The Rudolf Steiner Archive

(From an incomplete transcript)

When we contemplate the world around us we find as our environment on Earth the beings of the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms, and whatever belongs to and is produced from these kingdoms—mountains, rivers, clouds and so forth. We look up to the heavens and as we contemplate the stars and the planets we shall realise as the result of anthroposophical study that, like the Earth, these different celestial bodies have their inhabitants. But as man turns his gaze to his earthly environment and also to the heavens, he finds in this spatial environment Beings who are connected with one part only of himself. We know from Anthroposophy that man is a fourfold being, composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, and that in sleep the Ego and astral body separate from the physical and etheric bodies. But the Universe we perceive through our senses is related to our physical body only, not to our astral body or Ego. The only exceptions are two celestial bodies: the Sun and the Moon. The Sun and the Moon are the abodes of spiritual Beings just as the Earth is the abode of man. The other celestial bodies are also peopled by spiritual Beings but during his life between birth and death man is related to them in an indirect way only. In this respect the Sun and Moon are exceptions. They are the two gates or portals through which, in physical life on Earth too, men are linked with the spiritual world. The Sun is connected with our Ego, the Moon with our astral body.

We shall begin to understand this if we turn to what has been said in the different books and lecture-courses.

You know that the Moon, now moving independently through cosmic space, was once united with the Earth; at a certain point of time it liberated itself and went out into the Universe where it now forms a kind of colony of the Earth. This applies not only to the physical Moon but also to the Beings who inhabit it. You know too that the Earth was once inhabited both by men and by certain higher Beings who were the first great Teachers of humanity. They were not incarnated in physical bodies as men are to-day but only in etheric bodies. Nevertheless intercourse between men and these Beings continued until the Atlantean epoch. In those primeval ages on Earth men were exhorted at certain times to maintain complete stillness and calm in their souls, to be oblivious of their physical environment. And then, in those primeval men—we ourselves, in fact, for we were all on Earth in previous lives—it was as if the Great Teachers spoke from within them and they felt this as Inspiration. These Beings did not communicate their messages and teachings to men as we communicate with one another to-day, but in the way I have indicated. Works giving expression to a wonderful, primordial wisdom were the fruits of this intercourse. Modern man is fundamentally arrogant, priding himself on being infinitely clever. And so indeed he is, in comparison with the men of those remote ages. But cleverness by itself leads neither to wisdom nor to real knowledge. Cleverness is due to the intellect and intellect is not the only instrument for acquiring knowledge. It was by deeper forces of the soul that men in primeval times were led to the knowledge which they did not express in intellectual phraseology or in terms of our pedantic grammar—for all grammar is pedantic—but in language that was half poetry. Beings at an advanced stage of evolution, the primeval sages who taught men through Inspiration, were the originators of works of supreme beauty, fragments of which have been preserved to this day. Only the dull-witted could fail to wonder at the Vedic literature, the Yoga and Vedanta philosophy of India, the lore of ancient Persia and Egypt. The more thoroughly we steep ourselves in these records, the more obvious it is that although we of the modern age are far cleverer than those ancient men, the knowledge they presented in a most beautiful, poetic form leads very deeply into world-mysteries. The scripts which fill us with such admiration and astonishment if our hearts are rightly attuned are only the last vestiges of the wonderful, primordial wisdom that once existed in humanity as oral tradition and that Spiritual Science alone is able to investigate. But men have outgrown this wisdom in its primal form. They would not have reached maturity nor achieved freedom in knowledge through their own efforts had they continued at the stage of that ancient wisdom.

The great Teachers, having fulfilled their task, left the Earth together with the Moon which as a physical planet had gone out into the Universe. Today the great Teachers form a kind of spiritual colony on the Moon and a seer who investigates the Moon with the help of Initiation-Science finds it peopled by those wise Beings who were once the companions of men. The wisdom of these Beings can even now be investigated through a higher development of the faculties described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. These Beings have an important task to perform for humanity—a task which it is difficult to describe in earthly words.

The Moon Beings keep the “books,” the records, of the whole past of humanity and of every individual man. These books are not, of course, anything in the least like the volumes in our libraries but this designation is nevertheless justifiable. The “books” contain records of what every individual human being has experienced in his successive earthly lives. When we are descending from the Cosmos to the Earth from the existence stretching between death and a new birth, we come into inner contact with the records of our past in these great “books” kept by the Moon sages. Before we arrive on the Earth, this past is imprinted in the astral body we bring with us into earthly existence and in that astral body are the “entries” made by the Moon Beings.

In ordinary circumstances these entries do not reach the head. During earthly life the head is by no means an organ of outstanding importance, although it is, of course, essential for the concepts and ideas relating to outer, material existence. What is inscribed into man during the final stage of his descent from the Cosmos to the Earth is inscribed—believe it or not as you will—into the part of him we call the spiritual side of the metabolic-limb system. The inscriptions therefore lie deep down in the unconscious, but they are actually there and they pass over into the process of growth, into the health and above all they determine what I will call the “curability” (Heilbarkeit) of a human being when he is ill on Earth. It is obviously important to understand the nature of illness but even more important to understand how to heal. Supersensible knowledge itself is an essential help, for this reveals what has been inscribed from the Akasha Chronicle by the Moon Beings into the forces of the process of growth, into the forces of nourishment, into the forces of breathing, and so on. It is these inscriptions that determine whether a man puts up strong or only slight resistance to the healing of an illness. One individual will be easily healed, another only with difficulty. This is entirely dependent upon how the karma from previous earthly lives makes it possible for the inscriptions to take effect.

When we think about what the Moon, together with the Beings who inhabit it spiritually, means for us on the Earth, we are finally led to say that the Moon is intimately connected with our past, with our previous earthly lives. To understand what the Moon existence out yonder in cosmic space means on Earth is to have intuitive perception of man's past. Destiny is formed out of what we bring over from our previous earthly life, that is to say, from our past, and what we experience during the present life. And out of what can be experienced in the present life, together with our past, our future destiny takes shape.

In its cosmic aspect, therefore, the Moon with its Beings is revealed as the power which carves the pattern of our past in our destiny. You will realise from this how little is known to-day about the true functions of the celestial bodies. Information about the Moon such as we are accustomed to hear from the physical sciences to-day is not knowledge in the true sense. A modern physicist who purports to describe the Moon assumes that the mountain ranges depicted on lunar maps were always there. This is a very naive belief. The Moon Beings themselves were always there, the soul-and-spirit belonging to the Moon was always there, but not the physical substance. You will be able to understand this by thinking of man himself. In the course of a man's earthly life the physical substances in his body are perpetually changing. After a period of seven to eight years, all the substances originally within us have been replaced. What has remained is the soul-and-spirit, and the same applies to the heavenly bodies. The substance of the Moon, although of longer duration than the substance of the human body, has all changed in the course of the ages; spirit-and-soul alone has remained. With these things in mind, our view of the Universe is altogether different from that presented by the material knowledge of to-day. This knowledge is extremely astute, highly intellectual; above all it can calculate with deadly accuracy. The calculations are accurate—but they are not true. Suppose someone makes calculations about the structure of the heart. He scrutinises it to-day and again in a month's time. It has changed, very slightly. After another month the change is again slight, and then he works out to what extent the heart changes in a year. He need only multiply and he has the figure for ten years. He can calculate what the measurements of the heart were three hundred years ago, and what they will be three hundred years from now. The calculations will certainly be correct. Only—the heart did not exist three hundred years ago, nor will it exist three hundred years hence! The same procedure is adopted in other cases. The calculations are invariably correct but they do not tally with the reality! The same applies to the outer substantiality of the heavenly bodies. Their substance changes but the element of soul-and-spirit remains. And in the case of the Moon it is this element of soul-and-spirit that is woven into our destiny by the great Recorders of our past life and therefore constitutes part of the web of our destiny.

So the Moon is in truth one of the portals showing man the way into the spiritual world—the world out of which his destiny is woven by Beings who were once his wise companions of the Earth in times when men themselves wove their destiny instinctively. The weaving of destiny now takes place entirely in the subconscious.

Still another portal leads into the spiritual world: it is the portal of the Sun. When through Initiation-science we acquire knowledge of the Sun, the Beings we encounter are not connected with the Earth in the same way as the Moon Beings; in the Sun sphere we do not encounter Beings who once had their abode on the Earth. The Beings we encounter in the Sun are referred to in the book Occult Science as the Angeloi and the higher Beings of the Hierarchies. When I say “in the Sun,” you must of course picture such Beings in the whole Sun sphere, in the flood of light radiating from the Sun.

The Sun is the abode of the Angeloi, one of whom is always connected with an individual human being. We ourselves, in respect of our Ego are connected with these higher Beings through our Sun existence. The Angeloi are in a certain sense the cosmic prototypes of men, for in future times man will attain their rank. These Beings, with whose nature we ourselves have a certain relationship, have their abode in the Sun sphere. From this you will realise that just as our past is connected with the Moon existence, so is our future connected with the Sun existence. Moon and Sun represent our past and our future. When we know on the one side that the Moon Beings are the “bookkeepers,” the “recorders” of our past, that records of our past earthly lives are inscribed, as it were, on the leaves of their books, Initiation-Science makes it clear that we must turn to the Angeloi when we give any thought to our future. Just as what we have done in the past works on into our present life, the things we do in the present must work on into the future. But this is possible only through the Angeloi who direct their gaze to a man's present deeds and bring them to effect in the future.

It is good and right to take account of this function of the Angeloi. We do many things that ought to bear fruit in the future. Humanity of the present age has become sadly thoughtless about such matters. When a man has performed some deed he should think of his Angelos, saying inwardly: “May my Guardian Spirit receive this my deed as a root and from it bring forth fruit.” The more definite and vivid the imagery used when a man addresses his Angelos in connection with deeds which should subsequently bear fruit, the more abundant this fruit can be in the future.

And so the Moon Beings preserve our past destiny and the Sun Beings weave new destiny for the future. It is not outer, physical light alone that the Sun and Moon send down to the Earth. Being connected as it is with our astral body, the Moon provides the initial impulse whereby everything from our past is woven into our destiny. The Sun is connected with our Ego and through the Beings who are a prototype of our future cosmic existence, has to do with our future destiny. And so the heavenly mirror-pictures of our destiny are images of the relationship between Sun and Moon.

Initiation-Science explains and confirms these facts. When a man has achieved the necessary degree of development as I have described it in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, he then sees, when he contemplates the Full Moon, not only what normal consciousness sees. In the light of the Full Moon he perceives his past destiny, the content of his previous earthly life. And when with enhanced spiritual vision he focuses his gaze upon the place occupied by the dark, physically invisible New Moon, its dark shadow becomes for him the great Admonisher formed by his destiny, proclaiming to him what his attitude must be to actions in his previous earthly life in order that he may make compensation for them in the further course of his karma.

It is possible for a man to establish a similar relationship with the Sun. This enables him to have an inkling of future destinies—a general glimpse, at least, without specific details.

If we now turn from the cosmic aspect to man himself, we find that human destiny is woven in a wonderful way out of two kinds of circumstances. When two individuals meet each other, one of them, let us say, in his twenty-fifth year, the other in his thirtieth, it may be the case—not, of course, always—that when the one or the other looks back over his life up to this point he realises with absolute certainty that each of them has pursued his path of life as though they were deliberately seeking for one another. To ignore such things simply denotes lack of thought. The child had already set out upon the path that led inevitably to the other human being and the latter's path too led to the common meeting-point. All this took place in the subconscious realm—but what has been at work there? Think of the one individual as A and the other as B. Before entering into earthly life, A descended through the Moon sphere. The Moon Beings had inscribed in their records and also into his astral body, what he had experienced in common with B in the past earthly life, and these entries made by the Moon Beings in the Akasha Chronicle influenced the paths taken by both A and B. From the moment they meet, the subconscious is no longer all-important, for the two now come face to face and make a certain impression on one another. This is not a case of conservation of the past; it is the present that is now at work. The Angeloi intervene and lead the individuals concerned to further stages. The forces of Sun existence are now operating, so that within a man's inmost being, Sun and Moon together weave his destiny. This can be clearly visualised by thoughtful perception of the course of human life.

When two individuals meet, the impression they make upon each other may be intrinsically different. There are cases where one of the two takes the other right into the sphere of his will, of his feelings. The outer, personal impression has had little influence here. Intellectualists have no understanding of what is going on inwardly in such cases, for one of the most wonderful experiences imaginable is to see what kind of relationship is formed when two human beings come across each other for the first time. It may happen that A takes B into the sphere of his will by saying to himself: What B does I want to do myself; what pleases him, also pleases me.—Now B may be unsightly and unattractive and nobody can conceive that he could possibly be pleasing to A.—You see, the attraction in this case is not caused by the reasoning mind or by the sense-impressions, but by the deeper forces of the soul—by the will and what goes from the will into the heart. However unsightly the other may be, he has become so only in the present earthly life. The origin of the bond between the two lies in the experiences they shared in the previous life. Seen from outside it seems that the two cannot possibly live in harmony, but the fact is that what is present subconsciously in each of them leads their wills together. Even in childhood this often becomes evident. A child tries so hard to be like “him,” to have the same wishes as “he” has, to feel as “he” feels. A karmic connection is certainly present in such circumstances.

That is one kind of meeting between individuals and if they were alive to such happenings—as will inevitably be the case in a by no means distant future, when more attention will be paid to man's inner nature—the working of the will would indicate that past earthly lives have already been spent in company with such individuals; moreover subconscious soul-forces give hints of experiences shared with others in the past incarnation.

The other kind of meeting is this.—One individual comes across another but no relationship whatever is established between their wills; the aesthetic or mental impression is predominant. How often it happens that a man A makes the acquaintance of man B, but does not afterwards refer to him with the warmth or abhorrence with which he speaks of someone with whom he has a karmic connection from earlier times. One may praise an individual with whom there is no karmic tie, one may appreciate him, consider him a splendid fellow, but he makes no effect upon the will—he makes an effect only upon the mind, upon the aesthetic sense.

That is the second kind of meeting between individuals. If the effect made by the two upon each other reaches into the will, into the heart, into the inmost nature, then a karmic connection exists; the two individuals have been led to each other as the result of common experiences in the past earthly life. If an effect made by another person reaches only into the intellect, into the aesthetic sense, this is not an outcome of the Moon's activity, but a situation brought about by the Sun and one that will have its sequel only in the future. And so through a thoughtful, observant study of human life we can learn to perceive the signs of karmic connections.

What I have now told you is a fruit of knowledge attainable through Anthroposophy, and just as nobody need himself be an artist to see beauty in a picture, as little need a man himself be an Initiate to understand these things. They can be understood because the ideas harmonise. There are people who say: The spiritual world is no concern of ours; we shall understand it only when we are actually in it.—They say this because they are accustomed nowadays to accept as proof only what can be confirmed in a material, physical way. Such people are like dunderheads who say: Everything in the wide world must be supported—otherwise it falls down; the Earth, the Moon, the Sun—all have their places in cosmic space but they must have supports to prevent them from falling! Such people do not know that the cosmic bodies mutually support each other. Anthroposophy calls for this kind of understanding. Its ideas cannot be supported by external, physical proofs, but for all that they mutually support each other. When you read an anthroposophical book for the first time, you may lay it aside because you are accustomed to find everything proved up to the hilt and in this book there are no such proofs. But if you read on you will find that like the cosmic bodies the ideas support and sustain each other.

The teachings can be understood even when one is not an Initiate, but through Initiation-Science they become much more concretely real and are experienced differently. Therefore someone who is sufficiently advanced is able to speak in a different way about the web of human destiny that is woven out of the past, the present and the future. The experiences of a person who has reached a certain stage of Initiation become much more concrete.—Suppose that somebody is standing in front of you; he tells you something and you hear it clearly. An Initiate can hear the inner voice as well as the outer; he can hear the spiritual speech which is no less clear than ordinary human speech. A person with whom an Initiate was karmically connected in the past and whom he meets in the present life, speaks to him as clearly and unambiguously as people speak in the ordinary way. The Initiate hears an inner speech. You will say: then an Initiate must have around him a whole collection of people who speak to him with varying degrees of clarity. And that is actually the case. At the same time it is concrete proof of the way in which the previous earthly life has been spent. I have said that the Moon Beings, the great Recorders, register destiny; but immediately an Initiate encounters someone with whom he was karmically connected in the previous earthly life, the light of the Full Moon radiates to him the recorded ‘entries’ of the other individual.

What we think and do in the immediate present does not at once speak to us, but after a certain time, by no means very long, our deeds that have been registered by the Moon Beings become living and, in a sense, articulate. The Akashic pictures are living pictures; if you discover the content of a past earthly life you learn to know both yourself and the other human being concerned. Common experiences of the past incarnation rise up into consciousness; no wonder that we hear them speak both from within ourselves and from within the other individual. We are united inwardly with those with whom we were associated in the previous earthly life.

In the future men must develop a delicate feeling for the stirrings of the will when meeting another person. In about seven to nine thousand years all human beings on the Earth will be able to hear those with whom they are karmically connected, speaking from within.

Now if, after Initiation has been attained, a meeting takes place with someone with whom there is no karmic bond, who is encountered for the first time, again the experience is different. Naturally, an Initiate may also come across individuals with whom he is not karmically connected. In any case his experience will differ from that of others. He has a fine and delicate feeling for new facts revealed by the individual confronting him, in this case, as a cosmic being.

An individual encountered for the first time enables us to see more deeply into the Cosmos. It is a piece of good fortune to meet such a person and recognition that this meeting enlarges our knowledge of the world must develop into fine sensitivity. An Initiate has a certain obligation in connection with every individual with whom he has no karmic connection from the past, whom he encounters for the first time in the Cosmos (the spiritual world). He must link himself with the spiritual Being belonging to the realm of the Angeloi who is the Guardian Spirit of this individual. He must become acquainted not only with the individual himself but with his Guardian Angel as well. The Guardian Angel of this individual speaks unambiguously from within him. Hence when an Initiate encounters different human beings with whom he has no karmic bond, he hears a clear and definite speech. He hears what the Angeloi of these individuals are saying.

This gives a certain character to the intercourse between an Initiate and ordinary men. He takes into himself what the Angelos wishes to say to the person who has come into his ken; he transforms himself as it were into the Angelos of this person and what he can say to the latter is therefore more intimate than it is for ordinary consciousness. The Initiate is actually a different being in all his contacts with individuals whose first meeting with him is in the Cosmos, because he has identified himself with the Angelos of each individual concerned. This is the secret of the faculty of self-transformation possessed by those who with the power bestowed by Initiation come face to face with other men. People to-day have very little feeling for such things compared with the faculty of perception they possessed in centuries by no means very long ago. It might have happened then that a sage, confronting twenty other persons, would have been described quite differently by each of them. The commonplace verdict in such circumstances would be that as each of the twenty descriptions given was quite different from all the rest, none of the twenty writers actually saw the individual in question. But perhaps they all did! He changed in every case by establishing a link with the Angelos of each person concerned.

In this connection a veritable abyss lies between what is accepted usage today and what was taken for granted not so very long ago. A great deal of learning is available in our time but it is communicated in an entirely different way. In the higher training given in an epoch not far behind us, those who were called upon to be leaders of the people as priests or teachers were taught to develop the capacity to unite themselves with the Angelos of a human being. But even remembrance of this has vanished. Knowledge of the Angeloi was indispensable for those who aspired to be leaders of mankind, in order to develop the power of self-transformation.

And now something else.—It will strike you as extraordinary—I have spoken of it in the book Christianity as Mystical Fact—that there are great similarities in biographies of ancient Initiates. Study these biographies and you will find that very many features are alike, for the great Initiates underwent similar experiences in their souls. Biographies of ordinary human beings would never be alike. If those who encountered Zarathustra had all written about him, every characterisation would have been different, because Zarathustra changed every time an individual came before him. What the world was meant to know about the great Initiates was biography inspired by higher Spirits.

When the meeting between an Initiate and some individual takes place for the first time in the Cosmos, the Initiate has to establish contact with the Angelos of that individual. In doing so he acquires a great deal of knowledge about the outer spiritual world. In point of fact one cannot acquire deeper knowledge of other human beings through spiritual faculties without learning to know a host of Angeloi. A true knowledge of man is impossible without knowledge of the Angeloi. Just as human beings not karmically connected with each other acquire knowledge of the surrounding world through ordinary perception, the Initiate gains knowledge of the world of the Angeloi—which is then the bridge between himself and the higher Hierarchies.

There are also other indications of the existence of a karmic connection. We may meet an individual and then have a great deal to do with him, work with him and so on, but we never dream about him. The reason is that the karmic connection is not with our astral body, but only with our Ego.

We may come across someone of whom we have only a fleeting glance and yet he follows us into our very dreams—into our waking dreams too. Our picture of him is quite unconnected with his outward appearance and has arisen entirely in the inner life, because we have a karmic tie with him. Again we may meet someone with whom we are karmically connected and feel impelled to paint him. An artist may paint a portrait in which an uncultured person sees no likeness whatever, whereas an Initiate may recognise a previous incarnation of the individual whose portrait has been painted. We get to know someone with whom we have a karmic connection in the depths of his being although the knowledge may remain subconscious. Through individuals with whom we have had no previous karmic connection, whom we meet for the first time, we enlarge our knowledge of humanity in general.

When you go to a tea-party or some such function, just keep your ears open and listen to the conversation.—If someone has met another individual with whom he is karmically connected, he will say little about the others present, but about this particular individual he will say something of real significance, especially if he is unaware of what is behind it all. At the same kind of tea-party you may get into conversation with someone with whom you have no karmic connection at all. Your interest in him is very superficial and he seems to you to be typical of all the other guests. Such a gathering is very brief as a rule, and a great deal of talk goes on about world affairs, about noted politicians and the like. After listening to these few people we may judge the whole of society by this criterion. The judgement may be erroneous but nevertheless it is through individuals with whom we have no karmic connection that another aspect of the world is presented to us. There was once a traveller who happened to reach Konigsberg Station at midnight. He asked for a cup of coffee and was addressed in very coarse language by the red-headed waiter who had been dozing. The traveller wrote in his diary: “The people of Konigsberg have red hair, are sleepy and coarse.” He was judging all the people of Konigsberg by this night-waiter—someone with whom he had no karmic connection!

Through studies of this kind we learn not only how to assess life and its values, but we get nearer to other human beings and are connected with them in a different way. We learn not only to understand human life—which is the essential task of Anthroposophy—we also learn to know cosmic life. Sun and Moon cease to be the subject of abstract theories and become living realities in the Cosmos—the great counterparts in the Universe of the microcosmic destiny of men on the Earth.

Sun-activity combines with Moon-activity in our life. The light radiating to us from the Moon is connected with our cosmic past and the light of the Sun is connected with our cosmic future.

It was the aim of the Christmas Meeting, when the Anthroposophical Society was given a new foundation, to stress the importance of Anthroposophy for life itself. It was said that esotericism in the true sense of the word must be a living power among us. The Christmas Meeting was not intended merely to be a festive gathering of a number of Anthroposophists, but its efficacy and its impulses were meant to endure. One new plan is to issue a News Sheet—as a matter of fact the first three numbers have already appeared—containing reports of what is going on in the Anthroposophical Society. The Society must become a kind of living, spiritual organism. On my journeys I have constantly found Members in The Hague, for example, saying: “We have no idea what the Members in Vienna are doing, and yet we belong to an Anthroposophical Society!”—I wonder how many here in Zurich could tell me what is going on in the Groups of the Society in Leipzig or Hamburg? But this is what must be possible in future. Members of the New Zealand Group should have a real picture of what is going on in Vienna, and so on. It will be helpful if the Members will send to the editorial office of the News Sheet accounts of their experiences both in the Society and outside it. This material will then be edited, and Members will be able to read about whatever is going on in the Society. I propose in future to include in the News Sheet short, concentrated aphorisms for use in the Group Meetings or on other occasions.

All these measures should instil real life, pulsating life, into the Anthroposophical Society, and every Member should realise that this was the aim of the Christmas Meeting. Moreover it is only because this is how things ought to be, and indeed must be, if Anthroposophy itself is to do justice to its past and future, that I have undertaken the Presidency, associated with an Executive which I know will work fruitfully from the centre at the Goetheanum. I had for many years kept apart from all administrative matters, and had it not been an absolute necessity I should not have thought of starting anew and repeating in old age what one did as a young man. I want to appeal to every Member of the Anthroposophical Society to help in ensuring that through the Christmas Meeting the foundation stone of anthroposophical life shall be laid in the hearts of our Members and that it shall develop as a living seed, so that active life may constantly increase in the Society. If that happens, the Society will also be able to send its impulse out into the world.

INTRODUCTION

Rudolf Steiner's report in the weekly journal of the Anthroposophical Society, No. 25, June 29, 1924: "A number of younger members of our Society also participated in the agricultural course. At the end of the conference they still felt the need to gather together as a group. This took place during the early morning hours of June 17. In this gathering the younger friends spoke out of the depths of their hearts about their longing to approach—in their creative life and in their work—the insights out of the spiritual realm that unite the human being with the active forces of nature. It was an exchange out of the innermost soul of youth, wishing to move beyond fruitless materialism that does not unite with nature but rather separates man from her and condemns his work to fruitlessness. In this gathering I was allowed to point to paths on which this longing needs to move in order to arrive at a goal."

I.

The youth movement today is again searching for nature; anthroposophical youth is also searching for nature, but it is searching for the spirit in nature. This searching lives as a kind of call to the spirit in the hearts of those in this youth movement. This call to the spirit, however, was very little met in the civilizations stemming from earlier centuries, for humanity since the fifteenth century, through its particular world karma, had gradually to lose the spirit.

The spirit in nature can be lost most easily when one is already on the way to losing the spirit generally, for you must remember that death is the fundamental condition of nature's becoming. You must not forget that what is living, in order to exist, always needs the dead. You have only to think that in all living substance must be imbedded, as a bony or other form of scaffolding, that which was received out of the universe as the dead.

During our whole earthly life, therefore, we carry death within ourselves, in that we have to contain unliving, dead substance. We must have dead substance. It was known in ancient times that it is precisely this death element through which the living can gain revelations of the spiritual. From ancient Roman times there still resounds a phrase like, In sale sit sapienta (Wisdom rests in the salt.).

It was felt in the times when traditions of an ancient, instinctive clairvoyant wisdom still existed that in the dead salt, out of which the bones and other scaffolding are built, must be seen what differentiates the human being from other beings—those who, through the lack of such a lifeless scaffolding within, are unable to take into themselves enough spiritual light, sapienta (wisdom). We live again in a time of transition, however, in which the young person feels that even in nature around him he would find the death of the spirit if he were to approach this nature in the style of the last century, with the traditions of the last century.

Nature builds itself a wisdom-bearing crystal. This wisdom-bearing crystal can delight us when we wander out into nature. At the same time, however, we must be clear that the gods had to die—not an earthly death but the death of transformation, which means the transition into the unconscious—in order to be reborn in the light-reflecting forms of the crystal. Today, when we look out into what is dead, we must bring into our feeling again the fact that there, shining through to us, is the life of the gods that for thousands of years has lain unconscious in nature. We must find within our souls the possibility of sensing and feeling this light that can approach us from the sun, and also everywhere in nature, as the light of the gods, quickening our hearts.

Today let us try to feel this divine soul world, resting for thousands of years in all of the heaven-reflecting nature around us. The soul has much to search for here. The youth of today is searching for an ancient knowledge of humanity, the ancient knowledge that already in the period of ancient Saturn was connected with humanity and that, when the periods of Sun and Moon came, entered a kind of world sleep, a kind of resting consciousness, in order to form out of its own spirit-substance the foundation for earthly nature. The soul can only sense but cannot really penetrate through this earthly nature to the spirit, and thus earthly nature, even in summer, appears to the heart that feels young today like a snow-mantle of sparkling bright spirit crystals; yet it carries within itself death—which means unconsciousness—and challenges the soul to feel deep beneath this icy soul-mantle the fiery, living workings of the word, stemming from ancient times, radiating from the center of the earth out to earthly nature.

This appears complicated when expressed in this way, but it is actually very simple when it is sought for by youth today. When the call to nature sounds forth from somewhere, it arises from the souls of the youth. They wish to have a memory, a uniting with the divine source of everything earthly and starry, and this is what can be sensed when today's youth again searches for nature. In the searching of today's youth for nature and spirit there resides something of the deepest world karma, which actually can be comprehended only with great solemnity of soul.

Just think how in an earlier time—today we call it the time of Rousseau (we have a parallel back-to-nature movement in Germany in the Sturm und Drang period¹ that preceded Goethe and Schiller, though much wider circles than merely literary ones were involved)—let us think back to how the call to nature in this time sounded in an abstract, literary sort of way through broad areas of civilization. Just think of those warm, intense calls to nature issuing from the soul of Rousseau. Yes, many today will still be gripped if they listen to these calls. What has followed these calls to nature, however? "Nature, we want nature again," these young people were calling.

Goethe himself ominously called out in the cautious manner of the aged, "Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her; unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circle of her dance." Goethe did not want to allow to enter consciousness what appeared as the call for nature among the Rousseauists. If we try to imagine ourselves as the Goethe of that time, how he felt in relation to nature and how he approached the calls of the others, we can still experience today something like a slight shiver running over us. We can feel the shudder he felt in encountering this call for nature. This call seemed to Goethe to be something that was itself unnatural, and he wanted to be received into the dancing circle of nature without being bidden; he felt that nature neither bids nor warns.

Then in the nineteenth century came the fulfillment of this call for nature. It was the knowledge, the so-called knowledge, of nature, the ever-resounding call for nature in the most rigid, materialistic sense, not only in relation to knowledge but in relation to all of life. A horrible fulfillment of Rousseauism thus emerged in the nineteenth century, as if a kingdom of demons began to snicker when the people around Rousseau and others were calling for nature, and then laughed with scorn when nature was allowed to approach humanity in an Ahrimanic form, in the most outward Ahrimanic form.

This is the background, and when we look into the middle ground the mood of tragic karma appears, a mood in which something lying deep in the souls of the youth today can be raised into full consciousness only with the greatest inner soul difficulties, something that since the end of Kali Yuga has been lying there dormant. This call to nature must be found again, the ancient working of the gods that is present in everything that in nature is earthly, watery, airy, and fiery and that above nature illumines and weaves and lives. This ancient spirit of nature must be found. But how can we avoid a rain of wild demons? How can we avoid what followed the call for nature in the nineteenth century like a shower of wild illusions? This must not happen. The twentieth century must not become a materialistic one! Thus the voice of karma calls in the souls of the young people today: if you allow the twentieth century to become as materialistic as the nineteenth century has been, you will have lost not only your own humanity but that which is human in the entire civilization. This is what one who is able to hear such voices can feel again and again in the most manifold ways, where circles of young people gather today. It is this that makes many members of these youth movements so certain in their vague feeling. You can experience these young souls as vague, uncertain, shifting from one path to the other—and at the same time there arises out of this uncertainty and vagueness a certainty, not yet completely light-filled but carrying a certain strength within itself.

This strength may not be broken, it must not be broken. Anthroposophy would like to contribute something toward this, because it believes that the concrete spirit can be perceived in all the particulars of life—in the roots of the plants, in the deeds of the light above the plants, and in the soul-blessing of warmth penetrating the plants—because it believes that what has been given to humanity as animality can be experienced as an admonishing call. It believes that there is much to be healed in this animality. The animals are on earth for the sake of the human being. In order to relate to the animals in the right way, as to all nature, it is necessary to sense and feel and finally even know in all nature the individual spiritual beings.

This can also be felt today if previously one has recognized the necessity not merely to speak in a general way about the spirit but to search for the working of the spirit right into the individual details of agricultural activities and other activities concerning nature. I therefore felt the deepest sympathy in my soul when you proposed that we exchange a few thoughts today.

(A discussion followed here.)

II.

You see, this is the situation. What is it that continually makes those who have already found their way into the anthroposophical spiritual movement feel somehow uncertain? What makes them believe that strong support must be sought in order to find the way to what they are seeking? The reason for this is actually that the young people, who feel with all their hearts that we must seek the path to the human being in a new way, different from what has come to us from the wisdom of past centuries, are again and again—mostly due to outer conditions—thrown back into the old tracks. It has not been possible for the soul to perceive clearly what, in our time since Kali Yuga, must be revealed only unclearly, to perceive the hidden seeking of humanity that is not openly revealed in our time: to find the way into nature out of "nature" itself, to find the way into the spirit out of the "spirit" itself.

Our dear friend, Dr. Ritter, spoke of how he had been a peasant's child and how he had grown out of this peasantry. This process of growing out of the peasantry could be experienced in its archetypal significance in a time that unfolded when people like you were not yet even lying in your cradles. This time of uncertainty had already begun. Basically, you see, the life of the peasant, as it has unfolded over the course of the centuries, is only a myth today. This life is actually quite different, regarding the soul, from natural science and the so-called civilization that has become so remote from all existence. The peasant was really more spiritual than today's scholars. In the 1860's and 70's it could already be sensed how a kind of living spirituality within the peasantry was slowly dying out.

It could often be seen how the peasants were seized by the impulse to send their sons to the university. This was already the first sign of such peasant abstractions, this idea that arose in the last third of the nineteenth century. This is already quite different from the way it was earlier with the peasantry, who truly lived in harmony with nature. Certainly the peasants' sons also studied then, but not in the same sense as later, not as they did in the last third of the nineteenth century. Looked at from the peasants' viewpoint, their sons did not study but became priests. To become a priest united one with the consciousness of the peasant. To become a priest united one with the consciousness through which the way to the spirit is sought. It was this search for the spirit that the peasant wanted when he put his son through educational institutions. In the last third of the nineteenth century, however, these educational institutions gradually became poor in spirit, empty of spirit. At the same time the consciousness of the peasant also changed: his son must attend the university—and in relation to this another experience arose. The son, who becomes a stranger to us, enters a totally different life; he no longer belongs to us.

One can only suggest these things, for they would be able to be understood correctly only in life. In the overall coarsening of life toward the end of the nineteenth century there arose within the peasantry a kind of aversion to, and sometimes even hatred for, everything spiritual. I still remember a charming picture from a peasant's calendar, which was surely conceived by a journalist but which arose out of the mood of the 1860's and 70's. In a certain region of Central Europe a peasants' union was founded. The peasants banded together, and the representative of such a peasant union, depicted in this picture with a tassel cap pulled far down over his ears, was saying, "No lawyer, no teacher, is allowed to enter this union of peasants." This was the consciousness, you see: it was no longer known what to do with learning in all areas, even the area of theology. It was felt to be very clever to exclude ordinary learning from this union.

This really expressed an outlook that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, produced human beings who actually were only "images." Human beings actually became mere images. There were no longer human beings walking on the earth; with a few exceptions there were only images. And when the turn of the century came, the civilized world was populated not by human beings but by images. The time came when what should have been truth was changed in a strange way into its opposite. At times it was painful to see the things that were presented as truths. The teaching arose that even encouraged over-population in individual regions. It was said that if many people were born it was a sign that all was going well—in this way the increase in population was encouraged. This increase in population was understood as expressing true progress. if you looked at the matter spiritually, however, you had to say that through the influence of such a world conception more and more souls came to the earth from the spiritual world really before their time—beings who actually were spiritually premature and basically did not find the earth. The human beings of the last third of the nineteenth century did not find the earth at all. They were on the earth without finding the content of their being, and they went about like appendages of their intellects. That was what was so horrible, that human beings walked about like appendages of their intellects, not like human beings!

The twentieth century thus began, in which numerous souls were born who in turn, as others previously had walked about as shadows, as images, estranged from nature, felt the deepest deprivation regarding these human images and had to seek again that which is truly human.

Every conceivable outer social institution has been retained, however, and young people experience this as a kind of soul-depressing influence. If we were already in a position, through anthroposophy, to form the outer life as we are able to awaken souls, many things would be quite different. It would not always be necessary to speak about anthroposophy needing now to become "concrete"; rather it would be experienced that anthroposophy would be able to become world-forming if outer powers were not trying to prevent it.

Just think how we develop today, especially how we develop in our youth. Yes, Dr. Ritter had the possibility in the course of his early development to experience such a great agricultural estate as Koefering, which still retained its spiritual nature, while all around it the world was wallowing in materialism. This is indeed a phenomenon. There will always be such phenomena, however, in which you will find an outer refuge for precisely what youth is seeking. Anthroposophy must be somewhat like this, standing in the background, because, in a different way, it is not the intellect that is striven for in anthroposophy; one does not study, but rather one becomes, in the best sense of the word, a "priest," if one wants to learn. And if one can look at this transition that has taken place so unusually rapidly—the transition from the old way of becoming a priest, which has become a lie, to this new way of becoming a priest—something quite special can be encountered. It is a very unusual path—what has taken place in Koefering, for example—which you will understand much better if I describe it to you so that you can comprehend it in your own way: it is the path from the anthroposophical formation of the estate owner's being to the anthroposophical formation of the whole estate.

We must learn to understand in our hearts what it is that transforms the merely intellectual conception of the spirit, which remains estranged from nature, into the spirit that has been truly worked for, which finds its path again into the world of facts concerning nature. Therefore I have tried in this course to find my words, as it were, out of actual experience. Today you can find the spirit in no other way than by finding the possibility of clothing it in words given by nature, and through this even the sensations will grow strong again. Just think, you transform what you are already able to know today—for the time of Michael is here—transform what apparently lives only iii ideas into real devotion. Then you will be on the best path. You are on the best path of all if you transform things into devotion. Just think what everything could become in that case! Meditating means to transform what one knows into devotion, to transform the single, concrete things. If you express such things, of course, as I have done many times, you lay yourself open to being called audacious.

Those who have become old in the twentieth century—not in a spiritual but in a conventional sense—will not experience the deep feeling man can have if he is compelled to look upon the human brain as something that has developed (though in a somewhat different direction) in the same way as dung. You must sense these penetrating forces in the human being, however: the brain forms itself like a dung heap. Feel how, in manuring, this dung substantiality is returned to the world-creating forces, so that the spirit can receive it there in a much higher sense than the human spirit can receive what is given to it as material substance from within.

Let us look now at this human being: he takes in outer material substance and has no inkling of what he is taking in with the plant, what he is taking in from outside with the cultivated plants. He is ignorant about what he takes in from outside. And now it begins to work within him through the power of the gods. It has already begun to work when he transforms what he takes in from outside into taste on the tongue. Of this process, by which things are transformed, he still retains something of mere sense experience. Then it leaves his consciousness, and a mighty, wisdom-filled process sets in. Everything is transformed within the human being, making it possible for us to be able to grasp the spirit. What we thus work over unconsciously finally ends up in the dung heap that fills our brain. Let us learn to think that as human beings we are urged to offer this dung to the world in the right way, that we do not use it in such a way as to want to transform compressed dung into little machines for children! It is mainly in this way that the human being of the present day uses his brain. He does not manure the fields of the spirit with his brain so that the spirit might work in them; he makes mechanisms out of everything. You see, you must know what the brain is intended for—to manure the fields of the spirit for the gods that come down to human beings—and you must thereby acquire the chaste reverence that can arise out of such an inward contemplation of these matters. If you thus learn to intimate what takes place in the unconscious and in the subconscious and then begin to take up nature, formed in accordance with the image of man, into your knowledge, thereby beholding nature really in connection with the dung, you can see how within nature—slowly, gradually—there rises into consciousness something that otherwise works unconsciously within the human being. Then you learn truly to renew out of yourself what has endured for a long time only as tradition, what was belief and, like so many things that had to be propagated out of the ancient clairvoyant age—still penetrated by nature—lives unintelligibly in Roman sayings such as, "Naturalia non turpia sunt" ("All things in nature are beautiful"). If they do not appear beautiful, it is only because man cannot see their beauty, cannot sense their fragrance.

Try once to bring together what has lived as the attitude in ancient times with what has lived as the attitude in recent times. Let us look at the whole realm of Western culture. A large part of how one imitates nature consists of the fact that one washes. Certainly it is very good to wash, but by the way in which washing is done in these European-American regions, everything that is nature is simply washed away. In this washing man anesthetizes himself. We may recall how in Egypt there was also a great deal of washing. The Egyptian process of washing was still something that later in Greece was forgotten and was recalled only when they spoke of catharsis.

All this gives us the consciousness that when we go out into nature, to the surface of the earth, we are deep in the belly of cosmic being. We may then also regain that feeling which I actually still experienced when, as a very small child, I associated with miners, not with coal-miners but with those mining for metals. There were still some among them who knew that if you descend into the earth you meet spiritual beings that you cannot find on the surface of the earth. You meet there the organs with which the earth dreams and thinks about the universe. With those people, thinking was still something that lived within the earth. They still knew that if you look up, you see abstract stars, but if you become acquainted with what lives beneath the earth, then you see in the universe something you could call pictures, but pictures that spring forth, that are truly living. Thus at the end of Kali Yuga a person lived in a hopelessly dead knowing, from which he began to grow into something more related to the realm of feeling. If we are able to do this, we will gradually free ourselves from the shackles with which our time has fettered the abstract human being.

Therefore I must indicate again and again what can unite you as young people in a very special, intense way. What unites you is that you say to yourselves the following. Anthroposophy appeared among people who developed out of the godless thinking in their surroundings. These people then met anthroposophy, but they abstracted anthroposophy also. So it happened that anthroposophy was well understood by the older people around the turn of the century, but in a somewhat abstract way. They actually understood anthroposophy, and it is not just chance but a karmically necessary phenomenon that in the history of our anthroposophical development there was a period in which people were coming to us who in some way or other had already retired, who had left the surrounding world and entered a retired existence. Now, what do you believe had to be experienced again and again if one were responsible for anthroposophy? As long as people were stuck in their professions they said, "I can probably be of more use to anthroposophy if I am not an anthroposophist. I feel quite connected to it, but I cannot be an anthroposophist." And so they came—and even then often in a strange, inward way—only when they had retired. We have seen many people come into these circles in this way, and we have lived through it as a kind of tragedy.

Then there came the time when these older members should have worked actively. The twentieth century began, then the very difficult time of the second decade of the twentieth century, when those in their late middle age should have been active. This failed to happen. Those in late middle age were somehow dangling between passing their doctoral examinations—and this could also happen with proletarians and peasants—and not yet having arrived at receiving their certificate of retirement. All of life just remained dangling; there was no sense of direction. Those within anthroposophy thought that deeds had to emanate out of anthroposophy.

Then the necessity arose to take up the question of the threefold social order, to create a threefold nature in the economic life, in life as such, where spirit-nature could have lived. And this also would have come about if the threefold social order had gripped people's hearts—but this failed to happen. One worked with people who were somehow dangling between their matriculation diplomas and retirement certificates. This is the tragedy of these people.

It was impossible to go further. And now there exists this abyss between those who have retired and those who no longer value such diplomas and retirement certificates, who no longer have much respect for the doctoral examinations but just take them as a matter of course and who no longer take pride in them as people did in the 1860's and 70's, when people thought that it was not possible to see an individual in his spirit- permeated blood but only hanging somewhere on the wall, framed as a diploma. Such an attitude is no longer present, and I am often led to think, when I meet the youth of today, of an old friend of mine. He was already in his late fifties when I met him, and he had attained a modicum of success in a small town. When he reached age sixty-four, he connected this old age in a strange way with his youth, for when he had been eighteen he had fallen in love with a girl and become engaged to her, and now in his old age he wanted to marry her. The church in which his birth had been registered, however, had burned down, and so he could not get the birth certificate anymore and had to forego his marriage; this was still the time when a person had to be recorded somewhere, and he had to show papers everywhere to prove that he existed. It did not matter then if one existed; it only mattered whether it was recorded somewhere that one existed! The youth today are no longer able to believe in the same way what a doctoral diploma stands for—what any kind of certificate stands for—because they no longer believe that the one who has written it really knows anything.

Then came the time when in the depths of these young souls, particularly among the proletarians, a warm, eager striving began to unfold. At the same time, however, this youth felt a tremendous abyss separating them from the older generation. This abyss truly exists in all those who at the beginning of the twentieth century were between age twenty-five and forty-eight. If at the turn of the century one was between twenty-five and forty-eight years of age, there was little chance of remaining human. One just appeared human outwardly, by virtue of one's clothes. Late middle age already formed a kind of abyss.

With the youth of today it does not amount to much when anthroposophy is transformed more and more into abstractions, when it is transformed into ideas, concepts, and even science. Now the young people who come want to experience, to live everything in deeds, in the true understanding of nature. One cannot remain with that, however. I would like to emphasize this especially strongly. It has been said that the sword of Michael has been forged, but this is connected with something else. It has to do with the fact that in the occult part of the world there remains what must be prepared of this sword of Michael, which is really to be carried, in the forging, to an altar that is not outwardly visible, that must lie beneath the earth, that really must lie beneath the earth.

To get to know the powers of nature beneath the earth leads to the understanding that the sword of Michael, as it is being forged, must be carried to an altar that lies beneath the earth. There it must be found by receptive souls. It depends on your help, on your contribution, for this sword of Michael to be found by more and more souls. And it is not enough for it to be forged; something is really achieved only when it is found. You must have the strong but at the same time the modest self-conviction as young people that you are karmically called upon to carry the sword of Michael out into the world, to search for it and find it. Then you will have received what you are searching for in gatherings such as the one today. Then you will also be able to recognize what I had to say to you about anthroposophy, about all the difficulties of those people who were dangling between their doctoral examinations and retirement certificates. And you will recognize it in a truly instinctive-pictorial way, so that the spirit of abstraction, that frightful Ahrimanic spirit, is not able to touch you too. Think in mighty pictures of the fact that two words have connected themselves with the striving of youth—words that in the nineteenth century were no longer understood. If one hears Wandervogel (Wander-bird) one wonders, does a well-traveled person today actually know what in ancient times this wandering was, what the wanderer was? We must return to a pictorial experience of the soul. Does the human being today still know what a person had to go through when meeting the birds, what Siegfried had to go through in order to understand the language of the birds? Wandervogel: Wotan, Siegfried—this is something that must be felt again, must be understood. One must first find the way from the abstract conception of Wandervogel to Wotan, who weaves in wind and clouds and waves of the earth-organism, to the hidden language of the birds, with which one must become acquainted by reviving in oneself the Siegfried-recollection and the Siegfried-sword, which was only the prophetic precursor of the sword of Michael.

The way must be found from the wanderer to Wotan, how with opened hearts one can believe again in the hidden language of the birds. You can feel this path from the Wandervogel to Wotan, to Siegfried, and if you can feel this deeply in your souls you will also find the possibility of experiencing nature and knowing about these things. And then if you are still able to dream a little, you will be able to live with the heavenly dreams in nature.

This is something that we should not reflect on a great deal at first but that we can sense and permeate with feeling. If you do this, you will form a community in accordance with your heart—a community in which step by step you will find what you are seeking. Let us keep this alive in our consciousness!

Let it fill our souls!

• 1. Sturm und Drang, (Storm and Stress), German literary movement of the late 18th century that exalted nature, feeling, and human individualism and sought to overthrow the Enlightenment cult of Rationalism. Goethe and Schiller began their careers as prominent members of the movement.

My dear brothers and sisters! Again, today, new members have come into the school. It is not possible each time to give the introduction, which concerns itself with the duties and the significance of this Michael School. Therefore, I must ask those members who undertake, in the manner about which I shall speak in conclusion, to give the mantric verses to the members who have newly entered, I must ask them to give to these new members the introduction which, of necessity, must be known to each one who wants to be a member of this school.

So let us once again today begin without further introduction by inscribing the words in our soul which sound forth to human beings open-minded enough to receive them, words which sound forth from everything that surrounds us in the realms of nature and in the hierarchies of the world. In the past these words sounded forth to human beings from all the stones, plants, clouds, and stars, from the sun and the moon, from springs and from solid rock. They sound confronting him in the present, they will resound confronting him in the future.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

Now, my dear brothers and sisters, in describing the path of knowing we have arrived standing at the abyss of existence before the Guardian. The Guardian of the Threshold has made clear to us how all that surrounds us in the outer world can never reveal to us our own being. All gazing at the realms of nature, at all that appears downward emerging from the earth living and moving, at all that shines and speaks overhead from the realm of the stars, insofar as we can observe with the senses and with understanding, that gazing at all this can give us nothing which can give us clarity about the nature of our intrinsic self. In contrast to this brilliance in the sunshine, to this moving and living in the external world, which is so great and mighty, so beautiful and magnificent, our intrinsic self remains dark and distant for our true self-awareness.

Then is described to us how we approach closer and closer to the Guardian, who forms up for us as if out of cloudy conscious existence, emerging as a spirit-formation, showing our own counterpart, while also showing us what we as human beings must strive for, in order to come to true self-awareness.

We then stepped forth before the Guardian of the Threshold. He has shown us how the true form of our willing, feeling, and thinking reveals itself before the countenance of the gods. He has shown us how what lives within us as lack of courage and fear of knowing, as hate of knowing, as doubt in knowing, how these are indeed within us, because the configuration of the times in which we live has planted them in us. He has shown us the animal forms of our willing, feeling, and thinking. The Guardian of the Threshold worked upon us with shattering force, in order that this crushing, shattering experience might wake, out of the weaving and working of our own soul, might wake the very forces which lead to true self-awareness.

Then the Guardian of the Threshold raised us, showing us initially how our thinking that we have in ordinary life is the corpse of that living thinking which we bore within us before we descended out of spiritual-soul worlds into physical sense-existence. He shows us, the Guardian of the Threshold, how in our bodily being we are coffins for that living thinking that dies as we enter earth life, this thinking which lies as a corpse within the coffin. We use this corpse in ordinary abstract thinking that we carry within us between birth and death, to grasp the things of the physical sense world.

Precisely when we capture in mind how dead this thinking is, then we will proceed to capture in the dead thinking what we can learn about the corpse that lies before us. We look upon this corpse. We say to ourselves, as it lies there before us, as a corpse, it could never have come into existence. It is left over as the remains of a human being who was living in him spiritually, soulfully. The living human being, the ensouled human being, the thoroughly-spirited human being had to precede what lies here as a corpse. We only recognize the reality of the corpse when we are conscious of what went before it. And we approach the reality of our thinking when we become aware of it in its deadness and know that it is the corpse of that living thinking which was within us before we descended into physical-sensory conscious earth existence.

Then the Guardian reminds us how our feeling is only half living, but our willing is fully living, but that all this living comes to our consciousness externally.

In this way the Guardian of the Threshold reminds us that in order gradually to realize the living nature of thinking, we should look upward into the heights of heaven, that in order to realize the nature of feeling, we must look out into the widths of the world, and that we must look to the world depths, to the depths of earth, in order to approach the nature of willing.

But at the same time the Guardian shows us how we are placed with our thinking. As we look up into world-thinking, within which our earthly human thinking is rooted, between light and darkness, he shows how light can become dangerous for us if we give ourselves up to it one-sidedly, how darkness can become dangerous for us if we give ourselves up to it one-sidedly, how we must seek direction and purpose for our thinking between light and darkness. If it would find the truth, then in our feeling we stand midway between warmth and cold, and that if we give ourselves up to warmth, in the lustful glow of feeling, we ourselves can disappear, and on the other hand in the cold we can be hardened. The Guardian of the Threshold points out to us how we should walk the path of Christ between soul warmth and soul coldness.

The Guardian of the Threshold then instructs us that that when we seek willing in earth-depths we find ourselves between life and death, how life would let us vanish in powerlessness, how death would confine us in nothingness, how also for willing we must find the way in between. That, my dear brothers and sisters, since the most ancient mysteries, that is what has been described as the middle way along which the soul of man must walk, if the person would go further into the spiritual along its preordained paths.

We stand before the Guardian of the Threshold, the earnest first representative of Michael (for the actual leader of this our school is Michael) as he gives us further guidance as to how we can emerge from the appearance of thinking, from dead thinking into living thinking fraught with being. But we must become comfortable, we must first of all strictly abide by the laws which are inscribed for each esoteric student in golden letters, the gold which each student must grasp, which the Guardian of the Threshold now recapitulates for us.

He makes us aware how the yawning abyss of being is before us, how we must fly over it, as we cannot step across it with earthly feet, how we then will come into the spiritual world, which before us over there on the other side of the abyss of existence is deep night-bedecked darkness. But we must proceed across the yawning abyss of being into the deep, night-bedecked, cold darkness. Out of it must warmth, must light come into being for us, light which illuminates our own self, which warms our own self. We cannot find the stable support-point in the spirit, if we do not on each side, when we come into existence over there, if we do not remember the pledge that our soul takes on, when it is now in this situation, after having taken up the earlier admonition before the stern Guardian of the Threshold stand, who says to it:

Never forget that as long as you are a person of earth and cross over into the spiritual worlds, when you again return to this side you must submit to the laws of earth. You may not believe, when you enter the spiritual world with your thinking, when you return again and you undertake your work with your thinking in earthly surroundings, that you should fly around like a fantasy-filled dreamer within the earthly environment. You must keep the flying for your thinking when you are in the spiritual world. You must practice deep, inner, intimate modesty, always to want to be once again a human being among human beings, when you cross back over into the ordinary world of everyday consciousness. It is precisely out of such a modest wanting to remain in the world, not applying the laws of spiritual life to the customary world, that you will gain the strength to latch on to thinking in such a manner that it can serve you in ghostly, in spiritual worlds.

In this regard the Guardian of the Threshold instructs us further about thinking.

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

We must undergo this, as we allow the mantric dictum to work on us, we must experience it. We must, if we want to enter into earth being’s helm, which means the spirit of the earth, we must, my dear brothers and sisters, come initially to looking at our thinking as still animalistic. Fear of our intrinsic self that is still animal we must live into. Then the fear will give birth to its opposite courage, which we need. That is now the strong but serious admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold, pressing, cutting deeply into our hearts. He admonishes us to feel this when we enter the element of the earth. In this way we begin to hear from the Guardian of the Threshold about the stepping into the elements.

He admonishes us further, that if we give ourselves over as feeling beings to the fluid element, to the world of water beings, while present there we should be aware, not of fear of our self, but should be aware that we sleep dreaming, that we are sleeping dreaming sleeping in this water element, in this fluid element, which sculpts us, as we have seen. And as soon as we become aware, that in this our human earth-feeling our existence-awareness is plant-like, then this feeling will bring us to awakening. Then it will show us how lame our self is. Then we will awaken, if we seriously have the modesty to look into the lameness of our selves.

The third is to feel ourselves in the air with our willing, first with thinking in the earth element, then with feeling in the water element, then with willing in the air element. In the air element we initially feel that we have only what our ordinary memory gives us, memory picture-formations. As picture-formations they rest in our thoughts, they are passive in our thoughts. Willingly, inwardly we must grasp them, and then grasp the air nature within the pictures. And a particular characteristic of soul will appear to us, when we feel ourselves in this way in the nature of air, as though the soul were frozen solid. Similar to thinking ourselves along the path of the earth, as we breath will and think ourselves along the path of the air into the essence of air, then we will appear to ourselves as if frozen solid. But precisely out of sensing this frigid death, there we go through, to us will come the spirit-fire we need in order in inner reality to grasp our willing.

They are profound dictums that the Guardian of the Threshold places there before the soul. Only if we regard them rightly and face the fear of ourselves, how we become insignificant when we feel ourselves thinking only in regard to the earth, only then will courage of soul for living thinking awaken in us. If we feel how lame we are, when we feel ourselves half-alive, lamed upon the earth, then the strength will grow in us that will let us awaken, so that we are as though awakened into spirited life with the feeling in which we were before we descended into physical earth existence. Then, when we descend into our memory, willing with our memory into air-weaving,¹ in that moment we feel ourselves sclerotic and shivering with cold. But precisely when we feel this cold shiver in us, out of the cold the opposite once again will awaken, spirit-fire, which will show us how upon the earth willing is sleeping in us, even though rooted in living willing, in which we were before we descended into earthly consciousness. Remembering we must know ourselves in our existence before we descended into physical earth existence.

In regard to this the Guardian of the Threshold instructs us. In regard to feeling is his word:

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

In regard to willing the Guardian speaks.

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

[The mantra was now written on the blackboard, including corresponding underlined words.]

The Guardian utterly in earnest:

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

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

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

We step from thinking into feeling, down into memory, when we allow this verse to work on us. And as we come down into the depths of memory, where otherwise the soul's life vanishes, as the memory pictures again come forth, there is the boundary, as a mirror is a boundary. What from outside comes into us, comes over something like a memory wall, then it returns back again. Just as one does not see behind the mirror, so one does not see behind the memory wall. But here the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us that we are to break through what is otherwise a boundary in order to enter into the spiritual realm.

After the Guardian of the Threshold has led us further into our inner life with his admonishing dictums, and has allowed us time to process in the soul the content of these dictums, as we use these dictums in meditation, remaining at this stage for a long, long time, so that their inner force takes effect in us and really carries our “I” down through thinking, feeling, and remembering into what lies behind all remembering, then the Guardian directs us as to how we should behave, how we should conduct ourselves in regard to the external world.

He points us once again up to light, which lives in us merely in the apparent life of thoughts. It is the light which thinks in us. Light it is, that thinks in us. When light floods into us, it thinks in us. But in life on earth, light is mere appearance which thinks itself. If we go no further than this, untruthful spirit-being will bring us into self-delusion instead of into the truth of self-awareness. But it is just this we need to penetrate, that otherwise submerging in thinking in thinking we come only into self-delusion. We must infuse ourselves with the realization that when we merely sink down into thinking, we only come upon self-delusion. And precisely through taking stock of ourselves as earthly human beings stuck in self-delusion can we understand, being attentive in thinking, which absolutely is just what is needed to carry us over the abyss of existence, can we understand reflecting on the needs of earth with all its heavy burdens, and we will gradually find supports, in order to experience, to live into existence in thinking.

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

Let us proceed. The Guardian of the Threshold instructs us how initially in feeling we merely hold onto the wonderful universal fabric of the world chemism.² But if we merely hold onto this world forming in feeling, our spirit experience remains powerless. Self-possession is stifled, smothered if we merely stare fixedly in feeling at what has been crafted, has formed in the world. But if we begin to love, to love all that is already of value of the earth around us, then in feeling we find existence, and we save, save our humanity.

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

Usually, we try to catch a glimpse of the value of the earth in thought, but we only hold fast to the appearance of light, if we don’t contemplate what the earth’s heavy needs are. We hold fast to what forms itself in the world only in vague feelings if we do not experience, if we do not live into this earth fabric in love in its forming and configuring.

And of world life, what can we hold fast through our willing? Our will remains in world life. But if initially we only hold on to it in willing, we once again do not penetrate into existence. If world living fully captures us, so will ruinous spirit rapture slay our self-experiencing. Yielding oneself up to the world's willing engenders spirit rapture, which kills us. Yet when we develop the will, spirit-devoted to higher worlds, if we align our will to just that, to thinking in the physical-sensory world that gods wield authority³ in us, who inspire, stimulate our willing, if we would be in service to the gods, then God allows his existence to wield authority in us as human beings, and we catch the scent, we sense⁴ in god-infused willing a true existence.

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

These are the three admonitions which in this most earnest moment the Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us. [The mantra was now written on the board.]

The Guardian speaks as if the world word itself was resounding

You hold of light’s radiant might
Thoughts alone fast within;

It is as if the Guardian would make us take note of what we are actually doing. We are, he says, not yet beyond the mere forming of thoughts from light's appearance. [The writing continued:]

When light’s radiance thinks by itself in you,
So will untruthful spirit-being
Arise in you as self-delusion;
Reflecting on the needs of earth
Will hold you in humanity.

You hold of world chemism
Feelings alone fast within;

Once again, the admonition that only in vague blurry feelings do we have what is wonderfully forming the entire world. Into the micro-cosmos comes world-formation initially in the vagueness of feelings.

When world form feels itself in you,

not, therefore, when we in our feelings feel the world's form, but rather when world-form penetrates into us, the macrocosm penetrates into the microcosm –

When world forming feels by itself in you,
So will powerless spirit experience

Through this we become aware of our own powerlessness. [The writing continued.]

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

We need this rescue, for we are just about to cross over. If we carry over only the thoughts contained in light’s appearance, if we carry over only the feelings contained in vague world forming, then the true light over there destroys the delusion of selfhood, destroys the powerless feeling, the sleeping, the spirit experience. We need to reflect on the needs of earth, on all that suffers on the earth, in order that we may pass over worthily into the spiritual world and not be destroyed by world thinking. We need love for all that is of worth on earth, in order that we are not ground to dust, if we cross over with our feelings vague and undistinguished.

And on to the third, we need the following for our willing. [The mantra was written on the blackboard.]

You hold of world life
Will alone fast within;
When world living fully captures you,

And it will do so over there.

So will ruinous spirit rapture
Slay your experience of yourself;
Yet spirit-devoted earth-willing
Will allow the god in man to rule.

We may not carry over there what we simply have here on this side. In the spiritual world we must carry over a stronger soul than we have over here. We must prepare the soul [The words set in quotation marks were underlined.]. For over there ,we find “light's radiant might”. It lives in our “thoughts.” But this does not suffice. We need to be “reflecting on the needs of earth.” Compassion toward all the woes of earth will hold us in “humanity”.

We need over there, as we come over into “world forming”, not merely our “feelings”, we need to be “loving the value of the earth”, for all that is already worthy on earth, then will our “human soul” be saved. Here [in the first verse] human existence is upheld. Here [in the second verse] the human soul is saved.

We must enter into full “world life” that in our “willing” has only a weak reflection, which is too thin to be able to cross over. And we must develop “spirit-devoted earth-willing” so that the “God in man” can rule. This is the progression.

Light's radiant might
World-gestalt
World life

Thoughts
Feelings
Will

We need

Reflecting on the needs of earth
Loving the value of the earth
Spirit-devoted earth willing.

Then we need

To hold yourself in humanity
To save your human soul
To allow the god in man to rule.

That, my dear brothers and sisters, is just what the Guardian lays on our soul, in order to develop what specifically is referred to as wings of the soul, in order to cross over.

We now have only one more obligation in the next esoteric lesson to be held on Wednesday, that we receive those mantras for our soul through the Guardian of the Threshold, who in this instance is Michael's representative at the threshold to the spirit land, those mantras which are the first which one speaks when one has arrived over there into the spiritual, which still remains before the human being as in these mantras, as deep, night-bedecked, cold darkness.

Today, however, after this has passed before our soul, we should reflect back on what speaks to from all beings, challenging us to all that the Guardian of the Threshold has set before us with such determination.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

And what comes before us in this way with the words of the Guardian of the Threshold, when we take it up in the right attitude, then it is indeed the Michael presentation of this rightfully established Michael School. Then Michael's existence wields in this room, blessing and strengthening all that here comes before our souls. In light of this, what in this way comes before our souls becomes furnished with Michael's Sign and Michael's Seal. This is Michael's Sign [The Michael Sign was drawn on the blackboard.] and Michael's Seal, which he impressed upon what has been the Rosicrucian sentiment of soul for hundreds of years, and what is expressed as the Rosicrucian sentiment in the following dictum.

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus

This is so spoken with Michael's Seal, that we accompany the first words with this gesture [The lower seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.], and we accompany the second words with another gesture [The middle seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard], and the third words we accompany with yet another gesture. [The upper seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard]. The first gesture signifies [upon the lower seal gesture was written]

I honor the Father⁵

the second gesture [upon the middle seal gesture was written]

I love the Son⁶

the third gesture [upon the upper seal gesture was written]

I unite with the Spirit⁷

In this way we may consider what has been spoken as having been spoken while being confirmed through Michael's sign, while being confirmed and attested through Michael's Seal, that just with this, and this, and this [The three seal gestures overwritten with the phrases above were indicated.], which is impressed on the Rosicrucian-Words.⁸ The dictums should be living in this way, through the sign of Michael, and should be sealed for all your souls, that which lives through the Michaelic-Rosicrucian-School. [The Michael sign was made, and accompanying the three seal gestures with overwritten word, the following words were spoken.]

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus

My dear brothers and sisters, the mantric dictums which are given in this school may only be possessed by one who is a rightful member of this school, that is, whomever is in possession of a blue membership card. One who is not present at a lesson at which he or she might have been present according to the date of reception into the school, please take note, the verses of those lessons at which the person might have been present according to the date of that person’s admittance, such a one may receive these verses from another member who has received them in the proper way within the school. But, in this regard, it is necessary to obtain permission either from Frau Dr. Wegman or myself.

It is not an administrative regulation, but is fundamental in an occult school, that a real act should precede the handing on of something of this nature. The one, however, who wishes to ask permission from Frau Dr. Wegman or myself, can only be the one who wishes to give the dictums to another, not the one who wishes to receive them. One can, however, ask someone for the dictums. But one cannot then, as the one who wishes to receive them, ask further. One must then let that person who intends to hand them on ask further. It is of no use if the recipient asks.

Whomever writes down anything other than the mantras may keep it eight days, but after this one is in duty bound to burn it, because what should live in this school should live only within the school and should not leave it. All of these procedures have nothing to do with power or control, they are not arbitrary regulations. This is all grounded in occult laws. For if something of this kind gets into unauthorized hands, it ceases to have effectiveness for all those who have received it for effective use. If, therefore, misuse occurs, inasmuch as mantric dictums, or the content of what is given here, are transmitted to unauthorized persons, these mantric dictums and what is given here lose their effectiveness for those who are sitting here. This has to do with facts, not with something which is an arbitrary regulation.

I have still to announce the program for tomorrow. Once again at 9:30 the course on pastoral medicine, at 12 noon the course on speech formation, at 5:30 the theologians' course, and at 8 o'clock the members' lecture.

The Guardian, utterly in earnest

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

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

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

The Guardian speaks as if
the World Word itself resounded

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

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

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

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus

I honor the Father
I love the Son
I unite with the Spirit

• 1. Lüfteweben
• 2. das Weltgestalten
• 3. walten
• 4. spüren
• 5. Ich bewundere den Vater
• 6. Iche liebe den Sohn
• 7. Ich verbinde mich dem Geiste
• 8. die Rosenkreuzer-Worte

Let us begin, my dear friends, with the words the Guardian speaks - words we already know - when pointing in the direction of the spiritual world, which characterize what the human being can feel on the threshold of the spiritual world as he strides past the Guardian.

From the wide expanse of beings in space
Who experience existence in light,
From the tread of time's onward course
Which finds in creating its very activity;
From the depths of the feeling heart
Where in the Self the world is founded:

There resounds in the soul's utterance,
There shines from the spirit's thoughts,
Which from divine healing forces
in the cosmic-creative forces
Weave the mighty existential words:
O Man, know thyself!

It's about the path one should follow in thought, the path which one will actually take when seeking access to the spiritual world. And we should not say that when someone experiences in thought - if he honestly and earnestly lives in his thoughts - what the person in process of initiation realizes in reality by entering the spiritual world, that the former does not actually participate in what is revealed to the human soul when entering the spiritual world, because it is only a reflected ideation.

One should not say: Let's leave gaining entrance into the spiritual world to those who are striving to be initiates and stand with their souls in the spiritual world as people stand in physical existence with their senses. Rather should one say: When even in thought one approaches the description of the path that leads to the spiritual world, and provided the thinking is not superficial, he will experience and feel fully what it means to leave the world of the senses behind, a world only the intellect can grasp, and enter the spiritual world.

That is what I will speak to you about today, my dear friends, and not merely for those who already seek the transformation which will lead them into the spiritual world, but also for those who, at first, only experience the transformation in their thoughts. And that includes all of you, else you wouldn't be sitting here.

Therefore the following must be said: When man makes his observations in the world of senses - life consists of such observations - when man uses the things that he encounters in the sense world to unfold his will, when he proceeds from observation to action, and when he lets the combination of such observations and actions have an effect on his feelings, he stands to a certain extent on firm ground, for this process has been implanted in him as a physical being on earth between birth and death. Wherever he doesn't have this firm ground, he looks for it. When he is expected to believe something, he looks everywhere for the facts behind it. He asks: What experience proves this or that? He doesn't like to accept something in ordinary life which is not proven by this or that outward experience. He stands on firm ground because he says to himself: What is true is what is seen, what is real is what is held in the hand. The world, the world order itself, provides a certain security in human life. And because of this security, man differentiates - insofar as it is necessary for ordinary life between birth and death - he differentiates between truth and illusion, truth and semblance, truth and dream. When verification cannot be found, he calls it semblance. And only by differentiating between true and false, reality and semblance, is life secure.

Just imagine, my dear friends, that you were to go through life between birth and death in a way that you could never really know whether something that confronts you is truth or illusion. You could not determine whether a person who stands before you and speaks to you is a real person or the semblance of one. You could not differentiate between something happening to you being real or merely a dream. Just imagine what insecurity, what terrible insecurity that would cause in your life.

But exactly as you would feel if life were to withdraw the possibility of knowing whether you were dreaming or confronting reality, is also the way the adept feels standing at the threshold of the spiritual world. That is the very first important experience he has when he realizes that on the other side of the threshold is the spiritual world.

As we have already seen, only darkness streams at first from this spiritual world. Yet although here or there brilliant flashes of light emanate from the darkness - in which the Guardian of the Threshold's words are heard, as we learned last time - with all the knowledge of the senses and reason you may have gleaned in the physical world, you would never be able to know whether a real spiritual being, a real spiritual fact stands before you or a shape in a dream.

That is the first experience of the spiritual world, that semblance and reality are mixed up and to differentiate between semblance and reality is problematic at first. That is something which should be borne in mind especially by those who have experienced impressions from the spiritual world not through normal spiritual training, but due to elementary forces, which can be the result of any number of things, such as shattering events, illness and the like. He shouldn't deceive himself by saying: well, now you have the spiritual world, because it could well be that whatever it is that seems to suddenly shine from out of the spiritual world is merely an illusion. Therefore the first thing one must learn in order to enter the spiritual world is the ability to distinguish between truth and error, between reality and illusion - independent of what is experienced in the physical world. One must acquire completely new capacities for distinguishing between reality and illusion.

In our times, when people no longer pay much attention to how the spiritual world illuminates life, in which they only pay attention to what is palpable, to what can only be seen by physical eyes; in our times, when people are completely attuned to the overt security which life between birth an death provides; in these times it is especially difficult to acquire this capacity to distinguish between truth and error, reality and semblance in respect to the spiritual world. It is in this area where the most earnestness is required.

And where does this come from? You see, when you confront the outer world as a physical person, you think about this outer world. And at the same time you have impressions from the physical world, which in a certain sense slip under your thoughts, supporting them. You don't have to do very much in order to live in reality. Reality accepts you as a physical reality.

It is quite different in the spiritual world. You must first grow into the spiritual world. For the spiritual world you must acquire the correct feeling of your own true reality. Then you will gradually be able to differentiate between truth and error, between reality and semblance of reality.

When you sit down on a chair - at the moment you don't fall on the floor, but are able to sit safely on the chair, you know that in the physical world the chair is a real chair and not merely an imagined chair. The chair itself provides proof of its reality.

That is not the case in the spiritual world. For why is it so in the physical world? Because in the physical world your thinking, your feeling, your willing are held together by the physical body. You are a threefold human being: a thinking, feeling and a willing human being. But they are all unified within each other by the physical body.

At the moment when the human being enters the spiritual world, he immediately becomes a triple being. His thinking goes its own way, his feeling goes its own way, his willing goes its own way. So you can think in the spiritual world, have thoughts which have nothing to do with your willing; but these thoughts are illusions. You can have feelings which have nothing to do with your willing; but these feelings contribute to your undoing, not to your advancement.

That is the essential thing, that when a person approaches the threshold of the spiritual world it seems to him that his thinking flies out into distant space and that his feeling goes beyond his memory.

Consider for a moment what I just said. You see, memory is really something which comes very close to the threshold of the spiritual world. Let's say you experienced something ten years ago. It returns in memory. The experience is there again. You are justifiably satisfied, as far as the physical world is concerned, if you have a vivid memory of it. For someone who has entered the spiritual world, however, it is as though he pushes through the memory, as though he goes farther than the memory reaches. In any case he goes farther back than his memory of physical earthly life can reach. He goes back beyond birth.

And when one enters the spiritual world, he immediately senses that his feeling does not stay with him. Thinking at least goes out into the presently existing universe. It disperses, as it were, in cosmic space. Feeling goes out of the universe and if one wants to follow feeling one must ask: Where are you now? When you have become 50 years old, then you have gone back in time farther than 50 years; you have gone back 70 years, 100 years, 150 years. Feeling leads you completely out of the time in which you have lived since childhood.

And willing, if you take it seriously, leads you ever farther back in time, back to your previous earth lives. That is something which happens immediately, dear friends, when you really come to the threshold of the spiritual world. The physical body ceases holding you together. One no longer feels within the confines of the skin; one feels split into parts.

You feel as though your thoughts, which were previously confined by feelings, are streaming out into cosmic space and becoming cosmic thoughts. Your feelings seem to go back in time in the spiritual world between your last death and your present earth life. And with your volition you feel yourself in your previous earth life.

It is just this splitting of the human being - I described it in my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds—which causes difficulties upon entering the spiritual world, because your thoughts expand. They had previously been held together and now stream out into cosmos space. At the same time they become almost imperceptible. So one must achieve the ability to perceive the thoughts which have thus expanded.

Feeling is no longer permeated by thoughts, for the thoughts have gone, so to speak. So your feeling can only turn prayerfully, with reverence and devotion, to the beings with whom you pass your life between death and a new birth on earth. This is possible if one has cultivated such reverence for the spiritual world in life.

But the moment one's volition, which wants to proceed to previous earth-lives, takes over, the person meets a great difficulty in that he feels an enormous attraction for the contents of his lower nature. And here works most strongly what I previously said about the difficulty in being able to to differentiate between semblance and reality. For the person acquires a strong preference for semblance. I'll describe it as follows.

When a person begins to meditate, when he or she is really dedicated to the meditation, he would like to continue in tranquility. He does not want it to deprive him of life's comforts. Well, this desire not to be deprived of life's comforts is a strong producer of illusions and semblances. Because when you dedicate yourself completely to meditation, necessarily from the depths of your soul the question arises about your capacity for evil. One cannot do otherwise than to feel through meditation, through that penetration into the depths, everything you are capable of perpetrating. But the urge to deny this is so strong that one submits to the illusion that one is essentially a very good person.

The real experience of meditation does not indicate such a result. It shows how one can be full of all kinds of vanity and overestimation of one's self and underestimation of others. Also, one judges people not only because they have something important to say, but because one wishes to bask in the good opinion of others. But that is the least of things. He who really meditates honestly will see what drives live in his soul and what he is therefore capable of. Man's lower nature appears strongly before the soul's inner vision. And this honesty must exist in mediation. When it is there we can see what the will's disposition really is, which is reflected in the words we have already heard:

Behold the first beast, the crooked back
The bony head, the scrawny body,
His skin is all a dullish blue;
Your fear of creative spiritual being
Begat the monster in your will;

Because the human being tends to succumb to illusion, he suppresses the impression that necessarily arises in meditation, and he feels the urge to mock the spiritual world. Only by honestly facing these opposing forces can he stand in the spiritual world in the right way. Then the sight of the second beast appears on the threshold:

Behold the second beast, it bares
Its teeth in a warped face, scornfully it lies,
Yellow with gray spots is its body;
Your hate of spiritual revelation
Begat this weakling in your feeling;

And then when we are helpless to follow the thoughts we had in our heads during earth life and are now cosmic thoughts, because of this inability to bestride our cosmic thoughts, that the third beast appears:

Behold the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;
Your doubts in the power of spiritual light
Begat this ghost within your thinking;

The less we succumb to illusions about this trinity, which reflects our own being, the more we find in us the true human who can receive the light from the spiritual world and who is in a position to really solve the riddle, insofar as it is possible on earth to do so, which is conceded to us with the words: “O man, know thyself!”. For through this self-knowledge streams forth the true knowledge of the world which can lead us in the right way through life. Therefore, this threefold splitting in which one's thinking goes its way, feeling goes its way and willing goes its way, which otherwise are united by exterior forces, may be expressed by the words the Guardian of the Threshold says to the adept. We heard them the last time:

The third beast's glassy eye,
Is the evil counterpart
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking the spirit-force
which before it's earthly life
Lived its life in fields of spirit.

The second beast's mocking countenance
Is the evil counter-force of feeling,
Which hollows out its own soul
And creates an empty life
Instead of fullness of spirit
With light from the force of the sun
Before earthly existence.

The first beast's bony spirit:
The will's evil creative power,
Which would estrange your own body
From the soul's inherent strength
And devote it to the counter-forces,
Which would steal in future time
Cosmic being from the gods.

These are the words spoken by the Guardian as a warning so that we know how we should not enter the spiritual world. Upon entering the spiritual world we must have become accustomed to a different way of judging, a different way of feeling and a different way of willing from what prevails in the physical world. And for that it is really necessary that we grasp this threefold element within us, that we firmly direct our gaze within in order to be alert to what our thinking really is, what our feeling really is, what our willing really is and what they must become for us to be able to step across the threshold into the spiritual world, if only in our thoughts. For the fact is that the gods place will-power before the bliss of knowledge and they require it.

Therefore, directly after the Guardian has spoken these discouraging, perhaps frightening words, he continues with the other words which tell us what we should do. At this point the first lessons of this class also become practical in that they instruct us what should enter into our thinking, feeling and willing forces in order to enter the spiritual world in the right way.

And the verse should also be threefold which should flow into us in a way that we can live with it. For in living with it we are setting out on the path to the spiritual world. In the same way that we eat and drink , that we see and hear, must something be evoked in us by what the Guardian of the Threshold, standing before the spiritual world, says with earnest visage.

See in yourself the weaving thoughts:
Cosmic semblances confront you,
Selfhood as such hides from you;
Plunge beneath the semblances:
Etheric essence flows in you;
Selfhood as such should revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.

Let us examine the verse. When the human being lives in the sense-world between birth and death, he feels to be within his physical body. He knows that his legs carry him through the world. He knows that blood circulation gives him life. He knows that his breathing awakens life. He commits himself to this breathing, blood circulation and the movement of the members that carry him through the world. In doing so, he is a physical being on the earth. Just as he commits himself to these things physically, he must also commit with his soul to the leading powers of the spiritual world if he wants to participate in it, knowledgeably enter into it.

Just as I must say that for physical health your blood must circulate in the correct way, your breathing must be in order, I must also advise the person who wishes to stand correctly in the spiritual world, that his soul must follow, be sustained and led by his own spiritual guides:

[The first verse, beginning with the last words, is written on the blackboard:]

Guiding beings of your spirit

But, my dear friends, you are committed to your blood by the force of nature, as you are to the movement of your limbs, also your breathing. But you cannot be committed in this way to your spirit's guiding beings in the spiritual world. Inner activity is required. You don't reach them as you achieve breathing by movement of the lungs; you reach them, however, by learning to revere them.

[Over “Guiding beings of your spirit” “revere” is written:]

revere

Guiding beings of your spirit.

Revere with what is deepest in you, with your selfhood.

[“Selfhood” is written in front of “revere”.]

selfhood revere

Guiding beings of your spirit.

Selfhood as such should revere

Guiding beings of your spirit.

[When spoken, the missing words are added, then written on the blackboard:]

selfhood as such should revere

Guiding beings of your spirit.

Thus, you have the manner in which you must stand within the spiritual world, given in the words spoken by the Guardian of the Threshold.

And how do you stand within? Not as though you were standing with your legs on solid ground; not through the warmth of your blood in physical life; not by drawing breath. You stand there by virtue of feeling yourself in the half-spiritual etheric essence flowing through you:

Etheric essence flows in you

The feeling is as though one were a small cloud around which a spiritual wind blows, that one is carried by this wind in which selfhood, one's own I, reveres the spiritual guides which approach with the wind from all sides. We are invited to submerge into it. But what is it initially? As long as we remain in our meditation in what I have just described, it is mere semblance. We must submerge in this semblance fully conscious that the wind and the reverence for the spiritual guides is only semblance.

[The fourth line from the bottom is written on the blackboard.]

Plunge beneath the semblances

Why should we do all this? Well, in earth-life initially we have only a vague sense of our I - “Selfhood” - we define it with the word “I”, but in reality it is an undefined, dim, hidden feeling.

[The fifth line from the bottom is written.]

Selfhood as such hides from you

We don't know much about it. And what we do know is not cosmic-being, it is cosmic-semblance.

[The sixth line from the bottom is written.]

Cosmic semblance confronts you

When we follow the Guardian of the Threshold's indications ...

[The seventh line from the bottom is written.]

See in yourself the weaving thoughts

it all becomes the weaving of our own thoughts.

Now we have the first mantric verse which can give us the strength in our thinking to accept the challenge with our selfhood which can initially be expressed in the words:

See in yourself the weaving thoughts:
Cosmic semblances confront you,
Selfhood as such hides from you;
Plunge within the semblances:
Etheric essence flows in you;
Selfhood as such should revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.

This is the invitation to us when observing our thoughts in retrospection. If you close yourself off from the outside world and observe how your thoughts fluctuate and then you follow the invitation in these seven lines, you have complied with the Guardian of the Threshold's first demand.

Now you are to approach what the Guardian says to your feelings:
To hear within the flow of feeling:
when semblance and being within you blend,
Your selfhood tends towards the semblance;
So plunge into what's seemingly being:
In you the cosmic-psychic forces;
Your selfhood then should well consider
Your own soul's living powers.

Just as through the first mantric verse we enter thinking, we enter the inner world of thinking through the second.

[The second verse is written on the blackboard.]

To hear within the flow of feeling

Put aside thinking and try to observe your own feelings. In thinking everything is semblance. But when we descend into feeling semblance and being blend, intermix.

That is immediately apparent.

when semblance and being within you blend

Only our I, selfhood, does not wish to enter real existence. It is used to outside semblance and appearance. It tends towards semblance, still retaining this from the world of the senses:

Your selfhood tends towards the semblance
So plunge into what's seemingly being

in what results from feeling. It is seemingly being, a mixture of semblance and being.

“So plunge into what's seemingly being”: when we will feel the mood which lies in these four lines, we will realize that it has become serious as we plunge into the semblance:

In you the cosmic-psychic forces

First of all, selfhood had to “revere” by sinking into thought; now selfhood should “consider”. The thoughts are to be brought down into feeling. We then encounter something which assures us of true being:

Your selfhood then should well consider
Your own soul's living powers

No longer “semblance”, but “living powers”. Whereas our self, our I tends towards semblance, the gods give us the rock of being in the depths of feeling.

In order to convert the verse into a mantram, it would be good to revisit such correspondences.

Revere
consider well

—in the third verse we will see how it increases—

semblance you experience.

Here [first verse] is only semblance; and here [second verse]

semblance and being within you blend.
guiding spirits [in the first verse] your own
living powers [in the second verse]

the beings who guide us through the ether; the living powers who guide us back to pre-earthly existence - where feeling goes.

If you wish to make it into a true mantram however, you must take something else into consideration. Read the first verse:

See in yourself the weaving thoughts:
Cosmic semblances confront you,
Selfhood as such hides from you;
Plunge within the semblances:
Etheric essence flows in you;
Selfhood as such should revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.

Clearly this is a trochaic rhythm, which I beg you to observe. If you stress this strongly and this weakly [the iambic rhythm symbols breve and macron—are placed above the beginning of each line and then spoken with the appropriate stress], it corresponds to the correct etheric movement in the soul where reverence for the higher beings requires such a tone. Thus you will be led into the spiritual world.

It is otherwise in the second verse:
To hear within the flow of feeling:
when semblance and being within you blend,
Your selfhood tends towards the semblance;
So plunge into what's seemingly being:
In you the cosmic-psychic forces;
Your selfhood then should well consider
Your own soul's living powers.

The way in which the soul feels these words, either trochaic or iambic - here [in the first verse] there is a distinctly trochaic beat, and here [in the second verse] a distinctly iambic beat - gives the soul the corresponding verve.

It is not a question of merely acquiring intellectual information, even when the soul is making its way to the spiritual world only in thought. Rather is it important that the soul enters with the right breathing and rhythm of cosmic being. If you use an iambic rhythm in striving to enter cosmic thought, you have misunderstood the Guardian of the Threshold. If you use a trochaic verse and not an iambic one for entrance into the world of cosmic feeling, again you have misunderstood the Guardian of the Threshold.

The third element we must plunge into is willing. And the Guardian of the Threshold also gives us a verse for this. Now that we have contemplated the first two, the last one will be easy to understand.

[The third verse is written on the blackboard.]

Let strive in you with thrust of will:
Which rises out of semblance-being
With creative self it rises up;

it surges up from the will to what gives the self substance, content ...

Turn your life in full to this
Filled it is with cosmic-spirit-force;
Your inner self should truly grasp
Cosmic creative power in the spirit-I.

Feel again the escalation:

revere: one is far away, one looks up, one reveres from without;
consider well: one draws closer in thought, one enters;
grasp: the highest escalation, one enters and grasps it.
guiding beings
living powers and now:
cosmic creative power—now at the beginning of the line, corresponding to the reality of the direct power of the will.

You will feel that all three are mantric verses if you pay attention to the trochaic element here [the first verse], the iambic here [the second verse]. Here however [the third verse] we have two stressed syllables.

[on the line beginnings on blackboard the spondaic symbols - - are placed and spoken with the corresponding emphasis:]

Let strive in you with thrust of will:
Which rises out of semblance-being
With creative self it rises up;
Turn your life in full to this
Filled it is with cosmic-spirit-force;
Your inner self should truly grasp
Creative cosmic power in the spirit-I.

Here you have a spondee rhythm.

This is what must be observed. You must release yourself from the mere intellectual content and attend to the trochee, iambus and spondee rhythms. At the moment, we are able to move on from the intellectual meaning to commitment to the rhythm, from that moment it is possible to leave the physical world and really enter the spiritual one. For the spiritual, cannot be grasped only using the words whose meanings apply to the physical world; but only if we use the opportunity to carry the rhythms of these words out to the living cosmos.

Therefore, self-observation is exercised on the soul in a threefold sequence of thinking, feeling and willing. The soul will then express itself correctly if it experiences this as it does eating and drinking by the body, as it experiences blood circulation and breathing, if it experiences the rhythm in these words:

See in yourself the weaving thoughts:
Cosmic semblances confront you,
Selfhood as such hides from you;
Plunge beneath the semblances:
Etheric essence flows in you;
Selfhood as such should revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.

To hear within the flow of feeling:
when semblance and being within you blend,
Your selfhood tends towards the semblance;
So plunge into what's seemingly being:
In you the cosmic-psychic forces;
Your selfhood then should well consider
Your own soul's living powers.

Let strive in you with thrust of will:
Which rises out of semblance-being
With creative self it rises up;
Turn your life in full to this
Filled it is with cosmic-spirit-force;
Your inner self should truly grasp
Creative cosmic power in the spirit-I.

In words you have at first the blood; with the corresponding rhythms you have the circulating blood. Seek the sense of these rhythms, let them act in your soul and you will come near to the Guardian's first warning - which I told you at the beginning of these lessons, my dear friends:

Where on earthly ground, color on color
is manifest in creation;
from earthly matter, form on form,
lifeless is given shape;
sentient Beings, strong in will
themselves in joy of existence;
you, O man, your bodily being
from earth and air and light.

Your true being enters
night-enveloped, cold darkness;
ask in the dark sweeping expanse
longer, who you are and were and will be.
your own being the day grows dimly
soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
you turn with angst of soul
the light that from darkness streams.

And if we wish to find the light that emerges from the darkness, we will find it if we seek it by this threefold path, filling ourselves with this lifeblood for the soul that wishes to tread the path to true knowledge of the spirit and of God.

Our subject for today will relate in a wider way to many of the spiritual truths which will be known to you as anthroposophists. You are no doubt familiar with the kind of description given, for example, in my book Theosophy, of the spiritual worlds through which man has to go between death and a new birth. Today I will tell of those spiritual worlds from a rather different point of view. For in Theosophy, Imaginations are mainly used to describe the world of soul and the world of Spirit through which man passes when he has gone through the gate of death to advance into a new life on Earth. In today's lecture I shall relate these things not so much from the standpoint of Imagination, but rather from the aspect which is revealed by Inspiration.

To gain some access to it for our understanding, we may take our start from the experiences which are ours during earthly life. At any given moment between birth and death, we are here in our physical body, face to face with the outer world. We should describe as ourselves, our human being, what is contained within our skin, within the confines of our physical body. No doubt we take this “human being” to include not only the anatomical and physiological data; we take it for granted that processes of soul and mind are also somehow going on in there. Yet, speaking of “ourselves,” we generally have in mind what is contained within our skin, and now from here we look out into the world. There all around us is the world we call our “outer world.” And as you know, we make mental images of this outer world. We have the outer world around us, and mirror-images thereof—or something like it—in our life of soul.

Now in the life between death and new birth the essence of the matter is that we are in this very world which, here on Earth, is external to us. All that is now your “outer world,” including what you see in full, clear focus and what you but distantly divine, is then your inner world,—to that you say “mine I.” Just as you now regard your lung as belonging to your I, so, between death and new birth, do you regard the Sun and Moon as your organs,—in other words, as being in you. The only outer world which you then have is you yourself, such as you are on Earth—your earthly organs.

Whereas on Earth we say; “In us—a lung; in us—a heart; outside of us a Sun, a Moon, a Zodiac,” during the life between death and new birth we shall say; “In us—a Zodiac, in us the Sun, in us the Moon; outside of us, lung and heart.” Between death and new birth all that we now carry inside our skin increasingly becomes our outer world, our Universe, our Cosmos. Our view of the relation between World and Man becomes completely opposite when we are living between death and a new birth.

When we live through death—when we go through the gate of death—we have a distinct picture, to begin with, of what went before, of how we were on Earth. True, it is only a picture, but it is like the outer world. This picture, then, shines forth in you to begin with. Thus in the first period after death you still have a consciousness of the man you were on Earth—consciousness in the form of earthly memories and earthly pictures. But these do not last long; ever increasingly you have this other outlook upon man: “‘I’ is the World; the Universe is Man.” This becomes ever more enhanced. Of course, you will not imagine that the human lung, for instance, looks the same as it does now; that would not be a sight to compensate for all the greatness and beauty of the Sun and Moon. Yet in reality, what lung and heart there become is vastly greater and more sublime even than Sun and Moon are, here and now, to human vision.

Only in this way do you gain an adequate idea of that which Maya is. People speak of Maya—the great illusion of this present earthly world—and yet they do not quite believe in what they say. Deep down, they cherish the belief that things are as they look to be to earthly eyes. But it is not so. The human lung as we now see it is a mere semblance; so is the heart. In truth, our lung is but a part—a mighty part—of our Cosmos; and even more so is our heart. The heart in its true essence is vastly greater and more majestic than any Sun.

Thus we begin to see an immense and sublime cosmic world arising—a world of which we speak in this way: Beneath us are the Heavens. In saying this, we mean: Beneath us is all that which is preparing the human head of the next incarnation. Above are, we then say, what was below. For it is all inverted. Above are all the forces which prepare man for his earthly walking—prepare him to stand firm on his two legs in the next earthly life.

All this can then be summed up in the saying: The nearer we approach a new earthly life, the more does this Universe which is Man contract for us. Majestic it is indeed, notably in the middle period between death and a new birth. But now we grow increasingly aware of how this Universe, with all its erstwhile majesty and greatness, is shrinking and contracting. The planets which we bear within us—planets in their weaving movement—become what then pulsates and surges through the human ether-body. The fixed stars of the Zodiac become what forms our life of nerves and senses. All this is shrinking, to become a body—spiritual to begin with, and then ethereal. And not until it has grown quite tiny, is it received into the mother's womb, there to be clothed with earthly matter.

Then comes the moment when we draw near to earthly life. Vanishing from us we now feel the Universe which until recently was ours. It shrinks and wanes, and this experience begets in us the longing to come down again to Earth,—once more to unite with a physical body on the Earth. For the great Universe we had before, withdraws, eludes our spiritual gaze; now therefore do we look to become Man again.

All this involves, however, quite another scale of time. Life between death and rebirth goes on for many centuries, and if a man is born, say, in the 20th century, his descent will have been prepared for gradually, even as early as the 15th century. All through this time moreover he himself has in a certain sense been working down into the earthly conditions and events.

A great-great ... grandfather of yours, way back in the 15th century, fell in love with a great-great ... grandmother. They felt the urge to come together, and in this urge you were already working in from spiritual worlds. And in the 17th century when a rather less distant great-great ... grandfather and great-great ... grandmother loved each other, you once again were in a sense the mediator. So did you summon all the generations to the end that at long last those should emerge who could become your mother and your father.

In that mysterious and intangible quality that pervades the relationships of earthly love, forces are indeed at work, proceeding from human souls who look for future incarnations. Therefore full consciousness and freedom are never there in the external conditions which bring men and women upon Earth together. These things still lie outside the range of human understanding,

What we call history nowadays is in the last resort far too external. Little is known to us in outer life today of the soul-history of human beings. Even as late as the 12th or 13th century A.D., souls of men felt very differently than they do now. Yet this is quite unknown. Not indeed as distinctly as I have just been telling, but in a more dream-like way, the men and women of the 10th, 11th, or 12th century were aware of these mysterious forces working down to Earth from spiritual worlds,—working down, in effect, from human souls. Little was said in Western countries of repeated earthly lives—reincarnation—but there were human beings everywhere, who knew. Only the Churches always eschewed, not to say anathematized all thoughts about repeated lives. Yet you should realize that even as late as the 12th and 13th centuries there were not a few in Europe who were aware that man undergoes repeated lives on Earth.

Then came the time when mankind in the Western world had to go through the stage of intellectuality. For man must by and by acquire spiritual freedom. When the dream-like clairvoyance of olden time prevailed, there was no spiritual freedom. Nor is there freedom—there is, at most, belief in freedom—in those affairs of human life, governed, shall we say, by earthly love, of which we have been speaking. For here the interests of other souls, on their way down to Earth, are always mingled.

Yet in the course of earthly evolution mankind must grow freer, yet ever freer. For only by man's growing freer, will the earth reach her goal in evolution. Now to this end, during a certain period intellectuality was necessary. The period in question is, of course, our own. Look back into earlier times and conditions upon Earth, when human beings still enjoyed dream-like clairvoyance. Living in this dreamlike clairvoyance there were always spiritual beings. Man at that time could never say, “I have my own thoughts in my head,”—that would have been quite untrue. In very olden times he rather had to say “I have the life of Angels in my head”; and then in later times: “I have the life of elemental beings in my head.” Then came the 15th century, and at long last the 19th and the 20th. Now man no longer has spiritual beings in his head, but only thoughts—mere thoughts. And by not having any higher spiritual life but only thoughts in his head, he can make for himself pictures of the outer world,

Could man be free, so long as Spirits were indwelling him? No, he could not, for they directed him; everything was due to them. Man could only become free when spiritual beings no longer directed him—when he had mere pictures, mere images, in his thoughts. Thought-pictures cannot compel you to do anything. Say you confront a looking-glass; the mirror-images of other men may be howsoever ill-disposed, they cannot hit you, for they are not real—they are mere pictures. And if I am resolving on some action, I may cause the mirror-image in my thought to picture the resolve, but the picture can of itself make no resolve.

Thus in the epoch when intellectuality puts only thoughts into our heads, freedom is born, inasmuch as thoughts have not the power to compel, In that we hold our moral impulses simply in the form of pure thoughts—as described in my “Philosophy of Freedom” [Philosophie der Freiheit, 1894. The later English editions have been entitled Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.]—we can achieve true freedom in the present age. The intellectual age, therefore, had to be.

Yet, strange as it may sound, in essence this age is already past. The age in which it was right for man to develop mere intellectuality, mere thinking-in-images, has run its course. With the 19th century it has become a thing of the past. And if men now continue to develop mere image-thoughts, their thoughts will fall a prey to Ahrimanic powers. The Ahrimanic powers will then gain access to man, and having reached his freedom, man will lose it—lose it to the Ahrimanic powers. Mankind is at the threshold of this danger now. Mankind today is faced with the alternative: either to comprehend the spiritual life—to comprehend the reality of such things as I have been telling you today—or to deny them. And if man now persists in denying what is spiritual, he will no longer be able to think freely. On the contrary, Ahriman—the Ahrimanic powers—will then be thinking in mankind, and all humanity will undergo a downhill evolution.

Therefore it is in the highest degree necessary for an ever-growing number of human beings in our time to appreciate the need for a return to spiritual life. A feeling for the need to get back to a spiritual form of life, is what the men of today should try to awaken in themselves. For if they fail to seek for this, mankind will fall a prey to Ahriman. Seen from a higher standpoint, the situation of mankind on Earth today is no less grave than that, and we should put this thought before all others, testing all other thoughts in the light of this one.

So much for the first part of the lecture. If Mr. Kaufmann will now be kind enough to translate, I will then go on.

Descriptions such as these may help illustrate the fact that the life we lead in the spiritual world between death and new birth is very different from that we undergo here between birth and death. Pictures, therefore, borrowed from the earthly life, however well conceived, will always be inadequate. Slowly and gradually we must be led to an understanding of the kind of reality that prevails in spiritual worlds. Let me give some examples.

Suppose a human being leaves his earthly body, and, with his life of soul and spirit, enters the world of soul and spirit. Suppose moreover that someone here on Earth, who has achieved Initiation-knowledge in the deeper sense, is able to observe human souls in their continued life after death. Much preparation is necessary to this end; also a certain Karma is essential, connecting the human being upon Earth with the one in yonder world. Now he must find some means of mutual understanding with the other soul. The spiritual experiences which I shall here be relating are not all easy to achieve. Generally speaking, it is far easier to describe the Universe in its spiritual aspect than to come near to a departed soul. People will with ease persuade themselves that it is not so difficult, yet in reality it is far more difficult to gain access to the dead than to achieve spiritual knowledge of other kinds.

I will now relate some characteristic features of the real intercourse with the dead. To begin with, we can only communicate with them by entering into such memories of the physical world as they are still able to evoke. For example, they still retain an echo of human speech, even of the particular language which was mainly theirs while on Earth. But their relation to language undergoes a change. For instance, in conversing with a soul who has died, one will soon observe that they have no understanding for substantives—for nouns. The living may address such words to the dead; the dead, if I may use this expression, simply do not hear them. Verbs on the other hand—words expressing action—these they will understand for a comparatively long time after death.

As a general rule you will only become able to converse with a soul who has gone through death if you know how to put your questions to him. You may have to proceed as follows. One day you concentrate on him as quietly as you are able. You try to live with him in something definite and real, for he has pictures in his soul rather than abstract notions. Therefore you concentrate on some real experience which he was glad to enter into during earthly life; thus you will gradually get near him.

You will not as a rule get an immediate answer to your question. You will very likely have to sleep on it—sleep on it, may be, several times, after some days you will get the answer. But you will never get an answer if you ask in nouns. You must take pains to clothe all nouns in verbal form. Such preparation is indispensable. He will most readily understand verbs, especially if you make them pictorial and vivid. The dead will never understand for instance the word “table,” but if you imagine vividly what is astir while a table is being made—a process of becoming, therefore, instead of a finished thing—then you will gradually become intelligible to him so that he apprehends your question and you get an answer. But the answers too will always be in verbal form, or may be not even that; they may only consist of what we on Earth should call interjections—exclamations.

Above all, the dead speak in the actual sounds of the alphabet—sounds and combinations of sound. The longer a soul has lived in the spiritual world after death, the more will he be speaking in a kind of language which you can only make your own by cultivating a true feeling of discrimination even in the realm of earthly speech, insisting no longer on the abstract meaning of the words but entering into their feeling-content. It is as I was saying in the educational lectures here. With the sound a [a, pronounced as in father.] we experience something like astonishment and wonder. Moreover we take the sense of wonder deep into our soul when we not only say a, but ach [German or Scottish pronunciation of ch as in Loch. Ach is the German equivalent of the exclamation Ah.]. Ach signifies: “A—I feel wonder. The sense of wonder goes right into me: ch.” And if I now put m before it and say mach [Mach: German for ‘make’ or ‘do.’], I follow what awakens wonder in me as though it were coming nearer to me step by step—mmm—till at long last I am entirely within it. It is with this kind of meaning—meaning that issues from the sounds themselves—that the answers of the dead will often come. The dead do not speak English, nor do they speak German, nor Russian; their speech is such that only heart and soul can understand them,—if heart and soul are in the ears that hear. I said just now; the human heart is greater and more majestic than the Sun. Seen from the earthly aspect it is true, the heart is somewhere inside us, and will be no pretty sight if we excise it anatomically. Yet the real heart is there throughout the human being, permeating all the organs; so too it is in the ear,

We must get used to the heart-language of the dead, if I may so describe it. We get used to it in learning gradually to jettison all nouns and noun-like forms and live in verbs. It is the words of action and becoming which the dead still understand for a comparatively long time after death. Then, at a later stage, they understand a language that is no longer language in the ordinary sense, and what we then receive from them has first to be re-translated into an earthly language.

Thus as man grows out of his body and ever more into the spiritual world, his life of soul becomes altogether different. Then, as the time approaches for him to come down again to Earth, once more he has to change his life of soul. For now the moment draws ever nearer, whereat he is confronted with a mighty task. He will himself now have to put together—first in an astral and then in an etheric form—the whole future human being who will one day be standing physically here on Earth. The tasks which we fulfil on Earth are external. For while our hands are at work, something external to us is always being made or altered. In the life between death and re-birth it is the inner being of our soul that is at work, putting the body together. Truth is, it only seems as if man came into existence by hereditary forces. In reality, only the outermost aspect of the physical body he then wears is due to heredity. He has to make for himself even the forms of his organs. I will give an example,—if one of you will kindly lend a glove.

On his way down towards a new earthly life, man, to begin with, still has the Sun and the Moon within him. But they begin to contract. It is as though you were to feel the lobes of your lungs shrinking within you. So do you feel your cosmic life and being, your Sun- and Moon-organ, shrinking. And thereupon, something detaches itself from the Sun and from the Moon. Hitherto, you had Sun and Moon within you, but now you have before you a kind of image of Sun and Moon. All glistening and luminous, you have before you two immense spheres—immense they are, to begin with. One of them is the Sun in spiritual form, the other is the Moon. The one is all alight and sparkling, the other glimmering in its own warmth, more fiery-warm, holding the light as though more egoistically to itself.

Now the two spheres which thus detach themselves from cosmically transmuted man—even from ‘Adam Kadmon’ who is a reality to this day—draw ever nearer to one another. We, on our way to Earth, say to ourselves: Sun and Moon are becoming one. Moreover it is this that guides us—far away back you must imagine it to be, even from our great-great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother and so on—guides us at last to the mother who will give us birth. Sun and Moon are our guides—Sun and Moon, drawing ever nearer to each other.

And thereupon we see another task before us. Far in the distance like a single point we see the human embryo that is to be. We see the single entity that has become of Sun and Moon, drawing near our mother. And now we see a task before us, which I can describe as follows. Take this (the glove) to represent what goes before us there—the Sun-and-Moon united. We are aware that when our cosmic consciousness will have vanished and we shall go through a phase of darkness (for so we do when we dive down into the embryo after conception), then we shall have to turn inside-out this entity that goes before us. And as we do so a tiny aperture will arise, through which, as Ego, we shall have to go.

This, in its image, will then be there in our human body upon Earth. It is none other, my dear Friends, than the pupil of the human eye. For the one entity becomes two again, as though two mirror-images were to arise. These are the two human eyes: for they were once united—they were the united Sun-and-Moon, and thereupon they turned inside-out.

Such is the task which then confronts you. You do it all unconsciously. You turn the whole thing round and inside-out, and go in through the tiny aperture that remains. And then it cleaves asunder; two physical images become of it in the growing embryo. For the physical embryonal eyes are but images, representing what has thus become of Sun and Moon.

In this way we elaborate the several parts of the human body. Experiencing the entire Universe, we gather it and give to every item its destined form. What is thus formed in the Spirit, only then gets clothed and permeated with plastic material. It clothes itself in matter; as to the forces however, which have formed it, we ourselves had to develop them from the entire Universe,

For example, there is a time between death and new birth when we go through the Sun while the Sun is in the sign of Leo. (It need not be at birth; it can be farther back in time). We do not fashion then the eye of Sun and Moon which I described just now—we do that at a different time,—but we unite with the interior of the Sun. What do you imagine the interior of the Sun to be? If you could enter there, you would find it altogether different from what our physicists naively and unwittingly suppose. The interior of the Sun is no mere ball of gas; it is in fact something less than space—a realm where space itself has been taken away. If you begin by imagining an extended space in which some pressure is prevailing, you must conceive the interior of the Sun rather as a realm of suction. It is a negative space—space that is emptier than empty. Few people have an adequate idea of what this means. Now when you go through there, again you have a definite spiritual experience which you are able to elaborate and work upon, and as you do so it becomes the form of the human heart. Not only is the form of the eye made of Sun and Moon; the heart form too is fashioned from the Sun. But this is only possible when the Sun contains forces which issue from it as from the constellation of Leo.

So does man build his entire body both from the movements of the stars and from the constellations of the stars in the great Universe. The human body is indeed an image of the world of stars. Much of the work we have to do between death and new birth consists in the building of our own body from the Universe. Man as he stands on Earth is indeed a shrunken Universe. Science is so naive as to suppose that the human form is produced from the physical germ-cell alone. Suppose a man is looking at a magnet-needle, one end of which always points to the North and the other to the South. Perhaps another man to whom this is explained does not believe it, but begins looking for the cause inside the magnet-needle only, failing to see that the whole Earth is acting as a magnet. It is no less naive when someone thinks that man originates from the physical human germ-cell, whereas in fact he springs from the entire Universe. Moreover his life of soul and spirit between death and re-birth consists in working with the spiritual Beings—working at the super-sensible form of man, which is created first in the ethereal and astral realm and only then shrinks and contracts till it is able to be clothed in physical material. Man in reality is but the scene of action of what the Universe, and he himself with his transmuted powers, do thus achieve when the physical body in its true nature is being formed.

Such then is the development man undergoes. It begins with language when he no longer uses nouns but finds his way into another and more verbal form of speech. Thence he goes on to an inner beholding of the world of stars, until at last he lives right in the starry world Then he begins to detach from the world of stars what he himself is to become in his next incarnation. Such is man's pathway: out of the physical, via the transmutation of language into the spiritual, and then on the returning journey transmuting the Universe once again into Man. Only if we can understand how the soul-and-Spirit, having thus lost itself in language, becomes one with the world of stars and then recovers itself from the world of stars,—only then do we apprehend the complete cycle of human life between death and a new birth.

These things, dear Friends, were still clear to many people at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on Earth. At that time the idea did not prevail that Christ Jesus was, first and foremost, the Being whom they saw developing on Earth. They thought of Him as One who until then had belonged to the self-same world to which man himself belongs during the life between death and new birth. Therefore they pondered on the question: How did He descend from thence and enter into the life of Earth? It was the Roman world which then exterminated Initiation-Science. Only the dogmas should remain—such was their intention. There was in Italy in the 4th century of our era an actual organization, a specific body of people who left no stone unturned in seeing to it that the old methods of Initiation should not be transmuted into new ones. There should be left to men on Earth only the knowledge of the outer physical world, while of the super-sensible there should be no more than dogmas—dogmas which men would by and by receive as mere concepts into their intellectual life, till at long last they would no longer even have the power to conceive and understand, but only to believe them. So was the knowledge, which had in fact existed at one time, rent asunder into a knowledge of the earthly world alone, and on the other hand a mere faith, a mere belief in another world, till even this is so attenuated that for one group of believers it is a set of dogmas they do not understand, while for another it is no more than a point d'appui; there must be something to start from, to have any faith at all. For in effect, what is the substance of a modern man's belief, when he no longer holds to the ancient dogmas about the Trinity? He believes in something vaguely spiritual; the content of his belief is altogether nebulous.

We now need to return to a genuine perception of the Spiritual, into which we can enter livingly and fully. We need once more a Science of Initiation, able to relate such things as you have heard today of the human eye,—that we should look at it with wonder, for it is verily a shrunken Universe, This is no mere figure of speech; it is real and true, and as I have been explaining. For in the life between death and new birth this eye of ours was single, and from the unity it was—merging the images of Sun and Moon—it was then turned inside-out.

Truth is, we have two eyes because if it were our nature to see with a single eye like the Cyclops we could not attain to Egohood in an outward and visible world; we should attain it only in the inner world of feeling. Helen Keller for example has quite a different world of feeling and ideation than other people; she is only able to make herself understood because language has been taught her. We could never reach the idea of ‘I’ without being able to lay our right hand over our left, or, more generally speaking, to bring any two symmetrical members into coincidence. Thus in a subtle way we reach the idea of ‘I’ inasmuch as we cross the axes of vision of our two eyes when focusing upon the outer world. Just as we cross our hands, so do we cross the two axes of vision of our eyes: whenever we look at anything we do so.

Materially two, our eyes are one in spirit. This single spiritual eye is located behind the bridge of the nose. It is then reproduced in a twofold image—in the two outer eyes you see. By being left-and-right-hand man, man is enabled to feel and be aware of himself. If he were only right or only left—if he were not symmetrically formed—all his thinking and ideation would merge into the world; he would not become self-possessed in his own ‘I’.

In that we weld the twin images of Sun and Moon into one, we get ready for our coming incarnation. It is as though we were saying to ourselves: You must not disintegrate into the wide world. It is no use to become a Sun-man and have the Lunar man there beside you. You must be one; but you must also be able to feel your own oneness, you must be aware of it. So then you form the single Sun-Moon eye of man, which in its metamorphosis becomes the eye as we now bear it. For our two eyes are the twin images of the single archetypal Sun-Moon eye of man.

These are the things I wished to say to you today, my dear friends, about the kind of experience we have when we are in the spiritual world,—so very different from our experiences in the physical. They are related to one another none the less, but the relationship is such that we are turned completely inside out. Suppose that you could take the human being as you see him here and turn him inside out so that the inside of him—the heart for instance—would become outer surface. Physical man, you will readily believe, could not stay alive under these conditions. But if one could do this, taking hold of him in the inmost heart and turning him inside out like a glove, then man would not remain man as we see him here; he would enlarge into a Universe. For if we have the faculty to concentrate in a single point within the heart and thence to turn ourselves inside out in spirit, we simply do become the Universe which in the normal course we experience between death and a new birth. Such is the secret of the inner man. It is only in the physical world that he cannot be turned inside out. The heart of man however is in effect a Universe turned inside out, and that is how the physical and earthly world is really joined to the spiritual. We must get used to the ‘turning inside out.’ If we do not, we gain no real idea of how the physical world which surrounds us here is related to the spiritual world. These are the things which I was wanting to impart today.

What I presented here yesterday seems to be something very remote. Nevertheless, anyone who really wants to form ideas about what is spiritually and socially necessary in our time must also familiarize themselves with such ideas. Our thinking and feeling, our whole human nature must be imbued with feelings that arise from such ideas. I will briefly summarize what, so to speak, formed the main focus of yesterday's discussions. It is that which we already knew from other, more abstract points of view, namely that the human being has essentially a twofold organization; we could also say a threefold one, but today we want to consider the third, the middle link, less.

First there is the organization of the head, the nerve-sense organization, and then there is the organization of the rest of the human being. For the convenience-seeking thoughts of the present day, such a thing is difficult to grasp because people today want to know everything neatly, almost spatially, divided up. When one speaks of the head organization and the organization of the rest of the human being, people prefer to imagine: the head up to the neck and then the rest of the human being. Of course, this is not how things are meant. What is meant is that in a certain respect the whole person is the head, only that being the head, being the head, is most clearly expressed in the head. And the whole person is also a trunk and limbs person, only that being a trunk and limbs is most clearly expressed in the trunk and the limbs. The senses are, as it were, distributed throughout the whole human being; but inasmuch as they are distributed throughout the whole human being, we count them as belonging to the organization of the head, because those senses that are localized in the head are the most highly developed senses. |

From these indications you will understand how I actually mean the cited structure of the human being. But now we have seen that not only is there a necessity for this structure that comes from inner forces and processes in the human being, but that in fact the human being is integrated into the cosmos in a different way as a head-human being and in a different way as a trunk-and-limb-human being. Our head is, so to speak, the most advanced; but it actually belongs – and this is shown not only by occult knowledge but also by embryology when it is really considered rationally – our head organization does not belong to the earthly and solar sphere, but to the lunar sphere. The forces that are inwardly active in our head organization are lunar forces. And in the rest of our organization, the forces of the earth and sun are active.

The whole evolution of humanity on earth is connected with this essence of man. And now the time has come to see how to take a step forward, which depends on how we can set our human organization in motion. In human evolution on earth, what has taken place in the life of the human spirit and soul, let us say up to the Mystery of Golgotha, is of primary importance. That is the great turning-point in the whole of human evolution on earth. And if we exclude from all that has developed up to the Mystery of Golgotha the ancient Hebrew, the ancient Jewish evolution, we can say that what has developed up to that point bears a thoroughly unified character.

The ancient pagan culture, which, as I have described in my “Occult Science in Outline”, starts from the mysteries of antiquity in the most diverse ways, has a unifying character in a certain respect. What is this unifying character? This unifying character consists in the fact that there is an original wisdom of humanity, that an original revelation has actually taken place all over the earth. Why could this primal revelation take place? It could take place because in the early days of the development of the earth, the human head, if I may put it that way, had not yet progressed as far as it has in our time or as it had already done by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In the sense I explained to you yesterday, it was still alive. He was still imbued with the possibility of having dreams that were not connected with what is given only by earthly experience. He was able to evoke in himself what man had in ancient dream experiences, when consciousness was still more dimmed than it is in our time.

All this was used by the revealers of ancient times to guide humanity, so to speak, to the point of development at which it was to be at the dawn of the Mystery of Golgotha. What was revealed there and could be received by humanity through the organization just characterized to you, was such that, compared to what today's humanity knows, there was a comprehensive body of wisdom in primeval times that decreased more and more. We would not be satisfied with this body of wisdom today, because in many cases it was only the content of old atavistic clairvoyant dream images. Today we want to have correct, clear ideas, but we have not yet come very far in these clear, bright ideas.

An ancient wisdom had been poured out over mankind. From this wisdom much was said about the beings that rule nature, about the forces that rule nature, but very little about man himself. Man had not yet come to his earthly consciousness. He was still, as it were, entirely led by the hand of higher powers. He could become wise, but self-awareness had not yet dawned. The Apollonian saying: “Know thyself” is like a yearning placed in humanity, like something that was called out into the future by the leading minds of Greece. A wisdom was there that dealt with nature, but also with the nature of the cosmos. The ancient Hebrew revelation was placed into this life of humanity. If you consider the ancient Hebrew revelation, it has a certain peculiarity. It differs completely from the pagan wisdom revelations that spread around it. It disdained, so to speak, to contain the wisdom of nature and the universe. Basically, it contained only one thing about nature and the universe: God created it with man, and man has to serve God in the world. The whole ancient Hebrew revelation is geared towards the goal of showing man how he can serve his God Yahweh. What is appealed to in this ancient Hebrew revelation? — That which is not appealed to is found in the ancient pagan revelation: the organization of the head, which could still evoke memories of the ancient moon time. This could not be appealed to in the Hebrew revelation. It had to be appealed to in the rest of the human organization. But remember what I said yesterday: This remaining organization of the human being can understand and absorb precisely because it is solar, that which comes from the moon. What comes from the moon is that which, in the extreme, leads to illusions, to that which can reveal itself within the human being. But that is the content of the ancient Hebrew revelation. At first it is only about the human being. In this ancient Hebrew revelation, the human being is at the center.

But in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha, man had not yet been led to self-awareness, to self-knowledge. A path had to be sought that was actually a detour. And that was through Jewish nationality. Therefore, the Jewish religion is not primarily a religion of humanity. It does not address the individual human being, but the entire Hebrew nation. It is a national religion. It speaks of the human being, but only indirectly, through the people.

Two things were in existence when the Mystery of Golgotha intervened in the evolution of the Earth: the dying embers of ancient pagan wisdom and humanity's consciousness in the form of the consciousness of a people. Into this was placed the Mystery of Golgotha. It could only be grasped with what was already there. One must distinguish between the fact of the Mystery and the means of comprehending and feeling it. The heathen could only grasp it with the remnants of their world-wisdom. The Jews could only grasp it with what had been revealed. And so it was grasped at first. The remnant of the old wisdom showed itself in the Gnostic view of the event of Golgotha. That which was due to Jewish revelation became more and more the content of the Catholic understanding, the Roman Catholic understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And now, in order to grasp anything at all of the Mystery of Golgotha, the detour had to be made through these two world currents.

The following became evident, however. The old pagan wisdom, because it was a dying ember, because its origin lay far back, increasingly lost the ability to be grasped by people. People became far too lazy to pass on the gnosticized wisdom about the Mystery of Golgotha. Only the thinnest remnants of the old pagan world view remained. This is one current.

The Jewish proclamation was fresher and more intense. But it had no worldly wisdom. It spoke only of man and of commandments for man. It placed man at the center of the world view. It was passed on in the churches of the Occident. The last remnants of pagan wisdom, the origin of which was no longer recognized, remained as concepts for what is now scientific experience. With the last remnants of ancient pagan wisdom, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Copernicus grasped the new world experiences that were available. It is no wonder that this gradually became very unsatisfactory. All that had been achieved was the application of the last abstract remnants of ancient pagan wisdom to the knowledge gained through the new means of natural science. And there was no bridge from what was known about man from Jewish revelation to this wisdom. And so it went on, and so it continued to be lived in until our days. On the one hand, we have a science that works only with the very last remnants of the ancient pagan wisdom and that cannot of itself find a way to understand the human being. This lack of understanding culminated in the 19th century in the decision to dispense with any attempt to understand the human being as such and to comprehend only that which appears when one regards the human being as the final consequence of the animal series. The ideal of this science, working with the last remnants of paganism, was not to understand man, but to understand the highest animal and call that man.

That which followed from Jewish revelation gradually lost the possibility of saying anything about nature from what it had to say about man. Try to take on the theology as it has developed, and see if you can find anything in it that could give a satisfactory explanation for today's consciousness of even the simplest natural processes. Of course, moral considerations can be linked from this tradition to natural processes. But today's sense of time is not satisfied with the moral consideration that God allowed an earthquake to occur in Messina to punish people, and theology has gradually become incapable of bridging the gap between what the gods work and what occurs and breaks out in nature. In many respects it is therefore a mere phrase, while our natural science has material upon material before it in a grandiose way, which contains infinite secrets but does not know what to do with them because it lacks the concepts to connect the things with each other. It was out of this conflict that the whole of modern consciousness developed, that something like agnosticism developed, for example, for which it became the hallmark of an enlightened mind when he could say to himself: Man is incapable of knowing anything about the essence of things. He is simply not organized to know anything about the essence of things.

What is deeply present in people as a longing must fight against such a view. It fights in what man wants to know about the world, it fights in the external social order. And one must realize how to make progress because in certain things our ideas are still in the distant past. What did Jewish revelation bring forth? The most characteristic of what it has produced is national Jewish politics. This national Jewish politics, after it had exerted its influence on Romanism, has taken its path into the most recent times. And the most influential nations of the present day, what do they strive for in the political field? — To pursue national politics! But that is ancient Hebrew politics. In our public life we have not yet advanced as far as Christianity. We are still in the Old Testament. And it is the task of the present time to advance as far as Christianity in the sphere of public life. It will not advance unless it is supported on the other side by scientific progress in the field of Christianity. But for this it is necessary to really get to know man.

Take, for example, my “Occult Science”. There is much talk about cosmic evolution, about the evolution of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and so on, that people who are very clever today are either frightened or made to smile or annoyed. If you take a closer look at my “Geheimwissenschaft” (Occult Science), you will find that what is given there as knowledge of the world is at the same time knowledge of man. For man is actually everywhere in all knowledge of the world. What was developed by man in Saturn time and then further developed, how the other beings have joined, that is considered. You cannot separate knowledge of the world and knowledge of man.

But in the present day, this is a Christian demand from the point of view of the field of knowledge. It is also a Christian demand from the social point of view that we learn to disregard all other human contexts and to aim solely at the human being itself. From the point of view of the phrase, these things have been fantasized about for a long time, but from the point of view of reality, little has been done so far. From the standpoint of reality, the national connections in which the human being is largely and completely submerged today still exist as overwhelming forces in the political life of the world. What must take the place of these national connections is a relationship built on the perception of what the human being is, from person to person across the whole civilized earth. But to establish such a relationship requires a certain inner strength of spirit, a certain inner strength of the human soul. And if we ask ourselves: Has the human being actually become stronger in soul in the so-called blessed 19th century? — then, wherever we look, if we are sincere and honest, we find everywhere: in terms of the intensity of our concepts and ideals, the human being has not become stronger, but weaker. Those who know me will know how such a statement is meant.

I may insert a personal remark here. It is now decades since I was in Vienna in a conversation with a man who has since made a great name for himself as a historian. We were talking about the development of Germany. The man was of the abstract view, which he expressed at the time as follows: Well, this German development, it is there and it will continue in the way it is there. — I said: That is an abstraction, it is not something that is taken from reality. It seems to me something like someone saying: Here is a plant, it has already borne fruit, now new flowers will come, then again fruits, then again flowers, and it will continue to grow like this. When the plant has reached the stage of blossoming and fruit formation, one cannot say: it will continue as it is. Something new, a new plant, can indeed arise from the seed that came from the blossom; but one must not imagine that the old plant emerges again from the blossom in a new form and that it continues as it was. I said: That which is the substance, the essence of the German being, has reached its bloom and fruit in the time of Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Hegel. That is a high point. It cannot simply be continued. Since then we have been in decadence, since then we have been in a descending movement. I expressed these ideas at the time. As you can imagine, I received little understanding; for people had already entered the period when such ideas were too intense to be grasped by the human soul, and I had to think how it was quite different until the middle of the 19th century. For example, in the development of the Germans there was a man, Gervinus, who wrote a history of literature. One can have much against him; in the whole writing of this history of literature there is an enormous radicalism. It ends with the death of Goethe, and it denies the following generations the ability to continue to write in the old style, as if new blossoms were growing out of the leaves of the plant. At that time, people were still radical enough to say: with Goethe it is over; if you want to develop further, you have to look for new approaches! Gervinus could not give them, but he concluded the old, he made a line under it.

Of course, many beautiful things have been written in German since then, but they are epigonistic. They do not contain the essence that flows in Herder, Goethe, Schiller, not the philosophical essence, the Hegel-Schelling essence, the Fichte essence. The only thing is that Hamerling, in terms of his maturity, has introduced a new tone into his “Homunculus”, but it has become a satire.

Even then, the demands were already there to grasp something new, to develop a real sense for a new approach to the whole new civilization. This call for a new approach should resound throughout the world today. For it is only from this that any hope of salvation for the future development of humanity can be hoped for. Everything that does not connect with the feelings of the individual human being must be eradicated. You can see an outward sign of this in the way old ideas are being dragged out again today. In order to say something in the present, old ideas are being drawn upon. In one of the present leading spirits of Central Europe, one finds an outlook that is truly spoken out of this decadent sense of time, and which shows what humanity cannot hold on to today. This man asks: How do we come to a moral life again? He sees

In the last five years, the decrepitude of the old morality has become apparent, and lies have triumphed among all nations. The old Hebrew policy of Yahweh has gripped all nations to such an extent that one might think that there was a Judaism in Palestine at that time, and now all nations would like to pursue a policy for themselves that is similar to the one the Jews pursued in Palestine. They would all like to become like that, they would all like to pursue world politics to the exclusion of the achievements of Christianity. The content is missing. Therefore, one resorts to things that actually have no content. Instead of looking for new sources of morality from spiritual, new, fruitful views, one asks: Where are the sources of a new morality? - and gives the following answer: Power is an indispensable means to create good. Therefore, if you do not already possess it, you should strive for the power that is necessary to achieve the good in each case. - You want to have a good thing in the world and are given the good advice: seek the power to achieve the good. - The second reason for the new ethic is: with the power you have, you can create the good. Therefore, one should use power everywhere to achieve the good.

But first you have to have the good, you have to recognize the good first! To speak in this way is the opposite of what must spread through the spiritual science meant here in modern human civilization. Because it is not about basing something on power. You can only found something on power if you combine groups of people. If one person is to face another, you cannot found anything on power, but only on that which develops in the person so that he has value. Man must work to develop a value by which he accomplishes things for man, and at the same time he must develop a receptivity to recognize such human value.

That is the only possible basis for any morality of the future: developing human value and the ability to recognize human value. To put it in other words, this means: All morality must be built on real trust! — Because one did not want to penetrate to such views, one could not understand the moral demands contained in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. There is a reasoned justification for a so-called individualistic morality, and it is built on the idea that if what can be developed is developed in each individual human being, there is no need for legislation, but rather one can wait and see what people will do in their mutual dealings. And I had to say to many people at the time: Just look, when we walk down the street, one person going this way and the other that, do we need legislation to make us step aside for each other? That one goes to the left and the other to the right is done out of the demands of existence, which one reasonably recognizes. — Thus one acts morally when all the things that lie within the human being are truly developed. Without this there is no morality of the future.

But this is the only morality that will really be built upon a newly grasped Christianity. It must be built upon this: Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me. The Christ has come into the human race so that every single human being may recognize the value of his fellow man. And when people treat each other in the world in this way, the foundation for a new morality is laid. But only from our present point of view is the Mystery of Golgotha newly understood. This Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. It must be understood by each world-age in a new form. Not the teachings that are there are the decisive ones; they must change from age to age. The decisive thing is that the Mystery of Golgotha has happened once. For the creeds of the present day, it is becoming more and more apparent that they are becoming increasingly indifferent to the Mystery of Golgotha. They do not attach any importance to it being understood in terms of contemporary consciousness; they only attach importance to their teachings being propagated. But these teachings will be incapable of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha. And so today we already have a branch of theology that no longer speaks of the Christ at all, but only of the man Jesus of Nazareth, the “simple man” who walked in Palestine, a kind of Socrates. And then one cannot understand why those who speak of this Christ speak of him as the center of human development. Such are the serious issues facing the present age. And it is precisely this seriousness that must be recognized. But it will be necessary to work in harmony on the one hand with the scientific field and on the other with the social field. After all, things do converge. I believe that today the orthodox university graduate will be surprised if, for example, he is asked to accept that botany must become “Christian”. But it must become Christian, that is to say, the spirit that has seized humanity through the mind must also work its way into botany. And a few socialist-minded people, but only a few, only individual parts of this socialist-minded mass, talk about the fact that Christian sentiment - one then speaks of original Christian sentiment - must take hold in the mutual behavior of people. Nevertheless, no special value is placed on permeating social ideas with the Christian principle.

There is, of course, also a third variant; but the point is that we learn, on the one hand, to find the Christ in the world and, on the other hand, to ignite within us the ability to understand this Christ. What must work together in the great as well as in the particular in social life is the development of a certain human value and the development of the ability to recognize this human value trustingly and to act accordingly in the relationship between people!

In the 19th century, when people had the least understanding of how a new spirit was needed to grasp anew the mystery of Golgotha, they spoke of practical Christianity because they had become as impractical as possible with regard to Christianity. Now that the events of the past few years in the development of humanity have passed by, it would certainly be necessary for as many people as possible to realize how a new spiritual revelation actually wants to enter into human development and how it must be grasped by people. As long as we continue to pledge our entire spiritual life to external powers, to state powers or whatever else the world has, there will be no possibility for this spiritual life to really take in the spiritual revelation that wants to enter humanity. For this it is necessary that spiritual life really be put on its own feet, as is demanded in our threefold social order, that it develop out of its own impulses. Out of these own impulses, science will be imbued with spiritual methods, and the spiritual methods developed for science will ignite the power to morally permeate social life with what is spiritual. We must learn to actualize and actualize spiritual things in our social work and in the social life of people. But to do that, we must go beyond what we have to call empty words today. We live a spiritual life in empty words, in phrases. Today you can experience someone saying beautiful things that you may like in terms of content; if you get closer to them, you will find their soul empty of spiritual content. Why? Because nowadays you can pick up empty phrases anywhere. You don't need to be connected to the buzz of empty words in human life. There is no other way to find the connection with the spirit again than to first seek the guide, so that the human soul can truly reach the spirit on its own, but this guide cannot be found in any other way than by seeking him with the conviction that man can become what can become in the world today only by not remaining with what is present in him in the way of inheritance, of blood forces, but by developing something in himself that goes beyond what is merely inherited, beyond what is merely taken from the outer world. Today we are born into a world with certain predispositions; these predispositions are developed in school, but in such a way that only the traditions that have been handed down are used as a stimulus for this development. We must come to know that there is a hidden germ in every human being that is not there through mere inheritance, nor through what is included in education today as a stimulus. We must have the faith that there is something in every human being today that can only be awakened through spiritual forces and through the conviction of the existence of spiritual forces within him. From what is being educated and lived by today, only the consciousness of Yahweh can be experienced. Christ consciousness can only be awakened when one has faith not only in the development of the human being, but in the transformation of the human being, when one has faith that something will come of the human being that is not inherent in him simply because he has inherited a body from his ancestors, but that is seated within him because he has gone through earlier earthly lives in earlier human world cycles. At that time, however, the principle of inheritance predominated and shone forth in the human being, which came over from repeated previous earthly lives. Now the inherited qualities have become weak, and those characteristics in man become ever stronger, which come over from the earlier incarnations not with the blood, but with the soul.

This can be taken over into consciousness. And when it lives in the consciousness of one person, that person encounters another with quite different feelings than people usually have today.

Thus, although it is a very extensive subject and I may have stumbled over my words, I have tried to explain something of what must enter into our human development as an elementary necessity. When this demand arises in life, it still encounters the most serious prejudices in life today. It is fought against. And I have had to tell you about some of the fighting against what is being striven for with the anthroposophically oriented world view that is meant here, in recent times. I would like to mention just two more things in this direction today. Recently I read to you the letter of our friend Dr. Stein, which refreshingly showed how we had to confront a churchman whose helper, when he was shown Bible passages that sounded somewhat anthroposophical, even ventured the confession: “Then Christ is wrong - in his opinion!” So it is not he, the churchman, who is wrong, but Christ! When I came to Stuttgart, I was informed that all kinds of judgments had been registered from our circles about how it was so harsh to confront an old gentleman, who had even read my writings, in such a way. One must show consideration for, first of all, secondly, thirdly... Unfortunately, this is still widespread in our ranks, that precisely when it comes to taking a serious stand on any point, those people who would most like to keep our movement in a sectarian light will stab us in the back. That is one thing I must mention.

The other thing is that I have to familiarize you with the accusation that has now been made in the German press, the murky sources of which – and I am explicitly mentioning this here – I know very well, and where it is fairly unimportant what because the people who spread such things are not concerned with awakening belief in the things they spread, but only with fabricating something that can disparage an inconvenient personality or current trend. So, despite the not very enlightened hall, I will read these “unenlightened” remarks, which are now circulating in part of the press:

"The theosophist Steiner as a stooge of the Entente. - The “Mannheimer Generalanzeiger” reports from Berlin: Theosoph Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who influences a following of several million men and women” - - I expressly note: this sentence, which will be extraordinarily evidential for anyone who somehow looks into the affairs of the present, and in the time to come, when such attacks will intensify considerably, one will see why such attacks said, among other false things, “founded the League for the Threefold Social Organism in Stuttgart in the spring of 1919, which was originally supposed to be only a religious-communist community, but then came into political contact with the Bolsheviks and communists and is now engaged in a strange and repulsive political agitation. The learns the following from Dresden: “From reliable information, it is unequivocally clear,” - I ask you to take note of the tone — “that the League for Tripartite Division is determining the names of all officers allegedly active in a reactionary sense and collecting evidence against them of acts contrary to international law based on witness statements, which is then to be sent to the Entente for the purpose of extradition. Mr. Steiner and his comrades are completely unconcerned about the veracity of such accusations, and the fact that they do not even shrink from deliberately false statements is proven by the passage of a letter in which it says: “Accusations of theft are to be refrained from, since untruthfulness is easier to prove here. Likewise, one should not make accusations that are too incredible, such as the mutilation of children.”

Now, the fact that every sentence, every word – forgive me for using the expression in this context – is a “first-told” lie, that is quite obvious. But these things are fabricated in the present. They prove that what comes from the school of thought represented here is taken seriously enough to consider these malicious means necessary at all. You can be sure: small sectarian movements, that is, those that are supposed to be small in number, are not bombarded with such things. One would only wish – and I also expressed this in the article sent the day before yesterday for our next but one “Dreigliederungs” issue – that the number of naive people would become smaller and smaller, who still believe that by refuting such things, they are helping the people who are working today out of the murky sources that are at issue here. They are not interested in refutations; for they are not concerned with even touching the truth, but they fight with every means against all that is to move in as a new spirit in humanity. They follow the forces by which they are possessed.

I had to give you this example for the reason that a sense of the seriousness that should actually prevail among all those who find themselves somehow seriously inclined towards what is stated here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should be evoked little by little. One would really like to find words that our current worn-out language hardly has to awaken this seriousness in souls. But the souls are often paralyzed. Nothing that is necessary will penetrate them, if time is not to lead into complete decadence. You cannot continue to manage in the old way. Nor should we call 'ideals' what we take from the old currents. We should become more and more aware that a complete new beginning in human development is necessary.

In today's lecture I would first like to speak about what we can know within occult research about the Christ Being, and then link an examination of the progress we have made in our knowledge of the Christ since the Mystery of Golgotha.

Within our spiritual movement, the great significance of the Mystery of Golgotha for the entire evolution of the earth has been repeatedly pointed out. By pursuing this significance within occult research, we were able to arrive at three preliminary stages of the Mystery of Golgotha, which took place within and in connection with the evolution of the earth. Three preliminary stages precede the Mystery of Golgotha, preparing it, but they do not take place on the physical plane; they take place in the higher worlds.

The first of these events occurred during the Lemurian evolution of the Earth. The second and third events occurred during the Atlantean evolution of the Earth. The fourth event is the Mystery of Golgotha, which took place on the physical plane during the post-Atlantean period, at the beginning of our era.

In the Lemurian period, the same Being that we know as the Christ Being unites with another Being from the higher worlds, a Being from the higher worlds that did not embody itself on the physical plane but belonged to the world of the higher hierarchies. And just as we speak of the mystery of Golgotha as the Christ entering into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, so we can speak of the Christ entering into an archangelic being of the higher worlds in the ancient Lemurian times. One could speak of the fact that a similar event, translated into the spiritual, took place during the Lemurian evolution, as later took place on the physical plane the baptism of John in the Jordan. Thus, in those ancient times, we meet the Christ-being in the soul body of an archangel. And through this sacrifice of the Christ-Being, through entering into the soul body of an archangel, a very definite effect is radiated from the spiritual worlds into the evolution on earth.

In order to understand the significance of this event, we must speak of a danger that threatened the entire human evolution in the Lemurian period through the forces of Lucifer. If humanity had not averted this danger, all that we call the human being's sensory perception would have been disrupted. Under the influence of Lucifer, the sensory powers would not have been able to develop as they have done, but would have become much more sensitive, much more capable of arousal in relation to the outside world. For example, we would have had to go through the world like this: If we had seen a blue color, it would have been as if it had been sucked into our eyes and we would have felt something like a sucking power, and if we had seen a red color, we would have felt something like a stinging in the eyes. We only have to imagine what we humans would have become if we had been thrown back and forth at every turn in life by the sensory perceptions in nothing but arousing impressions. This danger was averted by the fact that the Christ, I must now say, did not embody himself, but rather ensouled himself in an archangelic being, and the powers that radiated from the spiritual worlds as a result poured into the evolution of mankind, and the powers of the senses were harmonized so that the danger just discussed was averted from people and they received the necessary balance. Today, when we consider the moderation of our sensory perceptions, we can look back to the ancient Lemurian time and say: It was then that the Christ sacrificed Himself, ensouled Himself in an archangelic being, and took from us the danger of hypersensitivity of our sensory system.

The second danger threatened human evolution, and that now through Ahriman and Lucifer together, in the first period of Atlantean evolution. During this time, an abnormal development threatened the life forces. The life forces should have developed in such a way that, for example, when man felt hunger and had food before him, he would have pounced on the food with animal greed. And on the other hand, for example, if he had had any food before him that was not beneficial to him, he would have felt terrible disgust and fled from the food. At that time man was threatened by the hyper-sensitivity of the life forces. The Christ once more embodied Himself in an archangel-like being of the higher hierarchies, and through this sacrifice of the Christ the danger just described was averted from humanity, and the life forces were so harmonized that we can now use them in moderation and balance.

The third danger threatened human development towards the end of the Atlantean period. Through the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman, the three soul powers, thinking, feeling and willing, were to become disorderly, so that they would have worked in a disorderly, chaotic manner if this danger had not been averted.

If we want to understand how this matter actually stands, we must realize that the earth is not only what geologists think, a mineral body, but that the earth is a whole organism. What rises from the earth's surface, what rises from the earth's surface as misty vapors, is not only physical haze, but also the embodiment of passions that can unite with the passions and drives of human beings and that are permeated by Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. In the human soul, they would have caused chaotic thinking, feeling and willing during the period of time indicated. And if this danger had not been averted, the whole human race would have had to fall into a kind of delirium as a result of the chaotic thinking, feeling and willing. The human race would have developed into a madness that would have become the normal state of the earth. Then the Christ-Being ensouled itself for the third time in an archangel-like Being and averted this danger through the radiations that could be exerted through this newly-characterized sacrifice on the development of mankind. The effect of this third ensoulment of the Christ-Being is the harmonization of thinking, feeling and willing in the nature of the human soul.

The Greeks, who sensed something like an afterimage of the events during the Atlantean period in their mythology, also expressed this supersensible fact in their mythology. And the image, the afterimage under which the Greeks imagined the third inspiration of Christ in an archangel-like being, is Apollo, the sun god. Apollo, as protector of the oracles of Pythia, appears as the entity that harmonizes the dragon that rises from the earth in the form of vapors. If Apollo did not harmonize this vapor, it would flow into the passion of Pythia, and thinking, feeling and willing would be expressed as madness. Through the impregnation with the powers of Apollo, what the Pythia has to say sometimes becomes the wisest advice given to the Greeks.

If one could have asked an initiate of the ancient mysteries for his true opinion of who Apollo is, he would most certainly have given the answer: He is the forerunner of the Christ Jesus, who has only not yet descended to the physical plane.

Humanity has preserved a wonderful image of this third Christ event in the picture of St. George slaying the dragon, or Archangel Michael slaying the dragon. It is wonderful to be able to pay attention to how, in fact, this image of St. George slaying the dragon is an echo of the third supersensible Christ event.

And the fourth event occurred in the post-Atlantean period, when humanity was again exposed to the danger of becoming disorderly in the course of development with the soul forces. Now the human ego itself was to become disorderly.

The first danger was that the sense powers would have come into disorder. The second danger was that the life forces would have come into disorder. The third danger was that the soul forces, thinking, feeling and willing, would have come into disorder. The fourth danger was that the powers of the I would have come into disorder.

The same Being, the Christ Being, which had previously divided Itself three times, now embodied Itself in the Mystery of Golgotha in Jesus of Nazareth, in order to avert this fourth danger from humanity through Its radiance into the earth aura.

One can truly see in the development of humanity over the centuries that preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, and the centuries that followed, how the danger existed that would bring disorder to the I and its power. We see how, with the blossoming of the power of the I, which we can observe in Greek philosophy in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, beginning with Thales and Heraclitus, we see how, alongside the blossoming of the power of the I through Greek philosophy, something else is taking place. As the powers of human thought are blossoming in Thales, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, we see, from about the same time, the powers of the so-called Sibyls spreading throughout the whole of the then civilized part of the earth, showing themselves here and there. These Sibyls, which appear alongside the emergence of philosophy, represent how chaos is to penetrate into the forces of the I. We see how, on the one hand, what such Sibyls proclaim can give rise to truth, to good prophecy, and, on the other hand, misunderstandings, deceptive, disorderly ego-forces that speak out of the Sibyls. How the chaotic-earthly speaks out of the Sibyls was wonderfully portrayed by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, out of tradition. It can be seen in the gestures of the individual Sibyls how the disorder of the ego-forces worked through them, expressing itself in the most diverse ways.

And Michelangelo has placed, as a polar opposite to the Sibyls, those who have tried to seek the I, to find the I in human nature and to make it fruitful for the historical development of humanity: they are the prophets. What appears to us in Michelangelo's Sibyls and Prophets represents the two poles: On the one hand, the tendency of the ego to fall into disorder, on the other hand, the Jewish prophetic search to bring the ego forces into order. Human nature was seething around the actual awareness of the ego, which was to occur at that time. If the danger had not been averted, dark prophetic and Sibylline forces would today be chaotically mixed up in our ego. A real clarity of the ego could not have existed in the development of the following centuries. Then the incarnation of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth fell into this ferment and brought about the harmonization of human nature for the fourth time. This could only happen because the Christ-being embodied itself in a human being who, in the highest sense, had brought all the abilities that came to man at that time to development within himself.

Just as today's occult research enables us to throw light on the four stages of the Mystery of Golgotha, it also enables us to spread light on the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ-being, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the last stage, has embodied itself. On earlier occasions I was able to point out that two Jesus children were born at the beginning of our era. I was able to show that in the twelfth year of the one Jesus child, who descended from the Nathanic line of the House of David, the soul of the other Jesus child, who descended from the Solomonic line, entered, so that the two Jesus children became one being. If we ask ourselves who this twelve-year-old Jesus of Nazareth was, occult research answers today: It is the soul of Zarathustra in a very special human being, who descended from the Nathanic line of the House of David. And if we now turn our spiritual gaze to the being of Zarathustra in the Nathanic Jesus, we see how this Jesus of Nazareth developed until his thirtieth year.

We can distinguish three epochs in the development of this Jesus of Nazareth. The first from the age of twelve to eighteen. The second from the age of eighteen to twenty-four. The third from about the age of twenty-four to thirty. The young Jesus of Nazareth lived in the house of his real father and the mother of the Solomon-like boy Jesus. The other two had died in the meantime. The young Jesus of Nazareth was introduced to his father's trade, a kind of carpentry or joinery. But strangely enough, he developed with infinite perfection of spiritual life in his soul. We must note that basically no one in his family understood the deeply significant development of the young Jesus of Nazareth. He was alone with it even as a boy from twelve to eighteen years old; completely alone with it. What made this inner development, which took place in the solitude of the soul, so remarkable was that Jesus of Nazareth was able to draw from the depths of his soul all the great revelations that had come to the Jewish people over time. In the time when Jesus of Nazareth lived, the Israelite people hardly had anything else but written traditions of what the ancient prophets had once received in direct revelations from the spiritual worlds. They knew from the scriptures what the ancients had received in revelation, but they no longer had the opportunity to reach up to the revelation itself, which had once come to the ancient prophets through that voice called the great Bath-Kol. In a retrogressive development, Jesus of Nazareth went through everything again that the Jewish people had gone through, and he worked his way up to the point where his soul sensed: “The great Bath-Kol speaks to me again. Directly from the spiritual world I hear the voice once received by the prophets. And as is the case with such inner development, so it was also with Jesus of Nazareth: this inner development was connected with the deepest mental pain and suffering. The highest realizations are not attained without pain and suffering. In particular, there was one that settled like a terrible pain in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth, who was about seventeen to eighteen years old, when he said to himself: “Once the great Bath-Kol spoke the most wonderful revelations to the Jewish people. Today the Jewish people are here, but if the great Bath-Kol were to speak to them today, there would be no one to hear her. They understand the scriptures, but they no longer understand the living scripture. He was lonely within himself; an immense sadness came over his soul, over what had become of his people in the downward development of humanity. Then the time came when Jesus of Nazareth was to be sent out into the world. He wandered around, practicing his trade here and there, in the most diverse areas, both in Palestine and outside of Palestine, in pagan areas. These wanderings were particularly remarkable in their impression on the people Jesus of Nazareth came to. What the pain in his soul had done had been transformed into something like love, which one felt radiating from him directly in his presence. When he sat with the people he visited in the evening after he had finished his work, they felt an atmosphere of love surrounding them with his words, but also through his mere presence. The love-imbued words he spoke to them made the deepest impression on the people, and when he had gone away to work elsewhere, something like the most vivid memory of him remained with the people he had left. It often happened that Jesus of Nazareth had been gone for three or four weeks when the people he had left three to four weeks earlier had a shared vision that he entered their house again and spoke to them – the vision spoke to them. So deep was the impression that, in essence, he had remained with them, this Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, what Jesus of Nazareth was, found expression in hundreds and hundreds of souls as he wandered around in his eighteenth to twenty-fourth year.

During these wanderings, Jesus of Nazareth also came to gentile areas. One day he came to a gentile place where the population was neglected. The place was abandoned by its priests. In this place was a place of sacrifice, but it was deserted. The priests had fled because an evil disease had broken out among the people of the place. Such places of sacrifice and the cultic practices at these places of sacrifice were derived from the mysteries. What had been revealed in the mysteries passed into the ceremonial acts at these places of sacrifice. To understand such a thing, one must be a little aware of the significance of ceremonial sacrifice. Through the way the sacrificial rites are performed and the prayers that permeate them, spiritual forces do indeed flow down onto the altars, so to speak. But Jesus of Nazareth, when he came to the place of worship in the place I have mentioned, no longer found the good powers that had once flowed down on the altars during the ancient sacrifices. He found the places of worship, abandoned by their priests, populated by demonic forces that were around the altar. Even the neglected, sickly, and downtrodden people of this pagan place were deeply impressed when they saw Jesus of Nazareth, whom they did not know, but who radiated an atmosphere of love. At first they thought that one of their old priests, who had abandoned them, had returned and wanted to offer them their pagan sacrifices. Of course, Jesus of Nazareth did not want to offer the pagan sacrifice, but he went among the people. There he was seized by the power of the demons that were around the altar, and he fell as if dead. When the people saw this, they fled, and in his stupor, Jesus of Nazareth still saw the people being pursued by the demonic forces. Then he lost his usual consciousness and was transported into spiritual worlds. And now he could perceive what had once been revealed to the ancient mystery priests in purity and truth; he could perceive the ancient pagan revelations, just as he had perceived the Jewish revelations in the voice of the great Bath-Kol. And now he could hear the ancient pagan revelation, which can be repeated in today's language in the following way:

Amen
Evil reigns
Witnesses of dissolving unity
Of self-guilt incurred by others
Experienced in daily bread
in which heaven's will does not prevail
because man has separated himself from your kingdom
and forgotten your name
you fathers in the heavens.

And Jesus of Nazareth knew in his altered state of consciousness that this revelation had passed through the ancient sacred teachings of the mysteries. He awakened and had retained the memory of that which had once been the ancient sacred teachings of the pagan religions. He then turned what he had received in this revelation around for the further progress of humanity, and the “Our Father” came from it.

What is learned about the higher worlds is not learned merely through teaching, but rather through facts that are experienced in the higher worlds. But the full significance of such a revelation is then experienced in an infinitely deeper way than one can ever experience something through teachings or theories. A new great sorrow settled in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. He had before him in a particularly clear case the whole misery that pagan revelations had become, and could now contrast it with what they had once been. Just as he could say in the midst of the Jewish people: And even if the voice of the great Bath-Kol were to resound today, there are no longer any people here who could understand it ; one is alone with it, – so he could now say in relation to the pagan people: And even if the voices of the old pagan mysteries were to resound again everywhere, there would no longer be any people here who could understand them.

Thus, Jesus of Nazareth was to learn of the declining development of humanity in the deepest pain.

The story just told took place around the twenty-fourth year of Jesus of Nazareth. Shortly after that happened, he returned home. It was around the time his father died in Nazareth.

During the time between his twenty-fourth and thirtieth year, now that he was back home in Nazareth, he came into contact with the Essenes, who had one or two colonies in the area. He did not actually become an Essene, but because of the depth of his inner life and the two great sorrows that had settled in his soul and been transformed into love, the Essenes accepted him and often talked to him about their deepest secrets, which they had otherwise only spoken about among their own kind, among initiates. Only to him did they speak of their deepest secrets. And in the Essenes he came to know people who, in those days, through a special inner development, sought to ascend again to that from which humanity had developed downward. He eagerly absorbed what he could learn from the Essenes about the human development of such an ascent. But one day, as he left the Essene house and passed through the gate, he had a particularly remarkable vision: on either side of the gate he saw two figures whom he later, through his later experiences, knew to be Lucifer and Ahriman. They fled from the gates of the Essenes into the rest of the world. And through what he had gone through in his own inner development, he was now so far that he could, so to speak, read in the occult writing the meaning of this flight of Lucifer and Ahriman from the gates of the Essenes. He now knew: Yes, it is also possible in this present time for individual

people, through a special development of soul, can ascend to spiritual heights, but only at the expense of other people. For only a few chosen ones could undergo the Essene development, and they could only do so because others remained at lower levels. He knew that the Essenes, through their mystical development, freed themselves from the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman, but that Lucifer and Ahriman, because they had to flee from the Essenes, fled precisely to the other people and seized the rest of humanity all the more. And from this occult experience came the third great pain for him, in that he could say to himself: Yes, it is possible for a few specially chosen people to ascend to what was formerly revealed to people, but they can only ascend at the expense of the other people. That almost broke his heart, for he was full of love for all people. And now, as a result of the third great sorrow, he could say to himself: Just as individuals in our time ascend to higher spiritual knowledge, it must be withheld from the rest of humanity. No matter how high a soul may rise, or what it may know, to experience this with the Essenes, the other people in the wide world are far too miserable for that.

When Jesus of Nazareth experienced such things, he was able to see how his stepmother or foster mother increasingly gained more and more understanding for his inner life. This was especially the case since the death of his father. And while in earlier years Jesus of Nazareth was quite alone and lonely in the family, during this time many a conversation developed with his mother in which Jesus of Nazareth was able to speak of what he experienced in his lonely soul. And there came a great and decisive conversation between Jesus of Nazareth and the mother in the thirtieth year of his life. All the insights that had been deposited in his soul since the age of twelve – through hearing the voice of the great Bath-Kol, through the cosmic Lord's Prayer, through the experience with the Essenes – all this he spoke to his mother one day. And he spoke to his mother in such a way that this conversation is deeply moving, even if it is deciphered afterwards from the Akasha Chronicle by occult research. The words went over to his mother not just as words, but as living forces that carried the essence of the soul of Jesus of Nazareth into the essence of his mother's soul as if on wings. So deeply connected was Jesus of Nazareth with what he had to clothe in his words that his suffering and his insights passed into the words and flowed over into the heart and soul of his mother. And it was as if the mother had been imbued with a new life; she lived anew, rejuvenated.

But Jesus of Nazareth entered into a completely different state of mind. With his words, he had poured out what was so intimately connected with them, his own ego. Zarathustra's ego had left the three bodies, the physical, etheric and astral bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, and the cosmic forces were working in the three bodies. Without ego consciousness, as in a higher dream life, Jesus of Nazareth was driven onto the path to John the Baptist: Jesus of Nazareth, who had breathed out his Zarathustra ego in conversation with his mother.

Thus prepared, after having surrendered his Zarathustra ego, he received the Christ essence as his new ego. The Mystery of Golgotha, the fourth stage of the Christ events we have been speaking of, was thus prepared. It took place during the three years that the Christ lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, up to the Mystery of Golgotha. And it was only at the event, the memory of which we celebrate in the event of Pentecost, that the disciples, as if from a different state of consciousness, came to realize what had happened to Christ Jesus.

When we survey what has now been revealed about the Christ-Being as a result of occult research in the present day, can we say that our hearts and minds would be less shaken by these revelations for our time than by those revelations that became known to an earlier time

about Jesus and Christ? The occult science of our day really does enable us to know more and deeper about the Christ Jesus than past centuries have known. And we may say that the figure of the Christ grows to cosmic greatness as we try to recognize it with the means that modern occultism puts at our disposal.

Let us look back at what was given to an earlier humanity about the Christ Jesus, for example in the four Gospels. From the occult point of view, we are clear that those who wrote the Gospels wrote them according to the inspirations of ancient mysteries, from an atavistic clairvoyance. I have pointed this out in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”. The first person to have an impression of the cosmic significance of the Christ was Paul; Paul, who was able to perceive how the power of the Christ-Being had flowed into the earth aura. What had emerged for Paul at a certain point in his knowledge of the Christ can, if we deepen our knowledge of occultism today, emerge for people in further fields of knowledge of the Christ. For by extending Paul's vision from the Mystery of Golgotha to its three preliminary stages, by extending it from what for Paul is almost exclusively the perception of Jesus of Nazareth to the life of Christ Jesus, then, in a sense, Paul's method is spread from a single center over the whole great phenomenon of the Christ Jesus life. In that today, through dedicated occult research, we are able to generalize the Pauline method for the realization of the Christ, real progress in the realization of the Christ has been made.

I did not want to speak in the abstract about the development of progress in the knowledge of Christ, but rather to illustrate concretely what knowledge of Christ can be gained in the present day through occult science. Thus, it may have become apparent to us from our reflection today that spiritual science, as we understand it, can be an instrument for an ever deeper knowledge of Christ. It is to be hoped that, even if humanity has come so far in the rejection of the old religious conceptions about the Christ through materialistic influences, the newer spiritual science will give the Christ to humanity again. For this spiritual science does not speak about the Christ out of theory, but in remembrance of the Christ-Word itself: “I am with you until the end of the days on earth!” For the Christ has been poured into the aura of the earth, in which we ourselves are embedded. He lives in it! And we can associate with him as a spiritual being in the aura of the earth if we acquire the ability to do so as the disciples once lived with Christ Jesus on the physical plane. We must only get used to really seeing through the living presence of Christ in the earth aura and not just identifying Christianity with a mere teaching, a mere doctrine. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ has been there, is around us. We can find him in the same world in which we are, in which he is, only not in a physical form, but as a spiritual being.

And we can follow how He is active as a Being, independently of what human beings have been able to think about Him. Have we not experienced that in councils and other places of dispute, opinions and teachings about the Christ have gone back and forth, that people have not been able to come to terms with their thoughts about the Christ? How many opinions have been expressed about the Christ! But if the further development of the Christ impulse had depended on the opinions of men about it, then this further development of the Christ impulse would truly be in a sorry state. This Christ impulse is a living reality in the evolution of the earth, and it works in it as a reality, quite apart from what men have thought about it.

To visualize this, let us consider the date October 28, 312. At that time, Constantine, son of Constantius Chlorus, stood at the gates of Rome, which was ruled by Maxentius. Constantine, with his relatively smaller army, approached Rome, where Maxentius commanded a significantly larger army. Maxentius was safe within the walls of Rome. Constantine approached in an open field. The battle that was fought then decided the map of Europe. Those who study history in its depths will always have to admit: it was not the ideas of the generals, not the rational arguments of men that decided what happened in the battle, but something quite different! Maxentius consulted the Sibylline books and received the answer: If you attack Constantine outside the gates of Rome, you will destroy the greatest enemy of Rome. — A true oracle! And in the night before the battle, Maxentius had a dream that urged him to leave the safety of the walls of Rome and go out to meet Constantine. But Constantine, with his much smaller army, had a dream that night that instructed him to let his army carry the symbol of Christ and to win in this sign. No rational arguments, no strategic reasons, no knowledge of warfare had played a role at that time, because it came down to the decision, but subconscious forces faced each other in Maxentius and Constantine. One may think of the value or worthlessness of Constantine as one wants, in the victory, which Constantine achieved at that time, the impulse of Christ lived as a real, actual force, which worked through the subconscious of humans since the Mystery of Golgotha, completely apart from what humans thought about the Christ.

This is only one of the events, of which many could be cited, that testify to how the Christ impulse first entered into the subconscious soul forces, which would otherwise have passed over into the Sibylline, and worked its way up. And while the superconscious soul forces increasingly tended to no longer understand the Christ impulse through the materialistic current, the Christ continues to work in the subconscious soul forces of people, just as He worked in Constantine and Maxentius.

Today, however, we are faced with the necessity of bringing up what has been working in the subconscious soul forces and consciously presenting it to the soul. We must consciously recognize the Being that has been working in the aura of the Earth, in the souls of human beings, since the Mystery of Golgotha, and that has determined the fate of the evolution of the Earth and of humanity from this aura of the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha.

When we bear this in mind, we understand the progress that human knowledge has made in relation to Christ, and we understand our own task in relation to the progress in the knowledge of Christ.

Today I would like to present you with something specific from the whole sequence of ideas on which the considerations presented here are based, in order to expand on it tomorrow from a more general point of view. You have gathered from the reflections that we have been cultivating here for some time that, in order to revive the declining culture of the West, it is necessary to develop a true knowledge of the human being based on spiritual science. This knowledge of the human being has been prevented for a long time. In the form in which it is needed for the future development of humanity, it has been prevented, first of all, by the kind of intellectual life that emerged in the 13th and 14th centuries of the Middle Ages, and then, again, by the intellectual trend of the time from the middle of the 15th century to the present, which has moved more and more towards materialism. On the one hand, we have seen the development of a detached, unworldly, religiously colored way of looking at things, which separated the spiritual from the world, did not allow it to approach the human being and therefore left the human being unexplained in terms of his essence. One might say: In the last centuries of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the last centuries of the Greek-Latin development up to the middle of the 15th century, humanity increasingly began to look up to a completely unworldly divine-spiritual and lost the opportunity to get to know the human itself in its divine origin. Then came the time when mankind directed its gaze to the subhuman, to what nature principles are, but which only explained everything in the world that is not human, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal , and in this way again left man unexplained, so that in a certain sense in an older time there was a looking up to a foreign spiritual, from the later time to our days a looking at a subhuman material. Man fell through in between. To consider the human being in his entirety, spiritually and soulfully, is the task of our time, and to this end we have tried to bring more and more elements into anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Today I would like to talk about how the human being initially finds himself in the world between two extremes in his inner experience. Let us dwell first on the inner experience of the human being. On the one hand, the human being experiences the world of ideas, but he experiences it in such a way that the more he immerses himself in this world of ideas, the more abstract and cold it appears to him. When man rises to the level of ideas, he feels that he cannot become inwardly warm. But he feels something quite different. He feels that in these ideas, which are then also expanded into natural laws, into world laws, he has something that, as an idea, does not include a reality, that as an idea is basically merely an image. Therefore, when faced with the world of ideas, the human being does not feel, let us say, that he wants to somehow implant his own existence in this world of ideas in a cognitive way. No matter how much the human being likes to reflect, he gradually retains the feeling, even with the most perfectly spun philosophy, that he cannot find proof of his real existence in the universe in the world of ideas. The ideas have something, as it were, rootless about them, as they are experienced in ordinary life between birth and death. That is the one, so to speak, the one pole of outer experience in ordinary existence: the abstract, sober, cold ideas, in which one cannot anchor, nor would one want to anchor, the reality of the actual human being. And finally, modern humanity has not warmed to Descartes' maxim: “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum), because no matter how much people think, they also feel: there is no getting out of thinking for the time being.

The other pole of inner experience is memory. Anyone who really practices psychology, not the art of words that is often practiced as psychology at universities today, knows that these memories we have are substantially exactly the same as the fantasies we create by working at them, so to speak, only that we use the same power we apply in weaving the fantasy differently when remembering. By remembering, by cultivating our memory, we ultimately live in the same element as in the creative process, only that we build on what we have experienced through the senses or through life in general and thus shape the “phantasms” in memory in a logical way, while in the imagination we let them roam freely. This is the other pole in our inner experience.

In the world of ideas, which we then also develop into laws of nature, we have the decisive awareness that our will cannot actually achieve anything through itself in the shaping of the world of ideas; it must submit to the inner logic, to the fabric of reality of the ideas. If we want to grasp reality, we cannot use our will to string one idea to another; we must adapt to the inner laws of this world of ideas, which is only pictorial and does not directly support any being. At the other pole, in phantasms, which also live in memory, we recognize very well: our will rules there – and our will is also quite appropriately there, and we notice in two respects that these phantasms, insofar as they shape memory, very much have to do with our ego, with our personality, with what our reality is. No matter how much we rail against mere fantasy or phantasmagoria, by sensing that our ego is at work in it according to its own arbitrariness, we feel at the same time that our ego, our personality, is contained in these phantasms. That is one thing.

The other is: in the moment when, due to some illness, our memory continuity is disturbed, when the thread of our memory breaks somewhere, so that we cannot remember a piece of our life, in this moment the real solidity of our inner I-experience is also disturbed. So, on the one hand, our sense of self is not directly connected to our world of ideas. On the other hand, we feel that this sense of self is part of what we call our world of phantasms, although we cannot rely on this world of phantasms and, in a sense, in this phantasmal world, although we know that it is active in it, and that it cannot properly live in our consciousness if this memory is not in contact with it.

The deepest riddles of life are contained in what I have now more or less abstractly discussed, and we can approach these riddles by taking together various aspects of what is scattered in our anthroposophical considerations today. The world of ideas appears abstract to us, pictorial to us! Where do we use it first? We use it when we think through what affects our senses from the outside world – colors, sounds, warmth and cold. We think through our perceptions. You will find more precise details in my books 'Truth and Science' and 'Philosophy of Freedom'. When we penetrate our perceptions with thinking, we use this world of ideas to imprint it, as it were, on our spiritual and psychological experience, on what we have as a world of perception. But we need to look a little more closely at what is actually happening. And this can be done by directing one's own soul abilities through spiritual scientific methods, as described in my books. One can actually raise the question: What would it be like if our sensory perceptions only penetrated us from the outside, if only what penetrates our eye as color, our ear as sound, our sense of warmth as heat, and so on, from the light, what would happen to us then?

Let us be clear about this: when we are awake, we never let this world flow into us alone. Even if we develop only a little active thinking in ideas, we nevertheless bring, as it were, from within ourselves, to meet these sounds, colors, smells, tastes, and all sensory qualities that are rushing towards us, the counter-attack of the world of ideas that rises from within us. And anyone who does not think according to the abstract psychology of words of the present time, but who has really learned to observe, can ask themselves: How do the contents of perception that rush in from outside and the counterattack from within, the world of ideas, meet in our sense organs? If we were merely given over to the world of perceptions, then we would actually live as human beings in our etheric body and with our etheric body in an etheric world. Just imagine how you, surrendered through your eyes to the world of colors, would live in a surging, ethereally surging world of colors, how you, surrendered through your ears to the sounding world, would live in a surging sea of sound. This is not ethereal at first, but it would be ethereal if you did not provide the counterblow through ideas. The way in which sounds are for us human beings is the way they are in the etheric. We swim in the ocean of air and thus in the condensed etheric. It is therefore aetheric that is only condensed materially up to the air; the tones are only the air-shaped material expression of the etheric. And so it is with the warmth qualities, with the taste qualities, with the smell qualities, with all sensory qualities. So, imagine the counterattack of the world of ideas from within. Imagine that you live in an ethereal sea as an ethereal being. You would never come to that human consistency with which you actually stand in the world between birth and death. How can you come to this consistency? By being organized to kill this ethereal, to paralyze it. And how do we paralyze it? How do we kill it? Through the counter-attack of ideas! It is really so: the world of the content of perception in living ethericity (red) would come from outside, so to speak — if I am to draw schematically — and we would swim as etheric beings in living etheric substance, if we did not send out from within the counter-impact of the world of ideas (blue), which, as it is the world of ideas between birth and death, kills the etheric substance and allows us to perceive the world as a physical world. We would have an etheric world around us if we did not kill this etheric substance through the world of ideas, bringing it down to physical form. The world of ideas, as we have it as human beings, connects with the sensory qualities in our organs, paralyzing these sensory qualities and bringing them down to what we experience as the physical world.

That is the fact of the matter. You can see from Dr. Stein's short paper, from his dissertation, how close he has come to this, through a spirited interpretation of what can be gained in the field of anthroposophy, of the character of the world of perception. In fact, there is nothing in the current physiological literature as good as this little book by Dr. Stein regarding the physiology of the senses.

So on the one hand we have this fact: that through the world of ideas we dampen the etheric surge of the sense qualities. What is the broader context of this? It is connected with the fact that the world of ideas that we experience as human beings between birth and death, as rising up from within, does not appear in its true form. People cannot see through this, that the ideas as they are experienced by them as human beings in the physical body do not have the true form of these ideas. People are still so crudely organized in present-day civilization that they would never think of saying to themselves, for example: You wake up from sleep, you have experienced a whole dream that has symbolically expressed to you what is screaming “Fire!” outside on the street. One experiences symbolically something that is quite different outside. What we have in ideas is very different from the way an external event is formed in the dream fantasy; but in the world of ideas we nevertheless also have something that is nothing other than the reflection of a completely different world. And what world is it? We have often spoken of this. It is the world that the human being has gone through before birth, or let us say before conception. This is what is shadowed here in life, up to the abstract world of ideas, experienced in a concrete way. Between death and a new birth, we live in the reality of what is only present here in the world of ideas in these shadow images of concepts, perceptions and ideas. Just as the outer world shines into the dream, so the prenatal world shines into our world between birth and death, by having an effect on the formation of ideas. But while everything is alive in what the ideas are between death and a new birth, while what is real in the world of ideas touches our own being, while we touch our own substantial being by touching ourselves, as we now touch our physical body, only that which we do not even know is cast into this earthly life from the world of ideas. But we use this shadow of our spiritual existence to make our very existence on earth possible. What do the gods give us when they send us into this world through birth? They give us the shadow image of the existence we have between death and a new birth. These shadows are the ideas, and these ideas serve us here to become physical human beings at all, otherwise we would swim as ethereal beings in the ethereal sea. We kill off the etheric life with the shadow images of our life between death and a new birth.

In this way, we place the human being in the whole universe, in the cosmos. This is another point where we gain real human insight. Here we connect what we have in our present experience with eternal experience. Here we say: When you think, when you look at the outer world through your senses and dull the etheric life that takes place in your eyes and ears with your ideas so that you can bear it and be human, then you do so with the inheritance, with the after-effect of your eternal human being, as you have developed it between death and a new birth.

Thus expanding human consciousness, thus pouring into the human being some of the knowledge that connects us with the whole universe — that is a need of the present. And all outer science will wither away, all outer culture will lead to decline. The death of the West will occur when people do not decide to acquire such a knowledge of the human being that, by observing the external conditions of life, reconnects the human being to the cosmos and thus reconnects the human being to the cosmos in such a way that the human being, by experiencing the world of ideas here, becomes aware of the eternal. It is precisely for this reason that this world of ideas is something so sober and abstract, because it is only the shadow image of the eternal and because it is basically intended to deadening the sense life that otherwise floods us ethereally.

Thus we are connected with our life with the prenatal. The traditional religious denominations do not like to point to this prenatal, indeed they even decisively reject it. I have already touched on the fact that it is precisely the peculiarity of the present traditional religious denominations that they speak only of the after-death, not of the prenatal, of the pre-existence. They do not want to speak of this because then one cannot appeal to man's egoism, to which one appeals when one preaches to man only about the life after death; for man wants to enjoy the knowledge of the life after death between birth and death. That which imposes obligations on them for this life, because the gods have released them from the spiritual world to fulfill their mission, does not appeal to human selfishness, it appeals to human responsibility and human obligation. That is why one finds little agreement when one speaks of this prenatal life. And these religious beliefs have managed to make people sleep so much about this prenatal life that we may well have a word 'immortality', that is, we negate mortality, but we have no word 'unbirth', which would be equally justified. For just as little as we die with our spiritual-mental, just as little are we born with our spiritual-mental. We should have a word in the language that suggests this. Yes, the German language needs the word unbirthlich (unborn) as much as it needs unsterblich (immortal), for man recognizes only half of himself if he can only say the word unsterblich but not the word unbirthlich. From the inability of language we can recognize the inability to rise to spiritual heights in this realm.

If we now look at the other pole, we see that man has in the phantasms, from which he also forms his memory images, something in which his I surges and surges, but often surges and surges in a chaotic way. Although man knows that his I lives in it, he does not rely on letting himself be told something about the nature of this I from the phantasms. If we look at the facts — and you can see this in the most diverse passages of our anthroposophical literature —, we have to ask ourselves: What exactly is it that develops from within us as the sum of our memory images, or, for that matter, as the sum of our imaginative images? It is nothing other than the transformation of that which, before it is metamorphosed into the power of memory or the power of imagination, lives in us as a growth force. What lives in the body as a growth force, when it emancipates itself from the physical, becomes the soul-spiritual power of memory. You know that up to the age of seven, when the change of teeth occurs, the same force appears in the human being that later forms well-contoured memories in the soul memory; it works on the body, shaping it. What ultimately drives out the teeth is the same force that lives in us as the power of imagination. In short, in what lives in us as phantasms, we have the same power that actually makes us grow, that underlies our becoming organic. We emancipate it from the organism. What does that mean?

There is another significant life riddle hidden there; it says: We are, so to speak, tearing this phantasmagorical power out of our organism. If we think that we leave it inside, how would we stand in the world? Imagine that everything you detach from your organism, so to speak, so that you can control it at will with your ego, with your personality, everything would surge in your organism. You would not say: I will – but you would feel the surging of your blood that drives you to your movements; you would not say: I take up the pen – but you would feel the mechanism of your arm muscles. You would feel yourself inside, losing yourself in the world, if you did not tear the world of phantasms away from your organism. Your independence would disappear. What moves within you, what lives within you, would be only a continuation within your skin of what is outside. Man must therefore say to himself: the grass grows out of certain forces outside my skin, within my skin my spleen grows, my liver; but I would not feel any difference if I could not tear my phantasms away from what organizes within me. Out there, I do not tear something away; I take the entity in its totality. Within my skin, I tear away the world of my phantasms. In this way I come to my independence. This is how we can find the bed, the substrate for the 'I'-ness in man. That is the other pole of inner experience.

While we have to kill our sensory experience through the world of ideas so that we can place ourselves in the physical world, for otherwise we would flood as spectra in the etheric sea, we have to tear away the world of phantasms from our organic events, otherwise we would simply be a link in nature like the growing tree. We would not stand there as an independent entity, emancipated from the rest of the world.

In this way, we recognize ourselves as human beings in our essence within the human being. And if we look further, we say to ourselves: This personal life between birth and death is what makes us experience the ego here between birth and death. But we do not experience the whole of our inner life, that which lies within our skin; this remains a shadow of that which constitutes our being after death. Just as we are connected to the pre-birth through the pole of ideas, we are connected to the after-death through the pole of phantasms, in which the will lives. We are attached to our unborn through our world of ideas, and to our immortal through our world of phantasms, which is now a world of phantasms, so that when we pass through the gate of death, it is shaped into a regular cosmos in which we then weave, live and are after death.

This is the effect of a true knowledge of the human being, of a spiritual realization of one's place in the cosmos. By answering these questions in terms of what he really recognizes in himself, in terms of what has entered from the cosmos into our inner being, the human being knows where he comes from, where he stands, and where he is going. Such knowledge is not like the knowledge that has gradually destroyed the culture of the West. Such knowledge has a different significance. This culture of the West has really been destroyed by its knowledge. Look back at the knowledge that people had until the middle of the 15th century. People today scoff at this knowledge. They consider it the childish knowledge of a childish humanity. They say to themselves: We have come so gloriously far in the present; only now do we have real chemistry, real physics, real biology, and so on. But there is a significant difference between the old knowledge, when it can only be properly understood in its truth and the rootless knowledge of the present. If you look into the old knowledge, as it existed until the middle of the 15th century, you will see: by appropriating elements of knowledge from the world, the human being always took something with him, through which he was connected to the world. Just consider: however cleverly you reflect on a tree and however much conceptual content you absorb into your soul about the tree, you are still aware that more lives in the tree than you can absorb with your ideas; the same applies to a flower and even to a crystal. If you look at the modern world, which has gradually become machine-like, then the human being is, I would say, standing in front of the object that has become completely transparent in terms of ideas. The machine we build, the mechanism we construct, we see through it. We know: the machine is built from these forces, in this and that combination. - Following the pattern of what man has built in technology, he has then also formed a world view and he now also imagines the universe as a large machine.

Because we have lost reverence for the enigma in the mechanical cultural order, because the machine has become ideationally transparent to us, we need to reconnect with the human being today in order to rediscover spirituality. People who could still seek spirituality by looking for it in natural objects did not need knowledge that was brought forth from the human being as we need it. We, who have gradually torn ourselves away from the world to the point of mechanically grasping it, to the point of building a mechanized technology, need the living spiritual science in contrast to dead technology, which also impacts our thinking life. This spiritual science connects human beings to the spiritual universe, to the spiritual cosmos, in the way we have again indicated today. But we must achieve this connection in the present by truly transforming our inner being before we go to the outside world. This transformation is taken into account by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wherever it occurs in practice.

We founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Little by little, people come to observe in the Waldorf School. This is what people of the modern age do; when something interests them here or there, they go and see it, then they “know” it, and under certain circumstances they can also set something like that up. That is how our lives have gradually become. But that is not what the Waldorf School is about. What it is about is the fact that, above all, one can delve into the inner life that has been introduced into the didactics and pedagogy at the Waldorf School. It is about the fact that one can grasp the relationship between the human being and the world in a completely new way. In terms of the world of ideas, people are indeed generous. Man does not want to keep his world of ideas to himself. He would like everyone to have the same ideas, that is, he would like to give his ideas to all people. Man is not so generous with regard to other goods; he prefers to keep them to himself. He is happy to give everyone his ideas. This is precisely what makes the radical difference between the spiritual world on the one hand and the economic world on the other. This difference is radically present if one only wants to look at it, and basically, if someone under the old system tends to be a teacher, it only consists of generosity with regard to the world of ideas. This is because children are even better at accepting gifts than adults, who may encounter you with criticism and resistance. It is even easier to give gifts of knowledge to children.

Of course, these instincts must also be taken into account in Waldorf schools and by Waldorf teachers. But a new element is introduced that can only come from the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. That is, to what was always traditional in the earlier confessions, to the afterlife, is added the decisive view of the prenatal, so that we are clear that in the child that grows up, what comes down from the spiritual worlds is gradually revealed. We came down from the spiritual worlds at a certain time. The gods sent us into this world, and we carry out what the gods have placed in us. The children come down later; they have been in the spiritual world longer. We look to what shines out of the children's souls. They carry messages from the spiritual worlds, where they were longer than we were. A feeling that something is coming down from the spiritual world into the present, that falls into the children, that the teacher first has to unravel, that a giving, which one so gladly does, is joined by a taking - that can only come from the spirit of true spiritual science, when the idea of pre-existence is joined by the idea of post-existence in living feeling.

What is new and what is poured into the pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf school is what matters; that is to say, basically only someone who has taken up anthroposophically oriented spiritual science into his own heart and soul can understand the Waldorf school. And only then should he sit in on classes, otherwise the few hours he has sat in on classes at the Waldorf school will show him nothing but writing on the board or speaking to the children and so on. But it is so inconvenient for people in the present day to really find their way into spirituality. Basically, why should we want to find the cause of this? If we take such works, which are truly born out of a current of the old, into our hands, we can ask: What is thought about the acquisition of spirituality by the human being?

I have laid out in front of me the “Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis for Use in Higher Educational Institutions and for Self-Teaching” by Alfons Lehmen, a Jesuit priest, fourth expanded and improved edition, published by Peter Beck, a Jesuit priest. The work was first published in 1899 and the fourth edition was published in 1917. I would like to read to you what is written on page 8 of the introduction about the spirit of this philosophy, which is thus genuinely Catholic philosophy. We will see in a moment that we are dealing with genuine Catholic philosophy. It says:

"From what has been said, it is not difficult to see what is to be thought of the principle of the ‘absolute freedom of science’. This principle grants every individual the right to form and advocate any opinion they choose, without fear of any doctrinal authority objecting to it. But freedom is not boundless. The Church's teaching authority has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion if it contradicts a revealed teaching or logically leads to such a contradiction. We assume here that an ecclesiastical teaching authority has been established by God with the task of protecting and interpreting divine revelation. With this mandate, the right in question is directly established. For the execution of the mandate given to it, the teaching office of the Church must be able to explain the true meaning of the word of God and to designate false interpretations as false. Hence, when the opinion of a philosopher or of a school of philosophy directly or indirectly challenges the true meaning of the content of revelation, the teaching authority of the Church has the power to judge the error as such and the authority to condemn it before the public.

This is quoted as the preface to a textbook on philosophy! Now, if you take the whole spirit of such a controversy, as is also the case today, what does it reveal? It reflects the whole Christian spirit that Paul meant when he spoke the word: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” As the Christ lives in us, He awakens the spiritual element in us, and it is precisely through this Christ-ization that we become able to connect man to the spiritual cosmos. We have often spoken about this meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha and we will speak about it again in more detail tomorrow. But there is one thing the Christ had to make clear to people, in order to show people how man has to gain his truth from the spirit, from the divine spirit. One need only recall another saying of Christ Jesus, and everything in this direction is given: “My kingdom is not of this world”; that is, the kingdom that the Christ wants to ignite in man must not be established in this world. It must be established by man's finding the way out of this sensual world and into the supersensible world.

My kingdom is of that other world, which is not this sensual world. Who has sinned most against this Word of Christ? The one who claims that a kingdom founded on this world, a kingdom that has its center in Rome, in physical Rome, a kingdom that works with physical advice and counsel, such a physical kingdom that is entirely of this world, is the kingdom that can somehow spread the Christian truth. Since the Kingdom of Christ is not of this world, it is certainly not of Rome. We are thus pointing out that in the present time, all that is of this world, all that wants to stamp even the truth so strongly with the character of this world that it says: ” The teaching authority of the Church has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion when it is in contradiction to a revealed doctrine or when it leads consistently to such a contradiction,” that is, insofar as the Church decrees it! Therefore, such books do not appear as books, for example, by anthroposophists, that one enters with one's whole personality and only with this and says: What I have to represent, I represent out of my connection with the spirit of Truth” — but here is the title: ‘Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis’, by Alfons Lehmen S. J., fourth edition 1917. If you turn the pages, you will find: Imprimatur Friburg, Thomas, Archbishop. That is, here not a personality represents what she has to represent as a personality, but a worldly body, from which everyone who wants to publish something that is to be recognized must get the imprimatur. Here a body, which is of this world and stamps truth from this world, represents that which is established as truth!

Today, we must not be cowardly, but look courageously at what true Christianity is and what alleged Christianity is. We are living in a time that has led to this catastrophe because people have been cowardly enough not to live outwards what they have more or less recognized inwardly. Our catastrophe is, in its origin, a spiritual catastrophe – as we have often said – and we will not emerge from this catastrophe until we turn to the Spirit of Truth, which, in spiritual vision, seeks that power which gives it the “Imprimatur”, not an ecclesiastical authority established by a worldly organization.

Automated Translation

My dear friends, this evening I would like to tell you something about the journey, and then give another talk tomorrow — since the next week has to be spent in Stuttgart and I will be dealing with some things that are perhaps more closely related in content to the things that I will also have to deal with today, as part of the description of the journey.

The journey began with Ilkley, in the north of England, where an educational course was to be held, a course dealing with Waldorf school methodology and didactics in relation to contemporary civilization. Ilkley is a town in the north of England with a population of about 8,000. At present there is a tendency in England to hold so-called summer schools at such places during the summer months, and this course was initially also in the form of such a summer school.

The course was to be accompanied by what we have developed in the anthroposophical movement in the way of eurythmy, and it was also to be accompanied by what six of our Waldorf school teachers could offer based on what has just been said in the individual lectures.

Ilkley is a place that is probably considered a kind of summer resort, but it is located in the immediate vicinity of those cities that really put you so deeply into what industrial-commercial culture is in our time. Leeds and other places are very close by, for example Bradford, and Manchester is not far away either. These are cities that truly reflect the life that has arisen from the present. One really has a feeling there that says very clearly how much the present needs a spiritual impact; a spiritual impact that is not limited to giving individual people something for their immediate individual-personal soul needs. It is certainly as justified as possible to see the anthroposophical movement in this light, but I am now speaking of the impressions that are really imposed on one by today's outside world.

You see, my dear friends, it is indeed the case that one would consider it an extraordinary, I would even say cultural paradox, if someone were to recommend adding indigestible mineral products - let's say any minerals, stones and so on - to human food, in other words, to regard it as something possible to add sand or the like to human food. One is compelled, on the basis of one's ideas about the human organism, to regard this as impossible. But anyone who is able to look more deeply into the structure and interrelationships of the world — and this may be said out of genuine anthroposophical feeling and perception — will have a special sense of a collection of houses and factories in such a style, which, so to speak, gives nothing to the aesthetic needs of human beings — as for example, in Leeds, where incredible-looking black houses are lined up in an abstract manner, where everything actually looks as if it were a condensation of the blackest coal dust, which has formed into houses in which people now live. If we consider this in connection with the development of culture and civilization of all mankind, and really do so with the same attitude as I have just applied to the sand in the stomach, we feel that we must say: It is just as impossible for human civilization for such a thing to become established in the long run in the whole course of human development and for human civilization to somehow progress inwardly.

Now it is really not the case that one could ever be a reactionary on anthroposophical ground. Of course, one must not speak of these things in a negative sense. These things have simply arisen out of the life of the whole evolution of the earth. But they are only possible within the development of humanity if they are imbued, permeated with a real spiritual life, if the spiritual life actually penetrates into these things and is gradually able to elevate them to a kind of aesthetics, so that people do not completely stray from the inner human through these things being placed in the unfolding of culture.

And I would like to say: it is precisely from such an experience that the most absolute necessity of a penetration of spiritual impulses into contemporary civilization arises. These things cannot be grasped merely in the sense of general ideas that one forms, but they must be grasped in connection with what is in the world. But one must have a heart for what is in the world!

Ilkley itself is a place that, on the one hand, has the atmosphere of its proximity to these other, purely industrial cities, but on the other hand, there are traces everywhere in the surrounding remains of the dolmens, the old Druid altars, that are reminiscent of an ancient spirituality that has no direct successor there. It is, I would say touching, to perceive when on the one hand one has the impression that I have just described, and when on the other hand, in this region, which I would say is thoroughly permeated by the effluents of those impressions, one climbs a hill and then finds the remains of the old sacrificial altars with the corresponding signs in the extraordinarily characteristic places where they are always found - there is something extraordinarily touching about it. There is such a hill near Ilkley, with such a stone at the top. And on this stone, essentially – it is a little more complicated – but essentially what is known as a swastika, which was imprinted on the stones that were placed at certain sites at that time and what was imprinted on something very specific: it points to how at these sites the Druid priest was imbued with the same thoughts that, let's say, two to three millennia ago, were culturally creative in these areas. For when one enters such a place, stands before such a rock with the engraved signs, then one can still see from the whole situation today that one is standing in the same place where the Druid priest once stood and where he felt so strongly about the engraving of this sign that he expressed his consciousness, which he had from his dignity, in this sign.

For what does one read in this sign when standing before such a stone? One reads the words that were in the heart of the Druid priest: Lo, the eye of sensuality beholds the mountains, beholds the places of men; the eye of the spirit, the lotus flower, the turning lotus flower – for its sign is the swastika – beholds the hearts of men, beholds the interior of the soul. And it is through this seeing that I want to be connected with those who are entrusted to me as a community. Just as one would otherwise read a text from a book, one reads this, so to speak, by standing in front of such a stone.

This is roughly the setting in which the Ilkley Conference was held. It consisted of my always giving the lectures in the morning, which this time, above all, tried to extract the Waldorf school pedagogy and didactics from the whole historical development of the art of education. This time I started from the way in which the art of education in Greek culture grew out of general Greek life, from which one can see that actually no special methods or special practices should be invented for school, but that school should impart what is contained in general culture.

It is certainly not right, for example, to invent special practices in Froebelian kindergartens – and I am not criticizing Froebel at all! – for doing this or that with the children, practices that are not connected to and have not grown out of general cultural life. Rather, it is right for the person practising the art of education to be directly involved in general cultural life, to have a heart and mind for it, and then to incorporate into the educational methods from direct life that into which the person to be educated is to grow later.

And so I wanted to show how pedagogy and didactics must grow out of our life, but now permeated by the spirit. This gave us the opportunity to shed light on the Waldorf school method from a different point of view. What I just mentioned was only the starting point; the subject at hand was an examination of Waldorf school pedagogy, which you are familiar with.

After that, there was a eurythmy performance by the children of the Kings Langley School and eurythmy performances by those eurythmy artists who had come with us at the Ilkleyer Theatre there. It would probably have been better if the latter had taken place first, so that it could have been seen in the order itself how what is cultivated as eurythmy in the school also grows out of eurythmy as an art that is part of cultural life. Well, these things will settle down in the future, so that in terms of external arrangements, too, a picture will be given of what is actually intended.

The third aspect, so to speak, was the achievements of those who had been involved as teachers at the Waldorf School. And here it must truly be said that the greatest possible interest was shown in the matter. I must say, for example, that the way in which Dr. von Baravalle presented his ideas was extraordinarily moving for anyone who cares about the development of the Waldorf School. When one saw how Dr. von Baravalle simply explained his geometrical views in the way they apply to children, using the method that you should know well from his book on physical and mathematical methods, and how then, from an artistic-mathematical development of surface transformation and surface metamorphosis, one might say, suddenly with an inner drama, the Pythagorean theorem emerged. When they saw how, after the audience had been led step by step and did not really know where it was all going, a number of surfaces were shifted until, at the end, the Pythagorean theorem was visualized on the blackboard by shifting the surfaces. There was an inner amazement among the audience, which consisted of teachers, an inner dramatic unfolding of thoughts and feelings, and I would like to say such an honest, sincere enthusiasm for what is coming into the school as a method that it was really moving – just as what our teachers presented in general aroused the most extraordinary interest. We had brought examples of our students' work, which consists of sculptural pieces, making toys, paintings, and so on. The greatest interest was aroused when it was described how the children work on these projects and how they fit into the school's overall curriculum.

The way in which music lessons are taught, as interpreted by Miss Lämmert, attracted the greatest attention, as did the discussions by Dr. Schwebsch. The insistent, loving way of Dr. von Heydebrand, then the forceful way of our Dr. Karl Schubert; all these are things that really showed that it is possible to bring the essence of the Waldorf school system to the soul of a teaching staff in a vivid way. Miss Röhrle then gave a eurythmy lesson for different people, which was also a good addition, so that the whole thing was quite well summarized from an educational point of view. I can say that because I had no part in putting the program together. All of this was put together by our English friends in such a way that it really was a very nice summary of the educational subject.

During the whole conference, a committee was formed which set itself the task of founding an independent school in England based on the model of the Waldorf School. The prospects are actually very good for such a school to be established as a day school, alongside the Kings Langley School, which had already agreed last year, after my Oxford lectures, to adopt the Waldorf school methodology. As I said, it was the children of the Kings Langley School who had presented what they had learned in eurythmy at the theater in Ilkley. The interest and the way in which these things have been received, and also how sympathetically the eurythmy performances have been received, is something that can already be very satisfying. This was the first half of August, until August 18. Then we hiked over to Penmaenmawr.

Penmaenmawr is a place in North Wales, on the western English coast, where the island of Anglesey is located, and this Penmaenmawr is a place that could not have been better chosen for this anthroposophical undertaking this year. For this Penmaenmawr is filled with the directly tangible astral atmosphere, into which the young man shaped himself, who had emerged from the Druid service, traces of which can be found everywhere. It is right on the seashore, as I said, where the island of Anglesey is located; a bridge, which, by the way, is ingeniously built, leads over to it. On one side, hills and mountains rise everywhere near Penmaenmawr, and on these mountains you can find the remains of the old so-called sacrificial altars, cromlechs and so on scattered all over the place; there are traces of this ancient Druidic service everywhere.

These individual scattered cult devices, if I may call them that, are apparently arranged in the simplest way. If you look at them from the side, they are stones arranged in a square or rectangle, with a stone lying on top. If you look at them from above, these stones would stand like this [see drawing], and then a stone lies on top, enclosing the whole thing like a small chamber.

Of course, such things were also grave monuments. But I would like to say that in older times the function of a grave monument is always connected with the function of a much more extensive cult. And so I do not want to hold back here from expressing what such a cult site can teach us.

You see, these stones enclose a kind of chamber; a capstone lies on top of it. This chamber is dark in a certain way. So when the sun's rays fall on it, the outer physical light remains. But sunlight is filled with spiritual currents everywhere. This spiritual current continues into this dark space. And the Druid priest, as a result of his initiation, had the ability to see through the Druid stones and see the downward flow - not of physical sunlight, because that was blocked - but of what lives spiritually and soulfully in physical sunlight. And that inspired him with what then flowed into his wisdom about the spiritual cosmos, about the universe. They were therefore not only burial places, they were places of knowledge.

But even more. If at certain times of the day this was the case, what I have just described, then one can say: at other times of the day the opposite was the case, that currents went back from the earth [upwards], which could then be observed when the sun was not shining on them, and in which lived that which were the moral qualities of the community of the priest, so that the priest could see at certain times what the moral qualities of his community children were in the surrounding area. So the descending spiritual substance as well as the ascending spiritual substance showed him that which allowed him to stand in a truly spiritual way in his entire sphere of influence.

These things are, of course, not recorded in what today's science tells us about these places of worship. But it is indeed what can be seen here directly, because the power of the impulses – the impulses from the work of the Druid priests in the time when it was their good time – was so strong that even today these things are absolutely alive in the astral atmosphere there.

I was then able to visit another type of place of worship with Dr. Wachsmuth: from Penmaenmawr, you have to walk about an hour and a half up a mountain. At the top, there is something like a hollow. From this hollow, you have an unobstructed, wonderful view of the surrounding mountains and also of the hollow boundary of your own mountain. Up there in this hollow, one found what can be described as the actual sun cult site of the ancient Druids. It is arranged in such a way that the corresponding stones are arranged with their cover leaves; the traces are present everywhere.

Think of it this way: these places of worship have no inner space. Up here, in close proximity to each other, you have two such Druidic circles. When the sun makes its daily path, the shadows of these stones fall in a variety of ways, and you can now distinguish, let's say, when the sun passes through the constellation of Aries, the Aries shadow, then the Taurus shadow, the Gemini shadow and so on. Even today, when deciphering these things, one still gets a good impression of how the Druid priest was able to read the secrets of the universe from the various, qualitatively different sun shadows that this Druid circle revealed, from that which lives on in the sun shadow when the physical sunlight is held back, so that in fact it contains a world clock that speaks of the secrets of the world. But these were definitely signs that emerged from the shadows that were cast, signs that spoke of the secrets of the world and the cosmos.

The second circle was then a kind of control to check what the first circle had revealed. If you had gone up in an airplane and gone so far away that this distance in between might have disappeared, you would have had, looking down, the ground plan of what the ground plan of our Goetheanum was, directly from these two druid circles.

All this is located where the island of Anglesey is also close by, where much of what has been preserved in the accounts of King Arthur took place. The center of King Arthur was a little further south, but some of the events that took place there were also part of King Arthur's work. All this gives the astral atmosphere of Penmaenmawr something that makes this place in particular a special one, one of which one can say: when speaking about spiritual things, one is compelled to speak in imaginations. It is the case with imaginations that when they are formed in the course of the representations, these imaginations in the astral atmosphere within today's civilization very soon disappear. When one tries to depict the spiritual, one is constantly fighting against the disappearance of the imaginations. One has to create these imaginations, but they quickly fade away, so that one is constantly faced with the necessity of creating these imaginations in order to have them in front of oneself. The astral atmosphere that results from these things is such that it is a little more difficult to form the imaginations there in Penmaenmawr, but that this difficulty in turn leads to a great relief of the spiritual life on the other hand, that now these imaginations, after they are formed, simply look like they have been written into the astral atmosphere, so that they are inside. Every time one forms imaginations that express the spiritual world, one has the feeling that they remain in the astral atmosphere there. And it is precisely this circumstance that so vividly reminds us of how these Druid priests chose their special places, where they could, I would say, effectively engrave in the astral atmosphere what was incumbent upon them to shape in imaginations from the secrets of the world. Coming from Ilkley, which is very close to industrialism and shows only very slight traces of the ancient Druidic period, one feels a kind of real transcendence, almost like crossing a threshold, and now entering into something that is simply spiritual in the immediate present. Everything here is spiritual. You could say that this part of Wales is a very special place on Earth. Today, this Wales is the custodian of an incredibly strong spiritual life, which admittedly consists of memories, but real memories that stand there. So that it may actually be said: the opportunity to talk about Anthroposophy at this place – not in reference to the branches of Anthroposophy, but about Anthroposophy itself, about the inner core of Anthroposophy – I count that as one of the most significant stages in the development of our Anthroposophical life.

The credit for having made this institution, for having placed something like this in the development of anthroposophical life, goes to Mr. Dunlop, who is extraordinarily insightful and energetic in this direction. He explained the plan to me when I was in England last year and then stuck to it and has now brought it to fruition. From the outset, it was planned to bring something purely anthroposophical in connection with eurythmy to this place this August.

Mr. Dunlop then had a third impulse, but it was impossible to carry out, and it may be said that what has become possible has only become possible through the truly spiritually insightful way of choosing this place. I think it is of some importance to bear in mind that there are such outstanding places on the earth's surface where, in such a vivid memory, there is an immediate awareness of what was once a living sun cult in preparation for the later adoption of Christianity in Northern and Western Europe.

The lectures were in the morning; the afternoon was partly devoted to allowing the participants to see this astral atmosphere and its connection to the memories of decaying sacrificial sites, dolmens and so on, on the spot; the evening was filled with discussions on anthroposophical topics or with eurythmy performances. There were five of them in. Penmaenmawr, which were received with great sincerity on the one hand and with the greatest interest on the other. The audience consisted partly of anthroposophists, but also of a non-anthroposophical audience. It was certainly the case that — which is, of course, understandable for a mountainous area bordering the sea — from one hour to the next there was always a nice change from half-downpours to bright sunshine and so on. For example, one evening — the external furnishings were almost the same as in this carpentry workshop — we really did go from a downpour to a eurythmy performance; at the beginning, people were still sitting in the hall with their umbrellas, but they did not let themselves be deterred in their enthusiasm. So it was definitely something, as I said in Penmaenmawr itself, that can truly be recorded as a very significant chapter in the history of our anthroposophical movement.

One event was dedicated to discussing educational questions in Penmaenmawr as well. And on this occasion, I would also like to mention the following, which you have already been able to read in the brief presentation I gave of it in the “Goetheanum”. When I came to England, to Ilkley, I found a book called 'Education Through Imagination', which I was able to skim through at first and which immediately captivated me; a book that one of our friends in particular describes as one of the most important books in England. Its author is Miss MacMillan. The same person was then chairman on the first evening and the following evenings in Ilkley. Miss MacMillan gave the opening speech. It was uplifting to see the beautiful enthusiasm and the inner honest fire for the art of education in this woman. And at the same time, it was extraordinarily satisfying for us that this woman in particular is fully committed to what can be achieved in a truly serious art of education through the Waldorf school methodology.

During the following days, I read more of the book and summarized my impressions in the article in the last issue of the Goetheanum. Then, last Monday, Frau Doctor and I were also able to visit the place of work of this excellent woman in Deptford, near London and Greenwich. There we found the Miss MacMillan Care and Education Institute. She takes children from the lowest and poorest social classes into this care and education institute; she also aims to take children at an older age. Today she has 300 children at the school; she started with six children many years ago, today there are 300. These children are taken in at the age of two, coming from circles where they are very dirty, impoverished, sick, malnourished or very poorly nourished – if I may say so, rickety, typhoid, afflicted with worse. Today you can see a kind of school barracks in the immediate vicinity, like those of the Waldorf School – the barracks, not our current opulently built house, the provisional barracks – but there they are very beautiful, nicely furnished. The things are in a garden, but you only have to take a few steps from any of the Iore and then you can compare the population from which these children come, living on the streets in the most terrible squalor and filth, with what is being done with these children.

First of all, the bathing facilities are exemplary. That is the main thing. The children arrive at 8 o'clock, are released in the evening, and thus return to their home every evening. The care begins in the morning with a bath. Then a kind of teaching begins, all done with tremendous devotion, with a touching, poignant sense of sacrifice, all arranged in a touching, practical way. Miss MacMillan is also of the opinion that the education of the Waldorf School must penetrate everything, so one must say: one can see that from this point of view with complete satisfaction – while today one might want to do some things differently in terms of methodology; but that is not considered at all in the face of this sense of sacrifice. Things are always in a state of becoming. It is truly significant how well-mannered these children become, which is particularly evident during mealtimes, when they are led to the table and serve themselves, or when the food is passed by one of the children. What practical sense can achieve is shown, for example, by the fact that this, I would like to say extraordinarily homely, “feeding” of the children, during which one would like to eat along, costs 2 shillings 4 pence for the child during the week. Everything is extremely well organized. It was wonderful, for example, to see how the older children, who have been at the center for years, were called together and then presented us with a long scene from Shakespeare's “Midsummer Night's Dream,” the Midsummer Night's Dream, with real feeling and even a certain mastery of dramatic technique. There was something touchingly magnificent about the way these children performed it, expressively and impressively, with real inner control of the drama.

And this performance of Shakespeare's “Midsummer Night's Dream” was almost in the same place where Shakespeare himself once performed his plays for the court with his troupe. Because near Greenwich was the court of Queen Elizabeth. There, in the rooms where today's classrooms are located and other rooms, as I will explain in a moment, even the royal household of Queen Elizabeth lived, and Shakespeare, coming from London, had to perform his plays for the courtiers there. The children performed these Shakespeare plays for us at the same location.

And in the same area, connected to this educational mental hospital, is a children's clinic, again for the poorest of the poor. Every year, 6,000 children go through this clinic, not 6,000 at the same time, but every year. The head of this clinic is now also Miss MacMillan. So that in a very impoverished and polluted area, in a terrible area, a personality is working with full energy and actually great in the conception of what she is doing.

It was therefore a very deep satisfaction for me when Miss MacMillan expressed the intention, if at all possible, to visit our Waldorf School in Stuttgart with some of her colleagues at Christmas. This teaching staff is extraordinarily devoted. You can imagine that caring for such children, with the characteristics I have just described, is not exactly easy. It therefore filled me with great satisfaction that this particular person was the chairman for the Ilkley lectures, and then in Penmaenmawr – where she came again in the few days that she could bring herself to do so – she introduced a discussion on education in which Dr. von Baravalle and Dr. von Heydebrand spoke. So it was precisely what took place at Penmaenmawr and what was connected with it that was really quite satisfying.

The last part, so to speak, was the third part, which was the days in London. Dr. Wegman had come over for what was to be my first task in London. We were to present the method and essence of our anthroposophic medical efforts to a number of English doctors. Forty doctors were invited, and most of them appeared at Dr. Larkin's house. I was able to speak in two lectures, first about the special nature of our remedies in their connection with the symptoms and with the nature of the human being. And then in the second lecture I was able to give a physiological-pathological basis for the functions of the human being; then something about the mode of action of individual remedies, again in connection with this basis, the effects of the antimony remedy, the effects of mistletoe and so on – and I believe we can truly say that perhaps a fairly good understanding of the matter has been brought to bear, even in a wider circle, as evidenced by the fact that Dr. Wegman was consulted quite frequently. So this aspect of anthroposophical work has also come into its own.

The finale was a performance at the Royal Academy of Art, which was an extraordinary success. The room is not particularly large, but not only was it sold out, people also had to be turned away. The eurythmy was received with extraordinary enthusiasm. One could say of eurythmy that wherever it goes, it makes its way. If only it were not for the enormous obstacles that exist in the present time! On the one hand, when one sees all that is going on, for example, the tendency of the Ilkley enterprises to now have a kind of Waldorf School emerge in England, then one looks again with a great concern, which cannot leave one today, at what one, I would like to say, encounters as an indefinite, painful response when one asks oneself: What will become of the Waldorf school in the terribly endangered Germany, from which, for example, the school efforts have emerged? I say this not so much because of the pecuniary side of the matter, but because of the extremely endangered circumstances within Germany. There are some things that make you say: If things continue as they are now, it is hard to imagine where the efforts of the Waldorf School in particular will lead.

After all, if things continue as they are now, as they have arisen from what is currently happening, there will hardly be any possibility of bringing such things through the current turmoil without danger. Then one has a heavy heart when one sees how these things are happening after all, and how in fact today all things in the world happen out of shortsightedness and without any inkling that spiritual currents must play a part in the development of culture, and how in fact in the widest circles people have lost all direct interest, all hearty engagement with things. Basically, we are all asleep when it comes to things that go so terribly to the root of human and earthly becoming. Humanity is asleep. At most, one complains about the matter when it is of immediate concern. But things do not happen without the development of great ideas! And there is such a dullness in the world towards the impulses that are to strike: Either one does not want to hear about it, or one feels uncomfortable in the world when something like the endangered situation in Central Europe is pointed out. One feels uncomfortable, one does not like to talk about it, or one colors it in a certain way and speaks of insubstantial things, of guilt and the like. In this way one gets rid of these things. The way humanity relates to general world events today is something that can be terribly painful for the soul. This general cultural sleep, which is becoming more and more widespread, is basically something quite terribly lamentable. There is actually no awareness of how the earth today, in its civilization, forms a unity, even in the face of such elementary events – I do not want to talk about them here, but they have happened – such as the poignant Japanese tragedy brought about by nature. Yes, when one compares how people looked at these things relatively recently and how they look at them today, there is something that really does bring home to one again and again the necessity of pointing out how urgently humanity needs to wake up.

Of course, this is always in front of you, especially when you see what could become of it if people would take an interest, if people would come to take things as they are, if they would not take them in terms of national divisions, in terms of state divisions, but in a general human sense! When one sees on the one hand what could become of it, and when on the other hand one sees how it is almost impossible because of general lethargy, then this actually characterizes, I would say, our present age most of all. That is the way things are. One cannot speak of the one without the other also arising in the context.

I wanted to give you a kind of travelogue today, my dear friends. I will speak about questions of intellectual life, which are, of course, more distantly related and which are actually also anthroposophical in content, tomorrow, after this.

My lecture will take place tomorrow at 8 a.m.; on Tuesday at 8 a.m. there will be a eurythmy performance here.

The same. Johannes and Lucifer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Exit Johannes with Lucifer.)