The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From a soul struggling for knowledge of the world, Goethe spoke the sentence:

Mysterious in the clear light of day
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil.
And what she may not reveal to your spirit,
You cannot force from her with levers and screws.

And much of what has taken place in the field of science since his time would have prompted him to say:... you cannot force that from her with microscopes and telescopes. — The saying does not arise from a lack of knowledge, but from an attitude that does not want to accept only the material. From his youth to his old age, he held fast to what he says in Faust:

The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Up! Bathe, disciple, undeterred
The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

And so he has here, as also expressed in the sentence mentioned earlier, not that man could not penetrate the mystery of existence, but to draw attention to the fact that the human spirit itself, in its development, can do what instruments cannot, that the human spirit is able to ascend from level to level.

What the human spirit can do can only be answered from an understanding of the secrets of our consciousness. Consciousness as it is experienced by people today relates to the other consciousnesses that exist and relate to today's normal consciousness in such a way that they, so to speak, plunge the human being into dark depths, and on the other hand lead him up to the summit of knowledge.

Let us ask ourselves today: Is there only the “normal” consciousness or are there other consciousnesses and thus the possibility of penetrating into the causes of our existence? Today, we will deal with the relationship between consciousnesses from a particular point of view. What the word “clairvoyance” encompasses is something that is unpopular and contested in our present time. People who only recognize normal consciousness will consider everything that has to be said as folly and fantasy.

It is based on nothing more than a lack of knowledge of the nature of human consciousness; it must be said that the common inner ignorance of facts speaks in this way. And it should not go unmentioned that one would wish that what is called 'clairvoyance' in the spiritual sense be known to those who speak of it and who know very little about it and crave it. They imagine something quite wrong under clairvoyance. Therefore, it must be spoken of that clairvoyance, which lies below our normal consciousness and also brings out the human being below normal consciousness. And in comparison, it must be spoken of what clairvoyance is in the spiritual-scientific sense and how it leads beyond normal consciousness. It can only be understood by placing oneself before the soul, which has often been said about the nature of man, about the visible and invisible man.

Spiritual science does not have it as easy as recognizing man as an external science that is tied to sensual matter. It regards only the outer physical part, and then speaks of the physical human body. Within this physical human body, the consciousness of which we will speak in a moment sees the invisible, the supersensible human bodies. Isn't it the case that the ordinary mind could form enough reasons for the existence of these bodies if it would only say the following to itself: I wake up every morning; during the night my normal consciousness is immersed in darkness and gloom. In the morning, entities from the most diverse realms of nature penetrate into the field of vision of consciousness; everything that was there yesterday penetrates back into consciousness.

Now everyone should continue by saying to themselves: If it were not too absurd, what fills the field of consciousness would have to disappear in the evening and arise again in the morning. They should say to themselves: Its existence would have to have disappeared during the night. Spiritual science tells us that the human being still has an astral body, which is the carrier of lust and joy, of urges and desires, etc. For clairvoyant consciousness, the astral body descends when we fall asleep. Why do we have no impressions during the night? Because it is in the spiritual world and because we have no organs for it. Imagine what would happen in the physical body. The eyes disappear; the ears stop hearing; you would have no sound, no color around you. Likewise, you could imagine that the other senses gradually fade away. This is what the astral body is like at night because it has not formed any organs in the course of human development; in the morning it uses the organs of the physical body. Thus we recognize in it one of the invisible links.

Between the astral body and the physical body lies a second link: the etheric body. During the time between birth and death, this is a fighter against the decay of the physical body. And then, when the human physical body is a corpse, it only follows the physical and chemical forces, because the etheric body moves out at death with the astral body. Sleep is separation from the astral body; physical body and etheric body remain in bed at night.

Then we distinguish a fourth element: the “I”, with which the human being can come to self-awareness. Thus, we see the human being as a composite of the physical body and three invisible elements: the etheric body, the astral body and the I.

Only when we consider the human being in its entirety can we form an idea of the stages of consciousness. There is only one thing we must be clear about: how do we look at the limbs? Once the physical body was of a spiritual nature; it has disintegrated, like ice separates from water. And the ether body is, as it were, a little denser spirit, and the astral body is still a little denser, and the I-bearing body is still a little denser spirit. Therefore, we also call the “I” that which is a “divine spark” or “drop”. It is only through the fact that man has gradually developed that he has become an “I-bearer” and awakened to his self-awareness.

If we go back, we find the first formation of the physical body. Then, as it were, as the physical body became denser, the etheric body was set apart. Even later, the astral body was added, and even later the I. Only through this did he - the human being - receive his normal consciousness, through which we perceive external objects.

This consciousness was not always there; it is a product of development. We could go back into the past and we would find that the human being was a being consisting of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. In this very distant past, man did not have today's consciousness; he had a completely different one, a consciousness that is one step lower. We can call this consciousness, in relation to today's, an “image consciousness”. The only way we can study this consciousness is to restore consciousness to a higher degree. In those days, people could not perceive objects in outer space. Imagine that there is some object lying nearby that has a certain taste. Today, a person has to become aware of it through the taste, through the tongue; he perceives from the outside what the object is. The image consciousness cannot perceive such an external object; an image arises, and this image is a symbol of what taste the external object has. Or one approaches an object that would shine for today's consciousness; the image consciousness does not see that; but through a mysterious bond between the soul and the body, an image arises again.

And so we may say that such a consciousness has images that surge up and down, images that are closely related to our present-day ideas, except that they are symbols; our present-day ideas are only photographic images. What the astral body experiences is an awareness of images. Indeed, if today's human being could erase his “self-awareness”, he would disappear into the sea of astral images. He would experience the surging images in the astral body. We can characterize our present-day consciousness by means of a comparison. Imagine a creature that lives in the sea for a certain period of time, so that it only stays at certain depths. It knows the animals and plants that are embedded in the sea, but it never looks at the sky. This is roughly how we have to imagine human consciousness. Man emerges from a sea of astral images, and self-awareness is ignited by the outside world. This could never have developed if he had remained in the sea of the astral; but only by having objects in the external world does self-consciousness ignite.

Thus we have pointed to a certain level of consciousness that lies below our present, ordinary sense of self, from which humanity has developed. If we go further, we would find a person who did not yet have the astral body. And so we could say that image consciousness has developed out of an “ether image consciousness”. If we were to descend further, we would perceive a consciousness that differs essentially from what the modern human being knows as consciousness. But you can get an idea from what has been said today: the ether consciousness is contained in what remains in bed during the night. And our astral consciousness has submerged in the sea of the astral.

Now we do not have to imagine extreme contrasts here, but differences in degree. We do not have to think that the consciousness during sleep is the opposite of our own today; imagine that you also know something similar in our daytime consciousness. When you walk down the street, it may happen that you say to yourself: Didn't I see something just now? — You did not pay attention to it. There you have a lower consciousness. There is only a duller consciousness in what remains in bed. The plant has the consciousness of sleep continually - they are sleeping beings.

And we can descend even further, we can enter the physical body and come to the mineral consciousness. This is the consciousness in which the whole mineral world lives. So we have listed four levels: mineral, plant, animal and human consciousness. Three levels of consciousness therefore lie below our everyday, normal consciousness. These three levels were completed by man in prehistoric times.

Today, people are occasionally able to revive the last remnants of ancient levels of consciousness within themselves. There are also such heirlooms in the physical world, such as the auricles, which are an atavistic remnant; likewise, certain states of consciousness, which are usually called clairvoyant states, are heirlooms from ancient developmental states. However, they are not the true ones in the sense of spiritual science; they are only old heirlooms that sometimes live into our present-day consciousness.

People have two very different types of such inherited traits, which express themselves in very different ways. One is what encompasses the dream world. What a person experiences in a dream are not perceptions that are made in the same way as those experienced by daytime consciousness. They are images of external events. You only need to imagine characteristic dreams. Let us take one as an example: a young man dreams that the vault of heaven has opened up in front of him and a number of shining beings have emerged. He wakes up and sees that the morning sun has shone on the wall through the window. The dream has symbolically expressed this shining of the morning sun in such a way that it allowed the experience to arise in the soul as an image. Here you have an image experience. That is why the dream is an heirloom from the time when man had inner soul experiences that were linked in their form to external objects. For example, if you see a symbol with an ugly color in your astral consciousness, you know that there is a harmful object nearby. The not yet awakened object consciousness does not see the object, but only an image, so that one could arrange one's actions accordingly.

The dream images are only a remnant, but since they have different degrees of approximation, the “dream can sometimes light up that it really corresponds to a real fact that appears symbolically. Let us take the case of a person who dreams of the colony of Kiau-tschau, how he sits in a meeting and is constantly confronted with the name Kiau-tschau. He wakes up and sees that a cat has crept into his room and is meowing. In fact, the dream is such an arbitrarily drawn conception.

If you study the dream in this way, you will see that it is lines of life that have been preserved, but that it mixes lines with the greatest arbitrariness, mixing in certain interests of the day. Such a mixing of interests is, for example, when an important philosopher dreams the following. In his soul lived the poem:

Do you want to roam into the distance,
when the good is so close,
just learn to grasp luck,
because luck is always there.

And he dreams:

Do you want to roam afar?
See, the money is so close.
Just learn to grasp the money,
Because the money is always there.

You see how the dream from the source of the inner imagination deals arbitrarily with what it has experienced – the structure of Goethe's poem, for example.

If we were to follow this, we would have an immersion in an earlier state of consciousness. All our ideas can be symbolized in this way. Imagine you are lying in bed, you press your feet against the lower edge of the bed and release them again. The dream symbolizes: the feet become free and a flight arises. What causes the dream? The fact that what happens does not happen completely when a person sinks into dreamless sleep.

It is now possible that the astral body has already left the physical body and not yet the etheric body; this is particularly the case when waking up and falling asleep. Then the astral experiences are reflected and the dream experiences arise. The dream stands on its own; it is really a last remnant of old, overcome states of consciousness.

It is different with other states of “abnormal consciousness”, which can develop in certain respects in humans. Because they submerge in the astral, so that they give up their full self-awareness in certain respects, completely different states of the subconscious arise than in a normal dream. What must be tuned down is what man calls his 'I', his healthy thinking, to distinguish it precisely from what is in the environment. Every time the actual 'I' of the human being is tuned down, when the human being does not feel: Here I stand —, then it is as if the human being were diving below the surface of the astral sea. Then what can be called the subconscious comes to him.

There are three forms of the subconscious: what is called presentiment, what is called vision and then second sight. These are three different forms of the subconscious. It is natural that when man muffles his ego, he enters into a closer relationship with all the threads that nature connects than he would otherwise. When we raise our usual ego consciousness, then man must be content to see only part of the space; there he is always in such a restricted area, and what effort it costs to pull the connecting threads of nature. In a limited consciousness – that is the work of our 'ego' itself, when we dampen it down, when we dampen down our abilities, when we let our reason fall silent, then we descend into our astral body and this is connected with many intimate threads to what lives in the astral. There the ordinary connections of space and time come to an end. There we dampen down all these concepts.

Because of the completely different concepts of space and time, it can happen, as it does in presentiment, that time is overcome. At the slightest immersion, what might be called “dark feeling” arises; this comes from the currents that run beneath the surface, which one senses gently when one descends into the astral world. If you dive deeper, then, just as it was with the astral consciousness, the experiences form into very specific images and the vision occurs. We are then in the world of causes, in the world of the primal reasons. Then those beings emerge that are invisible to the physical eye. We get to know such entities, and the visions are often the physical expression of beings that are behind the sense world.

Thus we can actually encounter those entities that are there and can also be human souls. This enters our consciousness when we descend. And the actions of these spiritual beings, what they undertake unbound by space and time, we experience in second sight. When we see things far away in second sight, it is a descent into the depths of consciousness.

Today's man cannot dive into the depths of consciousness without taking with him what he has experienced up here. Man has acquired the habit of seeing animals and plants, etcetera, in a very specific way. He takes the way with him and with it he covers, as it were, the beings that come to meet him. They are true beings that appear to him, but they are false images. The fact is that he submerges, that he sees a being that does not appear in its true form, and he covers that with the images he is accustomed to. For example, someone submerges and he thinks he sees the Christ himself. Nevertheless, it is a real being from the spiritual world, but he has endowed it with the image of the Christ himself. And so what he sees is an illusion of a real being. And because people who are not trained clairvoyants cannot know whether they are seeing what they are taking with them or what is the truth, such people can be very sure that they are indulging in the greatest deceptions. Descending is therefore always accompanied by deception after deception.

You can dive even deeper, into the sea of ether, and you also take with you the way of seeing things very definitely. You can perceive powers in this way, but they will be blurred. If you saw them clearly, you would see what could be described as an all-encompassing life. For example, you would see our earth as an all-encompassing living being. But in this world man perceives the images to which he has become accustomed, and sees all kinds of things that have indeed been caused by spiritual entities; but the forms that the lower clairvoyant perceives are in deceptive form. These clairvoyants are what are called the dream walker, for example, where the person in the dream performs actions with the physical body in the dullness of the etheric body.

Likewise, what is called “magnetic sleep consciousness” is to be sought in this sphere, because usually causes of illness underlie it; suppose you have an organ that is diseased, you do not need to know it, something is abnormal about the person, which steers the person towards becoming conscious in the etheric body, especially when another person strokes them, etc., accelerates this process. All kinds of events in the spiritual world appear to him in all kinds of illusions. So we see that one can descend into different states of consciousness. In occult science, they are called the “subconscious”.

All these states of consciousness are not relevant to what is said in esoteric science. Many people are eager to switch off their ordinary daily consciousness and descend. They only want to experience something strange, they want to experience spirits. That human beings are spirits is not proof enough for them; they want to have spirits without physical expression. This is not to say anything against the truth and reality of these spheres; but what would come from such states could never be decisive for spiritual science.

Just as there is a subconscious, there is also a superconscious. This can only be achieved through training in the occult sciences. This includes learning to manage one's ordinary consciousness in the most precise way. It is therefore always emphasized that what spiritual science hears from the spheres can only be grasped with ordinary human understanding. It cannot be expressed strongly enough that Theosophy can be grasped with ordinary human understanding. Only those who are trained clairvoyants can see the true shape of the spiritual world. But when it is related after he has seen it, those who absorb these facts, when they are presented in a sensible, comprehensive way, can understand everything and they can say to themselves: If I do this, I can then check whether all this can be applied to life. One must keep common sense as one's own possession. You have to keep telling people who come to you: Approach the physical world first, apply our minds to these facts and try to understand them.

But who has an unimpaired mind, unclouded by the suggestion of so-called scientific facts! You have to realize that this is no easy task! Never before has the human mind been so limited as it is today. Everyone is satisfied when they can construct a whole edifice of the world from a few pegged-out concepts, and when someone comes along who wants to build the edifice from the sum of spiritual truths, they say that this is folly, fantasy or something even worse.

This must be taken into account. Only unprejudiced thinking can approach the physical world, not judgment clouded by all sorts of suggestions. Today people talk a lot about the “independence of judgment”; they want to be free of authority. They do not accept what they have not examined themselves; but they do not ask themselves whether they are capable of examining everything. What matters is that they want to be independent of any authority and yet are dependent on a great authority: “They say.” This intangible authority has a tyrannical effect on people. Humanity languishes under it, believing itself to be free from all authority. It absorbs everything that is a matter of contemporary judgment; one believes everything that science has established, as if no one cared.

He who stands face to face with the facts of the spiritual world must free himself from this. There he has to use his usual healthy judgment to progress to superconsciousness. Many a person comes and says: I used to see all kinds of things, but now everything has disappeared. Those who understand will say: That is good. You should ascend to the superconscious; to do that, the best transition is to go through a sphere of spiritual darkness. You can expose yourself to danger if you don't want to. When [the person] descends into the subconscious and all the confusing impressions of the astral world come, then perhaps in a certain respect he will come to have premonitions, visions, etc.; he may still see so many black poodles that only pretend to be something. That is not the point of seeing this. He who is not yet mature enough not to have respect for these scraps of the spiritual world is also not mature enough to penetrate into the superconscious. To do this, he must undergo catharsis or purification. Man must be cleansed of all subconsciousness if he wants to ascend into the first sphere of the superconscious. There he also experiences a consciousness of images, but in the same way as he lives in everyday life. To do this, it is necessary to strengthen one's consciousness and throw out everything that is subconscious. And that is a lot! You can see this if you remember that in early childhood, a lot of things penetrate you; you have forgotten them in your sense of self, but they are inscribed in your etheric and astral bodies. Certain childhood impressions would come up and disturb a person every time he or she tries to penetrate into a higher consciousness. In a sense, diving into the spheres of the subconscious is a dressing up of the real facts with images from the real world. Try to register the images of such “clairvoyants”, follow them back to a time when there were no railways or telegraphs, wait and you will not be surprised that railways and telegraphs will play major roles in the “spirit realm”. This is only because the seer takes with him what has been imprinted in the etheric body. Therefore, if you want to penetrate unclouded, it is necessary to throw everything out of your subconscious. You can only acquire it by going through it with complete consciousness, which is provided by the spiritual scientific method. There is what the student has to practice, what he has to experience, absorbed in imagination, and that is pictorial representation, which proceeds according to the rule:

All that is transitory is but a parable.

Thus you will find that in every training session symbols are given such as the rose cross, the serpent staff of Hermes, etc. They have something tremendously significant when a person has to experience certain facts of the outer world inwardly. One forms a symbol that one does not use in the same way as a photographic image of the outer world.

Let me mention here once more, in the form of a dialogue between teacher and student – this dialogue did not take place, but the facts do take place –: Look at a plant; it takes root in the ground and lets stems, leaves and flowers emerge. And now compare the plant with the human being. You call him a higher being. You know that the red blood that makes man a higher being also enables him to develop passions, instincts and desires, but also the soul world, the higher consciousness. The plant has no desires and instincts; it stands there in pure, high chastity. But you see the human being with a higher consciousness; however, he pays for that which is connected with the red blood through passion and desire. And then imagine the high ideal that the human being will become like the plant; he has subdued the desires and purified his red blood.

For man the plant is a model; he forms a picture of how, in time, everything degrading will have died out in man, and his blood will be pure, like the sap in the red rose. Think of this as a symbol in the red rose and apply to it Goethe's saying:

Before you do not have this,
this: Die and become!
Are you only a gloomy guest
On the dark earth!

And when we feel the burgeoning and sprouting in the soul, like the reddened sap in the red rose, we feel that and let the image work on us in inner meditation! And the image has a certain effect: it pushes out everything that fills the subconscious, and we have taken the first step towards the superconscious.

There are countless symbols just as I have described the Rose Cross. The disciple must immerse himself in these and then put them together in the “occult writing”, and in this way he comes, purified and cleansed, to an ether consciousness. Through what we gain from the occult writing, we receive the so-called inspired consciousness in that which is not tied to space and time; but we do not see it clouded by the images of everyday life.

And then there is a higher link of the superconscious: intuition. — In all these spheres of the superconscious, man takes his full “self-awareness” with him. If someone says: You are describing a consciousness in vain, that does not reflect a true world, then let someone who understands it tell them: These things are there so that the forces develop in us that free the astral body, the etheric body, from the physical body, and by doing so, we learn to see into the spiritual world while being fully aware of our ego.

There is no danger associated with this path, nothing can happen to us on it, it is safe if we follow it with patience and perseverance. If you submerge yourself, if you dampen the I, there is a danger; we fall prey to the passions that reside in the astral, and eventually we can lose our minds, while we become more and more understanding as we ascend in superconsciousness. Hence the insistence that the road to superconsciousness lies through day-consciousness. Those who find it too dull and uncomfortable to go through the study of the physical often pay for it with the loss of their reason, which they have sought through their greed.

Thus we see that there are stages that lead up and stages that lead down. The former lead to true clairvoyant states, where the ego is among the actions of spiritual beings [in inspiration] and finally where it is spirit among spirits [in intuition]. Nothing less is achieved than the cleansing of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. There are some things you have to accept; for example, when a person frees his etheric body, he may experience a temporary loss of memory because it is attached to his etheric body. If a person partially draws it out so that he can use it, his memory fades. But it will be amply restored to him later, albeit in a different way. And the qualities and abilities of consciousness are lost for a time; even self-awareness takes on a different form. Like a wanderer who feels lonely, the person walks along. As he penetrates further, the common memory disappears and a certain insight into past things arises.

Those who undertake the right training must have composure and perseverance. They must enter the path with courage and boldness, but it will be rewarded with the great reward of insight into the spiritual world, where the powers lie to become master of the physical world. A time will come when only those who recognize the spiritual forces behind the physical and can make them fruitful will be considered practical people. This leads us into the spiritual world while fully maintaining self-awareness. Not instruments, telescopes and microscopes, which only explain the veil of nature, only the spirit leads into nature.

Mysterious in the bright day

Nature cannot be robbed of the veil.

And what it may not reveal to your mind,

You do not force it out with levers and with screws.

If we want nature to come to meet us, we must go to meet it by developing our consciousness into superconsciousness. Then man will live his way into what Goethe described with the words he put into the mouth of the wise man:

The spirit world is not closed; your mind is closed, your heart is dead! Arise, student, arise,

The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

Since we can meet so seldom, it will perhaps be good to touch upon some questions today, through which anthroposophy is directly concerned with life. Anthroposophists will often be asked: what does anthroposophy mean for someone not yet able to see into the spiritual worlds by means of clairvoyant consciousness? For the content of spiritual science is in the main received, derived and imparted through research undertaken through clairvoyant consciousness. It must be emphasised again and again that everything, all the facts and relationships, investigated and imparted from clairvoyant consciousness, must be comprehended by healthy human understanding. Once the things found by clairvoyant consciousness are there, they can be grasped and understood by the logic inherent in every ordinary human being, if only his judgment is unprejudiced enough.

Further, it can be asked: are there not facts experienced in normal human life which give direct support to the assertion by spiritual research, that our physical world and all its phenomena have underlying them a spiritual world? There are indeed many facts in ordinary life of which we could say that man would never comprehend them, although he has to accept their existence, without the recognition of a spiritual world.

We can look to begin with at two facts in ordinary human consciousness which cannot be explained without taking the presence of a spiritual world into consideration. Man knows these indeed as everyday facts, but does not usually regard them in the right light; if he did, there would be no necessity for a materialistic conception of the world. The first of these facts can be regarded in connection with very familiar events in ordinary life.

When a man faces a fact which he cannot explain with the conceptions that he has acquired up to that moment, he is astonished. Someone for example who saw for the first time a car or a train in movement (though such things will soon not be unusual even in the interior of Africa) would be very astonished, because he would think something like this: According to my experience up to now it seems impossible to me that a thing can move along quickly, without having something harnessed to it in front, that can pull it. But I can see that this is moving along quickly without being pulled! That is astonishing. What a man does not yet know causes him astonishment; something he has already seen, no longer astonishes him. Only the things which cannot be connected with previous experiences cause astonishment; let us keep this fact of ordinary life clearly before us. And we can bring it now into connection with another fact, which is very remarkable. Human beings are faced in ordinary life with many things that they have never seen before and which they nevertheless accept without astonishment. There are many such events. What are they?

It would be very astonishing, for example, if someone was to find in the ordinary way that after sitting quietly on his chair he suddenly began to fly up through the chimney into the air. It would indeed be astonishing; but when this happens in a dream he would do it all without being in any way amazed. We experience in dreams much more fantastic things than this, but are not astonished although we cannot relate them to daily events. In waking life we are even astonished if somebody leaps high into the air; but in a dream we can fly without being surprised at all. So we are faced with the fact that while in waking life we are astonished about things we had not experienced previously, in dreams we are not at all amazed.

As a second fact from which we shall begin, we have the question of conscience. When a man does something, and with a sensitive nature even when he thinks, something stirs in him that we call conscience. This conscience is entirely independent of the external significance of events. We could for example have done something very advantageous to us, and yet this act might be condemned by our conscience. Everyone feels that when conscience goes into action something influences the judgment of an act that has nothing to do with its utility. It is like a voice that says within us: Truly, you should have done this, or you should not have done this—this is the fact of conscience, and we know how strong its warning power can be, and how it can pursue us through life. We know that the presence of conscience cannot be denied.

Now we can consider again the life of dreams. Here we may do the strangest things which would cause us the most terrible pangs of conscience if we did them in waking life. Anyone can confirm this from his own experience, that he does things in dreams without his conscience stirring at all; while if he were to do them awake the voice of conscience would speak.

Thus these two facts, amazement and conscience, are excluded in a remarkable way from the life of dreams. Ordinarily man does not notice such things; nevertheless they throw their light upon the depths of our existence.

There is something else that throws light on this, concerned less with conscience than with astonishment. In ancient Greece the saying appears that all philosophy begins with astonishment, with wonder. The feeling expressed in this saying—the feeling of the Greeks themselves—cannot be found in the earlier periods of Greek history; only from a certain point in the development of philosophy is it to be found. Earlier periods did not have this feeling. Why was it that from a certain point onwards in ancient Greece this observation about astonishment was made? We have seen that we are astonished about something that does not fit in with our previous life; but if we have only this kind of astonishment this is nothing specially remarkable. Someone who is astonished about a car or train is simply unaccustomed to see such things. It is much more remarkable that a man can begin to be astonished about accustomed things. For example there is the fact that the sun rises every morning. Those people who are accustomed to this fact with their ordinary consciousness are not surprised about it. But when there is astonishment about the everyday things, which one is accustomed to see, philosophy and knowledge arise. Those men are the richer in knowledge, who are able to be astonished about things which the ordinary man simply accepts. Only then does a man strive for knowledge. For this reason, it was said in ancient Greece: All philosophy begins in wonder.

How is it with the conscience? Once more it is interesting, that the word ‘conscience’—and therefore the concept too, for only when we have a conception of something does the word appear—is also only to be found in ancient Greece from a certain time onwards. It is impossible to find in earlier Greek literature, about up to the time of Aeschylus, a word that should be translated ‘conscience’. But we find one in the later Greek writers, for example Euripides. Thus it can be pointed out precisely that conscience is something, just as is amazement about familiar things, known to man only from a certain period of ancient Greece onwards. What sprang up at this time as the activity of conscience was something quite different among the earlier Greeks. It did not then happen that the pangs of conscience appeared when a man had done something wrong. Men had then an original, elemental clairvoyance; going back only a short time before the Christian era we would find that all human beings still had this original clairvoyance. If a man then did something wrong, it was not followed by the stirring of conscience, but a demonic form appeared before the old clairvoyance, and a man was tormented by it. Such forms were called Erinys or Furies. Only when men had lost the capacity to see these demonic forms did they become able to feel, when they had done something wrong, the power of conscience as an inner experience.

What do such facts show? What really happens in the everyday fact of astonishment—when for example a tribesman from the depths of Africa, suddenly transported to Europe, sees here the trains and cars for the first time? He is astonished because his astonishment presupposes that something new is entering his life, something that he before saw differently.

If now a developed man has a particular need to find explanations for many things, including everyday things, because he is able to be astonished about everyday things—this too presupposes that he had seen the thing differently before. No-one would be able to reach another explanation of the sunrise, distinct from the mere appearance of its rising, if he had not seen it differently before. But it might be objected that we see the sunrise happening in just the same way from our earliest youth; would it not be nonsensical to be astonished about it? There is no other explanation of this than that if we are amazed about it after all, we must have experienced it earlier in another condition, in a way different from our present experience in this life. For if spiritual science says that man exists between birth and a previous life in another condition, we have in the fact of astonishment about something so everyday as a sunrise an indication of this earlier condition, in which man also perceived the sunrise, but in another way, without bodily organs. He perceived all this then with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. In the moment where dim feelings lead him to say: ‘You face the rising sun, the roaring sea, the growing plant, and are filled with wonder!’—there is in this wonder the knowledge, that all this has once been perceived in another way, not with bodily eyes. He has looked at all these with his spiritual eyes before he entered the physical world. He feels dimly: ‘Yet this is all different, from the form in which you saw it earlier.’ This was, and could only be, before birth. These facts compel us to recognise that knowledge would not be possible at all if man did not enter this life from a preceding super-sensible existence. Otherwise there would be no explanation for amazement and the knowledge that follows from it. Naturally man does not remember in clear pictures what he experienced in a different way before birth; but though it is not in the form of clear thought, it is present in feeling. It can only be brought as a clear memory through initiation.

Now we can go deeper into the fact that we are not amazed in dreams. First the question must be answered, what a dream really is. Dreams are an ancient heritage from earlier incarnations. Men passed in earlier incarnations through other conditions of consciousness which were similar to clairvoyance. In the further course of evolution man lost the capacity to look clairvoyantly into the world of soul and spirit. It was a shadowy clairvoyance; evolution proceeded gradually, from the earlier, shadowy clairvoyance into our present clear, waking consciousness, which could develop in the physical world—in order, when it is fully developed, to ascend again into the worlds of soul and spirit with the capacities which man has acquired with his ‘I’ in waking consciousness. But what did men acquire then in the old clairvoyance? Something has remained; the life of dreams. But the life of dreams is distinguished from the old clairvoyance by the fact that it is an experience of present-day man, and present-day man has developed a consciousness which contains the impulse to acquire knowledge. Dreams, as a remnant of an earlier consciousness, do not contain the impulse to acquire knowledge and for this reason man feels the distinction between waking consciousness and the consciousness of dreams.

Astonishment, which did not exist in the ancient shadowy clairvoyance, cannot enter even today the consciousness of dreams. Astonishment and wonder cannot enter the life of dreams. We have them in the waking consciousness, which is directed to the external world. In his dreams, man is not in the external world; he is placed into the spiritual world, and does not experience physical things. But it was in facing the physical world that man learned amazement. In dreams he accepts everything as it comes, as he did in the old clairvoyance. He could do this then because the spiritual powers came and showed him the good and evil that he had done; man did not then need wonder. Dreams thus show us by their own character that they are inherited from ancient times, when there was not yet any astonishment about everyday things, and not yet a conscience.

Why was it necessary that man, having once been clairvoyant, could not remain so? Why has he descended? Did the gods perhaps drive him down unnecessarily? It is really so, that man could never have acquired what lies in his capacity of wonder and what lies in his conscience, if he had not descended. Man descended in order to acquire knowledge and conscience; he could only do so through being separated for a time from these spiritual worlds. And he has achieved knowledge and conscience here, in order to ascend once more with them.

Spiritual science shows us that man spends each time a period between death and a new birth in a purely spiritual world. We experience to begin with after death the time of Kamaloca, the condition in the soul world where desires are purified, where man is only half in the spiritual world, so to speak, because he still looks back upon his impulses and attachments and is thus still drawn by what bound him to the physical world. Only when this Kamaloca period has been wiped out does he experience purely spiritual life in its fulness, in the realm of spirit.

When a man enters this purely spiritual world, what is his experience? How is it experienced by every human being? Consideration even by the quite ordinary understanding leads to the conclusion that our environment between death and a new birth must appear entirely different from what we have in physical life. Here we see colours because we have eyes; here we hear sounds because we have ears. But when in spiritual existence after death we have no eyes and no ears, we cannot perceive these colours, and sounds. Even here we see and hear badly or not at all, if we have not got good eyes and ears. It is self-evident that we have to conceive the spiritual world as entirely different from the world in which we here live between birth and death. We can form a picture of the way in which this world must alter when we pass through the gate of death with the help of a comparison. A man sees a lamb and a wolf. By means of the organs of perception available to him in physical life man perceives the lamb and the wolf; he sees them as material lamb, as material wolf. Other lambs and wolves too he recognises, and calls them lamb and wolf. He has a conceptual picture of a lamb, and another of a wolf. It could now be said, and is in fact said: the conceptual picture of the animal is not visible, it lives within the animal; one does not really see materially the essential being of lamb and wolf. One forms mental pictures of the essential being of the animal, but this essential being is in itself invisible.

There are theorists who hold that the concepts of wolf and lamb which we form for ourselves live only within us, and that they have nothing to do with the wolf and the lamb themselves. A man who holds this view should be asked to feed a wolf with lambs until all material parts of the wolf body have been renewed, according to scientific research—then the wolf would be built entirely of matter from lambs. And then this man should see whether the wolf has turned into a lamb! But if the result is nevertheless that the wolf has not become a lamb, it has been proved that ‘wolf’, as a fact, is something distinct from the material wolf and that the wolf's objective existence is something more than a material thing.

This invisible reality, which in ordinary life one only forms as a concept, one actually sees after death. One does not see there the lamb's white colour, or hear the sounds which it makes but one beholds the invisible power which works in the lamb. For the one who lives in the spiritual world this is just as real, this is actually there. Where a lamb is standing, there stands too a spiritual reality, which becomes visible for man after death. And it is the same with all phenomena of the physical environment. One sees the sun differently, the moon differently, everything differently; and one brings something of this with one, while entering through birth into a new existence. And if through this there arises the feeling that one has once seen something quite differently, then there descends with one's astonishment and wonder the power of knowledge.

It is something different, if one observes a human action. Then the element of conscience is added. If we wish to know what this is we must turn our attention to a fact of life which can be confirmed without the development of clairvoyance. The moment of falling asleep must be carefully observed. One can learn to do this without any clairvoyance; this experience is open to anyone. Just before one falls asleep, things first lose their sharp outlines, colours grow faint, sounds not only grow weaker, but it is as if they go away from us into the distance; they reach us only from far away, they grow weaker just as if they were going into the distance. The way in which the whole visible world grows less distinct is a transformation like the oncoming of mist. And the limbs grow heavier. One feels in them something which one has not felt before in waking life; it is as if they acquired their own weight, their own heaviness. In waking life if one were to consider it one should really feel that a leg, when one is walking, or a hand, which one raises, have for us no weight. We raise our hand, carrying a hundredweight—why is the hundredweight heavy? We raise our hand and it carries itself—why do we feel no weight? The hand belongs to me, and so its heaviness is not felt; the hundredweight is outside me, and since it does not belong to me, it is heavy. Let us imagine a being from Mars descending to the earth, knowing nothing about earthly things; and the first thing he sees is a man holding a weight in each hand. To begin with he would have to suppose that both these weights belong to the man as if they were part of his hands, part of his whole being. If he then later had to accept the idea that the man feels a difference between the hundredweight and his hand, he would find it astonishing. We really only feel something as a weight if it is outside us. So that if man feels his limbs beginning to become heavy as he falls asleep, this is a sign that man goes out of his body, out of his physical being.

Much now depends upon a delicate observation, which can be made at the moment when the limbs grow heavy. A remarkable feeling appears. It tells us: ‘You have done this—you have left this undone!’ Like a living conscience the deeds of the previous day stand out. And if something is there that we cannot approve of we toss on our bed and cannot fall asleep. If we can be content with our action there comes a happy moment as we fall asleep, when a man says to himself: ‘Could it always be so!’ Then there comes a jolt—that is when man leaves his physical and ethereal body, and then a man is in the spiritual world.

Let us observe the moment of this phenomenon, which is like a living conscience, more exactly. A man has not really any power to do something reasonable, and tosses about on his bed. This is an unhealthy condition which prevents him from getting to sleep. It happens at the moment when we are about to leave the physical plane through falling asleep, in order to ascend into another world; but this is not willing to accept what we call our ‘bad conscience’. A man cannot fall asleep because he is cast back by the world into which he should enter in sleep. Thus if we say that we will listen to our conscience about some action, this means that we have a presentiment of what the human being will need to be in future in order to enter the spiritual world.

Thus we have in astonishment an expression of what we have seen at an earlier time, and conscience is an expression of a future vision in the spiritual world. Conscience reveals whether we shall be horrified or happy, when we are able to behold our actions in the realm of spirit. Conscience is a presentiment that reveals prophetically how we shall experience our deeds after death.

Astonishment and the impulse towards knowledge on the one hand, and the conscience on the other—these are living signs of the spiritual world. These phenomena cannot be explained without bringing in the spiritual worlds. A man will be more inclined to become an anthroposophist if he feels reverence and wonder before the facts of the world. The most developed souls are those which are able to feel wonder more and more. The less one can feel wonder, the less advanced is the soul. Human beings bring to the everyday things of life far less wonder than they bring for example to the starry sky in its majesty. But the real higher development of the soul only begins when one can feel as much wonder about the smallest flower and petal, about the most inconspicuous beetle or worm, as about the greatest cosmic events. These things are very remarkable; a man will generally be moved very easily to ask for the explanation of something which strikes him as sensational. People who live near a volcano for example will ask for the explanation of volcanic eruptions, because people in such regions have to be alert about such things and give them more attention than everyday affairs. Even people who live far away from volcanoes ask for an explanation of them, because these events are startling and sensational for them too. But when a man enters life with such a soul, that he is astonished about everything, because he feels something of the spiritual through all his surroundings, then he is not very much more astonished about a volcano than about the little bubbles and craters which he notices in a cup of milk or coffee on his breakfast table. He is just as interested in small things as in great things.

To be able to bring wonder everywhere—that is a memory of the vision before birth. To bring conscience everywhere into our deeds is to have a living presentiment that every deed which we fulfil will appear to us in the future in another form. Human beings who feel this are more predestined than others to find their way to spiritual science.

We live in a time in which certain things are being revealed which can only be explained through spiritual science. Some things defy every other explanation. People behave very differently towards such things. We have certainly in our time many human characters to observe, and yet within the great variety of shades of character we encounter two main qualities.

We can describe one group as meditative natures, inclined towards contemplation, able everywhere to feel astonishment, feeling everywhere their conscience stirred. Many sorrows, many heavy melancholic moods can pile up in the soul if the longing for explanations remains unsatisfied. A delicate conscience can make life very difficult. Another kind of human being is present today. They have no wish for such an explanation of the world. All the things that are brought forward as explanations derived from spiritual research appear to them terribly dull, and they prefer to live actively and unheedingly, rather than asking for explanations. If you even begin to speak about explanations, they yawn at once. And certainly with people of this kind, conscience is less active than with the others. What is the source of such polarities in character? Spiritual science is ready to examine the reasons for the one quality of character, remarkable for its tendency towards meditation, its thirst for knowledge—while the other is prepared to enjoy life simply without seeking any explanation.

If the compass of the human soul is examined by means of spiritual research—one can only indicate these things, many hours would be needed to give a more thorough description—it can be found that many of those whose lives have a meditative quality, who need to seek explanations for what is around them, can be followed back to previous lives in which they had an immediate knowledge in their souls about the fact of reincarnation. Even today there are many human beings on earth who know it, for whom repeated earthly lives are an absolute fact. We need only think of those in Asia. Thus those men who in the present time lead a meditative life, are in the present connected with a previous incarnation in which they knew something about repeated earthly lives.

But the other, more insensitive natures come over from previous lives in which nothing was known about reincarnation. They have no impulse to burden themselves much with what conscience says about the deeds of their lives, or to be concerned much with seeking explanations. Very many people with us in the Occident have this quality; it is indeed the mark of occidental civilisation, that men have forgotten, so to speak, their earlier lives on earth. Indeed, they have forgotten them; but civilisation is standing at a turning point where a memory for former lives on earth will revive. Men who are living today are going to meet a future which will have as its characteristic the renewal of connection with the spiritual world.

This is still the case only with very few human beings; but certainly in the course of the twentieth century it will become widespread. It will take this form; let us assume that a man has done something, and is troubled afterwards by a bad conscience. It is like this at the present time. But later, when the connection with the spiritual world has been restored, a man will feel impelled, after he has done this or that, to draw back from his action as if with blindfolded eyes. And then something like a dream picture, but one that is entirely living for him will arise; a future event, which will happen because of his deed. And men experiencing such a picture will say something like this to themselves: ‘Yes, it is I who am experiencing this, but what I am seeing is no part of my past!’

For all those who have heard nothing of spiritual science this will be a terrible thing. But those who have prepared for what all will experience will say to themselves: ‘This is indeed no part of my past, but I will experience it in the future as the karmic result of what I have just done.’

Today we are in the anteroom of that time, when the karmic compensation will appear to men in a prophetic dream-picture. And when you think of this experience in the course of time developing further and further, you can conceive the man of the future who will behold the karmic judgment upon his deeds.

How does something like this happen—that human beings become capable of seeing this karmic compensation? This is connected with the fact that human beings once had no conscience but were tormented after evil deeds by the Furies. This was an ancient clairvoyance which has passed away. Then came the middle period when they no longer saw the Furies, but what was brought about by the Furies previously now arose inwardly as conscience. A time is now gradually approaching in which we shall again see something—and this is the karmic compensation. That man has now developed conscience begins to enable him to behold the spiritual world consciously.

Just as some human beings in the present have become meditative natures because they acquired powers in earlier incarnations which reveal themselves—like a memory of these lives—in the power of wonder,—in the same way the men of today will bring over powers into their next incarnation if they now acquire knowledge of the spiritual worlds. But it will go badly in the future world for those who today reject any explanation of the law of reincarnation. This will be a terrible fact for these souls. We are still living in a time in which men can manage their lives without any explanation of them which relates them to the spiritual worlds. But this period, in which this has been permitted by the cosmic powers, is coming to an end. Those men who have no connection with the spiritual world will awaken in the next life in such a way that the world into which they are born once more is incomprehensible to them. And when they leave once more the physical existence which has been incomprehensible to them, they will have no understanding either after death for the spiritual world into which they are growing. Of course they enter the spiritual world; but they will not grasp it. They will find themselves in an environment which they do not comprehend, which appears not to belong to them, and torments them as a bad conscience does. Returning once more into a new incarnation, it is just as bad; they will have all kinds of impulses and passions and will live in these, because they are not able to develop any wonder, as in illusions and hallucinations. The materialists of the present time are those who are going towards a future in which they will be terribly tormented by hallucinations and illusions; for what a man thinks in the present life, he experiences then as illusion and hallucination.

This can be conceived as an absolute reality. We can picture for example two men walking in a street together at the present time. One is a materialist, the other a non-materialist. The latter says something about the spiritual world; and the other says, or thinks: ‘What nonsense! That is all illusion!’ Indeed, for him, this is illusion, but for the other, who made the remark about the spiritual world, it is no illusion. The consequences for the materialist will begin to appear already after death, and then very definitely in the next earthly life. He will then feel the spiritual worlds as something that torments him like a living rebuke. In the period of Kamaloca between death and a new birth he will not feel the distinction between Kamaloca and the spiritual realm. And when he is born again, and the spiritual world approaches him in the way that has been described, then it appears to him as something unreal, as an illusion, as a hallucination.

Spiritual science is not something intended simply to satisfy our inquisitiveness. We are not sitting here simply because we are more inquisitive than other people about the spiritual world, but because we have some feeling for the fact that human beings in the future will not be able to live without spiritual science. All efforts which do not take this fact into account will become decadent. But life is arranged in such a way that those who resist spiritual knowledge at the present time will have the opportunity to approach it in later incarnations. But there must be outposts. Human beings who through their karma have a longing for spiritual knowledge already in the present can become outposts through this. You have this opportunity because there must be outposts, and you can be among them. Other human beings who cannot yet come to spiritual knowledge according to their karma, even though they do not reject it, will find later the longing for spiritual knowledge arising within them, more from the general karma of mankind.

Yesterday we again discussed the connection of the human being with the past and the future from a certain point of view, based on what is revealed in the outer human form. We based our discussion on the threefold structure of the human organism, to which we have often have already pointed out; the head organism, which points to the past, the limb organism, which points to the future, and then the rhythmic organism, the lung and heart organism, which actually belongs to the present. Now, today, in order to be able to round off this whole complex of facts tomorrow, we want to look first at the other aspect of the human being, the more inward, the soul aspect.

Just as we can distinguish three elements in the physical body of the human being – the head, the rhythmic system and the limbs – we can also distinguish three elements in the soul. We can point to thinking or imagining, to feeling, to willing, and in a certain way we are dealing with this threefold structure in the soul in the same way as we are dealing with the other threefold structure in the physical. We can then conduct research into each of these three members in relation to the whole position of the human being in the cosmos. Here we shall first of all refer to the life of the imagination. This life of the imagination or of the thoughts, thinking, is undoubtedly that which works most decisively within the human being. The life of the imagination is that which, on the one hand, leads the human being out into the cosmos, but on the other hand also leads him into his inner being. Through the life of the imagination, the human being becomes acquainted with the phenomena in the wide circumference of the cosmos. He takes in everything that must be grasped as the source from which his head education emerges, as we saw yesterday. But on the other hand, the human being takes his thoughts and ideas into himself again, he stores them as memories. He builds his inner life according to these ideas. This life of ideas, this life of thoughts, is primarily bound to the human being's head; it has its organ in the head. And from this alone we can conclude to a certain extent that the fate of the life of the imagination is connected with the fate of the head. As the head refers us back to the past, so to speak, we introduce the spiritual and soul germ cells for the formation of the head through birth into physical existence, and this fact already indicates to us that we also bring the life of the imagination as such from our prenatal existence. But there are also other reasons for such an appropriate assessment of the life of the imagination. I would say that our life of the imagination is the most definite in our soul life. It is the most rounded in our soul life. It is also the one that contains elements that, in essence, are not connected with our individuality here in the physical world.

Take, for example, what we find within us as mathematical truths or perhaps also as the truth of logic. We cannot verify mathematical truths from external observation, but we have to develop the truth of the mathematical, the truth of the geometric, from within us. The truth lies within us, for example, the Pythagorean theorem, or that the three angles of a triangle are one hundred and eighty degrees. We can visualize such truths by drawing corresponding figures, but we do not prove them on the blackboard; rather, we form through inner contemplation that which mingles in our imagination as mathematics. And there are many other things that mingle with our imagination in this way. And we know of these mathematical truths only through the fact that we are human beings. Even if thousands, millions of people came and said, 'The Pythagorean theorem is not true', we would still know as individuals that it must be true, through inner contemplation. Where does something like this come from? It arises from the fact that we do not develop our life of imagination in the physical realm only through our life of feeling and will, but that we already carry it with us into our physical existence through our birth. What I have just said, and what, I might say, can be clearly seen from the human being through the actual observation of this being, expresses itself for the spiritual researcher in the following way. Let us assume that the person advances to so-called imaginative presentation. What does this imaginative soul life consist of? It consists of the fact that we live in images, but in images that are not conveyed to us by the outer senses. In ordinary outer life we perceive outer objects through our sense organs. They give us the images through the eyes and ears, and we combine these images through the thinking. In imaginative presentation it is different. There we have the images when we are prepared in the appropriate way, without external observation. They arise in us, I could say, but we do not stop thinking when we rise in the right way to the imaginative soul life. We think in inner images, as we otherwise think in outer images when we perceive external objects. But the first thing we experience when we develop imaginative powers, what we experience when we think, when we permeate our soul with thinking, but at the same time the life of images arises, the first thing is not something present. The first thing is that the images of life before our birth or before our conception arise before our soul. Present life only later, after a long period of familiarization, comes to us in a certain way through our imaginations, and by no means with such clarity and certainty as the life that lies before birth, before conception. This fact is full proof that, when we disregard the perception of objects, [when we live thinking in images], this thinking can initially only present us with images from the past. What these images present to us includes cosmic elements from our pre-earthly life. This and much more shows how the life of imagination is what we initially carry with us from our prenatal life as a force.

Self-observation, if it is conducted with sufficient impartiality, shows us that the emotional life develops gradually in the physical. We cannot permeate our feelings with that which is as determined as mathematics, like our perceptions. We must develop all our feelings from childhood, but we must develop them from the moment of our birth through our life. The more we have experienced since birth, the richer our emotional life. A person who has gone through severe suffering and hard blows of fate has a different emotional life than a superficial person who has breezed through life so easily. The blows of fate prepare us for the emotional life. A mathematical judgment that permeates our imagination suddenly occurs. We cannot suddenly develop a feeling. A feeling develops slowly in life and is itself something that grows with us, that participates in our entire growth process in physical life.

And the life of the will is something that initially connects us only slightly with the cosmos. It is what pulses out of the indeterminate depths of our soul. We do carry the life of the will into the cosmos through our deeds; but just consider the difference between being connected to the cosmos through the life of the imagination and the other connection through the life of the will. We are connected to the cosmos through the life of the imagination when we go out into the starry night and, as it were, have the cosmos in front of us in pictures, embrace it in thought. We can also feel it. How small, in comparison, is the little deed that we detach from our will element and place in the cosmos! This testifies, first of all, that the will element is rooted in the human being in a completely different way than the element of imagination. Compare the will element in particular with the element of imagination as with the feeling. The element of imagination, as soon as we have awakened enough to it, connects us with the whole cosmos in one fell swoop. The element of feeling, it lives itself up to it. It lives itself up to it as slowly or as quickly as our fateful life between birth and death unfolds. But it is something that connects us with the cosmos, albeit less intensely and also less extensively than the life of imagination. Consider how universally human it is to be connected to the cosmos through the life of imagination: three people go out in the starry night; they stand in one place, they all three have the same cosmic image around them, they all three see the same thing, and if they have learned to summarize this image with thoughts, all three of them will be able to have the same thing in their imagination in one fell swoop.

It is different with the emotional life. Let us take a person who has spent his life rather thoughtlessly, superficially, only occasionally exposing himself to the starry world at night; and let us compare what such a person feels when he steps out at night and sees the starry sky with what another person feels who one evening goes for a walk with someone he has not known very well until then, and who are brought into deep questions of fate and life, into a discussion that lasts for hours and continues until the stars go down. Let us assume that at a moment when the sky is shining wonderfully in the stars, the friends become close, and let us further assume that years later, after that friendship has taken on the most diverse forms, such a person sees the starry sky in just the same way. What feelings may arise in him in the echo of the experience of friendship! Feelings go out into the cosmos, but they go out in proportion to the life that has been lived since birth. Through the powers of imagination, thoughts go out into the cosmos because we are born as human beings and have brought something of the soul into our physical existence through birth. Through feeling, the inner soul life reaches out to the things of the cosmos, but only in accordance with what has taken place in this physical life itself.

If you try to come to terms with what I am suggesting here, you will be able to say to yourself: The life of imagination is brought into physical existence through birth; we develop the life of feeling between birth and death; but how little of that is present, which goes out into the cosmos from us through the deeds of our will impulses! How little flows out into the cosmos from our will impulses! Here we are dealing with something that appears primitive compared to feelings, and even more so compared to the life of ideas. The spiritual researcher can explain the reasons for this when he rises to intuition; there he reaches the will impulses. The moment he has raised himself to intuition through inner soul development, when everything else has been extinguished in his soul life, it is not the present life of action that stands before him, but something very strange. What stands before him as the first experience of intuition is not his deeds themselves, but everything that his deeds can offer him as fates, as seeds of fate for the future. Everything that appears to intuition as a first impression is future, everything that can become of us because we have gone through such a sum of deeds that we do not see ourselves, but whose seeds appear before our soul. From this it follows that the life of the will is what we carry over through death, what points to the future. So we can say schematically: if we stay with the physical, we have the head person, the rhythmic lung and heart person, the limb person. The head person points us to what we bring with us from the past. The rhythmic person points us to the present between birth and death. The limb person points us to the future; later on, in later life, we will develop a head. If we look at the soul, we have the life of thinking, which refers us to the past, the life of feeling, which refers us to the present, and the life of will, which refers us to the future.

Yesterday we saw that the head of man is connected with the peripheral, with the whole cosmos, and that the limb-man is connected with the earth. The same applies to the soul. The life of thinking is connected with the cosmos, the life of will with the earth, and the life of rhythm, the element of feeling, which mediates between the two, is precisely the balance between the two, between the heavenly and the earthly. We have also pointed out that since ancient times, out of instinctive knowledge of primal wisdom, that which works from the earth into the limbs of man, which is only mitigated by the cosmos and its effect, that this has been designated as strength. And that in man which finds expression in the formation of the head, which is cosmic, but tempered by earthly things, has been called beauty since ancient times, and the balance between the two, which lives in the rhythmic human being, is called wisdom. But the same terms were also applied to the life of the imagination, which, in the sense of the ancient mystery wisdom, is thought of as being permeated by the principle of beauty, the life of feeling as permeated by wisdom, and the life of the will as permeated by strength.

Now we can also look at the human spirit, as we have seen the physical body and the soul. There too we have a threefold spiritual being of man before us. Only we have to speak of three states in the case of the spirit. We can distinguish first of all what the spirit shows us, I would say, in its full radiance, when we are fully awake. We can observe the spirit in the other states when it dreams between waking and sleeping, and we can contemplate the spirit when it is unconscious in the deep sleep of earthly life. That is the threefold spirit: the waking, dreaming and sleeping.

Let us take waking life. Waking life is, as is indeed quite clear to the unbiased observer, the most mature life of the human being; it is the one that he carries with him into physical existence through his birth. Even if it does not appear so at first glance, it is nevertheless the most perfect, the most mature, the one that he has as a result of being born as a human being. So that we can say: the waking life refers us to the past; the life of dreams - it seems strange at first, of course, to say of the dream life that it refers us to the present, but it is so. At a certain age, you can observe very precisely how the life of dreams refers to the present. The child, the very young child, dreams, and does not yet have a full waking life. Only when the past enters into the child does the waking life begin. But the present is the life of dreams; and the fact that we get the waking state into the dream life comes from the fact that our past life, our past, extends into the present. The present only educates us for the dream life. And the sleep life, it is the one through which we do not yet belong to the present, which is related to our will life, which is the most imperfect in us, which must first become perfect; it is the one that models the future in us, that points to the future. Thus the spirit belongs to the past, the present and the future. The past through waking life, the present through dream life, the future through sleep life.

We can associate these three states, these three different levels of the human being with the past, the present and the future of the cosmos. We have already done this for the physical body yesterday. We said that the formation of the head is connected with what the earth has gone through in its previous states on Saturn, Sun and Moon. The man with the limbs testifies that something is developing in man that cannot yet be fully realized on earth. You found it amusing that I spoke to you about the state of Venus, where human development will take a completely different course than on Earth. On Venus, I told you, man will lose his head in the middle of the development of his life. Instead, another head will grow out of his limb-man, which in the present, I thought, could be very pleasant for some, but it cannot be the case. Here, because the limb-man has the tendency to become a head, but can only be one when he has gone through the state between death and new life outside of the earthly, one must be satisfied with the one head. But this human of the limbs points to what we become physically through the states of Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. The head thus points to Saturn, the Sun and the Moon; the human of the limbs points to the future, to Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. The rhythmic human points to the present of the earth.

The life of imagination does not take us as far back as the head. In a sense, the head had to be present in the cosmos first before it could imagine. It only points us to the sun and the moon. The life of will points us to the future, to Jupiter and Venus. And the life of feeling belongs to the present.

Now we come to the spiritual. Here we have waking life and sleeping life. The waking life points us only to the lunar evolution; there it has formed. The waking life is the inheritance of the old lunar evolution, of imaginative imagining of the lunar evolution. During the solar evolution there was not yet any actual life of imagination. The sleeping life points us to the Jupiter state. After the Jupiter state, that which moves in our sleep today will take on outer forms; after the Venus state, that which is a state of will will take on outer forms. And the limbs, that is already expressed, take on outer forms through the three following states of the earth. Thus we see that the human being can be assigned to the cosmos according to body, soul and spirit.

Moon, moon, moon, volcano. Again, in contrast to waking life, 'dream and sleep life is such that, in the sense of ancient wisdom, beauty is intended for waking life, wisdom for dream life. Strength is intended for sleep life. From sleep we carry strength out for life. Primordial wisdom has mainly been based on such things that arise from life contexts.

But now we can also apply to human life what we develop from spiritual science through the threefold human being. We can perhaps start with the spirit and ask ourselves: How does a person stand in their outer life if they want to survey their outer life with clear ideas? They can carry the life of ideas that is in their head into the outer world. Out of the waking state, he can permeate his outer life with imagination. This is a special way of being active in the outer world, of permeating it with the life of imagination. All that happens in this way belongs to the special sphere of spiritual life.

Let us now turn to the conditions that arise from the life that is, on the one hand, an emotional life of the soul, but in spirit a dream life; how does this dream life take shape? Yes, just study life, and you will sense the reign of dream life among people. I ask you to pay attention when you make friends, when you develop feelings of love between yourself and another person; don't you know that you cannot be awake in the same way as when you think through the Pythagorean theorem? If you examine the experiences correctly, you will have to say to yourself: The state you experience inwardly when you make friends with people, when you do this or that for someone out of affection, is truly comparable to the life of dreams. You find the life of dreams in those feelings that prevail from person to person in the outer life.

But this is also the life that we develop to the greatest extent in the legal life. There the human being is confronted with the human being. Here, in general, the relationship between human beings must be found. We find our particular, special relationships by loving one person and hating another, by making friends with one person and not being able to stand another, and so on. These are the specific relationships that arise in differentiated ways here and there. But human life on earth is only possible if all people can enter into certain relationships with everyone, which we can describe as political, as state, as legal. They are directed not by the same waking day-life that permeates life, but by the life of dreams. And we are dealing with the life of right-mindedness when the human being incorporates the second link, this dream-life, into the outer world.

And what happens when he incorporates the life of sleep? Observe life impartially: you are hungry, you delight in a golden ring with precious stones, you have a need for a volume of lyrical poetry, in short, you have needs of some kind. They are satisfied by others. But now I ask you: Can you overlook this, even as you overlook your friendships or legal relationships? No one can. The individual can live a dream life with regard to legal relationships; one cannot oversee economic relationships, so one must associate with others. What one person does not know, another may know. The consciousness of the individual disappears in the association. There is something that takes place entirely in the unconscious and can only happen because the individual cannot see it at all, but lets his consciousness submerge into that of the association. There we have economic life.

Intellectual life is dominated by social waking, legal life by social dreaming; in modern parliaments, it is dominated by the nightmare, which is also a form of dreaming. Economic life is permeated by social sleeping. And where the human soul life disappears into the unconscious, love must spread through associative life. Love, which is a volitional element, must permeate economic life. Freedom is the element of waking life, brotherhood the element of sleeping life in the social sphere. And what stands between the two is that in which all people are equal, what they develop as equals, into which one disappears with one's waking life, which is determined only by the relationship of one to the other, from the dream-like element of life.

Thus that which I would call what is in man flows into what is social life; and one cannot really understand social life other than by realizing what flows from each individual human being into this social life.

1. Intellectual life: social waking
2. Legal life: social dreaming
3. Economic life: social sleeping

Now we have grasped a human context from a certain point of view. We will develop it further tomorrow. But consider how these things actually reach people of the present day. It is so that the person of the present day can begin by reading my “Theosophy”. This is something that seems somewhat paradoxical in relation to what one has learned. At first one may not be very favorably disposed toward what is presented, but one can go further, read the other books and see how what is in Theosophy is further deepened. Then one will see that the one supports the other, that one is added to the other, that the things are well founded. Or one can look at the other side of the “key points”. You can start by saying: I cannot yet see why the social organism should be subject to a threefold order. Now add everything that we have already gathered from the most diverse points of view to show again and again how this social life really must be subject to a threefold order.

Think about how we come from the human being himself, from his spiritual and soul conditions, from this threefoldness of soul and spirit, to the threefoldness of the social organism. Again, one thing leads to another. And of course much more could be added to what has already been compiled here; the justification of the demand for the threefold social organism would be seen more and more. But compare the attitude of our contemporaries with what I have just said. How do they very often approach what this anthroposophical spiritual science wants to bring to them? I don't know how it is, and I don't want to tell it here as if it were very binding, but I was recently told that at a lecture given by Dr. Boos to Basel theologians – if it is different, he can correct it on occasion – he was able to ask the man who had attacked me most intensely whether he had already heard my lectures. He is supposed to have replied that he had heard one, maybe two. Well, that is just one example of many. People feel the urge to listen to a lecture or to glance at a book and read a few pages. But spiritual science and everything related to its social consequences cannot be judged from that alone, because spiritual science demands a completely different relationship to everything than what such people assert. Such people train those entrusted to them, without this spiritual science, as far as possible – and they train themselves without spiritual science, and then they come and take note in a concise way. It cannot be done like that. The only way is for spiritual science to truly permeate our entire education system and for that which is permeated by anthroposophy to take the place of what has become spiritless over the last few centuries. It is important that we pay attention to this, that we at least know for ourselves what is needed. We can never promote the development of spiritual science by means of pious appeals, even if it may happen here and there for this or that opportunistic reason, that someone is dragged along to a single lecture, because nothing will come of such an approach except that the person concerned will be deterred. Spiritual science must be practised in such a way that its path is paved into the entire educational system, into the entire life of the present. Of course, this is what makes the path of spiritual science difficult, but on the other hand it imposes on us the necessity and obligation to also use our whole being for this spiritual science, if we ourselves have grasped its nerve.

This commitment of the whole person has unfortunately not always been cultivated, especially in the Anthroposophical Society. We must always remember how people have sometimes been ashamed to profess themselves as Anthroposophists. We want to organize a lecture here or there, but the words “Theosophy” or “Anthroposophy” must not be mentioned; it must be only anthroposophical, but must not be called “anthroposophical”, or “anthroposophical movement” or “theosophy” and so on. We have also experienced with regard to eurythmy that people demand that it be introduced into the school, but it must not be said where it comes from. One wants to let something “flow in” from here or there. This letting in, this shying away from full commitment, does not help us to move forward. Instead, we are beset on all sides by things that are truly born of the spirit of the age and that are actually cultural impertinences. Mrs. Baumann, the Waldorf eurythmy teacher, recently wrote a very nice article for a Swiss women's magazine about eurythmy as a pedagogical tool. The essay was also printed; but when Anthroposophy or even my name was mentioned, the editorial staff had carefully crossed it out. These things testify that one can indeed use the spiritual material, but in the mendacious world of the present, one would like to have this spiritual material without the very forces that once had to carry this spiritual material according to the necessity of the present.

The Anthroposophical Society itself has achieved a great deal of this by allowing these forces to flow in, by shying away from fully embracing them. Those who approach this anthroposophical spiritual knowledge and see how the various aspects interlock with mathematical clarity should find courage and strength in the matter itself to stand up fully for this cause in the world. Humanity is truly not served when people shrink back from fully standing up for it, and this full standing up must first be learned by the opponents. They are fully committed, they are fully committed in terms of opposition! Time and again, we experience how every harsh word that has to be wrung from us is resented. Recently, I was resented for calling Count Keyserling what he is, for saying that he has lied! Anyone who says that I started with Haeckel need only read the remarks on Goethe's scientific writings to see what I started from, also in my writing, and he is lying when he says that I started from Haeckel because I once wrote a pamphlet about Haeckel in the course of my life. Such simpletons as Keyserling do not see the inner connections. These empty-headed people have a large public because you don't have to think when you give yourself over to them.

But it is necessary that we should at last realize that when sharp words are spoken on our part, they are spoken in the grip of necessity; that there is really no sympathy for these sharp words, but that one must not come and say that it is out of unkindness. Should one love those people who lie and thus block the way for the truth? And from this point of view things must be looked at. Those who think that we are too sharp in our polemics should not turn to us, but to the attackers. For if we vigorously turn against the attackers, it will help a little; but it will not help at all if we leave a few alone in the necessary defense.

First, as in previous lectures here, I must take a moment to ask for apologies, as I cannot give the lecture in the language of this country. Since this is not possible for me, I must make the attempt to be understood in my customary language. Secondly, I beg to apologize as I've arrived here with a cold, and so perhaps there will also be interruptions here and there throughout the lecture.

When one speaks in the present time of the question that has been announced for today's topic, a question that is indeed related to the deepest needs, the deepest yearnings of the human soul, then there emerges out of today's education the objection that questions so bereft of discovery cannot be spoken of scientifically at all, that one must be satisfied to let such questions remain within traditional beliefs, within the same things said about these things as are perception and feeling on the fingers. This is the familiar view nowadays, and therefore everything that is put forward from the point of view of a truly spiritual knowledge will be perceived as somewhat strange. Yet all that is brought forward here, that has arisen from valid points of view, can absolutely stand on the same ground as the accustomed scientific views over the course of the last three or four centuries, when the natural sciences actually climbed and arrived at the point of their highest success. But if one applies only the same methods of knowledge that are allowed by science today, then a way cannot be found into those areas for which answers must be sought, as far as is possible for people regarding such matters as those that we want to deal with today, questions of the soul's eternity, of the eternity of the innermost being of man.

Now the point of view here submitted wants nothing further than to continue within those natural scientific methods set down, but not just to those points from which one can gain a glimpse into the supersensory world, from which alone a possible view into the eternal nature of the inner man can be won. One must initially want to succeed in the acquisition of such knowledge so as to set the sights overall on the expectation of the knowledge itself. One must ask whether the insight, the inner realization, will stop within the ordinary consciousness as we apply it towards the phenomena of nature by measuring, by experiments in balance, through counting, arithmetic and so on, or whether a further glimpse into the supersensory is possible; whether an entirely different cognitive perception ought to be gained or not. So that we understand by such means this different cognitive perception, allow me next to make a comparison. I do not from the start want to prove anything by this comparison, but only to make myself understandable so that what I want to add as more evidence of any nature can be captured in just the right way.

Even in ordinary life we know of two states of consciousness within the human being that are strongly different from one another. We know the state of wakefulness, where we are from morning till night, and we know the state of sleep, in which we are outside of the ordinary circumstances of life, and from which arise colorful iridescent dreams. If we maintain a reasonable point of view, we do not attribute the same perspective of reality to these dreams that we experience in the waking state.

But let us consider: by what means in general do we come to speak of the dreams that arise out of the sleeping state—in general so to speak—so that they often carry, namely, an interesting character, but have a lower reality value, or perhaps in a certain sense they do not quite have the reality value compared to what we experience when awake? We come to an assessment of the dream world only by the fact that we wake up, and by awakening we come to an entirely different state of consciousness. What happens because of this awakening? We switch our will on, especially in our body, in our physical tasks. These depend on the will. After all, what we perceive through the awakened senses is also essentially caused by the awakening of the will in the senses, in the switching on of the sense organs. To a certain extent this goes on in our entire organism, our entire organism is taken hold of; we are able to turn ourselves to the natural world through our organism. And by what we experience because of this activity we are quite capable of assessing the value of the dream's reality. We could never come within the dream to any other insight about the dream than that which the dream itself presents as full reality. So long as we dream we see everything as real, what the dream presents to us in its colorful, dazzling variety.

Let us allow ourselves, once, to take up a certain correct, daring, paradoxical hypothesis. Allowing for this even once we would never awaken throughout our entire earthly life, but would constantly dream. Then we would fill ourselves during our conscious life on earth with all the ideas that we know only from our dreams. And one with such a problem could therefore definitely think that any force of nature—or by my account any spiritual being—could drive us to our actions, and in everything that we do from morning until evening our outer life thus proceeds as it proceeds. We would be accompanied not only with waking concepts, we would be doing something completely different of which we know nothing. However, we would dream our entire lives through, and we would come only to the thoughts that are not true reality. For that which occurs when we grasp things, when we see with the eyes, such as we have in the waking state, would not occur at all.

Thus we know our dream state only from the point of view of the Guardian's judgement. If such a thing is taken seriously, if we do not pass lightly out of habit over the usual events of life, then there arises just opposite the deeper soul questions this hypothetical view: Yes, is it not then perhaps also possible to some extent from a higher point of view to turn from our habitual everyday Guardian and awaken to something new, to a higher state of consciousness? Can we not allow ourselves to think that, if we can wake up out of the dream into everyday reality, we can also awaken out of everyday reality into a higher consciousness? Just as a higher consciousness is given with which we can judge the reality of the everyday world—where we are from morning until evening—can we not also judge the reality value of the dream from the standpoint of wakefulness?

I have put this before you first of all as a question, as an entirely hypothetical question. The same scientific point of view that I have here asserted now shows that it is actually possible for the human being to come to such a second awakening. Just as the shift from sleeping to dreaming in life occurs out of ordinary wakefulness, so this occurrence can increase to another higher level whereby one awakens out of this ordinary everyday life to a higher state and, from this, everyday life likewise appears as though out of dreams.

Now in order to take such a point of view at all, something is necessary that I always call, in this context, intellectual humility. This intellectual humility, however, does not belong to present-day man. Indeed, present-day man says to himself: “Well, when I was a small child, I dreamed in a certain way within life. Then I left childhood, I had to do so, yes, and I came to parenting through becoming older, through life itself. I was then in my entire soul constitution a different person. Each intellectual point of view that I had won for myself I had not brought into the world, for I had first developed it within myself out of the dull, dreamy state of the child's consciousness.” This is indeed the man of today, but here he stops, and then he says: “Well, I have this point of view. What appears to me to be true from this point of view is true; what appears to me to be false from this point of view is false. Through this point of view that I once won for myself, I am the sovereign ruler over truth and falseness, error and accuracy.”

Yes, one should not have this gesture of immodesty if one really wants to ascend to true knowledge of the supersensory world. So care must be taken: just as the human being has evolved out of the dull, dreamy soul-state of the child, so must it be presumed that from the standpoint of the soul—where he has already come once—he can continue to develop himself when he becomes an adult. Now it will be shown whether such a second awakening as I have hypothetically constructed is possible, whether such a development can be produced.

First of all, we naturally use those cognitive and mental powers that are already there when we want to enter into true, exact spiritual research. For there is nothing else the human being can use in relation to his soul constitution than what is already there; this he can try to develop further. Now there is a soul force that the more perceptive philosophers admit to, even in respect to our day, and if one looks at this properly it is already pointing clearly to the eternal essence of man. This suggests, however, that man will not develop even this soul force further; he will merely engage in philosophical speculations about it. That is to say, he wants just enough to stop in ordinary reality, and it is as though he, the dreamer, does not want to wake up, but wants to dream further about the dream in order to give himself an insight about the dream. He does not want to wake up a second time. The soul force I refer to is indeed beyond the power of memory. I do not want to engage in wide-meshed philosophical arguments here—naturally there is no time for it; in other circumstances there could very well be—I want to remain entirely within the popular consciousness. Let us imagine once that this popular consciousness actually works in man just as the power of memory and the power of perception do. Events that we may have gone through decades ago are accordingly brought up from the depths of the soul—or, preferably, we should say out of the depths of the human being so that we do not present a hypothesis about the soul. Out of the depths of the human being thought pictures will be conjured before the human soul that are the same as those that perhaps years ago were experienced in all of their vitality. What is actually occurring here? There lies before us something in memory that is different from what had been perceived in the outer world. In order to perceive the outer world it must be there. When the eye sees, that which is seen must be there. When the ear hears, that which is heard must be there, and so forth. What is experienced by the one perceiving is provided by the perception. With memory we have something in the soul that is not now present. What began as a perception, perhaps a long time ago, but is now no longer there, is conjured up before our souls by the memory.

From these facts intended here to emanate from spiritual science and not from philosophical speculation, connections can now be taken up and developed further through exercises of the soul. The question is this: if we are capable through ordinary memory of having something of the perceptions and the thoughts that are no longer there, but once were there in our earthly life, could we not perhaps also, through further development of such soul exercises, arrive at what refers to something that was never in earthly life, to something that is a more highly developed memory, yet is not actually a memory but an Imagination where the memory is so far advanced that something is presented that was not originally there? This can be achieved the more that we really develop the thought life that is used for ordinary consciousness.

This is not to criticize, but only to show the facts of mental life. Because for natural science and for the ordinary consciousness of the practical human being, only the external impressions of his consciousness are taken into consideration, and it is entirely correct that he surrenders to and passively experiences the thoughts of these external impressions. However, through this second process the higher awakening of which I have spoken can come about, but one must surrender all of the work and activities of thought life, surrender the forces of thought.

There then occurs that which should not be confused with what today is often called clairvoyance, which of course is based upon all possible associations dependent upon human organic functions. That which is acquired here presupposes that each step during practice is completed with as much prudence as the mathematician takes with his arithmetic for the mathematical sciences; so it is known exactly and precisely how to practice every forward step of the soul, just as the mathematician customarily carries out his work. Only the works of the mathematician are in objective forms, while here the work is to bring forward your own soul forces. In this manner you are finally led to remember. You live in an entirely different mental power than previously. Previously the power of thought was just abstract; you could think about something through your thoughts, but now, now you are internally experiencing the power of thought as a real force, just as you experience the pulsation of your blood. Now you experience thinking and action as a reality within you—now you see that the power of memory also lives in thought, only it is a dilution—if I may express myself figuratively—of that which is seen as a much greater power of thought, like the pulse of organic forces. You experience the reality of thought. And you can experience this reality of thought in so far as you really feel something that has not yet been felt. It has been felt in the physical body, and now one begins to feel a second, higher person. And this second, higher person then takes on a very definite shape.

So you have more than life in this time-body, the head is free: you have a human being in the etheric cosmos. That which I now recognize and know only in its importance as the earthly human being—and it actually has the I-sense—this is the human being as earth man, this is only the physical body that evaporates in space.

What we are as human beings as we go around in ordinary life, we are in that we carry a space-body with us, a fleshly space-body. Then we experience what I would call a time-body. One can also call this an etheric or formative forces body, as I have done in my books.

We experience namely that which emerges as a powerful tableau, an overview of our previous life on earth, from the point of time that we have reached, going backwards until the beginning of childhood. As otherwise we experience only a space tableau, now we experience a time tableau that occurs suddenly and is an overview of the entire previous life on earth. This is the first supernatural experience that the human being can have, his own earth lives suddenly appearing before him as a tableau.

Now someone can say: Yes, but perhaps this is only a somewhat complicated picture from memory. Indeed, one could likewise place together in thoughts what has been experienced and then form a continuous stream of memory; yes, one could just receive this picture as a memory picture. And perhaps we are brought to a state only of some self-deception here, to nothing other than such a memory picture from what you describe to us on the basis of your active guidance.

This would assuredly be so if there were no differences in accordance with the content! Indeed, if these things were really faced as though one were a scientist, confronting scientific things in laboratories, in physical cabinets, at the clinic and so forth, and then considering: is this an ordinary memory image? Imagine how people have approached us, how they have done this or that to us, how this or that has touched us with sympathy or antipathy, and so on. This can perhaps also provide us with a memory image that represents how natural phenomena has approached us. But it is always this that comes to us: what the thing mainly is when it is merely recollected.

In this tableau to which I have just drawn attention, it is not that the things draw near to us, but rather that everything comes out of us. This appears chiefly to be like that which we confront out of the inner forces of the soul as natural phenomena and the human being, yet everything appears from within us. This is real self-knowledge, real, concrete self-knowledge, which in fact occurs initially out of the previous earth life. And if we compare what we see overall, then we must say: that which we have produced from our previous life on earth does not behave like an ordinary recollection, but—like a sealing wax impression in a signet—it is the correct reverse image. And whoever simply makes this comparison will know that this is the first step of a new knowledge, of an increased memory that is not just more memory but represents an overall Imagination of a previous earth life. This is the first stage where one feels that he is this higher human being who carries within himself this time-body; this is not just something that the space-body has conjured out of itself, but something that has worked itself into this space-body ever since we have been on earth as human beings. For we recognize that the powers that lie in this space-body are of the same nature as the power of growth, the same kind that, in addition—for instance, when we were children—has wonderfully modeled our first—I want to say—unplastic, amorphous brain to the wonderful form that this brain gradually becomes, and so on.

And in settling into this time-body of the human being, into this first stage of the supernatural experiences of the human being, what must be rejected are all of the narrow-minded notions of the ego that one has, such as that the I is resting inside of the human skin. Now one feels as though he belongs together with the entire cosmos. Now one feels that he really is in his etheric body, in his time-body as a member of the entire cosmos, and he has a concept that is very real: if I cut off a finger of my body then it is no longer a finger; the finger has meaning only in the context of the organism. So by focusing on this time-body, you have a clear awareness: as a human being within this higher being you have the sense of being a member of the entire etheric cosmos, you belong to the etheric cosmos. It is really correct that the I now recognizes itself in its significance as an earthly human being; knows that it is actually owing to the physical space-body that the human being has the I-sensations as earthly man.

However, this is only the first stage of a super-sensible knowledge that can be acquired in order to feel the eternity of the human soul. The following higher stage actually leads, in truth, to a second awakening. For in the first stage we have reached nothing other than the self-knowledge of the earthly human being. The higher level will now be achieved with the same power with which one has initially, through active thinking, concentrated fully on concepts, and, with the same intensity of soul life, now carries away in turn such concepts from consciousness; only one has to come back to them time and again.

In the handling of all of these processes there is nothing suggestive; it proceeds as something with the fullest deliberation, like the course of mathematical procedures. But still, the one who finds himself surrendering such concepts, such thoughts in a strong manner, the one who moves as in the described example into the center of his consciousness, this is the one who at first is wholly devoted to these concepts.

And it is more difficult to get rid of these than the passively acquired ideas of ordinary consciousness. Therefore, in order to forget or carry away something from your consciousness, a stronger force must be applied than would otherwise be applied. But this is good, because through the fact that you apply this stronger force you can reach yet another higher state of consciousness.

You need only think honestly about what occurs in human consciousness when the familiar, passively acquired conceptions stop. Think first of all about stopping these visual concepts and you know that the person will fall asleep—such attempts have indeed also been made in psychological laboratories. This is exactly what now occurs in the human being when he, as a spiritual investigator, has first concentrated all of the powers of his soul on certain conceptions and then clears them away again. There then occurs in him a state which I call the deepest silence of the human soul, empty consciousness. And within this deepest silence of the human soul something very significant is actually said. Thus, the concepts that were first brought into consciousness with all of your strength are again released, and then you have an empty consciousness. This is simply so. You can wait in mere wakefulness for that which the inner life of the soul then reveals, but in that which I can only describe as the deep silence of the soul, something else enters in.

If we can agree on this soul experience, allow me to make the following comparison. Think to yourself: at first we are in one of the big, modern cities, where, if we go out onto the street, such real noise and tumult reign that we cannot understand our own words. Then, removed from the city, five minutes away, it is always silent, and another five minutes away it is even more silent, and more silent. Let us imagine then that we come to the deep, silent solitude of the forest. We can say: all around is silence. With the environment itself in silence our soul comes to silence.—But you see, we have not yet attained that silence which I now speak of as the deep silence of the soul. When one speaks of the silence of the forest over the din of the city, it is said that sounds very gradually cease. At the state of zero—having arrived at the zero state over the loud din—we call this, then, rest. But there is something that goes beyond the zero! Distract yourself, once, with one who has a fortune; he gives continuously of this wealth until he has little, yes, until he has less than nothing.

Nowadays we see that one does not particularly stop when he has nothing, but goes further. How does he do this? He goes below the zero, goes—as the mathematician says—into the negative, into debts that are made against the assets, into that which is negative in respect to zero, which is less than zero. Regarding the silence, think of this: we can go from the loud roar to the rest—zero—yet we can go still further, so that we enter into the regions of silence where the silence is stronger than the mere zero-silence. And the life of the soul enters into such regions, where there is a greater peace within than the mere zero-silence. If this occurs as I have indicated, the complex concepts of the consciousness are first powerfully extinguished; then the soul moves into the growing emptiness toward the inner experiences. There then emerges from the deep silence of the soul, contrary to the opposite sensual world, the objective spiritual world. Thus the spiritual researcher has arrived at the level I have described, and from the deep silence of the soul he meets the spiritual world, and he is gradually within the spiritual world, just as the human being through his eyes, through his ears, is in the physical-sensory world. And in the deep silence of the soul the objective spiritual world is revealed.

And then one can go further in the exercises. Just as one can get rid of a concept, so can one get rid of this entire picture of life that he had at the first stage of his super-sensible cognition, as I have described it, and that was experienced as real self-knowledge. This he can now clear away with all of his strength, clear away this time-person just as when, in the moment of realization when he had come to the time-person, he had already rid himself of the space-person with his strong I-feeling. Now the time-person can be removed. And out of the silence of the soul one is inflamed when one compares his own self-knowledge, the real self-knowledge, to the waking consciousness that has come in the deep silence of the soul. There is now revealed nothing spiritual, but through the outer work of his time-person he enters into the same world where he was before he descended to take on the physical body that had been prepared by his parents and forefathers. And from the deep silence of the soul there is revealed, in addition to the simultaneous spiritual world events, one's own spiritual and soul being, what he was before he descended to this earthly existence. Now he looks into the life that he went through with others before an earthly garment, if I may call it so, was accepted, purely spiritual-soul beings. The existence of the human being prior to birth or prior to conception actually occurs before the soul seeks to connect with others.

It is this that is the point of view represented here. One does not begin to speculate on any viewpoints so as to determine whether or not the soul is immortal. Nothing can be expected from this, because that would be as though one had pulled oneself out of the dreams, out of the dream that had won enlightenment. One must awaken in order to educate himself about the dream. Now one can awaken in the deep silence of the soul to a higher stage and clarify what life on earth is. It is formed from that existence that he had gone through before the step through birth—or rather through conception—and the descent to this earthly existence.

Spiritual science in the sense meant here wants to show the methods by which the vision of the eternal can be acquired by the human soul. This however is the second stage of spiritual knowledge by which we can climb to the secrets of the world, and which can also give us, in addition, the secrets of our own being.

A third stage is scaled through the fact that something is now a power of knowledge, although it is not a power of knowledge in ordinary consciousness, nor is the power of memory an actual power. We remember what we have experienced.

Just as little is another power of the soul a power of cognition. And when I say it is to be a power of cognition, then any scientist who sits here—I can understand quite well, because you have first to think as a scientist about these things, I know very well, and no one should actually speak with full responsibility about the exact spiritual knowledge asserted here who is not fully familiar with the usual scientific methods. So if scientists do not receive from the above the silent "goose bumps," they will at least receive a little if I now also claim that a force which otherwise plays a huge role in ordinary life—but should not be scientifically availed upon in ordinary life—that this will be now be taken as a power of knowledge for the soul to complete: the power of love.

Yes, certainly love plays a huge role in existence, but it is said that she is blind. It may not be taken as some sort of complete power of knowledge. But if one has driven the power of knowledge so far that we have come to the deep silence of the soul, then there occurs above all within this deep silence of the soul what one might call a distinct impression: When you want to see you have first to deprive your sight of the outer sense world.

You must pull it out of your physical body, pull it out even from the time-body. And then it fades so to speak, that coarser part that is bound to the physical body; the I-feeling very strongly goes yet further, as I have described earlier, where you feel that the time-body is already one with the entire cosmic existence.

But if—through the exercises that are described in detail in the books mentioned—you become acquainted with this deprivation, in which there occurs, in a very real sense, deprivation of the physical, deprivation of the time-body—if you look to existence as it was before you descended into physical existence on earth then you will experience something like a deep pain of the soul. And the true higher knowedge is actually born out of this pain.

Do not believe, if you are honest, that you can describe higher knowledge as being born out of desire! It is born out of pain. And you must gradually acquire the endurance to win against this pain.

If one acquires the endurance to win against the pain, then he will learn as a spiritual researcher to turn back repeatedly to physical-sensory existence in a slightly different way. Because he will understand, yes, that he will have what I have described as a higher knowledge—that may be acquired in the characterized example—for only a very short time. It is not about getting caught in a higher world if you are a spiritual researcher, for when you have stepped through the higher world you must return ever and again to the ordinary physical-sensory world.

However, one returns from the moments of higher intuition in which one has first learned, in deepest pain, to do without this physical-sensory world. Then you get a very different stance with respect to this physical-sensory world, since you actually get to know what may be called the feeling of being a victim. One really has this feeling, that remains within, of being a victim, and with full awareness—not only out of instinct but with full awareness—he surrenders himself to other beings or even to other natural processes.

While the instinct of love so acts that the sensation of love is felt to a certain extent in the physical body, then the love can be so developed that it runs in bodily-free activity if it is carried up and formed as a sacrifice to the other, in the spiritual world and also in the physical-sensory world. Then this love itself gradually becomes the power of knowledge. And then you get to know just what you can really only know when love becomes the power of knowledge.

You see, through love we come into a relationship with another being who may at first be foreign to us, and we feel ourselves standing next to the other being if we carry across our own existence into that existence. We need the certainty of the sense of our building a bridge to the unknown being through love. If love—at a higher level, I would like to say—so awakens as I have just indicated, then we obtain our ego again, like a foreign being that—yes—we have lost along the way, as I have described.

But how do we obtain our ego? As the one whom we were in former earth lives, who is as strange to us in this earth life as a different personality, taken to a higher scale by the spiritualized, refined level of love. Our ego is not given back earlier to us, not until we can grasp it in love as entirely foreign. We have not desired to see this ego as it has lived in former lives on earth, and then passed through the time that lies between death and a new birth.

However, we discover our ego where we are able to perceive ourselves out of the deep silence of the soul, before we descended to earth life, and look back to the previous earth life as it was before this purely spiritual-soul life.

But, I want to say—we must first have developed an entirely selfless higher love as a power of knowledge; this then gives us an unsought insight into a former life on earth. Then we know that we had to go through these former lives on earth. And we have so risen that we can see the ego, how it was and how it had a body other than the body that we have now, that has carried us since birth to this point of time in earthly life. Then we have arrived at this moment, to be able to really comprehend ourselves as entirely free of the body—that is, recognizing the moment to live through that we then live through as real when we pass through death. For we have placed the physical body into reality.

In the stage of knowledge that is gained in love, we remove the physical body of knowledge and we experience ourselves in the same elements where we will be with our eternal inner being when we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world, from which we have descended into physical existence on earth. And so we experience immortality when we—forgive me when I use the term—first recognize the experience of unbornness.

But the eternity of the human soul consists of these two: from unbornness, for which we do not even have a word in our contemporary educated language, and from immortality. Only when one comprehends these two as two sides of the eternity of the human soul can one really approach understanding. In the intellectual conceptions of today, people unfortunately treat these things with a certain egoism. They say to themselves—without having to voice this—more unconsciously they say to themselves: Well, that which has preceded our life on earth does not interest us, for we are here. It interests us that we are here. But we are interested in what happens after death because we do not yet know this.

This is egotism, but the results are not knowledge. Knowledge results only from unegotistical essence. Therefore, no one can gain a real knowledge of the immortality of the soul who does not have the will to achieve knowledge of the soul's unbornness. Because the eternity of the human soul is composed of the soul's unbornness and the soul's immortality.

This also results in the outlook of repeated earth lives, as indicated at the third level of knowledge after full awakening out into the spiritual world; the memory not only extends into premortal existence, it also extends into the stages of existence in the previously-lived earth life.

Thus we know that there really is before us a second awakening of the soul. Out of the dreams we switch our will on in the body. As a result we live in the world of space while the images otherwise proceed, and we accept these passing dream images as realities; we recognize the awakened nature of the image. But by what means are the images images? By the fact that they stand as images. As we awaken, we switch on our bodily functions. I want to say, we see red as red, the same whether we are awake or asleep; we hear tones the same way, whether we are dreaming or awake. But while we are awake, having turned our will on to bodily functions, we go over to some extent to the realities—in crossing over the hard things we are not speaking now of philosophical speculations, but are entirely within the popular consciousness. Thus to a certain extent when we are awake we do not retain the picture in sensory perceptions, but cross broadly over the hard things. We are switched on to the same element that presents to us the things of the world, in the sense of physical existence.

Now we have gradually switched into a new world as a spiritual researcher. Why have we done this?

When you compare the thinking, the feeling, and the will of the human being as they exist in the soul and also in the waking state, they are actually a dream. We actually only wake up with sensory thoughts and ideas together in the outer world, and these are combined as sensory perceptions. As soon as we look within ourselves with ordinary consciousness, we are dreaming. Even our thoughts, when we turn inward, are more or less dream perceptions. This remains so dreamlike, even the will is asleep. For when we have decided upon any action we know how this action that we initially had as an idea continues down into our limbs as an idea, so that we begin to move the limbs. Only through spiritual science can one see what is going on in the muscles, what is going on in the entire organism; usually that which is a voluntary action remains inhibited during sleep. First we have only the idea. Then it all goes down into an unconscious state. Then the idea of the action occurs again. And what the soul by itself can only dream about even in the waking state, we gradually switch on through reinforced thinking, through the deep silence of the soul, through the power of knowledge awakened by love in the spiritual existence of the human being, as we switch on the ordinary awakening of the will in bodily existence.

Thus we learn to judge the eternal in the human being from the point of view of the ordinary physical-sensory life that we absolve between birth and death, as we judge the content of the dream from the point of view of physical-sensory life. We advocate recognizing the eternal in this way!

Again and again I have to say on such an occasion: of course the objection is given that these things only apply to those who want to be a spiritual researcher, who look into these worlds.—No, ladies and gentlemen, the spiritual researcher actually has these things for himself as a human being only slightly, when he brought them down with the usual introduction into ordinary language, into ordinary life. And this can happen as well for everyone who hears these things from the spiritual researcher.

Just as one has grown accustomed to accept the things that the botanist or the astronomer has explored with his difficult methods, so one will gradually have to get used to the things that the spiritual researcher has explored after he gives an account of his method, as I have described today—to accept, to accept more readily, for there is the same relationship between ordinary common sense and these truths as there is between the right aesthetic taste and a beautiful picture.

You have to be a painter to paint a beautiful picture, but you do not have to be a painter to judge the beauty of its image! One needs only to have healthy taste.

One must be a spiritual researcher in order to know the things as they have been portrayed. But just as little as one needs to be a painter in order to judge the beauty of a picture, just as little does one need to be a spiritual researcher in order with complete common sense to be in agreement with what the spiritual researcher says. Apart from this, for people today at a certain level it is possible that each one can be a spiritual researcher. The one who delves into the books I have mentioned, who does the corresponding exercises, can today—no matter in what profession, in what life situation—get as far at the least as to control in a completely satisfactory manner that of which I have spoken this evening, and many other things.

What is this knowledge that leads into the eternal soul? It is a realization that is not only grasped in the head of the human being, it affects the entire person. For that which is the world of color, the eye will grasp. For that which is the world of tone, the ear will grasp. For that which is the law of nature, the human mind will grasp. For that, however, which is the spiritual world—as I have indicated here today—that will be grasped by the entire human being.

Hence, allow me in conclusion to say something personal by way of illustration, although this is not meant to be personal, but is meant rather to be entirely objective.

If you really want to capture that which is disclosed by the spiritual world, you need presence of mind, because it slips so to speak, turns away quickly; it is fleeting. That which is to a certain extent advanced through an improvement in the power of memory imprints itself only with difficulty upon the ordinary memory. One must use all of his strength to bring down what he beholds in the spiritual world, to bring this down to ordinary language, to ordinary memory-thought.

I would not be able to lecture about these things if I did not try by all means to bring down what arises in me of what can be beheld in the spiritual world, especially to really bring these thought-words down into physically audible regions. One cannot comprehend with the mere head, because the entire human being must to a certain extent become a sense organ, but a spiritually developed sense organ. Therefore I attempt every time—it is my custom, another has another one—I attempt every time if something is given to me from the spiritual world, not merely to think it through as I receive it from the spiritual world, but to write it down as well, or to record it with some characteristic stroke, so that the arms and hands are involved as well as the soul organs. So something else other than the mere head, which remains only in abstract ideas, must be involved in these findings: the entire person.

I have in this way entire truckloads of fully-written notebooks that I never again look at, which are only there in order to be descriptions, in order to provide preliminary work in the physical world for that which is from the spiritual world, so that the spiritually beheld world can then really be clothed in words; whereby the thoughts of which memories are usually formed or that usually apply in life can actually be penetrated—Thus one obtains a science that relates to the whole person.

I will have to show you tomorrow how this science provides us with the opportunity not only to understand the cultural development of humanity, but it might also socially promote namely a foundation, a true, real foundation for a true, real education, for a true, genuine pedagogy, for Waldorf education.

These things, how the development of the humanity and the education of humanity in light of this spiritual-scientific world view is excluded, this I will have to describe tomorrow. Today I wanted only to evoke the idea of how this spiritual-scientific point of view, through knowledge, is based to a certain extent on a second awakening, the soul of the human being in its eternity again returning to the full life.

Yes, we have to experience this out of our awareness of time, that scholarship has just spoken of a doctrine of the soul without soul, in a certain sense.—I will have to touch upon this question tomorrow—even of religion without God.

Spiritual science as it is meant here wants in turn to enter into the fullest intensity of the soul of the human being, into the eternity of the soul; it wants religious consciousness, the godly-religious content to enter again into the development of humanity and the education of humanity, precisely so that man can come through awareness to his full dignity. And he, conscious of his dignity which results from his knowledge of the connection of his soul with the eternal, with the ur-eternal powers of the world, realizes that this is part of his true nature, as the physical body, as something that stands in everyday life, is connected with him, is part of his life.

This is that which people themselves have followed as knowledge, and already many, many of them crave the equivalent, if it is not fully conscious to them. That which today torments people, what they feel as the uneasiness of life that makes them basically nervous about what drives them so that they feel undermined in their whole existence, this is the burning question of the eternal forces underlying the temporal forces that we need to develop in normal and in social life. This spiritual science is here so that people who want to have knowledge of these eternal forces—that spiritual science here intends—can find methods to lead others to this realization, so that others can also engage in this knowledge in social life; that they and their fellow man not only see something as it were that is borne by the stream of life on earth, to be born with birth and die with death, but that they learn rather of something that will go through all eternity, guided by the stars and the aims of people through the cosmic goal so that this cosmic goal gives the correct meaning to all earthly goals.

Anthroposophy wants to speak to people of this cosmic sense, the sense of the goals of earth. This is what it would awaken in souls again as feeling and sensation in the relationship of the human soul with all of the forces of eternal life, for people of the present and of the future.

And this, ladies and gentlemen—if you are going on honest advice you will have to admit—is what one needs as a human being at the present time. And what one will need more and more as a human being of the future.

In the lectures which it has been my lot to deliver, I have often drawn attention to an observation which might be made in real life, and which shows the necessity of seeking everywhere below the surface of life's appearances, instead of stopping at first impressions. It runs somewhat as follows.—A man is walking along a river bank and, while still some way off, is seen to pitch headlong into the water. We approach and draw him out of the stream, only to find him dead; we notice a boulder at the point where he fell and conclude at first sight as a matter of course that he stumbled over the stone, fell into the river and was drowned. This conclusion might easily be accepted and handed down to posterity—but all the same it could be very wide of the mark. Closer inspection might reveal that the man had been struck by a heart-attack at the very moment of his coming up to the stone, and was already dead when he fell into the water. If the first conclusion had prevailed and no one had made it his business to find out what actually occurred, a false judgment would have found its way into history—the apparently logical conclusion that the man had met his death through falling into the water. Conclusions of this kind, implying to a greater or lesser degree a reversal of the truth, are quite customary in the world—customary even in scholarship and science, as I have often remarked.

For those who dedicate themselves heart and soul to our spiritual-scientific movement, it is necessary not only to learn from life, but incessantly to make the effort to learn the truth from life, to find out how it is that not only men but also the world of facts may quite naturally transmit untruth and deception. To learn from life must become the motto of all our efforts; otherwise the goals we want to reach through our Building¹ as well as in many other ways will be hard of attainment. Our aim is to play a vital part in the genesis of a world-era; a growth which may well be compared with the beginning of that era which sprang from a still more ancient existence of mankind—let us say the time to which Homer's epics refer. In fact, the entire configuration, artistic nature and spiritual essence of our Building attempts something similar to what was attempted during the happenings of that transitional period from a former age to a later one, as recounted by Homer. It is our wish to learn from life, and, what is more, to learn the truth from life.

There are so very many opportunities to learn from life, if we wee willing. Have we not had such an opportunity even in the last day or two? Are we not justified in making a start with such symptoms, particularly with one that has so deeply moved us? Consider for a moment!² On Wednesday evening last, many of our number either passed by the crossroads or were in the neighbourhood, saw the wagon overturned and lying there, came up to the lecture and were quite naturally, quite as a matter of course, aware of nothing more than that a cart had fallen over. For hours, that was the sole impression—but what was the truth of the matter? The truth was that an eloquent karma in the life of a human being was enacted; that this life so full of promise was in that moment karmically rounded off, having been required back in the worlds by the Spiritual Powers. For at certain times these Powers need uncompleted human lives, whose unexpended forces might have been applied to the physical plane, but have to be conserved for the spiritual worlds for the good of evolution. I would like to put it this way. For one who has saturated himself with spiritual science, it is a plainly evident fact that this particular human life may be regarded as one which the gods require for themselves; that the cart was guided to the spot in order that this karma might be worked out, and overturned in order to consummate the karma of this human life. The way in which this was brought home to us was heartrending, and rightly so. But we must also be capable of submerging ourselves in the ruling wisdom, even when it manifests, unnoticed at first, in something miraculous. From such an event we should learn to look more profoundly into the reality. And how indeed could we raise our thoughts more fittingly to that human life with which we are concerned, and how commemorate more solemnly its departure from earth, than by forthwith allowing ourselves to be instructed by the grave teaching of destiny which has come to us in these days.

Yet it is a human trait to forget only too promptly the lessons which life insistently offers us! It is on this account that we have to call to our aid the practice of meditation, the exercise of concentrated thinking, in order to essay any comprehension of the world at all adequate to spiritual science; we must strive continually towards this. And I would like to interpose this matter now, among the other considerations relative to our Building, because it will serve as an illustration for what is to follow concerning art. For let us not hold the implications of our Building to be less than a demand of history itself—down to its very details.

In order to recognise a fact of this kind in full earnest, it must be our concern to acquire the possibility, through spiritual science, of reforming our concepts and ideas, of winning through to better, loftier, more serious, more penetrating and profound concepts and ideas concerning life, than any we could acquire without spiritual science.

From this standpoint let us ask the downright question What then is history, and what is it that men so often understand by history? Is not what is so often regarded as history nothing more at bottom than the tale of the man who is walking along a river's bank, died from a heart attack, falls into the water, and of whom it is told that he died through drowning? Is not history very often derived from reports of this kind? Certainly, many historical accounts have no firmer foundation. Suppose someone had passed by the cross-roads between 8 and 9 o'clock last Wednesday evening and had had no opportunity of hearing anything about the shattering event which had taken place there: he could have known nothing, only that a cart had been overturned, and that is how he would report it. Many historical accounts are of this kind. The most important things lying beneath the fragments of information remain entirely concealed; they withdraw completely from what is customarily termed history. Sometimes possibly one can go further and say that external reports and documents actually hinder our recognition of the true course of history. That is more particularly so if—as happens in nearly every epoch—the documents present the matter one-sidedly and if there are no documents giving the other side, or if these are lost. You may call this an hypothesis but it is no hypothesis, for what is taught as history at the present time rests for the most part upon such documents as conceal rather than reveal the truth.

The question might occur at this point: How is any approach to the genesis of historical events to be won? In all sorts of ways spiritual science has shown us how, for it does not look to external documents but seeks to discern the impulses which play in from the spiritual worlds. Hence it naturally cannot describe the outward course of events as external history does, It recognises inward impulses everywhere. Moreover, the spiritual investigator must be bold enough, when tracing these impulses on the surface, to hold fast to them in the face of outer traditions. Courage with regard to the truth is essential, if we would take up our stand on the ground of spiritual science, The transition can be made by attempting to approach the secrets of historical “coming into being” otherwise than is usually done.

Consider all the extant 13th and 14th century documents about Italy, from which history is so fondly composed. The tableau, the picture, obtained by thus assembling history out of such documents brings one far less close to the truth one can get by studying Dante and Giotto, and allowing what they created out of their souls to work upon one. Consider also what remains of Scholasticism, of its thoughts, and try to reflect upon, to reproduce in yourself, what Dante, Giotto and Scholasticism severally created—you will get a truer picture of that epoch than is to be had from a collection of external documents. Or someone may set himself the task of studying the rebellion of the Protestant spirit of the North or of Mid-Europe against the Catholicism of the South. What can you not find in documents! Yet it is not a question of isolated facts, but of uniting one's whole soul with the active, ruling, weaving impulses at work. You come to know this rising up of the Protestant spirit against the Catholic spirit through a study of Rembrandt and the peculiar nature of his painting. Much could be brought forward in this way.

And so it comes about that historical documents are often more of a hindrance than a help. Perhaps the type of history bookworm who subsists upon documentary evidence would be elated by a pile of material on Homer's life, or Shakespeare's. From a certain point of view, however, one could say: Thank God there is no such evidence! We must only be wary not to exaggerate a truth of this kind, not to press it too far. We must indeed be grateful to history for leaving us no documents about Homer or Shakespeare. Yet something might here be maintained which is one-sidedly true—one sided, but true, for a one sided truth is nevertheless a truth. Someone might exclaim: How we must long for the time when no external documents about Goethe are available.

Indeed, with Goethe it is often not merely disturbing, but an actual hindrance, to know what he did, not only from day to day but sometimes even from hour to hour. How wonderful it would be to picture for oneself the experience undergone by the soul of a man who at a particular time of life spoke the fateful words:

“ I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology,
From end to end, with labour keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before.”

“Faust”, Part I,
(Tr. Bayard Taylor)

If one wished to find the answer oneself in the case of such men, one might well yearn for the time when all the Leweses, and so on, whatever their names may be, no longer tell us what Goethe did the livelong day in which this or that verse was set down. And what a hindrance in following the flight of Goethe's soul up to the time in which he inscribed these words:

“The sun-orb singe, in emulation
‘Mid brother spheres, his ancient round. . .”

What a hindrance it is that we are able to refer to the many volumes of his notebooks and correspondence, and to read how Goethe spent this period. This view is fully justified from one angle, but not from every angle; for although it is fully justified in the case of Homer, Shakespeare, and so on, it is one sided with regard to Goethe, since Goethe's own works include his “Truth and Poetry” (“Dichtung und Wahrheit”). An inherent trait of this personality is that something about it should be known, since Goethe felt constrained to make this personal confession in “Truth and Poetry”. Hence the time will never come when the poet of “Faust” will appear to humanity in the same light as the poet of the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey”. So we see that a truth brought home to us from one side only can never be given a general application; it bears solely on a particular, quite individual case.

Yet the matter must he grasped still more profoundly. Spiritual science tries to do this. By pointing out certain symptoms, I have repeatedly endeavoured to show that modern culture aspires towards spiritual science. In my Rätsel der Philosophie³ I have tried to show how this is particularly true of philosophy. In the second volume you will notice that the development of philosophy presses on towards what I have sketched in the concluding chapter as “Prospect of an Anthroposophy”. That is the direction taken by the whole book. Of course this could not have been done without some support from our Anthroposophical Society, for the outer world will probably make little of the inner structure of the book as yet.

I said that Goethe must be regarded differently from Homer. On the same grounds I would like to add: Do we then not come to know Homer? Could we get to know him by any better means than through his poems, although he lived not only hundreds but even thousands of years ago? Do we not get to know him far better in that way than we ever could from any documents? Yes, Homer's age was able to bring forth such works, through which the soul of Homer is laid bare. Countless examples could be given. I will mention one only one, however, which is connected with the deepest impulses of that turning-point during the Homeric age, much as we ourselves hope and long for in the change from the materialistic to the anthroposophical culture.

We know that in the first book of the Iliad we are told of the contrast between Agamemnon and Achilles: the voices of these two in front of Troy are vividly portrayed. We know further that the second book begins by telling us that the Greeks feel they have stood before Troy quite long enough, and are yearning to return to their homeland. We know, too, that Homer describes the events as if the Gods were constantly intervening as guiding divine-spiritual powers. The intervention of Zeus is described at the beginning of this second book. The Gods, like the Greeks below, are sleeping peacefully; so peacefully, indeed, that Herman. Grimm, in his witty way, suggests that the very snoring of the heroes, of the Gods and of the Greeks below, is plainly audible. Then the story continues:

Now all other gods and chariot-driving men slept all night long, only Zeus was not holden of sweet sleep; rather was he pondering in his heart how he should do honour to Achilles and destroy many beside the Achaians' ships And this design seemed to his mind the best, to wit, to send a baneful dream upon Agamemnon son of Atreus. So he spake, and uttered to him winged words: ‘Come now, thou baneful Dream, go to the Achaians' fleet ships, enter into the hut of Agamemnon son of Atreus, and tell him every word plainly as A charge thee Bid him call to arms the flowing-haired Achaians with al' speed, for that now he may take the wide-wayed city of the Trojans. For the immortals that dwell in the halls of Olympus are no longer divided in counsel, since Hera hath turned the minds of all by her beseeching, and over the Trojans sorrows hang.’

So spake he, and the Dream went his way when he had heard the charge. With speed he came to the Achaeans' fleet ships, and went to Agamemnon son of Atreus, and found him sleeping in his hut, and ambrosial slumber poured over him. So he stood over his head in seeming like unto the son of Neleus, even Nestor, whom most of all the elders Agamemnon honoured.”⁴

Zeus, then, sends the Dream down from Olympus to Agamemnon. He gives the Dream a commission, The Dream descends to Agamemnon, approaching him in the guise of Nestor, who we have just learned, is one of the heroes in the camp of the allies.

“In his likeness spake to him the heavenly Dream: ‘Sleepest thou, son of wise Atreus tamer of horses? To sleep all night through beseemth not one that is a counsellor, to whom peoples are entrusted and so many cares belong. But now hearken straightway to me, for I am a messenger to thee from Zeus, who though he be afar yet hath great care for thee and pity. He biddeth thee call to arms the flowing-haired Achaians with all speed, for that now thou mayest take the wide-wayed city of the Trojans. For the immortals that dwell in the halls of Olympus are no longer divided in counsel, since Hera hath turned the minds of all by her beseeching, and over the Trojans sorrows hang by the will of Zeus. But do thou keep this in thy heart, nor let forgetfulness come upon thee when honeyed sleep shall leave thee.’ ”

This, then, is what takes place. Zeus, the presiding genius in the events, sends a Dream to Agamemnon in order that he should bestir himself to fresh action. The Dream appears in the likeness of Nestor, a man who is one of the band of heroes among whom Agamemnon is numbered. The figure of Nestor, whose physical appearance is well-known to Agamemnon, confronts him and tells him in the Dream what he should do. We are further told that Agamemnon convenes the elders before he calls an assembly of the people. And to the elders he recounts the Dream just as it had appeared to him:

“Hearken, my friends. A dream from heaven came to me in my sleep through the ambrosial night, and chiefly to goodly Nestor was very like in shape and bulk and stature. And it stood over my head and charged me saying: ‘Sleepest thou, son of wise Atreus tamer of horses?’ ”

(Atreus' son then tells the elders what the Dream had said. None of the elders stands up excepting Nestor alone, the real Nestor, who utters the words:)

“My friends, captains and rulers of the Argives, had any other of the Achaians told us this dream we might deem it a false thing, and rather turn away there from; but now he hath seen it who of all Achaians avoweth himself far greatest. So come, let us call to arms as we may the sons of the Achaians ...”

Do we not gaze unfathomably deep into Homer's soul, when we know—are able to know, to perceive, by means of spiritual science—that he can recount an episode of this kind? Have we not described how what we experience in the spiritual world clothes itself in pictures, and how we have first to interpret the pictures, how we should not permit ourselves to be misled by them? Homer spoke at a time when the present clairvoyance did not yet exist; at a time, rather, when the old form of clairvoyance had just been lost. And in Agamemnon he wanted to portray a man who is still able to experience the old atavistic clairvoyance in certain episodes of life. As a military commander he is still led to his decisions through the old clairvoyance, through dreams. We know what Homer knows and believes and how he regards the men he writes about; and suddenly, in pondering on what is described in this passage, we see that the human soul stands here at the turning-point of an era.

Yet that is not all. We do not only behold in Agamemnon, through Homer, a human soul into which clairvoyance still plays atavistically, nor do we only recognise the pertinent description of this clairvoyance; but the whole situation lies before us in a wonderfully magical light. Homer is humorous enough to show us expressly that it is Nestor who appeared to Agamemnon; the same Nestor who is subsequently present and himself holds forth, Now Nestor has spoken in favour of carrying out the Dream's instructions. The people assemble; but Agamemnon addresses them quite differently from what is implied in the Dream, saying that it is a woeful business, this lingering before Troy: “Let us flee with our ships to our dear native land”, he exclaims. So that the people, seized by the utmost eagerness, hasten to the ships for the journey home. Thus it rests finally with the persuasive arts of Odysseus to effect their about-turn and the beginning of the siege of Troy in real earnest. Here, in fact, we gaze into Homer's soul and discern in Agamemnon a lifelike portrayal of the transition from a man who is still led by the ancient clairvoyance to a man who decides everything out of his own conclusions. And so with an overwhelming sense of humour he shows us how Agamemnon speaks to the elders while under the influence of the Dream, and later how he speaks to the crowd, having bade farewell to the spiritual world and being subject now, to external impressions alone. Homer's way of depicting how Agamemnon outgrows the bygone age and is placed on his own feet, on the spearhead of his own ego, is wonderful indeed. And he further implies that from henceforward everything must undergo a like transition, so that men will act in accordance with what the reason brings to pass, with what we term the Intellectual or Mind Soul, which must be ascribed pre-eminently to the ancient Greeks. Because Agamemnon is only just entering the new era and behaves in a quite erratic and contradictory way, first in accordance with his clairvoyant dream and then out of his own ego, Homer has to call in Odysseus, a man who reaches his decisions solely under the influence of the Intellectual Soul. Wonderful is the way in which two epochs come up against each Other here, and wonderfully apposite is Homers picture of it!

Now I would ask you: Do we know Homer from a certain aspect when we know such a trait? Certainly we know him. And that is how we must come to know him if we want rightly to understand world-history—an impossible task if nothing but external documents were available. Many other traits could be brought forward, out of which the figure of Homer would emerge and stand truly before us. We can come close to him in this way, as we never could with a personality built up only from historical documents. Just think what is really known of ancient Greek history! Yet through traits of this kind we can approach Homer so closely that we get to know him to the very tip of his nose, one might say! At one time there were men who approached Homer in this way, until a crude type of philology came in and spoilt the picture. Thus does one know Socrates, as Plato and Xenophon depict him; so also Plato himself, Aristotle, Phidias. Their personalities can be rounded off in a spiritual sense. And if we thus hold these figures before our mind, a picture arises of Hellenism on the physical plane. To be sure, one must call in the aid of spiritual science. As the sun sheds its light over the landscape, so does spiritual science illumine for us the figure of Homer as he lived, and equally of Aeschylus, Socrates, Plato, Phidias.

Try for a moment to visualise Lycurgus, Solon or Alcibiades as a part of Greek history. How do they present themselves? As nothing but spectres. Whoever has any understanding of an Individuality in the true sense must recognise that in the framework of history they are just like spectres, for the features that history sets itself to portray are so abstract as to have a wholly spectral quality. Nor are the figures of later ages which have been deduced from external documents any less spectral in character.

I am saying all this in the hope that gradually—yes, even in things that people treat as so fixed and stable that the shocks of the present time are treated as mere foolishness—spiritual science in the hearts of our friends may acquire the strength and courage to bring home an understanding that a new impulse is trying to find its way into human evolution. But for this we shall need all our resources; one might say that we shall need the will to penetrate into the true connections that go to make up the world, and the power of judgment to perceive that the true connections do not lie merely on the surface. In this regard it is of surpassing importance that we should learn from life itself. For very often—to a far greater extent than one might at first suppose—error finds its way into the world through a superficial reliance on the external pattern of facts, which really can do nothing but conceal the truth, as we saw in the cases described. In the field of philosophy particularly, it is my hope that precisely through the mode of presentation in the second volume of the “Rätsel der Philosophie” many will find it possible to recognise the connection between the philosophic foundations of a world-conception, as presented in the “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” and the “Outline of Occult Science”. If on the one hand we are looking for a presentation of the spiritual worlds as this offers itself to clairvoyant knowledge, then on the other hand there must be added to the reception of this knowledge a penetration of the soul with the impulses which arise from the conviction, that man does not confront the truth directly in the world, but must first wrest the truth from it. The truth is accessible only to the man who strives, works, penetrates into things with his own powers; not to the man who is ready to accept the first appearances of things, which are only half real. Such a fact is easily uttered in this abstract form, but the soul is inclined over and over again to back away from accepting the deeper implications of what is said.

I believe many of those who have tried to enter into spiritual science with all the means now at their disposal will understand how in our Building, for example, the attempt has been made through the concord of the columns with their motifs and, with everything expressed in the forms, to enable the soul to grow beyond what is immediately before it. For a receptive person, beginning to experience what lies in the forms of the Building, the form itself would immediately disappear, and, through the language of the form, a way would open out into the spiritual, into the wide realms of space. Then the Building would have achieved its end. But in order to find this way, much has still to be learnt from life.

Is it not a remarkable Karma for all of us, gathered here for the purpose of our Building, to experience through a shattering event the relationship between Karma and apparently external accident? If we call to our aid all the anthroposophical endeavours now at our disposal, we can readily understand that human lives which are prematurely torn away—which have not undergone the cares and manifold coarsenings of life and pass on still undisturbed—are forces within the spiritual world which have a relationship to the whole of human life; which are there in order to work upon human life. I have often said that the earth is not merely a vale of woe to which man is banished from the higher worlds by way of punishment. The earth is here as a training-ground for human souls. If, however, a life lasts but a short while, if it has but a short time of training, then forces are left over which would otherwise have been used up in flowing down from the spiritual world and maintaining the physical body. Through spiritual science we do not become convinced only of the eternality of the soul and of its journey through the spiritual world, but we learn also to recognise what is permanent in the effect of a spiritual force by means of which a man is torn from the physical body like the boy who was torn from our midst on the physical plane. And we honour, we celebrate, his physical departure in a worthy manner if, in the manner indicated and in many other ways, we really learn, learn very much, from our recent experience, Through Anthroposophy, one learns to feel and to perceive from life itself.

• 1. The First Goetheanum, later destroyed by fire.
• 2. Note by translator: A seven-year old boy was smothered by an overturned horse-drawn removal van, quite unnoticed since darkness had already set in. The boy, who was in the habit of running an errand for his mother at this hour, normally went another way.
• 3. Riddles of Philosophy
• 4. The Iliad, Book II. (Macmillan, 1949)

Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be With you and the hard duties you have to perform.

Today it will be my task to sum up some of the things we may know already, though it is good to review them again and again, for they may serve as guide-lines for our work in spiritual science.

Above all we must every now and again return to the thought that our present life on earth, between birth and death, really is an interlude between our many past earth lives and the many lives we have already lived between death and rebirth on the one hand and the many earth lives and lives between death and rebirth that lie ahead in the future on the other. An interlude is what I have called this life of ours. We may therefore expect to find something in our present life that may, as it were, be considered to have arisen out of what has gone before, and also something that may be seen to point us towards the future. Some of the things we shall discuss today will relate particularly to the latter.

A person could easily believe, in considering his life, that there is really nothing in this life to indicate that the germs, the seeds of our future life are already within us. Yet that is the case. It really is the case that what is to happen with us in the future is already in preparation. We merely have to interpret our lives correctly and we shall find out that something already lies hidden within us just as the plant now before us holds within it the hidden seed of the future plant' for a plant that is still to come into being.

One element in our present life which often tends to be incomprehensible is our dream life, a subject only too well known to us all. Our dream life does of course have aspects that we may consider to be to some extent comprehensible. We dream about things which remind us of something or other we have gone through in life. It does, of course, often happen that things we have gone through the day before or some time ago appear changed in our dreams, that they have undergone some kind of transformation. But still, it will often be fairly obvious that part of the life we have behind us comes up in what we are dreaming, even if it has changed. On the other hand I think no one who pays at least some attention to himself and the world of his dreams can deny that there are dreams which show us such strange things that we really cannot say they derive from something or other we have gone through in our lives. It really is a fact that a person only needs to reflect a little on his dreams and he will be perfectly aware that things come up in his dreams which he could never have thought up, could never have had an idea of, at least as far as he is aware from what he remembers.

We shall understand how all this fits together if we take a closer look at what really happens when we dream. As you know, when we are asleep we are outside the physical and ether bodies with our astral body and ego. The physical and ether bodies are lying on the couch; with our astral body and ego we are outside them. Under present conditions on earth it is not possible for any one to have conscious awareness of what the astral body and the ego go through whilst they are asleep—unless they somehow acquire special faculties. These things are at a subconscious level. However, clairvoyant perception shows that what the astral body and ego live through outside the physical body is just as rich and varied, just as clearly defined, as what the physical body experiences. It is just as rich and varied, showing just as great a variety of form as many of the things we experience here on the physical plane. Our consciousness cannot take it in, but it is there and it is experienced. The astral body and the ego are normally so far away from the physical and ether bodies during sleep that these are not aware of anything that goes on in the astral body and the ego. Dreams arise when the astral body and the ego come so close to the physical and ether bodies that the ether body is able to receive impressions of what goes on in the astral body and the ego. When you wake up knowing that you have been dreaming, it strictly speaking means that the contents of your dream have become conscious because the astral body and the ego were re-entering. And before the physical body was able to become conscious of having the astral body and the ego within itself again, the ether body became conscious of this. The ether body rapidly took in what the astral body and the ego had experienced and this gave rise to the dream. A dream therefore arises through interaction between astral body and ether body.

As a result the dream is given a particular colouring. It is given a kind of coating, one might say. As you know, at death the human being departs with his astral body, ego and ether body and the ether body then immediately sees the past life in retrospect. This vision of the past life is in fact attached to the ether body and the review comes to an end when this dissolves. The ether body therefore has the capacity for carrying the imprint of all the events in one's life. The ether body really bears the imprint of everything we have gone through in life.

This ether body has a very complex structure. If we were able to dissect it out in such a way that it retained its form, it would be a mirror of our present life, a picture of our life going back to the moment, the point in time, to which our memory extends. As we enter into the ether body with our astral body and ego and the ether body comes to meet the incoming astral body, it carries things—memories of things it has experienced—towards that which is coming in with the astral body and it uses its own images for what in the astral body is something real.

I want to put it more precisely. Let us assume someone is asleep and with his astral body and ego out there encounters, let us say, another individual. The person will know nothing about this. He experiences the encounter; he experiences a certain friendly feeling towards the other and knows that he is about to do something together with this other individual. Let us assume he experiences this outside his ether body. This is possible. Yet he'll know nothing about it. Then the moment of waking comes. The astral body and the ego return to the ether body, bringing towards the ether body whatever has been experienced. The ether body meets the astral body with all that is inherent within it, with its world of images, and the sleeper dreams. He dreams of something he undertook maybe ten, twenty years ago. And the person will say to himself: ‘Ah yes, I have been dreaming about something I experienced ten, twenty years ago.’ But if he reflects carefully he may well find that the past event has undergone a complete change. It will still, however, remind him of something he experienced in the past. Now what did really happen in this case? If we follow the process carefully, using clairvoyant perception, we find that the ego and astral body have experienced something that in fact Will only take place during the person's next incarnation: an encounter with an individual, something or other which has to do with the individual. But the person is not yet able to take this in with his ether body, for this only contains, is only able to hold, the images of his present life. When the astral body enters, the ether body expresses what really is part of a future life in images belonging to the present life. This peculiarly complicated process actually takes place all the time in the human being when he is dreaming.

Considering everything you have already heard in spiritual science, this will not seem strange to you. We must be aware that in the principles which depart from our physical and ether bodies, in the astral body and the ego, we have that which tends towards our next incarnation, which is preparing in us for our next incarnation. As we gradually learn to separate our dreams from the images deriving from our present life, we come to know the prophetic nature of dreams. The prophetic nature of dreams can indeed be revealed to us; we merely have to learn to strip our dreams of the images in which they are clothed. We need to consider the nature of the experiences in our dreams rather than the actual experience. We might say to ourselves for instance: The fact that I dream of an individual is due to the nature of my ether body, the way in which my ether body goes out to meet the experiences gained by the astral body with images relating to the present. To identify the things which have already been prepared for our next life, we have to focus our attention more on the manner or essential nature of the dream, separating it from the image belonging to the ether body. Through our dreams we really have prophecies in us of things that will happen in the future. It is really most important to pay serious attention to this. Human life will be more and more revealed the more we take account of its complex nature. We'd like to have it simpler, that would be easier, but the fact is that it is complicated.

You see, someone who is in the outer, physical world does not realize that there are all kinds of things within him. We have just come to see that there is a foreteller of future lives within us. But there are many other things in us, and in gaining self-knowledge we come to see more and more of what there is in us, what is at work within us, making us happy or unhappy—for all the things that are in us make us happy or unhappy. People do not usually realize that prior to this earth life they went through life on Moon—not they themselves but that which has made them human beings on earth. We know something of life on Moon and also of earlier life stages on Sun and on Saturn. Let us first of all consider life on Moon. At present we are of course living earth lives, but life on Moon was essential if earth life was to come about. Life on Moon was preparatory, producing the causes of life on earth, and in a certain way this Moon life is still in us. On Moon man had a dream-like clairvoyance. He perceived reality through dream images. Today we still have in us what we once have been on Moon; it is still in us. Yes, I know Moon man has become earth man, but this effect still holds its original cause within it, we still have Moon man in us. Looking upon this Moon man we are able to say: ‘He is what we call the dreamer in us.’ Yes, indeed, We all carry a dreamer in us, a dreamer who actually thinks and feels and uses his will in a less dense, in a thinner, way, but who is really also wiser than we earth individuals are. We have a dreamer in us. We all carry another subtle human being within us. The way we walk about on earth, thinking, feeling and using our will, is something we have been given in the course of earth evolution. What Moon evolution has left in us is a dreaming human being. We are however given more in this dreamer than we are able to have in our thoughts, feelings and will impulses, and this dreamer is not entirely inactive. We do not take him into account, but we do many, many things that we are really only half aware of, things the dreamer in us is directing and guiding. We arrange things, but the dreamer in us also does his part, guiding our thoughts in this or that direction. We may think up a sentence, for example. The dreamer will make us say that sentence in a specific way, giving it a point, a particular nuance of feeling. The dreamer is what is left in us of Moon. Let us refer to an outstanding individual and show how the dreamer can be found in him. When people get to know people in life, or get to know outstanding individuals through their writings, they usually consider the other as a human being on this earth and not as a dreamer, a poet. Yet it is there that he expresses himself more profoundly.

Emerson was a great writer.⁷⁸ He had the peculiarity that he always became so engrossed in whatever subject he was dealing with that it is easy to show up the occasional contradiction in his work. The reason is that he was always completely taken up with the subject he was dealing with at the time, failing to take into account that what he was characterizing at the moment was contradictory to the characterization he had given when involved in another subject. In the case of Emerson it is always possible to detect subtle undertones of his Moon being, of the dreamer, wherever he became completely involved in a person or an object. Emerson wrote two excellent essays—one on Shakespeare as the typical poet and one on Goethe as the typical writer. Now what happens is that people read this and that in Emerson's essay on Shakespeare and read this and that in the essay on Goethe and this satisfies them, they are content. But we can also take things further and say to ourselves: 'Surely there is some subtle touch of something unusual in these works of Emerson?' And We shall discover something very strange indeed, for Emerson's intention was not to characterize Shakespeare as Shakespeare, but to make him the representative, the example, of poets. It is very strange to see what has come about through Emerson's becoming engrossed in Shakespeare—if we perceive the subtle undertones that are present in this work.

You know I would not say anything derogatory about Shakespeare out of chauvinism, for nationalistic reasons. Of course I consider Shakespeare a great poet, certainly one of the greatest poets of all time. But let me bring out those subtle undertones that are there in Emerson's characterization of Shakespeare. He wrote that it was not originality which made a great man. Characterizing a great poet one should not demand such a great person to be original in everything he did.

And you'll find that in his characterization of Shakespeare Emerson makes it clear that the poet went to all kinds of sources, taking anything he liked and using it in his own poetic works. Emerson was making an effort, as it were, to excuse Shakespeare for not being original, for collecting his material from all kinds of sources—Italian, Spanish, French and German—and of course also from English history. Oddly enough, Emerson, a man giving such loving concern to the work of Shakespeare, characterized Shakespeare in the following words:

‘Great men are more distinguished by range and extent, than by originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men.’

He excused Shakespeare's lack of originality, the fact that he collected his material from many sources. Indeed, he went so far as to say that one had to consider the nature of English audiences at the time, for Shakespeare sought to be to their taste. Emerson wrote some strange things about Shakespeare:

‘It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man's work but came by wide social labour, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.’

And the strangest thing Emerson said about Shakespeare in his loving characterization, the strangest thing—please listen to this:

`It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.’

Emerson was therefore trying to demonstrate Shakespeare's world renown exactly by showing that great men plagiarize on each other's works and that the themes he used in his numerous works were actually taken from the work of others. That is the subtle undertone to be found initially in Emerson's Shakespeare characterization.

Let us now consider his loving appreciation of Goethe. Emerson characterized Goethe as representative of writers. Yet he said with reference to Goethe that nature depended on her wonders being put in words. Every stone, every plant, every creature in nature was waiting to be uttered in words by the soul of man. The writer, Emerson said, would be in immediate contact with nature. It was as though the creator himself has first made provision for the idea and then one day the writer would appear. It was strange, Emerson said with regard to Goethe, how this man owed none of his gifts to his people, his country, his environment, for everything bubbled up out of him. Truth and error, too, was determined by Goethe himself, everything was his own.

In his characterization of Goethe, Emerson sought to find his concepts from all kinds of sources. Characterizing Shakespeare as a splendid robber he presented Goethe as someone working out of the centre of the world, as nature herself. Here are some passages from Emerson's description of Goethe:

‘The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know in the high refinements of modern life, in arts, in science, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honour every truth by use.’

Elsewhere he said:

‘I find a provision, in the constitution of the world, for the writer.’

He characterized Shakespeare as being the way his audiences wanted him, Goethe as a man who had been envisaged from the very beginning of the world.

‘He is not a debtor to his position, but was born with a free and controlling genius.’

And again:

‘He sees at every pore, and has a certain gravitation towards truth. He will realize what you say. He hates to be trifled with, and to be made to say over again some old wife's fable, that has had possession of men's faith these thousand years.’

Those words were used to characterize Goethe. In his characterization of Shakespeare, Emerson said that he could never do enough to collect material from all kinds of sources, particularly written sources. I would say that in his characterizations of Shakespeare and of Goethe Emerson succeeded marvellously well in bringing out the difference between Shakespeare and Goethe. Out of what we feel about this we are then able to discover what the dreamer has contributed in either case, that is how Emerson came to characterize Shakespeare as a great robber and Goethe as the great ally of the truth. This is extremely interesting, for there was no conscious intention; yet there is this particular tinge to both essays.

You see, there is another way of reading than just picking up a book and going through it. In fact we do not find out the most important aspects of things if we just take them by themselves, but only by comparing them, by letting one thing act on us side by side with another.

It has been possible for me to give this example because in the case of Emerson it is often the dreamer who is speaking. It is absolutely possible to be aware of two persons speaking in his voice. Emerson was of course aware of the contradictions which your run-of-the-mill reader finds in his works. After all, some of the contradictions In Emerson are so glaringly obvious you really cannot miss them. On the one hand he calls the English the greatest nation on earth, on the other he puts the Germans above them. One thing is said out of surface consciousness, the other out of the dreamer. It is particularly interesting to read the two conclusions to the essays on Shakespeare and Goethe one after the other, taking them simply as conclusions. In the essay on Shakespeare, Emerson wrote that none has as yet attained to what the poet represented in the world: 'The world still awaits the poet-priest.' Something of a feeling of resignation is apparent in the conclusion of the Shakespeare essay. At the end of the Goethe essay we find the exact opposite: that we are spurred by him to revere all truth by not merely giving it recognition but also making it the guide-line for our actions. The Shakespeare essay ends in words of resignation, the Goethe essay in words of confidence and hope.

We are living in an age when it is important to consider these things to some extent, to realize them to some extent. We shall find that in all human beings there is a dreamer who makes himself known through their actions. Clairvoyant awareness is able to perceive him directly; in ordinary life we can recognize him by studying people. That is something we can do in the case of Emerson. Studying Emerson is of definite interest.

The dreamer is the principle in us which is influenced by everything that is supposed to influence us from the spiritual world without our being aware of it. In the experiences we gain as human beings on earth we form thoughts and will impulses. The things we know In the ordinary way are the things we discover in the course of life. Into our dreams however come the Inspirations of the angels, of the entities known as the Angeloi. These in turn are inspired by entities from higher hierarchies. Into our dreams enter things—more so in some and less in others—that are more sensible than anything we have gained from everyday life, anything we encompass in everyday life as we think, feel and use our will. The element that guides us, the element which is more than earth-dwelling man is or ever was, enters into the dreamer in us.

You see, this dreamer is capable of evoking many things that at present are unconscious in us. Oh yes, everything influencing us from the higher world by way of the entities belonging to the hierarchy of the Angeloi influences the dreamer; but all Ahrimanic, all Luciferic influences also influence the dreamer, they really act on the dreamer. A great deal of what people put forward—not entirely from their consciousness, I'd say, but at an instinctive level—is due to influence brought to bear on the dreamer from the spiritual world.

Again I would like to give you an example. I would like to take this example from contemporary history on a somewhat wider scale. I have told you on several occasions that we come to know the European peoples by understanding the way the folk soul speaks through the sentient soul to the Italian, through the intellectual or mind soul to the French, through the spiritual soul to the English, through the ego to the Germans, through the spirit self to the Russians. This communication through the spirit self in the case of the Russians takes the form of instincts today that will only develop further in the future. What the Russian folk soul has to say will only become apparent in the distant future, once the human soul has developed as far as the spirit self. This is why everything that emerges to the east of us is still only germinal. Those peoples to the east of us are, however, instinctively aware that they belong to a different cultural stream. They feel that they must wait. Yet no one likes to wait in reflecting on his awareness of the present. The point is that they are supposed to wait and consciously absorb European culture. Yet there is an instinct in them that they ought to lead and to guide, that they cannot put Europe to death quickly enough. The natural course of events, however, is that in Central Europe there develops whatever can develop in the dialogue between the folk soul and the ego.

As for the Russian folk soul, it must learn its lessons from Central Europe. Once it has worked through what is already being worked through in advance in Central Europe, it will be able to make its own Contribution to European culture. Instead, wild, chaotic instincts are giving rise to something very strange so that we are able to see that these instincts are brought to life in the dreamer out of all kinds of Ahrimanic and Luciferic impulses. It is due to these Ahrimanic and Luciferic impulses that the East of Europe has now turned against Germany in such a horrific way.

One mind in whose utterances the dreamer is apparent is that of Yushakov⁷⁹ He gave his views in 1885 on the relationship between Russian and English culture. I suggest you consider his ideas, for it seems most desirable that as many people as possible today ideas like those which not all that long ago arose in the mind of a Russian who then wrote them down. We should consider these ideas not so much for their content but rather as symptoms of something to be found in all Russian peoples. develop

Yushakov said that the West had grown decadent and was ripe for decline—everything in the West had outlived its time and had to disintegrate. Russia would have to come in at this point. But Russia should not merely cultivate the West, redeem the West from its barbarism; Russian would have to redeem the whole world and Particularly Asia. The way Yushakov envisaged this redemption of Asia for the sake of the soul is as follows.

Let us consider Asia. Asiatic culture really originated from Iran. Iranian culture based on Ormazd.⁸⁰ The Iranians had realized that there was conflict between Ormazd and Ahriman and it has always been possible to see how the Iranians did everything in their power to spread the beneficial influence of Ormazd in Iran. Then, however, the Turanian peoples appeared on the scene. They were independent of Ahriman and constantly harried, fought and overcame the Ormazd culture. First Ormazd was in conflict with Ahriman in Iran. But If we look at the way the peoples of Europe behaved towards this Ormazd culture we find that this lovely culture had spread in the areas which were then predominantly colonized by the English. The English were absolute barbarians when it came to the Ormazd culture. Russia will have to make up for many crimes committed by the English in Asia. The English went there, took possession of large parts of Asia and exploited the Ormazd culture, sucking it dry. What did the English have in mind? Those Englishmen believed the Ormazd culture to exist for their benefit; those Englishmen said that all those parts of Asia existed only to wear English fabrics, fight among themselves with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English dishes and play with English trinkets. Asian culture, they felt, existed for no other purpose. The whole of Asia was to their mind booty won by England. Yushakov put it very precisely:

‘England is exploiting millions of Hindus, and her whole existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples inhabiting that rich peninsula. I desire nothing of this kind for my own country—I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this brilliant yet at the same time also lamentable situation.’

That was written in Russian by Yushakov in 1885. And what did the Russians do? Yushakov asked. They had not been able to emulate the Western European nations, the English, and without legal justification attack and arrogate for themselves the Ormazd culture which existed in Asia. They only went to the places where the Ahriman culture had spread, holding back the peoples in whom Ahriman was at work, so that they could do no further harm to all that Ormazd had achieved for Asia. Once the Russians had liberated the peoples of Asia from the evil of Ahriman they would have to liberate them from the evils due to the sins the English had committed against the Ormazd culture in those areas. To prepare for their future mission in Asia, following the liberation of Asia from Ahriman, they would also have to make good the harm European peoples, and above all the English, had done to the Ormazd culture. Asked why those peoples were unable to carry on with the Ormazd culture, Yushakov's reply was that they had become slaves to industrialism and individualism, that they always thought of themselves first whilst the Russians always thought of themselves last. Such people were of no use. Having blended industrialism into their individualism they had become bloodsuckers in Asia. Russia, he said, would forge different links; a link between the Cossacks, with their brilliant military skills, and the country people who were working with nature. Out of this would come the people who were to liberate the people of Asia. The individual who was to liberate human evolution would come from Asia. That was Yushakov's ideal—that the one to liberate the world would come out of the union between the Cossacks and the country people tilling the soil.

Dear friends, you see an ideal set up here that surely makes it clear beyond doubt that something of the Ahrimanic spirit entered into Yushakov's own mind, into the dreamer. This influence on the dreamer has gradually created a mood in a whole nation—the mood we now perceive in the people who are to the east of us. We are dealing here with a popular mood, a mood brought to expression in Yushakov's words.

You see, I also wanted to show how spiritual science lets us enter more and more closely, giving us deeper insights, into what people say and dream. We all have the dreamer in us, the dreamer is in all of us. Both good and evil powers influence the dreamer.

We have the dreamer in us who has brought Moon nature into us, and we also have a Sun man in us from Sun evolution. This Sun man, however, is no longer able to dream. His conscious awareness if of the same kind as that of the plants. We have within us a plant or Sun man, who is asleep. And then we have in us a Saturn man who is completely dead, as dead as a stone. We have the Sun man in us who is asleep and also Saturn man who is at an even lower level of consciousness, below the level of consciousness we have in sleep. Saturn man I'd say, is our oldest cause, the innermost core in us. All the knowledge man gains at the present time in external life or in science is gained because the external world influences the Saturn man in us. We are not aware of being influenced in this way, but we are nevertheless influenced. Everything we think, feel and will penetrates to Saturn man. And Saturn man is what finally remains of us on this earth, irrespective of whether we are cremated as far as our physical body is concerned or whether we decompose.

The principle we call the dreamer does not endure; the Sun man does not endure. Saturn man becomes part of the elemental realm of the earth in form of very, very fine dust particles. This endures. The earth will always contain a trace of what there has been in us. If you investigate the elemental world today you can find in it the remains of Abraham, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, though in the form of very very fine dust particles. You can find the part of them that was their Saturn man. The part of man that was his Saturn man is given to the earth, remains with the earth, remains in the earth with our permanent essential character.

It was not like this in earlier times. It has been like this since the 15th and 16th centuries. Previously, the whole of the human being dissolved; only those who had been well ahead of their time, like Abraham, Plato and Socrates, left their remains to the earth. By now, or course, it has gradually come to be like this for all people. For this is what is so strange: everything presently achieved by following the path of external science is imprinted in this Saturn man and becomes part of the earth when he does.

Everything else there is to man will be lost, dissolving into the universe once the earth has reached its goal. The minerals, plants and animals around us will pass away. Only the Saturn man you have been remains, in the form of fine dust particles. It will go over from earth to Jupiter existence, forming the solid skeleton of Jupiter. Those are real atoms for Jupiter. People studying external science today, people thinking in an external way, influence their Saturn man to the effect that they produce atoms for Jupiter in their Saturn man. That is how Jupiter get its atoms. If that, however, were the only thing to happen, the whole of Jupiter would be merely a mineral or mineral-like sphere. Jupiter would merely be a mineral-like sphere without plant growth. What we are able to take across to Jupiter through the Saturn man in us merely causes Jupiter to be a mineral sphere. Plants could not grow on it. If plants are to grow on Jupiter the Sun man in us must also be given something. This Sun man in us only receives something from now on and into the future if men and women absorb concepts developed in spiritual science; for the concepts we absorb outside, from external science, enter into Saturn man. What we absorb by way of thoughts engendered through spiritual science enters into the Sun man. This is why spiritual science calls for greater activity. Its thoughts differ from those of external science in that they are active. They have to be grasped in a living way and it is impossible to remain passive towards thinking activity the way we do in the external world. In spiritual science everything has to be actively thought out, we have to be inwardly active. This has an effect on the Sun man in us. And if there were no Sun principle in man, the Jupiter of the future would be entirely mineral, with no plant world. People going through spiritual development take something across that will give rise to a plant world on Jupiter. Through the Sun principle in us we take across the future plant world. All we have to do to make Jupiter barren is reject spiritual science. We can establish spiritual science now in order that there shall be vegetation on Jupiter.

Unlike others, we spiritual scientists do not talk of the marvellous progress we have made. Just listen to a modern physician, one who is very much taking the present-day point of view, or to a modern philosopher and so on. They say: ‘We need not go far back to find people who amounted to nothing at all. Someone like Paracelsus really was in idiot, and a grammar school teacher today is cleverer than Plato every was.’ Plato's philosophy was thoroughly picked to pieces by Hebbel. The latter put down in his diary, as an idea for a play, that a grammar school teacher had a reincarnated Plato in his class.⁸¹ He intended to make a dramatic figure of him, showing the schoolmaster to be dealing with his reincarnated Plato who was quite incapable of grasping anything his teacher was saying about Plato. Hebbel intended to make a play of this. It really is a pity he did not do so, for it really is a very good idea.

But we do not consider ourselves to have made marvellous progress. We hold a different point of view. What people consider philosophy today holds the ego-boosting view that anything going back ten years is already out of date. We know that we have to present spiritual science today the way we do. We also know, however, that a time must come when everything we now present as spiritual science will be a nonsense in a future where quite different work will have to be done within mankind. What we have to present as spiritual science today has the form appropriate for the moment, seeking out from eternity what will be for the benefit of the present age. A time will come, however, when it will be necessary for us to try and influence the dreamer in us just as we influence the Sun man, and the whole of our external science influences Saturn man. Jupiter as mineral mass will be based on what external science makes of Saturn man. Its vegetation will be based on what spiritual science makes of Sun man. Animal life on Jupiter will arise from something that is going to follow on after spiritual science. It will be based on the spiritual science of the future. Then something else will follow which will influence man on Jupiter, something which is still to come. It will provide the basis for Jupiter culture in the real sense.

At present, therefore, we are in a period in life where we prepare the mineral nucleus of Jupiter through external science and where spiritual science influences its plant life, providing the basis for vegetation on Jupiter. The future will bring the principle that influences the dreamer, and this will provide the basis for animal life on Jupiter. Only after this will come the principle which corresponds to what man is today producing in his thinking, feeling and will activity. This is guided by higher wisdom to the effect that when earth evolution has come to an end man will be able to take himself, as man, across to Jupiter.

This is how we are involved in the evolution of the earth, and we perceive, out of our very own human nature, that we are part of the great world, of the macrocosm. We know that everything we do is of account. We know that in joining in the pursuit of spiritual science we contribute to vegetative life for Jupiter and that through the things we put in words we create what will be given to the future at the Jupiter stage of the world.

Just think, dear friends, as I have told you, everything belonging to the mineral kingdom will disperse in the world; everything belonging to the plant kingdom will disperse; everything belonging to the animal kingdom will disperse. Nothing will continue on from the earth except for the mineral atoms coming from man, from the Saturn parts of human beings. Nothing of the mineral, plant and animal worlds passes across to Jupiter. The only thing which will continue is the Saturn man now within us. This will be the mineral kingdom on Jupiter.

I do not know if some of our friends still remember how we first started many years ago in Berlin. We were a small band in those days—some who shared in the experience are still with us—and we started to consider these things.

Let us imagine ourselves on the Jupiter of the future. What are the atoms of Jupiter? They are the Saturn parts of present-day man. It is a nonsense to talk of atoms of the kind modern physicists speak of. Everything man gains from the whole of the earth enters into Saturn man and later becomes Jupiter atoms. It is pure nonsense to say that our minerals, animals and plants contain what physicists are looking for in them. Our present earth atoms were prepared during Moon existence and are what will prepare us to be Sun men, just as we are now preparing the Saturn man in us. I have previously spoken of the way the atom is prepared our of the whole cosmos. You'll find this in the lectures given at the very beginning of our work in Berlin.⁸² Today I'll have to be brief, also taking into account what we have gone through in the meantime.

Our stars, too—the external physical stars, the physical sun, the physical moon we see out there in the universe—that, too, is not the way physicists see it. Physicists would be most surprised if they managed to get up to the sun, for they would find nothing at all of what they have construed. They'd be most surprised at what they saw there. What we would find if we ever could travel up there—in accord with the times it would have to be in a balloon that is still to be invented, in an ether balloon—we'd find the unexpected. We would not find what the physicists have construed; we'd find nothing at all by way of a physical body. It merely looks like that. The sun, moon and stars are part of a whole that arose at some point after Moon evolution. After Moon evolution it was not only the Moon which perished but everything that is part of the visible universe entered into night. And everything there is in the universe today really belongs to the earth, so that the end of the earth will not only mean the plant and animal kingdoms perishing with it but everything out there in the cosmos perishing as well. The stars in their present form will perish into night. And then the future Jupiter world will emerge. Its atoms will be the Saturn parts of present man. Its environment will look very different from our earth environment.

A person considering all this today might ask: 'What will remain of the present world when earth evolution has come to an end?' Mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—all that disperses and passes away. What man gains today by virtue of being man, the external power of discernment he is acquiring, will pass over into the mineral kingdom of Jupiter. The spiritual science he gains will pass over as Sun man and establish the vegetation. What we say—the words we speak—will pass over. Anything moral that happens will pass over.

Was not the One who was to give meaning and direction to the whole of earth evolution able to say some very special words? Was he not able to say: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’?⁸³ Are we not now beginning to grasp the utter profundity of the words Christ spoke: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’? Is that not literally true?

Words coming from external science influence Saturn man and become the atoms of Jupiter. Words coming from spiritual science and influencing Sun man pass across to form the vegetation on Jupiter. That which acts on the dreamer passes across to form the animal kingdom on Jupiter. The moral progress made by man and what he gains through words of the spiritual science of the future—that will be man on Jupiter. It will be words, wisdom of thoughts. This shall endure. Everything all around us in the cosmos will perish. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’

So we gradually come to see words of profound wisdom flowing from this central place of activity we call Golgotha. They flow from that point. As I once said, the whole earth evolution to follow exists so that gradually men shall come to understand the words spoken by the One who went through the Mystery of Golgotha. Today I have tried to explain to you, out of the whole of spiritual science as we know it so far, Christ's words: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ Again and again in the future there will be people who know how to explain other words spoken by Christ out of spiritual science. There will have to be many of them before the full meaning of Christ's words can be understood, for they are words of guidance, words given out of the spirit, yet it will only be in the course of time that they can be understood out of what human beings are able to summon up out of the science of the spirit.

We need to enter into this with our feelings if we are to get a feeling for the utter uniqueness of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through perception directed upwards to the infinite we shall gain the marvellous insight into the one thing that has given the earth meaning from the world's beginning to its very end—the Mystery of Golgotha.

Dear friends, it will be another few weeks until we can talk again. And so it has been my task today to speak of something we are able to take into our hearts and minds and meditate on a great deal in the weeks to come. I wanted to put some ideas into your hearts and minds which you could then develop further. It always has been our summer task in spiritual science to develop further what has entered into our hearts and minds so that our souls shall grow more alive and mature. We do not progress in spiritual science by absorbing it as something theoretical, by merely absorbing ideas, but rather by transforming those thoughts into our whole inner life, letting them become living experience. If we let this thought of how man is part of the whole macrocosm act on our souls, we will come to feel part of it all as human beings. Faintheartedness, hesitation, lack of hope will have to vanish before the magnitude of this thought. We must then at last come to feel ourselves human beings in all humility. And all we have been able to absorb of spiritual science, all that can and shall come alive in us out of spiritual science—as has always been our principle until now—needs to be given emphasis in the present day. Again and again we have to remember, as we consider things today, that the great events happening in our time are a warning. We must remember those who are leaving their ether bodies behind for us while still young, ether bodies that will be a great help to us in letting the spirit enter into the culture of the future. If the spirit is to come in there must be souls that understand something of these spiritual things, souls that look up into that world and know that up there is not only what, in abstract terms, is called attraction, but up there are the living dead, up there is what they have given to mankind on earth of their own life—their unused ether bodies. Souls that have some understanding of these things will have to work together, souls whose thoughts reach upwards to meet what is streaming down from the unused ether bodies of those who have died before their time.

We must fill our souls with this image of the spiritual streaming down to join the earthly. Above all, we must look up to the spiritual realm with all our thoughts, with the part of us that is already spiritual. This I have always summed up in conclusion in the words that shall also be our conclusion today:

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 78. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82) American philosophic writer and essayist. Quotes taken from his Essays and Poems Collins, London & Glasgow 1954.
• 79. Yushakov, Seigel (1849–1910): Der Englisch-Russische Konflikt Ptersburg, 1885.
• 80. Ormazd (German spelling ‘Ormuzd)’ is equivalent to Ahura Mazda (translator).
• 81. Hebbel, Friedrich (1813-63): Tagebücher No. 1335:
  
  ‘The transmigration of souls makes it possible for Plato to be getting a thrashing at school today because he is unable to grasp Plato.’
• 82. See the lectures given in Berlin on 16 and 23 December 1904, in Die Tempellegende and die goldene Legende (GA 93); in English as The Temple Legend Or. John M. Wood) Rudolf Steiner Press. London 1985.
• 83. Mark 13:31.Mark 13:31.

Some time has passed since we met here, and the opportunity to discuss a number of things with you after such a long while gives me the profoundest pleasure. Behind, us lie extremely grave times, difficult times, of which the gravity is certainly felt, though in wider circles it is still insufficiently understood. It is true to say that people who have experienced the second decade of the twentieth century have gone through more than is otherwise experienced over a span of centuries. We are asleep in our souls if we fail to notice how everything to do with human evolution is different now than it was ten years ago. The whole great turnabout that has taken place will no doubt only be fully realized by mankind at large after some time has passed. Then we shall come to see how the events that took place so catastrophically at the surface of life reach deep down into the roots of human souls, and how what has happened came about in the first instance as errors of soul affecting the widest circles of mankind. Not until the decision is made to seek in human souls the true reasons for this great human misfortune will it be possible to reach a real understanding of this time of trial undergone by mankind. Then also an attitude will develop towards a spiritual stream such as Anthroposophy which will differ from that prevailing at present.

This anthroposophical spiritual stream wants to give to mankind the very thing that has been lacking over the last three, four, five hundred years, the thing whose lack is so intimately bound up with the wretchedness of culture and civilization we have experienced and are experiencing. Both the greatest and the smallest matters and events in the world come out of the spiritual realm, out of life in the spirit. Universal questions face mankind today, questions which can only be tackled out of the depths of spiritual life, yet they are being dealt with in the most superficial manner all over the world. There is no possibility of seeing what it is that is struggling to rise up from the depths of human soul- and spiritual life. Yet it is just this possibility which Anthroposophy wants to bring to mankind.

Today I shall speak out of the realm of the anthroposophical world view about some intimate aspects of human soul- and spiritual life. Then, from the point of view this will give us, perhaps we shall be able to conclude with a brief consideration of some recent historical events.¹ Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to speak about those worlds which for the moment are hidden from external sense perceptions and also from the intellect which is attached to these sense perceptions. It wants to speak primarily about everything connected with the eternal aspect of the human soul. We say of the realms into which this anthroposophical world view wishes to penetrate that they can only be reached if human beings step over the threshold of consciousness. What is meant is that the step over the threshold must be taken consciously, if knowledge about these super-sensible realms is to be gained. For human beings step unconsciously over the threshold every time they go to sleep. We say of the threshold we cross daily, in connection with going to sleep and waking up, that it is guarded by the Guardian of the Threshold. In doing so we speak of a spiritual force known by the spiritual researcher to be as real as are the human beings we meet. We speak of the Guardian of the Threshold because in the present phase of mankind's development human beings really do need to be protected in their consciousness from crossing unprepared into the spiritual realms.

It is quite remarkable that something which human beings have to value above all else, something to which they belong with the deepest roots of their existence and without which they would lack true human worth, namely the spiritual world, has to be hidden from them at the moment. This is profoundly linked to the whole purpose of human evolution. Human beings would not be able to achieve their true nature during the course of evolution if they did not themselves have to work for and win the strength with which to approach the spiritual world. If unearned grace alone were to allow them to step over the threshold, then perhaps they would be lofty spiritual beings, but they would not be human beings in the true sense of the word. They would not be beings who win their way towards their own value. For to be a true human being in the universe means to be the instigator of one's own worth. To step over the threshold unprepared would lead to a kind of burning up of the human being, a kind of extinguishing of the human being. However, what spiritual science has to say about man's relationship to the spiritual world can certainly be grasped by normal understanding. It is quite possible to understand what has to be said about this out of the foundations of spiritual science.

Observe how someone sinks into a kind of unconscious state on going to sleep. Out of this unconscious state individual waves rise up into the world of dreams as though from the depths of the ocean. Even for those who are free of any kind of superstition or nebulous mysticism, this dream world is mysterious, enigmatic, and it has to be sensed as belonging to the inmost being both of the world and of man's existence. So the period human beings spend between going to sleep and waking up is a kind of lowered consciousness out of which is revealed the picture world of dreams. And even if we only follow the dreams in an external manner, we still have to say: They contain picture echoes of that life which is not only given to us through our sense perceptions by way of our intellect, but also through our feelings. But they contain that otherwise familiar world in a way that is different. On the whole, they do not contain any abstract thoughts; they change everything into pictures. While the sense-perceptible world we know has a certain coherence and order which satisfies our understanding, so that everything has its place in space and time, dreams appear to shake everything up. Events which took place yesterday are mingled with others which happened decades ago. Dreams impose an order on things that differs from the order of space and time into which we look with our daytime consciousness.

Examining dreams more closely, we find that what is missing in them is our power of thinking. On waking up we feel that we step from dreamless sleep into the world in which human ideas and thoughts arise. We feel that we pour the picture world of dreams into our bodily nature. And as we do so our body sends out the power of thought which once more brings order into what the dreams have jumbled up. Our body takes us in hand when we wake up; our body gives us the power of ideas, and in dealing with this power we become fully awake. Then the world of dreams fades and its place is taken by the world of thoughts and ideas in the normal order of place and time.

Those who pay attention to these phenomena can observe in ordinary life how something, at first indeterminate, slips into our bodily nature. They can also understand this to the point where they can say: The power of thoughts is given to me by my body when I plunge down into it with my soul- and spirit-being. This everyday observation will bear out what Anthroposophy has to say: The ideas and thoughts we know in ordinary daily life are bound to our external physical body, which remains in bed at night when our being of spirit and soul steps over the threshold into another world. As consciousness is extinguished it leaves behind at the threshold the power and capacity to form a world of thoughts in the ordinary way. What steps over the threshold is whatever the human soul contains by way of feeling and will.

This content of feeling and will resembles the sleeping state even during ordinary day consciousness. We are properly awake only in our thoughts and ideas. Just think how dark is all that lives in our feelings, and how utterly obscure is everything living in our impulses of will. If we try to gain an idea of how we accomplish even the simplest decision of will, then what takes place in our muscles and bones when we put an idea into realization remains as obscure as our sleeping state. First we think: I lift my arm. Then we see our arm rising up. Nothing but impressions. The mysterious processes that take place remain as hidden from our consciousness as sleep itself. What we take with us across the threshold is, basically, something that is asleep and dreaming, even in our waking state. The dream pictures are no clearer than the feelings which attach to our world of thoughts and ideas. The forms in which soul life expresses itself—in the waking state through feelings and in the sleeping state through dreams—differ, but our life of feeling is no clearer than the pictures of our dreams. If it were clearer, we would lead an extraordinarily abstract life. Consider how we speak quite rightly of cold, sober thoughts and glowing feelings! But what lives in our feelings remains in a kind of darkness similar to that of our dream pictures.

When we go to sleep we carry our feelings over the threshold, and it is our feelings which, in a way, even light up to some extent in our dream pictures. We also carry our will into that world; it is as deeply asleep during our daytime as it is when we sleep. So we can say that what carries human beings through the threshold of consciousness is the feeling and will element of their soul being. Feeling and will belong to sleep consciousness. The life of thoughts and ideas and also a part of the life of feelings—because dreams light up—belong to the waking consciousness of daytime; they lie on this side of the threshold. We speak of the Guardian of the Threshold because it is necessary, at their present stage of consciousness, that human beings do not step consciously but unprepared over the threshold which they cross unconsciously every time they fall asleep. When we come to recognize the forces within which human beings find themselves on the other side of the threshold, we also learn to experience why they have to be guarded—prevented by a Guardian, by something which watches over them—from stepping unprepared over the threshold into the spiritual world.

When we enter the world beyond the threshold it certainly looks very different at first glance from what we have been in the habit of expecting. However, if we enter after having undergone sufficient preparation, it gradually changes and we come to new experiences, different from those we encountered initially, which are bewildering even for those who enter the spiritual world after some preparation. For what is it that appears to us first in the spiritual world? Forces, beings, are what first appear to us. And they behave—I cannot express it otherwise—in a very inimical manner towards the ordinary world of sense perceptions. As we step over the threshold into the spiritual world we are met with a burning, scalding fire which seeks to devour everything the world of sense perceptions has to offer. We enter, without a doubt, the world of destructive forces. This is the first sight that meets us on the other side. From the facts as they are I want to give you an idea of what it is like when we first step over.

Look at the human physical body which clothes us from birth to death. Now look, first with regard to the physical body, at the moment in which the human being approaches death and steps across the threshold. Looking simply at the world of space we find that, after the individual has crossed the threshold, the physical body appears externally much the same as it did before. But very soon we notice that this physical body, which has maintained its natural form for decades, is dissolved, destroyed by the forces of the external world, the external cosmos. It is the destiny of this body that it should be dissolved, destroyed by the forces of the cosmos. Simply by looking without prejudice at the fact, once the soul has departed, the body is destroyed and dissolved by the forces of nature, we must become convinced that between birth and death something not belonging to the world of sense perception lives in it which prevents its destruction. For if it belonged to this same world it would destroy the body instead of preserving it. If people would only take account of this obvious fact they would not find it so difficult to enter into anthroposophical spiritual science. There is the corpse; the external forces of nature destroy it. If what we bear within us were of a kind with the forces of nature it would destroy this body all the time. These simple thoughts are for ever disregarded.

Now bear in mind that we are permanently surrounded by a world which destroys our physical body. The moment our body is deserted by our soul it is destroyed. When we leave this body on going to sleep, we enter the world which destroys our corpse. This we have to come to recognize [Gaps in the shorthand report.]. We enter the world of destructive forces when we go to sleep, and yet this is the spiritual world. Why? Those who expect to find something beyond the threshold which resembles what is to befound here in the physical world of the senses are simply expecting to find another physical world beyond the threshold. But if spirit is to be found there, then the physical world of sense perceptions cannot also be there. What we experience there will have to be forces which have the inclination to destroy the physical world of the senses. This we experience in full force when we cross the threshold consciously. We experience with full force that in this spiritual world we find what is for ever inclined to destroy the physical world.

Now if we were to cross the threshold unprepared and unguarded, we should like it very much in that world—if I may put it simply. Especially would our lower instincts be most satisfied, and we would grow into this world we immediately meet, this world of destructive forces; we would become the allies of these destructive forces. We would no longer want to share in the work of maintaining the physical world which surrounds us. We have to learn to love this physical world as one which is filled with wisdom, in order to be well prepared to enter into the spiritual world. Before taking up our place, so to speak, at the side of the creators, we have to learn to love their creation and thoroughly understand that the world as it has been created has not been brought forth meaninglessly by divine, creative forces. In order to enter well prepared into the spiritual world we must first have thoroughly understood the meaning of earthly life. Otherwise on waking up every morning we would return to the world of sense perceptions filled with a terrible hate for this world and with an urge to destroy it. Simply out of the necessity of human existence we would wake up full of hate and anger if we spent the time between going to sleep and waking up in a state of consciousness such as that.

You can pursue this train of investigation further by looking at dreams in an unprejudiced way. Dreams are filled with terribly destructive forces. What comes to the surface in the form of dream pictures destroys every shred of logic. Dreams say: That's it, logic is finished, I don't want any logic! Logic is for the external world of sense perceptions; there it dogmatically arranges everything. Away with logic—a different world order is what is required! That is what dreams say. And if they were not only strong enough to caress our brain but were also able to submerge themselves into our whole body, then they would seize not only our logical instincts but also all our other instincts and our emotional life. Just as they destroy logic, so would they also destroy the whole life of physical human beings. We should be reluctant to enter once more into our physical body, and in doing so we would gradually destroy it. Because what lives in dreams is overcome by what meets it from the body, it comes about that logic is only destroyed momentarily. This can be observed in every detail. What continues during sleep are the forces which belong to our rhythmic system. Breathing continues, heartbeat and pulse continue. But thoughts cease, the will ceases. What belongs to our middle region continues, though in a subdued form. The moment the pulse grows a little weaker in the brain, dreams rush in and set about destroying the forces of the body—of logic—until these forces of the body once more overcome the dreams as the pulse gains in strength.

When it is a matter of really understanding these forces Anthroposophy knows very well how to be materialistic. Materialists do not really know how to be materialistic because they do not know how the spiritual realm works together with the physical. They fail to notice how the spirit enters into the physical and there continues to work. It is most interesting to observe how the spirit enters in and first wants to make itself felt and destroy logic. For then the forces of the physical body, its powers of thought and ideas, enter the fray and overcome it again. Dreams are rendered harmless to physical, earthly life. If you consider this properly you will gain deep insight into the relationship between waking and sleeping, for it shows that we have to remain aware of our spiritual origin, that we have to sink down again and again into sleep, but that on the other hand, in the present stage of our evolution, we have to be prevented from following in full consciousness what takes place in the state we enter between going to sleep and waking up.

We live on our earth. It is, in the first instance, a physical and a cosmic creation. A time will come when this earth will suffer death by fire. It will go through actual physical fire when the forces of destruction will seize hold of every earthly form, not only the corpses. Spiritual forces are leading this earth towards this death by fire, spiritual forces which are connected with the earth and which we meet in the first stage into which we enter when we step past the Guardian of the Threshold into the spiritual world.

Let us consider what we have gained with regard to stepping through the portal of death. Our physical body is entirely discarded. Our spirit and soul element now enters the spiritual world in such a way that it straight away develops the wish to return to the physical body. The element of spirit and soul, once it has laid down the physical body, can now begin to form a thought life without the physical body. While it lived in the body it was too weak to endure the forces of destruction. Now, as it passes through the portal of death, it has to be strong enough not to yearn for a return to the physical body. Since it no longer remains unconscious but, instead, enters a genuine consciousness as it passes through the portal of death it has to take up a certain kind of thought life, for only in the life of thoughts is it possible to become really conscious. This is the tremendous difference between crossing the threshold on going to sleep and passing through the portal of death. When we go to sleep our thought world is merely damped down until it returns when we re-enter our physical body on waking up. When we die we take up the thought life with our soul and spirit element without the mediation of our physical body. What does this mean?

Human beings would never return to their physical body in the morning if they knew the spiritual world, if they had grown to be part of it and did not have the wish, which is in them unconsciously, to return to their physical body, that is, to the physical world. Wishes, however, are something which is not connected with clear consciousness but which damp down this clear consciousness into a twilight. Human beings return to their body in the morning because of a wish, but it is these very wishes, pulling towards the physical body, which damp down their thought world. So they only find their thought life once again when they have returned to their body. But, in death, wishes have also died. Human beings enter the world-thoughts. As beings of spirit and soul they now have a thought life, but if they were to enter death entirely unprepared they would enter the same world as the one we enter when we go to sleep in the evening. To express this in extreme terms we have to say: If human beings enter death unprepared they find themselves in a terrible situation; for they have to watch what happens to their physical body. Their physical body is pulverized in the world-all, for if we do not cremate the body then it is cremated by the cosmos. And human beings would have to watch this happening if they were unprepared.

What is the consequence of this, and what has to happen so that human beings see not only destruction after death, so that they live not only in the midst of destructive forces? By absorbing spiritual content, by developing a world view which is consistent with the spirit, they must carry an inward relationship with the divine, spiritual world through the portal of death. If they are aware solely of a physical, material world, then they certainly enter after death in a state of terrible unpreparedness into the world of destructive forces as though into a world of scorching flames. But if they fill themselves with ideas and thoughts about the spiritual world, then the flames become the birthplace of the spirit after death so that they see not destruction alone; in the falling away of earthly dust from their human orbit they see the spirit rising up. No one should say what ordinary materialistic ideas are so prone to saying: I can wait until death comes to me! No, we must bear our consciousness of the spiritual world with us through the portal of death. Then with our soul and spirit we can overcome the destructive cosmic forces which take over our body, so that our element of spirit and soul rises up with new creativity above the destruction.

I am telling you this on the basis of anthroposophical spiritual science, but you have all, surely, heard of the fear experienced in former times in a sense of doom with regard to death, a sense of doom about which the Apostle Paul² taught when he spoke about man's soul being saved from falling a prey to death. In former times people knew that they could not only die physically with their corpse, but also spiritually with their soul. Human beings dislike speaking about the possible death of their soul. When speaking of death Paul does not mean physical death. He means something that can happen because physical death wants to lead on to the death of soul and spirit. Human beings must become aware once more that they have to do something during their physical earthly life in order to join their consciousness to their soul and spirit, so that these may carry something through death, in order that the spirit may arise for them out of the devouring flames which are always present after death.

Considerations like this must make it clear that to live within the whole universal order is an immensely serious matter. No view of the world is worthy of the human being if it does not lead through inner strength to a world of moral values, if it does not put before our souls the utter seriousness of life. To speak of physical and chemical forces building up the earth and of living creatures and, finally, man developing along the way, is not merely a one-sided world view; it is a world view which ignores the seriousness of life and which arises, actually, simply out of human laziness. A world view, on the other hand, which achieves a proper attitude to the spirit, leads to a seriousness about life because it puts before the soul the possibility that on passing through the gate of death the human being might become united with the forces of destruction. Throughout their physical life human beings are given the opportunity to prepare themselves suitably, because every evening as they go to sleep they are shielded from seeing the world of destructive forces to which they are related. They are given time to take in something that can guide them through the portal of death in a manner which enables them to discern the spirit within the forces of destruction. It is impossible to overemphasize the fact that feelings and perceptions about life must follow as a matter of course from a world view, and that a world view must not be allowed to remain mere abstract theory but must become something living, something which seizes hold of feelings and will. Civilized mankind must wrestle again for a world view such as this. Then, once more, what is imperishable will be seen within everything perishable; and, furthermore, out of everything that does not pursue its course egoistically within man it will be possible to push forward to eternity and immortality.

From this point of view look at life as it is carried on today. And do not take offence when someone who has to speak honestly is forced to say such disagreeable things. Look, for instance, at religious education. What is it built on? On egoism! Because people want to live beyond death, immortality—the possibility of going through death consciously—is spoken about. People long for this, and so to satisfy them—because it is disagreeable to appeal to knowledge—knowledge is omitted and mere belief is called into play. In this way, human egoism alone is approached, human egoism that wants to see what it will be like after death, instead of waiting till it happens. What it is like before birth is not found to be interesting. This can only be learnt through knowledge. Indeed, eternity—what comes after death and what stretches back beyond conception—can only be found through knowledge.

Even our language shows that we only have a half knowledge about the eternity of man. We speak only about immortality, ‘undyingness’. What we need in addition is a word denoting ‘unbornness’. Only when we can grasp both will we finally understand the eternity of the human being. Right down into language, human beings of our time have abjured their links with the spiritual world. These links must be found once more. If they cannot be found it will betotally impossible to carry on living in a proper way, and today's culture and civilization could fall into absolute decline.

In Stuttgart we have founded the Waldorf school³ and Waldorf education. All sorts of things are said about this. Recently somebody said: Why does Waldorf education take so little account of fatigue in the children? Fatigue ought to be carefully studied nowadays. In so-called experimental psychology it is pointed out with pride how children tire after repeating unconnected words or following lessons about a sequence of subjects. And then it is said: Waldorf education is not up to date because it does not take the fatigue of the children into account. Why is this? The Waldorf school does not speak much about fatigue. But it does speak about how children ought to be tended and educated after the change of teeth, namely by basing the education mainly on the rhythmic system—which means that the artistic element is cultivated, since this is what stimulates the rhythmic system. Abstract writing comes later, and abstract reading later still. Demands are made, not of the head but of the artistic realm. But those who work with children only at those things which make demands on the head will, of course, have to reckon with fatigue. When, however, we make claims on the rhythmic system, on the artistic element, then we are justified in asking: Does our heart tire throughout life? It has to go on beating, and we have to go on breathing. So Waldorf education need not concern itself too much with fatigue because it aims to educate children in a way which tires them very little. Experimental education has arrived at a system which tires the children dreadfully; by its very method it brings about this tiredness. [Gaps in the shorthand report.] Waldorf education is concerned with body, soul and spirit, and account is taken of what comes from the spiritual and soul worlds to unite with the body and what departs again at death. Anthroposophy is the very thing which can help us to understand the material, physical realm.

What is most lively of all in the child? Its brain activity! From the brain the forces which mould the whole body stream out. These are most lively until the change of teeth. At the change of teeth this moulding capacity is transferred to the system of breathing and heart, and until puberty this is what we have to work with, which means that artistic work, not theoretical work, is what is required. Between the seventh and the fourteenth year the muscles are formed inwardly in a way which is adapted to the rhythmic system. Not until the fourteenth year approaches do soul and spirit take hold of the whole human being, and it is interesting to observe how until this moment the muscles have taken their cue from heartbeat, pulse and breathing. Now, through the sinews, they begin to make friends with the bones, with the skeleton, and to adapt themselves to external movements. You should learn to observe how young people change at this age. [Gaps in the shorthand report.] The process starts from the head; the soul element grows further and further towards the surface of the human being and takes hold of the bones last of all; it fills the whole human being and uses him up, making friends ever more closely with the forces of death, until these forces of death win through to victory at the moment of death.

Anthroposophical spiritual science follows up the spiritual processes right into the minutest detail, showing how they become immersed in material life and how they take hold of the whole human being, starting with the head. Not until knowledge such as this is taken into account, will it become possible to educate people properly once again. We need intellect and understanding so that we may find freedom, but they drive away the certainty of our instincts. A friend of mine was quite a nice person when we were young. Later in life he invited me to visit him. I had never partaken of a midday meal with scales and weights on the table. My friend first weighed everything he ate! By his intellect he had discovered how much he needed in order to maintain his body, and this exact amount was what he ate. Intellect drives out instincts in small things, but also on a larger scale. Now it is necessary for us to find our way back to them. A sure sense for life, a firm stand in life, is needed once more. This is found by seeking our eternal element within the temporal sphere; we need to understand how the eternal finds its place in the temporal. This is what our contemporary civilization needs.

Such things must be treated on a global scale. No account is taken these days of the contrasts that exist between people of the West and people of the East. External matters are broached in an external manner; congresses are called to discuss ways of balancing out the world's difficult situation, but no account is taken of the fact that East and West can only achieve economic balance if they have trust in one another. Asians will never be able to work together properly with the West if they cannot understand each other. But understanding can only come about through the soul. Understanding out of the soul is needed for the economic realm in the world; and understanding out of the soul can only be achieved through a deepening of soul life.

This is why today the most intimate matters of individual soul life are at the same time matters of worldwide import. Comprehension of what the world today needs, in external public matters too, will not be achieved unless an effort is made to listen to what the science of the super-sensible has to say, for the world has changed during the course of evolution. The human race, in particular, has changed.

Looking at the span of human evolution, let us turn to that event without which the whole of human and earth evolution would have no meaning: the Mystery of Golgotha. In this Mystery of Golgotha something divine entered into the conditions of the earth by means of an earthly body. Christ entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth in order from then on to work with the earth. The earth would have perished, would have decayed in the world order, if a new fructification had not been brought about by the entering-in of the Christ. You know also that in the distant past an instinctive knowledge, a primeval wisdom, existed, of which only remnants remained in western civilization at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Enough remained, however, to make it possible for the Mystery of Golgotha to be at least instinctively comprehended for four centuries. In the early centuries of Christianity the understanding of the super-sensible significance of the Mystery of Golgotha was such that the leading Christian teachers knew about the entering-in of Christ, the Sun Spirit, into the human being, Jesus of Nazareth.

Who today has a living awareness of what it means to ask whether the human being Jesus of Nazareth bore two natures, a human one and a divine one, or only one? Yet in the early Christian centuries this was a vital question, a question which had a bearing on life. There was a vivid awareness of how, coming from the cosmos, the Christ Spirit had united with Jesus; two natures in one personality; God in man.

You have often heard that the fourth post-Atlantean period lasted from 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha to about 1413 after the Mystery of Golgotha. In the first third of the fifteenth century intellectualism proper began. Now, we look at physical forces, we calculate, we study physics, but we no longer know that spiritual forces are at work out there, that the spirit which was known in earlier times really exists out there. Look at this fourth post-Atlantean, period lasting from 747 BC until 1413 AD. If you halve this period you come to a point that lies in the fourth century AD, the point when the wisdom which still contained a spiritual comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha finally faded away. From then on, intellectual discussion was all that took place. And finally, as the fifteenth century approached, the human intellect became the sole ruler of human civilization. Because of this, anything that represented a living connection between the human being and the Christ was drawn more and more into merely materialistic human thinking. In the most advanced theology in the nineteenth century the Christ was entirely lost, and the most enlightened view was taken to be that of Christ as nothing more than the ‘man of Nazareth’. If we can really feel this in all its gravity, we cannot but develop a yearning to find the Christ Being once again. And this yearning to find Christ once more is what the anthroposophical world view wants to satisfy with regard to the major global questions. In Central Europe people are particularly well prepared for this, as all kinds of symptoms show.

One of Western Europe's great thinkers, Herbert Spencer,⁴ wrote about education in a way which pleases materialists very much. He said that all education is useless if it does not educate human beings to educate others. On what does he base this? He says: The greatest achievement in a human being's life is to beget other human beings. So therefore education must also be greatly important. From one point of view western thinking is correct. But what does an eastern thinker say? Out of the eastern spirit, something very ancient still lives in Vladimir Soloviev.⁵ For western culture, primeval wisdom has disappeared. In the East it remains as a feeling. Soloviev still bears something of true Christian wisdom. Here in Central and Western Europe we have only a God-consciousness. There is virtually no knowledge of the Son. Harnack,⁶ for instance, speaks of God in a way which makes it seem as though Christ, the Son, has no place in the Gospels. Consciousness of the Father, consciousness of God, is all that is left. What is said of the Son must also be said of the Father. But Soloviev still has something of the Christ-consciousness, and when he speaks it can sometimes be felt as if we were listening to the old Church Fathers from before the time of the Council of Nicaea.⁷ Even the titles of his works are quite different. For instance there is a treatise on ‘Freedom, Necessity, Grace and Sin’. You would be unlikely to find a treatise on grace or sin written by one of the western philosophers—Spencer, for instance, or Mill, or Bergson, or Wundt! No such thing exists in the West; it would be quite unthinkable and indeed is not to be found.

The eastern philosopher, though, still speaks like that, saying: Alife given to man on earth, a life in which there was no striving for perfection in truth, would not be a genuinely human life. It would be valueless, as indeed would the striving for perfection in truth, if human beings had no part in immortality. Such a life would be a fraud on a global scale. Thus speaks Soloviev, the eastern philosopher. And he goes on: The spiritual task of man only starts when he reaches puberty. This is the very opposite of what Spencer says! Spencer makes the begetting of offspring the goal of development. For the eastern philosopher, development only begins at that point. It is the same with every matter, including questions of economic life. This is how the western economist speaks today, without having any sense for what eastern people feel about economic life. Today's major questions require consideration on a historical scale, and we ought to realize that the great misfortune of mankind in the second decade of the twentieth century, the great challenge and the great trial, is that involving considerations of this kind. An entirely different treatment of life must rise up out of the depths of the soul. The great questions of life, those that lie beyond birth and death, must come to play a part in ordinary human life. The questions of the present time must be illumined by the light of eternity, otherwise people will hasten from congress to congress and sink ever further and further into misfortune.

• 1 . There are numerous gaps in the shorthand report of this lecture. The conclusion has been omitted. It deals with contemporary questions and covers virtually the same ground as Lecture One (Soloviev, Bismarck, Robespierre).
• 2 . For example: 1 Corinthians, 15.
• 3 . The Free Waldorf School, Stuttgart, was founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1919. The education of the children was to be in harmony with the knowledge of the human being as revealed by anthroposophical spiritual science.
• 4 . Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903. Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical, 1861.
• 5 . Lecture Two, Note 1
• 6 . Adolf von Hamack, 1851-1930. Theologian and historian.
• 7 . 19 June 325. Establishment of the creed of identity of Son (Jesus Christ) and Father.

In the first of these lectures I endeavored to set forth how Michael's Conflict with the Dragon persisted into the 18^th Century as a determining idea, really a determining impulse in mankind; and in the second lecture I tried to show how a productive revival of this impulse may and really must be brought about. But now, before discussing particulars for a Michael Festival at the beginning of autumn, I should like today to speak about several prerequisites involved in such an intention.

The core of the matter is this: all impulses such as the Michael impulse depend upon man's attaining to super-sensible enlightenment concerning his connection not only with earthly but with cosmic conditions: he must learn to feel himself not only as an earth citizen but as a citizen of the universe, as far as this is perceptible either spiritually or, in image, physically. Nowadays, of course, our general education offers only the most meager opportunities for sensing our connection with the cosmos. True, by means of their materialistically colored science men are aware of earth conditions to the point of feeling connected with them, at least as regards their material life in the wider sense. But the knowledge of this connection certainly engenders no enthusiasm, hence all outer signs of such a connection have become very dim. Human feeling for the traditional festivals has grown dim and shadowy. While in former periods of human evolution festivals like Christmas or Easter exerted a far-reaching influence on the entire social life and its manifestations, they have become but a faint echo of what they once meant, expressing themselves in all sorts of customs that lack all deeper social significance.

Now, if we intend in some way to realize the Michael Festival with its particularly far-reaching social significance, we must naturally first create a feeling for what it might signify; for by no means must it bear the character of our modern festivities, but should be brought forth from the depths of the human being. These depths we can only reach by once more penetrating and entering into our relationship with the extra-terrestrial cosmos and with what this yields for the cycle of the seasons.

To illustrate what I really mean by all that, I need only ask you to consider how abstract, how dreadfully out of touch with the human being, are all the feelings and conceptions of the extraterrestrial universe that today enter human consciousness. Think of what astronomy, astro-physics, and other related sciences accomplish today. They compute the paths of the planets—the positions of the fixed stars, if you like; and from the results of research in spectral analysis they arrive at conclusions concerning the material composition of these heavenly bodies. But what have all the results of such methods to do with the intimate inner soul life of man? This man, equipped with all such sky-wisdom, feels himself a hermit on what he thinks of as the planet earth. And the present habits of thinking connected with these matters are at bottom only a system of very circumscribed concepts.

To get a better light on this, let us consider a condition of consciousness certainly present in ordinary life, though an inferior one: the condition of dream-pervaded sleep. In order to obtain points of contact for today's discussion I will tell you in a few words what relates to this condition. Dreaming may be associated with inner conditions of the human organism and transform these into pictures resembling symbols [See: Rudolf Steiner, Supersensible Knowledge (Anthroposophy) as a Demand of the Age; Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life, Anthroposophic Press, New York.]—the movements of the heart, for example, can be symbolized by flames, and so forth: we can determine concretely and in detail the connection between dream symbols and our inner organic states and processes. Or alternatively, outer events of our life may be symbolized, events that have remained in us as memories or the like. In any case it is misleading to take the conceptional content of a dream very seriously. This can be interesting, it has a sensational aspect, it is of great interest to many people; but for those who see deeper into the nature of man the dream content as it pertains to the conception proper is of extraordinarily little significance. The dramatic development of a dream, on the other hand, is of the greatest import. I will illustrate this:

Suppose a man dreams he is climbing a mountain. It is an excessively difficult climb and becomes ever more so, the higher he goes. Finally he reaches a point where his strength fails him and conditions have become so unfavorable that he cannot proceed: he must come to a halt. Something like fear, something of disappointment enters his dream. Perhaps at this point he wakes up.—Now, something underlies this dream that should really not be sought in the pictures themselves as they appeal to the imagination, but rather in the emotional experiencing of an intention, in the increasingly formidable obstructions appearing in the path of this intention, and in the circumstance of encountering even more insuperable obstacles. If we think of all that as proceeding in an emotional-dramatic way we discover a certain emotional content underlying the actual dream pictures as dramatic content.—This same emotional content could give rise to quite a different dream. The man might dream he is entering a cave. It gets darker and darker as he gropes along until he finally comes to a swamp. There he wades a bit farther, but finally arrives at a quagmire that stops further progress. This picture embraces the same emotional and sentient dramatic content as the other; and the dramatic content in question could be dreamt in still many other forms.

The pictorial content of a dream may vary continually; the essential factor is what underlies the dream in the way of movements, tension and relaxation, hope and disappointment. Nevertheless, the dream presents itself in pictures, and we must ask, How do these arise? They do so, for example, because at the moment of awaking something is experienced by the ego and astral body outside the physical and etheric bodies. The nature of such super-sensible experiences is of course something that cannot possibly be expressed in pictures borrowed from the sense world; but as the ego and the astral body reunite with the physical and etheric bodies they have no choice but to use pictures from the available supply. In this way the peculiar dream drama is clothed in pictures.

Now we begin to take an interest in the content of these pictures. Their conformation is entirely different from that of other experiences. Why? Our dreams employ nothing but outer or inner experiences, but they give these a different contiguity. Why is this? It is because dreams are a protest against our mode of life in the physical sense-world during our waking hours. There we live wholly interwoven with the system of natural laws, and dreams break through this. Dreams will not stand for it, so they rip events out of their context and present them in another sequence. They protest against the system of natural laws—in fact, men should learn that every immersion into spirit is just such a protest.

In this connection, there are certain quaint people who keep trying to penetrate the spiritual world by means of the ordinary natural-scientific method. Extraordinarily interesting in this connection is Dr. Ludwig Staudenmaier's book on Experimental Magic. A man of that type starts with the assumption that everything which is to be comprehended should be comprehended according to the natural-scientific mode of thought. Now, Staudenmaier does not exactly occupy himself with dreams as such but with so-called mediumistic phenomena, which are really an extension of the dream world. In healthy human beings the dream remains an experience that does not pass over into the outer organization; whereas in the case of a medium everything that is ordinarily experienced by the ego, and the astral body, and that then takes shape in the pictures provided by the physical and etheric bodies, passes over into the experiences of the physical and etheric bodies. This is what gives rise to all the phenomena associated with mediumistic conditions.—Staudenmaier was quite right in refusing to be guided by what other mediums offered him, so he set about making himself into a sort of medium. He dreamt while writing, so to speak: he applied the pencil as he had seen mediums do it, and sure enough, it worked! But he was greatly astonished at what came to light: he was amazed at sequences he had never thought of. He wrote all sorts of things wholly foreign to the realm of his conscious life. What he had written was frequently so remote from his conscious life that he asked, “Who is writing this?” And the answer came, “Spirits.” He had to write “spirits!” Imagine: the materialist, who of course recognizes no spirits, had to write down “spirits.” But he was convinced that whatever was writing through him was lying, so he asked next why the spirits lied to him so; and they said, “Well, we have to lie to you—that is our way.” Then he asked about all sorts of things that concerned himself, and once they went so far as to say “muttonhead.” [Kohlkopf—literally “cabbage-head.”] Now, we cannot assume his frame of mind to have been such as to make him label himself a muttonhead. But in any case, all sorts of things came to light that were summed upon the phrase, “we have to lie to you;” so he reflected that since there are naturally no spirits, his subconscious mind must be speaking. But now the case becomes still more alarming: the subconscious calls the conscious mind a muttonhead, and it lies; hence this personality would have to confess, “In my subconscious mind I am an unqualified liar.”

But ultimately all this merely points to the fact that the world into which the medium plunges down registers a protest against the constraint of the laws of nature, exactly as does the world of dreams. Everything we can think, will, or feel in the physical sense-world is distorted the moment we enter this more or less subconscious world. Why? Well, dreams are the bridge leading to the spiritual world, and the spiritual world is wholly permeated by a set of laws that are not the laws of nature, but laws that bear an entirely different inner character. Dreams are the transition to this world. It is grave error to imagine that the spiritual world can be comprehended by means of natural laws; and dreams are the herald, as it were, warning us of the impossibility of merely extending the laws of nature when we penetrate into the spiritual world. The same methods can be carried over if we prepare ourselves to accomplish this; but in penetrating into the spiritual world we enter an entirely different system of laws.

The idea that the world can and should be comprehended only by means of the mental capacities developed in the course of the last three or four hundred years has today become an axiom. This has come about gradually. Today there are no longer such men as were still to be found in the first half of the 19^th Century, men for example, of the type of Johannes Müller, Haeckel's teacher, who confessed that many a bit of research he was carrying on purely as a physiologist refused to be clarified as long as he thought about it in his ordinary waking condition, but that subsequently a dream had brought back to him the whole work of preparing the tissue when awake, all the steps he had taken, and thus many such riddles were solved in his dreams. And Johannes Müller was also one of those who were still fully convinced that in sleep a man dwells in this peculiar spiritual weaving, untouched by inexorable natural laws; where one can even penetrate into the system of physical nature laws, because underlying these there is again something spiritual, and because what is spiritual is fundamentally not subject to natural necessity but merely manifests this on the visible surface.

One really has to speak in paradoxes if thoughts that result quite naturally from spiritual research are to be carried to their logical conclusion. No one who thinks in line with modern natural science believes that a light shining at a given point in space will appear equally bright at a distance. The physicist computes the decrease in the strength of light by the square of the distance, and he calculates gravity in the same way. Regarding these physical entities, he knows that the validity of what is true on the earth's surface diminishes as we pass out into the surrounding cosmos. But he refuses to apply this principle to his thinking. Yet in this respect thinking differs in no way from anything we can learn about earth matters in the laboratories, in the operating rooms—from anything on earth, right down to twice two is four. If gravity diminishes by the square of the distance, why should not the validity of the system of nature laws diminish in a similar ratio and eventually, beyond a certain distance, cease altogether?

That is where spiritual science penetrates. It points out that when the Nebula of Orion or the Canes Nebula is to be the subject of research, the same course is followed as though, with tellurian concepts, Venus, for example, were to be illuminated by the flame of a candle. When spiritual science reveals the truth by means of such analogies people think it is paradoxical. Nevertheless, in the state in which during sleep we penetrate into the spiritual world, greater possibilities are offered us for investigating the Nebula of Orion or the Canes Nebula than are provided by working in laboratories or in observatories. Research would yield much more if we dreamt about these matters instead of reflecting on them with our intellect. As soon as we enter the cosmos it is useless to apply the results of our earthly research. The nature of our present-day education is such that we are prone to apply to the whole cosmos what we consider true in our little earth cell; but it is obvious that truth cannot come to light in this way.

If we proceed from considerations of this sort, a good deal of what confronted men in former things through a primitive, but penetrating, clairvoyant way of looking at things takes on greater value than it has for present-day mankind in general. We will not even pass by the knowledge that came into being in the pastoral life of primitive times, which is nowadays so superficially ignored; for those old shepherds dreamt many a solution to the mysteries of the stars better than can be computed today by our clever scientists with their observatories and spectroscopes. Strange as that may sound, it is true. By studying in a spiritual-scientific way what has been preserved from olden times we can find our way into this mysterious connection we have with the cosmos. Let me tell you here of what can be discovered if we seek through spiritual science the deeply religious and ethical, but also social import of the old Druidic Mysteries on the one hand, and those of the Mithras Mysteries on the other; for this will give us points of contact with the way in which we should conceive the shaping of a Michael Festival.

Regarding the Druid Mysteries, the lecture cycle I gave a few weeks ago in Penmaenmawr, [See: Rudolf Steiner, Evolution of the World and Humanity, Anthroposophic Press, New York (actually, Anthroposophic Publishing Company, London, 1926. Also in Evolution of Consciousness, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1966.—e.Ed)] Wales—the spot in England that lies exactly behind the island of Anglesea—is of quite special significance because in that place many reminders of the old sacrificial sanctuaries and Mystery temples of the Druids are to be found lying about in fragments. Today these relics, these cromlechs and mounds, are not really very impressive. One climbs up to the mountain tops and finds stones arranged in such a way as to form a sort of chamber, with a larger stone on top; or one sees the cromlechs arranged in circles—originally there were always twelve. In the immediate vicinity of Penmaenmawr were to be found two such sun-circles adjoining each other; and in this particular neighborhood, where even in the spiritual life of nature there is so much that has a different effect from that of nature elsewhere, what I have set forth in various anthroposophical lectures concerning the Druid Mysteries could be tested with the utmost clarity. There is indeed a quite special spiritual atmosphere in this region where—on the island of Anglesea—the Society of King Arthur had a settlement. I must describe it as follows:

In speaking of super-sensible things we cannot form thoughts in the same way as we usually do in life or in science, where abstract thoughts are formed, conclusions drawn, and so forth. But to be reduced, in addition, even to speaking more or less abstractly—our language, which has become abstract, demands this—well, if we want to describe something in a spiritual-scientific way we cannot be as abstract as all that in the inner being of our soul: everything must be presented pictorially. We must have pictures, imaginations, before the mind's eye. And this means something different from having thoughts. Thoughts in the soul are extraordinarily patient, according to the degree of our inner indolence: we can hold them; but imaginations always lead a life of their own: we feel quite clearly that an imagination presents itself to us. It is different from writing or drawing, yet similar. We write or draw with our soul; but imaginations are not abstractly held fast like mere thoughts: we write them. In most parts of Europe where civilization has already taken on so abstract a character these imaginations flit past comparatively very quickly: depicting the super-sensible always involves an inner effort. It is as though we wrote something that would then be immediately wiped away by some demonic power—gone again at once. The same is true of imaginations by means of which we bring the super-sensible to consciousness and experience it in our soul.

Now, the spiritual atmosphere in the region of Wales that I mentioned has this peculiarity: while imaginations stamp themselves less readily into the astral element, they persist longer, being more deeply imprinted. That is what appears so conspicuous in that locality; and indeed, everything there points to a more spiritual way of retracing the path to what those old Druid priests really strove for—not during the decadence of the Druid cults, when they contained much that was rather distasteful and even nefarious, but in the time of their flowering.

Examining one of these cromlechs we find it to close off, in a primitive way, a certain space for a chamber that was covered for reasons having to do with the priest's purposes. When you observe sunlight you have first the physical sunlight. But this physical sunlight is wholly permeated by the spiritual activities of the sun; and to speak of the physical sunlight merely as does the modern physicist would be exactly the same as talking about a man's muscles, bones, blood, and so on, omitting all reference to the soul and spirit holding sway within him. Light is by no means mere phos: it is phosphoros, light-bearing—is endowed with something active and psychic. But this psychic element of light is lost to man in the mere sense-world.—Now, when the Druid priest entered this burying place—like other old cult sanctuaries, the cromlechs were mostly erected over graves—he set up this arrangement which in a certain way was impervious to the physical sun-rays; but the spiritual activities of the sun penetrated it, and the Druid priests were specially trained to perceive these. So he looked through these stones—they were always specially selected—into the chamber where the spiritual activity of the sun penetrated, but from which the physical effect was excluded. His vision had been finely schooled, for what can be seen in a primitive darkroom of that sort varies according to the date, whether February, July, August, or December. In July it is lightly tinged with yellow; in December it radiates a faintly bluish shade from within. And one capable of observing this beholds—in the qualitative changes undergone in the course of the year by this shadow-phenomenon enclosed in such a darkroom—the whole cycle of the seasons in the psycho-spiritual activity of the sun's radiance.

And further: these sun-circles are arranged in the number twelve, like the twelve signs of the zodiac; and on the mountain we had climbed we found a large sun-circle and nearby a smaller one. If one had ascended, perhaps in a balloon, and looked down upon these two Druid circles, ignoring the insignificant distance between them, the same ground plan would have presented itself—there is something profoundly moving about this—as that of the Goetheanum in Dornach which was destroyed by fire.

The old Druid priests had schooled themselves to read from what thus met their soul's eye how, at every time of day and at every season of the year as well, the sun's shadow varied. They could trace these shadow formations and by means of them determine accurately, this is the time of March, this is the time of October. Through the perception this brought them they were conscious of cosmic events, but also of cosmic conditions having significance for life on this earth. And now, think how people go about it today when they want to determine the influence of cosmic life on earthly life—even the peasants! They have a calendar telling what should be done on this or that day, and they do it, too, approximately; for the fundamental knowledge once available concerning these matters has vanished. But calendars there were none at the time of the old Druids, nor even writing: what the Druid priest was able to tell from his observations of the sun constituted men's knowledge of the connection between the heavens and the earth. And when the priest said: The position of the sun now calls for the sowing of wheat, or, it is the time to lead the bull through the herd, it was done. The cult of that epoch was anything but an abstract prayer: it regulated life in its obvious, practical demands in accord with the enlightenment obtained by communicating with the spirit of the universe. The great language of the heavens was deciphered, and then applied to earthly things.

All this penetrated even the most intimate details of the social life. The priest indicated, according to his readings in the universe, what should be done on such and such a day of the year in order to achieve a favorable contact with the whole universe. That was a cult that actually made of the whole of life a sort of divine worship. By comparison, the most mystical mysticism of our time is a kind of abstraction, for it lets outer nature go its way, so to speak, without bothering about it: it lives and has its being in tradition and seeks inner exaltation, shutting itself off and concentrating within itself as far as possible in order to arrive at an abstract connection with some chimerical world of divine spirit. All this was very different in those olden times. Within the cult—and it was a cult that had a real, true connection with the universe—men united with what the Gods were perpetually creating and bringing about in the world: and as earth-men they carried out the will of the gods as read in the stellar script by means of the methods known to the Druid priests. But they had to know how to read the writing in the stars.—It is profoundly affecting to be able, at the very spot, to transport oneself back to conditions such as I have described as prevailing during the height of the Druid culture. Elsewhere in that region as well—even over as far as Norway—are to be found many such relics of the Druid culture.

Similarly, all through Central Europe, in parts of Germany, in the Rhineland, even in western France, relics and reminders of the ancient Mithras Cult are to be found. Here again I will only indicate the most important features. The outer symbol of the Mithras Cult is always a bull ridden by a man thrusting a sword into the bull's neck; below, a scorpion biting the bull, or, a serpent; but whenever the representation is complete you will see this picture of bull and man surrounded by the firmament, and particularly the signs of the zodiac. Again we ask, What does this picture express? The answer will never be found by an external, antiquated science of history, because the latter has no means of establishing the interrelationships that can provide clues to the meaning of this man on the bull. In order to arrive at the solution one must know the nature of the training undergone by those who served the Mithras Cult. The whole ceremony could, of course, be run off in such a way as to be beautiful—or ugly, if you like—without anything intelligent transpiring. Only one who had passed through a certain training could make sense of it. That is why all the descriptions of the Mithras Mysteries are really twaddle, although the pictures give promise of yielding so much. The service of the Mithras Cult demanded in the neophyte a very fine and sensitive development of the capacity for receptive sentience. Everything depended upon the development of this faculty in him.

I said yesterday in the public lecture [See: Rudolf Steiner, Supersensible Knowledge (Anthroposophy) as a Demand of the Age; Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life, Anthroposophic Press, New York.] that the human heart is really a subconscious sense organ: subconsciously the head perceives through the heart what goes on in the physical functions of the lower body and the chest. Just as we perceive outer events in the sense-world through the eye, so the human heart is in reality a sense organ in its relation to the functions mentioned. Subconsciously by means of the heart, the head, and particularly the cerebellum, perceives the blood being nourished by the transformed foodstuffs, perceives the functioning of the kidneys, the liver, and other processes of the organism. The heart is the sense organ for perceiving all this in the upper portion of the human being.

Now, to raise this heart as a sense organ to a certain degree of consciousness was the object in the schooling of those who were to be engaged in the Mithras Cult. They had to develop a sensitive, conscious feeling for the processes in the liver, kidneys, spleen, etc., in the human organism. The upper man, the headman, had to sense very delicately what went on in the chest-man and the limb-man. In older epochs that sort of schooling was not the mental training to which we are accustomed today, but a schooling of the whole human being, appealing in the main to the capacity for feeling. And just as we say, on the basis of outer optical perception, There are rain clouds or, the sky is blue, so the sufficiently matured disciple could say, Now the metabolism in my organism is of this nature, now it is of that. Actually, the processes within the human organism seem the same the year round only to the abstractionist. When science will once more have advanced to real truths concerning these things, men will be amazed to learn how they can establish, by means very different from the crude methods of our modern precision instruments, how the condition of our blood varies and the digestion functions differently in January from September, and in what way the heart as a sense organ is a marvelous barometer for the course of the seasons within the human limb-metabolic organism. The Mithras disciple was taught to perceive the course of the seasons within himself by means of his heart organization, his heart-science, which transmitted to him the passage of food transformed by digestion and taken into the blood. And what was there perceived really showed in man—in the motion of the inner man—the whole course of outer nature.

Oh, what does our abstract science amount to, no matter how accurately we describe plants and plant cells, animals and animal tissues, compared with what once was present instinctively by reason of man's ability to make his entire being into an organ of perception, to develop his capacity for feeling into an organ capable of gleaning knowledge! Man bears within him the animal nature, and truly he does so more intensively than is usually imagined; and what the ancient Mithras followers perceived by means of their heart-science could not be represented otherwise than by the bull. The forces working through the metabolic-limb man, and tamed only by the upper man, are indicated by all that figures as the scorpion and the serpent winding around the bull. And the human being proper, in all his frailty, is mounted above in his primitive might, thrusting the sword of Michael into the neck of the bull. But what it was that must thus be conquered, and how it manifests itself in the course of the seasons, was known only to those who had been schooled in these matters.

Here the symbol begins to take on significance. By means of ordinary human knowledge no amount of observation or picturesque presentation will make anything of it. It can only be understood if one knows something about the heart-science of the old Mithras pupils; for what they really studied when they looked at themselves through their heart was the spirit of the sun's annual passage through the zodiac. In this way the human being experienced himself as a higher being, riding on his lower nature; and therefore it was fitting that the cosmos should be arranged in a circle around him; in this manner cosmic spirituality was experienced.

The more a renascent spiritual science makes it possible for us to examine what was brought to light by an ancient semi-conscious, dreamlike clairvoyance—but clairvoyance, nevertheless—the greater becomes our respect for it. A spirit of reverence for the ancient cultures pervades us when we see deeper into them and rediscover, for example, that the purpose of the Mithras Cult was to enable the priest, by penetrating the secrets of the seasons' cycle, to tell the members of his community what should be done on each day of the year. The Mithras Cult served to elicit from the heavens the knowledge of what should take place on earth. How infinitely greater is the enthusiasm, the incentive, for what must be done on earth if a man feels himself to be active in such a way that into his activity there flow the impulses deciphered from the great cosmic script he had read in the universe; that he made such knowledge his starting point and employed the resulting impulses in the ordinary affairs of daily life! However little this may accord with our modern concepts—naturally it does not—it was good and right according to the old ones. But in making this reservation we must clearly understand what it means to read in the universe what should be done in the lives of men on earth, thereby knowing ourself to be one with the divine in us—as over against debating the needs of the social life in the vein of Adam Smith or Karl Marx. Only one who can visualize this contrast is able to see clearly into the nature of the new impulses demanded by the social life of our time.

This foundation alone can induce the right frame of mind for letting our cognition pass from the earth out into cosmic space: instead of abstractly calculating and computing and using a spectroscope, which is the common method when looking up to Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and so on, we thereby employ the means comprised in imagination, inspiration, and intuition. In that way, even when only imagination enters in, the heavenly bodies become something very different from the picture they present to modern astronomy—a picture derived partly from sense observation, partly from deductions. The moon, for example, appears to present-day astronomers as some sort of a superannuated heavenly body of mineral which, like a kind of mirror, reflects the sunlight that then, under certain conditions, falls on the earth. They do not bother very much about any of the effects of this sunlight. For a time these observations were applied to the weather, but the excessively clever people of the 19^th Century naturally refused to believe in any relation between the various phases of the moon and the weather. Yet those who, like Gustav Theodor Fechner, harbored something of a mystic tendency in their soul, did believe in it. I have repeatedly told the story in our circles about the great 19^th Century botanists Schleiden and Gustav Theodor Fechner, both active at the same university. Schleiden naturally considered it a mere superstition that Fechner should keep careful statistics on the rainfall during the full moon and the new moon periods. What Fechner had to say about the moon's influence on the weather amounted to pure superstition for Schleiden. But then the following episode occurred. The two professors had wives; and in those days it was still customary in Leipzig to collect rainwater for the laundry. Barrels were set up for this purpose; and Frau Professor Fechner and likewise Frau Professor Schleiden caught rainwater in such barrels, like everybody else. Now, the natural thing would have been for Frau Professor Schleiden to say, It is stupid to bother about what sort of an influence the moon phases have on the rainfall. But although Herr Professor Schleiden considered it stupid to take the matter seriously, Frau Professor Schleiden got into a violent dispute with Frau Professor Fechner because both ladies wanted to set up their barrels in the same place at the same time.—the women knew all about rain from practical experience, though the men on their professorial platforms took quite a different standpoint in the matter.

The external aspects of the moon are as I have described them; but especially after rising from imagination to inspiration are we confronted with its spiritual content. This content of the moon is not just something to be understood in an abstract sense: it is a real moon population; and looked at in a spiritual-scientific way the moon presents itself as a sort of fortress in the cosmos. From the outside, not only the light-rays of the sun but all the external effects of the universe are reflected by the moon down to the earth; but in the interior of the moon there is a complete world that nowadays can be reached only by ascending, in a certain sense, to the spirit world. In older writings on the relation of the moon to other cosmic beings you can find many a hint of this, and compare it with what can now be said by anthroposophy about the nature of the moon.

We have often heard that in olden times men had not only that instinctive wisdom of which I have spoken: they had beings as teachers who never descended into physical bodies—higher beings who occupied etheric bodies only, and whose instruction was imparted to men not by speaking, as we speak today, but by transmitting the wisdom in an inner way, as though inoculating the etheric body with it. People knew of the existence of these higher beings, just as we know that some physical teacher is present; but they also knew that these beings surrounded them in a strictly spiritual state. Everything connected with that “primordial wisdom,” recognized even by the Catholic Church—the primordial wisdom that once was available, and of which even the Vedas and the sublime Vedanta philosophy are but faint reverberations—all this can be traced back to the teaching of these higher spiritual beings. That wisdom, which was never written down, was not thought out by man: it grew in him. We must not think of the influence exerted by those primordial teachers as any sort of demonstrating instruction. Just as today, we learn to speak when we are children by imitating the older people, without any particular instruction—as indeed we develop a great deal as though through inner growth—so the primordial teachers exerted a mysterious influence on people of that ancient time, without any abstract instruction; with the result that at a certain age a man simply knew himself to be knowledgeable. Just as today a child gets his second teeth or reaches puberty at a certain age, so men of old became enlightened in the same way.—Doubtless many a modern college student would be delighted if this sort of thing still happened—if the light of wisdom simply flared up in him without his having to exert himself particularly!

What a very different wisdom that was from anything we have today! It was an organic force in man, related to growth, and other forces. It was simply wisdom of an entirely different nature, and what took place in connection with it I can best explain by a comparison. Suppose I pour some sort of liquid into a glass and then add salt. When the salt is dissolved it leaves the liquid cloudy. Then I add an ingredient that will precipitate the salt, leaving the liquid purer, clearer, while the sediment is denser. Very well: if I want to describe what permeated men during the period of primordial wisdom, I must say it is a mixture of what is spiritually wholly pure and of a physical animalistic element. What nowadays we think, we imagine our abstract thoughts simply as functioning and holding sway without having any being in us: or again, breathing and the circulation seem like something by themselves, apart. But for primeval man in earlier earth epochs, that was all one: it was simply a case of his having to breathe and of his blood circulating in him; and it was in his circulation that he willed.—Then came the time when human thinking moved higher up toward the head and became purer, like the liquid in the glass, while the sediment, as we may call it, formed below.

This occurred when the primordial teachers withdrew more and more from the earth, when this primal wisdom was no longer imparted in the old way. And whither did these primordial teachers withdraw? We find them again in the moon fortress I spoke of. That is where they are and where they continue to have their being. And what remained on earth was the sediment—meaning the present nature of the forces of propagation. These forces did not exist in their present form at the time when primordial wisdom held sway on earth: they gradually became that way—a sort of sediment. I am not implying that they are anything reprehensible, merely that in this connection they are the sediment. And our present abstract wisdom is what corresponds up above to the solvent liquid. This shows us that the development of humanity has brought about on the one hand the more spiritual features in the abstract sense, and on the other, the coarser animalistic qualities as a sediment.—Reflections of this sort will gradually evoke a conception of the spiritual content of the moon; but it must be remembered that this kind of science, which formerly was rather of a prophetic nature, was inherent in men's instinctive clairvoyance.

Just as we can speak about the moon in this way—that is, about what I may call its population, its spiritual aspect—so we can adopt the same course in the case of Saturn. When by spiritual-scientific effort, we learn to know Saturn—a little is disclosed through imagination, but far more through inspiration and intuition—we delve ever deeper into the universe, and we find that we are tracing the process of sense perception. We experience this physical process; we see something, and then feel the red of it. That is something very different from withdrawing from the physical body, according to the methods you will find described in my books, and then being able to observe the effects of an outer object on the human physical organism; to observe how the ether forces, rising from within, seize on the physico-chemical process that takes place, for example, in the eye during optical perception. In reality, the act of exposing ourself in the ordinary way to the world in perception, even in scientific observation, does not affect us very deeply. But when a man steps out of himself in this way and confronts himself in the etheric body and possibly in the astral as well, and then sees ex postfacto how such a sense-process of perception or cognition came about—even though his spiritual nature had left his physical sense-nature—then he indeed feels a mighty, intensive process taking place in his spirituality. What he then experiences is real ecstasy. The world becomes immense; and what he is accustomed to seeing only in his outer circle of vision, namely, the zodiac and its external display of constellations, becomes something that arises from within him. If someone were to object that what thus arises might be mere recollections, this would only prove that he does not know the event in question; for what arises there are truly not recollections but mighty imaginations transfused by intuitions: here we begin to behold from within what we had previously seen only from without. As human beings we become interwoven with all the mysteries of the zodiac; and if we seize the favorable moment there may flash before us, out of the inner universe, the secret of Saturn, for example, in its passage across the zodiac. Reading in the cosmos, you see, consists in finding the methods for reading out of the inwardly seen heavenly bodies as they pass through the zodiac. What the individual planet tells us provides the vowels of the world-script; and all that forms around the vowels when the planets pass the zodiacal constellations gives us the consonants, if I may use this comparison. By obtaining an inner view of what we ordinarily observe only from the outside we really learn to know the essence of what pertains to the planets.

That is the way to become acquainted with Saturn, for example, in its true inner being. We see its population, which is the guardian of our planetary system's memory; everything that has ever occurred in our planetary system since the beginning of time is preserved by the spirits of Saturn as in a mighty cosmic memory. So if anyone wants to study the great cosmic-historical course of our planetary system, surely he should not speculate about it, as did Kant and Laplace who concluded that once there was a primordial mist that condensed and got into a spiral motion from which the planets split off and circled around the sun, which remained in the middle. I have spoken of this repeatedly and remarked how nice it is to perform this experiment for children: you have a drop of oil floating on some liquid; above the liquid you have a piece of cardboard through which you stick a pin, and you now rotate the drop of oil by twirling the pin, with the result that smaller drops of oil split off. Now, it may be a good thing in life to forget oneself; but in a case like this we should not forget what we ourselves are doing in the experiment, namely, setting the drop of oil in motion. And by the same token, we should not forget the twirler in the Kant-Laplace theory: we would have to station him out in the universe and think of him as some great and mighty school teacher twirling the pin. Then the picture would have been true and honest; but modern science is simply not honest when dealing with such things.

I am describing to you how one really arrives at seeing what lives in the planets and in the heavenly bodies in general. By means of Saturn we must study the constitution of the planetary system in its cosmic-historical evolution. Only a science that is spiritual can offer the human soul anything that can seem like a cosmic experience. Nowadays we really think only of earthly experiences. Cosmic experience leads us out to participation in the cosmos; and only by co-experiencing the cosmos in this way will we once more achieve a spiritualized instinct for the meaning of the seasons with which our organic life as well as our social life is interwoven—an instinct for the very different relation in which the earth stands to the cosmos while on its way from spring to summer, and again from summer through autumn into winter. We will learn to sense how differently life on earth flows along in the burgeoning spring than when the autumn brings the death of nature; we will feel the contrast between the awakening life in nature during spring and its sleeping state in the fall. In this way man will again be able to conform with the course of nature, celebrating festivals that have social significance, in the same way that the forces of nature, through his physical organization, make him one with his breathing and circulation. If we consider what is inside our skin we find that we live there in our breathing and in our circulation. What we are there we are as physical men; in respect of what goes on in us we belong to cosmic life. Outwardly we live as closely interwoven with outer nature as we do inwardly with our breathing and circulation.

And what is man really in respect of his consciousness? Well, he is really an earthworm—and worse: an earthworm for whom it never rains! In certain localities where there is a great deal of rain, it is so pleasant to see the worms coming out of the ground—we must careful not to tread on them, as will everyone be who loves animals. And then we reflect: Those poor little chaps are down there underground all the time and only come out when it rains; but if it does not rain, they have to stay below. Now, the materialist of today is just such an earthworm—but one for whom it never rains; for if we continue with the simile, the rain would consist of the radiant shining into him of spiritual enlightenment, otherwise he would always be crawling about down there where there is no light. Today humanity must overcome this earthworm nature; it must emerge, must get into the light, into the spiritual light of day. And the call for a Michael Festival is the call for the spiritual light of day.

That is what I wanted to point out to you before I can speak of the things that can inaugurate a Michael Festival as a festival of especial significance—significant socially as well.

I have already spoken of the different states of consciousness which can be developed out of the forces of the human soul. Initiation-knowledge is dependent upon the fact that our knowledge of the world stems from these different states of consciousness.

Today we propose to ascertain how man's relationship to the world is determined by these different states of consciousness. First of all, let us recall that a single level of consciousness, that of daily waking consciousness, suffices to meet the needs of everyday existence. In our present epoch man has the possibility of developing two further states of consciousness in addition to his normal waking consciousness, but initially they cannot serve as valid criteria for immediate purposes of knowledge.

The one is the state of dream consciousness in which man experiences reminiscences of his daily life or faint intimations of the life of the spirit. But in ordinary dream life these reminiscences and intimations are so distorted, so commingled with uncorrelated, grotesque images and symbols that nothing can be learnt from them.

If, with the aid of Initiation-knowledge, we wish to know what realm man inhabits when he dreams, the answer would be somewhat as follows: in normal life man possesses a physical body, the body which is perceptible .to the senses and which is an object of scientific study. This is the first member of man's constitution, the member which everyone imagines he understands, but which in effect, as we shall see later, he understands least of all today.

The second member is the etheric body which is described in more detail in my publications, especially in my book Theosophy. The etheric body or body of formative forces is a delicate organization, imperceptible to ordinary sight. It can be perceived only when man has developed the first state of consciousness which is able to accompany the dead in the first years after death. This etheric body is more intimately linked with the Cosmos than the physical body whose whole organization is more independent.

The third member of man's constitution—it seems best to adhere to the old terminology—is called the astral body. This is an organization that is imperceptible to the senses; neither can it be perceived in the same way as the etheric body. If we were to try to perceive the astral body with the cognitive faculty by means of which we perceive the external world today or with the insights of the next higher consciousness that is in touch with the dead, we should see nothing but a void, a vacuum, where the astral body is located.

To sum up: man possesses a physical body that is perceptible to the senses; an etheric body perceptible to Imagination by virtue of the forces that can be developed through the practice of concentration and meditation in the manner already indicated. But if we try to perceive the astral body with the aid of these forces, we meet with a void, a spatial vacuum. This void is filled with content only when we attain the emptied consciousness which I have described, when we can confront the world in full waking consciousness in such a way that, though sensory impressions are obliterated and thinking and memories are silenced, we remain none the less aware of its existence. We then know that in this void we have our first spiritual vehicle, the astral body of man.

A further member of the human organization is the Ego itself. We perceive the Ego only when the emptied consciousness is progressively developed.

When we dream, our physical and etheric bodies are detached from the astral body and Ego which are in the spiritual world, but we cannot perceive with the astral body and Ego if we possess only normal consciousness. We perceive external impressions of the world around because the physical body is endowed with eyes and ears. At the present stage of man's evolution we find that in ordinary life his astral body and Ego, unlike the physical body, are not endowed with eyes and ears. Thus, when he withdraws from his physical and etheric bodies in order to enter the dream-state, it is as if he had a physical body in the physical world bereft of eyes and ears, so that all around were dark and silent. But it was never intended that the astral body and the Ego should always remain without organs, without eyes and ears of the soul. Through spiritual training of which I have spoken in my books, it is possible to awaken these spiritual organs in the astral body and Ego and thus to see into the spiritual world through the insight born of Initiation. Then man withdraws from his physical and etheric bodies and perceives the spiritual, just as in his physical and etheric bodies he perceives the physical, and in a certain sense, the etheric as well. The man who achieves this insight then achieves Initiation.

Now what is the position of the ordinary dreamer? Try and imagine concretely the process of falling asleep. The physical and etheric bodies are left behind in the bed whilst the astral body and Ego slip out of the physical vehicle. At this moment the astral body is still vibrating in harmony with the physical and etheric bodies. The astral body has participated in all the inner activities of eyes and ears and of the will in the functioning of the physical and etheric bodies throughout the day. The astral body and the Ego have shared in all this. When they quit the body, the vibration continues. But the day experiences, as they continue to vibrate, come in contact with the surrounding spiritual world and there arises a chaotic, confused interplay between the activity of the external spiritual world and the continued vibrations of the astral body. The individual is caught up in all this and is aware of the confusion. All that he has brought with him has left its impact upon him, continues to vibrate and becomes the dream.

It is obvious that this will contribute little to the understanding of reality. What is the position of the Initiate? When he slips out of his physical and etheric bodies, he is able to obliterate the reminiscences and after-vibrations that still persist. He suppresses, therefore, all that proceeds from the physical and etheric bodies. Moreover through concentration, meditation and the development of emptied consciousness, the Initiate has been able to acquire eyes and ears of the soul. He does not now perceive what is happening within himself, but what is happening in the spiritual world outside him. In place of dreams he now begins to perceive the spiritual world. Dream consciousness is a chaotic counterpart of spiritual perception.

When the Initiate has first developed these inner astral organs, clairvoyance and clairaudience, he finds himself in a continual state of conflict and endeavours to suppress these reminiscences, these after-vibrations from the physical and etheric bodies. When he enters into the world of Imaginations, when he has an intuitive perception of the spiritual, he must fight a continual battle to prevent the dreams from asserting themselves. There is a continual interplay between that which seeks to dissolve into dreamlike fantasy and delude him, and that which represents the truth of the spiritual world.

Ultimately every aspirant becomes familiar with this conflict. He comes to realize that, at the moment he strives to enter consciously into the spiritual world, he experiences recurrent after-images of the physical world, disturbing images that intrude upon the true pictures of the spiritual world. Only through patience and persistence can he resolve this intense inner conflict.

Now if we are too easily satisfied when dream images flood our consciousness, we may readily dream ourselves into an illusory world instead of entering into a world of spiritual reality. The aspirant, in effect, must possess an exceedingly strong, intelligent inner control. Imagine what this demands of him. If we are to speak of spiritual investigation, or of methods for attaining to the spiritual world, we must draw attention to these things. If we wish to take the first steps towards an understanding of the spiritual world, we must show real enthusiasm for the task. Inner lethargy, inner indifference or indolence are obstacles in the path of its fulfilment. Our inner life must be active, lively and responsive. But there is a danger of losing ourselves in day-dreams, of spinning a web of illusion. We must be able, on the one hand, to soar into the empyrean on wings of fancy and, on the other hand, we must be able to temper this inner activity and responsiveness with prudence and sober judgment.

The Initiate must possess both these qualities. It is undesirable simply to indulge one's emotions; it is equally undesirable to submit to the dictates of the intellect and to rationalize everything. We must be able to strike a balance between these two extremes. We must be able to dream dreams and yet be able to keep our feet on Earth. As we enter into the spiritual world we must be able to participate in the dynamic world of creative imagination, but at the same time have firm control over ourselves. We must have the capacity to be a poet richly endowed with imagination, yet not succumb to its lures. We must be able, at any moment in our search for spiritual knowledge, to be fired by a creative impulse. We must be able to control the drift towards a world of fantasy and rely upon practical common sense. Then we shall not become victims of illusion, but experience spiritual reality.

This inner disposition of soul is of vital importance in true spiritual investigation. When we reflect upon the nature of dream consciousness and recognize that it conjures up chaotic images out of the spiritual world, we realize at the same time that, in order to acquire spiritual knowledge, the whole force of our personality must now enter into the psychic energy that otherwise persists in a dreamlike state. Then for the first time we begin to understand what ‘entering into the spiritual world’ implies. I said that dream consciousness conjures up the spiritual. This would appear to contradict the statement that the dream consciousness also conjures up pictures derived from the corporeal life. But the body is not only physical, it is wholly permeated with spirituality. When someone dreams that an attractive and tasty meal is set before him and he proceeds to consume it, though he has not a tithe of the cost of the meal in his pocket, then in the symbol of the meal he is presented with a picture of the real spiritual, astral content of the digestive organs. There is always a spiritual element in the dream despite the fact that the spirit has its seat in the corporeal. The dream always contains a spiritual element; but very often it is a spiritual element associated with the body. It is necessary to realize this fact. .

We must understand that when we dream of snakes, their coils are a symbol of the digestive organs or of the blood vessels in the head. We must penetrate into these secrets, for we can only arrive at an understanding of these subtle, intimate elements that must be developed in the soul when we undertake spiritual investigation through the science of Initiation and give the closest attention to these matters.

The third stage through which man passes in ordinary life is that of dreamless sleep. Let us recall this condition: the physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed; outside these bodies are the astral body and Ego-organization. The after-vibrations and reminiscences from the physical and etheric bodies have ceased. It is only in his Ego and astral body that man inhabits the spiritual world. But, having no organs, he cannot perceive anything. Darkness surrounds him; he is asleep. Dreamless sleep means that we live in the Ego and astral body and are unable to perceive the vast, majestic world around us. Take the case of a blind man. He has no visual perception of colours and forms. So far as these are concerned, he is asleep. Now picture a man living in his astral body and Ego, but without organs of perception. In relation to the spiritual he is asleep. Such is man's condition in dreamless sleep. The purpose of concentration and meditation is to develop spiritual eyes and ears in the astral body and Ego-organization. Then man begins to behold the spiritual plenitude around him. He perceives spiritually with that which in normal consciousness is lost in sleep and which he must rouse from its slumber through meditation and concentration. The otherwise uncoordinated elements must be integrated. Then he gazes into the spiritual world and shares in the life of the spiritual world in the same way as he normally shares in the life of the physical world through his eyes and ears. This is true Initiation knowledge. One cannot prepare a person for spiritual perception by external means; he must first learn to organize effectively his inner life which is normally so chaotic.

Now at all times in the history of humanity it was an accepted practice to prepare selected individuals for Initiation. This practice was interrupted to some extent during the epoch of extreme materialism, i.e. between the fifteenth century and today. During these centuries the real significance of Initiation was forgotten. Men hoped to satisfy their quest for knowledge without Initiation and so they gradually came to believe that only the physical world was their proper field of enquiry. But what is the physical world in reality? We shall not come to terms with it if we consider only its physical aspect. We only understand the physical world when we are able to apprehend the spirit that informs it. Mankind must recover this knowledge once again, for today we stand at the crossroads. The world presents a picture of disruption and increasing chaos. Yet we know that amidst this chaos, this welter of dark, obscuring passions that threaten to destroy everything, the intuitives are aware of the presence of spiritual powers who are actively striving to awaken in man a new spirituality. And preparation for Anthroposophy consists fundamentally in listening to this voice of the spirit that can still be heard amid the clamour of our materialistic age.

I said that in all ages men endeavoured to develop the human organization in such a way that they could perceive the spiritual world. Conditions varied according to the epoch. When we look back to ancient Chaldean times, or to the epoch of Brunetto Latini, we find that men were more loosely linked with their physical and etheric bodies than is the case today when we are firmly anchored in those bodies. And this is to be expected; it is the inevitable consequence of our education today. After all, how can we expect to communicate with spiritual beings when we are compelled in many cases to learn to read and write before the change of teeth? Angels and spiritual beings cannot read or write. Reading and writing have been developed in the course of human evolution in response to physical conditions. And if our whole being is orientated towards purely scientific investigation we shall obviously have difficulty in withdrawing from our physical and etheric bodies.

Our present age finds a certain satisfaction in ordering our entire cultural life in such a way that we cannot have any possibility of spiritual experience when we are separated from our physical and etheric bodies. I have no wish to inveigh against our contemporary culture, nor do I wish to criticize it. It is the inevitable expression of the epoch. I shall discuss the implications later; meanwhile we must accept things as they are.

In ancient times the astral body and Ego, even in waking consciousness, were much more loosely associated with the physical and etheric bodies than they are today. The Initiates, too, were dependent upon this loose association of the bodies that was natural to them. Indeed, in the remote past, nearly everyone could be initiated into the Mysteries. But it was only in the far distant times of the primordial Indian and old Persian cultures that everybody could be raised above his human station.

Then, in later epochs, the selection of candidates for Initiation was limited to those who had little difficulty in withdrawing from their physical and etheric bodies—men whose astral body and Ego enjoyed a relatively high degree of independence. Certain conditions were a prerequisite for Initiation. This in no way prevented every effort being made to bring the aspirant to the highest stage of Initiation commensurate with his potentialities. But beyond a certain point success depended upon whether the aspirant could attain to independence in his astral body and Ego easily or only with difficulty. And this was determined by his makeup and natural disposition. Since man is born into the world, he is inevitably dependent upon the world to a certain extent between birth and death.

The question now arises whether man today is subject to similar limitations when embarking on Initiation. To a certain extent that is so. Since I wish to give a full and clear account in these lectures of the true and false paths leading to the spiritual world, I should like to point out the difficulties in the way of Initiation today.

The man of ancient times was more dependent upon his natural endowments when he became an Initiate. Modern man also can be brought to the threshold of Initiation, in fact, through appropriate psychic training he can so fashion his astral body and Ego-organization that he is able to develop spiritual vision and perceive the spiritual world. But in order to complete and perfect this vision he is still dependent today on something else, something of extreme subtlety and delicacy. I must ask you not to come to any final conclusions about what I shall say today until you are familiar with the content of my next lectures. I can only proceed step by step.

In Initiation today man is dependent to a certain extent on age. Let us take the case of a man who is thirty-seven when he begins his Initiation and has good expectations of life. He begins to practise meditation, concentration or some other spiritual exercises, either under guidance, or independently, in accordance with some instruction manual. As a result of repeated meditation on some theme, he acquires, first of all, the capacity to look back over his life on Earth. His earthly life appears before his inward eye in the form of a uniform tableau. Just as in normal three dimensional vision objects are situated in Space—the front two rows of chairs and their occupants here, over there a table and behind it a wall; we see the whole in perspective in simultaneity—so at a certain level of Initiation we see into Time. One has the impression that the passage of Time is spatial. Now we see ourselves at the age of thirty-seven. We had certain experiences at thirty-six, at thirty-five and so on, back to the time of our birth. In retrospect we see a uniform tableau before us.

Now let us assume that at a certain stage of Initiation a man reviews his life in retrospect. At thirty-seven he will be able to look back into the period from birth to the age of seven approximately, the time of the change of teeth.

Then he will be able to look back into the period between the ages of seven and fourteen, up to the age of puberty. And then he is able to look back into the period between fourteen and twenty-one and the rest of his life up to his thirty-seventh year. He can survey the panorama of his life in spatiotemporal perspective, so to speak. If he can add to this perception the consciousness born of the emptied waking consciousness, a certain power of vision flashes through him. He acquires insight, but his insight assumes widely different forms. The experiences from birth to the age of seven, from the age of fourteen to twenty-one, and those of later years evoke different responses in him. Each life-period responds in its own way; each period has its own power of vision.

Now let us consider the man of sixty-three or sixty-four. He is able to look back over the later periods of his life. The period between the ages of twenty-one and forty-two appears relatively uniform. Then follows further differentiation. There are significant differences in his perceptions between the ages forty-two to forty-nine, forty-nine to fifty-six, fifty-six to sixty-three. All these periods are an integral part of his make-up. They represent the spiritual aspects of his life on Earth. If he develops this inward vision, he sees that his different insights are dependent upon the level of his being at a particular age. The first seven years of childhood awaken in him a different insight from that of the years between seven and fourteen. In the period of adolescence, from fourteen to twenty-one, it is again different; the years between twenty-one and forty-two bring further differentiation, to be followed in its turn by the somewhat differentiated powers of insight that belong to the later periods of life.

Let us assume that we have acquired the capacity to have memory-pictures of our life experiences and, in addition, have attained the insight derived from the emptied consciousness which has obliterated the memory-pictures. The forces of Inspiration now become operative, so that we no longer survey our life-periods through the physical eye, but through the spiritual eye, the new organ of vision. Through Inspiration we have reached a point when we no longer conjure up pictures of our life-periods with their separate happenings, but perceive them through spiritual eyes and ears. At one time we see clairvoyantly the life-period between seven and fourteen, at another clairaudiently the period between forty-nine and fifty-six, just as formerly we heard and perceived in the external world when we used our eyes and ears. In the world of Inspiration we make use of the power derived from the period between the ages of seven and fourteen and from the period between the forty-second and forty-ninth years. In this world the life periods become differentiated organs of cognition. Thus we are, to a certain extent, dependent upon our age for the range of our vision. At thirty-seven we are perfectly capable of speaking from first-hand experience of Initiation, but at the age of sixty-three we would speak with deeper knowledge, because, at that age, we have developed other organs. The life-periods create organs. Now let us assume that we propose to describe personalities such as Brunetto Latini or Alanus ab Insulis, not from information derived from books, but from clairvoyant knowledge. (These examples will be familiar to you because we have already spoken of them in the last few days.) If we try to describe them when we have reached the age of thirty-seven, we discover that we are in touch with them spiritually in the awakened consciousness of sleep. We can converse with them, metaphorically speaking, as we do with our fellowmen. And the strange thing is that when they discuss spiritual matters with others, they can only speak with them from their present level of wisdom and inner spirituality. Then we realize how very much we can learn from them. We must listen to them and accept in good faith what they have to teach.

Now you will realize that it is no light matter to stand in the presence of a personality such as Brunetto Latini in the spiritual world. But if we have made the necessary preparations we shall be able to determine whether we are victims of a dream delusion or in the presence of a spiritual reality. It is possible therefore to evaluate the communications we receive.

Suppose, then, at the age of thirty-seven we were to converse with Brunetto Latini in the spiritual world. This should not be taken literally, of course. He would talk to us of many things; then, perhaps, we should like to have more precise, more detailed information. Thereupon he would say: ‘in that case we must retrace our steps from the present, the twentieth century, back through the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, to the century in which I lived when I was Dante's teacher. If you wish to accompany me along this path you must wait until you are a little older, until you have a few more years behind you. Then I can tell you everything and satisfy your thirst for knowledge. You can become a high Initiate, but, in reality, you cannot accompany me along this path into the past by spiritual volition alone.’—For this to be possible you must have grown older. If you wish to make certain of returning without hindrance to the spiritual world with the person in question, you must have passed your forty-second year at least and have reached the age of sixty.

These things will show you the deeper aspects of man's being and the significant part they play in youth and age. Only when we draw attention to these things are we in a position to understand why some die young and others live to a ripe age in their different incarnations. I shall have more to say about this later.

We have seen how man, as he develops, progressively deepens and extends his perception of the spiritual world. I have shown how his relationship with a being existing as a discarnate soul in the spiritual world, such as Brunetto Latini, changes with the conditions of evolution, depending on whether he uses for spiritual perception the organs developed in youth or in age.

The panoramic survey of the world and its evolution that unfolds before the soul of man in this way can be extended to other fields. The question is: in what way can we enlarge human consciousness, human insight, and give it another direction? Today I will indicate one such direction and enter into further details in the following lectures.

In the normal consciousness of our earthly life we know only the Earth environment between birth and death. If there were an end to our chaotic dream life, if we were to have perception in a state of deep, dreamless sleep instead of normal consciousness, we should no longer experience a purely Earth environment around us. But we are, in effect, endowed with other conditions of perception and consciousness than the normal.

Let us now consider the following: our everyday consciousness is related to our immediate environment. Since we cannot see into the interior of the Earth our immediate environment is the sphere of normal consciousness. Everything else in the Cosmos, Sun, Moon and all the other stars shine into this sphere. Sun and Moon send down to Earth clearer indications of their presence in the Cosmos than the other heavenly bodies. Physicists would be astonished if they could experience in their own way—for they refuse to consider our approach—the prevailing conditions in the sphere of the Moon or the Sun. For the descriptions given in the text-books of astronomy, astrophysics and the like are wide of the mark. They offer only the vaguest indications. In ordinary life when we wish to make a person's acquaintance and later have an opportunity of speaking to him, we do not normally say: I have only a vague impression of this person; he must retreat to a distance where he is almost out of sight. Then I shall have a much clearer impression of him and will describe him.

The physicists of course have no choice; it is the result of necessity and they can only describe the stars when they are a long way off. But a transformed and enlarged consciousness lifts us into the world of stars. And the first thing we learn from this is to speak of these worlds of stars quite differently from the way in which we speak of them in ordinary life.

In normal consciousness we see ourselves standing here on Earth, and at night the Moon over against us in the heavens. In order to see differently, we must enter into another kind of consciousness and sometimes that takes a considerable time. When we have attained this consciousness and are able to perceive our experiences, all that we have lived through from birth to the age of seven, to the change of teeth, with the consciousness that is in touch with the dead, with a consciousness that has achieved Inspiration and so become inner power of vision, then we see a totally different world around us. The ordinary world grows dim and indefinite.

This other world is the Moon sphere. When we have attained to this new consciousness, we no longer see the Moon as a separate entity, we are actually living in the Moon sphere. The Moon's orbit traces the furthest limits of the Moon sphere. We know ourselves to be within the Moon sphere.

Now if a child of eight could be initiated and could review the first seven years of its life, it could live in the Moon sphere in this way. Indeed, a child would not have the slightest difficulty in entering into the Moon sphere because it has not yet been corrupted by the influences of later years.

Theoretically this is a possibility; but, of course, a child of eight cannot be initiated.

When we use the power derived from the first life-period, from birth to the age of seven, for spiritual vision, we are able to enter into this Moon sphere which is radically different nom the sphere perceived by ordinary consciousness. An analogy will help to illustrate my point.

In embryology today the biologist studies the development of the embryo from the earliest stages. At a certain stage in the development of the embryo a thickening of the membrane occurs at an eccentrically situated point on the external wall. Then encapsulation takes place and a kind of nucleus is formed. But whilst this is clearly visible under the microscope, we cannot say: this is nothing but the germ, the embryo, for the rest is also an integral part.

The same applies to the Moon and the other stars. What we see as the Moon is simply a kind of nucleus and the whole sphere belongs to the Moon. The Earth is within the Moon sphere. If the germ could rotate, this nucleus would also rotate. The Moon's orbit follows the boundaries of the Moon sphere.

The ancients who still knew something of these matters did not speak therefore of the Moon, but of the Moon sphere. The Moon, as we see it today, was to them only a point at the furthest boundary. Every day this point changes position and in the course of twenty-eight days traces for us the boundaries of the Moon sphere. When our inner experiences between birth and the seventh year become inspirational vision, we acquire the power to enter into the Moon sphere as our perception of the Earth is gradually lost.

When the experiences of the second life-period, between the change of teeth and puberty, are transformed into inspirational vision, we experience the Mercury sphere, the second sphere. We live together with the Earth in the Mercury sphere. The experiences of the Mercury sphere only become visible through the organ of vision that we can create for ourselves when we look back consciously and with clear perception into the experiences of our life on Earth between the ages of seven and fourteen. With the inspirational vision derived from the years between puberty and the age of twenty-one, we experience the Venus sphere. The ancients were not so ignorant as we imagine; with their dreamlike knowledge they knew a great deal about these things and they endowed the planetary system that we experience after the years of puberty with a name associated with sexual awareness which begins at this period.

Then when we look back consciously on our experiences between the ages of twenty-one and forty-two, we know that we are within the Sun sphere.

When the separate life-periods are transformed into organs of the inner life, they endow us with the power to enlarge step by step our cosmic consciousness.

It would be untrue to say that we cannot know anything of the Sun sphere before our forty-second year. We can learn about it from the Mercury beings for they are fully acquainted with it. But in that event our experience comes to us indirectly, through super-sensible teaching. Now in order to have direct experience in the Sun sphere in our own consciousness, in order to be able to enter into it, we must not only have lived in the period between the ages of twenty-one and forty-two, but we must have passed our forty-second year, we must be able to look back over the past, for only in the retrospective survey are the mysteries revealed.

And again, when we are able to look back upon our life up to the forty-ninth year, the mysteries of Mars are revealed. If we can look back upon our life up to the age of fifty-six, the Jupiter mysteries are revealed. And the deeply veiled, but extraordinarily illuminating mysteries of Saturn—mysteries which, as we shall see in the following lectures, veil the profound secrets of the Cosmos—are revealed when we look back upon the events and happenings between the fifty-sixth and sixty-third years.

Thus you will realize that man is in fact a microcosm. He is related to those things that he never perceives in normal consciousness. But he would be unable to fashion, or to order his life, if the Moon forces were not active within him from birth to his seventh year. He perceives later on the nature of their influence. He would not be able to re-create his experiences between the ages of seven and fourteen, if the Mercury mysteries were not active within him; nor would he be able to re-create his experiences of the years between fourteen and twenty-one—the period when powerful creative forces pour into him, if he is karmically predisposed to receive them—if he were not inwardly related to the Venus sphere. And if he were not united with the Sun sphere, he would not be able to develop ripe understanding and experience of the world between the ages of twenty and forty-two, the period when we pass from early manhood to maturity. In ancient times the system was not very different: the craftsman served his apprenticeship until he reached the age of twenty-one, then he became “travelling man” and ultimately “master.” Thus, all man's inner development between his twenty-first and forty-second years is related to the Sun sphere. And all his experiences during his declining years between the ages of fifty-six and sixty-three can be attributed to the influences of the Saturn sphere.

Together with the Earth we exist within seven interpenetrating spheres, and in the course of our life we grow into them and are related to them. The original pattern of our life between birth and death undergoes a metamorphosis through the influence of the starry spheres which mould us from birth to death. When we have reached the Saturn sphere, we have passed through all that the Beings of the planetary spheres can of their bounty accomplish for us. Then, in the occult sense, we embark upon a free and independent cosmic existence which looks back upon the planetary life from the standpoint of Initiation, an existence that in certain respects is no longer subject to the compulsions of earlier life-periods. However, I shall speak further on these matters in the following lectures.

Good morning, gentlemen! Perhaps one or the other of you has thought of something else you would like to ask? Or anything else about what we discussed the other day?

Mr. Müller asks if Dr. Steiner would like to say something about a question he asked the other day: There are quacks who can diagnose people's illnesses from their urine.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, you asked that recently. I just overlooked the question, or I didn't have time to answer it.

Mr. Müller continues as the person asking the question: In the Basel area, there is a man who has

his practice, urine tests, and the remedies he has prescribed have achieved good results. What do you think of that?

Dr. Steiner: Well, regarding the question about urine testing, I have the following to say. Urine testing is not limited to quacks and the like, but it also plays a major role in medicine today, which is recognized as scientific. However, there is a big difference between the way in which today's physicians and the people you are actually talking about – and you were basically talking about non-medical practitioners – treat things, and that is based on the following. Urinalysis has always played an extremely important role in all disease investigations since ancient times. However, you have to bear the following in mind. If you go back to the old medicine that existed until the 18th century – because medicine was only reformed in the 18th century in Italy in the direction of materialism – you will find that both the recognition of diseases and healing were based on completely different principles. Today, this old medicine is completely despised by science. To a certain extent, this is justified, but it is not entirely justified. And one must be aware of the difference between the old medicine and the newer medicine in order to understand what it actually means today. The old medicine knew very well that man is not just this physical body that you see with your eyes and touch with your hands, but is also a supersensible being that permeates the body, as we have always emphasized.

You will find the differences between this old medicine and the newer medicine if you go back very far in human life, namely if you go back to the time before birth. I do not mean the spiritual before birth, but the physical, the body of the human being in the womb. Today, medicine and science in general see the essential thing about a human being as it develops in the womb, the essential thing is how the egg gradually builds up. At first, we are only dealing with the egg that has been fertilized. This is therefore a small cell, only visible under the microscope. This cell then multiplies and takes on a kind of cup shape. And in the third week, this cup shape bulges out on one side. Then, in the sixth or seventh week, the human being becomes similar to a small fish. On one side, the head then develops (see drawing), and the first nerve cords form here. And so it continues. And in this way, observing formation after formation, today science is trying to get closer to understanding the origin of man and also of animals.

But apart from what is present in this way, there is also a thick liquid around the human being in the womb. This thick liquid is present in this way (it is drawn), and only then is the uterus all around it. This thick liquid, with all kinds of thick inclusions, then flows out at birth as the so-called afterbirth. This is considered to be a waste product, something that has no significance, because everything that occurs in a living being today, that is, that occurs in such a way that it comes out, is considered a waste product.

But that is not the case. Here, in the way the cell multiplies and the physical human body forms, the external natural force is at work inside, while in the surrounding fluid, which is then expelled as the afterbirth, the spiritual-soul element is at work. This spiritual-soul substance is first in the vicinity of the small human body; only later does it move into the human body. And one must actually look for the spirit in what is later rejected as the afterbirth. This is, of course, very surprising, but it is extremely important.

Today, there is so much denial of the spiritual that a friend of mine has set himself the task of examining this afterbirth, as it gradually releases the spirit to the actual embryo, the actual physical. One could examine this quite well scientifically; but that fails only because, where one gets human germs - it is not the case in very many cases - the fact that the mother dies or has to be operated on, the present-day natural scientists immediately take away everything that is around, and one does not get a human germ to examine in order to find out. So even the way things are treated today is a hindrance to real science. This materialistic way of thinking, I might say, begins with the examination of the origin of man.

Now you know that a person also secretes while they are alive. The secretions are not particularly popular in the external world, because they do not smell good. Almost all secretions do not smell good. Today, however, all secretions are considered, and quite rightly so, to be something that simply has to be secreted, washed away, and so on.

So the secretions in humans are, first of all, what you have mentioned: urine, perspiration, right, and then there are the coarse secretions, the feces and a few others. After all, what you cut from the nails is also a secretion of the human body. It is just a solid secretion. But some things that are also secretions are not recognized as secretions, but in reality they are secretions.

You see, the eye is often thought of as the noblest organ in the human being. Well, you just have to consider how easily an eye can be removed. It lies almost completely isolated in the eye socket. And what is in the eye as fluid – I have explained this to you – is also a secretion. And that there are secretions in the various organs of hearing, in the ear, that the secretion plays a role there, you can already see from the formation of earwax, which is the outermost secretion. So we are dealing with secretions everywhere in the human being; on the one hand the human being is built up, but on the other hand he dissolves, he secretes.

Now, what follows from this? I told you something the other day that might be instructive for you in this regard. I said: People see the nerves, the whole brain, as something that is just such an organ as the other organs, like the liver or spleen. But that is not true, gentlemen. The brain is a secretion. The whole brain, I told you, is a secretion! And if you want to compare the brain to something, then you should not compare it to the intestines, but to what is inside the intestines. So if you have a piece of intestine, there is the intestinal wall, and there is the intestinal contents (see drawing p. 159, bottom). The thing is that the intestinal wall is so corrugated. In the brain, in the nerve, the wall is missing; it is also there, but it is transparent, it is not visible, and only the contents are there (see drawing, above). You can quite rightly say: What is our brain actually filled with? It is filled with a very special kind of intestinal content! And if you call the intestinal content dirt, you can say that the brain is dirt. That is absolutely scientifically correct. For the activity of thinking does not consist in an activity of the brain, but the activity of thinking consists in the brain being separated out by thinking. The more you go from bottom to top in man, the more man is separation.

Now I have spoken to you about the sensual and the supersensible man, about the man you see and the man who is also in you, whom you do not see. That which you see in a person is what is continually being built up, what comes from what forms the physical human body. That is where he gets the arm stump (see drawing on p. 156), and the leg stump. But the supersensible, the astral body and the ego, are there to separate, they are constantly separating. Only the physical body and the etheric body build up. The astral body and the ego break down again.

When you build a house, you try to build it as quickly as possible and live in it for as long as possible. Little by little, nature also breaks it down. Otherwise, you would still have to see the houses that stood in ancient India today. But you will find few of our houses that stood here three hundred years ago. In the human being, building up and breaking down happens simultaneously. First, there is building up: We eat, absorb things; they come to the liver, where they are transformed. Then the breakdown begins again, the sorting out. And in this building and breaking down, the whole activity of the human being actually consists. If we only built up, we would be dull and stupid. We would be nothing but stupid fellows. We would not even be stupid fellows, but we would be completely spiritless plants if we only built. The fact that we break down, that we, for example, continually excrete in the brain, that we therefore have excretory organs, glands, is what it is that we are not stupid guys, but that we are clever people, with differences of course. But the spiritual is based on breaking down, not on building up. And that is why the secretions are of particular importance.

You see, the thing is this: the same activity that takes place when the afterbirth is secreted takes place during every decomposition. Whenever more and more is destroyed around the structure of the human being, then the spirit is at work. And when the spirit can then work in the human body itself, when the human being is born, then the afterbirth is no longer needed; then it is simply expelled. But it is expelled throughout life. It is expelled in the more or less solid-soft intestinal secretions, it is expelled in the urine, it is expelled in sweat, for example. You can observe the significance of sweat as a secretion when you have a real anxiety dream. Just observe it once when you have a real anxiety dream. If, for example, you dream that someone is chasing you with the intention of killing you or at least beating you up, you run away from him, you run in your dream, run, run, run; you wake up quickly, but not without being completely bathed in sweat. This activity, which is so intensified that you have such frightening images, takes place in the form of sweating attacks. And these sweats are the physical accompaniment of what the anxiety dream is. Or think of a person with a serious lung disease who is not in the last stage, but whose lungs are not in order. The lungs cannot breathe well, causing the lungs to compress: he suffers greatly from anxiety dreams. But he also always sweats when he sleeps. So you have the connection between the perspiration and these mental activities, images that come in dreams. Yes, then, gentlemen, the etheric body is active because the anxiety dream actually arises only at the moment of waking up. You only think that dreaming lasted almost the whole night. The whole dream takes place at the moment of waking up.

It can be proven that dreams play out at the moment of waking up. I once told you a characteristic dream, when many of you were not yet here, from which you can see how, when you wake up, you first have the whole dream flashing through your mind. A student is standing at the door of the lecture hall. Another student comes up to him and jostles him. Now, being jostled is a terrible insult among students! It can only end in a duel; there's no other way. So now, immediately, the moment the other student bumps into him, one of them looks for a second; the other student also has to look for a second – this is a long story that the student dreams – the whole thing is agreed, the negotiations for the seconds, everything; apparently it takes an awfully long time. He dreams of how they go out into the forest, how they line up, how the distance is determined, how they pace off how far away they are. The pistols are loaded – he dreams all this –; how they are then raised, the first shot is fired, and he wakes up! He quickly realizes that, because he has become restless in his sleep, he has tipped over the chair; but it falls while he is waking up. So the chair falling over made the whole dream; at that moment the whole dream shot through his mind. The dream only expands inwardly to the length. In reality, one actually dreams in the moment of waking up. And that is why it is also the case that such sick people have the frightening dreams when they wake up; they sleep, wake up, and in doing so, they start to sweat. That is the etheric body at work. When we wake up early of our own accord, we go back inside with our ego and astral body, which have left the physical body during the night, and that is why we break out in sweat. So when we sweat, it is the etheric body that mainly brings about the fact that we are spiritual beings, because stones and plants do not dream, and therefore are not spiritual beings.

But then there is the secretion of urine. You see, this is not as noticeable as it is with sweat because sweat can do nothing but come out, and then it covers the skin. But if the skin had small sacs where the sweat is secreted inside, and if there were a fine skin to cover it, you would not notice it at all. It could be that you have small sacs inside the skin. The sweat goes in there, and at certain times – you could have fine muscles – you press the skin and the sweat could run off. Just as the sweat is secreted through the etheric body, so is the urine secreted through the astral body. But you don't realize that, for example, when you have more vivid feelings, more urine is secreted than when you have weak feelings, because the urine does not pour out immediately. You see, it's like this: If a person is filled with enthusiasm and remains so, regardless of whether it finds expression in external deeds or whether he is contemplating something, and if he did not have a urinary bladder, then he would have to pass urine continuously, especially when filled with enthusiasm. It would be a very bad arrangement. A person could not go to a museum, because when he sees the pictures there and becomes excited, there would have to be toilets nearby! It just so happens that human nature provides for this secretion. It accumulates in the urinary bladder and can be drained at certain times. But urine is secreted primarily by the astral body, and this fills the human being everywhere; urine comes from everywhere, collects in the kidneys and then goes into the urinary bladder.

And the secretions of the intestines are particularly under the influence of the ego – in animals they are also under the influence of the astral body, but in humans they are under the influence of the ego. And not only the intestines are activated for secretion, but the whole human being is activated. In the whole human being, secretion is constantly taking place. The intestines are only the drainage system. So you can say that it is precisely in the secretion that you can see that the etheric body is active in sweat, the astral body is active in urine, and the ego is active in the secretion of feces.

If you consider this, you will not think of the secretions as something so unimportant. Because let us assume that a person has normal urine. Yes, then the astral body in the person is also active in a normal way. But whether a person is healthy or sick depends on how the astral body is active. Everything in health and illness basically depends on how the astral body is active.

For example, when we eat eggs and the eggs are to be digested, the egg must first go into the mouth, then into the stomach; then it goes into the intestines, and there, as I once said, it is completely destroyed as an egg. The egg white is destroyed. But then, on the way into the liver, the destroyed egg white is rebuilt, and human egg white is formed from animal and vegetable egg white on the way from the intestines to the liver. The human egg white then enters the blood.

If you look at the human organism, here is the diaphragm (see drawing), here is the liver, and here is the heart; they are only separated by the diaphragm. What comes from the intestines into the liver is transformed from animal and vegetable proteins – I will color this yellow – into human proteins (a darker yellow). This is held together in the liver and then passes over into the heart.

The thing is this: when we eat protein, our astral body has to work to properly transform animal and vegetable protein into human protein. If the astral body is lazy, it cannot work properly, and the animal protein is not converted into human protein in the liver, but goes directly into the kidneys and is secreted in the urine. If you now examine the urine – which is what modern scientific medicine does – you will find protein in the urine.

Or imagine, gentlemen, you are eating potatoes. The potato is usually already converted in the mouth, because starch is an important food in general, it is not just there to starch shirts. The potato consists almost entirely of starch. On the way from the mouth to the stomach and into the intestines, the potato is now gradually converted into sugar. The potato starch first becomes dextrin and then sugar. Potatoes are only bad in the mouth; in the intestines they are extremely sweet because they are converted into sugar there. But when the potato starch has been converted into sugar in the intestines, and when the liver has converted potato sugar or any other sugar into human sugar, then it delivers this inner sugar to the entire body, which becomes warmer as a result, which has its inner warmth as a result. But for that to happen, the astral body has to work properly again. If it does not work properly, then the proper transformation into human sugar does not take place, but the animal and especially the vegetable sugar goes directly to the kidneys. The sugar is excreted, and the person becomes diabetic. You can see from the sugar content of the urine that the person is ill.

All of this is something that modern medicine also does and considers to be extremely important. That is the first thing that is done today: the urine is examined for protein and sugar. This immediately provides a clue as to whether the person may have this or that disease.

Or take the following: if we want to have a healthy head, which, after all, is not something entirely unimportant for the physical human being here on earth – people want to have a healthy head because they believe that the head organ in the human being; so they want to have a healthy head. If we want to have a healthy head, then we have to bring up a substance that is constantly being produced in us, namely clover acid, through the chest into the head. A healthy head must have a certain amount of clover acid. We produce the clover acid ourselves, as we also produce the alcohol we need. But for this, the head must work in the right way again, so that the clover acid, oxalic acid, is produced. If it does not work properly and it stays down, we get a head that is anemic, and the clover acid is passed into the urine and goes away.

From this you can see, gentlemen, that even today the most important diseases can be identified by means of the most ordinary chemical examination of urine. But this chemistry that we have today was not available in the past. And there was medicine even then!

Now the matter is this: suppose a person has a fever; I will take a drastic case. What does it mean when a person has a fever? It does not mean that his astral body has become weak and listless, sluggish, but rather that it is in a state of excessive activity, so that it affects the I. Then the I is as if whipped when the astral body is in excessive activity. But the I causes the blood to circulate. And an excessively active astral body, which wants to enter the organs everywhere and cannot, and therefore seethes within itself like a storm-lashed sea, produces fever within itself. Now the person has a fever from his whipped astral body. What will be the further consequence? The blood is rushed through the body too quickly. The Blur is not properly transformed. The blood does not have time to form the organs, but goes as blood from the heart to the kidneys and from there into the urine, and we get a urine that is very dark in color. Those who know how to judge the dark color of urine know that, under all circumstances, whether it is a little darker or very dark, the fever is flooding the human organism.

Suppose the astral body becomes very sluggish, it will no longer work properly. The blood passes very slowly through the body, the pulse becomes barely noticeable. You can feel it at the pulse, how the blood passes slowly everywhere. Everything in the body comes together. The body experiences pain in all sorts of places; the urine turns light yellow or even white. Now, between the urine being dark and the urine being white, there are all kinds of shades, color nuances. If you focus on these color nuances and take the urine and look at it through the light, you can see a wide range of things from the colors of the urine.

The blood is constantly trying to replace what is leaving the organs. As a result, the blood has a constant tendency to solidify. If the blood rushes through the organs too quickly, it cannot give anything to the organs. But it wants to solidify. When it comes out of the kidneys as urine, the urine becomes flaky in such blood. If you look through it again, you will see flaky urine. If the astral body is sluggish and the pulse weak, then you don't have cloudy urine, but rather urine that is almost as clear as water, pure urine.

So not only from the color, but also from this cloudiness or purity of the urine, one can conclude a lot. If the urine, when you look through it, looks like a stormy summer's day, with dark clouds and everything in it showing, where everything is bubbling in the urine, so if it is like a stormy summer's day, then the person has something that causes a strong fever. And if you can judge what is going on, you can draw conclusions about the illness. If the urine, when examined, looks delightfully clear like a bright summer's day when the sun illuminates everything, one can conclude that the person is ill on the other side, that he has a very slight tendency towards all kinds of perishing organs; one organ becomes inactive, another becomes inactive, and so on.

So you see, the thing is this: if you have specialized in the secretions of the urine, you can tell a great deal from it. But that is precisely the difference between today's newer medicine and the old one: the old medicine looked at the urine in the same way that one looks at a summer's day as a bright or storm-lashed summer's day, thus judging more in the rough, but, having trained itself, judged more from the facts. Today's more materialistic medicine chemically analyzes the urine, finding protein, oxalic acid, sugar and so on in it. So the difference is that one did it according to how it presented itself, and the other did it more according to chemistry.

Now, of course, in the early days, when this view was still given a great deal of consideration, people learned it properly and there were no charlatans. Today, most of those who do this are charlatans, although I am not saying that all of them are. A person can train himself so well that he can actually recognize all possible illnesses. But that requires a great deal of experience, and this experience must be applied.

Now the difference is: people today do not give much importance to the mind. The mind is almost about to be abolished. What chemistry offers can be learned by anyone. To examine a substance chemically, that is simply learned in the three, four, five, six years one spends at the university. Basically, any fool can do that, examine the substance chemically. And that is what they are striving for. The mind is to be abolished. Everyone is to be able to do the same. That was not the case in the past. In the past, the mind was highly respected. But you have to have a mind to be able to look at urine. That is the difference: in the past, people were made spiritual by being taught; today they are made into henchmen. The story is this: if you want to work, you need your hands, and your hands should be guided by your mind. Today there is much talk of manual labor and brain work, but the two should not be distinguished. Those who do manual labor should be given the opportunity to educate themselves spiritually so that they can approach the spirit just as much as the so-called intellectual workers. These distinctions can only be made among people by valuing real spiritual work. But today they want to do away with the spirit.

Well, gentlemen, you can see from this that earlier medicine placed more emphasis on looking at things directly. But that had another consequence. I don't know if you know that today's so-called scientific medicine makes rather high noses, well, you can't make them as high as today's doctor makes them, with which he looks down on the old “dirty pharmacy”, because in the past they made the remedies from all sorts of secretions. And they said to themselves: the human being secretes the secretions. If you bring them back into the body in the right way, they want to come out again. But what are they doing there? In this way, for example, they bring a sluggish astral body into regular activity or a sluggish ether body into regular activity.

Now you can say: If you find that a person's astral body has become lethargic, you could give them sweat as a remedy – you could say that. And you could say: Well, that's just the old dirty pharmacy, it really does have something like that! – Yes, the difference is not that great. If you were to look at the products used in remedies today, you would find that they are the same products found in sweat, only they are applied externally, in a mineral combination. The ancients used sweat directly. And in many ways it was more effective than what is only put together later, because, as I have shown you in many cases, nature is much cleverer than man. Man can synthesize in his remedies what nature synthesizes. The ancients did something very remarkable: they valued something that is no longer valued today. The ancients said: when a person really sweats, he actually has a whole sweat blanket around him (see drawing). — Now, that is the first thing. But a person secretes sweat all over his surface. If you could hold on to this sweat that a person secretes and take the person away – imagine what it would be like: here someone is sweating terribly; his body is covered with sweat all over the surface – imagine if I could take this person out and the sweat would remain here: That would be the whole imprint of the human being, the whole person would be there in the sweat! Very interesting, isn't it? So it is that the sweat constantly has the intention of imitating the human form.

The ancients did something else as well. They did not just look at sweat in this way, they also looked at urine in this way. Now, for example, they had a small glass of urine (see illustration on page 170). The ancients now had an even better mental image; and lo and behold: something like a ghost of a human being emerged from this urine! What sweat forms by itself, by being on the surface, emerged from the urine. In fact, in ancient times, if you had a vial of urine, you could see that. Yes, there emerged – I don't know if you know this legend, that the goddess Venus emerged from the sea foam? —a human astral specter arose from the urine. And in a person who was prone to a certain disease, let's say a person who was prone to wasting, this astral specter was thin and scrawny. In a person who, let's say, was prone to morbid fatness, this specter was swelling in all directions. Call it an illusion for my sake; it can be an illusion if you want that someone who sees a light-colored urine sees a different ghost than when he sees dark urine. But he sees it. And as an experienced doctor, he judged the illnesses accordingly.

And it was the same in the days when not only urine but also feces, the intestinal secretions, were examined. In the old days, these were particularly important for determining the diseases. Just imagine, someone had taken the intestinal secretions. You can find out that one person has a lot of sulfur in it, iron in it. Depending on what is in it, you can have more sulfurous intestinal contents. Dogs, for example, have a lot of sulfur in their intestinal contents, which then goes outwards. The more sulfur in it, the whiter and firmer the intestinal contents. The more carbon, carbonaceous matter, the softer and darker the intestinal contents; this is found in cats. Now, from the intestinal contents that come out, from the feces, you can deduce the disease much better than from the urine.

Even with intestinal contents, the ancients, shall we say, had a vision; they just had such visions. This is something very strange! With sweat, they said: When man secretes sweat, he envelops himself in his own ghost. When man secretes urine, there is his ghost in it, rising up. And in the case of intestinal contents, it is completely contained on all sides and has certain colors. And according to these - call it visions or dreams, as you like - but according to these dreams, diseases were often diagnosed in ancient times.

And in an unspecific, sometimes quite foolish way, people like the ones you mention do it by reading old books that are hard to understand today. There are also those who diagnose diseases based on feces; this usually doesn't yield much. But a person can gain a great deal of experience, and something may come of it. Only today's science doesn't pay attention to this because it prefers to examine everything chemically. But, as I said, urine analysis is just as important to today's medical science as it is to unscientific medicine, which is a remnant of ancient times.

If you leaf through old medical books, you will come across expressions that you will not usually understand. All kinds of mystics and people who always say that they have all the wisdom, not only science but also wisdom, will always tell you what they have read in old books. This is not of much value because they do not understand the old books. But if you read them, you will come across an expression. The expression mummy appears again and again. One is told: if the mummy is light, then the person is afflicted with all kinds of diseases that drive him to emaciation and so on; if the mummy is very dark, blackish, then the person is afflicted with fever, with feverish diseases. It is told everywhere what the mummy is like, and the diseases are judged by it.

What then is the mummy? If a person today reads this, they only know that these are the Egyptian mummies. Well, what do they make of it when they read that the mummy is light or dark? They don't even get what is meant. But what did the ancient people who wrote the old medical books mean? They called the form that is in the sweat and the form that emerged from the urine and feces “mummy.” The mummy was the spiritual human being. And the spiritual human being becomes visible through the secretions. And the ancients said: When the child is born, the afterbirth goes away, and the last remnant of the spiritual human being goes away. And if people could examine this today, they would find that when a small child is born, sometimes there is very little afterbirth and thus something supernatural. But there are also some where quite a lot goes away. The latter, where quite a lot goes away – there the spirit leaves at birth – they then become materialists.

And so it is, gentlemen: the spiritual activity in man, the astral and ego activity, has an extraordinary deal to do with the secretion. And when one speaks of the old dirt pharmacy, it just indicates that today one no longer appreciates what was once appreciated. Waste phenomena are no longer appreciated today. In some respects it is good not to value them too much, because all kinds of things happen. I knew someone who wanted to get rid of washing because he said – after hearing that the spirit lives in the secretions – that you should keep what is secreted, so you should also keep the dirt. And the result of that was that he came to value dirt extremely! Yes, gentlemen, all this sometimes seems foolish. But it is not always foolishness. Take horses, for example. Horses have hooves, and the hooves then merge into the soft part of the horse's toe. Dirt collects there. And if you constantly scrape away the dirt on a horse, it can become ill. You have to have an instinct for how long you have to leave the dirt so that the horse can keep up with creating it. So there you can see quite tangibly, I would say, how significant the dirt, the secretion, is. The matter is significant for the spiritual in man; it is also significant for health and illness. Health and illness can be found in the secretion. And the ancients called the spiritual in the secretion the mummy. If you find the word mummy in old writings, you will understand it from now on, because I have told you how the mummy actually comes into being: that it arises precisely from the secretion products.

As you can see, Mr. Müller's question involves a very large science, but one that can only be mastered if one delves into the spiritual. Otherwise, everything that is secreted is simply a product of secretion; no attention is paid to it. But in the secretion, the human being shows what kind of spirit he is. And that this is the case with feces is evident even from a superficial glance. Compare horse feces with cow feces. The cattle feces are larger, spread out. The horse feces are almost small heads, round. You can't help it if you have a sense of beauty – isn't it true, beauty doesn't lie in the fact that you only find odorless things beautiful – if you have a sense of beauty at all, you can't help saying when you see a cow pat: The whole cow! In it she is reflected with her broad appearance, with her casual activity, with her tendency to want to lie down; she is completely within the feces. And the horse, this jumper among animals, always wanting to get away from the earth, wanting to hop and jump out into the world – a horse's dung shows the whole horse! And so it is with the excrement of all animals, you can recognize the whole animal in them. And from this you can see what the ancients understood by mummy and what is simply astral. The supersensible animal, the supersensible human being, lives in the secretions.

With spiritual science, we can master these things. Of course, we must not allow the enemies to say that spiritual science deals with sweat, urine and so on, and that it is therefore actually a dirty science. That is what the enemies would like best!

So, gentlemen, by raising the question, I had to point out to you what is true. But you can also point out at every opportunity that it is not about any particular considerations of what is dirty, but what is spiritual. Because man becomes unconscious when the build-up in him is too strong. Then the growths arise in him when he only builds up. He must break down accordingly. He must break down. Man becomes unconscious, constantly unconscious and absent-minded, when a lump forms in the brain, because then there is only building up. The lump is built up when there is no proper breakdown in the brain. And the brain nerves arise as breakdown products, as spiritual breakdown products. Only when it gets too strong, then the blood comes in too strongly; inflammation develops. And there you have the difference between tumors and inflammations. If you have dark urine, you tend to have inflammations somewhere in the body. If you have light-colored urine, you tend to have tumors. That's one thing. But in this way you can draw conclusions about all diseases from the urine, if you only examine the urine correctly.

So, more on this on Wednesday.