The Rudolf Steiner Archive

An introductory lecture by Rudolf Steiner: “Before which forum can a decision be made regarding ‘a unified worldview?’ — An attempt at an answer to the question of ‘Truth and Science’ ”; followed by discussion.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner, as speaker: I was once inspired to pose our question “Before which forum must a unified worldview be decided?” by the earlier discussions of our association, which, after all, wants to cultivate a monistic worldview, and also by my personal involvement in the dispute over Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddle). Here in the group, the questions were often considered: What is the essence of a unified worldview, what is its value, do we actually have the right to speak of a specifically monistic one? It was emphasized once that according to the present standpoint of science we have no right to speak of unity in material respects, and on another occasion Dr. Penzig explained that in the striving after a unified world picture embracing the whole of nature and the spiritual world one could not but round off the objective picture given by the individual sciences, thus forcing the facts. Even then I noticed that the greatest advances often originated from such supposed falsifications. The Copernican system, for example, was a “falsification” of the facts available for its time, just as the Lamarck-Darwin theory of evolution is nothing more. Just as Tycho de Brahe provided the only possible world view for his time, so it is easy for the fact fanatic, who does not want to go beyond the objectively given facts with his thinking, to prove the “falsifications” that Lamarck-Haeckel's theory of evolution contains according to the current state of science. Nevertheless, I believe that, like Copernicus, Haeckel will be proved right. At the time, I strongly supported the much-debated “Welträtsel” because I admired the consistency and extreme boldness with which a mind creates and “falsifies” a world view from a one-sided point of view. Although my basic philosophical views are only opposed to his in what he fights against in them and agree with him in what he presents positively. At the same time, however, I was described as one of Haeckel's main opponents, an experience that seems symptomatic to me of our time, in that the author's world of ideas takes on a completely different image in someone else's mind. We use our terms, based on their usual position in intellectual life, to put forward ideas that mean something other than what we want to express.

In the course of these arguments about Haeckel and in the discussions within the Bund, a question has been brought to life for me that I have often asked myself: What is the relationship between truth and science? Does science contain truth? Does it contain any elements that could lead to the construction of a unified world view? Do we have the right to construct a unified world view or any world view at all on the basis of science?

This question, which has occupied people for centuries, has been closer to being solved in the past than in modern times, and has been obstructed in

way of solution by the so-called theory of knowledge has blocked itself, one must realize before which forum anything at all can be established in relation to truth and science, in relation to the truth content of science.

Nowadays, after all the developments of the 19th century, we have the idea of truth as something that must correspond to objective reality. We find ourselves in an intensive fanaticism of facts that does not allow us to go beyond mere registration. If truth is only a conceptual repetition of what exists outside of us, then, according to the perception of those who today strive for a worldview, this is also nothing more than a counter-image of facts existing outside of us, of the reality already finished in the world outside of us. If it were possible to take a photograph of the world from some corner in the most favorable perspective possible, the ideal of a worldview would be achieved. But to construct such a world view would actually be superfluous, a mere luxury of the human mind, if, like science, it were to be nothing more than a mere repetition, a kind of photographic counter-image of what is going on in the world, what is available in a completed form. The fact that the individual still forms an individual counter-image alongside science would be completely superfluous, infinitely unimportant for the whole world context. If nature has provided and developed everything for us except the final point, then what the human spirit dreams and creates does not belong to reality. For this point of view, which appears grotesquely in today's science, even in Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddle), man is nothing more than a mere speck of dust in the cosmos, differing from the worm only quantitatively. If he forms a picture of the world, he lives a life of luxury, doing something that adds not the slightest thing to the evolution of the world. Rather, he is required never to contribute anything of his own that is not found in the rest of nature, but only to register, compare, and logically combine.

We ask: Is this procedure of merely confronting objective nature logically, never adding anything beyond the current state of affairs, consistent with the course of nature's entities; is there perhaps nothing in the direction of nature's development that compels us to add anything to reality? Nature gives us the answer itself. In particular, it should give it to the evolution theorist.

Allow me to explain this to you in a concise way, assuming that nature is at the stage of its development that there were only monkeys and no humans. The monkeys would have investigated the phenomena of the world, they would have found what lies beneath them, and monkeys too. If they had taken the empirical standpoint, they would have been satisfied with the realization that the world ends with monkeys. Perhaps they would have founded a monkey ethic based on general monkey perception, so that nothing new would have been added to the world here and they would have remained at their standpoint. But from our standpoint of knowledge, we know that in the principle of development there was indeed something that led beyond the ape genus, that, because it was a productive principle, because it led beyond what was present as a completed reality, , led to the development of man, something that was not limited to the actual, which, as a real imagination, as it were, real intuition in nature, leads it beyond its individual stages and lifts it beyond the immediate present.

Man, too, as a product of evolution, as a being in nature, is there to live for evolution, not merely to look back and form a picture of evolution and regard himself as the end of the series. A Weltanschhauung that seeks to summarize the content of all his thinking and doing will therefore not only be theoretical and contemplative, but also practical and postulating. Man should therefore not only repeat nature in some way, but see if there are not forces within him that lead beyond the immediately given. He should make the development spiritually, ideally alive in himself, should seek the forces that drive the species forward, that bring about progress, not merely examine his mental powers to see if they correspond to reality. The question “Can we penetrate to the thing in itself, see into the essence of the world?” is a disaster, an obstacle for man. But when he places himself in the process of evolution, intervening in nature to advance it a step further, he comes to a sense of his exalted task, of his position within the world.

There are in fact rudiments for the formation of this superscientific standpoint, which fully recognizes science but rises above what science offers it as the lawfulness of logical thought. Maeterlinck, for example, has advanced similar views in one of his more recent books, in which he describes the marriage of the bees. One wonders: can we speak of truth in the sense of scientific truth, of agreement with the given reality, which is always in the material small print, if it is to be the content of a world view, or does it, as a world view , does it lead beyond the purely objective truth in a similar way to the poetic truth according to the view of those who understand it in the Goethean sense, as the poetic truth leads beyond the immediate naturalistic truth?

Such approaches can be found in many forms today, to the delight of those who see truth in living life, and to the horror of fact fanatics like Tycho de Brahe or Haeckel's opponents. But it does not belong in their forum. The truth, which wants to fertilize, will always be a search, will always have to “falsify” the image of the fact fanatics; but it stands infinitely above this, in that it develops something intuitive, spiritual in man, adding something new to nature, which would not be without the human spirit. Thus, what man cherishes in his dreams, what he creates in his mind, acquires more than the significance of mere luxury; in life, it becomes a cosmic truth, something that man has newly generated. Thus, on the foundation of science, he rises to productive work that flows freely from his soul as original intuition. At the highest level of development, he has a task that no other being in the world has; he adds something that would not exist forever without him.

These views may be abhorrent to the pure scientist, but I believe it is a correct insight that man has the right to be productive in his world view, a feeling that was different times, when we had not yet been blinded by a fanatical belief in facts and by epistemology, times that were convinced from the outset of the cosmic character of this addition.

Let me conclude with the words of Angelus Silesius, which express the realization of the unique significance of the human spirit in the world:

Without me, God could not create a single little worm; if I became nothing, it would have to break into nothingness.

Schäfer, former spokesperson for the Free Religious and Humanist Community in Berlin, objects to the term “falsification” for Copernicus' error. If he had assumed a circular motion instead of an elliptical one, then that would have been an inadequate conception, which, like many similar ones, has been clarified by the advancing human spirit, as it will always be the fate of man to have to stop in front of imperfections of his conceptions, which will only be resolved later.

The speaker would have preferred to have seen the topic formulated as follows: “By what forum, by what court can a judgment be passed on a Weltanschhauung, on truth and untruth, and thus on its right and wrong?”

This forum can only be the personality, its sovereignty. From this position then flows the feeling of responsibility.

Dr. Stern: “An important basis for our discussion is the question as to whether a world view, that is, a general philosophical view of the true nature of the world and of all that exists, is possible at all. This question has been answered very differently. While on the one hand it is considered unobjectionable to create a dogmatic world view based on experience, another opinion, to which I subscribe, is critical positivism, which, starting from scientific knowledge, does not stop at the individual fact, but still does not consider it possible to gain a true picture of the cosmos.

To justify the dogmatic method, reference is made to the metaphysical drive that undoubtedly exists in man, even in the child who breaks the toy in order to get to the bottom of the matter.

In the formation of metaphysical systems to satisfy this urge, however, two psychological errors have crept in: Greek philosophy singled out one of the various parts of the universe and made it the subject, the true essence of nature. So Thales the water. In more recent times, people have fallen back on the idea of considering various psychological abilities of human nature individually and, fantastically magnified, of imposing them on nature as an entity. Thus Hegel makes reason the world principle, Schopenhauer blind will. Lotze assumes a comprehensive consciousness that mediates all interaction. Thus philosophy has happily returned to where it started, in hylozoism.

I consider it impossible to find a general, true and correct worldview, on the one hand because of the subjective nature of the human mind, which sees everything through subjective glasses and, according to Kant, can never recognize the thing in itself, and on the other hand for the objective reason that all our research covers only such a small part of the universe and it is generally impossible that such a large part of what is happening will ever enter into the circle of our experience that we can draw universally valid conclusions about the whole world from it.

Benedikt Lachmann: “Dr. Steiner seems to me to be positing a contradiction between human beings and nature. The essence of the human being, like that of every other form of existence, can be dissolved into a play of forces, of movement and resistance, that fight with each other in vain. It cannot be a matter for human beings to rise above these forces, but rather they must seek to engage with them as best they can.

Wolfgang Kirchbach: “Dr. Steiner said that it is a danger, indeed a necessity of the human spirit, to arrive at a falsification if it does not want to content itself with a simple image, an imitation of reality. In contrast to this, Baco of Verulam believed that he could build a correct world view based solely on the perceptionibus sensuum, and he rejected the Copernican system because it contradicted his conception of the perceptiones.

When determining the truth, it depends on the knowledge that man has of his powers and abilities, which are given to him to judge reality. This includes, for example, mathematical judgment, which corrects perceptions. One can only speak of falsification in the sense that man unilaterally renounces one or the other ability. There have also been minds that thought in full possession of all their mental abilities at a certain level of maturity, which we call reason. When Mr. Schäfer says that the forum of a worldview is the sovereignty of my personality, he certainly meant that this forum is the total possession of the mental powers of my personality, and we can agree on the name reason.

The rational grasp of truth demands that every judgment be reconciled with reality for every thought, in science as well as in world view, and requires observation, perception, correction of perception, to find the concept, the expression that expresses the greatest sum of known facts according to the respective state of knowledge, that expresses the greatest concordance of our judgments with reality.

This is the only way to make research and imagination productive, to protect oneself from error, which is refuted by reality, without content and unproductive. Only in this way is it possible to add something productively to nature. Even if the poet gives us a view of the world, we think it better that he creates realistic figures in which a social or other general law can be observed in his work. His work is also only a reflection of reality, but the act of finding the real inner symbol is an eminently productive activity, just as in science the act of finding the comprehensive, fruitful generic term from the sum of the opposing and restrictive data.

It does, however, require a productive imagination, but this also needs a rational regulator, a restriction of fantasy through reality.

This method has added something to the world by creating new organs. Through methodical and reasonable observation, Kant has added a completely new element to what we commonly call nature in the moral realm, the world of sensation and feelings of pleasure, which extends far beyond empirical nature: the categorical imperative.

Dr. Steiner: “I must confess that the attacks have not touched on what I have said today at all. I did not speak of a contradiction between humanity and nature. I was speaking rather from the standpoint of the most consistent point of view in the theory of evolution, that I regard all stages of nature, from the lowest to the highest stirrings of the spirit, as unified, and only appearing in different forms. But an amoeba is not a human being, and it is not a matter of blurring all distinctions. But if I say that in nature everything is only force, resistance, motion, then it is too reminiscent of the sentence: All cats are gray at night. It is not possible to get to the bottom of the world in the twinkling of an eye. Only when I have distinguished things can I look for a unifying, connecting principle. In the sense of the connecting principle of development, I have spoken of the task of man as one within nature, given by the facts of development.

I fully agree that we must adhere to reality if we want to be productive, and that we must correct our imagination in line with it. I only pointed out that efforts to present a world view that is only a copy of reality, as Büchner wants, have not yet met these requirements, and that, for example, this too is forced to do violence to the facts. It is not the intention that is important here, but the result. One behaves as if one wanted to give a picture of reality, but cannot. My principle is therefore not a theoretical, but a practical going beyond reality in the sense in which I see it in the principle of development, where creatures go beyond their own kind. This aspect of the problem has not been touched upon in the discussion.

I did not use the word falsification in the sense of the imperfection of a presentation that will only be clarified later, but rather meant that researchers are always forced into deliberately false representation for the sake of the system when they seek comprehensive unity, and therefore asked whether what we are entitled to call reality in the highest sense at all coincides with what the naturalist thinks of as reality. When Haeckel illustrates three stages of embryonic development with the same stereotype, he is forced to falsify in order to be able to provide evidence according to the scientific method. I mean that such forgers are nevertheless right, as Haeckel is in relation to his opponents who cling to the purely factual nature of the scientific method, because they intuitively see beyond the individual facts, not in a fanciful way.

But when Dr. Stern rejects the possibility of a world picture, of an overall view in principle, and in doing so draws on the diversity of philosophical systems to support his view, it is a fable convenue based on incomplete ideas of the individual systems. The most significant attempts at truth that have been made, from Vedanta philosophy through Greek to German, are approximations to the truth in varying degrees.

The forum before which the legitimacy of one or the other view is decided can only be the forum of the human being, his sovereign personality, as I agree with Dr. Schäfer. This sentence seems to me to be a truly real one, which has been formed not out of theoretical fantasies but out of the experience of men who have worked practically. But just as it is true that the personality is the ultimate forum, so it is certainly true that then the personality must always feel the responsibility of this position and the duty to constantly develop, to educate the depths of the personality. The child cannot be a forum in the same way as someone who is at the height of knowledge. The question therefore arises: Where in us humans lies the potential for development, the productive element? What in us corresponds to that which nature drives forward, which allowed apes to leave their species and become human?

If I regard man as a product of evolution, then I can indeed see him as the highest possible forum. But I also have the obligation to constantly call the highest human in me into existence and have no right in any moment of my life to recognize myself as the final and absolute forum, but I can, as I am in development, give myself up to the expectation that in every moment of my existence a higher point of knowledge than I now have can arise. The further development of the personality must be based on science, but it must also go beyond it, as art and poetry do. Just as art and poetry cannot be reduced to blind phantasms, so, when people control their personality by means of the principle of development, however far they go beyond objective nature, agreement will arise in the most diverse people, as the agreement of philosophical systems of all times shows.

The solution to the question “To what extent does science contain truth? Can it alone lead to truth?” lies in this sovereign meaning of human personality.

The world, especially for science, is in many respects dualistically constructed. Evolution is only possible because nature has prepared the future in it in a twofold way. Nature presents itself to man as an apparent, seemingly irreconcilable contradiction that cannot be resolved by science, as force, matter, and so on.

This is where the significance of human personality comes in. Only the life activity of man can be unifying, monistic. It consists in dissolving these apparent contradictions into a higher, productively generated view of life, in the life of development, in the uniting of contradictions, in living action.

Therefore, the question of the validity of the world view is to be decided before the forum of life, not before the forum of knowledge.

The first thing the soul needs to get to know its own nature scientifically, not just by faith, is a sharp concentration of thought that appeals not only to ordinary thinking but also to the application of inner willpower in imagining and thinking. The thoughts that penetrate us from the external sense world cannot help us with this. If we seek the immortality of the soul, we must think differently. Outwardly these thoughts resemble those mental images, those inner experiences that are destined to be forgotten. We can see this in the experience of 'dreaming'. Why? Because the dream engages the physical body in a much less intense way and thus creates less opportunity to feel and experience the dream as reality. It is the same with our free thoughts, which we let pass through the soul; we call them musings and quickly forget them. But the more one trains oneself to unfold the power of retaining freely formed thoughts, as otherwise only experiences supported by memory, the more one approaches the concentration of thoughts. Thoughts as images of external reality are least suitable for this. In the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have set forth thoughts that are suitable for concentration.

If one wishes to hold fast to such freely-generated thought-images, one must exert a stronger will than in ordinary life. The experiences of everyday life are so coarse that they cannot serve as a basis for comparison. What spiritual science reveals as immortal is fundamentally different in its meaning from what we feel and want in everyday life. Man passes by heedlessly, all the more heedlessly because he is inclined not to ascribe reality to that which confronts him as the being within himself, which finds the way through birth and death.

It is easy to see that this inner being exists, but it is not easy to ascribe the most intense reality to it. One must speak again and again about immortality from different points of view, because only when one has characterized it from the most diverse points of view is it possible to gain a true idea of it. The reality of immortality must be grasped by soul forces that are brought forth from within. Now you might say that I maintain that only subjectively something can be achieved! — The beginning of spiritual research is indeed subjective: an inner overcoming, a working one's way up from darkness to light. This is certainly subjective, because most people lack the patience to go far enough with spiritual research and to develop themselves out of the most personal of personal realms. It is precisely through this inner struggle that the soul is driven to work itself out of this realm; then it can enter into a world that is revealed to it. But the path from subjective to objective spiritual research is an intimate one, which makes it necessary for the human being to acquire soul habits within himself that otherwise do not occur in everyday life. We have to develop little willpower in our everyday life to hold on to it, but the other requires a strong tensioning of the soul's inner powers. They have to be drawn from the deeper soul life. These are strong inner energies that otherwise remain untrained in everyday life. People who need the support of sensory experience soon become exhausted and fall into a state not unlike that of falling asleep. When a person has developed thinking united with the will over a long period of time, when they have strengthened their inner life of imagination to such an extent that they are completely absorbed in it, when the rest of the soul life sinks away, the world flows away on all sides, the soul becomes completely one with what it has attained in a healthy way through practice: only then does man realize what the power of thought is, and how it must be supported by strong will if it is to rule freely in the inner life. Then, after months and years of practice, certain experiences begin to occur. At first, he succeeds in concentrating more and more brightly, clearly and intensely. He notices that the thought-experience grows ever stronger, and he feels that his whole consciousness is heightened as it merges with the thought.

Then comes a critical moment when he has arrived at the experience of the full strength of the thought. The thought fragments and dissolves in the soul, darkens and ceases to be present for us. We feel our whole being going with the thought. This is not easy. This experience shakes up all the human soul forces, calling into question everything one has previously held to be valuable. One resists coming to terms with this experience. Human egoism does not allow the forces associated with the depths of the soul to enter into consciousness. If we do not exert all our willpower, we will not be able to do so. In the subconscious, we fear that something much worse could happen to us than physical “death”. The materialist says: compared to physical death, the experience would not be so bad after all! But it does not enter into ordinary consciousness in this way; it takes hold as an impulse of an elevated consciousness compared to the ordinary life of the soul. It is not fear of the destruction of the body, but of the outpouring of one's own being into the cosmos. These are unspeakable feelings, yet they can be called feelings of fear. If one overcomes them, then an experience comes that could be described as follows: By developing these forces, you pull something out of the body. This seems particularly dangerous. It is a feeling as if something were being pulled out of us, as if it remained in us and yet had to be pulled out. There is a clear awareness that something else must be pulled out, that it is not possible with thought concentration alone, that this only pulls out a part of us.

If we want to understand how a person arrives at these descriptions, we must start from everyday experiences. The person must enter into a new relationship with themselves, develop a much more precise self-knowledge. In ordinary life, nothing is as questionable as a person's relationship with themselves, the opinion they have of themselves. How inadequate man's self-knowledge is can be seen in numerous examples, such as in the story of the philosopher Mach: when he got on a bus and saw his face in a mirror, he wondered what kind of ugly schoolmaster it was, until he realized that he was seeing himself.

It is easy to laugh at such things, but they are deeply indicative of man's questionable relationship to himself. Man must seek to come into a relationship of self-knowledge with himself. He has accumulated the forces that prevent him from detaching himself from what is connected with his inner life throughout his entire life. But this must be added to the concentration of thought: that we gain a completely different relationship to what constitutes our destiny. In everyday life we see fate approaching us. It strikes us as sympathetic and antipathetic coincidences; we regard what happens to us as something external. Even ordinary reflection can teach us that so-called coincidences are not so external. If we look at what we are at any given time in our lives, such a look will be able to tell us, if we do not want to close ourselves off from real knowledge of human nature: that we would not be able to do this or that if this or that had not happened to us eighteen or twenty years ago.

We see how the whole bundle of our talents, gifts and habits of soul life grows out of our destiny. We look at ourselves concretely as a fifty-year-old person and try to follow the whole tangle of experiences of destiny. If one is serious about this, which does not happen too often, then one must say to oneself: Destiny is not external; I am in it, my I is in it, I go along with my consciousness and pour myself out into the stream of my destiny. — This must become a method, it must be added to what has been achieved through concentration of thought. We are within ourselves in our everyday thoughts; through thought concentration we go out of ourselves and believe we are losing ourselves in it. The reverse process occurs when we identify with fate: we go into something that flows to us in the outer stream; we grow together with something that we believed was outside us. What I believed to be experiencing as external fate, I was already in it; I brought it about myself. When such considerations have become habitual, we come out of ourselves again, draw our soul after us; a very hidden inner man is drawn out of us. In that in which we know ourselves to be living, we look as we usually look at tables and chairs in the outer life. In this way, we have two means of experimenting here that we would otherwise use in a physics laboratory or in a clinic; but these are not external experiments, but rather activities that relate to inner soul experiences.

Anthroposophical spiritual science does not speak in a general, abstract way about the fact that one can separate from the body, but speaks experimentally, as one speaks of the fact that oxygen can be separated from hydrogen by showing that oxygen is in the water. In the laboratory we can be relatively indifferent to the things we are dealing with, but it is not the same with the tragedies of the soul, with the struggles, with the inner disappointments when we are on shaky ground or have lost our footing. This is often dreadful, often blissful. Then, when the inner soul is separated from the body, it knows that what is now outside of it contains all the forces that begin with birth and are given back to the earth with death. It has grasped the eternal core of the soul at the same time as the destiny of man. She knows that what separates from the physical body every night is this eternal soul core, which just does not perceive itself in ordinary life because it does not have the powers to do so. At the same time, she has grasped what goes through birth and death and has united it with destiny, with what was given in the spiritual world and then flows through the forces of heredity through father and mother and through the formative forces into the physical body, what has been prepared in the spiritual world for new bodily life. The immortal life core, which is otherwise imperceptible, becomes more and more concrete and alive. In everyday life, one works all this into the life core, but continually darkens the formative forces if they remain the formative forces of the body and cannot be used as powers of knowledge. The body is not their cause, but their effect, which has descended from the spiritual worlds. It bears within itself the character of previous earthly lives. This is how it is now because it is not the first time that one has lived in the physical body.

Spiritual research does not pursue the eternal essence through abstract theories, but through a spiritual experimental method, which, from one earthly life to the next, is subject to fate. It will take a long time before a larger number of people will take part in spiritual science, but it will become a truly real part of human spiritual culture and will intervene in human life and in what moral impulses are, in the life of consciousness in one's own being. Then spiritual science will intervene when the prejudices that now still seem comprehensible will have been overcome. They will be overcome as radically as the former prejudices against science. People believed that what they dreamt up was reality, and they called it an error. They called Copernicus a fool because he said that the Earth revolved around the Sun, whereas common sense told them that the Earth stood still. Today, the five senses do not want to believe that by grasping the heightened thinking, one can draw out a piece of the inner man and draw the other piece by entering into destiny. Humanity will have to learn to no longer trust the senses. There is a stronger power of holding for true than relying on the five senses and the mind. This power is connected with all impulses of human wisdom progress. One must develop trust in this by kindling a strong moral power in the soul. When man appeals to the powers of realization in himself, he will carry himself courageously through the world, not merely trusting in what he can experience through the outer five senses. Today, we have reached the point in the development of humanity where science must become what it could not become before. What the spiritual researcher distills out was always in man: he does not create it, he only calls it into spiritual knowledge.

An obvious objection, which comes from mental laziness, is: Why do we care about the eternal soul core at all? He is eternal, we will live in it again. — That is too cheap a thought. Two things must be said against it. Firstly, it is not only important to man's moral sense that he knows this or that, but that the process of development on earth progresses from natural science to spiritual truths, which were first unknown and are now being brought out. All human progress is based on this. Those who do not want to take part in this should admit that they are indifferent. This point is important, but more abstract. Secondly, however, there is a very concrete progress. In ancient times, people on earth were essentially not the same as they are today; their souls were different from today's. We find there a clairvoyant consciousness originating from primeval times, from ancient epochs, in connection with the divine-spiritual forces of the world. Today, man has lost this; but he is taking his independence out of this earthly world to which he has connected himself. Now that man has attained the stage of detachment from earthly thinking, he must again be seized by spiritual life, must again enter through spiritual science. Today, however, we can say that we still have so much inherited strength that the soul's life after death cannot be stopped. But man must develop in such a way that he does not go through life between death and a new birth in dullness, but in clear experience. Man became free by breaking the thread that connected him to the spiritual world. Now he must tie it again. From the present time on, there is more and more necessity to recognize spiritual life. Therefore, where spiritual life has become more intense in recent times, repeated earthly life as a teaching occurs. For example, in the eighteenth century, in Lessing's 'Education of the Human Race', which he left behind as a testament to humanity, the basic idea of repeated earthly lives and a purely spiritual life in between occurs. There are those who say that Lessing had grown old and weak and that is why he had this complicated idea.

What was established by a mind like Lessing's forms a kind of predisposition that must be further developed in the German national soul, in order to flow into the stream of spiritual scientific research, in order to become real science, as was indicated today. This lies deeply as a predisposition in what Fichte felt to be the original source of German uniqueness. Fichte's idea is a wonderful one, in the sense that Not only when we have passed through death do we become immortal; already in the body we can perceive what is immortal and forms the body. Only in grasping this actual immortal do I recognize the meaning of life, for the sake of which everything in this mortal body may live itself out. What spiritual research is to carry out scientifically is present here as a predisposition. Fichte expresses it: if only the right powers are released, then the immortal can be grasped. Spiritual science is particularly present in the personalities of spiritual striving, which I characterized yesterday.

We encounter glimpses of it in the most diverse places, but here it is a straight line from German spiritual striving to what must develop into spiritual science. In the stream of Central European spiritual life, consciousness in grasping the spiritual core has never been completely lost. I will now draw attention to just one example of this consciousness, which only wanted to be given in a delicate way. Herman Grimm, an art lover and one of the intellectual giants of the second half of the nineteenth century, who stood firmly on the ground of Schiller's and Goethe's world view, expressed it in his novella “The Songstress”. In the 1860s, the time had not yet come for spiritual science, but the people who were immersed in it at that time felt the need to describe not only the sensory world but also the other part of the world. They knew that if you want to describe true reality, it is not enough to describe the sensual world. Take, for example, a horseshoe that has become magnetized, which still looks like an ordinary horseshoe. Man belongs to the spiritual world with his spiritual part, just as he belongs to the world of sense with his physical part. Out of the deepening of German idealism, these people knew how to develop a genuine spiritual worldview. They did this by objectively and impartially observing German intellectual life, which has a mission that should be fulfilled from within, out of an idealistic appreciation of intellectual life: to penetrate to the spirit as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel did, but to do so by still perceiving the world with the real spiritual eyes and ears that Goethe spoke of.

Where the view is directed towards German spiritual research, especially towards Goethe, a kind of hope for humanity is connected with the development of this spiritual life. If one reads between the lines of German spiritual life, one can often find a concise expression of how the world can come to an understanding of spiritual life precisely through the development of the German being. There is no need to be seized by pride, but one can feel how what the Goethe-Schiller era produced can be defended in Central Europe today so that it can develop.

Based on this fateful sense of time, I would like to present two images: We learned in the first days of August 1914 how the news of the coming event was received in the various countries of Europe. First in Germany. One stands before the great event – the Reichstag is convening – I do not want to go into day-to-day politics, not into what is related to the military events – the representatives of the various party directions stand there – and remain silent. That is a powerful impression, as if it were the herald of what was to come, before a great coming truth.

With a kind of inner weeping, one looks at the other picture, at the meeting of the State Duma. There was no silence: they all spoke – so that one gets the impression that it was formally convened, like a historical theater performance. The frenzy of false enthusiasm was spoken by many, in contrast to the silence further west. If you want to explore history, what runs through humanity, you will have to look at such moods. In this silence lies the confidence that trust can be placed in spiritual power, in spiritual truth, that it must be well guarded, that it must be defended – a confidence that carries the soul beyond death and destiny.

Emerson wants to describe Goethe and points out what Goethe culture means for humanity. Referring to him, he says: “The world is young. Great men of the past show us the way with the words: ‘We must write scriptures that bear witness to the eternal. It must not be that a lie remains for us.’ Emerson means that lie that there is no spirit behind the external world.

A bright solar horizon must develop out of the twilight of current events, heralding a lasting peace for the good of humanity. All that those who make the sacrifice of their lives have to endure in body and soul must become a warning for those who remain behind. The unspent forces of those who must leave their young lives before their time will help: the law of conservation of forces also applies in the spiritual world. In the future, we will know that this world is connected to the spiritual world. These unspent forces will be real forces for people who will have an awareness of the spiritual world.

The spirit world will remain closed to you,
unless you recognize within yourself
the spirit that shines in the soul
and can become a bearer of light for you
in the depths and heights of the world.

On several Mondays here in the Besant-Zweige, an attempt was made to characterize the occult basis of Germanic myths, and on the last Monday an expansion of the entire mythical material was begun, as it extends in a broad spiritual belt from Persia through the East of Europe and through Europe itself. It might not be appropriate today to continue exactly there, because many of our friends who are present today were not present then. And so we will try to make today's lecture more independent; we will try to present some of the circle of European myths in general, without the prerequisites of the last two lectures. This means, of course, that today we have to treat some things very aphoristically in our consideration.

I would like to remind you that the number twelve of the higher gods, which is only the double number six, as we found it last time in the Amshaspands, also recurs in the Germanic number of gods, the number of gods whose meaning we learned eight days ago. Today we want to highlight only a few gods and only a few of their attributes to show the occult foundations of such gods and such divine qualities. We have recognized the relationship between Germanic mythology and Persian mythology. We have rediscovered how the same thing is presented in the mythology that originated in Asia as in the Central European myths. In the forces of the six Amshaspands, we recognized the twelve pairs of nerves that emanate from our head, and in the twenty-eight Izards, we recognized the forces that emanate from our spine.

You all know that Wotan-Odin belongs to this Germanic circle of gods as a kind of supreme god; furthermore, we have shown Thor and his daughter, the Truth, in their occult significance; and we have touched on Tyr, who was a kind of slaying deity, a god of war, but a strange god of war, and in some ways corresponds to the more southern Mars or Ares; it corresponds to him to the extent that Tuesday, as Tyrstag or Tiustag, is also dedicated to this god. But it is strange that we are told of other spiritual beings that play a certain role in the events that take place between the Germanic gods, and there a remarkable god, or let us say a family of gods, that of Loki, is brought into a certain relationship with Tyr. You know – and the occult basis has been explained to the members of the Besant Branch – that this Loki, who stands alongside the other Nordic gods, is descended from those fire powers whose southern origin we have characterized. While the Nordic gods are descended from the union of the fire element from the south and the cold, misty element from the north, in Loki we have an older god or at least an offshoot of an older deity, a kind of fire god. We may therefore say that Loki, who develops so much enmity towards the other gods, belongs to an older race of spiritual beings who had to cede their rule for a while to those to whom Wotan, Tyr and Thor belong. Therefore, he has declared war on them and lives in conflict with the Aesir, with those gods who only came to power when the Atlantean human race developed out of the earlier conditions and evolved into the post-Atlantean human race; that is when the Aesir became important. The spiritual beings to which Loki belongs come from much earlier times. Among others, this Loki has three offspring of a very strange kind from his wife Angrboda, who came from the race of giants: the Fenris wolf, the Midgard snake and Hel, the goddess of the underworld. These three beings, which can be traced back to earlier times, must first be tamed by the new gods, the Aesir, so that the new states of consciousness can develop in humanity. The Midgard Serpent is tamed by being forced down into the sea and wrapped around the continents, so that it bites its own tail and is powerless for the time during which the new gods, the Aesir, rule, having replaced the earlier gods. The Fenris wolf is tamed and bound by all sorts of means, but it is precisely this that gives rise to a certain relationship between the god Tyr, the imperious god of war or battle, and his family and Loki. The god Tyr has to stick his hand into the jaws of the Fenris wolf in order to be allowed to bind himself, and thereby loses his right hand. This is a very remarkable feature of Germanic mythology, which can only be understood from the occult point of view. We will visit this hand of Tyr later and see where it actually is. Hel, however, was banished to the underworld of Niflheim or Mistheim, where all those who did not fall on the battlefield had to come to her. Those who fell on the battlefield were reunited with the family of the gods; the Valkyrie appeared to them at death and took them up to the Aesir themselves. They died honorably. Those who have died the so-called death on the straw, who have fallen victim to an illness or old age, have a different fate; they must go down into the realm of Hel, where sorrow, deprivation, hunger and torment prevail. The dead who died on the straw were of no use to the realm of the Aesir, they were banished to Hel so that there would be peace during the reign of the Aesir. In this way, the children of Loki were shut out from the rule of the Aesir. Loki himself, however, was tricked and captured by the gods when he had transformed himself into a salmon. He was chained to three rock slabs and suffered great torment.

All these sagas take on a special coloration due to the fact that a remarkable tragic trait, which we have spoken about several times, is poured over all this divine existence of the Aesir. Those who have heard the lectures on Norse mythology know that this tragic trait was very much in evidence in the initiation sites of the Nordic mysteries. It was also transplanted into the myths of the gods. The Nordic gods, the Aesir, live in constant fear of their destruction, for they know that their realm will one day come to an end. We are confronted with a tragic element that tells us why this realm will come to an end. This tragic feature is that since the beginning of war and discord on earth, the seeds have been sown for what will one day be the great devastating world conflagration, when everything that the gods once bound will break free, when the Fenris wolf, the Midgard serpent and Loki himself will be freed and prepare the downfall of the Aesir. A particularly outstanding spirit from the realm of fire will come, Sutur, and the Aesir will have to yield to his power. The twilight of the gods will have come, and out of the world-fire of the old the new world will arise. Again, there is a strange feature which the saga tells us: when the Fenris wolf is released, it will open its jaws so wide that the upper jaw will reach up to the sky and the lower jaw will sink into the earth; its breath will burn up the whole world.

You all know this mythology. And now let us look at the occult basis of the traits we have just mentioned. In doing so, we will once again recall the fact that the Aesir, the gods to whom Wotan, Tyr and Thor belong, have taken up their rule, have become world-ruling powers, after man in the late Atlantean period made the transition from an earlier state of clairvoyant consciousness, where he could still see into the spiritual world, to the post-Atlantic state, where he was only in the sensory world, in the world of externally, physically visible facts. We know that the first little group of people formed at the exact point on the Earth where warmth and cold met. We know that the ancient Atlantis was a land where the air was still completely filled with masses of haze and fog, with widespread water vapors. If we were to research the early times of Atlantis, we would recognize two regions: dense, cooler water vapors in the north and hot water vapors rising from the south. The Atlanteans had a very special memory of this time. This is evident in the part of the saga that alludes to the clash between the cold Nordic and the hot southern. As I have shown, this equalization of forces made it possible for that atmosphere to arise from which emerged what became the post-Atlantean spirituality. What the ancient Atlanteans had, spiritual perception, has departed from human beings; it has come to the gods. The gods, of course, have preserved the old clairvoyance, but they can only speak to people from the outside and influence them because people themselves no longer had clairvoyance. What people used to have themselves, clairvoyance, they now only attributed to the gods, who live far from them, above them.

Let us now recall how the heavy masses of fog from ancient Atlantis gradually descended, how Atlantis was flooded by great masses of water, and how gradually the physical emerged from the purifying air. Let us remember how that came into being which had never existed before, which could only come into being when the downpours ceased and the air gradually cleared: the rainbow arose. The rainbow was a phenomenon that people saw for the first time with the sinking of Atlantis. As the old clairvoyance of men vanished, they saw the rainbow rising for the first time, which had to form the bridge between them and the gods. That is the bridge Bifröst. All this men really saw, and the sagas only relate what they saw.

What have people lost as a result of this discovery? They have lost what they used to receive from the surrounding waters of wisdom. When the waters still filled the air, they whispered wisdom to people. The trickling of the springs, the rustling of the wind, the lapping of the waves – all this whispered wisdom to them. All this was understood by men; all was a language of spiritual beings, and this was now sunk down into the sea, into the rivers. This had been a different spiritual world from the world of the Aesir; it was a world which still contained within itself the last remnants of man's origin from the spiritual. All that had filled the air had sunk down into the sea. Wisdom had sunk down with the waters. This is a real fact. In the waters that had wrapped themselves around the continents and touched each other, the ancient ancestors of the Central European population saw the Midgard Serpent. It preserved the old wisdom that had sunk down, that people had possessed in the past and that they could no longer possess now. The power of clairvoyance had to disappear from the human race. The gods could never have ruled from without as long as the humans themselves were still clairvoyant. The Midgard Serpent, a daughter of the fire powers, had to be cast down into the sea.

The last descendant of these fire powers was Loki. Loki was the enemy of the gods. He had given people what was left of their clairvoyance: the Midgard Serpent, which was now bound. But Loki had given people something else, something else came from the old original fire beginning of the human race in the land of the Lemurians, which, however, could only develop in the land of the Atlanteans. What had gradually developed there as people developed from clairvoyance to reason? Language! We have often spoken about this. While man gradually learned to walk upright - that was in the Atlantean time - language also developed, little by little it developed, so that it was only finished at the end of the Atlantean time. When the Atlanteans, with their well-developed minds, moved east, language was already developed. But as long as it was the language of the Atlanteans, it was a unified language that was based on the unified sounds of nature itself. It was an imitation of what the Atlanteans had heard during their periods of clairvoyance and clairaudience, from the trickling springs, the roaring winds, the rustling of the trees, the rolling of the thunder, the lapping of the waves. They translated these sounds into their language, and that was the common language of the Atlanteans. It was only in the post-Atlantean period that what one might call the difference between the individual languages and idioms, the elements of the different languages, developed and became structured. The old Atlantean language, which was taken from the elements of nature, from those forces with which Loki is so intimately interwoven, had to take on different forms when the Aesir became rulers and men divided into nations and tribes. The separation of men into nations and the struggle of the individual nations among themselves led to what is called war. What was this war waged for? Why did it come? Through speech, man was given something for his development, through which he can turn his innermost feelings outward. From the occult point of view, it is one of the most important advances in evolution when the soul comes to utter its own pains, joys and desires in sounds. Language, when articulated from within, when it makes the soul resound, is something that gives man a mighty power. This power had to be suppressed by the Aesir, otherwise they could not have ruled. How did the Aesir suppress the old unified language? They did so by splitting people into different tribes and thus into different tongues. The undivided nature of the language was a mighty power – the Fenris wolf. To prevent this power from asserting itself on the stage of the Aesir, the Aesir had to tame the Fenris wolf, that is, they had to dismember the language, they had to make the language different so that they could rule over men. In doing so, they created war. War is connected with this diversity of languages. But one thing was necessary for the Aesir to become rulers: the god of war had to stick his hand into the jaws of the Fenris wolf, and he had to leave his hand there. The hand of Tyr, the god of war, is stuck as a tongue in the jaws of the Fenris wolf. It is the human tongue that causes the different languages. The human tongue had to form in such a way that the old unity of language was lost. It is the individualization of language that is indicated in this profound myth of the Fenris wolf. In the myth, every organ is associated in some way with the influences of the gods from without. Here you have the organ of the tongue and the way in which the progressive organic development of man is expressed in images.

Something else occurred when the Atlanteans were gradually being prepared for the later post-Atlantean epoch. The individual states of consciousness of man were quite different at the time of ancient Atlantis than they are today. We have already mentioned that a certain degree of clairvoyance still existed; but this meant that the Atlanteans did not know the difference between the state of sleep and the state of waking as we know it today. The great difference between the state of sleep and the state of waking only arose in the post-Atlantean period. Of course, it was slowly preparing itself, but the preparation only gave the basis for what the change between waking and sleeping meant in the post-Atlantean period.

The old Atlantean dreamed during the day and dreamed at night. The dreams of the night corresponded more to reality than the dreams of today's man. And the dreams of the day were a real perception of the spiritual world that lived around the Atlantean people, especially in the early days of Atlantis. But it was only with the onset of this sharp change between the waking state of consciousness and the completely unconscious state of sleep that what is connected with the relationship of the astral body to the other bodies actually gained its full significance. Human illnesses in their present form only gained their significance in the post-Atlantic period. In the first Atlantic period, these illnesses did not yet exist; then, little by little, the illnesses that people got got worse and worse. You all know the healing influence of the astral body when it is outside the physical body during sleep. During the Atlantean period, the astral body was no longer completely outside the physical body, but it was still more outside than in the case of present-day man, and therefore it was still able to exert its healing influence. It was precisely through the penetration of the astral body into the etheric body and the physical body that completely new and different conditions arose between the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, and this is how the diseases we know today were created. The diseases only gained their significance when the astral body could no longer work on the physical body even during the day.

This is also expressed in the myth. Only those who fall on the battlefield die in such a way that they do not fall prey to the powers of the underworld; they still belong to the higher powers, and may go up to the gods in Valhalla. But the others, who succumb to the forces of disease, must go down to Hel, which is black on one side and white on the other, clearly expressing the change between the states of consciousness of day and night. The Aesir save themselves by taking up only those who, through death on the battlefield, can unite with the astral world, while the others must go down to Hel, who leads them into her realms. This is a profound feature of Norse saga, and this feature, too, is thoroughly based on fact.

Now all legends that are based on occultism, and all really great legends have emerged from the secret schools, always contain prophecy. Here, too, we have a reference to a future state in the development of humanity and the earth. Man will only be afflicted with seeing only the external sense world for a time. But he will ascend again to the perception that he originally had. In the distant past he was clairvoyant, but he had to descend to physical perception in order to become self-aware, and he will ascend again to clairvoyant vision. This coincides remarkably with the entire constitution of the human being. You know, at least those of you who have followed the earlier lectures, that the legend ascribes the gift of the nervous system, the ability to perceive external things as they are perceived by today's human beings, to the influx of divine powers through the gates of the senses. But you now have a very remarkable difference in your senses, which is magnificently reflected in the legend. If you take the sense of hearing: its tool is a single organ, it is localized in the ear; if you take the sense of sight: its tool, its organ is localized in the eye; if you take the sense of smell: its tool is localized in the mucous membranes of the nose; taste is localized in the tongue and palate. But now let us take the sense of feeling, the sense of warmth; where is it localized? It extends over the whole body. It differs quite essentially from the other localized senses. The organ by which man perceives warmth is curiously distinct from the other sense organs.

Let us take this sense of the saying that the forces of the gods enter through the individual human sense organs. We must say to ourselves: the forces that live in the world of sound enter man through the ear; the forces that live in the world of light enter through the eye, and so on. But the forces that live in the all-animating and all-pervading warmth fill the whole human being; they have the whole human being as their organ of perception. When the human being emerged from the bosom of the deity at the beginning of his development, it was quite different. Then the human being had no senses for perceiving the environment. First, that peculiar organ of feeling developed in him, which one would wrongly call an eye; that organ developed from the radiations and inflows into the upper layers of his being. This organ was a continuation of the human being outwards; you can still feel the soft spot in the skull of a child today, where this organ protruded, like the hole that was open where these currents entered. This organ was then the localized sense of warmth, which is now spread throughout the entire body of the human being. Man had this organ in ancient Lemuria, the hot land of fire. He could use it to find out where he could go, he could use it to feel whether the temperature was agreeable to him or not. Today this organ has shrunk and become the pineal gland. In the future, what is now spread over the whole body will reappear in a transformed form at a higher level, localized in a certain other organ.

You see this expressed in the myth through the rule of Sutur in the southern region, in Lemuria. The power of fire is represented by Sutur. You see hinted at in the myth how Sutur comes under the rule of the other gods, the Ases, whose power flows into people through the localized senses. But Sutur will return and rule in the place of the Ases. Man will return to the elemental forces of fire, and the sense of warmth will no longer be spread over the whole body, but will again be localized in one organ. The saga wonderfully reflects what also corresponds to the facts that we know through spiritual science. What has man retained from that ancient world of fire, from that fire and warmth environment, which he perceived with his ancient organs, what is it? It is not the Sutur itself. For in order to enliven this area, in which the Sutur was, man needed his old organ, the organ of feeling, which protruded like a lantern from his head. It is that “descendant” of the old sense of feeling that must experience the destinies of the whole human body, that is completely interwoven with the destiny of man, and that is the son of Sutur, Loki. Loki is chained to the triple rock of the human head, the human torso and the human limbs, so that he cannot move and is therefore exposed to all human torments and sufferings.

This leads you even deeper into this world of Germanic myths, which are of an almost impenetrable depth. You really have to dig very deep to see what kind of enthusiasm, for example, seized an artist like Richard Wagner and drove him to his work. It should never be said that Richard Wagner could have specified the individual legends in the same way as it happens through occultism. But the spiritual powers that stood behind him and inspired him directed and guided his artistic inspirations so that his art became the most beautiful expression of what the myth is based on. That is the great thing, that one does not see in the work of art what is behind it, everything has flowed out in sound and word. A remarkable instinct - if one wants to call it trivial, otherwise one would have to call it artistic inspiration - prevails in Richard Wagner. It was like a spiritual hearing of those ancient modes of speech that arose in him. He sensed those most ancient modes of speech very well and [that caused him] not to remain in the end rhyme, for that belongs to a later stage, a stage of understanding, but to choose that stage of speech development that is an echo of the the rushing waves that splashed out of the mists of ancient Atlantis: that is alliteration, that is trochee, which, for those who can feel it, repeats in sound what can be called the music of the waves.

In Germanic mythology, it is prophesied that the twilight of the gods must come because the cause of the wars has arisen. Because Tyr lost a hand in the jaws of Woltfes, the seeds of the later downfall of the gods developed. The prophetic view of the Germanic saga of the twilight of the gods points to the state where people will understand each other again, where they will no longer be separated by languages. The saga tells us that after the Atlantean population had moved east, it split up and fragmented. Only those peoples who descended from the Mongolian race and who came under Etzel or Attila - Atli, the Atlantean - have retained something of the old Atlantis. They alone have preserved the life element of the Atlanteans, while the other peoples who had remained in Europe have developed out of the old blood community through splitting and have fallen apart into wars between the individual tribes. Thus these peoples in the West are always divided and at war. They are unable to withstand the impact of the Mongolian element, which has retained the old Atlantean foundations of life. Attila's or Etzel's march is not stopped by the Germanic tribes, because the individual tribes are something that cannot impress Attila, who has retained his old great spirit - a kind of monotheism. What opposed him as individual tribes could not stop him. A remarkable feature of the saga is that Attila was immediately persuaded to turn back when he was confronted by something that went beyond blood relationship, when he was confronted by Christianity, personified in the then Pope. Then Attila saw the spiritual powers that will unite men again, and that is what the Atlantean initiate bows down to. Christianity is to prepare the way for that state of humanity when Sutur will reappear and, regardless of the differentiation of people into individual tribes, will bring peace to the world. Thus, to the people of that time, Christianity seemed like a first announcement of the twilight of the gods and the return of the old days, when people were not yet divided, not yet divided and divided by wars. This is how Christianity was perceived, especially in the very first centuries of its spread, when it was not yet Christianity that was proclaimed from Rome, but when it came from the north and west through secret Christian societies that originated in England and Ireland, and later also in France, and which were completely independent of the external authority of Rome. It was Winfried, Boniface, who emerged from the ranks of those western secret students and made his peace with Rome, whereby Christianity could then gradually adopt the special coloration of the Roman-Christian Church.

Thus we see what forces were at work in the spread of Christianity out of the memory of an ancient time and as a prophetic indication of a later future. What first appeared in Christianity in Central Europe were the feelings that lived in those people at that time and filled the outlook of those people who belonged to the secret schools and who had been taught and inspired by the secret schools.

Let us pause for a moment at this phase of Central European spiritual development and visualize what Europe was like at that time, when the old world of the gods - as described in the Germanic sagas - was gradually dying away in the twilight brought about by the religious world of Christianity. The advent of Christianity was felt to be a harbinger of the great twilight of the gods, the twilight that would one day sweep away the powers of the old gods. Christianity brought about the fading of the old world of gods, the downfall of the old gods themselves will bring the great twilight of the gods, which will then bring as reality what Christianity only brought as faith. This is how it was felt.

Now let us put ourselves in this mood, which was there. The tribes of the Goths, the Franks and so on, were all under the impression of the approaching Mongol tribes, the Hun king Attila or Etzel, on the one hand, and the gradually spreading Christianity, on the other. As a result of the events we have characterized, they were divided into different tribes; they spoke in different tongues, they had fallen apart among themselves. In the end, of all these tribes, only one actually survived: the Franconian tribe; it remained, in name and in significance. What remains to remind us of all the tribes that once roamed here, if not history: the Lombards, the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths, the Cherusci, the Heruli, and so on? The Franconian tribe was actually the one that triumphed over the others. But how did those feel who belonged to the dying tribes? These feelings were most vividly felt by the secret schools and the knowledgeable of these dying tribes. Let us take a look at one such tribe, the Visigoths. They lived in northern Spain and southern France, although they had once migrated far to the east. As you know, the westward migration was only a retreat. The abilities they had were still an echo of the ancient Atlantic times. When these tribes had migrated from the east to the west, they had lost the old abilities during their wanderings, but a kind of clairvoyance still lived in people as an echo of those old abilities. These people were no longer completely clairvoyant, but at certain times they could still see into the spiritual worlds. However, they often experienced this as something unknown and oppressive, and that is where the name 'Alp' comes from. Alp – what kind of being is that? It is an astral being that people sensed but no longer really knew, that they had known in Atlantean times, in the days of old seeing and clairvoyance, and that now appeared like an intruder into the world, like the Truth that we got to know last time. Nevertheless, some people felt it as the looking in of a higher, astral world into the physical one. Especially with those tribes that could not adapt to the new conditions, one felt “when the nightmare came and oppressed” that one could look into the higher worlds. In all tribes, especially the Goths, but also the Burgundians and other Germanic tribes, there were always individuals who could withstand such states of emergency and interpret them as the astral world reaching into the physical world. One such man was the Goth King Alphard, who is mentioned in those times when the Goths inhabited southern France. He was King of Aquitaine and ruled there at the time when Attila was undertaking his march from east to west. Alphard's son was the legendary Walther of the Walthari Lay. It presents us with a true transition from that time when people still knew something from their fathers about the old abilities and the connections between the old tribes. How the tribe and tribes belonged together in ancient times - the fathers knew it; therefore, the father of Walther, Alphard, had long since discussed with the king of the Burgundians that his daughter Hildegund should become the wife of Walther, in order to bridge the threatening gap between the peoples. But the tribes were unable to withstand the onslaught of the Huns, who still possessed the old vitality that they themselves had lost. Therefore, Walther, the son of Alphard, Hildegund, the daughter of the Burgundian king, and Hagen of Tronje, a hostage from the Frankish court, were forced to go down to the court of Etzel, the king of the Huns. Because Gunther, the son of the King of the Franks, Gibich, could not yet be given as a hostage, Hagen, the descendant of the old Tronje line, had to be given as a hostage. We need not relate the content of the Song of Walthari further. At the court of King Etzel, they distinguish themselves as capable warriors, but there is one thing they cannot do: they may well be able to conquer what elevates man to the ego, but what brings the ego back to peace, they cannot acquire that, it is impossible for them. Each individual was efficient in his own place, and so they are efficient warriors even in the land of the enemy, at the court of Etzel or Attila. But when Gunther came to power in the Frankish Empire and no longer maintained a friendship with Etzel, they could no longer stand their ground and had to flee. Now something remarkable occurs. There is an older version of the Song of Walthari, in which Walther, after fleeing with Hildegund, fights against the pursuing Huns. This version comes from the Franconian region. We then have a later version, which was mentioned yesterday, that arises from purely Christian intentions; it was last brought into its present form in the 10th century by Ekkehard I, a monk at the monastery of St. Gallen. The two versions differ greatly from one another. The older version originated in the land of the Franks. It comes from those who were influenced by the current in which the original Christianity still lives as a secret Christian current, which wanted to teach: Turn to the new ideas, and you will overcome what is still in you of the old that confronts you physically in the Huns. This interest could only have been taken by someone who came from the land of the Franks. But the man who reinterpreted the saga in the monastery of St. Gall to teach Christians no longer had this interest. He had a different goal; he wanted to tell people: If you stick with the old conditions, you will consume yourselves. He showed them vividly how they were consuming themselves. And indeed, it was not the Huns who consumed them. When Walther and Hildegund return to their country, it is Gunther himself who confronts them with Hagen of Tronje. Now it is the three representatives of Germanic tribes themselves who tear each other apart in battle, leaving the leg of one, the eye of another and the hand of a third on the battlefield. Walther was cut off his hand, Gunther lost his leg, and Hagen lost an eye. The one who wrote down the saga knew why he had the hand cut off the one who descended from Alphard. He represents the discord between tribes and peoples. The cutting off of the hand is meant to remind them of what happened to Tyr, the god of war. Where tribes fall out, the individual loses his hand. This motif continues down to Götz von Berlichingen, who also loses his hand; it is the same motif that appears in Germanic mythology. Thus Ekkehard wanted to say to his people: If you cling to these old views, you will tear each other apart, for discord has been brought into your midst. What can bind you together is the spirit of Christianity. He presents to them in such a way as to evoke in their souls a feeling of repulsion. That was Ekkehard's Christian intention.

In the face of this Walthari-lay, one must be especially careful not to speculate or interpret anything into it. The individual traits: the striking out of the eye, the cutting off of the hand, the cutting off of the leg and similar traits are such that something of the type and form of the saga continues to work in them, and that returns when it seems necessary. It was rightly said yesterday that the person who wrote this Waltherilied is an initiate. But it must also be emphasized that it was a Christian initiate who wanted to present a very specific Christian teaching to people.

Thus we see how spiritual science can help to clarify these phenomena of human intellectual life, and how we can shed light on areas that are still little understood by today's philology. And if you have seen this morning the way in which spiritual science can intervene in everyday life, and add to what has been said now, then this will be proof to you of the inner truth of the spiritual facts brought down from the higher worlds. Our world needs such a deepening again. But you can also see from this the way in which we have to work, and that external agitation cannot be what can really bring the theosophical world movement into the right channel. If you just come with dogmas and want to explain them to people, then they have every right to tell us that this is all fantasy. Only he who penetrates deeply into what the theosophical stream can offer, and who penetrates into it from all sides, will gradually see the theosophical truths. We need not be surprised if followers of materialistic currents find what we say foolish. How should they understand it otherwise? And how can we succumb to the delusion that Theosophy could be something that can be spread by external propaganda, like popular monism? Only through positive work, by spreading the teachings as best we can, only in this way can Theosophy become established. No matter how many failures we have, we must not let them hinder or disconcert us in any way. Therefore, the Theosophical Society can be nothing more than a place within which theosophical work is carried out. The Society can never be the main thing; the main thing must be our spiritual science itself. Perhaps the Society will even be only - to use the Nietzschean word you have probably heard before - a “bridge” and a “transition to a higher” level, to a free theosophical current in the world. At present, however, we need this place from which we can work, and without which we cannot let spiritual science flow into the world. But we must adopt the liberal view that distinguishes the human being and the cause, and that puts the cause above any institution that comes from external organization.

This brings us to the end of our program for our time together.

This lecture is something like a continuation of that which I held about the origin of the human being. We come today back to times which are in the distant past, and we get to concepts which are very far to the present materialistic thinking. Hence, allow me that I tie on a few introductory words about the relation of my topic to the contemporary ideas.

It has absolutely to be clear to everybody who has penetrated and understood the scientific knowledge of the present that today the theosophical ideas about the origin of the earth can be taken as something very speculative, maybe even very fantastic. However, do not believe if one goes deeper into the matters that then a real contradiction appears between the scientific and the theosophical ideas. We have to get absolutely clear about the fact that the naturalist is only able to verify and to explain what takes place in the external sensory world and is to be grasped with the scientific reason. I am of the opinion completely that about such difficult questions, as this is one, also from the theosophical point of view only somebody should speak who is also familiar with the whole scientific education of our time, so that he has an idea of it, how much he violates the generally accepted ideas. However, I would like to put an example of mutual understanding on the top of my lecture for those who oppose these advanced views from the materialistic point of view.

It was at the end of the sixties, when for the last time an even if pessimistic; nevertheless, decidedly idealistic philosophy appeared which made a deeper impression on a bigger public. It was Eduard von Hartmann's (1842–1906) Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). I only want to say what has resulted historically. Hartmann bore down on the ideological ideas which originated from Darwinism. When one noticed which great impression the Philosophy of the Unconscious caused, many opposing writings appeared. Among these one appeared anonymously with the title The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Physiology and the Theory of Evolution (1872). The most significant philosophers said that it was the best writing against Eduard von Hartmann and his philosophy. The writing was sensational. The naturalists realised that it was written by a naturalist and that Eduard von Hartmann was disproved thoroughly. The second edition of the same anonymous writing appeared soon afterwards, however, with the name of the author, namely with the name of Eduard von Hartmann! It was an ingenious mystification! Indeed, I am not a Hartmannian or follower of the Philosophy of the Unconscious, but this philosophy stands higher and contains more than one can otherwise bring forward from the pessimistic side. Hartmann showed that one only needs to scale down his point of view to understand the matters in question still much deeper than the opponents. Thus spiritual science or theosophy may also express itself in such a way like those who believe to be the best naturalists. I have said this to show that one may also disprove theosophy in similar way. However, theosophy may give this rebuttal better than any other.

We have to take into consideration that we deal with very difficult chapters and that it is exceptionally laborious to penetrate into these regions. However, it is even more difficult to find the appropriate means of expression within our language only shaped for the external sensuous world. One has to use everything possible to dress the fine, subtle concepts and the views which are taken from purely spiritual worlds into clear language. Nevertheless, I attempt to pictorially and clearly express what is familiar to me as experience in these higher fields. You find the relevant periods of the big world evolution also shown in the theosophical literature. But you find them shown more schematically than I will do it today. I do not make any objection to this schematic description which may also be useful and gives clear concepts of this evolution to the reason. One can learn this from the theosophical manuals. However, I would like to describe it somewhat clearer.

We have seen the human being facing us as another being in very distant times taking on the physical dress only bit by bit not having his origin from the physical but from the psychic. We have seen the psychic leading the way of the physical, the psychic developing the forces in itself by which it can gradually clothe itself in this physical dress. All that has been shown. At the same time, we have drawn our attention to the fact that we can trace back the human being, as well as he faces us today, only through a certain number of periods.

We are within the fifth age of our physical earth development. Another age preceded it that took place on a continent which forms the bottom of the Atlantic today. And another age preceded this Atlantean age called the Lemurian age. At that time, in the middle of the Lemurian age, we find that, actually, that connects with the human being, as well as he had developed till then which we call our immortal spirit. This higher element, this higher nature of the human being which outlasts any physical corporeality and any psychic development in other words the eternal in the human being this has established itself in those days. If we want to express ourselves figuratively, we may call it a spiritual spark in the human nature, so that the human being faces us till then as the connection of soul and body. Up to the middle of the Lemurian age, our ancestors were bodily-psychic beings.

If we want to conceive a clear idea how these human ancestors were in some way, actually, we have to remember that the spirit is inseparably connected with any really higher thinking. Without spirit the human being could not count, without spirit he could not speak, without spirit no higher spiritual activity, never mind still higher activities would be possible. So that we deal with a human being till then who waited to become mind-endowed who did not yet have the immortal part who had, however, a soul-life that was completely different from ours. Our soul-life is infiltrated with spirit. If we want to call the human being who was not yet mind-endowed a human being and we want to do this for the sake of the shortness of time , we must say that his soul-life was vague that it was a more dreamy, pictorial soul-life. One can understand the soul-life of the human being at that time only if one traces it back one period more. In the time of which I have spoken now the human being is able to receive external body impressions, to perceive the surroundings. This perception developed only slowly and gradually.

If we trace back the Lemurians still farther, we find that the human ancestors have sensation already, indeed, that the external objects make impressions on them but that they could not connect ideas with these external percepts. If you imagine a soul-life like that of the dream, then you have something similar. However, it is not completely the same. For the pictorial ideas which surged up and down in the soul at that time were much clearer, much more original and more elementary, much more saturated than the confused dream pictures of the present-day average person are. Above all, these pictures in the human soul were dependent in certain way on that which took place around the human being. At that time, the human being was not yet able to associate a colour with an external object, he could not yet see the things coloured. He could not see that an object is green or red; the colour idea did not yet combine with the object. Nevertheless, colours still surged in the human soul. These colours had some resemblance to that which the clairvoyant knows if he develops certain capacities in himself. The clairvoyant sees not only the external physical, but also the feelings and instincts in the form of an aura. The physical human being is only one part of the human being. The physical human being is embedded like in a cloud in which all sorts of formations surge up and down. Only someone can see them who has the gift of clairvoyance in our theosophical sense not in the sense of spiritism. I pass some remarks about the acquisition of such capacities next time when I speak about the great initiates of the world. Any real initiation can be connected only with the gift of clairvoyance. The capacities of the great initiates originated from the gift of clairvoyance.

Today you have to be an absolutely reasonable person, before you become a clairvoyant. You must be able to think logically and clearly. Somebody who would attain the gift of clairvoyance without having developed the gift of the reasonable, clear thinking would receive a bad gift. He would be led to a world of fancies rather than to a higher spiritual world. There he would miss any control and would face it like the chaotic dream world. Not before you get into the habit of logical, clear, reasonable thinking, so that you walk through the spiritual things as the reasonable human being walks through tables and chairs, so that it is no longer anything special, you can understand that the gift of clairvoyance guides one into the riddle of the world. All occult schools have as a precondition that the human being is a quite reasonable, maybe a somewhat sober human being, so that he is the opposite of a daydreamer. Hence, we say that clairvoyance, the cognition of the astral auric world, is connected with the development of our spiritual abilities.

The view of the human being, as I have described it, was similar in the pre-Lemurian time. But it was not pervaded with consciousness. Only a dim consciousness existed in the human being. Indeed, at that time on this level he already felt what was hot and cold; he had a sense of touch and could perceive certain differences of density. He also had the gift of hearing. The sense of hearing is one of the oldest senses which humanity developed. But he did not yet have the sense of seeing. This still was, so to speak, an internal one. The colours lived as pictures in the human soul. If he came, for example, to a region which was colder than that he came from then in his soul a colour picture of darker colour shadings appeared. If he made it reversely, if he came from a colder air layer to a warmer one, then there was a yellowish or a yellowish-reddish colour picture. Thus those human beings had colour pictures which did not combine, however, with the surface of the bodies, but lived as uncertain colour pictures in the soul. This combined then with the surroundings of the human being.

But at that time the human being had something else. He had a fine sensitivity for that what took place emotionally in his surroundings. If we are here in a room, you do not sit there only as physical bodies, but also as souls. In each of you feelings and sensations live. These are also something real like the physical body is something real. What today the human soul has as sentient ability can no longer penetrate these forces of the feelings and sensation because just due to the further development of humankind the human being became clearer in his consciousness because he has developed his reason, his everyday view. But he has temporarily lost what existed in his soul. He will regain this ability maintaining his present reasonability and his clear waking consciousness. Once the whole humankind attains a state which today only the practical mystic, the clairvoyant has. In order to attain this state the human being had to go through a merely physical view, through a merely bodily percipience. In one respect humankind gets to a higher level, and in another respect it descends to a lower level in certain way.

At that time, the human being came from a vague, dim percipience. But this was at the same time mental-clairvoyant percipience. If now in the nearness of the human being any likeable feeling, anything emotional lived which you allow the expression emitted sympathy, then the human being received those bright colour pictures in himself. Bad feelings let arise darker colour pictures tending to blue, brownish, reddish colours. This was the interrelation of the inner soul-life with the external mental reality at that time. But at that time this external mental reality could just be perceived.

Only bit by bit the senses developed as they are today. With it the reason, the object consciousness came into being. The original gift of clairvoyance withdrew. At the same time, we come to a time where another development goes hand in hand with this development, the development of the so-called uni-sexuality. The human being was not always in such a condition as he is today concerning his reproduction. The bigger force which the soul had over the physical caused that the human being could produce a being of the same kind without resorting to another physical human being because he combined both sexes in himself. Hence, the transition was at the same time that of the mutual perception and that from hermaphroditism to uni-sexuality. At that time, the human brain was not yet developed in the same way as it is today. The human being was not yet such a cerebral being as he is today; at that time he also did not have such a perception as he has today. This is the time of which we have already spoken which is simultaneously the time of the creation of the human brain.

I have indicated last time that we do not sign Darwinism completely. We sign it in this respect that it shows the relationship of the physical human being with all other physical living beings on earth. But I have also indicated that we do not regard the imperfect animal living beings as ancestors of the present human beings, not even of the psycho-physical human beings. We have to regard these animal beings rather as branches of a common ancestor which resemble neither the modern human being nor the imperfect living beings, the animals of today.

In the time of which I have spoken, the higher mammals did not yet exist. The higher mammals have, just as the human being, only more imperfectly, a brain and a perception similar to the human one. Beings which have developed such a perception did not yet exist in this time. There were on the earth only beings with pictorial ideas, with a pictorial kind of soul formation, and basically everything was united in one single being, like in a common nodal point, that is today the human being and the higher animal realm. The human being was, in so far as it is a psycho-physical being, in a certain respect on the level of animality. But no present animal and also not the present human being resembles the human being of that time. However, the human being has developed so far that a part, a branch of the previous type has further-developed up to the present-day human beings. Other members of the beings of that time remained behind because of certain circumstances which I will especially show another time. They went back in their development, became decadent. These decadent beings are the higher animals.

I want to make this point clear to you and use the following for it: you know that there are regions in which Catholicism has degenerated to a kind of fetish service where it appears like adoring lifeless objects or pictures of saints. Nobody is able to state that this point of view, in proportion to the more perfect to which humankind has developed, is the same one. This fetish Christianity is a decayed Christianity. Thus it is also from the theosophical point of view considering different “savage” tribes. The materialistic history of civilisation regards them as ancestors of the civilised people. We regard them as decayed, decadent descendants of once advanced peoples. The same applies to the higher animals if we go back in time even farther. Once they were more perfect, they decayed. We come to a formation of the human realm which is different which shows the human being still undifferentiated from the other higher animal species, indeed, at a time which lies millions of years behind us.

How has it come to pass that the human being stopped in those days on the course of his development? Concerning his soul development the human being is completely the result of that which takes place round him. Simply imagine the room in which we are with a temperature higher than hundred degrees, and imagine also everything changing there! If you expand this thought to all the other natural conditions, it shows you that the human being is in truth completely dependent on the constellation and configuration of the forces within which he lives. He becomes another being if he is in another interrelation.

One made scientific attempts recently: one made butterflies hatch at temperatures at which they do not live, otherwise. One found that they change their colours and colour shadings. At higher temperatures even bigger changes are to be observed. Today the natural sciences are already a kind of elementary theosophy. Concerning theosophy there is no contradiction between the natural sciences and theosophy!

Thus the developmental levels of humankind also depended on the quite different developmental levels on our earth. Already the physicist says to you namely as a hypothesis that the farther we go back in the earth development, we come to higher and higher temperatures. The theosophist or the practical mystic sees really back to these primeval times, and he sees these conditions in the Akasha Chronicle as truth, like the average person sees table and chairs as truth before him. We come to a condition in which all substances on our earth are in quite different relations to each other than today.

You know that the substances if they are warmed up change their state. Solid substances become liquid, liquid ones become vaporous et etcetera Now we come back to much higher temperatures than we know on earth today. There the whole material world of our earth was different. Only someone who is set on the materialistic view and on the immediate view of our earth can get to the view that this is impossible. Who emancipates himself from our reality today also realises that life was possible in these higher temperatures of the earth .The human being really lived in these higher temperatures, indeed, in another way. He lived in the state of the “fire mist.” The bodies were a vaporous, soft mass which cannot really be compared with anything we know today. Thus we come back to quite different circumstances. One can still follow up this if one wants to get to know the origin of the earth. This origin is intimately connected with the whole development of the human being. If we go back, we find the human being in company of much lower animals which belong to the lower classes of our present-day animal realm which had, however, other figures in those days, were different from their present-day descendants. Because the earth became more solid and denser, they took on other shapes and characteristics. We have, if we observe what takes place in us with the bare rational eye, no idea how it looked at that time. An animal world, nevertheless, lived round the human being. As the human being takes up food from the physical world today, he also took up it in those days in similar way.

We have now to realise that what I tell now is something quite fantastic and strange for those who are not used to such ideas. The time has come to pronounce it once again. We stand on the point of evolution where again an idealistic world view will replace the purely materialistic one. Going back to these times, the whole materiality of our earth becomes different. At that time, the mass of the earth I ask you to not be too much astonished about what I say was still in connection with other heavenly bodies than it is the case today. Already somebody who thinks the present physical ideas without clairvoyance to an end understands that what I say is not completely inconsistent.

You need only to go back according to the Kant-Laplace theory to the time when the single planets do not yet circle the sun, have not yet developed from the primal nebula, and then you have a valiant, but correct hypothesis. We can also come back from the standpoint of the physicist to a time when the earthly materiality still was in contact with the materiality of the whole solar system. At that time, the human being was much more related with everything than he is today. In the Akasha Chronicle we find in this time that the earth was in a material connection of much more intimate kind with another heavenly body which circles the earth today, with the moon. It was a certain material interrelation between earth and moon.

If I may express myself roughly: what we have today as earth mass formed only because the crude materiality that we have in the moon was extruded as it were. Both bodies have differentiated from each other. You can imagine which immense shocks must have occurred there in the whole materiality! This cosmic shock is the counter pole, the correlative of what I have told, the correlative of the big living being with whose separation and change is connected that the human being went over from hermaphroditism to uni-sexuality. The whole separation did not take place in one go. Unfortunately, the reading of the theosophical literature offers so much opportunity to assume as if a heavenly body hurries out of the other. However, it is not a violent development. Slowly and gradually everything took place, in millions and millions of years. However, it is difficult to speak about figures because one must get to know the methods which the secret doctrine applies.

If we go back even farther, we find another interrelation that is harder to imagine and more intimate than that interrelation which today exists between sun and earth. But it existed in an older time. We want to take an idea in hand which makes it somewhat easier to us to illustrate this interrelation a little figuratively. If you see the sun and then imagine the sun limited within space is it really limited that way? Already a quite usual reflection can teach us that a real demarcation of the sun is basically not possible.

Does the sun really stop being where one sees its border? It does not stop there, its effect spreads through the whole planetary system. On our earth the sun has an effect. Does not belong that to the sun body what the sun makes on our earth, do not the etheric forces belong to it which spread on the earth and make life possible? Are these etheric forces not only the continuation of the etheric forces of the sun? Or their force of attraction? Does it not belong to the sun? There we see that if we understand the existence in an unrestricted way, we can realise that such an arbitrary limitation does not take place if we speak of a heavenly body like the sun. The effects which come from the sun were in the former times still quite different on the earth than they were later, and than they are today. They were in such a way that, if anybody could sit down on a chair and could have looked at the whole world edifice basically the physicist imagines this in such a way if he illustrates it to the children , he would not have perceived the sun and the earth as separate bodies, but he would have over-viewed the whole filled with perceptible contents; he would have seen that the earth is crystallised from the whole sun ball in later times.

If we go back to the times of the most distant earth past, we come to a point where that what has deposited in the lunar matter today was still connected with the earthly matter where the forces, which are pulled out today, were still efficient on the matter. These had effects on our physical bodies. They formed it in such a way that it reacted in quite different way to the forces and that in quite different way the effects on the bodily expressed themselves. In even earlier times the solar effect on the earth was there in an even more different way than today, also concerning growth. When the lunar body and the earth body were still united, we have all earth beings in a state which we only find with the animals which have the temperature of their surroundings approximately. The warm blood starts to develop to the same extent as the lunar matter withdraws from the earth.

If we go back farther to the times in which the solar body was still connected with the earth, we find within the human ancestors the effects which are preserved today in quite decadent forms of the lowest animals. The human being reproduced in those days by a kind of separation process. The human being existed in delicate matter, even more delicate than the fire mist. At that time, the reproduction happened as a kind of detachment. The daughter being had the same size as the mother being. The solar forces were in those days vital forces. They overpowered the material. They imprinted forms to the material. Thus we look, if we go back to the origin of our earth, at a time in which the human being was surrounded by subtler and subtler material states.

In the end, we get to a state which only the clairvoyant can envision where the most delicate etheric corporeality merges into astral being; as a pure soul-being the human being was placed in the earthly scene. The human beings who were formed like the physical aura were placed into the earthly scene. In the soul forces worked that imprinted forms into the matter soaking up the matter into themselves and forming it so that they became external seal impressions, a kind of shades of that what the souls were in the pure soul land. Now we have come back to the stage of our earth where the human being did not yet have the physical materiality where the human being only came in as an astral being into this physical world which was in those days of extremely delicate nature. Now we could go back to still much older states in which the human being did not yet have this astral existence. We could go back to purely spiritual states. Now, however, this should not interest us; for we do not want to pursue the human being, but the origin of the earth.

A few words more about the course backward. We meet the human being there, so to speak, still without material earth. He is not yet embodied in physical corporeality. There we would have to go back long periods if we wanted to find the human being at the former developmental stadia. The human being who was placed as a soul-being on the earth has the ability to draw the substance to himself in a particular way. If one were able to investigate the etheric man, one would perceive that his soul was already organised. It could already create forms. It had to develop for that for long times.

It had already gone through long developmental states. These have been completed on other heavenly bodies, of course. How have we to imagine such a development on other heavenly bodies? All the abilities which the soul had acquired were in such a way that they could work in the physical. It was led from former developmental states. The soul had to have already gone through physical states several times, because only within the physical world certain abilities can be developed. The human being could not speak and think today unless he had got into contact with the physical nature. What we work today becomes our ability later. I have often pointed to the child that learns to write and read. When the child has grown up, it can write and read. What was labour, what was intercourse with the outside world before has disappeared, but the fruit, the result has remained. This is the ability of writing and reading. What we have in the soul has originated from the intercourse with the outside world.

The theosophical world view calls it involution. If the human being again works out from within what he has acquired, we call it evolution. Between involution and evolution all life takes place. What the soul has done in the evolution is based on the fact that the abilities have emerged from the soul. These abilities were acquired once by involution. This involution took place again in another physical body. We have there an important moment that has happened on our earth; this is the moment when the human being was able to become a warm-blooded being from a cold-blooded one, because the lunar matter had emerged. This is the important point of the earth development. In all mystic schools this is emphasised. The human being takes the heat into him and reworks it inside. The myth which always shows the great truths figuratively preserved this in the Prometheus legend. Prometheus got down the fire from the heaven. This is the warmth of the human being that he got down there, not the external heat. Thus the human being had to get down all remaining abilities from the heaven, too.

I would like to lead you still to a point that is also very important for the earth development. This is the moment when the human being takes up in him what we have once got to know as the inside of the soul. We have seen that pictures have risen up in the human being which he associated with the objects. The human being possessed this ability to develop light in him in the first time. He acquired that sooner as well as he acquired the ability later to develop warmth. The human being developed the ability to sense light around him or still more properly speaking to sense the objects around him in the light. This took place on a planet which the theosophical world view calls “Moon.” However, this was not our physical moon. When the soul had acquired the ability of the inner light, the connection was there, and who knows the circumstances of the past, knows that it evoked the soul ability of seeing colours, the inner luminescence. We have to realise once how this abilities are connected. The development of warmth is connected with all life on our earth, with the present kind of reproduction, with the way the human being can bring something into real existence. Everything else is combining; only the reproduction is a real creating, and this is connected with warmth. We have a similar level of development when the inner luminescence appeared. The human being developed the luminescence on a previous planet. This was a luminescence from within like it is warmth from within today. It was luminescence. With it we have come to the most excellent characteristic of the human being in his pre-physical state on another heavenly body. Everything that went out from the human being was luminous as his aura shines today. The human being was a luminous being, and the perception of the human being was the perception of his luminescence. At that time, luminescence developed down to the physical. It was a physical luminescence of the human being.

How do we get our most significant ideas of the environment? Just by means of the visual percepts. You would nearly lose nine tenths of that what you know if you cancel the visual percepts. Because we have visual ideas today, wisdom can pour somewhat in us. With our lunar ancestors this was different. From them the light was emitted. The same was emitted from them that pours in us as light effects today. One calls our earth the universe of love in the mystic mythology because it is connected with forces of love. The universe of wisdom on which the light played the same role as today the warmth preceded this universe of love. The earth followed as a universe of love the universe of wisdom. The inner light is connected with the human will. The human being, who has certain desires, passions, sensations, and emotions, provides his aura, his astral body with particular colour shapes. These are subjected to the will in a broader sense. In those days, in the lunar period, the whole human being was an expression of will. The will flowed outwardly and came to the fore as that which shines.

Hence, our ancestors are the sons of will if we call these human beings of the universe of wisdom human beings. The children of love descended from the sons of will. The light played a similar role in those days as today the heat on the earth. One calls these luminous human beings within the luminous environment also the sons of the twilight. It was an especially luminous human being within the surrounding luminosity, an exchange of light took place as we have an exchange of warmth today. As we have a feeling of cold if it is cold one approximately had a feeling if it was darker all around than in the own inside. The will was the basis of that because the will basically found its expression in the whole surroundings. As today the human being is creative by love, he was creative in those days using his will. His will had an immediate influence on all surroundings. As powerless the creating human being is before the physical things of the outside world today because he has got to clearness in his consciousness and thereby the other soul forces have become more imperfect , as powerful the will was in those days. The human will had influence on the whole physical surroundings. Because it strives and is the upward trend in the development, this will strove for the higher. Thus that was caused, immediately from the living nature, what separated the centre of the heavenly body in two, so that at that time already a kind of invagination took place. One centre became two centres in a more mental way. We see this separation of the centres achieved in the later development in the separation of the earth and the moon.

These are sketchy indications I could give you. However, you will see that the matters coincide. Who tries to think consistently and strictly can admit this from the start. I myself might give a rebuttal as I have indicated it in the outset concerning Eduard von Hartmann. Habitual ways of thinking are something temporary. Who studies history of the Middle Ages, for example, not only the external one, because it is a wrong picture which is given to us, finds my explanations verified.

Goethe also says that it is basically only the historians' own spirit, in which the times are reflected. It is the task of theosophy to show the development in the past to receive an idea of the great human future. I have quoted Goethe, because he deeply looked into these mystic, mysterious connections of the world development. He used a strange figure, the “old man with the lamp” in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The lamp can only shine where another light shines. I have shown that as the incarnation of ancient wisdom. Now we come to an even more profound significance. It becomes clear to us what Goethe means with the light which spreads its light only where light is. Where the gift of clairvoyance is developed again, the lamp develops its whole magic force. There we get to that time when the human being becomes the flame to look back to this epoch in which he was a luminous being when the ability developed to bring light into existence. Goethe knew that this internal light was there once in the human being and that the present-day seeing of light is a later developmental state.

Before the human being could see the sun, he had to become an internally luminous being first; he had to develop light in himself to show light to the light. Goethe was a mystic; one does not know it only. At the head of his preface to the theory of colours he pronounces it using the words of an old mystic:

Unless the eye were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

In this talk, I would like to give a picture of that what anthroposophy has to say about the most different areas of life and to start from some of its most significant results for the knowledge of the human soul life and its relation to the bodily life.

It seems that this psychology has to deliver the bases of the most important questions of life, of the boundary questions of existence. Since, nevertheless, one cannot deny that the present cultural life only accepts scientifically established knowledge. If one deals with the big riddles of the soul life today, one does not only ask this or that denomination, but approaches the world riddles also scientifically. That is why one will also ask psychology: what has psychology to say about birth and death of the human being? What has it to say about the relation of the transient to the everlasting of the human being?

However, one has to say,: when soul science which is acknowledged even today by tradition has turned to the modern thinking, this modern soul science got more or less into cloudy waters. If one speaks of modern psychology, one has to remind of a psychologist, the late Franz Brentano (1838-1917) who wanted to dedicate his life and investigations to the knowledge of the soul life in the last third of the nineteenth century. When he published the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, he said something strange. He said that one has to take a new way with reference to the soul knowledge which can justify itself towards natural sciences. Tomorrow should be talk of the fact that the way which is discussed here in this talk can justify itself towards natural sciences.

Franz Brentano attempted to approach the soul life with the same methods and way of thinking which one uses in natural sciences. Then he said, in course of time the soul science has solely considered imagining, feeling, willing, memory, attention, love, hatred, and the like. Modern natural sciences have brought to light all sorts of things, but it seems as if by the scientific way of thinking and methods psychology does not get to the big hopes—as Franz Brentano says—which already Plato and Aristotle had: the hope to gain a view of the everlasting of the human being by psychology.

That is why Franz Brentano means: if one can give ever so precise information how mental pictures follow each other how they associate in the soul with each other how they associate with feelings and will impulses, nevertheless, it is impossible to get to the real boundary questions of the soul life. Nevertheless, Franz Brentano still hoped in those days to be able to get to a psychology finally by applying scientific-methodical research that grants views into these boundary questions of existence.

The noteworthy fact is that Franz Brentano, when he published the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, which was intended for three to four volumes, the next volume should already appear in the autumn of the same year and the following volumes should be published within a short time. However, nothing appeared. I have told this fact already here.

That who gets involved with the special course of development of Brentano will discover that this serious researcher could not continue this work not for outer reasons but for inner reasons. That who pursues his following articles and books will realise how this man did attempts repeatedly to penetrate deeper into the soul life, and how they failed repeatedly. Somebody who looks for an answer from the different experiences which one can do, if one approaches modern psychology, finds that Franz Brentano, as well as his whole school and almost all the other psychologies shy away from entering into a real spiritual science.

Just in scientific circles, one shrinks from giving psychology a quite different face if it should be effective again for the human being. You receive a feeling if you open yourself to the psychological literature today that in this psychology even today always mental pictures prevail, as they were used since centuries.

Psychology has not changed much of these mental pictures. In the area of natural sciences, however, something has changed, and psychology has not kept abreast of this development up to now. Only a superficial consideration of this development can ignore the most essential that quite different thoughts and ideas prevailed. One does not want to admit this. One does not want to realise even today that concepts and ideas have changed thoroughly. However, the change has only taken place in the scientific area up to now.

At first, I would like to characterise this change in such a way: one had certain mental pictures once by which one could enclose the soul life and the physical life outdoors, so that they satisfied the demands of that time. One applied the same mental pictures that one applied to the phenomena of nature also to the human soul life. Soul life and physical life were not yet so separated as they are today by the advanced natural sciences. Natural sciences themselves have sorted things out in their area. They have demanded new mental pictures by strictly scientific observation methods, in particular by art of experimenting.

Psychology has stopped mostly at the old mental pictures. That is why that which psychology offers today is strictly speaking not after something objective, but appears only as word. Mental pictures, feelings, will impulses, memory, attention, even love and hatred: indeed, one can feel that they are realities in our soul life. However, in the scientific psychology one has empty phrases for it that do no longer correspond to that which must be demanded from true science today.

Just as natural sciences had to advance to new concepts and ideas for three to four centuries, and in particular, in the nineteenth century, psychology has to advance if it does not want to remain infertile. It has to take the plunge to new starting points.

I do not want to keep up you to show how just with that what one calls thinking, feeling, and willing in psychological books does not give you anything real. I want to point to the fact only that just thereby psychology has missed its real vocation.

You all probably know that if the human being looks at those big boundary questions of existence he seldom observes the academic psychology that should give some indication of that. He does not find anything in it. He finds all sorts of, I would like to say, little portrayals, how a mental picture associates with another mental picture, how mental pictures evoke other mental pictures et cetera, but he does not find what interests him, actually. One does not want to admit in this area that just the scientific thinking if it gets along with itself does not get further in psychology that it reaches an impasse, it gets to mere empty phrases.

However, this would be the first negative step so to speak to get to a real psychology. Spiritual science follows this way. It tries to get things straight concerning the kind of the scientific mental pictures. While it positions itself positively to the scientific research, it becomes able to recognise that that research breaks off as it were if one wants to grasp the soul life. One can grasp this soul life only if one resorts to a completely transformed thinking, generally to a transformed inside. Maybe it will still last long, until in more human beings this internal boldness awakes to prepare their whole inside in order to behold into the soul. Nevertheless, if soul science should originate again in a promising and fertile way for the human beings, this step is necessary.

I will explain the details of the spiritual-scientific soul research in the tomorrow's talk. Today I want to mention only how from two sides spiritual science tries to prepare the inside of the human being in such a way that it can really behold into the soul life. One side is a special development of thinking, of imagining. One forms a quite wrong idea of spiritual science if one believes that it deals with any spiritistic or mystic method. This spiritual science will prove to be the clearest which someone can find in science today who really wants to penetrate into it. Above all it concerns of strengthening the imagining, the thinking. It concerns that we only carry out the thinking as it were as a concomitant of life and research in the usual life and in the usual science.

We open ourselves to everything in the outer life that works on the senses. We also open ourselves to that in science, which enables us to observe by experiments. We let the thoughts be inspired which lead us to the physical principles. The thoughts that originate as it were only accompanied by the outer life in the soul just prove to be insufficient if you want to behold into the soul life. They lead to nothing.

You have to experience that at first. Hence, it concerns of projecting yourself in the imagining life in such a way that you imagine solely, so that you find out internally how it is, actually, if you only think, only imagine. It is completely irrelevant what you imagine. It concerns only that—tomorrow I speak about the further details—you do this imagining and this thinking in such a way that you dedicate yourself to it meditatively. So that you just experience in this thinking what you cannot experience, otherwise, that the inside of the human being attunes itself if it follows a bare thought, if it is an imagination thought, if it is a thought taken from without.

If you really experience the thinking internally as methodically as you experience, otherwise, the outer phenomena which present themselves, then you experience something that must touch a modern human being in strange way, just if you have tried to deal with the psychological views which have come down.

Someone who settles in the meditative thinking comes into conflict with the most approved views that originated from Augustinism at first, that have gone over then to Descartes that also haunt in the present soul anew and that have slipped in any thinking which approaches the soul with old methods, with old thinking.

A proposition goes like a motto through the entire modern philosophy. This is the proposition by Descartes “cogito, ergo sum.” “I think, therefore I am.” Augustine said this already. It is that to which the thinkers have come who said to themselves: well, if the outer world presents itself to us, maybe it deceives us, maybe everything is illusionary that eyes and ears manifest to us, which cause them. There is one certainty, Augustin already said which is directly experienced, and this is the fact that I think. Since if I also doubt everything that the world manifests to me, nevertheless, I must just doubt, that is I think. Hence, I am in my thinking myself. If I doubt, I think; therefore I am, cogito, ergo sum.

I do not say all that because I possibly believe that philosophical views control the thinking of many persons or because I believe that that which the modern human being thinks about the soul is an outflow of that what these philosophers said. No, but because that what these philosophers have said is just a reflection of that what humanity has thought through centuries. Not that the human beings have learnt to think from the philosophers, but the philosophers have used concepts that the human beings knew that are to be driven from the field by the methods to which modern spiritual science has to point. This modern spiritual science, while it urges the human being to experience the thinking independently makes him realise: the more one thinks, the more one continues that with the mere thinking what one has, otherwise, only as a concomitant of the outer life, the more one comes just into unreality; not into the reality of the inner life. Before one does not acknowledge the proposition “I think, therefore I am not,” one will not get to real psychology.

It is necessary to take the step to a real psychology in such radical way that one puts an end to the view: “I think, therefore I am”—and can bring himself to realise, if we start with the thinking lively internally, we go away from the real being: I think, therefore I am not. You learn to recognise that if you put yourself more and more in the thinking; while you just strengthen the thinking, you find out: while I think, I cease being.

Actually, sleep would already disprove the proposition I think, therefore I am. Since in sleep we do not think in the sense of Augustine or Descartes, also not in the sense of Bergson or similar philosophers. Well, this is the first: taking the step to realise the unreality of the inner experience with thinking.

The second is that it is something dreadful, actually, for every human being who takes these things seriously that, while he wants to advance to the so-called self-knowledge, thinking just leads him to nothingness. Then from the second side one has to support the spiritual-scientific method. While the meditative life cultivates the thinking, the will must be cultivated on the other side. We recognise the will, actually, if we get any relation to the outside world. As well as we have the thinking more or less as a concomitant of the outer observation or of the scientific researching, we have the will as a concomitant of our acting: we experience it if we are active outside. Besides, something escapes from our observation where the will plays a quite significant role. We live in time. We all look back to the time of our birth and know that it last some time until death. We live in time. However, we live not only in time; we develop in time. That who can eye his inside calmly knows that with the help of his body, with the help of education and other means he himself works on his transformation, on his development.

We are different in every period of life, and we always work on our changing. This inner work is necessary to practise self-discipline. That means that self-education does not only take place unconsciously, but that one has to work with those methods consciously on his transformation. Thereby you recognise that this conscious transformation is a quite essential work in the will. You get to know, actually, the will if you take charge of your self-discipline.

However, this gives the soul life certain forces from two sides with which you can gain quite different starting points of a psychology than they exist generally up to now. Above all: someone who has sharpened his thinking in such a way as it is meant with these methods can consider the whole course of life different. Then only he is able to observe the former soul life really which accompanies us always. Then he can understand certain moments in this soul life and focus on them really, what, otherwise, you do not manage with any concept but with those mental pictures and soul impulses that one develops in such a way as I have stated. They can reach the inner soul life. While all the other concepts try in vain to grasp the mental.

Then one also acknowledges the unreality of our being while imagining. This is the first step that one knows that imagining is not real. As much as modern psychology may collect with the old means from the mental pictures, as much as it wants to rest upon the proposition “I think, therefore I am,” it never gets any mental reality from the thinking because we do not exist while we think because we can find that only in the thinking, which is not real with us. The unreality of thinking is the first that the human being recognises if he is able to strengthen his thinking if he wants to discipline his will.

If one looks at the feeling which psychology wants to observe, one is not able to do it. Why is that?—Just someone can answer that question who has investigated the imagining and willing as I have described. He learns to recognise that the feeling, observed with usual means, appears confused. There the unreality of thinking, here the confusion of feeling.

A third one is particularly clear if one takes such ways as I have described them: the incomprehensibility of the will. Unreality of thinking, confusion of feeling, incomprehensibility of willing.

You need only to take such books like that by Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950, neurologist, psychiatrist, Guide to Physiological Psychology. 1891), then you realise that just those who rest upon present scientific mental pictures in psychology can be blinded, isn't that so? At least they believe that one can understand something of thinking. Feeling is to them only nuancing the thinking. But the will escapes them completely. One realises that one acts. One assumes that something takes place. However, the usual concepts cannot look into that which the will really is.

One has to apply those forces that one has obtained with the mentioned methods also to the soul life. It is good to take the starting point from the feeling, not from the thinking, also not from the will. There it becomes obvious that you cannot understand the feeling if you envisage one single moment of the human life only. One can never understand that which I feel now if one considers this present feeling only. One can understand it only if one considers the Before and the After. Let me start from a concrete case.

Somebody sets himself the task to understand Goethe's feeling, for example, in 1790. One struggles, while one tries first to visualise how Goethe felt in 1790. How were his sensations nuanced to the world et cetera? If one has got ideas of it, one puts the question to himself: yes, how does this feeling of 1790 relate to his feeling 15 years ago, to his feeling after the next fifteen years?—One is urged to the right thing by the method that I have described. Finally, one is urged to look at his whole life. Psychology has to consider biographies from such a viewpoint, as I characterised it. Goethe's feeling in 1790 would have been generally incomprehensible, even to Goethe, in 1790. We only start understanding it, while we face his whole life.

If we study that carefully what manifested of Goethe's being between 1790 and 1832, we study that what worked on Goethe from his birth, in 1749 until 1790, and we try to consider Goethe's life in its effectiveness after 1790 in such a way as we are accustomed to refer scientific things to each other, to that what he experienced before 1790, then the special feeling nuance of 1790 arises. Everything that we feel at a point is an effect of our own future on our own past. One will study biographies this way in future! One will also face the single human being this way.

One will say to himself, it is strange that in that which expresses itself in the feeling already shows not only the impact of the future life, but also that of the whole past life. However, one will get the experience with such studies that some determination is necessary for such studies. Since it will belong to these methods, for example, to ask himself, how does develop the emotional life of those human beings who very soon died after that time at which one looks? There arises something very interesting for a study of the emotional life.

One will find out that that which lives in a human being in the immediate present is the pressure of his future on his past. We also have the confusion of the emotional life, the mysterious of the feeling life because we have kept the past in mind and the future is shrouded in darkness. If we deeper investigate the human being, then the next step is possibly that one also tries to familiarise himself with the imagining life. One asks himself, what imagines in the human being so that he imagines that he can resolve to have thoughts about this and that?—Nobody can answer that question who cannot observe the moment of awakening appropriately.

Just as a future psychology will not start from all sounding phrases which you now find about the feeling in the textbooks of psychology, just as a future psychology will also not start from the so-called observation of imagining, but will feel pressured into going back to a reality which is over for the usual life: the awakening. The awakening happens for the usual life at one moment. The human being goes from sleep to the wake life, and he seldom finds opportunity to bethink himself, in the jumbled way of awakening, how he has woken. However, even if he found it, he could not at all understand this with the usual imagining. He can understand it only if he soars such an image as I have described it as a result of the meditative thinking.

However, the human being stands there, I would like to say, at the abyss that he must realise something unreal in the imagining. On the other hand, this imagining is refined and strengthened. With it, the human being is only able to observe the moment of awakening.

The method, which spiritual science has in this area, enables the researcher to face such a moment in such a way as the naturalist faces the electrostatic generator or another apparatus or a phenomenon of nature. Then the moment of awakening appears to the strengthened or transformed imagining in such a way that one looks into it immediately and can say to himself, you emerge from a world that was interspersed with thoughts from falling asleep until awakening as your day life is interspersed with thoughts.

This is the great discovery that you can do. Indeed, you find tips with single psychologists everywhere that one says, even if one does not know that one dreams perpetually, one dreams perpetually. However, one not only dreams—this is the discovery, which the strengthened thinking accomplishes—, but one also learns to recognise that the wake consciousness is something else than to be filled with thoughts. This is looking at the thoughts that you have by day. You cannot look only at the thoughts that fulfil you from falling asleep until awakening because you forget that which you have experienced in sleep at the moment of awakening.

This is just an important moment where you start realising that you emerge from a life of thoughts that remains unaware to the usual consciousness, you emerge from a true sea of thoughts. Then another observation is connected with it.

Only if you can look at that sea of thoughts that also penetrate the soul if it does not have the day consciousness, you recognise why you know nothing of these thoughts in your day consciousness. Since you notice: at the moment of awakening you cannot take everything in the body what you have experienced in sleep. However, the body is the only tool of thinking. You must use the body. You cannot draw in what pervades your soul as night thoughts. The body is inappropriate to take them in.

If one has recognised which real process forms the basis there that one lives, indeed, during sleep in a spiritual world which cannot enter into the body which exists for itself—. it is just the typical that this world cannot enter—, then one can find the transition from this experience to the usual imagining and thinking.

Since the same takes place, only in pictorial way, if you get to a mental picture while you are dozing or observing the outside world. Thinking and imagining is nothing but a decreased awakening in relation to reality. We wake up if we grasp any thought. It will be the important of the new psychology that it realises that awakening not only exists if we rub our eyes in the morning from sleep, but we are awaking perpetually. Nevertheless, the force that controls our whole life just appears especially strong at the moment of awakening, in so far as we grasp mental pictures or thoughts. Thus, that force penetrates us perpetually which manifests in the awakening, in grasping thoughts.

However, thereby we also know that this grasping thoughts is correspondent to a world which cannot enter into the human organism. While we think, however, we have to reduce reality to pictures because our body urges us. Reality is not admitted at the moment of awakening. However, we also learn to recognise that we could not have these pictures of imagining unless in our body the spiritual reality existed. From there you gain the possibility, while you have progressed on one side by the awakening to the imagining, of going back from the awakening to an important moment of life, to birth, or we say, to conception. You have gained the possibility because you have awoken in yourself that soul force, which reveals that imagining is a perpetual awakening. If you have this soul force, it enables you to look back from the observation of awakening to that what one may call: entering into the physical-sensory world. About that, I want to speak more exactly in the third talk.

You learn from this fact that modern spiritual-scientific psychology is based on real observation that, however, it does not cause this observation with those observations that you already have, but with those concepts, which you have to form first. Besides, the important thing is just to acknowledge that we have pictorial existence in the imagining only and that the imagining must accept this pictorial character because the bodily life cannot directly accept the reality of the mental.

You learn to recognise that in the imagining the pictures of the whole antenatal spiritual-mental life take place, as well as at the moment of awakening the contents of thoughts appear to the soul which we have experienced from falling asleep until awakening. If we continue the observations methodically, the spiritual-mental experience appears independently which has combined with the bodily at the entry of the human being into this bodily life. There is on one side just a straight progress from the understanding of the moment of awakening to imagining. On the other side, you thereby get the ability to proceed from observing the awakening to the entry of the human being in the earthly life.

Of course, the modern human being says that he cannot realise those things that he cannot imagine them.—However, this is why it concerns just that you cannot familiarise yourself with these things with the usual imagining. This is the first great discovery that you have. You can observe the spiritual-mental life before birth or conception only if you appropriate other forces than those are which you already have.

You can recognise only by such a way, as I have indicated it, that the imagining is rooted in the spiritual. On the other side, this way also enables you to delve into the will. The will must be developed by self-discipline to another level than it has in the usual life. However, thereby something else comes about than by that which I have described up to now. Up to now, I have described the way to the mental pictures that extended the view beyond birth or conception, which leads on the other hand into the unreal of the imagining life. We get the certainty of the independence of that which reveals itself in imagining in the suggested way.

The matter becomes different if we more exactly get to know the will by self-discipline. In the meditative imagining, we make ourselves independent of the physical body. We notice this independence by the fact that the night thoughts, which the body cannot accept, transition into the consciousness that you behold how you emerge from a sea of thoughts.

Because you take charge of the will discipline, you feel more and more depending on the body. You get more and more into the body. You get to that which the outer science can never reach. It can only externally investigate the appearance of the inside, while it goes forward anatomical-physiologically. In internal way, you learn to recognise what goes forward, actually, in the body if anyhow a will impulse gains ground. It sounds extremely weird, but you get to know this bodily life in the will in such a way that you have the same experiences, which you, otherwise, only know possibly with hunger and thirst, with immediate feelings that are connected with the bodily activity.

Whereas the picture of imagining makes us more and more independent from the bodily life, the cultivation of the will induces you to experience the will really in such a way as you experience hunger and thirst. You get to the most significant feelings associated with the bodily life.

In particular, you learn to recognise how the thought that transitions in the will impulse cannot help expressing itself as something emotional with that who has developed the will as the inside expresses itself if you are hungry. As paradoxical it sounds: you experience a will thought with developed will by a feeling of hunger or thirst; you may call it as you want.

It concerns of realising the big difference between the development of the imagining life that makes us more and more independent from the nature of the bodily life, and the development of the will life that shows us, how we are connected in the usual existence just by the will with our bodily life.

But it also becomes obvious if this observation of the will really becomes internal experience like hunger and thirst that in this will something is that proves every time when a will impulse is grasped to be very similar to the moment of falling asleep. Now you learn also to recognise the secret of falling asleep, this peculiar transition to the unaware state. This is parallel for the observation with letting an impulse of thought in the will. The will decision which one grasps proves to be a kind of falling asleep that is started and not finished.

Now you get to know the opposite of that which you got to know with the development of imagining. With imagining, you find out that the spiritual-mental that you experience from falling asleep until awakening is not able to enter. That spiritual-mental which expresses itself in the will cannot leave the body with the usual waking state; it is stopped. This stopping expresses itself as the will power. If the body no longer keeps it, the moment of falling asleep occurs.

This will be the other starting point for the modern psychology: to find the coherence of will and falling asleep, of the inability to retain the spiritual-mental which then unites with the general universe by the human body, and falling asleep, as we have found the coherence of forming of mental pictures and the awakening in other way.

If you learn to recognise how falling asleep is intimately related to every will impulse, you get by the line which one has drawn in research between falling asleep and willing the internal mental force to continue the line to the other side. Because you have investigated the imagining, you got the possibility to look at the mental-spiritual beyond birth or conception. Thus you can investigate the other line in the oppose direction. You pursue the line of falling asleep up to the will. You find the relationship of the will impulse with falling asleep. Then you pursue the soul life after falling asleep with the inner power that you have thereby appropriated, and then the other side of the human existence, death, appears. Since then the intimate relationship of the will with death appears.

Natural sciences will make this important discovery in not too distant future; they will prove that what spiritual science has to ascertain from the other side. Since natural sciences will show that everything that is associated with the will impulses is associated with the formation of certain poisons, with everything that leads the human being into the same direction in which he is led if he walks towards death.

Those forces that enable the human being to unfold his will impulse are heading to death. How are they heading to death? If the imagining is a bare picture of its true reality, the will is something embryonic. We can will because we can keep a certain force in an embryonic condition.

If you imagine the seed of a plant and then the whole plant, you have the picture that you can apply to what spiritual research shows with reference to the will. Since the will is an embryonic death. Even as we awake perpetually, we are born perpetually if we think; we die perpetually if we activate our will. The force of death is in us, we lower it by the nature of our bodily life, we dismiss it for a short time while falling asleep, and the body can recover again. However, the force that we carry in us because we can unfold will impulses is the embryo of that force with which the soul walks through the gate of death.

Thus, the big boundary questions of life join the most usual mental pictures of imagining and willing. We look beyond the bodily life if we learn to understand imagining and willing. Imagining, feeling and willing have become empty phrases—about other concepts I speak in the following talk—because one does not get around to applying the real way of thinking of natural sciences, the way of observation, to the soul life.

About other things, I have to speak in the third talk. However, such mental pictures arise, which show that the feeling is a result of the whole life between birth and death, which show that imagining is a result of the life beyond birth or conception, which show that the will is the embryonic of that which we carry beyond death.

One gets to no real concept of imagining, feeling and willing if one does not start considering the whole life in such a way as I have described it today by which one gets beyond awakening and falling asleep to birth and death. However, I have to say that that thinking which is necessary to familiarise yourself with these things must have the courage to break with many things.

However, do not believe that someone who has come to such things which must rightly seem to be paradoxical, maybe foolish, to the human being of the present, especially to the scientist of the present, has not taken the matter seriously, if he experienced everything that the others also know who doubt it. Disproving this thing is easy.

I have attempted once in Prague with two public talks to disprove spiritual science at first and then to found it. Of course, disproving is much easier than founding. However, something else is much more significant. One would have to say to himself, actually, in particular in view of some things that have taken place in the very last time: spiritual science must retrain concerning many things, and not few people have forced themselves to retrain the one or the other in the last time. Must the outer compulsion induce people to retrain? Indeed, many people will retrain repeatedly by outer compulsion. However, it is a time today where it is necessary to practise a kind of self-reflection, which makes you realise that that which originates from scientific or other present mental pictures leads into the unreal in the soul. Only such an investigating of the soul forces as I have described it today can lead into the soul. You can get around to attaining that strength for this research from yourself only. On the other hand, just modern natural sciences will automatically lead somebody to spiritual science who understands the essence of natural sciences. Tomorrow I would just like to show this.

The spiritual-scientific psychology leads from the temporal of the human being to the everlasting of his soul. It will show that in future if people do not force themselves to walk on the intimated way no psychology will be there or only such a psychology that gives useless food to the soul. Energy and courage belong to this new psychology. Our time already points to the fact that now the treasures of the human inside cannot be won—while it puts the human being in an outer existence to which one will need some courage—by mere letting himself go but only by courageous advancing with such methods, which one has to search, which did not already exist.

Since a number of years, I have spoken here about the objects of spiritual science, and several listeners who have already participated in these considerations many a time will find various knowledge that is not new just in the today's comprising consideration. Only that which I have said this year about spiritual science gave occasion to envisage the objects from the most different viewpoints. Since one could say, today spiritual science, as it is meant here, is by no means generally acknowledged and many people confuse it with everything that one calls “theosophy” more or less exactly.

The so-called chance passes something on to you in this respect. When I came on a lecture tour through a certain city, I saw two little writings in a bookstore in which I looked, however, for something quite different. The one contained a popular representation of the philosophical worldviews and approaches to life of the nineteenth century (probably by Max Bernhard Weinstein, 1852-1918, published under this title in Leipzig in 1910). If you look at this writing more exactly, you get the impression that this booklet was written with a certain seriousness; the single chapters correspond to a rather thorough knowledge of that which is discussed there—with the only exception of theosophy or—as it is meant in the narrower sense here—spiritual science.

I try to bring together spiritual science with that which is said there just in this chapter, and there one must say, as good and conscientious other chapters are, as superficial is the chapter about spiritual science. I do not want to dwell on this chapter here, I would only like to point out that beside various incorrect statements the author says that spiritual science spreads abstruse fantasies of these or those world facts.—Now I thought, there could be alluded to my Occult Science, and somebody would deny that what is well proved there, without inspection of the thing. However, I read on straight away, and found the sentence that in the circles of the supporters of this spiritual research everywhere prophecies of wars and earthquakes play a big role.—I ask you, do such prophecies play a big role in my explanations?

One could assume that few people read such writings. However, the other booklet or more precisely pamphlet had the title Seven Sects of Perdition. A Warning for Protestant Christians (edited by a Protestant association in 1913). I will not read out it. You find the following seven sects of perdition enumerated:

First: Adventists or Sabbatists—about four pages. Secondly: the dawn Bible students—also four pages. Thirdly: the new-apostolic—three pages. Fourthly: the Mormons—four pages. Fifthly: the Scientists—three pages. Sixthly: the spiritists—only two pages. Seventhly: theosophy, about that he knows half a page only. However, I do not want to read out it completely but only half of it.

“In particular it [theosophy] teaches self-redemption instead of the redemption by Christ; one can equal it to paganism” and one points to the church history. It is interesting also that this pamphlet contains the remark that you can buy the booklet at any price and dimension, also as loose sheets. For pennies you can form an opinion about that of which should be talk today, and then you can attach the concerning sheet to the wall.

Thereby it becomes clear where from the judgements come which face us from some sides if they condemn the value of our object wholesale. It is typical also that the author of this pamphlet can say only half a page about the “seventh sect.” Now, from this outer example it arises that there, indeed, in our time many prejudices exist against spiritual science and that there is little will to get really to the prime concern of spiritual science. Nevertheless, one may assume that that who wants to judge an object knows this really. It is obvious that this is not the case with spiritual science among wide sections of the population. From those persons who want to know nothing about it one cannot demand that they deal with it; however, from those who judge publicly. It would probably confuse some persons to have to deal with the things about which they want to judge “conscientiously.”

One has repeatedly to ask, how shall spiritual science place itself into the immediate life of the present? How and with which right does it position itself to the big questions of life and to the riddle of death?

It becomes more and more evident that from unaware depths of the soul life these cardinal questions become aspirations in the human souls. However, the area of spiritual science is as big as the world, and one would have to speak a lot if one only wanted to indicate what spiritual science encloses. However, even if spiritual science has to extend its research infinitely, nevertheless, its investigations culminate in both life riddles that we call with the words destiny and death. The knowledge has to assert itself that the outer science cannot answer the big questions of life and immortality if it is aware of its borders. However, this outer science tries to produce the most varied worldviews, namely just such worldviews that believe to stand on the ground of natural sciences, and believe that they are allowed to say that their results are directly contrary to that which spiritual science has to say.

It would be a wild-goose chase to speak of the fact that the bases of spiritual science really conflict natural sciences. These natural sciences have produced many things for three, four centuries, which have changed our whole life largely. If that is true which Goethe says that one has to judge a school of thought according to its fertility, natural sciences have shown their fertility—indeed, only with the solution of material life riddles. However, one has to take something else into account. Natural sciences have educated humanity in a particular way. They have been a wonderful means of education, so that the human being put the questions of life and death in another way than he put them before. It also corresponds to the fact that spiritual science works with its method, its whole view, completely after the pattern of natural sciences. However, while the questions have become deeper, the souls have been duped into accepting that as real only which they perceive with their senses.

Spiritual science cannot offer physical things. It cannot go into a laboratory and create spiritual knowledge there. Already the spirit that lives in us between birth and death can be fathomed for a certain time and for our consciousness by soul processes only. Everybody knows that the spiritual life is in him since his birth; everybody should know that he can reach that which he has experienced, for example, twenty years ago only by memory, and that he cannot bring up this process of memory with outer apparatuses. So one should also recognise that spiritual science has to look for its sources by an increase of such inner experiences like memory. However, it will still last long, until humanity realises that the method of spiritual science is, indeed, an inner one, but is inspired by the same spirit as the outer natural sciences. One can recognise this immediately if one looks at that which such critics of spiritual science say who deny that one can reach what is beyond sense perception. Even if they concede that there is something supersensible, nevertheless, they say, the human cognition cannot penetrate into it. With such spirits, one can observe with which difficulties spiritual science has to fight. Since such an objection has no other value as if anybody wanted to say, for example, what have the today's botanists in mind, actually? They say—and this should be a basic achievement of the nineteenth century—, the plants consist of single cells, and the animals consist of such cells, too. Let us assume that now anybody proves how much a human being can see with his eyes. He cannot see the cells and everything that crosses the borders of physical cognition.—Those who speak in such a way prove that the eyes cannot look into that which, nevertheless, the naturalists have seen. Such a proof can be right; then one would prove that it is impossible to reach the cell composition of plants and animals with the human eyes and to penetrate into these subtlest processes. Someone would be a fool who wanted to prove that such a proof is wrong.—Numerous proofs are of the same quality, which assume that the human cognitive faculties, as well as they are, can know nothing about the supersensible. Such proofs can be quite correct, and a fool would be who wanted to disprove them.

However, completely apart from the limits of the physical eye, [one has to take into account] that one has armed the eyes with cognitive means like microscope, telescope, and spectroscope and can thereby observe processes and substances which [were invisible before], for example, with spectral analysis. The fact that this has been done is also right, and it is as right if old worldviews spoke about the limits of knowledge. Just as natural sciences have sharpened the eye, spiritual science strengthens that about which one can say in its natural state probably rightly: it has limits. However, from it we realise that the proof of the limits of knowledge is justified just as little as the proof of the limits of the eye. The eye arms itself with microscope, telescope, and spectroscope—the human mind gains strength with inner, intimate means: meditation, concentration, and contemplation. I have already mentioned that. From my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? you can more exactly get to know what one understands by meditation, concentration, and contemplation.

The normal soul activity, however, depends completely on the physical body, on the nerves or the brain. Spiritual science argues nothing against that. However, spiritual science applies methods by which the mental capacity becomes different, as well as the vision became different by the application of microscope and telescope.

Let me speak about the mental capacity first. In the usual life, it deals with the world of the things. How does this mental capacity work? We stand here just at one of those points where it will maybe become obvious already in the next time that natural sciences—if they are properly understood—are in harmony with that which spiritual science has to give. Natural sciences already touch this. If we develop a thought that is directed in the usual life to the area of our sensory existence, the mental capacity intervenes in our brain. This is just a common result of spiritual science and natural sciences, save that spiritual science knows it, while natural sciences hypothesise. However, the usual life already teaches us how the thinking intervenes in the brain, and one knows that the mental capacity works in such a way that it causes destructive processes in the brain, destructive processes of the smallest subtlest structures of the brain. The mental capacity is active, and it destroys the brain perpetually. Our mental capacity could be protected from causing this destruction if it were used different.

Just as a human being behaves who sees himself in the mirror, the mental processes behave; they intervene in the brain: they reflect the work of thinking in our soul, so that we become aware of the mental process. Thus, the usual mental capacity works. The usual life proves it, while the thinking causes tiredness that sleep again balances. This is the regular course: the balance of these destructive processes with sleep. Natural sciences already have words for it like assimilation and catabolism, and for that who knows to observe these things it becomes clear that the results of natural sciences also lead to that which spiritual science teaches.

This process of thinking is as natural as the vision of the eye. Just as one can strengthen the eye with instruments, one can strengthen the mental capacity, not with outer means but with the inner means of concentration, meditation, and contemplation. What do they cause? They cause that the human being gets around—if he wants to become a spiritual researcher - to giving himself contents of thought arbitrarily which are not stimulated from the outside. The usual thinking proceeds in such a way that we get from outer impressions to inner experiences. The spiritual thinking proceeds in such a way that the inner work differs from the usual way [of thinking]. For longer time the thoughts have to be directed to an inner soul experience that the human being himself has created and that is not stimulated from the outside. For example, the soul dwells on the words:

In the bright light living wisdom is flowing.

Of course, this is folly for the usual thinking. However, it matters that we do not have images of the outside world [in the meditation]. These images have rather the purpose to deepen the soul forces. This happens if the soul tries to bring out its inner abilities from its depths to do something that one does not do in the usual life at all: concentrating on such an image. One usually does not apply the soul forces that appear in the meditation in the usual day life; at most, they become faintly noticeable. They are brought up quite different in the meditation. Slumbering soul forces emerge from the depths of the soul, and then it becomes obvious that these soul forces are independent of that on which the usual mental capacity is dependent. While the usual thinking is dependent on the brain and causes destructive processes, that thinking creates an inner power, which gives the soul the experience: I am independent of my physical body.

We want now to characterise this process of the independent mental capacity a little more. We get here to an area that natural sciences can also acknowledge. I have already touched one chapter. Du Bois-Reymond (Emil D. B.-R.,1815-1890, German physiologist) pointed [in his lecture] at the scientific congress in Leipzig (1872) to the limits of cognition and he considered the sleeping human being only as explicable because he is free of affects, desires, and mental pictures. Something is there that just such scientific thinkers who take the facts, as they are, will recognise more and more. Let us assume that anybody says, air surrounds us, the human being inhales it, then a quantity of air is in him; now I want to investigate the air. I investigate the lung how it is nourished how it carries out its organic processes et cetera.—It would be the worst method to investigate the air this way. One would find out something about the lung. However, one investigates the air best of all in the atmosphere, because the air has its existence in the atmosphere. If anybody wanted to recognise the air by investigations of the lung, one would consider him as brainless.

One is still far away from getting to know the affects and passions if one investigates the physical body. One cannot get to know the thinking, while one investigates the brain. This would be as brainless as to investigate the air in the lung. As the lung inhales the air in a respiratory process that envelops the earth as atmosphere, the body inhales the soul life with every awakening. As well as the inhaled air relates to the lung, the soul life relates to the brain. With falling asleep, the body exhales the soul life again. While we are waking, we have the soul life in ourselves, which belongs to the spiritual-mental life in which we live as we live physically in the atmosphere.

Here we have a field where it is clear, how natural sciences and spiritual science intertwine, as Du Bois-Reymond already recognised. The spiritual life belongs to the entire spiritual world, as well as the air belongs to the physical atmosphere. We may say, if the human being sleeps, he has exhaled spirit and soul. His spirit and soul are in the spiritual-mental of the whole world; however, he cannot perceive them there because he has no consciousness.

Somebody who has developed his mental capacity by meditation in such a way tears his power of thought out of the material body forces; he becomes aware of himself as it were beyond the body. That is he develops thought processes that do not originate from the application to the things of the material world, but he goes with his thinking to the spiritual world. He knows by immediate experience that he develops the thought process beyond the body and experiences beings that face him as spirits. This is based on the release of the thinking from the body and is that which can be considered as the first source of spiritual research. One can also experience internally that the thinking is different which one acquires this way; it does not tire us. Since it is an important phenomenon that we experience such processes, which do not fatigue us. However, some meditating people believe at first to note that they fall asleep straight away with the meditation. This is due to the fact that then the process has not yet advanced far enough because it is difficult to detach the thought process from the purely external. It takes years and years.

What do you experience then? Then you experience something that cannot be characterised in the abstract, you experience stupefying inner things. You experience that you have your self beyond yourself that you survey from without what you have experienced.

As you feel enclosed in your skin in the day consciousness, you experience it now as an outer object. The outer world remains interesting, you are attracted to it like with hundred about hundred magnetic forces. You do not want to be torn away from the outside world. You feel, so to speak, that you belong to it. However, these are emotional forces and sensory forces, which belong, above all, to the reality of higher experience. You learn to recognise the forces with which you feel attracted to the outer physical body. Now you get to know the reason, why you wake up in the morning, you learn to recognise that the body says to us, you belong to me, you have to unite with me as that unites with me which is exhaled by the outer physical nature [during sleep] when that is repaired which the outer life has destroyed. One learns to recognise, why the soul returns to the physical body.

You learn something else: the forces that were there before conception. You get to know the soul as it is today, however, you also learn to recognise that they are the same soul forces, which were there before birth, which have drawn us to the parents who could give the physical body. You get to know the forces that led to the present life on earth, also the forces that led to our destiny. If the human beings develop forces to get free from the body with the thinking, then they get around to recognising the forces by symbols that lead their destinies. The materialist dream research has already recognised that one experiences images, memories in the dreams.

One cannot easily imagine that in the usual everyday life a misfortune that a human being experienced twenty years ago is not something that he deeply longs for. If we have drawn ourselves with the thinking from the body, we experience that that which was unpleasant to us at that time that we feel now attracted by it. Why? Because the soul recognises that it has imperfections. They are so deeply concealed that one does not notice them with the usual day consciousness. This inclination to compensate imperfections works in the depths of the soul, even if it knows nothing of it in the usual consciousness. It feels attracted to something that brings ill luck into life; not before it has passed this ordeal, the former imperfection can change into a perfection.

The life with the released mental capacity looks in such a way that in the soul the forces appear to which we feel attracted. The question of destiny becomes the question of imagining. We start understanding the misfortune because we know that the soul must search the misfortune to compensate certain imperfections. It has to know that we were equipped before our birth with forces that have drawn us to the suitable embryo, as well as the plant seed is drawn to the topsoil that is suitable to it. In this respect, spiritual science is also in harmony with natural sciences that cannot deny that, for example, an Alpine plant grows in surroundings whose conditions correspond to its growth. The soul is led to such a destiny in which it can change an imperfection into a perfection. We walk through the gate of death. If the soul did anybody wrong and walks now released from the body through the gate of death, it feels: I can only feel perfect in future, if I try to balance out what I did wrong. Committed crime changes into a feeling: my soul is helpless against that which happened, but I can learn to develop forces which are as predisposition in me and which cause that I get a destiny in which I can transform myself.

In similar way, the human being gets beyond the present soul life if he acquires another soul force. As we can disengage the mental capacity, so that it proceeds internally, we can disengage another force that finds other use in the usual life: the power of speech. What happens with this power of speech? We develop something spiritual-mental in the speech, but it does not remain something spiritual-mental in the usual life. It intervenes in the processes of the brain, of the larynx—the power of speech intervenes in the material-bodily. As we stop the mental capacity, before it intervenes in the brain, we can also stop the power of speech, before it intervenes in the brain and the larynx.

Natural sciences look for the organ of speech in the third convolution of the brain, in Broca's field; monkeys do not have it. Someone who pursues the facts only with the view of natural sciences says, speech comes about with Broca's organ.—However, the fact militates against it that somebody who grows up only on a lonesome island does not attain language, in spite of Broca's organ. The fact is that the power of speech structures the brain, so that Broca's organ is [structured) and from there the activities of will develop in such a way that language originates. Thus, we have something spiritual in the power of speech that intervenes in the organic. However, we can now change the power of speech, while we do not allow it to come close to the bodily. We achieve this, while we make our meditation, concentration, and contemplation somewhat different. To release the power of speech it is not sufficient that we dedicate ourselves only to the contents of mental pictures, but it matters that we penetrate the object of our mental picture with sensation and emotion. We can meditate in thoughts on such a saying like

In the bright light living wisdom is flowing.

However, we can set our thoughts aglow with feelings, we can feel our soul life in that light which becomes a symbol of the flowing wisdom to us. Then we feel that we retain the forces which, otherwise, we let flow out in words. This leads to Inspiration, as well as the thought power—if it is retained—leads to Imagination.

If the human being emancipates the power of speech so that he applies the same forces internally, but retains them in the soul, then the view of the spiritual world extends. Then we can take up other results of spiritual science. Since the soul life extends not only up to the existence beyond the body, but we learn also to look back to former lives on earth. Stopping the power of speech enables us to experience former lives on earth. One always regarded silence as something special. Hence, one needs not limit the outer talking; one has only to apply the inner forces.

I want to bring not only results of spiritual science, but I want also to show the means which lead to them. One maybe contemplates: how long does the interval last, actually, between two lives on earth? For the spiritual researcher arises that our former life on earth goes back to a time where still nothing of the individual language was there. The individual language needed so long time for its development as time passed since our last life on earth.—This is an example of the fact that one can only investigate facts of the spiritual world if the suitable soul forces have developed. However, to understand that without prejudice what the spiritual researcher says, one only needs to think logically. As well as someone can understand a portrait who does not understand the technique of painting, everybody can also understand the messages of the spiritual researcher. One must be a spiritual researcher to penetrate into the spiritual world, but if one puts the investigated into words, one can understand them with common sense.

One has to expect no answer to questions of the spiritual world from science. However, the common sense knows what is right. Numerous philosophers say that the human being puts questions that exceed the usual capacity of the senses, for example, the question of human destiny. The outer life does not answer it. The thinking about which I have here spoken today answers it, while it changes the question of either sympathy or aversion into a question of imagining. The big questions answer themselves in such a way that life confirms spiritual science everywhere.

Except the mental capacity and the power of speech, one can still develop a third. The human being knows that he intervenes with it already in the usual life in such a way that it can seize his blood circulation. Shame makes us blush; fear makes us turn pale. Our soul life intervenes up to the activity of the heart. One can also retain this force in the soul if the human being carries out concentration, meditation, and contemplation in suitable way, so that that which lives in the blood circulation remains in the spiritual-mental. If he connects his will impulses with those forces if he meditates, for example, the sentence:

In the bright light living wisdom is flowing

and feels it in the following way: I want to move through time in such a way that I contribute to the flowing light process, then he tears a part out of that force which expresses itself in the blood circulation, in the movements of the limbs, in the gestures of the everyday life and turns them to the spiritual. The meditation has to come about with such motionlessness of the limbs as usually in sleep. If one breaks away these forces, one can seize that which works beyond the earth as a spiritual-mental life. One gets to know the earth as a re-embodiment of a spiritual being, as one has recognised the human soul as reincarnated from former lives.

Thus, the human being rises in the universe, he experiences his coherence with a spiritual-mental that surrounds us as physically the air surrounds us. Thus, we grow into the spiritual world, while we solve not only the questions of life theoretically, but experience the solution. Then that is not theory which spiritual science gives, it becomes an elixir of life, then it flows out into our soul lives like steam energy into a machine. As natural sciences intervene in the outer life and achieve triumphs, spiritual science will intervene in the inner human life; it will give us power and certainty of life. This will not remain a theory, but get closer to the solution of the questions of life at every turn, while the human being realises what he has in his inside, as well as he has the air in his lung.

Then he knows that he has a soul in himself, something that walks from life to life. One speaks about immortality not only theoretically, but one experiences it in himself, as well as one can experience the future plant in the seed that only creates it. Yes, spiritual science shows the living spiritual core by now; we learn to experience that which prepared the next life. We understand immortality, while we experience it in such a way that there is a guarantee of living on. We will recognise that something exists after this life and something existed before this life. We get to know an originally spiritual state from which we have arisen. We learn to recognise, as long as we are still imperfect, that we must develop that we will go over together with the earth into a spiritual-mental state at the end of our lives on earth. We will know that we must experience our guilt in this and in future lives as imperfections, until we recognise that our lives are lined up. We get to know immortality in our own souls. With it, spiritual science gives us what the human being needs in this present to solve the questions of life and the riddle of death.

It becomes completely obvious—if one looks at the present time—that, on one side, the need exists of that which spiritual science can give—that, on the other side, one has the biggest prejudices if spiritual science answers single questions of everything that it has to be.

Let us take an example. One mostly judges using outer reasons. There is a famous professor of philosophy (presumably Ernst Mach, 1838-1916, Austrian philosopher and physicist). If he speaks about the soul, you find the following words, and countless students carry the words as the highest wisdom into the world. In view of this fact, you must not be surprised about prejudices against spiritual science. There he says, the sum of our experiences, imagining, willing and feeling as they combine in the consciousness to a unity is the soul which rises to moral impulses at a certain level of perfection. Of course, someone who gives such definitions of the soul can only get to the result that the soul dissolves at death. The child has already to learn in the school that one is not allowed to add apples, pears, and plums and “unless the first and second were, the third and fourth would never be.” However, what does the philosopher mean? He talks about a sum of imagining, feeling and willing and—it is strange—this can become moral feeling and willing. He performs a miracle absent-mindedly. Such a miracle is put absent-mindedly: the single experiences combine to a unity, and after they have been summed up, they get to moral feeling and willing. The child already learns at school that one is not allowed to add different things.

From there the objections against spiritual science originate. However, where it is measured in life, solutions are found which can be understood and whose comprehensibility can make the soul healthy. Spiritual science can be measured how it can cope with life. Life answers the questions in such a way as well as the scientific questions are answered. A scientific invention is so long a figment, until life proves it true. It proves itself, while it says, yes, if the facts turn out to be right in life, I can reveal myself to you. This also applies to spiritual science.

If the human being walks through the gate of death, he fights in the spiritual world for that which he has already prepared here: the seed of a new life. Then in the postmortal life, the life between birth and death turns out to be a transformation of a new soul life.

We ask a modern psychologist, Bartholomäus von Carneri (1821-1909, Austrian materialist psychologist)) to get to know something about death which is only another state of consciousness to spiritual science. He says: “Life was a fight, the human being got tired from this fight, and death is the most beneficent if it proves to be sleep after the heavy work of life which no god disturbs.”—Yes, you can touch it here with your own hands in this characteristic that got stuck unconsciously in impossible mental pictures. Someone who wants to prove the cessation of the human soul life talks of the fact that it is the most beneficent if he sleeps without being disturbed by a god. I would like to know which mechanic says if his machine does not work: I put it to bed. There one notices how those get entangled who do not yet want to get themselves into spiritual research.

Others admit [the existence of a soul], as that American who was, actually, a chemist said in a lecture which he held in 1909: every human being has to feel as an independent soul. Yes, so far the naturalists who judge impartially have come: behind the bodily, something exists. One is allowed today to speak about soul and spirit in general which are behind the sensory world. However, one is labelled as a daydreamer if one does not only say: this is spirit, spirit, and spirit. However, if you say, as well as one finds beings in the animal and plant realms, there are spiritual hierarchies that outrank the human being, then one discounts it as a pipe dream.

If humanity gradually understands that spiritual research places itself in the spiritual life of the present, it knows: it is the same situation as it was when natural sciences, when Galilei, Copernicus, and Kepler appeared. At that time, people said, the human view has proved with certainty that the earth stands still and the sun circles around it, against all appearance these men state that the earth circles around the sun, that is nonsense.—Even if Copernicus was denoted a swindler; nevertheless, his teachings were accepted later.

The world does not behave much different today compared with spiritual science that substitutes scientific materialism with spiritual reality. Spiritual research shows what its knowledge can give. It solves questions of life and death. However, one objects what I have read out at the beginning of this talk [from two writings]. People who face spiritual science as those once who denounced Copernicus, Galilei, and Kepler as heretics, will “prove” for long that one can prove the human life only from birth to death. The course of the times and of the universal spirit will be in such a way that humanity has to recognise that it will experience the same as it experienced with Giordano Bruno concerning the outer borders of space. People considered the [visible firmament] as the border of space that encloses the world.

Giordano Bruno proved that only the [restricted] human cognitive faculties gave this border. Spiritual science shows today that the temporal firmament, that [the limitation of the human life] between birth and death has to be wiped out. As Giordano Bruno extended the borders of the firmament, spiritual science shows the infinite temporality [of the human life], the infinite possibility of life transformation, [so that the human beings] will recognise the everlasting work with self-knowledge.

Hence, may popular writings speak of figments and prophecies, that who recognises the development says, may people brand spiritual research and spiritual science ever so much. The course of time will show that spiritual research is as little a sect as natural sciences are a sect. One may say about those who want to progress in the area of truth that the genius of humanity will neglect them, and one will recognise that spiritual science is not a sect, but that it speaks about the riddles of life from deep knowledge and that its knowledge has to be handed over—as the knowledge of Copernicus, Galilei, and Kepler—to the welfare of humanity.

I thank you from my heart for the kind words of the General Secretary of the Swedish section, Colonel Kinell, and in reply I wish to say that it is deeply satisfying, on my journey from Helsingfors, to be able for a few days to discuss again with you in Stockholm those things and truths which touch us all so closely. I offer you a hearty greeting, as warmly felt as the kind words of the General Secretary.

On these two more intimate evenings we shall have to speak of a question, an affair of mankind, which in a double connection penetrates extraordinarily deeply into our souls. First, because the Christ question is such that, for two thousand years now, not only has it occupied countless souls on earth, but from it have flowed for countless earth-souls spiritual life-blood, strength of soul, consolation and hope in suffering, strength and sureness in action. And not only that, but when we consider all that surrounds us as external exoteric culture, created through many centuries, then through deeper knowledge we see that all this would have been impossible had not the Christ impulse taken hold of a large part of humanity. This is one consideration which shows us what strong interest the Christ question must offer if we approach it with anthroposophical knowledge. This is only one side of the interest which we bring to this problem; the other side of our interest comes out of the particular soul and spiritual conditions of our present time, our epoch. We need only look about us in the world and try to understand the yearnings, the seeking of the human soul, and we shall be able to say to ourselves: “Ever more do human souls seek after something which, through the centuries, has been connected in men's souls with the name of Christ, and ever more do they come to the conviction that a renewing of the ways, a renewing of interest, a deepening of knowledge, is necessary if the needs of human souls (which will steadily increase with regard to Christ) are to be satisfied.” If we find on the one side a thirsting for enlightenment about Christ, we find on the other side, among numerous souls of the present day, doubt and insecurity as to the means used up to this time. And therefore, because of the yearning for an answer and because of the doubt that the truth can be learned, this is one of the most burning questions of the present time.

It is thus obvious that a spiritual movement which penetrates more deeply into spiritual foundations has the task of throwing light on this question. Things are like this today, my dear friends, but in a relatively short time, truly in a very short time, they will be entirely different. If we somewhat unegotistically examine what, in relation to Christ, will be needed by those men who follow after our time, then we must say to ourselves that, although many men of the present can satisfy themselves with what there is, souls will feel themselves increasingly unsure and will thirst increasingly for enlightenment. Thus in speaking of Christ today we speak of something which we foresee as necessary for the human beings of a very near future. Anthroposophy would not fulfil its task if it did not put itself in a position to create clarity on these points by means of its knowledge, as far as this is possible today.

As my point of departure I shall indicate the three paths along which the soul, in accordance with human evolution, can attain to Christ. If we mention three paths we must briefly describe the first path, which today is no longer a path, though it once was; which today need not be an esoteric path, as just in our time the anthroposophic path is, but which was a path for millions of souls through the centuries. This is the path through the so-called Christian documents, through the Gospels. For millions and millions of people this path was, and for many it still is, the only possible one. The second path along which the human soul may seek the Christ is that which can be called the path through inner experience, which especially in the present and in the near future numerous souls, out of their particular constitution and qualities, must pursue. The third path is that which, through the anthroposophical movement, one can at least begin to understand in our time, the path through initiation. Thus there are three paths to Christ: First, the path through the Gospels; second, the path through inner experience; and third, the path through initiation.

The first path, the path through the Gospels, need be only briefly characterized here. We all know that, in the course of the centuries, the Gospels became nourishment for the hearts and souls of innumerable people. We know also that the most enlightened, the most critical natures (and these are not the irreligious), begin to have no further relation to this Christ, because it is maintained today that external knowledge cannot know what historical facts really stand behind that which the Gospels relate. Had the Gospels been read by men of past centuries as today they are read by a scholar, by a man who has gone through the current scientific education, they would never have been able to exercise the powerful influence, the life-influence, which has flowed out of them. Now, if the Gospels were not read in past centuries as the educated man of today reads them, how were they read?

To ponder a priori on what may have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of our era, this would never have occurred to the Gospel-readers of earlier centuries, and still does not occur to many Gospel-readers of today. Those who begin to test, in the Gospels, what may have taken place before the eyes of the inhabitants of Palestine at the beginning of our era lose confidence in the historical character of the events of Palestine. The men of earlier times did not read in this way. They read in such a way that they allowed a picture to work on their souls; for instance, the picture of the Samaritan woman at the well, or of Christ imparting the Sermon on the Mount to his disciples. The question of external physical reality never occurred to them. How their hearts warmed, how their feelings swelled in the presence of these great and powerful pictures—this was to them the main thing. What formed itself in their hearts, what force, what life-meaning they gained through these pictures—this was the main thing. They felt that spiritual lifeblood and strength flowed to them from these pictures. When they let these pictures work on their souls, they felt strong; they felt that, without these pictures, they would be weak. And then they felt living, personal connections with what is recounted in the Gospels, and the question of historical reality occurred to them no further. The Gospels were themselves reality, they were present as force, and one did not need to ask whence they came; one knew that men had written them not with earthly means, but with impulses from the spiritual worlds. I do not assert that one must feel in this way today (what one must do depends on the development of mankind), but I assert that men felt in this way through centuries.

How could it be so? On this point spiritual science is now first able to instruct us. When we begin to understand the Gospels in the light of spiritual science, and try to penetrate into what flows down from spiritual worlds and is contained in the Gospels, then we stand before the Gospels in such a way that we say: “We know from spiritual science, quite apart from the Gospels, all that has taken place in human evolution in connection with the Christ-impulse, and then we find what is contained in the Gospels, quite independently of them.”

How, then, do we conceive the Gospels from the spiritual-scientific point of view? If I may use a simple comparison, let us assume that a man has attained enlightenment on some subject. With this enlightenment, he meets a second man and begins to talk with him. At first he will not suppose that the other knows anything of the subject which is so clear to him, but from the conversation he perceives that the other knows it quite as well as he. What must reasonably be assumed? The reasonable thing to assume is that the other has enlightened himself through the same or similar sources. So is it also with the Gospels. We can do this, no matter from what standpoint we approach the Gospels. A society could be formed of people who read the Gospels in the above described way; then there could also be people in this society who were determined opponents of the Gospels, and who would say that, when the Gospels were tested by the methods of science, it would be found that they were written much later than the events in Palestine could have occurred, and that their accounts contradict each other—in short, that these Gospels cannot be regarded as historical documents. Such people might be in such a society, and one could say: “Well, let us at first leave the Gospels in peace, but let us do some research in the spiritual worlds.”

Then, if we did some genuine spiritual research, if we gained genuine super-sensible knowledge, we would find that in the course of human evolution there had once entered a strong impulse, which broke into human evolution as an impulse from the spiritual worlds, from which mighty things have proceeded for humanity; and we would see that at the beginning of our era, this impulse had taken hold of a man who was especially suited thereto. All this, and many other facts which fit into this knowledge and which can be won only through super-sensible research, all this we would have; and those who wished to know nothing of the Gospels would have this as well as others. Then one could approach the Gospels and say: “Well now, at first we did not trouble ourselves at all about these Gospels; yet it is remarkable that, when we read them carefully, we see that they contain what we found in spiritual fields independently of them. Now we recognize their value from an entirely different side.”

Then we are clear that it could not be otherwise, that those who wrote the Gospels must have received their knowledge from the same source which is now opening itself to humanity through the spiritual movement. This is just what now confronts us, what will come more and more, what will make a valid basis for the valuation of the Gospel documents. If this is so, we must say that men will be able to find along other ways what can be known through these documents. And so this knowledge begins to be more and more sacred to us through the spiritual cognition of the present day. It already worked through the force of the Gospels. Because the Gospels are suffused with the holiest knowledge, with the spiritual impulses of humanity, they had an influence even where they were taken in naively. Spiritual knowledge works not only abstractly, not only in theory, but works as a life-force, as life-blood of the soul. And ever more and more will men recognize how consolation and strength flow from this knowledge.

But when we speak of the inner way to Christ, we encounter more and more things which can be understood and felt at the present time only when approached with the right spiritual-scientific understanding. We shall try to speak of the inner Christ-experience in such a way that it may be seen how, independently of all tradition, this may appear in every man. To this end we must, of course, regard the human being with the knowledge which we have found through spiritual science. If we steep ourselves in spiritual science, then we find even the most elementary knowledge becoming fruitful when we apply it to life. We find that we get away from the abstract charts of the seven members of man when we contemplate the growing and becoming of man. The physical body has its especial development in the first seven years of life. We perceive further that in the second seven years of life, from the change of teeth until sexual maturity, the forces of the etheric body play in man. Then the forces of the astral body begin to play, and only later, about the 20th or 21st year, (depending on his whole organization and on the nature of the forces in him) begins what appears in man as the Ego, as the bearer of the Ego, with that force which it really has because of its organization for the whole life of man as the bearer of the Ego.

That the bearer of the Ego first becomes really capable of living in the 20th or 21st year is not often observed in our present time, because we are not yet inclined to pay attention to these things. What does it mean that the bearer of the Ego first becomes really active in the 20th or 21st year of life? Here we must observe, by occult means, the growing man and view the deeper forces of his organization. These forces continually change: from birth until the seventh year, from the seventh year until sexual maturity, from sexual maturity until the unfolding of the Ego. But they change in such a way that they cannot be tested by the methods of ordinary anatomy or physiology. By occult means, one can say that only around the 20th year does man develop his forces in such a way that a self-sufficing Ego-bearer now exists. Earlier this Ego-bearer is not yet formed; earlier the human corporeality, even the super-sensible, is not yet a proper Ego-bearer. So if we consider the members of man in the light of the great world-principle, we must say that, through the peculiarities of his organization, man is really ripe to develop an Ego out of himself only in his 20th or 21st year, not earlier.

With this fact another may be contrasted, namely that in the first years of life, in normal consciousness, we really dream ourselves, sleep ourselves into life, and that only after a certain point of time does life take such a course that our own memory begins. Of what happened before this time we may be told by our parents or elder brothers; after this point the man says “I am who I am.” From the time when he says “I have done this; I have thought that,” the man dates his own Ego; what came before that loses itself in the twilight of the soul. Our memory reaches only to the point of time so described.

What do we have when we put these two facts together; that the real bearer of the human Ego is born in the 20th or 21st year, and that in our souls we describe ourselves as an Ego from the third or fourth year on? This means that in the present cycle of man's development he has an opinion, a feeling, about himself which does not correspond to his inner organization, as this has developed; for the consciousness of the Ego appears in the third or fourth year, but the organization for the Ego first appears in the 20th or 21st year. This fact is of fundamental importance for the understanding of man. When this fact is stated abstractly as an item of spiritual-scientific knowledge, no one gets particularly excited about it; but, because this fact is true, there are numerous experiences available which we all know well, but which we do not observe in the light of this fact. All that man can experience of cleavage between external organization and inner experience, of sorrow and pain in life because (by reason of his organization) certain things are impossible for him, of disharmony between what he wishes and what he can perform; the fact that he may have ideals which lead far beyond his organization: all this leads back to the fact that the consciousness of our Ego goes an entirely different way from that followed by the bearer of our Ego. In this respect we are two men; An external man who is organized to develop his egohood in the 20th or 21st year, and an inner soul-man who already in his fourth or fifth year, as to his soul-life, emancipates himself from his outer organization. Emancipation of the Ego-consciousness from the outer organization takes place in childhood. We go through something in our soul which proceeds independently of our outer organization and which can even come into sharp contradiction with our outer organization. We are inclined, in regard to the inner consciousness of the Ego, to pay no attention to our organization, to what is below in our bodies. In our souls we develop in an entirely different way from that in which our bodies develop.

Thus the course of inner development of mankind is twofold. The development of our organization goes from the first to the seventh year, then from the seventh to the fourteenth, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first, in the above described way; but our inner development is such that we are entirely independent of the above, such that the consciousness of our Ego emancipates itself in tenderest childhood and makes its own way through life. But what is the consequence of this curious fact of human development? Only the occultist can tell us this.

If we survey all that the occultist can teach, we come to a curious fact. We come to see that sickness, frailty of the human organization, all that makes possible illness, age, and death, comes from our being really a duality. We die because we are organized in a certain way and in our organization pay no attention to our Ego-development. That with our Ego we go an independent path, not troubling ourselves about our organization, this is brought home to us when this organization, in sickness and death, places a hindrance before our Ego-development; we are reminded that our Ego-development proceeds quite separately from our organization. Whence comes really this curious fact of duality in human nature?

When we examine man in connection with reality, we see that, if at a certain time in the Earth evolution, namely in the Lemurian time, only progressive forces had intervened in human development, the youthful development of man would today proceed quite otherwise—namely so that it would keep even step with the Ego-development. At all times the soul-development would coincide exactly with the body-development. It would have been impossible for man to develop himself otherwise than in the way now set up as an ideal, for example, in my pamphlet The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. (Anthroposophic Press, New York City) Had only progressive forces been active at that time, the singular result would have been that, in the first twenty years of life, man would have been much less self-reliant than he is now. This lack of self-reliance is not meant in a bad sense, but in such a way that each of you would approve of it completely. For example, human nature in the first seven years of life is completely disposed to imitation. Since grown people, if only progressive forces had been active in the Lemurian time, would do nothing shameful, children between one and seven would be able to imitate nothing bad. In the second seven years of life the principle of authority would reign, whereas now it has come to be a curse of the land, a curse of the world, that persons between seven and fourteen want to be independent and are even educated to form independent opinions. The grown persons would have been the natural authorities for the children. From fourteen to twenty-one, man would have looked much less into himself, upon his own self; he would have turned more toward the outside. The force of ideals, the power of living himself into his life-dreams would have become immensely significant for him. Life-dreams would have sprung from his heart, and then full Ego-consciousness would have appeared in his 20th and 21st years.

Thus there would be in the first seven years a period of imitation, then in the second seven years a looking up to authority, then in the third seven years a springing forth of ideals, which would bring man to his full Ego-consciousness. The sum of those forces also working in evolution which are called the Luciferic forces have brought about a deviation from this path of development in the course of human evolution. Since the Lemurian time they have torn the Ego-consciousness away from the foundation of the organization. The fact that we already have the Ego-consciousness in tenderest childhood is to be traced to the Luciferic forces.

How did the Luciferic forces intervene? The Luciferic powers are beings who remained behind on the Moon, and who therefore have no understanding of the mission of the Earth, for that which should develop for the first time on the Earth for the Ego after the 21st year. They took man as he was on coming over from the Moon, and laid in him the germ of self-reliant soul-development. So that in the hastening of Ego-consciousness, in this peculiar cleavage in human nature, lie the Luciferic forces. Knowledge of such a fact is given for the first time by anthroposophy. It can be sensed by every man of sound feeling, for every man can sense that there is something in him which separates him from his full humanity. All that we call unjustified egoism in our nature, all withdrawing from the activities of men, all this stems from the Ego's not going along on the right path of the organization. Thus do we see man before us, if he can feel. If he says to himself: “I could be other than I am; I have something in me which is not in harmony with myself”—then he feels the strife within him of the progressive powers with the Luciferic powers. This fact had to occur in the course of human evolution; it was necessary because man would never have become really free without the Luciferic beings; he would have been always bound to his organization. What on the one hand brings man into conflict with his organization, gives him on the other hand the first possibility of being free. One thing, however, remains out of this duality of the organization for the ordinary human life; this shows itself in our feeling that the Ego has become incapable, out of its own powers, of transforming the organization.

When we survey the broad circumference of what has constituted and created man, we find the two forces described above; there are the organic forces of our human nature, which are intended to develop in seven-year periods, and there are the Luciferic forces. If there were nothing else in nature or in the spiritual life in the course of human development, it would follow that man could never, through his emancipated Ego, come into full harmony with his nature. Were there nothing else in the field of earth-existence, man could only become ever more estranged from his organization; his organization would become ever more infirm, more dried up; the cleavage would necessarily become always greater. If man only once reaches the point of intensely feeling this as spiritual-scientific knowledge, then he comes to a great moment in his life, when he can say: “Here I stand with my human organization which is given me by the progressive forces that work from seven years to seven years (he need not express this in precise words, he need only feel it dimly). But, because this organization has an opposing force, which develops itself independently, it becomes sick and infirm and finally dies.” In the depths of his soul man feels this. Without knowing anything of anthroposophy, he need only have this feeling of a discrepancy between the inner Ego and the outer organization, and, if he steeps himself in this feeling, then—he knows not whence—there comes into his soul something of which he feels: “I myself, with the Ego which I can trace back, can do nothing against my organization, for which I am no match. But there comes something which I can take into my Ego as force, which I can take into my consciousness as conviction; directly from spiritual worlds comes something which does not reside in me, but which permeates my soul. From unknown worlds something can flow into my soul; if I take it up in my heart, if I suffuse my Ego with it, then it helps me directly from spiritual worlds.”—This which comes from spiritual worlds may be called whatever we like; that is not important; only the feeling is important.

Let us assume that a man is today at odds with life and says to himself: “I must seek through the whole world to see if somewhere a force will spring up which will give me something through which I can come out of the conflict, something which will help me out.”—In the nature of things this man could never find his way with the means of the old religious confessions; in the ancient ecclesiastical ideas he could never find anything which would give him this force that he seeks. But, in order to have a concrete example, let us assume that such a man went to one of the ancient holy religions, that he went, for example, to Buddhism and steeped himself in the extraordinary teachings of Buddhism. If the man felt, however, naturally and in its full strength the cleavage described above, he would feel—I do not say this would come out of a theory, but out of a dim feeling—he would feel that in the personality, in the individuality of Gautama Buddha, something had lived which could appear in the world only on the basis of a long development. This individuality went through many incarnations, achieved higher and higher grades of evolution, and finally came so far that in the 29th year of his life as Gautama Buddha, he was able to rise from Bodhisatva to Buddha, was able to rise in such a way that he need never more return to a physical body. How did that which flows out from this individuality come into being? Every unprejudiced mind can feel what speaks out of the Buddha, can feel all that first came about and developed through the Bodhisatva in earth evolution after developing through many incarnations. In the most beautiful and comprehensive sense all this contains the forces which are found in the periphery of the earth, in the interplay of the forces of the organization and the Luciferic forces. Therefore, because it has gone from incarnation to incarnation, because it stems from the same forces from which the human forces stem, therefore that which flows from the Bodhisatva to the Buddha has such an effect that the unprejudiced mind does not feel anything that can call forth a full harmony between the Ego of man and his organization. The soul feels that there must be something which does not go from incarnation to incarnation, but which can stream into every human soul directly from the spiritual worlds.—When the soul feels that it must have a relation to what streams down from the heavens, then it is beginning to have an inner experience of the Christ. Then the soul can understand that in Christ Jesus something had to appear which was different from everything previously existing. This is the radical, fundamental difference, the difference in principle between the life of the Christ and that of the Buddha.

Buddha rose from a Bodhisatva to a Buddha with the forces which cause man to mount from incarnation to incarnation, as is the case with other great founders of religions. Into the life of Jesus of Nazareth something entered, something worked into the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth, over a period of three years, which streamed down directly out of the spiritual worlds, which had nothing to do with human evolution, which previously was not connected with a human life. We must keep this difference clearly in mind if we wish to understand why, in what the fourth post-Atlantean epoch called the Christ, there was something which was different from all other religious impulses, and why the other religions have always pointed mankind toward this Christ.

If we, in the post-Atlantean time, look back into the ancient sacred Indian culture, we see the seven holy Rishis, in whose souls there lived something of an immediate perception of the spiritual worlds. Had one of the seven holy Rishis been asked about the fundamental mood of his soul, he would have said: “We look up to the spiritual powers from whom all human development has proceeded. This reveals itself to us in seven rays, but above this is something else, something which lies above our sphere.” Vishvakarman, this was the name later given to what the seven holy Rishis thus felt. The seven holy Rishis spoke of a power which had not developed with the earth.

Then came the Zarathustra culture. Zarathustra spoke, when he directed his gaze to the spirits of the sun, of something which should flow into human evolution directly through a streaming out of the spiritual worlds. “What we can give to men,” so spake Zarathustra, “is not that which will one day, from the sun-distances, stream directly out of the spiritual worlds into mankind.” What is spiritual in the sun, this is what the later Persian culture called Ahura-Mazdao.

In the Egyptian mysteries the Christ question was felt with a particularly tragic force. It was felt in the deepest way, if by deep we mean a form of human feeling in which there was an especially strong consciousness that humanity stems from what is spiritual. The Egyptian initiate said to himself: “Wherever we turn our gaze, we feel in what surrounds us the decline from the original spiritual. Nowhere in the outer world is the spiritual to be found in its immediacy and purity. Only when man steps through the gate of death does he descry that from which he springs. Man must first die (in relation to inner experience, not in relation to initiation); then he becomes united with the Osiris-principle (so did the ancient Egyptian name the Christ principle); in life this cannot be done, that is the discrepancy. All that is in the periphery of the earth, this does not lead to Osiris; the soul must first have passed the portal of death to be united with Osiris. Then, in death, the soul becomes a piece of Osiris, it becomes itself a sort of Osiris. The world outside has become such that it dismembers Osiris through his enemy; that is, through all that belongs to the external world.”

And the initiate of the Egyptian mysteries said: “Mankind, as it now is in our culture, is a sort of reminiscence of the old Moon-time. As the culture of the seven holy Rishis is a sort of reminiscence of the old Saturn-time, as the Zarathustra culture is a reminiscence of the old Sun-time, so is the Osiris-culture a reminiscence of the old Moon-time when the Moon and its beings first separated from the sun, on which, however, remained the beings from whom man took his origin. At that time there took place the separation of man from the good forces of his organization, from the source of his life-forces. But, through the yearning and privation for the spiritual which will endure, the time will come for men when Osiris will descend and show himself as something which must come as a new impetus which was not before on earth, because already in the old Moon-time it had separated itself from the earth.”

All that to which the seven holy Rishis and Zarathustra pointed, and of which the Egyptians said that in their time men could not attain it during life, this was the force, the impulse, which for three years revealed itself in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. All great religions spoke of it; it revealed itself in Jesus of Nazareth, to whom all religions pointed. Thus not only Christians have spoken of Christ, but also the members of all ancient religions. Thus something entered into the course of human development which man needs and which is accessible to inner experience.

Let us assume that a man grows up on a lonely island. Those who have charge of his education tell him nothing of that happens in the world in regard to the name of Christ and to the Gospels; they give him only such culture as does not make use of the Gospels or the name of Christ, culture which may have come to birth under the influence of Christ, but divested of the name of Christ. What would happen in this case? In such a man the following mood would be bound to appear. He would say to himself one day: “Something lives in me which is in accord with my universal human organization; this I cannot at once grasp. For that in which my Ego-consciousness lives presents itself to me in such a way that I need something which cannot come to me through human culture, I need an impulse from the spiritual worlds, in order to make the Ego stronger again in its organization, from which it has emancipated itself.” If such a person can only feel strongly what man needs, then something can come over him from which he will recognize that, directly from spiritual worlds, something must stream out which penetrates directly into his Ego. He does not know that this is called Christ; but he does know that in his consciousness he can suffuse himself with it, that in his Ego he can foster this which comes to him from the spiritual worlds. Then something will come to him of which he may say: “Granted, I can be ill, I can be weak, I can die; but from my own Ego I can make myself stronger, I can send into my organization something which gives me strength and force directly out of the spiritual worlds.” It is indifferent what he calls this; if the man comes to this feeling, he is gripped by the Christ-impulse. That man is not gripped by the Christ-impulse who says he can have something from a teacher who has passed from incarnation to incarnation, but he who feels that directly from the spiritual world there can come impulses of force, of strength. Men can have this inner experience; without it men cannot live, without it men will not be able to live in the future. They can have this experience, because once, for three years, there lived objectively in Jesus of Nazareth this impulse which came directly out of the spiritual worlds. As it is true that a man can lay a seed in the earth, and that many other seeds can come from this one, so it is true that the Christ-impulse was once implanted into humanity, and that since that time there is something in humanity which was not there earlier.

This is why the Egyptian life was so tragic. Men felt that in their lives they could not come to Osiris; that they must first pass through the gate of death, to be united with him in inner experience. Of initiation we have still to speak. But since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha that is possible which earlier was not possible: that of his own motion, out of his single incarnation, man seeks his connection with the spiritual world. And this is because the impulse which was given through the Mystery of Golgotha can flash up in every soul, and can enter, since that time, into every man through inner experience. Not the Christ Who was on earth—the soul does not trouble itself about Him—but the Christ Who is attainable through inner experience. Since the Mystery of Golgotha it is possible, in the single incarnations, to win a connection with the spiritual. And because this is so, there happened in the one fact of Golgotha something which can shine out into humanity, which is not given through the achievements of the successive incarnations. Therefore it is impossible that Christ should show himself in a way which is a consequence of many incarnations, as happened to Buddha from his incarnations as Bodhisatva.

Tomorrow we shall see how the path to the Christ in human evolution can be found for the future.

Yesterday I spoke about a kind of ascending movement that is rooted in human nature. And basically, by contemplating this ascending movement, we have rediscovered everything we already know, namely, at the lowest level, knowledge that is applicable only to the facts of the physical plane, physical knowledge, which is called objective knowledge in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. So today I will call it physical knowledge. We then came to know the next higher stage of knowledge, the so-called imaginative knowledge; but we considered it as archetypally conscious imaginative knowledge; conscious imaginative knowledge can only be present in the human being who tries to work his way up to it in the way described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. The words “physical knowledge”, “unconscious imaginative knowledge”, “conscious imaginative knowledge” were written on the blackboard; see diagram.

But the fact is that the content of imaginative knowledge, that is, imaginations, are in every human being. So that the development of the human soul in this respect is nothing more than an expansion of consciousness to include a realm that is always present in the human soul. We may say, then, that the situation with imaginative knowledge is no different than it would be with objects in a dark room. For in the depths of the human soul all the imaginations that come into question for the human being are present just as the objects of a dark room are. And just as the objects in a dark room are not increased in number when light is brought into the room, but remain as they are, only illuminated, so, after the consciousness for imaginative knowledge has been awakened, there is no different content in the soul than there was before; they are only illuminated by the light of consciousness. So, in a sense, by struggling to the imaginative level of knowledge, we experience nothing other than what has long been present in our soul as a sum of imaginations.

If we look back again at what we were able to understand yesterday, we know that when our perceptions of the objects around us through our physical senses descend into the realm of memory, that is, into the unconscious, , so that we are in a position to be unaware of them for some time, but they have not been lost, but can be brought up again from the soul, then we have to say that we are sinking down into the unconscious that which we have in ordinary physical consciousness. Thus the world of representations that we gain through physical knowledge of the external world is constantly being taken up by our spiritual, by the supersensible; it continually slips into the supersensible. Every moment we gain representations of the external world through physical perceptions, and these representations are handed over to our supersensible nature. It will not be difficult for you to consider this in the light of everything that has been said over the years, because this is the most superficial supersensible process imaginable, a process that takes place continuously: the transition from ordinary perceptions to perceptions that we can remember. So it seems obvious, and this is also true according to spiritual research, that everything that takes place when we perceive the external world is a process of the physical plane. Even when we form ideas about the physical external world, this is still a process of the physical plane. But in the moment when we let the ideas sink down into the unconscious, we are already standing at the entrance to the supersensible world.

This is even a very important point to be taken into account by anyone who, not through all kinds of occult chatter but through serious human soul-searching, wants to gain an understanding of the occult world. For there is a very important fact hidden in the saying I have just applied: When we as human beings face the things of the external world and form ideas, it is a process of the physical plane. At the moment when the idea sinks down into the unconscious and is stored there until it is brought up again by a memory, a supersensible process takes place, a real supersensible process. So that you can say to yourself: If one is able to follow this process, which consists in the fact that a thought that is up in the consciousness sinks down into the subconscious and is present there as an image, one can, in other words, follow an idea as it is down in the subconscious, then one actually begins to glide into the realm of the supersensible. Just think: when you go through the usual process of remembering, the idea must first come up into consciousness, and you perceive it up here in consciousness, never down in the unconscious. You must distinguish between ordinary remembering and pursuing the ideas down into the unconscious. What takes place in remembering can be compared to a swimmer sinking under the water, whom you see until he is completely submerged. Now he is down and you no longer see him. When he comes up again, you see him again! [It was drawn.] It is the same with human perceptions: you have them as long as they are on the physical plane; when they go down, you have forgotten them; when you remember them again, they come up again like the float. But the process I am talking about, which already points to imaginative knowledge, could be compared to you diving under yourself and thereby being able to see the swimmer down in the water, so that he does not disappear when he submerges.

But from this follows nothing less than that the line I drew earlier, the level surface, as it were, below which the imagination sinks into the unconscious, into the realm of memory, is the threshold of the spiritual world itself, the first threshold of the spiritual world. This follows with absolute necessity. It is the first threshold of the spiritual world! Just think how close the human being is to this threshold of the spiritual world. [The words 'threshold of the spiritual world' were written next to the diagram.]

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And now take a process by which one can try to really get down there, to submerge. The process would be to try to follow ideas down into the unconscious. This can actually only be done by trial and error. It can be done by doing something like the following. You have formed an idea about the outside world; you try to artificially evoke the process of remembering independently of the outside world. Think of how it is recommended in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, where the very ordinary rule of looking back at the events of the day is given. When one looks back at the experiences of the day, one trains oneself to enter into the paths that the imagination itself takes by descending below the threshold and then ascending again. So the whole process of remembering is designed to follow the images that have sunk below the threshold of consciousness.

But in addition, it is said in “How to Know Higher Worlds” that one does well to trace the ideas one has formed in reverse order, that is, from the end back to the beginning; and if one wants to survey the day, to follow the stream of events backwards from evening to morning. In doing so, one must make a different effort than is made in the way of ordinary recollections. And this different effort of will brings one to grasp, as it were below the threshold of consciousness, what one has had as an experiential image. And in the course of trying, one comes to feel, to experience inwardly, how one runs after the images, runs after them below this threshold of consciousness. It is really a process of inner experiential probing that comes into play here. But it is important to do this review really seriously, not in a way that after a while you lose the seriousness of the matter. But then, if you do this process of looking back for a long time, or in general do the process of bringing up an experience from memory, an experienced world of ideas, so that you imagine the matter in reverse, thus applying a greater force than you when you remember in the usual sequence, then you also experience that you are no longer able to grasp the idea from a certain point on in the same way as you would have grasped it in ordinary life on the physical plane.

On the physical plane, memory expresses itself in such a way – and it is best for memory on the physical plane to express itself in this way – that if one brings up the image that one wants or is supposed to remember, one does so in a way that is true to the context of one's life, one brings it up in the way one has formed it on the physical plane. But if, through the suggested trial, one gradually gets used to chasing the ideas, as it were, under the threshold of consciousness, one does not discover them down there as they are in life. That is the mistake people always make when they believe that they will find a copy of what is in the physical world in the spiritual world. They have to assume that the ideas will look different down there. In reality, they look like this below the threshold of consciousness: they have stripped away everything that is characteristic of the physical plane. Down there they become entirely images; and they become so completely that we feel life in them. We feel life in them. It is very important to keep this sentence in mind: we feel life in them. You can only be convinced that you have really followed an idea down below the threshold of consciousness when you have the feeling that the idea is beginning to live, to stir. When I compared the ascent to imaginative knowledge with sticking one's head into an anthill, I explained it from a different point of view. I said: everything begins to stir, everything becomes active.

Now, for example, let us say you have had an ordinary experience during the day – I will take that – sat at a table and held a book in your hand. Now, at some time in the evening, you vividly imagine what it was like: the table, the book, you sitting there, as if you were outside of yourself. And it is always good to visualize the whole thing pictorially from the outset, not in abstract thoughts, because abstraction, the ability to abstract, has no significance at all for the imaginative world. So you imagine this picture: sitting at a table, with a book in your hand. - With table and book I simply want to say, imagine as vividly as possible some detail from everyday life. Then, if you really let your soul gaze upon this image, if you really imagine it intensely in meditation, then from a certain moment on you will feel differently than usual; yes, I will say comparatively, it is similar to when you would take a living being in your hand.

When you pick up an inanimate object, you have the feeling that the object is still, it does not tingle or crawl in your hand. Even if you have a moving dead object in your hand, you calm down when you feel that this life does not come from the object, but is mechanically assigned to it. It is a different matter if you happen to have a living object, let's say a mouse, in your hand. Let's say, for example, that you reached into a cupboard and thought you were taking some object in your hand and discovered that you had a mouse in your hand. And then, you feel the crawling and tingling of the mouse in your hand! There are people who start screaming at the top of their lungs when they suddenly feel a mouse in their hand. And the screaming is no less when they cannot yet see what is crawling and tingling in their hand. So there is a difference between having a dead or a living object in your hand. You have to get used to the living object first in order to tolerate it to a certain extent. Isn't it true that people are accustomed to touching dogs and cats, but they have to get used to it first. But if you put a living being in someone's hand in the middle of the night, in the dark of night, without their knowing it, they will also be shocked.

You have to realize this difference you feel between touching a dead and a living object. When you touch a dead object, you have a different feeling than when you touch a living one. Now, when you have an idea on the physical plane, you have a feeling that you can compare to touching a dead object. But as soon as you really go below the threshold of consciousness, that changes; so that you get the feeling: the thought has life within, begins to stir. It is the same discovery you have – as a comparison for the feeling of the soul – as when you have grasped a mouse: the thought tingles and crawls.

It is very important that we pay attention to this feeling if we are to get an idea of imaginative knowledge; for we are in the imaginative world at the moment when the thoughts that we bring up from the subconscious begin to tingle and crawl, begin to behave in such a way that we have the feeling: down there, under the threshold, everything is actually swirling and churning. And while it is very quiet up there in the attic and thoughts can be controlled so nicely, just as machines can be controlled, down there one thought follows another, the thoughts tingle and crawl, they churn and roll, down there they suddenly become a very active world. It is important to appropriate this feeling, because at that moment, when you begin to feel the life of the world of thought, you are in the imaginative or elementary world. That is where you are! And one can enter so easily if only one follows the very simplest rules given in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, if only one refrains from trying to enter by the way of all kinds of “practices” hinted at in recent days. One can really enter so easily. Just think that one of the very first things clearly stated in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is that one should try to follow the life of a plant, for example: how it gradually grows and gradually fades away. Yes, if you really follow this, you have to go through the life of the plant in your thoughts. First you have the thought of the very small seed, and if you do not make the thought flexible, you will not be able to follow the plant as it grows. You have to make the thought flexible. And then again, when you think of the plant shedding its leaves, gradually dying, withering, you have to think of shrinking and wrinkling. As soon as you begin to think in terms of living things, you have to make the thought itself mobile. The thought must begin to acquire inner mobility through your own power.

There are two beautiful poems by Goethe. One is called “The Metamorphosis of Plants” and the other “The Metamorphosis of Animals”. These two poems can be read, you can find them beautiful, but you can also do the following. You can try to really think the thoughts in these poems as Goethe thought them, from the first line to the last, and then you will find that if you go through with it, the thought can move inwardly from beginning to end. And anyone who does not follow the thought of these poems in this way has not understood the metamorphosis. But anyone who follows the thought in this way and then lets it sink down into the unconscious, and then, after having done this several times, remembers precisely this thought of the metamorphosis – for this is no different from the thinking that you are supposed to follow in 'How to Know Higher Worlds' Knowledge of Higher Worlds?», will sink into the unconscious, and will then, after he has done this often, remember precisely this thought of the metamorphosis. So he who carries this out, who sinks this thought down and then makes the effort to do it fifty, sixty, a hundred times, and a hundred and one times it will perhaps take, will one day bring it up. But then this thought, which he has practiced in this way, will be a mobile one. You will see that it does not come up like a small machine, but forgive me for using this example again, like a small mouse; you will see how it is an inwardly mobile, living element.

I said that it is so easy to delve into this elemental world if you just tear yourself away from the human tendency towards abstract thought. This tendency to have limited, abstract thoughts instead of inwardly mobile thoughts is so terribly great. Isn't it true that people are so eager to say what this or that is and what is meant by it, and are so satisfied when they can say that this or that is meant by it, because it gives them a thought that does not move like a machine. And people become so terribly impatient in their ordinary lives when you try by all means to convey to them flexible and not such abstract boxed thoughts. Because all outer life of the physical plan and all life of outer science consists of such dead boxed thoughts, of nested thoughts. How often have I had to experience that people asked me about this or that: Yes, what about it? What is that? They wanted a complete, rounded thought that they could write down and then read again, repeating it as often as they liked. But the aim should be to have a thought that is flexible within, a thought that lives on, really lives on.

But you see, there is also a very serious side to the mouse. Why do some people scream when they discover that they have reached into a cupboard and are holding a mouse in their hand? Because they are afraid! And this feeling really does arise at the moment when you realize, really realize: the thought is alive! Then you start to be afraid too! And that is precisely what good preparation for the matter consists of: unlearning to be afraid of the living thought. The materialists do not want to come to such living thoughts, I have emphasized this often. Why? Because they are afraid. Yes, the master of materialism, Ahriman, appears once in the Mystery Drama with the expression “fear”. There you have the passage in the Mysteries where it is indicated how one feels when thoughts begin to become mobile. But now, all the indications in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, if followed, lead to getting rid of this fear of the mobile, of the living thought.

So you see, you enter into a completely different world, a world at whose threshold you must truly discard abstract thinking, which dominates the entire physical plane. The endeavor of people who want to enter the occult world with a certain degree of comfort always consists of wanting to take with them the ordinary thinking of the physical plane. You cannot do that. You cannot take ordinary physical thinking into the occult world. You have to take mobile thinking into it. All thinking must become agile and mobile. If you do not feel this within you – and as I said, you are not doing it right if you do not feel it relatively soon – if you do not pay attention to what I have just said, then it is very easy not to grasp the peculiarity of the spiritual world. And one should grasp it if one wants to deal with the spiritual world at all.

You see, it is so difficult to struggle with human abstractness in this field; because once you have grasped this flexibility of thought, you will also understand that a flexible thought cannot occur in any old way, here or there. You cannot, for example, find a land animal in the water; you cannot accustom a bird, which is suited to the air, to live deep down in the water. If you go to the living, you cannot do otherwise than to accept the idea that one must not take it out of its element. You have to keep that in mind.

I once tried, in a very strict way, initially in a small area – I always try to do it this way, but I will just mention it now as an example – with a very important idea, to show vividly, precisely with an example, how things must be when one takes into account the inner life of the thought. In Copenhagen I gave a small lecture cycle on 'The Spiritual Guidance of the Human Being and of Humanity', which is also available in print. At a certain point in this lecture cycle, I drew attention to the mystery of the two Jesus children. Now take it as it is presented there. We have a lecture cycle that begins in a certain way. It draws attention to how man can already acquire certain insights if he tries to look at the first years of a child's development, tries to look back at these things. The whole thing is designed. Then it continues. The part of the hierarchies in human progress is presented - the book is printed, it is probably in everyone's hands, so I am talking about something very well known - then there is a certain connection, at a very specific point, about the two Jesus children. It is part of the discussion of the two Jesus children that it happens at a certain point. And anyone who says, “Well, why shouldn't we be able to take this discussion of the two Jesus children and present it exoterically, even though it has been taken out of context?” is asking the same question as someone who asks, “Why does the hand have to be on the arm, on this part of the body?” They could even say, “Why isn't the hand on the knee?” It could perhaps be there too. He does not understand the whole organism as a living being, he believes that the hand could also be somewhere else, right? The hand cannot be anywhere other than on the arm! So in this context, the thought of the two Jesus children cannot be in a different place because it is tempting to develop the matter in such a way that the living thought is included in the presentation.

Now someone comes along and writes a piece of writing and takes this thought in a crude way and puts it in context with other thoughts that have nothing to do with it! But that means nothing other than: he puts his hand on his knee! What does someone do who puts his hand on his knee? Yes, you can't do it to an organism, but you could draw it. Paper is patient, you could just draw a human figure, supported here, and the two knees so that hands grow out of them. [This drawing has not been handed down.] Not true, you could draw that, but then you would have drawn an impossible organism; you would have proved that you understand nothing of real life! One could also use the comparison: he has placed the eagle, the bird that is meant for the air, in the depths of the sea or something similar.

What did such a person try to do? Yes, you see, what he tried can be done with all things that relate only to knowledge of the physical plane. One professor can write a book by starting with one, another can start with another, and it does not matter so much there: things can be taken out and so on. But there one is not dealing with living beings, but with thought machines. That is the essential point.

A person who does something like this, who tears something out of context and puts it into an impossible context, has proved that he is completely ignorant of the essence that has been the driving force and inspiration of our entire spiritual scientific movement since its inception, because he is trying to apply the very ordinary materialistic scheme to the spiritual as well. This is very essential. It is very important to face these things squarely, otherwise one does not understand the inner significance of higher knowledge. One cannot say everything at any given point. And it is really true with regard to the exoteric, which borders on the esoteric, that Hegel has already said that a thought belongs in its place in context. I hinted at this recently when I tried to make some suggestions in this direction on Hegel's birthday. In this way, one achieves nothing less than to submerge into life with thinking, whereas otherwise one always lives in the dead; one submerges into life.

But through this, something also reveals itself that could not be recognized at all before and that cannot be examined at all on the physical plane, namely, arising and ceasing. You can also see this from “How to Know Higher Worlds.” On the physical plane, nothing else can be observed than what has come into being. The arising cannot be observed at all; only what has come into being can be observed on the physical plane. The passing away cannot be observed either, because when the object passes into the passing away, it is no longer on the physical plane, or at least it moves away from the physical plane.

So one cannot observe arising and ceasing on the physical plane. The consequence of this is that we can say: we enter into a completely new world element when we discover the movable thought, namely into the world of life and that is the world of arising and ceasing.

Occultly speaking, this could also be expressed in the following way: During the old moon time, man was - albeit only in the dream consciousness - in the world of becoming and passing away. It was not that he saw with his senses what was arising, for he had not yet developed the senses to perceive with, but was still immersed in things. He imagined in a dream-like way, but the images that he imagined in a dream-like way allowed him to really follow the arising and passing away. And that is what he must first strive for again by developing mobile thoughts. So the ascent to imaginative knowledge is at the same time a return, only a return to the level of consciousness. We return to something we have outgrown; we return properly.

So that we can say: This imaginative knowledge is the return to the world of becoming and passing away. We discover becoming and passing away when we return. And we cannot learn anything about becoming and passing away if we do not come to imaginative knowledge. It is quite impossible to discern anything about becoming and passing away without coming to imaginative knowledge.

That is why what Goethe wrote about the metamorphosis of plants and animals is so infinitely meaningful, because Goethe really wrote it from the point of view of imaginative knowledge. And that is why people could not understand what was actually meant when I wrote my comments on “Goethe's Scientific Writings”, which, in the most diverse turns of phrase, repeatedly express that it does not depend on the current scientific but to delve into Goethe's scientific knowledge and to see something tremendously outstanding in it, something quite different from current scientific knowledge. That is why I referred to a sentence that Goethe expressed so beautifully and in which he indicates what is important to him. Goethe made the Italian Journey and followed not only art but also nature with interest. When reading the 'Italian Journey', one can see how he gradually immersed himself in everything that the mineral, plant and so on could offer him. And then, when he had arrived in Sicily, he said that, after what he had observed there, he now wanted to make a journey to India, not to discover anything new, but to look at what had already been discovered by others in his way. In other words, to look at it with flexible concepts! That is what is important: to look at what others have discovered with flexible concepts. That is the tremendously significant fact that Goethe introduced these flexible concepts into scientific life.

Therefore, for those who understand occultism, the following is a fact that is otherwise misunderstood. Ernst Haeckel and other materialistic, or as they are also called, monistic scholars, have spoken very appreciatively about Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants and Animals. But the fact that they were able to express their appreciation is based on a very strange process, which I will also make clear to you through a comparison.

Imagine you have a plant in a flowerpot in front of you, or even better, outside in the garden, and you want to enjoy this plant. You go out into the garden to enjoy it, to enter into a relationship with it. And now imagine that there is a person who cannot do anything with the plant. And if you ask yourself why, you discover: He is actually disturbed by life! And so he makes a cast of the plant very finely, so that the plant is now like the real one, but in papier-mâché. He puts it in his room and now he enjoys it. Life disturbed him; only now does he enjoy it!

I cannot tell you what torments I suffered as a boy when comparing, which is also characteristic of the attitude of people, I often had to hear as a boy that someone wanted to emphasize the beauty of a rose particularly by saying: Truly, as if made of wax! - It's enough to make you want to tear your hair out! But it does exist. It really does exist that someone emphasizes the excellence of a living thing by saying, in his phrase, that it is like a dead thing. It really does exist. For those who have a sense for the matter, it is something terrible. But if you don't have such feelings, you really can't develop according to reality.

Now, the following happened with Ernst Haeckel. Goethe wrote “The Metamorphosis of Plants” and “The Metamorphosis of Animals”, Haeckel reads them and Ahriman transforms what is alive that Goethe has written into mock-ups, into something that is actually made of papier-mâché, and Haeckel grasps that. He actually likes it. So that in what he praises, he has not praised what Goethe really meant, but Haeckel has only translated it into the mechanistic. Ahriman steps between Goethe and Haeckel, transforming the living into a dead one.

Now, as I said, this conscious upward leap to imaginative knowledge is a return. I said at the beginning of the lecture: the imaginations are actually already within us, they have been within us since the time of the moon, and the development on earth consists in the fact that we have covered them with the ordinary layers of consciousness. Now we are returning through what we have acquired in our ordinary earthly consciousness. It is a real return.

And now one can ask: how can one describe the whole thing? One can now say: it is a descent and a re-ascent. Only now is there any justification for drawing this line at all [the words on the blackboard are connected by a line, see diagram]; there would be no sense in drawing it from the outset. And only now can we say: on the level of ordinary physical cognition, there we are below; here is unconscious imaginative cognition, which now sits below in our nature and has to do with the forces of becoming and passing away; and on the other side, in the ascent, is conscious imaginative cognition. [Both were marked on the blackboard.]

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If we take Goethe as an obvious example – I will only look at him as an example – we can say that in Goethe's later works, the point has been reached where the outer development of humanity embraces imaginative knowledge, where it is actually introduced into science.

Now one may ask: Now one can study whether or not very strange things are associated with it? Yes, they are associated with it, because basically the whole of Goethe's way of thinking is quite different from that of other people. And Schiller, who was unable to develop this way of thinking, was only able to understand Goethe with the greatest effort, as you can see from the correspondence between Schiller and Goethe at the point I have often quoted, where Schiller writes to Goethe on August 23, 1794:

”...For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your mind and noted the path you have mapped out with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it by the most difficult route, which any weaker force would do well to avoid. You take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the explanation for the individual. From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more complicated, to finally build the most complicated of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the whole of nature. By recreating it, as it were, you seek to penetrate its hidden technology. A great and truly heroic idea, which shows sufficiently how much your mind holds the rich totality of its ideas together in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would be enough for such a goal, but even just to embark on such a path is worth more than any other ending, and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad between Phthia and immortality. If you had been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and had been surrounded from your cradle by a refined nature and idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps even made superfluous. You would have absorbed the form of the necessary into your first view of things, and the great style would have developed in you with your first experiences. Now that you have been born a German, since your Greek spirit has been thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but to either become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace what reality withheld from your imagination by the help of your thinking power, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within and in a rational way, so to speak. In that period of your life when the soul forms its inner world from the outer world, surrounded by imperfect forms, you had already absorbed a wild and Nordic nature into yourself, when your victorious genius, superior to its material, discovered this defect from within, and from without it was confirmed by your acquaintance with Greek nature. Now you had to correct the old, inferior nature, which had already been forced upon your imagination, according to the better model that your creative mind created for itself, and this could not, of course, be done otherwise than according to guiding concepts. But this logical direction, which the mind is compelled to take in reflection, does not go well with the aesthetic one, through which alone it forms. So you had more work to do, because just as you went from intuition to abstraction, you now had to convert concepts back into intuitions, and transform thoughts into feelings, because only through these can the genius bring forth... “

He considers him to be a Greek transplanted to the Nordic world, and so on. Yes, there you see the whole difficulty Schiller had in understanding Goethe! Some people could learn something from this who believe they can understand Goethe in the twinkling of an eye and thereby elevate themselves above Schiller, even though Schiller was not exactly a fool when it came to those people who believe they can understand Goethe so readily!

But the peculiar thing that can be discovered is that Goethe also has a very peculiar and different view in relation to other areas, for example in relation to the ethical development of the human being, namely in the way of thinking about what the human being deserves or does not deserve as reward or punishment.

It is impossible to understand Goethe's work from the very beginning if you do not consider his, I would say his entire environment's, divergent way of thinking about reward and punishment. Read the poem “Prometheus,” where he even rebels against the gods. Prometheus, that is of course a revolt against the way people think about rewards and punishments. For Goethe there is the possibility of forming very special ideas about rewards and punishments. And in his “Wilhelm Meister” he really did try to present this, I would say, in a wonderfully probing way in the secrets of the world. You don't understand “Wilhelm Meister” if you don't consider that.

But where does that come from? It comes from the fact that in the realm of physical knowledge one cannot form any idea at all of what punishment or reward is to be applied to anything human in relation to the world, because that can only arise in the realm of imagination. That is why the occultists always said: When you ascend to imaginative knowledge, you experience not only the elemental world, but also - as they put it - “the world of wrath and punishment”. So it is not only a return to the world of becoming and passing away, but at the same time a climbing up to the world of wrath and punishment. The words “return to the world of becoming and passing away” and “world of wrath and punishment” were written on the blackboard. ]

Therefore, only spiritual science can truly illuminate the peculiar chain of cause and effect between what a person is worthy and unworthy of in relation to the universe. All other “justifications” in the world are preparatory to this.

We have now reached an important point, and I will continue with this tomorrow.

In the course of the last week we reflected on a number of considerations suited to throw light on the spiritual condition of the present and the immediate future. Recently, we have referred in particular to the decisive turning point of humanity's development in Europe in the fourth century. Earlier, at least in the south of Europe, people understood the Mystery of Golgotha to some extent on the basis of Oriental wisdom. They still grasped with a certain comprehension something that is viewed today with such antipathy by some circles, namely, the Gnosis. The Gnosis was indeed the final remnant of Oriental primeval wisdom, that primeval wisdom which, though proceeding from instinctive forces of human cognition, did penetrate deeply into the nature of the world's configuration. With the aid of the conceptions and feelings acquired through Gnostic knowledge, people were able to have insight into what had taken place in the Mystery of Golgotha. But the Christian stream that increasingly flowed into the Roman political system and took on its form was actively involved in destroying this Gnostic world outlook. Except for a few quite insignificant remainders from which little can be gained, this Christian stream eradicated everything that once existed as Gnosis. And, as we have seen, nothing was left behind of ancient Oriental wisdom in the consciousness of mankind in Europe except for the simple narrations, clothed in material events, about what took place in Palestine at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

To begin with, these narrations were clothed in the form that originated in ancient paganism, as you can see in the Heliand. They were adopted by European civilization. But there was less and less of a feeling that these stories should be penetrated with a certain cognitive force. People increasingly lost the feeling that a profound world riddle and secret should be sought for in the Mystery of Golgotha. For concerning the one who had been united with Jesus as Christ dogmas determined by council decisions had been established. The demand had been raised that people believe in these established dogmas; thus, gradually all living knowledge that had still existed up until the time of the fourth Christian century passed over into the solidly structured system of doctrines of the Roman State Church.

Then, if we have an overview of this whole system of the Occidental Christian church stream, we see that the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha was enveloped in certain firm, rigid, and more and more incomprehensible doctrines, and that any living spiritual knowledge was in fact eradicated.

We are faced with a strange factor in European evolution. One might say that the fertile, living Oriental wisdom flowed into the doctrines adopted by the Roman Church and became rigid. In dogma, it continued on through the ensuing centuries. This dogma existed. One must remember that there were some people who to some extent knew what to make of these dogmas, but it had become impossible for the general consciousness of humanity to receive anything but a dead form. Certainly, we encounter a number of splendid minds. We need only to recall some of those who came from the Irish centers of knowledge; we need only recall Scotus Erigena who lived at the court of Charles the Bald.¹ In individuals like him, we have people who received the doctrines and still sensed the spirit in them, or discovered it more or less. Then we have scholasticism, often mentioned here in a certain connection, which attempted in a more abstract form to penetrate the doctrines with its thinking. We face the fact that an extensive system of religious content was present in rigidified doctrines and was handed down from generation to generation; it survived as a system of dogmas. On the one hand, there were the theological dogmas, on the other, the narrations concerning the events of Palestine clothed in materialistic pictures.

Now, if we wish to comprehend our modern age, we must not forget what these Roman-Catholic dogmas couched in Roman political concepts are fundamentally all about. Among them are doctrines of great significance, splendid doctrines. There is, above all, the doctrine of the Trinity, which, in other terminology of later times, points to the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. An ancient and profound primordial wisdom was frozen into this doctrine, something great and mighty that human perception once possessed instinctively. Yet, only the brilliant, inspired insight of a few could fathom what is contained in such a doctrine.

Running through the various council resolutions, there was what finally rigidified into the dogma of the two persons of Christ and Jesus in one man. There were dogmas concerning the birth, the nature of Christ Jesus, the death, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. Finally, there were dogmas establishing the various festivals; and all this was basically the skeleton, the silhouette of a wondrous, ancient wisdom. Now this shadowy image, this skeleton, continued on through the centuries. One particular reason why it was able to go on was that it assumed a certain form of ancient cults. The content of what was thus expressed in dogmas, in the most sublime dogmas, such as the dogma of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, could spread because it was clothed in the form of an ancient, sacred cult, namely, the Sacrifice of the Mass. The ancient cult was just altered a bit but as such continued on. The various metamorphoses of the Christian festivals lived on through the whole ecclesiastical year. Those aspects lived on that you know as the sacraments. They were intended to lift the human being out of the ordinary material life through the agency of the Church, so to speak, into a higher, spiritual sphere. Because of all this and because of its link with the impulse of Christianity, this content lived on throughout the centuries of historical development in Europe. Side by side with this, as I have said, existed the humble narration of the events in Palestine, but garbed in materialistic formulas.

Because of its significant content and because people basically had nothing else with which to establish a relationship to the super-sensible worlds, all these doctrines together were something that affected minds striving for such higher knowledge. Due to the ritual and the simple narration of the Gospel, however, these doctrines could also unfold that form of activity that gained influence over the broad masses of Europe's population.

In addition to this, another separate and different cult system spread, one that counted less on Christianity as such but frequently accepted it. It was basically not organically connected with Christianity but proceeded more from older cults. This other system culminated in the dogma of present day Freemasonry, which, indeed, had and still has only a superficial relationship to Christianity. As you know, the element that clothed itself in the form of Roman-Catholic dogmatism and the element that in Masonic tradition is linked to other cults and symbolism fight each other tooth and nail to this day.

This development can be traced more or less if only we focus our soul on the historical facts with some sense. But what presents itself can be fully comprehended only when we look to that turning point of European evolution in the fourth Christian century that, in a sense, sank all the ancient spiritual wisdom and its aftereffects into a sort of abyss. Due to that, people in Europe knew little of Oriental primeval wisdom throughout the ensuing centuries.

As I pointed out yesterday, the inner faculties that enabled human beings in ancient times to experience weight, number, and measure in their own being had gradually disappeared. Measure, numbers, and weight then turned into abstractions. With these abstractions, people then established in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch what has today become our natural scientific world view, something that could not include human beings in its sphere and stopped short of them, unable in any way to comprehend them. By means of the abstractions of weight, number, and measure, it did, however, grasp the external natural phenomena with a certain excellence and arrived at a kind of culmination point in the nineteenth century.

People today do not yet have enough distance from these matters; they do not yet realize that a quite special point in time was actually reached in European development in the middle of the nineteenth century. Intellectual striving, pure rational effort, attained to its fullest and greatest unfolding at that time. It was the trend that resulted from those same sources from which the modern natural scientific views have been flowing since the first third of the fifteenth century. Yet, at the same time, this was the trend that ultimately could no longer make anything of the cult that had spread; indeed, this trend basically had been unable for a long time to do anything with the ritual and dogmatic formulas established by the Church councils. Merely a few vestiges had survived, a few remnants; for example, the vestige of the Council of 869,² where it had been resolved that the human being consists not of body, soul, and spirit, but merely of body and soul, with the latter possessing a few spiritual qualities. This vestige remained and lived on in the modern philosophical views that believed themselves to be objective but actually only reiterated what had originated in this Catholic dogmatism.

The modern mood of European civilization, which tended increasingly to a purely intellectual, rational view of the universe, formed out of all these directions. Having been prepared for centuries, this mood reached its culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century. How can we understand this culmination if we observe the human being from a soul-spiritual standpoint? We have to focus on human nature, as it was in ancient times and as it has gradually changed. We have done this already from a number of different viewpoints and shall do so again today from yet a certain other standpoint.

Let us place the human being schematically before us. Take, first of all, man's physical body (red). As I said, I am making a schematic drawing.

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This is man's etheric body (blue); that is the human astral body (yellow); here we have man's ego. Let us first consider the human being as he was in ancient times, those ancient times when instinctive clairvoyance still existed, which then faded, withered, and gradually disappeared. The ego is basically a product of the earth and we need to give it less consideration. But we must be clear about the fact that the whole world actually dwells in man's physical, etheric, and astral bodies. We can say, in this physical body lives the element that represents the whole world. The corporeality is born out of it and continues to reconstruct itself through the intake of nourishment. In the etheric body, the whole world lives as well; in the most diverse ways, influences enter constantly into it and send their effects into the human being in a superphysical manner, effects that express themselves in the forces of growth, for example in the circulation of the blood, in the breath, and so on. They are by no means identical with the forces that are present in the intake of food and in digestion. In addition, there are all the influences living in our astral body that receive impressions from the world through the senses, and so forth. It is like this to this day and was like this in the days when the human being still lived with his ancient instinctive clairvoyance, but in that age, he was more intimately connected with his physical body, his etheric, and astral bodies than he is today. When he woke up in the morning, he submerged with his ego and astral body into his physical and etheric bodies. A close connection developed between his ego and astral body and his etheric body and physical corporeality. And he not only dwelled in his physical body, he also lived in the forces that worked within the latter.

Let me give you a vivid description of this. Imagine that a person possessing ancient clairvoyance ate a plum. It seems almost grotesque to a human being of today when something like this is described, but it is profoundly true. Assume that such an ancient clairvoyant ate a plum; this plum contains etheric forces. If a person eats a plum today, he is not aware of what goes on within this plum. The ancient clairvoyant ate a plum; it was then in his stomach, was digested, and he experienced how the etheric forces in the plum passed over into his body. He cosmically participated in this experience. When he inwardly made comparisons between the various things he ingested into his stomach, he saw that all the relationships in the outside world continued inside the human being, and he perceived them inwardly. From waking in the morning to going to sleep at night, such a person was filled with the vivid inner perception of the life lived outside by the plums, by the apples, and by much else that he ate. Inwardly, through the breathing process, he was aware of the essential, spiritual being of the air. Through the warmth that coursed through his circulation process, he was familiar with the warmth forces of the cosmos in his surroundings. He did not stop short at merely sensing the light in his eyes. He felt how the light rays streamed in through the nerves of his eyes; how, in his own etheric body, they encountered the physical limbs and dwelled within them.

Such a person experienced himself quite concretely within the cosmic element. While it was a dim consciousness, it was present. During the day, it was muted by what a person perceived outwardly even in those days. But even in the early times of Greek civilization, it was true that human beings still retained an aftereffect of what is possessed today only by creatures other than man. I have already mentioned several times that it is most interesting to look with spiritual sight upon a meadow where cows are lying down and digesting. This whole activity of digestion is a cosmic experience for the cows. It is even more so the case with snakes; they lie down and digest and do indeed experience cosmic events. Out of their organism, something blossoms and sprouts that is “world” to their perception. Something arises out of their inner being that is much more beautiful than anything we are ever able to see with our eyes from outside. Something like this was present as an underlying mood in human beings who still possessed ancient, instinctive clairvoyance. While it was muted throughout most of the day by external perceptions, when these people fell asleep, they carried with them what they had thus experienced and received into their astral body and ego. Then, when their ego was alone with its astral body, these experiences arose powerfully in the form of true dreams. Then, in the form of true dreams, these people experienced after the fact what they had only dimly experienced during the day.

You see, I am referring you to the inner soul-bodily manner of experiencing on the part of human beings of ancient times; because they were able to experience in this way, they had cosmic experiences. It was in this that they found their cosmic, super-sensible perception. Then, when people in the Orient drank the Soma drink,³ they knew the nature of the Spirit of the Heights. This Soma drink permeated, surged, and wove through their inner being, enlivening their blood. When these people subsequently fell asleep and the ego and astral body, which had been active in the blood, took along the forms that had come into being through the digestion of the Soma drink, then their being widened out in the widths of space and, in their nocturnal experience, they felt the spiritual beings of the cosmos.

Such an experience was still present in those among whom the ancient Zarathustra found willing listeners in the ancient Persian epoch. If one is unaware of these things, one does not understand what finally came down to us from the Oriental scriptures that have survived. This living cosmic perception gradually became extinguished. Already in the historical Egyptian age, little of it can be found, only its aftereffects are still present. And except for final vestiges that have always been retained among primitive human beings, it then disappeared in the fourth Christian century. From then on, the intellect, the rational element, increasingly struggled to come to the fore in the human being, the element that is completely tied to the mere physical body in its isolation from the world.

If you have a pictorial imagination and enter into your body, you cannot help but experience something cosmic. If you have retained something of the inner quality of numbers and enter into your body with it, you cannot help but experience the number element of the cosmos. The same is true for the ratios of weight. However, if you enter into the human organism with the power of the ego, which is active as a purely rational, intellectual element, then you immerse yourself only in the isolated human body, in what the human body is by virtue of its own nature, without its relationship to the cosmos. You enter into the earthly human body in its total isolation. Thus, if I would try to sketch this from the point of view of the intellect, I would have to do it like this:

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The etheric body, the astral body, and the ego (see above, blue, yellow, and shape in the middle) are present there too. But the ego no longer experiences anything of the cosmic element here within the human being. It only has a dim experience of its own existence, of its own immersion in the isolated human organism. Therefore, when this purely intellectual ego goes into its surroundings in sleep, it takes nothing along. The fact that it takes along nothing is the reason that at most reminiscences, dream images of an unrealistic kind, can arise in the human being, and that this ego can in no way be permeated by anything from the cosmos. Basically, from the moment of falling asleep until awakening, the human being experiences nothing of significance, because his whole manner of experiencing is calculated for the isolated human organism, which in turn affects the ego with those forces that have nothing to do with the cosmos. This is why the ego is dulled from the moment of falling asleep until waking up.

Indeed, it must be so, for though instinctively clairvoyant ancient human beings possessed cosmic vision and dwelled in instinctive Imaginations, Inspirations, and Intuitions, they possessed no independent rational thinking. If this independent rational thinking, this actual intellectual thinking, is to develop, it has to make use of the instrument of the isolated human body. It has to be dull during sleep and therefore brings nothing along when it awakens. The ancient human being, on the other hand, having carried his experiences in the body out into the cosmos, brought with him what he had experienced in the encounter of the cosmic aftereffects with the actual spiritual-cosmic occurrences out there. Again, he brought back aftereffects of what he had experienced there and thus enjoyed a lively relationship with the cosmos. What is attained by the human being through intellectual thinking is acquired in the period from waking up until falling asleep and dims down after sleep begins. Human beings now have to depend on the time when they are awake.

We come across the strange phenomenon that in ancient times the human being was bound more to his body than he is today, but that he experienced in this body the spiritual aspect of the cosmos. Modern man has lost this experience in the body. The human being today is more spiritual but he has the most rarefied spirit; he lives in the intellect and can dwell in the spirit only from the time he awakens until he falls asleep. When he enters the spiritual world with his completely rarefied intellectual spirit, his consciousness is dimmed.

Why have we developed materialism? And why did ancient humanity not have materialism? The ancients did not have it because they dwelled within the matter of the body; modern men have materialism because they dwell only in the spirit, because they are completely free of a cosmic connection to their body. Materialism actually comes about because the human being became spiritual, but spiritual in a rarefied manner. People were most spiritual during the mid-nineteenth century. But they lied to themselves in an ahrimanic way inasmuch as they did not recognize that it was the rarefied spirit in which they dwelled. Into the most spiritual element possible for the human being, he only absorbed the concept of materiality. The human being had turned into a completely spiritual vessel, but into this vessel he only let flow the thoughts of material existence. It is the secret of materialism that human beings turned to matter because of their spirituality. This is modern man's negation of his own spirituality. The culmination point of this spiritual condition was in the middle of the nineteenth century, but human beings did not grasp this condition of spirituality.

As I said, this developed slowly through the centuries. The ancient instinctive spirituality had slowly died down in the fourth Christian century; beginning in the first third of the fifteenth century, the new spirituality dawned; the time between is in a sense an episode of purely human experience. Now, however, after this point in time in the first third of the fifteenth century and after that century as a whole this dependence of man on his isolated physical body made itself felt. Now he no longer developed any relationship to what was frozen into dogmatic council doctrines and what, although rigidified, still possessed a grandiose content. Now, too, human beings basically could no longer find any relationship to the humble narrations of Palestine. For a while yet, they forced themselves to connect some meaning with them. However, meaning can be connected with them only when they are penetrated by knowledge. In particular, modern human beings no longer could connect any meaning with the cults, the ritual itself. The Sacrifice of the Mass, a religious act of the greatest cosmic significance, turned into an external, symbolic act because it was no longer understood. The sacrament of the Transubstantiation, which had survived through the Middle Ages and which has profound cosmic significance, became part of purely intellectual disputes. Certainly it goes without saying that when people began to question with their isolated intellect how the Christ could be contained in the sacraments of the altar, they could not comprehend it, for these matters are not suited for comprehension by the intellect. But now human beings began to try to understand them by means of the intellect.

This then led to the emergence of debates of great importance in world history known as the “Eucharist-Dispute,”⁴ and linked to names like Hus⁵ and others. The most progressive individuals in Europe, those most advanced in the rational comprehension of the world, then arrived at the various forms of Protestantism. It is the intellect's reaction against something that had emerged from a much broader, much more intense power of cognition than is the intellect itself. The powers that had developed in the modern soul as intellectual faculties and what dwelled in the rigid dogmas yet containing something great and mighty, these two confronted each other as two alien views! Protestant confessions of the greatest variety arose as compromises between the intellect and the ancient traditions. The sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries passed, and in the middle of the nineteenth century the human being reached the culmination of his intellectual development. He became a spiritual being through and through.

With this spirituality, he could comprehend what exists in the outer, sensory world, but he did not comprehend himself as spirit. People hardly had an inkling any longer of the meaning of a sentence such as the one by Leibnitz that states, “Nothing dwells in the intellect that did not dwell earlier in the senses, except for the intellect itself.”⁶ Modern people completely omitted the phrase at the end and acknowledged only the sentence, “Nothing dwells in the intellect that did not dwell earlier in the senses,” whereas Leibnitz clearly discerned that the intellect is something totally spiritual at work in the human being quite independently of all aspects of the physical corporeality.

As I have said, the intellect was active but did not recognize itself. Thus, it has been our experience that human beings are now in the transition to another phase of development in their life, and, so to speak, they carry nothing out with them into the night. For what is intellectually acquired is attained through the body and has no relationship to what is outside the body. People now have to work their way anew into the spiritual world. The possibility distinctly exists for them to look into this spiritual world. What people earlier had attained from their physical and etheric bodies as well as from their astral body in regard to an instinctive view of the cosmos can be attained again today. We can come to Imaginations and by means of them we can describe the world evolution from Saturn, Sun, Moon, to earth, and so on. We can behold what dwells in the nature of numbers, namely, the being of numbers. Through Inspirations, we can receive insight into how the world is shaped out of cosmic spirituality according to the laws of numbers. It is entirely possible that we can have insight into the world in this way through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

Most people will say: If we have not ourselves become clairvoyant, we can at most study these matters. Good and well, but one can study them, and it has been said again and again that the ordinary intellect can grasp them. Today, I shall add the reason why the ordinary intellect is able to grasp these matters. Assume that you are reading something like An Outline of Occult Science. Imagine that you try to place yourself into these descriptions with your ordinary intellect. You take it in with the intellect, which is only linked to the isolated human body. But you do take something in that you could not receive through this intellect, since throughout the past few centuries this intellect did not comprehend itself. Now you take something in that is incomprehensible on the basis of those concepts that the intellect derives from the external sense world. It does become comprehensible, however, when the intellect on its own makes the effort to understand it, initially neither agreeing nor disagreeing but only comprehending. After all, the emphasis is on understanding these things.

Initially, you need simply understand them. If you do, then you create something with the insight the ego has gained that extends into the night. Then, during the night, you no longer remain dull as is the case with the merely intellectual attitude towards the world; then, from the time of falling asleep until waking up, you dwell in a different content in the delicately filtered spirituality. Then, you awaken and find that the possibility has been added—small though it is each time—of inwardly acquiring what you have struggled to understand intellectually. With each passing night, every time we sleep, something of an inner relationship is added, we acquire an inward connection. Each time, upon falling asleep, we bear the aftereffect of our daytime comprehension with us into the world beyond corporeality. In this way, we acquire a relationship to the spiritual world, a relationship acquired completely out of reality. This, however, is the case only if the human being does not ruin this relationship by means of something with which he so frequently ruins it today. I have mentioned these means for ruining spirituality quite often. As you know, many people are intent on acquiring a certain state of sleepiness prior to going to sleep; they consume as many glasses of beer as it takes to have the necessary degree of sleepiness. This is a quite common practice, especially among “intelligent” people. In that case, the faculties I just mentioned certainly cannot develop.

Spirituality can be researched, however, and this spirituality can indeed be experienced as well in the manner just described. The human being has grown away from spirituality. He is capable of growing into it again. Today, we are only at the beginning of this process of growing into spirituality. In the past few centuries, from the fifteenth century into the nineteenth century when the intellect had reached its highest level, a certain spirituality has developed, in particular among the most progressive people in Europe, albeit a spirituality that has as yet no content. For it is only when we turn to Imagination that this spirituality receives its first content. This spirituality, which is filtered to the extreme, must first receive its content.

At this point in time, this content is being rejected by the majority of the people. The world wishes to remain with the filtered spirituality; it wishes to produce a content derived from the outer material world. People do not wish to struggle with their intellect to comprehend the results of insight into the spiritual world offered. The confessions that follow the Gospel are, after all, compromises between the intellect and ancient traditions; they have lost the connecting link. Ritual means nothing to them. This is why the latter has gradually disappeared within these confessions. People arrived at abstract concepts instead of a living comprehension of, for example, the Transubstantiation. At most, the simple stories can be told, but no meaning other than the one that is compatible with a materialistic theology can be connected with them, namely, that one is dealing with occurrences that can be linked to the humble man from Nazareth, and so forth. All this can no longer lead to a content; it is something that loses all connection with spirituality.

Thus, the situation in the world today is such that there is, first of all a faith that has rejected the intellect and did not strike any compromise. Due to this, in vast segments of the population a relationship has been retained, albeit an instinctive one, to the doctrines and dogmas, the content of which is no longer accessible to human beings but did flow out into these dogmas. This segment of the populace also has retained its living relationship to the cult, to the ceremonial ritual; it has retained its link to the sacraments. As depleted as all this is, the ancient spirituality—the spirituality to which there is still a connection through dogmas—did once dwell in what has become a skeleton, a shadow. Among the more recent Protestant confessions, where a compromise is being tried out, such a connection is no longer alive. And then we have those who call themselves quite enlightened and dwell only in the intellect, which is spiritual but does not wish to grasp the spirit.

These are the three streams we confront. In regard to the future, we cannot count on the fruitfulness of those streams that only tried to make an external compromise; we cannot count on mere intellectuality that cannot arrive at any content and therefore can only lose itself since it does not want to understand itself. We can only count on the direction in which these streams are gradually heading, and they are more and more clearly heading there, namely, we can count on what has been poured into ancient doctrines and is represented in the surviving Roman-Catholic Church. We can count on the attitude that takes the new intellectuality seriously and deepens it Imaginatively, Inspiratively, and Intuitively, thus arriving at a new spirituality. The modern world is becoming divided and estranged in these two contrasting directions. On the one hand stand people with their intellect. They are inwardly lazy and do not wish to utilize this intellect, but they need a content. So they refer to the dead dogmas. Particularly among intelligent people, who are, however, mentally indolent, who are in a certain respect intellectual and Dadaistic, a neo-Catholic movement is making itself felt that is trying to take hold of the old traditions that have rigidified in dogmas and that is trying to receive a content from outside, through historical phenomena but that rigidifies in historical forms. Based on the intellect, this trend tries desperately to make some sense of the ancient content; thus we have intellectual battles that, by means of the old content, try to prepare their rigidified doctrines in a new way for the use of human beings.

To cite an example, on many pages in the newest edition of the magazine Tat,⁷ we can observe an intellectual, cramped tendency towards rigidified doctrines. After all, the publisher, Diederichs, does everything; he puts everything into categories and on paper. Thus, he has now dedicated a whole edition of Tat to the neo-Catholic movement. It allows us to discern how cramped people's thoughts are today, how people are developing inwardly cramped thinking so that they can avoid having to rouse themselves and can remain mentally lazy in order to grasp with the intellect whatever moves forward most indolently.

People experiment with all this in order to be able to reject this life-filled striving out of modern intellectuality towards spirituality, a striving that can and must be grasped. More and more, things will come to a head in such a way that a powerful movement with a fascinating, suggestive, hypnotic effect on all those wishing to remain lazy within the intellect permeates the world. A Catholic wave is even pervading the world of intelligent people who wish, however, to remain lazy within their intelligence. The drowsy souls just do not realize it. But it must remain unfruitful to strive for what Oswald Spengler described so vividly in his Decline of the West.⁸ One can turn the Occident Catholic, but one will thereby slay its civilization. This Occident has to concern itself with waking up, with becoming inwardly active. Its intelligence must not remain lazy, for this intelligence can rouse itself; it can fill itself inwardly with an understanding for the new view of the spirit.

This battle is in preparation; in fact, it is here—and it is the main point. In the future, everything else concerning world views will become crushed between these two streams. We must turn our attention to this, for what is coming to expression conceals itself in any number of formulas and forms. Nobody is living fully in the present who believes that he can make progress with something that people were perhaps still dreaming about at the beginning of this century. He alone lives fully in the present who develops an eye for what dwells in the two streams described above. We have to be aware of this. For everything I have discussed a week ago when I said that nowadays a great number of people love evil and, purely due to their tendency towards evil, indulge in slander in the way I described—all this is what must come before our souls. We must bear in mind that inner untruthfulness, which expresses itself in the facts—as I told you—that people, who are supposed to be strengthened in their Catholic faith, are sent to the Catholic church in Stuttgart to attend a lecture by General von Gleich, and that this Catholic general concludes with a hymn by Luther! There, the two tendencies come together that care nothing about the confessions but only try to stream together in the proliferation of lies.

These things must be noticed today. If this is not done, then one is asleep and does not participate in what alone can make the human being today truly human.

• 1. Johannes Scotus Erigena, A.D. 810–877, Irish philosopher of scholasticism in Paris.
• 2. Council of 869: See Johannes Geyer, “Ein Konzilbeschluss and seine kulturgeschichtlichen Folgen” in Die Drei, vol. X (1922) and Alfred Schuetze, “Das Konzil 869 zu Konstantinopel and die Verleugnung des Geistes” in Die Christengemeinschaft, vol. I and II.
• 3. Soma drink (Sanscrit): The fermented juice of the soma plant, a leafless vine (sarcostemma acidum), mixed with milk or barley, whose intoxicating and enthusing power was worshipped as the God, “Soma.” Concerning the occult significance of “Soma” see also H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, vol. I and II.
• 4. Eucharist-Dispute: The dogma of the Transubstantiation, the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ (Fourth Lateran Council, A.D. 1215), was rejected by the Reformation.
• 5. Johannes Hus: around 1370–1415, early Czech reformer from Bohemia, banned by the Church in 1410 and burned as a heretic in 1415.
• 6. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, 1646–1716, German philosopher.
• 7. “Die Tat”—Monthly Magazine for the Future of German Culture. VIII, 1921, vol. 1.
• 8. Oswald Spengler, 1880–1936, German philosopher of culture.

We have seen how the study of the conditions of soul of the human being leads us into the spaces, as it were, between physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I; the study of the spiritual conditions in the human being, however, leads us beyond the phenomenon of the human being as he is here in his life between birth and death out into the vast spiritual universe. One might say that insofar as the human being is spirit he stands absolutely in relation to the whole spiritual universe. Hence it is only in this connection with the entire universe that we can study what takes place in the human being as spiritual events. The soul element is, so to speak, man's intimate inner life, taking its course in a threefold form in such a way that the thinking aspect is situated between physical body and etheric body, the feeling aspect between etheric body and astral body, and the aspect of willing between astral body and the I. We therefore remain in our study of the soul element entirely within the human being. As soon as we approach the actual spiritual events, however, we must leave the human being as he usually confronts us as a self-contained being in the world between birth and death.

Now we know—and eight days ago we were speaking of this from another viewpoint—that when we first ascend into the spiritual we come to beings who are arranged above the human being in the same way as the human being has his place above the animal, plant, and mineral realms. As we ascend we therefore have—names add nothing to the matter—the angeloi or angelic beings, the archangeloi or arch-angelic beings, and the archai or primal beings, time spirits. We have already characterized from various points of view these beings who constitute the realm we encounter when we perceive the position of human beings in regard to the spiritual. The beings whom we designate as angeloi or angels are those who have the strongest relationship to the individual, to the single human being. The individual human being actually has a relationship to the hierarchy immediately above him such that he in a way—this is not expressed very exactly, but it can be said in the way that it is commonly expressed—develops a certain relationship to such an angelic being.

Those that then make up the second hierarchy above him are the archangels. We can say of them that among their functions is that which works as folk spirit, that which therefore embraces groups of those belonging together as a people, although here there are all possible gradations.

When finally we ascend higher, to the archai, we have the guiding beings throughout certain epochs of time, beyond the differentiations among peoples. These are certainly not the only functions, let us say, of these beings, but to begin with we receive certain conceptions if we keep to these particular functions that they perform.

Just as we can make man's physical life on earth comprehensible by asking ourselves what kind of relationship the human being has to the animal organization, to the plant organization, and to the mineral organization, so we must also ask ourselves, in order to learn what man is as a spiritual being, what kind of relationship he has to these ascending stages of beings in the spiritual.

For this we must proceed in the following way. Let us picture from certain viewpoints the way in which the human being goes through the portal of death. We know that in this age of earthly evolution that encompasses many years we live as human beings in such a way that there are present in the ordinary consciousness the laws underlying the mineral realm. From birth to death man fills himself, we might say, with everything that makes the mineral realm in a certain sense comprehensible, and he has a feeling that with the concepts and ideas at his disposal he is able to understand the mineral realm.

It is not the same where the plant realm is concerned. You know that science stops short on coming to the plant realm; at best it holds to the ideal that the complicated combination of the plant cells, of living cells generally, will one day be explicable in their structure. As I have explained to you, this is beginning completely at the wrong end, because the structure of the plant, or of living cells generally, is not distinguished by being a particularly complicated structure but by the chemical structure passing into chaos. Man, however, does not get beyond the concepts of the mineral realm. With his mineral concepts he comes still less—if I may venture to say so—to what concerns the animal realm or even to self-knowledge. All this must be given by spiritual-scientific investigations. The human being thus adopts a mineral consciousness, let us call it, that is, a consciousness adapted to the mineral realm. The human being carries the outcome of this consciousness, the weaving of which takes place between birth and death, with him through death. When he therefore goes through the portal of death and lives in the spiritual realm itself, he can journey through his further existence-with what became of this consciousness.

There is essentially something else, however, that pushes up into this consciousness. What penetrates up into this mineral consciousness, in spite of not belonging to it, what colors it, is the moral consciousness. This is what arises out of all the processes of consciousness connected to our will impulses, to our conduct. What we feel as satisfaction about this or that, what we feel as remorse, as reproach and the like, all this gives color, as it were, to our mineral consciousness and is something that the human being takes with him through the portal of death. One can therefore say that the human being goes through the portal of death with a mineral consciousness colored by moral experience; with what becomes of this consciousness, he then lives further in the spiritual realm.

Man not only understands the mineral world through this mineral consciousness, but through this mineral consciousness he develops his relationship to the being from the hierarchy of the angels, therefore to that being to whom he wishes to turn as the nearest to his individual development. When the human being has gone through the portal of death, it is a question of how far, through the consequences of his mineral consciousness, he can preserve intact his relationship to this angel being. He can do this only in accordance with what from the moral side has colored this mineral consciousness, for after death this mineral consciousness strives, as it were, to spread itself out in the world. It strives to become cosmic, to adapt itself to the whole universe; it strives to get beyond what is individual.

We can also say that in life between birth and death man is nearest to the angel being when he is living in the condition out of which dreams arise, which certainly also have something to do with his individual being, and which on the one hand deny and on the other hand hold fast to this mineral-thought being. Man would be unable to find even the subconscious relationship to the hierarchy of the angels were not this mineral consciousness colored by the conditions that in a certain sense he sleeps through but that reach up out of the sleeping condition and live out their life in the world of dreams. The dream itself, though in its outlines it does not adhere to outer sense reality and often actually denies contact with it, is nevertheless woven out of the same substance as the world of thoughts is woven between birth and death. In going through the portal of death, therefore, in order to maintain the relationship to his angel being, the human being takes with him what he has developed in himself within his mineral consciousness.

Now in the way we live today in humanity's present epoch man—especially when he reckons himself to be among the most enlightened—penetrates but little with his moral experience into what he possesses as mineral consciousness. On the contrary, he makes every possible effort to hold this mineral consciousness quite apart from the moral sphere. He would like at least to set up these two worlds; on the one hand he would like to study what ultimately may be comprehended in the realm of mineral nature, and the mineral nature in the plant, animal, and human realms, and would then like to study the moral element as something surging up from his inner being. It is not harmonious with the spirit of the time to think of what lives in nature as being at the same time permeated with moral impulses. There yawns an abyss between what is of a moral and what is of a mineral nature. The human being does not easily find the bridge to incorporate the moral into the mineral nature. I have often drawn attention to how man pictures the evolution of the earth to be a purely mineral affair, from the content of the Kant-Laplace theory up to the mineral nature of modern thinking, and how man eliminates everything in the way of moral feeling. It thus comes about that the human being is able to develop only an extremely slight relationship to the being of the angeloi; in our present age he cannot unite himself intimately with his angel being, to use an ordinary expression.

If the mineral consciousness were completely separated from moral coloring, then at what I call the Midnight Hour of Existence man would face the danger of entirely losing the necessary connection with his angel being. I say he would face the danger. Today only a small number of people face this danger, but if a spiritual deepening of the whole evolution of humanity on earth does not come about, a deepening of human thinking, human feeling, and human willing, then what lives as a danger may be realized. Then there would be countless human beings who, on approaching the Midnight Hour of Existence between death and a new birth, would have to sever the relationship to their angel beings. It is true that the angel being would always keep the relationship on his part, but it would remain one-sided, from his side to the human being. The human being between death and a new birth would not be able to reciprocate adequately. We must be perfectly clear that in our modern civilization, hastening as it is toward materialism, the human being injures his relationship to his angel being, so that this relationship becomes ever looser.

Just when the human being is approaching the Midnight Hour of Existence, however, he must enter into relationship to the archangelic beings through the angel being. Should this relationship be of such a nature—as it may well be when man is living in the spiritual world—that it not only comes from the side of the angel being to humanity but can be reciprocated by the human being, then man must absorb a spiritual content, which means that he must color his moral impulses religiously.

If the present trend of evolution persists, the human being of today faces the danger of his connection with the angel being becoming so slight that he cannot form any inner relationship to the archangelic being. The archangel, however, participates in bringing man back into physical life. This archangelic being is particularly involved in building up the forces that bring man back into the community of a certain people.

When human beings live inwardly unspiritually—as has been the case for centuries—the relationship of the archangel to the human beings develops one-sidedly, and then man does not grow into his people with the inner soul being, but he is inscribed from outside, as it were, by means of the world order, into the people that the archangel is assigned to guide. One does not arrive at an understanding of our present age, which may be characterized by the one-sided way in which the peoples are cultivated, until one knows that this actually may be attributed to the souls who have recently come down to earthly existence having a loose relationship to their angel beings and by reason of this having no inner relationship to the archangelic being—thus growing into their people only from without. The people thus remains in them as an impulse from outside, and it is only through outer impulses that human beings take their place within a people, through all sorts of impulses inclining toward chauvinism. He who stands within his people with soul—and this is the case with very few people today—will be unable to develop in the direction of chauvinism, of one-sided nationalism; he takes up the fruitful forces within the people and develops these, makes these individual. He will not boast of his people in a one-sided way. He will let his people flow into his being as color, as it were, flow into his human manifestations, but will not parade this outwardly, and particularly not in an outwardly hostile attitude toward others.

The fact that today it is exactly this that provides the keynote for world politics—that all relations built on peoples create such difficulties today for human evolution—all this rests entirely on what I have been indicating. If the bond that begins in the-Midnight Hour of Existence—before and after this, throughout long periods—cannot be ensouled by one's taking the appropriate religious inwardness through the portal of death—a religious feeling that is spiritual and not merely a matter of lip service—then the archangel is able to work only on what is plant-like in the cosmos and what as plant-like nature is imparted to the human being. Through very subconscious forces connected with his plant nature, which means with that which is placed in him by his breathing condition and is modified by all that has to do with conditions of language, by everything, therefore, that in language pushes in a plant-like way into the human organism, through all this man can be guided only by his archangel. It then happens that when the human being is born, when he grows as a child, he grows into his language in a more-or-less outer way. Had he been able to find the relationship, the inner relationship of soul, to his archangel through his angel, he would then have grown with his soul into all that had to do with his language, he would have understood the genius of the language, not merely what constitutes the outer mechanical aspect of it.

Today, however, we can see how strongly it is the case that in many respects the human being is an imprint of the mechanical in his language, so that actually he does not bear the element of language as a keynote in his entire being but receives an exact imprint of it. One can see quite clearly how the facial expression itself is an expression of the element of language. What confronts us in the people, what confronts us as their unique, national physiognomy, comes to man from the archangels in a completely outer way.

What takes place outwardly in humanity, insofar as it works into the spiritual of the human being, actually can be explained only through the kind of study we pursue in an anthroposophical spiritual science. All modern anthropology and things of that kind are actually what might be called a mere playing with terminology. In what is written today by anthropologists or their kind about the configuration of humanity on the earth, about the differentiation of humanity, we really in many respects have nothing to orient us, no guiding viewpoint, because what is there understood as concept is merely the classification of outer characteristics. One could just as well redistribute the whole picture. A real content streams into the matter only if it is studied spiritually. Then, however, one must not shrink back if in this study real, concrete spiritual beings arise.

One sees from this that only spiritual deepening can heal the damages of our modern age. The damages of today, insofar as they confront us in public life, are founded on the loose relationship of the human being to his angel and the consequent loose bond with the archangel, who is thus able to have an influence only from outside.

When a human being between death and a new birth undergoes his further evolution, which after the Midnight Hour of Existence leads him once more into physical, earthly life, he enters especially the realm of the archai, of the primal spirits. These archai, these primal spirits, in the present cosmic evolution have to do with leading the human being back into the earthly limits of his being.

When the human being passes through the portal of death his further life takes its course in such a way that he experiences to begin with the consequences of his mineral consciousness with its moral coloring—thereby expanding himself, as it were, over the world. Then, after the Midnight Hour of Existence, he draws himself together again. First he is led over into the plant element, which is incorporated into him. The more nearly he approaches earthly life, the more he draws himself together, so that he is able to be born once more as a being enclosed in his skin.

What must happen to a human being when he enters the realm of the archai is an incorporating, a densification, of the plant element into the animal element. In passing through the Midnight Hour of Existence, a man acquires first the forces—naturally not the organs but first the forces—which determine his breathing and also the differentiated breathing. The concentration of these forces into the actual forces of the organs comes about only after the Midnight Hour of Existence, comes about only in the realm of the archai. Man becomes, so to speak, ever more and more human. The fact is, however, that this cosmic activity exercised upon the human being as forces coming from the archai actually organizes him in such a way that the organs tend toward the animal structure. If we perceive the human being in his relationship to the cosmos we find that while the human being is striving away from the Midnight Hour of Existence toward a new life on earth he is subject to cosmic laws, just as here on earth he is subject to earthly laws. We may say the following: the human being is defined from the immeasurable expanses of the universe, in that he draws himself together more and more. Up to the Midnight Hour of Existence there is, as it were, an expansion of man, by means of his mineral consciousness, into the breadths of the universe (see drawing, arrows), into the immeasurable breadth of the universe. When the Midnight Hour of Existence arrives (see drawing, blue) those forces incorporate themselves into the human being that work in him as plantlike forces. Man returns from this Midnight Hour of Existence in order to confine himself within the appropriate limits for earthly life (arrows going in). This Midnight Hour of Existence is altogether a tremendously significant moment in human evolution.

While after his death a human being lives on into the cosmos, he becomes increasingly one with the world. He hardly distinguishes himself from the world. Expressing myself figuratively—naturally out in the cosmos we cannot speak of physical organs, but you will understand me if I present this to you in images taken from physical existence—I might say: man learns, as it were, how the eye grows together with the light and then no longer distinguishes the eye from the light, or the sound from the ear. By expanding himself out into the cosmic breadths he grows together with the universe.

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Having passed the Midnight Hour of Existence, where he begins to draw himself together in order to become once more a being with limits, there dawns in him a kind of objective conception: this is not the world, this is the human being. A consciousness grows more and more intense in the human being—a consciousness that is most intense when the human being returns into earthly life. As here on earth, however, the content of our consciousness is the minerals, the plants, the animals, the mountains, rivers, clouds, the stars, sun, and moon, so on our way back to the earth the being of man is the main conception.

It is really so that if we take the seemingly quite complicated world that lies outside our skin, with all that is within it, if we take the world with its soul and spiritual elements, it is indeed most complicated; what lies within our skin, however, is just as complicated and is different from the world outside only in size, but the size is not important. Between birth and death our world is what lies outside our skin; what is within we cannot really observe except in what during life man certainly is not, namely, the corpse. From the Midnight Hour of Existence, however, until the next life on earth, the human world, the inner being of man, is his body, soul, and spirit (see drawing, right, blue). There man is, as it were, the world. Up to the Midnight Hour of Existence we gradually lose the world as we know it through the mineral consciousness; we lose it by living into the world as though it were our self, our whole, all-embracing self, so that we no longer distinguish between our self and the world. In returning, our world becomes the human being. We do not behold the stars, we behold the membering of the human limbs; we do not behold all that is contained in the universe, let us say, between stars and earth, we behold what is within the human organization, insofar as it is formed out of spirit and soul. We behold the human being, and what we thus behold is what leads us to our renewed existence on earth. We behold the human being receiving his form.

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In the time of the Midnight Hour of Existence we live in the human being who is forming himself in accordance with the plant-like. When we come into the region of the archai we live in what forms the organs of the human being, in the sense of animal forces. I have said that just as between birth and death we are dependent on what works on us from the earth, so we are dependent, in that we are outside in the universe, on what is beyond the earthly—it is no longer a question of space, but naturally we can only present this in spatial terms. The moment we pass through the archai, we can express the laws that work in us in the sense of the universe—in the same way, as during our life here in an earthly community we test the laws of the earth by the laws of modern physics—we can express these laws by relating ourselves to Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, and so on.

By relating the positions of the sun to these stars, to the heaven of the fixed stars in general, in the constellations of the sun with this heaven of fixed stars we have the laws that prevail in the realm of the will of the archai. The will that prevails there, which permeates these laws, is the will of the archai.

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If we were to look outside for natural laws corresponding to our natural laws, as natural laws correspond to us here on earth during earthly existence, we would have to look to these constellations of the stars. We remain a long time in the kingdom where we are dependent on the star constellations—though not more dependent than we are dependent here on earth on natural laws where our will works also, which is something higher than the laws of nature. There too we may not speak of the cosmos in the sense of a cosmic law that works with mechanical necessity. What we find in the constellations of the stars, however, is the expression, as it were, the image, of these laws that work upon us there. As formerly, when we were in the kingdom of the archangeloi, the laws of the plant-like worked upon us, so now there work upon us the laws holding good in the animal realms.

When these things are found again through spiritual science, one comes upon the tremendously significant fact that the people in ancient times who used to acquire knowledge from certain dreamlike visions of the universe, which were then lost, that these people really showed a touch of atavistic genius, one could say, in naming this picture circle, which represented for them the heaven of the fixed stars, the Zodiac (Tierkreis, “animal circle”). I can only think that our new science of the spirit, which shows us these things again, is led from a completely different basis to an understanding of what was once grasped in a dimly sensed knowledge. It is tremendously moving when one finds the teaching about the Zodiac and its influence on the human being preserved from ancient times and when one then—quite apart from what has been preserved—with the means at the disposal of present-day spiritual science, comes once more to connect knowledge with the constellations of the sun, with the zodiacal signs, in other words, with the heaven of the fixed stars.

It is this that links the more recent science of the spirit so closely to the wisdom of the ancients. Between our time, when we wish to make spiritual science our quest, and this period when the wisdom of the ancients held sway, we have an age that was indeed necessary for the striving after human freedom; this age basically, however, was an age of darkness.

We thus come into the realm of the archai and receive and incorporate into us that which is our animal nature. What is our animal nature? Our animal nature is above all what gives us our organs, which even in number are very similar to the organs of the higher animals. Before we approach birth, however, we are stripped—if I may so express it—of the realm of the Zodiac and enter the realm of the planets—Saturn, Jupiter, and so on. In entering the realm of the planets, and thus in coming nearer to the earth, nearer the point of time when we take on the boundaries of our human form, what is incorporated into us out of cosmic law as the animal nature is given its direction, if I may express it in this way. Before we sink down into the planetary system, and therefore into the forces of the planetary system, our vertebral column, for example, has not taken on a direction away from the earth, which would raise the head aloft. We are more subject to the directional forces governing the posture of the animal. Everything, for example, that designs the hands as the organ of our soul element, not only as an organ for grasping or for walking—what makes of them organs that can act freely out of the impulses of the soul element, all this we owe to this planetary influence. All that helps us to be truly human, right into the lowest stages of our animal organization, we have by virtue of the constellations of the moon with the rest of the planets.

We are made human, therefore, as we return through the planetary system. I told you that man himself, man as he forms himself, is the world that is living in our consciousness during our return journey from the Midnight Hour of Existence. We also see how at first everything is present in him that ultimately pulsates in rhythm with the animal forces. We live through this in such a way that we actually experience a kind of decline, a kind of icy process. All this, however, is loosened on our entering the planetary realm, and this first forms the cosmic world, which we see as the human world, the world represented by the earthly human being who Wrests himself away from the animal element, who grows out of the animal element. All this now fills us; it becomes the content of our consciousness. We carry in us as a system of forces that which the cosmos has given us.

Thus we descend soul-spiritually from the spiritual worlds. We have lived through the worlds in which we were in direct touch, stood in connection with, angels, archangels, archai. We descend as man. It is true, however, that if, in the way characterized, we have failed to establish an intimate relationship to our angel being, we have difficulties when penetrating into the planetary region, because we have been unable to make any divine-spiritual connection with the world of the archai. Outwardly we become incorporated into a people. The archai are then obliged to work into us, as it were, only from outside. Through this we are given a definite place on the earth, for all the forces of the archai tend toward that end. The archangels give us our place among a people and our particular place within this people is then determined by the archai. Not imbued with soul and spirit, however, we grow in an outer, mechanical way into this environment.

This is a characterization of our modern age—that the human being no longer has that inner relationship, that intimate inner relationship, that he had to his environment in more ancient times, when he grew into this immediate environment also with his soul. This is still maintained at best in a caricaturish way—as a caricature, I repeat—when today, even if it is already coming to an end, children perhaps grow up in some particular castle after previously having been attracted to their ancestors. Here we will have a relationship that in earlier ages had to do with the soul element. Today a human being is pressed into his environment in such a way that he basically has little inner relationship to the place in which he finds himself, to which his karma takes him in an entirely outer way, so that he feels his whole placement into physical existence as something external to him.

When man's being is formed through education and life in such a way that he is filled with soul, filled with spirit, and comes to a spiritual conception of the world, he will then carry this through life between death and a new birth so that he does not lose the inner connection with his angel, so that through his archangel his soul is carried into his particular people, and so that he is not placed in a merely outer way into his immediate existence by the world of the archai. He should rather be able to absorb once again into his animal organization something that he experiences in such a way that he says: there is a deep significance in the fact that just from this place where my consciousness first gradually awakens, where my education is carried on—that just from this place I am to unfold my activity in the world. This is certainly something that should lead us to bring about reform in education, so that the human being once more feels that from the place where he is educated he takes something with him that gives him his mission in the world. When this is so, a human being grows beyond the merely outer realm of the archai. He will experience the forces directing human beings in a way that is permeated by soul and spirit, and he will grow into his new life in a way different from what is frequently the case today.

What happens, then, when the human being enters a new earthly life? His consciousness is filled with the way in which he is building himself up from within as a human being. He is filled with a world that he beholds, a world of activity, not a mere world of thought. As I have already mentioned, after the Midnight Hour of Existence this world gradually takes on the tendency of the will toward being human, and the human being immerses himself into what is offered him through heredity in the generations, through the substance he receives from his ancestors. Into this he immerses himself. He envelops himself with the physical sheath; he enters the physical world. On observing the human being spiritually, we can actually find out about the content of the soul element when he is immersing himself in a new life in physical existence.

Of all the realms lived through by the human being between death and a new birth it is natural that a human being comes into the closest relationship to the angeloi, archangeloi, archai, but these things stand in further relationship to the higher hierarchies. Between death and a new birth a human being thus pursues his course through a realm in which his relationship to that realm depends on what he carries through the portal of death. The extent to which he has succeeded in permeating with his mineral consciousness that which as spirit wishes to rise out of the depths of his being determines to what extent he can become intimate with his angel being. By being able to be intimate in this way with his angel being, however, he grows into the world of the archangeloi, so that knowing, as it were, experiencing their forces out of himself, he can consciously reciprocate and proceed further, so as to become the individualized being he must gradually become if the world is to move toward its ascent and not its decline.

It is perfectly possible to give from the most varied points of view a deeply significant description of this life between death and a new birth. One point of view is to be found in the lecture course I held in 1914 at Vienna;⁷ today I have been developing another point of view for you. All these points of view are intended to lead to increasing knowledge of the human being from his spiritual aspect. Those who are unwilling to explore a whole spiritual world in this way will never be able to grasp the spiritual in man himself. Just as we must go into the spaces between physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I in order to penetrate the soul element in its objective nature, so we must proceed out of the human being into the spiritual world to study his relationship to this spiritual world. Then we discover what actually weaves and lives in the human being as the spiritual. It is only the love of comfort today that makes man speak of the spirit in general terms. We must become capable of speaking about the spirit in all its particulars, just as we do of nature. Then there will arise a real human knowledge; as man needs it, the primeval saying of truth will be fulfilled, the saying that sheds its light from ancient Greece, the fulfillment of which must continue to be striven for by the human being—the truthful saying, “Know thyself.”

Self-knowledge is knowledge of the world, and world knowledge is knowledge of self, for if we are living between birth and death, the stars, the sun, the moon, mountains, valleys, rivers, and the plants, animals, and minerals are our world, and what lives within our human boundaries is what we are. If we are living between death and a new birth, then we are what is concealed as the spiritual behind sun, moon, and stars, behind mountains and rivers, and our outer world is then the inner being of man. World and man alternate rhythmically, the human being living both physically and spiritually. For the human being here on earth the world is what is outside. For the human being between death and a new birth the world is what is within. Hence it is a question only of alternating through the times for man to be able to say that, in the most real sense, knowledge of man is knowledge of the world; knowledge of the world is knowledge of man.

• 7 . Inneres Wesen des Menschen und Leben zwischen Tod und neuer Geburt, Vienna 1914, Bibl.-Nr. 153.