The Rudolf Steiner Archive

There is a beautiful saying by Hegel: The most profound thought is bound up with the historical, external Figure of Christ. And the greatness of the Christian religion is that it is there for every stage of development. It is within the grasp of the most naive consciousness and at the same time it is a challenge to the deepest wisdom.

That the Christian religion is comprehensible to every stage of consciousness is shown by the very history of its development. Properly understood, it must be the task of Theosophy, or of Spiritual Science in general, to show that the Christian religion calls for penetration into the deepest Wisdom-teachings. Theosophy is not a religion, but an instrument for understanding the religions. Its relation to the religious documents is rather like the relation of mathematics itself to the writings in which it was originally taught. A man can understand mathematics through his own spiritual faculties and comprehend the laws of space without having to refer to any such early text. But if he has really absorbed the truths of geometry, he will value all the more highly the original texts through which these laws were first presented. So it is with Theosophy. Its sources are not in ancient documents, nor do they rest upon tradition; they lie in the reality of the spiritual worlds. It is there that they must be found and grasped by the development of a man's own spiritual powers, just as he grasps mathematics by endeavouring to develop the faculties of his intellect. Our intellect, by means of which we are enabled to comprehend the laws of the world of sense, is supported by an organ, the brain. Similarly, in order to grasp the laws of spiritual worlds, we need appropriate organs.

How have our physical organs developed? Because forces from outside have worked upon them: the forces of the Sun, the forces of sound. Thus did eyes and ears come into being - out of neutral, sluggish organs into which, at first, the sense-world could not penetrate, and which opened only by degrees. If our spiritual organs are worked upon by the right forces, they too will open.

What then are the forces which surge in upon our still inert spiritual organs? During the daytime, the astral body of modern man is assailed by forces that work against his development, and even destroy such organs as he formerly possessed before the dawn of his clear day-consciousness. In earlier times, man received direct astral impressions. The surrounding world spoke to him through pictures, through the form in which the astral world comes to expression. Living, inwardly organic pictures and colours hovered freely in surrounding space as expressions of pleasure and repugnance, sympathy and antipathy. Then these colours wrapped themselves, as it were, round the surface of things, and objects acquired fixed outlines. This was when the physical body of man was steadily gaining in solidity and becoming more highly organized. When his eyes opened fully to the physical light, when the veil of Maya spread itself over the spiritual world, his astral body received impressions of the surrounding world by way of the physical and etheric bodies. The astral body itself transmitted these impressions to the `I' and from the `I' they passed into his consciousness. Thus he was personally involved and continuously active. But the forces working upon him were no longer plastic, weaving forces akin to the nature of his own being; they were forces that fed upon him, destroyed him, in order to awaken the I- consciousness. Only in the night, when he sank down into the rhythmic- spiritual world homogeneous with him, did he acquire new strength and become able once more to feed forces into his physical and etheric bodies. Out of this conflict of impressions, out of the deadening of the astral organs formerly working unconsciously in man, the life of the individual `I', the I-consciousness, arose. Out of life-death; out of death- life. The ring of the serpent was complete. And now from this wakened I- consciousness there had to arise forces that would kindle life again in the defunct vestiges of earlier astral organs, shaping and moulding them.

Mankind is moving towards this goal, guided by its Teachers and Leaders, the great Initiates, of whom the serpent is also the symbol. It is an education towards freedom, hence a slow and difficult education. The great Initiates could have made the task easier, for themselves and for man, if they had worked upon his astral body during the night, when it is free, in such a way as to impress the astral organs into it from outside. But such an act would have operated in man's dream-consciousness; it would have trespassed on his sphere of freedom. The highest principle in man, the Will, would never have unfolded. Man is led onward stage by stage. There has been an Initiation in Wisdom, an Initiation in Feeling, an Initiation in Will. True Christianity is the summation of all stages of Initiation. The Initiation of antiquity was the prophetic announcement, the preparation. Slowly and gradually the man of later times emancipated himself from his Initiator, his Guru. Initiation, to begin with, proceeded in deep trance-consciousness, but was equipped to imprint in the physical body a remembrance of what had transpired outside the body. Hence the necessity of releasing the ether-body, the bearer of memory, as well as the astral body. Astral body and ether-body sank together into the Ocean of Wisdom, into Mahadeva, into the Light of Osiris. This Initiation proceeded in deepest secrecy, in absolute seclusion. No breath from the outer world might intrude. The man was as if he had died to outer life, and the tender seeds were nurtured away from the blinding light of day.

Then Initiation came forth from the darkness enshrouding the Mysteries into the clearest light of day. In a great and mighty Personality, the Bearer of the highest unifying Principle, of the Word - of Him who is the expression and manifestation of the hidden Father, and who taking on human form became the Son of Man and thereby the Representative of all mankind, the Bond uniting all I's - in Christos, the Life-Spirit, the Eternal Unifier, the Initiation of mankind as a whole was accomplished, as historical fact and at the same time as symbol, on the plane of feeling. So potent was this Event that in every individual who modelled his life on it, its power could continue to work - right into the physical, expressing itself even in the appearance of the stigmata and in the most piercing pains. Feelings were shaken to their innermost depths. An intensity of emotion, the like of which has never surged through the world before or since, arose in mighty waves. In the Initiation on the Cross of Divine Love the sacrifice of the `I' for All had taken place. The blood, the physical expression of the `I' had flowed in love for mankind, and the effect was such that thousands pressed forward to this Initiation, to this Death, letting their blood flow in love and devotion for mankind. That blood untold was poured out in this way has never been sufficiently emphasized; the thought no longer enters the consciousness of men, not even in theosophical circles. Yet the waves of ardour which in this streaming blood flowed down, and then ascended, have fulfilled their task. They have become the wellsprings of powerful impulses. They have made mankind ripe for the Initiation of the Will.

And this is the legacy of Christ.

One who begins an esoteric training will, of course, try to get into higher worlds, but most people anticipate something different from what often happens there. Many think that the visionary life that must also begin is the most desirable thing, but an experience of this isn't the main thing; the important thing is a certain soul attitude. As soon as an esoteric training has begun, the soul changes under the influence of exercise that are given to an esoteric in accordance with his individuality. And then the main thing is to pay attention to such a soul attitude in the finest and subtlest way.

After the meditation, a meditator must let complete quiet enter his soul. At first the meditation still plays into his soul like a tone that slowly subsides. Then this too must disappear from the soul. The latter must become entirely empty for the reception of spiritual worlds. Practice this with patience and perseverance. One must remain quiet even if one experiences nothing for a long time. One must be glad that one succeeds in being quiet.

Without knowing it at first, one can experience something in such moments that are the most productive for development One can have the feeling: I just experienced something. It can appear as a mere dream, but experiences can also approach an esoteric in another way. On getting up in the morn and beginning our daily tasks it may happen that we suddenly have the feeling: I experienced something now. We should pay greater attention to these moments, for after awhile, another feeling will be added; we feel: You didn't think this thought yourself. It seemed to flit by and it was forgotten right away again, but it was there, we experienced it. Such an experience is very important. We should direct our attention to it ever more. For at this moment, our ordinary ego didn't think—what thought was the divine thinking that passes through all ages and eternities. It thinks me—the great world thinking, thinks me. This is expressed exoterically as: Within your thinking, cosmic thoughts hold sway. Esoterically one says: It thinks me. So when you let this mantric verse pass through your soul often, it has a very strengthening effect on it; this can happen right after meditation or at any spare moment while you're walking or standing One must fill the soul completely with thee words and feel the greatest piety. An esoteric should make it his business never to say, “It thinks me” as a mere sentence. There's another sentence we can use in the same way. Here we first have to look back at ourself. Most people don't understand why blows of destiny hit them. An esoteric should always keep the karma idea in mind. It's really so that we are to blame for everything that hit us. If we let this thought live in us, we gradually get to the point where we grasp karma, that we become aware of the connections that exist between the divine spiritual world and us, and of how our destiny, our karma is wrought out of these sub-depths. For this we have the second mantric sentence that should live in our soul in the same way as the first one: It works me; exoterically expressed: World beings work in your will. As we let the words of this second sentence pass through our soul, we should feel the holiest awe and reverence, the deepest devotion. There's also a third sentence. If we let this work on us, we can gradually get to the point where we feel the weaving of the divine hierarchies of higher worlds on our soul body. It weaves me. That's the content of the third mantric sentence, which we should let work upon our soul in the same way as the first two. With this sentence, we should feel the greatest thankfulness towards great, sublime spiritual powers. The exoteric expression of this sentence is: World forces weave in your feeling.

For instance, in the exercise: I rest in the Godhead of the world , we should feel the divine I and not the personal one. Of course, we can't exclude the word “I,” but it's the higher, expanded I that should be felt here. The personal ego with which we live in the physical body must cease at death and pass over into the higher I. It dies into the world ego: I C M.

Another feeling we must have is one of powerlessness with respect to divine, spiritual worlds. We can't preserve our physical body overnight during sleep, can't keep it from deteriorating. Divine, spiritual beings do this for us. On awakening, we come back into the physical body from the spiritual worlds from which we arose; spiritual forces maintain and form us: E D N. To experience E D N in the right way, we must fill ourselves with the thought that everything that we are in thinking, feeling and willing is given to us by the Godhead: it thinks us, it weaves us, it works us—we are born from it: Ex Deo nascimur.

We have darkened this divine soul nature in us during our life through the incarnations. We've surrounded ourselves with a world of visions that come from our being and not from primal, divine beings. Through esoteric life we must press through to the point where when we get into the spiritual world through death's portal, we've freed ourselves of this darkening that has enveloped our whole being like a visionary cloud.

If we've been successful in this, then after death we'll become united with the spirituality, the Christ, that flows through our cosmos. We die into the Christ, I C M—and thereby we're enabled to suck up pure cosmic forces to build up a purer corporeality for the next incarnation.

Our body is given to us from nature's forces; we suck these Father forces into our being; we come to the Father through the Christ: “I and the Father are One. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

We're helped to go on this path through the connection with the spiritual worlds that we can already find in physical life through esoteric life and thereby take the spiritual stream that flows towards us out of spiritual worlds into our intellect and our morality—and that is the Holy Spirit. P S S R.

It thinks me: the descent of the spiritual archetype from the Father forces behind the Zodiac.

It works me: die into Christ's etheric body that embraces the zodiac and in

It weaves me: receive the new thing that's given to us by Christ from the Father forces.

Verse for Thursday. My dear sisters and brothers! To protect ourselves against the raids of Lucifer and Ahriman we must know them and learn to distinguish between them. Lucifer is in mystical esoterics such as we find in Meister Eckhart, Ruysbroek, Tauler and Suso. Lucifer is in this pure devotion to the divine, in this pure, noble striving towards the spiritual in a good way, and one can say that he was pious in the souls of these mystics.

But as soon as a personal note flows into this pure striving and this devotion, as soon as a mystic would enjoy this, it would amount to a luciferic infringement. We must watch that nothing like this comes into our striving. It's relatively easy to be wakeful in mystical immersion, but more difficult in visionary perception. Lucifer is in this too. He puts all kinds of illusions before a mystic that are hard to distinguish from real visions. Something subjective gets mixed into all vision, for instance, someone sees certain apparitions, deceptive figures or the like repeatedly. One has to direct one's attention to this. One must be wakeful here also. If one sees eyes or faces or if one imagines them one isn't exposed to error as easily; one thereby gets the strength to ward off Lucifer. It's no reproach to say that bad qualities live in man's subconsciousness; they must be there, it's something that goes with earth life. A man may already have attained a certain degree of holiness, and yet drives are slumbering in his subconsciousness that would horrify him if he saw them. The greatest watchfulness and wakefulness must hold sway here also.

Lucifer is at work in all emotional and visionary things, in mystical immersion, also in all enthusiasm and in artistic activity, in what an artist creates and in what creates in the artist.

Some materialists may only express themselves in material things outwardly. Then if one has the good fortune to look into their souls one finds a deep religious striving, a longing for the divine. Lucifer is the instigator here also.

Ahriman works in everything that has to do with the will. He approaches us in everything that becomes manifest as gesture in words or writing, in everything that appears as mediumistic writing, whether it's acquired or natural, or if one feels compelled to write something. Whereas Lucifer brings about appearances of figures, heads of light, etc., that are created by a medium. If one feels that one is forced to write something one can counteract this by stopping and by not giving in to the inspirations that one thinks that one is feeling or perceiving; one opposes these whisperings with the firm will not to follow them. One acquires undreamed of forces in occult life through this effort of the will.

Ahriman is in what we say, in words that we form and transmit to other men. As soon as the ear hears sounds, the larynx emits sounds and words are put into writing Ahriman comes and hardens the sound, word or writing. That's why it's important to strengthen the soul and to check one's thoughts in the most subtle way.

Swedenborg's visions, dreams and world view are permeated with Ahriman and so is what Kant took from Swedenborg's writings.

People keep on asking: Should I think that what I see, hear or feel there is of importance? Is it true? Certainly one should attach importance to it, certainly it's true, every little thing in occult life is important and is true. The main thing is to know what's behind it. We should pay great attention to everything and watch and be awake. And we should acquire a certain tact so that we don't chatter about such experiences. One should try to find out whether Lucifer or Ahriman is at work in them. Something that can often happen to us is that as we're walking down the street we see someone in a vision and then a few minutes later we actually run into him. When we have this premonition of his coming we may have something to tell him, so we speed up our steps in order not to miss him. But this isn't permissible; we shouldn't use occult abilities for our own advantage in physical life.

If spiritists conjure up Goethe's spirit and thereby want to prove the soul's immortality, since they think that it's the soul as it's living now, then this might not be the case. It could be Goethe's soul as it was in say 1819 and that Lucifer is creating an illusion here. One has to press forward to Goethe's real soul, which has progressed, and then one has a real proof of immortality.

People often approach esoteric exercises with much frivolity. Some start to do them but soon stop due to laziness, half-heartedness, etc. But what breathing is for the body, meditations are for the soul. If one would stop breathing Ahriman would immediately intervene as the master of death. A soul must get to the point where it doesn't have to force itself to do meditations; it shouldn't want to live without them. One shouldn't wish and yearn to press into spiritual worlds before the soul is sufficiently strengthened. Quiet and peacefulness in the soul is the main condition. That's the only way that the soul can become strong enough to find the middle path between Lucifer and Ahriman.

That's very difficult, my dear sisters and brothers. But then we must remember what's said at the beginning of John's Gospel and later in chapter 8:12-14. When we stand in the tumult and chaos of the spiritual world and visions and figures come from all sides and we don't know how to get in or out and are torn this way and that, then we should place

In the beginning was the word

before our souls, or

I am the light of the world. He who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.

Then everything will dissipate and we'll be able to see what's right and true. We should repeatedly place the rosicrucian formula

EDN
ICM
PSSR

before us in this sense. And also we will be increasingly able to find the right thing on this difficult path if we think of the simple but profound verse with which our esoteric lessons are closed: In the spirit lay the germ of my body ...

There is a beautiful saying of Hegel's: The deepest thought is connected with the figure of Christ, the historical and external one. And the great thing about the Christian religion is that it is there for every level of education. It can grasp the most naive consciousness and at the same time it is an invitation to the deepest wisdom.

That the Christian religion is comprehensible for every level of consciousness has already been taught by the history of its development. To show that it calls for penetration into the deepest wisdom teachings of humanity in general must be the task of the theosophical school of thought - or of spiritual science in general, if it understands its task. Theosophy is not a religion, but a tool for understanding religions. It relates to religious documents in the same way that mathematical teaching relates to documents that have appeared as mathematical textbooks.

You can understand mathematics through your own mental powers, you can see the laws of space without regard to that old book. But once you have seen them and absorbed the geometric teachings, you will appreciate all the more this old book, which was the first to present these laws to the human mind. This is the case with Theosophy. Its sources [are not in the records, are not based on tradition. Its sources] are in the real spiritual worlds; there one has to find them and grasp them by developing one's own spiritual powers, as one grasps mathematics by seeking to develop the powers of one's intellect.

Our intellect, which serves us to grasp the laws of the sensory world, is carried by an organ, the brain. To grasp the laws of spiritual worlds, we also need appropriate organs. How have our physical organs developed? Through the agency of external forces: the forces of the sun, the forces of sound. Thus the eye came into being, and so did the ear - from neutral dull organs that initially did not allow the penetration of the sensory world and only opened slowly. In the same way, our spiritual organs will open when the right forces work on them.

What, then, are the forces that are now assailing our still dull spiritual organs? During the day, such forces penetrate the astral body of modern man that work against his development, that even kill those organs that he had before the bright consciousness of day had not yet opened up to him. In the past, man perceived astral impressions directly. The world around him spoke to him through images, through the expression of the astral world. Vivid, structured images, colors floated freely in space as expressions of pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and antipathy. Then these colors enveloped the surface of things, as it were, and the objects took on firm contours. That was when man's physical body became more and more solid and structured.

When his eyes opened fully to physical light, when the veil of Maya lay over the spiritual world, the astral body of the human being received impressions of the environment through the physical and etheric bodies, and then transmitted them to the ego, from where they entered the consciousness of the person. He was thus constantly occupied, constantly active. But what worked on him in this way were not plastic, malleable forces, corresponding to his own nature. They were forces that consumed him, killed him, in order to awaken his sense of self.

Only at night, when he immersed himself in the homogeneous, rhythmic spiritual world, did he regain his strength and was he able to restore strength to his physical and etheric bodies. From the conflict of impressions, from the death of the astral organs that used to work unconsciously in man, the life of the individual ego, the ego consciousness, had emerged. From life to death, from death to life. The serpent's circle was closed. Now, out of this awakened self-awareness, the forces had to come that rekindled life in the dead remains of earlier astral organs, forming them plastically.

It is towards this goal that humanity is moving, and it is being guided towards it by its teachers, its leaders, the great initiates, whose symbol is also the serpent. It is an education towards freedom, therefore a slow and difficult one. The great initiates could, so to speak, make the task easier for themselves and for people if they worked on the astral body at night, when it is free, so that they could imprint the astral organs on it, working on it from the outside. But that would then be an influence within the dream consciousness of the person, an intervention in his sphere of freedom. The highest principle of man, the will, would never come to fruition.

Man is led step by step. There has been an initiation in wisdom, one in mind, one in will. Genuine Christianity is the sum of all stages of initiation. The initiation of antiquity was the prediction, the preparation. Slowly and gradually, the newer man emancipated himself from his initiator, his guru. The initiation took place first in full trance consciousness, but equipped with the means to imprint into the physical body the memory of what had happened outside the physical body. Therefore, there was the necessity to also release the etheric body, the carrier of memory, together with the astral. Both plunged into the sea of wisdom, into Mahadeva, into the light of Osiris. This initiation took place in the deepest secret, in complete seclusion. No breath of the outside world was allowed to intrude. The human being was as dead to the outer life, the delicate germs were cultivated away from the blinding light of day.

Then the initiation emerged from the darkness of the mysteries into the brightest light of day. In a great, powerful personality, the bearer of the highest unifying principle, the word that expresses the hidden Father, that is His manifestation, that, by taking human form, therefore became the Son of Man and could represent all humanity, [a] unifying bond of all “I”s: In Christ, the Spirit of Life, the Eternal Unifier, the initiation of all humanity took place historically - at the same time symbolically - at the level of feeling, of the mind. This event was so powerful that it was able to have an effect on each individual who experienced it, even physically, to the extent of the appearance of the stigmata, to the point of causing intense pain. And all the depths of feeling were shaken up. An intensity of feeling arose that has never before flooded the world in such mighty waves.

In the initiation on the cross of divine love, the sacrifice of the self for all had taken place. The physical expression of the self, the blood, had flowed in love for humanity and worked in such a way that thousands pushed themselves to this initiation, to this death and let their blood flow in love, in enthusiasm for humanity. How much blood has been poured out in this way has never been emphasized enough, and people no longer realize it, not even in theosophical circles. But the waves of enthusiasm that flowed down in this pouring out of blood and rose up have done their work. They have become powerful sources of inspiration. They have matured man for the initiation of the will.

And this is the legacy of the Christ.

Let us take the standpoint of the universe and look at the world from the point of view of consciousness, life and being, or vice versa. Here, too, we have to distinguish between body, soul and spirit. Body would correspond to being, soul to life, spirit to consciousness. This also gives us a trinity.

If we take the body in a cosmic sense, Indian philosophy calls this Adi-Buddha = All-Body. Christian esotericism refers to the same thing as Kyriotetes - Empire. Indian philosophy refers to the All-Soul as Adi-Atma. Christian esotericism calls the same Dynamis-Power. Then All-Spirit: Indian AdiDeva, Christian esoteric: Exusiai - Revelation or Violence. So that from the standpoint of the microcosm we have to distinguish:

The gods circle the axis/staff 7x7 times, and the seven circles are the seven realms. However, each time the gods circle around, they move up one step, so that in the present mineral realm man is ruled by the light gods, but in the mineral realm of the next round he is already ruled by the power gods.

In all three, we have to distinguish seven levels, seven regions of the Adi-Buddha, then of the Adi-Atman - seven levels of living consciousness. - In the case of Adi-Deva, we also have to distinguish seven levels.

The 'day consciousness' reveals itself in the fourth round of the earth in the mineral kingdom, and from the outside the forces of light reveal themselves.

So, if we look at the three-part world from the point of view of the universe, we have bright day consciousness inside the mineral kingdom. When we look at the body, we see that it [gap in transcript] and what manifests itself in it are the forces of light.

When the light reveals itself on the physical plane, darkness must reveal itself with it, because the counter-forces of the realm oppose it and cause cloudiness.

On the plane of deception, the forces cannot reveal themselves other than in the twilight, so that the forces of darkness are necessarily opposed to the forces of light.

If we look at the formation of the Earth from this point of view, the forces of light and thus those of darkness are revealed first. Let us first consider the forces of light: Elohim.

Now, as one kind of force reveals itself, the earth passes through all the kingdoms: the first, the second and the third elemental kingdom, the mineral, the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom.

Adi-Atma goes through seven stages, and these are called “planetary developments” or “chains.

In each of these realms, seven stages are passed through. In each

round, seven globes again; these are the forces. An Atman has to go through 343 cycles to reach its goal.

7 x 7 - 7 stages of consciousness, 7 rounds, in each 7 globes.
Planetary development
Round development
Globe development
The forces of warmth used to be outside us, now they are within us.
1. The soul reaches 7 levels of consciousness. Each level of consciousness is called a “planetary chain”.
2. At each level of consciousness, the soul passes through all 7 realms - Buddhas. Each realm is called a 'round'. 3. In each round, one of the 7 different devas rules. Each type of deva government is a 'globe' or a 'planet'.

In Christian scriptures, the devas are called “angels of the ages”. The humans themselves are manifestations of the soul of the world in the mineral kingdom.

Before, before our earth came to the point of view that the Elohim revealed themselves on it, it was surrounded by a sea of warmth. Then we had an organ, the pineal gland, outgrown, it was also the one eye of the Cyclops; they were the people of fire. A great eye of warmth, with which he would swim around in this sea, which was then the earth, and perceive everywhere. That was the globe of warmth. Even earlier the globe of ether and before that the globe that was only life.

Returning to this state, we would arrive at the third round. During the third round, the various powers would appear seven times. Powers of warmth in the mineral kingdom. During the previous second round, the powers of fire ruled in the mineral kingdom.

1. The Arupa-Devas rule during the first round in the mineral kingdom.
2. The Rupa-, fire-Devas rule during the second round in the mineral kingdom.
3. The astral-Devas or warmth-spirits rule during the third round in the mineral kingdom.
4. The light-spirits rule during the fourth round in the mineral kingdom.
5. The Power Spirits rule during the fifth round in the mineral kingdom.
6. The Creative Spirits rule during the sixth round in the mineral kingdom.
7. The Divine Spirits rule during the seventh round in the mineral kingdom.

If we follow this, we have: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth” - Arupa-Devas emerged.

“The Earth was formless and empty” - It continues to develop from globe to globe.

“God separated the light from the darkness and called the light Day and the darkness Night.”

Description of the first round. The first round is the first day of creation; darkness is pralaya, which now passes over to the second round.

After the light spirits, the power spirits rule in the second round, and they are to pass over to the next round. “Then God made the firmament.”

When the third round is over, it dismisses its deities as creating spirits. The fourth round will dismiss godly spirits. Exactly the same as before, but now evolved. The fourth round is described in the Bible accordingly:

“Let lights be made” - light spirits, exusiai, elohim.

The fifth, sixth and seventh days represent the future.

How does evolution take place? One has a sum of circles of existence that are internalized later. This is the case throughout the universe.

Let us now consider the development of man. His physical body is fully developed in the present race. But the astral body of man is at present in an undeveloped period. It must develop to the point where it has sensory organs, like the physical body. These sensory organs, which will allow man to live consciously on the astral plane, are called chakras. These are in the appendix today. One sits above the larynx and is called the sixteen-petalled lotus flower because of its shape. It is formed by the person speaking today. An organ on the higher plane arises from an activity on the lower plane. This is also referred to in the third verse of 'Licht auf den Weg'. This is a guide. All those words that contain criticism, judgment, rejection, and barbs directed outwards do not contribute to setting the wheel in motion. So only selfless speech can make this organ effective on the higher plane. So that it is not asceticism, withdrawal from the physical plane, that makes the theosophist, but working on it. When our service becomes sacrifice, the two-petalled lotus blossom on the forehead is set in motion.

Everything that is, is the result of activity or karma. — How did eyes come about? Man had to carry out an activity that led to the formation of the eyes. The now rudimentary pineal gland was a kind of heat organ, like a mobile eye, when the bodies were not yet glowing and man moved in a mist of fire. He used it to probe the environment and could perceive temperature differences in a wide circle. The result of this perception is the perception of such bodies that glow when heated. Then this organ receded and the two eyes formed as a result. The Cyclops saga is a reminder of this.

It is clear to us how grandiose the metamorphoses are that man has undergone: they must take place in such a way that the outer formation of form becomes inner strength.

We are in the fourth round. When man came over from the moon, he was generally Moon Pitri. He had brought dream consciousness to its highest development. This was unable to perceive an object that was outside. Such an object was not even there. For that to happen, one object would have had to be opposite the other. The first three rounds were such that everything was internal, man was secluded within himself. The Pitris carried all available matter within themselves, there were only humans. If man had kept the mineral kingdom within himself, he would never have developed. Therefore, he had to put it out of himself. In the first round, he separates everything he cannot use out of himself; by leaving behind a lower being, he rises up. That is a deep law of occultism.

During the second round, he populates his earth with the plant kingdom; during the third round, he leaves behind everything that is cold-blooded. Now that sleeps over into the fourth round as a germ. He goes through the arupa, rupa and astral state and enters the thinnest physicality. As he is, he could not become intelligent, he still has to shed one thing, and these are the warm-blooded animals, they are, so to speak, decadent, stunted people.

By the middle of the Lemurian period, development had progressed to the point where the following could occur. Until then, a being could emerge from another being; sexual reproduction did not exist. Back then, when all beings reproduced asexually, the earth was in a completely different state. Everything that was solid mass was dissolved at that time, liquid element. The change brought about what we call sexual reproduction. Sexuality is connected with hardening; one being could no longer produce another on its own, so even molluscs had to adapt to the new conditions.

How did sexuality arise? A measure of strength -<1> let's call it that — was necessary to bring forth a new being. This is not possible through hardening. 1 is split into 2, half of the force goes into reproduction, the other half is split off. One half condenses into the brain, becomes spiritual, and is thus ennobled reproductive force, the other half becomes more brutal as a result. These are the two poles.

The split-off power, the spiritual, could be fertilized by Manas and became the carrier of Manas. That is why symbols were taken from the sexual to symbolize the highest. When later races came, the pure symbols were misunderstood and also led to excesses. Material science, which only starts from the physical plan, has only seen this.

This spiritual power, before it reached the phase where we are today, went through many phases. At first, the imagination was much more imbued with full sensual ideas; it was not yet diluted enough to live as memory, and it had magical power, could have a reproducing effect with appropriate training. The merely sensual part of man was hardened in a rough way, and then the productive power took effect. He had to give this up to the extent that he developed higher. The memory was what developed during the Atlantean period, and the power of reason during the Aryan race. Thus, power waned at the expense of refinement.

The purpose of evolution is that a higher level develops while a lower one is left behind. Thus we have left behind the wild peoples from whom, erroneously, the cultural history derives us.

Now, after the higher animal kingdom has been rejected, we are in the middle of the fourth round. Man must gradually take up again everything he has previously rejected; he must redeem everything. In the astral state he will be able to do so. The entire extended higher animal kingdom consists of the passions that man has externalized. With the more powerful organs of the developed, purified astral body, he can take up the externalized power again and use it to elevate himself. That is the development of the three future globes. So that when our development is complete, the higher animal kingdom, which has a mineral structure, will no longer be; the whole mineral kingdom will be absorbed.

So during the fifth round, only the plant kingdom, the lower animal kingdom and man himself are there. He now absorbs the plant kingdom and the higher part of the lower animal kingdom. It is a different physical state, the mineral kingdom will not be, but the plant will have an even denser physical state. There is no volatilization into the ether, but a physicalization of the plant. It will be a growing skeleton with secretions of a plant-like nature. Certain substances that are still air today will be water in which germs can swell.

When the sixth round begins, only the animal kingdom will be there, and that will be the advanced, now lower, forms, and man. The animal kingdom will be absorbed. And in the seventh round, man will reach Godlikeness. God rests on the seventh day. Man is creator and develops to that maturity which is necessary to start a new development.

At that time, a mineral kingdom, a plant kingdom, and an animal kingdom had already developed. The animal kingdom extended up to man. This is, after all, a product of the earth. The kingdoms at that time were quite different from those of today.

The mineral kingdom still had an immediate life in itself. The moon was, so to speak, like a fruit in the physical state, a fruit full of juice. The firm shell inside, and outside the fruit parts, merge into the spiritual atmosphere. The firm shell was physical matter. The fruit, the mineral kingdom of the moon, grew mightily from the outside; juicy, abundant fertility of crystals and so on. The Egyptians spoke of the fertile and abundant Isis in this context.

The second was the plant kingdom, which grew like lush vegetation and differed only slightly from the growing crystals. The plants stretched their aerial roots out into this soft watery mass of the surrounding area, jelly-like with dissolved Kama in it. In the roots that the plant world extended, it not only absorbed air and light, but also Kama, which was dissolved in the dense air; so they had sensation, but not special sensation, but that of general life. Our Venus flytrap is still something of a memory. The earth had a general sentient life, and the plants were its organs.

The animal world was not yet as low as our present animal world, but essentially related to the surrounding Kama element, floating and only occasionally groping, like water people very much related to their surroundings; hence this dull dream-like consciousness, which does not lead them to say “I” to themselves. The dreamy man of the moon had an excellent perception of the astral. Our present seawater is a dilution of the jelly water of that time. But since the water is still related to the astral, even if not directly mixed as it was then, seafarers have justified visionary insights; the rejection of these is more superstition than recognition.

These beings could not yet say 'I' to themselves; the 'I's floated as mere thoughts in the surrounding sea of wisdom.

So we have: inside, a solid crust of vegetative metal and stone; then vegetation endowed with sensation; a layer of wisdom not yet condensed to the point of air, in which the 'I's lived. These were still to take embodiment on Earth itself. That is why the moon is also called the cosmos of wisdom. This layer of wisdom is cher a sphere that permeates everything, permeated with threads, and at the intersections something like a knot arises, that is an ego.

Thoughts run through the entire sphere, like a collective nervous system, a manasic network. This was the wisdom-filled process by which all intellectual activity on the moon took place. Like electric filaments without the wire mesh; this is “Fohav – the relationship of our thought to electricity, illegible]

They have basically the whole tetrad of man as the three lower kingdoms, but the lowest has not yet moved to the hard minerality. For the threads to be torn, it was necessary for the jelly mass to move to its outermost boundary. Man is nothing but the piece of nervous system torn out by hardening.

This moon vegetation and moon animal nature is much more glorious for external observation. For this animal nature is completely chaste, everything is regulated by the common manas, and they relate only through wisdom.

When the earth was created, we must imagine that each kingdom descended by one stage:

- The mineral loses life.
- The plant loses sensation.
- The animal loses manas.

But the Iche advance and surround themselves with the now physical earth matter. So that the Iche really go through all three states, which they have ruled from the outside. Now man has a mineral body, in the next round a plant body, in the sixth round an animal body.

What we have described as the lunar form was thus in the third round of the moon, because that was the actual state that mattered for the moon – as was the fourth round for the earth. Later, it flooded and absorbed the realms it had formed. So that they were in the plant, but as if they had shot into the germ. And on earth, man draws the life out of the mineral and leaves it as dead rock. From this, he forms his bone system in the fourth round; he was able to crystallize this out as the basis of his own life, leaving that of the mineral kingdom behind, lifeless – Adam and Eve, the Persian myth, Deucalion and Pyrrha.

Because the second round of plants is deprived of sensation, man formed his sentient muscle system. And because animals are deprived of general wisdom, he formed his special manas - and left animal nature without wisdom.

During the flooding of the moon round, the hardenings start to prepare themselves externally. The whole soft stone material forms skins around itself, the plants an epidermis, the animals even skins with bristles. So everything has the tendency to form covers, it is a cover-forming development.

If we imagine that the beings we have come to know as Lucifers delimit creation, being special, and form shells there on the moon, we see that they are thus the creators of being special and of freedom; and they naturally have the tendency to to form shells, so that when they emerge on earth, they are the creators of animals that are endowed with an external skeleton, and in the plant kingdom, of those that are not rooted in the earth but in the life element itself, such as mistletoe, the parasite plants.

During the first development of the Earth, all our animals were soft, but they have the tendency to create something solid inside, while on the moon, something solid was created on the outside.

If the moon spirits had continued their work, they would have created an earth that brings everything that exists in terms of wisdom and love and power to the outside in a wonderful work of art. A magnificent marble work would have been created. We owe the fact that art now exists on earth, that a part of it could be wrested from people, to the Luciferian principle.

turn of the vortex, when the earth had come so far that it began to harden. Lucifer is the god of external heroism, of beauty, of outer wisdom; he has still wrested it for humanity. Hence the contrast between mystical internalization and outer sense of beauty. This contrast can only be overcome at a very high level. Then the mystic loves life in beauty. The Theosophical Society must become more and more life-friendly because it is meant to spiritualize life, not alienate it from life.

This separation into male and female must be understood in such a way that it had much more significance at the beginning of the Lemurian race than later, when the characters of the male and female were more neutralized. The matter is more profound and is connected with the whole evolution. The two sexes are preceded by a bisexual humanity, in which each individual has both within himself; a hermaphroditic humanity. The oldest gods were always described as having two sexes. We still find it with the ancient Greeks. In the mystery temples there were only hermaphroditic figures. Even the Bible itself still contains a certain awareness of this, in that it suggests the separation of the sexes as the emergence of the two sexes from the bisexual. This is even more evident in the Persian myth.

At the time of the separation, all the powers of the human being were still more magical and direct than they are now, so that after the separation we find in the being two powers, separated into man and woman, still magical powers of soul. Those of the masculine must be described as powers more related to the will, and those of the feminine as powers related to the mind and memory. Thus mankind is divided. In Sanskrit, Iccha Shakti is the power more akin to the masculine; Kriya Shakti, that more akin to the feminine. Both powers are not present at all in the original form, in that in further development the female emotional power has become more similar to the male willpower.

The hermaphroditic humanity was the vehicle of the very first and most highly evolved Pitris, who were not yet able to incarnate into these gendered races, and therefore had the forces in physical bodies to express the human being in a dual way. These are the great Sons of the Fire Nebula, the Arhats. The best known is Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian. You see that these first Arhats grasped the moment when they had a humanity that could achieve the highest, because with the division into male and female, only a one-sided incarnation was possible, and this one-sided incarnation also had the effect that at first a part of the incarnating mature dhyanic natures did not incarnate at all. Only a part – but this was from the outset thrust into a strong one-sided development of humanity, because they could only see half of humanity – was dependent on the leading world powers. It is therefore not surprising that the advanced Pitris refused to incarnate. The consequence was a lower level of humanity next to the Arhats. Now the separation of the human animal and the animal human also arose. The difference was not very great, and the consequence was that humans and animals lived together, that they had sexual intercourse. Thus a certain stretch was continued, which would have come if no manasic fertilization had occurred.

What essentially occurred was a deterioration of the low human nature. Thus there was no karma for the Arhats.

Only now, because human nature has developed further, was it necessary to bring it higher again. Only in the middle of the sixth root race will humanity be as highly developed as the arhats were at that time, but with the passage through karma. What will be the difference? That the great hermaphrodites were perfect when these human beings reached the summit. But perfect under the direct guidance of God, led by the gods themselves. What comes from these arhats is therefore sacred. What they lack, however, is freedom. It is impossible for them to do evil. The purely humanly created arhats, without the intervention of supernatural powers, have overcome the freedom to do evil through their own strength.

What has humanity achieved then? It has absorbed the remaining individuals from the moon, redeemed the luciferic beings. And from this follows that great truth of the kinship of the higher nature of Lucifer with the lower nature of humanity.

This truth, that the development of humanity through karma has to be redeemed with the help of humanity, is the basis of Manichaeism, from which sects have always developed since then. These know that people now have to overcome evil through good in order to redeem it. There were sects of Cathars and Waldensians who directly called themselves . The sects are often systematic foundations of initiates, after they can work in the next incarnation in a much more conscious way among people.

That is the whole purpose of the development through the Lemurian, Atlantean and Aryan root races. Nothing else is karma than humanity's descent by a step lower than foreseen in the plan of human destiny - to redeem Lucifer, who therefore gave freedom to people.

In the male, the will was developed preferentially; it was more of a natural force in the soul. This was initially under the influence of the great hermaphrodites; and it was strictly forbidden for the feminine to participate in cultic acts. By contrast, the soul power developed in the feminine, and if we consider that Lucifer works on the soul through the detour of the humanly inferior, then woman was called upon to absorb the influence of the Luciferian principle.

And so humanity is divided between the male nature, which tends towards the strengthening of willpower, and the female nature, which tends towards the thoughtful contemplation of the soul. Through the cruel education of boys, the carnal was killed and the iccha-shakti power was released, which is akin to the rhythmic movements of the universe. Of all this, the calendar is now only a decadent memory.

The female education was more concerned with absorbing the whole meaning of the surrounding nature with the soul. Man was almost systematically made into a microcosm at that time. In a kind of somnambulistic dreams, she absorbed nature, all the plastic power, Kriya-Shakti, was there and had an immense effect on the offspring. The masculine and feminine gradually neutralized each other.

Thus we see that what religion is, namely a free worship of the divine, came into being under the influence of woman. The men seemed more like divine powers. [...]

Cain went into foreign lands and took a wife. This is meant to indicate that he took a female from the bisexual being at all. Cain mixed with something that was already a foreign sex. Adam “recognized his femininity, not another being, self-fertilization, that is how Abel came into being - and of course, Cain as well. Gradually, a contrast emerged between the general human race and that small group that was destined to merge into the Atlantean race. This was, of course, under the influence of women with a tendency towards free religious practice, singing, dancing - a kind of Dionysian cult. The men were fertilized by this soul element of the woman, while the soul element is fertilized by the will element of the man and thus neutralized; hence the striving of human nature towards something higher is always symbolized as a woman.

This is how humanity lived at the beginning of the Atlantean race. Only then was the Luciferic principle so strong that in the fourth sub-race it became seduction through black magic, and we have a kind of derailment of humanity.

[ 1 ] The significance of the Mysteries in the spiritual life of Greece can be seen in Plato's conception of the world. There is only one means of understanding him fully: he must be placed in the light which shines forth from the Mysteries. The later pupils of Plato, the Neoplatonists, attribute to him a secret teaching, to which he admitted only those who were worthy, and then strictly under the “seal of silence.” His teaching was considered secret in the same sense as the Mystery wisdom. Even if Plato himself is not the author of the seventh Platonic Epistle, as some people assert, this makes no difference for our purpose; it need not concern us whether Plato or someone else expresses the attitude of mind contained in this letter. This attitude of mind was inherent in his conception of the world. It says in this Epistle: “But this much I can certainly declare concerning all these writers, or prospective writers who claim to know the subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine or of other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is impossible, in my judgment at least, that these men understand anything about this subject. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith, for it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself.”³⁰ These words could only indicate a powerlessness in the use of words due to personal weakness, if one could not find in them the sense contained in the Mysteries. What Plato never wrote and never intended to write about must be something that defies expression in writing. It must be a feeling, a sensation, an experience that cannot be conveyed in a moment, but is attained through “continued application ... and communion.” The intimate training Plato was able to give to the elect is indicated here. For them fire flashed forth from his words; for the others, only thoughts. It is of great consequence how one approaches Plato's Dialogues. They mean more or less according to one's frame of mind. To Plato's pupils more than the mere literal sense of his expositions was conveyed. Where he taught, the participants experienced the atmosphere of the Mysteries. The words had overtones which vibrated with them. But these overtones needed the atmosphere of the Mysteries. Otherwise they died away unheard.

[ 2 ] In the center of the world of Plato's Dialogues stands the personality of Socrates. We need not touch on the historical aspect here. What matters is the character of Socrates as represented by Plato. Socrates is a person sanctified through death for the cause of truth. He died as only an initiate can die, one to whom death is but a moment of life like other moments. He meets death as any other occurrence of earthly existence. His behavior was such that not even in his friends were the feelings usual to such an occasion aroused. Phaedo says in the Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul: “For my part, I had strange emotions when I was there. For I was not filled with pity as I might naturally be when present at the death of a friend; since he seemed to me to be happy, both in his bearing and his words, he was meeting death so fearlessly and nobly. And so I thought that even in going to the abode of the dead he was not going without the protection of the gods, and that when he arrived there it would be well with him, if it ever was well with anyone. And for this reason I was not at all filled with pity, as might seem natural when I was present at a scene of mourning; nor on the other hand did I feel pleasure, as was our custom when we were occupied with philosophy—although our talk was of philosophy—but a very strange feeling came over me, an unaccustomed mixture of pleasure and of pain together, when I thought that Socrates was presently to die.”³¹ And the dying Socrates instructs his pupils about immortality. His personality, knowing by experience the valuelessness of life, here acts as proof of a quality very different from all logic and intellectual reasoning. It is not as though a man were conversing—for this man is at the point of crossing the threshold of death—but as though the eternal truth itself which had made its abode in a transitory personality, were speaking. Where the temporal dissolves into nothingness we seem to find the air in which the eternal can resound.

[ 3 ] We hear no proofs of immortality in the logical sense. The whole dialogue is directed toward leading the friends to the point where they can behold the eternal. Then they will need no proofs. Is one to prove that the rose is red to someone who sees it? Is one to prove that the spirit is eternal to someone whose eyes have been opened so that he can see this spirit? Socrates indicates living experiences. First of all it is a meeting with wisdom itself. What is the aim of the person who pursues wisdom? He wishes to free himself from all that his senses offer him in everyday observation. He wishes to seek the spirit in the material world. Is not this a fact which can be compared to dying? “Other people”—this is Socrates' opinion—“are likely not to be aware that those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead. Now if this is true, it would be absurd to be eager for nothing but this all their lives, and then to be reluctant when that came for which they had been eagerly practicing all along.”³² To reinforce this, Socrates asks one of his friends, “Do you think a philosopher would be likely to care much about the so-called pleasures, such as eating or drinking? ... Or about the pleasures of sexual desire? ... Do you believe such a man would think much of the other cares of the body—I mean such as the possession of fine clothes and shoes and the other personal adornments? Do you think he would care about them or despise them, except so far as it is necessary to have them? ... Altogether, then, you think that such a man would not devote himself to the body, but would, so far as he was able, turn away from the body and concern himself with the soul? ... To begin with, then, it is clear that in such matters the philosopher, more than other men, separates the soul from association with the body”³³ After this Socrates is entitled to say: Striving for wisdom is comparable to dying, in that man turns from physical things. But where does he turn? He turns to the spiritual. However, can he expect the same of the spirit as of his senses? Socrates explains himself on this: “Now, how about the acquisition of intelligent insight? Is the body a hindrance or not, if it is made to share in the search for wisdom? What I mean is this: Have the sight and hearing of men any truth in them, or is it true, as the poets are always telling us, that we neither hear nor see accurately? ... Then, when does the soul attain to truth? For when it tries to consider anything in company with the body, it is evidently deceived by it.” All that we perceive with³⁴ the physical senses comes into existence and dies away. And this coming into existence and dying away is the cause of our being deceived. But if we examine objects more thoroughly with intelligent insight, then we partake of the eternal in them. But the physical senses do not convey to us the eternal in its true form. They deceive us when we rely implicitly upon them. They cease to deceive us if we confront them with logical insight, making everything conveyed by the senses subject to examination by this insight. But if logical insight is to judge the statements of the senses, must not something live within this insight which transcends the perceptions of the senses? Hence what is true and false in objects is judged by something in us which opposes the material body, and therefore is not subject to its laws. Above all, this something must not be subjected to the laws of growth and decay, for it bears truth within itself. Truth cannot have a yesterday and a tomorrow; it cannot be this on one occasion and that on another, as material things are. Hence truth in itself must be eternal. As the philosopher turns away from the transitory material world, and turns to truth, he approaches an eternal element, dwelling within him. If we immerse ourselves wholly in the spirit, then we live entirely in truth. The material world around us is no longer present in its material form only. “Would not that man,” asks Socrates, “do this most perfectly who approaches each thing, so far as possible, with the reason alone, not introducing sight into his reasoning nor dragging in any of the other senses along with his thinking, but who employs pure, absolute reason in his attempt to search out the pure, absolute essence of things, and who removes himself, so far as possible, from eyes and ears, and, in a word, from his whole body because he feels that its companionship disturbs the soul and hinders it from attaining truth and wisdom? ... Well, then, this that we call death, is it not a release and separation from the body? But, as we hold, the true philosophers and they alone are always most eager to release the soul, and just this—the release and separation of the soul from the body—is their study ... Then, as I said in the beginning, it would be absurd if a man who had been all his life fitting himself to live as nearly in a state of death as he could, should then be disturbed when death came to him ... In fact, then, the true philosophers practice dying, and death is less terrible to them than to any other men.”³⁵ Socrates also bases all higher morality on the liberation of the soul from the body. One who obeys only the demands of his body is not moral. Who has courage? asks Socrates. He has courage who not only disregards his body but follows the demands of his spirit when this endangers his body. And who is self-restrained? He who is “not excited by the passions and in being superior to them acts in a seemly way. Is self-restraint therefore not a characteristic of those alone who despise the body and pass their lives in philosophy?”³⁶ And thus it is with all virtues, according to Socrates.

[ 4 ] Socrates proceeds to characterize intelligent insight itself. What does cognition really mean? Doubtless we attain cognition through forming judgments. Very well, I form a judgment about something; for instance, I say to myself, This thing that stands before me is a tree. How do I arrive at such a statement? I shall be able to do so only if I already know what a tree is. I must remember my idea of a tree. A tree is a material thing. If I remember a tree, I remember a material object. I say that a thing is a tree if it reminds me of other things I have perceived before, and which I know to be trees. Memory enables me to reach cognition. Through memory I can compare the various material things with each other. But in this my cognition is not exhausted. If I see two similar things I form the judgment, These things are similar. But in reality two things are never completely similar. Wherever I find similarity it is only relative. Therefore I think of similarity without finding it in material realty. The thought of similarity helps me toward judgment, as memory helps me toward judgment and cognition. Just as I remember trees when I see a tree, so I remember the thought of similarity when I see two similar things. Therefore thoughts arise within me like memories which are not gained from material reality. All cognition not derived from this reality is based on such thoughts. The whole of mathematics consists only of such thoughts. It would be a poor geometrician who could relate mathematically only what he sees with his eyes and grasps with his hands. It follows that we have thoughts which do not stem from transitory nature, but which arise from the spirit. And precisely these thoughts bear the stamp of eternal truth upon them. What mathematics teaches will be eternally true, even if the whole universe were to collapse tomorrow, and a totally new one arise. The present mathematical truths might not be applicable to the conditions prevailing in a new universe, nevertheless they would remain true in themselves. Only when the soul is alone with itself can it bring forth such eternal truths out of itself. The soul therefore is related to truth, to the eternal, and not to the transitory, the seemingly real. For this reason Socrates says, “When the soul reflects alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these, it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom ... Then see, if this is not the conclusion from all that we have said, that the soul is most like the divine and immortal and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble and ever unchanging, and the body, on the contrary, most like the human and mortal and multiform and unintellectual and dissoluble and ever-changing ...Then if it is in such a condition, the soul goes away into what is like itself, into the invisible, divine, immortal and wise, and when it arrives there it is happy, freed from error, folly, fear, fierce loves and all the other human ills and, as the initiated say, lives in truth through all after-time with the gods.”³⁷ Here we cannot undertake to show all the paths along which Socrates guides his friends to the eternal. All these paths breathe the same spirit. All are intended to show that man finds one thing when he follows the paths of transitory sense perception, and another when his spirit is alone with itself. Socrates points to the archetypal nature of the spirit for those who listen to him. If they find it they can see with spiritual eyes that it is eternal. The dying Socrates does not prove immortality: he simply demonstrates the essence of the soul. It then becomes evident that growth and decay, birth and death have nothing to do with this soul. The essence of the soul lies in truth, but truth itself cannot grow and decay. The soul has as much to do with growth as the crooked has to do with the straight. Death, however, belongs to this process of “growth.” Therefore the soul has nothing to do with death. Must we not say that the immortal assumes mortality as little as the straight assumes crookedness. Continuing from this, Socrates says, “If the immortal is also imperishable, it is impossible for the soul to perish when death comes to meet it. For, as our argument has shown, it will not admit death and will not be dead, just as the number three, we said, will never be even.”³⁸

[ 5 ] Let us trace the whole development of this dialogue, in which Socrates leads his listeners to the point where they are able to see the eternal in the human personality. The listeners absorb his thoughts; they search within themselves for something in their own inner experiences through which they can say “yes” to his ideas. They put forward the objections that spring to their minds. What has happened to the listeners when the dialogue has reached its end? They have found something in themselves which they did not possess before. They have not merely absorbed an abstract truth; they have gone through a process of development. Something has come to life within them which was not alive in them before. Is not this comparable to an initiation? Does not this throw light on the reason why Plato expressed his philosophy in the form of dialogue? These dialogues are intended to be nothing but a literary form of the proceedings in the Mystery places. What Plato himself says at various points convinces us of this. As a teacher of philosophy, Plato wanted, insofar as possible through this medium, to be what the initiator was in the Mysteries. Well does Plato know himself to be at one with the methods of the Mysteries! He considers his method to be the right one only if it leads to the place to which the mystic should be led! He expresses this in the Timaeus: “All men who possess even a small share of good sense call upon God always at the outset of every undertaking, be it small or great: we therefore who are purposing to deliver a discourse concerning the Universe, how far it is created or is uncreated, must needs invoke gods and goddesses (if so be that we are not utterly demented), praying that all we say may be approved by them in the first place, and secondly by ourselves.”³⁹ And to those who seek along such a path, Plato promises “that the Godhead, as Savior, makes it possible that such a distant and difficult investigation—one so prone to error—can be accomplished through an enlightened philosophy.”⁴⁰

[ 6 ] The Timaeus in particular reveals to us the relationship of Plato's world conception with the Mysteries. At the very beginning of this dialogue, reference is made to an “initiation.” Solon is “initiated” into the creation of worlds by an Egyptian priest, and also into the manner in which myths that have been handed down, express eternal truths in picture form. “There have been and there will be many and divers destructions of mankind,” (thus the Egyptian priest instructs Solon) “of which the greatest are by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means. For in truth the story that is told in your country as well as in ours, how once upon a time Phaethon, son of Helios, yoked his father's chariot, and, because he was unable to drive it along the course taken by his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth and himself perished by a thunderbolt -that story, as it is told, has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move round the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals.”⁴¹ This point in the Timaeus clearly refers to the relationship between the initiate and the myths of the people. He perceives the truths hidden in their pictures.

[ 7 ] The drama of the world's creation is presented in the Timaeus. Whoever wishes to retrace the paths leading to this creation comes to the point of divining the archetypal force from which everything has sprung. “Now to discover the Maker and Father of this Universe were a task indeed; and having discovered Him, to declare Him unto all men were a thing impossible.”⁴² The mystic knew what was meant by this “thing impossible.” It indicates the drama of God. God is not present for him in the materially comprehensible world. There He is present as nature. He lies spell-bound in nature. According to the ancient mystics, only he can approach Him who awakens the divine within himself. Therefore He cannot so easily be made comprehensible to everyone. He does not appear in person, even to those who approach Him. This is what the Timaeus says. The Father has created the world out of the cosmic body and the cosmic soul. In perfect proportions He has united harmoniously the elements which came into being when He offered His own, separate existence by diffusing Himself. Thus the body of the world came into existence. On this body of the world, the soul of the world is stretched in the form of a cross.⁴³ This soul is the divine element in the world. It has met with death on the cross in order that the world may exist. Plato is able to call nature the tomb of the divine element.⁴⁴ This is not a tomb containing something dead, but something eternal, for which death only gives the opportunity to express the omnipotence of life. Man sees this nature in the right light when he approaches it in order to deliver the crucified soul of the world. It must be raised from death, the spell must be lifted from it. Where can it come to life again? Only in the soul of the man who is initiated. In this way wisdom finds its right relationship to the cosmos. The resurrection, the deliverance of the Godhead: this is cognition. The evolution of the world from the least to the most perfect is traced in the Timaeus. An ascending process is represented. The beings develop. God reveals Himself in this development. The process of creation is a resurrection of God from the tomb. Man makes his appearance in this stream of evolution. Plato shows that with man something special has arrived. True, the whole world is divine. And man is no more divine than the other beings. But in the other beings God is concealed, and in man He is manifest. The end of the Timaeus reads: “And now at length we may say that our discourse concerning the Universe has reached its termination. For this our Cosmos has received the living creatures both mortal and immortal and been thereby fulfilled; it being itself a visible Living Creature embracing the visible creatures, a perceptible God made in the image of the Intelligible, most great and good and fair and perfect in its creation—even this one and only begotten world.”⁴⁵

[ 8 ] But this one and only begotten world would be incomplete if it did not have among its images the image of the Creator Himself. Only out of the soul of man can this image be born. It is not the Father Himself who can be born of man, but the Son, the offspring of God living in the soul, who is like unto the Father.

[ 9 ] Philo of whom it was said that he was Plato reborn, called the wisdom born of man, the “Son of God;”⁴⁶ this wisdom lives in the soul and contains the intelligence that exists in the world. This world-intelligence, the Logos, appears as the book in which “has been inscribed and engraved the formation of the world.”⁴⁷ Further it appears as the Son of God, who “followed the ways of his Father, and shaped the different kinds, looking to the archetypal patterns which that Father supplied.”⁴⁸ In the manner of Plato, Philo speaks of this Logos as the Christ: “For since God is the first and sole King of the universe, the road leading to Him, being a king's road, is rightly called royal. This road you must take to be philosophy ... the philosophy which the ancient circle of ascetics pursued in hard-fought contest, eschewing the soft enchantments of pleasure, engaged with a fine severity in the study of what is good and fair. This royal road then, which we have just said to be true and genuine philosophy, is called in the Law, the utterance and word of God.”⁴⁹

[ 10 ] Philo experiences this as an initiation when he sets forth on the path to meet the Logos who is, for him, the Son of God. “I feel no shame in recording my own experience, a thing I know from its having happened to me a thousand times. On some occasions, after making up my mind to follow the usual course of writing on philosophical tenets, and knowing definitely the substance of what I was to set down, I have found my understanding incapable of giving birth to a single idea, and have given up without accomplishing anything, reviling my understanding for its self-conceit, and filled with amazement at the might of Him Who is, to Whom is due the opening and closing of the womb of the soul. On other occasions, I have approached my work empty and suddenly become full, the ideas falling in a shower from above and being sown invisibly, so that under the influence of the divine possession I have been filled with corybantic frenzy and been unconscious of anything, place, persons present, myself, words spoken, lines written. For I obtained language, ideas, an enjoyment of light, keenest vision, pellucid distinctness of objects, such as might be received through the inner eye as the result of clearest cognition.”⁵⁰ This is the description of a path to cognition which is so arranged that whoever takes this path is conscious that he becomes one with the divine when the Logos comes to life within him. This is clearly expressed in the words: “When the mind is mastered by the love of the divine, when it strains its powers to reach the inmost shrine, when it puts forth every effort and ardor on its forward march, under the divine impelling force it forgets all else, forgets itself and fixes its thoughts and memories on Him alone Whose attendant and servant it is, to Whom it dedicates incense, the incense of consecrated virtues.”⁵¹ For Philo there are only two paths. Either man can pursue the material world which is offered by perception and intellect, but then he is limited to his own personality, he withdraws from the cosmos; or he can become conscious of the all-embracing cosmic powers, experiencing the eternal within his personality. “One who runs away from God takes refuge in himself. There are two minds, that of the universe, which is God, and the individual mind. One who flees from his own mind flees for refuge to the Mind of all things. For one who abandons his own mind acknowledges all that makes the human mind its standard to be naught, and he refers all things to God. On the other hand, one who runs away from God declares Him to be the cause of nothing, and himself to be the cause of all things that come into being.”⁵²

[ 12 ] Plato's “dialogue on love,” the Symposium, also describes an “initiation.” Here love appears as the herald of wisdom. If wisdom, the Eternal Word (Logos), is the Son of the Eternal Creator of the world, then love has a maternal relationship with this Logos. Before it is possible for even a spark of the light of wisdom to light up in the human soul, there must be an unconscious longing, which draws the soul toward the divine. Man must be drawn unconsciously toward that which, when raised into consciousness, subsequently brings him supreme joy. What Heraclitus designates as the daemon in man is united with the idea of love. In the Symposium men of the most varied status, possessing the most varied views on life, speak of love; the man in the street, the politician, the scientist, the poet of comedy, Aristophanes and the serious poet, Agathon. Each has his conception of love according to how he experiences life. How they express themselves reveals the stage at which their “daemon” stands. Through love one being is drawn to another. The manifold variety of things into which the divine unity is diffused strives through love toward oneness and harmony. Love therefore has a divine quality. Hence each man is capable of understanding it only insofar as he has partaken of this divine quality. After these men, representing varying stages of maturity, have declared their views on love, Socrates takes up the discussion. He considers love from the viewpoint of a thinker capable of cognition. For him love is not a god. But it is something leading man to God. Eros, love, is no god for him. God is perfect, and therefore possesses beauty and goodness. But Eros is only the longing for beauty and goodness. Therefore he stands between man and God. He is a “daemon,” a mediator between the earthly and the divine. It is significant that Socrates does not pretend to give his thoughts when he speaks about love. He says he is only recounting a revelation about it, which a woman gave him. He has conceived an idea of love's nature through mantic art.^c7 The priestess Diotima awakened in Socrates the daemonic force which was to lead him to the divine. She “initiated” him. This passage in the Symposium is most revealing. We must ask, Who is this “wise woman” who awakens the daemon in Socrates? We should not think of mere poetic fantasy here. No actual wise woman could have awakened the daemon in the soul if the force for this awakening were not within the soul itself. We must seek this “wise woman” in the soul of Socrates himself. There must, however, be a basis which allows what brings the daemon to birth in the soul to appear as a being in external reality. This force cannot work in the same way as the forces we can observe in the soul as belonging to it and at home with it. We see that it is the force of the soul before it has received wisdom, which Socrates represents as the “wise woman.” It is the maternal principle which gives birth to the Son of God, Wisdom, the Logos. The unconscious force of the soul is presented as a feminine element, which allows the divine to enter consciousness. The soul which as yet lacks wisdom is the mother of what leads to the divine. This leads us to an important idea of mysticism. The soul is recognized as the mother of the divine. With the inevitability of a natural force it unconsciously leads man toward the divine. This point throws light on the conception held in the Mysteries regarding Greek mythology. The world of the gods is born in the soul. Man regards as his gods what he himself creates in the form of pictures. But he must progress to another idea. He must transform into pictures of the gods the divine force present in himself which is active before the creation of these pictures of the gods. The mother of the divine appears behind the divine, and this is none other than the original force in the human soul. Man places goddesses beside his gods. Let us look at the myth of Dionysus in the light of the above. Dionysus is the son of Zeus and a mortal mother, Semele. Zeus tears the premature infant from the mother as she lies slain by lightning, keeping him in his own thigh until he is mature. Hera, the mother of the gods, stirs up the Titans against Dionysus. They dismember the boy. But Pallas Athene rescues the still beating heart and brings it to Zeus. Thereupon Zeus begets the son for the second time. In this myth we have an exact description of a process which takes place in the depths of the human soul. Whoever wishes to speak in the sense of the Egyptian priest who instructs Solon about the nature of a myth could speak as follows: What you tell us, that Dionysus, the son of a god and a mortal mother, is dismembered and is born again, may sound like a fable, but what is true about it is the birth of the divine and its destiny in the human soul. The divine unites with the temporal-earthly soul of man. As soon as this divine element, Dionysus, comes to life, the soul experiences a great longing for its true spiritual status. The consciousness which once again appears in the image of a female divinity, Hera, is jealous of the birth out of a better consciousness. It stirs up the lower nature of man—the Titans. The child of god, still immature, is dismembered. It is present in man as a dismembered material-intellectual science. But if in man sufficient higher wisdom (Zeus) is at work, it cherishes and cares for the immature child, which then is born again as the second son of god (Dionysus). Thus out of science, out of the dismembered divine force in man, is born the harmonizing wisdom, which is the Logos, the son of God and of a mortal mother, who is the transitory soul of man striving unconsciously for the divine. We are far from the spiritual reality represented in all this as long as we see in it only a mere process of the soul and take it as a picture of this process. In this spiritual reality the soul does not merely experience something within itself; it is completely disconnected from itself and participates in a cosmic process which in truth takes place outside itself and not within it.

[ 13 ] Platonic wisdom and Greek mythology unite; so, equally, do Mystery wisdom and mythology. The gods that they created were the objects of the religion of the people; the history of their coming into existence was the secret of the Mysteries. No wonder that it was accounted dangerous to “betray” the Mysteries. This meant “betraying” the origin of the gods of the people. And the right understanding of this origin is wholesome; misunderstanding is destructive.

• 30. Plato, Epistle VII, 341 C.
• 31. Plato, Phaedo, 58 E.
• 32. Plato, Phaedo, 64 A.
• 33. Plato, Phaedo, 64 D.
• 34. Plato, Phaedo, 65 B.
• 35. Plato, Phaedo, 66 A, 67 D, 67 E.
• 36. Plato, Phaedo, 68 C.
• 37. Plato, Phaedo, 79 D, 80 B, 81 A.
• 38. Plato, Phaedo, 106 B.
• 39. Plato, Timaeus, 27 C.
• 40. Plato, Timaeus, 48 D.
• 41. Plato, Timaeus, 22 C, 22 D.
• 42. Plato, Timaeus, 28 C.
• 43. Plato, Timaeus, 36—“... like a great cross †.” Here Plato refers to the Greek letter &Chi, “Chi.”
• 44. Plato, Cratylus 400 BC: “... some say it (the body) is the tomb of the soul, their notion being that the soul is buried in the present life.” The Greek words for “body” and “tomb” suggest a mystical similarity between the two. This was a part of the Orphic doctrine.
• 45. Plato, Timaeus, 92 C.
• 46. Philo of Alexandria, De Profugis, I, 562. Philo or otherwise known as Philo Judaeus, a Jewish philosopher, was born at Alexandria in Egypt, c. 10 B.C., where he spent most of his life. In the year 40 A.D., he headed a Jewish embassy to Rome to petition the Emperor Gaius to refrain from requiring homage from the Jews as a divinity. Eusebius and other Church Fathers advanced a tradition that in Rome Philo met St. Peter, but this is not confirmed. Philo was the most important representative of Hellenistic Judaism, and his many writings extant are brilliant expositions of the Mosaic law and the Jewish religion.
• 47. Philo, Legum allegoriarum, Allegorical Interpretation, Lib. I, 19. (Includes commentary on Genesis 2:1–17)—“Book is Moses' name for the Logos of God in which has been inscribed and engraved the formation of the world.”
• 48. Philo, De confusione linguarum, The Confusion of Tongues, 63. A part of Philo's Allegories of the Sacred Laws, though published under a separate title. The work contains a commentary on Genesis 11:1–9
• 49. Philo, De poseritate, Caini, The Posterity and Exile of Cain, 101, 102. A part of Philo's Allegories of the Sacred Laws, this work includes commentary on Genesis 4:16–25.
• 50. Philo, De migratione Abrahami, The Migration of Abraham, 34, 35. Commentary on Genesis 12:1–6.
• 51. Philo, Quod a Deo mittantur somnia, On Dreams, that they are sent by God, II, 232. A commentary on the two dreams of Jacob, Genesis 28 and 29, and Book II refers to dreams of Joseph, the chief butler, the chief baker, and Pharaoh, Genesis 37, 40, 41.
• 52. Philo, Legum allegoriarum, Allegorical Interpretation, III, 29. See Note 47, above.

  [ 11 ] Plato's world-conception aims to be a form of cognition which in its whole nature is religion. It brings cognition into relationship with the highest man can reach through his feelings. Plato allows cognition to be valid only when it completely satisfies man's feelings. Then it is not pictorial knowledge; it is the content of life. It is a higher man in man. The personality is but an image of this higher man. In man himself the superior, the archetypal man is born. And with this another secret of the Mysteries is expressed in Plato's philosophy. The Church Father Hippolytus points to this secret: “This is the great and ineffable mystery of the Samothracians (the guardians of a particular Mystery-cult) which it is permissible only for the initiated to know. For the Samothracians expressly hand down, in the Mysteries that are celebrated among them, that Adam is the archetypal man.”

• 53. Hippolytus, born probably 2nd half of 2nd century A.D. in Rome; according to legend he was a Roman soldier converted by St. Lawrence. Died c. 326 in Rome. Steiner's reference is to Hippolytus' The Refutation of All Heresies, Book V, ch. 3. Otherwise known as the Philosophumena, Book I was long printed with the works of Origen, Books 2 and 3 have been lost, and Books 4 through 10 were found in ms. form at Mount Athos by a Greek scholar in 1842.
• c7. In ancient mysticism “Mantic” signifies everything relevant to knowledge gained through “spiritual eyes.” On the other hand, “Telestic” is the indication of the paths which lead to initiation.

When the riddles of existence touch the human soul, they become not only great problems in life, but life itself. They become the happiness or sorrow of man's existence. And not a passing happiness or sorrow only, but one he must carry for a time through life, so that by this experience of happiness or sorrow he becomes fit or unfit for life.

Now, man's attitude to his own soul is such that the most important questions about it and about its spiritual essence do not arise from any actual doubts he has regarding the spiritual element within him. It is precisely because he is certain of his spiritual substance and because he cannot help seeing in it his human dignity and his true significance as a man, that the question of the fate of his soul becomes for him a tremendous riddle. To deny the mind in man himself does not, of course, occur to even the most rigid materialist. He acknowledges the mental as such, regarding it as a result of physical, material processes. Yet anyone who, with no such theory but simply from his deepest emotional needs, queries the fate of this soul of his, will find himself confronted by a plethora of phenomena and experiences. And these become riddles to him just because he is fully conscious of the mental or spiritual life, and must accordingly ask: Is this spiritual life a passing breath, rising from physical existence and returning with it once more into the generality of natural phenomena, or is it connected with a spiritual world within which it has eternal significance?

Of the many experiences in the realm of the psyche which present the riddles of the soul to our “mind's eye,” I will select only two.

There are, it may be objected, very few people on whom such experiences obtrude so much that they become even conscious, let alone theoretical, problems. But that is not the point. The point is that these experiences take hold of the subconscious or unconscious, establish themselves there, and flow up into consciousness only as a general temper or distemper of the soul, making us courageous and vigorous in life or making us dejected, so that at no point can we properly come to grips with life. As I have said, I want to pick out only two of these experiences.

The first appears before the “mind's eye” every evening when we fall asleep, when the mental and psychic experiences that have floated up and down during the day sink down into the unconscious as if extinguished. Now, when he looks at this experience or, as is most often the case, when the unconscious awareness of it affects his soul, man is overcome by a sense of the powerlessness of his mental life in face of the outside world. And just because man sees in this life his most valuable and dignified quality and cannot deny that he is in the true sense of the world a spiritual being, he is assaulted from within by this sensation of powerlessness, and has to ponder the question: Does the general process of nature overtake mental experiences when man passes through the gate of death, just as it always does at the onset of sleep? The first experience, if I may so put it, is a sense of the powerlessness of mental life.

The second experience is in a way a direct opposite of the first. We perceive it distinctly or indistinctly, consciously or unconsciously, when on waking, perhaps after passing through a fantastically chaotic dream world not attuned to reality, our spirit descends into our bodily existence. At such times we feel it informing our senses, feel too that our psychic experience is being permeated by the interplay between the outside world and our senses, which are of course physical and physiological. We feel the spiritual element descending further into our body; we inform our organs of will with it and become alert and self-possessed, able to make use of our body, our organism. On reflection, however, we cannot help realizing: Anatomy and physiology make a valiant attempt to penetrate and analyse the bodily functions from without; yet looking from within, we ourselves, by means of ordinary consciousness, do not know anything about the interrelationship between our spiritual element and our bodily functions. A glance at the simplest bodily function controlled by the will, the lifting of an arm or movement of a hand, tells us: First there exists in us the thought or concept of this arm-lifting or hand-movement. How this thought or concept flows down into our organism, however, how it informs our muscles, and how finally there comes about what again we know only through observation—what actually goes on inside remains hidden from ordinary consciousness. So, too, in that wonderful mechanism that physics and physiology show us, the human eye or some other sense-organ, there remains hidden the spiritual element that informs this wonderful mechanism.

We are thus faced with problems both by the powerlessness of our mental life and by the darkness into which we feel our spirit descending when it flows down into our own body. We are forced to conclude (most people certainly don't do so consciously, but it affects them as the temper of their soul): this spiritual element in its relationship with the organism is unknown to us just when it is creative; it is unknown to us at the very point in physical life where it manifests its outgoing function.

What every naive individual thus experiences extends, in a different form, to psychology itself. It would need a great many words to explain scientifically how these enigmas creep into the subject; but we can put it, rather superficially perhaps, as follows.

On the one hand, psychology looks at the mind and asks: What is the relation between this and the physical, the external and corporeal? In looking at the physical, on the other hand, and at what physical science has to say about it, some people—and in this respect psychology has a long history—believe that we must regard the mental as the really effective cause of the physical; others believe that we must regard the physical as the really empowering element, and the mental only as a kind of effect of it. The unsatisfactory nature of both views has been perceived by recent psychologists. They have therefore set up the curious theory of psycho-physical parallelism, according to which one cannot say that the body affects the mind or the mind the body, but only: corporeal processes are parallel to mental ones, and mental processes to bodily ones; one can only say what mental processes accompany the corporeal or what corporeal ones the mental.

Psychology itself, moreover, is conscious of this powerlessness of the mind! If we attempt to examine the mind, even as it presents itself to the psychologist, with ordinary consciousness, we find that it has something passive about it, so that we cannot see how it can penetrate dynamically the life of the body. Anyone who looks at the psychic characteristics of thinking and feeling (volition is impenetrable, so that for psychology much the same is true of will as of thinking and feeling)—anyone who looks at thinking and feeling with the tools of psychology finds them powerless, and cannot locate anything that would really be capable of effectively activating the physical. It is then that the psychologist experiences his sense of the powerlessness of mental life in the eyes of ordinary consciousness. The most varied attempts have certainly been made to overcome this feeling. But the disputes of philosophers and the changing philosophies that have succeeded one another provide the impartial observer of humanity with factual evidence of the impossibility for ordinary consciousness of approaching the mind's experience. Everywhere there obtrudes a sense of the powerlessness of the mind as it is perceived by ordinary consciousness.

With regard to this particular point, a series of works have appeared here in Vienna which represent milestones in the development of philosophy. Although I cannot associate myself in any way with their content, I believe that, from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness, these books are extraordinarily significant. They include Richard Wahle's The Whole of Philosophy and its End, which is designed to show that ordinary consciousness is incapable of reaching any significant conclusion about mental life, and that what philosophical investigation is here attempting ought to be handed over to theology, physiology, aesthetics and social science. And Richard Wahle went on to work out these ideas still more clearly in his Mechanism of Mental Life. We may say: here for once ordinary consciousness is revealed as basically incapable of saying anything about the problems of mental life. The ego, the psyche, everything that earlier psychology brought to light—all these collapse in face of the self-criticism of ordinary consciousness.

In recent years, however, psychology has, understandably and indeed of necessity, not attempted to deal directly with the things of the mind—in face of which, as we have seen, ordinary consciousness is powerless—but has sought to discover something about what are usually called mental phenomena indirectly, via the physical phenomena that spring from them. In this way, experimental psychology has come into being. This is a necessary product of our present attitude to life and methods of research. And anyone taking the philosophical standpoint that I do will never for one moment deny that experimental psychology is completely justified, though he may not perhaps agree entirely with this or that detail of its methods and results.

It is here that the other enigma of the soul comes in. However much we learn about what can be experienced by the human body in experimental psychology, the fact remains: everything that appears to be discovered in this way about purely psychic functions is, strictly speaking, only indirect knowledge, acquired via the body. It all belongs to a sphere which, at man's death, is given over to the general process of nature, so that through it can be learnt nothing about the soul, whose fate in the world is of such paramount concern to man. Thus we may say: for psychology, also, the great riddle of the soul reappears.

This point, too, has been made by a modern psychologist who for many years lived and worked here in Vienna, and who will never be forgotten by those who sat at his feet here, as I did. In the first volume of his unfinished work on psychology, he asks: What can any psychology ever achieve by establishing—whether experimentally or non-experimentally, I might add—how concepts combine and separate, how attention operates, how memory develops in life etc.?—if, precisely because of the scientific character of this psychology, with its emulation of natural science, we must renounce all claim to understand the fate of the human soul once the body crumbles into its elements? This was said not by some eccentric or other, but by that rigorous thinker Franz Brentano, who made psychology his central concern in life and who sought to apply to his work the strict scientific method of modern times. Yet he it was who presented the riddle of the soul to his contemporaries in the way I have just outlined, as something scientifically unavoidable.

From all this the impartial observer today must draw a conclusion. It is that, in the study of man, scientific methods will take us only to the point they have now reached; but that we cannot deal with the soul by means of ordinary consciousness, entirely adequate as this is for science and for ordinary life. And so, since for scientific reasons this fact must be apparent to the impartial observer today, I speak to you from the standpoint of a philosophy of life that concludes: it is impossible, with the soul-powers that manifest themselves to ordinary consciousness and operate in ordinary life and ordinary science, to investigate the life of the soul. There must be developed other powers, which to ordinary consciousness are more or less sleeping or, let us say, latent in the soul.

To adopt the right attitude to such a conception of life, we need something which, if I may say so, is found only rarely in people today. I would call it intellectual modesty. There must come a moment in life when we say to ourselves: When I was a little child, I developed a mental life that was so dim and dreamy that it has been forgotten like a dream. Only gradually did there arise from this dream-like mentality of the child something that enables me to orientate myself in life, to bring my thoughts, my impulses and my decisions into step with the world, and to become a capable being. Out of the vagueness and lack of differentiation of the child's mental life, interwoven with the body, has emerged that experience which derives from our inherited qualities, as these develop with the growth of the body, and which derives also from our customary education.

Anyone looking back, with intellectual modesty, on his development during his life on earth, will not be above saying to himself at a certain point: Why shouldn't this continue? The soul-powers which are the most important to me today, and by which I orientate myself in life and become a capable being, were dormant during my existence as a child. Why shouldn't there be dormant in my soul other powers that I can develop from it?

We cannot help reaching this conclusion, which springs from intellectual modesty. I call it intellectual modesty because men are inclined to say: the form of consciousness I have once attained as an adult is that of the normal person; any impulse in the life of the soul to be different from this so-called normal consciousness is eccentric or hallucinatory or visionary or something similar. The philosophical standpoint from which I speak definitely starts from a healthy psyche and attempts on this basis to develop powers dormant in the soul, cognitive powers, which then become clairvoyant powers in the sense in which I spoke yesterday of exact clairvoyance. What the soul has to undertake I indicated yesterday. I mentioned my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Occult Science, Riddles of the Soul and so on. There you will find details of those exercises which, starting from a healthy soul-life, lead upward to the development of the soul, which thus in fact attains a kind of spiritual vision with which it can see into a spiritual world, just as with the ordinary sense-organs it can perceive the physical and sensuous world. In each of these books there is a first part, which is accepted as something that can be definitely useful to man even by many opponents of the philosophy of life I am advocating. It shows that by certain exercises of an intellectual, emotional and moral kind man can produce in himself a state of soul and body that can be regarded as wholly healthy. They also enable him to be on his inner guard against anything which, deriving from an unhealthy life of the soul, leads to mediumism, hallucinations and visions. For everything brought about in this way is unacceptable to a true psychology. Visions arise not from the sphere of the soul, but because morbid structures exist in the organism; the same is true of mediumism. None of these have anything to do with sound psychology and sound psychic development, and indeed from the point of view of this sound psychology all must be condemned. Opponents today, however, find fantastic and harmful the exercises which follow these preparatory ones, and which are designed to draw from the soul those powers of thinking, feeling and volition which, once they are trained, introduce man into a spiritual world in such a way that he learns to orientate himself in it and can enter it at will.

I have already suggested how, as modern man, we manage by certain mental exercises to remove thinking from its ordinary state of passive surrender to the phenomena of the outside world, and to what appear inwardly as memories but are also connected with the outside world. We transcend this kind of thinking by carrying out exercises in meditation seriously, patiently and energetically, and by repeating them over and over again. Depending on predisposition, it may take one person years, another not so long; but each can note, as he arrives at the crucial point, how his thinking, from what I have previously called dead and abstract thinking, becomes inwardly vital thinking in tune with the rhythm of the world. A balanced view of the world and of life thus strives, not to conjure up visions or hallucinations from the soul, but to experience the life of thoughts and concepts with an intensity that we otherwise experience only through the outward senses.

You need only compare the vitality of our experience of the colours we perceive through the eye, and the sounds we hear through the ear, with the pallor of our experience of thought in ordinary consciousness. By energizing our mental life in the way I suggested yesterday, we can gradually give the mere life of thought and concept the same intensive quality as the life of the senses. Man today, seeking to know the spiritual, does not therefore, if he is a reasonable being, seek hallucinations and visions. He strives quite calmly to achieve the ideal of the life of the senses, with its intensity and plasticity, in his mental activity. And if you devote yourselves as students of the spirit to meditations such as I have described, you need not be in any way dependent on the unconscious or subconscious. You can refer to the exercises, they are all directed at what I am trying to describe—and you will find that everything that is carried out by way of exercises in the life of the soul is done as consciously, as reasonably, as precisely we may say, as are operations in mathematics or geometry.

To sum up: we are concerned here not with the old nebulous clairvoyance, but with a clairvoyance brought about by fully conscious and balanced experiences and exercises of the soul. The self-possession at each step is such that we can compare what a man experiences and makes of himself here with what we otherwise experience in the case of a geometrical problem. If not, the exercises have no value.

A conceptual life of this kind is energized; is independent of breathing; is set free of the body; is a spiritual function only; and in it, as we know by direct perception, thinking is carried out not by the body, but in the purely spiritual sphere. Only when modern man attains this kind of conceptual life does he feel his thinking, in contrast to abstract thinking, as something vital and not as something dead. Our sensation when we experience the transition from ordinary abstract thinking to vital thinking is exactly as if we found a dead organism suddenly come to life. And although this vital thinking is a spiritual process, it is not so linear, not so superficial as ordinary abstract thinking. It is full and plastic. And this plasticity is what counts.

Now, however, a very great deal depends on our carrying over the balanced attitude, required during the actual exercises, to the moment when this vitalized or plastic thinking appears in us. If at this moment we surrender ourselves to the images we have struggled to achieve, believing we find in them realities of a spiritual kind, then we are, not students of the spirit but simply fantasy-mongers. This is something we must certainly not become; for it could not provide us with a firmly based philosophy of life for modern man. Only when we say to ourselves: we have attained one component of spiritual life, but it is a semblance component; it merely tells us something about powers that operate within ourselves—about what we ourselves can do through our own human nature; only when we really say to ourselves: this imaginal knowledge cannot give us any information about any kind of outside world, not even about what we are in the outside world; only if we perceive ourselves in this semblance-making and know ourselves as a power living within it—only then do we have the right attitude to this experience and feel ourselves as spiritual beings outside the body, and yet feel ourselves only in ourselves, with an inner plasticity.

Only by having the courage to continue the exercises to the next stage do we attain true spiritual perception. This next stage not only involves developing the capacity to focus our consciousness upon certain concepts that are readily comprehended—as we comprehend geometrical concepts, which we know to contain no unconscious element—so as to increase our strength of soul; it must also, and more particularly, involve being able calmly and at will to banish these concepts from our consciousness. This is, in some circumstances, a difficult task! In ordinary life, forgetting is not particularly difficult, as our ordinary consciousness is only too well aware. But when one has just struggled, although without driving oneself into auto-suggestion—which cannot occur if we are self-possessed—to focus one's consciousness upon certain concepts, then unusual strength is required to banish them from consciousness again. However, one must develop this greater strength gradually; and just as at first we concentrated all our attention and inner strength of soul, so that we might dwell upon such a concept in a state of meditation, so now we must dispel these concepts, and all other concepts, calmly and voluntarily from consciousness. And there must be able to enter, from our will, what one might call “empty consciousness.” What “empty consciousness” (if only for a few moments) implies, can be judged by reflecting on what happens to ordinary consciousness when it has to forgo both sense-impressions and recollections—when for some reason or other man is deprived of external impressions and even memories: he falls asleep; that is, consciousness is depressed and dimmed. The opposite of this is what must happen: completely controlled, conscious wakefulness, despite the fact that the will has swept consciousness completely clear.

If we thus first strengthen the soul and then empty it, yet keep it conscious, there will appear before it, as colour to the eye and sounds to the ear, a spiritual environment. We can look into the spiritual world. And so we may say: to the spiritual investigation here intended, it is perfectly understandable that ordinary consciousness cannot reach the spirit and the soul, and indeed that it turns out, as Richard Wahle found for instance, that ordinary consciousness ought not to speak of an “I” at all! For in this sphere, ordinary experience can only indicate and label with words a dark element which is immersed in and contrasted with the clear light; and which will never emerge until we have developed powers that are usually lacking. It is a sober recognition of the limits of ordinary consciousness, tied to the body, that impels us to develop in ourselves those powers that alone are capable of really discovering the soul and the spirit.

There is another point to consider, however, if you seek to arrive by this path at a sound and not a morbid psychology. Taking the mediumistic, visionary and hallucinatory as morbid, the fact is that anyone who falls into this kind of morbid psychic activity is entirely absorbed into it. For the duration of his sickness of soul, at least, he becomes one with this activity. Quite the reverse with the exercises I have been proposing here. Anyone who explores the soul with their aid does, it is true, leave behind his physical body with its capacity for ordinary thinking and ordinary orientation in life. He steps out of this body and learns to see imaginally, free of body; he develops a visual thinking. Yet not for a moment is he completely subsumed in this higher man, if I may so call it without arrogance. He always remains capable of regaining his body and acting just as calmly as before: there always stands beside this more highly developed man that ordinary man with his healthy common sense who is a sober critic of everything to which in his vision this higher being attains.

By developing plastic, vital thinking and then creating an empty consciousness, we reach a view of our own psychic nature, one that embraces in a single image all we have encountered in this life since we entered it. Our past life does not stand before the soul as is usual in the memory, with isolated reminiscences emerging, independently or after some exertion. Instead, all at once our life is surveyed like a mighty tableau, not in space but in time. All at once, with a single glance of the soul, we survey our life; but we see it as it informs our growth and the energies of our physical body. We see ourselves as we have been here on this earth as thinking, feeling, willing beings, but in such a way that thinking, feeling and willing now densify and at the same time take their places organically within the human substance. We can see into our spiritual life in its direct association with the physical. We cease trying to establish by philosophical speculation how the soul affects the body. In seeing the soul, we also see how at every moment our physical life on earth has been informed by what the tableau shows us. This will be described more fully in the next few days.

The next step must now be to strengthen still further by removing them from our consciousness the energized concepts that we have introduced into ourselves. We do this by continually repeating the exercises, just as we strengthen muscles by repeated exercise. And by continuing with these energized concepts, we also manage to eliminate from our consciousness this whole newly achieved tableau of the life of the soul from birth to the present. This requires more effort than the simple elimination of images, but one does eventually achieve it. We succeed in removing from consciousness what in our earthly existence we call our inner life, so that now our consciousness is empty not only of current impressions, but also of all that we experience within as if in a second and finer body (which yet informs our growth and our memory), a finer being, an ethereal being as it were, a now for the first time super-sensible being. And when we do so, our consciousness, which though fully awake is now empty and yet has attained a greater inward power, will be able to see further in the spiritual world. It will now be able to look at the nature of its own soul before this descended from spiritual worlds to an earthly existence. Now, what we call the eternity of the human soul is taken out of the sphere of mere philosophical speculation and actually beheld. We learn to look at the purely spiritual that we were in a spiritual world, before we descended to clothe ourselves, through conception, foetal life and birth, in a physical earthly body.

Although attained by as exact a method as are mathematical concepts, this may seem fantastic to many people today. Still more paradoxical may appear what remains to be said, not only about the soul when it still had a spiritual existence, but also about the concrete nature of this experience. These things can only be suggested in this lecture; more will be said in subsequent lectures. The suggestions can perhaps be explained in the following terms.

Let us first ask ourselves: What do we actually see when, in ordinary life, as beings who recognize, understand and perceive, we enter into a relationship with our natural environment? We actually see only the external world. This is clear from what I mentioned at the beginning today. We actually see only the outside world, the cosmos. What takes place within us we see, too, but only by making it into something external through physiology and anatomy. Imposing as these sciences may be, we see what is within only by first externalizing it and then investigating it exactly as we are accustomed to do with external processes. Yet it remains dark down there in the region into which we descend, where we feel our spiritual element flowing into our body. In the last analysis, we see in ordinary life only what is outside ourselves; by direct observation we cannot look directly into man and see how the spiritual informs the bodily organs. Anyone, however, who can examine life impartially from the spiritual viewpoint I have established will conclude: noble and great is external appearance and the laws we discover in the external world of the stars and of the sun, which sends us light and warmth; noble and great is our experience when we either simply look—and we are complete men when we do so look—or when we investigate scientifically the laws by which the sun sends us light and warmth and conjures forth the green of plants; noble and mighty is all this—but if we could look into the structure of the human heart, its inner law would be even nobler and greater than what we perceive outside!

Man can sense this with his ordinary consciousness. But the science that rests on exact clairvoyance can raise it to the status of true research. It can say: far-reaching appear to us the changes in the atmosphere, and there exists an ideal of science which, here too, will discover greater and more potent laws; but greater still is what is present and goes on in the structure and functions of the human lung! It is not a question of size. Man is a microcosm in face of the macrocosm. But as Schiller said: “In space, my friend, dwells not the sublime.” He means the highest form of the sublime. This highest form can be experienced only in the human organism itself.

Between birth and death it is not investigated by man with his ordinary consciousness. Exactly the opposite is true, however, of our existence before we unite with the body—our spiritual existence, in a spiritual environment. In this life on earth, the inner world is dark and the outside world of the cosmos bright and full of sound; in the purely spiritual life before our earthly embodiment, the outer cosmic world is dark, and our world is then the inner world of man. We see this inner world! And truly, it seems to us no smaller and no less majestic than does the cosmos when we see it with our physical eyes during our earthly existence. As if it were our “outside world,” we come to understand the law of our spiritual inner world, and we prepare ourselves, in the spiritual realm, for dealing later with our bodily functions, with what we are between birth and death. For what we are between birth and death extends before us like a world, before we descend into this physical existence on earth.

This is not speculation. It is direct perception arising from exact clairvoyance. It is something which, starting from this exact clairvoyance, leads us some way into the connection between the eternal element in man and the life on earth—that eternal element which remains hidden from us between birth and death, and of which we see the first gleams when we are able to perceive it in the still unembodied state. And with this we explore a part of human eternity itself. We don't even have a word in our modern languages for this part of human eternity. We rightly speak of immortality; but we ought also to speak of “unborn-ness.” For this now confronts us as a direct experience.

This is one aspect of exact clairvoyance, one aspect of human eternity, of the great riddle of the human soul, and thus of the supreme problem of psychology in general. The other aspect arises from those other exercises, which I yesterday termed exercises of the will, through which we so take in hand our will that we learn to make use of it independently of the body I explained that these exercises induce us to overcome pain and suffering within the soul, in order to make it into a “sense-organ” (to speak loosely) or a spiritual organ (to speak exactly) of vision, so that we not only look at the spiritual, but see its authentic shape. And when we learn to experience in this way outside our body, not only with our thoughts but with our will itself—that is, with our entire human substance—there appears before the soul the image of death, in such a way that we now know the nature of experience without the body: both in thinking and in willing and in what lies between, feeling. In an imaginally creative way we learn to live without the body. And in doing so we gain an image of our passage through the gate of death; we learn how in reality, too, we can do without the body and how, passing through the gate of death, we enter once more that spiritual sphere from which we descended into this bodily existence. What is eternal and immortal in us becomes not only philosophical certainty, but direct perception. By training the will, we disclose for the soul's contemplation the other side of eternity—immortality—just as unborn-ness is disclosed by the training of thought.

When the soul becomes a spiritual organ in this way, however, it is as if, at a lower level, a man born blind had been operated on. What for those endowed with sight is a world of colours, the blind man has hitherto been accustomed to perceive by touch alone. Now, after the operation, he sees something quite new. The world in which he previously lived has changed. So too, anyone whose “mind's eye” is opened in the way I have described finds that his environment is changed. How far it is changed I wish to bring out today in only one respect.

Even with our unopened “mind's eye” we can see in life how, for example, a man takes his childish steps, then grows up and reaches a fateful moment in his life: he meets someone, and their souls link up so that the two people combine their fates and move on through life together. (As I said before, I want to single out just one event.) In ordinary consciousness we are drawn to regard what happens in life as a sum of chance occurrences; to regard it, too, as more or less chance that we are brought at last to this fateful meeting with the other person. Only a few individuals, like Goethe's friend Knebel, gain an inner wisdom of experience, simply in growing older. He once put this to Goethe in the following words: If at an advanced age one looks back on the course of one's steps in life, one finds that these steps seem to reveal a systematic arrangement, so that everything appears to have been present in embryo and to have developed in such a way that one was led by a kind of inner necessity to what we now see to have been a fateful event. Human existence as seen with the “mind's eye” unveiled is as different from the life observed by the unopened eyes as the world of colour is from the merely tactile one of the blind man.

Looking at the child's soul life and the interplay of sympathy and antipathy, we see how it develops from these first steps; how then, welling up out of his innermost being, the man himself, out of his innermost longings, directs his steps and brings himself to the fateful moment. This is sober observation of life. When we look at life in this way, however, we see it rather as we see the life of an old man. We should not say that an old man's life simply exists “in its own right;” by logical processes we know how to refer it to its infant beginnings; its very idiosyncrasies make us so refer it. What simple logic does for the old man's life is done for human life in general by exact clairvoyance, by true vision: if we are really to look at life as it develops from the innermost longings of the soul, we must follow it back. And when we do so, we come to earlier lives on earth, in which were prepared the longings that appear in the present and lead to our activities.

I have not been able to do more today than suggest that what leads to this comprehensive contemplation of life is not a tissue of fantasy, but an exact method. It is a contemplation which, by means of an advanced psychology, penetrates to the eternal in human nature. And on this foundation there now arises something that is a certainty, something that wells up out of the knowledge appropriate to us as modern men today and forms a basis for true inner piety and true inner religious life.

Anyone with an insight (and I may say that I am using the word “insight” in its literal sense) into the way the individual soul struggles free of the body, in order to enter a spiritual realm, will have a different way of looking at our social life too. Armed with this new attitude, he can see how friendships, relationships of love, and other associations are formed; how soul finds its way to soul, moving outside the family and other social groups; how physical proximity may be a means to the community of souls, the sympathy and togetherness of souls. He now knows that, just as the body falls away from the individual soul, so the physical element and all earthly events fall away from the friendships and from the relationships of love; and he sees how the soul-relationship that has come into being between men continues into a spiritual world, where it can also be spiritually experienced.

On a foundation of knowledge, not of faith, we can now say: as they stride through the gate of death, men find themselves once more together. And just as the body, which impedes our sight of the spirit, disappears in the spiritual world, so too in that world every impediment to friendship and love now disappears. Men are closer together there than in the flesh. A mode of knowledge that may still appear abstract in relation to true psychology culminates in this religious feeling and vision. Yet the philosophy of life I am here presenting does not seek to infringe religious faith. This philosophy can be tolerant; it can recognize fully the value of every individual religious faith, and even exercise it in practice; but at the same time, as a nurse to this religious life, it provides an epistemological basis for this religious life too.

I have sought today to say something basic about the relationship to psychology of a spiritually appropriate modern view of life. I know, better than many an opponent perhaps, the objections that can be raised to the beginnings of such a philosophy. But I believe I also know that, albeit entirely unconsciously, the longing for such a psychology is present today in countless souls. It therefore needs to be said over and over again: just as one does not need to be a painter to feel the beauty of a picture, so too one does not need to be a spiritual scientist oneself—although one can become one up to a point—to be able to test whether what I am saying here is true. Just as one can feel the beauty of a picture without being a painter oneself, so with ordinary common sense one can perceive what the spiritual scientist says about the soul. That one can see it, I think I have established all the more firmly in recognizing how souls thirst for a profounder approach to psychology and to the great riddles of existence in relation to the soul. The aim of a modern view of life such as has been outlined here today does in fact represent the desire of countless people, though they are not ordinarily aware of it; it forms the pain, the sorrow, the privation, the wish of countless people—of all those who are serious about what we must regard as constructive forces in face of the many forces of decline present in our age.

Anyone today who wishes to advocate a philosophy for the times must realize that he has to speak, think and will in harmony with what the souls in our serious age, if in many cases unconsciously, strive for. And I believe—if I may close on this note—that just such a philosophy as I have adumbrated does hold something of what countless souls strive for today, something of what they need as spiritual content and vital spiritual activity for the present and for the immediate future.