The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Although the form of man, in those ancient times which have been already described, was very different from his present form, yet, if we go still further back in the history of humanity, we find conditions differing even much more widely. For it was only in the course of time that the forms of man and woman arose from an earlier, original form in which the human being was neither the one nor the other, but both at the same time. He who would gain for himself a conception of those primeval ages must free himself entirely from those customary ideas which are drawn from present conditions. The times to which we are looking back lie somewhat before the middle of that epoch called in the preceding extracts the Lemurian. The human body then consisted of soft plastic matter; and the rest of the earthly forms also were both soft and plastic. Compared with its later firmness, the earth was still in a bubbling and more fluid state. The human soul, being embodied in that matter, could then adapt itself in a much greater degree than later. For the clothing of the soul in a male or female body is due to the fact that the one or the other is forced upon it by the development of external nature. So long as matter had not become firm, the soul could enforce its own laws upon it. It moulded the body in its own likeness; but when matter had grown dense the soul had to suit itself to the laws stamped on that matter by external nature. So long as the soul was master of matter, it formed its body neither male nor female, but gave to it qualities common to both. For the soul is at once both male and female. In itself it bears these two natures. Its male element is related to that which we call Will, its female element to what is designated Imagination. The external formation of the earth has led the body to adopt a one-sided evolution. The male body has assumed a form determined by the element of Will; the female, on the contrary, bears rather the impress of Imagination. Thus it is that the bisexual male-female soul inhabits a unisexual male or female body. And so the body had in the course of evolution assumed so decided a form through the influence of external earth-forces that thereafter it was no longer possible for the soul to pour its entire force into this body. It had to retain within itself something of the force that belonged to it, and could allow only a part to flow into the body.

When we study the Âkâshic Records we see that, at a period in the far past, human forms appear soft, plastic, and quite unlike those of later times. They still retain in equal measure the nature of man and woman. As time passes and matter densifies, the human body appears in two forms, one of which resembles the man's later form, the other the woman's. Before the appearance of these differentiated forms, every human being could of itself bring forth another. The fructification was no outer process, but one which took place within the human body itself. When the body took on a male or a female form, it lost the possibility of self-fructification. Co-operation with another body was necessary in order to produce a new human being.

The separation of the sexes appears when the earth attains a certain condition of density. The density of matter partly checks the power of reproduction, and that portion of the reproductive force which is still effective requires completion from outside by the opposite force in another human being. But the soul must retain within itself a part of its earlier force, in man as well as in woman. It cannot expend this part in the outer corporeal world. Now this portion of his force is directed inwards in man. It cannot appear outwardly; therefore it is set free for the use of inner organs—and here comes an important point in the evolution of mankind. Before it, that which we call mind—the ability to think—could have found no place in man, for this capacity would have had no organ through which to act. The soul turned its whole force outwards to the building up of the body. But now the soul-force, which cannot find an object for its activity without, can unite itself with the mind-force; and, by such union, those organs of the body are evolved which, at a later period, make man a thinking being. Thus could man direct a part of the force that in earlier times he had turned to the bringing forth of his kind, to the perfecting of his own being. The force by means of which mankind formed for itself a thinking brain is the same force by which, in ancient times, man fructified himself. Thought is attained by unisexuality. Since man no longer fructifies himself, but the opposite sexes fructify one another, they can turn a part of their productive force inwards and become thinking beings. Thus the male and female bodies respectively present externally an imperfect picture of the soul, but because of this they become inwardly more perfect beings.

Very slowly and gradually this change is accomplished in man. Little by little the later single-sexed human forms appear side by side with those of the double sex.

It is again a kind of fructification which takes place in man on his becoming a thinking being. The inner organs which can be built up by the superfluous soul-force are fructified by the mind. The soul is in itself two-fold—male-female, and so in ancient times it also formed its body. At a later period it can only give to its body a form that can co-operate with another externally; for itself it retains the ability to co-operate with the mind. From this time forward man is fructified from without for the exterior part,—from within and for the interior part of his nature by the mind. It may be said, then, that the male body has a female soul, the female body a male soul. This inner one-sidedness in man is now balanced by the fructification of the mind. The one-sidedness is removed. The male soul in the female body and the female soul in the male body both become bisexual again through fructification by the mind. Thus do man and woman differ in their outer form, and, within, the one-sidedness of the soul unites itself in both sexes to a harmonious whole. Within, mind and soul melt into unity. The mind affects as female the male soul in woman, and thus makes it male-female; it works upon the female soul in man, as male, and so forms it female-male. The bisexuality in man has withdrawn from the outer world, where it existed in pre-Lemurian times, to his inner self.

We see that the higher inner man has nothing to do with male and female. Nevertheless the inner uniformity comes from a male soul in a woman and in like manner from a female soul in a man. The union with the mind brings uniformity at last; but the fact that before the appearance of this uniformity there exists difference, this fact contains a mystery of human nature. The knowledge of this mystery is of great importance to all occult science, for it is the key to weighty problems of life. For the present it is forbidden to raise further the veil that covers this mystery.

Thus did physical man develop from the bisexual body to the unisexual,—to the separation into man and woman. And because of this, man has become a being endowed with mentality, such as he now is. But it must not be imagined that there were not intelligent beings in connection with the earth even before this period. If we search the Âkâshic Records, we certainly see that in the first Lemurian period the physical man of the future was a very different being from that which we call man to-day. He was unable to connect any sense-perceptions with thoughts: he did not think. His life was one of instinct. His soul expressed itself simply in instincts, desires, animal wishes, and so on. His consciousness was dreamy; he lived in a kind of stupor. But there were other beings in the midst of this humanity. These were, of course, also bisexual; for with the prevailing conditions in the evolution of the earth at that time, no male or female human body could be brought forth. The external conditions were still wanting. But there were other beings who, in spite of their double sex, were able to acquire knowledge and wisdom. This was possible, because these beings had undergone an entirely different evolution at a still more remote period of the past. It had become possible for their souls to fertilize themselves with mind, without waiting for the development of the inner organs of the human physical body. It is only by the help of the brain that contemporary man is able to ponder upon those impressions which he receives from outside and through the senses. It is the evolution of the soul of man that caused this. The human soul had to wait till there was a brain to co-operate with the mind. The soul would have remained mindless had it not taken this indirect path. It would have remained at the stage of dream-consciousness.

It was different with the superhuman beings already mentioned. The soul of such beings had at earlier stages developed soul-organs which required nothing physical to enable them to unite themselves with the mind. Their knowledge and wisdom were supersensually acquired. Such knowledge is called intuitive. It is not until a later stage of his evolution that the man of the present attains to this intuition, which enables him to come into touch with mind, apart from the assistance of the senses. He must reach it indirectly through the material senses. This indirect course is called the descent of the human soul into matter, or popularly “The Fall” (into sin). Owing to an earlier evolution of a different kind, these superhuman beings did not need to undergo this descent into matter. As the soul of such beings had already attained a higher stage, their consciousness was not dreamy but inwardly luminous, and the comprehension of knowledge and wisdom by them was clairvoyance which needed no senses and no organs of thought. The Wisdom by which the world was built streamed directly into their soul.

Thus were they able to be the leaders of young humanity, still sunk in apathy. They were the bearers of an Ancient Wisdom, to comprehend which man must struggle upwards by the roundabout path described. They differed from what is called “man” by the fact that Wisdom poured out its rays on them “from above” as a free gift, just as the sunlight streams down on us. It was not so with “man.” He had to acquire wisdom for himself by the labour of the senses and of the organ of thought. It did not at first come to him as a free gift. He must desire it. Only when the longing for wisdom is alive in man does he strive to attain it for himself through his senses and thought-organ. So a new impulse must awaken in the soul,—desire, the longing for knowledge. The human soul could not possess this longing in its earlier stages. Its impulses were only towards embodiment in that which took on an outer form, in that in which it lived as a dreamy life, but not towards the knowledge of an outer world, not towards understanding. With the separation of the sexes first appeared the desire for knowledge.

It was just because the superhuman beings did not desire it, that wisdom became known to them by the path of clairvoyance. They waited till wisdom streamed into them, as we wait for the sunshine that we cannot create by night, but which must come to us of itself in the morning.

The longing for knowledge is evoked in this way, in order that the soul may build up inner organs (the brain, etc.) by which it comes into possession of knowledge. This result follows, because part of the soul-force works no longer from without but from within. But the superhuman beings who have not accomplished this separation of their soul-forces direct their entire soul-energy outwards.

They have thus also at their service, for the outer fructification by the mind, that force which man turns inward for the building up of his organs of knowledge. Now that force by means of which man turns outwards to unite himself with another is Love. The superhuman beings directed their whole love outwards to let the wisdom of the worlds stream into their souls. But man can turn outward only a part. Man became sensual, and thus his love grew sensual too. He withdrew from the outer world a part of his being which he then directed towards his inner building. And this produced what is called “selfishness.” When man became man or woman in his physical body he could only surrender a part of his being; with the other part he separated himself from the surrounding world. He became selfish. And his outer activity, as well as his striving for inward development, became selfish. He loved, because he desired, and he thought, because again he desired,—in this case, knowledge. In contrast to a childish and selfish humanity stood the leaders in their all-loving, unselfish natures. The soul which in them inhabits neither a male nor a female body is itself male-female. It loves without desire. The innocent soul of man loved thus before the separation of the sexes; nevertheless, it could not at that time know, for the very reason that it was still at a lower stage—in dream-consciousness. Thus too does the soul of the higher beings love; nevertheless, these beings can know in spite of this and on account of their advanced development. “Man” must pass through selfishness in order once more to reach unselfishness at a higher stage, but this time with an absolutely clear consciousness.

This, then, was the task of the superhuman beings, of the great leaders,—to stamp upon the young humanity their own character, that of love. They could do so only with that part of the soul-force which was directed outwards. Thus arose sensual love. And hence the latter accompanies the soul's activity in a male or female body. Sensual love became the force for human physical development. This love brings man and woman together in so far as they are physical beings. On this love rests the progress of physical humanity. It was over this love only that the so-called superhuman beings had power. That part of the human soul-force which turns inwards and must gain knowledge by the indirect path of sensuality withdraws itself from the power of those superhuman beings. They themselves had never descended to the development of corresponding inner organs. They could clothe the outward impulse in love, because they possessed as their very essence the love that was outwardly active. Thus there was a gulf between them and the young humanity. They could implant love in man, at first in a sensual form; knowledge they could not give, because their own knowledge had never taken the by-path through those inner organs which man was now developing in himself. They could speak no language which a being with brains could understand.

Now the said inner organs of man were, it is true, not ripe for contact with mind till that stage of earthly existence was reached which lies in the middle of the Lemurian period; but once before, at a much earlier period of development, they had been cultivated into an imperfect first beginning. For the soul had already passed through physical embodiments in times long gone by. It had lived, not indeed on the earth, but on other celestial bodies in densified matter. More exact information on this subject cannot be given till later. Only so much as this may now be said,—the beings of earth had formerly inhabited another planet, and, according to the conditions existing on it, they had developed to the stage at which they stood when they reached the earth. They laid aside the matter of the preceding planet like a garment, and became pure soul-germs at the stage of development reached then,—capable of sensation, of feeling, and so on; in short, able to lead that dreamlike life which still belonged to them in the first stages of their earth existence. But the superhuman beings spoken of, the leaders in the domain of love, had also lived on the preceding planets, and were even there so perfect that they no longer needed to descend in order to develop the first beginnings of those inner organs.

But there were other beings, not so far advanced as these Leaders of Love, but who might rather be counted as men on the preceding planet, who nevertheless outstripped mankind at that time. They were thus indeed, at the beginning of the earth formation, further advanced than man, but nevertheless still at the stage at which knowledge must be acquired through inner organs. These beings were in a peculiar position. They were too far advanced to pass through the physical human body, either male or female, and yet not far enough to be able to act by means of perfect clairvoyance, as were the Leaders of Love. They could not be, as yet, Beings of Love; and at the same time they could no longer be “men.” So it was only possible for them as semi-superhuman beings to continue their own evolution, but with the help of man. They could converse with the beings with brains in a language these understood. By this means the human soul-force directed inwards was aroused, and they were enabled to unite themselves to knowledge and wisdom. It was indeed only thus that wisdom of a human sort came to the earth. The “semi-superhuman” beings spoken of were able to absorb this human wisdom, and thus reach that perfection which they themselves still lacked. They thus became the creators of human wisdom. For this reason they were called “light bringers” (Lucifer). Thus had infant humanity leaders of two kinds—Beings of Love and Beings of Wisdom,—human nature was yoked between Love and Wisdom, when it assumed its present form on the earth. By the Beings of Love it was stimulated to physical development, by the Beings of Wisdom to the perfection of its inner self. In consequence of its physical development, mankind advanced from generation to generation, forming new tribes and races; through its inner development the individuals increased in inward perfection; they became scholars, sages, artists, technical scientists, etc. From race to race physical humanity advances; each race throughout its physical evolution transfers, to the following one, such of its qualities as are perceptible to the senses. Here the law of heredity reigns. The children bear the physical characteristics of their fathers. Beyond this lies an evolution towards perfection of mind and soul which can only be accomplished by the development of the soul itself. And here we are confronted with the law of the evolution of the soul within the bounds of earthly existence.

[ 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.

Man, who is the center of our cosmos, has four stages, and they are: his being, his life, his feeling and his self-consciousness. One is right to distinguish these stages, because on earth there are beings that have only one stage, only being: the mineral; beings that have two stages, being and life: the plants; and those that have three stages: Being, life and sensation - the animals. The beings that are above man, the gods, have even higher levels in addition. Man has all these four levels on the physical plan. We get to know through sensual perception his being; when man moves and stirs, his life; when he feels, desire and dislike, his sensation; when he speaks: his self-consciousness. All this is on the physical plan.

For the other beings we perceive only the stages indicated for them. But it does not follow that they do not have the other stages. Only their consciousness is not on the physical plan as in the case of man, but it works down from a higher plan. The clairvoyant notices that the animal has its consciousness on the astral plane, and it is not one animal that has the consciousness, but a whole series has it together. This is called a group soul; it is a communal consciousness on the astral plane. It is the regulator, the regent for the whole animal species. The plants have similarly developed a self-consciousness, but on the lower mental plan. From there, like threads, go down the conduits, and these guide the individual plants. The minerals have their common consciousness on the arupa plane.

It presents itself, if we consider a genus of animals, as if threads were reaching down from the astral plan and directing the individual animals. But it is not that astral plan on which we are in the dream [- monkey is probably there]. But all the animals, which have separated from man before the moon split, have their consciousness on the lunar astral plan. Therefore the animals are in a certain relation to the moon. They change with the rising and waning moon. Our plants partly have their group soul on the sun, because they had separated from man when the sun separated from the earth. So that the sun gives not only light and warmth to the plant, but also the regulating consciousness. Thus everything is connected with the whole cosmos. Our solar system is a collective body that exerts magnetic force among itself. These are magnetic lines of force.

Some institutions of our earth can be explained only in an occult way. We find the living together reasonably regulated in the earlier people; this was implanted in them, they could not do otherwise. Then man became freer; what used to be instinct, he now regulates by reason. With the Iroquois this can still be traced in the formation of language. Still with the Mongols there was an instinctive consciousness of cohesion through eighteen generations; then two streams emerged, which in turn united and formed one tribe.

The Greek felt himself a link in the polis in connection with the others. The Roman felt himself a Roman and then a member of a particular race. It was not until the North Germanic peoples that such a strong emphasis was placed on the personal. The future will develop selflessness in community; people will form groups. The foundation was already laid when, at the time of the Lemurian race, people were gifted with manas. Manas, which rises to Budhi, is the society-creating principle. On our earth there are associations of great internal regularity, for instance, in groups of animals such as bees and ants, which build things up in such a way that the greatest human reason could not do better. The dog cannot grasp, where from that comes with the human being, what eludes his consciousness. It is the same with the man who looks at the bee-state: He does not see the associated BudhiManas principle; this seems reasonable. The Budhi-Manas principle, which descended to the Earth, has formed elsewhere, namely on the planet Venus. With the sons of Venus - Manasaputras - came down peculiarly beautiful group souls, namely those of bees and ants. That is the reason why these states are so special. They are merely the terminal members of higher consciousness, like the fingertips compared to the human brain. Our domestic animals are more individual, but their group souls are far behind those of bees and ants.

The Insightful One speaks so much of Maya and illusion because he thinks that things are opaque unless viewed from higher plans: They are here offshoots.

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.

Dear attendees! There is no doubt that it is always important for people to devote themselves to the necessary reflections on the great question of the soul and human destiny. And basically, it is these questions that should also form the basis for tonight's reflection. But in our fateful times, when death and fate itself are taking such a powerful and tragic hold on the world, it seems particularly appropriate to incline the human heart, incline the perceptions and reflections, towards this enigma, which is so incisive in the life of the human soul.

Now, as I have often been allowed to make such observations from the field of spiritual science here, it has been pointed out that the nature and aspects of spiritual science still go against what has been recognized and thought possible in our time through centuries-old habits of thinking and feeling. Spiritual science still finds no support in what is today external science, and especially not in what has developed out of this science in the broadest circles as a kind of creed. For all habits of thought, all [research practices] that have developed in the way indicated seem – I say expressly, seem – to directly oppose what spiritual science has to say about the great riddles of human existence.

However, as has been mentioned here often, the change that has to take place in human thinking from the present point of view to that of spiritual science will be no greater, relatively speaking, than that which had to take place when the dawn of the natural scientific way of thinking arose; when, so to speak, all concepts, all ideas and notions that people had about the structure and interconnection of the world and the nature of the human soul and the weaving of human destinies were subjected to transformation. Just as it certainly seemed to many people at that time, how the solid ground of the life of ideas on which they stood was shaken, so it may be for many people in our present time with regard to spiritual scientific ideas. But the human soul is changeable, the human soul is born for progress. And just as the scientific point of view has become interwoven with human development, so the spiritual scientific world view will become interwoven with it.

Now, it must be said that, when considering the question of what is immortal in the human being, the habits of thought in the present day resist in the most diverse ways the recognition of the truths that spiritual science has to give from its foundations. Above all (and we shall find further confirmation of this in the course of today's lecture), the whole character of those truths that relate to the immortal human being is quite different from the character of those truths that relate to external, sensual things and to the scientific summary of these sensual things. Man has become so accustomed to ascribing reality to that of which he can say: the matter has been confirmed to me by something outside of my soul life. But spiritual-scientific truths cannot be recognized in this way. It is impossible for them to invoke something, as scientific truths do, that gives the impression of truth from outside and to which we only have to surrender, so that we can say: the matter is true because it presents itself to us in this way in our observation, independently of our soul life. That which presents itself as spiritual scientific truths, especially as truths about the immortal human soul, must be grasped inwardly. And for this grasping there are no external points of reference, there is no relying on anything that proves itself independently of the human soul.

Therefore, as was already mentioned yesterday, spiritual science must say without arrogance: it must be a kind of brave science; a science that courageously dares to experience the impulses of truth not through intuition but through inner experience. Therefore, spiritual science cannot passively indulge in world contemplation, but must arise as the soul actively develops hidden powers within itself, as it brings up from the depths that which is hidden in its depths, that which the power of truth includes within itself. This is one of the reasons why spiritual truth is so opposed to current ways of thinking.

The other, esteemed participant, is even closer to the contemplation that is to be undertaken today. We shall see that spiritual science, as something immortal in the human soul, presents something that is so fundamentally different from all that the senses convey to us, from all that we think, feel and want in everyday life, so fundamentally different from all that, that in this everyday life, man actually carelessly passes by what is eternal and immortal in him. And he passes it by all the more carelessly for the reason that he is inclined not to ascribe reality to what confronts him just as the being in his own inner being, which finds the way through the eternities and through births and deaths. There is something so light and fleeting in everyday life that is immortal in us that we are not at all inclined to ascribe the most intense reality of life to this very light and fleetingness.

How this immortality is found in the human soul has been the subject of my frequent discourses here. However, this search for the immortality of the human soul must be discussed again and again and from different points of view for the simple reason that the spiritual-scientific investigations are more complex and diverse. And only when they are characterized from the most diverse points of view is it possible to gain a true understanding of them.

If one now says that what is immortal in the human being must be grasped through the development of such soul forces, which are initially hidden in the deepest interior of the human being and in the inner soul [experience], if one says this, then the person of the present has the belief that basically only something subjective, something that has personal value, can be achieved.

The beginning of spiritual research is indeed subjective; it is an inner experience and inner development of otherwise hidden powers in the soul. It is a process of overcoming, an inward journey, a working of one's way out of darkness and into the light, which must be experienced by people's souls in a wide variety of ways. It is certainly subjective at first. But this belief can only exist because most people do not have the patience to go far enough with the spiritual researcher. For even if all beginnings of spiritual research are steeped in subjectivity, so that they develop out of the most personal of personal things, it is precisely through inner conquest, through inner struggle, that the soul is driven to overcome the inner itself within. And by inwardly working out an objective element that lies within it, it can gain entry into a new world, which, alongside our own, arises as if, roughly speaking, a new sense were to awaken in our physicality, and a completely new area of the external sensory world were to open up for us. But the urge from the subjective to the objective in spiritual struggle and spiritual research is an intimate one; it is such that it makes it necessary for the human being to acquire soul habits within himself that otherwise do not occur in everyday life. I have also already emphasized that inner activity of the soul which so transforms and transforms this soul that it can make its way into the spiritual worlds, which always surround us and which remain hidden only to the unprepared soul.

The first thing that the soul must practise in order to get to know its own nature truly and scientifically, not merely by faith, is what can be called technical sharp concentration of thought, such concentration of thought that does not merely appeal to the inner power of thinking, but which appeals to the application of inner willpower in thinking and imagining. Those thoughts that come to us as a result of the external world making an impression on us, and that are fixed in us as a result of them entering us through the senses, that they arouse a sensual process in our body and that this sensual process fills us in our inner being , that reality is guaranteed by these thoughts, which are carried as reality through the effects of the external sensory world within our own body, so that we believe in their reality. These thoughts cannot help us if we are seeking the immortal essence of the human soul.

These must be other thoughts, thoughts that are basically quite similar, at least superficially similar to such spiritual images, such inner experiences, ladies and gentlemen, which all too easily succumb to a very special inner fate, the fate that they come and go as quickly as dreams, which easily succumb to the fate of being forgotten. We know this fate of being forgotten in a general human experience, in the experience of dreams. We know that what flits through our soul as a dream experience is quickly forgotten. Why? Because the dream takes hold of our whole physical being in a much less intense way, and thus creates much less within this physicality the conditions by which we inwardly sense, sense reality precisely in the embodiment of thoughts, and then also permanently retain reality. In a sense, the thought experience does not pass over into the physical one and therefore flits by.

It is similar with thoughts that we, as it were, allow to be drawn by the soul as thoughts that we have formed independently. We often observe them and call them daydreams; they are quickly forgotten and quickly fade away. And yet, the further one progresses, the more thoroughly one trains oneself to unfold precisely those powers within oneself that can receive formed thought experiences in the soul, as otherwise only appearances based on external sense impressions are received, the more one progresses in this unfolding of soul activity within the soul, the better one trains oneself for spiritual research. This is the basis of what is called thought concentration in the true spiritual sense of the term.

The thoughts that are least suitable for this concentration are those that are images of external, sensory reality. Images that we form ourselves, that do not directly depict anything, but that we freely form in our minds, and to which we then surrender, are most suitable. I have described such [meditative inner soul processes] in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, [for example]. If one wants to hold on to such thought-forms, which are freely created spiritually, one must apply a stronger, more powerful inner will to hold on to them than one usually has in one's outer life.

In the external world, we have a firm support in the life of the soul precisely because thoughts cause a real material process, make an impression [and cause real changes in the body]. Based on these changes, the experience is so strong that we need to muster little will, little inner soul will, to hold on to such thoughts. But to form thoughts freely, without being forced to do so, and to recognize them from the point of view that we simply give ourselves to them to strengthen our inner soul power, to hold on to such thought-forms or feelings or even impulses of will, requires a strong tension of the inner power of the soul, requires a far stronger will than for everyday thinking. But it is precisely on this that the schooling of the spirit is based, which is necessary for [exploring the spiritual worlds,] that inner strength and inner energy are released, as it were, which would otherwise remain unused in everyday thinking.

This is why people who need the aforementioned support for their thinking all too soon tire in this concentrated thinking, all too soon fall into a state not unlike falling asleep. But only by tensing the inner forces of will, which relate only to the inner movement of thoughts, do we attain the stronger forces that we need in the soul to grasp not only the transitory but also the immortal of the human soul.

And now it becomes apparent when a person, one might say, has developed thinking and feeling through faithful inner schooling for a long time, that the person is then in a position to have a truly inner experience of imagination, that he is completely absorbed in this inner experience of imagination, that all his powers are gathered in this experience of imagination and the rest of his life seems to fade away. The spiritual researcher must bring it about that the world is, as it were, distracted on all sides and the soul becomes completely one with something that it has placed at the center of its soul life in the healthiest way, [as I would like to emphasize]. All willpower must be directed towards that which is at the very core of the soul's life. Only then does a person realize what the power of thought is and how thought, if it is to be allowed to rule freely in the life of the human soul, must be supported by strong willpower.

And then, [my dear audience], the spiritual researcher makes a very specific discovery, one that we must indeed bear in mind. The experience comes at a very specific point. The exercise I just discussed must be carried out for long months, for years. Again and again, we have to come back to it, just to evoke thoughts and ideas in our consciousness through the inner willpower of our soul. And again and again, we have to develop this direct thought life. Then, after some time, we have a certain experience based entirely on this experience. At first, the spiritual researcher is able to concentrate his thinking [ever more brightly and clearly], ever more intensely and ever more intensely, to be in the thought experience within it. And he notices that the thought experience intensifies, becoming ever more powerful and mighty. Indeed, he feels how his entire consciousness of being, in uniting, in generally uniting and becoming identical with the concentrated thinking, is increasingly shaken and shaken.

But then there comes a very definite critical point, which consists in the fact that just when we have arrived at the experience of the strength of the thought, this thought shatters as if within itself in our soul, dissolving as if within our soul. One would like to say that the critical point occurs when the thought, when it is carried to its highest energy, darkens, darkens, ceases to be present for us. And we, who have followed thought, as it were, identified ourselves with thought, we feel how something, how our whole being goes along with thought. And that is a significant, an extremely significant experience.

When you put it that way, it might seem simple; it is not simple, the experience I am talking about. It is an experience that shakes up all the human powers of the soul, that calls into question everything that one has felt until then, everything that one has acquired as valuable for the soul in this or that sense. And what particularly resists moving closer to this experience, what repeatedly and again stands in our way, getting stuck earlier, not going so far that this experience arises, which, as it were, does not allow us to approach this last experience, these are the forces of human egoism associated with the depths of the soul.

What is meant, esteemed listeners, is that if we do not harness all our energies, all our inner willpower, we will simply get stuck sooner, we will not get to where the thought, as it were, splinters. We do not do this consciously, but it happens entirely through unconscious volition. It does not let us go because we are afraid, inwardly afraid, without being conscious of it, that something much worse than even physical death could happen to us.

When I speak of this fear, it is of course a small thing for someone who wants to hold on to materialistic ideas to say: Well, the experience will not be as bad as physical death. But it is indeed an experience that does not enter into ordinary consciousness, but it does take hold of the soul's life as a force, as an impulse, as an impulse that acts like unconscious fear: not only of the destruction of the body, but of the absorption, of the outpouring of one's entire being into the cosmos, into the whole environment. You don't want to pour out like that. (You haven't consciously felt that in your soul, but you don't want to approach the experience.)

If you overcome all the inexpressible feelings, which can, however, be called feelings of fear, if you overcome all that, then, dear attendees, there comes a time when you know exactly, know through inner experience: now you are drawing something out of your body through those powers that you have developed in this way through concentration of thought. But precisely this drawing out of a spiritual being that otherwise - as we now know - permeates the body, this drawing out always seems particularly dangerous: because this drawing out is precisely connected with the feeling of having to dissolve and of something is stuck in us that we cannot draw out in this way, but which must be drawn out of us if it is not to fall prey to the dissolving Nothing that is to be drawn out in the way described. We have the clear consciousness: Now, something else must be drawn out of us, [if we want to draw the whole inner man out of us.] It is not enough with the concentration of thought alone. That draws out a part of us. We have the clear consciousness.

Now, dear audience, if you want to understand why it is so difficult for a person to have experiences like the ones I have described, then you can start from everyday experiences that are not noticed at first. What has been described exists in a relationship of attraction that a person has to himself. It presupposes that the human being has the inner strength to approach his own nature, so to speak. But nothing is as questionable in ordinary life, esteemed attendees, as a person's relationship to himself. In ordinary self-knowledge, this relationship of the human being to himself is only expressed very, very imperfectly, even in everyday life.

I would like to give an example that seems to have been taken from something quite different to the things I have been talking about. A well-known contemporary philosopher wrote a book about the “Analysis of Sensations”. On the third page, he talks about a strange experience that he had twice. He was a philosopher and a university professor. In his own way, he had also struggled for a worldview: Dr. Ernst Mach.

He says:

As a very young man, I was once walking down the street when I saw a man coming towards me with a face that I found extremely unappealing, even repulsive. I was quite shocked when I realized that it was my own face in profile, which appeared to me because I had passed a set of mirrors and the mirrors were placed against each other in such a way that I saw my own face.

Not only the man, but even the philosopher, knows his own figure so little! But there is a second, similar experience, which happened to the person concerned not as a very young man, but in very mature years, he says. He says:

Not so long ago

- in the nineties -

I got on a bus after a very exhausting train journey, very tired, and noticed that a man was also getting on the bus from the other side, and I thought to myself: what kind of down-at-heel schoolteacher is getting on there? It was only then that I noticed a large mirror on the back wall that showed me my own image!

He adds:

So the habitus of my class was more familiar to me than my own personal habitus.

He knew so little about himself that he was amazed at his own appearance. [Well, he knew what a down-at-heel schoolmaster looked like, but he didn't know exactly what he looked like himself.]

[Yes, my dear attendees], it is of course very easy to laugh at such things, but they are deeply, deeply significant if you want to get an idea of how questionable the relationship is that a person has with themselves in ordinary life. But what prevents us, esteemed attendees, from coming into a relationship with ourselves in our ordinary lives that leads to self-knowledge, all of that is at the same time a sum of forces that prevent people from bringing their concentration of thought to such a development, as described above, to the point of bringing out a second person inside the person. One sees that the forces that prevent man from detaching himself from his inner self, from what this inner self is connected with from birth to death, are stored up in the very existence of man. But this detachment succeeds through what has been described. But in such a way that we are not so far through this obstacle that we bring our whole being out of ourselves. Something else must be added to the concentration of thought. Not only must we develop a more energetic relationship to our thoughts than is the case in our everyday life, but we must also develop a completely different relationship to our destiny, to the destiny in which we live, than we do in our everyday life.

How do we relate to our destiny in our everyday life? We see what we call our experiences of destiny as they come at us, whether we like them or dislike them. They affect us as “coincidences of life”, as we say. We regard what befalls us as fate as something external, as something external to our being, and we grow up and develop from birth to death with the idea that fate befalls us in such a way that it is something external to us. But even a simple reflection, one that extends only over the life between birth and death, can teach us that what must be called fate is by no means something so external to man.

If we look at ourselves at any time in our lives, at a later, more mature age, and take a look at what we are, what we can do in life, then, if we do not want to close ourselves off from a real knowledge of human nature, then we will come to the conclusion, dear Dear attendees, we would say to ourselves: Yes, I would not be able to do this or that now if this or that had not happened in my life eighteen, twenty, thirty, thirty-five years ago, if I had not had to go through this or that to encounter this and that. I am the result of what happened to me in my life as an experience of fate, and if it had not happened, I would not be the me that I am today.

And if we take this whole bundle of talents, strengths, habits, and the nature of our soul life, we can see how it develops between birth and death from the fateful experiences that have affected us, how we would be quite a different person if fate had not made us what we are. We are already our coiled, twisted fate in ordinary life. One does not look at oneself abstractly, but concretely in all that one has become as a fifty-year-old person; and one wonders what one can do, what one is, coiled up from the experiences of fate, whether one can trace the whole tangle [that is coiled up there] back to the experiences of fate.

[But what happens when you take such a contemplation seriously, that seriousness that is truly not all that common in everyday life, but which, when developed, becomes a second means of spiritual research. When one takes such a contemplation seriously, one comes to say to oneself, yes, fate is not something external to me at all; I am immersed in fate. The experience that has approached me has now become my self. And when I survey my entire fate, my self is in it. I step out of myself, as it were, with my consciousness and pour myself out into the whole stream of my fate. But this must be considered in a deeply serious way, it must become methodical, so to speak. Then, through such an activity of the soul, the opposite of what has occurred through the concentration of thought occurs, so to speak. With our thinking, we are otherwise inwardly absorbed. We usually have thoughts that are based on external impressions and that therefore have their basis and their power in complicated inner relationships. But when we concentrate our thoughts, we go out with our thoughts so strongly that our inner being goes with them and we believe we are losing ourselves there. When we immerse ourselves in our destiny, we undergo the opposite process. Then we go out of ourselves, but into something that we [otherwise] believe in the external, that we believe flows to us from the outer stream of life. We step out of ourselves and into something that we only now recognize: [this is what generates and makes us; we grow together with something that we believed externally].

If we do this with intense seriousness, if we go out of ourselves with our will and know how to say: what I have experienced as fate, I am already in it, I have brought it about myself, because I am connected with my ego in it. [When we make this a habitual inner activity], then we come out of ourselves again, but in such a way that we draw out the other part of our inner being, which is as it were torn off, that which has not been brought out [is] through the concentration of thought , that we now follow up on that and that it connects with what has been brought out first, and now a whole, initially hidden inner man is drawn out of us, an inner man in whom we then know ourselves to be alive, in whom we know ourselves to be so alive that we now look at this outer, this physical man, as we otherwise look at the outer surroundings, tables and chairs.

I have thus indicated to you two means that are just as much technical means of real spiritual research as the work of the laboratory or the physics cabinet or the clinic are strictly distinguishable means for external natural science research. The only difference is that when one wants to research the spiritual, one cannot do external [experiments] but only inner soul experiences, which bring about a transformation so that the soul withdraws from its body in its essence.

Not even in the abstract does spiritual science today need to speak of the fact that man's spiritual being is something real that separates from the body; but, one would like to say, through spiritual experimentation, spiritual science today knows how to separate the physical and the soul, just as one separates oxygen from hydrogen, in order to show that the oxygen is contained in the [water]. And the spiritual-soul substance is in it and can be drawn out through strictly observed procedures. Only, however, while we are experimenting in the laboratory, we face things externally with a certain indifference.

The tasks the spiritual researcher has to undergo are such that they represent, as it were, inner soul tragedies, overcoming and inner wrestling, inner bliss, inner disappointment, inner standing on firm ground, and again feeling like the bottomless; all this in often gruesome, often blissful concreteness of the inner soul experience. But then, when the spiritual researcher has succeeded in separating the real inner self from the physical body, he knows that the physical body, which he now observes with the being that is now outside the body, contains all the forces that begin with birth, or let us say with the birth and which are handed over to the earthly element at death, and he says to himself, that what he has withdrawn is working on this earthly-physical body, that he has grasped the eternal soul core in what he has withdrawn from the human being, and that he has grasped it simultaneously with fate. Now he knows that what separates from the physical body remaining in bed every night when falling asleep is this eternal essence, which is in the spiritual world from the time of falling asleep until waking up and can only not perceive itself because in ordinary life the person does not have the inner has the inner strength to bring about this interpenetration and interweaving of the soul that is outside the body, and also to make it shine and resound – spiritually speaking – so that one perceives it for oneself and has the strength to look down again [at the external, bodily level].

[But then, having explored what lives in the body, one has at the same time grasped that which goes through birth and death. And by grasping the soul as united with its destiny, one has grasped that which was present in the spiritual world before the human being was born or conceived, which represents the sum of the forces that themselves first sink to that which is given through the father and mother as a physical body, and become incorporated into it, in order to use the body as an instrument, to be the inner formative power through life, to work in the material world and also to wear away the body in the process, and to become stronger and stronger inwardly, in order to then pass through the gate of death back into the spiritual world, in order to prepare oneself there for a new bodily life.

Something else comes to life for the spiritual researcher: he is able to explain why this eternal, immortal core of being is not perceptible in ordinary life, why we know nothing of it. When we live between birth and death, we do indeed work all the experiences of life, [all sensations, feelings and thoughts], everything that life offers into this immortal core of being. But because we are accustomed to perceiving and working with the two eyes of the body for our daily lives, the labor of the physical body continually obscures these inner educational forces, which are immersed in the body and, when they are worked in the body, , but instead of being able to become the power of knowledge, they are eternal formative forces of the body, used for something else, similar to what the development of the outer physical existence represents. But we get to know this power so that the present body, which we carry between birth and death, is not its cause, as materialism believes, but on the contrary is its effect: [As it presents itself in life, it is the effect of that which has descended from the spiritual world, indeed, that which carries within itself the fruit of previous earthly lives. That which emerges from him, that which has descended from the spiritual world, indeed, that which bears within it the characteristics of previous earthly lives. For as soon as one comes to observe that which lives in the body and can be lifted out of the body in the manner described, one knows at once that that which lives in the body is as it is now because it is not the first time that it has lived in the body; one sees spiritually that it bears within it fruits that it has acquired in previous earthly lives. And in direct vision, the entire life appears to the spiritual researcher in such a way that it is composed of what has been achieved in the spirit, and this is transformed in such a way that it can in turn form a new life.

Thus spiritual research, dear attendees, does not arrive at the eternal, indestructible core of a person's being, how it goes from earthly life to earthly life and forms destiny, through fantasy or by making some kind of vague philosophical-abstract considerations, but rather in a spiritual experimental method that is actually modeled on natural science, so that one can say: What you are experiencing now, what is penetrating you now, will become strength in your immortal self, will pass through the gate of death, will transform itself so that in your next life it will enrich your self, your self working in your destiny. It is you yourself who, in your destiny, has brought over from a previous life and carries into the now; it is you yourself in your immortal essence.

Of course, esteemed attendees, it will take a long, long time in the development of human spiritual culture before a larger number of people will participate in spiritual science, which is described here as something positive. But this spiritual science will become a truly real part of spiritual human culture, just as chemistry or physics, or any other branch of external natural science. And just as the external natural sciences have brought progress to man in the external material sphere, so to speak radically transforming earthly life as far as man and his circumstances were concerned, so spiritual research will intervene in human life. And spiritual science will intervene in a transforming way in that which is moral impulse, in man's consciousness of his own essential being, in life in its true essential being, when only once those prejudices are overcome that today quite understandably still stand in the way of this spiritual science. These prejudices will be overcome as truly as the prejudices against natural science were once overcome.

Anyone who believes that spiritual science, as described here in a small part, is something completely dreamt up, fantastic, knows that those who are able to grasp the inner essence of this spiritual science live in the same error as he who belonged to those who said that this fool, Copernicus, imagined that the Earth revolved around the Sun, whereas everyone with healthy five senses could see that the Earth stood still and the Sun revolved around it! People in those days said, “Anyone with healthy senses cannot believe the fool Copernicus, that both of them of the external cosmic world contradict the appearance of the healthy five senses.” So, of course, people today must also say: anyone in possession of their right five senses cannot truly believe that one can develop one's thinking to such an extent that one first draws something like a piece of the inner human being out of oneself and then pulls the other after it by immersing oneself in destiny. But human history strides beyond such prejudices. And if humanity has already learned not to trust appearances with regard to the course of the stars, it will have to learn not to trust appearances with regard to what passes through the human soul through birth and death, and withdraws from appearances again when it leaves the realm of appearances through the gate of death.

There is, dear honored attendees, a stronger power of holding something to be true than the one that many still invoke today – and rightly so, when one considers contemporary history and conditions – and the one that those who refer to the so-called healthy five senses and to research recognized as valid today draw upon. There is a stronger force. But this force is connected with the deepest impulse of all human progress towards truth. And this must be developed within oneself to some extent if one wants to profess spiritual science today: this trust in the progress of truth of humanity. But this trust is also something that impresses a strong moral force into our soul. And just in this lies a gain in life, that man is able to bring himself to appeal to the powers of realization within him, which he must bravely bring forth through the strength of his soul, and which carry the truth through the world on their own wings, and do not merely need to borrow it from what presents itself to the external senses. But it is the strong inner experiences of fate that the human soul must undergo if it wants to deal with the immortal core of being, which, one might say, is naturally ignored in everyday life. With that, it may be said that today we have reached the point in the development of humanity where science must become what could not previously be science.

Of course, dearest ones present, what the spiritual researcher, as it were, distills out of the human being and presents to the intellect is always within the human being; it is the immortal within the human being. The spiritual researcher does not grasp it; the spiritual researcher only calls it forth into the horizon of knowledge.

And of course one can raise an objection here, an obvious objection, which is particularly obvious because it is so closely connected with our inner soul life, with our inner soul laziness. One can say: Why make an effort for this eternal core of our being? We will come to it in eternal life when we have discarded our body. Why make the effort for it? [It is eternal, after all, we will see after death!] We can quite calmly abandon ourselves to life and, for the rest, leave to the world spirits what they want to do with our immortal core! Two things must be said against such a cheap objection.

Firstly, it is about the fact that people need to be active, not just to know this or that, to see this or that, but to be active in order to advance the general process of evolution and development of humanity on Earth. Just as the laws and ideas of natural science were once unknown and had to be brought out of the [unknown] darkness into the light of knowledge, so most truths are first unknown and must be brought out of the unknown into the known. All human progress is based on this bringing out of what was previously unknown. And anyone who does not want to participate in this human progress, so that spiritual truths are also incorporated into this human progress in the future, just as natural science had to be incorporated in the past, should just admit that he is basically indifferent to all human progress, in which he is, after all, involved. That is the more abstract path, even if it is important.

But the other is that not only such abstract progress takes place in the development of humanity, but a very, very concrete progress takes place. It is only a superficial consideration of human development on earth to believe that as long as there have been people on earth, they were essentially the same. They were not essentially the same at all. We allow ourselves today to judge a Greek soul, a Roman soul, a soul originating from ancient Persian history, because we have no idea how much the souls of people in ancient times were different from those of people in the present. When we look back into ancient times, we find [at the bottom of the soul, everywhere] an inner, clairvoyant consciousness that originated in primeval times and ancient regions, through which the souls had their connection within themselves with the divine-spiritual forces of the world. But the very fact that human beings have the ability to withdraw to freedom in the course of developmental history, to extract themselves from this original dream-like clairvoyance, is precisely what constitutes their independence. The possibility of today's purely external knowledge is also based on this, and now, however, after man has attained the stage of detachment from spiritual life, he must in turn be grasped by spiritual life, the substantial spiritual life must be poured into his soul through spiritual science.

Today, however, we as human beings are still mostly at the stage where we can say that we still have so much inherited strength that our soul will not be darkened and [dawned] when it passes through the gate of death. But man, as he progresses from life to life, undergoes a development. The inner spiritual powers are being tested and tempered. And when a person passes from the present into the future course of life, he is dependent on developing within himself, consciously and out of inner freedom, that which fills him with conscious connection with the astral world , with such forces that can only be released in the soul itself, so that he does not go through the time between death and a new birth in dullness, but in bright inner feeling and experience.

The fact that spiritual science is currently entering our human development is connected with the whole meaning of earthly development; it is connected with the fact that man could only become free by, in a certain way, breaking the thread that bound him to the spiritual worlds. But out of freedom, out of free consciousness, he must now tie this bond again, which holds him together with the spiritual worlds. It is impossible that little by little, from the present time on, more and more people will not recognize the necessity of incorporating knowledge of the spiritual world into consciousness, knowledge of the eternal essence of the human being.

Therefore, where spiritual life has become more intense in recent times, where it has felt more dependent on gaining certainty of life and destiny from within, the idea of repeated earthly lives arises. It comes to us, for example, in the eighteenth century through one of the leading spirits of German intellectual life, Lessing. I have already mentioned here that Lessing left his most mature work, 'The Education of the Human Race', as a testament to humanity. And the basic idea of this most mature work of Lessing's, this testament of Lessing's, is the idea of repeated earthly lives and the intervening purely spiritual lives. I have already mentioned that very clever people today still treat spiritual science in such a way that they say: A person with his healthy five senses cannot understand it, such people say: Well, Lessing was a great man; throughout his life he really wrote reasonably or ingeniously; in his old age he just got a little weaker, and then he had the complicated idea of repeated lives on earth.

It may well be that these very clever people today can still feel a right to rebel against such a seeker as Lessing was, who felt something of the time that needs stronger soul power than the mere passive of external natural science. What has thus been established in German intellectual history by a mind like Lessing's, in turn, forms a kind of predisposition that must be developed; and in particular, it must be felt in all that lies within the realm of the German national soul - it will be felt - and which will lead to the fact that, in particular, from the realm of the German national soul, [not ] from some Central European culture, that which is also developed by such a clear mind as Lessing, in order to slowly enter into the stream of spiritual scientific research, which sheds light on the nature, on the true nature of the immortal human soul, as has been hinted at today.

This concept, however, was deeply rooted in what was said yesterday, that Johann Gottlieb Fichte perceived as the actual source of Germanness. Today, we would like to draw your attention once again to something that Fichte emphasized time and again, and always succinctly.

Fichte said: Not only after we have gone through death do we become immortal living beings.

In Fichte, we see clearly before knowledge what spiritual science is to elaborate on today and must elaborate on more and more in the future. What does Fichte talk about? Fichte says that in this mortal human body, which [grows] and develops, precisely through the immortal soul between birth and death, that in this mortal human body can be grasped - if only the right, the suitable inner strength is released from the soul - can be grasped, even the immortal, that immortal, that man in his mortality can already become aware of the immortal and that he does not have to wait for the recognition of immortality in death, but that he can find within himself that which goes through births and deaths, through eternities, with the powers of knowledge suitable for this.

This spiritual science is particularly present in those personalities of spiritual striving whose time first had to be characterized a little, and it is present there in such a way – and that is the essential thing, because naturally things occur in the most diverse places in their direction towards us - but it is so disposed there that we can, so to speak, draw a straight line between what is beginning to bear spiritual fruit and what must now develop. And one would like to say, dear ladies and gentlemen, that never again in the stream of German, of Central European intellectual life has this awareness of the immortal core of man been lost in a scientific way. It was always there, again and again. I could list many, many things that have emerged in the course of the nineteenth century to the present day. I would just like to draw attention to one thing that should show how there was indeed an awareness, albeit a delicate awareness, or rather, one that only wanted to arise delicately, of what has just been developed here today.

One of those minds, belonging to the second half of the nineteenth century, who also stands on the ground of the Goethe-Schiller-Fichte worldview, who has developed this worldview in his life in uninterrupted progress, is the late, excellent art historian Herman Grimm, who has also been mentioned by me here several times.

This art historian Herman Grimm also wrote novellas. In his volume of novellas, one of the first novellas is this one, entitled: “The Songstress”. In it, he describes how a certain relationship develops between two people, a songstress and a man. He describes how the two people are then driven apart by life's circumstances and character. And he describes how the man commits suicide out of grief, how the singer learns of it, and how it affects her. And now, in the 1860s, Herman Grimm vividly describes in his novella 'The Songstress' how the detached etheric form – a part of what, when a person passes through the gateway of death passes into the spiritual world - appears before the singer, so that after the death of the man she spurned in life, one might say she is looking at the epitome of his immortal being. If I were able to describe this to you in detail, I would also be able to justify why I am referring to this novella in particular. Of course, it can be retorted that the poet is able to exaggerate and misrepresent everything. That is not the point. Rather, the spiritual researcher has the direct impression: here a poet is accurately [reproducing] what is known to be the way the matter unfolds, [he is] giving an account of the life after death.

Herman Grimm has written a novel that should be read thoroughly for other reasons as well: “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Insurmountable Forces). The story of the novel takes place during the war, in 1866. The interplay of European and American cultural relations is described in this novel in the same masterful way. And from this background, the fate of various people arises; towards the end, the description of the death of the heroine. At the end of the novel, we find that the poet Herman Grimm describes something very strange to us. He describes death very vividly, and he describes death in such a way that what I have described today, how it stands out, I would say through spiritual research experimental art from the body in death. [Gap in the text]. In the 1960s, the time had not yet come to pursue spiritual science, but those people who, through the special structure of their soul life, had a connection with the spiritual, were immersed in this spiritual and felt the need, even when describing forces, to show not only the external sense world, but also that which is the eternal part of this sense world.

People developed out of that spiritual beginning of culture who knew that if one wants to describe true reality, one has to describe more than the physical, external sense appearance, who knew that he who denies this speaks like one who has a strongly magnetic horseshoe in front of him and says, “You are a fantastic fool. It has no invisible powers in it.” The whole sensory world is as it is here in the rough. But people knew this, who, especially out of the deepening of German idealism, learned to feel the spiritual reality. This is the path of human development, dear honored attendees, out of mere idealism, which constitutes the greatness of a bygone and particularly German epoch, to develop a genuine spiritual-scientific worldview. This can be clearly felt by objectively and impartially observing German intellectual life. It is truly a mission of German idealism to concretize itself, to fulfill itself inwardly, so that it can advance from the ideal recognition of intellectual life, as we have it with Fichte, with Schelling, with Hegel, [can advance] to the real view of intellectual experience with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, of which Goethe spoke.

And again, it is very remarkable, dear honored attendees, that enlightened minds of the nineteenth century, right where they turn their gaze to German intellectual life – [in particular, Goethe] – that they come to the conclusion that a kind of hope for humanity is connected to the development of precisely this intellectual life. One would like to say that, if so, today in these fateful times of ours, perhaps precisely from what is happening between the lines of life – forgive the foolish but perhaps apt expression – , if one examines [with sharpened powers of soul], one feels something of how, through the further development of spiritual life from the roots of German idealism, the world can come to grasp the spiritual. One can feel this without being filled with particular arrogance in relation to one's own German spiritual life. One does not need to be filled with pride, one can really feel today in some phenomena how that which has placed itself in the world as a great thing in the Goethe-Schiller-Fichte era was the beginning of a great spiritual development that is to be defended [in Central Europe].

I would not want to do otherwise than to present, if I may say so, out of a “tragic” feeling, two images that have personally come to mind; I would like to present these two images not out of some national subjectivity, but because they are related to certain feelings of our fateful time.

We experienced them, the first days of August last year – 1914 – and we experienced them in such a way that we received reports of how they were being experienced in the various European countries. I would like to present just two images. The first image: one is confronted with a great event, the magnitude of which one cannot even begin to comprehend! The German Reichstag convenes. I do not want to go into the details, because, as Bismarck famously said, I do not want to mix up what wants to remain in words with what should be decided by action. I do not want to go into the details of the immediate day-to-day politics, or what of this day-to-day politics is connected with the political events. But one image stands out vividly in my mind: there they stand, the representatives of the various political parties, and they are silent, silent! And this silence makes a tremendous impression; an impression, esteemed attendees, as if it were the herald of what was to happen afterwards. And in this silence lies the word of a great truth that has been murmuring throughout world history.

One can avert one's gaze, but actually I should turn it to the other place, more to the east. I would like to say, really, no, I have to say it with a kind of inner weeping, the image that then presented itself during the same days in the assembly of the Gossudarstwennaja Duma. There was no silence, everyone was talking. The people of the various party organizations. And they spoke in such a way that these speeches seemed to form the impression that one was dealing with a staged, world-historical theater performance – one would forgive the expression where one does not want to forgive it, because, as I said, one could only look at it with inner weeping. The dizzying intoxication of a false enthusiasm contributed to what was much talked about in the Duma, in contrast to the silence that prevailed further west.

If you no longer want to merely research external appearances, but want to delve into the inner moods of world history, you will want to grasp spiritually what the development of humanity is murmuring, to look for such moods. There is something in this silence that in turn gives confidence in an inner strength, that gives us a sense that spiritual truth and spiritual strength are well preserved in the bosom of Central European culture and that, as it rests there, it must be defended.

This is what lifts the soul above the [pervaded] pain that enters us from death and heavy fate when we survey Europe and the world of the present. And then you realize that it is still alive in the German character today, which in turn was noticed by a non-German mind, Emerson, the great American, when he wanted to describe Goethe and, starting from Goethe, wanted to point out the mission that the Goethe culture in particular has for the future of humanity.

The American Emerson says it from his time, the time of the nineteenth century, but from the time that is also ours:

The world is young, great men [of times past] call to us with friendly voices.

And these are now Emerson's own words:

We must write [holy] scriptures,

- that tell of the eternal -

to reunite heaven and the earthly world. The secret of genius is not to tolerate a lie

— Emerson is referring to the lie that there is no spiritual reality behind the sensual —

to make everything of which we are aware a truth, to inspire faith, determination and trust in the refinement of modern life, in art and science, in books and in people, and to honor every truth by not only recognizing it but also making it a guiding principle for our actions, both at the beginning and at the end, in the middle of the path and for [endless] times.

When spiritual science approaches the contemplation of what is immortal in the human being, it does nothing other than make true what the geniuses guiding humanity have felt to be the task of our time and of the coming time.

And in our fateful days, do we not feel it so clearly from the voices of death and fate that are so close to us every day, do we not feel that a bright sun is emerging from the twilight of the events of the time that surrounds us, that peace for the sake of humanity must develop out of this terrible war? But do we not also feel that all those who have to endure, who have to risk life and limb for the great destiny of our time, that these, by making the sacrifice of their lives, are a warning to those who will live later? Can we not feel today more than ever what significance there is in the union of earthly and spiritual life when we look at the immortal core of man's being, when we see a kind of spiritual detachment, as in death it detaches itself from the physical body. Then we say to ourselves: There, there they go, many of those human beings who still carry unspent human forces within them, who could still have worked, lived, worked, recognized and perceived here on earth for many more decades of their lives. This is possible because they pass through the gate of death, out into the spiritual world, still full of strength. Humanity will recognize that the law of conservation, of non-disappearance of forces, rules in the spiritual world just as it does in the physical world.

Mankind will know that that which apparently is unused, in which so many people must pass through the gate of death in full bloom of life, will not disappear. In the future, people will not only believe, they will know. This world is connected to a spiritual world; and in that spiritual world, all the forces that now had to leave the physical body unused are real. They will radiate on the horizon of earthly activity in future times; they will be real powers for those people who will become aware of the connection between the physical and the spiritual world. Gone will be the gulf that makes one forget what is only seemingly lost. In physical life, one will know that one has been permeated by those who have made the sacrifice of death for the sake of human goals and human progress.

Widows, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and all those who are connected with dear dead ones will know themselves to be really concretely connected; and one will become in the future the world in which the human mortal body lives, but also the world in which the human immortal essence lives. And truly, the human being will not become weak in view of the physical world but rather in view of the spiritual one. Just as we only discover the forces that live in iron when we know that it is magnetic, so we will only find true human strength, elevation, enhancement, enrichment of life when we carry the other part of true reality, when we carry the spiritual part of reality within us.

This is what spiritual science wants to gradually bring from the immortal core of man into human culture. In this way, it wants to work in a concrete way for life. So that we can now summarize in the final words what has been developed. I would like to summarize it, somewhat transforming a German poet's words, who was just trying to express his hope for the human world view of the future in such words: spiritual science [wants] to fathom a knowledge of the human being that does not merely extend to the short present between birth and death, but which envisages that which passes from life to life through eternities and elevates that which is thus discovered from spiritual eternity to the throne of truth, where it shall reign for the true liberation of human beings, the souls within human beings.

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.