In many places one finds this spirit knocking at the door of consciousness. In people who, for example, have been somewhat abnormal in their lives, a loosening of the spiritual and mental in the physical and bodily today results in the subconscious making a more correct impact on the conscious than in those who have nothing loosened in them. It is by no means certain that relaxation should be aimed at, truly not, but in some people something is relaxed in a natural way, as for example in Otto Weininger. He was truly a talented person; he had completed his doctorate at the beginning of the 1920s, then formed the book “Sex and Character” out of the doctoral dissertation, which is quite amateurish and even trivial in many respects, but is nevertheless a remarkable phenomenon. Then he took a trip to Italy, kept a diary during which something quite remarkable happened. Certain spiritual-scientific insights are expressed as a caricature. This relaxed spiritual-soul-like already sees many things, but it caricatures them! The moral is also usually somewhat tainted. But Weininger was a genius. He then rented a room in the Beethoven House in his twenty-third year and shot himself inside. From this you can see that he was a very abnormal person. But I just want to mention: if you read his last book, you will also find a strange passage among all the other things. There he says: Why does man not remember his life before birth? Because the soul has brought itself so low that it wants to submerge itself in unconsciousness with regard to the previous life! - I mention this only - and I could multiply the example a thousandfold - to show: There are many people who are very close to spiritual science but cannot find it because the present time does not want to let people approach spiritual science at all. I mention this as an example because it can certainly be seen: Weininger comes to it by loosening the spiritual and soul, as a matter of course, to express that the human being connects with the physical and bodily. He expresses it as a matter of course, as many other people still do today, only in a very shamefaced way. But this is a fundamental demand of our time: that people really pluck up the courage, educate themselves in strength, to face the spiritual world in its concrete manifestations.

And one such concrete manifestation is precisely the one I particularly wanted to talk to you about: that people allow the dead to have a say; that people's social lives are again determined by feeling the differences between people and people according to age, but also by the fact that something becomes different, that people believe in their entire human life. God does not only reveal Himself up to the age of twenty. In the past He revealed Himself physically, but now He must be felt through spiritual science. But the human being must believe in the gifts of the divine spiritual world. Throughout his entire life he must have the encouraging, sustaining feeling that When I am fifteen years older, I will bring to the Divine-Spiritual what it can take up differently than before. Imagine how one can live into the future when one is so expectant! How this pours a different soul-spiritual aura over our entire social life! It must be known that people will need this aura as they develop towards the future. This is of infinite importance. Try to feel how many things must change! We live in an age in which many, many things must change. Above all, it must be so that certain things are no longer seen in a hypocritical way, but are seen in reality. It is of no use to tell lies to oneself about certain things. And I would like to discuss one such self-lie.

How many people are there today who say: I do not look up to the various hierarchies, to angels, archangels and so on, but I look up to “my God”. And how many continue to declaim what great progress it is that humanity has come to the one God, to monotheism. But one must ask the question: To whom do people actually turn when they seek to enter into a concrete relationship with the spiritual world and speak of “their God” in doing so? Whether one is Catholic or Protestant, when one speaks of one's God, one can only speak of that which really enters one's consciousness. This can only be one of two things: either it is the one angel that protects him, whom man then calls God, who is no higher god than an angel – and since every human being has an angel whose task it is to protect him, we are in a pluralism – or he means his own ego. But man is mistaken in that he has the same name for it, because everyone calls their particular angel by the same name “God”. In contrast to this, one should consider one thing, which is actually very instructive. There is a word whose origin people know nothing about, despite all their research: that is the word “God”. That is interesting and makes one think! Look it up in the various dictionaries in which the words are treated linguistically and philologically: there is complete uncertainty about the word “God”. People do not know what they are actually designating with God. And in our time, people either mean their angel, or, by speaking of their God, they become, so to speak, unconscious followers of our teaching: they speak namely of their own ego, as it has developed since the last death until this birth. That is the concrete thing they call God: either the angel that protects them intervenes – it is only the angel, they call it God – or it is only the individual ego. Whether one reinterprets this or not, it does not matter: it is the egoistic religious confession that is in many souls today, but one does not want to admit it to oneself. Only spiritual science will make people aware of it. Then people will hate spiritual science and will fight it more and more because it is so convenient for people to call their closest neighbor, who stands above them in the hierarchical order, their god. When people talk about God today, they mean either their own ego or the angel.

One can only get beyond such a view by entering into the concrete spiritual-scientific relationship. This is one of the points about which people will have to become more and more enlightened as the future approaches. And there must be truth among people. This will have to be a particular demand in the future, and truth is not very widespread in the present, not at all widespread. Particularly in learned circles, one sometimes encounters very strange ideas about what truth is. You will recall from my book 'Puzzles of the Soul' (if I may refer to it briefly) the peculiar way in which the remarkable man Max Dessoir dealt with the truth. What one reads in the last issue of the Kant journal is truly heartbreaking! I may mention this in particular because anthroposophy is not mentioned there; so this essay does not hurt in relation to its own cause. But in this “scholarly” journal one finds an essay that is not only the most banal in the anthroposophical field, but also, through and through, the most amateurish for anyone who understands the matter. But it is taken seriously.

You know from my book how one has no choice but to point out to Dessoir, in a schoolmasterly manner, that he has not read my books but distorts everything possible. I would like to mention just one of the most stupid distortions: Dessoir states in the first edition of his book 'Beyond the Soul' that my 'Philosophy of Freedom' was my first work. Now, this 'Philosophy of Freedom' was published in 1894, ten years after my first work; but he is so superficial about everything that he does not get it right. So the 'Philosophy of Freedom' was my first work. I also dared to say this about it among more important things to show him his nature. A second edition is being published. In the preface, he asserts all kinds of things that are precisely such that one can see from them what kind of person this university professor is. But now he has said in the first edition that the Philosophy of Freedom is my first literary work; now he says that he did not mean that, but that it is my “theosophical first work”. If you now take this together with the way in which the Philosophy of Freedom is again taken by others as something that would be denied by my “theosophy”: you will see a real quagmire! But it is very easy to see into the present through such things, and it is very important to get complete enlightenment about these matters. And this is possible only if one unreservedly arms oneself with the weapons of spiritual science.

Historical observation, too, will have to become something quite different under the influence of spiritual science than it has been up to now, because history, for the most part, is actually nothing other than a fable convenue, as it is offered. Where one really gets to the facts, one is led into something quite different from what popular history presents.

I will give you one example. You will see shortly what my point is in this consideration. We know that the fourth post-Atlantic period ended with the 15th century. That is the Greco-Latin period; in its last stages it extends into the 15th century. In 1413, the fifth post-Atlantic period begins, and a mighty upheaval occurs. If we bear this in mind, we may perhaps ask ourselves: how did this Roman Empire, into which everything that is Greek-Latin culture was finally drawn, come to its downfall? There are various causes, but one of the important ones is the following: the Romans waged great wars; these wars gradually expanded the territory beyond its borders. Many new border peoples emerged. This had a very specific consequence. Anyone who studies the time of the first Christian centuries will find that the peculiar nature of the Roman Empire, in its administration and internal social structure, with the border peoples and towards the Orient, has resulted in a continuous outflow of metal money from the Roman Empire to the Orient. And this is one of the most important events in the second, third and fourth centuries A.D., when the Roman Empire was gradually coming to an end: that metal money flows over to the neighboring peoples in the Orient. And the Roman Empire, despite having a complicated military administration, is becoming increasingly poorer in gold and money. This is the external expression, the image of the internal processes. I mention this external picture, the impoverishment of the Roman Empire in gold and money, because it is the external expression of the inner mood of the soul. What arose out of this inner mood of the soul? Of course, this inner mood has a definite significance in the whole sense of world-historical events. Something had to come out of this impoverishment of the Romans in metallic money. And what came of it? Individualism arose, which is the characteristic feature of our age. There was much talk of the art of making gold. How did this art come about? Because Europe became materially poor in gold, this external physical longing for making gold arose until America was discovered and gold came from there. These great connections must be grasped. What one comes to know by really studying the fall of the Roman Empire had an effect all the way into alchemy and thereby into the development of human souls: poverty of gold through the expansion of the social structure beyond the peripheral peoples into the Orient.

We now live in a time when people have to admit to themselves: the time of instinctive living is over. We cannot achieve social structures if we are unable to invigorate social thinking with thoughts that come from an understanding of the spiritual world. That is why the social sciences are so sterile and why humanity has brought itself into this catastrophic present, in which social structures create chaos throughout the world because people cannot let spiritual scientific thoughts flow into community life. These thoughts should flow from the impulses of human development into social thinking. There are spiritual causes for this catastrophic present. This is the rebellion of people against the influx of the spirit. That is the true origin of the present catastrophe. For people everywhere turn against the spirit that wants to come in.

I will give you an example that you might find characteristic. Let us suppose that someone is thinking today about the different world views that exist and, purely superficially, classifies them as: Catholicism, Protestantism, socialism, naturalism and so on. Take the cycle that I once gave in Berlin, where I built the world views more on inner categories, on the number twelve and on the number seven. You really do get seven world views: Gnosticism, Logism, Voluntarism, Empiricism, Mysticism, Transcendentalism, Occultism. Of course, anyone who just picks them up will not call them by these names. And yet the music of the spheres reigns everywhere! So just imagine someone who is nothing more than a materialistic observer, who reads the world views as they are accessible to him. How many would he have to find? He would have to find seven. He may call them something else, depending on how they present themselves externally, but they must appear in seven links. Read the current issue of the “Preußische Jahrbücher”. In the first essay you will find an observation according to which a person wanted to register the worldviews as they currently exist. He lists them. How many does he find? Seven: Catholicism, Protestantism, rationalism, humanism, idealism, socialism and personal individualism. There are indeed seven. The categories are only shifted, but one cannot find more than seven. There you have an example of how what we find as a sense of development overlaps with ordinary external development. People do not want to admit this, but it is necessary to acknowledge it in the present; that we should not ignore these things, but have the courage to face them.

What is actually happening in the present? In ancient times, in the third post-Atlantic cultural period, there was a far-reaching impulse from east to west, across the entire globe, an impulse that did not come merely from material life, as do today's impulses, but from the spiritual. In those days, spiritual impulses also intervened in social life. A certain impulse developed from the East to the West. It can be characterized by saying that some people at that time were striving to pass on to others what they had obtained from the spiritual world as enlightenment, what came to them more or less through their age or through initiation from good or bad mysteries; they wanted to impose what they had on others. In those days there was an impulse that went from the Orient to the West: a few spiritual powers in the sense of spreading progress to humanity, filling the earth with a few spiritual maxims, with powers that came from the fading mysteries. Even then, social life was based on this. It was in the third post-Atlantic period; historically, little is recorded. But the repetition of what happened then is happening now. Imagine what spread in those days as the urge from east to west, implemented purely materially in the fifth post-Atlantic period: in those days it was the atavistic-spiritual forces that brought about a social structure in which strong spiritual impulses were to be given to people; these were to be brought into humanity. Now imagine the opposite: some people want to conquer the material world of the earth of their own accord, to take it away from other people. At that time, the aim was to give spiritually, and that is precisely what caused the catastrophes that befell the Earth so many years after the Mystery of Golgotha. In the process, the Roman Empire fell. At that time, spiritual catastrophes befell the Earth, culminating in the fact that certain peoples from the East wanted to flood the Earth's countries with individual maxims. The same is now taking effect, in that the British-American people want to take the earth away from people. That is behind the whole thing. And it is exactly the same: it appears as a mirror image. What is happening in the present can only be understood by looking at the real course of human development, by replacing what is taught as history with the real history. For it is necessary that people be placed in full awareness in what is really happening, in the direction of the future. Today's economic life has long been a chaos, and this is how the catastrophe developed. Now you have two things that are having an effect. From west to east: the mirror image; from east to west: what has become old. There you still have the remnants of the old spiritual outlook of the entire Asian Orient, what it did to spread the spiritual and push the soul into the background. If you study the present catastrophe, you have a war of souls from the east, with souls fighting to assert the oriental-Slavic concepts; and from the west, a purely material war for sales territories. These things can only be understood if they are viewed from the great perspective of human development. But it would be necessary to be able to speak freely about these things for once. People should be allowed to be enlightened about what it actually is that they live in. This is of tremendous importance. What must stop, however, is people literally oversleeping what is happening. The most important things can happen without people being able to understand them. They can no longer grasp their significance because at present one can only do so if one is able to illuminate them with the light of spiritual-scientific knowledge. They cannot be illuminated in any other way.

But what is the attitude of the most learned people today towards spiritual-scientific knowledge? Yes, here we have a good example. In various places I have repeatedly mentioned the interesting fact that a book was written by a Haeckel student, Oscar Hertwig, an excellent book: “The Origin of Organisms, a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance.” In it, Oscar Hertwig pointed out the various downsides of Darwinism. I have praised this book highly. But in our spiritual scientific movement you will have to get used to there being no absolute authority. For a short time ago another book appeared by the same Oscar Hertwig: 'In Defense of Ethical, Social and Political Darwinism'. Now you must not say: Well, Steiner praised Hertwig, so we will now also study his latest book with this in mind, because then you will be in for a disappointment. The disappointment that I have to say: While the one book is an excellent book, this latest book is the most amateurish, most nonsensical thing one can possibly say about the chapters in question. If you just want to say: Steiner praised it, so we can accept it as gospel in turn, then you can never be sure that I will not be forced to give the opposite rating to something that is created on the same ground. Blind faith must not flourish in our ranks, only our own observations and our own opinions. But where does that come from? It stems from the fact that Daf Hertwig is an excellent naturalist; but the concepts of natural science must not be introduced into social life. If they are, then one finds everywhere only the dead, the dying of history, as for example with Gibbon, who wrote the excellent history of the decline of the Roman Empire. That is one secret – I have already presented this too – of historical development, that if you want to observe this historical development with the concepts that apply in science, you will never find that which grows and sprouts, but only that which turns into a corpse. You only encounter signs of decay in historical life if you want to use the concepts that are well applicable in science. People have suspected this from time to time. That is why Treitschke said that the driving forces in history are the passions and follies of men. It is not so. There are unconscious forces that descend in historical becoming. Therefore it is true that if you want to introduce decay into public life, and thus also into practical life, then you put scholars and theorists into parliaments. These people will concoct nothing but laws that lead to decadent phenomena, because with what is considered scientific today, only the decadent phenomena in history can be found. These things must enter into the consciousness of the people. This is far more necessary than most people realize, and it must be grasped if one is honest and sincere about what is to lead humanity out of the present catastrophic time. It is no longer acceptable to continue to oversleep the important events that unconsciously occur in human life, which people will not be able to cope with through their consciousness if they do not illuminate them with spiritual science. But the point is to grasp life in its reality, to really look into the true nature of life.

Here we must take into account the interaction of these three impulses: the normal human, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. For we must not treat these things in such a way that we say: I want to be a normal human being, and so I avoid everything Ahrimanic, everything Luciferic! Those who want to be really good and avoid everything that is Ahrimanic or Luciferic will flounder all the more into the Luciferic on one side and into the Ahrimanic on the other.

The point is not to avoid things, but to bring the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic into balance. The Luciferic is more characteristic of youth, the Ahrimanic of the age that is passing away. The Luciferic is more characteristic of woman, the Ahrimanic of man. When we look into the future, we look mainly into the Ahrimanic; when we look into the past, into that which is still to germinate, we look mainly into the Luciferic. If we look at the British Empire, we look into an Ahrimanic realm; in the case of oriental state institutions, we look into a Luciferic realm. The point is that we find these forces interfering with human life everywhere. We must not be blind to these things.

Take just one example: in the entire social structure of human life, the Luciferic has sometimes played a highly disastrous role because people did not know how to channel it into a right current, because they allowed the scales of Lucifer to swing too far. That is why Luciferic impulses have played a major role in the way the social structure has developed. Even at school, young children are accustomed to 'being first', 'being second', 'being third'. Think of the Luciferian ambition that has been at work when people want to be first! Then there are the titles and medals and everything that goes with them! Imagine how the social structure has been built up by the Luciferian! But this time is coming to an end; that too would be something to be recognized! The time is coming to an end, the Luciferic is dwindling more and more to its shadowy areas. That too would be a good thing if people were a little more vigilant with regard to the dwindling of the Luciferic - for the time being, for the near future. But they are unwary of something that is coming in again in a different way to do harm. This is: an Ahrimanic takes the place of the Luciferic. The slogan has been dropped: Free rein to the brave! - I have already said: What use is it to say “Free rein to the brave” and then still consider the nephew to be the bravest! No, it depends on looking into the concrete, looking into the real. But that is not what I mean now. What I do mean is that an entire Ahrimanic system is emerging, with very dangerous side effects. This Ahrimanic system is somewhat connected with the buzzword that is now used in the field of education and is called the gifted test. This gifted test is praised everywhere. People are possessed of it in a purely devilish way when they talk about it. From a number of hundred gifted boys and girls who have particularly good grades, the most gifted are to be selected, the best in terms of intellectuality, power of concentration, memory and so on. And so they are tested using the latest psychological methods. For example, intelligence is tested in a very peculiar way in experimental psychology. Three terms are presented to the children: murderer, mirror, rescue. Now they are supposed to find the connection through their intelligence. The one who merely finds the connection: the murderer sees himself in the mirror like the other people – he is merely stupid. But the one who finds the “most obvious” connection: the person looks in a mirror, sees the murderer who is just creeping up on him, and can save himself - that person is normal. A “gifted” person would be the one who says, for example, that the murderer creeps up to the mirror, sees his own face in the mirror, is frightened and desists from murder. Particularly clever would be the one who would say something like this: Near the one whose life is to be ended by the murderer, there is a mirror; in the darkness, the murderer bumps into the mirror, makes a sound and then desists from the murder. That is even cleverer! This is how you test cleverness! This is supposed to be something particularly great, whereas it is nothing more than the transfer of a purely Ahrimanic method, which applies to machines, to humans. The most terrible thing will come out of the mechanization of human life if one wants to find out about giftedness in this way. People need only reflect on what they themselves assumed until recently. I could show you the evidence of how nonsensically people talk when they carry out such tests. Take a whole series of people whom those people themselves also regard as important, very important people, who are now the spiritual heirs of the gifted test, let us say, for example, Helmholtz, the physicist, and others. If all of them had been tested using the gifted test method, many would have been shown to be untalented, including Helmholtz, for example. These things must all be taken much more seriously, because the salvation of the future depends on them. Nothing can be left to chance in this area. Today, events themselves teach an enormous amount.

Take the following: Imagine the period from 1930 to 1940. There could be certain people then in their forties or early fifties. Imagine you had had this thought in 1913, you would have thought: Of those living in 1913, a certain number will still be alive in 1930 and will be in leading positions; the social structure, and even the outer physical life in various areas of the earth, will depend on them. You can roughly imagine how things would have gone from 1930 to 1940 if the eighteen- to twenty-year-olds, the current young people, had then turned forty. Now take another thought and ask yourself: How many of those who would have done what you assumed for 1930 have now fallen on the battlefields and will no longer be able to physically participate in the management of physical earthly affairs? Others will take part! Imagine these two pictures side by side: the one picture: if this catastrophe of war had not occurred, then what would have been formed from the antecedents would have been in accordance with how you would have imagined the future at that time. And now the other picture that you must now imagine: How perhaps all those who could have had the most important positions have fallen on the battlefields! If you paint such a picture for yourself, you will come to a very tangible concept of the Maja, of the great deception of the outer physical plane. Is this physical plane in 1930 as it should have been if all those who were young in 1913 had lived? It would have become quite different. To think through such things is not without significance. But only spiritual science, by thinking through such things, can offer the possibility in the right sense of thinking realistically in the real world as well. Spiritual science leads you to such concepts that break away from the merely physical brain. Our present concepts are mainly bound to the physical brain, which is why the thinking of the present has a certain quality. It is precisely because the concepts of natural science, which are most closely bound to the brain, dominate the present, that our thinking in the present has a special quality: narrow-mindedness, limitation. For that is the most limited thinking, which is preferably bound to our brain. Spiritual science must tear thinking away from the brain, must set thoughts in motion. Today we have tried to present a whole series of thoughts before our soul, thoughts that are easy to move, that broaden the horizon.

But not only the horizon of thought must become broader, but also the horizon of feeling. How people became philistine because their thoughts were tied primarily to physical life! Besides narrow-mindedness, philistinism is the most important characteristic of our age. Narrow-mindedness! Men are interested in the narrowest circle. Spiritual science must lead men out again into the vastness of the universe, must unfold before them great fields of happenings, because the present can only be understood from them. Spiritual science must lead men out of narrow-mindedness. It must fight against narrow-mindedness and philistinism.

The will, too, has gradually acquired certain qualities. As a result of a certain social structure having grown out of materialistic culture, people have become unskillful. Ineptitude has arisen! People are pigeonholed into very specific subjects and actually know nothing but their subject, and are highly inept with regard to everything else. Today one meets men who, because they have not become tailors, cannot sew on a button. But spiritual science has the peculiarity of developing such concepts that are alive, that pass into the limbs, that also make man more skillful. The remedy for narrow-mindedness, for philistinism, for clumsiness is spiritual science. We need an age that leads people out of narrow-mindedness, out of narrow-mindedness, out of clumsiness, into wide horizons, into broad-mindedness, into skill. Spiritual science must be taken as full of life and with a sense of life. If we just look at the simplest concepts from spiritual science in relation to our time, we will see that the misfortune, suffering and pain of our time, which have not yet reached their peak, are intimately connected with humanity's resistance to the spirit. People have cut themselves off from the divine spiritual life, people must find the connection again with the divine spiritual life.

That is what I wanted to bring before your soul this time. Do you get more and more the feeling: the signs of the times speak clearly and audibly! But only those who have learned to read them with the means of spiritual science will find what they speak. No matter how far one goes, one can never find enough spiritual science as a vigorous and serious matter. One must always go further and further in penetrating life through that which spiritual science gives. People in our time have little courage to think through life through the forces that come from the spirit. This must be learned; that is what is mainly missing. If it is not learned, if it continues to be lacking, then what has befallen humanity as a catastrophe will last a long, long time. Therefore, one can say that one should seek a way out of the conflict of the present with spiritual science. Please take it very seriously and very deeply: then what we wanted to speak to each other about at this meeting will bear the right fruit in your hearts, in your souls.

When you undergo a spiritual development, you get to know the spiritual life. But there it is always, this spiritual life. For the ordinary human mind, it is much too fine and unfamiliar compared to the external world, and man cannot go beyond the familiar.

This spiritual world is the area where man lives between death and the new birth. With those souls with whom one had no connection at all here in life, no relationships can be established from here after death. The moral and intellectual life continues over there. In ordinary life, one cannot achieve such a strong ability to get in touch with that area.

Here, in the physical world, we hear what someone else says. If the disembodied soul wants to connect with another person here, it is the other way around. The disembodied soul tells us what we ask it. What comes from us, the dead person tells us, what comes from the “dead resounds in us. It is very easy to say this, but it is so difficult to fulfill, because it is usually overlooked that the messages come from us, which we think we are receiving from there. The moments of falling asleep and waking up are the most favorable for the usual communication between this world and the spiritual one. The spiritually developed person can, of course, also use other [moments].

If you want to come together with a [deceased] soul at the moment of falling asleep, then it is good to summarize what you feel for the dead person in a question to the dead person, just as you would have done when he was still alive, as far as possible in the same way as you were accustomed to during his lifetime. This can have an effect in dreams. It can lead to illusions; it is not the dead person who speaks, but what we have thought, felt and wished during the day in relation to the dead person. This comes back to us from the dead person in a dream. It is right at the moment of waking up, when something comes from the dead person into one's own soul and this comes up again during the day. During sleep, what we have thought of the dead during the day comes up; during the waking hours, what has come to us from the dead during falling asleep and waking up.

Spiritual science does nothing other than grasp with the mind's eye what is in the spiritual world. Much more plays out of the spiritual world – including the one in which the dead are – into our world than we know.

For a long time, not enough attention has been paid to what changes in the different periods. What we have experienced during life between death and a new birth lives in us. What we bring with us from the spiritual world is woven into the inherited physical body - into the blood, the nervous system, the muscles and so on. The soul that moves in with the birth is wise. We are actually tremendously wise; enchanted, we carry this wisdom within us. And we have to release what pulses as a wise being in our blood, nerve, muscle and respiratory systems. What soul mood is most suitable for this? The one that has been lost to people in recent centuries: faith in life. This is connected to a casualness in relation to religious life.

We now only really believe in our youth and young adulthood into our twenties; only up to that point can we get something out of the development of the body – up to around the age of twenty-seven. In ancient Greece, it was still possible up to the age of thirty, and so on.

But we have to replace the physical and bodily, which no longer has anything to offer, with the spiritual and soul. We must learn to believe in the whole of life. Even if I want to be able to experience something different at forty than at thirty, I have to imbue myself with the spirit that makes us capable of always experiencing something new. Not like today, of course, when twenty-year-olds are already saying, “From my point of view.” How can you have a point of view at twenty? A person must give himself impulses. Today it is the case that a person stops at the age of 27; he does not live further. That would be a person who, in terms of character, is rooted in our time, a self-made man, not a grammar school student, who already takes up traditions, not only

not only what comes from the time. Coming from a poor background, gifted with an active intellect, elected to parliament at the age of twenty-seven, and thus committed for life: that is Lloyd George, a true representative of our time.

We must rediscover our faith in the meaning of life. The different parts of the human body have different speeds, so to speak. What is in the head and what is in the trunk has different rates of development. The main organization develops relatively quickly and is completed by the twenties. The heart organism – let us call it that – develops throughout life. Our educational and social lives actually only serve the development of our minds. Our head would be ready to die at the age of 27. But there is also a spiritual side to this. If people only cared about developing their minds, humanity would soon become decrepit, physically too. It must become a principle of education that memories of youth appear like a paradise. The head that is ready to die at the age of 27 must always be able to draw new strength from what radiates from youth. Those who study spiritual science know that there are things they cannot know in their 30s or 40s, because only in their 50s can this or that enter into them. If we acquire a sense of the whole of life, then we will not be thrown back by the leap from the physical to the spiritual life, but will develop more quickly.

The leap from the physical to the spiritual life does not bring us back, but develops us faster. People today can demystify much more of the “wise” than was possible in an earlier time.

Only by starting from the point of view that Goethe can now tell us something completely different than in 1832, only by finding the strength to live with the Goethe of 1882, have I been able to achieve what is called Goethe research, which I have done.

One must set age higher, in the social higher than twenty-seven, where people are elected to parliament.

The dead should be allowed to speak. For example, Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years”, what is said there about social issues, should be allowed to affect the soul of people who are socially active. We can always give something to the world after we die – let the dead be fruitful for the living. This is to be taken together with what was said at the beginning about the relationship to the dead.

Dessoir: “Philosophy of Freedom”, one of Dr. Steiner's “first works”; [in the second edition] a first work in the theosophical field - all the more wrong.

It is necessary to develop a sense for the concrete, a sense of truth; to feel pain at what is not true. Full participation, pictorial participation, has declined sharply today; that wants to get into the souls later than in the 28th year.

A speaker once said, after raising many questions: “Now I have presented you with a forest of question marks.” You just have to imagine that. You have to be careful not to slip up in your speech.

How a person expresses himself in his thoughts - the “how” of thoughts - from the way a person thinks, you can see how he stands in life. A Herman Grimm has won and fought for what he says. A Woodrow Wilson seems to be possessed by his point of view, by demons. Today it is not so much the content of what one says that matters, but the “how”, whether it is identical with the personality or whether the personality is possessed. Today it will matter less and less what the content of theories is, but rather how they are presented.

We must gain a sense of the whole of life and make it fruitful for the whole of life, including life after death, and how the hereafter is referred to here. Today, despite the catastrophic events taking place outside, life is being overslept a great deal. Many people today have not yet realized that since August 1914 we have had to think differently.

In the spring of 1914, Dr. Steiner said that there was a cancer in social life and so on. This cancer soon broke out. You have to rethink and learn to feel.

When physics and so forth speak of negative and positive and so forth today, that is quite correct, but what we say about Lucifer and Ahriman is just as correct. But there must be balance between the two poles. The Luciferic lives in the spiritual world as well as here, it lives in the selfish drives. This has long been taken into account in the social structure: medals, titles and so on. In our social structure, far too much has been attributed to the one-sided Luciferic. Now the Ahrimanic is rising. The public is at the mercy of what is printed. Now it is the case that people want to take the social structure into their own hands, so to speak, in an Ahrimanic way. Through aptitude tests, they want to find out whether a child has intellectual potential. Nothing but Ahrimanic forces are revealed by these tests, nothing of the soul itself. It would be terrible from a social point of view if the aptitude tests were to continue. The child is a mystery. Belief in the meaning of life could also have a positive effect on pedagogy, not what is achieved through aptitude tests and so on.

I wanted to make sure that what has happened in these four years would not be forgotten.

Sophia's room. The colour scheme is a yellow red. Sophia, with her two children, a boy and a girl; later, Estella.

Children (singing, whilst Sophia accompanies them on the piano):

The light of the sun is flooding
The breadths of space;
The song of the birds is filling
The heights of air;
The tender plants are shooting
From the kind earth;
And human souls in reverent gratitude,
Rise to the spirits of the world.

Sophia: Now, children, go to your rooms and think over the words we have just practised.

(Sophia leads the children out.)

(Enter Estella.)

Estella: How do you do, Sophy? I hope I'm not intruding?

Sophia: Oh no, Estelle. I am very glad to see you.

(Asks Estella to be seated and seats herself.)

Estella: Have you good news from your husband?

Sophia: Very good. He writes to me saying that he is interested in the Congress of Psychologists; though the manner in which they treat many great questions there does not appeal to him. However, as a student of souls, he is interested in just those methods of spiritual shortsightedness which makes it impossible for men to obtain a clear view of essential mysteries.

Estella: Does he not intend speaking on an important subject, himself?

Sophia: Yes, on a subject that seems important both to him and to me. But the scientific views of those present at the Congress prevent his expecting any results from his arguments.

Estella: I really came in, dear Sophy, to ask whether you would come with me this evening to a new play called Outcasts from Body and from Soul. I should so like to hear it with you.

Sophia: I'm sorry, my dear Estelle, but to-night is the date set for the performance of the play, which our society has been rehearsing for a long time.

Estella: Oh yes, I had forgotten. But it would have been such a pleasure to have spent this evening with my old friend. I had set my heart on having you beside me, and gazing with you into the hidden depths of our present-day life. ... I only hope that this world of ideas, in which you move, and which is so strange to me, will not finally destroy that bond of sympathy, which has united our hearts since we were at school together.

Sophia: You have often said that before; and yet you have always had to admit that our divergent opinions need not erect barriers between those feelings which have existed between us in our companionship from our youth upwards.

Estella: True, I have said so. Yet it always arouses a sense of bitterness in me, when, as the years roll on, I see how your affections are estranged from those things in life that seem to me worth while.

Sophia: Still, we may be of much mutual help to one another if we recognize and realize the various points of view which we reach through our different inclinations.

Estella: Yes! My reason tells me that you are right. And yet there is something in me that rebels against your view of life.

Sophia: Why not candidly admit that what you require of me is the renunciation of my inmost soul-life?

Estella: But for one thing, I should admit even that. And that is, that you always claim that your view is the more profound. I can readily understand that people whose conceptions differ radically may still meet in sympathy of feeling. But the nature of your ideas actually forces upon you an inner assumption of a certain superiority. Others can compare views and realize that they do indeed diverge towards different standpoints, but they nevertheless stand related by an equality of values. You, however, seem unable to do this. You regard all other views as proceeding from a lower degree of human development.

Sophia: But you realize, I hope, from our previous discussions, that those who think as I do, do not finally measure the character of man by his opinions or by his knowledge. And while we consider our ideas such, that without vital realization of them life has no valid foundations, we nevertheless try most earnestly not to over-estimate the value of the individual, who has been permitted to become an instrument for the manifestation of this view of life.

Estella: All that sounds very well, but it does not remove my one suspicion. I cannot close my eyes to the fact, that a world-view which ascribes to itself illimitable depth must needs lead through the mere appearance of such depth to a certain superficiality. I rate our friendship too high to point out to you those among your companions who, whilst they swear allegiance to your ideas, yet display spiritual arrogance of the most unmitigated sort, despite the fact that the barrenness and banality of their soul speaks in their every word and in all their conduct. Nor do I wish to call your attention to the callousness and lack of sympathy shown by so many of your adherents towards their fellow men. The greatness of your own soul has never permitted you to stand aloof from that which daily life requires at the hands of the man whom we call good. And yet the fact that you leave me alone on this occasion, when true and artistic life comes to be voiced, shows me that your ideas too with reference to this life are to a certain extent superficial—if you will forgive my saying so.

Sophia: And wherein lies this superficiality?

Estella: You ought to know. You have known me long enough to understand how I have wrenched myself away from that manner of life, which, day in and day out, only struggles to follow tradition and convention.

I have sought to understand why so many people suffer, as it seems, undeservedly. I have tried to approach the heights and depths of life. I have consulted the sciences, so far as I could, to learn what they disclose.

But let me hold fast to the one point which this moment presents to us. I am aware of the nature of true art; I believe I understand how it seizes upon the essentials of life and presents to our souls the true and higher reality. I seem to feel the beating of the pulse of time, when I permit such art to influence me, and I am horrified when I have to think what it is that you, Sophy, prefer to this interest in living art. You turn to what seem to me the obsolete, dogmatically allegorical themes, to gaze on a show of puppets, instead of on living beings, and to wonder at symbolical happenings which stand far away from all that appeals to our pity and to our active sympathies in daily life.

Sophia: My dear Estelle, that is exactly the fact that you will not grasp—that the richest life is to be found just there where you only see a fantastic web of thoughts: and that there may be, and are, people who are compelled to call your living reality mere poverty—if it be not measured by the spiritual source from whence it comes. Possibly my words sound harsh to you. But our friendship demands absolute frankness. Spirit itself is as unknown to you as it is to the multitude. In its place you know only the bearer of knowledge. It is only the thought side of spirit of which you are aware. You have no conception of the living, the creative spirit, which endows men with elemental power, even as the germinal power of nature shapes living entities. Like many another, for instance, you call things in art which deny the spirit, as I conceive it, naive and original. Our conception of the world unites a full and conscious freedom with the power of spontaneous creation. We consciously absorb this power, and do not thereby rob. it of its' freshness, its fullness, and its originality. You believe that the character of man shapes itself, and that we can merely form thoughts and considerations about it. You will not see that thought itself actually merges into-creative spirit; reaching the very fountain of Being; and developing thence into an actual creative germ.

Our ideas do not teach, any more than the seed-power within a plant teaches it how to grow. It is the actual growth itself, and in like manner do our ideas flow into our very being, kindling and dispensing life. To the ideas that have come to me, I am indebted for all that makes life worth while; not only for the courage, but also for the insight and power that make me hopeful of so training my children, that they shall not only be capable and useful in ordinary everyday life, in the old traditional sense, but that they shall at the same time carry inward peace and contentment within their souls. I have no wish to stray from the point, but I will say just one thing. I believe—nay I know—that the dreams which you share with so many can only be realized when men succeed in uniting what they call the realities of life with those deeper experiences, which you have so often termed dreams and fantasies. You may be astonished if I confess it to you: but much that seems true art to you is to me a mere fruitless critique of life. No hunger is stilled, no tears are dried, no source of degeneracy is discovered, when merely the outer show of hunger, or tear-stained faces, or degenerates are shown upon the stage. And the customary method of that presentation is unspeakably distant from the true depths of life, and the true relation-ship between beings.

Estella: I understand your words indeed, but they merely show me that you do prefer to indulge in fancies, rather than to look upon the realities of life. Our ways, indeed, part.—I see that my friend is denied me to-night. (Rises.) I must leave you now. But we remain friends, as of old, do we not?

Sophia: We must indeed remain friends. (While these last words are spoken, Sophia conducts her friend to the door.)

On the essence of practice
Transcription for Prof. Dr. Hans Wohlbold, Munich, from 1917.

The essence of practice lies in the appropriation of the imaginative activity that can elevate spiritual reality to knowledge. The essential thing is that this imaginative activity is experienced independently of the physical organization. It is a matter of experience to know: now I notice how I am able to think, etc., without the usual conditions of the imagination being tied to the physical body. This point in time occurs in the course of practice. In particular, I advise:

1.) In the evening, a backward imagining of the day's experiences. This is a first step with an imagining that does not bind itself to the usual pursuit of imagining. The imagining becomes freer.

2.) To concentrate in complete calm on a short train of thought. This should be completely manageable, so that one does not mix in unconscious or subconscious reminiscences of images, etc., but really remains in a mental activity with complete awareness. Then one lets the thought-content fall away in consciousness and tries to retain the energy, to remain consciously for a short time without thought-content. In this way one brings the ability to perceive to that calm energy which is necessary to grasp the spiritual, which otherwise, as it were, falls through the meshes of ordinary thinking and thus does not come to consciousness.

I advise doing exercises 1 and 2 in the evening.

In the morning it is good to do a kind of thought-concentration similar to the second one. Pictorial imagination can play a role here, as I have discussed in principle with the rose-cross exercise in the second part of “Occult Science”. In order to gain the necessary calmness of thought concentration, it is good to do the six exercises (as auxiliary exercises) described in the second part of my “Secret Science”.

The purpose of practicing lies partly in the application of stronger soul activity in contrast to the ordinary. Just as in the physical world, at critical points, the quantitative naturally changes into the qualitative, so the increase of the ordinary capacity for knowledge becomes that which can have the spiritual world as its object.

Exercises for Adolf Arenson
given in Stuttgart at the beginning of April 1904
Manuscript archive number 5299, 5300, 5301.

I. Every day, review the experiences of the personality during the day. You consider the most important experiences you had during the day and the way you behaved within them. All this is done with the aim of learning from life. How can I do a better job of something I did today? Such questions are asked. This does not make you dull to pleasure and pain. On the contrary. You become more sensitive. But you don't get stuck worrying and regretting what you've done; you turn it into a resolution to do better in the future. You become your own architect. Just as an architect does not stand and regretfully lament over a house he has built, that it is not better, but rather evaluates the experiences he has with the less good one for a next possible construction, so man does the same with himself. Our personality is lost in regret and worry; through learning it rises. Regret and worry are of no use; we should spend the time we waste on them on our upward development. The whole process should not take more than three to four minutes. You then fall asleep with a manas that has received the strength to develop upwards within itself. If you can add an important resolution for life or even a good thought for fellow human beings, it is particularly good. This gradually transforms you, because you have given the manas, which is free of all personal barriers during sleep, a worthy content that promotes development.

II. In the morning as the first mental work of the day:

a) Elevation to one's own higher self through complete surrender to the formula:

I am the living urge in my covers.
My higher self is pure like the purest crystal.

b) Concentrated devotion to a high thought. The meditation of Bhagavad-Gita, chap. III, Karma Yoga, is best. From the third verse onwards:

3. As I have already told you...

Always just one verse. You stay with one verse for two weeks. After two weeks, you choose the next one and so on. In this meditation, as well as in the previous elevation to the higher self, the field of vision of consciousness must be completely pure. Every other thought must be kept away completely. If one should arise, it must be banished with all one's strength.

c) Devotional mood toward that which is most sacred to one. (The Creative All, God, etc., according to the personality, according to what one has learned to honor and name as the highest.)

For the morning meditation, 8-10 minutes.

Patience and perseverance, absolute earnestness are absolutely necessary. One must get into the mood in which the spirit perceives this meditation as a need as natural as the body's physical needs. And then one waits to be given. It will be given to everyone in due time.

It can be started now on April 16 (not earlier), then again on May 16.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3105/06

Morning meditation - 5 minutes

1. Brighter than the sun
purer than snow
finer than ether
is the Self
the spirit in my heart
That Self is me

2. 5 minutes

Inhalation: seek the way - 1 time (deep, calm)

Breathing retention: Search for the path in contemplation – 3 times.

Exhalation (not in spurts): Search for the path by boldly stepping out of yourself – 2 times.

(3 times)

because:

14 days: Before the eye sees
14 days: Before the ear
14 days: Before
14 days: Before them

3. Devotional surrender to one's own divine ideal. 5 minutes

Ending:
1st month: Self-confidence
2nd month: self-control
3rd month: presence of mind
4th month: energy

In the evening

Review of the day: If there was an experience:
Have I learned enough from it?
If there was an action:
Can't I do it better?
Without regret. Only with the intention of learning from life.
From back to front. From evening to morning.

Without alcohol.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3107

In the morning

I.) Brighter than the sun
purer than the snows
more subtle than the ethers
is the Self
its spirit in my heart
this Self am I
I am this Self.

Full waking consciousness.

II.) Think of the left hand and the heart and at the same time imagine:

Seek the way

Now you stop at the heart and think:

Seek the way of inner contemplation.

Now think of the right hand and fold it over the left, imagining:

Seek the way by boldly stepping out of yourself.

III.) Devotional surrender to that which one regards as a divine ideal.

In the evening

Review of the day.
Without regret.
From evening to morning. Backwards.
You can fall asleep doing this!!

Exercises from a Notebook: Archive number 105, 1906

February 16.

1.) Radiant ---

2.) Inhalation, exhalation, holding the breath.

I am, which is poured through the whole body.

This three times in succession, whereby actually the “I am” should accompany
the whole process.

Inhalation, exhalation, retention of breath
It - whereby it is actually “I” - It is
This again three times

Inhalation, retention of breath, exhalation The inner being

3.) The currents within the body.

Then, after the meditation, a sinking into and letting oneself be affected by the following figures:

What does it mean to disappear into oneself and to arise again from one's disappearance?

How does a point become a circle, and how does a circle become a point?

What is inner, what is outer; what is upper, what is lower; what is matter, what is spirit; what is physical matter, what is ether?

What is astral?

How do the spirits of the sensation affect the wearer of the substance?

Imagine that the lines are clasps made of whalebone, which are in the above position; but in every moment they resist this length through their strength.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3187/88

In the evening

First look back over the life of the day, presenting individual episodes of this life in pictures. Going back from the evening to the morning. This need only take 5-7 minutes. Then, with the feeling, “From the spiritual world my self flows to me,” concentrate on the center of the eyebrows and direct the words to this point:

“I am.

Then, with the feeling, ‘The spiritual world lives soulfully in the silent word,’ concentrate on the larynx and direct the words to this point:

”It thinks”.

Then, with the feeling: “The spiritual world creates its knowledge,” concentrate on the heart, arms and hands and direct the words into this area:

“It feels.”

Then with the feeling: “In me the spiritual world creates its self-awareness,” concentrate on the aura, which is thought of as egg-shaped and surrounding the body; at the same time, direct the words into this area:

"It wills.

The meditation should last 10-15 minutes.

In the morning

The meditation of the Rose Cross, as described in “Occult Science”.

In addition, the 6 subsidiary exercises.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 6860-62 with note:
End of August [1906] Stuttgart.

Immerse yourself completely in the idea of

an impersonal higher self

It is not important that you visualize something prescribed by someone, but that you try to form the best idea of the “higher self” that you can, based on your level of development.

Now treat this idea as if you were placing it in the place inside the head where the pineal gland (Z) is located. Transfer your consciousness there for a while and fill it completely with the above idea of an “impersonal higher self”. So for a while you imagine that your own being is in Z, compressed, and that you are the above idea. Banish everything else from your consciousness.

Once you have done this for a while, slowly guide the above idea from Z in a line to the beginning of the spinal cord, approximately where the brain passes into the spinal cord. Then you continue it from there approximately down the area of the spinal cord to a point called K (kundalini). After imagining that you have imbued the above idea with kundalini power (spiritual) fire, you slowly guide it back up along the spinal cord to a point inside the head: approximately at the point (B) of the small brain (back of the head). Now you imagine (impersonal higher self) from this point in two lines to the two eyes and let it flow out through them, as it were, into infinite space. Then you draw it back in through the eyes and guide it to point B. Do this again by leading the image from B to the two ears, letting it flow through them into infinite space and then back

to B through the ears. Once you have imagined that you have led the “impersonal higher self” through space twice and filled it with its content, then lead the thus enriched idea again from B through the spinal cord to K, imbue it there in the imagination with the spiritual fire and now lead it very slowly (so slowly that the time during which one ascends from K to the point at the throat at laryngeal level takes about 20 minutes) to the throat (at laryngeal level). There one now thinks intensely:

I am not you.

I, the concept of the higher self according to all the paths it takes in the above sense.

You, the ordinary self that one does not identify with at this moment.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3192

Christian Gnostic Meditation

I. Early in the morning, immediately after awakening, when no other impressions have yet passed through the soul, one seeks to free the consciousness completely from all memories of everyday life, one seeks to distract one's attention from all external perceptions. Then, when one has attained this inner silence, one lets live alone in the soul:

The first five verses of the Gospel of John. II. Then, for the first fortnight, one should try to recall one's whole past life in order to get to know oneself completely. After the first fortnight, one should read the whole Gospel of John, so that one lives in one chapter every day for seven days.

So in the first 7 days: 1st chapter from sentence 6 to the end
So in the second 7 days: 2nd chapter
etc.

When you have reached the 13th chapter, you try to experience

foot washing to experience the feeling of how every higher being owes its existence to the lower ones, and must therefore humbly bow down to them.

Flagellation the feeling that one can stand upright facing the scourging of life, i.e. facing all suffering and pain.

Crowning with thorns: the feeling that you have to stand tall, even in the face of all scorn and mockery.

Crucifixion: the feeling that your own body is something alien that you carry and to which you are tied from the outside.

Mystical death: You experience the curtain that still covers the spiritual world, but then also how it tears and you look into the spiritual world.

You learn to see the causes of evil and the evil ones: descending into hell.

Entombment: You feel at one with all beings on earth, with the earth itself. You are immersed in it.

Resurrection: This can only be experienced because the words of ordinary language are insufficient to describe it.

III. Then one calls the figure of Christ Jesus to mind and delves into the following image:

I, in Your Spirit.

In the evening: review of the entire day.

I and III are the same every day; only II changes every 7 days, as described.

After completing cycle II, you start again from the beginning and so on forever. After a long time, you may experience the inner and outer symptoms mentioned in the description of Christian development.

Outwardly one feels as if one's feet are surrounded by water.

Outwardly one feels a burning sensation etc. over the whole skin.

Outwardly one feels pain in the head.

Outwardly the wounds redden during meditation.

Internally, one experiences the vision as if one were personally performing the washing of the feet.

Internally, one sees oneself being scourged.

Internally, one sees oneself wearing the crown of thorns.

Inwardly you see yourself crucified.

Exercise with the Rose Cross Visualization.
Handwritten manuscript archive number 3229

Evening:

1.) Retrospective. Pictorial. Retrospective.

2.) Search You, my soul, to plunge into yourself, sensing you;
At the bottom of you lies your spirit;
In your spirit the spirit of the world is at work.
I am in all this
thinking feeling
living.

(Peace of mind)

In the morning:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

In you, you world letter
I see
The sevenfold workings of the spirit
In seven rose stars
The dark paths of life
In the black wood of the cross
I am in all this.

(Peace of mind)

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3236/37/38

In the morning:

Concentrate on a line that goes through the body, so

The line does not go through the spinal cord, but a little in front of it through the body.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Then meditate on the following words:

Warming light penetrates into me from above
The gravity of the earth spreads warming light within me
and shapes me,

Then, for a longer period of time, hold the idea

I am

Then do not imagine anything, but wait in empty consciousness for what comes.

In the evening: try to concentrate on your own physical sensations in the following stages:

I am my head
I am my neck
I am my arms
I am my chest wrapping
I am my heart
I am the blood that circulates in me
I am my lungs

Then, concentrate on the breath in the following way:

Concentrate on inhalation and perceive the inhaled air as J

Concentrate on the inhaled air filling the body and perceive it as A

Focus on the exhalation and feel the air leaving the body as O

Do this for seven consecutive breathing cycles;

then focus contemplatively on the inside of the head (point a)

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Feel as if the sound J A O were resounding there; hold this sound for one to two minutes, then imagine nothing but wait in empty consciousness for what comes. Neck: luminous stream along the spine A

Luminous stream from the center of the eyebrows to the neck: J

Luminous stream along the spine: A

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Light flow inside from the spine back to the center of the eyebrows: O

(seven times every 2 minutes (14 minutes)

J A O penetrates into me through me out of me

J A O creates forces in me through me out of me as often as

J A O lives, webend in me through me out of me, possible.

Mood:

J A O as the name of Christ
This is connected with the secret of
how Christ works in man.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 5273

1.) Evening: 4-5 minute review of the day's life (in reverse chronological order).

2.) Evening: The following meditation for 4-5 minutes:

I feel myself in the space of light (thereby imagining the light-filled world around me)

Light weaves my etheric body (imagining my own body consisting of light)

I feel myself in the world of colors (imagining a sea of colors in which you yourself are)

The world of colors of the mind gives me the soul (imagining your own soul).

In light and color, My Self thinks, feels and wills.

3.) In the morning: Imagine a black cross with seven shining stars.

Meditate on this:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

4-5 minutes:

My Self
Thinks, feels and wills
Through light and color 4-5 minutes
I rest quietly
In my higher self
My I In
Christ.

In addition, the six exercises: concentration of thought, etc., as they appear in Occult Science.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3233

I. Day: Evening, 10 minutes:

Summarize a realization in a short sentence.

Transformation into a mathematical or physical symbol.

Breaths:

Inhalation: Consuming the symbol for several minutes through the head.

Holding the breath: Storing the symbol.

Exhalation: Imagine letting the symbol out along with the air you breathe out, without the symbol.

Morning: 15 minutes:

Repeat the same exercise.

Remain with an even inner soul, without external impressions and without memories of life on the physical plane.

Day 2:

Evening:

Summarize a realization into one sentence.

Transform it into a plant symbol.

Breaths:

Inhale: Consume the symbol through the heart.

Holding the breath: Holding the symbol

Exhaling: Imagining that you are holding the symbol within you and letting out air without a symbol.

Morning:

Repeat the exercise and remain as on the first day.

III. Day:

Evening:

Summarize a realization in a short sentence.

Transform it into a symbol from the animal kingdom.

Breaths:

Inhale the symbol through the larynx.

Hold your breath: Hold the symbol.

Exhalation: Imagine that [the] symbol remains inside and empty breath goes out.

Morning: Repeat as on other 'days.

No alcohol. No lentils, beans, peas.

Handwritten Exercise: archive number 5269

Evening:

1.) Retrospective review of the events of the day in reverse chronological order. 4-5 minutes.

2.) First, concentrate on the visualization: I think things and facts.

Hold this visualization for about a minute, excluding other thoughts.

Then concentrate on the visualization:

My thinking flows in time.

Hold this image again for a minute.

After this preparation, concentrate on the following in succession (3-4 minutes):

I follow the flowing thought
I will recognize my will in my thinking
I will find my I in my thinking will
I will live as I in my thinking will
I await the solution of the I from the I.

Then a calm inner frame of mind.

In the morning: visualization of a blue circular area with a red surrounding.

Then transform it into a red circle with a blue surrounding. Transform back into the previous state.

Do this 7 times in a row.

Observe inwardly how, as a result, thinking gradually becomes mobile, free within itself and ultimately elevated to a body-free state.

With the soul thus prepared, concentrate on some simple object and observe how this inner activity is now different from what it would be without this preparation.

The whole thing takes 4-5 minutes.

Do the six exercises as in the second part of “Occult Science”.

The time indications are, of course, based on how you feel.

Handwritten Exercise: Archive number 3230.

In the morning:

I recognize the thought-image
of a being
in my head;
I think the feeling-rhythm
invigorating my being
in my heart;
I feel the willpower strengthening my limbs in my entire body.

At noon:

Let the power of the right eye flow into my left arm and the power of my left arm into my right leg.

Let the power
of the left eye flow
into my right arm
and the power of my right arm
into my left leg.

Before falling asleep:

I will
leave my body
My feelings follow me
My will enters the spiritual realm
power permeates him
He seizes all limbs when awakening

Supplement

End of an exercise with no beginning. Archive number 1704.

Now, with all your strength, as far as your memory reaches, go through your own life in concrete terms and feel responsible for descending into this incarnation; say to yourself that every part of one's destiny has been earned by myself – then realize the distance that exists between the life in such an incarnation, burdened with unbalanced karma, and the life of the purified person – with a completely balanced life account (karma).

Looking up to the idea of a purified Master.

That is what I shall become, that is what I want to become.

Notes on “Light on the Path”. From a notebook from 1906. Archive number 105. It is not known what the individual dates refer to.

II/1 (meditation of 1/11) is about the following:

When the higher self has taken complete possession of the person, when the personality shell has fallen away, then the whole choir of higher spirits can speak through him, just as the sensual world speaks through him before – in order to prepare for this moment, one must develop within oneself the attitude that renounces defending one's own, separate self. One ceases to be a warrior; one becomes an instrument of the Warrior.

The saying does not refer to the higher fact itself, but gives the instruction for developing the attitude through which the higher fact is attained.

On the meditation of 12/1.

Instead of “king”, it should be “kings”, because [one] is dealing with whole hosts of higher spirits; however, one can only speak of one fighter because at this level of being, the many resonate in complete harmony so that their expression appears as one.

From the meditation of 13/1.

Nothing – at least nothing essential – is left behind, but is redeemed in the course of time, i.e. absorbed into the higher. The higher (good) itself absorbs evil in the course of time and transforms it into good through its own power.

First of all, we are dealing with the divine spirit. It could not develop up to certain levels if it did not repel evil from itself and thus first reached a certain height without this evil.

264-17

With the evil in him, he could not have reached a height; but now at this height he is able to retrieve the evil and take it with him on his further journey.

The saint redeems the criminal. God redeems Satan.

Regarding 16.1

Wherever intuitive knowledge is mentioned here, it should be read as 'imaginative' knowledge. Intuitive knowledge is developed through [the] second sentence: unlearning sensitivity.

1. Sensory knowledge: everyday knowledge.

2. imaginative knowledge: spiritual seeing (pictures)

3. intuitive knowledge: spiritual hearing (the inner word).

4. knowledge of God - complete oneness with the absolute.

The realization regarding [name] is quite correct, and the more you attain in this direction, the faster you progress. However, we must give each such thought the right spiritual weight by acting as if we could do everything despite the opposite assumption:

1. I am clear in my feelings that [the person concerned]'s fate is the right one.

2. I am clear in my will that I should nevertheless act as if I could extend [the person concerned'] life into the immeasurable.

Feelings and will must always go in opposite directions. Otherwise, the realization is not spiritual, but abstract.

Except during meditation: reflection.

During meditation: live with the contemplative thought.

Regarding January 19:

When considering such ideas, it is always important to keep the counter-thought in mind: Inner peace should never be bought by turning away from the outside world, but always only after harmonizing with the outside world. This is just the same as with two other pole thoughts, for example; the esotericist never thinks or speaks one or the other without at least subtly striking the corresponding opposite pole in the background. Say, for instance,

God is in me

, then I should at least think subtly:

I am in God

, and thereby the one-sided thought-form is always paralyzed by the corresponding other, as for instance the physical body is paralyzed by the etheric body.

264-18

The forces (r ) act within the body and would immediately dissolve it if the pole forces did not hold it together from the outside. Dynamically, the etheric body is the positive pole and the physical body is the negative pole.

20.

Excessive emphasis on the inner self can easily lead to rigidity in the ahamkara. One can rise very high and still remain in it. That is why all esotericism has an important sentence:

Everything contributes to your immortality,

what is not done for this immortality

is done.

For example: if I devote myself to a teaching, I do raise myself, but not completely. If I build this teaching into a Gothic cathedral or into the soul of another person, or even just into my dealings with people, then what I have planted outside myself becomes part of my eternal body.

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The building plan as such

The master builder dies.

The effects of the cathedral become the building blocks of the eternal soul of the master builder. This is also the basis of the sentence:

Pray and work.

Contemplating the absolute, the relative has lost all power over you. Polarity thought:

You cannot recognize an absolute without shining the light of the absolute into the relative.

A criminal is only recognized in his relativity if one is clear about how the divinity in the criminal reveals itself.

Such a dream can be a very good pointer: Tired swallow - Looking into development (symbolized by the swallow emerging from the reptile) is initially tiring and allows the wings to unfold less than independent progress in dullness. Seen more deeply, however, the former leads safely to the goal. It is precisely the deepest wisdom that appears worthless to people who live only in the moment. Such thoughts play around you and sometimes break through in dreams.

The dream of the 24th is significant. All such dreams are symbols of higher truths. The first part: floating in the vegetable corresponds approximately to the image of man in the 5th round. (There is no longer any mineral present). All visions that have a basis are prophetic to a certain extent, for no highly developed human being can see anything that will not later become part of the experience of all human beings.

Consciousness will only achieve continuity when experiences are present not only in dreams but also in dreamless sleep.

Dream experiences are images analogous to the seen image. Dreamless sleep experiences are always hearing experiences and, if they are to be of any value, articulated hearing experiences, e.g. words.

Sometimes you don't even need to understand the words. Because they can appear in the reminiscence as in a language that is not understood by us.

ad. 25.

All forms are at the same time expressions of the eternal. If we seek the eternal in form, we find it; if we seek it by fleeing from form, we separate ourselves even further.

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ad. 26.

The subtlety of vibrations causes a heightened sensitivity to the outside world. A drunkard is immune to the vibrations of another drunkard. Therefore, at first the drinker becomes unpleasant to the non-drinker. It is the same with everything. Through the subtlety of vibrations, evolution precisely unlocks all impurity, baseness, etc. of the surrounding world, and in this way only an intensification of crucifixion in the material world can be achieved. The capacity for suffering in the world around increases with evolution. Only when one has overcome oneself, i.e., has stepped beyond the subtlety of the vibrations, then comes peace. But then one has not finer, but on the contrary simpler vibrations in oneself. Not refinement, but simplification of the vibrations is what matters.

I. Two undeveloped people.

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The vibrations correspond to each other, and consequently they coincide; one does not perceive the other.

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II. An undeveloped and a developed person.

264-23

Each individual rhombus of the second one perceives those of the first one, but cannot paralyze them.

III. An undeveloped and a more highly developed human being.

264-24

The simple vibrations of the second one do notice the deviations in the first one, but they are strong enough to paralyze them.

ad. 27.

This in particular should be considered in the light of the previous law of simplification. Man becomes greater when he becomes simpler.

ad. 29.

It is important to understand that sensitivity is not the same as sensitivity. It therefore means:

Before the ear is able to hear, it must replace sensitivity with a simplified perception. In sensitivity, the person reacts to the external world. In the perception, the eternal that is absorbed into the person permeates the external world with the simple rhythms of infinity.

ad. 30. All in the sense of I II III.

ad. 3/2.

The masters are not a bulwark against evil, but the guides to the absorption of evil. We should not exclude evil, but absorb it and use it in the sphere of good. The lion's rage is only evil as long as it is used selfishly by the lion; if a ruler could appropriate the lion's rage and use it to build welfare institutions, it would be good. Therefore, evil is to be recognized as non-real. There is no evil. Evil is only a displaced good. Only with this realization is spiritual alchemy possible.

ad. 6.

That is precisely the progress made by Christianity, that the personality is taken along into eternity.

Therefore the Christian principle is correct: You will rise with your transfigured body, i.e. through Christian thinking the personality becomes eternal.

Pentagram and hexagram exercise

as a supplement to the letter to Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden dated November 15, 1908

Memorandum of the esoteric lessons in Berlin, November 29, 1907 and January 7, 1908

Berlin, November 29, 1907. Memory notes by Günther Wagner.

A current flows through the etheric body in the form of a pentagram: from the point of the I in the forehead to the two feet, from there to the antipolaric hands and from one hand to the other through the heart. When the body and limbs are bent, the currents also bend. The various planets are connected with the various parts of the currents as indicated. The planets are to be understood more as principles that actually always work on all globes, only on the individual in an outstanding way.

The principle of Saturn is the physical basis
of the sun: eternal growth, eternal progress
of the moon: holding back, retarding, solidification
of Mars: courage to introduce the aggressive into the life of the senses, the red blood
of Mercury: leading out of the life of the senses
of Jupiter: liberation of the ego
of Venus: rising in love.

The colors correspond to these planets and the principles:

Saturn - Green
Sun - Orange
Moon - Violet
Mars - Red
Mercury - Yellow
Jupiter - Blue
Venus - Indigo ¹

The hexagram corresponds to currents in the astral body, but this is not to be understood as a line figure; the double triangle is only an average. (While the currents in the etheric body form the lines of a pentagram, the hexagram represents the currents in the astral body.

Pentagram and Hexagram Exercise

264-25

On the Pentagram and Hexagram Exercise of the Esoteric Hour, Berlin, November 29, 1907.

264-26

the astral body in a completely different way, not linearly, but two-dimensionally physically.) If the figure is turned on its vertical axis, the real figure emerges, although the horizontal cross-section does not quite correspond to a circle (oval). The horizontal lines thus actually form a surface; the upper one at arm level, the other at knee level.

The downward-pointing triangle has to do with the bodies: the astral body (Moon), etheric body (Sun), physical body (Saturn principle). The other triangle with the higher parts: sentient soul (Mars), intellectual soul (Mercury) and consciousness soul, which is only at the beginning of its development (Jupiter). Accordingly, the colors.

One should meditate on these figures and the meaning of their details in order to become aware of one's own inner life and its relationship to the cosmos. One will then awaken strange feelings within oneself.

Memo notes from the same session by Camilla Wandrey

The principle of Saturn (Oriphiel. Green. Lead): the physical basis, but spiritual.

The principle of the Sun (Michael. Orange. Gold): eternal growth, eternal progress. Individual life.

The principle of the moon (Gabriel. Violet. Silver): Holding. Retarding. Freezing. Appearance in Maya.

The principle of Mars (Samael. Mars. Red. Iron): Courage. The aggressive. Introduction to the sensual life through the red blood. Consciousness.

The principle of Mercury (Raphael. Yellow. Mercury): leading out of the life of the senses. Divine intelligence. Holy Spirit.

The principle of Jupiter (Zachariel. Blue. Tin): Liberation of the ego. Power. Father. The principle of Venus (Anael. Indigo. Copper): The rising in pure love. Love. Son. Transition from God to man. Mediator.

The pentagram

The hexagram

The hexagram corresponds to currents in the astral body. But it is only an average. If the figure were rotated around its vertical axis, the real figure would emerge, the horizontal average of which corresponds approximately to a circle. The upper surface can be experienced at arm level, the lower at knee level.

The downward-pointing triangle is connected to the physical body, Saturn. Moon: astral body. Sun: etheric body. The upward-pointing triangle with the higher parts: Mars (the soul of feeling). Mercury (the soul of mind). Jupiter (the soul of consciousness).

Through intense meditation on these figures, man gains knowledge of himself and his connection with the macrocosm. The pentagram represents the currents of the etheric body and their connection with the planets.

The physical body is connected with all the forces in the universe. It is the center of the irradiation of all the forces of the zodiac.

The etheric body is initially connected to the center of the earth.

The astral body is connected to the center of the moon.

The I is not only a point that has gradually united through the growth of the forehead and the retraction of the etheric body at the upper root of the nose, but there is a second point in front of it. The connecting line to this point changes, the direction of this line points to the center of the sun. The more a person develops, the closer the two points come together. The developing human being must place himself in this second point, that is, outward, and he must learn to look at his body as at anything physical besides him (Tat tvam asi [= That art Thou! Famous formula of the Veda]); this frees the human being from egoism. A vivid reliving of the mystery of Golgotha and the fact that the superfluous, egoistic blood of humanity has flowed there is a help in this.

Meditation should be like sacrificial smoke rising to the gods.

Berlin, January 7, 1908 (continued from November 29, 1907) Memory notes by unknown hand

If we want to profitably observe such an occult figure (the hexagram) as in the previous lesson, it is not enough to stare at it constantly. Rather, we must picture it over and over again in our minds in quiet hours and meditate on the meaning of the individual colors. Only in this way will we gain the advantage and benefit that such occult signs can have when viewed in the right way. For the whole wisdom of the world is given to us in a few such occult figures. And by delving into them, the spiritual connections of the higher worlds will gradually become clear to us.

Let us take two colors from the hexagram that are opposite each other: red and green. These two colors are deliberately placed opposite each other. What might the red color mean, what the green? We find the green color in the plant world outside, covering the earth with its blanket. And what is the relationship between man and plants? We know that man on Saturn led an existence that in some respects corresponds to our present-day minerals. Not that man was ever a mineral! Our present-day mineral kingdom is in fact the youngest of the natural kingdoms. We also know that man on the Sun led a plant-like existence. Today a greenish sap flows in plants. A similar sap flowed through the human being of that time. If, by some magic, astral components were to be pressed into the plant today, it would turn red! The fact that man on the moon acquired the astral body turned the inner sap red – the red blood came from it.

Consider that the plant is chaste, it has no desires, passions: anger, fear, dread. By becoming in some respects worse than the plant, man received something that elevated him above the plant: the waking day consciousness. The plant world of today is asleep. A plant is the reverse of a human being. A plant's roots point towards the center of the earth, where its I is located. The same force that works downwards in the plant works upwards in the human being. The fact that the human being received blood expresses the reception of the I. The expression of the I is the red blood.

If you look at the inner surface of a green leaf with spiritual eyes, it will appear red to you. This red power is, so to speak, spiritual. If you see a red surface against a white background, look at it sharply and then look at the white surface, a green spot will appear. And the same is true the other way round. These colors are called complementary colors. Thus, the inner spiritual connection is also expressed in such a physical phenomenon.

Or let us take two other colors: blue and orange, which are opposite each other. You should know that orange has two aspects: orange and gold.

Where do we find the color blue in nature? When we look up into the boundless distance of the vaulted sky! And where do we find the color gold? In the paintings of the old masters, we see golden backgrounds. These old masters still painted according to a tradition that possessed some knowledge of the phenomena and beings of higher worlds. When we look out into the celestial space with spiritual eyes, it appears in golden depths. That is why we see angelic heads on a golden background in the old paintings, because when you look out (mentally) into the celestial space, it appears to you in golden colors.

Thus we must search for and gather together what is scattered throughout the cosmos, for the building of our soul. Just think how all the foodstuffs needed for the building of our body are scattered over the earth. Imagine that vividly! It is exactly the same in the spiritual realm. From the chaos the soul must also gather together what is suitable for its building up.

When a soul begins to meditate in this way, an organ in the physical body begins to develop: the mucous gland. In the normal average person, the mucous gland is an organ, hardly the size of a cherry stone, located behind the pineal gland. But it contains disproportionately great powers. It regulates the correct build-up of the body in relation to its size. The so-called giants who are shown around have a disease of the mucous gland. In some way, the forces set in motion by them must be allowed to run their course. When the Meditand begins to work on himself, forces are awakened in the mucous gland. From the mucous gland, the organic structure from the chaos of sensations to the astral body takes place. When the mucous gland flows around the pineal gland with golden threads, then the time has come when the transformation of the astral body into the spirit self, into manas, has progressed so far that the etheric body can now be transformed into the buddhi.

Those who meditate on such occult signs in this way will work purposefully on building up their higher bodies. Sometimes, in the briefest of moments, the soul can grow tremendously. One could say that it is not time that is needed for development, but rather profound inner calm.

From the same hour, memory notes by Günther Wagner:

Meditating on the hexagram. Pointed end up red, pointed end down green. Contrasts: complementary colors. Green is the color of plants. Red is the color of human blood.

Human beings have only been able to achieve progress by also accepting desires and passions. That part of the earth's astral body that belongs to the plant world is red. Thus, physically green, spiritually red: the plant. In plants, the red astral forces point downwards towards the center of the earth, while in humans, the same forces have reversed and point upwards.

Green and red: opposites. Likewise blue and orange, or rather in one of the two aspects: golden [addition in a different hand: violet and golden]. These too are complementary colors. In the physical world the sky is blue, in the devachan world it is golden, as can still be seen in old, early medieval paintings. Such are the other opposites.

By contemplating such symbols given to us by the masters, we transform and shape our astral body, especially the aura, around (to the manas). All sorts of scattered outer experiences may point out to us these color relations, and so our spiritual body is formed, shaped, and developed by the assimilation of all sorts of scattered experiences, as our physical body is by the assimilation of all sorts of physical food gathered from the face of the whole earth.

And as our astral body thus orders and organizes itself, it acts specifically on the mucous gland or pituitary body (hypophysis), a small organ, hardly the size of a cherry stone, which is initially involved in the growth of the body. Through such an organization of the astral body, the mucous gland begins to become more and more luminous; it emits rays and gradually envelops the pineal gland lying before it, stimulating it; as a result, the effects on the astral body expand and begin to impress and reorganize it.

• 1. In other contexts, different correspondences are sometimes given, e.g. for eurythmy or on the color sketch “Man in Connection with the Planets”. This should not be understood as a contradiction, but as an expression of different aspects. See, for example, the lecture in Vienna, June 1, 1918.

My dear friends! Most certainly the truths which a person can learn from the Guardian of the Threshold are what we are confronting in these present considerations. And contained within the incessant admonitions, most certainly, is that a person becomes aware, just how he progresses soulfully in spiritual life, as he himself brings to awareness his true relationship to the world.

To bring one’s true relationship to the world to awareness, first you let yourself become acquainted with the world, which is around about yourself in the kingdoms of nature, the kingdoms of nature lying external to your own existence. Focus on your relationship with the animal, the plant, and the mineral kingdoms. Through this relationship you will be afforded the opportunity at first to become acquainted with plants, animals, and minerals. Then you may go on as well to marvel at them, and then to bending them to the unfolding of your will-impulses, and so forth. A person becomes acquainted with this entire world as his external world, and in customary awareness will be but little aware of how he most certainly has grown up and come out of this entire world, and of how there is a deep kinship between himself and this entire world.

Alone, when one allows one’s gaze to sweep around and about over this external world, alone a person simply cannot feel this kinship with the realms of the world. One must stride forward to becoming acquainted with the feeling of oneself being out there in the world. And then absolutely, one may not, when one becomes acquainted with the feeling of oneself being out there in the world, then absolutely a person may not, my friends, come to a stop there, seeing things in this manner, as they present themselves to an external viewpoint, then a person must return to exactly that which reveals itself between things.

Since the onset of the recent phase of the development of mankind, a person gazes only minimally at what is revealed in the relationship between things. One gazes externally at the entities of the three kingdoms of nature, but my friends, it is well known that at the outset one has to see behind the kingdoms of nature, into what one calls the world of the elementals.

We may say that our feet are planted firmly on the fixed earth. [The word was written on the blackboard.]

earth

And whatever fixed as earth holds our feet up, most certainly also sends forth its substance into animals, plants, minerals, and into our physical human bodies. And when we lift our view up from the floor underneath our feet, observing what affects us at our own level, certainly right at hand is something with the quality not merely of air, but of airy substance permeated with the watery element. Indeed, people's manner of life on the earth has evolved, so that now this watery element is found finely dispersed within the air perceived around about oneself. This must first be concentrated, consolidated for the purposes of one's own organism, although one can also say that a person also lives within this watery element. [Above earth was written the second word.]

water

And also, a person lives in the air-formative element, in which he has to carry out his breathing. [Above earth was written the third word.]

air

In the moment, as we look upon these elements, we may not say, as we must say in regard to the entities of the kingdoms of nature, that we see them before us in sharp contour. We do see the individual, fixed, and sharply contoured bodies, although from the fixed as such, from the earthly, we may not say, that we live within it. We are in relationship with the earth, nevertheless we have become particularly disconnected from it. Whatever belongs to our own selves, we certainly do not separate from anything else. A dish or a stool, standing external to ourselves, we distinguish from ourselves, but whatever is in us, we don't look upon as existing in discrete bordering regions. We don't look upon our lungs or our heart as being self-contained beyond our borders. Only when we approach the matter by way of transforming it into objects, as in anatomy, do we look upon ourselves in this way. In reality, just as we normally are in relationship to our own bodies, this is how we are related in an immensely comprehensive way with what and whatever the elements are. We live in earth, we live in water, we live in air, and we live in warmth. They belong to us. They are too close to us to be understood as sharply contoured objects of the world.

Let us attend once more to what is around about us as the elemental world, and, at the same time, is also within us. We must regard it so, as both the substance of the world and as our own substance. In this sense we have been focusing on substances that we designate as earth, that we designate as water, that we designate as air, that we designate as warmth.[Over the word air, the next word was written.]

warmth

When we go out further, out, out into the thick substances of the etheric beyond warmth, which is also most certainly etheric, in this manner we come to light, [Over the word warmth, the next word was written.]

light

and into the arena that we have always named by the dry, abstract phrase the chemical ether and its processes. We will call it this today, for in this way the orderliness of the world will be called forth, the configuration of the world will be called forth, and we will designate at the same time the great chemism of the cosmos, world configuration, or world forming. It is difficult, concerning this, to find an appropriate designation. [Over the word light, the next word was written.]

world chemism

world life

Now although we have already received the impression here in the previous Class lessons, my friends, that a person, as he actually lives on the earth, certainly does not stand in inner relationship to all of these elements in the same manner, it must be pointed to specifically that a person lives inwardly fully in relationship only with the element of warmth. [The word warmth on the blackboard was cross-marked with red chalk.] It is essential for striding ahead in the spirit to be fully versed in this matter.

So, think for a moment, how without any intermediary agent, how without mediation, but rather how directly one feels and is affected by warmth and cold. You certainly take note of the starkly contrasting natures of warmth and cold. But with what passes before you in the encircling air, for example, you don't make such an immediate, direct connection. Initially the air being good or bad is only noticed through its intermediate effects on one's organism. And just so, it is just so with the effects of light. In this way a person stands not immediate, but very close to air and light. [The words air and light were cross-marked with gold.] He stands extraordinarily close to them.

But already we notice that among the denser elements, a person characteristically is more distant from the watery element, in spite of being related. Yet, the watery element is still quite deeply related with human life. [The word water was cross-marked with blue.] In looking back over an extremely animated but troubling dream, my dear friends, let us attempt to see how such a troubling dream represents one's perspiration, the secretions of one's watery element. Take note of the watery element's important role in sleep, in which the secretions of the watery element play such a remarkable part. A person lives in the watery element. Whatever exists in his vicinity as dispersed fluid is quite significant for him, but has none of the immediate quality of warmth. Whether it is warm or cold, a person feels it as his own person. He might be cold, or he might be hot. What occurs for instance, if we are enveloped in fog, is that the fogbank is just as significant for us, but the effect on our inner human nature is indirect, and is not so starkly evident for normal awareness. For just then, as we are enveloped in fog, then in a certain way our own watery element is enmeshed with the watery element in the external world. And we feel in this very gentle transition of our watery element into the watery element of the external world, which is not felt in the transition of our watery element into dry external air, we feel in this transition that we are somehow one with the entire cosmos. Dry air allows us to remain more inward in feeling our human nature, but air heavy with water allows us to feel our unity with the cosmos. In this day and age, we have no schooling in such things. I have dealt with this in detail previously in the Hague, and it was published (this intimate unity of a person with the elements). It is really there, and it belongs to the esoteric path of life, this becoming aware in practicality of such intimate unity.

Still deeper, may I say, in the subconscious, lies a person's relationship with the earthly element. [The word earth was cross-marked with blue.] What does a person know with certainty of his relationship with the earthly element? He knows that salt is acrid, and that sugar is sweet. This is part of the earthly element. Although what salt and sugar accomplish in his organism in significant metamorphosis, how he is positioned in a unity with the cosmos in the dissolution of sugar, or withdrawn into his organism with salt, how certain forces entering in from the cosmos affect the organism when the sweetness of sugar rolls through our body, is really noticed by a person only in the minimally-connected reflex of salt and sugar on the tongue. There are processes of a deeper nature at work. In a manner of speaking the whole world has opened its doors to certain forces when sugar dissolves on a person's tongue and flows through his organism.

And always, just as the thicker elements affect a person indirectly, the thinner etheric elements world-chemical-ether and world living also have an indirect effect on a person, a concealed effect. [The words world-chemism and world living were cross-marked with blue.]

The most obvious effect on a person comes from the most centrally located element, warmth. Next at hand for customary awareness are the effects of light and air. In the subconscious, however, lie the effects on the one side of water and earth, and on the other side of life and chemical gestalt of the world, chemical gestalt in the cosmos. This being so, then during one's life on earth a person should be aware that he most certainly lives in his human state in these middle elements [air, warmth, light were indicated on the board], and that his awareness draws on his relationship with water and earth, and with world chemism and world living.

Since this was always so, back when the old instinctive awareness had dominion, in which always a bit of clairvoyance was mixed, in the mysteries back then, the students at the proper stage of their development received the following injunction: trust in fire, trust in air, trust also in light, yet become mindful of the underworld of water and earth, become mindful of the over-world of the gestalt of world chemism and world life. For even as relations, as they are so firmly emplaced down in the unconscious, that just so in world living and world chemism the allurement of Lucifer may present itself, and out of earth and water the seduction of Ahriman. [The words Lucifer and Ahriman were written down, and so the schematic was complete.]

And esoteric guidance in the mysteries has always maintained that a person should find the proper relationship with these elements, that in the proper way he should feel his relationship with the elements. When a person ascends to imaginative living, then he feels this relationship with the elements immediately. In customary awareness we look about and get to know as external to us the presentation of animals, plants, and minerals. If we get to know the elements in their relationship with us we really may no longer just look about at the world, but must also feel inwardly, live inwardly in the very things that are in us and in the world at the same time.

For as we ascend to imaginative living, we can feel our kinship with the elements. And so, if we have developed this feeling properly, we formulate for ourselves a strong inner stance. And contained within the self-development of this stance is most certainly progressive, effective, and genuine human self-awareness. One becomes aware at the beginning only that he is human, when after a fashion he is let out into the world with which he is so inwardly interconnected, into this world in which he stands alone, in which the plants, animals, and minerals stand apart from us as strangers. But were one through an imaginative experience to become aware of his kinship with the earth, then one would feel himself no longer to be in his humanity, but he would feel himself in his animality, he would then feel his inner human kinship with the multiplicity of beings of animal nature, of animality.

And if a person feels himself united with the water-existence on earth, then he becomes aware: yes, you are actually related, are akin to plant-nature. It is something in you, something likewise sleeping, likewise dreaming in the world, just as it is in plant-nature.

And if a person were to become aware of his kinship with the air, then he would feel the mineral existence in himself. He would feel as he does when some sort of mineral preparation on his whole skin fills him totally within.

A person feels, as soon as he with his imagination enters the world of the elements, that he is related, is akin to animal, plant, and crystal. And a person feels quite different in regard to these realms of nature, for he feels a self-other unity, a belonging together. He feels the inner kinship which he has with these realms, somewhat in the following manner.

One looks about on the animal realm. One observes the beasts of burden, as they slowly place one foot in front of the other. One observes the vibrant animals, such as the flittering birds. One observes everything in the nature of animals that is in motion, pervading the world with movement out of its own being. Then a person says to himself, that all that rules in the innermost being of the animal nature is evidently the same, manifestly the same, as his own will. And he feels the kinship of his own will with the nature of animals.

At the same time, however, one feels something further. A person becomes afraid of himself. And what would be preferable, soon after entering the esoteric life when a person feels this fear of himself, would be not to immediately be held back by it, but by means of it to acquire a higher craft of soul. But even before, when someone becomes aware that actually this human structure is in this manner in us, even as we stand alone with nature’s realm external to us, even as we are able to observe it externally, then one feels that the earth, in its elemental reality, simply does not yet turn us into human beings, but into animals. There we are animal. By virtue of earth, we are animal. And as the earthen is always there, so ever at hand is the danger that we may sink down into animal nature. If and when one considers this, not just with abstract theoretical knowledge, as the person of today is used to, but rather feels it, then one comes to fear that at any moment he may fall down and under into animal nature. But at the same time this fear bolsters, encourages one henceforth, to wish to raise oneself above this animality, to strike out from a life in the elements, and in spite of the alien world all around, nevertheless to strike out at once into a life of humanity. Recognizing your relation to the world, recognizing it with feeling, that is just the thing that leads into real esotericism.

And furthermore, when a person feels his kinship with the water-world, the water-element, then he becomes aware that on the ways of water we would not be as humans are, for we would be like plants. And our feelings, that have a certain dreamy quality, as I have often delineated to you in other venues, my friends, our feelings forthwith would have the tendency to be of the quality of plants. Now try most intimately to delve into your most gentle feelings, and you will be able to experience the plant-quality of the life of feelings. And then the feeling will come to you, that threatening you is not only the danger of sinking down and under into animality, but also the danger of living in the weakened awareness of a plant, of sleeping, of dreaming. But this feeling of weakness, albeit sitting in the depths of awareness, must be transformed in your feelings, in order for you to awaken into human existence. Fear of animality must be transformed with courage, in order to lift oneself up to the human. The feeling of weakness in plant existence must be transformed with an inner call to awaken, to bring oneself with inner force into the world of the awakened human.

And were someone to become aware of living in the ways of air, then, if he becomes aware of it, then he observes that in effect all thinking, unknown to humanity, that in effect all thinking is none other than rarefied breathing. Thinking is rarefied breathing. The thoughts within which we live are through and through processes of rarefied breathing. Inflowing breathing, mid-breath pausing, and out-breathing are working, I might say, on the one side by groping about in our circulation of blood, although on the other side by the rarefied vibrations of the brain-organ. And as breathing continues on in the brain-organ it becomes thinking in the physical world. Sublimated breathing, breathing becoming sublime, is what thinking is.

Whoever strides ahead into imagination certainly no longer trusts merely to this sort of abstract reasoning, which with much else weak and flimsy lives in the brain. Whoever strides ahead into imagination perceives in-breathing as the broadening out of breath into the brain. He feels how the breath broadens itself out. When the breath spreads itself out, so that in a certain sense it is consummated, then cohesive ideas develop, cohesive conceptions. When the breath is otherwise consummated and wells up within, inwardly-moving conceptualizations arise. It is merely a refined breathing process, moving through us and welling up; we characterize it as conceptualization, as thinking.

At once, however, as one is feeling, "I am breathing in, I draw the breath from around about into the brain, and I let the breath impinge upon my ear," so would he feel, "it presents itself to me as thoughts, these things that I perceive as tones, bells, and whistles. And as I let the breath beat upon my eyes, it presents itself in what I see as color. It is really the inner speech of the breath that takes its effect as concepts. When the breath, totally refined, beats on the organs of sensation, it produces concepts. But if one were to be aware of this, to be aware of himself at once as thinker and as breather, then one would feel this process of thinking, this refined breathing, as an organized mineral substance, as an organized stone or crystal, filling one up.

You know that oxygen transforms itself in humans into carbonic acid. The connection with carbon in the finely-diffused multiply-branched arborization of the breath in human heads really displays itself there as an entrapment of carbonic acid. That is a process of mineralization. And the longer one lingers there, inwardly immersing oneself in carbon's entrapment of oxygen, in such measure may one grasp the mineralization process. One may grasp carbonic substance itself, the element carbon, the carbonic. And the carbonic is the Philosopher's Stone. Manifesting inwardly in human beings the carbonic is the Philosopher's Stone.

You may glean much from the old instinctive clairvoyants, in how they described the Philosopher's Stone. You will find that all over the world they described the Philosopher's Stone, not known by the common man, yet everywhere to be found. One can discover it everywhere. A person can find it where it lies, waiting to be discovered. It is to be found on the earth. It is very exactly described, how one discovers the carbon substance by burning wood. It can be discovered everywhere, this Philosopher's Stone. Carbonized material is what it is. It is contained in the veins of coal in coal-mining operations. It is also contained in the rarified breathing process. In a person, however, it is a process of nature, this incinerating process of coal, of coal that is living, but still a process of mineralization. … [Here the rapid tempo of speech made stenography somewhat less than reliable.]] A person feels inwardly turned to stone …crystalized, mineralized in his mineral nature through this process in the life of the wafting air, as one feels implanted in his plant-nature through the life of the ways of water, and as one feels animated in his animal nature through this process in the life of the earth.

This is what the Guardian gives to the human being in admonition, that a person should become aware of his relationship with the realms of nature. We have these admonitions from the Guardian of the Threshold for this reason, given to human beings as spoken meditative verse. If and when a person with deep emotion, with earnest sensitivity allows them to work on his heart and mind, then he will become somewhat aware of his kinship with the element of earth, which is related to his will, with the element of water, which is related to his feelings, and with the element of air, which in this manner, as I have just depicted for you, is related to his thinking, to his conceptualization. [Two lines were written on the blackboard.]

You stride into earth being’s helm¹
With deployment of your force of will;

That remains totally unknown for customary awareness. Every time we exercise our will to do something, we actually clamber down into the element of earth. But customary awareness knows nothing of this. The moment this clambering down becomes known, the person is changed from humanity into animality, and appears to himself as some sort of animal, at least in the etheric gestalt, into which he is looking, he appears changed into some sort of animal. One certainly does not feel right away exactly like an elephant or exactly like an ox, but it will be so, to such an extent, for in the element of will, one can bring to expression the world of the ox, the world of the elephant, or the world of the eagle. [Three more lines were written.]

Enter as thinker the earth domain,
And thought-power will show you yourself
As your intrinsic animality;

But such an admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold, my friends, is not there for the purpose of being taken up as an idea, as a theory. It is there in order to become experienced by all human beings. If a person looks into what is within the will, he will become aware of his own animality, then he will become consumed with self-fear, but all of this must metamorphose, in courage, in courage of soul. Then one comes a step further. Then he comes into the spiritual world. [The verse was continued on the blackboard.]

The fear of yourself
Must change you in courage of soul. ²

There we have the first clambering down and under, into that realm where the Ahrimanic powers work so strongly and effectively. Our proper attitude is shown to us at once by the appropriate declamation, the admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold.

You stride into earth being’s helm
With deployment of your force of will;
Enter as thinker the earth domain,
And thought-power will show you yourself
As your intrinsic animality;
The fear of yourself
Must change you in courage of soul.

As a general rule, to attain what is best for our spiritual progression, is to undergo something that takes us down and under. When we encounter something that takes us down and under, as this fear of one's own animality appears, when we overcome this, when we metamorphose it by an inner action, in courage of the soul, then it will become the impetus to a higher human state of being. We need this fear in order to move up and on in the spirit.

The other clambering down, in the ways of water, we meet in the following admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold, for the words which I impart to you are the words of the Guardian of the Threshold, whom we meet in the following admonition.

You live with water being
Only through feeling’s dream-weaving;
Surge awakening into water existence,
And the soul will reveal itself in you
As plant existence dank and dull;
Then lameness of yourself
Must lead you on to wakefulness.

The metamorphosis conversely of this sleepy dreamy way of feeling, when we clamber down and under in full awareness, will be for us to emerge as one awake. [The second stanza was now written on the board.]

You live with water being
Only through feeling’s dream-weaving;
Surge awakening into water existence,
And the soul will reveal itself in you
As plant existence dank and dull;
Then lameness of yourself
Must lead you on to wakefulness.

And when a person feels his kinship with the airy being, even in customary awareness, then he feels his kinship truly. He does not have to clamber down so deeply into the unconscious. Nevertheless, there still is the scent of Ahrimanic allurement in this descent. And yes, when we are living in our memories, living in our thoughts of the past, we are inwardly communing with breathing. When we have rarefied customary breathing in thinking about what is in our surroundings, then admittedly there is no danger at hand. When memories arise, however, the breath working from inward out, then once again a danger is at hand, exactly when this danger is most easy to observe. And for this descent through thinking into reflection, into musing, in which we deal primarily with thinking of notions of the past, for this the Guardian of the Threshold gives us the following admonition. [The beginning of the third stanza was written on the board.]

You muse in wafting ways of air
Only in memory's picture-forming;
Enfold willingly airy being,

One can do this, my friends, if with the same degree of inner activity, with energy, one arrays one thought upon another, much as a person does concerning external affairs. A person is used to exerting himself in moving a chair from one place to another. A person is not used to packing off a thought from one spot to another. He wants to think only along normal channels concerning external appearances, as things are given to him. He wants a book to display a succession of thoughts, he wants a newspaper to display a succession of thoughts, and he is satisfied when that is the case. It is just as if you were waiting expectantly, and rather than exerting your own will externally, deploying the force of your will, you were waiting to somehow be activated by an objective power, for example whenever you might want to move your arm to place it on a chair. It would be as if some sort of spirit were standing there and continually placing one of your legs in front of the other, so that you could walk. In one's train of thinking a person is just so, as it were, as if he were counting on one leg being placed in front of the other, in order to walk. [The next lines of the third stanza were written on the board and spoken.]

And your intrinsic soul will threaten you
As cold observing stone;

This is to become mineral-like, and whoever is not familiar with imagination, just does not know how mineral-hard customary thinking is. Customary thinking is hard as stone. One really feels the crusty abrasiveness of this thinking, once one has achieved entry into the spiritual world. Thinking is actually painful when it veers off into abstract forms. Whoever has spiritual life, can in any case still live with whatever emerges in thinking out of human feelings, with whatever emerges in thinking out of human impulses. He can live with himself, when animosities and scornful outbursts emerge externally out of human nature in thoughts, but he feels inwardly wounded by crusty abrasiveness, when the abstract thoughts of present-day civilization penetrate into his organization. What can be inflicted on present-day thoughts is such that even the sentence, "And intrinsic soul will threaten you as cold observing stone," does not make it clear. But when a person knowingly descends into the realm of memories, into the realm of the airy ways, when one’s breath is taken away, in and by the grasp of conceptualization, then it will be as I have depicted. But this inner death in thinking, this icy death, must in turn inflame us to a contrary force, even in thoughts it must call forth spirited vitality by means of inner force. [The stanza was completed on the board.]

Yet your selfhood’s frigid death
Must weaken and yield ³ to spirit fire.

These are the three admonitions concerning the underworld, the world of the lower elements, addressed by the Guardian of the Threshold to whomever comes to the Threshold. Here he portrays the human being’s need to become aware, if he would become a knower, of his inner kinship with the three realms of nature, how he must become aware through his kinship with the earth-beings of his animality and thereby of the nature of the animals in his vicinity, how he must become aware through his kinship with water-beings of his own plant-like nature, and thereby the nature of the plants in his vicinity, how he must become aware through his kinship with the air-beings of his own innate mineral-crystal-realm, his innate mineral-being, his innate stone-nature, and thereby the essential nature of the mineral realm in his vicinity.

Fear, lassitude, and death, as the negative attributes, must thereby not just develop, but must metamorphose into the positives, into spirituality, leading into attributes of soul courage, awakening, and flaming exhilaration.

This is indeed what the Guardian of the Threshold calls out step by step, first the inner feeling of fear in descending into animality, then the inner feeling of powerlessness in the lassitude of plant-existence, and then finally the yearning in the face of the chilling freezing consciousness of stone-existence, the yearning to develop exhilarating fire.

So sounds forth the three-part admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold.

You stride into earth being’s helm
With deployment of your force of will;
Enter as thinker the earth domain,
And thought-power will show you yourself
As your intrinsic animality;
The fear of yourself
Must change you in courage of soul.

You live with water being
Only through feeling’s dream-weaving;
Surge awakening into water existence,
And the soul will reveal itself in you
As plant existence dank and dull;
Then lameness of yourself
Must lead you on to wakefulness.

You muse in wafting ways of air
Only in memory's picture-forming;
Enfold willingly airy being,
And your intrinsic soul will threaten you
As cold observing stone;
Yet your selfhood’s frigid death
Must weaken and yield to spirit fire.

And as we come there [The lower part of the schematic was indicated.] into Ahriman's realm, and by means of the Guardian of the Threshold are admonished and rescued from the seductive art of Ahriman, so we press on to the other side, [The upper part of the schematic was indicated.] in which from where we stand in life on earth we will forge ahead into the esoteric, into light, world chemism, and world living.

We absorb, we gather up the light. Usually, we do not immediately know that the light, when it flows in through the eyes, actually unites with the breath. Warmth of course lies in between. The breath of air unites with the light [The middle part of the schematic was indicated.] The conception evolves from the perception. We live in the light, in that we build thoughts for ourselves, and just so, in accordance with the other side, in accordance with the lower realms, we live in the air, in the breath. We hold thoughts in retention by means of the light. We don't realize it, but thoughts can live in us only if they are illuminated by light, if the breath is illuminated by light.

For those who ascend through imagination, thinking is a gentle inspiration of breath, that, as the light is inwardly taken hold of, is fully illuminated, resplendent, vibrant.

There go the thinned-out waves of breathing. [Waves were drawn.] They start to glow in the light [yellow], for the light in spiritual science bestows significance on all that works primarily through the senses. Not only that which works effectively through the eyes, but also what works effectively in sound is light, and also what works effectively in the sense of taste, insofar as we have taken note of it and so it has come to light. All that we have taken note of through the senses has come to light, is light. But if and when we become aware of how this thinking, this having thoughts, is just rarefied breath, upon which light beats and interweaves, then it is most certainly so, as when a person wishes to observe the surface of the ocean, and on the surface of the ocean sees not just sunlight dancing off the waves [red on the yellow light reflection], but dwells there, catching the scent, feeling the weaving of the waves with the sheen of reflections, it is just so that all this may be taken to heart and mind, insofar as one experiences it inwardly.

And here enters the allurement of Lucifer, for to some extent it is immensely beautiful, and to some extent induces an immense desire and an immense complacency. True inner lustful desire creeps over a person. He easily falls prey to the allurement, the seduction of Lucifer, who wishes to draw a person away from this world, into a world of beauty over which Lucifer himself has dominion. This allurement would wrestle a person away from the earthly elements and heave him up into the angelic, into the spiritual realm, so that after every sleep he would no longer descend into the physical body. In this manner enters the seduction of Lucifer, ever-so-much in contradistinction to the thicker elements, into which the Ahrimanic seduction enters.

But it has been so arranged, that just here we hear the admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold, and are not drawn into this realm without holding fast to the determination never to forget the many needs, the many woes of earth. Then our bonding with earth existence, that of course we must wander through, will be strongly established. And so sounds forth the admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold.

You hold of light’s radiant might
Thoughts alone fast within;
When light’s radiance thinks by itself in you,
So will untruthful spirit-being
Arise in you as self-delusion;
Reflection on the needs of earth
Will hold you in humanity.

[The first stanza of this mantra was now written on the board.]

You hold of light’s radiant might
Thoughts alone fast within;
When light’s radiance thinks by itself in you,

For a person will be totally changed through the imagination of the appearance of light, with thoughts no longer held in their abstraction, but rather as light playing over the sweep of breath.

So will untruthful spirit-being
Arise in you as self-delusion;
Reflection on the needs of earth
Will hold you in humanity.

As we ascend further into the etheric element, then the Luciferic allurement becomes still more intense. Coming into consideration now, are not just our thoughts, in which it is comparatively easy for us to find our way, but rather the dim element of feelings. For the only part a person holds of the gestalt of world-forming-design, which is working and weaving cosmically in the chemical ether, the only substantial part he holds fast to is in his feelings. And when he then imaginatively ascends out into the flow of this world chemistry, it is certainly not the way it is in a jovial philistine narrow-minded earth-chemistry laboratory, where the chemist stands by the laboratory table and all is external to him, but in ascending he must, the person must, in all the blending and separating of the stuff coming into himself, he must himself be drawn in. So he becomes himself a cosmic chemist. His own chemical processing is interwoven there, and in this existence, interwoven with the gestalt of world-forming design, he feels the Luciferic allurement in the design as a powerless becoming. For the person is thrown into a sort of willful lustful desire, knowing that he can indeed be spirit. He will no longer return, if he does not recollect the necessary tones of earth. He will be made powerless, in not being able to come again into his humanity. He must take great care in this soul-powerlessness, just as soon as he approaches this world, in regard to the love he has acquired for all that is of value on the earth, for the value of the earth.

You hold of world chemism

so says the Guardian of the Threshold:

Feelings alone fast within;
When world⁴ forming feels by itself in you,
So will powerless spirit experience
Smother⁵ your self-possession;
Yet loving the value of the earth
Will save your human soul.

[The second stanza was now written on the board.]

You hold of world chemism
Feelings alone fast within;
When world forming feels by itself in you,
So will powerless spirit experience

that comes at this level from Lucifer

Smother your self-possession;
Yet loving the value of the earth
Will save your human soul.

A person can only attain his cosmic intent by becoming angelic at the proper time. During the Jupiter evolution the man of today will certainly ascend to angelic existence. Lucifer's seduction consists of affecting people out of time, trying to make them into angels still in the Earth evolution, into stunted angels. Then would the souls of men be lost, and a stunted angel-soul would emerge. So we should attend to the admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold.

Yet loving the value of the earth
Will save your human soul.

The most intensive seduction is in the last element, in world life, when we ascend into global world life. We hold some of this fast within our will, but it is held as if in sleep, as I have often related to you. If it would be awakened in imagination, if we would be aware, instead of our well-circumscribed life on earth that is enclosed within our skin, of our experiencing world living, then we would be dead in an instant. For to live knowingly in the general earth-life, means undergoing death as an individual being. Universal life kills us, if and when we grasp it. Similar to the insect flying into a flame, entranced by the fire, by the light, and dying the instant it flies too close, in a similar manner individual life dies in the general world living, when it is entered knowingly with one's own spirit. And as the animal, out of an immense lustful desire, flutters into the flame, so does the person as an individual die in his spirit within the general, the cosmic life.

We ought not to suddenly be thinking of ourselves venturing into this element, if we have not first built up in ourselves a god-devoted, a spirit-devoted earthly will, namely, for us to be fully aware, that upon the earth we carry out the intentions of the gods. If we infuse ourselves with this god-devoted will, up to the point of inner sacrificial fervent love, then we will not let ourselves be enticed into becoming degenerate angels. Instead, so long as human existence is essential for the being living in us, we will remain human. And so sounds forth the admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold.

You hold of world life
Will alone fast within;
When world living fully captures you,
So will ruinous spirit rapture
Slay your experience of yourself;
Yet spirit-devoted earth-willing,
Will allow the god in man to rule.

[The third stanza was now written on the board.]

You hold of world life
Will alone fast within;
When world living fully captures you,
So will ruinous spirit rapture
Slay your experience of yourself;
Yet spirit-devoted earth-willing,
Will allow the god in man to rule.

And so, we have here the three-part admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold concerning the upper tier [of the schematic], concerning the etheric elements.

You hold of light’s radiant might
Thoughts alone fast within;
When light’s radiance thinks by itself in you,
So will untruthful spirit-being
Arise in you as self-delusion;
Reflection on the needs of earth
Will hold you in humanity.

You hold of world chemism
Feelings alone fast within;
When world forming feels by itself in you,
So will powerless spirit experience
Smother your self-possession;
Yet loving the value of the earth
Will save your human soul.

You hold of world life
Will alone fast within;
When world living fully captures you,
So will ruinous spirit rapture
Slay your experience of yourself;
Yet spirit-devoted earth-willing
Will allow the god in man to rule.

It is the practice of recognition, of inner knowing, that will be brought to you in these lessons, my friends. And the things given to you in this way, you should take in and understand as a simple description of theoretical matters, but rather, in order to experience the heart of the matter, you must put it in its proper perspective. The actual and truthful perspective, is that everything said in these lessons is the specific instruction of the Guardian of the Threshold himself, emerging directly out of what a person can receive, in discussions with the Guardian of the Threshold. For the intention here in these Class lessons, my friends, is not to give theories. The intention is to allow the spiritual world itself to speak. This was spoken about in the very first lesson, about how this school should be seen as having been established by the spiritual world itself.

This has been the nature of all mystery schools. In mystery schools people speak as entrusted by the spiritual guardianship of the world. And this must remain the nature of mystery schools. This is why it has been stipulated so strongly in earnest, that each and every participant in this class should make it come alive, and should enshrine it. Certainly no one can be a real member of this school of spiritual life without this serious demeanor. This is just what I would like to direct your attention to once again, quite seriously. Take up this school as having been constituted immediately out of the will of the spiritual world itself, which the school seeks merely to interpret in a manner proper for our period of time, for the era we have entered into, in which the darkness has passed and a light has once again come forth, a light that at first admittedly externalizes itself imperfectly upon the earth, as human beings still retain the old darkness. It is there however. And only those who understand that the light is there, will enter into the ways and means of this our spirit-school in the true sense.

• 1. Das Heft = the haft, meaning the handle of a tool which you hold in your hand. On a psychological level more properly, it is earth-being’s helm, although realm is probably good enough.
• 2. The fear changes you, and you change yourself in soul-courage. It is not fear that changes to courage.
• 3. weichen: Weichen is an ancient English and German word meaning “to be weak or soft,” but in German it has veered off to include the meaning “to yield,” and in English to include “to weaken in moral strength.” To adequately express this, it should be translated as “Must weaken and yield to spirit fire.”
• 4. Welten is cognate with world. The entire physical-material universe is the cosmos (Kosmos in German). Cosmic rays were initially mysterious, although we now know that they come from supernova and black holes, so cosmic in English acquired the secondary meaning of powerful and mysterious. A third meaning is cosmetic jewelry and makeup. The cosmetic adornment of the world-all is the cosmos. Our entire world, however, is quite a bit more than the cosmos, as it includes inner worlds (such as the world of mathematics, the world of education, and the spiritual world). We must translate various forms of Welt as world and never as cosmos or universe.
• 5. Ersticken: What does one do with a stick? A walking stick doubles as a fight stick, and with the prefix er- it becomes an internal action. You stick someone with emotional barbs, you stick it to someone until the person becomes overwhelmed, stifled, smothered, choked up, and loses his self-possession.