The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This evening I would like to speak about important questions of life from the viewpoint of the so-called spiritual science, that is from a viewpoint which is not popular today and which has exceptionally many prejudices against itself. Nevertheless, I am allowed to say that often that which later became common property of humanity in this or that area was unpopular at any former time, and was exposed to prejudices. Hence, I want to go over to the object without further introduction.

Spiritual science is concerned with an enclosing area of worldview. However, if one surveys the contents of spiritual science, everything amounts to answering two questions of existence which do not arise in a separated area of science, but appear everywhere in life. These are such riddles of existence which not only stress the intellectual interest but the deepest human interest; one is not only curious of the solution of these questions, but one longs for their solution because inner peace, viability, but also pain, doubt, trouble are associated with it. We can summarise with two words what it concerns: human destiny and human immortality—or we could say, death.

The human destiny puts big serious questions at every turn. We realise that a human being enters into existence and worries and efforts surround him, so that he will have a more or less painful existence; or we realise that he shows low abilities and predispositions, so that he cannot become any valuable member of humanity. Against it, another human being enters into existence without guilt or merit, early surrounded by providing hands, so that an indeed happy existence will be his destiny. We realise that with him also early abilities appear which let him become a useful member of the society. Maybe you can reject these questions with your intellect and you do not allow approaching you. However, if our sensations speak in life if our wishes must deal with the living conditions, then all wishes and sensations emerge in the subconscious depths of life, which wake the anxious longing after answers to such questions. Perhaps you can feel not in the thirst for knowledge, but in the positive or negative approach to life how the soul urges to know something that is in the way that I have suggested.

The riddle of death approaches the human being particularly. What people know about immortality does often not look scientific. How much passion, how many prejudices are contained in this question. Fear of death or the wish to extend the existence is involved in the evaluation of the question and in the answer that most people want to give themselves. When natural sciences were about to emerge as a worldview, there were people who completely denied the possibility that the soul would exist after death, and one may say, among these deniers were many who often outranked those morally who accepted immortality. These persons said to themselves, we want to sacrifice what we have worked during our life to the public.—These persons regarded that as something morally higher than the selfish wish to carry on the compiled. One cannot deny that such persons are moral.

However, there is a viewpoint from which the question of immortality must be put even quite scientifically if one does not completely feel this scientificity today. If we practise self-knowledge a little, we recognise that that which the human being creates and which he becomes as a human being has a personal individual character. With some introspection, you may say, the best is so particular with every soul that we cannot give this best to any public. If the consciousness of our soul being were destroyed after death, the most valuable would be lost not only to us, but also to the world economy. Should it be true that the human being works hard for something that is most valuable to him on earth and is destroyed at a moment? - Such a thing does not happen in the universe. It happens that the forces that are highly strained are incorporated into the world economy. There the question becomes only scientific.

Thus, we have characterised both questions—the question of the human destiny and that of human immortality. Today spiritual science is unpopular because it is rather strange to the habitual ways of thinking. One is used to counting on the outer sensory observations and on the intellect that is bound to the brain. However, with these means one cannot cope with the real being of the human nature. Then the question arises, are there other cognitive possibilities? Spiritual science just wants to deliver to the general intellectual culture that there are special methods to attain such cognitive faculties. To get to know this we have to take a phenomenon as starting point that is related to death that not enough is taken into account because we do not use that as an opportunity to put questions to which we are used. That which appears more seldom or in such a way that it dismays us like death or destiny becomes a riddle. However, the everyday consciousness passes an important riddle, the riddle of sleep. We have to go through this riddle if we want to approach the question of death.

Every day we see our consciousness sinking into nothing during sleep. Let us take the fact of falling asleep completely apart from scientific hypotheses. The limbs stop doing their services, the soul feels maladjusted to the senses, to the inner life that is bound to the physical body; then the darkness of unconsciousness begins. There are many scientific views about that; we do not want to mention them today, although it would be very interesting which attempts one undertakes in our time. However, we want to do spiritual-scientific considerations.

At first, that which spiritual science has to say about sleep. From this hypothesis, the facts will arise as it were. Spiritual science states that it is illogical to assume that the whole day life with all its experiences sinks into nothing and is made new in the morning. The experiences must still exist somewhere. On the other hand, spiritual science has to join the view that one can discover nothing in himself as causes, why mental pictures should fulfil him as the whole wake day life contains them in itself. Spiritual science considers all that—the mental pictures, the memories et cetera of the wake day life—as a spiritual-mental reality which withdraws from the physical body and the etheric body during sleep and enters into the spiritual world, so that the human being is with his inner existence beyond the physical body. Then the human being is in the spiritual world and in the morning this spiritual-mental of the human being submerges again in the body, in the senses, in the brain et cetera. Thus, we have separated the human being during sleep as it were in a bodily being and a spiritual-mental being; both combine again after waking up.

The materialist monist will argue how someone can sin in such a way against the view of monism; you split the human being in two parts.—You can argue that the chemist commits the same sin if he separates water in hydrogen and oxygen; but there you cannot forbid it to him. In no other way, we speak in spiritual science of a duality of the human being. That who does not know the methods of chemistry to recognise the existence of hydrogen in the water could also state that the hydrogen does not exist. Thus, somebody can also state that that does not exist which leaves the body with sleep. It concerns that during sleep the spiritual-mental of the human being is not aware of itself. For the usual consciousness all that is not there if it has left the body. Everything depends on the fact that the human being can recognise that which has left the body as something real.

One reaches this with rules that the spiritual researcher has to apply to himself. He reaches this while he puts himself in a state that is similar to sleep, but it is different from it at the same time. The sign of sleep is that idleness of the senses, of the reason and, in the end, unconsciousness happens. Could another state also happen now? Yes. For this purpose, we assume what will prove true then; we assume, the human being gets really rid of his body, so that in sleep this supersensible being cannot experience itself in the usual state. If we could cause anything by which this soul still experienced itself, the movement of the limbs et cetera would be excluded, but consciousness would still exist. One causes this state by inner means, by meditation, concentration, or contemplation.

In the soul are forces that one only has to strengthen if complete consciousness should replace the unconsciousness of sleep. One attains this in such a way that the human being suppresses the movement of the limbs arbitrarily, makes them as quiet as the body is in sleep, then he excludes all outer impressions which divert his thoughts. He must artificially cause this state towards the outside world, and then he must exclude the thoughts of the usual life. If this empty consciousness occurs in the usual life, then the human being falls asleep. However, long, patient exercises enable the person concerned to keep [the consciousness] alive, and then it concerns that he moves any mental picture in the centre of his consciousness arbitrarily and fulfils his consciousness with it. The things of the outside world are not suitable for that; symbolic images are much better which we ourselves produce. Everybody may say, to have such mental pictures is a crazy thing. However, it matters what they cause in the soul.

Let us imagine, for example, two glasses, one is empty, the other contains some water. Now we imagine that we pour from the latter perpetually water into the first glass and thereby the latter does not become emptier but fuller and fuller. This is, actually, a quite crazy image. However, it does not matter here but that this image works allegorically for a deep secret: love. Love is something with which we cannot cope with human images. It is a secret. However, we can give one of its qualities by that which the soul gives: it becomes richer and richer. Love has the quality that we can express allegorically, and there we find this specific what one is used in another area.

Let us take a round medallion as another example. With it, all relations can be determined: that of radius, diameter, circumference, area et cetera, but you can do that just as well with a drawn circle. Since its regularities also apply to the medallion. Mathematics shows such symbols of regularities perpetually. The spiritual researcher does nothing else than that he applies this mathematical method to a higher area not only to thinking but also to life. We do not speculate about these symbols, but it matters that all our impulses are directed to them, and it concerns the power that we develop there. Whereas the human being normally takes his mind off things, we concentrate our soul life completely, even if only for a few minutes. You have to continue these things for years, then a particular result will arise: the human being feels now that that which sank, otherwise, into unconsciousness becomes active in him that it is something that was filled, otherwise, with nothing at all.

You have to open yourself to many such images. Then particular experiences appear as pictures, as “imaginations;” they shoot up before us, they face us. With it, you already attain something that you have to treat, however, with caution. Someone who stands on a materialist viewpoint will say rightly, now you have brought it just as far as those who have hallucinations and visions, which are of no value.—Indeed, there is a cliff. People who experience such visions will believe in them like in something real that is much more real than the things that they see with their eyes. There are people who invent the most logical system for their delusions to keep them. There is a term, which explains all that, it is the word “self-love.” Why does the human being believe in these images? Because of self-love; because he himself has developed them; because the person cannot help to identify himself with that which he is internal. A spiritual researcher has to bear this in mind. He has to have such strong will so that he says to himself, what I see is only a reflection of my being.

The spiritual researcher has to be so strong that he can remove this whole imagination by his will. If one has developed his soul until then where the contents of the soul appear as objects, then he has to be thrown back to nothing, and then one can say, one prepares himself to get spiritual percepts. It does not matter so much that you develop this or that vision, but that you develop the usually slumbering soul forces. In particular, a strong will belongs to it. The human being is familiarised at first with the whole power of self-love. This must be defeated. Here it concerns a heavy victory. You have to extinguish what you have conquered.

The way to self-knowledge makes the forces that one knows only as inner ones work with the power of a natural phenomenon. The soul forces work like natural elements. You face yourself as a kind of nature. Then a certain experience takes place that one calls the “encounter with the guardian of the threshold.” It may take place in various ways. I would like to give an example only, you feel something new that drives through you like a lightning or you feel as if your body is dissolved and still remains. You feel incapable to use your body. This is a very important moment. You have the feeling as if your hands are forged to your body and your brain is something over which you do not exercise power that works mentally as an obstacle. You must prepare yourself to endure this moment. This preparation consists of the fact that you strengthen your courage. You must experience this moment fearlessly.

Some other experiences are attached to it which let us recognise what it means to face the own body, the usual soul forces like things. You recognise the meaning and vincibility of self-love only now. Because for the usual experience this moment cannot be endured without appropriate preparation, one calls this experience the encounter with the guardian of the threshold because good spirits stand before it as it were and protect us against this experience.

It depends on such experiences that you develop certain strictly moral impulses. Thereby you acquire maturity to build spiritual-scientific knowledge only on a healthy soul. Compared with that which the spiritual researcher must experience before he approaches the spiritual world, the objection is childish that the spiritual researcher dedicates himself to any mania. He knows the experiences of mania, the visions completely. He knows how he has removed them from his soul. If he is able to erase the results of self-love, a new world appears before him completely objective; it is fulfilled with individual things and beings, as well as the outer physical world is fulfilled with individual things and beings.

Our time tends quite strongly to accept something supersensible, and one can notice how this trend becomes prominent. I want to point only to an outstanding fact. Charles William Eliot (1834-1926, American chemist), board of directors of the Harvard University in America, held a lecture in 1909 where he spoke about a kind of future religion which acknowledges the supersensible on scientific basis. He said, people have always acknowledged an absolute soul being which is not subject to outer physical laws.—We find such a tip with many scholars. However, such persons would like to stop at the tip. They say, there is soul, soul, and soul. Yes, this is exact the same way, as if one says about the most different plants and animals: this is nature, nature, and nature. However, if the spiritual researcher tells details of the spiritual world, these persons become awkward. It is not enough to point to the fact that there is spirit and soul. However, if one states that there are beings and events in the spiritual worlds, then these persons become awkward and say, these are pipe dreams. One cannot say that everything that emerges before the spiritual researcher is delusion. Since the spiritual researcher has taken part in the experiences which enable him to distinguish.

Nevertheless, in natural sciences it is exactly the same way; one has to experience these things. If a human being has never seen a whale fish, zoology cannot prove that there is a whale fish. With it, some objections disprove themselves. Schopenhauer characterised a part of his system with the fact that he said, the world is my idea.—With it, he stated that one cannot separate percepts from mental pictures. However, there is an easy, even if trivial rebuttal. If we imagine that we touch our skin with an iron piece of 900 degrees centigrade, we can imagine the pain probably in thoughts, but an only imagined hot iron does not cause ache as a real one does. There is a proof that is produced by life. The same applies to the spiritual life; it must be experienced to the end.

Somebody argued, with big thirst one can imagine the taste and the refreshing effect of a lemonade. Yes—but one cannot quench the thirst with this image. One is not allowed to use intellectual games. The spiritual researcher must have advanced so far that he can distinguish reality and speculative fiction, as one has to distinguish reality and mental picture in the physical world.

Thus, the human being enters into that world in which he is every night after he has left his physical body where he is also in the spiritual world, save that he has no inner activity. By the exercises, his soul and mind become so strong that it experiences itself and its environment.

Now you start understanding that something spiritual forms the basis of the human being. If you have experienced once how you can be separated from the body how you do not exercise power over this body and, nevertheless, your consciousness is maintained, you understand something else. You understand that this is something embryonic, nevertheless, that assists in the creation of the body. Then one looks quite scientifically at the human life in such a way as one sees a plant growing. If a [living being] were born with the roots of a plant and died after flowering, it would have no notion of the fact that the seed which develops in the blossom starts a process again and that you have to imagine the whole plant concentrated in the seed. If you have recognised the human inside, you understand the dictum of Goethe: in old age we become mystics.—The rich soul life is like the seed of the plant.

We look at a human being now who enters into existence at birth how his abilities develop, and we realise at his death that he has stored inner forces that he can no longer express with the body. Thus, the inside enters into the spiritual world at death; and if we see a human being born, we see him again coming out of the spiritual world and moving in the lines of heredity of father and mother. If we say, all qualities are inherited from father and mother, it is like the old natural sciences that believed that from mud even fish could originate. Only Francesco Redi said that life can come only from life.

The spiritual researcher knows the human spiritual core. If anyone states that everything comes from father and mother, one has to answer: this is an inexact observation. One has to say, that which comes from former embodiments enters and attracts what comes from father and mother to itself. All spiritual-mental goes back to a former spiritual-mental. That means, we get to the repeated lives on earth. We have already gone through many lives. All that has a beginning and an end. We bring with us what we have acquired as inner forces into this life, so that we also work on the construction of our body. One can observe that quite externally. One looks at the brain at birth and observes how it develops then plastically. There the individuality works its way out. In that we find ourselves if we become spiritual researchers, we have acquired that in this life.

Hence, the stupefying impression which a spiritual researcher receives because he can change nothing of that which comes from former lives. There the riddle of death and destiny faces us in special way. If we suffer in a present life, we have prepared it to ourselves in a former life. This could seem cruel. However, let us suppose once that anybody has to experience in the eighteenth year of his life that his father loses his property. Now he has to learn something, this is very disagreeable, and he can feel it as something extremely bad. However, at the age of fifty years he will judge quite different. Thus, the human being cannot always judge a misfortune correctly, as long as he experiences it. We have to say to ourselves, if we expose ourselves to distress and misery: it is at the same time a condition of development. It is only imaginary if one believes that this knowledge is cruel.

How does immortality face us now? Not like in many philosophies, that one considers an infinite time line and speculates how the human can last. No, we acquire something that concentrates in the human life internally; the soul life concentrates, we carry our spiritual core through the gate of death into the spiritual world; connected with the body our destiny leads it to the next life, and we use the next life again to enrich our inside. Nevertheless, overall, life is ascending. The entire human life consists of the life between birth and death and of that which remains between death and new birth. The whole immortality consists of that which life itself renders. We get to know life as the creator of a new life, as the plant, which has the guarantee in the seed that a new plant will originate. This is a scientific consideration.

Admittedly, it is comprehensible that many prejudices exist against it, but Francesco Redi also experienced that. One wanted to burn him to death. This is the destiny of truth. Today people are no longer burnt, but one refers to them as fools. The fashion changes, the being has remained. Later these “pipe dreams” are a given. Thus, it will happen with truth: something spiritual-mental can originate only from something spiritual-mental. Somebody who knows how it stands with the investigation of the spiritual world understands that these prejudices must arise. At first, people believe that natural sciences are in danger. The following example serves as explanation. We see a person; two others stand before him and ask, why does this person live?—The one says, he has a lung inside and air outside, hence, he lives; this is a scientific fact. You cannot argue anything against it. The other says, this is not the only reason. He fell into water fourteen days ago, and I have pulled him out—this is the reason why he lives.

Thus, spiritual science denies no observed scientific facts; it says nothing against the theories of heredity, as far as they do not disprove themselves. However, beside heredity the law of destiny exists.

Spiritual science completely acknowledges natural sciences. The misunderstanding consists only of the fact that natural sciences often cross their borders and want to establish a kind of spiritual science. Many people say, one has to comply with that which the eyes perceive; natural sciences can count only on it. Then one can ask whether Copernicus had new astronomical perception.

No, he rethought what one had thought earlier because of sense perception. Copernicus had the courage and the mental power to interpret the sense-perceptible anew. From it, there the new astronomy originated which did not come about by sense perception. Giordano Bruno broke through the sense perception, while he did not regard the sky as a border. As well as the blue vault of heaven originates from the limitations of the human intuitive faculty, the firmament of the soul life originates between birth and death. We stand spiritual-scientifically at the place of Giordano Bruno. Spiritual science breaks through the borders of birth and death. As Giordano Bruno broke through spaces, spiritual science breaks through times.

Galilei had a friend who was a follower of Aristotle and who had discerned something incorrectly from Aristotle that the nerves take the heart as starting point. He led him to a corpse and showed that the nerves take the brain as starting point. The friend said, yes, it seems so, but I read with Aristotle that it is different, and I believe him more.—Today people come and say, it sounds reasonable, but with Haeckel we read it different. Here Schopenhauer's sentence counts: truth always had to suffer from the fact that she appears paradoxical if she enters into existence, because she cannot sit down on the throne of the widespread error. Thus she looks up at her guardian angel, the time, whose wing beats are, however, so slow, that someone who has recognised the truth often dies in the meantime.

We have to understand that the objection is unjustified that only the spiritual researcher can know something about the spiritual world. To find the truth, one has to go through all that, but spiritual research relates to spiritual science like that which the painter has to learn to his picture. From the picture, we can recognise something. One can understand what the spiritual researcher has investigated if one only approaches what he has to say with common sense. Then these truths give us joy of life, they help us over helplessness and give us security.

One beholds into the spiritual worlds not because one has something of it, but because one has brought [the beheld] into ideas [and concepts] which every other human being can understand. The spiritual researcher does not have the results different from the reader or listener. Thus, we get answer not only to scientific questions but also to the riddles of life.

If we could develop the human education in such a way that from youth on the human beings grew up with these questions, in us something would develop like a predisposition, like a seed or core that offers the guarantee of future life. The vigour of life becomes stronger and stronger, and if the outer forces go to ruin, we feel the inner ones concentrating. The seed of the plant could not feel different compared with the wilted leaves as the spiritual that enters with its power through the gate of death. This and not only science gives answers to life. They console us in the heaviest situations. One has not to be a spiritual researcher for that. As one can taste food without being a chemist, not everybody has to be a spiritual researcher. There must be only some. This becomes a steady conviction in the soul so that one learns to treat the hostility against it as Goethe said to the deniers of movement in his Zahme Xenien III (collection of sayings). Goethe answered out of common sense. One cannot easily disprove this view philosophically.

Something hostile may happen;
Keep cool, remain silent;
And if they deny the movement,
Walk around them before their noses.

One can apply humour to opponents; however, one has not only to believe but also to know how it stands with truth. Thus, spiritual science will familiarise itself with life, thus, those who feel the inner strengthening of the soul and how it adapts itself in life feel something similar as Goethe felt towards the deniers of movement. Thus, we can summarise everything that has arisen from our today's consideration in a sensation towards the opponents of spiritual science:

Something hostile may happen;
Keep cool, remain serene;
And if they deny the spirit,
Do no longer ponder.
Yes, admit at last that they are right;
Since their mind is in poor condition.

If you think back to the entrance of the Blessed Boys in the final scene of Goethe's Faust, you will recall the verse:

Boys, brought forth in midnights haunted,
Half-unsealed the sense and brain,
For the parents lost when granted,
For the angels sweetest gain!

I've already called your attention to many a profundity in this final scene of Faust, but it contains a great deal more than I was able to point out on that occasion, more indeed than could possibly be brought to light in a limited period of time.

The four lines just quoted are equally fitted to be the leitmotif of the deeper spiritual-scientific expositions with which we will be concerning ourselves today, tomorrow, and next Monday.

I want to point out today by way of introduction that it is possible to delve more deeply, in a truly spiritual-scientific approach, into the statement made here recently when I characterized sleeping and waking and related matters. I spoke of how the whole nature of spiritual science was such as to require finding the correct approach to the facts we encounter in the world. And I showed that this approach is to be found only when we seek it as was done in our study of the alternating states of sleeping and waking. We tried to understand how differently consciousness functions in the waking and the sleeping states. But much else can be learned here by studying the way consciousness works according to whether it is that of human beings or of other beings. The four lines quoted from Faust refer to a human state of consciousness, possessed by the souls of the “boys brought forth in midnights” and “for the parents lost when granted,” in other words, by souls claimed by death immediately after birth. But the verse states expressly that these souls are “for the angels sweetest gain.”

We'll see that the saying that souls of this kind are “gain for the angels” is comprehensible only if we look into the state of consciousness of beings belonging to the hierarchy of angels. But let us first acquire some preliminary concepts of these matters and so prepare ourselves for the deeper understanding of the spiritual world into which they are to lead us.

I'll start from the fact, familiar to us from various spiritual-scientific studies, of how remote from reality the learning, the truth, and our concepts of things in ordinary life all are. People are even glad not to have these add anything to reality as they see it, for in their view the reliability of knowledge and “the unvarnished truth” depend on the fact that our cognitive processes and our soul experiences add nothing to things. Just consider what a point science makes of restricting itself to merely reflecting what goes on in the world and not allowing the soul the least influence on its pronunciamentos. Let us recall what trouble is taken by those who dream up a world view on the basis of all sorts of illusions to show that their fabrications are dictated by some reality or other outside themselves rather than originate within them. This is true all the way up to what is claimed to be valuable “occult knowledge” such as we hear some people touting. Those who desire to have occult insight here on the physical plane are basically concerned with not adding anything to the conceptions they develop. How proud people of this type are when they can report that such and such beings appeared to them, this or that was “dictated” to them, or something else was mysteriously communicated to their spiritual ears! This satisfies them, for then they can have the feeling that the conceptions they have created are reflections of reality, not something they produced. We might say that in their concern for attaining the reliable knowledge they are seeking, they actually make a fifth wheel on the wagon out of it. Knowledge should not add anything to what already exists, for only then do they regard it as something particularly reliable, particularly right.

We can arrive at a true and reliable concept of the relationship of knowledge to reality only if we gradually ascend from ordinary knowledge about physical matters to higher types of insight. We are familiar with the fact that the next level of knowledge is that called imagination. But if imagination is to have any relationship to reality it cannot be attained by living in the physical body; we must make ourselves capable of overcoming all dependence on the physical body to attain genuine imaginative knowledge. We must have progressed beyond using the physical body as our instrument. But we do still use the etheric body when we seek imaginations; we have to make use of our etheric bodies to obtain really objective imaginative experience, exactly as we make use of our physical bodies for perceiving objects in the physical realm.

Now we find that when a person on the path of clairvoyant knowledge has progressed to the point where he has loosened his soul from his physical body and is using his etheric body as his cognitive tool, what is called knowledge in the physical world, the kind of knowledge sought without a wish to add anything to the findings, remains behind on the physical plane. For example, everything that a modern scientist is interested in finding out is left behind on the physical plane by those who leave it to ascend into the imaginative world. Nothing remains of what scientists and natural philosophers think of as a world of whirling atoms, a world, as I have often explained, that is dreamed up and totally lacking in reality; nothing remains but pictures of this world. In other words, on leaving the physical plane we become aware that the conceptions of a world of whirling atoms left behind there were just dreamed up. In the imaginative world into which we have ascended no direct use can be made of any knowledge acquired on the physical plane. Please note the word direct here. We will see the subtleties of what is involved as we progress.

Now in earlier lectures I've already shown that the spiritual energy underlying thinking changes when a clairvoyant seeker frees himself from the instrumentality of his physical body. I've said that it is as though all our thinking comes alive. Instead of living in the passive world of thinking experienced on the physical plane, it is as though all our thinking comes alive and starts to tingle as we enter the imaginative world. Once, in Munich, I used a drastic comparison. I said that upon entering that world the thoughts we were previously accustomed to sending hither and thither and otherwise dispatching them as perfectly passive entities become transformed as though we had stuck our heads into a wasps' nest and our thoughts swirled and whirled about, every thought possessing a life of its own. We have to endure it in the sense that we don't feel unfree as a result of being wrested, as it were, out of ourselves by this independent life of our thoughts.

We gradually make the discovery that the insights, the conceptions we obtain on the physical plane as mere images of external reality fall away from us like a rain that rains back down upon the physical world and doesn't enter the imaginative world; they fall away and stay behind in the physical realm. All that is left of them is a memory. So we can look back on everything we have attained by exerting thinking, but that is now left behind on the physical plane as something we have finished with and no longer have any influence on.

This is a diagram of how it actually is. This would represent the physical body out of which the individual ascends. Then he immediately perceives his knowledge about physical facts falling like raindrops into the physical world. Knowledge of physical things is then outside him.

This is an extremely interesting and extraordinary process. As we ascend into the first spiritual world, the imaginative world, we see our thoughts dropping away from us. And then we see that these thought-forms become beings, and they make a strange impression on us if we really see them. We have the impression as we look at them that they are something wrested from us, something with significance for the physical world only.

Now it is extraordinarily difficult to get a more exact conception of what is dropping away from us there. It is scarcely possible, on ascending into higher worlds, to acquire correct insights by any other means than the most painstaking comparisons. First of all, it is necessary to discover what these thoughts of the physical plane, which have dropped away, can be compared to. These thoughts become very lively indeed. And the curious thing is that these thoughts we see back there on the physical plane are engaging in all sorts of dances similar to eurythmy. It is almost impossible to find these thoughts keeping really still.

I spoke of their dancing resembling eurythmy—not the eurythmy that is being nurtured here, but regular movements of a sort. These thoughts have an extremely peculiar aspect: they are inwardly alive when they have left us. And this fact makes them valuable in this first stage of true clairvoyance.

When a person says something colossally stupid here in physical existence, he certainly doesn't hold on to it for very long, once he has realized the situation. Most people like to skip lightly over their stupidities, once they've recognized them. A really stupid thought laughs when it gets out! It laughs in proportion to its stupidity. And other thoughts can be seen behaving in a similar manner. They manifest an inner life, these thoughts, a very lively play of expression. They convince us that no stupidity we perpetrate escapes being eternalized.

The only way we can get at the facts about these strange thought-forms which put in such a lively appearance is through a comparison. We will find one only if we are in a position to see our thoughts in the way just described. Then we are also in a position to experience what I am going to describe. We need for purposes of comparison the whole wide world of gnomes, the fairy folk that rules all of external earthly nature. These gnomes, who belong to the external inorganic realm in the way other elemental beings belong to plants, water, air, and fire, and so on, this whole world of gnomes has the same character, the same inner nature as the thought-forms described. I could also say that gnomes belong to the same class as our thought- forms, referring however to those thought-forms based on mental images derived from the physical plane alone.

Now as you see, we have a comparison. And that is why there is an inner relationship of sorts between the gnome world and our thoughts about things on the physical plane. As I've mentioned, people make an effort to be faithful to the facts in their knowledge and perceptions, making these into a fifth wheel on the wagon.

The gnomes have a similar relationship to their realm. Speaking euphemistically of course, but in a way corresponding to the facts, when a person talks with a gnome, he finds the gnome regarding the world to which he belongs with tremendous wistfulness, because he is so extremely uninvolved with it. He has as little influence over it as human beings have over the physical world around them with their knowledge. It is a matter of considerable indifference to the physical world surrounding us how we think about it with thoughts derived from the physical plane. A tree grows neither more nor less slowly because of thoughts derived from the physical plane that we may have about it, or because we go past it without giving it any thought at all. As I mentioned recently, we are the only ones to gain by this; our thoughts about the tree have not the least effect upon it.

The gnomes too have a similar external relationship to the world to which they belong externally. I might say that their world belongs to what we call the terrestrial world, the solid element. But we can just as easily disregard the world of the gnomes when we study the solid element as we can disregard watchmakers in a study of the laws involved in watch-making.

It is extremely important to develop a right understanding of a comparison of this kind, one that I have often resorted to, the comparison of the structure of the universe with the mechanism of a watch. If you want to understand a watch, you must study the laws governing its mechanism, and it would be ridiculous to say, Ah ha! The hands of a watch keep moving; there must be tiny demons pushing them. No such demons are involved. But if someone who understands watches as a result of studying them were to say that a watch has nothing to do with the watchmaker who put it together, he would also be talking nonsense. The fact that the world can be understood from its own make-up and that it is possible for scientists to discover natural laws can just as little be taken as proof of the nonexistence of a spiritual basis for the universe. The laws that govern the functioning of a watch are equally discoverable in the watch itself. So when it is stated that the laws that govern nature are to be found within the natural world and it is therefore unnecessary to look for anything divine in the universe, this reflects the same lack of thought as saying of watches that no watchmaker is needed because they are explainable on the basis of their own construction.

In the world surrounding us that is so entirely explainable on the basis of the laws that govern it, gnomes have a function. They too are somewhat comparable to the fifth wheel on a wagon: they accompany the world to which they belong, but without having any effect upon it. I ask you to consider the inner relationship of the world of gnomes to our physical thought world, for then you will realize that we have to make a start at understanding such a thing as the gnome world by taking a state of consciousness into consideration. Then we will ask ourselves how it is that we come to know about the physical world. We do so by forming the reflections I've been discussing. Just as reflections have no real connection with what they reflect, physical knowledge has nothing to do with what it knows about; it doesn't make anything happen in the physical realm. If we come to see physical knowledge as a matter of a state of consciousness and sense in full awareness how unessential, how superfluous, mirrors are to the objects mirrored, we will understand the soul-mood that envelops the world of gnomes. That is their soul-mood. Gnomes are therefore unable to grasp how there can be anything but an ineffectual relationship with this world.

If a clairvoyant person were to feel pain and sorrow, as they can indeed be felt on many occasions in human life, and were then to perceive gnomes, as clairvoyants do, he would find that they cannot comprehend his pain. They are aware that people can feel a general sadness and depression, but they cannot understand how anyone can be attached to physical existence; they laugh at such feelings. Indeed, we might say that our sense of the value of things on the physical plane is lost in encounters with the world of gnomes, because they heap such ridicule upon us for the value we attach to much that exists on the physical plane.

We understand the mental state of gnomes, then, if we become cognizant of the state of consciousness involved in the relationship of physical knowledge to the world reflected in it.

The beings to whom the name undines has been given and who are inwardly related not to the earthly but to the watery element and to everything liquidly rippling and flowing must be pictured somewhat differently. We cannot form a proper concept of plants just by looking at them and making a one-time image of them analogous to a papier-mâché reproduction. To be aware of nothing more than such a one-time impression is to lack any true conception of a plant, and the same holds true in the case of undines. We picture a plant rightly only if we know it in its various states: first in its root development, then growing a stem, then putting forth leaves, then blossoming, the blossoms wilting, fruits appearing, and so on. Goethe tells us in his beautiful Metamorphosis of Plants that we must study a plant's growth process.¹ And there live in the plant, in addition to what it is in and of itself, mobile elemental beings inwardly related to the shaping, rippling, mobile element of water.

And now we have to realize that the imaginative world into whose life we make our way on evolving beyond the physical plane is an inwardly mobile realm resembling the cloud-world in its metamorphoses, resembling the rippling, flowing element. The imaginative world is itself in flowing motion. And just as we encounter the realm of our own physical thoughts when we first enter the spiritual world, under favorable conditions encountering the elemental world of the gnomes, so do we live in the realm of higher elemental beings as waves live in water; we belong to and are part of its encompassing whole; we live in it.

It is of course difficult to give an impression of such matters, but here too we must picture the state of consciousness involved. It helps us to understand to say that all our thinking begins to come alive, that we are swept up by thoughts that become alive as though the thoughts we produce, thoughts endowed with imagination, were to take on a life of their own. Purely physical thoughts such as we had before are left behind, an abandoned realm. Then we can say that the gnomes live in the world we have abandoned. But now we are living in the realm of the undines, and both for them and for us it is a world of movement.

Let us picture this very exactly. We separate from our physical bodies and become strangers to them. We begin to carry on a life of inner mobility, of continuously changing, rippling motion. Everything takes on inner life as we experience ourselves in our etheric bodies. This is the experience we have also immediately upon dying, except that the tempo is slower.

This experiencing of the imaginative world is what we experienced on the moon, except that it is at a higher level now; there, it was a dream-world of imagination, a realm of pictures. On Jupiter we will experience it in full consciousness. We lift ourselves into it upon leaving our physical bodies behind as described. Try to picture it really vividly. The world of the senses is obliterated; what we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears is no longer perceptible. We cease to feel as well. Thoughts related to the outer world are laid aside in a way that could be described as follows: O gnomes, we give you our physical thoughts to keep you company; occupy yourselves with them for awhile.

Now an inner living and weaving sets in, a sharing in everything on earth that is inwardly alive and streams and ripples in the way the earth's fluid element carries on its rhythmic life. It is a sharing with the earth reminiscent too of the ancient moon period. A strange process starts: In addition to being aware of living in a realm of elemental beings belonging to the plant kingdom and to flowing liquids, we realize something else of a very special nature, something quite strange, namely, that we are becoming part of a rhythm that is involved both in the inner rhythm of the earth and in our breathing rhythm. We acquire the idea that the rhythm of our breathing is inwardly related to the rhythm of the earth. In short, we begin to be aware that we are part of the whole earth-organism. We really begin to sense our belonging to it. The earth-organism claims us.

This can be compared to what Goethe described to Eckermann on April 11, 1827, when he said, “I picture the earth with its vapor mantle as a huge living organism involved in an unceasing in- and out-breathing.”² We feel ourselves involved in this. We share in this unique way in the life of the earth.

I'd like to point out something here that demonstrates again how fruitfully spiritual science illuminates the findings of natural science made by some characteristic scientific figures, and how well they go together. So I remind you of the famous exclamation of the Greek philosopher Archimedes, who as he sat in his bath shouted, “Eureka! I've found it!”³ And what had he found out? He lifted his feet out of the bath water and then put them back in again, finding that they were lighter in the water than outside it. So he discovered the important principle that any body suspended in water loses as much weight as the water it displaces weighs. Balloons rise according to the same principle, losing as much weight as the air they displace. In the case of water, a heavy object lying on the bottom does not lose weight, but it does so when it is suspended in the water. This principle obtains throughout nature, and it is an important one, for it is related to something of the greatest importance in human beings.

You will have heard that the human brain weighs on the average 1350 grams. It is therefore quite heavy, almost 1 1/2 kilos. Very fragile organs occupy the space beneath it, organs that would be crushed by laying anything weighing a single kilo on top of them. Yet it is a fact that we all have a brain heavy enough to crush the organs that lie at its base. But the pressure exerted on them actually amounts at most to 20 grams, rather than to a kilo. How is this accounted for? It is due to the fact that the brain is suspended in a fluid; it loses all but 20 grams of its weight because it is floating in the brain fluid. We are speaking here not of what it actually weighs, but of its 20-gram pressure on the organs at its base. We picture it correctly when we conceive the brain floating in the brain fluid and this fluid extending downward into the spinal column.

Now picture this brain fluid rhythmically rising and falling. This fluid with the brain floating in it is involved in rhythmical movement as the diaphragm contracts and expands with the in- and out-movement of the breath, and it is thus involved in the breathing process. Insofar as the brain is its instrument, the whole thought process thus is connected with the breathing process. The brain is thus an extraordinarily sensitive sense organ for the forces continually playing in the earthly realm. Goethe, in his deep insight into matters of this kind, refused, for example, to accept what the crude meteorological science of his time had to say about the rise and fall of barometric pressure being due to atmospheric lightness or heaviness. He spent an endless amount of time registering barometric readings in various localities. And he tried to determine how regular this rise and fall was over the earth as a whole and showed how it could be compared to an inner terrestrial force, an in- and out-breathing on the part of the earth, which is of course closely related to meteorological regularity and irregularity. We need not be surprised at the barometer's changeableness despite the regularity of the earth's in- and out-breathing; human beings too are prone, despite the regularity of their breathing, to contract colds and other conditions that act like barometers showing that something is amiss.

We perceive this wonderful lawfulness in the earth's gravity, this inner life of the terrestrial, even though we are not conscious of it in physical life. We perceive the mysterious inner processes of the “earth-creature” taking place in the continuous rising and falling of the brain fluid in exactly the same way we gaze out into the world and listen to it. Goethe said of it, “I picture the earth with its vapor mantle as a huge living organism involved in an unceasing in- and out-breathing.” We feel that we share in it, though on an unconscious level. But the moment we use our etheric bodies as perceptive organs we begin to perceive it consciously and to participate in it; we become part of this huge earth-creature.

Our age is really the first to confront such matters entirely without understanding. Kepler, whom even those currently eager to wipe out all spiritual insight regard as a great mind, still spoke of our earth as having a periodic respiratory process which he likened to that of whales, a going-to-sleep and reawakening, dependent upon the sun-rhythm and accompanied by a fulling and ebbing of the ocean.⁴ We have an experience of these processes on an unconscious level, and it finds expression in a physical process of which we are not consciously aware.

It will not surprise you, then, that clairvoyant perception reports that what has now withdrawn into the inner organism, the strange relationship between the external atmosphere and our thought process through the blood and the rising and falling of the brain fluid was once an external element on the ancient moon, where dreamlike clairvoyance prevailed. The circulating air was outside. The human being himself was as yet only a vortex in the moon substance, for there was as yet no earthly matter; the moon was still in a fluid state or, at its most material, a thickened fluid. And in this whirling and perceiving the whirling lived moon human beings, floating as condensations in the fluid element.

What we were as moon humanity remains within us. And if we study the brain in the brain fluid and study the nature of the various functions related to the breathing process, we see that it is indeed true that we have inherited the legacy of the ancient moon, but now withdrawn into our interior make-up. We are still there, as brains floating in fluid, in rhythmically alternating motion.

We see here a reflection of the old moon rhythm that constituted human physical nature on the moon. And our whole physical make-up, which we perceive with our nerves and external senses, has spread out over that nature as an outer covering. Hidden beneath it is what remains as a moon legacy.

There are always and everywhere these interrelationships, marvelously wrought. But we have no inner perception of them as long as our eyes and ears are directed only toward the external. The moment we surrender the use of our senses and leave our thoughts behind as described, however, we feel our unity with the life of the earth. And we know ourselves inwardly to be one with the earthly gravity of our etheric life, that life into which we enter upon leaving our physical bodies in the transformed condition known as death.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet and thinker. Published Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790; in this book he shows the leaf as the primeval organ of the plant out of which all other plant organs evolved.
• 2. Johannes Peter Eckermann, 1792–1854. Published Conversations with Goethe, 1823-1832 in 1836.
• 3. Archimedes, 285–212 B.C., Greek physicist and mathematician.
• 4. Johannes Kepler, 1571–1630, German astronomer. Calculated orbits of the planets and discovered the laws of the movement of the planets.

It really is exceedingly difficult in our Western civilization to speak intelligently and intelligibly about such a work as the Bhagavad Gita. This is so because at present there is a dominating tendency to interpret any spiritual work of this kind as a kind of doctrine, an abstract teaching, or a philosophy, that makes it hard for people to come to a sound judgment in such matters. They like to approach such spiritual creations from the ideal or conceptual point of view. Here we touch upon something that makes it most difficult in our time to gain a true judgment about the great historical impulses in mankind's evolution. How often, for instance, it is pointed out that this or that saying occurring in the Gospels as the teaching of Christ Jesus is to be found in some earlier work no less profoundly expressed. Then it is said, “You see, it is the same teaching after all.” Certainly, that is not incorrect because in countless instances it can be shown that the teachings of the Gospels occur in earlier spiritual works. Yet, though such a statement is not incorrect, it may be nonsense from the standpoint of a truly fundamental knowledge of human evolution. People's thinking will have to get accustomed to this and realize that a statement can be perfectly correct and yet nonsense. Not until this is no longer regarded as a contradiction will it be possible to judge certain matters in a really unbiased way.

Suppose, for instance, someone says that he sees in the Bhagavad Gita one of the greatest creations of the human spirit, a creation that has never been surpassed in later times. Suppose further, having said this, he adds, “Nevertheless, what entered the world with the revelation inherent in the Christ Impulse, is something altogether different, something to which the Bhagavad Gita could not attain even if its beauty and greatness were increased a hundred times.” These two statements do not contradict each other. According to the habits of modern abstract thinking, however, we may have a contradiction here. Yet, in no sense is it in truth a contradiction. Indeed one might go further, and ask, “When was that mightiest word spoken that may be regarded as giving the impulse to the human ego, so that it may take its place in the evolution of man?” That significant word was uttered at the moment Krishna spoke to Ar-juna; when he poured into Arjuna’s ears the most powerful, incisive, burning words to quicken the consciousness of self in man. In the whole range of the world’s life there is nothing to be found that kindled the self of man more mightily than the living force of Krishna’s words to Arjuna. Of course, we must not take those words in the way words are so often taken in Western countries where the noblest words are given merely an abstract, philosophic interpretation. In any such we would certainly miss the essence of the Bhagavad Gita. In this way Western scholars today have so outrageously misused and tortured the Bhagavad Gita. They have even gone so far as to dispute whether it is more representative of the Sankhya philosophy or of some other school of thought. In fact, a distinguished scholar, in his edition of this poem, has actually printed certain lines in small type because in his view they ought to be expunged altogether, having crept in by mistake. He thinks nothing is really a part of the Gita except what accords with the Sankhya, or at the most with the Yoga philosophy.

It may be said though that no trace is to be found in this great poem of philosophy as we speak of it today. At most one could say that in ancient India certain basic dispositions of soul developed into certain philosophic tendencies. These really have nothing to do with the Bhagavad Gita, at least not in the sense of being an interpretation or exposition of it. It is altogether unfair to the intellectual and spiritual life of the East to set it side by side with what the West knows as philosophy because there was no philosophy in the East in the same sense there is philosophy in the West. In this respect the spirit of our age, just beginning, is as yet imperfectly understood.

In the last lecture we spoke of things that men still have to learn. Above all we must firmly realize how the human soul, under certain conditions, can actually meet the Being whom we tried to describe from a certain aspect, calling him Krishna. We must realize how Arjuna meets that Spirit who prepared the age of self-consciousness. This knowledge is far more important than any dispute as to whether it is Sankhya or Vedic philosophy that is contained in the Bhagavad Gita. To understand it as a real description of world history—of history and of the color and temper of a particular age in which living, individual beings are placed before us—is the important point. We have tried to describe their natures, speaking of Arjuna’s thoughts and feelings as characteristic of that time, trying to throw light on the new age of self-consciousness, and showing how a creative Spiritual Being preparing for a new age appeared before Arjuna. Now, if we seek a living picture of Spiritual Beings in their relation to each other, we need an all-around point of view to know this Krishna Being more exactly. The following may therefore help us complete our picture of him.

To really penetrate into the region where we can perceive such a mighty being as Krishna one must have progressed far enough to be able to have real perceptions and real experiences in the spiritual world. That may seem obvious. Yet when we consider what people generally expect of the higher worlds the matter is by no means so self-evident. I have often indicated that misunderstandings without number arise from the fact that people wish to lift their lives into the super-sensible world carrying a mass of prejudices with them. They desire to be led along the path into the super-sensible toward something already familiar to them in the sense world. In that higher realm one perceives, for instance, forms, not indeed of gross matter, but forms that appear as forms of light. One finds that he hears sounds like the sounds of the physical world. He does not realize that by expecting such things, by entering the higher world with such preconceived ideas, he is wanting a spiritual world just like the sense world though in a refined form. In our world here man is accustomed to color and brightness, so he imagines he will only reach the higher realities if the Beings there appear to him in the same way. It ought not to be necessary to say all this since the super-sensible beings are far above all attributes of the senses and in their true form do not appear at all with sense qualities because the latter presuppose eyes and ears, that is, sense organs. In the higher worlds, however, we do not perceive by means of sense organs but by soul organs.

What can happen in this connection I can illustrate by a childish comparison. Suppose I am describing something to you, verbally. Then I feel impelled to represent it with a few strokes on the blackboard, thereby materializing what I have expressed in words. No one would dream of taking the diagram for the reality. It is the same when we express what we have experienced supersensibly by giving it form and color and stamping it in words borrowed from the sense world. Only that in doing so we do not use our ordinary intellect, but a higher faculty of feeling that thus translates the super-sensible into sense terms. In such a way our soul lives into invisible worlds, for instance into that of the Krishna Being. Then it feels the need of representing to itself that Being. What it represents, however, is not the Being himself but a kind of sketch, a super-sensible diagram. Such sketches, super-sensible illustrations so to say, are Imaginations. The misunderstanding that so often arises amounts to this, that we sensualize what the higher forces of the soul sketch out before us. By thus interpreting it sensually we lose its real essence. The essence is not contained in these pictures, but through them it must be dimly felt at first, until by slow degrees we actually begin to see it.

I have mentioned among other things the wonderful dramatic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. I tried to give an idea of the form of the first four discourses. This same dramatic impulse increases from one discourse to the next as we penetrate on and on into the realms of occult vision. A sound idea of the artistic composition of this poem may be suggested by looking to see if there is not a central point, a climax to this increase of force and feeling. There are eighteen discourses, therefore we might look for the climax in the ninth. In fact, in the ninth one, that is in the very middle, we read these striking words, “And now, having told thee everything, I will declare to thee the profoundest secret for the human soul.” Here indeed is a strange saying that seems to sound abstract yet has deep significance. Then there follows this most profound mystery. “Understand me well. I am in all beings, yet they are not in me.”

How often men ask today, “What is the judgment of true mystic wisdom about this or that?” They want absolute truths, but actually there are no such truths. There are only truths that hold good in certain contexts, that are true in definite circumstances and under definite conditions. Then they are true. This statement, “I am in all beings but they are not in me,” cannot be taken as an abstractly, absolutely true statement. Yet this was spoken out of the deepest wisdom of Krishna at the time when he stood before Arjuna, and its truth is real and immediate, referring to Him Who is the creator of man’s inmost being, of his consciousness of self.

Thus, through a wonderful approach we are carried on to the central point of the Gita, to the ninth discourse where these words are poured out, to Arjuna. Then, in the eleventh discourse, another element enters. What may we expect here, realizing the artistic form of the poem and the deep occult truths contained in it? When we take up the ninth and tenth discourses, the very middle of the poem, we notice a remarkable thing—a peculiar difficulty in imagining and bringing to life in our souls the ideas presented to us in this part of the song.

As you begin with the first discourse your soul is borne along by the continually increasing current of feeling and idea. First, immortality is the subject. Then you are uplifted and inspired by the concepts awakened through Yoga. All the time your feeling is being borne along by something in which it can feel at home, one may say. We go still further and the poem works up in a wonderful way to the concept of Him Who inspired the age of self-consciousness. Our enthusiasm is kindled as we approach this Being. All this time we are living in definite, familiar feelings. Then comes a still greater climax. We are told how the soul can become ever more free of the outer bodily life. We are led on to the idea, so familiar to the man of India, of how the soul can retire into itself, realizing inaction in the actions the body experiences. The soul can become a complete whole, independent of outer things as it gradually attains Yoga and becomes one with Brahma. In the succeeding discourses we see how our certainty of feeling—the feeling that can still gain nourishment from daily life—gradually vanishes. Then as we approach the ninth discourse our soul seems to rise into giddy heights of unknown experience. If now in these ninth and tenth discourses we try to make the ideas borrowed from ordinary life suffice, we fail, As we reach this part of the song we feel as if we were standing on a summit of mankind’s attainment, born directly out of the occult depths of life. If we are to understand it, we must bring to it something our soul in its development has first to attain by its own effort.

It is remarkable how fine and unerring the composition of the Bhagavad Gita is in this respect. We can get as far as the fifth, sixth, or seventh discourse by developing the concepts given us at the very beginning, in the first discourse. In the second our soul is awakened to realize the presence of the eternal in the ever-changing flow of appearance. Then follows all that passes into the depths of Yoga, from the third song onward. After that an altogether new mood begins to appear. Whereas the first discourses still have an intellectual quality, reminding us at times of the Western philosophic mode of thinking, something enters now that requires Yoga, the devotional mood, for its understanding. As we continue purifying more and more this mood of devotion, our soul rises higher in reverence. The Yoga of the first discourses no longer carries us. It ceases, and an altogether new mood of soul bears us up into the ninth and tenth discourses because the words here spoken are no more than a dry, empty sound echoing in our ear if we approach them intellectually. But they radiate warmth to us if we approach them devotionally. One who would understand this sublime poem may start with intellectual understanding and so follow the opening discourses, but as the song proceeds toward the ninth a deep devotional mood must be awakened in him. Then the words of the mighty Krishna will be like wonderful music echoing and re-echoing in his soul. Whoever reaches this ninth song may feel this devotional mood as if he must take off his shoes before treading on holy ground; there he feels he must walk with reverence. Then follows the eleventh discourse. What can come next, now that we have reached the climax of this devotional mood?

When man has risen to the summit where Krishna has led Arjuna—a height that cannot be attained except in occult vision or in reverent devotion—it can only be the holy and formless, the super-sensible, that appears before him. Then the super-sensible can be poured out into Imagination. Then the uplifted and strengthened soul-force that belongs not to the realm of the intellect but to imaginative perception, can cast into living pictures what in its essential being is without form or likeness. This is what happens at the beginning of the second half of the sublime song—that is to say, about the eleventh discourse. Here, after due preparation, the Krishna Being to whom Arjuna has been led step by step, is conjured up before his soul in Imaginations. This is where the majesty of description in this Eastern poem appears in its fullness, where Krishna finally appears in a picture, in an Imagination.

We may truly say that experiences such as this, which only the innermost power of the human soul can undergo, have almost nowhere else been described in such a wonderful way, so filled with meaning. For those who are able to realize it the Imagination of Krishna as Arjuna now describes it will always be of most profound significance. Up to the tenth discourse we are led on by Krishna as by an inspiring Being. Now the radiant bliss of Arjuna’s opened vision comes before us. Arjuna becomes the narrator, and describes his Imagination in words so wonderful that one fears to reproduce them.

“The Gods do I behold in all thy Frame, O God. Also the hosts of creatures; Brahma the Lord upon His lotus throne; the Rishis all; the Serpent of Heaven. With many arms and with many bodies, with many mouths and many eyes I see Thee, on every side endless in Thy Form. No end, no center, no beginning see I in Thee, O Lord of All! Thou, Whom I behold in every form, I see Thee with diadem, with club and sword, a mountain flaming fire, streaming forth on every side—thus do I behold Thee. Dazzled is my vision. As fire streaming from the radiance of the Sun, immeasurably great art Thou! Lost beyond all thought, unperishing, greatest of all Good, thus dost Thou appear to me in the Heaven’s expanse. Eternal Dharma’s changeless guardian, Thou! Spirit primeval and Eternal, Thou standest before my soul. Neither source, nor midst, nor end; in-. finite in power, infinite in realms of space. Great are Thine eyes like to the Moon; yea, like to the Sun itself. And what streams forth from Thy mouth is as the Fire of Sacrifice. I look upon Thee in Thy glowing Fire; Thy splendor, warming all worlds. All that I can dream of between floor of earth and fields of Heaven, Thy power fills it all. Alone with Thee I stand. And that heavenly universe wherein the three worlds live, that too doth in Thee dwell, when to my gaze is shown Thy wondrous, awesome Form. I see whole hosts of Gods approaching Thee, hymning Thy praise. Stricken with fear I stand before Thee, folding my hands in prayer. ‘Hail to Thee!’ cry all the companies of holy seers and Saints, chanting Thy praises with resounding songs. Filled with wonder stand multitudes beholding Thee. Thy Form stupendous with many mouths, arms, limbs, feet, many bodies, many jaws full of teeth—before it all the universe doth quake, and I with dread am filled. Radiant, Thou shakest Heaven. With many arms I see Thee, and mouth like to vast-flaming eyes. My soul trembles. Nothing firm I find, nor rest, O Mighty Krishna, Who art as Vishnu unto me. I see within Thine awful form, like unto fire itself. I see how Being works, the end of all the ages. Nought know I anywhere; no shelter I find. O, be Thou merciful to me, Thou Lord of all the Gods, refuge of all the worlds!”

Such is the Imagination that Arjuna beholds when his soul has been raised to that height where an Imagination of Krishna is possible. Then we hear what Krishna is echoing across to Arjuna once more as a mighty inspiration. In reality it is as if it were not merely sounding for the spiritual ear of Arjuna, but echoing down through all the ages that followed. At this point we begin dimly to perceive what it really means when a new impulse is given for a new epoch in the world’s history, and when the author of this impulse appears to the clairvoyant gaze of Arjuna. We feel with Arjuna. We remind ourselves that he is in the midst of the turmoil of battle where brother-blood is pitted against its like. We know that what Krishna has to give depends above all upon the old clairvoyant epoch ceasing, together with all that was holy in it, and a new epoch to begin. When we reflect on the impulse of this new epoch that was to begin with fratricide; when we rightly understand the impulse that forced its way in through all the swaying concepts and institutions of the preceding epoch; then we get a correct concept of what Krishna lets Arjuna hear.

“I am time primeval, bringing all worlds to naught, made manifest on earth to slay mankind! And even though thou wilt bring them unto death in battle, without thee hath death taken all the warriors who stand there in their ranks. Therefore arise; arise without fear. Renown shalt thou win, and shalt conquer the foe. Rejoice in thy mastery, and in the victory awaiting thee. It is not thou who wilt have slain them when they fall in battle. By Me already are they slain, e’er thou lay them low. The instrument art thou, nought else than he who fighteth with his arm. The Drona, the Jayandana, the Bhishma, the Karna and the other heroes of the strife I have slain. Already they are slain, now do thou slay, that My work burst forth externally apparent. When they fall dead in Maya, slain by Me, do thou slay them. And what I have done will through thee become perceptible. Tremble not! Thou canst not do what I have not already done. Fight! They whom I have slain will fall beneath thy sword!”

It was not in order to bring to mankind’s ears the voice that should speak of slaying that these words were uttered, but to make them hear the voice that tells that there is a center in man’s being that has to develop in the age to come; that into this center there were focused the highest impulses realizable by man at that time, and that there is nothing in human evolution with which the human ego is not connected. Here we find in the Bhagavad Gita something that lifts us up and sets us on the horizon of the whole of human evolution.

If we let the changing moods of this great poem work upon us we shall gain much more than those who try to read into it pedantic doctrines of Sankhya or Yoga philosophies. If we can only dimly feel the dazzling heights that can be reached through Yoga, we shall begin to lay hold on the meaning and spirit of such a mighty Imagination as that of Arjuna presented to us here. Even as an image it is so sublime and forceful that we are able to form some lofty conception of the creative spirit, which in Krishna is grafted onto the world. The highest impulse that can speak to the individual man speaks through Krishna to Arjuna. The highest to which the individual man can lift himself by raising to their full pitch all the powers that reside within his being—that is Krishna. The highest to which he can soar by training himself and working on himself with wisdom—that is Krishna.

When we think of the evolution of humanity all over the earth, and trace it through as we are able to do by means of what is given, for example, in our occult science; when in this sense we see the earth as the place where man has first been brought to the ego through many different stages following one another and developing from age to age; when we thus follow the course of evolution through the epochs of time; then we may say to ourselves that here then on earth these souls have been planted; the highest they can attain is to become free souls. Free—that is what men will become if they bring to full development all the forces latent within them as individual souls. In order to make this possible Krishna was active, indirectly and almost imperceptibly at first, then ever more definitely, and at last quite directly in the period we have been describing. In all of earthly evolution there is no Being who could give the individual human soul so much as Krishna.

I say expressly the individual soul because—and I say this deliberately—on earth there exists not only the individual human soul but also mankind. Consider this in connection with all I have tried to give about Krishna, because on earth there are all those concerns that do not belong to the individual alone. Imagine a person feeling the inner impulse to perfect himself as far as ever a human soul can. Such might be. Then, each person separately and by himself might go on developing indefinitely. But there is mankind. For this earthly planet there are matters that bring it into connection with the whole universe. With the Krishna Impulse coming into each individual soul, let us assume every soul would have developed in itself a higher impulse; not immediately, nor even up to the present time, but sometime in the future. So that from the age of self-consciousness onward the stream of mankind’s collective evolution would have split up. Individual souls would have progressed and unfolded to the highest point, but separately, dispersed, broken apart from each other. Their paths would have gone further and further apart as the Krishna Impulse worked in each one. Human existence would have been uplifted in the sense that souls individualized themselves and so lifted themselves out of the common current, developing their self-life to the utmost. In this way the ancient time would have shone into the future like many, many rays from a single star. Every one of these rays would have proclaimed the glory of Krishna far into future cosmic eras. This is the path on which mankind was traveling in the sixth or eighth centuries before the foundation of Christianity.

Then from the opposite side something else came in. The Krishna Impulse comes into man’s soul when from the depths of his own inner being he works, creates, and draws forth his powers more and more until he may rise into those realms where he may reach Krishna. But something came toward humanity from outside, which men could never have reached through the forces that lived within themselves; something bending down to each individual one. Thus the souls that were separating and isolating themselves encountered the same Being who came down out of the Cosmic Universe into the age of self-consciousness from outside. It came in such a way that it belonged to the whole of humanity, to all the earth. This other impulse came from the opposite side. It was the Christ.

Though put rather abstractly for the present, we see how a continually increasing individualization was prepared and brought about in mankind, and how then those souls who had the impulse to individualize themselves more and more were met by the Christ Impulse, leading them once more together into a common humanity. What I have tried to indicate has been a rather preliminary description of the two impulses from the Christ and Krishna. I have tried to show how closely the two impulses come together in the age of the mid-point of evolution, even though they come from diametrically opposite directions. We can make very great mistakes by confusing these two revelations. What I have developed today in a rather general way we will make more concrete in the succeeding lectures. But I would close today with a few words that may simply and clearly summarize what these two impulses are—truly the most important in human evolution.

If we look back to all that happened between the tenth century before Christ and the tenth century afterward, we may say that into the universe the Krishna Impulse flowed for every individual human soul, and into the earth the Christ Impulse came for all mankind.

Observe that for those who can think specifically, “all mankind” by no means signifies the same as the mere sum total of all individual human souls.

My dear sisters and brothers,

Once again, I must say that the introduction about the character and the responsibilities connected with the School cannot be repeated for the new arrivals each time. Therefore, I must request that those of you who were already here and have the mantras inform the new members concerning the contents of the introduction.

Today we will once again begin with the words which contain the fundamental exhortation to the human being, which resound to him from all the kingdoms of nature and from all the spiritual hierarchies, if he has the necessary sensibility, to seek his own being, and also exhort him to recognize, through his own being, the world in its true spiritual nature. They resound from all that interweaves and lives in the earthly depths, in water and air, in warmth and light, from what lives in the mountains and springs, in rocks, in the plants and animals, in the physical human form, in human souls, in human spirits, what lives in the residents of the stars, in the spiritual hierarchies—it resounds thus:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,
The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,

Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

My dear sisters and brothers, the description of the spiritual path which leads from the sunny, light-filled world in which we live on earth appears on the other side of the yawning abyss of being at first as a gloomy, night-cloaked darkness. The path which leads us to where we become aware that, when we seek our own being in all that lives in the depths, flows in the air, all that creeps and flies, in all that our senses perceive in the majestic glow of the stars, in the powerful depths of universal space, in the immeasurably distant flow of time, that all that does not contain our being, the true source of our humanity, that it becomes gloomy when we look here for our humanity. The description has led us thus far to show that we must find the way past the Guardian of the Threshold, who has told us so much about the meaning of the spiritual world, over to what is still night-cloaked, black gloom, so that it can become bright there, and in this brightness the light arises to illumine before the eyes of our soul our own being, and therewith the being and essence and interweaving of the world.

It must be clear to us that in the moment—and we have come so far in the description—when we have crossed over the abyss of being, past the Guardian of the Threshold, in that moment an important change takes place in the human being, that is, in ourselves.

Let us look, my dear sisters and brothers, at our human existence as it is between birth and death on earth: we grasp the world thinking, we grasp the world feeling, we act in the world by willing. But thinking, feeling and willing are interwoven in our human earthly existence. If we want to carry out something in the near future, we consider it first, so what we carry out is already present as a seed in our thoughts. We see it flowing out in impulses of will. We feel that it is worthy. We feel love flowing to this or that being. Because we feel it, we form a thought about it. Or we go beyond that and carry out a deed of love towards the being, we let ourselves grow wings of love, and are urged forward to willing. But all that—thinking, feeling, willing—is closely related to our humanity as it unfolds between birth and death in the physical world. We are at one in thinking, feeling and willing.

And the truth is that we are only really awake in our thoughts. They are bright and clear, although the Guardian of the Threshold had revealed them to be illusory. They are bright and clear, we are awake in them.

Our feeling is darker and less clear. We are closer to existence in feeling, but the content of what we feel is like a dream, so that we can only speak of dream-feeling, even when awake.

The will, however, as it emerges from our being, remains at first completely unclear to our normal consciousness. We have the thought that we want this or that; the thought appears, grasps the organism; the organism acts, carries out the thought; we see what we have carried out, again with thought. But the will itself rests in deep sleep, as do the things in our soul rest between falling asleep and awakening.

But the initiate sees the thoughts in their living state, which they were in before the human being had descended from the supersensible world to the sensory one. He sees radiant being in the thoughts. But this radiant being he sees is not the illusion of thoughts as in ordinary thinking.

We stand beside the Guardian of the Threshold. The abyss of being is there; before us—beyond the abyss, beyond the threshold—is the black, night-cloaked gloom; but from out of the darkness gleaming, living shapes are moving. We say to ourselves—because we sense that the kind of thoughts we had as physical persons have abandoned us—we say to ourselves: There is our flowing, living thinking. It doesn't belong to us now, it belongs to the world. Light on light, thought extracts itself from the black gloom. We know that thought, all our thinking, is there as the first brightness within the black gloom that we are approaching.

And then we see something further down. We have the feeling—and the Guardian of the Threshold points to it with an admonishing gesture—we see how the darkness below is becoming fire-like. Fire, dark fire yes, but fire that we can sensepsychically, spreads out below us. What we recognize as our willing comes towards us over the abyss of being. The initiate gradually learns the following: What happens when thinking merges with willing? The thought—of what is wanted—is grasped; then this thought merges with corporeality as beneficent fire. What brings the will to existence is warmth, which is fire when our own will meets us from out of the darkness.

And between this warmth, from which our willing streams toward us across the abyss of being (for our human will is a mere reflection of our cosmic will)—between this warm, dark out-streaming from below, which has at most a whiff of bluish-violet, and the bright lights of thoughts above, between both there is an interweaving, flowing warmth rising, light descending. Light-enveloped warmth rising, warmth-enveloped light streaming down: that is our feeling.

It is a powerful picture which the Guardian of the Threshold draws. And now we know that when we cross over from the sensory world, from the world of physical reality in which we are between birth and death, into the world of the spirit, then we will be—in thinking, feeling and willing—no longer the unity that we are here; there we are Three. In the universe, we are Three: our thinking merges with light across the threshold; our will becomes fire; our feeling becomes light-enveloped fire.

We must have the courage to expand and intensify the Self, the I, so that it holds the Three together when we cross over. We can do this once we are permeated with what could otherwise be a banality: that our head is the source of all our senses and thinking: All our senses and thoughts are distributed over the whole body, but what is especially expressed in our head is that in its roundness, with an opening below, it imitates the shape of the universe. If we can say to ourselves in all seriousness and inner ardency: my head is inwardly and outwardly an imitation of the world's shape, we feel then, in that we want to view the head from within, how this perspective expands to include the universe, which is only concentrated in our head for our earthly vision.

We should then intensely feel how our heart, the physical expression of our soul, does not only beat because of what is in our body, because of what is enclosed within the skin; we breathe in the air, which is the impetus of the heartbeat, we breathe it out again. The world in all its grandeur and majesty participates in our heartbeat. What is sensed in our heart is not merely what is within us: it is the universal pulse-beat.

If we consider how our limbs work through willing, it gives us the strength to not only will what is within us. Consider for a moment how the forces of heredity are in us when we are born, how the forces of karma, which we have acquired through many, many earth-lives, live in our willing. Let us think of all that, and feel: when we will, world-force lives in our limbs, not merely human force.

Just think, my dear sisters and brothers, while still here at the Guardian of the Threshold's side he points over to the brightly lit, universally living and acting thoughts; to what wells up as warmth, light-bringing, light-filled; to what spiritually wafts over us from below like warm wind—the universe's fire, which is the ur-force of the will.

So we hear, resounding, what the Guardian of the Threshold has to say to us in this situation:

Behold the Three

(thinking, feeling, willing; man is split in three)

Behold the Three,
They are the One,
When you in earthly life
the human imprint bear.

Experience the head's cosmic form

The Guardian makes this sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard.]

so that we stop and feel the head's cosmic form in this closed, upward pointing triangle. Let us concentrate on this.

Feel the heart's cosmic beat

The Guardian makes this sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard.]

for us to feel in this sign the wave-like pulse of the universe, which crosses in the heart.

Consider the cosmic force of the limbs.

The Guardian of the Threshold makes the other sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard:]

We should concentrate on this line in order to sense the mantric force of this line and of the whole verse.

Then the Guardian of the Threshold strengthens it again:

They are the Three,
The Three, which as the One
In earthly being live.

This is the verse by which the Guardian announces how we are to prepare—through forceful courage, through ardent striving for knowledge—to sense the wings which carry us over from the One to the Three. In the physical world, we are the One. In the spiritual world, we are the Three, which we experience in imaginative pictures.

[Written on the blackboard]

The Guardian reminds us:

See the Three,
They are the One,
When you in earthly life
The human imprint bear.

[Alongside the first sign on the blackboard is written:]

Experience the head's cosmic shape
the cosmic shape can be experienced in the head

[Alongside the second sign is written:]

Sense the heart's cosmic beat
the cosmic beat can be sensed in the heart

[Alongside the third sign is written:]

Consider the limbs' cosmic force
the cosmic force can be considered in the movement of the limbs.

The escalation is:

[The following words are underlined:]

Experience
Sense
Consider

Shape
Beat
Force

The three lines must be strengthened by concentrating on these figures.

[Written:]

They are the Three,
The Three, which as the One
In earthly being live.

My dear friends, when we are standing here in earthly existence—and we are still doing so, we are just preparing to cross to the spiritual world—we ascribe to our head our spirit, in that it contains thoughts. At first, though, this spirit is only apparent. The thoughts are the appearance of the spirit. We ascribe the thoughts to our head, that is, we ascribe the spirit to our head, because the spirit lives in the form of thoughts during earthly existence.

But we can do something else, recalling the Guardian of the Threshold's admonition. In this situation, as we are preparing to cross over the abyss of being, we must endeavor to concentrate on the force we normally use when we move a limb, when we walk or stand, when our will pervades us. We must endeavor to concentrate to the extent that we will each thought, as though it were being pushed out. We must sense the thought being pushed out as when we stretch out an arm: thus, reality passes through the will into the thoughts. Then the things perceived by our senses, whereas they came to us previously as the appearance of color or tone, now stream toward us from the multifaceted sensory appearance as cosmic will.

My dear sisters and brothers: Learn to extend your thoughts out to the world as you learn to stretch out your hands through willing. Just as the objects of the world respond when you extend your will to them, offering resistance, so do the spirits offer resistance when you extend your thoughts to them, in that the will permeates them. If we do this, we are interweaving reality in wisdom. The Guardian of the Threshold's admonishes us once again.

The Guardian's last admonition:

The head's spirit,
You can will it;

(otherwise we only think it, now we will it; and when we do so, willing becomes something different)

And willing

(the willing of thoughts)

provides you with
The senses' multi-forming heaven-weave;
You interweave with wisdom.

The next thing the Guardian of the Threshold points to is the heart, in which the rhythm of our humanity is concentrated. We cannot bring anything except feeling into the heart, that is, feeling here in the sensory world between birth and death. But we must also bring the feelings to the heart when we are in the spiritual world.

If we could feel the heart as if the world were feeling our heart, because we are, after all, in the world, then our feeling would be different. Just as willing becomes “the senses' multi-forming heaven-weave”, so feeling becomes something which must be conceived of in a way that we can say—Look: thinking, the spirit's head, becomes the will; feeling remains feeling, but rays out to thinking on one side and willing on the other. It is both at the same time. Therefore, at this point we must get used to concentrating on a line in which we interweave what rays upward and downward.

This line must read as follows: “And feeling becomes your will's thinking, your thinking's will, the awakening seed of cosmic life.” Then you live in the glow. This is not a dying away glow, it is the world's revelation in beauty, which can also be called “glow” in the sense of “gloria”. The glow here means gloria.

Thus, the Guardian's second admonition is:

The heart's soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
The awakening seed of cosmic life:
Will's thinking, thinking's will.
You live in the glow.

[This second verse is written on the blackboard and “heart's” and “feeling” are underlined:]

The heart's soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
The awakening seed of cosmic life:
Will's thinking, thinking's will.
You live in the glow.

You must, my dear sisters and brothers, by practicing this, try to think that—the will's thinking, the thinking's will—flow together in one, because it is so in the world.

The third thing to which the Guardian of the Threshold points is the force of our limbs. The Guardian of the Threshold demands that that our spirit wills our limbs, that we do not feel that what we do is the result of exerting our own force, but that we observe it as if we stepped out of our bodies and were standing beside ourselves. Then the will's thinking becomes the thinking which we unfold here: the will's goal-oriented human striving. And now we recognize the virtue of human diligence, what human will can accomplish in the world's evolution. The guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:

[The third verse is written on the blackboard and “limbs” is underlined.]

The limbs' force,
You can think it
And thinking becomes
The will's goal-oriented human striving.
You strive in virtue.

The escalation is:

[Now the following three words are underlined:]

weave
live
strive.

The other escalation is:

wisdom
glow
virtue.

Now I will read the lines as the appear to us at first when the Guardian speaks them to us:

The head's spirit,
You can will it;
And willing becomes for you
The senses' multi-formed heaven's interweaving.
You interweave in wisdom.

The heart's soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
The will's thinking, thinking will's
Awakening seed of cosmic life.
You live in the glow.

The limbs' force,
You can think it;
And thinking becomes
The will's goal-oriented human striving.
You strive in virtue.

That is the Guardian of the Threshold's last admonition.

That is the decisive point which is indicated by the words which are spoken here as the words Michael himself speaks, because this Esoteric School has been founded and is sustained by Michael and his force. Now we have come to the important point in our instruction where, if we have conscientiously practiced all that we have learned, it gives us wings to fly over the yawning, deep abyss of being.

Everything which has been said in this Michael School shall again be accompanied by the sign and seals of Michael; for all has been given in such a way that while it resounds through the space of this School, Michael is present, which may be confirmed by his sign:

[Michael-sign (in red)
Come in, the door has opened, you will become a free human being]

and which may be confirmed by his seal, which he has impressed on the threefold Rosicrucian verse:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

the seal makes us feel the first line in this gesture:

[The lower seal is drawn on the blackboard.]

[lower seal-gesture]

the second line in this gesture:

[the middle seal gesture is drawn on the blackboard]

[middle seal gesture]

the third verse in this gesture:

[the upper seal gesture is drawn on the blackboard]

[upper seal-gesture]

As we know, this first gesture means [beside the lower gesture is written:]

I revere the Father

We feel this as we say “Ex deo nascimur” and confirm it by the gesture, which is Michael's seal.

The second gesture means [beside the second gesture is written:]

I love the Son

We feel this while saying “In Christo morimur”, thus expressing the feeling through what lies in the Michael-Seal.

The third gesture means:

I unite with the spirit

It accompanies, in feeling, “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus”. It is the gesture which is Michael's seal upon the third part of the Rosicrucian verse.

Thus, Michael's Sign and Seal accompany the path onward, which will be followed in this School for spiritual development:

[the Michael-Sign is made]

[The following three lines are spoken, accompanied by the three seal-gestures:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Then the moment comes when the Guardian of the Threshold's decisive words resound as though coming from Michael, as though from the cosmic distances. After the Guardian has said how we are to prepare ourselves—and we feel this preparation to be necessary—then his words resound as though coming from Michael, as though coming from the cosmic distances:

Come in.
The door has opened.
You will become
A true human being.

We must create the feeling that we are not speaking ourselves, but that as we are speaking it becomes objective, that we hear it, as if it is coming from the other side:

[Across the mantra “See the three” on the blackboard, the following is written in red chalk:]

Come in.
The door has opened.
You will become
A true human being.

In the following lessons, what resounds on the other side of the threshold will be described.

But now let us again consider—for all real development always leads back to the starting point—how from all the beings of the world the challenge speaks to us about what we have learned from the Guardian's mouth:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

Once more—confirming all, confirming Michael's presence—the sign and seal of Michael:

[the Michael-sign is made]

[The following is spoken together with the seal-gestures:]

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

The mantric verses given here in order to practice contain the force necessary to experience what is described here. Only the members of this Class may possess them, no one else. If someone who belongs to the School cannot attend a lesson during which he would have received the corresponding verse, he may receive it from another member who was present. But for each time this happens permission must be received either from Dr. Wegman or myself. However, the one who is to receive the verse may not request permission, but only the one who is to give it.

Once permission has been granted to give someone the verses, it continues to hold good for that particular person. For every other person, permission must be obtained from Dr. Wegman or myself. It would be useless for the one who wants to receive the verses to request permission; only the one who is to give them should ask. So, if one wants to have the verses, he must go to someone who has them legitimately. The latter should then ask for each individual to whom he wishes to give them.

If someone makes notes of something else, other than the verses, he is only authorized to keep them for one week; after that they must be burned. We must really observe the occult rules. An occult rule is contained in all I have said and insist upon. This is not an arbitrary administrative measure, but because if esoteric things fall into the wrong hands, then, my dear sisters and brothers, the mantras lose their force. It is simply based on an occult law.

*

At twelve o'clock tomorrow is the Speech Formation course; at 10.45 the Theology course; at five o'clock the Pastoral Medicine course and at eight o'clock the lecture for members.

In our efforts to understand existence it is our practice to trace the course of some aspect of its development up to the present time, and we have had many opportunities of becoming familiar with the idea that everything we perceive around us is in course of evolution. We must get used to applying the idea of evolution more widely, we must apply it in spheres not usually associated with it today—for instance, we must apply it to the life of the soul. We probably do recognise it as it manifests itself outwardly in the life of the individual between birth and death. But so far as humanity as a whole is concerned, people immediately think of evolution as an ascent from the condition of the lower animals and draw the conclusion—even from the standpoint of modern knowledge a somewhat fanciful one—that the human has evolved out of the animal—as if the higher could, without more ado, evolve out of the lower! It is of course not my task in this cycle to show in detail, as I have often done, that our present consciousness has undergone a far-reaching evolution, that the kind of consciousness, the kind of soul-life we have today, was preceded by another form of consciousness. We have often described this earlier form as a kind of lower clairvoyant consciousness. Our modern consciousness furnishes us with mental images of outer objects by means of external perception. But that other earlier consciousness can best be studied if we look back to the Moon evolution.

The most outstanding difference between the evolution of the Moon and that of our present earth is that the old form of clairvoyance, a kind of picture-consciousness, has been superseded by the present-day object-consciousness. I have for many years been calling attention to this, and years ago I was able to give information out of the Akasha Chronicle on the subject of evolution. It appeared in the early essays of the magazine Lucifer-Gnosis.¹ There I pointed out that the old, dreamlike picture-consciousness which characterised our own nature in former times has developed into our earth-consciousness, into what today gives us consciousness of external things, consciousness of things outside us in space as contrasted with what we ourselves are in our inner being. This ability to distinguish between external objects and our own inner life is what characterises our present state of consciousness. When we have an object in front of us—let us say a rose—we say: “That rose is there in space! It is separated from us; we stand at a different spot from it.” We perceive the rose, and make a mental image of it. The mental image is within us, the rose is outside. The distinction between outer and inner is the mark of our present-day consciousness. Consciousness on the Moon was not like that. Beings with the Moon-consciousness made no such distinction. Suppose that when you looked at the rose you were not conscious that the rose was outside, and that you were making a mental image of it, but that you felt “The real being of this rose which hovers there in space is not confined to the space which it occupies, but its being extends outward into space, and is actually in me.” Indeed you could go further. Suppose that when you looked at the sun you did not feel that the sun was above you and that you were below, but felt that while you were forming a mental image of the sun it was within you; suppose your consciousness was taking hold of it in amore or less spiritual way! Then there would be no distinction between outer and inner. If you can make that clear to yourselves, you will have grasped the outstanding characteristic of consciousness as it was throughout the Moon evolution.

Another quality of this consciousness was that it was pictorial; things did not appear directly as objects, but as images, just as today dreams often unfold as imagery. For example, a dream can take its course in such a way that a fire external to ourselves appears as a being radiating light. It was somewhat in this way that consciousness on the Moon perceived things. It was a pictorial consciousness, at the same time permeated with the quality of inwardness.

There was yet another essential in which the consciousness of that time differed from that of our present time. It did not work in such a way that outer objects would have been there at all as they are for our present earth-consciousness. For the consciousness of the Moon period what we today call our environment, what we perceive in the vegetable, the mineral, the human kingdoms as sense-objects, was not there. What was there—on a lower, dreamlike level—was something similar to what there is in the soul today when the power of seership awakens, when conscious clairvoyance awakens. The first awakening of clairvoyant consciousness is of such a nature that to begin with it does not extend to external Beings. This is a source of countless deceptions to those who are training themselves esoterically to develop clairvoyance.

Such a training progresses by stages. There is a first stage which unfolds in various ways. In it the student sees many things around him. But he would make a great mistake if he were straightway to think that what he sees around him, so to say in spiritual space, is also spiritual reality. Johannes Thomasius in my Mystery Play goes through this stage of astral clairvoyance. Let me remind you of the scenes which rise before his soul as he sits in meditation down-stage, and feels in his soul the dawn of the spiritual world. Pictures arise in his soul, and the first one is that the Spirit of the Elements brings before him persons whom he has previously known in life. In the Play, Johannes Thomasius has come to know Professor Capesius and Doctor Strader. He knew them on the physical plane, and there formed certain impressions of them. Then, when after his great sorrow his clairvoyant capacity breaks through, he sees them again. He sees them in remarkable forms. He sees Capesius as a young man, as he was at the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, and not as he is at the moment when he, Johannes Thomasius, sits meditating; and he sees Doctor Strader as he will be in his present incarnation when he is old. This and many other pictures pass through the soul ofJohannes Thomasius. These pictures which are really living in the soul through meditation can only be represented in the play as happening on the stage. It would be quite wrong for Johannes Thomasius to regard this as deception. The only right attitude towards all this would be to say to himself that he cannot yet know how far this is reality or deception. He does not know whether what the pictures show is an external spiritual reality or not; that is, he does not know whether it is something inscribed in the Akashic record or whether he has expanded his own self to a world. It could be either, and he must recognise that fact. It is only from the moment when the Devachan consciousness begins, when in Devachan he perceives the spiritual reality of a being whom he knows on the physical plane—Maria—that he is able to look back again and to discriminate between reality and mere picture-consciousness. Thus you can see that man has to pass through a stage in the course of his esoteric development in which he is surrounded by pictures, but is unable to distinguish between what is a manifestation of spiritual reality and what is merely picture. The scenes of the Mystery Play of course were intended to express spiritual realities. The appearance of Professor Capesius is a real picture of the young Capesius, as it is inscribed in the Akashic record, and the appearance of Doctor Strader is the real Strader as he will be in his old age. They are intended to be real in the play, only Johannes Thomasius does not know it.

The stage of consciousness I have just described was experienced on the Moon, only at a lower, more dreamlike level, so that no faculty of discrimination was possible. The ability to discriminate only began later. You must try to get a thorough grasp of what I am telling you. Let us bear in mind that the clairvoyant lives in a kind of picture-consciousness. But during the Moon period the pictures which arose were in the main quite different from the objects of our earthly consciousness; and the same thing applies today in the early stages of clairvoyance. To begin with, the clairvoyant does not see spiritual things at all; he sees pictures, and the question is what do these pictures signify? In the first stages of clairvoyance they do not express real spiritual Beings, but a kind of organic consciousness. The experience is a pictorial representation, a projection into space, of what is actually taking place in himself. To take an actual example, when the clairvoyant begins to develop these forces in himself, he can have the experience of seeing two luminous globes far outside in space. He sees pictures of two globes in luminous colour. If he were then to think to himself “there outside me are two Beings,” the probability is that he would be quite wrong; at any rate that would be the case to begin with. What is happening is that his clairvoyance is projecting outwards into space forces which are at work in himself, and he sees them as two globes. And these two globes could represent what is at work in his astral body to produce within him the power of sight in his two eyes. This power of sight can be projected outwards in the form of two globes. Thus what is actually to be seen is an inner faculty showing itself as an external phenomenon in astral space. It would be a very great mistake for such an experience to be taken to herald the external presence of spiritual Beings.

It would be a still greater error if in these early stages by some means or other it were to happen that voices were heard, and these voices taken as inspirations from outside. That is the greatest error into which one can fall. Such an experience can hardly be more than an echo of an inner process; and while what appears in picture form, in colour, usually represents fairly pure inner processes, voices as a rule manifest lower and rather worthless elements of soul-life. It is best for anyone who begins to hear voices to cultivate the greatest distrust of them. The early stages of these imaginal representations should always be received with the greatest caution. It is a kind of organic consciousness, a projection outwards into space of one's own inner being. Such an organic consciousness was quite normal during the Moon evolution. The human being at that stage scarcely perceived anything except what was happening to himself.

I have often called attention to an important saying of Goethe's: “The eye has been formed by the light for the light.” This saying should be taken quite seriously. All man's organs have been formed by his environment, out of his environment. It is a superficial philosophy which stresses only one side of this truth, that without the eye man could not perceive light. For the other important aspect of the truth is that without light the eye could never have developed; and in the same way without sound there would have been no ear. Looked at from a deeper standpoint Kantianism is very superficial, because it only gives half the truth. The light which weaves and floods throughout the cosmos—that is the cause of the organs of vision. During the Moon period, the main task of the Beings who took part in the development of our universe was the construction of our organs. First these organs have to be built up; then they are able to perceive. Our present objective consciousness is due to the fact that organs have first been formed for it. The sense organs, as purely physical organs, had already been formed on Saturn, with the eye somewhat like the photographer's camera obscura. Purely physical apparatuses like that can perceive nothing. They are constructed according to purely physical laws. In the Moon period the organs acquired an inner life. Thus on Saturn the eye was so formed that it was merely a physical apparatus; at the Moon stage, through the sunlight which fell upon it from without, it was transformed into an organ of perception, an organ of consciousness. The essence of this activity during the Moon evolution is that the organs were, so to say, drawn forth from the Beings. During the earth period light works essentially on the plants, maintains plant development. We see the outward result of this activity of light in our flora. During the Moon evolution light did not act in this way, it drew forth our organs; and what was perceived by man at that time was this work upon his own organs. He perceived it in the form of pictures which seemed, it is true, to fill cosmic space. The pictures seemed to be spread out in space. In reality they merely represented the work of elementary existence upon the human organs. During the Moon period what man perceived was his own inner becoming, he perceived this work upon himself, saw the way he was fashioning himself, the way he was evolving his perceiving eye out of his own being. Thus the outer world was an inner world, because the entire outer world was working upon his inner being. And he made no distinction between outer and inner. He did not perceive the sun as external to himself. He did not separate the sun from himself, but within himself he felt his eyes coming into existence. And this active coming into existence of his eyes expanded for him into a pictorial perception which filled space. That was how he perceived the sun, but it was an inner process. The characteristic thing about the Moon-consciousness was that one was surrounded by a world of pictures, but these pictures represented an inner development, an inner formation of soul. Thus the Moon-man was enveloped in the astral and felt his own development as an external world. Today it would be an illness to perceive this inner development as an outer world, not to distinguish these pictures from the world outside, to perceive the outside world merely as a reflection of one's own growth. During the Moon evolution it was normal. For instance, man perceived in his own being the work of those Beings who later became the Elohim. He perceived the activity of the Elohim somewhat as today you might perceive your blood flowing into you! It was inside him, but it was reflected in pictures from without.

But on the Moon such a consciousness was the only one possible. For what happens upon our earth has to take place in harmony with the whole cosmos. A consciousness such as man has upon the earth, with this distinction between outer and inner, with this perception that real objects are there outside us, and that our inwardness exists alongside them, called for the whole evolutionary transition from the Moon to the earth, called for an entirely different kind of cleavage in our cosmic system. During the Moon evolution, there was no separation between Moon and earth, as there is today. We have to think of the Moon as the present earth would be if the moon were still united with it. So all the other planets, including the sun, were quite differently formed; and under the conditions which then obtained only a picture-consciousness was possible. It was only after our whole cosmos had assumed the form it now has, encompassing the earth, that our present objective consciousness could develop.

Such a consciousness as man has on earth today was withheld from him until the time of earth evolution. Not only was man without it, but none of the other Beings whom we speak of as belonging to this or that hierarchy had it. It would be superficial to think, because the angels underwent their human stage on the Moon, that they must therefore have had on the Moon such a consciousness as man has today on the earth. It was not so, and this is what distinguishes them from men—that they experienced their humanity in another consciousness. An exact repetition of the past never takes place. Each evolutionary impulse happens once only, and happens for its own sake and not for the sake of repeating something. Thus to produce what we know today as human, earthly consciousness all the processes which have actually brought this earth about were needed—for that purpose man had to be there as man. It was impossible for such a form of consciousness to develop at an earlier stage of evolution. To us an object is something outside us; earlier, all the Beings of whom we can speak had a consciousness which made no distinction between outer and inner, so that it would have been nonsense for any of them to say: “Something is standing before me.” Even the Elohim could not say that; they had no such experience. They could only say: “We live and weave in the cosmos; we create, and in creating are aware of this our creation; objects do not stand before us, do not appear to be before us.” To say “objects appear before us” conveys a situation in which we are confronted by something real formed in an external space from which we ourselves are separated. This did not come about even for the Elohim until the time of earth evolution. During the Moon evolution, when these Elohim felt themselves weaving and working in the light which streamed from the Sun upon the Moon, they might have said to themselves: “We feel ourselves to be within this light, we feel how with this light we sink into the beings who live as men on the Moon; we speed through space with this light.” But they could never have said: “We see this light outside us.” There was no such thing on the Moon. That was a completely new earth experience.

When at a certain stage in the Genesis account the momentous words occur And God said, Let there be light, it meant that something new had happened, that the Elohim did not merely feel themselves to be flowing with the light, but that light streamed back to them from objects, that objects appeared to them from without. This is expressed by the writer of the Genesis account when to the words And God said, Let there be light he adds: And God saw the light. In this ancient document there is nothing superfluous, nothing meaningless. If only men could learn, among much else that this document could teach them, to ascribe to it nothing that is not pregnant with meaning, to take nothing in it as an empty phrase! The writer of the Genesis account wrote nothing unnecessary, nothing by way of commonplace embellishment to enhance the beauty of the creation of light; he does not make the Elohim say anything like this: “We see the light and are very pleased with ourselves that we have made it so well.” What the brief sentence emphasises, what it signifies, is simply that something new has come about.

Moreover it does not say merely And God saw the light, but that He saw that it was beautiful—or good.² Note that in the Hebrew tongue the distinction between “beautiful” and “good” was not made as it is today. The Hebrew language has the same word for good and for beautiful. What is the significance of this? In ancient Sanskrit, even in German, there is still an echo of what it meant. The word “beautiful” covers all words in all languages which mean that an inner spiritual element reveals itself in an external form. To be beautiful means that something inward is externally manifest. Today when we use the word “beauty” we are thinking most truly when we hold that an inner spiritual reality in the beautiful object is represented on its surface in physical form. We say that something is beautiful if the spiritual, so to say, shines through what is externally sense-perceptible. When does a marble sculpture become a thing of beauty? When its form arouses the illusion that spirit indwells it. Beauty is the manifestation of the spiritual through the external. Thus when in Genesis we come to the words God saw the light, we can say that they convey the specific quality of earth evolution; also that what could formerly only be experienced subjectively now manifests itself from without; that the spirit presents itself in its external manifestation. Thus we can paraphrase the biblical words by saying “and the Elohim experienced the consciousness that something in which they themselves formerly existed confronted them as an external phenomenon; and they realised that the spirit was behind this appearance and came to expression in the external.” This is the significance of the word “beautiful” or “good.” Wordy explanations will not help us to understand the Genesis account, but only diligent search for the secrets which are really hidden behind the words. Then research will yield rich fruits; whereas all too many interpretations are nothing but tiresome pedantry.

Let us go a step further. We have seen that the characteristic features of the Moon evolution were only able to come about through the separation of the Sun from the Moon. Then we have seen that during the earth evolution it again became necessary for the sun to separate off from the earth; we have seen that a duality is necessary for a life of full consciousness. The earth element had to withdraw. But in such a withdrawal something else is also involved; the elementary conditions of the moon nature and of the sun nature change, become different. If you make a study of our present sun, even from a purely physical aspect you are obliged to say to yourselves: “The conditions which we have on earth and which we call solid and liquid are not to be found in the physical sun.” The most you can say is that the sun still condenses to the gaseous state. This is recognised by modern physics. Such a separation of elementary conditions comes about through the severing of what was previously a unity.

We have seen that the earth develops in such a way that a gradual densification downward takes place from warmth to solid, to earth, and that what is above as elementary existence light-ether, sound-ether, life-ether—seems to press inwards from without. But this description does not fit the part which goes out as the sun. It would be better therefore to say that there are seven states of elementary existence. The first, the most rarefied state, which constitutes and brings about life; then what we call number, or sound-ether; then light-ether; then warmth-ether; then we have air, or the gaseous element, the watery element and fmally the earthy or solid. It is in the earth that we have to look mainly for the elements up as far as warmth. Warmth permeates the earth, whereas the earth only shares in light in so far as the Beings in its environment—or if you like the bodies in its environment—take part in the life of the earth. Light streams upon the earth from the sun. If we wish to locate the three higher elementary states—light-ether, the ether of spiritual sound, and life-ether—we must place them in the sphere of the sun. In the earth we have to look for the solid, fluid and gaseous elements; warmth is shared by both earth and sun.

The Sun separated off for the first time during the Moon evolution. It was then that the light was for the first time active from without, but not then as light. I have just pointed out that the sentence in Genesis which reads And God saw the light ... could not have been spoken in respect of the Moon evolution. There one would have had to say that the Elohim speeded through space with the light, were in the light, but saw it not. Just as today one swims in water and moves forward in it without actually seeing it, so one did not see the light, but light was a bearer of the work in cosmic space. It was with the coming of earth evolution that light began to appear, to be reflected by objects.

It was natural that this, which held good for light on the Moon, should itself reach a higher stage of development during earth evolution. It is therefore to be expected that what applied to light on the Moon should during earth evolution apply to the sound-ether. This would involve that what we call spiritual sound was not perceived by the Elohim as reverberating back to them in the manner of the reflected light. Thus, if Genesis wished to convey that evolution was advancing from the activity of the light-ether to that of sound-ether, it would have to say something like this: “And the Elohim saw the light in the developing earth, and saw that it was beautiful.” But it could not go on in the same way to say: “And the Elohim during this phase perceived the sound-ether”; it would have to say “they lived and wove in it.” Nor could it be said of the second “day” of creation that the Elohim perceived the stir which separated the elements above from those below; it could not be said of this work of the Elohim that they perceived. The words “perceive” and “beautiful” would have had to be omitted. Then the description would correspond with what can be observed through Spiritual Science.

Thus the seer who wrote the Genesis account had, when describing the second “day,” to leave out the words: And God saw ...

Now look at Genesis. On the first “day” it reads: And God saw the light, that it was good. On the second day of creation, after the end of the first day, it says: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters ... and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. The sentence And God saw ..., which we find on the first day, is left out on the second day. Genesis gives the facts as we should expect them to be given from what we have been able to observe by spiritual scientific method.

Here again is a knotty point of which the commentators of the nineteenth century have not known what to make. There have been commentators who said: “What does it matter if the second time the words are omitted? The writer just forgot them.” Men should learn that Genesis not only records nothing irrelevant, but also omits nothing relevant. The writer has forgotten nothing There is a profound reason why on the second day of creation these words are not to be found. Here we have another example—I could quote many—of what fills us with immense reverence for such ancient records.

We could learn much from these ancient writers, who really needed to take no oath, but followed of their own accord the rule of telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth which they knew. They felt through and through that every word that stands there must be sacred to us, and equally that nothing essential must be omitted.

We have now gained an insight into the composition of what are called the first and second “days” of creation. Anyone who discovers through spiritual investigation what lies behind things might well say to himself, as he turns to his Bible, “It would be marvellous, it would be astounding, if these intimate details which can be discovered by scrupulous spiritual investigation should be corroborated by the words of the ancient seer who took part in the making of Genesis.” And when he finds that the astounding thing is true, a wonderful feeling comes over him—a feeling such as should indeed penetrate human souls if they are once more to appreciate the holiness of this ancient document.

• 1. Many of these articles were subsequently published in English in book form as Atlantis and Lemuria (Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1923).
• 2. The English Authorised Version uses the word “good.”

In our efforts to understand existence it is our practice to trace the course of some aspect of its development up to the present time, and we have had many opportunities of becoming familiar with the idea that everything we perceive around us is in course of evolution. We must get used to applying the idea of evolution more widely, we must apply it in spheres not usually associated with it today—for instance, we must apply it to the life of the soul. We probably do recognise it as it manifests itself outwardly in the life of the individual between birth and death. But so far as humanity as a whole is concerned, people immediately think of evolution as an ascent from the condition of the lower animals and draw the conclusion—even from the standpoint of modern knowledge a somewhat fanciful one—that the human has evolved out of the animal—as if the higher could, without more ado, evolve out of the lower! It is of course not my task in this cycle to show in detail, as I have often done, that our present consciousness has undergone a far-reaching evolution, that the kind of consciousness, the kind of soul-life we have today, was preceded by another form of consciousness. We have often described this earlier form as a kind of lower clairvoyant consciousness. Our modern consciousness furnishes us with mental images of outer objects by means of external perception. But that other earlier consciousness can best be studied if we look back to the Moon evolution.

The most outstanding difference between the evolution of the Moon and that of our present earth is that the old form of clairvoyance, a kind of picture-consciousness, has been superseded by the present-day object-consciousness. I have for many years been calling attention to this, and years ago I was able to give information out of the Akasha Chronicle on the subject of evolution. It appeared in the early essays of the magazine Lucifer-Gnosis.¹ There I pointed out that the old, dreamlike picture-consciousness which characterised our own nature in former times has developed into our earth-consciousness, into what today gives us consciousness of external things, consciousness of things outside us in space as contrasted with what we ourselves are in our inner being. This ability to distinguish between external objects and our own inner life is what characterises our present state of consciousness. When we have an object in front of us—let us say a rose—we say: “That rose is there in space! It is separated from us; we stand at a different spot from it.” We perceive the rose, and make a mental image of it. The mental image is within us, the rose is outside. The distinction between outer and inner is the mark of our present-day consciousness. Consciousness on the Moon was not like that. Beings with the Moon-consciousness made no such distinction. Suppose that when you looked at the rose you were not conscious that the rose was outside, and that you were making a mental image of it, but that you felt “The real being of this rose which hovers there in space is not confined to the space which it occupies, but its being extends outward into space, and is actually in me.” Indeed you could go further. Suppose that when you looked at the sun you did not feel that the sun was above you and that you were below, but felt that while you were forming a mental image of the sun it was within you; suppose your consciousness was taking hold of it in amore or less spiritual way! Then there would be no distinction between outer and inner. If you can make that clear to yourselves, you will have grasped the outstanding characteristic of consciousness as it was throughout the Moon evolution.

Another quality of this consciousness was that it was pictorial; things did not appear directly as objects, but as images, just as today dreams often unfold as imagery. For example, a dream can take its course in such a way that a fire external to ourselves appears as a being radiating light. It was somewhat in this way that consciousness on the Moon perceived things. It was a pictorial consciousness, at the same time permeated with the quality of inwardness.

There was yet another essential in which the consciousness of that time differed from that of our present time. It did not work in such a way that outer objects would have been there at all as they are for our present earth-consciousness. For the consciousness of the Moon period what we today call our environment, what we perceive in the vegetable, the mineral, the human kingdoms as sense-objects, was not there. What was there—on a lower, dreamlike level—was something similar to what there is in the soul today when the power of seership awakens, when conscious clairvoyance awakens. The first awakening of clairvoyant consciousness is of such a nature that to begin with it does not extend to external Beings. This is a source of countless deceptions to those who are training themselves esoterically to develop clairvoyance.

Such a training progresses by stages. There is a first stage which unfolds in various ways. In it the student sees many things around him. But he would make a great mistake if he were straightway to think that what he sees around him, so to say in spiritual space, is also spiritual reality. Johannes Thomasius in my Mystery Play goes through this stage of astral clairvoyance. Let me remind you of the scenes which rise before his soul as he sits in meditation down-stage, and feels in his soul the dawn of the spiritual world. Pictures arise in his soul, and the first one is that the Spirit of the Elements brings before him persons whom he has previously known in life. In the Play, Johannes Thomasius has come to know Professor Capesius and Doctor Strader. He knew them on the physical plane, and there formed certain impressions of them. Then, when after his great sorrow his clairvoyant capacity breaks through, he sees them again. He sees them in remarkable forms. He sees Capesius as a young man, as he was at the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, and not as he is at the moment when he, Johannes Thomasius, sits meditating; and he sees Doctor Strader as he will be in his present incarnation when he is old. This and many other pictures pass through the soul ofJohannes Thomasius. These pictures which are really living in the soul through meditation can only be represented in the play as happening on the stage. It would be quite wrong for Johannes Thomasius to regard this as deception. The only right attitude towards all this would be to say to himself that he cannot yet know how far this is reality or deception. He does not know whether what the pictures show is an external spiritual reality or not; that is, he does not know whether it is something inscribed in the Akashic record or whether he has expanded his own self to a world. It could be either, and he must recognise that fact. It is only from the moment when the Devachan consciousness begins, when in Devachan he perceives the spiritual reality of a being whom he knows on the physical plane—Maria—that he is able to look back again and to discriminate between reality and mere picture-consciousness. Thus you can see that man has to pass through a stage in the course of his esoteric development in which he is surrounded by pictures, but is unable to distinguish between what is a manifestation of spiritual reality and what is merely picture. The scenes of the Mystery Play of course were intended to express spiritual realities. The appearance of Professor Capesius is a real picture of the young Capesius, as it is inscribed in the Akashic record, and the appearance of Doctor Strader is the real Strader as he will be in his old age. They are intended to be real in the play, only Johannes Thomasius does not know it.

The stage of consciousness I have just described was experienced on the Moon, only at a lower, more dreamlike level, so that no faculty of discrimination was possible. The ability to discriminate only began later. You must try to get a thorough grasp of what I am telling you. Let us bear in mind that the clairvoyant lives in a kind of picture-consciousness. But during the Moon period the pictures which arose were in the main quite different from the objects of our earthly consciousness; and the same thing applies today in the early stages of clairvoyance. To begin with, the clairvoyant does not see spiritual things at all; he sees pictures, and the question is what do these pictures signify? In the first stages of clairvoyance they do not express real spiritual Beings, but a kind of organic consciousness. The experience is a pictorial representation, a projection into space, of what is actually taking place in himself. To take an actual example, when the clairvoyant begins to develop these forces in himself, he can have the experience of seeing two luminous globes far outside in space. He sees pictures of two globes in luminous colour. If he were then to think to himself “there outside me are two Beings,” the probability is that he would be quite wrong; at any rate that would be the case to begin with. What is happening is that his clairvoyance is projecting outwards into space forces which are at work in himself, and he sees them as two globes. And these two globes could represent what is at work in his astral body to produce within him the power of sight in his two eyes. This power of sight can be projected outwards in the form of two globes. Thus what is actually to be seen is an inner faculty showing itself as an external phenomenon in astral space. It would be a very great mistake for such an experience to be taken to herald the external presence of spiritual Beings.

It would be a still greater error if in these early stages by some means or other it were to happen that voices were heard, and these voices taken as inspirations from outside. That is the greatest error into which one can fall. Such an experience can hardly be more than an echo of an inner process; and while what appears in picture form, in colour, usually represents fairly pure inner processes, voices as a rule manifest lower and rather worthless elements of soul-life. It is best for anyone who begins to hear voices to cultivate the greatest distrust of them. The early stages of these imaginal representations should always be received with the greatest caution. It is a kind of organic consciousness, a projection outwards into space of one's own inner being. Such an organic consciousness was quite normal during the Moon evolution. The human being at that stage scarcely perceived anything except what was happening to himself.

I have often called attention to an important saying of Goethe's: “The eye has been formed by the light for the light.” This saying should be taken quite seriously. All man's organs have been formed by his environment, out of his environment. It is a superficial philosophy which stresses only one side of this truth, that without the eye man could not perceive light. For the other important aspect of the truth is that without light the eye could never have developed; and in the same way without sound there would have been no ear. Looked at from a deeper standpoint Kantianism is very superficial, because it only gives half the truth. The light which weaves and floods throughout the cosmos—that is the cause of the organs of vision. During the Moon period, the main task of the Beings who took part in the development of our universe was the construction of our organs. First these organs have to be built up; then they are able to perceive. Our present objective consciousness is due to the fact that organs have first been formed for it. The sense organs, as purely physical organs, had already been formed on Saturn, with the eye somewhat like the photographer's camera obscura. Purely physical apparatuses like that can perceive nothing. They are constructed according to purely physical laws. In the Moon period the organs acquired an inner life. Thus on Saturn the eye was so formed that it was merely a physical apparatus; at the Moon stage, through the sunlight which fell upon it from without, it was transformed into an organ of perception, an organ of consciousness. The essence of this activity during the Moon evolution is that the organs were, so to say, drawn forth from the Beings. During the earth period light works essentially on the plants, maintains plant development. We see the outward result of this activity of light in our flora. During the Moon evolution light did not act in this way, it drew forth our organs; and what was perceived by man at that time was this work upon his own organs. He perceived it in the form of pictures which seemed, it is true, to fill cosmic space. The pictures seemed to be spread out in space. In reality they merely represented the work of elementary existence upon the human organs. During the Moon period what man perceived was his own inner becoming, he perceived this work upon himself, saw the way he was fashioning himself, the way he was evolving his perceiving eye out of his own being. Thus the outer world was an inner world, because the entire outer world was working upon his inner being. And he made no distinction between outer and inner. He did not perceive the sun as external to himself. He did not separate the sun from himself, but within himself he felt his eyes coming into existence. And this active coming into existence of his eyes expanded for him into a pictorial perception which filled space. That was how he perceived the sun, but it was an inner process. The characteristic thing about the Moon-consciousness was that one was surrounded by a world of pictures, but these pictures represented an inner development, an inner formation of soul. Thus the Moon-man was enveloped in the astral and felt his own development as an external world. Today it would be an illness to perceive this inner development as an outer world, not to distinguish these pictures from the world outside, to perceive the outside world merely as a reflection of one's own growth. During the Moon evolution it was normal. For instance, man perceived in his own being the work of those Beings who later became the Elohim. He perceived the activity of the Elohim somewhat as today you might perceive your blood flowing into you! It was inside him, but it was reflected in pictures from without.

But on the Moon such a consciousness was the only one possible. For what happens upon our earth has to take place in harmony with the whole cosmos. A consciousness such as man has upon the earth, with this distinction between outer and inner, with this perception that real objects are there outside us, and that our inwardness exists alongside them, called for the whole evolutionary transition from the Moon to the earth, called for an entirely different kind of cleavage in our cosmic system. During the Moon evolution, there was no separation between Moon and earth, as there is today. We have to think of the Moon as the present earth would be if the moon were still united with it. So all the other planets, including the sun, were quite differently formed; and under the conditions which then obtained only a picture-consciousness was possible. It was only after our whole cosmos had assumed the form it now has, encompassing the earth, that our present objective consciousness could develop.

Such a consciousness as man has on earth today was withheld from him until the time of earth evolution. Not only was man without it, but none of the other Beings whom we speak of as belonging to this or that hierarchy had it. It would be superficial to think, because the angels underwent their human stage on the Moon, that they must therefore have had on the Moon such a consciousness as man has today on the earth. It was not so, and this is what distinguishes them from men—that they experienced their humanity in another consciousness. An exact repetition of the past never takes place. Each evolutionary impulse happens once only, and happens for its own sake and not for the sake of repeating something. Thus to produce what we know today as human, earthly consciousness all the processes which have actually brought this earth about were needed—for that purpose man had to be there as man. It was impossible for such a form of consciousness to develop at an earlier stage of evolution. To us an object is something outside us; earlier, all the Beings of whom we can speak had a consciousness which made no distinction between outer and inner, so that it would have been nonsense for any of them to say: “Something is standing before me.” Even the Elohim could not say that; they had no such experience. They could only say: “We live and weave in the cosmos; we create, and in creating are aware of this our creation; objects do not stand before us, do not appear to be before us.” To say “objects appear before us” conveys a situation in which we are confronted by something real formed in an external space from which we ourselves are separated. This did not come about even for the Elohim until the time of earth evolution. During the Moon evolution, when these Elohim felt themselves weaving and working in the light which streamed from the Sun upon the Moon, they might have said to themselves: “We feel ourselves to be within this light, we feel how with this light we sink into the beings who live as men on the Moon; we speed through space with this light.” But they could never have said: “We see this light outside us.” There was no such thing on the Moon. That was a completely new earth experience.

When at a certain stage in the Genesis account the momentous words occur And God said, Let there be light, it meant that something new had happened, that the Elohim did not merely feel themselves to be flowing with the light, but that light streamed back to them from objects, that objects appeared to them from without. This is expressed by the writer of the Genesis account when to the words And God said, Let there be light he adds: And God saw the light. In this ancient document there is nothing superfluous, nothing meaningless. If only men could learn, among much else that this document could teach them, to ascribe to it nothing that is not pregnant with meaning, to take nothing in it as an empty phrase! The writer of the Genesis account wrote nothing unnecessary, nothing by way of commonplace embellishment to enhance the beauty of the creation of light; he does not make the Elohim say anything like this: “We see the light and are very pleased with ourselves that we have made it so well.” What the brief sentence emphasises, what it signifies, is simply that something new has come about.

Moreover it does not say merely And God saw the light, but that He saw that it was beautiful—or good. [ The English Authorised Version uses the word “good.”] Note that in the Hebrew tongue the distinction between “beautiful” and “good” was not made as it is today. The Hebrew language has the same word for good and for beautiful. What is the significance of this? In ancient Sanskrit, even in German, there is still an echo of what it meant. The word “beautiful” covers all words in all languages which mean that an inner spiritual element reveals itself in an external form. To be beautiful means that something inward is externally manifest. Today when we use the word “beauty” we are thinking most truly when we hold that an inner spiritual reality in the beautiful object is represented on its surface in physical form. We say that something is beautiful if the spiritual, so to say, shines through what is externally sense-perceptible. When does a marble sculpture become a thing of beauty? When its form arouses the illusion that spirit indwells it. Beauty is the manifestation of the spiritual through the external. Thus when in Genesis we come to the words God saw the light, we can say that they convey the specific quality of earth evolution; also that what could formerly only be experienced subjectively now manifests itself from without; that the spirit presents itself in its external manifestation. Thus we can paraphrase the biblical words by saying “and the Elohim experienced the consciousness that something in which they themselves formerly existed confronted them as an external phenomenon; and they realised that the spirit was behind this appearance and came to expression in the external.” This is the significance of the word “beautiful” or “good.” Wordy explanations will not help us to understand the Genesis account, but only diligent search for the secrets which are really hidden behind the words. Then research will yield rich fruits; whereas all too many interpretations are nothing but tiresome pedantry.

Let us go a step further. We have seen that the characteristic features of the Moon evolution were only able to come about through the separation of the Sun from the Moon. Then we have seen that during the earth evolution it again became necessary for the sun to separate off from the earth; we have seen that a duality is necessary for a life of full consciousness. The earth element had to withdraw. But in such a withdrawal something else is also involved; the elementary conditions of the moon nature and of the sun nature change, become different. If you make a study of our present sun, even from a purely physical aspect you are obliged to say to yourselves: “The conditions which we have on earth and which we call solid and liquid are not to be found in the physical sun.” The most you can say is that the sun still condenses to the gaseous state. This is recognised by modern physics. Such a separation of elementary conditions comes about through the severing of what was previously a unity.

We have seen that the earth develops in such a way that a gradual densification downward takes place from warmth to solid, to earth, and that what is above as elementary existence light-ether, sound-ether, life-ether—seems to press inwards from without. But this description does not fit the part which goes out as the sun. It would be better therefore to say that there are seven states of elementary existence. The first, the most rarefied state, which constitutes and brings about life; then what we call number, or sound-ether; then light-ether; then warmth-ether; then we have air, or the gaseous element, the watery element and fmally the earthy or solid. It is in the earth that we have to look mainly for the elements up as far as warmth. Warmth permeates the earth, whereas the earth only shares in light in so far as the Beings in its environment—or if you like the bodies in its environment—take part in the life of the earth. Light streams upon the earth from the sun. If we wish to locate the three higher elementary states—light-ether, the ether of spiritual sound, and life-ether—we must place them in the sphere of the sun. In the earth we have to look for the solid, fluid and gaseous elements; warmth is shared by both earth and sun.

The Sun separated off for the first time during the Moon evolution. It was then that the light was for the first time active from without, but not then as light. I have just pointed out that the sentence in Genesis which reads And God saw the light ... could not have been spoken in respect of the Moon evolution. There one would have had to say that the Elohim speeded through space with the light, were in the light, but saw it not. Just as today one swims in water and moves forward in it without actually seeing it, so one did not see the light, but light was a bearer of the work in cosmic space. It was with the coming of earth evolution that light began to appear, to be reflected by objects.

It was natural that this, which held good for light on the Moon, should itself reach a higher stage of development during earth evolution. It is therefore to be expected that what applied to light on the Moon should during earth evolution apply to the sound-ether. This would involve that what we call spiritual sound was not perceived by the Elohim as reverberating back to them in the manner of the reflected light. Thus, if Genesis wished to convey that evolution was advancing from the activity of the light-ether to that of sound-ether, it would have to say something like this: “And the Elohim saw the light in the developing earth, and saw that it was beautiful.” But it could not go on in the same way to say: “And the Elohim during this phase perceived the sound-ether”; it would have to say “they lived and wove in it.” Nor could it be said of the second “day” of creation that the Elohim perceived the stir which separated the elements above from those below; it could not be said of this work of the Elohim that they perceived. The words “perceive” and “beautiful” would have had to be omitted. Then the description would correspond with what can be observed through Spiritual Science.

Thus the seer who wrote the Genesis account had, when describing the second “day,” to leave out the words: And God saw ...

Now look at Genesis. On the first “day” it reads: And God saw the light, that it was good. On the second day of creation, after the end of the first day, it says: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters ... and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. The sentence And God saw ..., which we find on the first day, is left out on the second day. Genesis gives the facts as we should expect them to be given from what we have been able to observe by spiritual scientific method.

Here again is a knotty point of which the commentators of the nineteenth century have not known what to make. There have been commentators who said: “What does it matter if the second time the words are omitted? The writer just forgot them.” Men should learn that Genesis not only records nothing irrelevant, but also omits nothing relevant. The writer has forgotten nothing There is a profound reason why on the second day of creation these words are not to be found. Here we have another example—I could quote many—of what fills us with immense reverence for such ancient records.

We could learn much from these ancient writers, who really needed to take no oath, but followed of their own accord the rule of telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth which they knew. They felt through and through that every word that stands there must be sacred to us, and equally that nothing essential must be omitted.

We have now gained an insight into the composition of what are called the first and second “days” of creation. Anyone who discovers through spiritual investigation what lies behind things might well say to himself, as he turns to his Bible, “It would be marvellous, it would be astounding, if these intimate details which can be discovered by scrupulous spiritual investigation should be corroborated by the words of the ancient seer who took part in the making of Genesis.” And when he finds that the astounding thing is true, a wonderful feeling comes over him—a feeling such as should indeed penetrate human souls if they are once more to appreciate the holiness of this ancient document.

• 1. Many of these articles were subsequently published in English in book form as Atlantis and Lemuria (Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1923).

What we have now been studying for some time in our Group-lectures is meant as a completion or expansion of the subjects that have occupied us during the winter. It may well be that a remark here or there seemed somewhat aphoristic, and we want by means of these studies to enlarge or round off thoughts and concepts that have been aroused in us.

In the last lecture we were particularly occupied with the presence of all sorts of spiritual beings which are to be found, so to speak, between the sense-perceptible kingdoms of nature that surround us. We saw especially how in the place where the beings of different nature-kingdoms come together, where the plant is pressed close to the stone at a spring, where ordinary stone impinges on a metal as constantly occurs under the earth, where there is a communion as between bee and blossom, how everywhere in such spots forces are developed which draw various beings, whom we have called elemental beings, into earthly existence. Moreover, in connection with these elemental beings we have been occupied with the fact of a certain cutting off, a detaching of beings from their whole connection. We have seen that the elemental beings called by spiritual science “Salamanders” have in part their origin from detached parts of animal group souls. These have, as it were, ventured too far forward into our physical world and have not been able to find their way back and unite again with the group soul, after the death and dissolution of the animal. We know that in the regular course of our life, the beings of our earth, the beings of the animal, plant, mineral kingdoms, have their “ego soul”—if one may so call it, have indeed such ego souls as man, differing only in the fact that the ego souls of other beings are in other worlds. We know that man is that being in our cycle of evolution who has an individual ego here on the physical plane—at least during his waking life. We know further that the beings which we call animals are so conditioned that—speaking loosely—similarly-formed animals have a group soul or group ego which is in the so-called astral world. Further, the beings which we call plants have a dreamless sleeping consciousness for the physical world here but they have group egos which dwell in the lower parts of the devachanic world; and, finally, the stones, the minerals, have their group egos in the higher parts of Devachan. One who moves clairvoyantly in the astral and devachanic worlds has intercourse there with the group souls of the animals, plants and minerals in the same way as here in the physical world he has intercourse during the day with other human souls or egos.

Now we must be clear that in many ways man is a very complicated being—we have often spoken of this complexity in different lectures. But he will appear more and more complicated the further we go into the connections with great cosmic facts. In order to realize that man is not quite the simple being which he may perhaps appear to a naive observation we need only remember that by night, from going to sleep to waking up, the man of the present evolutionary cycle is quite a different being from what he is by day. His physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, the ego with the astral body is lifted out of them. Let us consider both conditions, and in the first place the physical and etheric bodies. They lie there, and if we disregard the transitional state of dream, they have what we may call a sleep consciousness devoid of content, perceptions, or dreams. But the ego and the astral body outside have, in this present cycle of evolution, just the same dreamless sleep consciousness. The sleeping man, whether in the members remaining here in the physical world, or in those which are in the astral world, has the same consciousness as the plant covering of the earth. We must occupy ourselves a little with these two separated parts of the sleeping human being.

From other lectures we know that the man of the present time has arisen slowly and gradually. We know that he received the first rudiments of a physical body in the embodiment of our Earth lying in a primeval past which we call the Saturn evolution. We know that then in a second embodiment of our Earth, the Sun evolution, he received the etheric or life body, that in the third embodiment, the Moon evolution, he also received the astral body, and that in the present Earth embodiment of our planet he acquired what we call the ego. Thus the human being has evolved quite slowly and gradually. This physical body which man bears today is actually his oldest part, the part that has gone through most metamorphoses. It has undergone four changes. The first rudiment, received by man on ancient Saturn, has gone through three modifications, on the Sun, on the Moon, and finally on the Earth, and is expressed in man's present sense-organs. They were quite different organs on ancient Saturn, but their first rudiments were there while no other part of the physical body as yet existed. We can look on ancient Saturn as a single being, entirely consisting of sense-organs. On the Sun the etheric body was added, the physical body went through a change, and the organs arose which we call today the glands, though at first they existed merely in their rudiments. Then on the Moon when the physical body had undergone a third transformation through the impress of the astral body, were added those organs which we know as the nerve organs. And finally on the Earth was added the present blood-system, the expression of the ego, as the nervous system is the expression of the astral body, the glandular system of the etheric body, and the senses system the physical expression of the physical body itself. We have seen in former lectures that the blood system appeared for the first time in our Earth evolution and we ask: Why does blood flow in the present form in the blood channels? What does this blood express? Blood is the expression of the ego and with this we will consider a possible misunderstanding, namely, that man actually misunderstands the present physical human body.

The human body as it is today is only one form of many. On the Moon, on the Sun, on Saturn, it was there but always different. On the Moon, for instance, there was as yet no mineral kingdom, on the Sun there was no plant world in our sense, and on Saturn no animal kingdom—there was solely the human being in his first physical rudiments. Now when we reflect on this we must be clear that the present human body is not only physical body, but physical-mineral body, and that to the laws of the physical world—hence it is the “physical body”—it has assimilated the laws and substances of the mineral kingdom, which permeate it today. On the Moon the physical human body had not yet assimilated those laws: if one had burnt it there would have been no ash, for there were no minerals in the present earthly sense. Let us remember that to be physical and to be mineral are two quite different things. The human body is physical because it is governed by the same laws as the stone; it is at the same time mineral because it has been impregnated with mineral substances. The first germ of the physical body was present on Saturn, but there were no solid bodies, no water, no gases. On Saturn there was nothing at all but a condition of warmth. The modern physicist knows of no such condition because he thinks that warmth can only appear in connection with gases, water, or solid objects. But that is an error. The physical body which today has assimilated the mineral kingdom was on ancient Saturn a nexus of physical laws. We are physical laws working in lines, in forms, what you learn to know as laws in physics. Externally the physical human being was manifested on Saturn purely as a being which lived in warmth. We must thus clearly distinguish between the mineral element and the actual physical principle of man's body. It is physical law which governs the physical body. It belongs, for example, to the physical principle that our ear has such a form, that it receives sound in quite a definite way; to the mineral nature of the ear belong the sub-stances which are impregnated into this scaffolding of physical laws.

Now that we have become clear about this and realize particularly how the sense-organs, glands, nerves and blood are the expressions of our fourfold nature, let us turn again to the observation of the sleeping human being. When man is asleep the physical and etheric bodies lie on the bed, the astral body and the ego are outside. But now let us remember that the astral body is the principle of the nervous system and the ego that of the blood system. Thus during the night the astral body has deserted that part of the physical body of which, so to say, it is the cause—namely, the nervous system. For only when the astral body membered itself into man on the Moon could the nervous system arise. Thus the astral body callously leaves what belongs to it, what it is actually due to maintain, and in the same way the ego deserts that which it has called into life. The principles of the blood and of the astral body are outside and the sleeping physical and etheric bodies are absolutely alone. But now nothing of a material physical nature can subsist in the form which has been called forth by a spiritual principle when this spiritual principle is no longer there. That is quite out of the question. Never can a nervous system live unless astral beings are active in it, and never can a blood system live unless ego-beings are active in it. Thus you all meanly desert in the night your nervous and blood systems and relinquish them to other beings of an astral nature. Beings which are of the same nature as your ego now descend into your organism. Every night the human organism is occupied by beings fitted to maintain it. The physical body and the etheric body which lie on the bed are at the same time interpenetrated by these astral and ego beings; they are actually within the physical body. We might call them intruders, but that is in no sense correct. We ought in many ways to call them guardian spirits, for they are the sustainers of what man callously deserts in the night.

Now it is not so bad for man to leave his bodies every night. I have already said that the astral body and the ego are perpetually active in the night. They rid the physical body of the wear and tear which the day has given, which in a broad sense we call fatigue. Man is refreshed and renewed in the morning because during the night his astral body and ego have removed the fatigue which were given him by the impressions of daily life. This all-night activity of the astral body in getting rid of the fatigue substances is a definite fact to clairvoyant perception. The ego and astral body work from outside on the physical and etheric bodies. But in the present cycle of his evolution man is not yet advanced enough to be able to carry out such an activity quite independently. He can only do so under the guidance of other, higher beings. So the human being is taken every night into the bosom of higher beings, as it were, and they endow him with the power of working in the right way on his physical and etheric bodies. These at the same time are the beings—that is why we may not call them intruders—who care for man's blood and nerve systems in the right way in the night.

As long as no abnormalities arise the co-operation of spiritual beings with man is justified. But such irregularities can very well enter and here we come to a chapter of spiritual science which is extraordinarily important for the practical life of the human soul. One would like it to be known in the widest circles and not only theoretically but as giving the foundation for certain activities of the human soul life. It is not generally imagined that the facts of the soul life have a far-reaching effect. In certain connections I have also called your attention to the fact that it is only when viewed in the light of spiritual science that events in the life of the soul can find their true explanation. We all know the deep significance of the statement: “Regarded from the spiritual-scientific aspect a lie is a kind of murder.” I have explained that a sort of explosion really takes place in the astral world when man utters a lie—even, in a certain way, if he only thinks it. Something takes place in the spiritual world when man lies, which has a far more devastating effect for that world than any misfortune in the physical world. But things which one relates at a certain stage of spiritual-scientific observation, characterizing them as far as is possible then, gain more and more clearness and confirmation when one advances in the knowledge of spiritual science.

Today we shall learn of another effect of lying, slandering, although these words are not used here in the ordinary crude sense. When more subtly, out of convention, for in-stance, or out of all sorts of social or party considerations, people color the truth, we there have to do with a lie in the sense of spiritual science. In many respects man's whole life is saturated, if not with lies, yet with manifestations bearing an untruthful coloring. The enlightened materialist can at any rate see that an impression is made on his physical body if he receives a blow on the skull from an axe, or if his head is cut off by the railway, or he has an ulcer somewhere or is attacked by bacilli. He will then admit that effects are produced on the physical body. What is not usually considered at all is that man is a spiritual unity, that what happens in his higher members, the astral body and ego, has positive effect right down into his physical nature. It is not considered, for instance, that the uttering of lies and untruthfulness, untruth even in the affairs of life, has a definite effect on the human physical body. Spiritual vision can experience the following: If a person, let us say, has told a lie during the day, its effect remains in the physical body and is to be seen by clairvoyant perception while the person sleeps. Let us suppose this person is altogether un-truthful, piling up lies, then he will have many such effects in his physical body. All this hardens, as it were, in the night, and then something very important happens. These hardenings, these “enclosures,” in the physical body are not at all agreeable to the beings who from higher worlds must take possession of the physical body in the night and carry out the functions otherwise exercised by the astral body and ego. The result is that in the course of life and by reason of a body diseased—one might say—through lies, portions of those beings who descend into man at night become detached. Here we have again detachment processes and they lead to the fact that when a man dies his physical body does not merely follow the paths which it would normally take. Certain beings are left behind, beings which have been created in the physical body through the effect of lying and slander, and have been detached from the spiritual world. Such beings, detached in this circuitous way, now flit and whir about in our world and belong to the class that we call “phantoms.” They form a certain group of elemental beings related to our physical body and invisible to physical sight. They multiply through lies and calumnies, and these in actual fact populate our earthly globe with phantoms. In this way we learn to know a new class of elemental beings.

But now, not only lies and slanders but also other things belonging to the soul life produce an effect on the human body. It is lies and slanders which so act on the physical body that a detaching of phantoms is caused. Other things again work in a similar way on the etheric body. You must not be amazed at such phenomena of the soul: in spiritual life one must be able to take things with all calmness. Matters, for example, which have a harmful result on the etheric body are bad laws, or bad social measures prevailing in a community. All that leads to want of harmony, all that makes for bad adjustments between man and man, works in such a way through the feeling which it creates in the common life that the effect is continued into the etheric body. The accumulation in the etheric body caused through these experiences of the soul brings about again detachments from the beings working in from the spiritual worlds and these likewise are now to be found in our environment—they are “spectres” or “ghosts.” Thus these beings that exist in the etheric world, the life world, we see grow out of the life of men. Many a man can go about amongst us and for one who is able to see these things spiritually, his physical body is crammed, one might say, with phantoms, his etheric body crammed with spectres, and as a rule after a man's death or shortly afterwards all this rises up and disperses and populates the world.

So we see how subtly the spiritual events of our life are continued, how lies, calumnies, bad social arrangements, deposit their creations spiritually among us on our earth. But now you can also understand that if in normal daily life the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego belong together, and the physical body and etheric body have to let other beings press in and act upon them, then the astral body and the ego are not in a normal condition either. At any rate they are in a somewhat different position as regards the physical and etheric bodies. These two have in sleeping man the consciousness of the plants. But the plants on the other hand have their ego above in Devachan. Hence the physical and etheric bodies of sleeping man must likewise be sustained by beings which unfold their consciousness from Devachan. Now it is true that man's astral body and ego are in a higher world, but he himself also sleeps dreamlessly like the plants. That the plants have only a physical and an etheric body and that man in his sleeping condition possesses further an astral body and ego, makes no difference as regards the plant-nature. True, man has been drawn upwards into the spiritual, the astral world, but yet not high enough upwards with his ego, to justify the sleep-condition. The consequence is that beings must now enter his astral body too when the human being goes to sleep. And so it is: influences from the devachanic world press all the time into man's astral body. They need not in the least be abnormal influences, they may come from what we call man's higher ego. For we know that man is gradually rising to the devachanic world, in as much as he approaches ever nearer to a state of spiritualization, and what is being prepared there sends its influences into him today when he sleeps. But there are not merely these normal influences. This would simply and solely be the case if human beings were fully to understand what it is to value and esteem the freedom of another. Mankind at present is still very far removed from that. Think only how the modern man for the most part wants to over-rule the mind of another, how he cannot bear someone else to think and like differently, how he wants to work upon the other's soul. In all that works from soul to soul in our world, from the giving of unjustifiable advice to all those methods which men employ in order to overwhelm others, in every act that does not allow the free soul to confront the free soul, but employs, even in the slightest degree, forcible means of convincing and persuasion, in all this, forces are working from soul to soul which again so influence these souls that it is expressed in the night in the astral body. The astral body gets those “enclosures” and thereby beings are detached from other worlds and whir through our world again as elemental beings. They belong to the class of demons. Their existence is solely due to the fact that intolerance and oppression of thought have in various ways been used in our world. That is how these hosts of demons have arisen in our world.

Thus we have learnt again today to know of beings which are just as real as the things which we perceive through our physical senses, and which very definitely produce effects in human life. Humanity would have advanced quite differently if intolerance had not created the demons which pervade our world, influencing people continually. They are at the same time spirits of prejudice. One understands the intricacies of life when one learns about these entanglements between the spiritual world in the higher sense and our human world. All these beings, as we have said, are there, and they whiz and whir through the world in which we live.

Now let us remember something else which has also been said before. We have pointed out that in the man of the last third of the Atlantean age, before the Atlantean flood, the relation of etheric body to physical body was quite different from what it had been earlier. Today the physical part of the head and the etheric part practically coincide. That was quite different in ancient Atlantis; there we have the etheric part of the head projecting far out—especially in the region of the forehead. We now have a central point for the etheric and physical parts approximately between the eyebrows. These two parts came together in the last third of the Atlantean age and today they coincide. Thereby man is able to say “I” to himself and feel an independent personality. Thus the etheric and physical bodies of the head have joined together. This has come about so that man could become the sense being that he is within our physical world, so that he can enrich his inner life through what he takes in through sense impressions, through smell, taste, sight, and so on. All of this becomes embodied in his inner being so that having obtained it he can use it for the further development of the whole cosmos. What he thus acquires can be acquired in no other way, and therefore we have always said we must not take Spiritual Science in an ascetic sense, as a flight from the physical world. All that happens here is taken with us out of the physical world and it would be lost to the spiritual world if it were not collected here first.

But humanity is now getting nearer and nearer to a new condition. In this Post-Atlantean age we have gone through various culture epochs: the old Indian, the ancient Persian, lying before the time of Zarathustra, then the epoch which we have called the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian, then the Greco-Latin, and now we stand in the fifth culture-epoch of the Post-Atlantean age. Ours will be followed by a sixth and a seventh epoch. Whereas in the course of past ages and up to our own time the united structure of our etheric and physical bodies has always grown firmer, more closely united inwardly, man is approaching a period in the future when the etheric body gradually loosens itself again and becomes independent. The way back is taken. There are people today who have a much looser etheric body than others. This loosening of the etheric body is only right for man if during his different incarnations in those culture-epochs he has absorbed so much into himself that when his etheric body goes out again it will take with it the right fruits from the physical sense world of the earth, fruits suitable for incorporation into the increasingly independent etheric body. The more spiritual are the concepts which man finds within the physical world, the more he takes with him in his etheric body. All the utilitarian ideas, all the concepts bound up with machine and industry which only serve outer needs and the outer life, and which man absorbs in our present earthly existence, are unsuitable for incorporation in the etheric body. But all the concepts he absorbs of the artistic, the beautiful, the religious—and everything can be immersed in the sphere of wisdom, art, religion—all this endows man's etheric body with the capability and possibility of being organized independently. Since this can be seen in advance, it has often been emphasized here that the world-conception of spiritual science must send its impulses and activities into practical life. Spiritual science must never remain a conversational subject for tea-parties or any other pursuit apart from ordinary life; it must work its way into the whole of our civilization. If spiritual-scientific thoughts are one day understood, then men will understand that everything our age accomplishes must be permeated by spiritual principles. Many human beings, among them Richard Wagner, fore-saw in certain fields such a penetration with spiritual principles. Some day men will understand how to build a railway-station so that it streams out truth like a temple and is in fact simply an expression suited to what is within it. There is still very much to do. These impulses therefore must be effective and they will be effective when spiritual-scientific thoughts are more fully understood.

I still have a vivid recollection of a rectorial address given about twenty-five years ago by a well-known architect. He spoke about style in architecture and uttered the remarkable sentence: “Architectural styles are not invented, they grow out of the spiritual life!” At the same time he showed why our age, if indeed it produces architectural styles, only revives old ones and is incapable of finding a new style because it has as yet no inner spiritual life. When the world creates spiritual life again then all will be possible. Then we shall feel that the human soul shines towards us from all we look at, just as in the Middle Ages every lock on a door expressed what man's soul understood of outer forms. Spiritual science will not be understood till it meets us everywhere in this way as if crystallized in forms. But then mankind too will live as spirit in the spirit. Then, however, man will be preparing more and more something that he takes with him when he again rises into the spiritual world, when his etheric body becomes self-dependent. Thus must men immerse in the spiritual world if evolution is to go further in the right way.

Nothing symbolizes the permeation of the world with the spirit so beautifully as the story of the miracle of Pentecost. When you contemplate it, it is as though the interpenetration of the world with spiritual life were indicated prophetically through the descent of the “fiery tongues.” Everything must be given life again through the spirit, that abstract intellectual relation which man has to the yearly festivals must also become concrete and living again. Now, at this time of Pentecost, Whitsuntide, let us try to occupy our souls with the thoughts that can proceed from today's lecture. Then the Festival, which as we know is established on a spiritual foundation, will again signify some-thing living for man when his etheric body is ripe for spiritual creation. But if man does not absorb the Whitsuntide spirit then the etheric body goes out of the physical body and is far too weak to overcome what has already been created, those worlds of spectres, phantoms, demons, which the world creates as phenomena existing at its side.

Yesterday I attempted to roll out before you the overall significance of the earnestness of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science through the fact that I made the effort to show you what a difference exists between the overly abstract representations and conceptions, and that which also comes about in the soul in the form of representations and concepts—which also takes on the configuration of representations and concepts—but then is reality, effective working. We are concerned with the fact that man has the strong insight, how the human being, in his increasingly materialistic attitude (through the fact that he completely turns away from spiritual concepts) only concerns himself with concepts of the natural realm etc., makes himself evermore similar to the element of matter, how he in fact climbs down into this matter element, so that in the end it is no longer false when he maintains that the matter of his body thinks, his brain thinks—but that that is even correct that man becomes in fact a robot of the universe—and gradually, bit by bit, through the denial of the soul-spiritual element, the actual losing of this soul-spiritual element occurs. I said that this is naturally an uncomfortable view of the world for many people, and that many take to be something that they do not wish to accept for the reason that they believe that the human being, without his own input, will somehow in the long run be able to have his soul-spiritual element saved. This however, is not the case. The human being can also so strongly immerse himself into the material element that he cuts himself off from the soul-spiritual element, that he sinks himself into the Ahrimanic powers and continues on with these Ahrimanic powers in a world stream alien to our world, but without his ego, which indeed cannot belong to the Ahrimanic world, but which can only find its actually intended development when man follows the normal progressive element, that is, when he joins himself to everything that is connected to the Mystery of Golgotha, when he, above all else, recognises that in our time one has to seek the connection to what can be brought to all mankind in the way of spiritual research. In this evolution of humanity that has taken place for the occident since the middle of the 15th century, the period has begun in which the human being, when he looks out into his environment perceives only the sense world. And when he looks into himself since the middle of the 15th century he has been increasingly misled in the direction of intellectualising, abstracting, making thin his inner soul experiences.

What we experience today as concepts, what we receive for our view of the world out of the customary official professions, that contains, basically, absolutely no relationship to existence. That also cannot be used to penetrate into the true realities. It is only a prejudice when one believes that the human being, in that he makes the usual abstract thoughts, actually has a life of soul. These abstract thoughts are actually an element alien to reality, they are merely a sum of images; so that we can say: outside himself man sees the sense world, and inside man sees that which, fundamentally is only a world of images which basically has no real connection to existence.—That is actually the destiny of mankind since the middle of the 15th century; to perceive the sense world outside—we shall soon see what significance this sense world has in regard to a universal world view—and to experience “inside” a soul element that increasingly becomes a mere image element. One can raise the question: why is it then that mankind of the civilised world since the 15th century, in regard to soul existence, has become increasingly mere images? That is so, so that man, through this, can ascend to a true freedom.

So as to understand that, lets look at our world more closely as it is for us today and as we ourselves stand within it, Let us disregard the human being himself in the whole of the wide world; look upon all that can be found in all the wide world, shall we say as clouds, mountains, rivers, as structures of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, and let us ask ourselves: what is then actually in the whole surrounding, of what one may so describe as I have done it? Let us just schematically sketch what we are concerned about. Shall we say: everything above us, everything spread out around us as the minerals, the plants, and to a certain degree the animals—the human beings we shall disregard, which naturally in reality we cannot do, but which we may do hypothetically - thus we imagine that that is nature without the human being. Here, in this entire nature, without the human being, there are no gods. That is what has to be seen and understood! In this nature devoid of humans the gods do not exist, just as in the shucked oyster shell the oyster does not exist or in a separated snail shell the snail does not exist, This entire world devoid of humans which I have spoken of hypothetically, it is what the divine beings have separated from in the course of development, just as the oyster separates from its shell, The gods, the divine beings are no longer within it, as little as the oyster or the snail are in their separated and shed shells. What we have around us as world as I have described it is in the past. In that we look out upon the nature, we look upon the past of the spiritual element, and upon what has remained as a leftover from the past of the spiritual element, Therefore, there also no longer exists the possibility of truly coming to a religious consciousness merely through looking upon the outer world, for one should by no means believe that in this outer world there is present anything consisting of the actual humanity—creating spiritual divine beings. Elemental beings, certainly: a lower order of spiritual beings, that is another matter; but what the actual creative spiritual beings are that belong to the consciousness of religion as such, that belongs to this world only insofar as it is the shell, the residue, what is left behind.

Such things as we have just touched upon are indeed sometimes felt as earnest truths by single outstanding personalities. Truths that arise in the souls of such personalities. The one who, in the spiritual development of the 19th century, felt most deeply how what surrounds man as nature is the remainder of a divine spiritual development is Phillip Mainlaender, who through the overburdening heaviness of this knowledge arrived at his philosophy of suicide, and then also ended his life in suicide. Sometimes it is the destiny of human beings through their karma, to have to go very deeply into such one-sided truths. Then this destiny itself becomes for one incarnation one-sided and difficult, as it did for Phillip Mainlaender, the unfortunate German philosopher.

After you have taken that up into yourselves which we had to say about this hypothetical outer nature, you can now ask yourself: indeed, where are then the gods, those gods of which we speak as the actual creative ones? Here I would have to make the schematic sketch a little different, here I have to sketch the human being, and within the human being the gods. If I may put it this way: within the human skin, in the human organs are the actual creative gods. The human beings, in their being, are the bearers of the Divine Spiritual Being at present. Thus the divine-spiritual, that is also the actual creative element in the present, is within the human being. And if today you imagine the entire outer nature, and then imagine a future of several thousand years lying before us, nothing will then exist of these clouds, minerals, plants, and even the animals. Nothing of all that will exist, that now lives outside the human skin. But what gives the inner human organisation its permeating spirit and soul, that will find its continuing development, that will be the future.

If I were to sketch this schematically, then I would have to say: if this large outside circle is nature, and the smaller one within it is man, and the smaller kernel within it is the human-divine element, then, in the future nature will be shattered and disbursed (shown by outraying beams). The human being will be expanded into a world, and that which today is his inner core will be his outer surroundings, the nature itself.

The insight into the fact that the divine-spiritual, which we have to address as the really creative element in the present, lies within the human skin, is a uniquely serious bit of knowledge. For that lays a responsibility upon the human being in regard to the whole cosmos. This enables the human being to understand such a thing as the Christ word: “Heaven and earth shall pass away,” that is, the outer world, “but my words will not pass away.” And if the word of Paul is fulfilled in the single human being: “Not I, but the Christ in me,” then again the words of Christ live in the single human being: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words” in the single human being, that is, what is within the skin and is taken up by Christ, “will not pass away.”

But what does what I have said indicate? It indicates that man through his abstract concepts, through what he has intellectualised, has so to speak, made himself empty in his inner being ever since the middle of the 15th century. For what purpose then has he made himself empty? He has made himself empty, just so that he can take up the Christ impulse, that is to take up the creative-divine into his own inner being. We look into the outer world, I said: we look only into the sense element. There we see only the divine past. Among those things that have remained out of this divine past are also the elemental spirits etc. which have remained at a lower stage. We look into our inner being, and in this inner being we see at first the mere imaged abstract concepts that are increasingly intellectualised—which only thereby become something concrete and real, in that the human being takes up the spirit-impulse through spiritual science and joins it to his inner life. Man has the choice—and this choice becomes an ever more serious matter since the middle of the 15th century—either to remain static with the intellectualised abstract concepts, or to take up the vitalising content of spiritual science. If he stays with the intellectual abstract concepts, then he will further develop a brilliant natural science—for these concepts are dead, and he will grasp the dead nature with the dead concepts in a remarkable way. But all that makes a mummy out of him, all that similarises him to the element of matter, all that leads to the fact that he succumbs to the Ahrimanic element, For the continuing progress of earthly affairs, for the progressive continuation of the entire earth development he needs the taking up of the spiritual element—which today does not approach the the human being in an atavistic instinctive way, but rather which has to be worked for, worked hard for, by the human being. Thus the taking up of the science of the spirit is not a theory, but rather is the working out, the working for, of something real. It is the filling out, of the otherwise empty inner soul life, with a spiritual and spiritualised content. With an empty inner life, confronting the past in what is outside, thus will humanity in its mass remain today in that it only wants to give real meaning to thought-logic along with experimentation and does not want to take up what is a vitalising spiritual life. The world today stands not only in danger of succumbing to the Ahrimanic element, but it is also in danger of losing the mission of the earth as a whole.

Whoever thinks this through and feels this through will only first properly sense the deep earnestness that is to be connected to the acquisition of spiritual science, And he will then not underestimate this knowledge, which is the knowledge of the human being. The knowledge of the human being does not actually exist within present day natural science or within the old religious traditions. What do the old religious traditions offer? They direct the gaze of the human beings up into abstract, world-estranged heights; they do not speak of how the gods indeed live, organically, in the inner life of man's being, These thoughts they would declare to be heretical to the highest degree. If today one wanted to bring the traditional European and American religious confessions to an understanding that the gods live in human beings, and that this ancient word is a truth: the human body is the temple of the gods - they would rise up in indignation and wrath against such heresy. Thus, this is on the one hand.

On the other hand we have a materialistically oriented natural science which, just because it is materialistic, does not understand matter. What does natural science understand about the function of the human brain? What does natural science understand about the function of the heart, etc.? I have often showed you, and have also expressed it publically that material science holds the view, for instance, that the human heart is a kind of pump that pumps the blood in the body. This general heart science taught as university science is simply nonsense, no more or less than simple nonsense. It is really not the case that the heart is a pump that presses the blood out in all directions and again allows it to return, but the actual vitalising element is the circulating of the blood itself. There is in the blood, in the circulating blood itself, there lives what just in human existence is the actual mover of the circulation in the human organism, and the heart is only the expression of this and nothing else, The circulating movement is evident. Whoever says, in the sense of today's natural science that the heart drives the blood into the body he speaks in approximately the same way, as though one would say: when it was ten minutes to nine the one hand was close to nine, and the other hand was over ten, and these hands along with the whole clock works have driven me up here to the podium. But that is, indeed, not so! the clock is only the expression for that which has happened. Just as little is the heart the pump works that brings it about that the blood is driven through the body; it is only the expression for it; it is a concomitent part of this entire blood system, and is the expression for the blood system.

Natural science as it is generally practised today also leads just as little into the inner life of the human being; at the very most it makes the inner into something external in that it dissects corpses. However, through this one does not come into the inner life, one comes thereby only to making the inner into something external, for at the moment when one anatomises the interior of the human being, one makes what one achieves into something external. Thus we are concerned with the fact that in the entire spiritual life today there is tendency present to really penetrate into the inner life of the human being. This is just what spiritual science has to bring; here spiritual science has to bring the knowledge of the human being. However, most of our contemporaries are frightened away from this knowledge of man. why, then? Because the religious traditions for centuries have expressly surrounded man in a fear regarding all real striving for knowledge. One needs only to consider what nebulosity, what a swimming in words the traditional confessions have presented to man, which they then bring to a climax in the sermon, that the human being ought not to cognise the super-sensible element, but just believe it, merely feel it in a darkling way. All that bears within it the tendency that man, even out of his arrogance, his having too high an opinion of himself, and yet at the same time out of his tendency to inertia, brings to birth the idea: one does not need to think about the divine, that must rise up out of the depths in dim feelings and instincts. Then, however, there rises up nothing other than the dim miasma of the organic element, which is then transposed into illusions, which then again are transformed by the practioners and theologians (who are working toward comfortably convenient practices) into all sorts of nebulous things.

Through many centuries the instinct for knowledge was suppressed which solely and along can bring humanity forwards, on the course of earthly development, and then onwards in the course of spiritual development. Today, human beings downright get gooseflesh when they are to begin to develop real cognition and are to live up into the spiritual world. But to the degree that one gets this gooseflesh, to that same degree one cuts oneself off from the spiritual-soul beings, and similarises oneself to the element of matter.

One can say that when such things are to be undertaken seriously, then human beings immediately withdraw in fright, because today everything is considered only externally. I should like to intersperse something here which I have recently noticed again. We have founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. This Waldorf School was founded entirely out of the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that is to say, a pedagogy and didactics was given in lectures to those who were expressly chosen for this school. Here we are concerned with spirit that has permeated into this pedagogy and didactics. Today it is already even happening—for everything that is founded by us becomes a sensation—that people want to visit this Waldorf School and observe it for a couple of hours, in order to see whether in this couple of hours something or other could be observed that is somewhat different than in other schools—thus, again, only a sensation! However, the spirit of the Waldorf School one can become acquainted with only through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, not in that one sits down so as to audit the lessons, and disturbs the instruction to a lesser or greater degree. To take up anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is just more inconvenient and less sensational, than it is to audit -that is to say, basically to make it more convenient and comfortable for oneself.

The pedagogy and didactics we are dealing with here reckon with spiritual worlds and above all with the pre-existence of the human being. How is it then with the pre-existence of the human being? Well, we think back to the earthly year of our birth. Let us suppose we were descended to earthly life in this period of time (a short red line is drawn). Children who are born quite a bit later, during this same time, have still been above in the spiritual world (a longer red line above). We were already on the earth during the time when those children were still above. They bring something to us that has been experienced in the spiritual world during the time when we were already down in the physical world.

One can see that consciously in the children that are before one, if one instructs with the pedagogy and didactics in such a way as the instruction should be in the Waldorf School. One should vividly place onesself into the spirit of the child, that is, develop the practice in daily life, for the reality of what must be given in representations and ideas from out of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. But just from such things people were kept away through the traditions of the traditional religious confessions, who above all else, did not want that the inner activity would be more highly developed in human beings, which then also leads to real knowledge of man, and which brings about the deep truth that the location of the gods is itself within the skin of the human being.

Let us look upon our planets from outside. In all of what otherwise is in the planets, there is no divine-spiritual element, From out of the human-like beings that are upon them, there radiates the divine element out from the planet. Are the planets thereby diminished, because this radiates out from the bodies of the human beings? You will also become formally friendly with this thought, if you take it away from earthly life and transpose it onto another planet. In that you stand here upon the earth, you will to be sure, find that this thought has something preserved and oppressive about it, the thought that you and your fellow human beings are the bearers of the divine-spiritual element. But if skilfully you direct your gaze to another planet, then you shall more easily be able to conceive the thought, that among those beings who constitute the highest kingdom of nature there, is the location from which the divine-spiritual element gleams down toward you.

The thought which we have developed today supplements from a particular side the other earnest thoughts which we have yesterday allowed to appear before our souls.

Yesterday we have allowed the thought to appear before our soul, that in the interior of the human being that is developed, which is to bring forth the further reality of the earth development which is to carry the earth development forward, whereas it also lies within the will of the human being to hinder this earth development: to take up the Ahrimanic stream alone. And today we place alongside this the other thought, that actually everything that is around us is transitory outer nature, for it today represents only a leftover of the divine-spiritual creating. Divine-spiritual creating which hold sway in the present and will hold sway in the future: that is what is present within the human skin; so that it appears to be paradoxical, and yet is true, when one says: everything which the eyes see, which the ears hear from out of the human surroundings, that passes away with the earth. That alone which lives in the spaces that are enclosed in the human skin that lives over into Jupiter, that carries earth existence into the future planetary development. One will again receive an urge to really become acquainted with the relationship of the human being to the cosmos, when one places the tremendously serious necessity before one's gaze, to learn the real knowledge about the human being.

The human being indeed actually lives between two extremes. We have called these extremes the luciferic stream and the ahrimanic stream. We can also grasp them, I should like to say, in a more elementary way. The philosophers have always spoken of the fact that man cannot actually grasp his being going out from the thoughts. That is also actually true; for, what it is that man has as the feeling of Being; from whence does that actually come? The human being exists in the spiritual world before he enters, through conception or birth, into the physical existence. He comes down out of supersensible worlds into his earthly, physical, sensory existence, Here he experiences, above all, something new that he has not experienced in the supersensible worlds, which actually encompasses when he has descended. That is what one—but only representatively—can call gravity, the attractive force of the earth, which one can call “having weight.” Now, you know: the expression “having weight” is only actually taken from the most important phenomenon of gravity. For what we have, for example, as “being tired” is also something similar to “having weight” and what we feel in our extremities when we exercise them is also something that is related to “having weight.” But because “having weight” is the most representative of these things, we can say: the human being places himself into gravity. And in a concealed way the human being always perceives something of this gravity when he designates something or other on the earth as real.

In the opposite sense, if the human being is between death and a new birth, there, just as on earth he is joined to gravity, he is then joined to the light. For light also has a sense: “to the light” is again used in a representative way, for we receive through the eyes most of our higher sense perceptions, when we have vision, and then we speak of light. But that which lives in the sense-feeling of the eyes as light, is the same as what lives as sound for the sensing-feeling of the ear and gives evidence of itself in single tones, as the light gives evidence of itself in single colors, And this it is also for the other senses. Fundamentally speaking it is the stimulation by all the senses which one designates representatively as light, just as one designates gravity in a representative way. We are taken up into the extreme of gravity when we descend to the earth. We are taken up into the extreme of light when we transpose ourselves through death into the world between death and a new birth. And we are always, actually fitted into the middle condition between light and gravity, and every sense-feeling, in that we experience here, is fundamentally half light and half gravity. At the moment when we, perhaps through something pathological or through a dream, experience ourselves without our gravity, we experience the mere spiritual element as just in a bout of fever or in a dream. The bout of fever, in regard to the soul, consists in this, that man has experiences, without being aware of his own gravity while experiencing them. This balance between gravity and light, into which we are spanned, that is, for a great deal of what we experience in the world in that we as men are spiritual-physical beings, just that which is intimately with the world riddles. But neither the world stream that lives itself out in the traditional religious confessions, nor that which lives itself out in the fantasies of natural science, arrives at the break-through from the abstract concepts into the light or form the sense-feelings down into gravity. Human beings have indeed become blind, deaf, and stupid regarding these things.

Let us take a crystal; that gives itself its own from. What then is in that as a force? In that is the same force man feels pressing down upon him, the same force that gives form to the entire earth. Just look there where the earth can give form: in the whole surface of the sea, in water; here gravity gives the form. Then the same force gives the crystal the form, only here it works from within. The scientific fantasies move in the direction of saying: what lies behind matter, or in matter, one does not know, that is a world riddle. What lies behind the surface of matter we experience, when we experience our own gravity, for in regard to the whole earth we are placed within the same forces which, for example, work in the small entities and hold the single parts together. One must just be in the position to recognise the great in the small, and the small in the great, and not just speculate what may stand behind matter. What goes beyond matter, the divine-spiritual element that holds sway in the beings, that must be recognised through the fact that one stokes up the fires that can be stoked in the inner element, which brings one to higher inner experiencing, that brings to understanding the concepts and representations that are really related to what dwells in the temple, which is represented by old traditions as being man himself,

There is something within old atavistic widsom, as I have often emphasized, which one can experience with deep devotion, In the present, one is called upon again in full consciousness to fetch it up again out of the depths of being, and also to make this a guideline for the spiritual and social actions, and for life.

We have been considering the human form, human life, the inner life and the human spirit in relation to the cosmos. Looking back on the different aspects considered, we are able to produce a kind of extractof it all and say: Deep down in the to produce a kind of extract of it all and say: Deep down in the depths of human nature lies the will (Fig. 37).

In a number of ways it is the most “mysterious” element in human nature, if I may put it like this. When we think of the moral sphere, it inevitably strikes us that our aberrations, tendencies in us which are often entirely hostile to the world, arise from the moral sphere as if from unfathomable depths, and that all pricks of conscience and self-reproaches we may feel stream up from the depths of the will.

We also know that this sphere of the will is mysterious by nature because in many respects there is something indefinite about it, something over which we have little control. It is an element which pushes us hither and thither on the billows of life, and we are not always able to say that we relate to it with our conscious impulses. In another respect, relating to our understanding, I have always stressed that the true nature of the will impulse lies outside our conscious awareness, being at the same level as experiences made in deep, dreamless sleep. In this respect, too, will intent is an indefinite, mysterious element which has been poured into human nature.

Considering the human mind and spirit, we are not able to say that human beings have it only when awake, say, or consciously forming ideas; we also have it in sleep and in the part of us into which will intent have been poured and where we are in the equivalent of deep sleep. We can imagine, therefore, that mind and spirit are also present when we sleep.

With reference to our will intent, two things can be distinguished. In the first place there is the will intent which induces us to be active from the time we wake up until we go to sleep—unless, of course, we are real lay-abouts. We are unable to perceive the nature of this will intent, but its effects come to awareness because we are able to form ideas of them. We do not know how our will impulse works when we take a step, but we can see that we have taken a step forward. We form an idea about the effects of our will intent and in our waking life we thus have an idea and awareness of those effects. This is one aspect of our will intent.

Another aspect is that the will is active in us even while we sleep. Internal processes occurring while we sleep are also effected by the will. We merely do not perceive them. Just as the sun also shines at night—on the other half of the earth, where we do not live—so will intent streams through our inner nature while we sleep, though we are not aware of this. It does, however, show itself afterwards, when we look back on the state of sleep.

We may thus distinguish between two kinds of will intent, an inner and an outer one.

Our will intent may be said to be down in the ocean depths of soul, rising up in waves. Since we had to agree that it is active also during sleep, when our living body is merely involved in organic activity, with no soul element streaming through it nor the light of mind and spirit illumining it, we also have to say: Our sleeping will intent has to do with organic activity, for organic, or vital, processes occur in us that are essentially connected with the will. They continue when we are awake and our will intent is in full flow. Will intent is revealed in internal metabolic processes, another area where we can speak of organic activity.

Out of the depth of this will ocean in human nature rise the waves of what comes to expression in our feelings. We know that in feeling, human nature works at a dimmed-down level (Fig. 37), with the intensity of conscious awareness reduced to the level of dreams. It is, however, less dim than our will intent. Something from the depths of human nature rises up into the light. Human beings bring light into their inner nature through feeling. In the process, the two aspects of will intent rise up into the more intensive level of conscious awareness; both inner and outer will extent can rise up and come to conscious awareness.

We therefore distinguish two kinds of feeling. One is the feeling which rises up from the sphere of the will and is related to the sleeping state in us. It comes to expression mainly in the antipathies of which we have so many. The kind of will intent which makes us active in the outside world when it rises up into our feeling, bringing us together with the world in sympathy, comes to expression in all the sympathies we feel for the world. In this region of the soul, therefore, we have dreamlike feeling experience coming to expression in sympathy and antipathy, sympathies and antipathies which go all the way up to our feeling for beauty, sympathies and antipathies relating to forms in life, both man-made and natural forms, and also the sympathies and antipathies which we have thanks to our organs of smell or taste, as we perceive odours and tastes, finding them good or repellent. All this rich and varied activity is the actual activity of the soul. Will intent is therefore revealed in organic activity, feeling in soul activity (Fig. 37).

If we study soul life from this point of view we can learn a great deal. We perceive that the waking state rouses us to be in sympathy with the world around us. Our antipathies essentially come from more unconscious levels. They rise from the sleep level of our will. It is as if our sympathies were more on the surface and as if our antipathies entered into them from unknown depths. Antipathies reject. With them, we put the world around us at a distance, isolating and shutting ourselves off. Egotism is mainly based on antipathies rising up inside us. The more egotistical a person, the more is the element of antipathy active inside. Egotists want to isolate themselves and be as far as possible by themselves.

In ordinary life we are not aware of the interplay of sympathies and antipathies in the inner life. We do become aware of it when our relationship to the outside world becomes abnormal and our defensive reactions, using our antipathies which come from the realm of sleep, also become abnormal. This happens, for instance, when our breathing is out of balance during sleep and we have nightmares. Inwardly we experience this as antipathy used to defend us against something that wants to invade us, reducing the experience of our egoity.

We get a glimpse of deep secrets in human life. When someone develops very powerful antipathies which then also enter into waking life, antipathy may enter into everything, even the astral body. The astral body then lets antipathetic nature stream out in front, rather like an abnormal aura. It may happen that the individual feels even people with whom he normally has a neutral relationship to be antipathetic and indeed people he normally loves. All the different kinds of persecution mania arise from this kind of situation. When we experience antipathetic feelings that cannot be explained by external circumstances, they come from overflowing antipathies in the soul. The pole arising from the realm of sleep in the life of the soul has undergone abnormal development in this case.

If this antipathetic element gains the upper hand, we get someone who hates all the world. And this can go to extremes. All education and all work done together in the social sphere should be designed to prevent people from developing this hatred. But just consider, if the element which rises up from the depths of human nature can make people into such egotists when it becomes too powerful, what must the inner will intent be like which is at the sleep level and which is mercifully hidden from us! We never come to realize the all-pervading presence of this sleeping will intent in the whole of our organism and our limbs. At most, highly unusual dreams may make some people a little aware of what lives in the will intent which restores the organism when we are sleeping. This element—I have shown it from another point of view in earlier lectures³⁴—is rightly beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness. When you come to know it, you come to know everything in human beings which can take them to an extreme degree of badness. It is a profound mystery of life that our organic activity is balanced out by powers which would make a person a criminal, a bad character, if they were to gain the upper hand in conscious life.

Nothing in the world is in itself evil or good. Something which is thoroughly evil when it comes up into conscious life, also regulates our organic functions and restores our used up powers of vitality during sleep, which is the right place for it to be used. If you enquire into the nature of the powers which restore used-up vitality, you have to say: It is evil. Evil has its function. When human beings gain spiritual insight and see this element it is an element about which spiritual scientists of earlier times also said: Its true nature must not be described, for sinful are the lips which utter it, sinful the ears which hear it. People must know, however, that life is a dangerous process and that evil is very much present down in the depths, a much-needed power.

The waves also rise higher than this, into the forming of ideas. When the sleeping inner will intent which brings light in the sphere of feeling rises into the forming of ideas, light is shed, but at the same time the quality of our ideas is reduced through abstraction. Feelings of antipathy still have living intensity in human experience. When they rise up into the sphere of ideas, they live in all the negative, dismissive attitudes people have (Fig. 37). Everything we dismiss in this way, every “negative judgement”, as logicians call it, is due to antipathetic feeling, or sleeping will intent, rising up into the life of ideas.

When the sympathetic feelings which have their origin in wide awake, outside-related will intent, rise into the sphere of ideas we get positive attitudes. As you can see, we now have merely abstract images. In our feelings of sympathy and antipathy we still have something very much alive. In the opinion-based attitudes formed in the sphere of ideas we are standing still, as it were, and observing the world. We take a positive or negative stance. We are not as intensely involved as in antipathy, we merely say no. This is an abstract process. Instead of developing the heat of antipathy we simply say no. Instead of developing the warmth of sympathy we say yes. In contemplative calm we are above any relationship to the outside world to the point of forming an abstract judgement. Activity is merely at image level, therefore, and we are able to say, especially in the light of what was said yesterday: Here (Fig. 37) is the activity of mind and spirit, but will intent, feeling and judgement, or the forming of ideas, rise even further, into the sphere of the senses. What becomes of a negative opinion when it enters into the sphere of the senses? It becomes a situation where we perceive nothing. In terms of the most notable form of sensory perception, vision, we may call it a situation in which we see nothing and experience darkness: Experience of darkness. A positive judgement on the other hand means experience of light. We might of course just as well speak of experience of dumbness, experience of sound, etc. We could put this into words for every one of the twelve senses.

We may now ask ourselves what kind of activity we have in the sphere of the senses. We have considered organic activity, activity of the soul, and activity of mind and spirit. The last of these is entirely image-based, but still our own activity. The processes which occur between our senses and the outside world, on the other hand, really are no longer our own activity, for the world is influencing us. It is perfectly possible to draw the eye schematically, making it an independent entity, as it were. What happens in the eye is that the outside world penetrates into the organism as if through a bay. Here we are not engaged in our own activity in the world, but our position in the world is such that we may say: It is the activity of the gods. This is active throughout the whole world around us which in darkness inclines towards negative judgement and in light inclines towards positive judgement. Wise minds of the second post-Atlantean age had a particularly strong feeling for this activity of the gods influencing human beings in their relationship to the world. They had a powerful feeling for God in the light and God in the dark. God in the light is the divine principle with luciferic bias, God in the dark with ahrimanic bias. This is how people of the ancient Persian civilization experienced the world around them. To them, the sun represented that outside world—Sun as source of divine Light: second post-Atlantean age.

The sphere which lies between judgement and feeling was the main sphere of experience for the third post-Atlantean civilization, which is the Egyptian and Chaldean civilization. People then experienced the divine principle not so much in light and darkness outside but in the area where ideas come together with feelings. The influence of the gods on Egyptians and Chaldeans caused people to pour something of their antipathies into their negative judgements and something of their sympathies into their positive attitudes. We need to be able to read the images and other documents which have survived from that period to see how everything arose from positive sympathies and negative antipathies. Looking at figures from Egyptian tombs and elsewhere you can sense something in them that was artistically created out of positive sympathies and negative antipathies. You cannot create a sphinx without bringing in ideas alive with sympathy and antipathy. People then experienced not only light and darkness but the living quality inherent in feelings of sympathy and antipathy. The Sun was experienced as the source of divine Life.

During Greco-Latin times people had largely lost the direct connection with the outside world. In my Riddles of Philosophy³⁵ I have shown how people still experienced thoughts the way we experience sensory perceptions today but were gradually progressing to the state in which we are today. Due to I development, we essentially no longer have a real relationship to the outside world in which our I is in effect asleep in the body, and we tend towards the sleeping state. This was not so highly developed in ancient Greece, though it had already become quite powerful. The ancient Persians had not entered deeply into their physical nature. They did not really see themselves living fully in their bodies, particularly if they were sages. It was their belief that they moved and were active throughout the whole universe on the waves of light. The ancient Greeks had already reached a stage where they were asleep inside their bodies where this cosmic aspect was concerned. When we are actually asleep, our I and astral body are outside us; but compared to the wakefulness of the ancient Persians, even our waking state is one of sleep. The wakefulness, or let us say the “waking up”, of the ancient Persians which I have characterized in my Occult Science was like entering into the human senses, with light itself coming in at the same time.

We are no longer aware of the fact that on awakening we bring light into our eyes. Light is a shadowy element outside us. This meant that the Greeks were no longer able to perceive the sun as the true source of life but as something which penetrated them inwardly. To them, the element in which the sun lives inwardly in human beings was the element of Eros, love. Eros, the sun-element in man, was the true inner experience of the Greeks. Thus the sun was seen as the source of divine love.

Then, from about the 4th century onwards—I have spoken of various aspects of its specific nature on other occasions—came the age when the sun was experienced as no more than a physical body, a sphere of vapour, out there in space. The sun had, in fact, become obscured for humanity. Persians truly felt the sun to be the reflector of the light which billowed and lived in space with tremendous vigour. The Egyptians and Chaldeans saw it as life billowing and pulsing through the universe. The Greeks experienced it as something which instilled love into organic nature, as Eros guiding them through the waves of the emotions. Entering more and more into the human being, experience of the sun vanished into the deep down depths of soul. Today we carry the sun element down in those depths. We are not meant to reach it, because the Guardian of the Threshold stands before it, and because it is in the depths of which it was said in the ancient mysteries that no utterance should be given, for sinful were the lips which uttered it, and sinful the ear which heard it. Schools existed in the 4th century who essentially taught, to allow Christianity to spread: The Sun Mystery must not be revealed; a civilization has to come where the Sun Mystery is not known.

Behind everything which happens in the physical world are the inner powers which, I’d say, are teaching out of the universe. The Roman emperor Constantine (306–337) was one of the instruments of those powers. Under him, Christianity took the form in which the sun is denied.

Another emperor, Julian the Apostate,³⁶ took less account of developments in his day but let himself be guided by his enthusiasm for the last remnants of the old instinctive wisdom learned from his mystery teachers. He was murdered because he sought to restore the old tradition of the threefold Sun Mystery. The world did not want to take that road.

Today we have to realize that the old, instinctive wisdom needs to be revived in conscious wisdom. Wisdom which has gone down to subconscious levels, into mere organic, and even sub-organic, activity needs to be brought back to consciousness. The Sun Mystery must be found again.

When the Sun Mystery was in the process of being lost, Julian, who still wanted the world to be aware of it, made the most terrible enemies who finally killed him. Today we have enemies who are against the new Sun Mystery which anthroposophy must give to the world. Historical evolution now follows the opposite trend. The 4th century brought the decline; today we need the rise.

In this respect Constantine and Julian are symbols of historical evolution. Julian may be said to have stood on the shattered ruins of the past, wanting to rebuild the forms of the old wisdom out of those ruins. The old forms had been destroyed by Christianity, which initially, under Constantine, had taken materialistic form. Countless works of art, works of ancient wisdom and written works were destroyed, anything that might give people even a hint of the old Sun Mystery.

It is true that in order to achieve freedom, humanity had to come to believe that a sphere of gases moved through the universe out there, though physicists who would be able to go there would be really surprised, for instead of a sphere of gases they would find an empty space, indeed less than space. They would discover that the sun out there is not a sphere of luminous gases—which is a nonsense—but in the first place just a reflector (Fig. 39), unable to radiate light and at most merely reflecting it. In the spirit, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus and the moon radiate light. Physically the sun appears to be shining on them, but in reality they radiate light towards the sun, which acts as a reflector. This is the physical reality. The ancient Persians were still able to perceive the sun as the source of light for the earth, but not an actual source but a reflector. Later it became the reflector of life and the reflector of love.

Julian the Apostate wanted people to understand this and was got rid off because of this. To achieve freedom, humanity had to go through superstitious belief in a sphere of gases radiating light—something we see represented as the absolute truth in modern physics textbooks. Now we must penetrate to the truth of the matter again.

In this respect, therefore, Constantine and Julian are very much like two symbols. Julian wanted to preserve the old traditions so that the true Sun Mystery might still reach people. During the early centuries, the Christ was still an Apollo or Sun figure.

The Sun Mystery was seen as the most precious jewel humanity possessed. It was symbolized in the Palladium,³⁷ which was said to have been kept in Troy, where the mystery priests used it to reveal the true nature of the sun to people in ritual, sacramental form. It was then taken to Rome, and part of the secret knowledge held by Roman initiates was that the Palladium was in safe keeping in Rome. Essentially the initiate priests of ancient Rome, and also the early emperors of Rome, above all Augustus,³⁸ based their actions on the knowledge that the greatest jewel the world possessed, or at least its physical symbol, was in Rome. The Palladium had been placed beneath the foundations of the most highly esteemed temple in Rome, a fact only known to those who knew the deepest secrets of Roman life. Through the spirit, it had, however, also become known to those whose role it was to bring Christianity to the world. The early Christians went to Rome because of this. So there was a definite spiritual element.

When Christianity was secularized under Constantine, the Palladium was removed from Rome. Constantine founded Constantinople and had the Palladium put in the ground under the column he erected to himself. The further development of Roman Christianity was that the Sun mystery was taken away by the very emperor who established the rigid forms, rigid mechanisms, of Christianity in Rome. With this, Christendom has lost the wisdom of the world, the outward sign of this being the transfer of the Palladium from Rome to Constantinople.

In some parts of the Slavonic world—people always put their own interpretation on this—it was believed until the beginning of the 20th century that in the not too far distant future the Palladium would be taken from Constantinople to another city, in their belief a Slav city.

Whichever way this may be, the Palladium—you may take the whole as an outer symbol, but it is the inner aspect which matters—is waiting to go forth from Constantinople, which is casting darkness on it, to a place where it will be totally obscured. The Palladium is thus taken to the East, where the old wisdom lives in decadence and growing obscurity. Just as the Sun is a reflector of light given to it from the universe, everything depends on it in the further evolution of the world that the Palladium be illumined by a wisdom arising from the treasury of insight gained in the West. The Palladium, heirloom of the past taken from Troy to Rome and then to Constantinople, and to be taken even further into the darkness of the East, the Palladium, jewel of the Sun, must wait until in the West grows in mind and spirit and is able to release it from the dark, obscured treasury of insight limited to the natural world. Our mission for the future is thus linked to the most sacred tradition of European development.

To this day, then, legends are still alive for those initiated into these mysteries, some of them very plain, simple people who walk about on this earth. Legends are still alive of the Trojan Palladium being taken to Rome, of the Palladium jewel of wisdom, being taken to Constantinople when Roman Christianity became worldly and superficial, and that it shall be taken to the East one day when all the old wisdom will have been stripped away in the East, having fallen into utter decadence, and legends that speak of the need to bring new light from the West to this Sun jewel.

The Sun has vanished into the depths of human nature. We have to find it again by developing the science of the spirit. Humanity must find this Sun again, or the Palladium will vanish into the obscurity of the East. Today it is sinful to utter words that are wrong: “Ex oriente lux”. The light can no longer come from the East, which has fallen into decadence. Yet the East, which will have the Sun jewel, however obscured, is waiting for the light of the West. Today, people walk in the darkness, arrange to meet in the dark, their eyes turned to—Washington.³⁹ Salvation, however, will only come from Washingtons able to speak out of the mood of the spiritual world in such a way that they not only open economic gates for China, looking for the darkness which surrounds the Palladium. Salvation will only come when conferences held in the West decide to take light to the East, letting the Palladium shine out again. Like a fluorescent body, the Palladium in itself is dark; it shines out when light streams into it. The same holds true for the wisdom of the East. Dark in itself, it will be illumined and fluoresce when the wisdom of the West, the light of the spirit from the West, enters into it.

The people of the West are as yet unable to see this. The legend of the Palladium needs to be placed in the bright light of consciousness. We must feel the right kind of compassion for Julian the Apostate who wanted to close his eyes to the age when the light of freedom would be able to germinate in the darkness, who wanted to preserve the instinctive wisdom of old and therefore had to perish. We have to realize that Constantine took the light of wisdom from the Romans by giving them a worldly Christianity, sending Christianity into the darkness. We have to realize that the light which will let the Palladium shine out again must be sought in modern science. Only then will an important step in world history come to fulfilment. Only then will the Palladium, which became Western the moment the Greeks burned down Troy and which still holds the light that shone from Troy, become Western and Eastern. It is now in the dark and must be brought out of the dark. Light must be brought to the Palladium.

We can win enthusiasm from historical evolution if our hearts are in the right place. If they are, in the sense of what I have been presenting today, we shall also be able to find the right response to the impulses which are the true impulses of the science of the spirit.

I’ll continue with this on Friday.

• 34. See the lectures given on 23 and 24 September 1921—Cosmosophy Vol. 1. (GA 207)
• 35. Steiner R. Riddles of Philosophy (GA 18), tr. by F. C. A. Koelln. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1973.
• 36. Flavius Claudius Julianus (c. 331–363), half-brother of Constantine, Roman emperor (361–363).
• 37. In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an image of the goddess Pallas Athene which had come from heaven and was “the luck of Troy”. Stolen by Odysseus and Diomedes, it was thought to be in Argos, Athens or Sparta. According to the Romans, Anaeas had taken it to Rome.
• 38. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (63 BC–AD 14), first Roman emperor.
• 39. Washington Conference (21 November 1921 - 6 February 1922) to discuss naval disarmament and the Far East. Led among other things to American-British-French-Japanese agreement to guarantee each other’s territories and a collective guarantee of China’s independence.

We have been studying how the living form of man, his soul and his spirit, are related to the cosmos. The various aspects of this subject presented in recent lectures may be summarized in somewhat the following way:—

In the deep foundations of man's being lies the will. In many respects the will is the most mysterious and secret element in human nature. It is obvious that aberrations, inclinations that often run counter to the world's well-being surge up from fathomless depths of the moral life; everything experienced by the soul in the form of pricks of conscience or self-reproach streams up from the deep ground of the will.

The reason why the will is so mysterious and secret is that in many respects it is a highly indeterminate force; there is in it an instinctive element over which we have little control and which drives us hither and thither on the turbulent waves of life often without our being able to claim that any conscious impulses are racing effect. In another respect too, namely in respect of our knowledge of the operations of the will, it has again and again been emphasized that these operations of the will are as withdrawn from human consciousness as the experiences of deep, dreamless sleep; so that in this respect too, the will is an indeterminate, mysterious element.

But when we think of man's spiritual nature we cannot conceive that this spirituality is active in him only during his waking hours or in his conscious mental life; the fact is that this spirituality is at work in him during sleep too, within that part of his being where his will lies and which, like the experiences of deep sleep, is wrapt in unconsciousness.

Spirit is therefore also present and at work in the sleeping human being. Two aspects of the will can be distinguished.—There is first of all the will which—unless we are out-and-out idlers—spurs us to activity from the time of waking until that of falling asleep. True, we cannot perceive the will in actual operation, but the effects rise into our consciousness inasmuch as we can form mental concepts and images of them. We do not know how the will-impulse works in us when we are walking; but we can see ourselves stepping forward. We form mental images of the workings of our will and in this sense are conscious of its effects. That is one aspect of the will.

The other aspect is that the will is also active in us while we sleep; for then inner processes are taking place, processes that are also operations of the will, only we are not aware of them—precisely because we are asleep. But just as the sun also shines during the night on the other side of the earth where we are not living, so does will stream through our being while we are asleep, although we have no consciousness of it.

Thus two kinds of will can be distinguished: an inner will and an outer will. The workings of the outer will are made manifest to us while we are awake; those of the inner will take effect while we are asleep. Strictly speaking, the inner will is not revealed to us; nevertheless when we look back, its effects can be apprehended afterwards, as having been part of the condition of sleep.

The will is present as it were in ocean depths of the soul. It surges upwards in waves. But just because we must admit that the will is at work during sleep, when the bodily part of our being is engaged in purely organic activity, neither pervaded with soul nor illumined by spirit, it follows that the will as such has to do with this organic activity. The will that is working while we are asleep has to do with organic activity, inasmuch as organic processes, life-processes take place in us. These processes are essentially connected with the will.

But during waking activity too, that is to say when our will is in flow, life-processes are taking place. The will takes effect in the processes of internal metabolism. So that here again we can point to organic activity.

Out of the ocean-depths of will in the human being, waves which come to expression in the form of feeling, surge upwards. We know that feeling is a dimly apprehended experience, that so far as actual consciousness is concerned it has really only the intensity of a dream. But at any rate it is clearer than the workings of will. It raises into greater clarity what lies in the ocean-depths of man's being. Feeling brings a certain light into, intensifies, consciousness; the two poles of the will rise into this intensified consciousness and in it both the inner will and the outer will are made manifest.

Thus we distinguish two kinds of feeling, as we did in the case of the will: an inner will in the sleeping state, an outer will in the waking state. One kind of feeling surges upwards from the will that is connected with man's sleeping condition. This kind of feeling lives itself out in the antipathies—taking the word in the widest sense—unfolded by the human being. This is feeling which tends towards antipathy. Whereas the will that is involved in outer activity and therefore leads man into the external world, manifests in all those experiences of feeling which have in them the quality of sympathy. The dreamlike experience of feeling which comes to expression in sympathies and antipathies aroused by different forms of life, by forms of art or of nature, or in sympathies and antipathies connected more with the organs and arising in us through smell or taste or through a sense of well-being or comfort—all this weaving activity belongs to the soul. Will therefore reveals itself in organic activity, feeling in activity of the soul.

If the life of soul is studied from this point of view, great illumination will be shed upon it. Waking life arouses in us sympathy with the surrounding world. Our antipathies really come from more unconscious realms. They press upwards from the sleeping will. It is as though our sympathies lie more on the surface, whereas antipathies rise up through them from unplumbed depths. Antipathies repel; antipathies draw us away from the surrounding world; we isolate ourselves, shut ourselves within our own being. Inwardly up-streaming antipathies are the antecedents of human egotism. The greater a man's egotism, the more strongly is the element of antipathy working in him. He wants to isolate himself, to feel enclosed within his own being.

In normal life we do not notice the constant interplay of sympathies and antipathies in the life of soul. But we become aware of it when our connection with the outer world becomes abnormal, and when the antipathetic element that derives from sleep also works in an abnormal way. This happens when our breathing, for example, functions irregularly during sleep and we have nightmares. In a nightmare, the soul is putting up an antipathetic defence against something that is trying to penetrate into us, preventing us from full experience of our egohood.

We are gazing here into deep secrets of human experience. If a man unfolds the element of antipathy in his life of feeling so strongly that it plays into his waking life, his whole being is permeated with antipathy which then lays hold of his astral body; his astral body is steeped in the element of antipathy; antipathy streams out from him like an abnormal aura. It may then happen that he begins to feel antipathy to people to whom his attitude was otherwise neutral, or indeed even to those he loved or knew intimately. These conditions can give rise to persecution mania in all its forms. When feelings of antipathy not to be explained by outer circumstances are experienced, this is due to the overflowing antipathies in the soul, that is to say, to an abnormal intensification of the one pole in the life of soul which forces its way upwards out of sleep. If this antipathy gets the upper hand in a human being, he becomes a world-hater, and such hatred can assume incredible proportions. The aim of all education and all social endeavor should be to prevent human beings from becoming world-haters.

But think of it.—If what surges up from the ocean-depths of man's being can promote overweening egotism when it gets the upper hand—and persecution mania in all forms is nothing but superabundant, excessive egotism—if all this is possible, what is there to be said of the inner will itself, which a beneficent creation conceals by means of sleep? We have no knowledge at all of how this inner will permeates our limbs, our entire organism. The most that can be said is that now and then, through strange dreams, something comes up into the consciousness of what lies in the will that works in our organism during sleep. What lives in this will lies—and rightly so for the ordinary consciousness—on yonder side of the Threshold. He who comes to know it, learns to know the force by which the human being can be led to uttermost evil. The deepest secret of human life is that we have the counterbalance of our organic activity in the very forces which, were they to gain control in the conscious life of a man, would make him into a criminal.

Let it be remembered that nothing in the world is in itself evil or good. What is radically evil when it breaks into our conscious life, is the counterbalance for our spent life-forces when it take effect in its right place, namely as the regulator of organic activity during the sleeping state.

If you ask: What is the nature of the forces which make compensation for the spent life-forces?—the answer is: They are the forces of evil. Evil has its mission—and it is here. If this becomes known to anyone through spiritual training, it is for him as it was for earlier seers, something of which they said: Of its essential nature it is not lawful to speak, for sinful is the mouth that speaks of it, and sinful the ear that hears of it.—Nevertheless man must realize that life is a process fraught with danger and that evil lies in its deep foundations as a necessary force.

Now these waves of the will surge even higher—into the conceptual life, the mental life. The sleeping will lights up in feeling, and when it surge upwards into mental life, it becomes still clearer but at the same time denuded qualitatively—it becomes abstract. In feeling fraught with antipathy there is still a certain lively intensity. When this element of antipathetic feeling surges into the conceptual life, it comes to expression in the form of negative judgments, judgments of rejection or denial. Everything we negate in life, everything the logician calls “negation”, negative judgment, is the uprush of antipathetic feeling, or of the inner will, into the conceptual life.

And when sympathetic feeling—which has its origin in the will of waking life, in the outer will—rises up into the conceptual life, our judgments are affirmative. We have arrived at something which, as you see, lives in us as abstraction only. In feeling, inasmuch as we unfold sympathies and antipathies, there is still intensity of life. Whereas in acts of judgment—which are a mental, conceptual activity—we are, as it were, immobile, contemplative observers of the world. We affirm and negate. We do not come to the point of actual antipathy; we merely negate. It is an abstract process. We do not rouse ourselves to antipathy: we merely say, no. In the same way we do not rouse ourselves to sympathy: we merely say, yes. We are raised above our relation to the outer world—to the level of abstract judgment.

This, then, is a purely mental, concept-forming activity, which can be called spiritual activity. But will, feeling and conceptual activity can surge even higher—into the domain of the senses. When negative judgment surges into the domain of the senses, what is the result? The condition wherein we perceive nothing. If we think of it in relation to the most obvious process of perception, we can say: It is the experience of darkness—where we see nothing. On the other hand, affirmative judgment becomes experience of light. The same could be said with regard to the experience of silence, or of tone and sound. To all the twelve senses it would be correct to apply what has here been said in connection with the experiences of light and of darkness.

And now let us ask: What, in reality, is this activity in the domain of the senses? I We have spoken of organic activity, activity of the life of soul, spiritual activity. Spiritual activity is merely a concept-forming activity but it is still our own. What takes place between the senses and the outer world is in truth no longer our own activity, for there the world is playing into us. It would be quite correct to depict the eye as an independent entity; what takes place in the eye is that the outer world penetrates into the organism as it were through a gulf. We are no longer standing in the world with our own activity, but this is divine activity. This divine activity weaves through the world surrounding us. Darkness inclines in the direction of negation, light in the direction of affirmation.

The influence of this divine activity upon man in his relationship to the world was an especially vivid experience in the wisdom of the second Post-Atlantean epoch.—God in the Light—that is to say, the Divine with a Luciferic quality; God in the Darkness—the Divine with an Ahrimanic quality.—Thus did the ancient Persians experience the world. And to them the sun was the representative of the outer world. The sun as the divine source of Light—so it was experienced in the second Post-Atlantean epoch. On the other hand in the third Post-Atlantean epoch (Egypto-Chaldean) men experienced more strongly the sphere lying between judgment and feeling. At that time they did not feel so intensely that the Divine in the outer world is experienced in light or darkness, but rather in the impact between conceptual activity and feeling. Experience of divine activity among the Egyptians and Chaldeans caused men to bring an element of antipathy into negative judgments and sympathy into affirmative judgments. And only when we are able to decipher and understand the pictorial or other records of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch shall we realize that all were created and shaped out of sympathetic affirmation or antipathetic negation. When you look at Egyptian statues, figures on tombs, and so forth, you can still feel that their forms give expression to sympathetic affirmation or antipathetic negation. It is simply not possible to create a sphinx without bringing into it sympathies and antipathies inhering in the conceptual life. Men did not experience merely light and darkness but something of the element of life that is present in sympathies and antipathies. In that epoch the sun was experienced as the divine source of Life.

And now we come to the Greco-Latin epoch when man's experience of direct communion with the outer world was largely lost. In my book Riddles of Philosophy, I have shown that although in that age man still felt his thoughts as we today feel sense-impressions, he was already approaching the condition in which we live at the present time, when owing to the development of the ego we no longer feel any really living connection with the external world, when with our ego we are practically asleep within the body, are in a state of slumber. This condition was not so pronounced in the Greeks, but to some extent it was certainly present. To understand the Greek nature we must realize that the Greek had already begun to live very intensely in his body—not as intensely as we do, but nevertheless intensely.—Not so the ancient Persians. The wise men among them did not believe that they were living enclosed within their skins but rather that they were borne on the waves of the light through the whole universe. In the Greek, this experience of cosmic life was already losing intensity, falling into slumber within the body. When we ourselves are asleep, the ego and astral body are outside the physical body; but our waking, in comparison with that of the ancient Persians, really amounts to sleep. When the Persians woke from sleep—I am speaking of course of the ancient Persians as described in my An Outline of Occult Science, it was as though the light actually penetrated into them, into their senses.

We no longer feel that at the moment of waking from sleep we summon the light into our eyes. For us the light is outside, phantomlike. Nor could the Greeks any longer see in the sun the actual source of Life; they felt that the sun was something that pervaded them inwardly. They felt the element in which the sun lives within the human being as the element of Eros—the element of Love. Thus: the sun as the divine source of Love. Eros—the sun-nature within the human being—this was what the Greek experienced. Then, from about the fourth century A.D. onwards, came the time when, fundamentally speaking, the sun was no longer regarded as anything but a physical orb in space, when the sun was darkened for man. To the ancient Persians the sun was the actual reflector of the Light weaving through space. To the Egyptians and Chaldeans the sun was the Life surging and pulsating through the universe. The Greeks felt the sun as that which infused Love into the living organism, guiding Eros through the waves of sentient existence.

This experience of the sun sank more and more deeply into man's being and gradually vanished into the ocean-depths of the soul. And it is in the ocean-depths of the soul that man bears the sun-nature today. It is beyond his reach, because the Guardian of the Threshold stands before it; it lies in the depths of being as a mystery of which the ancient teachings said: Let it not be uttered—for sinful is the mouth that speaks of it and sinful the ear that hears of it.

In the fourth century A.D. there were schools which taught that the sun-mystery must remain untold, that a civilization knowing nothing of the sun-mystery must now arise. Behind everything that takes place in the external world lie forces and powers which give guidance from the universe. One of the instruments of these guiding powers was the Roman Emperor Constantine. It was under him that Christianity assumed the form which denies the sun.

Living in that same century was one whose ardor for what he had learnt in the Mysteries as the last remnants of the ancient, instinctive wisdom, caused him to attach little importance to the development of contemporary civilization. This was Julian the Apostate. He fell by the hand of a murderer because he was intent upon passing on this ancient tradition of the threefold Mystery of the Sun. And the world would have none of it.

Today, of course, it must be realized that the old instinctive wisdom must become conscious wisdom, that what has sunk into the subconsciousness, into purely organic activity and even into sub-organic activity, must once again be lifted into the light of consciousness. We must re-discover the Sun-Mystery.

But just as when the Sun-Mystery had been lost, bitter enemies rose up against the one who wished this mystery to be proclaimed to the world, and brought about his death, so again enemies are working against the new Sun-Mysteries which must be brought to the world by spiritual science. We are living now at the other pole of historical evolution. In the fourth century A.D. there was sunset; now there must be sunrise.

In this sense Constantine and Julian the Apostate are two symbols of historical evolution. Julian the Apostate stands as it were upon the ruins of olden times, intent upon building again out of these ruins the forms of the ancient wisdom, upon preserving for humanity those ancient memorials which Christianity, assuming a material form for the first time in the days of Constantine, had destroyed. Countless treasures were destroyed, countless works of art, countless scripts and records of the ancient wisdom. Everything that could in any possible way have given men an inkling of the ancient Sun-Mystery was destroyed.

It is true that in order to reach inner freedom, it was necessary for men to pass through the stage of believing that a globe of gas is moving through universal space—but the fact is that physicists would be very astonished if they could take a journey in space; they would discover that the sun is not a globe of gas giving out light—that is nonsense—but that it is a mere reflector which cannot itself radiate light but at most throw it back. The truth is that in the spiritual sense, light streams out from Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and the Moon.

Physically it appears as though the sun gives the planets light, but in reality it is the planets that radiate light to the sun and the sun is the reflector. As such it was recognized by the wise men of ancient Persia with their instinctive wisdom, and in this sense the sun was regarded as the earthly source of Light—not indeed as the source itself, but as the reflector of the Light. Then, among the Egyptians and Chaldeans, the sun became the reflector of Life and among the Greeks, the reflector of Love.

This was the conception that Julian the Apostate wanted to preserve—and he was done away with. In order to reach freedom it was indeed necessary that men should hold for a time to the superstition of the sun as a globe of gas in space, giving out light—a superstition enunciated as a categorical truth in every book of physics today. But our task must be to penetrate to the reality.

In truth, Julian the Apostate and Constantine stand before us as two symbols ... Julian the Apostate was bent upon preserving those ancient memorials of the world which could, in a certain way, have made it possible for the true Sun-Mystery to find its way to men. Indeed during the first centuries of Christendom, Christ was still a Sun-Figure—an Apollo.

This Sun-Mystery was felt to be the greatest spiritual treasure possessed by mankind. And it was symbolized by what was known as the Palladium. It was said that the Palladium had once been in Troy and that the priests of the Mysteries there saw in it the means whereby, in sacred ritual and cult, they revealed to the people the true nature of the sun. Then the Palladium was taken to Rome, and its presence there was a secret known to the initiate in Rome. The initiated priests of the Romans, and even the first Emperors—Augustus, for example—worked in the world out of a direct consciousness that the greatest of all treasures was represented in Rome, at all events in an outer symbol, inasmuch as beneath the foundations of the most venerated Roman temple, lay the Palladium, its existence known only to those who were initiated into the deepest secrets of Roman existence and destiny. But in a spiritual sense it had become known to those whose task it was to bring Christianity to the world. And out of the knowledge that the Palladium was guarded in Rome, the early Christians made their way thither. A spiritual reality lay behind these journeys.

But when, under Constantine, Christianity was secularized, the Palladium was taken away from Rome. Constantine founded Constantinople, and he caused the Palladium to be buried in the earth under a pillar erected there by his orders. Thus it transpired that in its further development Roman Christianity was deprived of the knowledge of the Sun-Mystery by the very Emperor who established Christianity in Rome in its rigid, mechanical forms. In the secularization of Christianity brought about by Constantine, the cosmic wisdom was lost to Christianity—and this comes to expression in the removal of the Palladium from Rome to Constantinople.

In certain Slavonic regions—people always interpret things according to their own conditions—a belief reigned for centuries, lasting indeed until the beginning of the twentieth century, that in a none too distant future the Palladium will be removed from Constantinople to another place—to a Slavonic town, as the people believed. At all events the Palladium is waiting, expecting to be removed from the darkening influence shed upon it by Constantinople to that locality which, by its very nature, will bring it into complete darkness. Yes, the Palladium goes to the East, where the decadence of the ancient wisdom still survives but is passing into darkness. And in the further evolution of the world, everything depends upon whether—just as the sun is the reflector of the light bestowed upon it from the universe—the Palladium-treasure is illumined by a wisdom born from the riches of the knowledge living in the West. The Palladium, the ancient heritage brought from Troy to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, and which, as it is said, will be carried still farther into the darkness of the East—this Sun-treasure must wait until it is redeemed spiritually in the West, released from the dark shadows of a purely external knowledge of nature. Thus the task of the future is bound up with the holiest traditions of European development.

Legends are still extant, even today, among; those who are initiated into these things—often they are quite simple people going about here and there in the world. These legends tell of the removal of the Palladium, the treasure of wisdom, from Troy to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople when Roman Christianity was secularized; they tell of its future removal to the East when the East, denuded of the ancient wisdom, will have fallen into utter decadence; and they tell of the necessity for this sun-treasure to receive new light from the West.

The Sun-Mystery has disappeared into the nether regions of human existence. Through spiritual-scientific development we must find it again. The Sun-Mystery must be found again—otherwise the Palladium will vanish into the darkness of the East. It is wrongful today to utter a saying as untrue as Ex Oriente Lux. The light can no longer come from the East, for the East is in decadence. Nevertheless the East waits—for it will possess the sun-treasure, even though it be in darkness—it waits for the light of the West. But today men are groping in darkness, arranging conferences in the darkness, are looking expectantly towards—Washington! Only those “Washingtons” that speak with the tones of the spiritual world—not conferences looking for the darkness that surrounds the Palladium, for an open door for trade in China—only those conferences will bring salvation which are conducted in the West in such a way that the Palladium can be kindled once again to light. For like a fluorescent body, the Palladium, in itself, is dark; if it is suffused with light, then it becomes radiant. And so it will be with the wisdom of the East: dark in itself, it will light up, will become fluorescent when it is permeated by the wisdom of the West, by the spiritual light of the West.

But this the West does not understand. Only when the Palladium legend is brought into the clear light of consciousness, only when men can again feel true compassion for one like Julian the Apostate who felt constrained to ignore the age in which the light of freedom could germinate in the darkness, who longed to preserve the old instinctive wisdom and therefore met with his death—only when men realize that Constantine, in giving an externalized form of Christianity to the Romans, took from them the light, the wisdom, and sent Christianity into the darkness—only when men realize that the light whereby the Palladium can again be made to shine must be born out of modern nature-knowledge in the best sense—only then will an important chapter of world-history be brought to fulfillment. For only then will that which became Western when the Greeks see Troy on fire, become Western-Eastern. The light that flamed from Troy is present even to-day; it is present but it is shrouded in darkness. It must drawn forth from the darkness; the Palladium must again be illumined.

If our hearts are in the right place, knowledge of the course of history can fire us with enthusiasm; and this same enthusiasm will give us the right feeling for the impulses which spiritual science would fain impart.