The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Our study of the Michael Mystery was irradiated by thoughts of the Mystery of Golgotha. For, in effect, Michael is the Power who leads man towards the Christ along the true way of man's salvation.

[ 2 ] But the Michael Mission is one of those that are repeated again and again in rhythmical succession in the cosmic evolution of mankind. In its beneficial influence on earthly mankind it was repeated before the Mystery of Golgotha. It was connected in that time with all the active revelations which the Christ-Force—as yet external to the Earth—had to pour down to the Earth for the unfolding of mankind. After the Mystery of Golgotha, the Michael Mission enters the service of what must now be achieved in earthly humanity through Christ Himself. In its repetitions, the Michael Mission now appears in a changed and ever-progressing form. The point is that it appears in repetitions.

[ 3 ] The Mystery of Golgotha, on the other hand, is an all embracing World-event, taking place once only in the whole course of the cosmic evolution of mankind.

[ 4 ] It was only when humanity had reached the unfolding of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul that the ever-continued danger which was there potentially from the beginning—the danger lest humanity's existence should become severed from the existence of the Divine-Spiritual—made itself fully felt.

[ 5 ] And in the same manner in which the soul of man loses the conscious experience in and with the Divine-Spiritual Beings, there emerges around him that which we today call ‘Nature.’ [ 6 ] Man no longer sees the essence and being of Humanity in the Divine-Spiritual Cosmos; he sees the accomplished work of the Divine-Spiritual in this earthly realm. To begin with, however, he sees it not in the abstract form in which it is seen today—not as physically sensible events and entities held together by those abstract ideal contents which we call ‘Natural Laws.’ To begin with, he sees it still as Divine-Spiritual Being—Divine-Spiritual Being surging up and down in all that he perceives around him, in the birth and decay of living animals, in the springing and sprouting of the plant-world, in the activity of water-wells and rivers, in cloud and wind and weather. All these processes of being around him represent to him the gestures, deeds and speech of the Divine Being at the foundation of ‘Nature.’

[ 7 ] Once upon a time, man had seen in the constellations and movements of the stars the deeds and gestures of the Divine Beings of the Cosmos, whose words he was thus able to read in the heavens. In like manner, the ‘facts of Nature’ now became for him an expression of the Goddess of the Earth. For the Divinity at work in Nature was conceived as feminine.

[ 8 ] Far down into the Middle Ages, the relics of this mode of conception were still at work in the souls of men, filling the Intellectual or Mind-Soul with an Imaginative content.

[ 9 ] When men of knowledge wanted to bring the ‘processes of Nature’ to the understanding of their pupils, they spoke of the deeds of the ‘Goddess.’ It was only with the gradual dawn of the Spiritual Soul that this living study of Nature, filled as it was with inner soul, grew unintelligible to mankind.

[ 10 ] The way in which men looked in this direction in the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul is reminiscent of the Myth of Persephone and of the mystery that underlies it.

[ 11 ] Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, is compelled by the God of the Underworld to follow him into his kingdom. Eventually it is achieved that she spends one-half of the year only in the Nether world and dwells for the remainder of the year in the Upper world.

[ 12 ] This Myth of Persephone was still a great and wonderful expression of the way in which Man, in an age of immemorial antiquity, had perceived and known the evolutionary process of the Earth in dream-like clairvoyance.

[ 13 ] In primeval times all the world-creative activity had proceeded from the surroundings of the Earth. The Earth itself was only in process of becoming, and moulded its existence in cosmic evolution from out of the activities of the surrounding world. The Divine-Spiritual Beings of the Cosmos were the creators and moulders of the Earth's existence. But when the Earth was far enough advanced to become an independent heavenly body, Divine-Spiritual Being descended from the great Cosmos to the Earth and became the Earth-Divinity. This cosmic fact the dream-like clairvoyance of primeval mankind had seen and known; and of such knowledge the Myth of Persephone remained—but not only this. For indeed, far down even into the Middle Ages, the way in which men sought to know and penetrate into ‘Nature’ was still a relic of the same ancient knowledge. It was not yet as in these later times, when men only see according to their sense-impressions, i.e., according to that which appears on the surface of the Earth. They still saw according to the forces that work upwards to the surface from the depths of the Earth. And these ‘forces of the depths’—the ‘forces of the Nether world’—they saw in mutual interplay with the influences of the stars and elements working from the Earth's environment.

[ 14 ] The plants in their varied forms grow forth, revealing themselves in many-coloured glory. Therein are at work the forces of Sun and Moon and Stars, together with the forces of the Earth's depths. The ground and foundation for this is given in the minerals, whose existence is entirely conditioned by that part of the cosmic Beings which has become earthly. Through those heavenly forces alone, which have become earthly, rock and stone shoot forth out of the Nether world. The animal kingdom, on the other hand, has not assumed the forces of the earthly depths. It comes into being through those world-forces alone which are at work from the surroundings of the Earth. It owes its growth, development and surging life, its powers of nutrition, its possibilities of movement, to the Sun-forces streaming down to the Earth. And under the influence of the Moon-forces streaming down to the Earth it has the power to reproduce itself It appears in manifold forms and species because the starry constellations are working in manifold ways from the Cosmos, shaping and moulding this animal life. The animals are, as it were, only placed down here on Earth from out the Cosmos. It is only with their dim life of consciousness that they partake in the earthly realm; with their origin, development and growth, with all that they are in order to be able to perceive and move about, they are no earthly creatures.

[ 15 ] This mightily conceived idea of the evolution of the Earth lived once upon a time in mankind. The greatness of the conception is scarcely recognisable any longer in the relics of it which came down to the Middle Ages. To attain this knowledge one must go back, with the true vision of the seer, into very ancient times. For even the physical documents that are extant do not reveal what was really present there in the souls of men, save to those who are able to penetrate to it by a spiritual path.

[ 16 ] Now man is not in a position to hold himself so much aloof from the Earth as do the animals. In saying this, we are approaching the Mystery of Humanity as well as the Mystery of the Animal Kingdom. These Mysteries were reflected in the animal cults of the ancient peoples, and above all in that of the Egyptians. They saw the animals as beings who are but guests upon the Earth, and in whom one may perceive the nature and activity of the spiritual world immediately adjoining this earthly realm. And when in pictures they portrayed the human figure in connection with the animal, they were representing to themselves the forms of those elementary, intermediate beings who, though they are indeed in cosmic evolution on the way to humanity, yet purposely refrain from entering the earthly realm, in order not to become human. For there are such elementary, intermediate beings and in picturing them the Egyptians were but reproducing what they saw. Such beings, however, have not the full self-consciousness of man, to attain to which man had to enter this earthly world so completely as to receive something of this earthly nature into his very own.

[ 17 ] Man had to be exposed to the fact that in this earthly world, though the work of the Divine-Spiritual Beings with whom he is connected is indeed present here, yet it is only their accomplished work. And just because only the accomplished work, severed from its Divine origin, is present here, therefore the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings have access to it. Thus it becomes necessary for man to make this realm of the Divine-accomplished work, permeated as it is by Lucifer and Ahriman, the field of action for one part—namely, the earthly part—of his life's development.

[ 18 ] So long as man had not progressed to the unfolding of his Intellectual or Mind-Soul, this was possible, without man's nature becoming permanently severed from its original Divine-Spiritual foundation. But when this point was reached, a corruption took place in man—a corruption of the physical, the etheric and the astral bodies. To an ancient science, this corruption was known as something that was living in man's nature. It was known as a thing that was necessary in order that consciousness might advance to self-consciousness in man. In the stream of knowledge that was cultivated in the centres of learning founded by Alexander the Great, there lived an Aristotelianism which, rightly understood, contained this ‘corruption’ as an essential element in its psychology. It was only in a later time that these ideas were no longer penetrated in their inward essence.

[ 19 ] In the ages before the evolution of his Intellectual or Mind Soul, man was, however, interwoven still with the forces of his Divine-Spiritual origin, so much so that from their cosmic field of action these forces were able to balance and hold in check the Luciferic and Ahrimanic Powers that reach out to man on Earth. And from the human side enough was done by way of co-operation to maintain the balance, in those actions of Ritual and of the Mysteries, wherein the picture was unfolded of the Divine-Spiritual Being diving down into the realm of Lucifer and Ahriman and coming forth again triumphant. Hence in times prior to the Mystery of Golgotha we find in the religious rites of different peoples pictorial representations of that which afterwards, in the Mystery of Golgotha, became reality.

[ 20 ] When the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was unfolded, it was through the reality alone that man could continue to be preserved from being severed from the Divine-Spiritual Beings who belonged to him. The Divine had to enter inwardly as Being, even in the earthly life, into the Organisation of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul which, during earthly existence, has its life from what is earthly. This took place through the Divine-Spiritual Logos, Christ, uniting His cosmic destiny with the Earth for the sake of mankind.

[ 21 ] Persephone came down to the Earth in order to save the plant kingdom from being obliged to form itself from what belongs only to Earth. That is the descent of a Divine Spiritual Being into the Nature of the Earth. Persephone, too, has a kind of ‘resurrection.’ but this takes place annually, in rhythmical succession.

[ 22 ] Over against this event—which is also a cosmic event occurring on the Earth—we have for Humanity the descent of the Logos. Persephone descends to bring Nature into its original direction. In this case there must be rhythm at the foundation; for the events in Nature take place rhythmically. The Logos descends into humanity. This occurs once during human evolution. For the evolution of humanity is but one part in a gigantic cosmic rhythm, in which, before the stage of man's existence, humanity was something altogether different, and in which, after this stage is passed, it will be something altogether different again; whereas the plant life repeats itself as such in shorter rhythms.

[ 23 ] From the age of the Spiritual Soul onwards it is necessary for humanity to see the Mystery of Golgotha in this light. For already in the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul there would have been a danger of man being separated, if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place. In the age of the Spiritual Soul a complete darkening of the Spirit-world would needs come about for human consciousness, if the Spiritual Soul could not strengthen itself sufficiently to look back in inward vision to its Divine-Spiritual origin. If, however, it is able to do this, it finds the cosmic Logos, as the Being Who can lead it back. It fills itself with the mighty picture which reveals what took place on Golgotha.

[ 24 ] The beginning of this understanding is the loving comprehension of the cosmic Christmas, the cosmic Initiation-Night, the festive remembrance of which is celebrated each year. For the Spiritual Soul, which first receives the element of Intellectuality, is strengthened by allowing true love to enter into this, the coldest element of soul. And the warmth of true love is there in its highest form when it goes out to the Jesus child who appears on Earth during the cosmic Initiation-Night. In this way man has allowed the highest earthly Spirit-fact, which was at the same time a physical event, to work upon his soul; he has entered upon the path by which he receives Christ into himself.

[ 25 ] Nature must be recognised in such a way that in Persephone—or the Being who was still seen in the early Middle Ages when they spoke of ‘Nature’—it reveals the Divine Spiritual, original and eternal Force out of which it originated and continually originates, as the foundation of earthly human existence.

[ 26 ] The world of Man must be so recognised that in Christ it reveals the original and eternal Logos who works for the unfolding of the Spirit-being of man in the sphere of the Divine Spiritual Being bound up with man from the Beginning.

[ 27 ] To turn the human heart in love to these great cosmic facts: this is the true content of the festival of remembrance which approaches man each year when he contemplates the cosmic Initiation-Night of Christmas. If love such as this lives in human hearts, it permeates the cold light-element of the Spiritual Soul with warmth. Were the Spiritual Soul obliged to remain without such permeation, man would never become filled with the Spirit. He would die in the cold of the intellectual consciousness; or he would have to remain in a mental life that did not progress to the unfolding of the conscious Spiritual Soul. He would then come to a stop with the unfolding of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul.

[ 28 ] But in its essential nature the Spiritual Soul is not cold. It seems to be so only at the commencement of its unfolding, because at that stage it can only reveal the light-element in its nature, and not as yet the cosmic warmth in which it has indeed its origin.

[ 29 ] To feel and experience Christmas in this way will enable the soul to realise how the glory of the Divine-Spiritual Beings, whose images are revealed in the Stars, announces itself to man, and how man's liberation takes place, within the precincts of the Earth, from the Powers which wish to alienate him from his origin.

(Christmas, 1924)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing Christmas Study)

[ 30 ] 137. The activity in the evolution of the World and Mankind which comes about through the forces of Michael, repeats itself rhythmically, though in ever-changing and progressing forms, before the Mystery of Golgotha and after.

[ 31 ] 138. The Mystery of Golgotha is the greatest event, occurring once and for all in the evolution of mankind. Here there can be no question of a rhythmic repetition. For while the evolution of mankind also stands within a mighty cosmic rhythm, still it is one—one vast member in a cosmic rhythm. Before it became this One, mankind was something altogether different from mankind; afterwards it will again be altogether different. Thus there are many Michael events in the evolution of mankind, but there is only one event of Golgotha.

[ 32 ] 139. In the quick rhythmic repetition of the seasons of the year, the Divine-Spiritual Being which descended into the depths of Earth to permeate Nature's process with the Spirit, accomplishes this process. It is the ensouling of Nature with the Forces of the Beginning and of Eternity which must remain at work; even as Christ's descent is the ensouling of Mankind with the Logos of the Beginning and of Eternity, whose working for the salvation of mankind shall never cease.

I

Dear reader, I cannot find the words to describe to you the impression that the poems that came to me today have made on me. Listen to the poet himself:

Year after year...
In the park
I tease the young girls,
who no longer blush, no longer smile.
Don't make a bad face!
They just keep quiet, look past me.

Cross their arms.
The distant sound of
chattering happiness.

Here,
where my sweetheart fell into my arms,
loud

Love sobbed
the red mouth of a flower is silent,
it was quiet around me.
My mother's coffin collapses under the earth!

And if you still haven't had enough, dear reader, I'll give you a second sample:

This morning I sang three love songs
over the melting snow
into the soft air.

At noon I was so hungry;
my dreams almost fell into my peas.
I stuffed.

Now the moon is shining.

From my heart
three hundred cats are screaming.

But now I won't bring you another sample. I love you too much, dear reader. But I had to tell you about the latest volume of poetry, “Neues Leben” by Georg Stolzenberg, which has just been published in Berlin by Johann Sassenbach. If you think it is intended to compete with the “Kladderadatsch”, which contains many a cheerful stylistic experiment in its “Correspondence of the Editorial Office”, you are mistaken. It is really and truly serious “modern poetry”, and the booklet is dedicated to no less a person than Mr. Stolzenberg's “friend” Arno Holz.

Mr. Georg Stolzenberg has truly discovered the new lyricism with his singing. On May 7, 1898, he announced this in the “Zukunft”, which is so suitable for “self-advertisements”. He says that he has been searching for many years to be able to put his feelings into the appropriate form. “Then I read some of the newest poems by Arno Holz. As soon as I grasped their essence, it was clear to me what had held back the development of a truly contemporary art of verse for so long: the thick tangle of words that even those of our poets who have long since been beyond criticism had to stuff by the cartload into their verse buildings so that there were no too large cracks, the compulsion to twist the reluctant thread of thought through the rhyme ear each time, the necessity to constantly make the word dance. With the technique created by Arno Holz, in which, as he himself puts it, ultimate simplicity is the highest law and [possible] naturalness seems to be the most intense form of art, lyric poetry is beginning anew, as it were.” And now enough. Stolzenberg's prose is worthy of his ‘poetry.’

II

Poetry is now blossoming in new ways. The editors of this journal have not yet reformed their tastes enough to be able to pass judgment on this latest artistic direction. Therefore, without passing judgment, they present readers with a few samples of these latest achievements. However, it should be noted that these lyrical creations are meant to be taken seriously by their creators.

The master, Arno Holz, leads the way. In his latest collection, “Phantasus” (Berlin, Sassenbach. Second issue 1899) contains:

I ride my winged steed
I whip my winged steed.
through!

Beyond shattered planetary systems, beyond glaciated
primeval suns, behind deserts of night and nothingness
shimmering new worlds grow - trillions of crocus flowers!

Now the students: Georg Stolzenberg, “Neues Leben” (Second Issue. Berlin 1899):

Spring wind
touches the skirts.
All the girls are beautiful.
They buy little bunches of violets
and laugh for no reason.
I
twirl my beautifully curled
Maikaterbart! [ruffled]

*

Robert Hess writes in his “Fables” (Berlin 1899):

The evening sky is shining metallic.
Under dark branches
a shepherd is blowing.
The goats are still gambolling.
mosquitoes dance.
A sheep looks at the setting sun.
Yuck!

Rolf Wolfgang Martens “Befreite Flügel” (Berlin 1899) contains:

In water boots,
with rolled-up sleeves,
he roams the primeval forests.
His gaze
measures the giant trees.
On the summit of Gaurisankar
he proudly builds himself a castle.
There he carouses with Ramses, Timur and Alexander the Great. I approach
I approach him and show him a colorful, shimmering
Indignant [meadow flowers]
he throws me down the stairs!

Play in three acts by Björn Björnson
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Björn Björnson is, as can be seen from his play "Johanna", a complicated personality. Firstly, he is a clever man who lacks the power with which real poets create. That is why he has a good understanding of an interesting problem that is in the air, but he cannot develop this problem so dramatically that one likes to follow him. Secondly, he is a man who understands stage routine and who could therefore write a good "play" if he wanted to exercise this ability, but at the same time he wants to be a distinguished artist. That's why his play hovers in the middle between "theater product" and work of art. Thirdly, he is a man who wants to be a free spirit, but who is only capable of replacing old prejudices with new ones. That is why he paints the bearers of outdated opinions as black as possible. And finally, fourthly, he is the bearer of a famous name. That's why his play is performed on stages that would hardly have bothered with it if it had been written by a common miller.

I'm sorry about the problem. Johanna Sylow is a talented girl who will probably go far in the musical arts if she can develop freely according to her talents. Her father is dead. Although he was a simple master carpenter, he had a rare love of art and a musical sense. He passed both on to his daughter. But she also received another heirloom from him, namely a groom. At the hour of his death, she had to promise him that she would seek her happiness in marriage to the theologian Otar Bergheim, for the caring father was of the opinion that he could die in peace, knowing that his beloved child would be under the protection of this faithful soul. Johanna now lives in a house with her mother, the widow Sylow, with her two siblings Hans and Johann, with her bridegroom and an old uncle. A bright future as an artist seems to be her "inner destiny". But how is she to reach her goal? Her mother is naturally stupid and understands nothing of her daughter's talents. The brothers are naughty wranglers who are always bickering and fighting and making such an unholy racket that Johanna can't work. The bridegroom is a good theologian who is determined to keep the promise he made to Johanna's father on his deathbed. He wants to be a firm support for Johanna in life, but he also wants to feel a little of that without which a love affair is not really possible: a kiss or something similar here and there. But Johanna lives too much in her artistic dreams to have time for such things. Moreover, the good theologian cannot bear his bride's artistry. He is constantly tormented by the thought that she will roam the world as an artist, while he, as a priest, must be pining for her somewhere. These two natures do not belong together; yet they seem to be chained together by the will of the deceased. What is to become of Johanna? A fine task for a true poet would be to show the terrible struggles the girl goes through until she is strong enough on her own to break the vow she has made to her father, or until she perishes because she is unable to do so. Björnson does things differently. Hans Sylow, the good uncle, fully understands his talented niece and does everything he can to pave the way for her to become a free artist. At the right time, Peter Birch, the impresario, is also there to take care of business matters, and Sigurd Strom, the poet with the free outlook on life, who raves to the girl about what lies dormant in her and what she is called to do - finally, to ensure that everything goes smoothly, a good friend who provides temporary accommodation when the good uncle, the rapturous poet and the clever impresario have brought the budding artist to the point where she runs away from her bridegroom.

The audience is shamefully deceived. He is promised an interesting conflict of the soul: he has to make do with an uninteresting plot and with people who are too insignificant to captivate us with the psychological conflicts that the poet wants to portray with them.

In addition to all this, the performance in the Deutsches Theater did not meet the expectations with which one goes to this house. Only Emanuel Reicher played Uncle Hans with the humor in which the role is intended. Lotti Sarrow seems to have none of the things that actors have to bring to their profession. The girl the poet had in mind is interesting - the girl he drew is less interesting - the girl Lotti Sarrow portrays is the least interesting.

If we dive down within us, we'll find a lot of beings there. This may seem strange to us at first, but the more we learn to look into spiritual worlds, the more we'll see that a number of spiritual beings are working in us—often to undo the destruction that we men bring about through foolishness. Let's ask ourselves where disease comes from. We know that every disease has a physical cause and also a spiritual one that must be looked for in immorality, passions or other mistakes in this existence but mostly in the previous one. The overcoming of every disease releases force, but this doesn't mean that one should drag out an illness as long as possible to make rapid progress. Everyone should do his best to get well fast. But if he's been sick for three weeks or six months, he should look at this as karma and bear it patiently and calmly.

But there's another reason why disease is something beneficial. Since the Lemurian epoch and on through Atlantis until the Mystery of Golgotha, mankind sank ever more deeply into matter. Through the fact that we follow our drives and passions, we were brought ever further away from the goals that the Gods set for us. Disease is what bends this downward impulse and gives us an upward direction again.

Modern science condemns theosophical teachings and calls them dreams, but just read John's Gospel or any theosophical book and one will see the enlivening, refreshing effect it has, whereas a materialistic or monistic book desiccates one's soul. And since purely materialistic thinking only uses up forces the consequence in the next existence is that such people will be feeble-minded. Their brain will be a spongy watery mass; they'll want to think, but won't be able to. This feeble-mindedness is a good thing that keeps these people from sinking irrevocably. For through the fact that the brain is kept from materialistic thinking, the eternal can work on the core of the man's being after two successive incarnations, and influence it so that it strives upward again.

Something you'll all experience sooner or later in meditation is that one feels entirely loosened, the etheric body expands, one feels carried out to distant world boundaries, and then suddenly, one feels as if one were riveted to this world again, that one can't get away from it; it's as if one were sitting in a vise. That's good. It's our karma from previous incarnations that holds us fast like this. If our exercise would immediately take us up into the spiritual world before we took care of our karma, the result would be a long fall. Mehazel is the leader of these hosts who fix us to the earth. Like Samael, Azazel, and Azael, we get to know him when we descend into our interior. Then we'll really see that our interior is a field of action for demons, and as it says in the Bible: My name is Legion. We're supposed to become acquainted with these beings on our esoteric path so that we become sensible and gradually outgrow them. Azael works in such a way that he harmonizes what arises through dullness with respect to the spiritual world. We take over Azael's work when we acquire equanimity. Equanimity doesn't mean to jubilate or to complain about pain, but to recognize the reality of karmic action in everything. We shouldn't just believe in the karma idea theoretically, but should sense that karma is active in everything that hits us. This is the scourging stage in Christian initiation, that is, one should calmly confront all the pains of life that hit us like the blows of a whip and know that they're conditioned karmically. That's true equanimity.

We know that the physical world is only an inverted mirror image of the astral world. A very important meditation to make the words “The world is only maya” effective is the following. Everything around is really there in reverse. What we see from above downwards is really there from below upwards. A plant's root is above and the flower down below. The starry heavens we have before us is the result of spiritual beings who are really active behind us. Any sound that's received by the left ear comes from the right. We must become familiar with these facts and also with complementary colors. If someone has a lot of red spots imagine that they're green, or imagine that projecting limbs are cavities. One imagines the green in a plant as reddish purple and a brown root as dark blue. One should permeate all of these exercises with reverence and devotion. That's the feeling with which we can hope to approach the world's Godhead; whereas God remains an abstraction to mere thinking. If we glow through our thinking with reverence, devotion and humility, we may hope to penetrate the spiritual world.

Today it's my duty to speak out of my occult experiences about the progress that we make through our exercises. Someone may do his exercises correctly for years and is also able to create that quiet that's indispensable if thoughts, feelings or visions are to enter our soul as a result of meditation, and may yet have the feeling that he's at the very same place that he was at the beginning. But this is not so. The main thing for an esoteric is for him to pay attention to his soul life, for this is so intimate that one's attentiveness must be very great if one wants to perceive anything.

If after doing our meditation conscientiously and well, we, for instance, wash and dress ourselves, our consciousness is devoted to this activity. Then we may have the feeling that: I did my things quite mechanically now; my thoughts weren't with them. And when we reflect on what our thoughts did, we can get a feeling of a quiet dream, as if it wasn't we who thought—it was as if what passed through our soul had thought in us. When we observe something like this, we increasingly get the feeling that something happens in us to which we can apply the mantric words: It thinks me. If we say or think these words in everyday life whenever we have a quiet moment, we'll find that they help and promote us in our soul life. But we must strictly observe one thing. When we say or think them to ourselves, a feeling of piety will arise in us, and we must connect this feeling with it every time we say the words. It would be wrong if someone didn't say the words at all so as not to say them with the wrong soul mood; instead, one must practice connecting them with the feeling of piety each time. Then we get the feeling that what thinks in us is related to the I, that the sublime beings who gave it to us are thinking in us. This is clarified for exoterics in our third mystery drama in the words: In your thinking world thoughts are living.

A second word that's mantric and that can help us if it's used correctly is It works me. We know that all the hierarchies work in us and through us, that we would be nothing without them, and so it's good to become increasingly clear that we're their work entirely. This is in the mantric words: It works me. We should think and say them with a feeling of holy devotion and shy reverence. In the Bhagavad-Gita, that sacred text, we have a conversation between Krishna and Arjuna that graphically tells us that we should do our duties and yet keep a feeling for the Gods' work alive in our soul. No other sacred text, no Christian one either, points to this in such a way. Krishna says: “You should be a warrior, priest or merchant, depending on which caste you belong to, and do your work conscientiously, for your destiny has placed you in your activity. But you should stand over your work with your I and feel that you're connected with the divine.”

A third word arises from the feeling that we must acquire when we make it clear to ourselves that forces stream into us out of the whole world space, that we get our head from here, our limbs from there, all our organs from various sides, and that they're also directed from there. We express this in the mantric word: It weaves me. We should always say and think this with a feeling of deep thankfulness when we return to our physical body in the morn by saying: I'm returning to something that I didn't weave myself; I couldn't become conscious again if you, Father Spirit, hadn't created my body for this, and I thank you for it in shy reverence.

We can do our meditation in such a way that we get the feeling: I'm not thinking it—it thinks me. Just as we dive into our bodies to become conscious in the morn, so we must dive down into something at death to get a consciousness—and that is the Christ.

That's what the verse tells us: Ex Deo nascimur—in the morning we dive down into the physical body through the Father Spirit; in Christo morumur—at the portal of death we must dive into the Christ-Spirit; Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus—to come to life in the Holy Spirit.

Dear attendees!

If today we are to speak about the value and significance of truth for the development of the human soul, then the old question may well arise for some: What is truth anyway? Can one speak in any way in general about what truth actually is? And if one cannot answer this question, how can one then possibly determine anything about the value and significance of truth for the human soul? Nevertheless, it is by no means the case that one cannot distinguish between approaching the truth and moving away from the truth. What Lessing really meant to express in his famous saying about truth is truly valid: If God were to extend to me his right and his left hand and in his right hand held the pure, full truth; but in his left hand held the eternal striving for truth, then I would say: Father, give me what you have in your left hand, the eternal striving for truth; for the pure, full truth is, after all, only for you.

It is true that man can only have an eternal striving for the pure, full truth; but it would be a mistake if, because of this, one were to fall back into the misunderstanding that one cannot distinguish between that which corresponds more and that which corresponds less to the ideal of truth.

Let us visualize, not so much through theoretical discussion as through an example, how there is indeed a tangible difference, so to speak, between what can be called truth and what can be said to have removed man from the truth. It is not at all true in general that everyone can have their own point of view regarding the truth, that one cannot distinguish whether what someone claims from their point of view comes closer to the truth or moves further away from it. In this context, we may recall the saying of a recently deceased American multi-millionaire, who, among other things, in addition to his occupation, which was certainly more lucrative in terms of his millions, was concerned with arriving at the truth about certain things through thought. In his aphorisms, he made a remarkable statement about the value of human beings: no person in the world is irreplaceable; indeed, one cannot even speak of a special value of the individual. If I – so he said – now lay down my work, numerous others will be found to take it up where I left it. If I withdraw from what I have been doing, I will easily be replaced, and when I die – so roughly he said – the railways will run just as before, the dividends will be earned just as before. In short, nothing special in the world will have changed with the departure of a person. And then he adds – and this is important –: It is the same with every human being.

Let us compare this so-called truth, which the multi-millionaire has expressed from his point of view, about the value and significance of man in the world, with a similar saying by the witty German art historian Herman Grimm, who said this at the time. When Treitschke died, Grimm said about his work and significance: When a man like Treitschke has passed away, only then do we realize what he actually meant to all those who had contact with him. Treitschke was one of those people – as Grimm says – who, when they stop working, cannot find a successor for their work. He makes one realize that individuals are irreplaceable in their value and significance.

They are different, these two statements about the value and significance of a person: one from the American millionaire, the other from the spirited German art historian Herman Grimm. I would like to add: Grimm did not add what the American millionaire added: That is how it is with every human being! Two points of view, one could say, if one wanted to judge lightly, to the effect that the truth can take on a special form for each person. Two points of view, one could say, about the value and significance of the human being.

Now, which is the truer? If you examine the two statements a little, you will notice a huge difference between the two. You just have to examine them according to certain characteristics that are not usually examined today. How does the millionaire take his point of view? Merely in terms of his own personality. He considers what would become of the work he has done up to a certain point in time; he judges entirely from himself and comes to the conclusion that the work he is giving up could be taken up by someone else at any moment, and therefore it must be the same for everyone. A very personal point of view confronts us here, which looks only at itself in order to arrive at the truth about the value and significance of the human being. And Herman Grimm, he does not judge anything about himself in this case, but about another personality. He judges in such a way that he completely disregards himself and is, so to speak, overwhelmed by something that is outside of him as a being. And that is precisely how he comes to judge the case, not making a general judgment from this individual case, but simply accepting the case as it is. We need only consider the difference in the two points of view to see what is characteristic in each case. In the one case, the value and significance of the human being is judged quite subjectively, quite personally, quite from one's own ego; in the other case, the ego is not involved at all. And if we really consider both statements, who could fail to feel that the one who judges impersonally, who disregards himself, allows himself to be overwhelmed, as it were, by the objective, has more to say about the value and significance of a human being than the one who judges quite subjectively, quite personally! This must be the natural feeling of everyone. Such a comparison shows that we must never say: point of view is just a point of view; but that there is a way of approaching the truth, of actually arriving at it in certain respects, if we try to fathom the truth by taking an impersonal approach. Or do we not feel that in certain respects, as Herman Grimm says, each person is irreplaceable? Not only great people are irreplaceable. Can the point of view of the American millionaire apply when one considers how irreplaceable a mother is for many a child, for example? Can one say that something can step into this gap to replace her? Oh, one will feel it as soon as one takes the point of view that there is a coming closer to the truth, even if there can only be an eternal striving for the pure, full truth.

So it is precisely with those things that have such value for the human soul that it is important to examine them sometimes in a very intimate and profound way. And with what we have gained from the simple example of personal and impersonal judgment, we have already gained a great deal precisely for the characterization of truth.

In the lecture on the mission of anger, we started from the assumption that what is actually the nature of the human soul, what we can call its soul nature in contrast to the human body, consists of three parts: the sentient soul, which is, so to speak, the lowest of the human soul members, the mind or emotional soul, which forms the second link of the human being within, and the consciousness soul, which is the third link. And we have already characterized that this sentient soul is the link in the human being within which we find desire, instincts, passions and so on. We have, after all, examined a part of this sentient soul ourselves by pointing to the element of anger and its effect on the sentient soul, and we have seen how the I is present in this sentient soul in a dull way, as it is still overwhelmed by the passions, drives, instincts, and so on.

If we ascend to the next higher level of the human soul, to the soul of mind or feeling, then the I becomes clearer and more luminous, and the I becomes a power in the human being that can perceive and understand itself. How does the soul of mind or feeling actually free itself from the sentient soul? The human being stands in relation to the external world. This external world makes its impressions on the human being; it gives him the rich world of color and light, of sounds, of warmth and cold, in short, everything we perceive through our senses. When we bring our soul into relationship with the outer world through its organs, then, in our sentient soul, joy and delight, suffering and pain, and so on, arise in relation to what we perceive outside in the world of color, in the world permeated by sound, in the world of taste and smell, and so on, through our perceptions. Everything that is connected to our perceptions in our sentient soul, our desires and instincts, makes up the lowest of the soul's members, so to speak, and in this lives, still unaware of itself, the human I, this center of the human being. But in this lowest limb of the soul also live the affects, the passions, the drives and desires. Man lets himself be easily carried away by them; his ego is not yet master over anger, annoyance, vexation; it lets itself be carried away by lust and suffering, by drives and desires, is submerged in them, is not the conductor, the actor in relation to these drives and desires. We can say that the I lives down there, brooding in the surging sea of the sentient soul; but what we call the mind or feeling soul cannot be distinguished from this surging sea of the sentient soul, that which we call the mind or feeling soul, unless the human being delves so deeply into himself that he connects in his inner life with what he has experienced in the outer world. We receive direct impressions from this outer world. We carry these away from our interaction with the outer world. Then we are alone with ourselves. There we weigh one joy against another, there we brood over our pain, we try to get over it or to delve even deeper into it. There we expand within ourselves what we have received from outside impressions. What the soul builds up within itself could not be worked through by it if the I did not do something with what has been received, if the I did not work in this soul. Stimuli from outside can come without the ego; man only has to face the outside world, the world has an effect on him. Like in a mirror, the outer world gives rise to pleasure and suffering, desires and instincts and so on in the sentient soul; but it is only when we turn away from this outer world and collect ourselves, when we process our instincts and desires, when we form a whole in our imaginations, that we say: We work our way through the ego from the sentient soul to the mind soul, then we internalize ourselves within our self, then we process what we have received from the outside. And this inner work is the content of the mind or emotional soul. And only then, when we are able to relate what we have built up to the outside world, when we have formed a realm of inner experiences through our inner life, when we have developed a sum of pleasure and joy in our soul that we call ' beautiful', for example, and then apply all this to the outer world; when we come to recognize something in the outer world as good, beautiful, true through the concepts we have formed, then we say we attain knowledge of the outer world. There we work our way up to grasping the outer world, up to the knowing, cognizing human being: there we develop the consciousness soul. This is initially the highest level of the human soul. Thus the sentient soul leads us from the outside in, we live in ourselves through the mind or emotional soul, and we find the way again to grasp the world through knowledge and understanding through our consciousness soul.

Within the sentient soul, we have encountered the element of anger, and in that anger we have found one of the preparers for the development of the I and the soul. A person who is not yet mature enough to form an opinion about what is true, just, and good will, by falling into righteous anger at the sight of some lie, some injustice, some evil, take a stand on this external world. Anger will, so to speak, indicate to him: This is not in accordance with you, [this is a discordance, an obstacle] and in his inner being awakens that which is called the ego, which opposes the outside world. Where we are inflamed with anger at something we cannot admit, there is the awakening of the ego. [And [the anger] develops this in the transition and ascent into the intellectual and emotional soul through constant internalization out of the developmental soul.] So if anger is something that a person must overcome in order to develop, we can almost say of anger: It has its value in that it can be overcome; if anger has only attained its full significance for a person when the has been transformed into love and gentleness, we can say that the most important thing for the mind or soul is that it presents itself to us as the element that, in the best sense, brings the two sides of the ego mentioned yesterday to development. If the human ego is to develop in an appropriate way, it must happen in such a way that, on the one hand, it becomes fuller and fuller. Only by developing a rich life of ideas and thoughts, a rich life of feelings, emotions and will within himself [and thereby strengthening his ego forces within himself], only in this way will he be able to embrace much of the world on the one hand – and on the other hand, the ego will be able to become a strong starting point for working outwards. The more his individuality develops, the more — we may say — a person is worth in the world as a human being. But we have already pointed out that this I is a two-edged sword, that on the other hand this I, by only aspiring to become richer and fuller in itself, can close itself within itself; that precisely by wanting to live only in itself, it closes the door to the outside world and thereby becomes impoverished. If, on the one hand, a person is to become as independent and strong as possible, then he must avoid impoverishing himself by closing himself off from the outside world by also cultivating the second aspect of the self, selflessness, the merging with the outside world.

Where is the element in human development that, by its very nature, does justice to these two sides of the I? There is nothing else that does justice to both sides of the I as much as truth does. Truth is something that, if it is to appear to us in its highest form, we can only find in the innermost part of our I. Only that which we have recognized as such through our I itself can be considered truth for us. Thus, the truth for the ego must be found in the innermost part of the human ego. We can say: Through the self, the truth for the human being is found. When the human being understands this character of truth, then he will say: It is precisely through the work for the truth that the ego becomes stronger in its selfhood in its inner strength; for truth is only achieved when the ego has to make an effort, because truth can only be found in the depths of the ego.

Hence the peculiarity of truth: we need nothing more than the work of our own ego if the truth is to have any value for us. Admittedly, in the case of present-day man, there are hardly any truths other than the simplest ones that take on such a form for him that the ego can really decide through itself. These are the simplest arithmetical truths. Once we have decided for ourselves that three times three is nine and not ten, then this decision, made in the innermost sanctuary of our ego, is enough to know that this is true. And even if millions of people were to say that three times three is ten, we would still decide for three times three is nine. This is valid for mathematical truths because they are clear and, so to speak, present themselves to us directly in their simplicity. Therefore, when we overcome this simplicity through the passions that assert themselves in the sentient soul, by the I working its way up into the rational soul, it must overcome the other affects in the same way as it overcomes anger. For only by casting out the instincts, desires, drives and passions that are in the soul can what a person experiences in the soul become truth. Where people disagree about the truth, where not everyone finds the same truths in their soul, it is precisely the urges, the desires, the passions that prevent them, so to speak, from truly seeing the circumstances of the truth transparently and brightly and clearly. The passions cannot have a say in simple mathematical truths. If, for example, passions were to arise regarding the transparency of mathematical truths, then many a housewife would certainly desire that if she takes three times three marks to market, it would make ten marks; for the passions speak in favor of this, but the simplicity and transparency of the mathematical truths do not allow the passions and desires to arise. In this case – in any matter at all, where we have managed to silence the passions and desires, we also clearly see the circumstances of the truth. In all the things in which we have not yet succeeded in silencing the passions and desires, we are not yet capable of deciding on the truth in earnest. But when we have succeeded in deciding on a truth, then the ego is in its inmost being the judge of the truth. Thus, the ego must feel itself in its power when it decides on the truth, when it acquires truth.

And again: once we have acquired the truth about something, we may say: this truth, although acquired in the most personal way, is the most impersonal of all; for we can find the same truth in all souls. When we have found a truth, it will take on the same form in millions of people who have also found it. Thus we will be able to communicate with the whole world about the truth. Thus truth is the most personal and thus it is the most impersonal. It leads most deeply into us, because there it must be decided, and it leads out again, because it applies independently of our arbitrariness. Truth is therefore the element in the life of the soul that has the most important mission in relation to this life of the soul. On the one hand, it educates the self to independence – for the self is the judge of truth – and on the other hand, it educates the self to selflessness, in that truth brings together this self with everything in our environment where truth is to be spoken at all. The two sides of the double-edged sword are best educated by the truth, and so the ego becomes strong to be led up from the surging activity of the sentient soul, where it still broods dull; so it becomes strong enough to be led up into the soul of mind or emotion, and at the same time it is prepared to be led up into the consciousness soul, where it comes out again to grasp the environment, to grasp the world selflessly. Thus we have characterized truth as the most important and essential element in the development of the I, in the work of the I on the three soul-members, the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. This is why truth is such a powerful educator of the ego, because it works on both sides. We just have to take it seriously. Only those who truly strive for the truth in their own selves, and only strive for the truth, who allow only the truth to determine their inner world of ideas, may hope that this truth will fulfill this implied mission for them. A great English poet rightly says of truth, hinting at its brittleness, hinting at the high demands it makes of us: “To him who prefers anything to truth, this goddess does not surrender.” Those who place their Christianity above truth will soon realize that they are placing their particular denomination above Christianity. But those who place their particular denomination above Christianity will soon realize that they are placing their sect above their denomination. And those who place their sect above their denomination will soon realize that they are placing their personal whims above even the teachings of their sect. So says the poet Coleridge. Truth reveals itself only to him who is in turn ready to surrender himself entirely to it. But now we meet this truth within ourselves in a twofold form. The I asserts its two sides, which we have characterized, quite well in relation to this truth. If we want to characterize these two sides of the I, then we must present to our soul the way in which truth presents itself to the I from the world.

We look into the world. World phenomena present themselves to our senses, that is, to our sentient soul. Those who want to form concepts, ideas, and images about the world but do not want to believe that this world is built from concepts, ideas, and images may as well admit that it is possible to scoop water out of a glass that contains no water. However nonsensical it would be to claim this, it is nevertheless true that we can draw from a world in which there are no ideas or concepts and create in our minds what we then have in our souls: ideas and concepts of the world. A world that was not built according to ideas, that was not steeped in wisdom, could never evoke a reflection in the human soul that represents concepts and ideas of this world as an inner experience. For what would our concepts and ideas be, through which the laws of the world are to be experienced in us, what would all science be, if the world were not built according to ideas? All science would be fantasy, reverie; for science is a sum of ideas and concepts. If there were no ideas and concepts, in other words, if there were no wisdom in the world, if the world were not interwoven and permeated by wisdom, then our wisdom would be folly; for it would be pure fantasy, pure error. We would imagine something in our soul as a picture of the world that is constructed quite arbitrarily. It only makes sense to create an image of the world with the help of concepts and ideas if one assumes that these concepts and ideas are present in the world and that the things themselves that present themselves to our senses arise and grow out of the wisdom of the world, out of the wisdom that flows and streams through the world. So we say to ourselves: Behind this world, which we perceive through our senses, which we feel and desire through our sentient soul, behind this world is wisdom. And we seek to approach this wisdom by working our way up in our soul to that which our mind-soul inwardly reveals as truth. Wisdom is there in the world; wisdom works its way out in our own soul as we ascend to the mind and consciousness soul. But when we relate to this wisdom in the world, we have to say: Oh, this wisdom is built into the world, incorporated into it. We human beings stand, so to speak, as belated observers in relation to this world and explore the wisdom that is implanted in it. [A large part of our striving in the acquisition of knowledge consists of appropriating what pulses and lives through the world as wisdom.] If we allow the wisdom that flows through the world to shine in us as truth, then we are truly the ones who come afterwards. And if we look at the development of humanity, [it shows us how, with all his doings and inventions, man falls short of the wisdom already achieved by the environment with its wisdom]. So we can say: A closer look at human development soon shows us how man, so to speak, stands behind the wisdom of the world with his truth. One can see this by taking a look at the historical development of humanity. In the school books, one can read how people gradually came to produce what we call paper from certain substances. Through human wisdom, people have learned to produce paper. Just as man makes paper out of certain substances, so the paper of the wasp's nest is made – for the wasp's nest consists of paper. The wasp's nest shows the art of making paper, which has been present in nature as wisdom for countless centuries and which man, in his historical development, has found afterwards. In this way, man is truly a thinker of what has been thought outside. A large part of our striving in the acquisition of knowledge consists in reflecting on the wisdom of the world, in appropriating within ourselves what pulses and lives through the world as wisdom. By relating to the world in such a way that we allow its wisdom to shine in us, we feel, precisely in the innermost essence of our I, that we are strengthening ourselves, that we are relating to the world with the substance that is outside as spiritual substance. We grow stronger as the wisdom of the world shines in our I as truth. This truth, which reflects the wisdom of the world, corresponds perfectly to one side of our ego, namely the side that we can call the selfless side. After all, everything we think about the world is there without our ego, it has been there long before we could think it. In grasping the wisdom of the world, we experience something that is outside of our ego. We pour our I out into the world, so to speak: we are completely world, we are completely given to the world, completely selfless, by reviving the wisdom of the world in ourselves. In this way we make ourselves selfless by completely giving ourselves, objectively giving ourselves, to the wisdom of the world, which, as the light of truth, is to shine in ourselves. That is one side of the truth.

The other side of the truth comes to us when we consider human labor. When we consider all the human ideas that we realize in the smallest and largest of things, whether it is an everyday idea or the idea of an inventor who invents a machine, for example, we have the resounding, productive, creative work of man in mind. First we have the idea, then we have what is the external expression of this idea or the consequence of the idea. We see what arises in us, what has not yet been thought in the world, springing from our I. We see our innermost being emerge in our everyday activities, in the activities that we can describe as the realization of the great ideas of the inventors. First there is the thought, we do not reflect on the thought, the sensory phenomenon is not there first, the thought is there first, in which the sensory phenomenon comes to us through our own action, we are the forethinkers and we are the ones who, after our forethought, enter the world creatively ; there we feel our I growing stronger on the other side; there we feel how the essence of our I has flowed out, feel that which we can call our selfhood; through which we become capable of seeing realized that which the I first experiences outside in the surrounding of our existence. There we feel that side of the I where we do not merge into something that exists without the I, but on the contrary, there we feel our inner activity, our selfhood. [Our I is in our deeds, our works, just as it has also worked first in our thoughts.] As a forward thinker, the I is truly cultivating its selfhood; as a backward thinker, the I is truly cultivating its selflessness. And in these two components of the entire inner life, the truth within our work and striving in the world confronts us as reflected truth and as thought-out truth.

Now we ask ourselves: Is there a mediation between these two sides? Just as life approaches the human being, so do the two sides of his ego approach each other, but still keeping the components of truth apart. Truth is indeed the great educator of both sides, but the way the ego appropriates this truth introduces a division. Is there anything where the two sides of truth confront us in the world? [But if there are such truths that existed before, before the ego, and the ego grasps them independently of the external world, then realizes them in the world, that is a truth that we can recognize as one of selfhood and at the same time of selflessness.] If there are such truths that, on the one hand, can be conceived before all sensual reality and yet are realized, not in machines and daily activities; but if we enact the truth independently of the external world and then see it realized in this external world; if the truth that presents itself to us as pre-thought can at the same time show itself to be formed entirely according to the pattern of the postulated truth: Such a truth would be one that particularly cultivates both sides of the self. Do such truths exist? It is precisely such truths that Theosophy or spiritual science seeks to provide for modern humanity.

Let us try to make this clear with an example. It has already been stated that it is the task of Theosophy to present the proposition: that which is soul-spiritual arises only out of that which is soul-spiritual, just as Redi, in another field, first presented the proposition: that which is alive arises only out of that which is alive. We have seen that this proposition follows from what we call the realization of the repeated lives of man on earth. The way in which spiritual research reveals that the innermost core of man's being re-embodies itself is not brought about by logical conclusions, but is an immediate realization of the clairvoyant consciousness. Just as a person with physical eyes sees color and light, so a person who has developed the inner, hidden powers of the human soul perceives the essence of the human being, which we can call the immortal, that lives in the human being and presents itself to the clairvoyant consciousness, that comes from previous embodiments and that goes to future embodiments. So, through supersensible knowledge, we have the concept of the re-embodiment of the human essence. So the spiritual researcher comes and says: Through my research I have established that the human being undergoes re-embodiments; he describes the re-embodiment, he conceptualizes it in the same way that modern natural science conceptualizes the sensory perception and intellectual acquisitions. With these concepts he presents himself to people. Such knowledge cannot be found through outer perception; it must be found through supersensible vision, through the development of those organs that we call the spiritual eyes and ears. But when it is found, it can be conceptualized, thought of, and given forms that we call the forms of truth. So, we have a truth before us that expresses itself in a way that is not possible through outer perception. We have a preconceived idea in contrast to external perception. Just as the thought, as the idea of the machine lives in the mind of the inventor, without him seeing it externally, so the thought of re-embodiment lives as a result of research in the spiritual world, it lives in the mind of the spiritual researcher, but then the message goes out into the world, then we can we can look at the outside world and say: We see how [for example, a child] from the first day of a human being [gradually] develops from the vague, blurred facial features into distinct forms, [into a fixed physiognomy], which slumbers in a dark background of existence. There we see the definite forms developing. And we say to ourselves: According to what the spiritual researcher tells us, we can easily understand this. What has been brought over from previous embodiments is the core of the human being, [who lives anew in the child and comes from a previous life], who works out what was indeterminate into definite forms. We look at the whole development and say: When we look at life and test life, then this life itself in its appearances shows us the truth of what the spiritual researcher says; and only bias can cloud a person's view to such an extent that he would not find the truth in the external sensory appearance of what the spiritual researcher brings down as a preconceived idea from the higher worlds. Thus the spiritual researcher brings his truths down from the higher worlds, and holds them up to external perception. What confronts us in the external world offers us the evidence for the truths from the higher worlds, in that we then understand the external world. We penetrate beneath things with what we bring to them as truths. Thus what has been thought out agrees with the outer world, as the inventor's idea agrees with the finished machine. Thus what is otherwise separate is united in the truths that Theosophy presents. There we have, as it were, nothing behind us. The theosophical truth is not found like the idea of an inventor — created out of nothing in a certain sense —, it is found through observation in the spiritual world. But it can be applied to the external sensual world. This theosophical truth is both a pre-thought and a post-thought. Therefore, it affects the human soul in a completely different way than all the other truths that we encounter. (By absorbing this truth, man unleashes his ego.

By immersing himself in the wisdom of the world, man loses his self, and his I becomes one that, so to speak, flows out more and more; it becomes impoverished of inner strength. By thinking ahead in his daily activities, by demanding that what has been thought ahead be translated into external reality, he wants to imprint his ego on the external world, he wants to see more and more in his surroundings what his self wills; he wants to imprint his self on his surroundings. In this way, he is completely absorbed in his selfhood, and has created an interest in making this I, quite apart from the environment, as strong as possible. We can see two possibilities for the education of the I. One is that the I becomes a completely reflective one, where it is completely devoted to the outer world, where it is more and more devoted to the outer world, where it does not grow stronger in its power. The other is where the self is not merely filled with ideas from the outside world, but should be filled by the will. In the first case, the self can become desolate in the will. We can experience that such people, who absorb objective truth in the most conscientious way, are weak in will. On the other hand, we can observe that those people who only want to impress their will on their environment become closed off from what is going on in the outside world, from what should awaken their interest in the wisdom-filled content of the world. Thus we see, so to speak, the thinking I developed in those people who develop in the first way, and the willing I in those who develop in the second way. But we can achieve harmonious interaction between the thinking I and the willing I by allowing spiritual-scientific truths to take effect in us. Then the two beneficent powers in the I will awaken. On the one hand, the I will let all the content of the world into itself, out of which it is born, and will enrich itself inwardly through what is poured out into the whole world as its spiritual content. On the other hand, it will gather itself together within itself in order to become strong within itself. Thus the ego will not be impoverished in either direction, but will become strong and healthy in both. And this is the health-giving quality of theosophical truth: on the one hand, it is as fully realized as the reflective truth, and on the other hand, it has the same effect as the reflective truth. Therefore, it is healing because on the one hand it pours into us all the beauty of the world and on the other hand makes our ego so flourishing and fruitful because it enables what grows in the ego to find its reflection in the outer phenomena. Through the theosophical truth, we develop our ego so much because it is the truth that is both premeditated and reflected. That is the healthy aspect of the theosophical truth. While we would see in a person who is only a reflective person, who only wants to comprehend the wisdom of the world, that he can, under certain circumstances, paralyze himself more and more in terms of willpower and that his inner weakness , that he becomes inwardly ill from lack of such power, we would see on the other hand that he who only wants to realize his will becomes inwardly impoverished because he has no connection with the world. On the other hand, we see harmony prevailing in all respects in the theosophist. The thought becomes more concentrated as it is seized by the confidence of realization. In short, by permeating itself with the theosophical truth, the ego becomes a point of passage for wisdom. There the will is enlightened and on the other side becomes the true center by having the premeditated truth with the postmeditated truth in relation to the world. Humanity will gradually recognize that the will, which can appear so dry and so sober to the one who merely wants it implemented in external reality, warms up to living feelings because it meets with the wisdom of the world; and again, that this wisdom, which can seem so dry to us when we merely reflect on the world, can seem individual to us when it meets with the living will in the ego. Wisdom and will must meet in the ego. This is the healthy, life-affirming truth that we not only produce mind-soul - or emotional soul - but mind-permeated mind-soul and mind-permeated emotional soul in the higher soul members, in the mind-soul, through the nature of the I, these two sides of approaching the truth.

Above all, in more recent times, no one has felt this so deeply as the person we have spoken about here many times before, who was as close to spiritual science as possible, who created the greatest poetic works, as Goethe. And a work by the later, older Goethe should serve as an illustration to what has been said today. Oh, Goethe knew clearly and distinctly that the way in which man confronts the truth depends on how he has developed in his own self. That truth is merely something objectively compelling was never Goethe's thought. That truth enlightens man all the more the more receptive he is, that was his fundamental conviction, which is little understood today. People come and say: Oh, we have long since gone beyond a certain way of grasping the truth. Science has led us to the point where we cannot help doubting that there is something spiritual in a living being. [Science has thoroughly driven out of us the belief that something spiritual is to be sought behind every material thing. It has driven out our belief in something like an etheric body or a life force, because science is close to showing how living substance can be composed of external chemical components. Don't you hear everywhere that we are told: We cannot recognize such fantasies as those presented by Theosophy, because our ideal is to produce protein, that is, something living, from dead matter in the laboratory. May a counter-question be asked here? After all the development of man, can what he expects about the composition of a living being decide anything? Can that decide anything for his beliefs about the spirit of the world? If you want to think about it, you can find external proof that nothing is decided about the belief in the spirit through something like the expectation that protein could one day be produced chemically in a laboratory. The one does not force the other at all, this can be proved historically. Ask what else people have believed in the past, for example, in earlier centuries, in the Middle Ages, they not only believed that they would succeed in synthesizing protein from carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and so on, they believed something quite different. Imagine the sentences in Goethe's Faust, where Wagner stands before the preparation of the homunculus; the ability to do this was a belief that existed in the Middle Ages. People believed that they could create something that was a small human being from external substances through the various processes they performed in the laboratory. However, this belief that they could create a human being from external substances did not cause these people to deny the spirit. Therefore, the denial of the spirit today does not arise from the compulsion of objective facts, but from the inability [to grasp the spirit] to rise within one's own soul to the kind of thinking that sees the conditions for professing the spirit. One must also consider such things, then one will understand what it meant that only the one who can work in the substance of the soul as the external naturalist works in the external substance can grasp the life of the soul.

And Goethe was one who could see deeply into the ideas we have presented today. Above all, he was aware of the contrast between reflective and pre-reflective truth. And he beautifully expressed this contrast in a wonderful little poem, his “Pandora”.

This “Pandora” was written in 1807; a lot of nonsense has been written about it. People said: This is a Goethean late work, in which Goethe presents all kinds of concepts in symbols. In a Goethe edition, by a much-praised German scholar, you can read the words: Well, what does that tell us, other than that we can form a concept of ourselves, that man represents what he thinks of himself? Goethe would have thanked himself for presenting to the world what he had “formed of himself.” Goethe himself may have once expressed himself in a manner that was not polite but clear about people's judgment of his late works.

Anyone who takes [Pandora] in hand [and lets it sink in], attentively and without prejudice, will recognize one of them. Oh, there are not many works in which the content is evaluated in such a wonderful way, in keeping with the style. It is the one in this work that can be called the light artistic hand. Read “Pandora” and, if you imbue it with your sense of style, you will admire the ease with which everything is shaped to suit the person and situation in question, whether in the verse structure or in the diction. One person speaks in this verse form, the other in a different, more lightly flowing style. Everything is easy in this “Pandora”. It is precisely in this that the greatness of Goethe having to leave this work a fragment is revealed. Even with a Goethe, such a powerful artistic accomplishment as that evident in “Pandora” is only possible for moments. Even for Goethe it was only sufficient for the beginning of Pandora; but then he lost his way, for he was too small to continue the work in the greatness that inspired him as an artist when he created the beginning. But that should not deter us from recognizing the greatness that is present in Pandora.

Goethe was very clear about people who say: Yes, what Goethe wrote in his youth, one can go along with, it is all full of poetic originality; but what Goethe allegorized in his old age, no reasonable person can understand. This was already the case during Goethe's lifetime – not with regard to Faust, but to his other works of later years – Goethe himself by no means held the first part of “Faust”, which is so admired, in the highest esteem. He knew what he had put into it in order to develop ever higher and higher; he knew within himself how much his later works stood above his earlier ones. And so he says something impolite, but clearly:

They praise Faust
And what else
In my works roars
In their favor.
The old Mick and Mack
Is very pleased;
The pack of rags and bones thinks
It would no longer be!

This judgment is justified in the face of the philistine critics of Goethe, who make Goethe into what they themselves are – at least something good comes of it! In recent times, our audience has been inundated with such interpreters of Goethe. [Let us take a closer look at the work in terms of our topic today:] “Pandora” contains on a large scale the problem of the reflective and the forward-thinking human being – [Epimetheus belongs to the former, Prometheus to the latter]. Zeus wanted to take away the existence of evolving humanity. Under Zeus's rule, humanity would have been doomed. Prometheus confronts Zeus. According to the legend, he brings man fire, language and writing. He is thus the one who gives people the opportunity to emerge from the state in which they used to be, where the ego brooded dull down in the sentient soul. Man was to develop his I more and more. It is a correct observation that everything to do with fire, for example, is somehow connected with human forethought. Travelers described how, in areas where they had made a fire, the monkeys, for example, came and warmed themselves, but it never occurred to the monkeys to stoke the fire themselves; that is, these animals of the highest species are not able to envision the future. These higher animals, which are closest to humans, certainly felt the pleasant warmth of the fire; they may also have felt some kind of thought in a dull form, but they still did not think the thought through to the point of maintaining the fire by adding wood, much less to think of further practical applications. It is precisely because man has mastered the element of fire that he has been enabled to make his ego the starting point of thinking ahead, [and thereby gradually to lead his ego to a higher level in ever-increasing measure].

Thus, in his “Pandora”, Goethe presents us with the two brothers, Epimetheus and Prometheus. There stands the one brother: Epimetheus. His name already indicates that he is the contemplative; he is devoted to that which is imprinted on the world as wisdom, those thoughts that can shine as truth in the human soul. He is not prepared to think ahead; in his soul he dreams the truth dream of the world, which is an afterthought conceived behind the wisdom of the world as truth. Such is Epimetheus. Prometheus, on the other hand, is devoted to the other one-sidedness; he wants nothing to do with the reflection of wisdom. He only wants to know about that which arises in the soul of man himself, in order to realize it.

The true celebration of the real man is the deed

— that is Prometheus' saying. [He is a man of action, and this is how he appears before us as a forward thinker.] Thus we see the two opposites: Epimetheus, the thinker, and Prometheus, the forward thinker. Goethe expresses this in his “Pandora” already in the scenery. On the one side, we have Prometheus' dwelling. We see that everything that has been built there has been created by human labor. Although it is rough, we see that it does not bear the character of nature anywhere, does not depict anything outside in nature; we do not see a copy of a natural beauty, it is rough and crude, but as a human work it stands before us. In contrast, what is on the side of Epimetheus as his residence, comes to us as a scene that is composed of the beautiful creations of nature, of parts of nature, and continues into a wonderful landscape. We see in it the reflection on nature and the act of settling in such a way that one lives according to what is exemplified outside. Epimetheus and Prometheus appear to us as complete opposites in their striving for truth.

In the Greek saga, we are told that Zeus wanted to take revenge for the act of Prometheus. [Through Hephaistos, Zeus had an image of a woman made in an artful, artistically beautiful way] – Pandora – [which he brought to life]. She was to bring people gifts from the world of Zeus. [After her descent to earth, Prometheus rejects the divine being, but Epimetheus takes her in and makes the beautiful goddess his wife.] The saga tells how Pandora, the woman created by the gods, opens the box [that Zeus gave her] and how the goods that actually make people miserable fly out. Only one good remains in it: hope. Thus we see that in the saga, Pandora also has something to do with that which belongs to the human race of the past. From the future, thinking humanity has only hope from Pandora. What else it has, what people can use to get by, has been handed down from the past.

This Pandora also appears in Goethe as the wife of Epimetheus. But we see very clearly that Goethe takes what is an external action and elevates it into a spiritual world. We see the reflective soul of Epimetheus and see it connected with Pandora, that is to say, in this soul of Epimetheus lives that which is spread out in the world as wisdom, which is reflected upon as in a dream. The characterization of Epimetheus, who dreams wisdom, which is nothing other than Pandora herself when personified, is wonderful. He feels unsatisfied and weak, and then, in the further course of the drama, Goethe has Prometheus, the brother, confront Epimetheus. There Epimetheus raves about the [beloved, but also vanished, divine] Pandora, about the all-gifted Pandora. Goethe shows us that through this figure, worldly wisdom is illuminated to him, but worldly wisdom as it is grasped by man in reflection. What is this reflected truth like? It is abstract, uncreative, unproductive. Imagine that we could combine in our soul all knowledge about the entire world; but this knowledge would be unproductive if it were only reflected. Just as the wife of Epimetheus, just as Pandora, is endowed with the wisdom of the world but is unproductive. Prometheus, who has no sense for this Pandora, confronts Epimetheus; while Epimetheus raves about Pandora's magnificent hair, about how beautifully her foot moves – Prometheus says: Oh, I know how it is made. [I know how Pandora was made by Hephaestus, the blacksmith, and how she was brought to life by Zeus. He thinks only of the origin of the goddess, not of the beauty of what has come into being, what has been created, and so Pandora, who is otherwise unproductive, gives him the impetus for productivity. And this is what can come out of it as a reaction in him.] In Pandora's case, it is something mechanically put together, something that cannot be put into practice; something against which he asserts his saying:

The true man's true celebration is the deed!

Now Goethe shows how Elpore and Epimeleia, Hope and Foresight, have sprung from the marriage between Epimetheus and Pandora. [In her departure, Pandora took one of her daughters, Elpore, with her to the gods and left Epimeleia, chosen by Epimetheus, with her father.] These two daughters show different sides of Epimetheus's nature, [especially the latter in particular]. Hope, [Elpore], is what reflection alone can defend in relation to the future. The one who is a forward-thinking person sees what he has thought come into being in reality; the one who is a reflective person can say: I expect this or that to happen in the future; because what should happen does not come from himself. On the other hand, there is Epimeleia, the other daughter, who protects the past.

Prometheus also has a scion, Phileros; the one who descends from this I-human Prometheus is the actual caretaker of human I-ness. But already in the son we see the full one-sidedness of mere self-seeking. He no longer wants to create. He no longer wants to create. He cannot endure in a useful, different, thinking activity. This does not endure, because one-sided striving for the self is not complemented by wisdom. In Prometheus, this striving for the self is still present in such a way that it permeates the whole being of Prometheus. In the son, it manifests itself in such a way that it shows its harmful side at the same time. The son is not only the creator, but also the enjoyer of what is there. In this way, he causes conflict. In his blind rage, he even wounds the one who protects what exists, [his beloved] Epimeleia, the daughter of Epimetheus, in a fight.

Thus the powers of the human soul, the reflective and the thinking powers, confront each other in this Goethean drama. [And so these powers fight each other. But nothing is achieved by this; for the soul powers only increase and strengthen each other through harmonious interaction. Only in this way can truth fulfill its mission in the human being.

Goethe shows us how, ultimately, it is through the interaction of the two currents that true human salvation comes about. And Goethe also shows us how what he has depicted here is, for him, a mature result of development. Goethe looked back to the time when he had only developed the Promethean nature in himself one-sidedly. In 1774, the Goethe who was certainly already endowed with all the makings of Goethe, but still immaturely youthful, expressed this one-sided Promethean truth as his conviction in his 'Prometheus' at that time, and it flows towards us there. And if today we find a certain self-satisfaction in pointing to this youthful “Prometheus” as if it gave us the whole of Goethe, then we have to say: this is only a one-sided expression of Goethe himself. Goethe did not stop at thinking ahead; he added the thinking of his mature knowledge, his reflection. No, not only the premeditation, not only that which rejects all wisdom, not only the pre-thinking that rejects all reflection, but the confluence of both alone can establish the mission of truth.

That Goethe in his youth stood on a one-sided point of view, we can still gather from something else. He does not remember the words in the first part of “Faust” where Faust sets out to translate the Bible. There we see how Faust approaches the Bible and wants to replace the correct word “In the beginning was the word” with another: “In the beginning was the deed.” This is what he wants to contribute to the Bible more as a youthful person; that was not Goethe's final opinion. People should stop seeing the whole of Goethe in this. In his youth, Goethe probably cultivated this Promethean point of view, but later he clearly showed how he had progressed beyond it, how he later knew that in addition to the aforementioned deed, in order to develop people healthily, the word, that is to say the reflection of the wisdom imprinted by the world's spirits, must occur. Therefore, in his “Pandora”, Goethe adds from his totality, broadening his youthful point of view:

From heaven,
Senkert's word and deed blessedly descend,
a gift descends, undreamt of before.

That is, he means, unimagined by himself in the past, when he still believed that he had to correct the Gospel of John at this point, to replace the passage “In the beginning was the word” with “In the beginning was the deed”. For Goethe, the deed becomes the word, which expresses the character of what was previously conceived. The word becomes the other, the illuminating wisdom of the world. This is why Goethe says in “Pandora”:

What you below feel is our wish;
What you can give, we know.
You Titans make great beginnings; but
To lead to the eternal good, the eternal beautiful
Is the work of the gods; let it be.

Thus Goethe complements his youthful Prometheus point of view in the right, harmonious way with the point of view of Epimetheus, showing us what attitude and loyalty to true philosophy should be. In this way, Goethe's example shows us the mission of truth within our own human hearts.

Today you have recognized the truth as an educator of the human being. You have seen that truth is something most personal and at the same time something impersonal; something that makes the human being an I-human being, and something that in turn brings the I together with all other beings. You have seen that the ego is so strong on its two sides that it still expresses its selfless character in the Epimetheus-like element of truth and its selfish character in the Prometheus-like element on the other side; and you have seen that it is possible to bring about harmony between the two in spiritual-scientific truth, which encompasses the two, leading the will up to wisdom, leading wisdom down and allowing it to be seen as light, to illuminate the will itself.

Thus we see that truth, although it yields to the strong human ego at an intermediate stage, nevertheless fulfills the great mission in its perfection of shaping the ego ever higher and higher. Truth has this mission, to be the greatest educator of the human ego, at the same time leading to strong inwardness in thinking ahead and to strong selflessness in reflecting.

Thus, truth is the power that has the strongest mission, that leads the ego from level to level, making the soul more and more perfect. And we see this from the point of view that Goethe himself took towards truth, not ignoring any earlier stage, adding the necessary Epimetheus element to the Prometheus element. And Goethe is a true model of a person striving for truth precisely where we eavesdrop on him so intimately, where we readily admit: precisely because we see that he has become more and more mature, we can emulate him; he is great because he shows us the hopeful paths in the pursuit of truth. And then we feel this striving in us in such a way that it fills us with healthy strength, making us stronger and more unselfish. We feel that, in contrast to this, the sentence falls silent that wants to say that truth depends solely on the point of view.

But then again we turn to Goethe and let another mood come over us. In all seriousness of striving for truth, we must never abandon that other healing element that tells us: When you believe you have reached some level of truth, have recognized something, it is also able to tell you on the other side: You must also have already decided; you must tell yourself about no truth that it could be completely infallible, you must strive to let it appear before your soul in an even more truthful form, even with regard to that which you have already recognized as truth. When we feel earnest and dignity in our striving for truth, we also feel a serious, dignified humor, which on the other hand so beautifully corrects what pride could instill in us as a sense of truth. We then also feel the other thing that Goethe always said when he was in danger of holding on to the one truth too tightly: Oh, the thought that has been considered could only be an illusion, the thought that has been considered could be something that does not prove feasible. Yes, let us also feel that as a corrective to our arrogance of truth, as a strain on our seriousness, our dignity in the pursuit of truth! Let us feel the Goethe word

Quite and truly
I am a poor wretch.
My dreams are not true,
And my thoughts go awry.

If we can feel this, then we will be able to cope with our lofty ideal of truth.

The same. Johannes and Lucifer.

Lucifer:
Take warning by Capesius' fate and learn
What fruits are ripened when a soul attempts
To penetrate too soon the spirit-world.
He knows the words writ in his book of life
And knows his tasks for many lives to come.
But suffering not ordained by destiny
Is wrought by knowledge which path not the power
To change itself to deeds in earthly life.
The choice that to successful issue leads
Depends upon the ripeness of the will.
At every step that he would take in life
Henceforth Capesius must ask himself:
Can all my obligations thus be met
Which are the outgrowth of my former lives?
So o'er his path a dazzling light is shed,
Causing his eyes to suffer from the glare
And giving him no help upon his way.
It kills the forces which, whilst still unknown,
Are trusty guides for every human soul,
Yet does not aid the power of conscious thought.
Thus it can only hurt the body's strength
Before the soul bath learned to master it.

Johannes:
I do perceive the error of my life.
The forces of the soul that worked unconsciously
Deep in the body, I did steal from thence
And proudly carried to the spirit heights.
Yet it was not a human being whole
That thus was carried upward to the light.
Nought was it but the shadow of a soul,
Which could but rhapsodize of spirit-realms
And feel a oneness with creative powers;
It wished to live all blissful in the light,
And deeds of light in colour to behold;
It fancied that as artist it could paint
Spirit-existence in a world of sense.
This form that took its semblance from mine own
Bath shown to me myself with cruel truth.
I dreamed of soul-love, pure and free from stain,
Whilst passion yet was coursing through my veins.
But now I have beheld the past earth life
From which my present life derives its source
This shows me whither I must truly strive.
The spirit-pathways which of late I trod
Cannot be followed far by such a soul
As just before its present life on earth
Lived in the body of the miner, Thomas.
The fashion of his life must be for me
The rule by which to seek my present goal.
I've striven for attainment here and now
Of things that only later can bear fruit.

Lucifer:
My light must serve to guide thy further steps
As it bath done to guide them hitherto,
The spirit-path which thou hast sought to tread
Can wed the spirit to the lofty heights,
But to thy soul it bringeth nought but gloom.

Johannes:
What hath a man attained who gives himself
A soul-less puppet to the spirit-world?
E'en at the end of all his earthly days
He is but that same being which he was,
When in earth's primal days his human form
From out the cosmic womb did first emerge.
If to those impulses I yield myself
Which, springing from unfathomed depths of soul,
Clamour imperiously for life and form,
Then.in me works the universal all.
I know not then what drives me on to act;
But surely it must be the cosmic will
Which leads me on to its appointed goal.
This will must know the wherefore of man's life
Though human knowledge cannot make it plain.
That which in perfect manhood it creates
Is vital wealth wherewith to form the soul.
To it will I surrender, and no more
By idle spirit-striving kill it out.

Lucifer:
Myself I work in this same cosmic. will
When it flows mightily through human souls;
They are but limbs of higher entities
Until they can experience my power.
'Tis only I who make them men indeed
Whose human self stands firm within the world.

Johannes:
I long have thought I knew the whole of thee;
Yet dwelt within me but thy phantom shade
Portrayed there by my visionary dreams.
Now must I feel thee, live thee by my will;
Then can I overcome thee later on
If so 'tis written in my destiny.
Let spirit-knowledge, that I gained too soon,
Repose henceforth within mine inmost soul
Till impulses in life shall call it forth.
With confidence I yield me to that will
That hath more wisdom than the human soul.

(Exit Johannes with Lucifer.)

Among other things, the body with its organs, for example the heart, must become more and more perfect. Today, man can still have little effect on his soul. When he can move his heart organ at will through ether currents, he will become the independent conqueror of the organism. Thus humanity changes from form to form. Each time a person returns, his dwelling is improved.

The Indians worked on the etheric body, the Persians on the sentient body, the Egyptians on the sentient soul, the Romans and Greeks on the mind soul. Today's humanity has brought it to the consciousness soul. We notice a crossover of individualities through the cultures. The Indians developed memory, but it was more of a mental memory than that of the Atlanteans. The Persians came to an intimate relationship with nature. The Egyptians were mystically inclined. The Greeks and Romans developed intellect and wisdom. Now man must really experience the outer world, where he belongs, through experience, otherwise it remains a dream to him. We are now in a stage in which man is trying to control the forces of nature.

There is a karma that connects entire nations. For example, throughout the Middle Ages, the peoples of Europe were often threatened by the Huns just as they had barely begun to rise through Christianity. These Mongols had astral bodies that went into decay, but this is a spiritual process. They were remnants of the ancient Atlanteans under their leader Attila or Etzel. If the peoples had not been afraid, the Huns could not have harmed them. Thus the corrosive influence was transmitted to the fresh astral bodies of the peoples. This caused leprosy or misery. The saga of this is in “Poor Henry” by Hartmann von der Aue. The picture “The Battle of the Huns” shows the event on the astral plane.

We collect good karma when we bring our lives together into a harmonious unity. We always experience something; life brings it to us, we have to add the fruits.

To get certainty about facts of karma, we must not speculate or philosophize, we must let the facts speak for themselves as they unfold. The occultist investigates real facts. It is difficult to trace past lives backwards. The occultist does not make hypotheses, otherwise he would soon be discredited. Observational thinking is better for the occultist than subjective thinking. It is important to experience world-ending thinking.

From the karmic point of view, experiences are of two kinds: those for which we are not responsible and those we have earned. Not everything is a karmic effect. We are confronted with facts, misfortunes; those for which we are not responsible find their compensation later. A thought that becomes a habit in our life expresses itself in the etheric body in the next life; the tendency to rejoice becomes the tendency of the etheric body. Sensations and perceptions depend on the experiences of the previous life; we cannot help how they now arise in us. Let us consider the astral body itself. Feelings, passions, sensations and perceptions are properties of the astral body. Stormy lust indicates an undeveloped astral body, while high moral concepts indicate a purified one. Depending on whether we educate it with careful moral concepts, sublime ideas or by indulging every desire, the astral body takes shape in the next life - and consequently even more so the etheric body - in inclinations and temperaments. A libertine who gave in to sensual lust in his previous life will experience this as a temperament in his etheric body in his present life. Those who work intellectually acquire talents and abilities for the future.

The occultist must acquire the ability to effortlessly return to the same fact and to love it; this will have a great influence on his etheric body, giving him an excellent memory in the next life. In the Buddha-doctrines there are always repetitions, these have the purpose of making the etheric body, which is dependent on the astral body, capable of expanding the memory. The qualities of the astral body become those of the etheric body and are expressed in the physical body in the next life. Through patience and perseverance, we can already expand our memory somewhat in this life.

Dispositions for disease come from outside and from within the person. Dispositions for this come from sensual habits and express themselves in diseases in the next life. We should not only increase healthy dispositions, but also acquire good ones. A person of good health takes care of good habits. This is how abilities and temperaments develop. Those who are bitter and do not get rid of this fault will develop a tendency towards typhoid, feverish diseases. Those who are always criticizing, who can't do anything right for anyone, who can't truly love, will age prematurely and easily develop wrinkles and be ugly. Those who can develop sympathy and love stay young for a long time. Those who focus on an unhealthy, heightened sense of achievement and want to own a lot are consequently prone to infectious diseases.

Experiences affect people; what they do and what constantly takes place on the physical plane all shape their future destiny. Their deeds, good or evil, in turn shape the future body. Thus we have a cycle of facts and their consequences.

Again and again we see how difficult it is for people today to understand theosophical life. I therefore intend to present some general ideas on the subject. The nature of theosophy is such that everyone who feels drawn to it hopes it will fulfil his deepest longing with regard to the spirit. Yet if we want to know the right core idea of theosophy for the present time, if we want to fill the whole of our conscious mind with the idea that the spiritual principle is something very real, then it is indeed time that we respect the dignity of the individual who is our neighbour. We acknowledge the individual principle, for as human beings endowed with sentient souls we would not permit ourselves to injure the outer person of someone else, nor would we permit ourselves to encroach on his personal freedom. But we have not yet reached the point and are still far from being able to extend such tolerance to the inmost reality of the human being. We are as yet far from being aware—at most we are so in theory, but certainly not in practice—that sentience and thought, the spiritual principle altogether, is something very real. Surely this is something you all understand. Everyone understands today that it is utterly and absolutely real when I slap someone. But people do not find it so easy to believe that it is something real to send bad thoughts to someone. We have to be aware that the bad thought I have about someone I meet—antipathy, hatred—is like a slap in the face to his soul. A negative inner response, feelings of hatred and lack of love for others are truly the same as the ordinary external injury inflicted on someone. It is only when you know this that you become a theosophist.

If we let ourselves be wholly aware of this, if we understand that the spirit in ourselves is a reality, we have grasped the idea of theosophy, and such thinking will have an important consequence. People who are members of a cultured society will not slap each other in the face, they will not cause bodily harm to one another. But I need not tell you the thoughts, the opinions held by people sitting side by side in our cultured society. You know it. It is the function of the Theosophical Society to make people aware of the need for sympathy and the inviolability of the person. If you have seven people sitting together in our present day and age—a time when people are above all concerned to have opinions, views—they will have thirteen opinions, and because of those thirteen opinions they would really like to split up into thirteen factions. That is the consequence of differences in opinion. The theosophical movement must replace this difference of opinion with the deep-down idea of brotherhood. We only grasp theosophy, this idea of brotherhood, fully when we are able to sit together in brotherhood even if other thoughts we have show the greatest possible differences. We want not only to respect and honour the individual nature of the other person, wholly aware of and acknowledging his full human dignity, but also to acknowledge to the very depth of our souls the inner life of our fellow human being.

This means, however, that we have to remain sitting on our chairs and stay with the other person even if opinions differ to an extreme degree. No one should leave the theosophical community, the theosophical brotherhood, because of a difference of opinion. This is indeed the special quality of theosophists, that they remain brothers even if they are not of the same opinion. Unless we come together in the spirit of brotherhood we shall not be able to bring a core idea of theosophy to realization. For this alone makes it possible to let the deepest secrets that lie dormant in people's souls emerge, abilities that lie deep down in our soul as though asleep. We have to understand that we can work together with others even if there are fundamental differences of opinion among us.

It was not for nothing that the Theosophical Society was founded in the last third of the 19th century.¹ The way in which it seeks the spirit does differ markedly from those of endeavours in which others seek to gain proof of human immortality. There is a big difference in the search for the eternal as one sees it in the Theosophical Society and the search for the eternal in other movements that seek the spirit. The theosophical movement is in reality nothing but a popular form of the occult brotherhoods that existed secretly everywhere in the world through the millennia. I have mentioned before that the most outstanding, the greatest brotherhood founded in Europe in the 14th century, was the Rosicrucian brotherhood. This Rosicrucian brotherhood is really the source, the starting point for all other brotherhoods and has preserved the culture of Europe. Occult wisdom was taught in strict secrecy in these brotherhoods. To define the aims of the individuals who met in those many different brotherhoods I would have to speak of the great, sublime wisdom taught and of the study of this wisdom in those occult brotherhoods, with the Rosicrucian brotherhood the most outstanding among them.

The teaching and the work done in those brotherhoods enabled human beings to become aware of the eternal core of their being. They enabled human beings to make a connection with the higher world, with the worlds that are above our own, and to look for guidance to our elders, for the guidance of those who lived among us and had reached a level which all of you will reach at a later time. We call them the ‘elders’ because they have hastened ahead of general evolution and reached this high level before us. We thus have the certainty of the eternal core of our being, and of its awakening so that human beings will be able to gain sight of the eternal just as ordinary people do of the world perceived through the senses. To achieve this, they must follow in the footsteps of the elders who live among us everywhere. These elders or ‘masters’, the great guides of humanity, have always been the most important leading figures among humanity, always the most important leading figures in the sublime occult wisdom through which man becomes aware of the eternal core of his being. Up to the middle of the 19th century people wishing to be received into such an occult brotherhood had to go through stringent examinations and trials. Admission would only be granted to individuals whose character guaranteed that the sublime wisdom taught would never be used for base purposes. They also had to have the kind of intelligence that ensured that they would understand anything given to them in the occult brotherhoods in the right way and give it the right meaning.

People had to meet these conditions, giving a full guarantee that they were in a position and had the right attitude to receive the most sublime teaching in life if they wanted to be members of such a brotherhood. People may be little inclined to believe it, but everything truly great that happened up to the French Revolution and into the 19th century came from those occult brotherhoods. People were not aware how much they were influenced by the streams that came from the occult brotherhoods. Let me describe a scene to show how those occult brotherhoods worked in this world. Let us take the following scene. A highly gifted, important man is quite unexpectedly visited by a seemingly unknown person. This unknown person knows how to arrange things so that a conversation develops between him and the important person, a statesman, for example. All of this in the most natural way and quite by ‘chance’, though we have to put the word ‘chance’ in quotes. The conversation is not just about anything, for in the course of it things are said that without his realizing it enter into the mind, the intellect of the individual who is being visited. Such a discussion, which may perhaps take no more than three hours, then brings about a complete change in the individual concerned. Believe it or not, but that is how many great ideas that played a major role in the world were implanted in human minds. Voltaire's great ideas were stimulated in this way, and he probably had no idea who it was that he spoke to, someone apparently utterly insignificant who nevertheless had important things to tell him. Some of Rousseau's² basic ideas were established in this way; and so were Lessing's.³

This kind of influence coming from occult brotherhoods gradually died away in the course of the 19th century. The 19th century was of necessity the century of materialism. The occult brotherhoods had withdrawn. The great masters of wisdom and of harmony in the sentient soul⁴ withdrew to the East, if we may use a technical term. They no longer influenced the West. And then something of special significance happened in the West. Let us consider this, so that we may get a clear understanding of the significance of the Theosophical Movement.

It was in 1841 that people who were members of the most secret society realized that something important was about to happen in Europe. To contain the flood waters of materialism, it was necessary to direct a stream of spiritual life into humanity. This was the time when a certain difference of opinion arose, initially among occultists. Some would say that humanity was not yet ripe to receive spiritual facts and experiences, and that the system of silence should be maintained. These were the conservatives. The system has much to be said for it, for the dissemination of occult truths holds great dangers. Others would say that the danger of materialism was too great and something had to be done against it, so that at least the most elementary knowledge should be conveyed to humanity. But—in what form? People had completely got out of the habit of grasping the spirit in its true form, they were no longer able to rise into higher worlds in any real way, they no longer had an idea of them, so that such a world actually no longer existed for them. How could one teach a human race which only understood materialism and show that there is also the spirit? Why was it so important to help humanity gain awareness of the world of the spirit?

Here we touch on one of the important secrets that lie dormant in our age. I have indicated on a number of occasions why we have a Theosophical Movement, and why it is needed. Anyone able to look into the world of the spirit knows that everything which exists in outer material terms has its origin in the spirit, comes from the spirit. There is nothing material that does not come from the spirit. The health and sickness people know in outer terms thus also comes from their way of looking at life, from their thoughts. The saying ‘What you think today you'll be tomorrow’ does indeed hold true. You have to understand that when people have bad, corrupt ways of thinking in one age, the next generation and the next age will have to pay for this physically. It is the truth that lies in the saying of visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children for many generations.⁵ The fact that people began to think in such coarse material terms in the 19th century, turning their minds away from anything spiritual, did have its consequences. What people thought then will be fulfilled. And it will not be long before strange diseases and epidemics will appear in our human world. Nerviness, as we call it, will take on serious forms not more than half a century from now. Just as there was the plague once, and cholera, and leprosy in medieval times, so there will be epidemics in the inner life, diseases of the nervous system taking epidemic form. These are the very real consequences of the circumstance that people lack a spiritual core to their life. Where someone has awareness of this vital core at the centre, he will grow healthy under the influence of a sound, true and wise way of seeing the world. But materialism denies the soul, denies the spirit; it hollows people out, focusing them on the periphery, on the outside. Health is only possible if the inmost core of the human being is spiritual and true. The very real disease that follows when the inner human being is hollowed out—that is the epidemic in mind and spirit which we now face.

We have a Theosophical Society in order that people may be given awareness of the spiritual core of their being. It exists above all to bring health to humanity, and not in order that one person or another knows something or other. It is not a matter of you knowing—I mean merely knowing—that reincarnation and karma exist. What matters is that these ideas become the very life blood of the soul, the spiritual core of our being, for they are sound. It is not a matter of proving or disproving them, nor of founding a science where reincarnation and karma are presented in strictly mathematical terms. There is only one proof of what is taught in the science of the spirit, and that is life itself. The teaching of spiritual science will prove to be true when healthy life develops under its influence. This will be the proof of what is taught in theosophy. If you want to have proof of theosophy, you must live theosophy; then it will show itself to be true. Every step and every day must gradually give us proof of the truths taught in the science of the spirit.

This, then, was the reason why a Theosophical Society came into being. But how could one teach 19th-century materialists that there is a spirit? The spiritualist movement then came up. It came up exactly because people did not think it possible to teach humanity that there is something which is of the spirit; one had to show the spirit, to see it with one's own eyes. In Stuttgart someone asked why theosophists were unable to give Haeckel solid proof that there is a spirit. You see, solid evidence was to be provided as to the spirit. People first tried to do this with the aid of spiritualism. They tried for decades, right into the 1860's and 1870's. But then an awkward situation arose. Let us take a look at it. It will show you the difference between the theosophical way of rising to higher worlds and any other approach that is used. We are not for the moment concerned with the truth or untruth of spiritualist phenomena. It is evident that phenomena exist that bring spirits from other worlds into our world, so that definite proof can be furnished even for people who will only accept what they can perceive through the senses. We have grown out of the foolishness of saying that a lot of cheating goes on in spiritualism. Yes, there is false coin, but there is also true coin. We'll leave the truth issue aside for now.

But does one learn from attending a seance? We assume—leaving all else aside—that we are dealing with genuine revelations. If one has been presented with the apparition of someone dead, this is definite proof of the immortality of the human soul. It has been physical proof, one is able to convince oneself that the dead are still there in some world or other, and that they can even be called into our world. But it shows us that just to know this is of no real account; it is not what matters. Let us assume you have all been convinced in this manner, with a dead person brought into this group in a seance. You would then know that the human soul is immortal. But the question is, does such knowledge have real significance in a higher sense for the true higher life of man? At first people thought that would be the case. They thought people could be taken one step higher if they knew that there is immortality. But this is the point where the view held in the science of the spirit differs quite distinctly from one where all one is given is visible proof of immortality.

Here is a kind of analogy. I have spoken of all kinds of higher worlds before. I have told you what it is like in the astral world and the devachan,⁶ and you know that after death the human being must first enter the astral world and then the devachan world. Let us now assume that many of the people sitting here say: ‘What he's telling us is something we cannot believe. It is too improbable.’ People who do not believe it, who go away and do not come back, would really have to prove their point of view entirely on their own. But with those who come back, even though they do not believe these things, it does not matter at all. I would say to those who come back: ‘Don't believe anything I say. You do not have to believe anything. That is quite immaterial. You may even consider it to be humbug, or think I am telling you something that comes from an utterly fantastic realm—but do listen and take it in.’ That is what matters.

Imagine I were to draw you a map of Asia Minor. Someone might come along and say: ‘The rivers and mountains he is drawing there are nonsense.’ I would then say to him: ‘I do not mind in the least that do you not believe me. But look at it, and keep it in mind. When you go to Asia Minor, you will find that it is true, and you'll then know your way about.’ What really matters—also for astronomers—is to go to higher realms, map in hand. That is what matters. And that is also true for knowledge of a higher world. We can only really enter into it if we take something of its essential nature into ourselves. So when I speak of the astral, you must take in something of the nature and the ways of that swaying, mobile character of the astral world, and when I speak of the devachan, you must take in something of the peculiar nature of that world which is so much the opposite of our own world. if you just make a connection with these ideas and a feeling comes alive in you for those higher realms, you will get a feeling for the state of awareness we have when the astral world surrounds us, for the state of awareness when the devachan world is around us. If you enter in a living way into the states a seer experiences as he rises into those worlds, this is something different from having solid proof that you can come across something or other in life. That is the difference between the method used in the science of the spirit and all other ways of gaining certainty of the spirit's existence.

With theosophy we seek to rise into the higher worlds so that we shall be able to gain direct sentient awareness of the spiritual, so that we have a breath of the higher worlds whilst still in the physical world. The spiritualists' approach, which I have described to you, is to bring the world of the spirit down into the physical, put it here before us, as if it were material. The theosophist seeks to raise the human world to the sphere of the spirit. The spiritualist says: ‘If the spirits are to be shown to be real, they must come down to me. They have to tickle me, as it were, then I can perceive them through the sense of touch.’ The theosophist goes up towards them, he seeks to come closer to them; he seeks to develop inwardly, so that he may understand the things of the spirit.

It may help to use a simple analogy. It is difficult enough, in present circumstances, to rise to the level of some higher spirits who have incarnated in the flesh. Imagine Christ Jesus were to appear in our midst today. How many people do you think would accept him? I won't say that some would call the police if someone were to make the claims today that Christ Jesus once made. But it all depends on people being ready to see what is going on right beside them.

Another analogy. A singer arrived a bit late for a dinner invitation.⁷ Her chair between two gentlemen had remained empty. One of them was Felix Mendelssohn, who was a friend of hers, the other was someone she did not know. She talked happily to Mendelssohn; the gentlemen on her left was very agreeable, paying her all kinds of compliments which she did not like, however. She therefore asked Mendelssohn: ‘Who is the silly fellow sitting on my other side?’ ‘That is Hegel, the famous philosopher,’ Mendelssohn replied. If she had been invited to meet Hegel she would no doubt have behaved differently. But having no idea as to who he was as she sat beside him, she took him for something of a fool.

Believe me, it is perfectly possible for you to come across one of the masters and take him for something of a fool. We can only recognize these higher spirits incarnated in the flesh if we have made ourselves capable of doing so. People would not recognize Christ Jesus if he were to come down among us today, unless he showed himself in the way they would imagine him to be. It is the aim of theosophy to develop and transform human beings, making them able to recognize the higher worlds. And this is a problem for the awareness we have in our present civilization. What matters is not that the principle which lives in higher worlds descends to us but that we ascend towards it. We need to develop the ability to ascend to higher worlds. This alone will make it possible for us to reach the higher worlds in a worthy way when we depart from this world at our death. Someone who has a map of Asia Minor can find his way around there, a map created out of life itself. If we know about the things that await us over there, we are going to enter into a world that we know, knowing what may be found there.

Mere knowledge of such a world does not mean much, however. Here we are on the threshold of a great mystery, and another fact that is of the utmost significance. It was because of this fact that European and American occultists decided to abandon the spiritualist approach in the 1870's and start the theosophical movement. The great occultist conference held in Vienna at that time provided a major impulse towards this change of tactic.

To initiate the spiritualist movement it had been necessary to establish a number of procedures. These procedures, established in countries where people were educated, had come from American occultists or lodges. The spiritualistic approach was decided on in those lodges. It consisted in offering particular groups the opportunity to galvanize certain dead people and thus furnish solid proof of immortality. This means that initially the astral corpses of certain dead people on the astral plane were sent to spiritualist groups, into the physical world. They were to give proof of immortality. Now we may ask: ‘Is it right for occultists on earth to make the dead appear?’ It is true there is no border between dead and alive for those who do occult work. They are able to visit the dead in the astral world and in the devachan. If they want to they can indeed—as I have told you—furnish proof of immortality in spiritualist groups. Please take note of this and remember it. It would not make much sense to anyone who is not well versed in these things. But it was different for the occultists. It was found that this way of gaining conviction of immortality was not only worthless but in some respects extraordinarily harmful. This way, where people did not become better people but were given solid evidence of immortality in the physical world, was not only worthless but in fact quite harmful, the reasons being as follows.

Imagine people who have gained proof of immortality in this way then abandoning their longing to gain access to the higher world. They would have become materialists also as regards the world of he spirit. They knew themselves to be spiritualists, but in their way of thinking they were nothing but materialists. They believed in a world of the spirit, but thought it could be seen with the aid of the senses and not by spiritual means. It was then found that when individuals with such materialistic ways of thinking came to kama loka⁸ they were even less able to recognize things over there than the materialists were. The materialists generally believed themselves to be in a dream world; this usually happens when one gets there. The materialist thinks he is dreaming and that he'll wake up any moment. The human being sees himself in kama loka—he dreams, he sleeps, he wants to wake up.

For someone who has become convinced of the spiritual world's existence and now finds that this world does look very different after all, it is not the case that he just finds himself in a dream world. The difference between what he thought the spiritual world to be and what he now perceives it to be is like a lead weight to him. Remember, human beings have enough to contend with as it is when they reach kama loka, especially being unable to satisfy their desires. Gourmets for instance could only gain such satisfaction when they still had their tongue or their senses, and now they will no longer have them. It will then feel as if they were parched with thirst, or in a burning furnace.

The feeling is not exactly like that of parching thirst, but it is similar. If you consider everything human beings have to experience and go through over there, one might sum it up in the words: ‘He has to get used to living without a body.’ This is, however, difficult for anyone who is much attached to the sensual sphere. It is not really very difficult for anyone who has tom himself away from the sensual sphere. Someone who has done nothing to raise his soul higher, to develop it further, will know this difference between the spiritual and the sensual; it will be like a difference in weight, as though he were weighed down with a leaden weight. The spiritual and the sensual need different ways of perception, and the individual concerned expects the spiritual to be material and tangible. Over in the world of the spirit he finds, however, that the astral is very different by nature. The difference feels like a weight that threatens to drag him down again into the physical world, and that is the worst thing.

These are the reasons why the masters of wisdom abandoned the method used in the 1850s, 1860s and early 1870s to give certainty of the higher world. They abandoned this method and decided on the theosophical path of development to give access to the world of the spirit. Essentially this is based on two things. One is that it is most eminently necessary to create a spiritual core [other set of notes: spiritual centre] so that humanity will be protected from new diseases affecting mind and spirit. The other is to make it possible for humanity to develop to a higher level and reach the higher world rather than draw the higher world down to themselves. Instead of dragging the higher world down to us, we must be raised into the higher world. Rightly understood, this gives you an idea of, a feeling for, the true mission of the theosophical movement. In this sense the theosophical movement sets us the task of developing to higher and higher levels, so that we may grow into the world of the spirit. Then, I think, the idea of brotherhood will come to us absolutely of its own accord. We would no longer want to go off in different directions. People only go apart for as long as they want to be completely on their own on this physical plane. In reality we are only separate whilst on the physical plane. As soon as we rise to the higher world we do become aware of brotherhood in the spirit; spiritual unity comes to awareness.

I have tried on several occasions to speak to you of this brotherhood in the spirit, at least in ideas for the intellect. It is so beautifully expressed in the words: ‘This is you.’ Let us think of this. As I told you before, if you cut off my hand, in a very short time it will no longer be my hand. It can only be my hand if it is part of my organism; otherwise it is no longer a hand; it shrivels up. As a human being you are such a hand belonging to the earth organism. Imagine you are raised a few miles above the earth. There you cannot live as a physical human being, you cease to live as a human being. You are part of this earth just as my hand is part of my body. The illusion of being independent creatures arises because you walk around on this earth, whereas the hand is attached to the body. But that does not matter. Goethe was referring to something very real when he spoke of the earth spirit. He meant to say that the earth has a soul and we are its members. He spoke of something real when he wrote the following lines for the earth spirit:

In life's floods, in roaring activity
I move up and down,
Going hither and thither.
Birth and the grave,
Weaving to and fro
Creating ardent life,
I work the rushing loom of time
Weaving the godhead's living garb.⁹

And so even the physical human being is part of the earth organism, part of a whole. And now think about the soul and the spirit—there it is exactly the same. I have so often said that humanity would not be able to live if it had not developed further against the background of the other realms on earth. In the same way the more highly developed human being cannot exist without the less developed one. A spiritual principle cannot exist without those that have remained behind, just as a human being could not exist if it were not for the fact that the animals have remained behind, and an animal cannot exist without the plant, nor the plant without the mineral. This is brought most beautifully to expression in the gospel of John after the washing of the feet: ‘I could not be, were it not for you...’¹⁰ The disciples were a necessity for Jesus, the soil that fed him. This is a great truth. Just look into a court of law—a judge sitting on the bench, feeling superior to the accused. But the judge might reflect and say to himself that they may well have been together in an earlier life when he did not fulfil his obligations to the accused and this has made him the way he now is. If the judge's karma were investigated it might turn out that he should really be sitting in the dock. The whole of humanity is an organism. If you tear out at a single human being, that human being cannot continue but will shrivel up. A common bond unites us all. We will begin to understand this when we seek to develop the faculties we need for the higher world, so that we may truly rise and find the core in us that is the essence of the spirit. If that essence of the spirit lives in us it will lead us to brotherhood. This exists already on the higher planes. On earth we have only an image of it. Brotherhood here on earth is but an image of what exists on the higher planes. We deny something that already exists in us if we do not cherish brotherhood among ourselves here on earth.

That is the deeper meaning of the brotherhood idea. And we must therefore seek to bring the theosophical ideas to realization more and more, in such a way that we understand the other human being in his very depth of soul, and that we stay together as brothers however great the differences of opinion. That is true togetherness, true brotherhood, where we do not ask that the other individual should be in harmony with us by thinking the same way, but allow every individual to have his own opinion. Then the greatest wisdom will be achieved as we work together. This is a more profound view of our first theosophical principle. If we take our idea of brotherhood to be such that we say to ourselves: ‘We belong together, whatever the circumstances, and however much someone's views may differ from our own. Differences of opinion can never be a reason for us to separate.’ We shall only fully understand one another if we let each other be as we are. I know this view of theosophical brotherhood is still a long way off, and it cannot take effect until the theosophical idea has taken root in this sense, in this style.

• 1. The Theosophical Society had been founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott in New York in 1875.
• 2. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78), French philosopher, educationalist and author.
• 3. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81), German writer.
• 4. Figures of supreme importance in human evolution. These sublime spirits have already walked the road which the rest of humanity still has to travel. They are now working as ‘the great masters of wisdom and harmony in man's inner responses.’ (From a letter Rudolf Steiner wrote to a member, Berlin, 20 January 1905). See also lecture of 24 August 1911 in Wonders of the World (GA 129); lecture of 26 December 1909 in Festivals of the Seasons (GA 117); The Christian Mystery. Novalis the Seer, Berlin 22 Dec. 1908 (GA 108).
• 5. Exodus 20:5
• 6. A Sanskrit and Tibetan compound noun meaning 'go country'; the corresponding Christian term is ‘heaven’.
• 7. The singer was Therese Devrient (1803–82). Her memoirs were published in Stuttgart in 1905.
• 8. A compound noun that may be translated as ‘desire world’; the Christian equivalent is ‘purgatory’.
• 9. Goethe, Faust 1, Night scene.
• 10. There is a gap here in the text as it was taken down.

It cannot be said that our present age has no ideals. On the contrary, it has a great many ideals which, however, are not viable. Why is this so? Well, imagine—please forgive the somewhat bizarre image, but it does meet the case—a hen is about to hatch a chick and we take the egg away and hatch it out in a warm place, letting the chick emerge from the egg. So far so good; but if we were to do the same thing under the receiving part of an air pump and therefore in a vacuum, do you think the chick emerging from the egg would thrive? We would have all the developmental factors which evolution has given except for one thing—somewhere to put the chick for it to have the necessary conditions for life.

This is more or less how it is with the beautiful ideals people talk about so much today. Not only do they sound beautiful, but they are indeed ideals of great value. But the people of today are not inclined to face the realities of evolution, though the present age demands this. And so it happens that the oddest kinds of societies may evolve, representing and demanding all kinds of ideals, and yet nothing comes of it. There were certainly plenty of societies with ideals at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it cannot be said that the last three years have brought those ideals to realization. People should learn something from this, however—as I have said a number of times in these lectures.

Last Sunday (14 October) I sketched a diagram to show the spiritual development of the last decades. I asked you to take into account that anything which happens in the physical world has been in preparation for some time in the spiritual world. I was speaking of something quite concrete, namely the battle which began in the 1840s in the spiritual world lying immediately above our own. This was a metamorphosis of the battles which are always given the ancient symbol of the battle fought by St Michael against the dragon. I told you that this battle continued until November 1879, and after this Michael gained the victory—and the dragon, that is the ahrimanic powers, were cast down into the human sphere. Where are they now?

Now consider this carefully—the powers from the school of Ahriman which fought a decisive battle in the spiritual world between 1841 and 1879 were cast down into the human realm in 1879. Since then their fortress, their field of activity, is in the thinking, the inner responses and the will impulses of human beings, and this is specifically the case in the epoch in which we now are.

You must realize that infinitely many of the thoughts in human minds today are full of ahrimanic powers, as are their will impulses and inner responses. Events like these which play between the spiritual and the physical worlds are part of the great scheme of things; they are concrete facts which have to be reckoned with. What good is it to get bogged down in abstractions over and over again and to say something as abstract as: ‘Human beings must fight Ahriman.’ Such an abstract formula will get us nowhere. At the present time some people have not the least idea of the fact that they are in an atmosphere full of spirits. This is something which has to be considered in all its significance.

If you consider just this—that as a member of the Anthroposophical Society you are in a position to hear of these things and to occupy your thoughts and feelings with them—you will be aware of the full seriousness of the matter and that you have a task today, depending on your particular place in this present time, which is so full of riddles, so much open to question and so confused. You have to bring to this the best kinds of feelings and inner responses of which you are capable. Let us take the following example. Suppose a handful of people who have naturally come together and become friends, know of the spiritual situation I have described and of other, similar ones, whilst many other people do not know of them. You can be sure that if this hypothetical group of people were to decide to use the power they are able to gain from such knowledge for a particular purpose, the group—and its followers, though these would tend to be unaware of this—would be extremely powerful compared to people who have no idea of this and do not want to know of such things.

Precisely such a group existed in the eighteenth century and still continues today. A certain group of people knew of the facts of which I have spoken; they knew that the events I have described as happening in the nineteenth and on into the twentieth century would happen. In the eighteenth century this group decided to pursue certain aims which were in their own interests and to work towards certain impulses. This was done quite systematically.

The masses of humanity go through life as if asleep, without thought; they are completely unaware of what is going on in groups, some of them quite large, which may be right next door. Today, more than ever, people are much given up to illusion. Just consider the way in which many people keep saying today: ‘lt is amazing how effective modern communications are and how this brings people together! Everybody hears about everybody else! This is totally different from the way it was in earlier times.’ You will recall all the things people tend to say on the subject. But we only need to take a cool, rational view of some specific instances to find some very odd things going on in modern times. Who would believe, for example—I am merely giving an illustration—that the Press, which understands everything and goes into everything, would ever fail to make new literary works widely known? You would not think, would you, that profound, significant, epochmaking literary works would remain unknown? Surely we must hear of them in some way or other? Well, in the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘the Press’, as we call it today—with due respect—was in the early stages of becoming what it is today. A new literary work appeared at that time which was more epoch-making and of more radical importance than all the well-known authors taken together, people like Spielhagen,¹ Gustav Freytag,² Paul Heyse³ and many others whose works went through numerous editions. The work in question was Dreizehnlinden by Wilhelm Weber,⁴ and it really was more widely read in the last third of the nineteenth century than any other work. But I ask you, how many people in this room do not know of the existence of Wilhelm Weber's Dreizehnlinden? You see how people live alongside each other, in spite of the Press. Profoundly radical ideas are presented in beautiful, poetic language in Dreizehnlinden, and these are alive today in the hearts and minds of thousands of people.

I have spoken of this to show that it is entirely possible today for the mass of people to know nothing of radically new developments which are right on their doorstep. You may be sure, if there is anyone here who has not read Dreizehnlinden—and I assume there must be some among our friends—that these individuals must nevertheless know three or four people who have read it. The barriers separating people are such that some of the most important things simply are not discussed among friends. People do not talk to each other. The instance I have given concerns only a minor matter in terms of world history, but the same applies to major matters. Things are going on in the world which many people fail to see clearly.

Thus it also happened that in the eighteenth century a society spread certain views and ideas which were taking root in people's minds and became effective in achieving the aims of such societies. The ideas entered into the social sphere and determined people's attitudes to others. People do not know the sources of many things that live in their emotions, inner responses and will impulses. Those who understand the processes of evolution do know, however, how impulses and emotions are produced. This was the case with a book published by such a society in the eighteenth century—perhaps not the book itself, but the ideas on which it was based; the book shows the way in which Ahriman is involved in different animals. The ahrimanic Spirit was, of course, called the devil then, and it was shown how the devil principle comes to expression in different ways in individual animal species. The Age of Enlightenment was at its height in the eighteenth century, and, of course, enlightenment still flourishes today. Really clever people, many of them to be found as members of the Press, managed to turn it into a joke and say, ‘Once again, some ...—I'm putting dot dot dot here—has written a book to say that animals are devils!’ Ah, but to spread ideas like these in such a way in the eighteenth century that they would take root in the minds of many people, and in doing so take account of the true laws of human evolution—that really had an effect. For it was important that the idea that animals were devils should exist in many minds by the time Darwinism came along and the idea would then arise in many nineteenth-century minds that people had gradually evolved from animals. At the same time, large numbers of other people had the idea that animals were devils. A strange accord was thus produced. As this really happened, it was perfectly real. People write histories about all kinds of things, but the forces which are really at work are not to be found in them.

We need to consider the following: animals can only thrive if they have air—not in the vacuum to be found under the receiver of an air pump. In the same way, ideas and ideals can only thrive if human beings enter into the real atmosphere of spiritual life. This means, however, that spiritual life must be encountered as a reality. Today, people like generalities better than most other things. And they easily fail to notice that since 1879 ahrimanic powers have been forced to descend from the spiritual world into the human realm—this is a fact. They had to penetrate human intellectuality, human thinking, responses and perceptions. And we will not find the right attitude to those powers by simply using the abstract formula: ‘Those powers must be fought.’ Well, what are people doing to fight them? What they are doing is no different from asking the stove to be nice and warm, yet failing to put in wood and light the fire. The first thing we must know is that, seeing that these powers have come down to earth, we must live with them; they exist and we cannot close our eyes to them, for they will be more powerful than ever if we do this. This is indeed the point: The ahrimanic powers which have taken hold of the human intellect become extremely powerful if we do not want to know them or learn about them.

The ideal of many people is to study science and then apply the laws of science to the social sphere. They only want to consider anything which is ‘real’, meaning anything which can be perceived by the senses, and never give a thought to the things of the spirit. If this ideal were to be achieved by a large section of humanity the ahrimanic powers would have gained their purpose, for people would then not know they existed. A monistic religion similar to Haeckel's materialistic monism⁵ would be established and prove to be the perfect field for the work of these powers. It would suit them very well if people did not know they existed, for they could then work in the subconscious.

One way to help the ahrimanic powers, therefore, is to establish an entirely naturalistic religion. If David Friedrich Strauss⁶ had fully achieved his ideal, which was to establish the narrow-minded religion which prompted Nietzsche to write an essay about him,⁷ the ahrimanic powers would feel even more at ease today than they do already. This is only one way, however. The ahrimanic powers will also thrive if people nurture the elements which they desire to spread among people today: prejudice, ignorance and fear of the life of the spirit. There is no better way of encouraging them.

Just think how many people there are today who actually make it their business to foster prejudice, ignorance and fear of the spiritual powers. As I said in yesterday's public lecture,⁸ the decrees against Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and others were not lifted until 1835. This means that until then Catholics were forbidden to study anything relating to the Copernican view, and so on. Ignorance in this respect was actively promoted, and gave an enormous boost to the ahrimanic powers. This was a real service given to those powers, for it gave them the opportunity to make thorough preparations for the campaign they would start in 1841.

A second statement should really follow the one I have just made to render it complete. However, this second statement cannot yet be made public by anyone who is truly initiated into these things. But if you get a feeling of what lies behind the words I have spoken, you may perhaps gain an idea of what is implied.

The scientific view is entirely ahrimanic. We do not fight it by refusing to know about it, however, but by being as conscious of it as possible and really getting to know it. You can do no better service for Ahriman than to ignore the scientific view or to fight it out of ignorance. Uninformed criticism of scientific views does not go against Ahriman, but helps him to spread illusion and confusion in a field which should really be shown in a clear light.

People must gradually come to the realization that everything has two sides. Modern people are so clever, are they not?—infinitely clever; and these clever modern people say the following: In the fourth post-Atlantean age, in the time of ancient Greece and Rome, people superstitiously believed that the future could be told from the way birds would be flying, from the entrails of animals and all kinds of other things. They were silly old fools, of course. The fact is that none of these scornful modern people actually know how the predictions were made. And everybody still talks just like the individual whom I gave as an example the other day,⁹ who had to admit that the prophesy given in a dream had come true, but went on to say: Well, it was as chance would have it.

Yet conditions were such in the fourth post-Atlantean age that there really was a science which considered the future. Then, people would not have been able to think that the kind of principles which are applied today would achieve anything in a developing social life. They could not have gained the great perspectives of a social nature, which went far beyond their own time, if they had not had a ‘science’, as it were, of the future. Believe me, everything people achieve today in the field of social life and politics is actually still based on the fruits of that old science of the future. This, however, cannot be gained by observing the things that present themselves to the senses. It can never be gained by using the modern scientific approach; for anything we observe in the outside world with the senses makes a science of the past. Let me tell you a most important law of the universe: If you merely consider the world as it presents itself to the senses, which is the modern scientific approach, you observe past laws which are still continuing. You are really only observing the corpse of a past world. Science is looking at life that has died.

Imagine this is our field of observation (Fig. 10a, white circle), shown in diagrammatic form; this is what we have before our eyes, our ears and our other senses. Imagine this (yellow circle) to be all the scientific laws capable of being discovered. These laws do not relate to what is in there now, but to what has been there, what has been and gone and remains only in a hardened form. You need to find the things that are outside those laws, things which eyes cannot see and physical ears cannot hear: a second world with different laws (mauve circle). This is present inside reality, but it points to the future.

The situation with the world is just like the situation you get with a plant. The true plant is not the plant we see today; something is mysteriously inside it which cannot yet be seen and will only be visible to the eyes in the following year—the primitive germ. It is present in the plant, but it is invisible. In the same way the world which presents itself to our eyes holds the whole future in it, though this is not visible. It also holds the past, but this has withered and dried up and is now a corpse. Everything naturalists look at is merely the image of a ‘corpse, of something past and gone. It is also true, of course, that this past aspect would be missing if we considered the spiritual aspect only. However, the invisible element must be included if we are to have the complete reality. How can it be that people on the one hand set up Laplace's theory and on the other hand talk about the end of the world in the way Professor Dewar¹⁰ does—I spoke of this in yesterday's public lecture. He construes that when the world comes to an end, people will read their newspapers at several hundred degrees below zero in the light of luminous protein painted on the walls; milk will be solid. I would love to know how people are going to milk such solid milk! Those are completely untenable ideas, as is the whole of Laplace's theory. All these theories come to nothing as soon as one goes beyond the field of immediate observation, and this is because they are theories of corpses, of things which are dead.

Clever people will say today that the priests of ancient Greece and Rome were either scoundrels and swindlers or that they were superstitious, for no one in their right mind can believe it is possible to discover anything about the future from the flight of birds and the entrails of animals. In time to come, people will be able to look down on the ideas of which people are so proud today; they will feel just as clever then as the present generation does now in looking down on the Roman priests conducting their sacrifices. Speaking of Laplace's theory and of Dewar they will say: Those were strange superstitions. People in the past observed a few millennia in earth evolution and drew conclusions from this as to the initial and final states of the earth. How foolish those superstitions were! Imagine the way in which those peculiar, superstitious people spoke of the sun and the planets separating out from a nebula and everything beginning to rotate. The things they will be saying about Laplace's theory and Dewar's ideas concerning the end of the world will be much worse than anything people are saying today about finding out about the future from sacrificial animals, the flight of birds and so on.

They are so high and mighty, these people who have entered fully into the Spirit and attitudes of scientific thinking and look down on the old myths and tales. ‘Humanity was childish then, with people taking dreams seriously! Just think how far we have come since then: today we know that everything is governed by a law of causality; we've certainly come a long way.’ Everyone who thinks like this fails to realize one thing: The whole of modern science would not exist, especially where it has its justification, if people had not earlier thought in myths. You cannot have modern science unless it is preceded by myth; it has grown out of the myths of old and you could no more have it today than you could have a plant with only stems, leaves and flowers and no root down below. People who talk of modern science as an absolute, complete in itself, might as well talk of a plant which is alive only in its upper part. Everything connected with modern science has grown from myth; myth is its root. There are elemental spirits which observe these things from the other worlds and they howl with hell's own derision when today's mighty clever professors look down on the mythologies of old, and on all the media of ancient superstition, having not the least idea that they and all their cleverness have grown from those myths and that not a single justifiable idea they hold today would be tenable if it were not for those myths. Something else, too, causes those elemental spirits to howl with hell's own derision—and we can say hell's own, for it suits the ahrimanic powers very well to have occasion for such derision—and this is to see scientists believe that they now have the theories of Copernicus, they have Galileo's ideas, they have this splendiferous law of the conservation of energy and this will never change and will be the same for ever and ever. A shortsighted view! Myth relates to our ideas just as the scientific ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries relate to what will be a few centuries later. They will be overcome just as myth has been overcome. Do you think people will think about the solar system in 2900 in the way people think about it today? It may be the academics' superstition, but it should never be a superstition held among anthroposophists.

The justifiable ideas people have today, ideas which do indeed have some degree of greatness in the present time, arose from the mythology which evolved in the time of ancient Greece. Of course, nothing could possibly delight modern people more than to think: Ah, if only the ancient Greeks had been so fortunate as to have our modern science! But if the Greeks had had our modern science, then there could have been no knowledge of the Greek gods, no world of Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Plato or Aristotle. Dr Faust's servant Wagner would be a veritable Dr Faust himself compared to the Wagners we would have today!¹¹ Human thinking would be dry as dust, empty and corrupt, for the vitality in our thinking has its roots in Greek and altogether fourth post-Atlantean mythology. Anyone who considers mythology to have been wrong and modern thinking to be right, is like someone who cannot see the need for roses to grow on bushes, making it necessary for us to cut them if we want to have a bouquet. Why should they not come into existence entirely on their own?

So you see, the people who consider themselves to be the most enlightened today are living with entirely unrealistic ideas. The ideas evolved in the fourth post-Atlantean age seem like dreams rather than clearly defined ideas to the people of our present age; yet that particular way of thinking has provided the basis for what we are today. The thoughts we are able to evolve today will in turn provide the basis for the next age. They can only do so, however, if they evolve not only in the one direction, where they wither and dry up, but also in the direction of life. The breath of life comes into our thinking when we try and bring the things which exist to consciousness and also when we perceive the element which gives us a wideawake mind and makes us into people who are awake.

Since 1879 the situation is like this: people go to school and acquire scientific attitudes and thinking; their philosophy of life is then based on this scientific approach and they believe only the things which can be perceived in the world around us to be real, whilst everything else is purely imaginary. When people think like this, and infinitely many people do so today, Ahriman has the upper hand in the game and the ahrimanic powers are doing well. Who are these ahrimanic powers which have established their fortresses in human minds since 1879? They are certainly not human. They are angels, but they are backward angels, angels who are not following their proper course of evolution and therefore no longer know how to perform their proper function in the spiritual world that is next to our own. If they still knew how to do it, they would not have been cast down in 1879. They now want to perform their function with the aid of human brains. They are one level lower in human brains than they should be. ‘Monistic’ thinking, as it is called today, is not really done by humans. People often speak of the science of economics today, a science in which it was said at the time when the war started that it would be over in four months—I mentioned this again yesterday. When these things are said by scientists—it does not matter so much if people merely repeat them—they are the thoughts of angels who have made themselves at home in human heads. Yes, the human intellect is to be taken over more and more by such powers; they want to use it to bring their own lives to fruition. We cannot stand up to this by putting our heads in the sand like ostriches, but only by consciously entering into the experience. We cannot deal with this by not knowing what monists think, for example, but only by knowing it; we must also know that it is Ahriman science, the science of backward angels who infest human heads, and we must know about the truth and the reality.

Of course, it can be said like this here, using the appropriate terms—ahrimanic powers—because we take these things seriously. You know that you cannot speak like this to people outside, for they are totally unprepared. This is one of the barriers which divide us from others; but it is, of course, possible to find ways and means of speaking to them in such a way that the truth comes into what we say. If there were not a place where the truth can be said, this would also deprive us of the possibility of letting it enter into the profane science outside these walls. There must be at least some places where the truth can be presented in an honest, straightforward way. Yet we must never forget that even people who have made a connection with the science of the spirit often have almost insuperable difficulties in building the bridge to the realm of ahrimanic science. I have met a number of people who were extremely well informed in a particular field of ahrimanic science, being good scientists, orientalists, etc., and had also made the connection with our spiritual research. I have gone to a great deal of trouble to encourage them to build bridges. Think of what could have been achieved if a physiologist or a biologist who had all the specialized knowledge which it is possible to gain in such fields today had reconsidered physiology or biology in the light of the spirit, not exactly using our terminology, but considering those individual sciences in our spirit! I have tried it with orientalists. You see, people may be good followers of anthroposophy, and on the other hand they are orientalists and work in the way orientalists do. They are not prepared, however, to build the bridge from one to the other. This, however, is the urgent need in our time. For, as I said, the ahrimanic powers are doing well if people believe that science gives a true image of the world around us. If, on the other hand, we use spiritual science and the inner attitude which arises from it, the ahrimanic powers do not do so well. This spiritual science takes hold of the whole human being. It makes you into another person; you come to feel differently, to have different will impulses, and to relate to the world in a different way.

It is indeed true, and initiates have always said so: ‘When human beings are filled with spiritual wisdom, these are great horrors of darkness for the ahrimanic powers and a consuming fire. It feels good to the ahrimanic angels to dwell in heads filled with ahrimanic science; but heads filled with spiritual wisdom are like a consuming fire and the horrors of darkness to them.’ If we consider this in all seriousness we can feel: filled with spiritual wisdom we go through the world in a way which allows us to establish the right relationship with the ahrimanic powers; doing the things we do in the light of this, we build a place for the consuming fire of sacrifice for the salvation of the world, the place where the terror of darkness radiates out over the harmful ahrimanic element.

Let those ideas and feelings enter into you! You will then be awake and see the things that go on in the world. The eighteenth century really saw the last remnants of the old atavistic science die. The adherents of Saint-Martin, the ‘unknown philosopher,’ who was a student of Jacob Boehme, had some of the old atavistic wisdom and also considerable foreknowledge of what then was to come, and in our day has come. In those circles it was often said that from the last third of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century a kind of knowledge would radiate out which had its roots in the same sources, the same soil, where certain human diseases have their roots—I spoke of this last Sunday (14 October); people's views would then be rooted in falsehood, and their inner feelings would come from selfishness.

Let your eyes become seeing eyes in the light of the inner feelings of which we have spoken today and let them see what is alive and active in the present time! It may well be that your hearts grow sore with some of the things you find. This does no harm, however, for clear perception, even if painful, will bear good fruit today, fruit which is needed if we are to get out of the Chaos into which humanity has entered.

The first thing, or one of the first things, will have to be a science of education. And one of the first principles to be applied in this field is one which is much sinned against today. More important than anything you can teach and consciously give to boys and girls, or to young men and women, are the things that enter unconsciously into their souls whilst they are being educated. In a recent public lecture I spoke of the way in which our memory develops as though in the subconscious, and parallel to our conscious inner life. This is something especiaily to be taken into account in education. Educators must provide the soul not only with what children understand but also with ideas they do not yet understand, which enter mysteriously into their souls and—this is important—are brought out again later in life. We are coming closer and closer to a time when people will need more and more memories of their youth throughout the whole of their lives, memories they like, memories which make them happy. Education must learn to provide systematically for this. It will be poison in the education of the future if later on in life people look back on the toil and trouble of their schooldays, on the years of education, and do not like to think back to those days. It will be poison if the years of education have not provided a source to which they can return again and again to learn new things. On the other hand, if one has learned everything there is to be learned on a subject, nothing will be left for later on.

If you think on this, you will see that principles of great consequence will have to be the future guidelines for life, and this in a very different way from what is considered to be right today. It would be good for humanity if the hard lessons to be learned in the present time were not slept through by so many, and people would use them instead to become really familiar with the thought that a great many things will have to change. People have grown much too complacent in recent times and this prevents them from comprehending this thought in its full depth and, above all, also in its full intensity.

• 1. Friedrich Spielhagen (1829–1911), German novelist.
• 2. Gustav Freytag (1816–1895), German novelist and playwright. Works translated into English are Soll und Haben (1855; Debit and Credit 1858), Die Verlorne Handschrift (1864; The Lost Manuscript 1865) and Reminiscences (English translation in 1890).
• 3. Paul Johann von Heyse (1830–1914), German writer, Nobel Prize and ennoblement in 1910. Wrote novels, plays, epic poems and translations of Italian poems but was especially famed as a writer of short stories.
• 4. Friedrich Wilhelm Weber (1813–1894), Westphalian poet. Dreizehnlinden, an epic work on the time when the Saxons were converted to Christianity, was published in 1878.
• 5. The German naturalist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel was Professor of Zoology at Jena and one of the first to outline the tree of animal evolution. His theory was one of materialistic monism. Works translated into English are Creation, 4th edn. 1892 (Natuerliche Schoepfungsgeschichte, 1868) and Evolution of Man, 1879 (Anthropogenie 1874). (See also Note 1 of lecture 2.)
• 6. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), German theologian. His Leben Jesu (1835/36) was designed to show the Gospels to be a collection of myths with perhaps just a little historical truth to them. His second Life of Jesus, composed for the German people (1864; translated 1865) sought to create a positive life of Christ. In Der alte und der neue Glaube (translates as ‘Old and New Religious Belief, 1872) he aimed to show that religious belief was dead and a new faith had to be created on the basis of modern science and of art.
• 7. ‘David Friedrich Strauss, der Bekenner und Schriftsteller’ (translates as ‘David Friedrich Strauss, Confessor and Writer’) is part one of Nietzsche's volume of essays Unzeitgemaesse Betrachtungen (translates as ‘Untimely Thoughts’), Leipzig 1873.
• 8. Lecture given in Basle on 19 October 1917. Not translated. Published in German in GA 72, Freiheit—Unsterblichkeit—Soziales Leben (1990).
• 9. See lecture 6.
• 10. Sir James Dewar (1842–1923), Professor of Physics at Cambridge. (Earlier editions referred to Professor Drews (1865–1935) in error.)
• 11. Wagner, Faust's narrow-minded, pedantic servant and pupil in Goethe's Faust.