The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The undeveloped person follows his instincts, the average person chooses between them, he refines and purifies them. This work is done by all of humanity. The I does this work on the astral body, which integrates itself into it as a higher one. The astral body consists of two parts: one that the human being had before humanity moved into him; the other he has transformed into the spiritual self. A man in whose soul nothing stirs any more that incites him to passions and desires has transformed his astral body into a spiritual self. From the middle of the Atlantean period until a distant future, man has to accomplish this work through his I.

The work of the I is the shaping of the spirit of the mind at the astral body,
the shaping of the spirit of life at the etheric body,
and the shaping of the spirit of the human being at the physical body, and this work is carried out systematically by the students of occultism.

The ennoblement of the astral body through the acquisition of intellectual abilities resembles the minute hand of the clock, the transformation of the etheric body through the ennoblement of the temperaments and moral abilities resembles the hour hand of the clock. The most powerful impulses for changing morals come from religions, they emanate from the great founders of religions, and also through genuine art, an art in which the divine passes through the sensual forms.

The etheric body also consists of two parts: one that the human being has inherited and one that he transforms into the spirit of life. This happens through conscious, systematic work in a spiritual way, which then takes firmer hold than the inherited part. The effect of such work can then be applied to the physical body. This task is not the lowest, but the highest; it requires the strongest forces.

The physical body is a structure full of wisdom, which is less understood by man than the astral body. We know more about our instincts, passions and desires than about how blood corpuscles move. What do we know about the functions of the spleen, liver, gall bladder, pineal gland? The latter was once used for clairvoyance and will be made capable of it again.

Man will not get to know his own body through anatomy, by cutting up corpses, but through inner observation, through mastery of the body. The first step in this direction will be the transformation of the breathing process. The breath is the breath that, as it were, breathes into itself, which is why “Atma” means “spiritual man”. This I with its bodies is at the same time an imprint of the universe. With each step that man takes, his penetration into the universe deepens.

It is dangerous and misleading to speak of theosophy as if the soul were absorbed in the universe. This absorption can only be achieved in stages through the deification of the human being.

The three fundamental aspects of the self:
the astral body, transformed into manas or spirit self;
the etheric body, transformed into budhi or life spirit;
the physical self, transformed into atma or spiritual man.

The I is not easy to understand, it arises through work on the lower limbs; for this it must be trained.

After the Atlantean time, people began to work on the Manas. In the Lemurian time, it entered the physical body. Before that, only the physical body, etheric body and astral body existed. There was an intermediate stage until the middle of the Atlantean period before work on the Manas could begin. Three stages were prepared for the ability to work out the I: the sentient soul, the mind soul and the consciousness soul. As far as the I is conscious, it works on the astral body in the mind soul. As the sword is in its sheath, so is the sentient soul in the soul body. The I first fertilizes the sentient, intellectual and consciousness soul in the astral body and works on the spirit self, life spirit and spiritual man in the etheric body.

In the Nordic Druid schools, there were nine members of the human being, in Egypt seven. The Nordic students distinguished between the astral body or Kama-Rupa, the sentient soul in the soul body and, in the higher Manas, the consciousness soul and spirit self.

According to the sevenfold division, five members are developed, two - Budhi and Atma - are still in the core.

When a person falls asleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed; the astral body and the ego withdraw, along with everything that develops through the ego. The dream is an intermediate state when the astral body is still connected to the etheric body in a certain way. Actually, the astral body should also be out; but one must not imagine this out-of-being in a tangible way. The astral body is drawn out with its powers; this is to be understood dynamically, not spatially. As long as the astral body is in the body, the person thinks and feels; all consciousness takes place through the eye, ear and so on. All this sinks when the astral body withdraws, fatigue sets in, but in the morning it gives way to refreshment.

Where do the forces that strengthen and heal people come from? When people sleep, they lie in their physical and etheric bodies, which are in a plant-like state. Meanwhile, the soul returns to its radiant, better home in the astral plane. For those who have not yet been trained, all experiences sink into a higher world. More highly developed beings then find themselves in a surging world of flowing sound formations. At first there is silence, but spiritual ears hear a new world of sounds. It is possible to hear the connection between the planets and our sun. Those who look at the starry sky in terms of the Ptolemaic system see the stars moving. Divided into 360 degrees, each star moves one degree in relation to each other in one hundred years. Saturn moves one thousand two hundred times as fast, Jupiter two and a half times as fast; Jupiter moves five times as fast in relation to Mars, and Mars moves twice as fast as the Sun, Venus and Mercury - when viewed occultly. Mercury to Moon is like twelve to one.

According to the speed of movement, each world body has a different tone; the harmony is the music of the spheres or spherical harmony. These tones move and swim in astral substances and forces. Just as we do not see the stars during the day, the soul moves away from its home; at night, it returns to a blissful, comforting element. The soul plunges into the cosmic worlds that belong to the sun, and in its vibrations the soul renews its strength.

Paracelsus had the right concept for this state, he says: “A calm sleep must always bring health; insomnia, insufficient sleep shorten the physical life.

After death, only the physical body remains and [this is] left to the dissolution of its substances and forces. The etheric body no longer works against the dissolution. The state that the etheric body is united with the deceased without the physical body can last for two to three days; it can last about as long as a person could endure without sleep. During this time, everything he has experienced from birth until he loses consciousness in death passes in his memory. No pain or pleasure is associated with these memories, the images are objective, they pass by like in a panorama. This is because the etheric body has the ability to form memories through the ego; it is the carrier of memory. It is an experience that the etheric body is separated from the physical body after death.

In a finger, there are muscles and nerve ganglia. These ganglia are immersed in the substance of the etheric body as if in a hollow sphere. When a limb falls asleep, we feel a tingling sensation. This comes from a partial separation from the etheric body. Hypnotizing is therefore dangerous because a permanent tendency to push out the etheric body can arise. For a short time, the etheric body can leave the physical body through shock, falling and the like; if the person remains conscious, life appears as an image. This is proof that the etheric body conveys memory.

When a person is free from the physical body through death and in the etheric body, he takes an extract of life with him, which joins the others as a new leaf, like a link in a chain. In this way, the ego enriches itself, the carrier of all further wanderings.

Yesterday I described the astral world. To-day we shall deal with man's life after death in the astral world. This will give us a basis for an understanding of reincarnation and karma.

We have seen that when we die the following processes take place: The physical body remains behind as a corpse; whereas during sleep the etheric body remains connected with physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego go out of the physical body at the moment of death. Immediately after death, the whole earthly life unfolds itself in every detail before the soul of the departed in the form of pictures. This process lasts for about three days, until the next separation, namely that of the etheric body from the astral body and the Ego. In the occult meaning we therefore speak of two corpses. After a while, the etheric body remains behind as a second corpse.

When the second separation has taken place, the capacity of memory ceases—but not for always—and a new condition begins for the human being. What is this new condition? Man now experiences himself in the world which he enters every night during sleep. But this after-death condition greatly differs from the sleeping condition. Theosophical books sometimes describe death as if it were a kind of sleep. But this is not the case; soon after death man grows conscious of the astral world. Nevertheless there exists in the proverb: Sleep is the brother of death. ... and this is justified. This new state of existence is called life in Kamaloca.

We have seen that during sleep the astral body works on the physical body and on the etheric body in order to renew their forces. This work suppresses consciousness during sleep and prevents us from having perceptions of the astral world. After death the astral body is dispensed from this work indeed no longer to restore fatigue, and for this reason it begins to grow conscious of the astral world. Upon the Earth, this force was used for the reconstruction of the physical body, but now it is free and exists in the form of consciousness. When the astral body is no longer obliged to restore anything, it perceives the images of the astral world. This also shows you why we should strive after a sound sleep.

Observe physical life here in this world, how everyone seeks to satisfy his senses. What a human being enjoys, is enjoyed by his soul, but the organ which enables him to enjoy is physical. If a person enjoys eating, the soul needs the palate for its enjoyment. After death the longing for these enjoyments continues to exist, whereas the organs no longer exist. The soul yearns for good food, but the organ enabling it to taste it is lacking. The longing can no longer be satisfied. The soul is like a wanderer suffering terrible thirst looking in vain for water, for a possibility to quench his thirst.

This state of existence does not last forever, little by little the longings cease. Many religions describe it as a life in purgatory. And old painter sometimes depicted in other pictures with flames of fire. In fact, the soul suffers a burning thirst.

The further courses is that the human being feels his last longings and lives through his whole life backwards, as far as his birth; when he had no passionate longings. Afterwards man enters Devachan. This is clearly indicated in the Gospel verse: unless ye become like little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.—Little by little the human being must free himself from everything which linked him up with the physical world. Kamaloca is the condition in which he emancipates himself from everything which chains him to the world of the senses. It is influenced entirely by the sensory life in the physical world. If a person entirely submitted to his senses, his life in Kamaloca will be long and difficult. Ordinarily the Kamaloca-existence takes up about one third of the duration of earthly life. Past life rises up before the soul in the form of images and beings that torment us. In Kamaloca everything is reversed: what used to satisfy us, is now want. Hot passion calls up the feeling of horrible chilling Beings. And the burning thirst remains throughout. The more a human being freed himself from physical life before death and the easier his death, the more readily will he disaccustom himself to the world of the senses. In the case of suicides this will be most difficult of all, for they were the prey of an illusion: they do not consider that in violently severing themselves from the life of the senses, they will be seized by an unspeakable greed for their physical body, which would keep them in close proximity to the physical world. A similar fate—though in a weaker form awaits those who lost their life suddenly through some accident. Such a sudden death also brings with it an avidity for the physical world, for the physical body, but later on this will be compensated in Devachan. When the soul has laid aside its earthly desires, it enters the Devachan state of existence.

Spiritual science does not teach us to turn away from life. The spiritual scientist may use the following comparison: the soul resembles a bee that flies out to the meadows to seek honey and bring it back to the hive. Here on earth the soul gathers the honey of life which he brings to the altar of the Godhead after death. The soul could never do this without a life in the physical world.

When man incarnates and begins to see, he at first simply perceives through his eyes. Gradually spiritual enjoyment grows out of this. Physical pleasure changes into spiritual enjoyment. The savage with but a few incarnations enjoys the many colors and the simplest sense-impressions. With each incarnation his senses grow more refined.—If we had never enjoyed colours sensually, we could never attain spiritual enjoyment of colors. The sensually enjoyment is therefore a necessary deviation. We should enjoy the beauty of the physical world. Similarly, sensual love gradually leads to the highest, purest, spiritual love. The soul should transform every experience and carry it up to the altar of spirituality. Nothing, really nothing, is ever lost. Without the school of sensuality, we can never reach spirituality. The Earth is not a valley of tears, it is a gathering place and the human beings are—so the Bible says—messengers, Angels of God, sent out to gather honey.

The human being is passing through a process of transformation. Think of your childhood years! How many thoughts and concepts approached you and how much you took in! And how your thoughts and concepts changed from the 10th to the 20th year! Your temperament undergoes a far weaker change. A passionate child will still be passionate in old age. The temperament is engraved in the human body. A choleric person has quite a different expression, bearing and walk from a sanguine, melancholic or phlegmatic person. We should strive, above all, to change our temperament to a certain extent at least. This was a training Occult Schools. The whole trend of life was changed in Occult Schools. The essential thing there was to transform the will.

After death, our spiritual connections and ties reach us as far as Devachan. Two people are intimate friends and their friendship takes on more and more spiritual character. Yet the physical body constitutes a certain obstacle. In Devachan this friendship will find its full, pure expression.

Everything that we drew out of our earthly life becomes interwoven with the soul, with the spirit. This enables us to shape our next incarnation, as far as the body, and earthly life is the expression of what we worked out for ourselves. In the East there is a proverb which says: what you think to-day, you are tomorrow.

During each incarnation we thus work for the next one. In my next lecture I will describe man's experiences in Devachan. Life in Devachan is not a dream-condition, for the human being does not sleep through the spiritual world. There, his consciousness is a much higher one, it is more alive than here on Earth. In Devachan everything appears in a stronger light. We do not lose our friends in Devachan; our connections with them are simply of another kin—it is a far more intimate and spiritual union. Devachan is a far more real state of existence than earthly life.

We have followed the evolution of mankind back as far as Atlantis and will now proceed to the study of Lemuria and speak of the Lemurian human forms. These human beings are the first representatives of real men with bodies permeated by souls. Let us first consider the structure of the Lemurian continent and the type of human being who lived on it.

In the Lemurian age everything was filled with the kind of watery mass, out of which emerged islands which were all of a volcanic kind. Typical for Lemuria is the manifold change in Nature, in the forms and in life. The single forms and species underwent a rapid transformation. The Atlantean soul-characteristics were in the case of the Lemurians, still more strongly marked, especially the will, which also had the greatest influence on the form of the physical body. This consisted only of gelatinous, transparent substances, into which the present bones and muscles had still to be built in. An organ which plays a very great role to-day was then in its very first beginnings. This is very significant, for with the development of the lungs is connected the fact that man was endowed with a living soul.

This installment did not happen in a moment, but lasted throughout long epochs of time.—How was the human soul connected with the body, before giving life to this body which, according to present-day concepts was very misshapen? It was the same connection which now exists during sleep: the soul was outside the body, it soared above it and drew it with it to an earth which was at that time still permeated by powerful streams of life.

The Lemurian constantly lived in a sleep-like condition which may be compared with our dream-consciousness in which a living image-world appears. He could only perceive in this manner and he knew the meaning of the single images, thus recognizing the soul-aspect of things.

An important moment in evolution was when he first used his body for the purpose of perception. The human being moved about in swinging, soaring movements. For this purpose he had a special organ in his bodily cavity, a kind of swimming bladder. The lungs developed out of this bladder, under the influence of the soul that soared above the body. The soul entered the human body in the same measure in which man began to breathe through his lungs. He actually breathed in his soul, with the air he breathed. This process too is described with literal accuracy in Genesis, in the Six Days' Creation, with the words: And God breathed his breath into man and he became a living soul ...

At that time man had the outward appearance of a very soft-bodied dragon (the designation of snake does not quite correspond to the reality); his companions were toads, fish, frogs, etc., in short, a primeval world of reptiles and amphibians, though their present-day descendants can in no way be compared with them; for they are quite degenerate descendants. At that time there were no mammals. To-day no remains can be found either of these reptiles or of the human beings of that age.

How should the relation between animal and man be tought of? The theory of man's ascent from apes may be considered as obsolete, for it is based upon a false train of thought. Think of a morally degenerate and of a highly ethical man. The assertion that man is descended from apes is like saying that the perfect man descends from the imperfect one. They need not descend from one another at all, but they may have a common father and be brothers! The one developed upwards, the other became decadent. Also the relation between ape and man may be viewed in this light. On Atlantis, the human form was still ape-like. During the Lemurian age the sole possession of a body which was even less perfect. This body then took an upward course of development. But the ape-like forms have partly degenerated and have become the apes of to-day. The apes are therefore the degenerated bodily brothers of man.

In the Atlantean age the human race branched out; the one main stem to an ascending development and became the human being of to-day, whereas the other descended and became the ape of to-day. All animals which live among us are consequently human beings who were expelled and condemned to degeneration. The ascent of certain beings is only possible through the fact that others sacrifice themselves. The higher expels the lower, in order to rise still higher; later on there will be a compensation for those who were expelled.

In this connection we must speak of a cosmic event of greatest importance, without which the soul could never have incarnated. This is the exit of the moon from the earth. The moon severed itself from the earth and formed a secondary planet. Formally, moon and earth were one planet. Thus the evolution of the Earth and the evolution of man are closely connected. What the astronomer sees of the moon, is not the whole moon, for everything in the world also has a soul. So also the moon has its soul. The moon went out of the earth with all its forces, with its whole aura, or its astral part.

This event stands in closest connection with everything which one calls fecundation and procreation. The ancient Greek Mysteries still knew this. In the Lemurian age the sexes began to separate; before that time the human beings were hermaphrodites. There was no act of fecundation and conception; procreation took place in a manner which has been preserved in certain lower living beings. The separation of the sexes coincided with the separation of the moon. This applies to all living beings. At that time, certain forces were eliminated from the earth, which had given man the possibility to bring forth descendants without the aid of another being. These forces were eliminated through the exit of the moon. At that time earth plus moon circled round the sun. But the moon maintained the old movement of the earth-moon planet, for it does not turn around its own axis as does the earth. Even as the moon of to-day always turns the same side to the earth, its “sun” and never the back side, so at that time the earth-moon planet always turned the same side to the sun.

Sun, moon and planets are also inhabited by beings. In a still earlier time, sun, moon, and earth were one body, and everything which now exists in the form of human beings, animals and plants, still lived together with sun. At that time man still had a quite etheric form of a very fine substance and he lived a kind of plant-existence. Animal forms and human forms arose much later, for at that time everything still stood at one stage of planned-existence.

These sun-plants were of course entirely different from the plants of to-day. Nevertheless when they say with their blossom they strove towards the center of the planet, i.e. the sun, and that their roots stretched upwards. When the sun severed itself from the earth, the plants turned completely around and again turned their blossom to the sun. From that time onwards the blossom stretched upwards and the root downwards. the animals only made a right-angle turn, when the moon left the earth.¹ Man made a complete turn, so that he is a reversed plant, even as the plant is a reversed human being.

The life-soul passes through the three kingdoms of Nature. Plato therefore says that the world-soul is nailed on to the cross of the world. Also the human soul hangs on that cross, by passing through the three realms of Nature. This is the significance of the Cross in the ancient Mysteries.

From the world-historical aspect, the whole process of development exists for the sake of man. Life can only arise out of life, but life eliminates the lifeless. Everything lifeless has arisen out of life. The minerals are deposits of living substance. But life comes from the spirit. The spirit is consequently the first original source, from which everything descends. And man is the first-born of creation. He has thrown out animals, plants and minerals; the lower always comes from higher.

To-morrow we shall speak of the development of man towards higher stages of knowledge.

• 1. See in this connection: Rudolf Steiner: “Goetheanismus, ein Menschen-Umwandlungsimpuls und Auferstehungsgedanke” 1st Lecture: Die Antwort der Geistwissenschaft auf die wichtigsten Fragen der Zeit. (Philes.Anthrop.Publish. Company, Dornach)

Today I should like to add a few remarks to what I started to say in the last lecture. Since our friends wish it, I shall today and tomorrow endeavour to penetrate more deeply into this matter. But so that we may understand, and not misunderstand, one another when I start to illuminate the subject more from the spiritual side, as is the intention, I must first of all lay the foundation. For if we cannot take into account certain circumstances now prevailing on the physical plane and also the times during which these circumstances were being prepared, then it is not possible to enter into the more spiritual aspects. You know that it is not a question of taking sides or of sympathies or antipathies, but of displaying certain conditions and relationships which, so I have heard, some people wish to know in order to help them understand today's difficult times. So today, in so far as time allows, I shall give a few more introductory explanations.

To start with, it must become clear to us that everything that happens externally on the physical plane is dependent on the underlying spiritual forces and powers. But it is difficult to get to know precisely and concretely the manner in which these spiritual forces and powers work. For the incursions of the spiritual world into the physical plane are more obvious in some places than in others. I have often pointed out here that there are, in a certain way, lines of connection, via the most varied intermediate links, between the external world and the secret brotherhoods, and onwards from the secret brotherhoods to the spiritual world. To understand this rightly it is necessary to take into account that wherever human beings work with the help of spiritually effective forces, whether with good or evil intent, they have to reckon with long stretches of time; because of this, account must also be taken of the fact that much depends on the ability of the individual to grasp and use the conditions of the physical plane with a certain cold-blooded detachment. This is particularly required when existing spiritual streams are to be used in order to achieve something. During the course of my description you will doubtless see whether something is striven for or achieved with good or bad intent. One characteristic of those who make use of spiritual forces is that very frequently—not always but very frequently—they have reasons for not wishing to appear on the stage of the physical plane. Instead they make use of intermediaries through whom certain plans can be realized. Often these things have to be done in such a way that others do not notice what is going on. I have already pointed out a number of times that people are, in a way, inattentive; they do not like looking closely at what is going on. Many of those who work with certain occult connections in order to bring something about in the world make use of this fact. Those of us who see the world, not in the usual way but with free and open eyes, will know that there are people who can be influenced by those who want to make use of such means. Someone who is intent on influencing people, someone who, as an occultist, is not entirely scrupulous, can indeed gain power over people in this way.

Let me start right at the beginning and take an example. You will find that starting at the beginning will lead us to an understanding of more profound aspects later. In the year 1889 Count Richard von Pfeil, who had lived in St Petersburg and knew it quite well, wrote the following lines about the reigning Tsar of Russia:

‘The overall impression I gained of Tsar Alexander III confirmed what I had long suspected: that those around him were purposely keeping him in a state of deep mistrust towards Germany and that this mistrust was now so firmly rooted in him that a change could hardly be expected. He was rightly convinced of his own deep love of peace, but he also believed his counsellors and other influential people in Russia, many of whom did not desire peace nearly as strongly as did he.’

Here, in a most prominent position, you have an individual of whom it must be said: He can be influenced by those who approach him for that purpose, yet who do not want to show themselves by stepping into the foreground. What does someone do who knows about certain connections arising out of the impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean period and wants to make use of them for his own ends or those of some group? He aspires to approach such a person by awakening the impression that nothing is further from his mind than the desire to influence him, so that no one will notice that he does indeed desire to gain influence. And so he gains influence over him. All he need do is form his sentences in a certain way, use certain expressions, and other means which I shall not describe, and he succeeds in turning the other's mind in the desired direction. The world at large, being to a certain extent unobservant and therefore kindly disposed in its judgement of certain people, will simply assume: Well, he is rightly convinced of his love of peace, but he also believes all his counsellors and other influential people!

You see how easy it is in the widest context to practise something similar to what I have described in another case, that of Blavatsky. After the mahatma who is known as K.H. had had a good influence over her for a while, he was replaced, through machinations, by another who was a spy in the hands of a particular society. He had run away from certain secret brotherhoods into whose highest degrees he had been initiated, and it was thus possible for him to remain in the background as a mahatma and achieve, through Blavatsky, things that he wanted to achieve.

By pointing out these elementary matters I simply want to draw your attention to what you must take into account if you want to form a judgement; for the world is frequently misled by the way in which history is written. The writing of history is really something very much more profound. Only at the outermost edge of physical existence, in the utmost maya, can it be said: If this or that professor is a competent historian who has mastered the historical method, he will know how to depict the right things historically. This need not be the case at all. Whether a historian knows how to depict the right things or not depends on whether his karma leads him to the possibility of discovering the right things or not. Everything depends on this. For the right things are often not expressed in what he finds when he looks here or there; they are often revealed only to one who knows how to find the right places to look. Let me say this in another way: For one who is led by his karma to see the right things at the right moment, they are revealed at the point where something significant is expressed by a single phenomenon. Often a single phenomenon expresses something that throws light on decades, illuminating like a flash of lightning what is really happening. To prepare for what will be specially important when we turn to the more spiritual aspects, I should now like to tell you a little story.

There was, in Vienna, a physician who, even in the eighties of the last century, was practising analytical psychology, psychoanalysis, though not to the exaggerated extent that has since become fashionable through the theories of Freud. He still lives there, as a matter of fact, but no longer occupies himself so much with these things. He enjoyed some outstanding successes with his psychoanalysis because he managed to draw a good deal out of people by his method of catechism. In 1886 a man came to this physician who gave the impression that he might have a great deal inside him. So he started to treat him for his nervous condition. And indeed, for a doctor who knew his job, there was a good deal to be found in this man's soul life; it was handed to him on a plate, you might say. This was a particularly interesting case. The doctor found out that his patient was involved in the most varied political factions, that he could poke his nose in everywhere and had his finger in every pie. He also discovered that he wrote articles for certain journals and that these articles had a great influence on the ruler of his country.

The patient, Voidarevich was his name, was a late descendant of a family of voivodes from Herzegovina. He said a great many things. Amongst much else he knew all about the interconnections in the net spun from Russia in the seventies in Herzegovina and Bosnia before the beginning of the Russo-Turkish war. Under normal conditions people do not usually give away such secrets; but under the hands of a psychoanalyst things come out which would otherwise remain hidden. After a number of sessions it became clear that he had also been involved when, before the declaration of war, King Milan and Nikita had resisted Turkey at the end of the seventies, and the uprisings in Bosnia and Herzegovina had been arranged. The motive for declaring war on Turkey had been given to Nikita and Milan by sources in Russia. And yet, outwardly, it was said, the people of the Balkans had been roused by the bad treatment given them by Turkey. This is not to deny that such treatment did occur. I am only relating the connections and, in this respect, we must realize that causes often lie, or are made, far longer ago than is suspected.

Something else was revealed by Voidarevich, something that prompted the doctor to seek an interview with an appropriate authority in Vienna, for even though it was only a matter of disconnected sentences, nevertheless the doctor, an intelligent man, was able to deduce a great deal. He learned from Voidarevich that the Russian ambassador was in Vienna and was on his way to St Petersburg, and not to Constantinople as the papers were saying. Further, he learned that the Russian Foreign Minister was staying at home and would not be going to a Bohemian spa as the papers were saying. These two things made a strange impression on the doctor: that the Russian ambassador in Constantinople was on his way to St Petersburg via Vienna, and that the Russian Foreign Minister was not going to a Bohemian spa but was waiting in St Petersburg to receive the ambassador, and also that the newspapers were saying something quite different. It suddenly dawned on him—it was one of those obscure intuitions that come by instinct: All this is connected with the fact that Alexander von Battenberg is to be deposed in Bulgaria. It all seemed very suspicious to the doctor, and he informed the appropriate authority. But the appropriate authority merely knew that the Russian ambassador was travelling to St Petersburg on private business, as they say; and the authority was quite satisfied with this explanation, as often happens, because such authorities, too, can be so plagued by that urge for inattentiveness about which I have spoken, that they are not in the least concerned with getting to the bottom of things. And a week later Battenberg was forced to abdicate.

You see, this is quite an insignificant event from a historian's point of view, but it is nevertheless an event that throws light in the deepest sense. And if it had not happened ‘by chance’—as is so easily said—that the doctor wormed these things out of Voidarevich by psychoanalysis, it would never have come to light. The threads of karma run in remarkable ways. We know from the psychoanalysis that Voidarevich—who gave away a number of other things of a similar kind—was destined, had everything gone according to plan for the descendants of the ancient voivodes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to assume the rank of voivode himself. Because of the light that dawned on the doctor we know how the threads ran from Russia in the East to Herzegovina and Bosnia and we can eavesdrop on the origins of a story that later on played an important part in history. For Voidarevich was in the service of Russia and was a party to all this from the beginning.

So we are dealing here, not exactly with magic but with the knowledge of how to utilize the situation and conditions of the physical plane in order to achieve certain quite definite aims. Voidarevich failed to serve his purpose only because he grew nervous; a great deal had been instilled into him and it was intended that he should achieve much. You have here a striking example of how to work in the world while at the same time obliterating the tracks you intend to follow. From this you will be able to grasp that forming judgements about world events is not as easy as is usually imagined. Those who desire to work systematically behind the scenes of world history know very well how to pull such strings and they are cold-blooded enough to make use of them in a way that suits their purpose. Much can be exploited in this connection. Only a thirst for knowledge and a will to learn can lead us to see the things of the world clearly.

In order to understand what many of our friends here are striving to grasp, let us turn our attention to what exactly there is that can be utilized. We will look at the manner in which the streams of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch work through certain externally discernible endeavours and facts of the present time in a wider sense. Let us start with the Russian people in the East of Europe. I said only last Monday that all the people of Europe have taken them to their hearts. In the Russian people, together with various other Slav elements, there lives—I have spoken about this a number of times—a folk element of the future. For in the folk spirit of all that is gathered together as the Slav peoples there lives what, one day in the future, will furnish the material for the spiritual stream of the sixth post-Atlantean epoch.

In this Slav element we have first the Russian people and, in addition, all those other Slavs who, though differentiated from the Russians, nevertheless feel themselves in some degree linked as Slavs with the Russian Slavs. Out of these links arises, or arose, what is nowadays known as Pan-Slavism, a sense among all Slavs of belonging together in spirit and in soul, in political and in cultural life. In so far as such a thing lives within the folk soul it is a thoroughly honest and, also in the higher sense of human evolution, a right thing—though the word ‘pan’ is thoroughly misused these days. For one who understands the interconnections it is possible to use the phrase ‘Pan-Slavism’ for that spiritual communion which, I would like to say, quivers through all Slav souls in the way I have just described. To speak of ‘Pan-Germanism’, whether within or outside Germany, is nonsense, more than just mischief, for it is not possible to force everything into the same mould. If something does not exist, it is not possible to speak about it. It might perhaps be posed as a theory and even haunt the minds of some individuals; but it is quite different from that genuine communion which quivers in the many Slav souls, varying from one Slav people to another.

Whoever, since the nineteenth century, has concerned himself seriously with certain spiritual knowledge, knows that in the East of Europe there is a separate folk element. Spiritual scientists have always known that a folk element for the future lives in the Slavs. If certain occultists belonging to the Theosophical Society have maintained something else, for instance that this folk element for the future sixth sub-race lies with the Americans, this only goes to prove either that these people were no occultists or that they wished to bring about something other than that provided for by the facts. So we must reckon with the fact that there is in the East an element which bears a certain future within it, that emerges as though out of the blood, an element that today is still basically naive and does not know itself, yet prophetically and instinctively contains within itself something which will one day evolve from it. It is often present in dreams.

As every spiritual scientist further knows—not externally, but as a cultural fact—the Polish element comes forward in a quite particular way as the most advanced and culturally secure, because it is both political and religious; this element differs from all the other Slav elements in that it possesses a uniform, firmly-rooted spiritual and cultural life that is exceptionally vigorous and energetic. This just as a short sketch. Perhaps we will go into more detail later.

Let us return to what I have just described. In contrast to what I characterized just now there is the spiritual and cultural life of the British people, which is equally well-known to the spiritual scientist in its deeper significance. I mean the kind of cultural life as it appears before the world in British institutions and the life of the British people. This element is, above all, extremely political in character; its tendency is supremely political. One consequence emerging from it is the political thinking that is so much admired by the rest of the world; in a certain way the most advanced and free kind of political thinking. Wherever in the world efforts have been made to set up political institutions in which freedom can live—freedom in the sense we have come to understand it since the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century—there, ideas have been borrowed from British thinking. The French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century was more a matter of feeling, of passionate impulsiveness, but the thoughts it contained had been brought over from British thinking. The manner in which political concepts are formed, the manner in which political bodies are structured, the manner in which the will of the people is led within political organizations that are as free as possible so that it can work from all sides—all this is expressed in British political thinking in accordance with its original tendencies. That is why so many new states in the nineteenth century imitated British institutions. In many places efforts were made to take over the British way of parliamentary life and parliamentary institutions, for in this connection British thinking is the teacher of modern times.

In England during the nineteenth century, let us say up to its final decades, this political thinking came to expression in some very important politicians who modelled their thoughts in particular on this political thinking. One thing especially became obvious: The salvation of the world could be brought about by this thinking if only people would devote themselves entirely to it and allow nothing else to take effect in the arrangements of the various institutions. Therefore, politicians who may seem one-sided to some extent but who model their thoughts entirely on this political thinking and endeavour to work in accordance with it, appear as outstanding and entirely moral. Think of Cobden, Bright and others, not to speak of greater men who are always being mentioned; for in this field it is very possible to go astray as soon as a really prominent position is reached. That is why I mention those who have not gone astray in any direction but who are genuinely important in the sense I now mean. I could name many others. This phenomenon was really present there as an impulse right up to the nineties of the nineteenth century, and as such it is, in a certain way, the counter-image of what I described earlier as being borne by the Slav people. For this way of forming thoughts of a political orientation belongs in its character very much to the fifth post-Atlantean period. That is where it belongs and where it has to be developed. And those people I have mentioned have taken it up in the right way. On the one hand we have something that is made visible through good sense, intelligence and political morality, and on the other something that exists as a future folk potential deep down, not only in the soul but in the blood.

Let it be clear to us that what I am speaking about is not only my own knowledge; it was viewed in the way I have described throughout the nineteenth century by those who are concerned with such things. In those western brotherhoods I told you about there lived an exact knowledge of these things and of their connection with the stream of evolution in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and its transition to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. And in some individuals there was the will—we have yet to see whether for good or bad—to make use of the forces concerned. For these are indeed forces: on the one hand the talent to think in that way, and on the other a folk element for the future.

If someone wants to use these things, he can. Of course there exist not only those streams I have described but also others which flow side by side with them, and it is necessary gradually to point these out as well. There exist ways and means in the world of carrying out what I might call ‘mass hypnosis’. To bring about a suggestion on a grand scale you have to place something in the world which makes an impression. Just as it is possible to insinuate an idea into the mind of an individual in the way I have shown, so too, by using suitable means, suggestions can be made to whole groups of people, especially when one knows what actually binds these groups together. It is possible to steer a force that lives in an individual person in a particular direction. This person may then be totally convinced of his deep love of peace; and yet he does what he does because somehow or other a suggestion has been planted in him. He is quite at odds with what he does. In the same way, with the right knowledge, similar things can be done to whole groups; it is merely a matter of selecting the appropriate means. You take a force that lives but has no particular direction, such as the force living in certain Slav races, and by suggestion on a grand scale you nudge it into a definite direction.

There is a suggestion on a grand scale which has worked, is still working and will continue to work in a marvellous manner: the so-called ‘Testament of Peter the Great’. You know the history of Peter the Great; you know how he was at pains to introduce western life into Russia. There is no need for me to describe it since you can read it up in any encyclopaedia. I have no intention of recounting external history nor of developing sympathy in any one direction; I shall merely point in the simplest way to certain facts. Much of what is said of Peter the Great is true, but it is not true that he composed that testament. The testament is a forgery; it did not come from him but emerged at a certain point, in the way such things do emerge, out of all sorts of underground goings on. It was thrown in amongst human evolution; suddenly it was there. It has nothing to do with Peter the Great but a great deal to do with certain underground currents. It is very convincing, for it vindicates the future of Russia—I say Russia, not the Slav people—by stating that Russia must extend her boundaries over the Balkan states and Constantinople, across the Dardanelles and so forth. All this is contained in the testament of Peter the Great. It is easy to be so moved by this testament that one says: This is no bungling effort, it has been given to the world by a grand gesture of genius! I still sometimes recall the impression made by the testament of Peter the Great, during a course I had to give, when I studied it with individual students in order to demonstrate the implications of the separate paragraphs and their influence on the cultural development of Europe.

Those who desire to work in this way are always concerned, not to stimulate just one stream but to make sure that one stream is always crossed by another, so that they influence each other in some way. Not much is achieved by simply running straight ahead with a single stream. It is necessary sometimes to throw a sidelight on this stream so that certain things become confused, so that certain tracks are covered up, and other things are lost in an impenetrable thicket. This is very important. Thus it comes about that certain secret streams which have set themselves some task or other also set about achieving the exact opposite. These opposing tasks have the effect of obliterating all tracks. I could point to a place in Europe where so-called Freemasonry, so-called secret societies, had a great influence at a certain time when significant things were going on; certain people were acting under the suggestive influence of certain Masonic societies with an occult background. It was then necessary to obliterate the tracks at this point. So a certain Jesuit influence was brought to play so that the Masonic and Jesuit influences met; for there are higher instances, ‘empires’, which can quite well make use of both Masons and Jesuits in order to achieve what they want to achieve through the collaboration of the two. Do not believe that there can be no individuals who are both Jesuit and Freemason. They have progressed beyond the point of working in one direction only. They know that it is necessary to tackle situations from various sides in order to push matters in a particular direction. I say this in order to point out certain connections in an elementary way.

Peter the Great—let us return to him once more—introduced western civilization into Russia. Many genuine Slav souls bear a deep hate for all the western elements that Peter the Great brought to Russia; they have a deep antipathy against it all. This has grown particularly strong during this war, but it has always been present. On the other hand there is the testament of Peter the Great, which is not really his but which somehow made its appearance, and which is suitable for making use, by means of suggestion, not of individuals, but of whole masses of Slav connections, those masses in whom lives that antipathy towards the west that is symbolized by the name Peter the Great. So here we have two things at the same time in a way amounting, I must say, to historical genius: sympathy with the testament of Peter the Great and antipathy towards everything western. They work beautifully all muddled up together, so mingled, in fact, that their working can become extremely effective. And with this I point to another side of this stream in the East. I shall show as we continue how, after years of preparation, use can be made of such a stream from a definite moment onwards. Then there is one stream into which, as it were, two tributaries haved been made to flow. As I said at the beginning, account has been taken of long passages of time. Once a stream has been brought to the point of being effective, it can then be put to use.

Now let us prepare in yet another way. I want to show you another stream that flows along in the West beside the one that has brought into being what is hitherto the most mature political way of thinking in the fifth post-Atlantean period. This other stream has been more hidden and has only revealed its occult basis from time to time, smuggled into all kinds of public activities. With that I have to point once again to certain secret brotherhoods in the West. It is characteristic of these, more than anything else, that they have an exact knowledge of the kind of situations I have been describing and can instruct their pupils how things are going for the fifth, for the sixth post-Atlantean period, and what kind of forces are at work: for instance for the one the element of intelligence, and for the other the folk element. And they can show their pupils how such things can be used for one purpose or another.

These occult streams which live, as I have said, through the secret brotherhoods have, as one of their basic doctrines, the teaching that the English-speaking peoples are for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch what the Romans were for the fourth. This is a fundamental doctrine among these brotherhoods and they say further that, whatever happens, account must be taken first of the Latin element. This expresses itself in the various Latin cultures and peoples—I am not saying this myself but am merely repeating what has always been taught in the brotherhoods—and is destined to be submerged further and further in the materialism of science, the materialism of life and the materialism of religion. There is no need to take any trouble over these, for eventually they will disintegrate in the decadence into which they will fall. So, they say, their chief attention must be turned to ensuring that what they call the Latin race is in the process of total disintegration, that it is an element that is perishing; the task is to arrange and do everything in such a way that the Latin element will perish.

This view goes so far as to say: Those forces which push the Latin element down the slippery slope must be absorbed into all political impulses and also all spiritual and religious impulses. Of course nothing of this must show outwardly; but support must be given to anything that helps to free the world of the Latin element. They say that, just as at the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period everything was to be permeated with the Latin culture, so at the end of the fifth period the nature of everything must be filled with the culture that is to arise out of the English-speaking peoples. I am only speaking of the teachings of the secret brotherhoods and of what can, and indeed does, ensue from them. In addition, it has always been taught that, just as the Germanic-British element, as they call it, opposed the Latin; so will the Slav element come to oppose the English element, for that is the way of the world. Only now there is a ninety-degree change of direction. Whereas the Latin element found its impulse in the North, now the impulse strives from East to West.

We must realize that such things flow into much that is printed, much that is read by the general public, and into whatever else seeps into human social life. There are ways and means of bringing this about unnoticed, as I have described. For just imagine if this were to become known in certain quarters—it is, of course, unthinkable! It is just that things are expressed differently; it is a matter of exercising influence by means of suggestion. You can do one thing and say another, you can say something different from what you are doing, and you can often do something that seems to be the opposite of what is supposed to happen and of what you are really doing.

You may look upon what I have been sketching for you as some kind of spiritual atmosphere; indeed care is taken that it should be a kind of spiritual atmosphere. You might read something quite innocuous, but between the lines—this concept ‘between the lines’ can be something perfectly concrete—you find yourself reading something quite different as well; you learn something quite different and find you are looking at something quite different. So now people are immersed in this atmosphere and their thoughts form themselves accordingly. The thoughts of even the most intelligent people sometimes take on quite bizarre forms. Thus, in order to judge the way other people think, it is not enough to develop that naive enthusiasm of inattentive people, of which I have often spoken during these lectures; attention has to be paid to the kind of atmosphere in which people are living. This is perfectly real and is not that nebulous, abstract something which many people call the influence of the environment. Eucken, for instance, speaks of the influence of the environment without noticing that he is saying on the one hand: The environment creates the person; and on the other hand: The environment is created by people; which is equivalent to saying: I want to lift myself up by my own pigtail! The way to look at what is termed the environment in which people are immersed is to realize that this environment emerges in a definite way from certain spiritual streams. It is not the nebulous something that many people consider it to be.

Let us look at a case in point. You will have to forgive me, but I did say last Monday that I would not be able to make matters easy for you. We cannot avoid going into certain details; and you will understand the connection tomorrow. I want to read to you some passages from a letter written in the middle of April 1914 by Mitrofanoff, a history professor in St Petersburg, to a German who had been his teacher and with whom he had remained friends. Imagine this Mitrofanoff immersed in the various streams. In April 1914 he writes a letter that contains the following passages:

‘... aversion towards the Germans is felt in every soul and expressed by every mouth, and it seems to me there has rarely been such unanimity of public opinion.’

The following is a particularly interesting passage. Please pay particular attention to this passage, but not because of the name it mentions; it is possible to feel sympathy or antipathy with regard to this personality. I simply want to draw you attention to the formal content living in this passage:

‘It was perhaps Bismarck's greatest political mistake that he did not want to be more Russian than those Russian diplomats who, from weakness and lack of understanding, meanly surrendered the interests of their country during the Congress.’

What a marvellous expectation! This man reproaches Bismarck for not having been more Russian than the Russian statesmen who attended the Berlin Congress! That is why it is necessary to hate the compatriots of Bismarck! Whatever you may think of it, this sentence is certainly most original. And because the good professor of St Petersburg indulges in thoughts of this kind, he can also write the following:

‘As a reaction’—against the Triple Alliance that had come about in Central Europe—‘the Double Alliance was formed, which meant that Russia was associated with a vengeful France instead of the Triple Alliance.’ ... ‘For Russia the Balkan question is no guerre de luxe, no adventurous dream of the slavophiles. Its solution is without doubt an economic and political necessity. The Russian budget is based on export; if her balance of payments becomes negative the Russian treasury will be bankrupt, because it will be incapable of paying the interest on its enormous foreign debts. And two thirds of these exports pass through the southern ports and the two Turkish straits. If these outlets are blocked Russian trade will falter, and the economic consequences of such a blockade would be incalculable. The last Italo-Turkish war showed this clearly. Only possession of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles can bring to an end this insufferable situation, since the existence of a world power such as Russia cannot be allowed to depend on chance and the arbitrary acts of others. On the other hand Russia cannot possibly behave with total indifference towards the fate of the southern Slavs of the Balkan peninsula. First of all, the little Balkan states provide rear cover for the two straits and, secondly, over the course of the centuries far too much Russian blood and Russian gold have been expended on the Balkan heroes for the whole thing to be dropped now: Such an act would constitute moral and political suicide for any Russian government.’

Connect this, please, with the various remarks I have made about the Slav Welfare Committee. Too much Russian gold has been expended! Mitrofanoff continues:

‘One must, of course, not exaggerate the significance of Pan-Slavism and its ideals, but it does exist and it is doubtless quite vigorous; the demonstrations by the slavophiles in 1913 on the streets of so many Russian towns, in which even elements of the opposition participated, provide a clear demonstration of this.’

This letter of April 1914 then gives the following summary:

‘Once more: The urge to go south is a historical, political and economic necessity and whatever foreign power opposes this urge is eo ipso an enemy power. For some time the Triple Alliance has been single-mindedly set upon this course towards war. In Austria the urge to go south is also seen as a historical necessity, and the Austrians are just as right from their point of view as are the Russians from theirs. During the first half of the nineteenth century there were three directions in which the mighty Habsburg monarchy could expand: towards Italy, towards Germany and towards the Balkan peninsula. Since 1866 only the latter remains; Bismarck once again, this time perhaps unintentionally, caused Austria and Russia to face one another for a decisive battle, and by entering into the Triple Entente he placed the might of the German Empire at the disposal of Austria. Austria of course took advantage of this: everywhere and at every opportunity, if it was a matter of the Balkans, Russia found Austria standing in her way. The annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which made a deep impression in Russia, constituted not more than a page in the thick volume of Russian-Austrian enmity. Indignation was so great and danger was approaching so obviously that even the peace-loving Russian Government, despite its shattered finances, was prepared to go to war.’

He means in 1908.

‘But the “Nibelung” by the Spree threateningly shook his armoured fist and Russia, not sure of her allies, was forced to yield. In the year 1913 the realization of the Slavo-Russian ideal at last seemed almost within reach. The Turks were hit on the head, the victorious southern Slavs pressed forward to Salonika and Constantinople; one small push and the matter was settled.’

This letter is really interesting for it points to a number of remarkable matters. For instance the writer gets all excited about the following:

‘The workshops of Essen sent their cannon to the Turkish artillery; they were not up to the standard of the Creuzot guns, but nevertheless were very well made. And most important of all, German instructors drilled the Ottoman field army ... It has now become clear to the Russians’—April 1914—‘that if everything remains as it is at present, the road to Constantinople lies through Berlin. Vienna is merely a secondary question.’

April 1914! A number of other things are said which demonstrate clearly that in this head there is a dream of what is to happen soon. Whether the head in question imagined that the time was so close is another question; but this head, together with its body and limbs, of course, now set out to visit its teacher in Berlin. They spoke about many things together and I intend to tell you about a number of these. The professor of history said:

‘If you do not leave Constantinople to us, war will be inevitable.’

He repeated over and over again: It goes without saying that the Germans will remain God's choice of teacher for the Russian people, and that we only have to keep the peace—that the Germans only have to keep the peace—in order to conquer by means of spiritual, inner superiority. But do not believe that you can conquer us. On my estate at Saratov I own a house in which my ancestors have lived for centuries; but I would set it on fire with my own hands before allowing German soldiers to be quartered there. We could get on rather well together if we were to share Austria between us, so that German-Austria became part of the German Empire while the other part of Austria was taken over by Russia!

This is in June 1914! We could show in a number of ways how thought forms come into being in a particular environment. Quite a bit has taken place recently that could astonish us. Where social forms are more autocratic, things that happen tend to emanate from single sources, whereas in other situations they arise more out of popular streams. Never generalize, for in one place it is like this and in another like that. We could ask, for instance: What is the basis for this peculiar, puzzling behaviour by a country like Romania? I am not speaking of the incident that gave the final push but of the stream out of which it arose. But I do not want to give what is nowadays usually called a ‘historical’ explanation, for the type of history that has been coming into being since the nineteenth century and has now entered the twentieth is not worth a snap of the fingers. A true science of history has to proceed symptomatically; it has to show the different situations which are suddenly illuminated as if by lightning. I should like to point out one such lightning illumination.

Those who are knowledgeable in the field know that much that has gone on in Romania recently has been puzzling. This is connected with the fact that in the whole of the East a certain circumstance has been reckoned with that has dominated very many people like a suggestive idea. I do not want to characterize this by means of impressions; instead I shall merely tell you certain remarks made—I do not want to be vague—by the Minister for Interior Affairs, Take Ionescu, in 1913 to a certain Mr Redlich. He said, almost word for word, that in his opinion the monarchy of Austria-Hungary would not exist beyond the death of Franz Josef, and he would surely die soon. It would then be a matter of dividing this monarchy into its constituent parts. This was a firmly-rooted opinion and, in accordance with it, people's thoughts tended to go in one particular direction. It was another of those widespread, suggestive ideas.

‘But whatever surprises may be in store for us in the future, one thing is certain, and that is that the Triple Entente would only constitute a true political alliance if France were to enforce a three-year military service and if England were to introduce general conscription.’

June 1914! This is how that prince sees the Triple Entente that had gradually come about; for he thought that the alliance with France was no longer sufficient. The French would have to be quite strong, yet this was not enough; England must also introduce general conscription!

You see, the thought is so comprehensive that there was no time to realize it before the outbreak of war; but general conscription was introduced in England anyway. To understand the real situation in the world it is not enough to single out one thing or another arbitrarily; it is necessary to develop the will to look at those things that really matter. One person can say something far more important than a hundred others who chatter away like the blind talking of colours, repeating what they hear, and whose words have no effectiveness.

I have attempted, on the one hand, to show you how definite environments come into being and, on the other hand, to give you a few examples which show how people are immersed in these environments, and how it is necessary to get to know the environment if one wants to understand the thoughts that are expressed in one place or another. It is necessary, at least once, to thoroughly absorb the demand that is made of life as it is developing today: to develop, not the enthusiasm of inattentiveness but the enthusiasm of attentiveness.

We shall speak more about such things tomorrow, and thence endeavour to penetrate more deeply into our subject. We need these details in order to do this. It would be more comfortable to skim over the surface, but those who do not know at least a few actual cases cannot put the right questions to the spiritual world.

Our first thoughts must once again be directed to the guardian spirits who are guiding those who are at the front where the events of our day are taking place. We address ourselves to the spirits protecting those who are with us in this movement but are now out there, and have to stand up with their life and the whole of their physical being in response to what the time is asking of them. And in a wider sense we are also turning towards the spirits who protect all who have to offer life and limb out there in the field, even though they are not part of our community.

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 have already gone through the gate of death we say:

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 in the spheres.
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 in our movement, the spirit we have been seeking in coming together through the years, rule over you and spread his wings over you, so that you shall be able to complete your task according to your karma. Dear friends, I do not know how many of our friends were able to sense that it is much harder than usual to speak in public lecturers in the present day, lecturers like those given yesterday and the day before¹⁵—especially in public lectures of the type given yesterday. The reason is that the things which have to be said may only too easily be subject to misunderstanding. It is particularly when we are within our movement with heart and mind that we need to let a thought I also made reference to the last time I was able to speak to you here, enter more and more profoundly into our souls. It is the thought that, fundamentally speaking, external life—life on the physical plane as man normally encounters it, not in its reality—is Maya, a kind of ghostly dream, and that the truth, the reality, lies only behind this. It must be clear to us that this truth of the Maya cannot be grasped by theories only, nor indeed just with the intellect. It has to be grasped with all the powers of our soul, the whole of our soul-life and, above all, also the impulses of our heart and feelings. Our intellect is focused on things physical and finds it impossible to grasp that this world that surrounds us is not to be regarded as the true, real world. And our feelings, our will impulses, find this truth even more difficult to grasp. Entering into the life of spiritual science we not only have to learn to think differently but also to feel differently and go down to the wellsprings of our will activity in a different way.

It is difficult to find adequate expression for these things, for no words exist for what pertains to the spiritual world. It is therefore only too easy for the things I said yesterday to be taken to show a certain bias, a certain sympathy or antipathy, in the characterization of one folk soul or another in these days when human thoughts and feelings are so strongly tinged with the sympathies and antipathies that arise out of the mood of the time. And yet, when spiritual science is spoken of in the right frame of mind, it will have to be believed that things like the characterization of folk souls in fact cannot be presented in sympathy or antipathy in the usual sense, even if it is necessary to characterize them sharply. If they were presented in sympathy or antipathy they could not be true, they would have to be untrue, a lie. Why is this so?

It is very easy to think that someone developing his soul life in a certain way to attain to perception of the spiritual worlds, to an objective view of these spiritual worlds, might dry up in his inner feelings and will impulses. That definitely is not possible, however. It would be quite impossible for someone to attain to an objective vision of the spiritual world if he first allowed himself to dry up in the sphere of his living will and feelings, dry up in the inner fire of the impulses that are normally arising in the world of human feelings, sentiments and paSsions. On the contrary all the inner feelings there are, all the inner will activity, must be firmly taken hold of, must become as fiery as possible. But they need to be transformed in the soul. They cannot remain the way they are in ordinary life. They need to be transformed to such effect that through this life of feeling and will impulses the person achieves something of a new synthesis in the sphere of his will and feelings. It is exactly in this way that something must evolve which we may call the inner eye, the inner ear. It is impossible to become inwardly dried up when seeking the spiritual world. Yet once that world is perceived, once it has been reached after all the inner struggles, all inner victories, then it does present itself in such a way that, for example, it may still evoke sympathy and antipathy in us, but that any characterization given of it has as little in it of budding sympathy and antipathy as you would find of budding sympathy in a rose you arc looking at. We are able to experience sympathy with it and antipathy, but it is there before our eyes as an objective presence and if we wish to grasp its nature we are merely able to characterize. For a person who is forced, as it were, to characterize the spiritual world, it is in every single case an impossibility to speak in either sympathy or antipathy.

Yesterday the attempt was made to characterize the Italian, the French, the British and the German folk souls. There will, of course, have been some people in the audience who felt that what was presented was not objective characterization but sympathy and antipathy. Yet if sympathy and antipathy were to come to expression the characterization itself would have to be a lying one, it could never be reliable.

You will be able to understand this very well in this individual instance if I tell you the following. You all know that man is not merely the entity that stands before us when we look at him with our everyday eyes. There he is living in his physical body by his very nature, there he looks at us, as it were, through his physical body. Yet he has another reality, one he is not conscious of in ordinary life on earth for reasons you are aware of. This reality essentially lies within his ego and astral body, and he lives and passes through it quite independent of his physical and etheric body between going to sleep and waking up. A spiritual scientist obtains the results of his researches by illuminating for himself what normally remains unconscious between going to sleep and waking up. This gives him inner experiences of things that normally remain hidden behind the outer impressions of the world, the ghostly dreams of the world.

One thing I said in yesterday's lecture was that the folk spirit, the folk soul, lives specifically in the etheric body of man, and we are within this body from the moment we wake until we go to sleep. On waking we become immersed in the folk soul as we enter into the body. When asleep we are not in the folk soul—only between the moments of waking and going to sleep.

The question is: If the spiritual scientist brings inner life and light particularly into the aspects that are not within the physical body, what is the situation with regard to his life in the folk soul when separate from the body? There the folk soul has a divisive effect. The spiritual scientist cannot live within the folk soul when consciously going through the things man goes through in his sleep. The peculiar thing is that at any time, at any particular moment, a certain number of folk souls may be said to be reigning. The way these folk souls behave toward one another actually makes up the whole earth life of mankind, in so far as it is on the physical plane. Entering into the physical body we also enter into our folk soul. Coming out of the physical body, and having conscious experience outside it, we also enter into the folk-soul element—this is one of many experiences one has—but not into our own folk soul. We enter into the other folk souls and never our own, that is the one we live in during the day in our physical bodies. Accept the full weight of these words. On going to sleep we do not enter into one particular folk soul but into the concerted action, the dance as it were, of the other folk souls. The one soul which does not contribute to the dance is the one we enter into on returning to the physical body. In doing his researches, the spiritual scientist actually joins those other folk souls—which are acting in concert and with them lives through the same things we normally experience on the physical plane in relation to our own folk soul, the soul belonging to the nation within which we ordinarily find ourselves.

Let me ask you then: If a spiritual scientist really knows of life not only in his own folk soul but also in those other folk souls, if he has to go through this, would he then have any real reason to describe his own folk soul with a different kind of objectivity than other folk souls? He does not. Here the potential is given to rise above the prejudices of sympathies and antipathies and be objective. Of course it is not only the spiritual scientist who goes through this—and he does it consciously—but all human beings go through it. Between going to sleep and waking up every human soul lives in the sphere where all folk souls act in concert, except for the one his soul lives in when awake in the daytime.

This is something spiritual science offers so that the horizon of our feelings and sentiments can be truly widened. We often say that spiritual science is able to provide for genuine love, with no distinction of race, nation, class and so forth, because of the nature of the insights it makes possible. This statement is so profound that anyone who clearly sees himself as a human being in that part of himself that is of the spirit simply cannot shut himself away in hatred and antipathy from that which is humanity. He will have to say to himself that it is really senseless not to love. Yet in order to be able to say ‘It is really senseless not love’ spiritual science simply must come to us as something we live, not something we merely know. That is also why we pursue spiritual science not merely as knowledge but in such a way that in living together for years in our branches it truly becomes one with us, a spiritual nourishment that we take in and digest.

I have said that between going to sleep and waking man usually lives in the interplay of folk souls other than the one which is his own folk soul at the time. That is the usual way. There is a way, however, of living one-sidedly, as it were, in just one particular folk soul. There is a way in which one is forced, in this state between going to sleep and waking, to live not within the whole interplay of those other folk souls, within their dance as it were. Instead one is more or less under a spell to live together with one or several folk souls that are taken out of the total concord of all folk souls. There is such a way. It consists in our feeling a particular hatred for one or several folk souls or nations. This hatred we produce lends the special power that forces us in our sleep state to live with the folk soul we hate most or even hate altogether. There is no better way of preparing ourselves for entering completely into one particular folk soul when in the unconscious state between going to sleep and waking, and having to live with it the way we live with the folk soul we know when in our physical bodies, than to hate it—but to hate it sincerely, at the level of our feelings, not merely persuading ourselves that we hate it.

When such things are said we become aware how the reality of Maya has to be taken with profound seriousness. It is not only that our intellect, being what it is, does not want to see that things are different in their depths than in the outer ghostly dream they present, but our feelings, our will, also rise in protest against something which holds true for the spiritual world. If we consider such truths as the one of having to live in other folk souls, and particularly in the one we hate, we have to say to ourselves that the vast majority of people reject spiritual truth not only because it is not accessible to the intellect but also because they simply do not want it, because it upsets them also in the sentiments they ordinarily live with on earth. As soon as one enters more deeply and seriously into the realities of the spiritual world, they are not the least bit comfortable; they are not in the least the kind of thing man really likes when he desires to live on the physical plane only. They are uncomfortable. They shake us up and shake us through and the more profound they are the more they demand of us, really at every single moment, that we must be different from the way we usually are on the physical plane. As a living inner entity it demands something different from us than we are on the physical plane, and that is usually one of the reasons why people reject spiritual reality. We cannot do other than see ourselves linked, not with just one part of the world or of mankind but linked with the whole world and the whole of mankind.

Fundamentally speaking, our physical existence is merely the swing of the pendulum to one side. The swing of the pendulum in the other direction is in many respects the opposite, only we do not know of it in our ordinary life. It can be said that things are getting serious as soon as we consider the deeper truths of spiritual life. These deeper truths can become infinitely important in pointing the way for what human evolution, progress for mankind, demands of us at this very time. Let us take a particular example from spiritual science that can be of special importance for the present time.

Things being the way I have just described to you—so that in entering into physical body and ether body we join in experience what is normally called the folk spirit, the folk soul—you will easily understand how sharing in the experience of the fate of the individual folk spirit is one of the things we will gradually shed after death. Many things have been spoken of that man will shed after death; and one of these things is the link with the folk spirit. The folk spirit is active in the progress of earth evolution, it is active in the way mankind develops on earth from generation to generation. After death, between death and rebirth, we have to come free of the folk spirit in the same way we also grow out of other things. This at the same time lends significance to the hero's death, on the field of battle for instance, a significance that is felt. Any who feel it in the right way—and those going through such a death in the right frame of mind surely will feel this—will know that this death is a death of love. It is not suffered for personal reasons, not for the things one can keep with one for. the whole period between death and rebirth—it is suffered for the folk soul, in that this physical and ether body is given up selflessly. It is impossible to think of death in battle without knowing that it is filled through and through with genuine and most heartfelt love, with men being upheld by something that contributes to the future good of mankind. That is what is so great, so utterly tremendous in this death on the field of battle, if it is experienced in the right frame of mind. For it is impossible to conceive of it except in conjunction with love.

The association with our particular folk spirit has to be cast off between death and rebirth. It has to fall away from us. We have to reach a region where we do not live with the individual folk spirit as such. We shall not, however, be able to enter immediately into other folk spirits. That only happens between going to sleep and waking up. We have to free ourselves altogether of everything that is wholly of the earth, and enter into a life that is separate from anything to do with the evolution of mankind on earth. We must also free ourselves of everything that links us to folk spirits. And this again is something that widens and enlarges the horizons of our feeling life, if we make it something we know, for it lets us look towards the other element, an element we seek that is not around us when we live on the horizon of physical existence.

As you were able to see from the characterization of individual folk spirits given yesterday, it is so that in conscious awareness one of them may be more inclined towards the individual personality of man, to what man is as an individual personality, whilst another is less inclined that way. I have compared it with the way one person looks more into his inner life whilst another lives more in the life of the outer world. One particular folk spirit is more concerned with individual human personalities, another less so. As we belong to one folk spirit or another, this determines the way we relate to what the folk spirit is doing in our ether body, what is in preparation there. As a result there are certain differences in the casting-off process after death, in the gradual emergence out of what the folk spirit has made of us.

Let us take the French folk spirit, for example. It is a folk spirit whose Inspirations are connected with a highly developed culture, a culture that can only be seen as arising because this folk spirit is looking back to ancient Greek civilization. I have discussed this already. This folk spirit now works on the people belonging to that particular nation in such a way—and that is the very nature of the folk spirits that go hand in hand with highly developed civilizations—that deep impressions are made on the human ether body, that the signature of the folk spirit leaves a sharp imprint on the ether body. This has to do with something I pointed out yesterday, that the Frenchman becomes attached to the image he has created of himself. The consequence of the sharp impressions left on the ether body by the folk spirit is that when the soul leaves the body when death occurs, sharply distinct features are left in their ether body and also in the astral body of man. It is particularly if one belongs to a nation such as the French that the soul emerges from physical life with an astral body bearing distinct features. The consequence is that it takes a lot to cast off all that is left of the folk spirit after death.

If we compare the shedding of the essential folk spirit as it occurs in a member of the French nation with the same process for a soul that has been under the influence of the Russian folk soul, for example, we get really the opposite effect in the latter case. The Russian folk soul is young, as it were, and as yet concerns itself less with the individual human beings put in its care. Because of this, individual people passing through the gate of death bear little of the stamp of the Russian folk soul in the ether and astral bodies. Looking at the overall situation in the spiritual world we find, in looking at the souls that have passed through the gate of death, that we encounter sharply defined ether bodies and also sharply defined astral bodies in the souls of the French people whilst Russian souls show little of the imprint of the folk spirit on their ether and astral bodies. Because of this the different souls can be used for different purposes by the guiding spirits that have the task of furthering the evolution of mankind.

We are now in an age that truly cannot progress unless a certain sum of spiritual truth reveals itself to mankind. That has been discussed on many occasions, even to the point that it has been said that by a certain time-span in the present century the revelation of Christ will be made to man in the spiritual world. But we can take it in such a way that we say: A spiritual element has to come into the world. This spiritual element entering into human evolution is first of all the fruit of a struggle won by the spirits in the supersensible sphere. Higher spirits, spirits belonging to higher hierarchies, are fighting in this supersensible sphere to enable the spiritual stream to enter into human evolution. In this struggle they also bring into play forces deriving from human beings who have passed through the gate of death. In the life between death and rebirth man is always participating in the work that brings about what happens in the world. Being individual in his constitution he will also contribute in quite a different way, depending on whether he comes from a French body, for example, or a Russian one. That is why the spirits of the different higher hierarchies are able to use these souls in different ways.

The future development of mankind does, however, depend on a tremendous struggle taking place in the spiritual world at this moment. A struggle in the spiritual world does have a different meaning from one in the physical world. A struggle in the spiritual world means working together to give form and function to something fruitful. It is a struggle necessary for human evolution; in short it is a struggle that gets somewhere. It is being fought by certain spirits belonging to the higher hierarchies. They are fighting it by making use of certain young souls coming from the area of Eastern European civilization and certain souls coming from the Western European civilizations. It is a struggle that will go on for a long time yet, a struggle between Russian souls that have gone through the gate of death and French souls that have gone through death; a war waged by spiritual Russia against spiritual France. It is a terrible war if we use the words belonging to the physical plane. Looking into the spiritual world today one sees this struggle between spiritual Russia and spiritual France, and the spiritual world is full of it. It is a distressing struggle.

And now, in the light of this, let us look at what is happening on on the physical plane. An alliance is made. That is the mirror-image of the struggle in the spiritual world. Now this is the kind of problem one has to cope with in spiritual science. Please do not think that it is possible simply to generalize and say: ‘It is easy to arrive at spiritual truths by always thinking the opposite of what is happening on the physical plane’. If that were made the rule we would get the most silly and erroneous results. For it may hold true in five out of a hundred cases, but not in the other ninety-five. All spiritual truths are individual and have to be considered individually! They cannot be determined by mere dialectics. But the truth I have spoken of is one of those that make a particular impact today, for it can make us aware once again how very different the world looks when we see behind the veil of Maya and how the external doings of man may present the opposite of the true reality, of the spiritual.

If we take this point of view it is inevitable that our feelings must change in the contemplation of external happenings. We come to understand that proper discernment must first be used with regard to external events if the truth is to be seen. A cloud formation may look undefined when seen from a distance and quite different from near by. And that is also true for things that happen on the national scale. And right in the middle, I would say, between the warring parties in East and West, lies the German area in the spirit, and this exists for the purpose of mediating between the two sides, truly to mediate between the two, and also does this. And whilst in the spirit there is mediation between the two sides we see them hitting out from both directions and in both directions in the physical world.

In a sense the events we are now experiencing have to do with the deepest impulse in present-day human evolution. I have often said: Why do we actually pursue anthroposophy? We pursue it because it is a cosmic mission, a work the spiritual world demands of man. A number of Imaginations have to be conveyed to mankind; within the near future men will have to take in a number of spiritual truths. That is part of the plan, I would say, for human evolution. Against it there is the objection, the very real objection, the opposing view, that men have to mature gradually and that this takes a long time. But the Imaginations want to come in now into human evolution. Something has to enter into human evolution that lies a bit above the physical plane, I would say, something higher. Men are still rejecting it today, rejecting it as comprehensively as possible. As a result the counter-image appears. And the counter-image of Imaginations are passions, are emotional outbreaks arising from the depths of human nature, from a point as far below the physical plane as the Imagination are above it. When we see human beings face one another in hatred today, in genuine untruthfulness—what is this hatred, this untruthfulness? They are the mirror-images of the Imaginations that want to burgeon forth and are now emerging in this form because men resist them. An element present at a certain height above the physical plane emerges as a product of transformation, as something that lies at the same distance below the physical plane; it has to work itself out. Again it is possible to find the reason for these disagreeable events in the general karma of mankind.

Why does it have to be now, in our present age, that men receive a certain sum of spiritual truths? The question can be answered as follows.

Two things are possible. One is that a person has a certain feeling for spiritual truths and does not meet them with deaf ears, but rather takes them into his heart and his soul. That he becomes an anthroposophist, as it were, the way it is possible now to become an anthroposophist. Or it may happen that a person rejects spiritual truths, that he will say perhaps that all this is foolish, stupid nonsense; that it all comes out of the heads of a few foolish dreamers who would do better to take up something else.

When a person passes through the gate of death he does of course enter into the spiritual world. If someone were to say: ‘Do we only enter into the spiritual world if we acquire knowledge of that world in the time between birth and death?’ we might perhaps say to him: ‘Of course, a person who knows nothing of the spiritual world will also enter into it.’ But what it the difference between these two types of people? The difference is considerable. I am now always speaking only of our own time, for spiritual truths are individual. And if someone were to say in relation to what I described earlier: 'I assume Imaginations unable to come through will therefore always be transformed into a war of malice, like the one we have now?’ that would be the wrong view. At other times they may behave quite differently. Spiritual truths are always individual and what I am going to say now represents a truth that is individual to our time.

A person going through the gate of death without having made use of the opportunity to take in spiritual elements that exist in our time hands over his soul to the higher worlds on passing through the gate of death in almost the same state he received it when he went through birth to enter into physical existence. The higher worlds receive nothing from him but what they have given him on his incarnation. On the other hand, a person may make his own here on earth what it is possible to obtain from the spiritual world, not by mere faith, but by entering into the spiritual worlds in a living way. On his death he will not hand over his soul to the spiritual worlds the way he received it at birth. He will also hand over to the supersensible beings the concepts, ideas and feelings he has achieved here. These belong not only to him, they belong also to the supersensible beings. Any who do not bring these with them will, of course, also live into the spiritual world but make no contribution to human progress, and if people had always lived like that, or done so from a certain point of time, mankind would have remained as it was. There is progress, further development, and souls will always find something new on entering the earth in a new incarnation because they find opportunity to take in the particular mission of an age. In the final instance, a decision always has to be made as to whether we relate to the spiritual world or not. For instance, someone might say: ‘What do I care about the progress of mankind! What does the evolution of the earth matter to me? Let the earth come to a stop! I shall go on regardless.’ That is how a person may speak who has no real love, no interest in earthly progress. Any, however, who bear within them the love for human progress as their highest responsibility will be unable to choose that road. There is also freedom in this sphere. And souls will come to anthroposophy only through freedom and love for man's true progress and man's true good. So it is not possible either to become an anthroposophist out of mere egotism; in becoming one we contribute something to the progress which one otherwise withdraws from. One is active in love therefore—not merely for oneself but for something else.

This is something I hope will always shine through in all our discussions of the spiritual knowledge we are seeking: that this spiritual science is a living, active force. I am not talking about visions; I am talking of this science. Vision merely yields the results. I am speaking of the results coming alive in man. Spiritual science is something alive, something active, that takes up its abode in our souls, that is working and active in our souls.

I have often used the comparison that merely to speak of love—considering particularly the talking that goes on in the theosophical movement—is like standing in front of a stove and preaching that it shall grow hot, this being its duty as a stove. Even the best of sermons concerning its responsibilities as a stove will not make it grow hot. It will grow hot, however, if we put some wood in it and put a match to it. Basically that is how it is with all preaching of human love, and such preaching will prove hardly more successful when directed at men than a sermon directed at the stove, telling it to grow hot. Such preaching has been done at all times and the results can be seen. But anything that is not mere knowledge of the spiritual world, not mere idea, mere word, but is instead something alive, something active in the word, that is the wood we give to our soul, and it will burn if it is rightly taken in by the soul. This can be learned particularly from conflicts like the present one. There knowledge is set aflame, knowledge becomes love, for man is transformed by the spiritual life he has recognized in his depths, in his foundations. This profound transformation is indeed most uncomfortable for him; he rejects spiritual truth and would rather remain in Maya.

Basically, that is also the next reason for the often-heard statement that spiritual truths should not be offered too freely to the public. After all, these are not truths that act as neutrally as physics or chemistry when they are spoken, but truths towards which the human soul cannot maintain a wholly neutral attitude, having to either reject them or take them in. To take them in, however, the soul has to change in a certain way from what it is in ordinary physical life. So it is true that the world does get somewhat stirred up, excited, when the deeper spiritual truths are presented. Yet our age is ordained not to shrink from such excitement and really to go through this excitement. This will be the only way of preparing the ground for a new spiritual life, a spiritual life we must live towards, for we are now indeed at its starting point. And the signs of the times indicate that it is necessary to understand certain things. We may find many of the things that are happening in the outside world particularly in these days incomprehensible and senseless. Just try and take a number of things together. It is my task here, as it were, to speak to you in more intimate fashion than is possible in a public lecture. I have the task of formulating the things I said in my public lectures that were in the context of current events in such a way that they become effective truth; to formulate them in such a way that the words are the right ones for this our time. If you try and take a number of things together, you will see that one particular aim has been present all the time: to call forth ideas that are a little more the right ones, sentiments and feelings that are more the right ones, with regard also to current events, than those that come so easily and are so widespread.

Try, for instance, to hold on to the fact that in my first public lecture I endeavoured to show how the German people at heart really had a very strong inclination towards peace, towards peaceful progress, and how it really is quite accurate to say: the German people as such did not want the war. Though if we listen to our left and to our right we find they all say, they all stress: ‘We did not want the war!’ The French did not want the war. The English did not want the war. They had to go to war for 'moral reasons'. But those moral reasons were produced in just eighteen hours! They all stress they did not want the war. Let us hold fast to that—there is a lot of truth in it, a great deal of truth—and consider what I did when I said: the German people did not want the war. I did not follow this with the conclusion: this means the other side did want it. Instead, I said quite expressly in that first lecture that at most we could raise a question, the question as to who could have prevented the war. And there I pointed to the Russian East, for they could have prevented the war.

I have drawn special attention to the fact that the right answer depends on the right question being asked. If someone insists he did not want the war this does not necessarily mean the other person did want it. It is possible that both did not want it and yet it came about. Leaving aside the peculiar situation of Russia, we are basically able to say that the war really had not been wanted or intended—what we call ‘intend’ on the physical plane. This war arose with elemental necessity out of opposing forces; quite incomprehensibly out of forces in elemental opposition. Basically, it has never before happened in world history that an event popped up as though out of a box within such a few days. This has shown that whatever takes place in external events arises from spiritual contexts and presents itself as something physical.

From this point of view the events of today may serve as a lesson, to show mankind that we will never get the right answer by asking: ‘Did he do it?’ or ‘Did another do it?’ Instead you have to accept the premise that something else has been involved as well; you will have to make the effort and go somewhat deeper. Only then will we learn to speak of events in the right way.

There is yet another reason why it will be necessary to go to the effort of taking a deeper view of things. We are now experiencing how the world appears divided against itself. People are not yet able to do other than always blame another person. The time will come when the deeper truths relating to karma will have entered into the hearts and minds of men. Then this way of blaming the other for whatever has to be lived through will no longer exist. Then people will know that every nation is, in its karma, living through the things it has to live through for its own sake. A nation will be aware of the necessity to gain strength in battle—not because of another but for its own sake—to progress; the other is in a certain way only the agent. This will focus attention on the karma of folk souls. And seen from a higher point of view, the statement: ‘I am standing here and the other is standing there. It is his fault. He is responsible for my having to go through these events, these struggles. It is his doing’ is like a man of fifty looking at a child. The child is young, he is old; when the child did not yet exist he was not yet old, and as the child grows he is getting old. It is then as though he were to say: ‘It is the child's fault that I am getting old; for if the child were not to grow and get older I also would not get old!’ But the child can merely make him aware of getting old.

This is what we must take note of. Every nation has to experience whatever it does experience out of its karma, even the most serious of events. Do not say that such a truth, when it enters into the hearts and minds of men, will be something comfortless that enters into their hearts and minds. Instead, it will lead to a heroic view of life, a courageous view of life, a view of life that encompasses evolution. Once men are able to hold such a view of life it will appear to them as a waste of energy always to seek the fault in another and always to carry on to the usual conclusion. They will call upon the energies that can help them onward. They will learn to identify with their destiny in every sphere. We have seen, in my public lecture, that this destiny, generally seen as something external, can only be properly grasped when we surrender to this destiny. And it is the same with the karma of a nation. When love comes to earth then this attitude will arise among men.

Again, as on former occasions, I would appeal to you, dear friends, who have dedicated yourselves to a spiritual movement, to consider that in future it will be necessary to fill the mental horizon we live in not merely with the kind of thoughts that existed before, but to fill it with new thoughts. These, however, can only be thoughts arising from the spiritual world. It will not be immaterial whether or not a number of people send up thoughts into the spiritual world like those deriving from such considerations as have been presented today. In deciding to meditate on these truths you will help the events that are to happen in the future to happen in the right way, for the good of man. You are anything but inactive with regard to human progress if you meditate on the thoughts the present time calls for in order that man may truly progress. Let us hope that a good many of us succeed in doing spiritual work side by side with the work that is done with blood and death; spiritual work which consists in filling the World with the right thoughts, with thoughts that relate to the mission of age. We shall then be able to feel that these are the true thoughts of love. Looking for a quotation, many people have been reaching for the popular volume by Buechmann these days to find the right phrase and quoted the words of old Heraclitus, according to which war is the ‘father of all things’.¹⁶ Heraclitus was right in saying this and those who quote him are also right. Yet a father on his own cannot produce a child. The child has to have a mother. As war is the father, so anything achieved in peace-filled work is the mother. Unless the father is to remain sterile, there has to be a mother. And she in turn will have to come from the hearts and minds of those who understand the mission of our time in the spirit and know how to come to love out of understanding.

That is what I want to put into your souls in today's gathering, so that in keeping with the demands made in the present day our spiritual science shall not serve merely to satisfy our curiosity or thirst fa: knowledge but give us the right living energies, energies that we develop to make them a true comfort in the sorrows our time is bringing. True comfort does not result in weakness but leads to strength, courage to be active—spiritually active or physically active, but in any case active. Over and over again we have to remember how important it is in our time for a number of people to feel the free impulse to enter more deeply into the spirit. For this in itself means that progress is made not by the individual but by the whole of mankind.

And in this attitude of mind let us in conclusion return once more to the thoughts we are sending forth, in the way I have indicated, to those who are at the front.

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.

• 15. Lectures given on 26 November 1914 (‘Die Menschenseele in Leben und Tod’) and 27 November 1914 (‘Die Seelen der Volker’) both in Aus schicksaltragender Zeit (GA 64). The Human Soul in Life and Death (tr. V. Compton-Burnett, C. Davy, D.S. Osmond and K. Wegener) London, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1935 and The Soul of the People (tr. not mentioned) London, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1934.
• 16. Heraclitus (c. 540–480 BC), Greek philosopher of Ephesus: Fragment B53 in H. Diels Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Vol. I.

Automated Translation

The friends of our spiritual movement who are here in Ulm got together some time ago to cultivate the thoughts, aspirations and impulses of our spiritual movement here as well. We are here, friends from out of town, united with our Ulm friends today to commemorate this event together, which consists in the fact that friends of our movement have also come together in this city of Ulm. They have joined together in a serious time, in difficult times, in a time that speaks to the human soul through significant signs. And so it is appropriate on this occasion today to remember larger contexts, spiritual connections in the development of humanity, into which our spiritual movement will place itself for our time and for the near future. I would like to say: First we want to turn our gaze from what is connected with the very nearest human interests, including those in the spiritual, to the all-encompassing, that all-encompassing with which our movement is connected.

We know, of course, that those personalities of the present day who join together under the sign of our spiritual impulses must feel deeply in their souls and hearts that they want to seek something that another spiritual movement, another spiritual endeavor in the present time, and which is connected with what the soul of man must seek in our time and in the near future if he is to become truly conscious of his humanity. In this seeking, precisely as it is expressed in our movement, we find many opponents. And our opponents are precisely those who believe that they must protect the true interests of the development of humanity from this or that point of view, and protect it from what they consider to be such an aberration of the human spirit as is found in our movement. Thus many people of the present day who are religiously minded or apparently religiously minded believe that our movement is likely to lead away from what they need for real religious deepening.

Now, one could indeed reply to some of those who speak in this way, with a somewhat superficial but no less apt judgment: Has the Christian idea, for example, in the course of the last few centuries, managed to bring humanity to a height that could have mitigated, or I will not even say eliminated, the present terrible catastrophe? But those people who never want to learn from events, who learn nothing even from them, that religious life has been developing in their sense for centuries, even millennia, and now, despite this religious life, this catastrophe has been able to break out over the whole earth. But even if it is obvious to ask, we do not want to move our thoughts in this direction. Today, by way of introduction, we would like to raise another question that is perhaps given very little consideration, but which is in fact connected with very, very profound matters of the present.

Do you know which word is most unknown to contemporary scholars, to philological scholars, in terms of its origin and development? Do you know which word is most often found in even the most learned works when you seek advice, a word for which you cannot determine its origin, what it actually means, or what it means? The word for which you will most often search in vain in the scholarly resources, both in terms of its linguistic and spiritual origin, is the word “God.” No science today can give you any information about the linguistic and spiritual origin of the word God. That is a peculiar fact. For this fact does not merely point to externals, to something that is in this or that series of facts, but it points to something that is deeply, deeply connected with the human mind. People all believe they are saying something when they speak of the divine, when they speak of their turning to God. And with all the means of present-day learning, they do not even know how to somehow indicate the origin of the word God. This indicates that by far the greatest number of people in the present day who speak on religious or other spiritual subjects really do not know what they are talking about. If one would only go deeply enough into what is actually meant by people not knowing what they are talking about when they believe they are talking about what is most intimately connected with the human soul's striving! This is felt, if not clearly conscious, then instinctively by those who feel compelled to come to our spiritual impulses from the various spiritual confusions of the present. That these spiritual impulses, which come precisely from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, are connected with the most urgent needs of our time, has been emphasized by me again and again in the times when the present severe thunderstorm has actually gathered for a long time.

I would like to remind you of a sentence that I have often spoken, as those friends who have been following our movement for years now know. I have often said that over the last three to four centuries, the earth and its various peoples have become one in commercial, industrial, banking and so on. I have pointed out how modern means of transportation and what, through modern means of transportation, has rolled across the whole earth until recently, has poured out over the whole earth a unity of economic, of external economic life, a unity, if we may say so, of physical life on earth. We had a unity of physical life on earth. A check written in New York could be cashed in Tokyo, Berlin, or wherever. In the years leading up to the war, I always added the following demand to this fact: Not only does the human body need a soul, but every body needs a soul and cannot live without one. What has spread across the earth as a physical body in commercial, industrial, or other ways, needs a soul, a soul that offers the possibility that people on earth understand each other spiritually as they understand each other commercially and monetarily. To give the earthly body an earthly soul is something I have often spoken of as desirable.

Now, something like this certainly does not develop in a day; it takes time. And what I am expressing here is not meant as a criticism of the time, but only as a description; it is intended to stir in human souls what the impulses of action, of thinking, of feeling, and of will should be. It is not meant to accuse, but to express what should happen. Therefore it is not meant in the form of a reproach, [when it was said] that people have neglected to form a common earth soul for this earth body in the last decades, in which the common earth body has developed particularly intensively. This earth soul can only be found if people are made to understand what is as common to people in a spiritual sense as the sun is in a physical sense, and what is to be spread among mankind through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

But this has been neglected until now. And in this present catastrophic time, we are experiencing it in the most terrible way, as has never happened before in the history of the development of humanity, which can be traced with documents, that humanity finds itself in a dead end, in a real dead end. And it will only escape from this deadlock if it decides to add to the physical culture of which humanity is so proud, the spiritual culture of the earth soul for our time and for the near future, which belongs to this physical culture.

One may resist these efforts to give the earth a new spirituality as much as one wants, but the truth will have to prevail under all circumstances. Humanity is now living in the midst of a terrible catastrophe. If humanity does not decide to truly adapt to the new spirituality meant here, then these catastrophes will keep recurring in ever new periods, perhaps in very short periods. This catastrophe and all its consequences will never be healed by the means that humanity already knew before this catastrophe broke out. Anyone who still believes this is not thinking in terms of the earthly development of humanity. And this catastrophic time will last as long as it can be bridged, apparently, for a few years in between, until humanity interprets it in the only correct way, namely, that it is a sign that people are turning to the spirit that must permeate purely physical life. Today this may still be a bitter truth for many because it is inconvenient, but it is a truth.

Let us ask ourselves what it is that has actually maintained some connection with the spiritual world to this day, despite the increasingly intense purely materialistic culture of the earth that has been occurring for three to four centuries. Anyone who has experience in this field knows that it is actually only a single fact that is still maintaining the connection with the spiritual world, and that this is a fact of great importance for humanity. A man who had been one of the most important leaders of the barren “Society for Ethical Culture” in recent years once told me one day that he had thought for a long time about how it could be that in our enlightened times, when humanity knows that salvation can only lie in understanding the material world, how it is possible that in these enlightened times there are still churches, churches alongside the various states. And he said he had come up with the reason why there are still churches. He clothed this solution, with which he meant to express a deep secret, in the following words: “The states administer life, the churches administer death; and since people have not yet ceased to think of death as something terrible, the power of the church lies in the fact that it administers death.” It is a truly materialistic way of thinking, because the man wanted to express that when people would finally have given up thinking of death as something terrible in people's lives, when they would have gotten used to letting death come over them like an animal, then the churches would have lost their power.

Now, of course, this saying is complete nonsense, absolutely brilliant nonsense; but looking at the intellectual life of the present day, it is not entirely unfounded. Sometimes, in order to understand itself, to express what it is in intellectual terms, the present day has to say nonsense. In the future, this will be cited as a special characteristic of our time: that the most ingenious people of the present were compelled, when they sought to express the character of the present, that is, the time around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, that they then had to say nonsense. But now, there is something true in this nonsense, namely the truth that for many people of the present time, it is almost the only connecting bridge to the spiritual world, that in a certain respect they either have a fear of death or cannot bear the thought that their loved ones have gone and cannot imagine them as being in a nothingness. Certainly, it should not be denied that these thoughts are still significant enough, that they are still connected with the deepest interests of the human soul. However, neither fear nor any other feeling about death can lead to a real connection with the spiritual world. For this, there must be real, true knowledge of the spiritual world, there must be understanding of the reality of the spiritual world. And this understanding of the reality of the spiritual world is not possible today other than by adding a spiritual-scientific attitude to the natural-scientific attitude.

If people do not know where the word of God actually comes from, what the divine actually is, what do people who speak of the divine today actually do out of need of this or that religious worship? Those people who often believe themselves to be deeply religious, pretending to worship the highest divine, what are they actually doing? It is not unimportant to ask yourself this question in a moment of seriousness. What does this question imply? This question implies: What is the God that most people of the present time speak of, who pretend to be of a religious nature?

Now, people reject it when we speak from the standpoint of spiritual science that there are other beings above us, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on, so that we see a hierarchy of spiritual beings, and that the way up to what is the highest divine is long. People of the present day do not want this epistemological modesty. They often express it by saying that they want no mediation between themselves and God; they always want to turn directly and immediately to the Most High God. But it is not a matter of what one believes about such a turning, but of what one really does in one's soul, what one really experiences in one's soul.

Take everything that a preacher of any recognized religious community tells you about the divine today, everything he talks about the divine. What does it refer to if you do not go by his words, but by reality? It refers to two things. Either what he talks about refers not to a higher being than to his angel, who stands as a guiding entity over each and every one of us. He worships this angel; he calls him the highest God. He who knows what words can really mean, he knows that everything that is said about God in modern sermons never refers to any higher God than an angel, or if not to an angel, then to something else. If one investigates the question of where such people get what they feel when they speak of their God, when they preach of their God in their churches, when they often even claim to have an experience of God in their souls, as some people of the present time do – they then call themselves with a certain pride “evangelized people” and the like – where one comes from, one arrives at the following: In their souls, such people feel the impulse of their own being, how this being has developed in a purely spiritual environment between the last death and birth. This spiritual being that has developed in us between the last death and our birth is now in our body, has taken up residence in our body. Much of what we now experience in life comes only from this being, from this prenatal being. Man feels this prenatal being as a spiritual one; it is this prenatal being with which he feels united. Yes, even so-called theosophists of the most varied schools of thought have repeatedly told people, in order to make something spiritually honeyed sound, that it is a matter of man uniting with his God within himself. But what man feels when he supposedly unites with his God is he himself, it is only his spiritual-soul being in the time between the last death and the last birth. And what numerous pastors and priests speak of when they speak of the God they feel in their soul is nothing more than that they sense their own ego, not as it develops here in the physical body, in the physical environment, but as it developed in the spiritual world between death and birth. They sense this, and then they begin to pray. And what do they pray to? To themselves.

This is the one that comes from many spiritual currents of the present so heartbreakingly. If you look at these things in reality, so you have to confess that people have gradually come to worship themselves unconsciously, without them knowing it. And once someone finds out, he expresses it in strange forms, as Friedrich Nietzsche has done. This must be made perfectly clear: either the person who does not want to recognize the hierarchies, the wonderful breadth and greatness of the spiritual world, merely worships his angel - which is also a form of selfish worship - or he worships himself. This is the spiritual form of egoism to which humanity has gradually come under the influence of the materialistic development of modern times. Now you will say: What is he telling us? That is not true! People do not say that they worship themselves, that they only worship their angel! - Of course they do not say it, but they do it; and what they say only happens in order to numb themselves to the fact that it is no less real. What is spoken today is often an anesthetic for humanity, because, of course, people do not want to admit to themselves what it is actually about. Today, people often find it too inconvenient to rise to the spiritual worlds through inner work. They do not want that. They want to penetrate to the spiritual worlds in a much easier way, as simply as one can. Therefore they deceive themselves, therefore they anesthetize themselves. But one cannot deaden one's senses with impunity. The world goes its course. The Divine-Spiritual is at work in the world, even if one does not want to acknowledge it. It is at work and weaving therein. And that is the most profound task of our time: to rediscover the connection with the real spiritual, to bring out of ourselves the spiritualized egoism that we have just described, to overcome it. That is what speaks so powerfully to the heart when one has grasped the actual deeper impulse of spiritual science for the present time. The world – as I pointed out earlier – will, through its mighty signs, force people to seek the spirit again. But there must be a certain core of striving humanity that can find its way into this spiritual striving, which alone can be the right and true and real thing for the present.

You see, the earth has gone through various tasks. It is not only the individual human being who has a task; the whole earth is constantly having its various tasks. In the period immediately following the great Atlantic catastrophe, the people of Indian culture had a different task; a little later, the people of Persian culture had a different task; the people had a different task when the Egyptians and Chaldeans were in charge, and a different task when the Greco-Roman peoples set the tone. This continued until the 15th century. Another task has been assigned to us from the 15th century until today. And this task, which is now assigned to us, is quite different from any other task on Earth. One can characterize this task, which is presently allotted to mankind, which began with the 15th century and which will last into the 4th millennium, by pointing out the most essential thing that is happening on earth during this period.

If we look back to the time before the 15th century from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see that until the 15th century everything that people did was imbued with a certain spirituality. External history tells us nothing about this, because it is a fable convenue that we learn in schools and universities. But if you really study what people have created in their daily lives, you will see that it is imbued with a certain spirituality. The characteristic feature of our epoch is that this spirituality has declined and must gradually be lost altogether if man does not add a new spirituality to the purely external, material culture. Through purely external conditions, the development of the earth is doomed to become purely materialistic. The spirit, which more or less came of itself in earlier epochs of earth evolution, must be added by mankind of its own free inner deed to what presents itself.

If we disregard what people can bring to earthly culture out of their inner freedom, out of their consciousness, and only look at what has arisen by itself in our fifth period, which has lasted since the middle of the 15th century, then it turns out that this is the period in which the Earth is gradually beginning to die for the whole cosmos, for the whole universe. The fifth period is the beginning of the death of the Earth. While all the earlier periods could contribute to the spirit of the universe through what arose from the Earth itself, all the brilliant culture that developed in this fifth period - the telegraph, the telephone, the railroad - has its great significance for the Earth, but no significance outside the Earth. Nothing of what arose in Egyptian or Greek civilization perishes with the earth; but what arises in our time on the soil of purely materialistic culture perishes with the earth when the earth itself becomes a corpse of the cosmos. That which the present material culture creates perishes with the earth. This time had to come. For people must become free. They did not have to be forced to find the spirit; they had to find the spiritual through a free act of consciousness. That is why this present period came, in which everything that we can find externally, of which we can be so proud, is only there for the earth, but is not there for the spiritual world. But that is why it is also the time that leaves it up to man to rise to the spirit, that refers man to his inner being, to his soul, to his heart, to his mind, when they want to become more spiritual, that does not force man to be more spiritual, but that leaves it up to man whether they want to decline with the outer declining culture, or whether they do not want to decline with this culture.

We can either understand a truth such as the one that has just been expressed, that is, what is absolutely necessary for humanity, from spiritual science – and everything that you find in spiritual science literature gives you the building blocks for understanding what I have now summarized. But people are still not very inclined to read the signs of the time.

Consider the following. Anyone who has looked around a little in the fields of human development in recent decades has been able to make very strange observations. If he has asked himself: How are people striving for ideals for the future, for spiritual renewal? - and when he went to really get to know these things, he found active striving, he found spiritual striving, spiritual activity, a sense that things must change on earth in the area that used to be called socialism in the working-class world, in the labor movement. Purely material, but correct ideals for the future, always asking how the world must be transformed, how something new must come, that was one thing.

If you ask in other areas than the field of socialism, our intellectual movement is still a very small group of a few, as people say, quirky, half-crazy people – if you ask among the clever people, among those who have really understood the ideas of the time, you will find the most outrageous intellectual barrenness everywhere in recent decades. Within church theology, the strangest discussions arose: Whether Jesus Christ ever lived at all or not, but in any case that he could not have been some extraterrestrial being; after all, the “simple man from Nazareth” was the only thing that people cared about. And otherwise? Yes, what did they find? In this time, when people have “gotten rid of all belief in authority,” when people only follow the principle: test everything and keep the best, they found the most blind belief in authority in what, as they say, science demands. Blind belief in authority in all fields! Blind faith in authority from the historical branch right into the medical branch. Nobody found it very convenient to somehow know a lot about what health depends on; you let the one who is an authority in this field take care of that. Simply the most terrible belief in authority! Clinging to the remnants and scraps of what had been saved from the past, what had been held on to out of convenience. No striving that would have emerged from the awareness that a renewal of humanity in spiritual terms is necessary!

At the same time, it became apparent to those who were able to observe spiritually that in the east of Europe, I would say under the sign of fire, something of a new spirit was announced through pure natural processes, so that under the most disgraceful external yoke in the east of Europe, a future time developed in the minds of even the dull inhabitants of this part of Europe. It is remarkable how, since the 9th century, the rest of Europe has been pushed back to the east by that which was to remain, which was not to be eaten away by the west, as it then appeared in the outer form of the so-called Russian Empire in the various centuries, inwardly preserving the old and, in the shell of the old, as in a chrysalis, preparing a new one for a later culture! One is tempted to say that mystery cults have been preserved within this Russian people, that this Russian people, which has little understanding of the abstract religious concepts of the West, but which has a deep, profound inner feeling for cultic forms, lives with these, and that these cultic forms bring the human soul to the Divine in a pictorial form. In the East, people feel in their own souls that which the Western religious leader bears the name of: “pontiff”, that is, bridge-maker, bridge-maker to the spiritual. But in the East, as much of the old as was necessary to keep the bridge to the spiritual at least open, untouched by the new, the new materialistic.

And now take today's signs of the times together with this! One would like to say: the most bitter irony of human evolution has been poured out precisely over Eastern Europe, the bitterest irony! The caricature of every higher human aspiration, which has asserted itself in Leninism, in Trotskyism, as the final caricature consequence of purely materialistic socialist ideas, is like a dress that does not fit the body, put on the people of the East. Never before have greater contradictions collided than the soul of the European East and the inhuman Trotskyism or Leninism. This is not said out of any sympathy or antipathy, it is said out of the realization that the greatest contradictions that have ever come together are brewing in the European East through the combination of the greatest contradictions that have ever come together. This should also remind us that the signs of the times speak meaningfully. This should show us that, above all, we must begin to take spiritual science so seriously that we want to enter into reality through it; because with it we can penetrate into the reality of the present.

Rabindranath Tagore gave a remarkable lecture to the Japanese on the spirit of Japan. He speaks as an Oriental, Tagore; but the Oriental is already speaking today in such a way that the European, if he wants to, can understand him a little. But just when one delves into what Tagore said about the spirit of Japan, what he wanted to say to the whole world, then one finds that this Tagore knows with all insightful people of the East: The East preserves an ancient spiritual culture, a spiritual culture that the sages of the East have carefully kept secret, which they have not allowed to come out among ordinary people. But it is a spiritual culture that they have incorporated into the social institutions until very recently. A culture that is spiritual through and through, but whose time is up. Hence the peculiar unnaturalness that confronts us, I might say, throughout the Asian Orient. People are adapting the Western forms of thought and culture to their old spiritual way of feeling. This is basically a terrible thing, because spiritual thinking, especially as developed by the Japanese, is flexible and penetrates reality. If it fraternizes with European-American materialism, then, if European materialism does not want to spiritualize, it will certainly outstrip it. For the European does not have the flexibility of mind that the Japanese have. They have this as a legacy of their ancient spirituality.

Now, as if by some wonderful wisdom, I would like to say, the Russian folk soul had been preserved from everything that leads to abysmal development, to decadence. But now it is to be poisoned by Leninism and Trotskyism. It is to be infected by that which would extinguish the spirit from all earthly culture if it came to power. Of course, that must not be allowed to happen. But if it is not to be allowed to happen, then success, spiritual success, depends on our deciding to regard spiritual science not merely as an abstract theory, not merely as a convenient means of developing a certain inner voluptuousness, a certain mystical ic dreaming in the soul, in which one feels comfortable, through which one pretends that one has nothing to do with the world - one despises this vile world, one feels one is in a spiritual beyond. But this is only selfishness, a higher selfishness, but still only selfishness. One should want nothing to do with such mysticism, such theosophy, but only with that spiritual comprehension of existence that really grasps the spirit, experiences the spirit, but wants to comprehend reality through the spirit.

Now we must recognize the subject as a task, as a serious task for the present time. But these things are sometimes inconvenient. And precisely because they are inconvenient, certain brotherhoods have kept them secret from the masses and guarded them. That time is past. It is time that people strive out of their conscious inner being in free spirituality. The things that have been kept secret for thousands of years must now be communicated to people. One must realize that in the East in old, bygone epochs, a spiritual wisdom already existed, but the time for this spiritual wisdom is past. Another spiritual wisdom must come. In this, people often want to be mistaken. How many people have appeared in our present time of searching and wanted to make things comfortable for the Europeans, because something like our spiritual science is much too difficult for them, because there you have to think; thinking is something so uncomfortable! You have to be spiritually awake; being spiritually awake is something so uncomfortable! So many people were found who wanted to spare the Europeans the trouble of seeking their own path to the spirit and taught them all kinds of oriental wisdom, Zarathustrian wisdom and all sorts of other things. The Europeans felt so comfortable when they did not have to seek the spirit themselves, but when the spirit was brought to them ready-made from ancient India. This was a narcotic, for they did not want to search the universe through the spirit. They wanted to anesthetize themselves by taking hold of an old means of knowledge. That was the mistake made in many fields after the East.

And another mistake has been made. This other mistake is connected with the fact that this more recent time, which is leading the earth to die off in its culture, so to speak, brings with it the unconscious necessity in people to seek their own inner being. The urge to seek and find this inner being is already there. Oh, there are more and more people who are out to search for their own inner being! The search for the inner being even disguises itself, masks itself, in the worship of God, which is either a worship of the angel or of one's own self. The search for the inner being will become ever more lively and lively in modern humanity. The more science and technology people in modern times embrace, the more vividly the counter-thrust of the search for the inner self will come. Today, people often search in the wrong ways, but they search for it. Those who search the least are those who are employed as official organs to search for the spirit; they search for the “limits of knowledge”. They seek to determine what man cannot know of the spiritual world. And so today we have spiritual leaders who, above all, endeavor to tell people how not to penetrate into the spiritual world, and a humanity that seeks but has no real awareness of its seeking.

This is the most striking phenomenon. If you really want to unravel the souls on earth, you will find that people who are laymen, who are in the midst of the trials and struggles of life, are searching for the soul everywhere. Ask about the leaders who should speak down to the people from the pulpits and lecterns in such a way that the search is satisfied. They will tell you that science does not allow you to cross the boundaries of knowledge, that man cannot penetrate into the spiritual world. Kant established the limits of human knowledge for all time, and anyone who does not accept this is a fool. This is the most striking phenomenon of the present time. But the urge is there in the widest circles, even if they are not aware of this urge to search within. Where such an urge exists, in the long run one will not be satisfied with mere limitations, but one will seek for something else.

Just as the East has sent the narcotic of an old culture, a culture that has passed away, the Far West is sending people another narcotic. This is what people will gradually come to realize: Anglo-Americanism is culturally the narcotic of modern times for the spiritual search within the human heart. On the one hand, Anglo-American culture has the task of organizing and spreading material things across the earth, but it combines this task, by virtue of an inner characteristic of the Anglo-American nature, with the task of numbing people through Americanisms in their search for the spiritual in the soul. The more Europe becomes orientalized, the more it will become numbed to spiritual knowledge of the world; the more Europe becomes Anglo-Americanized, the more it will become numbed to the search for the true spirit, the true self within the human soul.

These things are not said here to develop chauvinism, not to talk all sorts of tirades about this or that world mission, but because - in the most modest way - this must be seen through in order to understand the responsible situation of the Central European human being. For since the times of the spiritual deepening through Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, through everything that I have tried to describe in the book “Vom Menschenrätseb as the forgotten sound of German intellectual life, the Central European spirit has been called upon to lead humanity away from these two narcotics: from the narcotic of Orientalism, from the narcotic of Americanism.

To understand how the spiritual tableau is spread across the earth, to understand what is placed on our souls, for this spiritual science is intended to be a guide. Can people out there in the world know today what spiritual impulses can come from Central Europe into the world? Can they know that? Let us ask the question in a different way: Have we proved ourselves worthy of such spiritual seeking as was inspired by Herder and Goethe? My dear friends, meditation is rightly recommended to us in spiritual science. Do you know what a wonderful meditation would be that you could start with even the youngest children? Read Herder and see how he presents every sunrise in the morning as a new creation in a grandiose world picture. And read the countless images that Herder presents in his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind”. Forgotten, faded away! Just recently, a gentleman who is serious about Central European intellectual life said to me: I have never heard of any of this at Herder's!

Yes, we have a task; we must recognize this task. Listen today to a Chinese like Ku Hung-Ming. Listen to an Indian like Tagore. Do you think that these people have the opportunity to really understand what is going on in Central European intellectual life and what intellectual impulses are at work there? They look and say to themselves: Well, Goethe lived; even a Goethe Society has been founded to cultivate Goetheanism. But what has happened? In recent years, they have been looking for someone to lead this Goethe Society, to stand at the helm of this Goethe Society; the question has not even been raised: should it be a man who works in the spirit of Goetheanism, who could work for spirituality in the sense in which it is to be thought now, a hundred years after Goethe? No, a man who was a former finance minister has been placed at the head of the Goethe Society. The world sees him as the administrator of Goethe's spirituality. No one other than a former finance minister is seen as the administrator of Goethe's spirituality!

It is not enough to call out: Spirit, Spirit, Spirit! We must permeate reality with what we have gained from spiritual insight, but we must also lead this spiritual insight into reality. A task has been assigned to the Central European, and this task has begun. For spiritual science, as it is conceived here, is nothing other than the continuation of that which has emerged around the great turning point of the newer spiritual life, to which I have just pointed. It should have found a counterpart, the purely material socialist striving, which for decades was the only impulsive movement in a spiritual movement! It is never too late, but it must be understood at last, so that it does not decay, that which is precisely our task. It must finally be understood that one cannot get ahead with all the buzzwords, that a new spirit must take hold of humanity. But people today walk past the spirit. Life gives us countless examples of this.

One example among thousands upon thousands could be cited. Recently a remarkable essay by a very clever man appeared in a widely read German newspaper. This witty man gave a book a roasting in the collection “From Nature and the Spiritual World” that had unfortunately been published; he was horribly scathing about this little volume. And when one read this essay, one could not understand why the man was actually scolding. Because in this book, the development of astrology and the horoscope is discussed as a normal, well-behaved, upstanding university professor today, who does not participate in the “superstition” of astrology, would discuss it. And at the end he develops his view by describing Goethe's horoscope, and he actually makes fun of the fact that you can find all sorts of things in this horoscope. So a very good university professor wrote from today's point of view. You couldn't be a more decent university professor than the one who wrote the little book. But Fritz Mauthner rants like a pipe about this book, that someone is spreading superstition. He rants and rants and doesn't know why! A few days later, the author published a correction in which he pointed out: “I am quite in agreement with Fritz Mauthner, he makes fun of astrology and horoscopes, so do I! I only quoted the horoscope to show that you can read anything you want into it. So we are in complete agreement. The “Berliner Tageblatt”, of which Fritz Mauthner was once the theater critic, had nothing to add, because it did not think that Mauthner had misunderstood. Mauthner does not offer a word of clarification either. In short, two people who were absolutely in agreement came into the most furious conflict, and no one knew why. There was not the slightest reason for it.

That is the way it is in general in the present time, that is the characteristic of the present time! People no longer listen to what they have to say to each other; they also usually have very little to say to each other. But what they develop, what they have against each other, arises from something quite different from what they confess. One lives in a completely inexplicable way, in a completely irrational way, because one has become estranged from what reality is and can no longer enter into it.

If you think and feel your way through such things, you will feel the importance, the significance of what spiritual science is, in your soul. Anyone who believes today that spiritual science is something impractical is on the wrong track. In fifty years' time it will no longer be possible to found factories or establish any kind of working community without permeating things with spiritual science, because it alone will find the way to reality. When people understand, really understand, that all the old catchwords lead to dead ends, that we need insight into the spirit that rules the world for the very most material life, then one will understand spiritual science, then one will not want to get into the spiritual world in an egoistic way through the “only bridge of death”, but then one will also draw life from death.

Perhaps someone who has seriously studied spiritual research is allowed to speak of such things in such an intimate circle. I, who have been writing about Goethe for more than thirty years now, have not wanted to write about Goethe in an outwardly philological or philosophical or other scholarly way, but rather, my aim has always been to offer, through my relationship with Goethe, a possibility to express in my books what Goethe now wants to say to humanity in a particular field that is close to me. I did not want to go to the dead Goethe to study him, but through what Goethe left behind, I wanted to find the way to the living Goethe. To the Goethe who speaks to our souls when we know that the dead are alive like us, that they live in the world in which we ourselves live, only that we walk around in the body, but the dead are among us in the spirit.

Do religious communities really believe that they live together with the dead? There is, admittedly, a selfish belief in immortality, and this should not be criticized. But only spiritual science can make fruitful the life of the dead. For it is through spiritual science that men will find the way to those with whom they were karmically connected and who have passed over into the other world and still cling to the world with a thousand and one threads. For in what happens here on earth, not only the impulses of the living work. Man does not cease to work for the world when he has passed through the gate of death.

We are only partially awake. When we perceive and form ideas, we are awake. When we feel, we are dreaming. Our feelings do not live more strongly in our consciousness than our dreams. And our will impulses, we oversleep them. We know how to remember dreams in our imagination, but in our ordinary consciousness we do not even know how our will works when we move our arm. We dream in feeling, we sleep in willing. Because we are sentient beings who feel and will, there is a world of spirit around us that we cannot see into in our ordinary consciousness. We are torn out of this world by perception and thinking. Because we are perceivers and thinkers and enjoy the physical world, we do not know that the dead walk among us. The dead walk among us. Man, when he has developed throughout his life, goes through the gate of death. He remains connected with earthly existence, the threads go down from him into earthly existence. We cannot feel and will without the dead who were karmically connected with us working in our feelings and wills. Spiritual science gives recognition of what looks in as a life not lost to the earth, which one otherwise believes in nothing, in a living way. The spiritual inclinations of the people of the East are also based on this. The peoples of the European center have the task, out of the freedom of the soul, to draw everything that the human being can consciously create out of the freedom of his soul into the fourth millennium. To do this, however, the outer material reality must be spiritually permeated. But it must not be immersed in Wilsonism, which is the opposite of all spirituality. In the East, what is preparing itself as the next culture must be released from those terrible contradictions, from that which does not belong together, which has developed from the grafting of Trotskyism and Leninism onto burgeoning spirituality. This next culture will be called upon each time something happens on earth to ask: What do the dead say about this?

Yes, it is a much more important thing today to know that this is something we are approaching in our development on earth. Today people are clever, they are so clever at twenty! They let themselves be elected to parliament at twenty because today everyone has their own point of view by the time they are twenty, they are fully formed human beings. That life from the age of twenty until we die is not given to us in vain, but that we are constantly growing, that new things are revealed to us, that when we have passed through the gate of death, wisdom continues, life continues, we become wiser, that is something that people must imbibe. And in the future, people will realize that the wisest people to ask about what is happening on earth are the dead.

The consciousness soul - if you read about what that is in my book 'Theosophy' - develops the present, the spirit self develops the nearest culture. The spirit self develops in that the dead will be the advisers of the living on earth. Today this is still considered a fantastic reverie, half madness. It will become a reality. There will come a time when people united on earth to do something worthwhile and meaningful for the evolution of the earth will not only consult the living but also the dead. It is not possible at present to go into detail about how this will take shape politically in the future and how it must be prepared. This can only remain a mystery. But one can already penetrate with the fact that this living consciousness must arise in humanity, that we are with the dead; that man should not only develop egoistic striving for immortality, but that living striving that lives in work, in action.

To become aware that spiritual knowledge would like to place the individual human striving into the all-embracing striving of the earth, I thought was particularly suitable to be considered on this occasion, when our friends have come together here to find the spiritual-scientific answers to certain questions of life. That it is not just about narrow-minded human soul needs, but that today, if we are serious about what spiritual science is, it is about the fate of earthly culture, to This realization is not arrogance, not megalomania; it can be done in all humility, but it must be done because there must be people today who truly understand the seriousness of human endeavor on earth. Immerse yourself in spiritual science, and you will find that however small a branch it may still be, it can make its contribution to what should come about in the development of humanity, what must come about if the earth is to reach its goal!

1. The Literary revolution around the middle of the nineteenth century

[ 1 ] On December 8, I began the cycle of lectures on "The main currents in German literature from the revolutionary period (1848) to the present", which the board of the "Freie Literarische Gesellschaft" commissioned me to give.

[ 2 ] I do not want to turn the "Freie Literarische Gesellschaft" into a university college, but I would like to find a middle way in these lectures between the light tone of French conferences and that of university lectures, which follow the strict course of scientific methodology. Nor do I wish to offer the members of the Society a purely historical approach. Anyone who, like myself, wants to contribute to the development of the new world view that has become possible for us through the revolutionization of intellectual life in this century, prefers to look to the future rather than the past, and is only capable of describing the past insofar as it contains the seeds for the present and the future.

[ 3 ] I have said of our present sensations that they are so fundamentally different from the sensations of the most eminent spirits of the first half of the century that we have the feeling that the writings of these spirits are written in an idiom foreign to us. A radical transformation of the world view has taken place in our century, as radical as few in world history have been. If we want to describe this transformation in a few words, we must say that man has gone from being a humble, weak being who wants to be dependent on higher powers to a proud, self-confident being who wants to be the master of his own destiny, who does not want to be ruled but wants to rule himself. Man has learned to draw his best strength not from powers beyond, but from the reality to which he himself belongs. The best minds in the first half of the century were far removed from this view of life. They were still dominated by the old world of imagination, by the old religious views. In their emotional world, they could not get away from the otherworldly God who controls the destinies of mankind. They longed for new ways of life, for new forms of state and society; but their longing was a dull, vague one, because it did not emerge from the driving force of a new world view. Political revolutions can only take place on a large scale if they are linked to a revolution of the entire spiritual life. Christianity brought about such a great, comprehensive revolution. The political revolutions of recent times have not achieved their goal because they lacked the driving force, the revolutionization of the world view. Men like Jahn, Börne, Sallet, Herwegh, Anastasius Grün, Dingelstedt, Freiligrath, Moritz Hartmann, Prutz knew that the old world of ideas had become worn out, overripe, rotten; but they were not able to put a new world of ideas in the place of the old one. They became revolutionaries, not because a new world of ideas lived within them, which they wanted to realize, but because they were dissatisfied with the existing, embittered by the present.

[ 4 ] But the world of imagination and the old form of government belonged together. This truth was expressed by Hegel when he was given a professorship in Berlin. Hegel was the most unproductive mind imaginable. He was incapable of giving birth to a new idea from his imagination. But he was one of the most rational people who ever lived. He therefore penetrated the old world of ideas down to its last nooks and crannies. And he found this world of ideas realized in the Prussian state. That is why he could say: everything real is reasonable. Hegel pronounced the last word of the old world view. It was not possible to revolutionize with this view. This required a new world of ideas. The first herald of such a world was Ludwig Feuerbach. He taught people that all higher powers are idols which man has created in his own breast and which he has transferred out of his own soul into the world in order to worship them as entities acting above him. Feuerbach made man the master of himself. This was the beginning of a completely new world of ideas. The old world of ideas had become an idol, a ghost, a spectre by which man allowed himself to be enslaved. Max Stirner said this in the clearest words that have ever been spoken. Away with all idols was his slogan. And there was nothing left behind but the "I", enslaved by nothing, free and unchained, who stakes his cause on nothing. We, in the second half of the nineteenth century, are working to find the universe in this nothingness. The old ideals lie destroyed at our feet; they are nothing to us, a yawning chasm. The poets, the artists, the naturalists, the thinkers in the second half of the century are endeavoring to fill this nothingness with life again. Darwin and Haeckel brought a new world view, new religious ideas.

[ 5 ] Through Feuerbach, minds have been revolutionized, prepared to understand Darwin and Haeckel. This transformation of the world view is the great revolution of the nineteenth century. Compared with it, the political revolution of 1848 is only an outward sign, a symbol. The spiritual revolution is still going on today. It will be the victorious one.

[ 6 ] I was delighted that so many members and guests of the "Freie Literarische Gesellschaft" attended this first of my lectures.

2. From Heinrich Laube to Paul Heyse

[ 7 ] Heinrich Laube is to me the type of man of letters who looks at things with a cold gaze that goes little into the depths of the human soul. In his youth, the fire of the revolutionary lived in him, which led him to glorify the Polish uprising. Gradually, the sobriety in his nature overgrew; he became a self-confident man, who approached things with the feeling that he knew how to handle them at the right end. He is the best director of the century because he has a clear eye for the harmony into which the outside of things must be brought if they are to be effective. He is the man of scenic aesthetics. And he is also a scenery artist as a playwright and as a novelist. One misses the soul in his characters, the historical ideas in the events he depicts. Gutzkow is different. He is the most important of the spirits who worked around the middle of the century. If Laube can be described as a social anatomist, Gutzkow is the philosophical observer of his time. His "Ritter vom Geiste" (1850-51) appears as a comprehensive, profound document of this period. Gutzkow presents all the typical figures of society at the time, all the social currents, in order to paint an all-round, perfect picture of his present. The spirit of the time is no less vivid in his novel "The Wizard of Rome" (1858-61). Gutzkow unites the light and dark sides of Catholicism, the sympathetic and unsympathetic characters it produces, into a cultural portrait of the highest value. Gustav Freytag does not seem as important to me as to many others. I see the spirit of journalism in all his creations. Freytag endows his creations with all the inaccuracies, obliquities and half-measures with which the editorialist characterizes people and conditions. In this art of characterization, the contemporary catchphrase applies more than the unclouded view into the ramifications and the fullness of reality. The "journalists" are not true characters, but half-true figures, as they live in the minds of the daily writers. This Bolz, as Freytag describes him, is not to be found in reality; but journalism has to invent him in order to express the thoughts of the time.

[ 8 ] The figures of Laube, Gutzkow and Freytag no longer have much to say to us contemporary people. Forces have revealed themselves to us in the life of the human soul and in history of which the spirits around the middle of the century still knew nothing. The sense in which this assertion is to be understood will be shown in my next lectures.

3. Spiritual life in Germany before the Franco-Prussian War

[ 9 ] The fifties and sixties of this century show a number of parallel currents. One-sided directions of intellectual life went side by side. Only in our time has a confluence of these individual currents taken place. Herman Grimm is a personality in whose intellectual physiognomy one of these currents came to the fore. It is the purely aesthetic world view that he professes. For him, the world is not governed by "eternal, iron laws", by the laws of nature. For him, it is a work of art created by a divine artist, revealing infinite beauty. Alongside this purely aesthetic view of the world, the one based on a broader spiritual foundation, founded by David Friedrich Strauß, is asserting itself. For Strauß, the personality of the Son of God has evaporated into the divine idea, which cannot be realized in a single human individual (Jesus), but only in the whole of humanity. God cannot gain earthly existence in a human being, but only in the life of the human race.

[ 10 ] The third worldview, the one that held the most promise for the future, was introduced by Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species" (1859). Through him and his student Ernst Haeckel, the worship of nature took the place of the worship of God. There was now no spirit apart from that which nature is capable of producing from itself. Only through it can man come so far as to draw ethical satisfaction from nature itself, which was previously only possible through the prospect of an afterlife. Now his joys spring from this earth.

[ 11 ] The artistic document of these world views is Paul Heyse's "Children of the World". What matters is not what is told in this novel. What matters is that the world views of the fifties and sixties have taken on an artistic form in it.

[ 12 ] The audience that found satisfaction in this novel was one that needed a new world view, a new way of thinking and feeling, but that had no need for a reorganization of social conditions, of the social order.

[ 13 ] Friedrich Spielhagen met the needs of readers who longed for new forms of life. He made the social ideas and trends of his time the subject of his novels.

4. The literary struggles in the new empire

[ 14 ] In the 1970s in Germany, art, philosophy and science are not matters that are at the center of life. Minds are preoccupied by the desire to make themselves as comfortable as possible in the new empire. Politics occupies far more interest than artistic tendencies. The latter are merely a luxury, an addition to life to which people turn during breaks. Poets who sing about things that have nothing to do with the seriousness of life find a large audience. Redwitz, Roquette, Rodenberg, Bodenstedt, Geibel are very much to the taste of the time. One must forget one's higher spiritual interests if one wants to take unalloyed pleasure in these poets. The eternal sadness of the forest, the cuteness of the little birds, the dreamy devotion to the sweet aspects of nature are not for people for whom art is the highest thing in life.

[ 15 ] The further development of the human spirit suffers from the tenacity of human nature. The time of which I speak was not yet so far advanced as to permeate the whole man with that mode of feeling and conception which dominates the scientific view of the world. The old idealism, which seeks to understand the world one-sidedly from the spiritual, still prevails. It could not yet be understood that the spirit is born out of nature, out of immediate reality. Full proof of this is the appearance of Robert Hamerling. He is the type of an artist in an overripe age. He has absorbed the ideas of the occidental world in their entirety. But he is unable to bring the artistic form he gives his works into full harmony with his ideas. The sensual, lush images, the colorful depictions that he gives seem only outwardly grafted onto his ideas. If Hamerling were really a modern spirit, the spiritual content would not have to stand beside and above the reality he describes, but would have to ooze out of it. Sacher-Masoch is the most vivid example of how little the emergence of the spiritual from the sensual-natural could be understood at that time. This poet burrows into the sensual with a subtle way of understanding. He knows all the secrets of the carnal-natural. But his descriptions remain entirely in the realm of raw, naked sensuality. The spiritual appears next to it as an illusion, a bubble of foam which the sensual produces to deceive man. Hamerling is half Christian, half pagan; Sacher-Masoch is the reverse Christian, who practises a religious cult with the carnal. As certain as Sacher-Masoch's art represents a one-sidedness, his works are certainly documents of the seventies, the time that did not have the strength to rise above one-sidedness.

[ 16 ] In Hamerling and Sacher-Masoch lives something that is not exhausted in the merely artistic. For them, poetry is a link within human activity, a means of living out the whole human being, who is more than just an artist. Opposite them are those who cultivate a late art that does not flow directly from human nature, but which has arisen through the transformation and further development of earlier art forms. I count among them: Hermann Lingg, Josef Victor Scheffel, Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Storm, Gottfried Keller, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Theodor Fontane.

[ 17 ] The basic character of the artistic sensibility of the seventies is most clearly evident in drama. While Brachvogel still saw the task of drama in a genuinely German way in the shaping of human characters, the most popular playwright of the time became a mere experimenter of dramatic form. And a truly great man like Ludwig Anzengruber remains unnoticed. Under Paul Lindau's leadership, drama ceased to serve a higher spiritual need; it became a gimmick with the forms of dallying stage poetry borrowed from the French.

[ 18 ] Such was the intellectual atmosphere of the time in which the young German Empire was being formed. A thorough dissatisfaction among the young minds is therefore only too understandable. Michael Georg Conrad, Max Kretzer, Karl Bleibtreu, Konrad Alberti became the spokesmen for the dissatisfied. They wanted to put a young, promising art in the place of the old-fashioned, outdated one. It doesn't matter what the young revolutionaries achieved. They all failed to deliver what they promised. What matters is that they gave expression to a basic sentiment that was only too justified among the young generation of the seventies.

5. The significance of Ibsen and Nietzsche for modern intellectual life

[ 19 ] In the fifth of my lectures I tried to describe the significance of Ibsen and Nietzsche for modern intellectual life. Ibsen himself lived through the battles that took place between the spirits in the second half of this century. He was not so happy to be able to devote himself entirely to a one-sided current of thought and to fight everything else from one point of view, like Schopenhauer, Max Stirner, Lassalle, David Friedrich Strauss. His soul is a battlefield on which the spiritual battle types all appear and wrestle with each other without one of them being victorious. His spiritual work is a discussion of many individuals who dwell within him.

[ 20 ] Two main currents run through the second half of our century. The first is a radical longing for freedom. We want to be independent of all divine providence, independent of all tradition, of inherited and inherited elements of life, independent of the influence of social and state organization. We want to be masters of our own destiny.

[ 21 ] This longing is countered by the belief, flowing from modern natural science, that we are completely woven into the fabric of a rigid necessity. We are descendants of the most highly developed mammals. What they accomplish is an effect of their organization. And what we humans do, think and feel is also a result of our natural constitution. It is conceivable that natural science will come so far as to be able to prove exactly how the parts of our brain must be organized and move when we have a certain idea, a certain sensation or expression of will. How we are organized is how we must behave. How can we still speak of freedom in the face of this knowledge?

[ 22 ] I believe that natural science can give us the awareness of freedom in a more beautiful form than human beings have ever had. Laws are at work in our souls which are just as natural as those which drive the heavenly bodies around the sun. But these laws represent something that is higher than all the rest of nature. This something is present nowhere else but in human beings. What flows from this something is what makes man free. He rises above the rigid necessity of inorganic and organic lawfulness, obeys and follows only himself. The Christian view, on the other hand, is that divine providence rules in this area, which man has for himself over and above nature.

[ 23 ] Henrik Ibsen was unable to find a balance between the belief in the rigid necessity of nature and the urge for freedom. His dramas show that he wavers back and forth between these two extreme beliefs. Sometimes he lets his characters struggle for freedom, sometimes he lets them be members of an iron necessity.

[ 24 ] It was Friedrich Nietzsche who first taught the emancipation of man from the rest of nature. Man should not follow any supernatural or mere natural laws. He should not be a plaything of divine providence and not a member of natural necessity. He should be the meaning of the earth, that is, the being that lives itself out in full independence. It should develop of its own accord and not be subject to any laws. This is Nietzsche's ethics. This is the basis of his idea of a "revaluation of all values". Until now, people have favoured those who best follow the laws that they believe to be divine or natural. An image of perfection has been held up to man. The person who only wanted to live out of himself, who did not strive for this image, was seen as a troublemaker of the general order. That should change. The type that strives for all the strength, power and beauty that are not predetermined, but lie within itself, should be able to develop freely. Man, who lives only according to the law, should be a bridge between the animal and the superman, who creates the law himself.

[ 25 ] All belief in the hereafter will be overcome when man will have learned to build his existence on himself.

[ 26 ] I would also like to describe Zola as a personality who works in the sense of Nietzsche's world view. In Zola's opinion, the work of art should not represent something higher, something divine in relation to immediate reality, no, the artist should represent this reality as he sees it through his temperament. In this way, he feels himself to be the creator and the one who enjoys him to be the sense of the earth. Both remain within the real, but they depict it in such a way that through their representation they awaken the consciousness that man is a natural being like all other natural things, but a higher one, which is able to give things a free form of its own accord.

6. The influence of the world view of an age on the technique of poetry

[ 27 ] Schiller's dramatic technique is only possible with a poet who believes in a moral world order. In Schiller's sense, the dramatic hero must be brought to the tragic catastrophe through guilt. The catastrophe must appear as a punishment. We, with our purely scientific view of the world, find it absurd if the catastrophe in the drama is linked to guilt. What happens in the human world has for us the same character of moral-free necessity as the rolling of a billiard ball that is hit by another. Such a necessity also satisfies us in drama alone. Following on from this, I developed the connection between the scientific direction of the eighties and the poetic naturalism of the time. The young poets of that time wanted to depict the facts just as externally as the naturalists observed them. They were attached to the outside, which often lies before the senses; the deeper connections in nature and human life, which only reveal themselves to the mind, were not taken into account by either the researchers or the artists at the time. Today we are striving towards a different view of the world and of life. The poet will not link the facts of the world as they appear in the light of a moral or other divine world order, but neither will he link them as they present themselves to mere external, sensory observation. He will assert the right of his personality. His temperament, his imagination will move him to see things in a different context than observation shows him. He will express himself through the things he depicts. Therefore, all aesthetics will dissolve into psychology. The only reason for the way a poet creates will be the peculiarity of his personality. I would like to call the criticism that must necessarily develop from this view individualistic, in contrast to the surviving criticism that applies objective standards. This time I am only giving this brief account of my lecture because I would like to discuss the matter in more detail in this space next time.

7. The spiritual life of the present

[ 28 ] We live in a time in which the revolutionization of the spirits through the world view gained on the basis of natural science exerts its convincing effect on all people who take a remarkable part in spiritual life. But for many, this effect is only on the mind. These many see man as the creature they must regard him as when they draw the necessary conclusions from Darwin's world-changing ideas. But the hearts of these spirits, their sensibilities, are not as advanced as their minds. They think in scientific terms and feel in Christian terms. This causes in them that terribly painful mood of the soul which must arise when one says to oneself that what is valuable is the world beyond, the world of pure ideals and heavenly goods, and when one realizes at the same time that this world is an empty fantasy, an insubstantial dream. One spirit in whom this painful mood has found a grandiose poetic expression is Marie Eugenie delle Grazie. In her admirable poem "Robespierre", she gave words to this pain. To her, the earth is the ruthless all-mother, who uselessly and pointlessly creates new beings and destroys them again just to serve her greed, and who from time to time also creates prophets - Socrates, Christ, Robespierre - who dream of ideals in order to deceive people for a short time about the nothingness of existence. Without these idealistic dreamers, they would prefer annihilation to existence. Through the idealists, people are repeatedly stimulated to a new lust for life, but at the same time deprived of real knowledge.

[ 29 ] The dichotomy between head and heart, between feeling and understanding is the content of most contemporary poetry. Arno Holz, Julius Hart are the singers of this dichotomy. But we also have poets who can draw from the new world view the courage to face life and the joy of existence that flows from it for those who truly recognize it. We do not need a view of the hereafter to get over the tribulations of this world. This was expressed in poignant poems above all by Hermann Conradi, who unfortunately died so young. It also resonates in some of Wilhelm Jordan's poetry and that of many others.

[ 30 ] But we also have a poet to whom the modern way of feeling is as if innate, who has not forced his way into it through struggle and pain, who is naively modern: Otto Erich Hartleben. The others first have to come to terms with Christianity in order to feel modern; he originally feels modern. I like every note in his poetry because I have to feel everything the way he does.

[ 31 ] I have now explained in this lecture what Wilhelm Jensen, Wilhelm Raabe, Richard Dehmel, Detlev von Liliencron mean within the modern world; I have characterized contemporary drama (Max Halbe, Ernst von Wolzogen, Hermann Sudermann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Otto Erich Hartleben). In a short paper I cannot reproduce the content of the lecture, into which I have squeezed everything I have to say about my contemporaries.

[ 32 ] In these lectures I have endeavored to give a picture of the revolutionization of minds in the second half of this century. We are currently celebrating the anniversary of the revolution. But more important to us than the political revolution is the purely spiritual revolution of our world view. We are entering the new century with significantly different feelings than those of our ancestors who were brought up in Christianity. We have truly become "new people", but we, who also profess the new worldview with our hearts, are a small congregation. We want to be fighters for our gospel, so that in the coming century a new generation may arise that knows how to live, satisfied, cheerful and proud, without Christianity, without a view of the hereafter.

Today and next time I am going to speak about the Gospel of St. John. I would mention that what I have to say will only really be comprehensible to those who are already somewhat familiar with spiritual science. It would, however, take us too far out of our way if we went into everything unfamiliar to non-theosophists. You are probably aware that latterly New Testament textual criticism has discredited the John Gospel as an historical source. It is said in theological circles—at least in advanced circles—that the first three gospels, the synoptic gospels, are the only documents relevant to the life of the founder of Christianity. They are called synoptic because they can be taken together to form a general picture of the life of Christ Jesus. On the other hand modern theologians try to interpret the John Gospel as a sort of poetic work, a confession of faith, the writings of a person portraying his feelings, his intimate religious life as it was born in him through the impact of Christianity. Thus the John Gospel could be considered as a devotional work, a deeply felt confession of faith, not as anything that could be taken as Christian historical facts.

But for everyone who immerses himself in the writings of the New Testament, one fact is indisputable: an immediate life flows from the John Gospel, and there is a conviction, a source of truth of a different nature to that proceeding from other religious writings. There is a certainty, which needs no outer confirmation. There is a feeling that comes over one when one meets the John Gospel if one is sensitive to inner soul life and spiritual devotion. Only with the help of spiritual science can one understand why this is so. Many a time have I told you how spiritual science helps towards a more intimate connection with religious documents.

You all know that when one first meets the scriptures one adopts the attitude of a simple person and takes the facts as they are described, without criticism; one takes the bread of religious life from these sources and is satisfied with it.

Many people of our day who had this naive outlook and then became “clever”, became “enlightened”, noticed the contradictions in the gospels. Then they rejected the gospels and lost faith. They said: We cannot reconcile remaining faithful to these writings and seeking wisdom in them with our conscience and our sense of truth. This is the stage of the “clever” ones, the second stage.

Then there is the third way that people approach religious documents. They begin to explain them symbolically. They begin to see symbols and allegories in them. This is the way of free-thinkers, especially in recent times.

Bruno Wille, the editor of the paper “Der Freidenker” (The Free Thinker), has now chosen this way. He has taken to explaining symbolically the Christ myth and the Bible in general. The really necessary way of development that man needs, an inner turning point, cannot follow from this. Those who are less ingenious will explain the scriptures less ingeniously. Others who are more ingenious will be better. Much will be read into it that springs from human ingenuity. The third way is thus a half believing, but arbitrary, attitude.

Then there is quite a different standpoint. One learns that there are realities pertaining to higher worlds, that besides our world of the senses, there are soul-spiritual things, and that religious revelations are not concerned with the sense world but present facts of a higher world. Those who have gotten to know the realities of the astral world which lies behind our sense world, and of the devachanic (or mental world) which lies even deeper, will come to a new and higher understanding of religious sources. It is impossible to understand the John Gospel without rising to such higher worlds. The John Gospel is not a poetic work, nor a writing arising from mere religious fervour, but sets forth revelations from higher worlds that the writer of the gospel has received. It is something like this—I will briefly describe it. The supporting evidence I will not deal with today; perhaps I can go into it next time. The writer of the John Gospel learned, through experience in higher worlds, what took place at “the beginning of our era“ that related to the life of the founder of Christianity, and his acts.

Let me give you an example of the difference between just knowing, and truly comprehending. We have recently mentioned here that someone can be next to us, we can see what he looks like, but we need not necessarily really know him for what he is. I have told the story of the singer who, at an evening party sat between Mendelsohn and someone else she did not know. She got on very well with Mendelsohn, but towards the other guest, though he was very courteous, she felt an aversion. Afterwards she asked, “Who was that bore on my left?” The answer was, “It was the famous philosopher Hegel”. If the lady had been told previously that the great philosopher Hegel would be present at a party, that alone would probably have been enough for her to have accepted the invitation. But because he sat beside her unknown, he was a bore. This is the difference between seeing and understanding, between just knowing and comprehending.

He who was the founder of Christianity could not readily be recognised if one only possessed the ordinary intellect employed in the sense world. It needed that which the Christian mystics so often expressed in profound and beautiful language. This was what Angelus Silesius meant when he said:

There is an inner experience of Christ—there is the possibility to realize inwardly what took place outwardly as events in Palestine between the years 1 and 33 A.D. He who came into this world from higher worlds must be understood from a higher world. And he who portrayed Him most deeply had to raise himself to the two higher worlds we have mentioned, the astral and the devachanic, or mental worlds. This elevation of John, if we so name him, was the elevation into these two higher worlds. His Gospel reveals this to us.

The first twelve chapters contain John's experiences in the astral world. From chapter thirteen onwards it is his experiences in the devachanic, or mental world. He who wrote it down says of Christ (the words are not to be taken literally): Here on this earth He lived, here has He worked with divine powers, with occult powers. He has healed the sick, he has gone through everything from death to resurrection. It is impossible to understand these things with the ordinary intellect. Here on earth there is no science or learning by which one could really understand what occurred. But there is the possibility of rising to the higher worlds. There one can find the wisdom to understand Him who walked here on earth among us. Thus did the writer of the John Gospel rise to the two higher worlds and become initiated. It was an initiation, and the writer describes his initiation into the astral world and the devachanic, or mental world.

In olden times, in regions where man's body was still suited to these things, such an initiation took place as follows. The person had to go through a sort of sleep-state. What now takes several years in a modern European initiation—because the modern European can no longer go through the process I will describe—what today is achieved through long exercises of meditation and concentration, was achieved in a short time by some individuals, after the appropriate exercises of meditation and concentration. I particularly emphasise that anyone who really wishes to receive initiation must, in some form or other, face the two important experiences about to be described—though in a somewhat different way. He must go through a sort of sleep condition. To understand the nature of sleep, let us remind ourselves what takes place when one sleeps. One's higher bodies are then separated from one's lower bodies. Man consists of a physical body, which one can see with one's eyes. The second member is the etheric body which surrounds the physical body and which is much finer than the physical body. Currents and organs of wonderful variety and splendour are active in it. The etheric body contains the same organs as the physical body. It has a brain, heart, eyes etc. They represent the forces which formed the corresponding organs. It is as if one cooled water in a vessel until it becomes ice. In this way you should picture the arising of the physical organs through the densifying of the etheric organs. The etheric body extends only a little beyond the physical body.

The third member is the astral body. It is the bearer of desires, wishes, passions, etc. It permeates the physical body in the form of a cloud. There are colours—violent passions appear as lightning flashes. The peculiarities of temperament glide through the body in glowing points of varying intensity.

The whole inner man is expressed in a luminous form. This is the real ego of man, the bearer of the higher centre of his being. In normal sleep the physical and etheric bodies are lying in bed. They are closely united. The astral body and all the rest is separated. As long as one does not do anything particular one is unconscious when the astral body is outside the physical body. One is as unconscious as one would be in the physical world without eyes or ears. One could live as long as one liked in the physical world; if one had no eyes there would be no colours, if one had no ears there would be no sound. So it is when the astral body is outside the physical body. It is spread out in the soul world, but one does not see this world or become aware of it because one has no astral sense organs. They must gradually be formed. If a person does not practice exercises he remains unconscious in higher worlds. But if he does practice then he can attain consciousness in these higher worlds. When his astral body acquires organs he begins to see the astral world around him. Those of you who have often attended these lectures will know that there are seven such organs. They are called wheels, chakrams or lotus flowers. The two-petalled lotus flower lies between the eyes—between the eye-brows, the sixteen-petalled lies in the region of the larynx, the twelve-petalled lies in the heart region. If these organs are gradually developed one becomes clairvoyant in the astral world.

This astral vision is something quite different from physical sight. You can get some idea of astral vision if you think of the flow of dream life. In dreams we have symbolic pictures—true symbols. One sees symbols. One loses consciousness of what takes place here in the physical world, but one can experience in symbolic pictures such events as the life of Christ Jesus as John describes it from his own experience in the astral world. Descriptions of this nature form the content of the first twelve chapters of the John Gospel. Don't misunderstand me. I know many will say: If all this is astral experience, then it is nothing real and what is told us of the founder of Christianity is not authentic. But this is not the case. It would be as if one denied that a man of flesh and blood could be a genius, because one cannot see genius. Although one learns the truth of Christ Jesus only on the astral plane, it is still a fact that he lived his life on the physical plane. We are dealing with symbols on the astral plane and outer reality on the physical plane. Nothing is taken away from the facts when we understand them more deeply in the sense of the John Gospel.

Initiation in the astral world is preceded by, and depends on what is called meditation. This means that the soul sinks into itself—I have often described it here. To reach a meditative experience one must make oneself blind and deaf to all sense impressions. Nothing must be able to disturb one. Cannons can go off without one being aware of it in one's inner life. One does not achieve this at once, but through constant practice one can attain this capacity. One must empty oneself also of all past experiences. Memory must be wiped out. The soul must be concerned only with itself and then out of its inner being there arise the eternal truths which are able—not only to awaken our understanding—but to release capacities which lie slumbering under a spell in our souls. These great eternal verities will rise up in man according to the maturity he has attained through his karma—the one, as Subba Row says, in seven incarnations, another in seventy years, another in seven years, others in seven months, seven days or seven hours.

John sets forth the means whereby his soul was led to perception on the astral plane. The formula he used for meditation stands at the beginning of his gospel. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was a God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without this Word was not anything made that was made. In it was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.”

In these five sentences lie the eternal verities which loosed the spell in John's soul and brought forth the great visions. This is the form of the meditation. Those for whom the John Gospel is written should not read it like any other book. The first five sentences must be taken as a formula of meditation. Then one follows John on his way, and attempts to experience oneself what he experienced. This is the way to do it; so it is meant.

John says: Do what I have done. Let the great formula, “In the beginning was the Word” work in your souls and you will verify what is said in my first twelve chapters.

This alone can really help towards understanding the John Gospel. Thus is it intended and thus should it be used. I have often spoken of what the “Word” signifies. “In the beginning” is not a good translation. It should really read: Out of the primal forces emerged the Word. That is what it means: The Word came forth, came forth out of the primal forces. Thus “in the beginning” means: coming forth out of the primal forces.

When man is in this sleep condition he is no longer in the sense world. He moves into a soul world and in this soul world experiences what the sense world really is. The truth of the sense world is revealed. He starts out from these words derived from the sense world leading back to the primal forces, and rises up to the words of truth. Every truth has seven meanings. For the mystic, immersed in contemplation it has however this meaning: The knowledge, the Word which emerges, is not something that merely applies to yesterday and today, but this Word is eternal. This Word leads to God because it was ever with God, because it is the very essence that God has planted into all things.

There is however, still another way of understanding this, and one acquires it if one returns day after day to the momentous words: “In the beginning was the Word”. When one begins to understand, not with the intellect, but with the heart, so that the heart becomes one with these words, then the power begins to work, and there begins the state of mind of which John speaks. He says it with great clarity: “All things were made by Him and without the Word was not anything made that was made”.

What do we find in this Word? We find life. What do we perceive through this life—through this light? We must take these religious texts quite literally if we want to attain higher knowledge. Where does this light shine? In the darkness of night. It comes to those who sleep. It comes to everyone who sleeps. But the darkness comprehended it not—until the ability develops to perceive it on the astral plane. Thus is the fifth verse to be understood literally. The astral light shines into the darkness of night but man does not normally see it, he must first learn to see.

As all this became reality for the writer of the John Gospel, the light dawned and he saw who He was, He whose disciple and apostle he was. Here on earth he had seen Him. Now he had found Him again on the astral plane, and he knew that He who had walked the earth in the flesh only differed in one respect from what lived in his own deepest inner self. In every single man there lives a divine man. In the distant future this divine man will arise resurrected in every man. As man stands before us today he is, in his outward appearance, to a greater or lesser extent, an expression of the inner divine man, and this inner divine man works constantly on the outer man.

Last Thursday [Public Lecture, Berlin, 15 Feb, 1906. “Reincarnation and Karma”] I already pointed out how one can illustrate this by a simple comparison. Look at a child. One could be tempted to say that these innocent features came from the father or mother, an uncle or an ancestor. However, everything within the child expresses itself in the features, in the gestures of the hands and in all its movements. What slumbers in the child strives to come to expression. Finally the individual emerges and the physiognomy becomes an expression of the individual soul, while previously it showed more of a family type. In primitive man the individual soul is usually still slumbering and has but a meagre existence. In the course of many incarnations and efforts the individual emerges, the soul aquires more power over the physical body, and the physiognomy takes on the imprint, or the expression of the inner man. An immature person expresses little of the power of the soul. Gradually man matures, and full maturity is reached when the inner word has become flesh completely—when the outer has become an exact imprint of the inner, so that the spirit shines through the flesh. This however, John only understood once his higher self had appeared clearly before his astral eyes. It stood in front of his astral eyes and he knew: This is I. Today have I experienced it on the astral plane. However it will gradually descend as it did in Him, who I followed. This is the deep relationship between Christ Jesus and the divine man that exists in every man. This is the deep inner experience of John.

The inner soul lives unconscious in man and he only becomes aware of it through the processes we have described.

What does it mean to say: something becomes conscious. Can we become conscious of something which lives within us? As long as it only lives within us we are not aware of it. Man is not aware of what he carries within him, what is subjective. I will use a crude comparison to make clear what I mean. You all have a physical brain but you cannot see it. It would have to be taken out, and then you could see it. For the same reason, though there is a certain difference, you cannot see your higher self. It is the “I” within you. But it must come out if you are to see it, and this can only happen on the astral plane. When it is outside and confronts you, then spiritually, it is as if you had a physical brain on a platter and made it the object of your sense perception.

The writer of the John Gospel describes this process. His own higher ego appears before Him—his own higher ego, which in its fullness represents the Christ. When you know this you will be able to understand certain hints and truths in the John Gospel. You will be able to understand certain things quite well with the help of what I said up to now. In occult language one describes what this ego inhabits—the physical body, which it has built for itself to dwell in—as the temple. Thus one says: The soul dwells in the temple.

It is not altogether a painless procedure when for the first time the soul must leave the temple of the body so that it becomes visible outside of it. This leaving of the body is not without pain. All that forms this higher connection with the physical body are bands that are not so easy to loosen. Imagine that you are bound with fetters and you break loose. You would experience pain through this tearing apart. It is like a process of tearing apart when the astral body leaves the physical body when it leaves it, perceptibly. Leaving the body in sleep is different, one is not aware of it. If one leaves it consciously then one experiences pain.

When man begins to develop astral consciousness, things on the astral plane appear to him as in a mirror. The number 165 should not be read as 165 but as 561—as reflected writing. Everything appears reversed on the astral plane. Even time is reversed. When you follow someone on the astral plane you start, to begin with, from where he is. Then you go back to his birth. You can follow him on the physical plane forwards; on the astral plane backwards. Leaving the physical body is like this: It is as though we were leaving the temple of the physical body and were laid hold of from all sides. This is the occurrence which John wants to describe. He left his body in order to experience the Christ, his own higher divine self, confronting him. People around him have their astral bodies bound strongly to their physical bodies as if with fetters. Had John remained like them he would have continued to be fettered to his physical body. Now let us read how this occurrence is described pictorially and symbolically in the John Gospel, chapter 8, verses 58 and 59: “Jesus said unto them, verily, verily I say unto you: Before Abraham was, I am. Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them”, through the hindrances. With this ends the eighth chapter. This is the passing out of the astral body from the physical body. The final act, leading to the leaving of the physical body and to higher vision, usually lasts three days. When these three days are up, one attains a consciousness on the astral plane comparable to that previously experienced on the physical plane. Then one is united with the higher world.

In occult language this union with the higher world is called the marriage of the soul with the powers of the higher world. When one has left the physical body, this appears to one as a mother would appear to a new-born child, were the child able to be conscious at birth. Thus the physical body confronts one, and the astral body can very well say to the physical body: This is my mother. When one has celebrated this marriage one can say this. One can look back on the former union. This can happen after three days. This is the occult procedure on the astral plane. In chapter 2, verse 1, it is stated: “And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there”. This is the pictorial expression for what I have just said. It happened on the third day.

When a person enters the astral world, he finds himself in a region from which he can rise a step further into a still higher world—the mental, or devachanic world. This entry into the devachanic world can only be gained at the expense of the complete extinction, the death of the lower nature. He must go through the three days of death and then be awakened. Once he has attained vision of the astral plane and the pictures of the astral plane have confronted him, he is mature and ready to receive knowledge on the mental or devachanic plane. It is possible then to describe the awakening on the devachanic plane. To find oneself on the higher plane with conscious clarity of thought, this is the awakening of Lazarus.

John describes the awakening of Lazarus. Previously he has shown that through this chain of events one can enter the higher worlds. In chapter 10, verse 9, it is said: “I am the door: by me if any man enter in he shall be saved and shall go in and out and find pasture”. This is the awakening of what was wrapped in sleep and is now awakened on the devachanic plane. John goes through it. John is Lazarus, and John means nothing more nor less than what is described in his first twelve chapters. He describes as an astral experience that he was awakened on the astral plane. Then followed the initiation for the devachanic plane. Three days he lay in the grave, and then he received the awakening. The raising of Lazarus is the awakening of John who wrote the gospel.

Read everything up to the chapter on the raising of Lazarus and you will find no mention of John anywhere. Consider Lazarus and John. It is said of John (John, ch. 13, v. 23): “Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.” Regarding Lazarus, you find the same words—that He loved him. It is the same person. He is not mentioned previous to the awakening. He appears for the first time after he is “raised from the dead”. These are the enigmas hidden in the John Gospel. The disciple whom the Lord loved is he whom the Lord himself has initiated. The writer of the John Gospel was he whom the Lord loved. How was he able to say this? Because he had been initiated, first on the astral plane and then on the devachanic plane. If one is able in this way to find the deeper meaning of the John Gospel, then will one be able to understand it in its true profundity, and then it becomes one of the greatest texts ever written. It is the description of the initiation into the depths of the inner life of the soul. It has been written so that everyone who reads it can follow the same path. And this one can do. Sentence for sentence, word for word, one can find within oneself, by rising to the higher plane, what is described in the John Gospel. It is not a biography of Christ Jesus but a biography of the developing human soul. And what is described is eternal and can take place in the heart of every human being. This text is an example and a model. Hence it has this living and awakening power which not only makes people into Christians but enables them to awaken to a higher reality. The John Gospel is not a profession of faith, but a text which really gives strength, and a self-supporting, independent higher life. This springs forth from the John Gospel, and he who does not merely want to understand it, but to live it, has truly comprehended it.

With these few words I could only touch on the contents. Next time we will go into certain details. Then you will see how every single sentence confirms what we have said today in general terms. Step by step you will then see that the John Gospel is not addressed merely to the human intellect, but to man's entire soul forces, and that real soul experience springs from it.

Yesterday we concluded by outlining the three methods of occult development: the Eastern, the Christian and the Rosicrucian. Today we will begin by going more closely into the details which distinguish these three paths. But first I should say that no occult school sees in its teaching and requirements anything like a moral law valid for all mankind. The requirements apply only to those who deliberately choose to devote themselves to a particular occult training. You can, for instance, be a very good Christian and fulfil everything that the Christian religion prescribes for the laity without undergoing a Christian occult training. It goes without saying that you can be a good man and come to a form of the higher life without any occult training.

As I said earlier, the Eastern training calls for strict submission to the Guru.⁴² I will describe briefly the kind of instruction that an Eastern teacher gives. You will realise that the actual instructions cannot be given publicly; I can indicate only the stages of the path. The instructions can be divided into eight parts:

1. Yama includes all the abstentions required of anyone who wishes to undergo Yoga training: Do not lie, do not kill, do not steal, do not lead a dissolute life, desire nothing.

The injunction, Do not kill, is very stringent and applies to all creatures. No living creature may be killed or even injured, and the more strictly this rule is observed, the further will the pupil progress. Whether this rule can be observed in our civilisation is another matter. Every killing, even of a flea, impedes occult development. Whether someone is obliged to do it—that again is a different question.

You will understand the command, Do not lie, if you recall what I said about the astral plane, where to lie is to kill and every lie is a murder. Lying therefore comes into the same category as killing.

The precept, Do not steal, also has to be applied most strictly. A European might claim that he does not steal. But the Eastern Yogi does not look at it so simply. In the regions where these exercises were first promulgated by the great teachers of humanity, conditions were much simpler: stealing was easy to define. But a Yoga teacher would not agree that Europeans do not steal. For example, if I unjustifiably appropriate another man's labour, or if I procure for myself a profit which may be legally permissible but which involves the exploitation of another person—all this the Yoga teacher would call stealing. With us, social relations have become so complex that many people violate this commandment without the slightest awareness of doing so. Suppose you have money and deposit it in a bank. You do nothing with it; you exploit no-one. But suppose now the banker starts speculating and exploits other people with your money. In the occult sense you will be responsible for it, and the events will burden your karma. You can see that this precept requires deep consideration if you are entering on a path of occult development.

With regard to the injunction, Do not lead a dissolute life, take a person with private means whose capital is invested without his knowledge in a distillery; he is just as culpable as the producer of strong drinks. The fact that he knew nothing about it makes no difference to his karma. There is only one way of keeping to the right path with these abstentions: strive to need nothing. Even if you have great possessions, in so far as you strive to have no needs, you will injure no-one.

The injunction, Desire nothing, is especially hard to carry out. It means that the pupil must strive to have no needs, no desire for anything in the world, and to do only what the outer world demands of him. He must even suppress any feeling of pleasure at doing good to someone; he must be moved to help not by any such feeling but simply by the sight of suffering. And if he has to spend money, he must not think of his own wishes or desires but must say to himself: “I need this to maintain my body or to meet the needs of my spirit, as everyone else does. I do not desire it, but am considering only how best to live my life in the world.”

In Yoga training this concept of Yama is, as I have said, taken most strictly; it could not be transplanted to Europe as it stands.

2. Niyama. This means the observance of religious customs. In India, where these rules are chiefly applied, a problem is solved which causes many difficulties in European civilisation. For us it is very easy to say that we have passed beyond dogmas; we hold to the inner truth only and have no use for outer forms. The further a European has got away from religious observances, the more exalted does he imagine himself to be. The Hindu takes the opposite view; he holds firmly to the rites of his religion, and no-one may touch them, but anyone is free to form his own opinion of them. There are sacred rites which have come down from very ancient times and signify something very profound. An uneducated man will have very elementary ideas about them; a more highly cultured man will have different and better ideas, but no-one will say that anyone else's ideas are wrong. The wise and the unlearned observe the same customs. There are no dogmas, only rites. Hence these deeply religious customs can be observed by all, and in them the wise and the simple are brought together. Thus the rites are socially unifying. No-one is restricted in his opinions by conforming to a strict ritual.

The Christian religion has followed the opposite principle. Not customs, but opinions, have been imposed on people, and the consequence is that formlessness has become the rule in our social life. So begins a complete disregard of all observances that could draw human beings together; every form that expresses symbolically a higher truth is gradually rejected. This is a great loss for human development, especially for development in the Eastern sense.

In Europe today there are plenty of people who think they have learnt to do without dogmas, yet it is precisely the freethinkers and the materialists who are the worst fanatics for dogmas. The dogma of materialism is much more oppressive than any other. The infallibility of the Pope is no longer valid for many people, but instead we have the infallibility of the professor. Even the most liberal-minded, whatever they may say to the contrary, are victims of the dogmas of materialism. Think of the dogmas which burden lawyers, doctors and so on. Every university professor teaches his own dogma. Or think how people suffer from the dogma of the infallibility of public opinion, of the newspapers! The Eastern teacher of Yoga does not demand that the ceremonies which unite the learned and unlearned together should be abandoned: these sacred ancient rites are symbols of the highest wisdom. No culture is possible without such formal observances; to believe otherwise is an illusion. Suppose for instance a colony is founded with no forms or accepted customs. Clearly a colony such as that, with no church, no religious services or observances, could exist quite well for a time, because its people would continue to live in accordance with the rules and conventions they had brought with them. But as soon as these were lost, the colony would collapse, for every culture must embody a certain pattern which will give expression to its inner character. Modern civilisation must recover the forms it has lost; it must learn again how to give external expression to its inner life. In the long run social life is conditioned by its pattern, its formal customs. The ancient sages knew this, and hence they held firmly to religious practices.

3. Asanam means the adoption of a certain bodily posture in meditation. This is much more important for the Oriental than for the European, because the European body is no longer so sensitive to the flow of certain subtle currents. The body of the Oriental is even nowadays more delicately organised; it responds readily to the currents which pass from East to West, from North to South, from the Heights to the Depths. Spiritual currents flow through the universe, and it is for this reason that churches are built with a particular orientation. It is for this reason also that the Yoga teacher makes his pupil adopt a special posture; the pupil has to keep his hands and feet in a particular position, so that the currents may flow through his body in the right direction. If the Hindu did not bring his body into this harmony, he would risk losing all the benefits of his meditation.

4. Pranayama is breathing, yoga-breathing. It is an essential and detailed part of Eastern Yoga training. Christian training pays almost no attention to it, but in Rosicrucian training it has regained some importance.

What does breathing signify in occult development? You can find the answer in the injunctions not to kill and not to injure any living creature. The occult teacher says: “By breathing you are slowly, continually, killing your surroundings.” What does this mean? We breathe the air in, use it to furnish our blood with oxygen and then breathe it out again. What does this involve? We inhale the air with its oxygen; we combine the oxygen with carbon and we exhale carbon dioxide, in which no man or animal can live. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, which is a poison; and this means that with every breath we draw we are dealing death to other beings in our environment. Bit by bit we are killing our whole environment: we inhale the breath of life and exhale air which we can make no further use of. The occult teacher is concerned to alter this. If there were only men and animals in the world, all the oxygen would soon be used up and all living creatures would die. It is thanks to the plants that this does not happen, for in plants the breathing process is the reverse of ours. They assimilate carbon dioxide, separate the carbon from the oxygen, and use the carbon to build up their bodies. They liberate oxygen, and men and animals breathe it in again. So do the plants renew the life-giving air; otherwise all life would long ago have been destroyed. We owe our life to the plants, and in this way plants, animals and men are complementary.

But this process will change in the future, and since anyone who is undergoing occult training must begin to do what others will achieve at some time in the future, he must learn not to kill with his breath. That is Pranayama, the science of the breath. Our modern materialistic age places health under the sign of fresh air; but our modern way of achieving health through fresh air is one that terminates in death. A Yogi, on the other hand, will retire into a cave and as far as possible will breathe the air he has himself exhaled—unlike the European, who is always wanting to open windows. A Yogi has learnt the art of contaminating the air as little as possible because he has learnt how to use it up. How does he do it? The secret has always been known to the European occult schools, where it was called the finding of the Stone of the Wise, the Philosopher's Stone.

At the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century a good deal of information about occult development leaked out. The Stone of the Wise was often mentioned in published writings, but one can see that the author understood little of it, even though it all came from the right sources. In 1797 a local Thuringian newspaper printed an article about the Stone of the Wise which included, inter alia, the following: “The Stone of the Wise is something one has only to recognise, for every man has seen it. It is something which everyone holds in his hand for part of almost every day, but without knowing that it is the Philosopher's Stone.” This is an enigmatic way of indicating that the Philosopher's Stone can be found everywhere. Yet this strange expression is literally true.

This is how it comes about. The plant, as it builds up its body, takes in the carbon dioxide and retains the carbon for its body-building purposes. Men and animals eat the plants, take in the carbon, and give it up as carbon dioxide when they breathe out. So we have a carbon cycle. In the future there will be a great change. Man will learn to extend the range of his innate powers and will gradually come to do for himself what at present he leaves to the plant. Just as man passed through the plant and animal kingdoms in the course of his evolution, so will he in a certain sense retrace his steps. He will himself become plant; he will take up the plant-nature into himself and accomplish the whole plant-process within himself. He will retain the carbon dioxide and will consciously build up his body with it, as the plant now builds up its own body unconsciously. He will prepare the necessary oxygen in his own organs, unite it with carbon to form carbon dioxide, and then deposit the carbon again in himself. Thus he will be able to build up his bodily structure. Here is an idea which opens up a great perspective for the future; and when it comes about man will cease to be a killer with his breath.

Now we know that carbon and diamond are the same substance; diamond is more thoroughly crystallised and a more transparent form of carbon. Hence we need not think that in the future people will go about looking like negroes. Their bodies will consist of soft, transparent carbon. At that stage man will have found the Philosopher's Stone and he will transform his own body into it.

Anyone undergoing occult development has to anticipate this process as far as possible He must deprive his breath of the capacity to kill, and must organise his breathing so that the air he exhales is usable and can be breathed again. How is this to be accomplished? You have to bring rhythm into your breathing. The teacher gives the necessary instructions. Breathing in, holding your breath and breathing out again—this must be done rhythmically, if only for a short period. With every rhythmical exhalation the air is improved, slowly but surely. Here the old saying applies drops of water wear away the stone. The chemists cannot yet confirm this: their instruments are too coarse to detect the finer substances, but the occultist knows that breath imbued with rhythm is life-promoting and contains more than the normal amount of oxygen. The breath can be purified also, and at the same time, by meditation. This, too, contributes, if only by a very little, towards bringing the plant-nature back into man, so that he may become a being who does not kill.

5. Pratyahara, the curbing of sense-perception. Nowadays in ordinary life a person receives a continual stream of sense-impressions and allows them all to work on him. The occult teacher says to the pupil: “You must concentrate on a single sense-impression for a specified number of minutes and pass on to another only by your own free choice.”

6. Dharana, when the pupil has done that for a while he must learn to make himself deaf and blind to all sense-impressions; he must turn away from them and try to hold in his thought only the concepts they leave behind. If he thus lives in concepts only, and controls his thoughts and links one concept to another by his own free choice, he has reached the condition known as Dharana.

7. Dhyanam. There are concepts—often disregarded by Europeans—which do not derive from sense-impressions. We have to form them for ourselves—mathematical concepts, for example. No perfect triangle exists in the outer world; it can only be conceived in thought, and the same is true of a circle. Then there is a whole range of concepts which anyone undertaking occult training must study intensively. They are symbolic concepts which are connected with some objects—for example, the hexagram, or the pentagram, symbols which occultism can explain. The pupil must keep his mind sharply concentrated on such symbolic objects, not to be found in the outer world. It is the same with another kind of concept: for example, that of the species Lion, which can be laid hold of only in thought. On these, too, the pupil must focus his attention. Finally, there are moral ideas, such for example as the following, from Light on the Path:⁴³ “Before the eye can see, it must be incapable of tears.” This, too, cannot be experienced outwardly, but only inwardly. This meditation on concepts which have no sense-perceptible counterpart is called Dhyanam.

8. Finally, Samadhi, the most difficult of all. After concentrating for a very long time on an idea which has no sense-perceptible counterpart, you allow your mind to rest in it and your soul to be filled with it. Then you let the idea go, so that nothing is left in your consciousness. But you must not fall asleep, as would then normally happen; you must remain conscious. In that state the secrets of the higher worlds begin to reveal themselves. This state can be described as follows. You are thinking, for you are conscious, but you have no thoughts, and into this thinking without thoughts the spiritual powers are able to pour their content. But as long as you yourself fill your thinking, they cannot come in. The longer you can hold in your consciousness this activity of thinking without thoughts, the more will the super-sensible world reveal itself to you.

These are the eight realms with which a teacher of Eastern Yoga deals.

Now we will speak about the Christian way of occult training, as far as this is possible, and we shall see how it differs from the Eastern way. This Christian way can be followed with the advice of a teacher who knows what has to be done and can rectify mistakes at every step. But in Christian training the great Guru is Christ Jesus Himself. Hence it is essential to have a firm belief in the presence and the life on Earth of the Christ. Without this, a feeling of union with Him is impossible. Further, we must recognise that in the Gospel of St. John we have a document which originates with the great Guru Himself and can itself be a source of instruction. This Gospel is something we can experience in our own inner being and not something we merely believe. Whoever has absorbed it in the right way will no longer need to prove the reality of Christ Jesus, for he will have found Him.

In Christian training you must meditate on this Gospel, not simply read and re-read it. The Gospel begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God ...” The opening verses of this Gospel, rightly understood, are sentences for meditation and must be inwardly absorbed in the condition of Dhyanam, as described above. If in the morning, before other impressions have entered the soul, you live for five minutes solely in these sentences, with everything else excluded from your thoughts, and if you continue to do this over the years with absolute patience and perseverance, you will find that these words are not only something to be understood; you will realise that they have an occult power, and you will indeed experience through them a transformation of the soul. In a certain sense you become clairvoyant through these words, so that everything in St. John's Gospel can be seen with astral vision.

Then, under the direction of the teacher, and after meditating again on the five opening verses, the pupil allows the first chapter to pass through his mind for seven days. During the following week, after again meditating on the five opening verses, he goes on to the second chapter, and so in the same way up to the twelfth. He will soon learn how powerful an experience this is; how he is led into the events in Palestine when Christ Jesus lived there, as they are inscribed in the Akashic Record, and how he can actually experience it all. And then, when he reaches the thirteenth chapter, he has to experience the separate stages of Christian Initiation.

The first stage is the Washing of the Feet. We must understand the significance of this great scene. Christ Jesus bends down before those who are lower than himself. This humility towards those who are lower than we are, and at whose expense we have been able to rise, must be present everywhere in the world. If a plant were able to think, it would thank the minerals for giving it the ground on which it can lead a higher form of life, and the animal would have to bow down before the plant and say: “To thee I owe the possibility of my own existence.” In the same way man should recognise what he owes to all the rest of nature. So also, in our society, a man holding a higher position should bow before those who stand lower and say: “But for the diligence of those who labour on my behalf, I could not stand where I do.” And so on through all stages of human existence up to Christ Jesus Himself, who bows down in meekness before the Apostles and says: “You are my ground, and to you I fulfil the saying, ‘He who would be first must be last, and he who would be Lord must be the servant of all’.” The Washing of the Feet betokens this willingness to serve, this bowing down in perfect humility. This is a feeling that everyone committed to occult development must have.

If the pupil has permeated himself with this humility, he will have experienced the first stage of Christian Initiation. He will know by two signs, an outer and an inner, that he has gone thus far. The outer sign is that he feels as though his feet were being laved with water. The inner sign is an astral vision which will quite certainly come: he sees himself washing the feet of a number of persons. This picture rises up in his dreams as an astral vision, and every pupil has the same vision. When he has experienced it, he will have truly absorbed this whole chapter.

The second stage is that of the Scourging. When the pupil has reached this point, he must, while he reads of the Scourging and allows it to act upon him, develop another feeling. He must learn to stand firm under the heavy strokes of life, saying to himself: “I will stand up to whatever pains and sorrows come to me.” The outer sign of this is that the pupil feels a kind of prickling pain all over his body. The outer sign is that in a dream-vision he sees himself being scourged.

The third stage is that of the Crowning with Thorns, and for this he has to acquire yet another feeling: he learns to stand firm even when he is scorned and ridiculed because of all that he holds most sacred. The outer sign of this is that he experiences a severe headache; the inward symptom is that he has an astral vision of himself being crowned with thorns.

The fourth stage is that of the Crucifixion. A new and quite definite feeling must be developed. The pupil must cease to regard his body as the most important thing for him; his body must become as indifferent to him as a piece of wood. He then comes to look quite objectively on the body he carries with him through life; it has become for him the wood of the Cross. He need not despise it, any more than he does any other tool. The outer sign for having reached this stage is that during the pupil's meditation red marks (stigmata) appear at those places on his body which are called the sacred wounds. They do indeed appear on the hands and feet, and on the right side of the body at the level of the heart. The inward sign is that the pupil has a vision of himself hanging on the Cross.

The fifth stage is that of the Mystical Death. Now the pupil experiences the nothingness of earthly things, and indeed dies for a while to all earthly things.

Only the most scanty descriptions can be given of these later stages of Christian Initiation. The pupil experiences in an astral vision that darkness reigns everywhere and that the earthly world has fallen away. A black veil spreads over that which is to come, and while he is in this condition the pupil comes to know all that exists as evil and wickedness in the world. This is the Descent into Hell. Then he experiences the tearing away of the curtain and the world of Devachan appears before him. This is the rending of the veil of the Temple.

The sixth stage is that of the Burial. Just as at the fourth stage the pupil learnt to regard his own body objectively, so now he has to develop the feeling that everything else around him in the world is as much part of what truly belongs to him as his own body is. The body then extends far beyond its skin; the pupil is no longer a separate being; he is united with the whole planet. The Earth has become his body; he is buried in the Earth.

The seventh stage, that of the Resurrection, cannot be described in words. Hence occultism teaches that the seventh stage can be conceived only by a man whose soul has been entirely freed from the brain, and only to such a man could it be described. Hence we cannot do more than mention it here. The Christian teacher indicates the way to this experience.

When a man has lived through this seventh stage, Christianity has become an inner experience of the soul. He is now wholly united with Christ Jesus; Christ Jesus is in him.

• 42. “The form of instruction in oriental schooling.” From the old Indian classic, The Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali.
• 43. Light on the Path, written by Mabel Collins.