The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! In the field of spiritual research, which was discussed here yesterday, it is even more necessary than in any other field of knowledge of life to search for the sources of error. It is especially necessary for the reason that on the paths of truth, of which we spoke yesterday, error lurks at every turn, so to speak, and because the nature of error in relation to the exploration of the spiritual worlds is quite different from that in the exploration of the sensual world in which man lives. It may be said that, to a certain extent, an old saying of the great philosopher Aristotle can serve as a motto for the seeker of truth on his way into the spiritual worlds. This saying sounds simple at first, but it is quite difficult to follow. It reads:

Only he can know the truth who has ceased to love his own opinion.

This saying applies to all of life's experiences and wisdom, but it applies to a particularly high degree in the field we are dealing with here. In our external life, what is contained in this saying is disregarded everywhere, so to speak. What do we hear people emphasize more often than: This is my point of view on any given matter, this is my opinion. And particularly in our time it is emphasized again and again that it is justified, and only justified, if every human being asserts his point of view, so to speak, his opinion about some matter. Of course, one can admit such a demand of life up to a certain limit, but to the real truth, namely to the truth in the spiritual field, such a point of view cannot lead. For one's own opinion – one has formed it in life entirely according to one's personal education, the personal circumstances in which one has lived, according to the part of the world that has just come across one; and it does not actually take much to realize that this opinion, which an individual personality has formed, can at least have only a narrow validity under all circumstances.

Now, in the realm of intellectual life, the fact that we bring our opinions, our view of life, our point of view with us when we engage in research intervenes in a completely different way than in any sensual realm. In ordinary life, where we are dealing with external things, we can say that error corrects itself at every turn. If we form a false opinion about this or that being or this or that process in the sensory world, we only need to let the appearance of this being or this fact itself affect us, and the incorrect judgment is, so to speak, eliminated. We cannot approach a matter with an incorrect judgment without the matter itself proving us wrong. In the spiritual realm, it is quite different. There it is a matter of course that all beings, all facts receive their very special coloration from that which we bring with us as our own soul constitution, as that which lives in our soul. And we carry a wrong opinion into the spiritual world with us; it lays itself like a veil over the corresponding observation. And if we want to hold on to this wrong opinion, then the spiritual fact, which is veiled by our opinion, cannot convict us of lying. It wraps itself in the garment of our wrong opinion and appears to us in a completely false form.

If, on the other hand, we want to point to mediumship as the antithesis of true spiritual research – without recognizing it as justified for spiritual research and without expecting to gain anything from it – then this is only for the sake of explanation. Those people who, in the manner already discussed yesterday, want to receive messages from the spiritual worlds through mediums or somnambulists are usually very concerned that their medium does not pick up, let us say, spiritual-scientific truths or any convictions from certain points of view about the spiritual world. For the people who make use of mediums are justifiably afraid that in the event that the medium has absorbed certain thoughts about the spiritual world into the ordinary consciousness and soul life, the fact that when the medium is put into his sleep-like state, what he has absorbed comes out again in his revelations, that, so to speak, the personal interferes with what the medium is supposed to reveal. And such people believe that they can only come to real, factual revelations of the spiritual world that stands behind the physical world when they have eliminated all personal feeling from the medium, when there is, so to speak, no predisposition at all to put anything personal into his revelations.

What do such people strive for? [They strive] to eliminate the personal, everything that comes from elsewhere than from the subconscious depths of the medium. That is why most is given to such revelations of mediums of which one can be certain that the mediums have not been in contact with the matter concerned in any way. If the medium speaks in a language of which one knows that it is unknown to him, then most is given to such revelations, and rightly so. What such persons strive for, who make use of mediums, can serve as an explanation. For even if spiritual research does not use anything that comes from this side, it is still true for the true spiritual researcher, who makes himself an instrument to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, that he must strip away the personal, that is, that which is only attached to his own soul life and is peculiar to his own soul life.

This is a more difficult task than is usually believed, because it requires something that is, so to speak, extremely difficult for ordinary consciousness to understand. It is necessary [that which] is called in spiritual research “the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold”. The threshold here refers to that which demarcates the realm of the sense world from the spiritual world. What is this “Guardian of the Threshold” if we start from ordinary life and its relationship to truth? Because basically, this Guardian of the Threshold is the sum of those forces and powers that prevent people from true self-knowledge in their ordinary lives and that lead them to this self-knowledge if they want to become a spiritual researcher. But in everyday life, self-knowledge is not an easy thing, and precisely because the human soul clings to what it has formed from its experiences, from everything it encounters. And this is precisely how the various points of view arise, the struggles of opinions, where materialism and spiritualism, realism and idealism, and many other points of view, which people advocate with devotion, but which make it impossible for people to understand each other, especially with regard to the most important things.

What is the actual situation regarding these points of view? Anyone who considers the human soul in relation to the rest of existence will be able to see, when he delves into the matter, that idealism, materialism, realism and so on arise as human opinions because man always has only a limited and then forms his opinion from this; and he loves this opinion of his, and it is actually love that inspires him for this opinion and makes him think that this opinion is the only possible one and fights against other points of view. This love is basically self-love. That which we have achieved, which is so closely connected with us that we actually become the thing itself - it is understandable that we love it. If we give it up, we give up ourselves. That is the significance of clinging to certain points of view in life: everyone feels that if they give them up, they give up themselves, because their whole self has taken on the coloration of the point of view. A person cannot but affirm this point of view.

There are people who, through their lives or the direction of their science, through their preoccupation with purely external things, which live in their ideas, people who are accustomed to only fix their eyes on what is material about things, become materialists; their attention is diverted from everything that is not material, and they are materialists, not because idealism is wrong. For anyone who really understands the arguments will soon see that materialists have good reasons for their assertions. But idealists also have good reasons for their views, and only someone who is biased in his materialistic direction actually sees bad reasons for idealism. Man only opposes idealism and insists on materialism when he adopts the habits of thinking that he only has to do with material things. Other people are, so to speak, less affected by the hardness and density of matter. They are more directly pointed to the struggles and victories of human life through their abilities and circumstances. Such people become idealists. They see the reasons that speak for idealism, and since they have never learned to pay attention to the reasons that speak for materialism, they regard materialism as the great error that must be fought.

And so one could characterize all spiritual directions; one would always have to lead them back to what the people have in the way of abilities and circumstances. But those who have come to a broader horizon, like Goethe, knew, and this is known by anyone who can look at the different worldviews impartially. Goethe knew that all points of view have a certain one-sidedness and that basically, for and against each point of view, much can be argued. Some people, however, also realize this, and then they easily come to the conclusion that the truths lie between the different points of view, so that a balance can be found, so to speak. But anyone who wants to know the truth in this area can be compared to a person who sits between two chairs. But the right thing would be to use both chairs, depending on the circumstances. To this end, he who is able to relate human opinions to their relationship to the all-encompassing world will come.

[Goethe says]: Truth does not lie between the different points of view, but between these lies the task, the path to truth. What does that mean? It means that when considering the individual world views, one must say that materialism is fully justified in the material realm, and that those who want to explain the material world with spiritualism will not uncover anything. Concepts of materialism belong in the world of materialism, and the mistake of materialism is not that materialism is used to explain the material, but that one also wants to explain the spiritual realm with materialism. It is the other way round for spiritualism. The enthusiastic idealist will speak everywhere of the spiritual and spiritual forces; he is like someone who looks at a clock and does not want to explain the mechanism of the clock in a mechanical way, but seeks a demon inside it that moves the hands forward. This is what one comes to and must come to if one wants to come to the truth about the different worldviews, which are only opinions after all: that one is able to see the justification and limitations of the different views.

What prevents man from doing this? Depending on the field of the world and of life, man loves his point of view with true self-love; he cannot get out of himself, cannot put himself in the place of another point of view. That is why it is so resented when one looks at Haeckel and puts oneself in his mind and does not everywhere have the tendency to fight Haeckel from a spiritual or ideal point of view, and when one turns to other minds and looks at them just as objectively. The true spiritual researcher must be able to put himself in the shoes of the positive and negative aspects of the various points of view. For it is a peculiarity of human nature that when a person applies such a method to his soul, as was discussed yesterday, then his opinions and points of view change with him. We can observe this very well, especially with the opposing points of view - idealism and materialism.

Someone who rejects everything spiritual, who is a strict materialist, will not apply any method to his soul as described yesterday; all of this is nonsense and folly to him. From his materialistic point of view, he is right. But the one who, as a spiritual researcher, not only sees the material effect in life, but can look into the whole mechanism of life, into the spiritual forces that stand behind the sensual, knows that it is not the material opinion that prevents this person, who rejects all methods of spiritual research, from coming to it. Man can deny the spiritual world if he wants. But this spiritual world does not only exist in a separate spiritual realm; this spiritual world is also present everywhere in the sensual, material world. Even in the matter that the materialist alone observes, spirit is present everywhere. But this spirit, which only lives in the material, is the spirit, the power that, when it works through man – and it does so when he has the thinking habits of moving only in the material – causes him to be incapable of directing his soul's reflection, his soul's direction, to the spirit at all. There is something in all material existence that has such an effect on us that it draws us away from the spirit, distracts us. There we see how error works.

In our studies of spiritual research, as they now try to engage in the spiritual cultural life of the present, we call this spirit, which lives in matter and works there as a force that darkens man's view of the spiritual world, the Ahrimanic spirit. This spirit is the same one that Goethe portrays in Faust as Mephisto, who accompanies Faust, who accompanies every human being, because every human being has to deal with the material world. This, then, is the power that darkens our view of the spiritual world. Materialists can indeed deny the spirit with their concepts, but it would be a serious mistake to believe that they can do any harm to the reality of the spirit. It takes revenge on them and obscures their views. This is the peculiar effect in the soul of the materialist, that this spirit erects a wall, that man cannot see the spiritual world; so the materialist denies the spiritual world because the spirit of matter inspires him to do so. You can deny him, but you cannot escape him, and what is buzzing around in the world as materialism is actually the inspiration of the [Ahrimanic] spirit. Goethe was right when he has Faust confront the mothers in such a way that Mephisto presents the spiritual realm as a nothing. But Faust says: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” – The materialist should admit to himself that he belongs to a certain group of people about whom Mephisto says:

The devil this little group never sees

And even if he had them by the collar.

It is precisely the material spirit that the little people do not feel and that inspires their materialism. In this way, if we go deep enough, we see how materialism cancels itself out, because it is itself a product of the spirit.

Let us now take the idealist's point of view. He wants nothing to do with materialism; he has formed ideas and feelings that only lead him into spiritual spheres. It would certainly not occur to him to apply what has been said to himself, but the one-sidedness of the idealistic point of view is evident precisely in these points. If the idealist, who rejects matter, applies the method mentioned yesterday to himself and gains access to the spiritual world, his way of thinking and feeling, his whole attitude, confronts him there; he carries it into this world, and the result is that this person can enter the spiritual world, but he sees everything through the spectacles of his opinions and ideas, and [he sees] that there are a great many such beings in the spiritual world that are called demonic natures, which do not appear in the external world but live in the spiritual world. These beings are too insignificant for our world – and who distract man from the world to which he nevertheless belongs, since he is born as a human being in a physical body; so the idealist, if he is narrow-minded, is very easily driven into certain methods in the world that we call demonic. He is so firmly rooted in this that, whereas he used to understand nothing of matter, so to speak, he now shuns it. People then end up in all kinds of false ascetic directions. He wants nothing more to do with matter, and his error leads him to an estrangement from the world to which he really belongs. He falls into loneliness.

This example shows us that errors in the spiritual realm are more disastrous than in the sensual realm. In the sensual world, errors are corrected; in the spiritual realm, however, errors are like realities that confront us, although these realities themselves are brought in by us. We cannot get through them. All errors [in the spiritual realm] affect our personality like realities. In the sensual realm, one can become free of errors through refutation; in the spiritual realm, there is no way but through struggle, for one must fight against that which appears as real. In the field of spiritual research, therefore, the fight will not be a mere logical one, but an ongoing spiritual work, a fight against the powers of error, for there are the powers of error.

The question now arises: How can we find the way to become efficient fighters against error in the spiritual field? We can do this through true self-knowledge! How do we go beyond the one-sidedness of materialism, spiritualism, idealism and realism in our [ordinary] lives? By making the decision once in our lives to see how we actually came to our opinions. This is a momentous decision, less difficult to grasp than to carry out. When we trace our lives back in strict introspection and ask ourselves how we came to this or that school of thought, when we examine how our attitudes and opinions arose, then we, so to speak, put ourselves together, then there comes a point where it can become difficult for us, where our minds feel great resistance. Whether one was a materialist or idealist or insisted on some other opinion that one thought was the only right one – then one feels: one has only received this opinion through one's own experience. Then comes the moment when one first feels what opinions and worldviews actually are.

As long as you interact with the world without prejudice and carry your views with you, you don't even notice how much you love your opinions; but once you withdraw from the world and realize how you have become a materialist, how you have become a spiritualist, then you come to the point of saying to yourself: Yes, basically, when you no longer have these or those thoughts, what remains of you? Then you become completely empty? You feel how you gradually cut yourself out of yourself. What then comes is that terrible moment in life when you see yourself disappearing, when you turn your gaze to the formation of your opinion. But no one can come to a worldview who does not practice self-knowledge. Then you stop insisting on your opinion, only then do you understand the saying of the old wise man Aristotle:

Only those can recognize the truth who have ceased to love their own opinion.

Then you really start to love your opinion when you have to give it up, just as you really feel love for a being when you lose it. The moment you recognize the origin of your opinion and learn to give it up, that's when you really love it. That is what our mind experiences.

If you now come to the realization that all these points of view are valid, you feel for a while as if you are floating in the air between the different points of view, standing without a floor in the world with your soul's existence. It exercises self-knowledge if you look at it as worldly wisdom without crossing the threshold. But there is a direct path from this self-knowledge, if it is energetically carried out, really into the world, to which attention was drawn yesterday. For the one who is left with no play on words by what has been described, who experiences it inwardly, with inner pain, who experiences it with all his energy, who has warmth for what happens in the world, who cannot stand coldly before the world, such a person, in this self-inspection, will experience one of the meditations that were pointed out yesterday. Because such introspection is an important kind of meditation. If it is done often, then something arises that is similar to the imagination that was shown yesterday, but such an imagination that refers to ourselves. And what then arises as a result of the introspection of ordinary life, if one takes introspection that far – what then arises is: one sees how one is in one's own being. Before, you only knew your opinion, but now you see how far you have brought each part of the soul that lies below your conscious life, that goes from life to life, in the present life.

This then arises from the spiritual world itself. You come to realize what you actually are as a human being; you never came to this realization in ordinary life. We only rarely occupy ourselves with ourselves, but when we descend into ourselves, we spiritually face ourselves. This self-knowledge is what we have called “the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold”. For that which rests in the part of the soul that goes from life to life does not show itself in ordinary life, and as long as it does not show itself, we cannot enter the spiritual world. In ordinary life, our own nature veils the spiritual world from us; at the moment we want to enter the spiritual world, we have to have the aforementioned encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold, we have to objectively face our own being, which we now face in a reincarnated being.

Then we come to see the depth of our own being, which we were spared in life, and it may be said: This world institution is beneficial, that this guardian of the threshold hides himself for ordinary life, because you can easily imagine that a person is not always strong enough to give up that which he must love most; a fear and terror of himself, so to speak, would overtake the unprepared and unripe person for true self-inspection to such an extent that it would have to bring irregularity into his inner soul life. Therefore, all true schooling for the path into the spiritual world is such that the disciple is made ready for the encounter with the “Guardian of the Threshold”. The mere enunciation of what has just been said can never be intimidating. It is only when one has one's own beingness before one that one feels that it is that which, if not faced and recognized, would prevent one from ever entering into truth into the spiritual world. We only see the spiritual world clearly when we have placed this Guardian of the Threshold within us, when we contemplate him as another being, that is, when we have been reborn. Only then can we judge how what we have been up to now is the source of all error.

Then the great, powerful fact arises before us, which can be formulated in the question: Where do the errors of spiritual research come from? They come from what we personally are; that is mixed with truth and error. We can only separate these when we can look at ourselves objectively. Only when we have ourselves in the world we are looking into, can we find a way to fight the powers of error. But there is still another difficulty, because the feeling of facing nothingness increases when one enters the spiritual world. As long as one is connected in some way with the external world, that external world is always the cause that one still loves one's own individuality too strongly. But when you look at yourself, when this peculiarity has become something like an object of the external world, then the evil temptation approaches us, that we are seized by an infinite love for our self - and never is the spiritual researcher more in danger of falling into error than now. Therefore, it takes all courage to tear all self-love out of the heart from this moment on; one must tear it out of the heart if one wants to fight errors.

So we can say that basically moral courage is the deciding factor at a certain level of spiritual realization when it comes to overcoming errors, and then we see how it becomes possible to fight the errors when we feel the source of the errors, our personal self, standing before us. If we can do this, then we will also be able to turn a healthy gaze back into ordinary life; then we will find that both those demonic powers and those Ahrimanic powers that inspire materialism, and also the enthusiastic powers, that all these spiritual powers and spiritual entities are the revelations of the spiritual world. Only then do we face the full reality. Only then do we gain a sound judgment of those who fall into errors of spiritual science, that they do not want to believe in real spiritual powers in the historical course of human development, but speak of ideas that guide the course of history.

In the nineteenth century, historians appeared who spoke of ideas in history. Those who understand the facts in this area know that ideas live in people, but that they cannot work to understand them. These ideas can no more work in history than a painter can paint a picture. And when in our time a doctrine arises that seeks to replace a historical and personal Christ, saying that one can believe in the idea of Christ, this doctrine is based on the view that ideas can have an effect, that ideas are not merely the expression of real beings. But only when we recognize the spiritual Powers standing behind them, can real life be understood.

When one accepts such a world-view, one need not be a spiritual researcher oneself to see whether his teachings are true. Man must pass through self-knowledge, for the assurance and elevation of his life. It is absolutely true that when the spiritual researcher forms and fashions what he has researched into human ideas, then everyone who is unbiased enough can understand these images. And that is why it must be emphasized that the true path of the listener to the spiritual researcher is not to devotedly surrender to the authority of the spiritual researcher, but rather the true relationship of the listener to the confessor is one that arises out of the free judgment of the listener. The spiritual researcher can only come to a correct judgment about what he sees if he applies his common sense, his healthy thinking, and if this thinking is morally and intellectually sound. But this brings us to the point where we can not only speak of the errors themselves, but also of the errors that arise in the dissemination of spiritual research, and these are very important. It is not possible to specify individual errors and how to avoid them. Rather, it can only be said that whoever advances more and more conscientiously to true spiritual research will avoid the errors that lurk everywhere. We will fight error when we recognize ourselves. Errors also arise when there is not the right relationship between those who profess and the spiritual researcher himself. Here too we have all kinds of points of view. A large number of our contemporaries reject everything that comes from spiritual research. The spiritual researcher can understand such points of view. That is why he finds so much opposition, because spiritual research is something that is new to our culture and that thinking is not yet attuned to. That is one way in which spiritual research is encountered today. A number of these people do come, however, when they realize the errors of materialism and gradually approach the results of spiritual research. It is different with the confessors. Just as much as criticism of the spiritual researchers, they experience, on the other hand, false confession, which recognizes authority and does not see that everything can be tested. The spiritual researcher does not shy away from a close examination, only from those examinations that arise from a superficial scientific approach, but not from a thorough one. It is the right approach to take what the spiritual researcher offers, to be inspired and then to examine it with the mind through which it can be examined. But besides the dismissive people, there are many who find it easier to simply believe instead of examining. And it is from these people that the kind of confession comes that leads above all to error after error in the spread of spiritual research. Because one does not check, but accepts what the spiritual researcher gives, the spiritual researcher is considered something of a higher animal by such a believing confessor. Because he looks into the spiritual world, he is considered a higher being.

It is correct to not see such a spiritual researcher as a special being. The value of a spiritual researcher does not depend on his ability to see into a spiritual world, but on his moral and intellectual qualities. This is, so to speak, an area of purely human research, because its results are connected with all the hopes and longings of man, and just as one is not held in higher esteem for pursuing mathematical or geometrical science, so one should not be held in higher esteem for being a spiritual researcher. When one peers into the spiritual world, one does not yet need to have a judgment about what is seen; one can look in and see many things and tell the greatest nonsense and the greatest errors from this world. Only then, when one regards the spiritual researcher, so to speak, as nothing more than an instrument through which spiritual truths flow into the world, and then checks for oneself, only then does one have the right relationship to the spiritual world. Otherwise, how could charlatans so easily set themselves up alongside the real spiritual researchers? But those who do not want to examine cannot distinguish between what has been conscientiously gained and what has been gained by false and even fraudulent means.

The spiritual researcher can only save himself from his confessor by not being tempted to become overconfident in the faith that is placed in him. There are natures that, when they see that they are being regarded as something special, communicate all kinds of things that have only been obtained by false means. That is why charlatanry and humbug are often indistinguishable. And much less harmful in terms of the dissemination of spiritual research are the critical opponents, as long as they are not driven by their longing than the blindly faithful followers. In no other field is belief in authority worse and more harmful than in the field of spiritual research, and in no other field is this belief so at home. A healthy dissemination of spiritual research and spiritual science in our time, which wants to avoid errors within what it disseminates, must above all be concerned with eliminating blind faith from all dissemination of spiritual science.

However, we are still far from this ideal in many respects because of the complacency of the many, because they no longer check whether what the spiritual researcher says is justified. If they like what is offered, they accept it on blind faith in authority. It is always possible to apply common sense to what is presented in spiritual science, and when one sees that the spiritual researcher is endeavoring to place the results of his research in such strict [gap in the transcript] images, when does not tend towards enthusiasm on the one hand or carelessness on the other, but when one sees how he treats all matters of spiritual research in the same logical way as external matters, only then is he a true spiritual researcher. Then, when he sees more and more souls of the present and the future incline towards spiritual research in this way, then the objection cannot be raised that [Jelder should be a spiritual researcher. Just as not everyone needs to become a botanist to understand botanical research, not everyone needs to become a spiritual researcher either – although anyone can become one.

But the ideas of spiritual research must spread more and more, because we live in a time when souls long for what only spiritual science can give. Its facts are what souls long for today and will long for more and more. He who can grasp the spirit of the time knows that certain needs of the soul can only be satisfied if spiritual science finds its way to the hearts and souls. But since the time itself will ensure that there will be enough spiritual researchers, and since one only needs logical mind and a sense of truth [to see the results of spiritual research], then through these spiritual researchers one will find the way that open up the perspective for everyone to enter the spiritual worlds, that spiritual world from which man can come security, joy, hope for the life in which he is, and that which opens up when the gate of death closes. That security, which can develop with the approach of wisdom towards old age, when our body decays, to prepare to go through a spiritual existence, to come back to this earth to continue its work - that security, that certainty will these souls, these personalities find in the spiritual world.

This perspective will arise for more and more souls of the present and the future: the opportunity to look into this spiritual world. And a time will come when truly every single person, not just the spiritual researcher, will stand there in such a way that [he] will take a very simple stand against all denial of the spiritual world. These people will become so great as the force of the reasons for spiritual research [for the same] continues to grow. Such secure souls will behave towards the deniers of the spiritual world as Goethe once behaved when the philosophy that came from Greek thought, which could not come to terms with the laws of movement, came before his soul. They said that there was no movement, that it was only apparent, that when a body moves, it is actually at rest in every moment; but movement is not composed of rest, so there is no movement. There was such a school of philosophy! Goethe, when he heard about this philosophy, said:

They may see what they want,

You remain calm, remain silent;

And if they deny you movement,

Walk around in front of their noses.

In this way, movement is proven by the evidence of walking in front of their noses.

If one could delve a little into the certainty of the souls that must come, which will gradually feel the force of the spiritual-scientific proofs, such souls will then confront the deniers of the spirit just as surely as Goethe confronted the deniers of the movement. Such souls will then perhaps say to those who disdain to regard as foolishness the science of the spirit:

Adversity may arise,
but you remain calm, remain cheerful,
and if they deny the spirit,
do not brood over it.
Yes, in the end even agree with them,
their spirit is in a bad way.

Question and Answer

Question: Is the soul of the deceased aware of the life just concluded?

Rudolf Steiner: In “Occult Science”, we have attempted to characterize the nature of consciousness. Those who want to inform themselves must let the presentation given there take effect on them. [One can answer the question] with an absolute “Yes”, but this “Yes” needs to be explained, and that is only possible through a detailed presentation.

Question: Why are new embodiments always necessary, in other words, why is there never any rest?

Rudolf Steiner: The questioner probably regards rest as something desirable, which underlies the question. What can be meant by the concept of rest here? Rest that is the rest of death or some other kind of behavior? It is impossible to find out what is meant by 'calm' here. Of course, not all of life's mysteries can be solved in a lecture, and many things must remain unsaid. Of course, the embodiments do not continue uninterruptedly from eternity to eternity; they once took a beginning from a purely spiritual existence, and at the end of the earth we will be in a different spiritual state, no longer returning to the earthly existence. But in the meantime, we have to undergo incarnations. Repeated earthly lives are necessary because only in this way can a person approach the all-round development and realization of his potential, approaching his goal in an ascending and descending wave. That is precisely the course of earthly development; the earth never remains the same after a certain number of centuries; consider all that has changed, not only in culture, since the founding of Christianity! One experiences great intervals, not short ones, between two successive earthly lives. The soul is therefore in a position to always experience something new.

Question: In which incarnation will we be resurrected on Judgment Day, in the first or in the last?

Rudolf Steiner: Incarnation is not fixed; one must be clear about how the word “incarnation” is meant here: how “resurrection” is meant. One must first understand St. Paul's teaching on the spiritual body. This has nothing at all to do with the physical body. Only then can an answer to this question be given.

Question: What dreams at night, the soul or the brain?

Rudolf Steiner: This is easy to answer from what was said yesterday. The soul is in the astral world during sleep, and the human being experiences his dreams inwardly; of course it is not the brain that dreams, but the soul.

Question: What consolation can a person who is not clairvoyant find in the doctrine of reincarnation, since only the spiritual researcher can see his past incarnations and the other person would have to despair because he cannot see for himself?

Rudolf Steiner: In the lecture it was said: It does not depend on doing research in the spiritual worlds oneself, but rather, when these things are expressed in concepts, everyone can understand them and the spiritual researcher himself has no more from them than what he gains from his clairvoyance by expressing them in concepts. The doctrine of re-embodiment is something that gives life security and content. So this question is already answered in the lecture. One should also read the booklet 'Reincarnation and Karma'. Then one will find what can give the soul security and comfort, and that it has been ensured that the non-spiritual researcher also has the opportunity to understand it. Question: I have already taken part in two introductory courses, but I still do not understand how it is possible that some people are doing badly, some are doing well; often highly developed people are doing badly, while the rich libertine finds no punishment, but still lives a joyful life.

Rudolf Steiner: The latter does not follow from the doctrine of reincarnation, because it is not the case that life always advances, but [that] it ascends and descends, as [it] just [the] causes [it] yield. That a rich libertine would find an even more joyful life, such a question arises from a complete misunderstanding of the overall course of human life. If someone observes another person or themselves and finds another person noble or themselves quite noble, or afflicted by suffering and misfortune, the judgment they make in the given moment is by no means always decisive.

I will give you a comparison: Let us imagine a young person who has lived off his father's pocket until the age of eighteen, let us assume that it was not a bad life. When he is 18 years old, his father loses his fortune. He was not doing badly before, but he gets into this bad situation; now he has to learn something proper when he has not learned anything proper before. Now, at this time of his life, he will consider this stroke of fate as something quite difficult, quite undeserved. When he is 50 years old, he may look back and say to himself: If that hadn't happened back then, I would now be a good-for-nothing and would know nothing about the world. At 50 years old, he will judge [it] quite differently than at 18 years old.

We are usually not the right judges of our own clumsiness. Later, however, we will judge more objectively, especially from the spiritual world in the time between death and birth, or in subsequent earthly lives, when one can already look back; because everyone will achieve that; humanity is developing; everyone will be able to look back, which now only the spiritual researcher can do. Then one will say: That which seemed inexplicable at first, that was precisely the reason why I had to strongly resist, why I released forces that became the most important for further development, for ascent. In ordinary life one will see that already; one experiences many things. Many a person who, as a prospective spiritual researcher, looks at life more intimately and in more depth, will know how to tell about it. Then you look back on what brought you joy, pleasure and many other things, and you look back on the struggles, evil and pain you went through. You look back on all kinds of things. You will say to yourself: I am grateful to fate for the many joyful experiences I have had. But would you rather give up your joys or your sufferings? Then you may perhaps come to the realization: I would rather give up my joy and bliss, because I owe my pain and suffering my realization. You first have to know what becomes of the causes.

In short, one should not make the judgment of such a question so easy. Spiritual science has a deeply satisfying answer to all such questions.

Question: Would the same result be obtained if, for example, the astral body were perceived in the same way by several spiritual researchers?

Rudolf Steiner: This question cannot be answered meaningfully with a simple “yes” because what the spiritual researcher perceives in a kind of imaginary vision is only to some extent based on complete objectivity. What applies in the sensory world, that one can look at things from a different point of view, applies to a higher degree in higher worlds. If two people write a travelogue about the same area, there will still be a great difference. But one need not doubt altogether that these areas exist. And if we look into the ever-flowing, fleeting astral body, then it is understandable that the external image is different, even though the reality is quite the same. Therefore, one can answer this question in the affirmative, even if the external images are different, but no more different than when two people form an image of a physical-sensory object; seeing and representation are different in a certain way. Everything depends on the objectivity of the observer; it is always assumed that real spiritual researchers describe things.

Question: Must not the stripping away of the standpoint be taken so far that even what is peculiar to the human species is eliminated? [...]

Rudolf Steiner: The first question concerns the generic. What exactly is the generic? When we speak of the generic, we often imagine something quite abstract. But the concept of 'generic' can only be applied in the right sense to the realm of nature that is below the human being. Within the animal kingdom, the concept of the generic is fully justified because it cannot be a mere concept for a one-sided observation. For when people who are full of whims and fancies find that there are only individual dogs, and thus no such thing as “dog nature” or “wolf nature”, the retort is that if one only allows the individual being, for example the individual being “wolf”, to count, and not what reigns in it supersensibly, thus only recognizes the material, then the refutation is easily given. If a wolf only eats lambs, it shows that it does not become a lamb just because it eats lambs. But in the animal kingdom, we are interested in what lives in the species, just as we are interested in the individual, the ideal, in the human being. Therefore, only humans have a biography.

Some will find this strange because one can also have a biography of animals. It should not be denied that a mother dog can give a biography of her dogs, a mother cat a biography of her cats. But that is not the point. A teacher can also ask children to present the biography of their pens. But what is biographical in the individual is only found in humans. The concept of the species only makes sense in the case of humans if one lives in an abstract philosophy. On the other hand, the ideal in the human being is not exhausted in the species. What adheres to the human being through the people, the tribal characteristics, belongs to him in a different direction than to the animal. This species-like quality is even stripped away from the ideal; in the true sense of the word, one cannot even speak of it. At the beginning of the development of the earth, man was entirely a generic being, but in that lay the idea that individuals would all become ideal, so that the generic aspect plays a secondary role in man.

Question: Without doubt, the one who is to face the Guardian of the Threshold has to overcome great dangers that he does not know in advance; how can he protect himself, or is there no protection?

Rudolf Steiner: The path is followed in a concrete way if one follows what is given in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Through this, the qualities are also implanted in the soul to enable one to pass the encounter in the right way. There are still great difficulties, but one has also acquired stronger forces.

Question: What can be said about Mohammed and his mission? Why did he have to come 600 years after Christ?

Rudolf Steiner: It is not possible to answer this question briefly; it would lead to the greatest misunderstandings. The answer would have to be given from the fundamentals. 600 years after the Christ Impulse, Mohammed gave content to such a human community, which was predisposed, on the one hand, to the sometimes fantastical mind and, on the other, to the fine elaboration of the intellect. Compared to the Christ impulse, it was something of a setback, an atavism. This shows how development generally occurs: in advances and setbacks. The nature of this Mohammedanism must be understood from the whole nature of development: the Christ impulse, the greatest religious impulse, which must gradually become part of the evolution of the earth, while the Mohammedan impulse had to oppose it before.

Question: Are the Theosophists in favor of cremation? Rudolf Steiner: Theosophists do not take sides for this

or that party, but these things are a matter of knowledge. One says what is true and right, and then everyone can build their own view of what they want to take up into life as impulses of will.

Such questions cannot be answered in absolute terms. The various stages of human development are different, and the same is not best for all times, but people change, and with that, the emergence or lack of emergence of human institutions changes. On the whole, for the time that has passed, and for a large number of people in the future, cremation is not an important [right?] thing, although the propagandists of cremation are, so to speak, pioneers of the future. But people have to mature, everything has only relative validity, so also the question: bury or burn for one age or another. For spiritual contemplation, many things appear different than for external perception.

Question: How do you reconcile the view that all people have already experienced life on earth with the fact that the earth used to be less and less populated?

Rudolf Steiner: This is a mere mathematical calculation, and it will be seen that what has been said is simply a bold assertion. The question comes up almost after every lecture. The intervals between two lives are not the same for all people. Sometimes there are many more people embodied in one age than in another shortly before. Let us assume that in the seventeenth century 100 souls were incarnated and in the sixteenth century 100 as well, and the intervals between their embodiments were different, then in the nineteenth century the 100 from both groups may have incarnated again, so there are 200 in the nineteenth century. Because the intervals are different due to the entire karma of the souls, there is an increase in certain periods of time. The conscientious person cannot speak of anything else. The time since the last incarnation is on average longer than the time that separates us, for example, from the discovery of America. But if it is claimed that the number of people is increasing, then one must first ask: How can this be proven by external things? For example: Who has studied the increase for China; so what is the population of the whole earth; or what worlds have perished; or what was before the discovery of America, and long before America was discovered? So with conscientious research, this claim cannot be made in the physical world.

Question: What does the speaker say about Adventism, where the world history is explained from Daniel and Revelation of John, and now the time is coming when Christ promises his return and the world will change socially and politically?

Rudolf Steiner: It is a well-known phenomenon that the sects today take the “viewpoint of all viewpoints” and are completely in love with their point of view, to a much greater extent than is the case with other people. And to give someone who belongs to a sect an explanation for this or that symbol, or to dissuade them, or to make something understandable, is usually a pure impossibility for this incarnation. But anyone who fully grasps the Aristotelian principle that 'only by disregarding one's own opinion can one arrive at the truth' has the right point of view. Anyone familiar with spiritual science knows that when you look at things more deeply, they cannot be taken quite so literally and in quite such a way as they often are from such a point of view. Nevertheless, nothing should be said against the piety and the cozy intimacy of the souls who are caught up in such a point of view, and one can have the highest respect for it. But in such sects one does not go beyond the point of view, which narrows the truth. Those who look back at the development of mankind will find that there have always been sects that have said the same thing. They said: In fifty years the return of Christ will be here. He did not come, but that did not refute the teachings; and however often the refutation occurred through the facts, it did not harm the point of view. It was no means a means of somehow refuting such a “point of view of points of view”.

Question: Is there any contradiction between spiritual science and positive Christianity?

Rudolf Steiner: The questioner usually understands positive Christianity to mean what he understands by Christianity. I cannot go into this further, I would have to talk a lot about the Christ impulse, the Christ presence.

Question: How can the doctrine of rebirth be understood empirically or philosophically?

Rudolf Steiner: I must refer you to the literature, “Occult Science” and so on; because one lecture would not be enough to answer this question; even if I would be able to give some lectures this very night, some listeners might not be able to; I do not want to boast!

Question: Is there a third cognitive faculty?

Rudolf Steiner: Imagination, inspiration, intuition; I am a little surprised that questions are being asked as if it were a fact that the lecture had not been listened to at all; after all, my answer was a detailed response to this question.

Question: Is there a real and practical difference between soul and spirit?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, it follows from Theosophy that they should not be lumped together. This lumping together happened quite recently in history; a council decreed that soul and spirit are not two different things, lumped them together; since then they have no longer been distinguished, not even in science; although science is not aware that it is following an ecclesiastical dogma. There is a real difference in the relationship to the body. The relationship of the spirit to the body is different from the relationship of the soul to the body and vice versa.

Question: Should not someone who grows up in the theosophical view, who first gets to the bottom of the view of this view, become free of it?

Rudolf Steiner: That is as if someone who has just eaten had to eat again immediately, because outwardly nothing has changed in this person, at least not in many cases, because he has just eaten. One attains self-knowledge when one stands outside of one's personal self; that is, one attains freedom through self-knowledge. If you now want to become free again, where you have already become free, this is even less justified than with the meal. But then you have already achieved liberation; there is no need to become free a second time after you have just become free. The point of view cannot be compared with mere materialism or individualism, because spiritual research uses all the different points of view, but not to stand on them, but to characterize them. And the truth is not in the middle, but by the reasons that can be given for it, these points of view appear to illuminate the real truth from different sides. Only those who get stuck in abstractions can apply what is applicable to one thing to another. But just as in real life you don't just have the general human characteristics, but are first a child, then a man, then an old man, and can't ask whether you have to shed the stage of childhood again, so the question of self-knowledge is there once, but not again. There is then knowledge in the world within, and from that point on, self-knowledge begins for the human being; that is the conclusion of self-knowledge, the self-knowledge that is acquired selflessly by the individual and thus has a selfless character.

For many years now, almost every winter I have had the privilege of speaking here about one or other topic from the field of spiritual science, as it is meant in tonight's reflections. And just on the occasion of my last lectures, which I was allowed to give here, I allowed myself to make the remark that when one speaks of spiritual science today in our present time in the sense in which it is meant here, one then by no means talking about anything in our time that is well known or even popular in wider circles; on the contrary, with this spiritual science one has to talk about something that is widely unrecognized and, above all, misunderstood. Indeed, this spiritual science has to fight against misunderstanding upon misunderstanding. One person may be informed about this spiritual science from second or third or sometimes even seventh or eighth hand reports and come to the conclusion that it is something like a new sect entering the world or some new attempt to found a religious community or something similar. The other comes to the opinion that this spiritual science has fantasy and 'dreaming' at its sources. Above all, it contradicts in the most eminent sense what today, as a worldview, wants to establish itself, as they say, as genuine, true science.

Perhaps I may, just on the occasion of this lecture, conclude with a few words about the misunderstandings that are currently close to us here, and may I first devote the greater part of the lecture to our topic and to that from whose field I have already been able to bring some details here for discussion, today in general, in order to then consider some special questions in the lecture on January 27 of next year.

Above all, it may be said that spiritual science wants to place itself in the spiritual life of the present, precisely as this spiritual life of the present has developed from the scientific way of thinking that has taken hold of the spiritual life of humanity for three to four centuries. And it may be said that the most serious misunderstanding is the assumption that this spiritual research can somehow come into conflict with the legitimate claims of true scientific research. From its point of view, this spiritual science will admire and fully recognize this science, and must do so if it wants to stand on the ground of true and genuine observation of humanity and the times. It will admire and recognize the great scientific achievements of our age where it is justified, will acknowledge what science has done for the transformation of our entire cultural life, will acknowledge how it is a scientific way of thinking, what is at work at every turn today and lives in our cultural assets and, in particular, what has virtually transformed all external areas of the rest of life in the course of the nineteenth century.

To what extent this spiritual science is fully included in the natural scientific series of development on the one hand, but on the other hand must go beyond its final conclusions, precisely because it draws the last and most genuine conclusions about what today is often called natural science thinking, I would like to explain this first by means of a kind of comparison, by which we simply want to communicate, but by which we do not want to prove anything special about what spiritual science has to say.

I do not want to talk about what science has achieved in terms of commercial and industrial aspects of contemporary cultural life; I want to talk about what scientific thinking has achieved. Apart from the fact that it has influenced the various cultural fields, it has contributed to a certain education of all human thinking, it has transformed the nature of the habits of thought, of the life of imagination and the cognitive needs of the human soul to a much greater extent than is usually realized. For this transformation has not only taken hold of those who have been drawn to science directly through their profession, their inclination or their interest, but of all souls; people simply think differently today than they did five or six centuries ago. We are accustomed to holding very different ideas about what we might call the reign of a sense of existence than we had in earlier centuries.

This is not something that has been arbitrarily brought about; rather, it is based on that inner necessity that had to take place in the history of mankind, just as human life must be different for an old man of sixty than for a man of thirty. These things correspond to historical laws of life, and anyone who wants to deny them must deny the inner truth of things. Those people who today are not yet seized by this change in thinking will be seized by it in the future, in difficult times, in the very near future. Thus, if we may say so, centuries of scientific education have transformed the innermost part of human thought and feeling. We may say so.

How does that which wants to shape cultural development as spiritual science relate to this transformation of human thinking over the last four centuries? I would like to illustrate this to you through a comparison. Let us look at the farmer who harvests the fruits when they are ripe. The greater part of the harvest is used as human food. But a part must be used, if life is to continue, to be sown as seed again, so that a harvest can ripen again next year.

We can compare this process in the life of nature with what has been achieved in recent centuries through scientific knowledge. The greater part of this must be used to allow human cultural life to flow broadly; it is incorporated into the important industrial achievements, into commercial life, into external social coexistence, into the individual sciences; and the individual branches of this culture flourish because the scientific way of thinking flows into them all. This part of human thought can be compared to the part of the seed that is used for human food.

But a part – and certainly not the least valuable part – of thoughts that have entered the human soul only in the last century, a part of these inner acquisitions, of what we have learned about the secrets of the existence of the world precisely through the natural sciences, can be used like the seed that goes into the field to produce new fruit. This is the part we use for what is referred to as meditation, concentration of thought. We can process this part of scientific thoughts and ideas inwardly with the soul, allowing them to take effect in our soul, to germinate there, so to speak. Under the influence of these thoughts, to which we devote ourselves in meditation, which we practise in the very innermost, most intimate soul work, we can allow precisely these scientific ideas to work on our soul in such a way that they work, weave, and bring forth sensations and feelings within it, that they practise this soul life so inwardly that this soul life not only expresses the word 'development', which is so popular today, but also comes into development itself. It is precisely the scientific way of thinking, when meditatively processed, that transforms our soul, makes our soul into something else. And it will soon become clear how, from this point of view, spiritual science is the correct continuation of the scientific way of thinking. But with regard to this spiritual science, when such considerations are employed, as is the case today, only suggestions can be given, only communications about the method of research, through which the spiritual researcher himself can devote himself to contemplation, the means by which everyone can be convinced.

Therefore, I would first like to draw attention to some of the results of spiritual science and then show how the spiritual researcher arrives at these results. These results are so at odds with what people today believe and suppose to be truth that they seem quite paradoxical, like something fantastic, like a flight of fancy for some. The spiritual researcher in particular knows how alien these results must be to many a soul of the present time, and he is least surprised when someone who wanted to be his friend walks away from him with the impression that he was talking to a fanatic. The spiritual researcher is fully aware of every reaction, even hostile confrontation, because he knows where such antagonism can come from.

Above all, spiritual research is a unique discipline in that it seeks to connect the human soul with its spiritual source in a way that is based on scientific thinking. It shows that what man carries in his soul as the deepest, innermost part is spiritual , a spiritual core; and that this spiritual core is connected with an all-embracing spiritual life of the world that lies beyond the life of the senses, and that it cannot be perceived or recognized by the ordinary human senses or by the intellect that binds itself to these human senses. But in this method of research, a tremendous difference between spiritual science and all other sciences immediately comes to light. Every other science works with the same means of thinking and looking at things, which are otherwise peculiar to man in everyday life. Just as man is, just as he develops in the normal way from childhood to later age, as he develops a certain capacity for knowledge, so he also approaches the scientific research objects of the present. And everything that such a normal person has to say forms the content of the sciences in the various fields of life.

It is quite different in spiritual research. It takes development seriously. It is based on the fact that with the powers of knowledge, with the soul faculties, which are initially inherent in people in their everyday lives, these boundaries cannot be crossed, which separate the sensual from the supersensible, the material from the spiritual; but it is based on the fact that a person's powers of knowledge, a person's soul powers, can be developed. It is serious about the word “development”. And today we will be speaking about intimate inner processes and activities of the soul, through which the soul elevates itself beyond itself, comes to develop powers of knowledge that are not those of ordinary life, but that, within this soul, which can be addressed in the soul as the true, immortal, spiritual core of the human being.

In a sense, spiritual research is not as comfortable as other forms of research; it cannot accept people as they are, but must make uncomfortable demands of them. If you want to become a spiritual researcher, you have to transform your soul so that it is guided beyond the ordinary level through its own activity and conducts research with powers that are not present in everyday life. This is the language of spiritual research. Only these powers lead to the regions of the spiritual world and to its beings.

But then, when the soul is led out so that it grasps its own essential core as a soul, then it first comes to a truth that, in the truest sense of the word, represents the continuation of the findings of natural science, but which is still everywhere looked upon as fantasy wherever it has not been studied in detail. One comes to the truth about repeated lives, the truth that can be expressed in a nutshell by saying: What we experience and work for in this life between birth and death, we do not experience and work for only once. As we see our life, when we look back into childhood as far as we can, and as we hope for our life in relation to the rest of the life before death, we do not live only once. We go through the gate of death and live in a purely spiritual world, which can only be seen with the spirit, a life between death and new birth, and then enter with the fruits of this life, also with those that we gather between death and new birth, into a new life on earth, to which we can look in the future just as we can look back into the past on the already expired earth lives of the individual human. So we always look forward to life on earth - between birth and death - and to life that passes between death and new birth in a purely spiritual world. The way we present this truth in today's spiritual life, it seems quite naturally fantastic to the vast majority of people. But all new truths in the world have seemed as fantastic as they have appeared. It will always be the fate of new truths that at first they seem like fantasies, then they become something that can no longer be seen as different; they then become a matter of course. Then, when man beholds himself as in an extended memory, then he can also explore the connections of this spiritual-soul core, which goes from life to life, with the spiritual worlds, through which the divine-spiritual, which interweaves and lives through this life, also passes. But from that which the spiritual researcher has so fully brought to life within himself, it springs forth for man that which he needs more and more for the cultural development of our earth, especially in the present and in the future.

Thus I have presented some of the truths of this spiritual research. It now remains for me to show how the spiritual researcher arrives at these truths, that is, how the spiritual world is investigated and researched. One must not believe that this spiritual world can be investigated with the senses that we can apply to the sensory world. It is a spiritual world precisely because it cannot be perceived by the senses. It is necessary for the study of this spiritual world that man himself should make himself the instrument of investigation. All other sciences have their external instruments. Spiritual research has as its only instrument the human organism itself, which is, however, the most wonderful instrument we can find on earth. But this organism must undergo a certain transformation if it is to acquire, to use a phrase from Goethe, “spiritual eyes and ears” in order to see what is always around us in spiritual form, but which cannot be seen unless a spiritual eye and spiritual ear are developed in the human soul, which would otherwise remain dormant.

How does one develop the spiritual organs through which the spiritual world becomes visible, audible and perceptible to man? Not tumultuous external processes, not experiments that can be carried out in the same way externally as in laboratories or clinics, bring about this change, but inner soul processes that the spiritual researcher can carry out with himself if he wants to gain insight into the spiritual world. What I have to say in this description may appear to many people to be extremely mundane. But it must be said: however mundane these things appear, in their execution they are among the most difficult that a person can undertake on this earth, including all his other activities. But we are not speaking of special wonders, of some things that in their simplest form not every person would know, when one has to speak of what the spiritual researcher must develop in his soul if he wants to come to the real exploration of the supersensible. The soul forces that the spiritual researcher has to develop are always there in the soul, but only in their beginnings, as they are needed for everyday life. The spiritual researcher has only to develop these qualities to an unlimited degree. Here I must call attention to something that is not only present everywhere in everyday life, but is also necessary in the most eminent sense. It is what is called attention: the attention of the soul to these or those things, the turning of interest to these or those things, as we have them in ordinary life.

We need to pay attention to two things. Many people need to reflect – but usually they think about these things when things are no longer going well – they need to reflect on why their memory is getting worse in life. Why does memory get worse at all? If you delve deeper into the question of memory, you come to the conclusion that it is actually a question of attention. What we grasp intensely with our attention remains in our memory.

You could say something quite mundane as an introductory remark when you want to point out the importance of attention. Many a person is quite annoyed in the morning when they cannot find this or that thing that they put here or there in the evening. They have completely forgotten it. For example, they cannot find their cufflink. Why does this happen? Well, they have forgotten where they put it. He can remedy that. A sure way to help himself is to resolve not just to lay it down thoughtlessly, but to think: I am putting the button in this place, I am laying it down with will. If you also pay attention to the act from your inner arbitrariness, you will not forget it, you will surely remember the place where you put the button. This can be extended to all other memories. If only people realized that they also take into their memory everything they take into their arbitrary attention, then they would combine the attention problem with the memory problem, and a training of the memory can be summarized in a training of attention.

And there is another point to which attention must be drawn, which seems even more important. It is necessary for a healthy mental life that we are able to recognize the experiences we have had back to the point of our childhood as ours in memory. If we are incapable of this, if, let us say, at the age of thirty a person's soul life is such that he cannot recognize certain experiences that he had at the age of five as his own, then a perforation of the ability to remember occurs that is somewhat unhealthy. Only then are we healthy when we can follow our entire present self as a continuous thread. This depends on our being able to experience the events that happen to us in such a way that they line up on a thread of memory through which, as it were, our ego runs. And a person - this happens in certain mental illnesses - can, as it were, come to have a double ego in that he can have the opinion that someone else has experienced what he has actually experienced. Such things happen. Then his healthy soul life is destroyed, torn apart. Much could be achieved for the education of people in whom one can recognize in many cases that such a perforation of the ego is taking place, much could be achieved for education if one were clear about the fact that the ability to remember is intimately connected with the way we pay attention to and are interested in the things of the world. Nothing but attention — that is what belongs to the imaginative soul forces.

It is this attention that must be developed to infinity by the spiritual researcher in what is called concentration of thought. To do this, however, an ordinary, everyday soul force must be driven with tremendous inner energy and resignation to an extent that it is otherwise never driven in external life. The human being must bring himself to explore the state of mind in which he is when he is attentive; he must become aware of it when he is attentive in ordinary life. His attention is aroused by external impressions, by sensational things that have a strong effect on him. But the spiritual researcher must transform his attention so that he does not allow himself to be forced by anything external, but is able, through inner arbitrariness alone, to unfold the activity of the soul that would otherwise only be unfolded in attention.

The safest way to achieve this goal is one that is highly inconvenient for many people. In order to achieve something very safely, you have to force yourself to turn your attention to something that is as uninteresting as possible in ordinary life; something you would like to run away from, that is completely uninteresting. If you can bring yourself to treat that from which you otherwise run away with your soul in such a way that you place it at the center of your spiritual life, that you concentrate all the powers of your soul on this one thing, but in relation to the rest of your soul, through inner arbitrariness, through training of the soul, you come to be as in sleep, so that no eye, no ear perceives anything externally, that all the worries of life fall silent: Anyone who has silenced their entire being in this way, as is otherwise only achieved in sleep, but then does not fall asleep but focuses on something that they have deliberately placed at the center of their mental life and now turn their soul's attention to in an unlimited way, will awaken forces in their soul that would otherwise remain dormant in their soul.

This brings about what could be called – I do not particularly value the expression – a spiritual chemistry. Because when you develop your imagination and thinking, you are doing something in your own soul life that can be compared and only compared with the separation of hydrogen from water in the chemical laboratory. When we have water in front of us, it is liquid. If we separate the hydrogen from it, we have a gas that has very different properties than water. No one can see the properties of hydrogen and oxygen in the water. And no one can recognize the spiritual destiny in the person who stands before us every day. To do this, the spiritual and mental must be separated from the physical and bodily. This does not happen through external processes, but through the increase of that which may appear so ordinary to man, into the immeasurable. So that one can indeed say: “Although it is light, the light is heavy.”

There are many details that need to be observed. Here, only the principle can be stated. If the soul then increases its attention, as required, it is able, through the concentration of forces that are otherwise unconscious, to tear everything of the soul and spirit away from the physical, just as hydrogen is torn away from oxygen in the laboratory.

If you continue such inner exercises of the soul life, then the day will come when you can connect a meaning to the words that are otherwise just a phrase: Now I know that I can think even when I am not thinking with the brain; now I know that I can think and visualize even when I am not using my body; now I know what it means to leave the body and to feel and experience the soul and spiritual realm. And when someone leaves the physical body with the soul and spirit, he has completely different qualities and experiences in his inner life than a person has within his body. Just as someone says that hydrogen can be extracted from water, then hydrogen has the properties of a gas that burns, so from the point of view of an everyday materialist, one can laugh at what the spiritual researcher experiences when he reaches the point of lifting his spiritual soul out of his physical body through long, energetic exercises. It sounds like empty phrases when he talks about it. And yet I would like to describe the progress, at least in detail.

What the spiritual researcher experiences when he continues the exercises is indeed so completely paradoxical that from a certain moment on he feels: Yes, your thinking used to be such that you had to use your brain to think – but now you feel that you are actually thinking outside of your brain. He feels as if he can move like a sun in the spiritual with his present thinking, emancipated from the brain. He experiences himself in such a way that he now even knows: the way he thinks otherwise now runs almost automatically, it is bound to the brain. From a certain moment on, one acquires a very definite knowledge about it: When you are in your present state, you have to slip back into your brain if you want to use your brain again. You perceive your brain as something external to you, like you would perceive an external object, a table, a chair, next to you.

Then comes that significant experience, which makes such a significant, such a shattering impact on the spiritual life of the spiritual researcher. It must be repeated several times in life, but when it occurs for the first time in life, it is the most harrowing event that cannot be compared to anything else in life. It can occur, for example, as the following: one wakes up in the middle of sleep as if to a dream, but it is not a dream, but a spiritual reality that outshines all the rest of the reality of the day. The experience can also occur in the middle of the outer life of the day, but it does not disturb it, because true and correct preparation will never make a person fantasize. In the life of the day as well as in the life of the night, the moment may arise, which I would characterize in the following way. But it can also occur in hundreds of other ways; I will give only a typical example. Something of what is attempted to be described with words will present itself to every person who becomes a spiritual researcher. He will communicate what happens in such a way that he says: It is like a room in which he finds himself. Lightning strikes the room; he follows the lightning as if speaking to himself inwardly, he feels the elements striking his body in a flash, as if his body were being destroyed. From that moment on, he knows that he is united with the spirit without the body, he knows that man carries a spiritual and soul element within him; this is the direct experience of every person who can have the experience if he wants to. Only from that moment on do you know what the human essence is in the truest sense of the word; what lies beyond birth and death.

This experience can only be made in a spiritual way, not through external experiments. Those who demand that the spiritual be established through external experiments should also demand that some experience they had fifty years ago be extracted with some kind of powder so that it can be prepared and made visible externally. Spiritual facts are not established externally. That which spiritual researchers of all times have called “approaching the gate of death”, that is, experiencing death in the image, that is, what a person experiences in real death when his eternal core detaches itself from the physical body, is experienced in the image in the serious experience, which so absorbs the soul of the person who has already had it once, imprinting on the soul that seriousness that can be expressed and felt with the words: You were connected to the deepest core of your being, to that which, as the eternal, spiritually permeates, lives through and interweaves the world. However, this seriousness is to be lived through painfully and not without making the greatest efforts to which man is unaccustomed. Not without surrendering what is otherwise considered pleasure and joy; what one otherwise likes in life, not without giving up what one otherwise strives for in life for certain moments, one attains this purest experience, which has been spoken of and points to light in the spiritual world. Then one attains something further when one adds the following to what has just been said: One must also give up everything that one perceives as desirable in everyday life, and one must give it up in such a way that one completely renounces everything that one otherwise desires, everything that one otherwise likes, that one gives up everything that gives one pleasure, and one must not give it up in such a way that one has only a very specific self-awareness in the devotion, but in such a way that one really renounces during this devotion all such activity that we otherwise call our complete devotion to the world, which one otherwise does not really know, that one gives up no compulsion and nothing that otherwise calls us to devotion in life. This must be added, and the spiritual world, into which we have entered, senses this with what we call the spiritual state.

One should not imagine this perception in the spiritual world as being the same as the perception in the external world. The external world is presented to us in such a way that we can say: there is an object out there that I see with my eye or perceive with my other sensory organs. One can only experience spiritual states if, after devotion, one becomes one with the states. We do not experience these states from outside ourselves, but in such a way that they enter into us. We have to immerse ourselves, become one with the spiritual states that come to meet us. Therefore, when a person increases his inner thinking through attention, and when we make this thinking an organ of perception for spiritual states through devotion, then we perceive these spiritual states.

What one experiences inwardly can be called spiritual mimicry. Just as in ordinary life one unconsciously expresses one's spiritual states in facial expressions, so too, through the processes described, one becomes one with the spiritual world because one feels at one with it. As the soul experiences, it is driven to a facial expression, it becomes very active, very active, as it lives into the conditions. By experiencing the spiritual world, it undergoes something similar inwardly in a spiritual-soul way, as it is the facial expression of our face. A reliving is the perception of the spiritual world, an invisible, supersensible reliving. This reliving is attained, as it were, through this spiritual chemistry, through this detachment of the life of ideas from the instrument of the brain.

Likewise, one can detach the faculty of speech from the tool that otherwise serves language. When we speak, a certain part of the brain is externally active, which we have to use as a tool of our body, the one that specifically leads to the larynx. The one who studies the secrets of human speech knows that, even when one is thinking, finer movements take place internally than the coarser external speech movements. Now, as a spiritual researcher, one must be able to grasp the inner activity of the soul, which one otherwise expresses in speech. The mental researcher must detach it from the sound and the word; he must keep it as an inner activity, not allowing it to become a word, not shaping it into words, and he must keep it so inwardly that not even the parts of the brain that are otherwise active when speaking are used. He detaches the power of speech from speaking. He learns to keep something inwardly in his soul that otherwise vibrates inwardly when speaking. Then he does not speak, but what otherwise floods and pulses through the soul in the word is a strong power, a power through which he not only performs inner facial expressions, but also what can be called inner gestures, inner gesticulation, signs. Then not only intermediate states of the spiritual world, intermediate processes of perception, come to light, but the spiritual world itself is revealed, revealed in us, when we can imitate it in inner gestures. And only through the power of language will it be possible to imitate the processes of the spiritual world.

You can put yourself in the shoes of the beings and actions of real spirits around us. Only by living in their gestures and becoming one with them can you perceive the spiritual beings; this is how you gain knowledge of the spiritual world, but you also gain knowledge of your own sojourn in the spiritual world. When the ability to speak has been chemically detached from speaking, so to speak, the moment has arrived when memory can be extended beyond the previous life on earth, when it is realized that these are not theories; when it is known that our life did not begin yesterday, but that it is the continuation of many previous lives. From the moment we can imitate the spiritual world through the power of speech in an inner gesture, we know that our present life on earth is part of a whole chain of lives. In an inner gesture, we come to the spiritual essence that represents the eternal.

Something else has to be separated from our activity. But this is more difficult to understand. I would like to express what I mean in the simplest way. When we remember our childhood, we have to say: In our childhood we were all four-footed creatures. We walked on all fours. We straightened up through our own inner activity, which was certainly practiced, but which left no memory of its inwardness to the human being. And just imagine what the human being, as a cultural being on earth, is because he looks up into the heavenly sphere with his face! That has changed his entire direction in space. The human being has only made himself into the being that he is. To experience again in later life that inner urge that inspired us when we made ourselves into an upright being and thereby formed ourselves into a human being, that is what we should activate in our soul.

This leads us to a third power of the soul, which we separate from our bodily life. We have already used this power in the past of our present life. We no longer need it in later life, because then we can straighten ourselves up. But now we bring out the strength with which we straightened ourselves up; we apply it, we become aware of it. At that time it worked without us having caught up with it in our soul; we were content with becoming upright beings from crawling beings through the inner application of this strength. The spiritual researcher learns to recognize a wonderful soul power in this power. Through this power he is able not only to experience the spiritual through the state of thought and the gestures of spiritual beings through the detached power of speech, as in the state of thinking, but he is able to experience the spiritual beings themselves, to become one with them, as it were, to become one with the spiritual worlds, to work and weave in them. With them one learns to recognize that the human being has come to earth as a spiritual being, and by bringing these forces with him, he has become what he is as an earthly being. He has become a human being by bringing the body from a horizontal to a vertical position. Only man uses this power in the universe to change from a quadruped to a biped. If you discover this power inwardly in the soul, then you enter into the inner being of other spiritual beings that permeate and live through the world. These are beings that have different tasks to perform because they have a different purpose in the world than humans do. One gains insight into earthly conditions by concentrating one's attention, recognizing spiritual beings with their co-experiences, by unfolding in the spiritual world precisely that which gives the human being his spiritual physiognomy as a human being. Through inner physiognomy, one becomes one with the spiritual beings. Inner gestures and movements lead to the perception of processes in the spiritual world; but spiritually motivated physiognomy, as it gives the upright physiognomy to a person, leads to the knowledge of that which people can only experience and experience in the spiritual world, in association with other spiritual beings.

The paths that lead the spiritual researcher into the spiritual worlds are briefly indicated. These ways cannot be particularly popular. Today they are such that one must say that they go against one of the characteristics of the human soul: its love of comfort. This love of comfort goes so far today that the human soul only acknowledges the existence of something when it can simply passively devote itself to it. If one demands of this soul that it should first be active itself, that it should itself experience that which previously meant nothing to it, and through which it should then recognize the object in its own experience, then this goes against the complacency of today's soul, which wants to be passive, which does not want to conquer truths for itself, but wants to be given them.

Therefore, spiritual research is so aligned with the goals of the present that these goals of the present do not want to know about spiritual science, because, especially in the most spiritual sense, these goals are directed towards passivity. Spiritual science demands the development of soul powers that are based on activity and that, in their further pursuit, lead into the higher, supersensible worlds; because the spiritual can only be experienced through inner activity.

But today's man often imagines the spiritual to be mere fantasy. He imagines it to be like an external object that commands him: “I am here, you have to recognize me.” In this way, he is very far from the right understanding. The following was explained quite philosophically in a newspaper: When you immerse yourself in Kant or any other philosopher, all the concepts are so intangible that you have to think about them for a long time before you can understand them. Can our time provide a remedy for this? And precisely because of the spirit of our time, he [the author] finds that they can be made tangible. Everything should be made tangible, including the spirit. Yes, even that which every human being can know is not visible, human thinking, the thought should become visible. And how should that happen? Well, Spinoza, for example, who is said to be difficult for people to understand, who want to make everything vivid, should be approached in such a way that the cinematograph is used. Why not? You could do the following, says the person concerned. This has not been suggested as a fairy tale, but as a serious proposition based on the aims of our time. It shows how Spinoza arrives at seemingly difficult thoughts. Through the idea of the expansion of thought, it shows how the whole of ethics, up to God, are juxtaposed, culminating in the higher ideas. Cinematography could be used to illustrate Spinoza's entire ethics from individual forces. That is one of the aims of our time. And the editor of this journal, who is taking up the treatise, makes the following comment: “So we could finally hope that the ancient masters of humanity can be brought closer to people in a way that corresponds to the present day through what most people today obviously see only as a game, namely the art of film.

In this way, however, spiritual science cannot keep pace with the goals of our time. These goals of our time are geared towards passivity, and even if we were to talk for hours about the goals of our time, this passivity of the spirit is the necessary correlate in relation to what could be said about these goals in intimate terms. This much can be said.

If you look closely, you will see that the spiritual life of humanity is no different from the rest of nature. What is gained on the one hand must be taken away on the other. One has to admire the boldness of the inventions of the mind that are used in technology. Man will even conquer the unruly air; but all this is achieved with the most profound spiritual passivity.

But precisely for this reason our time is also so ripe for developing the spirit itself in its activity. Indeed, more than that, our time has the necessity of making the spirit inwardly active. The innermost moral, intellectual and emotional powers are brought forth through the habits of thinking and feeling that are gained through spiritual science. On the one hand, as a result of the education that humanity has already acquired under the influence of what is truly admirable in itself, spiritual science is seen as something paradoxical, something fantastic, perhaps even something quite different; but as a result, this opposition locks itself onto the other side. Opposition is necessary. Just as when you press an elastic ball for a long time, it finally develops that strength, which is perceived as an elastic counterforce against the pressure, so the soul must come to strong and ever stronger passivity precisely through the admirable achievements of thought, so that it longs for inner activity. Unconsciously, it already longs for this activity today. And all activity can become a power through which the soul is liberated and redeemed when spiritual research is allowed to work in the fabric of contemporary spiritual culture.

With just these few remarks, I wanted to show today how spiritual science wants to engage with the whole spiritual fabric of the present.

Looking back at what has just been discussed, it will be fully understood that spiritual science faces opposition from all sides. One of these oppositions comes from those who believe that religions or something else is endangered by spiritual science. They will not appear incomprehensible to the observer of history. For the time of Copernicus, the fact that the earth orbits the sun was just as fantastic as the fact of repeated earth lives is for our contemporaries. At that time, people believed that religion was endangered by Copernican astronomy; just as people today believe that religion is endangered again by the teaching of spiritual science about repeated earth lives.

We can be more reassured about such beliefs if we consider that when an outstanding scholar-philosopher, who was also, admittedly, active in the [cosmological] field, came to the realization that truth is invincible, he was talking about Galileo. He said that today the Church has learned to see in Galileo, in Copernicus, no longer those whom she once saw in them; but today she has learned to point out that through discoveries in the field of science, the glory of divine revelations is revealed to mankind all the more brightly. Science in the true sense of the word is to the praise of religious life, not to critically do something detrimental to true, religiously understood life.

That it is not so widely understood, that was made clear to a large number of our friends who want to start building a relatively small structure in the near future that will provide a home for spiritual science and a variety of studies. Many of these voices were instructive, which certainly sometimes spoke from a point of view that is so thoroughly imbued with what fantastic stuff, what a reverie this spiritual science actually is. Yes, it was interesting from a cultural-historical point of view when the remarks that had been made about the building in the most diverse places were also presented to me. It was interesting to look at things from this point of view as well. Indeed, one could admit that the humanities or their adherents have a little imagination, but they don't have as much as those who have occasionally written these articles.

At most, they can measure up to the article that I also received, about a spiritual researcher who is quite close to me and which states what he expresses in terms of fantasies. You can't get enough of his fantasies, and then you move on to the second section, where you are then really told, probably from the elbow, the very worst fantasies about birth, kinship, descent. Truly, even if he had some imagination, if he were inclined to fantasize par excellence [...], he would never dream up so much fantasy, especially not a fantasy about external descent, about kinship and so on.

The strangest things can be read. For example, it is said that a Buddhist temple is to be built on the site. Just as modern chemistry is far removed from what was once practiced as chemistry in distant Asia centuries or millennia ago, so too is modern spiritual science far removed from what Buddhism is. It takes more than a little imagination to talk about Buddhism. Today I have tried to explain, albeit insufficiently, what the adherents of spiritual science actually want. Perhaps some of the ideas will be able to be gained from it after all. But that will have little to do with what these spiritual researchers are supposed to be, according to the newspaper reports. One remark, which has appeared in at least thirty newspapers, has particularly caught my attention. We learn of a remarkable ability of the spiritual researchers: they can make it rain. It was emphasized everywhere that the foundation stone was laid in the pouring rain. What kind of people must the spiritual researchers be that they can order rain so that they can lay the foundation stone protected by the rain? If that were the case, they would certainly be very dangerous. But if you get to know those who make the Dornach building their own, you will recognize that they like sunshine just as much as you do; that they did not order the rain at all and did not shy away from the day. It would even have been daytime when the foundation stone was laid if some of the members who would have liked to have been there had not come on a later train. That is a more trivial explanation, which cannot be made much of, but it looks a little better if one says: These people must have certain reasons for working at night and in the rain. That was not said, but it was still in the subconscious and can be interpreted from the words. But reality is not that interesting. As for the rest, the future will show how little foundation there is for the fantastic ideas that have been spread in the outside world about this place, which is said to be a place of activity in the sense indicated in this lecture. This lecture was not given to talk about this place, but because it is being given, I may refer to it with these few words, because, so to speak, spiritual science has made an unwanted sensation in this area.

If you want to say what this building is for, yes, isn't it true that stations are built so that people can travel by train? They are built so that the machines, the trains, can drive in and out. For this, the stations must be usable. We must see as the characteristic quality of this building nothing other than that which is useful for the purposes of spiritual science, which is capable of stirring the soul when the word of spiritual science is spoken, as is necessary to bring the soul into contact with the spiritual world. To evoke the mood of the soul that is necessary in our time, to prepare the soul to receive the spiritual world, it is necessary to speak not only through the word, but also through that which is around us. What otherwise can only be expressed in words should be poured into the architecture. In the form of symbols that are truly artistic, a building should be created in the interior design that can serve the cultivation of spiritual culture in a spiritual way, just as a train station serves its material purposes in the right way. Even if the comparison is a trivial one, it is still apt.

It will be more and more recognized that what spiritual science can achieve from the human soul is connected with all the goals of the present. By appealing to the active element in the soul, to that which can only be awakened through activity in the soul, spiritual science speaks at the same time to the most important activities of the soul through the results of its research. More and more, those souls who can be active in the truest sense will desire spiritual science in the spirit. Spiritual science will appeal to soul powers that can only be taken into account from the present time onwards, but which also have to intervene in all the aims of human culture; above all in artistic life, so that just as in ancient times spiritual science developed on the one hand and art on the other from the common source of spiritual life, so here too artistic activity will go hand in hand with the current of spiritual science. And a weak beginning for this is to be given in the architecture of the site that will be built in Dornach. The architecture should speak to those who, in the longings of the soul, feel drawn to it, through the form of the same spiritual secrets, of which otherwise only in words can be actually stammered. Spiritual science has a hope. How many opponents it can grow up with in the present, that it corresponds to a necessity of the heart and the human soul, that will be seen from what it has inserted into culture. Just as scientific and religious prejudices were unable to stop Copernicanism, so the truths of spiritual science will not be hindered by the prejudices of these opposing sides. That which lies in the organism of human becoming and happening will happen with the same inevitability with which a young person matures and ripens according to an inner law. Just as this natural property is inherent in humanity, so too will this spiritual science mature. And just as natural science intervenes in and transforms the outer material life, so too will spiritual science intervene in the social, moral and spiritual conditions of the soul life. Just as we travel differently today – by rail – than we did two centuries ago, so too do longings live differently in the soul today than they did two centuries ago.

These longings must be satisfied; we can also see this from the following remarkable matter, which may be recalled again, even if something external is compared with something internal: When the first railways were to be built in Germany, the Medical College was consulted. The college replied that no railways should be built, otherwise people would suffer severely from nervous disorders when traveling on them. And if some people still want to travel, then the railways should at least be fenced in with boards so that the other people do not become dizzy. That was the judgment in 1837. The railways run all the same. That is how it is in life. And spiritual science will run through spiritual life, just as the obstacles of antagonism will want to assert themselves. Spiritual science will show precisely in those in whose hearts it is to take root how unfounded all the prejudices against it are. Science will see how in spiritual science it finds its best ally, how science, limiting itself to external matters, cannot achieve what spiritual science must give it. It will recognize that spiritual science contradicts natural science just as little as there is a contradiction for healthy thinking in the following. We can have three people standing in front of us, one and two others in front of him. The question arises: Why does the one live? Well, because he has a lung inside and breathes air in and out. Nothing to be said against that. But the other says: I know he also lives for another reason. I found him hanged eight days ago; because I cut him down, he is alive today. Everyone is right. The natural scientist is fully justified in saying that when certain qualities appear in life, we have inherited them from our parents, our ancestors and so on. He has the merit of pointing to what is given in the line of inheritance. The spiritual scientist says: what develops in the wonderful mystery of growth, that is brought by the person from previous earthly lives. There is no contradiction in this; both are true.

And with the religious concerns it will be as with the concerns about Copernicanism. The one who stands on the ground of revelation nevertheless feels united with all those minds that have grasped the truth from their point of view; what spiritual research is supposed to be, that it will become, and when spiritual research is an achievement of our time, then the people blessed by this cultural progress will have counted these spiritual goals of spiritual research as their own; as spiritual beings, they will have felt united with spiritual research, they will have grasped its point of view in relation to the spiritual world.

As with all other honest minds connected with human progress, spiritual research also feels at one with Goethe, and with his words I would like to summarize today's reflection from this point of view. To all those who are prejudiced against spiritual research, I would say this: if people believe that religion or something else is endangered by spiritual science, then the spiritual researcher, whose soul has been touched by spiritual science, knows that he is walking through the world and knows that Goethe's words are true, and that they that the one who truly allows himself to be penetrated by science and art, enters in such a way that his soul is truly religiously moved; and that only the one who lacks the gift for science and artistry in the right sense will not be religiously moved in the true sense of the word. Therefore, allow me to characterize the position of spiritual science in relation to the goals of all times and also of our time with Goethe's words, by saying with Goethe:

He who possesses science and art
also has religion;
he who does not possess those two
shall have religion.

Today we will discuss some topics that have played a certain role in our current development of the spiritual movement within Germany. As you know, and as some of you have already experienced, we have discussed the various spiritual truths and insights based on the Gospels. We have talked about what can be said in connection with the Gospel of John in a wide variety of places, and we have also discussed what can be said in connection with the Gospel of Luke. Now, admittedly, not all of you have heard these things. Nor is it intended to speak today in the sense of presupposing something of what has been said there. Rather, it is intended only to mention to you some of the overall field of this spiritual-scientific field, which must be important for everyone.

It has often been mentioned here in Stuttgart that Christianity, and everything connected with it, has made a deep incision in the overall development of humanity and that what is happening around us today, what the human soul can experience today, cannot be properly understood without considering the full significance of the Christ event within our Earth's history. For every single human soul, it is of infinite importance to become acquainted with the significance of this event.

Now you know that this Christ event for humanity is described in four documents, in the so-called four Gospels. You are all familiar with these four documents and have certainly followed them in a variety of ways. These four documents, the Gospel according to Matthew, the Gospel according to Mark, the Gospel according to Luke and the Gospel according to John, have met with the most diverse fates in the course of human development since the founding of Christianity. Great transformations have taken place in the judgment and position of man regarding these four documents. If we ask ourselves first how these four documents appear to today's man, even to today's theologian, the answer is quite obvious. One says to oneself: First of all, we have the three documents of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. They at least agree – so the general opinion today – on some points. But the fourth, the Gospel of John, is quite different from these three documents. At first, this Gospel of John makes such an impression on people that they say to themselves: If we take the first three Gospels as historical documents, as descriptions of the life of Christ Jesus, then the fourth document contradicts the first three so fundamentally that we cannot take this fourth as a description that corresponds to the historical facts. Thus, the opinion exists that this fourth document is merely a writing that arose from the confession of a man who was faithfully devoted to the mission of Christ Jesus, a kind of hymn that arose from the heart to express in an enthusiastic way what the narrator had to say. The other three gospels are also called the canonical gospels because they attempt to provide a kind of historical picture and because it is believed that they reflect the historical facts to a certain extent. However, if one wants to look for contradictions that the external mind, bound to physical conditions, seeks, then the first three gospels truly present such contradictions. For should there be no contradictions in the fact that the Gospel of Matthew tells of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, tells of the flight to Egypt, of the appearance of the Magi from the Orient, whereas the Gospel of Luke tells of a journey to Bethlehem, but completely omits what is told in the Gospel of Matthew about the Magi, that the flight to Egypt is kept secret and so on? We do not want to go into the details of the three years of Christ Jesus' ministry. We could find contradiction upon contradiction.

Now one could raise the question: How has the development of the judgment about the Gospels actually progressed over the course of Christian times? Was it always the case that people looked at the Gospels and saw contradictions in them above all else? We must be clear about how this development of judgment about the Gospels has taken place. It is not so very long ago that people have had access to the Gospels as they do today. They have only been available to the general public for a short time. Before the invention of the printing press, the Gospels were basically only in the hands of a few people, and truly not of the most ignorant, but of those people who had studied them in the most erudite way, who had made them the subject of their lives. And it is not the case that the further back in time we go, the more and more people said: There are contradictions – but the opposite is true. The further back we go, the more it appears that these contradictions were not perceived, that people had the four gospels next to each other and did not see the contradictions. The whole mood that people had towards the Gospels was quite different in the first Christian centuries. If we wanted to characterize this mood, we would have to say that the people of the first Christian centuries were filled with tremendous reverence for what is described in the Gospels. This whole mood was permeated by looking up to the great figure of Christ Jesus.

So how were the Gospels perceived? How did people perceive the fact that the Gospel of Matthew tells a different story than the Gospel of Luke? They perceived it similarly to how someone today - I have already used the comparison in the various lectures that have been given here and there - photographs a tree from one side. A photograph like this gives a view of the tree. If you went among people with it and wanted to create an impression of the tree based on it, this impression would be highly one-sided. And you could hope to create a more accurate impression of the tree if you photographed it from four sides. Then you would show four pictures of the one tree. These would agree with each other very little, they would be very different. Nevertheless, no one would have the feeling that it could not be that these four photographs were the pictures of a single tree. Everyone would say: I can only get a somewhat complete picture of the tree by having seen it from four sides. That is more or less how people in the early centuries of Christianity felt about the Gospels. They said: the whole great event is described from four sides, and we get a complete picture of it when we really take these four descriptions together and thus, so to speak, get an overall view. But then we must be clear about how these four descriptions from the sides actually relate to each other. The great event is indeed described from four different points of view. If we want to understand what each individual point of view describes, we must first realize the following.

We have before us an enormous individuality, Christ Jesus, an individuality of whom we know from descriptions already given here that he descended from the spiritual world and appeared in Palestine at the beginning of our era. What came to earth as an individuality now appears as a great, all-embracing ideal for every single human being. The individual human being strives upwards, as it were, intuiting that perfection in an individuality that is expressed in the Christ Jesus, and strives towards this ideal. Now, in the beginning, man sees what he can regard as his striving in intellectual, moral and so on. But he sees even more when he enters into what we call the spiritual-scientific movement. There he sees the development into the spiritual world. He knows that man can grow beyond his ordinary self, that he can grow to see into the spiritual world, that he can develop his spiritual senses in order to live up into the spiritual world. That is what man recognizes. In the essay “How to Know Higher Worlds” you have described one side of this upward life, of entering into the spiritual worlds, in which you have described what is called “splitting of the personality”. When a person develops spiritually so that he gradually grows into the spiritual worlds and becomes a seer himself, something similar to a kind of splitting of the personality does indeed occur. Three forces are initially expressed in the personality: thinking, feeling and willing. These three forces are, so to speak, united in the ordinary person; they work together, thinking, feeling and willing. You go out into the meadow, see a flower, that is, you have an idea of the flower; you have thought. You like the flower; you call it beautiful, that is, you have felt. A feeling has connected with thinking. You pluck the flower and take it home, that is, you have desired it. And so the entire outer life of man actually flows. He perceives, thinks, feels and wills, and the three go into each other. Perception gives rise to feeling, feeling to will or abhorrence and the like. When man now develops upward into the higher worlds, develops himself to clairvoyance, to participation in the spiritual worlds, then a splitting of these three forces takes place. In him who has reached a certain level of clairvoyant consciousness, not every thought evokes a feeling, but the thought occurs in isolation, and the feeling can occur in isolation and the will can occur in isolation. And precisely because he is divided into three beings, so to speak, whereas otherwise thinking, feeling and willing are only powers in his soul, man must become all the stronger in his individuality. He must not only then balance three powers, but become master of three beings, of a willing being, of a feeling being, of a thinking being. He must be the leader of a band of these three entities. He must create order; he must rule them, otherwise something evil will happen: the will will pull him in one direction and the intellect in the other, and he will then really be split and no longer find his way. Therefore, man must grow strong within himself, become powerful, so that he can be master in the entities that have become his soul forces. When man therefore develops upwards into the higher worlds, he splits himself, so to speak, into three different entities. When the entities come to meet us from above out of the spiritual worlds and one sees them in their actual entity, which one can only recognize through spiritual vision, then they appear from the outset sharply separated as thinking beings, volitional beings and feeling beings. That is what man develops them into.

This was particularly the case with the great individuality who came to us as the Christ. Therefore, those who first described the Christ said: You cannot describe the Christ by choosing only one point of view; you have to describe him as you first see a thinking, wisdom-filled being, then as you see a willing being, and then as you see a feeling being. He must be described from the point of view of wisdom, from the point of view of will, from the point of view of feeling. That is how one must describe him, people said. And they were especially prepared for this by the whole education that was customary in ancient times. If a person was to be developed at all into the higher worlds - today something different is needed for the first steps of attaining higher knowledge; in ancient times a different approach was taken - when someone was ripe to be led up, so to speak, to be made a citizen of the spiritual worlds, it was said: Well, he is ripe to be led up into the higher worlds. But let us take a closer look at him! Should we particularly develop wisdom or thinking powers or will in him?

In the old secret schools, not all powers were developed equally. Depending on the karma of the person concerned, one person's thinking was developed to the point of clairvoyance, another's feeling to the point of clairaudience, and a third's will to the point of magical power. Therefore, in the old secret schools there were three classes of developed abilities, those pupils who had developed especially the ability to see through illumination, to see the spiritual world with wisdom - these were the people in the mysteries who were asked when one wanted to know how things are in the higher worlds and how they are connected according to law. If we want to use a trivial expression today, we can say that they were the experts of knowledge within the mysteries. Then there was another class of initiates. In these, feeling was particularly developed. In order for this feeling to be particularly developed, they refrained from training in knowledge and will, and developed feeling in itself. When feeling is particularly developed in a person, then, as a result, he becomes a healer, a physician, something that is almost no longer known today. For in ancient times the physician had exerted a spiritual influence proceeding from the spheres of feeling, and had healed the receptive soul by means of a more highly developed feeling than exists today. This was the second class of initiates. They had trained their feeling to the highest willingness to sacrifice, to the surrender of all the powers they had within them. They divided the work among themselves. If someone wanted to know what was wrong with someone, they went to those who had developed the wisdom. They determined what was wrong and what needed to be done. Then came those who could not say what was wrong with the sick person because they had not developed the ability to think; but they came and sacrificed their strength because they had developed the powers of feeling. At the same time, these were the people who also had other functions, who showed their willingness to make sacrifices in the event of accidents or similar occurrences. The third category of initiates were the magicians. These were the ones who had developed the sphere of will. They had to take the external measures. The magicians had developed the powers of will and were able to carry out the task at hand. So there were three types of initiate: initiates of thinking, initiates of feeling, and initiates of willing. And a fourth class or category consisted of those in whom an attempt had been made to develop something of each of the three remaining faculties: something of thinking, something of feeling, and something of willing. Therefore, they did not advance as far as the others in any one sphere, but they showed how, with a certain initiation into the three spheres, things are connected. Thus there were powerful initiates of wisdom, powerful initiates of sacrifice, powerful initiates of magistery, and a fourth category, which had something of each of the first three.

When now the Christ Jesus was to be described, so to speak, from all sides, there were found - this can be explained in more detail another time, today it can only be done in broad strokes - four people who now described the abilities that were naturally united in him from their four points of view. One of them, for example, was particularly initiated into the secrets of thinking. He described the Christ Jesus from the standpoint of the one who could understand him particularly well, an initiate of wisdom. He left out the other sides. Another was an initiate of feeling. He described the Christ Jesus from the standpoint of feeling, as a physician, so to speak, as a healer. A third was an initiate of magisterial power. He described the powers that the Christ could unfold to organize all of humanity. And a fourth was an initiate of the fourth class, in which the powers worked together, working in harmony. He described primarily the human work of Christ Jesus. He did not see the full power of wisdom, of sacrificial service, nor the mighty magic strength of the willpower of Christ Jesus; but he saw how the three powers of thought, feeling and will were harmoniously combined in Christ Jesus. He described the human Christ Jesus.

Thus we have described the Christ Jesus to four initiates. The one who described the Christ Jesus as an initiate of wisdom was the writer of the Gospel of John; the one who described him as an initiate of feeling was the writer of the Gospel of Luke ; the one who described him in terms of magical power, that was the writer of the Gospel of Mark; and the one who described the harmonious synthesis of the lower three human members, that was the writer of the Gospel of Matthew. Thus each described that in Christ Jesus in which he was initiated.

Thus we shall understand that we can gain a complete picture of Christ Jesus through the four Gospels, in that they describe what was particularly close to the four personalities on which they are based. Anyone who has the necessary reverence for such a great individuality as the Christ will say: Precisely because of this I can gain a comprehensive picture, that the writers of the Gospels, each one, gave the best they could give. But that is why it is also necessary that you do not always take what is said in spiritual science in reference to the four Gospels, to the fourth for instance, or the third, or the second, or the first, as if you had the whole truth about Christ Jesus in each such chapter. It could easily have been thought from the various lectures that have been given here and there: Now the Christ Jesus has been described, and at most it would still be interesting to describe him with reference to another gospel. It is not so. One gets only the picture from one side, if one describes the Christ Jesus according to one gospel. We must wait until, in the course of our spiritual movement, the Christ Jesus has been described in connection with all four gospels. Only then will you have all the secrets that can be said about him.

Now we will have to start from a certain one-sided description in order to gather together, so to speak, a picture of Christ Jesus, but in such a way that you really have to keep to what has just been said. You must not go away today from the lecture and say: Well, now we have the truth in these matters - but you must say to yourself: It has now been described from one point of view and the other must be added and must be illuminated with what is said from other points of view.

In the Christ Jesus we actually have a confluence of all previous spiritual currents of humanity and at the same time a rebirth of the same. In the Christ Jesus, all spiritual currents flow together and are reborn, reborn to a higher degree. We could mention many such currents of pre-Christian times that arise from spiritual science in the context of those considerations that tie in with the four Gospels, currents that we see flowing together in the Christ event; but for now we will draw attention to only three currents.

First of all, there is a powerful spiritual current that has been active in Asia since ancient times. This is what we can call Zarathustrianism. A second spiritual current is that which flourished in India and reached a certain high point with the appearance of Gautama Buddha, six hundred years before our era. A third spiritual current is that which found expression in the ancient Hebrew people. So that we have the confluence in Christ Jesus of the ancient Hebrew spiritual current, then that which was realized in Gautama Buddha, and that which was associated with the name Zarathustra. We could mention many more such spiritual currents, but that would make the matter too confusing.

Now, in a certain way, everything that actually happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era comes to light in the four Gospels – if we really understand them correctly. It is not the task of spiritual science to draw from the Gospels what it has to say. Nothing at all of what is said about me is drawn from the Gospels. The only source for the spiritual researcher is what is called the Akasha Chronicle, that which can be observed clairvoyantly. If all the Gospels had been lost due to some catastrophe, everything that is said about the Christ in spiritual science could still be said. It is based on spiritual research. Only afterwards is the result of this spiritual research compared with what is in the Gospels. And that is precisely what gives the Gospels their objective reverence when one sees what is presented in the Gospels. You must never lose sight of this point of view. We are not drawing on the Gospels; therefore what I am going to tell you now is not drawn from the Gospels either. But we can compare it afterwards with what is in the Gospels, and we will find it to be in agreement.

One of the spiritual currents that then flowed into Christianity is the one that reached its peak in the personality that was incarnated in India as Gautama Buddha about six hundred years before our era. What kind of individuality is this? We understand this individuality when we consider the following: Everything that has gradually emerged in the development of humanity is precisely a product that develops and gradually settles in. You would be mistaken if you believed that the abilities of today's human beings have always been there. Today, for example, there is something called the voice of conscience. It has not always existed. We can almost grasp when conscience arose in the course of human development. If you go back to Aeschylus, you will find nothing of a description of conscience in his works. It is only in Euripides that we find a description of conscience. Thus, the Greek consciousness first developed the concept of conscience between these two. What man today calls an inner voice has only just developed. Before that, there was, within humanity, we can say, a kind of clairvoyant consciousness. If a person had done something he should not have done, a picture would appear to him like a vengeful spirit, and it would pursue him. This was what the Greeks called the Furies. He really saw the fruits and the avenging spirits of his evil deeds around him. This phenomenon, which was outside of man, has been drawn into the human soul as the voice of conscience. And so, too, did the other faculties of men come into being only gradually, and it is only short-sightedness on the part of men, who do not see farther than the end of their own noses, so to speak, which outer science amply does, to believe that men have always been as they are today.

Thus, people have not had what we might call the teaching of compassion and love. We have to imagine the teaching of compassion and love in ancient times as being very different from today. Today, people can, so to speak, go within themselves. When this or that happens outside, he can allow the feeling of compassion and love to arise within him, and he knows that this is good. He can find the principles of love and compassion within himself. This was not the case in the past; rather, in the past, it was instilled in people purely by suggestion from those charged with instilling it, and they were told how they should behave. People themselves had to be guided. There were individual leaders and guides for humanity who indicated how people should behave. The guides for humanity dictated what should be done in the way of acts of love and compassion. And those who were the guides in the field of love and compassion were in turn under higher guides and all together under a guide who is called the Bodhisattva of love and compassion. He had the mission to spread the teaching of compassion and love. But this Bodhisattva, who was the leader in terms of compassion and love, was not like an ordinary incarnated human being, in that not his entire being was absorbed in the physical human being. He had, so to speak, a connecting bridge up to the spiritual world.

The Bodhisattva of compassion and love lived only partly in the physical man; for the rest, his spiritual being reached up into the spiritual worlds. There he brought down the impulses he had to instill. If we wanted to describe this spiritually, we would have to say: the clairvoyant saw the image of the person in whom the bodhisattva was partially embodied, and behind him a mighty spiritual-astral figure that rose up into the spiritual worlds and was only partially in the physical body. That was what this bodhisattva was like. This Bodhisattva was the same one who was then reborn as the king's son Gautama Buddha in India, and for this Bodhisattva, so to speak, this was the ascent to a higher dignity. He had earlier, so to speak, allowed himself to be guided from above, had received impulses from the spiritual world and passed them on. But in this incarnation, six hundred years before our era, he was elevated to the dignity of Buddha in the twenty-ninth year of his life. That is to say, in this incarnation he experienced his entire individuality entering the physical body. While he had to remain outside as a bodhisattva with a part of himself in order to build the bridge, it was this progress to the dignity of Buddha that allowed him to be fully incarnated in the body. This enabled him not only to receive the teaching of compassion and love through inspiration, but also to look within himself and receive this teaching as the very voice of his heart. This was the enlightenment of the Buddha at the age of twenty-nine, under the bodhi tree. Then it dawned on him: the teaching of compassion and love, independent of the connections with the spiritual world, as a human soul property, that he could think the teaching of compassion and love, which he pronounced in the eightfold path. And the sermon that followed is the great teaching of compassion and love for the first time from a human breast.

This must happen with every human capacity. At some point in the development of humanity, an ability must first be expressed in an individuality; only then can it gradually develop as a separate ability in people in general. The teaching of compassion and love could only be felt as something that man brings out of himself after it has been brought by an individuality. In Oriental philosophy, this is called “turning the wheel” of dharma, compassion and love. This happened through the full individuality of the Bodhisattva sinking into the king's son Gautama Buddha. From that time on, there are people who can find the teaching of compassion and love within themselves. And it will develop in such a way that more and more people will find the teaching of compassion and love within themselves, and three thousand years after our era, a sufficient number of people will live on earth to develop in their own hearts what Buddha has found. Then the mission of the Buddha in this respect will be fulfilled on earth. For at the time when the Bodhisattva descended to become a Buddha, the dignity of the Bodhisattva was taken over by another. Until then, what we call the Buddha today was a Bodhisattva. The next rank after the Bodhisattva is that of the Buddha. From the Bodhisattva, the ascending being becomes a Buddha.

Oriental philosophy expressed it this way: When the Bodhisattva descended to earth, he handed over the crown of the Bodhisattva to his successor. This successor still lives today as a Bodhisattva. He will only ascend to the dignity of Buddha three thousand years after our present time. This is the one whom Oriental philosophy calls the Maitreya Buddha. This one is a Bodhisattva today and will be the Maitreya Buddha in three thousand years. He has a different mission from Gautama Buddha, which is connected with things that people today cannot yet find within themselves. That is a line of development. So that we can say: That Bodhisattva, who contains within himself the teaching of compassion and love, has indeed advanced to the dignity of a Buddha, and in so doing has given his mission a tremendous impetus. The fact that he was in a human body with his entire being six hundred years before our era earned him the right not to be incarnated in a physical body on earth again. In fact, the incarnation of that time was the last incarnation of this Bodhisattva. He no longer needed to incarnate in a physical body, but only needed to descend to the etheric body. All the following embodiments of the Buddha are therefore not such that he can be seen externally on the physical plane, but such that he can only be seen by those powers that enable people to see the etheric body. In the entire following period, the Buddha therefore only embodied himself in an etheric body. Six hundred years after his presence on earth, Buddha incorporated what he had to bring to humanity into what had been initiated by Christianity. He offered what he had to bring as a sacrifice to the founding of Christianity, so to speak, he let it flow in like a spiritual tributary into the great overall stream. This is the current that reaches its climax in the Buddha. That is the one current.

Another came about in the following way. We can form an idea of it by looking a little at the development of humanity itself. You all know that after the great Atlantic catastrophe, people did not have the same abilities as they do today, but that after the great Atlantic catastrophe they still had remnants of an old, dim clairvoyance. Logical thinking developed only gradually. The culture that we call ancient Indian culture was entirely a culture that emerged from ethereal clairvoyance. The Zarathustra culture was also still one in which people worked with ancient, dimmed clairvoyance, and the Chaldean-Egyptian cultures were not yet cultures in which people thought as they do today. Everything was still inspiration; it was not yet permeated with logic, but everything that came to light in Chaldean astrology and in Hermes wisdom was more or less inspired imagination. The human ability to think logically had not yet developed in these cultures. It was reserved for a completely different current to develop what could be called a logical culture, a culture of thinking. The first post-Atlantean culture was still entirely based on ethereal clairvoyance. The Zarathustra culture was still one of these as well, even if it was no longer as pronounced. Likewise, the Egyptian-Chaldean culture was still based on inspiration. Thought in those days was not yet permeated by logic; it was interwoven with imaginations that are expressed in the astrology of the Chaldeans and in the Hermes wisdom of Egypt in magnificent images.

The post-Atlantean cultures emerged from two streams. Apart from those who went west and populated present-day America, two streams of migrating people poured east under the leadership of their leaders, one in a northerly direction and the other in a southerly direction.

The northern stream, parts of which remained in Europe, penetrated further into Asia. While new cultures were developing and unfolding there, the population of Europe lived through the centuries as if biding its time. Its energies were, as it were, reserved for what was to come. In their essential cultural elements they were influenced by that great initiate who chose this field as his own as far as the Siberian regions and who is called the Scythian initiate. The leaders of the original European culture were inspired by him. This culture was not based on what came into humanity as thinking, but on an ability to absorb an element that was halfway between what could be called recitative-rhythmic language and a kind of singing accompanied by a peculiar music that no longer exists today but was based on an interplay of whistling instruments. It was a peculiar element, the last remnants of which lived in the bards and skalds. Everything that the Greek myths of Apollo and Orpheus tell us has developed from this. In addition, practical skills were developed in Europe through colonization, construction and so on.

The other masses of people migrated under the leadership of the great sun-initiates to Asia. The outpost formed the first post-Atlantean culture under the leadership of the Rishis. Further in Western Asia the most ancient Zarathustra culture developed; but we are not speaking here of the historical Zarathustra. What he brought forth is in some respects opposed to ancient India. The latter was entirely built upon ethereal clairvoyance; Zarathustra turned his gaze to the sun. He saw the spirit of the sun, the “great aura,” Ahura Mazda. Zarathustra was the first to express the peculiarities of northern culture here. All that followed is built upon this.

The other trend that came over, the southern one, formed the basis for the Chaldean-Egyptian culture, which arose from a merging of the one with the other. This can be schematically represented: Indian culture signifies the development of the human etheric body; in Persian culture, the sentient body developed; the Egyptian-Chaldean culture gave the sentient soul; it is essentially an inner culture, going through an inward path. And just as the sentient body and the sentient soul join together, so it is the case for all of humanity. This can be seen particularly in the Egyptian-Chaldean culture. The same will be the case with the consciousness soul and the spirit self. This can only happen through the transition of progressive culture into that region where spirituality has been held back: this can only happen in Europe. There the development towards the intellectual and consciousness soul had still been held back and only developed after the Christ event. It is there that the fusion with the spirit-self qualities will also be able to take place in the future. This can only happen through a spiritual current such as the spiritual-scientific one. This will be brought about by the sixth period of our culture.

While the two currents described were still under the influence of the old, dim clairvoyance, the third current, which merged with the others and prepared the Christ event, was followed by a fourth cultural current, which could be called a logical-intellectual one. To understand each other clearly, you have to realize that all clairvoyance comes about because the etheric body works independently in a certain way, namely the etheric body of the brain. Where the etheric body of the brain and the physical tool of logical thinking are strictly united, clairvoyance cannot come about. Only when the etheric body retains something in order to be independent can clairvoyance come about. When the etheric body of the brain is completely linked to the physical brain, it works out the brain in the finest way; but it also engages in the elaboration of the physical brain and nothing is left over to develop clairvoyance. But it was necessary that precisely this ability, which is connected with brain thinking, with the brain's synthesizing of the world phenomena, should make its appearance in humanity. For this to happen, something had to happen in humanity that can be characterized by saying that it had to be selected from humanity – well, let us take an individuality in whom, so to speak, what was called ancient clairvoyance was least present, whereas the physical tool of the brain was highly developed, chiseled, and carved out. This individuality was able to survey the phenomena of the external physical world in terms of measure, number, order and harmony, to seek unity in the externally manifested phenomena. While all the members of the earlier cultures knew something from the spiritual world through inspiration from within, so to speak, this individuality had to direct its gaze out into the surrounding world of phenomena, had to combine, logically weigh and say to itself: “Out there are the phenomena, everything falls into place in harmony when one sees everything in a large unified picture. That which appears as unity there appeared as unity in the external world, as God behind the phenomena of the physical plane. That was one difference compared to the other views of God. The other views of God said: The idea of God arises from within. But this individuality directed his gaze everywhere, organized the phenomena, looked at the different kingdoms of nature, brought them under one unity, in short, he was the great organizer of the world phenomena according to measure and number, who was chosen from the whole of humanity. This individuality, who was chosen from the whole of humanity, to first survey the external physical world and find the unity in it, was Abraham. Abraham or Abram was the one who was chosen, so to speak, by the spiritual-divine powers to receive this special mission, to convey to humanity the powers bound to the measure and number of external appearances. He emerged from Chaldean culture. Chaldean culture itself had recognized its astrology out of clairvoyance. Abraham, the forefather of arithmetic, emerged to find all this through combination, through the physical brain having undergone a very special process here. Thus a very special mission was entrusted to him.

Now we must bear in mind that the way the mission was to proceed was not to remain with him alone, but was to become the common property of mankind. But since the thinking was bound to the physical brain, how could it become common property? It could only become common property by being transmitted through physical inheritance. That is to say, a people had to come forth from this individuality, in whom this special quality was inherited as long as it was to enter humanity as a mission. A nation had to come forth from it. A nation had to be founded, not just a culture, where something had been taught: what one has received clairvoyantly can be taught. What was now to be received by humanity had to be transmitted to the descendants through physical inheritance, so that it could be realized in all its details. What was to be realized? It should be found through human combination, that order which was first brought into humanity through Abraham. If one looks up at the order of the stars, one can find the order through combination. The wise men of Chaldean astrology have reflected on the thoughts of the gods. Now it was a matter of finding this particular transition to combining, to logically grasping the phenomena, in the external world. Therefore, there had to be an inherited property in the physical human body that resulted from the work of thinking itself, which is spread out in space as order. This is expressed very beautifully when the one who assigns this mission to Abraham says: Your descendants shall be arranged according to the order, according to the number of stars - which the Bible nonsensically translates as: “Your descendants shall be like the sand of the sea.” It means that there should be an order in Abraham's descendants, the descendants should be structured in such a way that there is an image of the stars in the sky. This is also expressed in the twelve sons of Jacob. They are an image of the twelve constellations. This is where the dimensions come in, which are modeled in the sky. In the line of generations there should be an image of the number in the sky. Just as the number is written in the sky, so the order of the number is to be written in the line of generations. This is the profound wisdom contained in these words, which are foolishly translated: “Your descendants shall be as the sand of the sea.”

Thus we see the meaning of Abraham's entire mission. But the symbolism of this mission, which is meant to reflect the secrets of the world, is also expressed in other ways. First of all, we ask ourselves the following: what is meant to be sacrificed, so to speak, is ancient, dimmed clairvoyance. Everything that has been rooted in humanity since the earliest times is to be sacrificed. The innermost conviction in this whole mission is that everything is received as a gift from outside. What is to come into being should come into being through physical descendants. Through them, this mission should enter the world. Abraham must receive this himself as a gift from God. This happens when he is first called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac and then prevented from doing so. What does he actually receive from the hand of God? He receives his whole mission. For if he had really sacrificed Isaac, he would have sacrificed his whole mission. He gets his people back by getting Isaac back. He receives as a gift from the divine order of the world in Isaac what he is actually meant to give to the world. Thus everything that followed Abraham was a gift from God Himself. The last gift of clairvoyance that still existed – you will understand later how the individual gifts of clairvoyance express themselves; each one can be related to one of the constellations – the last gift of clairvoyance to be voluntarily sacrificed is linked to the constellation of Aries. That is why we see the ram in the sacrifice of Isaac. This is a symbolic expression of the sacrifice of the last gift of clairvoyance in exchange for the gift of being able to judge the outer phenomena of the world in terms of number and measure. That is this mission of Abraham.

And how does this mission continue? The last gift of clairvoyance is sacrificed, it must be expelled from this mission, and if it still shows itself as an inheritance, it is, so to speak, not tolerated within the straight line of succession. Joseph shows a relapse. He has his dreams, he has the old gift of clairvoyance. The brothers cast him out. This shows how tightly this entire mission was drawn: Joseph is cast out. He migrates to Egypt to establish the connection that was now necessary, the connection with the other wing of our entire cultural development, with Egyptian culture. Joseph had united within himself that which was general in character within this mission and at the same time remnants of ancient clairvoyance. He brought about a complete revolution in Egypt by correcting the declining Egyptian culture in accordance with his clairvoyant gift. He placed his gift at the service of external institutions. This is the basis of Joseph's cultural mission in Egypt.

And now we see a peculiar spectacle. Now we see that those who were the missionaries for outer thinking in terms of measure and number are no longer on the earlier path, but are seeking the outer connection through Joseph by seeking in return what they could not bring forth from themselves in Egypt. There they go, there they take in — the descendants of Abraham take in what they need in Egypt. That is where they go. What is necessary for the further organization of this mission is given from the outside through the Egyptian initiation, because it cannot be brought forth from within. Moses brings this from the outside and connects Egyptian culture with this special mission of Abraham. And now we see how it is passed on from generation to generation, what is the human comprehension of the outer world, what is the recognition of the outer world in terms of measure, weight and number. A new element has entered. This is transmitted through blood relationship and can only be transmitted in this way, because it is bound to that which must be inherited. This is the second of the currents.

The third stream is the one that connects with Zarathustra, which is what was expressed in ancient Persia and spread to the Near East, as we have already learned in the various lectures. These three streams are what flow together in the Christ Jesus. The individuality that is the Christ Jesus must have had to do with all three currents. They must unite in him. How does that happen? This happens in the following complicated way. First of all, we have to realize that one of the things that was to flow into the general world current took place in India six hundred years before our era. At about the same time, something also happened within the Babylonian-Chaldean culture in that Zarathustra reappeared in ancient Chaldea under the name Zarathos or Nazarathos. There he lived and worked as a great teacher at the same time as some of the chosen teachers and leaders of the ancient Hebrew people were led into Babylonian captivity, because that is also the time when the Jews were led into captivity. There you see how the first contact of the Hebrew people with Zarathos took place at that time and how the Hebrew people, through their members, were under the personal influence of the reborn Zarathustra or Zoroaster. The events took place as described in the Bible. The following happened. At the beginning of our era, there were two sets of parents, both named Joseph and Mary. One of them lived in Nazareth and the other in Bethlehem. The husband of the couple in Bethlehem was descended from the Solomonic line of the House of David. The other couple in Nazareth was descended from the Nathanic line of the House of David. Solomon and Nathan are both sons of David. Both sets of parents have a son. To the Nazareth parents, the Nazareth Jesus child is born, as described in the Gospel of Luke, and to the Bethlehem parents, the Bethlehem Jesus child is born, as described in the Gospel of Matthew. So we have two Jesus children at the beginning of our era.

Let us follow the story of the Bethlehem Jesus Child! How did he actually come into being as a physical child, so to speak? As a physical child, we see in the physical line of descent, which the writer of the Gospel of Matthew traces very beautifully back to Abraham, descended from this line. We have to follow the line from Ur of the Chaldees to the land of Canaan, then to Egypt and back to Canaan again. That would approximately give the line of the Israelite people from Chaldea to Palestine, to Egypt and back again. These were the ancestors of the Bet-lehemitic Jesus-child. And because he carried the blood of these ancestors within him, he went through this journey, so to speak. That individuality, which now wanted to embody itself in this Jesus boy of Bethlehem, quickly passed through the same path, albeit in a shortened form. That individuality had been active as Zarathustra in ancient Chaldea. Thus, at the moment when the Bethlehem Jesus child was born, a spiritual individuality, which exactly imitated the traits of Abraham, came spiritually from Chaldea to Canaan. There it was born into the Bethlehem Jesus child. Then it had to briefly imitate the move to Egypt and later back again, until it settled in Nazareth. There you have the individuality that, so to speak, spiritually went through the whole journey of the people of Israel. You can go through this journey that you have described in the Bible and you will find that it is true. The Bible describes better than any external records. What can be found in the Akasha Chronicle for the clairvoyant eye is confirmed by the Bible: the journey that the Israelite people went through from Chaldea to Canaan, to Egypt and back. And the parallels are wonderful everywhere. Who leads the Jews to Egypt? Joseph's dreams lead them there. Who leads the Bethelehemitic Jesus child to Egypt? Also the dreams of Joseph, his father. These parallels go as far as these details. It is again a special gift of clairvoyance that has remained, that establishes the connection.

So the Jesus child is born in Bethlehem, having received the element that came into humanity through Abraham by inheritance, the individuality of Zarathustra. And those who were connected with Zarathustra in the Chaldean secret schools are now pursuing the path. In the spiritual world, their star leads the way: Zoroaster himself, who is going to be born in Bethlehem. They can follow them, the three magi, they appear in the Bible. They know him, who lives in the Bethelehemitic Jesus child.

This is the one Jesus child, the Bethelehemitic. In the other Jesus child, who was also born in Bethlehem only through a journey, something completely different lives, something that is already announced by the fact that this Jesus child was different in all his qualities from the Bethelehemitic Jesus child. From the very beginning, the Bethlehem Jesus Child showed himself to be an extraordinarily gifted human being beyond all human measure, for he had a powerful individuality within him. He was gifted for everything that humanity had so far conquered in terms of cultural means. He showed himself to be extraordinarily gifted for everything that could be learned from the environment. The Nazarene Jesus Child was not at all gifted for the external things of culture. He had only a deep, deep, emotional inwardness. It was precisely the quality of the soul and mind that was developed in him. But he was not gifted to learn what was externally available in terms of cultural means. He had no inclination for that. He had something that people cannot even imagine in terms of distinguishing good from evil. But what had arisen on earth in the way of culture was foreign to him. It was foreign to him because something had been born in him that had not gone through the whole development of humanity.

We can understand this if we consider the following. In the ancient Lemurian times, what we call the Luciferic influence took place within humanity. Then the Luciferic powers crept into the human being's astral body. As a result, humanity has become what it has become. Now, in those days, the guiding powers of the human being's etheric body had to be held back a little so that it would not be infected by anything that the astral body, which was under Luciferic influence, could give it. Part of the etheric body was withdrawn from the influence of the astral body by the fact that man retained influence only over his etheric body, in so far as he is a thinking and feeling being, but not with regard to everything of a thinking nature. This was, so to speak, withheld and conveyed from the spiritual-divine world from above. Therefore, from the very beginning of their earthly existence, human beings have, so to speak, their individual desires and personal feelings, and they could not have their personal thoughts, nor the expression of personal thoughts, language. Thinking was such that it was guided by a continuous spirituality in all of them. As a result, they all think the same. But even language was at least guided by the folk gods, so that not every person has their own language. That which is expressed in the spirit of language was, with respect to the etheric body, removed from the arbitrariness of the individual personality; it was held back. What was withheld in Lemurian times is related in the Paradise Myth: Man partook of the Tree of Knowledge but not of the Tree of Life; he acquired freedom of will, but what was not given to man at that time was now mysteriously transmitted to this Jesus child, to the Jesus child of Nazareth, whose etheric body it was. There was that which had been withdrawn from humanity in the very beginning, and that prevented the Nazarene Jesus Child from taking an interest in the culture that humanity had acquired. He had something much more original, something that reminded of the time when humanity had not yet fallen into the sin of the arbitrariness of the individual. The author of the Gospel of Luke expresses this by leading the family tree up to Adam. So that in the Nazarene Jesus-child something appears which had sunk in Adam, which had been withdrawn from the Luciferic influence. What mankind was before this Luciferic influence, that was in this Nazarene Jesus-child.

These two Jesus-boys lived side by side. When they were both twelve years old, the following happened: the Zarathustra in the Bethlehem Jesus-boy decided to merge with the Nazarene Jesus-boy. This is hinted at in the Bible in the event known as the loss of the twelve-year-old Jesus, where the parents are amazed to find him again. He was quite different from what he had been before, the Nazarene Jesus-child. Now, all at once, he took an interest in external culture because Zarathustra's individuality was in him. This happened at that moment in time which is described in the Bible as the twelve-year-old Jesus getting lost. Something else had happened as well. At the birth of the Nazarene Jesus Child, that which we can call the later embodiment of the Buddha descended into the astral body. From the time of his birth, the Buddha in his etheric body was connected with this Jesus child of Nazareth at his re-embodiment, so that in the aura of the Jesus child of Nazareth in his astral body we have the Buddha. This is alluded to in a profound way in the Gospel of Luke. The Indian legend tells us that at the time when the royal son Gautama Buddha was born, there was a remarkable sage who was to become the Buddha. His name was Asita. He had learned through his clairvoyant abilities that the Bodhisattva had now been born. He looked at the boy in the royal palace and was full of enthusiasm. He began to weep. “Why are you weeping?” the king asked him. “O king, there is no danger of misfortune. On the contrary, the one who has been born is the Bodhisattva and will become the Buddha. I weep because I, as an old man, will not live to see this Buddha.” Then Asita died. The Bodhisattva became the Buddha. The Buddha descends and unites with the aura of the Nazarene Jesus child, in order to contribute his mite to the great event in Palestine. At the same time, through a karmic connection, the old Asita is reborn. He becomes the old Simeon. And he now sees the Buddha, who had become this from a bodhisattva. What he had not been able to see in India six hundred years before our era, the becoming Buddha, he now saw it when the Buddha floated in the aura of the Nazarene Jesus child, whom he held in his arms, and now he said the beautiful word: “Now, Lord, you let your servant go in peace, for I have seen my master,” the Buddha in the aura of the Jesus child.

Thus we see how the three currents flow together: through the blood, the current of Abraham; through the individuality of the Bethelehemitic Jesus-child, the Zarathustra current; and the third current through the Buddha's etheric body or Nirmanakaya floating down and being seen by the shepherds. Thus we see these three currents flowing together. And how these currents live on within Christianity, and how he who lives in the Nazarene Jesus-child, endowed with the individuality of Zarathustra, carries them forward, can only be described at another time.

It should also be said that after the Zarathustra individuality had passed over into the personality, into the body of the Nazarene Jesus child, that the Bethlehem Jesus child gradually wasted away and soon died.

The important thing is that you understand how this guidance of the Zarathustra individuality into the Jesus child took place. You know that the development of the human being proceeds in such a way that from birth to the age of seven the development of the physical body takes place, from seven to fourteen the development of the etheric body takes place, the special unfolding, and that then the astral body is born. The special I, the egoity, as it was born in man in the Lemurian time, was not at all in the Nazarene Jesus child. If He had developed further without the Zarathustra going over to Him, no I could have been born. He had what had been joined together as the holy three members, as they were before the Fall: physical body, etheric body and astral body, and only then received the gift of the I through Zarathustra. All this joined together in a wonderful way. In the Gospels we have the facts mirrored, which can be found in the Akasha Chronicle.

I have only been able to sketch out a few individual features of the confluence of these great, powerful spiritual currents of the Buddha, Zarathustra and the ancient Hebrew stream in Western Asia, where, at the beginning of our era, Christianity was reborn from these three currents. These are a few lines that we can continue another time.

At the start of the hour, various participatory questions and objections were presented. The stenographer didn't add to these words, but Rudolf Steiner had jotted down the following key words in one of his notebooks (See the fax page 38-40 NB 127 in the documentary supplements):

• Discussion
• Can we define religion?
• Impossibilities—
• Luther as an answer—
• Do without knowledge to reach religion!—
• Spine of the world—and turn to the divine—
• Gulf—world = God
• ?—another: Contrast between God and World isn't found
• Rel. Connection with God—3 ways

Thinking Feeling Willing

• Anthrop unclear: due to transformation of world through science or not making religion dependent on knowledge—so that people who have no knowledge, come short—Good faith =
• Dr Geyer: It is said: Anthrop in the world Religion belongs to God. Paradox
• Another: Can religion become independent?
  or Art—science?
  will religion stop being independent
• Another: if it repulses someone
  faith—endangered
  Secret—deepest being. Despite all unravelable difficulties on hand ... submit/go through to* the soul-like
• and another: religion—relation between one soul and God—but the effects change towards others—this is increased by Anthroposophy
• and another: ? leads us to God today?
• and another: Is a value judgement of Anthrop to religion both necessary? (Ist ein Wertunterschied z. A. u. Rel. beide nötig?)*
and another: Living relationship to concepts—are concepts in contrast with corrupted form—
• Main concept: Pledge faith
  Faith has knowledge content—gradually got lost
  awareness, which gives knowledge content—
  the results of today—

(*—words are abbreviated which can create various interpretations—Translator)

• To what extent does the Pauline contrast with the Pistis and Gnosis.—

Rudolf Steiner: I would prefer at best to answer you more concretely than in abstractions. First, I would like to approach a difficult question by saying the following.

In Anthroposophy we currently have very few people who are engaged in spiritual activity. Anthroposophy is in the beginning of her work and one can admit that in a relatively short time it may work differently into the human soul, compared with today. One thing is quite remarkable today, and perhaps you'll find that reprehensible, but it is perhaps much better to side with what appears currently than to express it with an abstract reprimand.

Anthroposophy is taught, recited, written in books and I have the basic conviction that the way those questioners here, at least some of them, require Anthroposophy to be a knowledge—and that such a knowledge which is understood by most, at least a good many, for the majority who interest themselves intensively in Anthroposophy, this is not yet the case. Many people today accept something which they have heard about in Anthroposophy, on good faith. Why do they do this? Why are there already such a large number of people who accept Anthroposophy on good faith? You see, among those the majority have acquired religious natures in a specified direction and without them actually claiming to understand things in depth, they follow Anthroposophy because they have become aware of a certain religious style throughout the leadership of Anthroposophical matters. It is just a kind of religious feeling, a religious experience, which brings numerous people to Anthroposophy, who are not in the position of examining Anthroposophy, like botanists who examine botany; this is what is promoted here.

One doesn't usually intensely observe that in relation to what I mean here, Anthroposophy is quite different to the other, the outer, more scientific sciences. Scientific knowledge is in fact quite so that one can say about it: take the human being into consideration and it will in fact be quite dangerous for faith, you'll impair faith. It is not just about science making you uncomfortable, but it is about having the experience of the mystery of faith being disturbed. In the practical handling of this question one finds, as far as it goes beyond where it is another kind of science, as is the case with Anthroposophy, that numerous people experience a consistent religious stance in the way Anthroposophy is presented. Despite it not wanting, as I often repeat, to be a religious education, it is nevertheless felt that it is moving in the direction where a religious feeling can go along with it. Actually, this idea that knowledge kills faith—I have much understanding for this—must be revised regarding Anthroposophy. One must first ask if it is not because Anthroposophy is a not conceptual knowledge, but a knowledge based on observation, that the relationship between faith and knowledge becomes something quite different. Let us not forget that this observation of knowledge killing faith has only been created on the hand of a science which is completely conceptual, completely intellectual. Intellectualism is for Anthroposophy only a starting point, it is only regarded as the basis and foundation, then one rises to observation quite indifferently whether it is one's own or a shared observation.

My view is that it is not necessary at all, to place a wall in front of Anthroposophy, that things should be accepted in good faith. This is not quite so. A certain shyness remains today, to shine a very thorough light into what is said by single anthroposophical researchers. When this shyness is overcome then one doesn't need some of other perception or clairvoyance. Just like one can take a dream as an error or a truth, even if one only experiences the dream for what it is, which is a perception; in the same way one can recognise the truth or error in a painted image. Basically, it's the same for life. This is not easily understood—those involved with spiritual research know. One gets much more out of life when one looks at things yourself rather than being told about them, because observation of life demands a great deal. Yet, these things need to be researched so they can enter into life.

Now, something like the viewpoints of conceptual knowledge which we are already familiar with, is what I noticed in the inquiries of our questioners, whose first point was: How can we define religion? One could—this is how it can be said in the course of the discussion—renounce knowledge, leave the world lying on its back and turn to the Divine because there is an abyss between the world and God, and so on. This is said about it.

Now if you are familiar with my arguments you will have found that I do not give definitions anywhere; in fact, I am sharply against giving definitions in Anthroposophy. Sometimes, since I speak about popular things, I conceptualise them. Even though I know quite well that definitions can certainly be a help in the more scientific or historic sense of today's kind of knowledge, even though I'm aware of the limited right of definitions, I remind myself how, within Greek philosophy, defining a human being was recommended. The definition is such that a human being is alive, that it has two legs and no feathers. So the next day someone brought along a plucked chicken and said, this is a human being.—You see how far a person is from the immediate observation, even with practical definitions. These things need to be examined.

That is the peculiarity of intellectualistic knowledge, and in it, is to be found many such things which have led to the judgement which sharpens the boundary between belief and knowledge even more. One needs to enter into the intricacies a bit more. You see, already in our simplest sciences are definitions which actually have no authority at all. Open some or other book on physics. You find a definition like the following: What is impenetrability? Impenetrability is the property of objects, that in the place where an object is present, another body cannot be at the same time.—That is the definition of impenetrability. In the entire scope of knowledge and cognition, however, not everything can be defined in this way; the definition of impenetrability is merely a masked postulate. In reality it must be said: One calls an object impenetrable when the place where it is in, can't at the same time be occupied by another object.—It is namely merely to determine an object, to postulate its individual character; and only under the influence of materialistic thinking, postulates masked as definitions are given.

All of this creates an entire sea of difficulties which current mankind is not aware of at all because people have really been absorbing it from the lowest grade of elementary school; mankind really doesn't know on what fragile ground, on what slippery ice he gets involved with, in reality, when educated through the current system of concepts. This conceptual system which is in fact more corrupt than theological concepts—a physicist often has no inkling that their concepts are corrupt—this is something which not only kills belief, but in many ways, it also kills what relates to life. These corrupt scientific concepts are not only damaging to the soul, but even harmful to physical life. If you are a teacher, you know this.

Therefore, it is no longer important that the spiritual scientist, the Anthroposophist has to say: Precisely this scientific concept must be transformed into the healing of mankind.—Here is where the Anthroposophist becomes misled, when the religious side insists that an abyss be created under all circumstances between belief and knowledge, because, between what one observes with the senses, and Anthroposophy, there is really a great abyss. This is what even from the anthroposophical side needs to be clarified.

Now I would like to consider this question from the religious side and perhaps as a result of me approaching it from the religious side, it will be better understood religiously. You see I can completely understand that the following may be said—that one must turn away from the world to find the way to God. The basic experience that exists, the paths that will have to be taken, those I know. I can also certainly understand when someone talks about how it would be necessary, in a certain sense, that the dew of mystery should cover anything with religious content. I would like to express myself succinctly only; it has already surfaced in the questions. Briefly, I can fully understand if someone strives in a certain way to place everything that can be known on the one side and on the other side, look for a religious path according to such fundamentals as are searched for by a whole row of modern evangelists. This search should take place not through events but in a far more direct way. In the elaboration of Dr Schairer, it was again correctly described: also in the questioning of Bruno Meyer which was given to me yesterday, it is expressed clearly. So, I can understand it well. But I see something else.

You see, what people take from Anthroposophy, quite indifferently now, how far their research comes or in how far they have insight—and as we said, it can be seen without being a researcher or an observer through what you get from Anthroposophy—means they must relinquish quite a few things from their "I," I mean from their egotism. In a certain sense selflessness belongs to this point of departure from one's self, when entering the world. One could say a person needs to radically tear out inborn egoism in order to really find a human relationship to the simplest Anthroposophical knowledge. A feeling for the world as opposed to an ego feeling for oneself must be developed to a high degree, and gradually grow just by following this apparent path of knowledge, which is not only similar to fervent love but equal to it; everything grows from here. Basically, one learns about true submission to objectivity by following anthroposophic content.

In opposition to this, I propose something else. One can relinquish all such involvement in the world, all such conceptual submission of oneself and then try, out of oneself, I don't want to call it "in feelings" but for instance how Dr Schairer expressed it, through "connecting to God" make one's way. One can try to stretch the entire sum of inner life, one could call it, electrically, to find what the direct communication with God is. Also there, I must say, I know what can be achieved by that strong relationship of trust in God, without entering into some kind of unclear mysticism, up to certain mystics who have remained with clear experiences. I've seen it before. Yet I find despite everything that is attempted in devotion to the world, in connecting to the world, in connecting to divine world forces and so on, a large part of egoism, even soul-filled egoism, remains. Someone can be extraordinarily religious out of the most terrible egoism. Prove it for yourself by looking with the eyes of a good psychologist at the religiosity of some monks or nuns. Certainly, you could say, that is not evangelistic belief. It may differ qualitatively, but in relation to what I mean now, it still differs qualitatively. If you prove this, you perhaps find the performing of a devotion to the utmost mortification, yet it sometimes harbours—the true observation of psychologists reveals this—the most terrible egoism. This is something questionable which can give up even a superficial view of an important problem. You see, to find an exchange with God in this way is basically nothing extraordinary because God is there and whoever looks for Him, will find Him. He will obviously be found. Only those who don't find Him are not looking for Him. One can find him, sure, but in many cases, one asks oneself what it is one has found. I may say out of my own experience: What is it?

In many cases it is the discovery the forces of the inner life, which only exists between birth and death. One is able to, with these forces which exist between birth and death, to be a very pious person. However, these forces are laid down with us in our graves, we have no possibility of taking these forces with us through the gate of death. Should we acquire thoughts of eternity, acquire thoughts of the supersensible, these we will take with us through the gate of death and while we do so, we must already have become selfless, as I have indicated. You see, this is something which is always questionable to me, when I discover it—what I can quite rightly understand—like Schleiermacher's philosophy of religion. Licentiate Bock has recently told me that with Schleiermacher one could discover something quite different. It would be lovely if something could happen, but according to the usual way Schleiermacher is interpreted, I find in the Schleiermacher way the reference and exchange with the Divine as only created through the forces which are lost when we die. What is this then, that is lost though death, my dear friends? Even if it's religious, if it is lost with death it is nothing more than a refined lust of the soul, an intensification of temporal life. One feels oneself better for it, when one feels secure with God.

You see, I want to speak religiously about the necessity to achieve a concept of belief which lives within the danger of connecting temporal forces to people. This of course has a relationship to the Divine. Here something terrible always appears to me in the great illusion within the numerous people's current lives which consist of people being unable to see how the rejection of a certain content, which must always have a content of knowledge—you could call this observational content, but finally this is only terminology—how the judgement of such content severely endangers religious life. Old religions didn't exist without content and their content of Christian teaching was once full of life, and it only turned into what we call dogma today, at the end of the fourth century after Christ. So one could say this distaste for content, this selfish fear of so-called wisdom—I'm fully aware of calling it "so-called wisdom"—that, my dear friends, always reminds me of people living in this illusion, that this fear of knowledge of the supersensible actually is also produced by materialism. Within this concept of faith, I see a materialistic following, I can't help myself; this following of materialism is no conscious following but something which exists in subconscious foundations of the soul as a materialistic following.

I really believe that it will be through religious foundations, particularly for the priest, if he could bring himself to it, to overcome the shyness of the so-called gulf between belief and knowledge. The world and God, and the gulf between them—yes my dear friends, this is indeed the deepest conviction of Anthroposophy itself; what Anthroposophy seeks, is to create a bridge between the two. When this gulf has been bridged, then only will the higher unity of God and world be possible. At first, from the outside, this abyss appears, and only when man has gone through everything which makes this bridging necessary, can the abyss be overcome, and only then does man discover what can be called the unity of God with the world.

Let's consider the religious connection with God. Would a religion—this question was asked in three ways and called thinking feeling and willing—would a religion still be approachable through Anthroposophy, which is dependent on knowledge, to people who do not have knowledge, or will they get a raw deal?—Anthroposophy certainly doesn't make religiousness dependent on knowledge. I must confess in the deepest religious sense I actually can't understand why a dependent religious life should exists beside Anthroposophy because the course of an anthroposophic life becomes such that firstly, of course, single personalities become researchers, who to some extend break through to the observation; then others will apply their healthy human minds to it—yes, this is what it is about. Just recently in Berlin this word was taken as evil from a philosophic view, and opposed on the grounds of the human mind being unable to understand anything super-sensory, and that the human mind which is able to understand something super-sensory, would surely not be healthy.—

A healthy human mind can simply look through the communications of spiritual researchers when he only wants to, if he doesn't put a spoke in his own wheel because of today's scattered prejudices. Certainly, there will be numerous other people who take it on good faith. Now, we can't compare something small with something big, but if this is only about using comparisons, one could perhaps do it. You see, I assume that the Being, Who we call the Christ, possesses an immeasurable higher content within, than human beings who call themselves Christians, and you have but trust in Him. Why should that be unjustified? That knowledge appears through this, knowledge which is not immediately clear, but which arrives in an earnest manner, that is to say as it comes out of personal research, clarifies what is discovered with no need to somehow try to understand why that would let people be given a raw deal. In this I actually find something which ultimately amounts to the fact that one can't acknowledge anything which one has not discovered oneself.

We won't get far in life at all if we are not also presented with something through other means than only direct observation. You see, it is obvious for a spiritual researcher to say: You, living in the present, haven't seen the deeds of Alexander the Great, but there is a connection between the life at present and the regarded-as-truth unseen deeds of Alexander the Great. Here a theologian objected: Yes, Alexander the Great don't interest me any longer, but that which is claimed in Anthroposophy I must see for myself, otherwise it doesn't interest me.—One can't say that everything of interest must always come from something observed. Just imagine if someone could only believe in his father and mother after he has looked at the truth of his belief in them. So, as I've said, I can't quite grasp something by applying precise terms to what is really meant; I would like to rather say, that I find a certain contradiction between, on the one hand, it is said that Anthroposophy wants to be wisdom and therefore appears dubious, and on the other hand, one could accept it, if you knew about things. This doesn't seem like quite a good match.

A particularly important question to me is the following. Perhaps its difficulty has resulted from what I've said myself: A person experiences through the anthroposophic life at the same time something which can meet the religious need. The next question then comes: When art assumes religious form, when science and social life take on religious form, will religion stop being independent and gradually only become something which exists with everything else in the world?—Well, that seems to me or at least seemed to me to be a complete misjudgement of the religious when it is indicated that art will develop in future in such a way, in the anthroposophic sense, and that it will develop social life in such a way according to the anthroposophic sense, that religion as something independent will vanish. Religion has indeed other living conditions, quite other needs than Anthroposophy.

It was so that the old religious foundations always had wisdom in the background. One can say there is no old religion which doesn't have wisdom in its background, and because knowledge existed there, it is not involved in religion. Religion is only created through the relationship of man to what is known. When so much anthroposophic art produced in future is not looked at with a religious mood, it will never make a religious impression. One would never be able to cultivate religion, no matter how hard one tried, in order to say about the social life what can be said out of spiritual science, out of Anthroposophy, when in reality people don't experience in all earnest the meaning of the words: "What you do to the least of my brothers, you also do to me."—The most beautiful anthroposophical impulses could never become a reality in life, if so much should be done, it would remain an empty science if religious life wasn't cultivated.

However, something has to be taken into account. In Shairer's defences there are three images: The first image is that man can approach water in a dual manner, either as a chemist and analyst in H₂O, or one can drink water. The supersensible world analyses a person whether he comes as an Anthroposophist, or when he takes possession of a direct experience, then he is a religious person. The religious person equals someone who drinks the water, the Anthroposophist is someone who analyses water and finds H₂O. Dr Shairer's second image is the following: Let's assume I've deposited a large amount of bank notes or gold on the table and I count, divide it and so on, so I calculate the money; but I may also possess this money, that is another relationship. The person who calculates the money is an Anthroposophist; the one who possesses it all, is a religious person. Shairer's third image is particularly characteristic. A person could have studied every possibility of human health and illness; he could know every branch of medicine. The other person can be healthy. So the one who is healthy, is the religious person, and the one who studies everything about illness and health, is the Anthroposophist.

The three examples are, considered abstractly, are extraordinarily accurate but still, only thought about abstractly. They are actually only valid for today's common knowledge. You see, with the water analysis, something can be done. For someone who doesn't study Anthroposophy, it is useless. Because one has to, if one wants to approach it, begin by "drinking" it. Water in Anthroposophy is not there for mere outer analysis; it must be drunk at the same time. The activity of drinking and the activity of the analysing or synthesizing are the same. That one believes something else about it, results from the fact that recently an otherwise excellent man has written in "Tat" that he would have no interest in my statements regarding the Akasha-Chronicle unless I honour him with them in a splendid illustrated edition.—Yes, my dear friends, to use such an image at all, one must acknowledge that the Akasha-Chronicle can only exist for those who allow themselves to experience it spiritually. It can't be allowed to be compared in this way. Already upon this basis I'm quite sure that the modern bad habit of the cinema will not be applied to Anthroposophy—hopefully not.

Therefore, the comparison between drinking water and water analysis is relevant for ordinary science but has no relevance to Anthroposophy. The second image was about counting money and possessing money. This also is not quite so; it is tempting, but it doesn't work this way. I can namely possess money but when I'm too foolish to be unable to count it, then its possession doesn't matter much. Under some circumstances I could possess the whole world but if I can't enter into it, then under the circumstances the world can mean very little.

Now; the thing about medicine. Materialistic medicine can certainly be studied on the one hand while on the other hand one could be healthy. One could certainly, if it's your destiny, be sick despite anthroposophical medicine. However, the comparison on this basis is not entirely true for the reason that materialistic medicine, what one knows about it, actually has nothing to do with being healthy in earthly life, but it is a knowledge and from this knowledge action can result. With Anthroposophy it is namely so, that anthroposophical medicine has to certainly also be a deducted knowledge, but the human being is approached much more closely. Here is something which can be proven with great difficulty, and it is because of the following. Take for example, this is necessary, someone aged forty and recommend, for a start, that he should stop smoking and drinking wine or something, and say to him, it would in fact improve his health, he would live longer than he would otherwise. Now he dies aged 48; and people say he already died at 48, it didn't help him.—I can't prove that if he hadn't avoided wine, he could perhaps have died at 44 already. When one encounters such things, there are small stumbling blocks. It is extraordinarily difficult to deliver proof when that which is to be accomplished, must be created as proof out of the world.

People certainly sometimes think curiously about things. I knew an anatomist, Hyrtl, who was an extraordinary big man who equally had a stimulating influence on his students and had a long life after he retired. He became over 80 years old then he died in a small place into which he had withdrawn. Just after Hyrtl's death, a widow who was a farmer encountered a man and she said to him: "Yes, now Hyrtl has died, we liked him so much, but he studied so much, and that's why he had to die; it doesn't bode well if one studies so much."—To this the man asked: "But you husband, how old was he when he died?" She said: "45 years."—Now the man asked if her husband has studied more than old Hyrtl?—You see, similar things actually happen on closer examination.

Now I don't want to deviate from serious things and would like to say the following. For Anthroposophists it is not important that there should be a distinction between drinking water and water analysis, but there is in fact something where in place of abstract knowledge, of discursive knowledge, an experience occurs within the knowledge of analysis; yet it remains above all knowledge. Only the Leese licentiate has resented calling an experience knowledge while he claimed—not out of a Christian but out of another scientific dogma—he may never take what he has experienced as an object of knowledge. Well, I mean, the thing is, if you really understand what Anthroposophy is as a human experience, this alien-to-life of the scientific no longer applies.

In relation to the secret, the Mystery, I may here insert what I said yesterday. I said it is not so that Anthroposophic knowledge can be obtained and then through thoughts, change into ordinary knowledge. In order to have the correct relationship to it, one must repeatedly return to it. It exists in quite another kind of inner relationship to people than does scientific knowledge. There still exists something of a sacred shyness in the relationship people have to anthroposophical knowledge and it is certainly not the case that clarity is thus undermined according to what is attained through Anthroposophy. You see, basically it's like this: when we go through the Portal of Death and before we enter the Portal of Birth into this earthly world, we live in that world which Anthroposophy speaks about. That is in fact the reality. Through Anthroposophy we take part in the riddle of creation and in the riddle of death, to a certain degree. That one doesn't understand these things in the same way in which one understands ordinary intellectual knowledge, something else must make this possible. You are not going to be guided into such a world as some people suppose. I have heard among thousands of objections, also heard that it is said Anthroposophy wants to solve all world riddles, and when the time comes where there are no more riddles in the world, what will people do with this knowledge? Then the earth will not be interesting anymore; everything which one can know about the earth, exists in them being riddles.—

Certainly, in an abstract sense, this can be an objection. However, even understood abstractly, the riddles do not become smaller, but they become ever bigger. Life has not been made easier by entering into the spiritual world, but at first the immeasurability of the world and the immeasurability of knowledge becomes apparent. That is why, in the case of the Mystery there is no reduction or degradation of the Mystery, but there is actually an elevation of the Mystery. This at least is apparent in experience.

Regarding the question whether there's a difference in value between Anthroposophy and religion or if both are necessary, I would like to say the following. Value differences lead into a subjective area and one has no sure foundations if one wants to assert differences in value. In any case you may from the scant anthroposophic explanations which I've given today and before, actually say that Anthroposophy and religion are both necessary in the future and that Anthroposophy is only necessary for the foundation of the work, which you need towards the renewal of religious life. Anthroposophy itself doesn't want to appear as endowed with religion but it wants to offer every possible help when religious life wants to find renewal.

Now my dear friends, I could, as I see, not answer everything exhaustively, I still want to put some things on hold. I have certainly had feelings through experiences with which I now want to give an answer to the question, which perhaps has not already appeared in the question, for instance this: I also have my religious objections to the faith which serves only those human forces which actually die with us, and that one—according to my experience I can say this—also through religious instruction, say something in a sense of: avoid the world and develop something completely different—and precisely in this way, strongly refer to man's egoism.

I have experienced the following phenomenon. For example, a good Anthroposophist who tried to work with all his might in order to find a path in Anthroposophy, but without a necessary measure of selflessness and without enough self-confidence, when courage failed him, became a Roman monk. I'm not speaking hypothetically but from experience. Yes, this person has experienced nothing other than having failed due to a lack of selflessness which he would have needed and the lack of confidence which he would have needed. This is the strongest appeal to those forces which dissipate with death; it doesn't serve these forces to go through the gate of death with the soul, to penetrate to reality. People just want to go down to where they don't have to be so strong, so there arises a sinking courage, this attach-oneself-on-to-something which through its submission into activity brings a certain inner satisfaction—which is only a kind of inner desire or lust—to become a Roman monk.

It is indeed from a religious basis needed to say that the priest should give a person something which doesn't only work for his communications with God up to death, but beyond death. In this connection Anthroposophy must be honest throughout with its knowledge. If one could know more—which is possible—about what goes beyond the gate of death and what doesn't remain, where for instance one has a mystic like saint Theresa, with an involvement only with the transient, so one could, even if you weren't a mystic, prepare yourself for life after death, where one enters atrophied for being a mystic with desires in life. One does enter, but in such a way of course as one would enter into life without hands or feet.

Through Anthroposophical knowledge a religious impulse can be discovered. To all of this the shyness must be overcome to unite belief and knowledge, which is what Anthroposophy strives for.

One has often said that the human being himself is the best and most important study of the human being, and that the human being himself is the biggest riddle of the human being. In view of certain facts, one has to emphasise that this riddle faces the human being in manifold forms. The human riddle appears as multiplied to us and looks at us from all sides. The manifold forms of the human being, the races, are certainly such a multiplication of the human riddle. Natural sciences and spiritual science have always tried to bring in light to this variety of the human existence, in these different forms of the human being. Besides, we realise plenty of questions. We have the consciousness in ourselves that in all human beings a uniform nature and being exists. However, how does this uniform nature and being behave to the manifold forms and physiognomies, which face us as races? In particular, this question approaches us if we see which different abilities the single human races possess.

Apparently, to our consideration, the one human being is on the highest cultural level, the other on the most primitive, subordinated one. All that makes it appear strange to us that the human being who has, nevertheless, a uniform nature can appear in such a different and imperfect figure. One feels it often as an injustice of nature that it condemns one to an existence in a lower human race and raises the other to an apparently perfect race. To put a new contemplation to this mystery, to lighten up this riddle, the spiritual-scientific worldview seems to be more suitable than any other is. For this spiritual-scientific worldview does not speak in the same sense of the uniform human being as the other worldviews. It has a concept of it, which is different from that of the philosophers, religions et cetera, and it speaks of a recurrence of the human soul. It says to us that the soul, which lives in the modern human individual, was already often on this earth and will still often return. If we look at the matter even closer, we see that the souls of the human beings go through the different races. Thus, the variety of the races gets sense and reason. Thus, we see how the one is not condemned to live only in a primitive race and the other to be on the developmental levels of race existence.

Each one of us goes through the most different levels of the races, and this passage just signifies a further development of the single soul. Someone who appears as a member of the European race today went through other races in former times and will go through others than ours later. The races appear to us as levels, and this variety becomes coherent and reasonable.

However, if we want to see this sense quite thoroughly, we have to investigate the developmental basis of the different races deeper. Someone who rises above the only sensuous view to the invisible, supersensible world and tries to answer this question from such realms can really get an adequate solution of the riddle.

The usual natural sciences, which have to confine themselves to the sensuous observation in this question, were only able to bring in one leading thread in these cases concerning the human types. They are able to lead us back to the imperfect levels of human existence according to the modern Darwinist point of view. They trace the human being back to the former epochs of the earth evolution. They show us how the human being experienced stages in the former times in which he satisfied his needs with simple, imperfect tools with which he could only perform small work. To even former times the natural sciences want to lead us back in which the human being developed from the animal realm. We are led to the statement that we can no longer prove the earliest developmental stages of the human being scientifically, presumably because the areas of the earth in which the human being developed at that time are covered with the floods of the ocean. The natural sciences only point to an area repeatedly. This is the area in the south of Asia, in the east of Africa and down to Australia. Ernst Haeckel supposes that an ancient, extinct continent is to be sought there and that the interstates of animal and human being developed there. He calls this continent Lemuria.

Indeed, in the same sense in which Haeckel speaks about this continent and his inhabitants, about pithecoid human beings as the ancestors of the modern human beings, spiritual science cannot speak about this matter out of its experience. I have tried to show that there are other methods and means to find out something of the prehistoric times as those are on which the natural sciences must rely, other methods than the investigation of the leftovers, which one has found in the earth. You find everything about the origin of the human being and his classification in different races that has always been taught in the so-called secret schools out of inner mystic experience in my essays From the Akasha Chronicle (CW 11). Physical records and sensuous experience cannot lead us to the times, which can really teach us the decisive of this question. The supersensible experience only can teach us this. Today, I can only give a spare concept of this supersensible experience, and only a comparison should show us where from that is taken which we want to discuss in the main.

You know that my words I speak here are carried away by the undulations, which are stimulated in the air. The oscillatory air brings my words through your organ of hearing into your soul. While I am speaking here, this whole airspace is filled with sound waves. Imagine that these sound waves could be fixed, one could get an imprint with any means at every moment of that which is spoken here. Then you would have a recording of everything that is spoken here. Just as the word that I speak here makes an imprint on the medium around us also the other expressions of the human nature do, indeed, not on the air, which is somewhat coarse in relation to many other and subtler substances, because there are subtler substances than the air is. I point only to the ether, although our consideration deals nothing with it. However, I mean, actually, the finest matter, the akashic matter in which not only the spoken words imprint themselves, but all thoughts, feelings and will impulses of the human being.

This akasha matter with its imprints really forms a large phonograph. While these sound waves pass here in the air perpetually, last only as long as the sound is heard, the imprints that the human achievements up to the thoughts cause in this so-called akasha matter always persist. Somebody who is able to develop so far to read in this akasha matter can read the recordings, which have been put down since primeval times. From this chronicle, from the higher spiritual experiences the information comes which spiritual science announces about the human development through the different races. We are led back not only to the human beings who the natural sciences and archaeology register investigating the leftovers of human beings who had primitive tools and weapons in the caves of France or anywhere. These human beings had low receding foreheads and were backward in their intellectual development compared to the modern civilised human beings.

These researches do not lead us back to those forms of humanity that the spiritual-scientific worldview teaches us, even if the modern naturalists think that they lead us back ten to fifteen millennia, maybe even farther. All those human forms and racial forms that the naturalist can find in the earth point again back to quite differently formed human physiognomies, to races which have lived on another earth area, on Atlantis which extended between Europe, Africa and America. The idea is also no longer strange to the natural sciences that the Atlantic was once land. The resemblance of the fauna, of the animal realm and the various soil formations, also some relationships of languages, all these matters point the naturalist to the fact that we deal with a big earth subsidence, with a flood of a large land domain that took place in very early times of our development. Plato tells about an island Poseidonis which is still stated by him as an island in the ocean, it was the last rest of the past world. The spiritual-scientific view teaches us that, too.

If we go back to the inhabitants who lived in Atlantis, then something appears to us that is different from today. We get to know a race in which the most significant abilities, which make the modern civilised human being a civilised human being, did not yet exist. The Atlantean race did not yet have these abilities, the ability of combining, of counting, of logical thinking. These human beings had memory and language at that time. That had only developed in them. However, in return, they had other abilities. A progress of the human abilities takes only place if certain so-called higher levels of the human existence are purchased with the disappearance of former levels of development. Exactly the same way as the human being has a very low ability of smelling compared to certain animals, whereas the animals have less developed higher senses, the brain in particular, however, they bring the lower abilities to perfection. It is the same here on these higher levels of humanity.

The Atlantean had an almost omniscient memory. His knowledge was generally based on his memory. He did not know what we call law or rule. He did not calculate in such a way that he knew a multiplication table; indeed, he did not know this. His memory was the basis for his whole thinking. He knew if he had piled up twice five beans that this was a small heap of so and so many. He did not count, but he kept it in his memory. His language was also different from ours. I will come back to this phenomenon in the course of this talk. Because the Atlantean had developed these abilities only, a certain clairvoyant talent belonged to him inevitably which withdrew when our day consciousness, our reason, our mathematical, logical consciousness, our cultural consciousness developed. The Atlantean was able to quite different sense to work on the growth of plants out of his nature using the special magic willpower. Without sensuous mediation, the Atlantean was able to carry out certain magic effects. All that also was connected with a completely different body structure, above all with a receding forehead and with a defective formation of the forebrain. On the other side, other parts of the brain were unlike those of the modern civilised human being. This enabled him to use his big abilities of memory.

If we observe such an Atlantean according to the recordings of the Akasha Chronicle, we find that at the same time the brightness of our present consciousness was not yet achieved. It was a dream consciousness. It was brighter than this, but it did not yet have that bright clarity of the intellect, which our modern consciousness has. It was more a brooding and dreaming one. What worked with him was also not in such a way that he could regard himself as the master of that which he caused, but it was in such a way that everything that was in him was like a kind of inspiration. He felt to be connected with other forces, like with a spirit flowing through him. The spirit was something concrete to him, it was that which was in the wind, in the clouds and which grew up in the plants. The spirit was something that one could feel if one moved the hands through the air, if the trees rustled. This was the language of nature. The independence of the Atlantean was also not as great as that of the modern human beings.

If we look back farther, we come to the ancestors of this population, to those human beings who lived on a part of the world, which the natural sciences know as well as spiritual science: on Lemuria, the land between Asia, Australia, and Africa. However, spiritual science has to portray the appearance and figure of those human beings quite different from the naturalists. The portrayal of the figure of these human beings, which the spiritual researcher gives, is not so different from that which the naturalist supposes. However, it is spiritually completely different. The Lemurian was much more clairvoyant than the Atlantean. He had a gigantic willpower; he was a human being with whom language and memory were not yet developed. The language began only in the later Lemuria. However, the Lemurian could make the plants grow, he could command the wind, he could take natural forces out of the earth like with magic, briefly, what the Lemurian was able to do borders on the miraculous compared with the modern ideas. However, all that was in a vague consciousness, in a deeper dream sleep than it existed with the Atlantean. Completely conducted by higher influence, by higher spiritual beings, this Lemurian was a dependent creature in the hands of higher forces, which gave him the impulses of his intentions, of his actions.

With it, we have three successive developmental forms of our race. This Lemurian developed out of the not yet human companion of the ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, et cetera. These fabulous animals were there still before our mammals and perished because of big physical revolutions in these continents. The volcanic formations that stand out of the ocean are the remains of that old Lemurian age. In addition, those primitive constructions of gigantic size and strange form, as they are found on the Easter Island, are remains of the cyclopean constructions, extend into our time like monuments of those human beings whose soul life was completely different from ours.

Only with a few words, I would like to point to the relation between the human being and the different animal forms. The modern naturalist, accustomed to materialistic ideas, supposes that the human being developed from lower animal forms. The spiritual researcher is not able to do this. He supposes that the spiritual led the way of the material that the primal ground of the outside, of the material is founded in the spiritual that the external human body of the human being is an expression of the human soul. What the spiritual researcher describes as an astral body developed much earlier than the physical body of the human being. This astral body experienced a compression and it forms the etheric body this way, and only the compression of this etheric body forms the physical body.

The denser condition evolved only later. The thinner one, the astral one in particular, existed in much earlier times. Thus, spiritual science shows us that a being did not originate from an accidental agglomeration of physical matter, which has such impulses, passions, and instincts as the human being, but that these impulses and passions are the origin of the encasing matter. The passion did not create this matter, but the former passions created the forms of the physiognomy. Thus, the human being goes through a process of compression. Indeed, if we go back to the Lemurians, we see that their bodies become thinner and thinner, until we come back to human beings whose physical matter is very similar to the gelatinous matter of certain present animals. If we went back even farther, we would find ancient human ancestors, formed in a matter, which one cannot see with the usual physical eyes: the etheric human being. However, I do not want to go back to this very ancient time.

We want to begin our considerations with those human beings who start appearing in such a carnal cover as the present human being carries it, although the covers of the human beings who inhabited Lemuria and Atlantis were completely different from the construction of our muscles and skeletons. All that was much softer, more pliable, and flexible, and complied with the requirements of those vague, dreamlike soul forces I have described to you. Just by the fact that the physical matter of the human being becomes denser and denser; the pole of the physical matter is created on the other side, which is the tool of intelligence. With the creation of the brain, a compression of the remaining human organs took place at the same time.

Thus, the brain becomes the tool of the intellect, of the mind. If we summarise these three stages, we have them in the civilised human being. First, we have the Lemurian human being, his consciousness is trance-like, then we have the Atlantean human being who develops memory and language and then we have the actual civilised human being, the human being of our time.

If we consider the modern human beings, they developed from these former stages of existence. The primitive stage does not disappear at once when the higher one appears. It survives for the time being and changes in manifold ways. So that we can say: a part of the former Atlantean population migrated from Atlantis to Europe and farther to Asia and established colonies, a part stayed behind, so that we have the most manifold stages side by side. Every progressive part leaves behind as it were the stages of development like memories. That also applies to the human being in a similar way. He developed the most different forms of the animals from himself. Just as humanity leaves lower races behind, the human being leaves certain animal forms behind on even former stages which are like externally preserved memories of his former existence. Looking at the animals, we can say that they show the stages of our own development, from the lower animal form up to the forms of our race. However, our own forms did not look like that which stayed behind. At that time, the conditions were still different.

One normally does not imagine at all how infinitely big the changes were which took place on the earth. In the old Atlantis was no distribution of rain and sunshine, air and water as today. There was another air saturated with water. There was not yet rain at that time. Myths and legends hold on these things vividly. Hence, the Nordic legends also speak of “Niflheim,” “nebulous home.” A real fact forms the basis of that. The forms of our ancestors were different from ours, and those human beings whom they left behind got to conditions, which they did not stand. Hence, they had to develop to lower stages, they became decadent, and they degenerated.

The physical conditions of our present earth make it possible that the mind develops with a certain level of the beings. If the earth had not developed from the completely different conditions of rain and sunshine to our advantage, the human being would never have been able to develop to the stage on which we are today. We see that only the progressive race is able to develop suitably. However, what maintains the former form and is as a reminiscent sign of it, becomes degenerate because it does not comply with the later conditions. If we go back to the former times, we understand that that which we were once was completely different from the present animals. These changed because of the completely changed conditions. We also have to regard the subordinated races as stages of former human existence that were adapted, actually, to other earthly conditions according to their nature.

The matter becomes much more understandable, if we look into it that way. Then we understand that the Indian population of America, which appears to us so mysterious with its social structures and peculiar instincts must be completely different. The African race, the Ethiopian one, the black race is different in another way. There are the instincts that tie in with the lower human. We find a certain dreamlike element with the Malayans. Within the Mongolian population those qualities exist which are based on a special energy of the blood. There are also certain mental qualities, which developed quite typically. Hence, the Mongolian race always refuses to accept a pantheistic view. Its religion is a belief in demons, a cult of the dead. The population, which one calls the Caucasian race, constitutes the real civilised race, which is appointed to develop the logical thinking, to create tools for the work on nature using the mere reason of the human being who can no longer use the magic forces but has to rely on the mechanical. Everything that the human being had in the times of the old Atlantis in this way got lost, and, therefore, he manufactured tools because he could no longer work as he worked once; hence, he required tools for the mechanical effect.

The physical research tried in manifold ways to divide the different races. It tried to divide them according to the shaping of the skull in those, which have a narrow and backwards long skull, in those, which have a short and broad skull, and in those, which are between the both. One divided the human beings also according to their skin colour, into black ones: Black, Ethiopians; in yellow-brown: the Malayans and Mongols, and in white ones, the Caucasians. This division is done more according to external signs and gives certain differences, however, is not exhaustive. In the newer time, one has taken the language as a basis. However, if you consider the past spiritual-scientifically, you get quite different views. You find that our white civilised humanity originated from the fact that certain parts separated themselves from the Atlanteans and developed higher under other climatic conditions. Certain parts of the Atlantean population stayed behind just on the former stages, so that we have to observe remains of the different Atlantean races in the population of Asia and America. However, they have changed; they differ from the original Atlantean population.

We distinguish seven human sub-races within the Atlantean population. Five of these seven sub-races are in an ascending development. I only want to mention here that the Chinese are descendants of the fourth sub-race of the Atlantean population, and that the Mongolians are descendants of the seventh sub-race of this Atlantean population. Memory and language gradually developed. Only with the third sub-race, with the Primal Toltecs, language appeared clearly. There also appears a culture supported on memory. The fifth sub-race which we call the primal Semites and which had established its main residence in Ireland was the first germ of our present Caucasian or—as spiritual science also calls it—Aryan human race.

A part of this sub-race—it was very unlike the modern Jewish population but was still called Semitic rightly because of certain processes—moved to Asia and developed the intellectual culture which spread then over Europe, southern Asia and over the population of northern Africa. On the other side, around this centre is a belt of human population that had manifold remains in its character from inhabitants of former times, remains of the Atlanteans. All these inhabitants left behind descendants, and thus we can imagine that the train, of which I have just spoken surged to Asia, collided there with a population that was left from Atlantis and maybe from Lemuria, and formed the Malayan races then. With them, one can perceive a drowsy being and a prematurity concerning passions and sexuality. In such a way, the Indian-Aryan race developed from a choice branch of the Atlantean population, with mixing in of remains of the old population. It connected a certain dreamlike, clairvoyant being with a peculiar intellectual worldview. Perhaps, in no other worldview the clairvoyant view of deeper forces of nature and a system of thinking with such an architectural unity and pervasive astuteness were connected with each other. We find other new populations of quite different forms in the direction to the Middle East.

Moreover, another train of Atlanteans went to America—the spiritual-scientific worldview can prove this. There were rests of Lemurians and of Atlanteans who intermingled in many respects. This Indian population faces the European immigrants later. There two very different human developments collided. What lived in the ancient times, a completely different soul element, something clairvoyant, something of the spirit flowing through the whole world still lived in this Indian population. A speech is preserved to us that an Indian chief held at a clash of Indians and Europeans. He condemned the breach of promise by the Europeans. One had promised to the Indian population, after one had taken their residences from them, to give them other residences. He possibly said the following, oh you pale-faces, you do not understand what the Great Spirit teaches us. This comes from the fact that you pale-faces read everything that the gods say from books that the letters in your books tell you what is true. You promised us that you give us land again, but you have not kept your promise because your god does not teach you the truth and keeping your word. We know a god who speaks to us in the clouds, in the waves, in the rustling leaves, in flash and thunder. The god of the red man keeps his word. The god knows that he has to be loyal to the tribe.—This was a great speech. The Great Spirit was a rest of a human view that originated from a dreamlike consciousness, from inspirations of higher forces. Hence, at the same time it was closer to the divine, the springs of the divine.

The languages teach us something similar. If we compare the different human races, we find a quite different structure in the languages of this external belt of peoples. We find the old Atlantean structure in the Mongolian languages, and we find something of Atlantean origin expressed in the structure of certain African languages. They emphasise the nouns, and they express by prefixes what we express by inflexions. We learn from that that they originated from an excellently working memory. The Mongolian languages show that they originated at a time in which memory did no longer function in such a way, as it was the case once. There the verbs are more developed which already tend to the reason. The Atlantean did not at all talk, actually, from memory. Everything was present to him. Not before one starts forgetting, the verb forms in the language. I would like to say that a magnificent monument of the middle of the Atlantean culture has remained, and this is the Chinese language. This language has something purely composing and at the same time something original where in the sounds even something inside, mental and a certain relation to the outside world is expressed. If we studied certain parts of the population in the connection with it, we could understand this completely.

We can understand our race if we pursue it in two currents, which we can clearly, prove. There we have that current at first, which moves from the west, maybe from England to Asia. It probably gave cause for the Indian, the Near Eastern-Semitic, for the Indo-African-Semitic races as well as for the Arabian-Chaldean race. Then, however, we must imagine another current that did not progress so far which came maybe only to Ireland or Holland, or also to the area that the ancestors of the ancient Persians inhabited. There we have a belt of related population through the area of the Persians via the Black Sea to Europe.

Thus, we can verify two zones of human population. One extends from India over here and encloses the southern peninsulas of Europe; the other encloses the zones located to the north with different gradations. There we have the Aryan one and the different Semitic gradations in Asia and Africa; then in Greece and Italy the Greek-Latin population. However, we have to imagine them also in such a way that it originated from the mixture with the northern belt which also encloses the Persian population and everything that developed, like from undergrounds, the Slavic and the Germanic populations in the west, and that which provides the basis more or less of all, the ancient Celtic population. We can imagine that we had an ancient Celtic population in the west of Europe. This part of the current of peoples lies farthest to the west, while the Persian population is that part which went the farthest to the east. The Slavic and the Germanic peoples stand between; intermingled with the southern belt, these established the Greek-Latin race. You can prove it in the languages that a relationship of the population exists, which expresses itself the strongest in the deep relationship of the languages in the northern belt.

There we have languages that are completely different from that which constitutes the character of the Semitic-Egyptian culture. The structure of the Semitic-Egyptian languages express what developed in the fifth sub-race of Atlantis as a Primal Semitic culture. It is characterised by the first lighting up of the intellect in the human development. Here logic and intellect developed first. The former dreamlike clairvoyant element intermingled in the most different way, and the different religions formed. However, the Semitic language does not have an atomistic character like the Chinese one, but an analytic character. On the other hand, the Caucasian languages have a synthetic character.

We distinguish five human races. I leave it undecided whether the word is used rightly or wrongly. The ancient Indo-Aryans with their marvellous visionary thinking established the first culture. This culture preceded the Vedic culture. That is why there are no recordings of it. What you read in the Vedas is only an echo of the ancient visionary Indian culture. Then the ancient Persian culture comes as the second race, that population which preferably applies the intelligence to the external work. The ancient Indian culture has something unworldly. In these northern regions, we find human beings who enclose the world who want to conquer the world who use tools and the like. Hence, we see in this culture how there the consciousness develops that humanity has to achieve something that there is good and bad. Here Ormuzd and Ahriman confront themselves. Then we come to the Near East. There develops another race. What expresses itself in the structure of the Semitic language is the combinatorial, the mathematical, and the logical-conceptual aspect. This faces us in the architecture of Egypt; this is expressed in the pyramids and in the great thought structures, then in the marvellous science, in the astrological form of astronomy.

We have three sub-races now. We come now to Europe to the southern peninsulas. There we find that which flows from the north and expresses itself in old cultural peoples. We find that something develops that looks for the inner life. While the Egyptian builds up externally, with internal symbolism, the Greek starts erecting monuments and cultivating sculpture stimulated by the mystery dramas. However, the most significant action within this fourth sub-race or culture epoch is the rise of Christianity. The southern peoples are not able to understand this Christianity in its peculiar figure. In Greece, it is Grecized, in Rome it is Romanised and becomes state church. This happened while the fifth sub-race approached gradually in the Middle Ages. This is our own sub-race. It had the task to bring the culture down to the physical plane. This indicates that sense and reason is in the succession of races.

Still in another sense, sense and reason are in this racial development. The human being consists of three members according to his lower nature: of physical body, etheric body, and astral body. The physical body is that which we see with eyes, can touch with hands. The astral body is the bearer of our desires, passions, and instincts, of our emotions, affects, of rage and hatred. The etheric body is the bearer of the vital forces. The human ego lives in them. This expresses itself differently.

I immediately want to begin with the way in which it expresses itself in our present cultural epoch. It has developed the physical body most remarkably, elaborated it most marvellously. The body, the brain became the tool of the intellectual life and thinking. Gradually the body had to be conquered. If you were able to look back, you would see that during the Lemurian age the body looks like an awkward huge thing. The astral body is not yet able to move the limbs. The ancestors of the Lemurian age were clumsy. You see this still echoing in the Native American population. On one side, the instincts still fight because the human beings do not yet have the consciousness to penetrate themselves from the inside, they work on the body from the outside, they tattoo it because it does not yet appear finished to them. If we go up to the other races, we see the human being conquering the etheric body. The functions of life and nutrition developed, so that the human being becomes a conscious and autonomous being from an unaware one.

The human being gradually starts the campaign of conquest through his own being. The Lemurians conquered the astral body, the Atlanteans the life body, and our present humanity conquers the physical body. The conquest of the spiritual-mental forces follows, which is the task of our time. Thus, the racial development gets an even higher sense and we understand that it is a training of the developing human mind. We look back to areas where the human being is structured quite differently. Our souls embodied themselves at that time and got to know the phenomena of the external world. Later they returned to the earth in another race and learnt to look into the world in another way. Moreover, it goes on that way. The human being goes through race by race. Those who are young souls reincarnate in those races that remained on their former level.

Thus, that which lives as race and souls round us fits into each other organically and mentally. Everything gets a sense, becomes transparent, and becomes explicable. We approach the solution of these riddles more and more and we can understand that we have to go through other epochs in the future that we have to go other ways than the race made them. We must be clear in our mind that mental and racial developments are different. Within the Atlantean race our own souls lived which developed then upwards to a superior human race. This gives us a picture of the human development up to our time.

Hence, we also understand the principle to found the core of a general brotherhood without taking into consideration race, colour, social rank et cetera. I shall explain this thought in particular. I wanted to show today only how in the different figures the same being exists, namely in a much more correct sense than the natural sciences teach it. Our soul steps from stage to stage, that is, from race to race, and we get to know the significance of humanity if we look at these races. We learn to understand one thing more and more, namely how deep and true the saying is, “Somebody was successful, and he lifted the veil of the goddess of Sais. However, what did he see? He saw—miracle of miracles—himself!” We see ourselves everywhere and in the manifold figures.—This is self-knowledge! The great saying in the temple of the Greek school of wisdom comes true: human being, recognise yourself.

[Ladies and gentlemen present!

The last time I drew attention to the fact that I wanted to talk about Pythagorean teaching. Pythagoras had founded a school in Lower Italy. It was not so much a school, but rather a discipleship whose spiritual leader was Pythagoras. He formed a doctrine. We can no longer say how much of it belonged to Pythagoras and how much to his disciples.

The world view of the Pythagoreans emerges before us, and this shows itself to be one of the most profound world views we have. Since it is very important for us to really introduce the things we are dealing with, I would like to introduce a modern Pythagorean before I mention Pythagoras himself, a Pythagorean who lived in Germany himself and whose world view always seems to me like a forecourt to Pythagoras.

You can understand this world view much better if you are familiar with the works and views of Baron von Hardenberg - Novalis, a poet of a thoroughly mystical nature. No one who knows his writings will doubt this.

Take his "Apprentices at Sais". This is something that can only be understood in its esoteric meaning. But anyone who knows the personality of Novalis - he was born in 1772 and died in 1801, so he was 29 years old - will understand this. This Novalis seems to have remained the most innocent youth throughout his life. He seems to us more like the revelation of an unearthly individuality than an earthly personality. It is quite impossible to understand that this immersion, this contemplation, could have been acquired in his immense youth.

When we read his "Heinrich von Ofterdingen", we find that he drew from direct sources, from the sources of mysticism. He then incorporated these into his novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" and thus showed that he understood the mysticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If we look at his basic ideas, we will find a certain similarity with other mystics.

He searched for the "Blue Flower. People have often mocked this "Blue Flower. We will understand each other better if we remember Goethe's "Prophecies of Bakis", where he speaks of the serpent's thread and the flower, where he says that man can walk the path that is long and narrow. When man then walks this path, he sees knots before him. He also sees the knot in which lives are tied together. Behind him, he trails a snake. The snake disappears and the knot transforms into a flower in front of him.

This image, which Goethe repeatedly refers to, is egoism, the approach to the highest spirituality or deepest knowledge. The symbol for this is the "blue flower. It is also a symbol of that which arises for man as an entanglement of life when he progresses along the path of knowledge. It is this "Blue Flower" that Novalis has in mind for his Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

We also find this flower in Master Klingsohr, who can prophesy. The future lies open before him. Goethe says: The future also lies open before him who really has a complete overview of the past. [...] - Master Klingsohr reveals the future to Heinrich von Ofterdingen. This satisfies him to such an extent that he is able to see the individualized Blue Flower in the daughter, as he has progressed so far that he can see the highest in the female being.

Matilda dies away from Henry of Ofterdingen. He decides to die after his beloved. For him, reality turns into a dream. What he was previously inclined to regard as a dream, the higher spiritual world, is now reality. He no longer finds this highest in the individual being, but he

finds it in other beings as well. He finds a second girl. It is the same for him. He finds Mathilde again in Cyane. She is like a new embodiment of him. He lives a life of the afterlife.

We find the idea of this in his "Apprentices of Sais". A beautiful fairy tale is woven into it about the boy Hyacinth, who loves the girl Rosenblüthe. Only the trees and birds of the forest know of this love. Then we find Hyacinth changed. He is overcome by a longing to seek something deeper. He leaves Rosenblüthe without sufficient reason. Then he comes to the evil old man, who plants in him the longing to seek the mother of all things, or the veiled maiden. He sets off on his journey to the temple of Isis, comes upon an image, and when he unveils it, he finds nothing but roses. [He finds the beloved as the solution to the riddle, as the veiled image of Sais.

This is reminiscent of the higher concept of "Know thyself", as he expressed it in an epigram. He stands before the veiled image at Sais. He lifts the veil and - wonder of wonders - he finds himself. A magical individualism consists in the fact that one can find the infinite in the finite, [that one can turn the spirit into immediate reality].

So in Novalis we undoubtedly find a mystical personality. So if we assume that in Novalis we are dealing with a deep-seated, mystical nature, and if we then get to know him, he does not appear to us as a mystic, as he has just been described, but as a resurgent old Pythagorean disciple.

When we let Novalis pass us by, when he seems more like a memory, and when we then see how this touch of the earthly, how this personality nevertheless stands firmly in life, has tendencies that we would least expect to find in such romantically inclined natures, then we are referred to the Pythagoreans as to fleeting ghosts.

We must by no means equate this view and philosophical contemplation, as we have it of Romanticism in him, with the view of the other Romantics, with contemporaries of his who lack any depth. Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegel or Tieck, [E-T.A.] Hoffmann and so on must not be confused [with him]. But anyone who allows Novalis to have an effect on them will not be tempted to make such a confusion. What is astonishing about Novalis - despite his [poetic] nature - is that he is one of the most enthusiastic admirers of everything mathematical. He has a thoroughly educated, mathematical psyche, an immediate revelation of what he calls the magical in nature. In this he finds the law of the spirit. That which he who wishes to enter the higher regions would like to leave behind, we find in Novalis as the main thing, as that which led him to emphasize the magical in his [idealism]. In the concatenation of basic mathematical concepts he sees the most intriguing revelation of the mystery of the world. He sees free matter at the bottom of things. Mathematics is the foundation on which existence rests, it is therefore nothing other than the highest form, the purest form of spirituality.

If we find this as the basis of his view, then he appears to us as a representative of Pythagoreanism. We can understand Pythagoreanism much better if we imagine it like Novalis. The Pythagorean soul must be imagined in this way, then we arrive at where Novalis stands; [just as] Pythagoras was able to arrive at the view that the basic structure, the basic essence, the basic spirit of the universe is actually given in the connection between numerical quantities and spatial quantities in this harmony.

If we want to gain an insight into a Pythagorean soul from the first elementary beginnings, we must imagine it in the following way. The pupil was led up step by step to the knowledge to which he was to come. He was guided in a very careful way. The first was mathematical knowledge, the second astronomical. Astronomy was preferably mathematical. The regularity resulted from the numerical relationship in the universe. He was first introduced to these numerical relationships. Then he was gradually led on to the knowledge of man himself. The fulfillment of the desire "Know thyself" [came] last. First he was introduced to mathematics.

How can one imagine that man can actually come to the idea that mathematics is the spiritual foundation of the entire universe? How can this be imagined in the form of harmony, formed in space and time? If we immerse ourselves in those areas of space and time which outwardly already show a regular grouping, such as the movement of the celestial bodies, if we immerse ourselves in that, then we have basically given nothing other than an embodied mathematics, an embodied arithmetic, in this construction of the celestial vault that we perform in our minds.

No human being can actually find anything of a mathematical structure, of a spatial structure of geometric figures in the world and in reality, if he has not first formed these mathematical figures in his mind. If someone described a circle or an ellipse, we would not know what it is that he is describing as an object. We would be able to trace the line in the various places in space and connect these places. But we would not be able to connect a concept with the whole line that describes the object if we had not already formed the concept. We can draw a star and then think about what kind of line the star describes. But only then can we find the figure if we already have it in our minds. The same is also the case with other things, even if we take the numerical relationships. We will only recognize the objects outside in space in their certain mutual numerical relationships, in their numerical diversity, if we have formed these relationships in our minds. If we know that 2 x 2 = 4, then we can also recognize it outside in space. We would not be able to connect any concepts with reality, we would not be able to grasp them at all, they would pass us by like nothing, they would not be there for us at all, if we had not formed the images in a purely spiritual way in our psyche.

So it is that the Pythagoreans could say: That which I see outside must also be contained in a certain way in my mind. What emerges from the source point of my soul is the same as what I perceive outside as the primordial ground of the world itself. The Pythagoreans thought about this more deeply and said to themselves: "It is impossible that two things that are completely separate from each other, spirit outside and world inside, [merely] exist side by side [and do not agree]. The coincidence would only have meaning if what is in the spirit is exactly the same as what is outside in space. If the circle, the ellipse that I perceive within me, the numerical relationships, are the same as those outside, which I see in the outer world, then it makes no sense at all if [the Pythagorean] does not have something that he forms within himself. If he sees the spirit of things and has it within him, then it has only one meaning.

Therefore the Pythagorean did not initially think like the philosophers of the nineteenth century under the influence of Kant. He did not ask: How is it that my imagination inside me corresponds to the things outside? My experience is quite different. That is the unquestionable unity of what is outside and what is in my mind. This is how the Pythagorean thinks.

It makes no difference whether I take the ideas of the Pythagoreans' astronomy or apply the new ones. It doesn't matter at all. So when the Pythagorean sees the celestial body describing an orbit in the form of an ellipse, it is a direct experience for the Pythagorean that the ellipse that he perceives within himself and the ellipse that exists outside as the orbit of a star are not two ellipses, but only one. And that is experience.

Schelling also expressed this, and this makes the matter clear in the simplest way. He has taken up the "power of attraction that physicists have always [known]. They imagined that objects exert a force of attraction on each other. The earth attracts the moon, the sun attracts the earth. When the sun attracts the earth, it acts on the earth. It is difficult to attribute an effect to a body where it does not exist. But the fact is that when a body acts on the earth, it is on the earth. A body is where it acts. The boundary of light is not the boundary of the real sun. The sun is in the entire space where it exerts its gravitational pull. The space that the earth fills is also part of solar space.

Imagine this Schellingian idea as [already] underlying the Pythagorean doctrine. The human spirit fills the entire world space. It is not enclosed in a single organism. The spirit is where it perceives.

For the philosophers of the nineteenth century who followed Kant, the question is this: How is it that the mind perceives what is outside it? - The Pythagorean does not say this at all: How is it that the mind perceives that which is apart from it? The Pythagorean says: If the mind perceives an ellipse in the sky, then it is a fact that the mind is not enclosed in the organism, that it is not there where it perceives with the senses, but that it is there where it perceives [mentally]. The limit of the spirit is not the sense, but the spirit is where it perceives. - There is a separation between the numerical relationships in space and what exists in our head as numerical relationships, which does not exist for the Pythagoreans. The Pythagoreans do not recognize the idea that man is initially a sensual, finite being, enclosed with the psyche in a fabric that connects the senses with the outside world. This gives people today the impression that the mind is also enclosed in [a] housing.

When other philosophers take this for reality and ask: "How is it that we perceive external things?", the Pythagoreans take the opposite view. They do not ask: How is it that the mind is enclosed in such an organism? - It is perhaps better that I do not say "individual", but "individual being". This then leads to an understanding of a world view such as the Pythagorean one. It leads to an understanding that can only be grasped if one sees in the mathematical that which constitutes the basic structure in the universe, and which, if one thinks of the whole world as filled with spirit, constitutes the basic structure of the spirit itself.

So we actually have in the basis of the thing that can be perceived with the senses deep down, on a lower level, in the spatial-temporal of the universe, commonalities that can be expressed through spatial sizes and numerical ratios, that which appears to the spirit on a higher level. The spirit has a numerical, geometrical basis. The spirit has its origin where things are regular. The spirit grows out of the mathematically constructed world. Therefore [the Pythagorean] seeks the primordial grounds of existence in the mathematically constructed world.

I have pointed out that there is a difference between the Greek worldview, as represented by Heraclitus, and the Pythagorean one. At the time, I constructed my remarks in such a way that they came back to Goethe's basic view. I said then that Goethe says that the seed and the plant are one and the same being. The material seed contains everything that is still in it in complete concealment. It is the same as the fully developed plant. The plant is not in it, but it has the sense that in a spiritual way the plant is the same in every form as in another form, so that the plant with its foliage and petals, with its whole fruit and with all that is in it, is to be regarded as that which has become material, materially, which is in the seed in an ideal way. Goethe therefore says that the seed is the whole plant, except that the spirit is still concealed behind it. That which is ideal in the seed becomes material reality in the whole plant.

The same image can be applied to the whole world. One can understand the world by observing it in its highest state, by immersing oneself in its blossom and fruit, in the human soul, by studying the "Know thyself" and going to the human being. There, where the purely spiritual-soul then appears directly, i.e. in the deepening, in the direct immersion into the self, one can first look for a world view, a world view. But you can also examine a seed. You can find ways and means to examine the seed. One can assume that what lies in the seed is already indicated and that the world view that is gained from the human being is the highest. The Pythagoreans do not seek man where he is soul, nor where he appears as spirit, but where he is apparently not spirit at all, where he apparently is not at all. The Pythagorean seeks certain reality through indifferent numbers. And that is why he seeks the spirit where he already knows the spirit. That is why he also finds the primal source, the basic structure of existence, in mathematics.

I just wanted to say that this world view of the Pythagoreans can only be understood if one understands the immersion of Novalis, which must be understood mathematically - of Novalis, who was of a thoroughly poetic nature and as such was what literary history calls a "Romantic", yet was rooted in such laws that he could see strict mathematics as the primal source of existence. That is why the Pythagoreans, because their spirit was powerful enough, were able to find spirit in the relationships of numbers. They started from the lowest level of the spiritual. Just as the seed is not yet a plant, but can become a plant, so they ascended from the seemingly unspiritual to the spiritual.

This is what can make us understand the whole world view of the Pythagoreans. The Pythagorean worldview is usually presented as if it were the numerical aspect of the world that led the Pythagoreans to regard number as the origin of things. And one cannot quite imagine what they meant by that. I must confess that if we follow what is written in the textbooks and read that the Pythagoreans regarded number as the origin of all things, it would seem meaningless to me. Only if I imagine how it is in reality, if I assume that they grew up in a completely different theory of knowledge, can I understand what they meant. Their view is simply described by the word: the Pythagorean did not look for the spirit where it appears to be a sensual entity, but where he perceives it as something that fills the whole of space.

That is one side of the Pythagorean world view, that is the reason why they descended to numbers and geometric shapes. On the other hand, the reason is also because they found something in these numbers and geometric figures that they could address as spirit.

What do geometric or mathematical ratios mean? Anyone who can only imagine a circle or an ellipse when they are drawn on the blackboard cannot be said to have any idea of the real geometric or mathematical relationships. If he has to put five peas or beans on the table when he wants to imagine the number <>, we cannot say that he has an idea of the real numbers.

On the contrary, we are aware that what we call a circle, what we call an ellipse, can only be represented approximately in material reality. We know that the material circle we draw is only an approximation of what we can create in our minds. We also know that what the celestial bodies in outer space describe is only an approximation of a circle. However, it is the same law that governs the creation of the world as the law that governs us when we imagine a circle in our minds, when we no longer need to deduce the spiritual from the sensual. That is why mathematics would be the best thing to introduce us to the spiritual. This is also why the Pythagoreans placed the highest value on mathematics. So if you really want to recognize the spirit, you have to be able to disregard everything sensual. You must be able to realize that it is not what you draw on the blackboard with chalk that is a real circle, but what remains for the spirit without the chalk drawing on the blackboard. Using the salt cube, it was possible to show that the cube is something completely different from the [salt] cube. In this way, the pupils could be shown that the spiritual - also of other things - can only be understood if the sensual remains absent. This is easy to show with the salt cube. The spiritual content is not the same as the outer cube.

But if we understand this for the whole sum of world phenomena, if we understand that the spiritual can be detached from the material, then this leads us up to higher levels. Everyone admits that mathematics has nothing to do with the things of the world, but with the spiritual. But if this goes further up, people confuse the spirit with reality

A strange document on the confusion of the spirit with reality has just come out these days. A book has been published entitled "Kritik der Sprache" (Critique of Language) by Fritz Mauthner, which aims to show how all our knowledge floats in the air, how nothing is given to us but the sensory world, and if we disregard the sensory world, we have nothing more in our imaginary world than empty words.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is something that someone who is unable to detach the spirit of things at a higher level of reality, as he can do with mathematical entities, can very easily come to. He who has no intuition, who does not really have from the source point of his spirit what he has to hold up to things, who is sterile and barren, who cannot fill his soul with spiritual realities, believes that he has nothing more when he goes beyond [the sense world] than words. Instead of a "critique of knowledge, he writes a "critique of language.

The book comprises two volumes. It seems to me as if someone wanted to write a critique and had not mastered what he wanted to criticize. He confuses what the mind adds to the formations. What Mauthner gives would be - compared to what spiritual content can and should give - a critique of pencil drawing. It shows how much the pencil is capable of depicting circles. Thus sterile views cling to those who are unable to feel the true content. He does not know that the spirit gradually acquires the ability to ascend to the higher realms of existence and is aware of its difference from material things at every stage of spiritual life, just as the mathematician is able to detach the spiritual, the spiritual from things, i.e. to advance from what is not yet spirit to the immediate God in the world.

This was something that the Pythagoreans sought to achieve step by step by trying to lead the student from the lower to the higher. They were convinced that by ascending from the lower to the higher, man was not merely having an experience within himself, but was fulfilling a task in the universe itself. They were convinced that he was doing something in the world, they were so convinced that they only compared the ascent with the numerical relationships themselves. They said to themselves: The individual human being who perceives is apparently a duality. The perceiver and the perceived. These two great opposites stood for the Pythagoreans at the basic level of their table of knowledge.

But they said to themselves: All this is only apparent because man does not stand on the highest level of perfection, but on the lower levels. The perceiving and the perceived must be overcome if they are to become one. Thus the Pythagorean imagines that, just as now in human cognition, unity triumphs over duality, over what is separate in the world, the Pythagorean must imagine everything according to numerical relationships and specifically again in such a way that what is separately a duality presents itself to him as unity.

Now the Pythagorean is convinced that the whole multiplicity of the world, the fact that there are many things in the world, derives only from the fact that man first sees the appearance, not the thing, that he does not see things as they are, but that he sees them as they are not, because of the limitations of his own existence. He sees that this multiplicity, when he overcomes appearance, then presents itself in reality, in truth, as unity. What man ultimately achieves is the primordial unity, the primordial One of the world, and the Pythagorean also sees this as the foundation from which everything springs.

This is what makes it possible for man to perceive something in space. This is the general unity of the world, but man can only gradually ascend to it. What is revealed last is there first, and that is because it is a member of this multiplicity. After it has been placed in a corner for a while, it integrates itself into the world structure and becomes one with the world harmony. The numerical harmony, the geometric regularity of the world view embraces the human being. And so he finds it by integrating himself into the structure of numbers. Therefore, the Pythagorean can say that all good, all virtue consists in man overcoming appearances and finding numerical, geometric regularity, whereby he integrates himself into the great world existence.

Thus man appears to himself like a tone in harmony, and because he appears to himself like a tone in harmony, he has to give himself the right tone and the right proportion. He does not fulfill a task for himself, but fulfills a moral task. If he does not fulfill it, then he is not in the right numerical proportion. He has something to [contribute] not to himself, but to the whole structure of the world. Through every transgression, man brings upon himself an unlimited responsibility, and, recognizing this, he should strive more and more to attain the mood that he has to fulfill in the great music of the world.

So to the Pythagorean, what is spread outside in space and time appears as a moral task itself. For the Pythagoreans, the moral task is not to be understood as a mathematical one on a higher level. The mathematical task is that he discovers the world space, but in such a way that he is thereby integrated, that he is thereby integrated like a tone in the world music, like a number in the law of numbers. He then discovers that when he does something - because he is not just his own redeemer - it is not just important for himself, but something that concerns the whole universe. The spirit is not only in me, but also where it works. He then sees that the spirit not only has to work on its own moral perfection, but also on the harmonization of the whole universe. When the Pythagorean imagines the harmony of the universe in such a way that he thinks of the world as permeated by musical tones, by music of the spheres analogous to music itself, this happens because music is based on tonal relationships.

The Pythagorean translates this by saying: Just as the tonal relationships become perceptible to our senses as a harmony of tones, there is also a harmony of tones, a music of the spheres in the world, which acts like the numerical relationships in the world. But if it does not find the right numerical relationship, the right tonal relationship to the world within itself, then it disturbs the harmony of the world.

This is why the insights of the Pythagoreans had to lead to the strictest educational system. The Pythagorean is aware, when he teaches the individual this or that, that he is taking upon himself a responsibility, not only towards that person, but towards the whole universe.

Answer to the question:

Everyone's special disposition enables them to gain knowledge of the spirit. The Pythagoreans endeavored to create this possibility for everyone.

[Mathematical ideas are only easy to prove because they are simple, almost without content.

For those, however, who are not at all suited from the outset to immerse themselves in the content of the world, the best and safest school will be to go through mathematics. Plato therefore demanded a thorough knowledge of mathematics from his students. Otherwise it might not have worked for everyone. I would like to explain this to someone who has gone through the Pythagorean school: Let's imagine a person who can only feel. Such an organism would be able to perceive geometric shapes and also be able to conceive of numbers. In fact, blind and deaf people have been taught these relationships and turned into accomplished mathematicians. Such an organism can also arrive at music in a mathematical way. The numerical relationships only appear to him in a shadowy way. Now let us imagine that such a person suddenly hears. He will then perceive the same thing that he had previously understood. He now perceives it with his ears. It is the same with the blind. Through an explanation of the vibrations of the world, he can get an idea of the colors through the numerical relationships. The Pythagorean should now also bring the higher senses to rise. It is the same thing as when a mathematician comes to a musician who is constructing his work himself and calculates it for him. Then the musician can say: "Stay away from that. If you have the necessary receptivity, you can have perceptions even without mathematical representation.

I have contrasted two currents. One current within Hellenism, which starts from Heraclitus, and the other, which starts from Pythagoras. Heraclitus and Pythagoras stand before us as two who have the same object. Heraclitus, as it were, as the composer, Pythagoras as the one who mathematically calculates his subject. It is the same with us as with Pythagoreanism. You first have to teach the blind and the deaf and then you can lead them to higher levels.

Mathematical concepts devised by humans are often confirmed in the outside world. In the case of electricity, people calculate that this or that must be one way or the other. If you then carry it out in reality as an experiment, it must agree [with the calculation].

I would like to cite a famous conversation between Schiller and Goethe. Goethe and Schiller left a scientific lecture together and got into a conversation about what they had heard. In the course of the conversation, Goethe took a piece of paper and drew a symbolic plant, an ideal plant, saying: "This plant is actually in every plant. Every plant is actually an individual embodiment of this general plant. To which Schiller replied: Yes, but that's just an idea! To which Goethe replied: But then I see my ideas with my eyes.

[Or let's take a] triangle [it is presumably drawn]: The angles add up to 180 degrees. Because we have seen a triangle, we can form a quadrilateral by connecting the blue one with the green one. This can be extended in the mind. We can move from the triangle to the square. But we cannot go from one shade of color to another. We can only perceive sensually what belongs to the world of the senses. In mathematics, the spiritual is the easiest to grasp. The mathematical is the most spiritual.

You don't know how to perceive sounds from numerical relationships? Sounds are not perceived [with the ears], only thought. Composers who become deaf therefore only have a surrogate. It is the same as when we deduce one mathematical entity from another. It is not [sensory] perception, but a mental experience.

The sensual is transformed [into the spiritual], it is elevated.

Studying mathematics makes no difference, but recognizing the essence of mathematics does. The most superficial person just splashes and splashes around in the primordial being. Someone can also have studied mathematics. Goethe studied little mathematics. But no one understood the essence of mathematics more than he did. Goethe arrived at his magnificent world of metamorphoses precisely because he had such a great idea of the nature of mathematics, even though he was only able to arrive at the [gap in the transcript] theorem.

He who can make razors may not be able to shave, and he who can shave usually cannot make razors. Thus the mathematician who knows mathematics [only] in form need not know its meaning and its application to the primal being.

We have seen that about eight hundred years before the beginning of our era an empire spread out from Rome, which originally took its origin from a kind of priestly kingship; how this priestly kingship then passed through about two and a half centuries into a republic. Then we see the Roman state spreading through five centuries over the whole world then under consideration. So we see about seven hundred years before Christ's birth in Rome a king ruling, who is clothed at the same time with the highest priestly dignity of that time. This office has been preserved. The bearer of it, to whom the royal dignity belonged in the older times, before there were secular kings in Rome, was called Pontifex Maximus. So we see a Pontifex Maximus standing at the head of the Roman state, in the rise of this state. We then see how the dignity of the Pontifex Maximus is gradually lowered, so that only the priestly forms remain to him. We see that the Rex, the king still exists, but is actually only a shadow of the original personality. Now we see the republic expanding more and more and in the time when Christianity is founded in the East, we see in Rome again a personality having all authority, all power in his hands in the emperor Augustus. He finds it appropriate, necessary at that time, to have conferred upon him, among other offices of the Republic, the dignity of Pontifex Maximus. Thus, at the beginning of our era in Rome, we again have the Pontifex Maximus with the supreme power. But this is a Pontifex Maximus, a high priest, whose power is not based on the priesthood, but whose power is based solely on his temporal power.

And we see a few centuries, about five hundred years later, this worldly power of the Roman ruler completely destroyed. But instead we see again a Pontifex Maximus, a high priest, a Roman bishop, the later pope, who again bears the dignity of the Pontifex Maximus. And about the year 800 A.D., the prince who is most mentioned, who ruled over those who overthrew the secular Pontifex Maximus in Rome, received the secular royal crown from this Pontifex Maximus. He completely subjugated the secular rule to the priestly rule, to the priestly power. And now begins the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire.

So we see a transformation taking place in history. We see that the only thing that has remained, that has continued, is the dignity of the chief priest in Rome. All around, changes of a world-historically drastic importance have taken place, which one must also look at from a higher point of view in order to understand them completely.

We will have to ask ourselves above all: how did this change take place at the time in which we are now, in which Christianity took its beginning, that is, at the beginning of our era? How did it come about, on the one hand, that a worldly ruler had complete dominion over the world of that time, and that this immense power was completely destroyed a short time later? that the people on whom this power was based ceased to play a role, to be a power? How is it that five hundred years after the beginning of our era the Roman emperorship was destroyed, and that in Rome the Roman priest sat as a prince, with as much power over souls as the Roman emperor, the Caesar, once had in worldly relations?

There are two great currents that bring this about, two currents of such importance and significance as few have in history. On the one hand, it is the spread of Christianity from the East, and on the other hand, it is the wandering wars of the Germanic tribes. The Roman Empire is threatened from two sides: in spiritual relation from the East and in worldly relation from the North. Everything that used to make up the greatness of the Roman Empire was no longer there in a certain respect. But something else was there. The outer forms of this Roman empire had remained. What had remained was that which constituted the actual significance of this Roman Empire, that which originally determined the greatness of the Roman world empire. The Roman thinking, the Roman world view with regard to the external institutions had remained. We shall see to what degree these were preserved. It is true that all former content had been driven out of this empire. But the mere form, the outer dress had remained. And poured into this form was something else, namely Christianity, which now appears in the same forms as Roman emperorship. That on which the rule of the Romans was based had been destroyed by the Nordic peoples. This is a peculiar story, because at least as much of the Roman empire has remained as has perished. And what has remained of it is told by the history of the Catholic Church, what has remained of it is told by what we can experience every day. Go into a courtroom and see how people are accused, defended and how justice is done. That is Roman law. This law was created in Rome and still exists today. We live in institutions that are completely permeated by the views of this Roman Empire. Everything that we still think about legal, property and ownership relationships, about family relationships and so on, can be traced back to the old Roman Empire, even though the people from whom all this emerged lost its external power and importance in world history five hundred years after the birth of Christ.

We have described the spread of Rome over the globe, we have seen how from this then center of the world Rome extended its dominion into all known countries then under consideration. But we have also seen on what actually the possibility was based that Rome became so powerful. We have gradually seen the Roman people in its whole development, and we have seen that with a certain necessity from the whole arrangement and the whole character of this people, the kind developed, how this people founded its world domination. At the same time we have seen how the decline of the Roman world dominion had to come out of this very way, and this is so closely connected with the origin that we have to use the same thoughts that we used when we spoke of the origin. We have seen that the Roman landed property, acquired in immense greed, had to increase the wealth immeasurably, and on the other hand had to produce a poverty, likewise increased immeasurably, so that we see luxury and wealth on the one side and discontent on the other side.

We have also seen on what all that was based, by which Rome became great. We have seen what it meant to be a Roman citizen. We need to get into that mindset. We have seen how the cives, the Roman citizens, had their interest in the state, how every Roman citizen felt called to have a say, to participate, how the voice of the individual came into consideration. This is expressed in the way Rome was governed, how all the offices were conceived in such a way that the power to govern was in the hands of the entire citizenry. Those who administered the empire during the republican period of the Romans were nothing other than administrators of civic power. They were entrusted, for a period of one year, but also for other periods, with what constituted the importance of their office. A Roman citizen never thought otherwise than that what the praetor did was actually for his benefit and that the praetor did it only as his representative. The Roman considered the consul, the quaestor, the praetor as a substitute. And on what was this based? It was based on the fact that the shortest possible election periods were introduced, so that basically no one ever held an office for a long time. There was nothing other than trust between those who were elected and those who voted. There could be no mistrust between a ruling personality and the people. Incidents could occur during the brief reign of a Tribune, but on the whole this government was entirely based on trust. It was a delegated power, and the Roman understood that. He understood what it meant that he was the master and that the other, to whom the power of government was delegated, conducted it only by proxy. This is evident from the way the Roman was the member of a legal people. Only in later times it became somewhat different. Try to ask an educated person today - he may even be very educated - what is the legal difference between the term "property" and the term "possession". These are two terms that come from Roman law. I am convinced you can go far and wide, even among people who have studied a lot, and they will hardly be able to tell you the difference. If you had asked a Roman peasant, he would certainly have known the difference between possession and ownership. Just as the Ten Commandments were learned in the Middle Ages, so every Roman boy learned the twelve tables of the law in school. The Romans were a people of law, and. in flesh and blood the law went over to them.

Now the Roman rule extended over immense areas and many provinces. You can imagine that such a state structure can only hold together in the way we have come to know it, as long as it does not exceed a certain size. But at the moment when the many provinces were conquered, this could no longer be so. The difference between the original Roman state and the provinces appeared. The Roman citizenship was denied to the provinces. The provinces have no rights, they are subjugated. This goes hand in hand with the other stages of development, with the expansion of large-scale landownership and the related problems of inheritance. It goes hand in hand with the emergence of an enormous proletariat. The proliferation of the proletariat is connected with the fact that the old army of citizens was gradually transformed into an army of mercenary troops recruited by individual leaders such as Marius and so on. Thus we see that next to the old Roman citizen a kind of military power developed, which is docile to the one who can just win the favor of this military power. We further see that people like Gracchus are trying to stop the fall of the Roman Empire by creating a kind of middle party. I have already described the Gracchian movement to you. Now it is still important that the younger Gracchus wanted to create a middle party. - This party was to consist of people who had been senators and had left. So it was a kind of knighthood. It was this knighthood that had been enmityed by the proletarians.

Now something very special had happened in Rome at the time when the Caesar power was coming up. This knighthood was to form a power against the great landowners, against the so-called optimates. The old agrarian laws were to be renewed. No one should have more than five hundred acres of land, at most two hundred and fifty acres for adult sons, and at most one thousand acres. The other land was to be given to this middle class as smaller estates. In this way, it was believed that a middle class would be created between the large landowners and the proletariat. This failed, however, because the proletariat had become suspicious and because it did not want to tolerate a party between itself and the actual owners. In the end, the middle party also joined the Optimates. Thus we now have the proletariat on one side and a kind of party of order on the other. This has emerged in recent times. The republican power has passed very gradually, almost unnoticed, into the Caesarian power. Octavius, the Roman emperor, was himself a kind of republican ruler, and he gradually rose to - one cannot say - dignity, for quite by necessity this peculiar fullness of power of Octavius-Augustus emerged from the Roman conditions. He simply continued the old Roman conditions, had all the offices gradually transferred to him. And that he was able to fill these offices as a kind of autocrat came from the fact that the difference between the Roman conditions and those in the province outside had become so great. In the province, people had long since ruled in a kind of noblemanly way. The Roman citizens did not dislike this at all. They felt themselves to be Roman citizens, and they were not at all concerned that those outside in the province should have the same right as they. So they were satisfied with the fact that from Rome a kind of absolute governmental power developed over the province. In particular, the Roman autocrats had all the so-called proconsular powers in the provinces transferred to them. Thus it happened that the first consuls were rulers of their own kind and power. In Rome they knew how to maintain the power that had been transferred to them as in earlier times, and outside in the sense of holding the provinces to the state. Thus developed, one can say with agreement of the Roman citizenry, the Roman violence.

And then, during the Caesar period, came the following. It was actually so that by the absolute power in the provinces the Caesars had appropriated the entire tax institution and the entire military power. Therefore, they were able to draw enormous revenues from the provinces. Thus, in addition to the Roman state treasury, a kind of imperial treasury developed. And with the Octavian power, the Roman-Caesarian autocracy developed in the following way: It was the Roman citizens who agreed that everything that had to be done in the province could no longer be done with the Roman treasury. These were often things that had become necessary. But even these could no longer be paid from the state treasury. The income did not flow into the treasury, but into the treasury of the Caesars. And so it happened that the Caesars could raise themselves to a kind of benefactors. Thus the Caesarian authority and power developed, and all other offices had to sink down to a kind of shadow offices. From within, the Roman Caesar power conquered the power in the state. And so we understand that basically only the first emperors were true Romans. We understand that later, basically, there were not real Romans sitting on the chair of the Caesars, but people who had been elected in the provinces, and who, like Hadrıan and Caracalla, were able to seize power. From the periphery, Rome was fed to absolutism. Thus, by a kind of inner necessity of development, what had been distributed among the Roman citizens passed into the hands of an autocrat. It is now quite natural that the whole Roman system of law and concepts is transferred to the one inner center. What was formerly the responsibility of the Roman citizens is now the responsibility of individual officials, not only in the provinces but also in Rome itself.

There is something going on that one must understand if one wants to understand the times correctly. If we look back for a moment to Greece and to Rome in the time of the old kingship, we will see that everywhere a direct relationship between the rulers and the ruled is involved. Whether this relationship of trust was formed in this or that way, it was a natural relationship from the older times, from which we started in the last historical consideration, because they were recognized in this or that way by the governed, so that one believed in them. In principle it was like this. The one who ruled had to acquire certain qualities, especially in the older priestly states. There nobody believed in divine powers floating beyond the world. But one believed in a kind of divinization of man, because one looked for the principle of development in man. The priest-king in Rome was recognized only if he had acquired spiritual and moral qualities of the gods, if he had developed inwardly. It was possible to acquire this, it was possible to become a kind of divinized person who deserved veneration. It was not a relationship of subservience, it was trust. That's what everybody who knows things has to say. That was based on something that was always there in the heart, and it continued to plant itself in the Republic.

But in the way Roman law developed, it was capable of completely erasing this personal, living relationship of ruler and ruled. It was capable of replacing the personal abstract, thought relationship. If you could go back to those times of Rome, you would see that he who sat in judgment as praetor at Rome, even if he had the twelve table laws before him, he could still do something based on trust through personal insight. Something still depended there on the personality. That became quite different later. Later, the whole legal system gradually became a purely abstract system of thought. The only thing that mattered was to interpret the law according to its paragraphs by logical sharpness. The jurist should be a mere thinker, a merely logically trained man. Thinking was the only thing that mattered. Nothing of the immediate life should flow into it, nothing of the mind and nothing of personal influence. Only the letter was to be followed. And the law was interpreted more and more according to the letter. It was only officials who had to handle the letter outside in the provinces and later also in Rome. There it was a question of studying the paragraphs and to decide apart from every immediate life only by thoughts - and this went over to the sophistic thoughts. The whole way of thinking, which expressed itself in the administration and government, had assumed something, which treated the whole institutions like a calculating example. This you must hold fast, and then you will understand what it means to say that the whole Roman life had been transformed into a system of dogmas. The Roman state, which had created a law out of the free decision, out of the soul of the citizens, had gradually transformed it into dogmas. At the time of the emergence of Christianity, personal government was no longer considered, but only written law. It was a real dogma law. The Caesars could be taken here and there, all that mattered to them was to squeeze the whole state into a legal system that could be stretched tightly from a center point. The whole Roman state was gradually dogmatized. We see it divided into smaller areas headed by administrators of a juridical nature. These areas were again grouped together into dioceses. Thus we see the Roman state gradually taking on a form that we later see again in the division that the Catholic Church adopted. It was not Christianity that created these forms; this was done entirely according to the template of the Roman dogmatized state.

Christianity transplanted itself from the East into this state, with the whole appearance that you know now. Of course, we have to deal with personalities. But we cannot deal with individual Roman emperors. Basically, this history is also rather boring. It is perhaps sufficient if we mention Caligula - Commissar Boots. But one thing is important. We have to realize what became of or with the Roman culture. This Roman culture had something that will remind you of the culture of another time. I would like to describe to you a personality who is typical, representative, and who can be cited here for comparison, that is Lucian. He came from Asia and is introduced as a very special light. He tells us about himself in a remarkable work "The Dream". I mention this, not because it is a significant literary product, but because it can be considered a characteristic sign of the way of thinking of the Roman Empire of that time. Two female figures appeared to him in a dream, one was art, the other was education. Art demanded that he strive for hard work. The education demanded nothing of all this. He only needed to acquire a few tricks of the trade, how to persuade people as well as possible. And in ancient Rome, talking meant as much as writing newspapers does today. So he said to himself, why should I follow Phidias, why Homer? I'll remain a poor guy. He followed the second female figure and became an itinerant speaker, a speaker of a very peculiar kind, a speaker with no educational basis. In those days, education meant speaking to people without knowing anything, without having studied seriously, just as one writes in the newspaper today.

That's how he went out into the world. And now we see how he talks about religion and politics, how he appears as a personality of whom history reports nothing, but who was able to lift the speech in a conversation, as in an editorial, up to heaven. Everywhere he was active in this way. He came as far as France, was a personality without support, without inner content and substance. This was the nature of education in the great Roman Empire of that time. These were the educated. The one who had a core, like Apollonius, a contemporary of Lucian, could not come to any kind of considerable importance. It was quite impossible at that time. But the whole wide empire sighed. It was the discontent and immorality from which one suffered. I cannot describe to you the kind of amusements of a gruesome and immoral nature. A third of the year was spent in gladiatorial games, in bullfights or in shows of the most boisterous kind. And this spread more and more. On the one hand we have extreme luxury, and on the other hand we have poverty and misery that is indescribable.

Now you see how it came to this, how in this whole Roman empire an element gained more and more spreading, which differed from all others in that it had more seriousness, that it had a deeper content. That was Judaism. The Jews could be found everywhere in the Roman Empire at that time. It would be quite unhistorical if you wanted to believe that at that time the Jews were limited only to Palestine. In the whole of North Africa, in Rome and in France, everywhere you can find the Jews already at that time. Their religion was still much more substantial than what the education of the Roman time offered. It existed next to the currents of lower spirit. By the fact that the Romans came into all world, they spread also the cult, the sacrificial acts, the holy acts of the different provinces. In Rome one could see Persian, Arabian, Egyptian services. This resulted in a tremendous externalization.

In the Roman Caesar period religion came to such a degree of externalization that it cannot be compared with anything earlier. The priest of the older times was a kind of initiate, after he had previously overcome everything lower. Then he was also called a divinized personality. This was achieved in the various schools of different countries. As far as this dignity was exalted - it was one of the most sacred of antiquity - it was now lowered. It was so that the Roman Caesars were revered as so-called initiates, even divinely worshipped. Lucretia even attained divine veneration, because with her, prepared by external actions and training, an initiation had been accomplished.

But this was entirely external. When Augustus had assumed the title Pontifex Maximus, he had outwardly assumed everything that had formerly been the inward sign of the priests. Because it had lost all connection with its origin, it had also lost all meaning and the right relationship.

This was the situation in Rome at the time when it received a complete renewal of its religious outlook from the East. A renewal of the religious view came, which we do not need to describe according to the content, because we are not presenting a history of religion, but a general history, but which we must describe according to the outer forms. Above all, a wisdom religion was transplanted. The first propagators of this Christian religion were indeed the most learned, the deepest and most significant men of that time. They had looked up to the founder of Christianity, from the whole ground of this learning. Read them: Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and so on, and you will see what they accomplished in wisdom in the scholarship of that time. They put all that at the service of this new idea. All they were trying to do was nothing other than a complete renewal of religious feeling, linked at the same time to a penetration of the whole human being.

Now imagine that while in Rome over there everything had become externality, all religiosity had been draped around Caesar like a cloak, and everything was talked about with admixture of mockery, as Lucian did, there the religious was to be renewed with renunciation of all worldliness, merely out of the innermost of man, of the human mind. And the religious is renewed in such a way that deeply disposed, most learned men are placed in the service of this idea. are placed at the service of this idea. It was so - this must not be misunderstood - that the people of the first Christianity were not people like the ordinary members of the masses of people, but they were the most clever ones of that time. This spread with lightning speed, because the whole religion had nothing of asceticism, nothing of otherworldliness about it. The people in the immediate everyday life took it up. Everything that had been perceived as Roman, everything that had led to luxury and well-being in Rome, was foreign to the core of this religion. You can see what was understood and grasped by the whole man, by the man of everyday life, through this confession, which spread with great speed, if you read the description of the Christian principle in Tertullian, who says: We Christians know nothing that is foreign to human life. We do not withdraw from everyday life, we want to bring something to man as he is everyday, we want to represent the world, we want to enjoy what is in the world. Only we do not want to know about the debaucheries of Rome.

And to show how these Christians lived together, where the Roman Empire had not yet destroyed the market dominions, I need only quote the words from the Acts of the Apostles, not as a sermon and not as an admonishing word: "But the multitude of the faithful were of one heart and one soul. Neither did anyone say of his goods that they were his, but all things were common to them . . . Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as had fields, or houses, sold them, and brought the money of the things sold, and laid it at the apostles' feet; and they gave to every man his necessities. But Joses, surnamed of the apostles Barnabas, of the family of a Levite of Cyprus, had an accker, and sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet." This is not a sermon, this is a description of what was intended, and in many cases realized. This was what was opposed to the Roman state life. That was one reason why Christianity was introduced with such speed. That is why Christianity so quickly entered the hearts of those who had nothing to hope for. Not only did they hear at that time that there was no dogma, it was the living word, the living action that they felt.

The one who spoke, spoke what he knew and had recognized as truth. He could say it today in one form and tomorrow in another. There was no established Christian dogma. It was the attitude, the inner life, that held this Christian community together. And that was what the first Christians preached. It was also why, in the early years of Christianity, people freely discussed the truth back and forth. There is no freer discussion, no freer debate than was present in the early days of this Christianity. There is only a little by little talk of a violence. The important thing to take into account, which then later leads to the rape, which leads to the emergence of the dogmatism of Christianity in the first place, is the fact that the Roman Empire was dogmatized. The whole Roman Empire was transformed into a dogma system. One could not conceive of anything other than matters of understanding, nothing other than stiff, abstract dogma. Thus it came about that the first Christians were persecuted, but that they grew more and more in importance, and that the Caesars, after Constantine's action, and the Constantines themselves, were forced to recognize the Christians. But how did they recognize them? They let them grow into the Roman state, into that which was filled with the dogma and temporal power that were founded in the Roman state. For this it had to put all its influence at the disposal of the Roman rulers; and the original division passed into the bishoprics and dioceses.

It is not to be wondered at that in 325 the Nicaean Council turned out as it just did. At that time, the two currents of Christianity were still opposed to each other in the presbyter Arius and Athanasıius, who was educated entirely in the Roman spirit. Arius believed in the gradual development of man. He saw it as unlimited; he called it divinization. Man can resemble God; that is true Arianism. This was opposed by the Roman dogmatist Athanasius, who said: "The divinity of Christ must be raised above all that is connected with humanity to the abstractness, the otherworldliness of the dogmatism that gradually developed in the Roman Empire. Thus, Arian Christianity turned into Athanasian Christianity, and the latter won. What was important for the Roman Caesar? Later, he himself converted to Christianity, but not to Athanasian Christianity, but to Arian Christianity. He knew, however, that Athanasianism could at least seemingly support the old Roman Empire. Christianity was to become a support of the Roman Empire; this was the important question that was decided in the beginning of the 4th century. At the same time, however, this was the period of world history when the Germanic tribes had become more and more powerful, and it was no longer of any use to support the old Roman Empire through transformation and remodeling; it was swept away by the Germanic tribes. We will talk about this next time, how the Germanic tribes overthrew the old Roman Empire.

Then we still want to show how the Roman Empire was still a power in the last death twitch. This was the task of transforming the doctrine of Christianity in such a way that this doctrine took on a political form and was suitable to be the carrier of a political system. Powerful was this idea, however, which at that time the leading Christianity knew how to take out of the original Christianity. Power was what it added to the Roman Caesar idea and the transformed Christianity. Power was. The political system was so powerful that when Germania destroyed this Roman Empire, when the Germanic land territory spread more and more, the so-called important ruler of the beginning Middle Ages, Charlemagne, received the imperial crown from the hands of the Pope, the Pontifex Maximus. Such were the effects when little remained of the old Roman Empire. You see how peculiarly the destinies of the world are interlinked, you see that we must know above all that we are dealing with a political power throughout the Middle Ages, because the Roman idea of the state flowed into the original Christianity. The actual Christianity was not inserted into the Roman idea of the state; and it was always the case that Christianity in monasticism rebelled against the political form of Christianity.

An idea is connected with it. It is an idea that is difficult to grasp because it was not based in the original Christianity at all. You will find nothing of monasticism in Christianity, because this kind of isolation, of withdrawal from the world, was completely foreign to it. To the one who took Christianity seriously, the form, the political form, was foreign. So, in order to lead the religion of Christianity, he withdrew to the monastery. Everything that has asserted itself as such associations, as monasticism, through the centuries - even if it degenerated, because the Catholic Church wanted to suppress every such attempt - that was a living outcry of Christianity against political power. Thus we have the development of power.

Now we still have to recognize what significance the Germanic element has in this time, to recognize what role Christianity plays in the Germanic element. We also still have to recognize what is developing out of the old Roman Empire and to see how this old Roman ruin is collapsing, but how something came out of it under which the peoples had to groan for a long time. It begins with the call for freedom and ends with the suppression of freedom. It is the call that everyone should respect each other as equals, and it ends with everyone being oppressed. It is strange that in our time historians have found themselves defending Caracalla because he gave the so-called equality to the whole Roman Empire. He, as one of the most insignificant and harmful Caesars, made those who were outside in the provinces equal to the Romans. But, he then oppressed them all together! This is the shape that the original Roman liberty took.

When we see that the destiny of freedom can be such, then we really gain from history what we can call a kind of education through history. Then we learn that there is a real rock, like Peter had, a rock based on the original founder, on which human development can really be built. This rock is and must be: human freedom and human dignity. These can be suppressed at times, so strongly suppressed, as it happened in the old Roman empire by the conditions, which can be compared with few. However, the education of man to freedom is given in history. This is an important fact, that when violence ruled in ancient Rome, in the summit, at the same time the foundation was submerged, and the whole structure collapsed, so that it must be said of freedom that, however deeply it is suppressed, to it and from it the true word applies:

The old overthrows, time changes,

And new life blossoms from the ruins.

When we think of all the achievements of the spiritual life, all the insight into the spiritual world and conceptions of the universe which have come to birth during the course of human existence, we have, on the one side, a picture of great and significant progress in the evolution of mankind on the Earth; and when this progress is investigated by Spiritual Science, it becomes clear that the human being—the single individual—participates in this general progress in that he passes through the successive epochs and time-periods in reincarnations; in this way he is able not only to preserve everything that his soul has assimilated in ancient and more recent times, but also to play a real part in the whole evolutionary process. Thus when a man has lived as a being of body and soul in one epoch of culture, he does not vanish from the field of evolution, but remains, in order again to take part in what Earth-existence has later become. In a general sense, progress of this kind is certainly to be perceived. But many of our studies will remind us that this progress is not so straightforward a matter that it could be said to begin with the simple and the primitive, rising from thence into the heights; on the contrary, it will be found that progress—indeed the whole process of evolution—is full of complication.

The First Post-Atlantean epoch of culture after the great Atlantean catastrophe was that of ancient India. Its sublimity and power of vision into the spiritual worlds have never since been equalled, nor will its heights be reattained until the Seventh Post-Atlantean epoch—after the Fifth and Sixth have run their course. Thus in certain forms of spiritual life there is a decline, followed again, in due course, by an ascent. Graeco-Latin culture, for instance, was a most noble expression of the inner union existing between the Greeks and their Art, and of the wise ordering of civic life in Greece and Rome, whereby a certain harmony in the conditions of life on the physical plane was created. But an utterance of a great Greek is also indicative of the character of this epoch: “Better it is to be a beggar in the Upper World than a king in the realm of the Shades.” This indicates that in an epoch of golden prime on the physical plane, men had only very limited consciousness of the significance of the spiritual world lying behind and beyond the physical plane. Since that time the intensity of the union between the human being and life on the physical plane has waned, together with the noblest fruits of that union; on the other hand, however, mankind begins, gradually and perceptibly to ascend once again to the spiritual worlds. This will serve as an illustration of the complicated course taken by human evolution. When emphasis is laid on the blessings and high lights of one particular epoch, this most certainly does not imply that lesser value is to be attached to other epochs which lack certain characteristics. Although we speak again and again of all that Christianity has brought into the world, we know that its impulse is only beginning and that the spiritual heights attained in the East before the coming of Christianity, have not again been reached. All this must be remembered, because there must be no thought or suggestion that in bringing forward the merits of one epoch, we do less than justice to the greatness and significance of others. In this sense I ask you to pay attention to a difference that is neither a merit on the one side nor a failing on the other: I want simply to describe a certain difference between pre-Christian, Oriental culture and Christianity (not Pagan or even ancient Hebrew culture)—a difference which becomes clear when insight into Christianity has been deepened by Spiritual Science.

In typically Oriental conceptions of the world there is a firmly established principle to which repeated allusions are made but to which, up to now, Christianity has paid little heed. Oriental culture has knowledge of the great cosmic Laws revealed today by Spiritual Science, namely, those of the return of the human being in different Earth-lives, and of Karma. Whereas Christianity through the centuries has had eyes only for the life of a man between birth and death, and its continuance in a simple heavenly life, the Oriental world possesses definite knowledge of the return of man in repeated lives on Earth; and the knowledge of this great manifestation of law in the evolution of humanity constitutes much of the profound significance in Oriental teachings. As a result of this, Oriental culture contains teachings regarding the leaders and great heroes of human evolution which differ fundamentally from anything taught in the West. In the Oriental world-conception we find references to Beings of whom it is said from the outset that they return again and again and that the importance of their influence can be measured by their achievements in successive Earth-lives. The very name, “Gautama Buddha” is indicative, for “Buddha” is not a proper name like “Socrates” or “Raphael,” but denotes a rank. The world of thought from which Buddhism has grown speaks of many Buddhas “Buddha” is a rank. Before “Gautama Buddha” the royal son of King Suddhodana—became the “Buddha” of whom Oriental teachings speak, he was a “Bodhisattva.” In other words, the Oriental conception of the world perceives the Individuality who passes through the different incarnations, ascending from incarnation to incarnation and finally reaching the height at which the rank of “Buddha” is attained Such an Individuality is then no longer called by a proper name. In speaking of the characteristics of the Buddha, Buddhism rarely refers to “Prince Siddhartha,” but far more often to a rank, attained not only by him but to which every human being can attain. And so, in pointing to the great leaders, the East points to the Individuality who passes through repeated Earth-lives; the greatness and significance of these leaders are attributed to the merits they acquired through repeated lives on Earth.

And now compare this with characteristic features of western culture. There we are told of the greatness of a Plato, a Socrates, of a figure like Paul; even in the Old Testament, a figure like Moses stands out in strong relief, and, later on, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci among many others. The West speaks of the single personality—not the “individuality” who passes through repeated lives on Earth. Attention is directed not to the being who goes on from birth to birth, from death to death, but to the one personality who lived from a certain point of time to another. The East directs its attention more to the onward progress of the Individuality from one incarnation to another, whereas western culture has been little concerned as to who Socrates, for example, could have been in previous Earth-lives, or what becomes of him in later lives. It is the same with Paul and with all the others. This is a very fundamental difference. The matter may be summed up by saying that the whole trend of the West hitherto has been to lay emphasis upon the importance of the personality, of the single life of the human being. Only now, when we are on the threshold of a great change in the spiritual life, are we beginning—having acquired in western culture a gauge as it were for the single personality—to discern a principle of existence which Oriental culture accepts as a matter of course, namely, the development of the Individuality within the single personalities, through many lives. A perspective of the future fraught with great significance is here opened up, of which mankind will stand increasingly in need.

Christian thought has actually lost sight of something which the East has always possessed and knowledge of which has now to be reacquired. The course of evolution is such that certain outworn fragments must be discarded and new elements added; ancient heritages must be rescued again, but in a new form and through a new impulse. In olden times, clairvoyance was a natural gift in humanity. It had to fade away and be replaced by thinking based upon purely external observation and perception; this will be enriched by the clairvoyance of the future and will add something of untold significance to human life. The West had to pass through a period during which mankind was split up, as it were, into separate personalities, but now that men stand on the threshold of a deepening of thought and experience, they will themselves be aware of a longing to find the thread uniting the fragments which make their appearance in the life of the human being between birth and death. The light of understanding will thus be shed on the forces which flow onwards through the stream of spiritual development and human progress. Let us illustrate this by a particular example:—

In the lecture on “The Prophet Elijah in the Light of Spiritual Science”¹ I spoke of what occult research reveals concerning this prophet. I do not propose to go into further details now, but will only say that in the light of occult knowledge, Elijah was one who proclaimed with power and deep intensity that the primal, original form of what humanity may call the “Divine” can be glimpsed only in the innermost centre of man's being, in the “ I ”. The great prophetic message of Elijah proclaimed that everything the outer world can teach is, at most, semblance and parable, that realisation of the essential nature of man can only arise in the “ I.” Elijah could not, in his time, proclaim the power and significance of the single, human “ I,” but he proclaimed the existence, as it were, of a Divine Ego, external to the human being. Men must recognise this Divine Ego, must realise that it rays into the human “ I ”. That this Divine Ego rises up within the human “ I ” and there unfolds its full power—such is the knowledge won by Christianity. The work and mission of Elijah are therefore a true heralding of Christianity. This can be said when the life of Elijah and his place in the history of human evolution are being described in the light of occult knowledge.

And then we may think of another life, the life of the personality known as John the Baptist. From the mouth of John, humanity was to learn what the immediate future held in store.... “Change the attitude of your souls! Do not look back to the times that are past, when men sought to find the Divine only at the starting-point of evolution; look, rather, into your own souls and into the deepest core of your being and then you will know that the Kingdoms of Heaven are near”.... This, was the substance of the message of the Baptist. In other words: the phase of development has come when, in very truth, the “ I ” can find the Divine within itself. The form in which Christianity was heralded by Elijah has changed with the flow of time. Something altogether different is represented by John the Baptist. But through Spiritual Science and a deepened understanding, we realise that one and the same Being lived in the prophet Elijah and in John the Baptist. We add to our understanding of the single life a principle of knowledge already possessed by the East, only the East did not lay such emphasis upon the power and force inhering in the single personality.

Going further, we can speak of that most remarkable personality who lived from 1483 to 1521, was born on a Good Friday and through this very fact, indicated, as it were, his living connection with the Mystery of Golgotha. I am referring, of course, to Raphael, the great painter. In the western world, as is only to be expected, it is customary to study Raphael as a figure in himself, but it will very soon become clear to deeper insight, that what the West has to say with regard to Raphael has many shortcomings. This figure of Raphael presents a remarkable spectacle to those who aspire for a more profound understanding. It is as though his genius came with him at birth. In a manner of speaking it can be said that he “let himself be born” on a Good Friday, in order to indicate his connection with the Mystery of Golgotha. It is quite obvious that from the very first, his life gave promise of all his subsequent greatness. Orphaned at an early age, he was thrown out into the world, and finally into the brilliance and splendour of Rome; there, within the span of a short life, we see him rise step by step to heights of fame. What is there to be said about this remarkable life? Think of the environment into which Raphael was born—it was in the period at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was a time when disputes in the world of religion were rampant and widespread, when Christianity was scattered into countless sects over the whole Earth, when mighty and also terrible conflicts were being waged in Christendom. And now we turn to Raphael's paintings. It is a strange experience! They seem to make us forget what was happening all around in the Christian world at the time and a kind of jubilation at the power with which Christianity has taken root in human evolution streams out from them. Think of a picture like “The School of Athens” as it is generally called. We see all those remarkable figures, deciphered by pedants with the aid of historical guide-books, as Socrates, Diogenes, and so forth. This, however, means nothing whatever from the point of view of Art. But if we take the New Testament and read the Acts of the Apostles attentively, we feel that in this picture we have before our very eyes the whole vivid difference between the pre-Christian views prevailing in Greece and those of Christianity; we also find this in the picture usually, though erroneously, known as the “Disputa.” “The School of Athens” really depicts the scene in the New Testament when Paul came among the Greeks, saying to them: “Until this day you have heard of many Gods; but the Divine does not express Itself in images. You have spoken great words concerning the living Gods, but there is something still greater: the Glory of the God Who died on the Cross and has risen again!“ We feel the power of the message as we stand before the picture called “The School of Athens,” and look at the remarkable figures of the philosophers listening attentively as Paul speaks. When the picture is actually before us, the pedantic interpretation given to it later on—that the central figures are Aristotle, Plato, and so forth—fades into insignificance. We feel that Raphael was trying to depict the moment when Paul came among the Greeks. If we study the New Testament closely, we shall be able to identify the figure of the man with the hand pointing forward so significantly, as a personality drawn from the New Testament account. The New Testament, therefore, provided the model for a personality depicted in this picture, namely, the personality of Paul.

And so we pass from one picture to another, forgetting all the statements that have been made about the one or the other, for a great force streams out of them; we feel that Christianity is living on in its mightiest power in the paintings of Raphael and that they portray a Christianity in which there can be no strife or splitting into sects. Recent times, however, have had little understanding of the Christianity which pours its living influence through Raphael's paintings. When we look at them even more closely, still another feeling comes to us. It is as though their creator wanted to portray the eternal youthfulness, the eternal power of victory in Christianity. And then perhaps we ask ourselves: In what form did the influence of these paintings live on?

Before very long, a despot like Bernini—who accomplished so much for Art—was giving warning against imitation of Raphael; it is even possible to say that Raphael was “forgotten.” In Germany and in the west of Europe during the eighteenth century there is a strange story to tell in regard to men's understanding of Raphael. In the whole of Voltaire's works you will find hardly a mention of Raphael. The name of someone else may also occur to you, although he held a very different view later on. Goethe's experience when he visited the Dresden Gallery for the first time, was a strange one. When you yourselves stand before the “Sistine Madonna” you will probably imagine that the picture must have filled Goethe with enchantment, and this may well be assumed in view of all the eulogies with which he later sang its praises. We have to remember however, what he had heard from the officials of the Dresden Gallery and from those who were the official custodians of the picture. He was informed by them that the Child in the arms of the Mother, the Child Whose eyes express a rare gift of seership, was painted with realistic vulgarity, that it could not be from the hand of Raphael himself but must have been painted over by someone else; and that the little heads of Angels could not possibly have been Raphael's own work. The coming of the Sistine Madonna to Dresden was not crowned with triumph! But at any rate it is to Goethe's credit that after he had learnt to appreciate Raphael, he contributed a great deal towards an understanding of the Sistine Madonna and of Raphael himself.

Now let us think of the course, taken by evolution in the nineteenth century, leaving aside what occurred in Catholic countries and turning our attention to Protestant lands in which the dogma concerning the Virgin Mary is not essential to faith. There, not only the “Sistine” Madonna but all the other Madonnas of Raphael are veritably crowned with glory! Without thinking now of the originals, the many excellent engravings and reproductions are a proof of how men have endeavoured to present Raphael's creations to the world in the most perfect possible form. Few people, after all, have the opportunity of seeing the originals themselves. Naturally, no reproduction can convey the essence of the artistic power in a picture; to suppose any such thing would be ignorant and barbaric. But something else made its way into the evolution of mankind: in regions which would have nothing to do with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, a form of Christianity independent of all differences of doctrine found entrance. While men have fought for these differences of doctrine in theories and systems, a picture of this great Mystery—in the characters of an “occult script,” as it might be said—found entry in the reproductions of Raphael's Art, filling the Mystery with new life. Here again is a heralding of Christianity from which great and glorious fruits will ripen in the future. And understanding of these things will be quickened by the experiences which have arisen in human beings at the sight of the “Sistine” Madonna, the “Madonna del Pesce” and other Madonnas, or from “The School of Athens,” the “Disputa” and other paintings of Raphael. Without being aware of it, men have in their souls today the feeling of an inter-denominational Christianity, conveyed by this wonderful “occult script.”

Raphael both heralded and established a new impulse in Christianity although, to begin with he was not understood. Occult investigation finds that the same Individuality who once worked in Elijah and later in John the Baptist, lived again on earth in Raphael.² This helps us to understand how the forces develop in the same soul from life to life, and to discern the effects of earlier causes. The Baptist was beheaded; his work came to light again in the achievements of his great successor. The new proclamation of the Baptist in the Raphael life was for long ages forgotten. It came to life again in what Spiritual Science teaches concerning the Christ-Impulse. What a light shines in our understanding when we gather up the threads leading through the single personalities, and in what vivid perspective the single personality stands there before us!

I said that the paintings of Raphael are like chants of jubilation at the might of Christianity. Raphael naturally keeps to the accepted events and facts, but out of his feelings he is able to portray them with a unique power. As our eyes wander over his paintings we realise with what majesty and sublimity he portrayed the forces of Christianity, and ask ourselves: What is it that Raphael did not paint? He painted no scene on the Mount of Olives, no Crucifixion. True, he painted a “Bearing of the Cross,” but it was a very poor picture and gives the impression of having been done to order. Neither did he paint any of the scenes leading directly to the Crucifixion. His creative genius begins to reveal itself again only when he portrays the figure of the great successor of John—the figure of Paul in “The School of Athens”; or when, passing over the other events in the life of Christ, he paints “The Transfiguration.” What Raphael has not painted helps us to understand that it was alien to him to portray those events on Earth (not events in the spiritual world) which took place after he was beheaded in his previous life. We realise why it was that Raphael painted fewer pictures of these particular events. When we look at the pictures, we feel that all those which portray events subsequent to the Beheading of John the Baptist, are not, like the others, born of earlier remembrances.

As we think of all this, another feeling, too, may arise in us. In a few more hundred years, what will have become of all the paintings which have been such great and mighty symbols in mankind? True, for some time yet the reproductions will be left to us, but not the originals—for so very long. Anyone who looks today with sorrow in his heart at Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper” realises what will become of the physical materials used in these pictures. It dawns upon us, too, that they can only be truly appreciated when, through Spiritual Science, we understand what it is that Raphael has painted, for example, in “The School of Athens” or the “Disputa.” What is to be seen today on the walls of the Vatican in Rome has been ruined by the many restorations. No real idea of the originals is possible, for they have been so grievously spoilt by the restorations. What, then, will have happened in another few centuries? No means of preservation devised by the mind of man will be able to prevent the materials from deteriorating. In another few centuries everything will have vanished. The subjects themselves, of course, will still be known; but the creations of Raphael's own hand will disappear. And then the thought arises: Is the process of human evolution such that things continually come into being only to sink, finally, into non-existence?

Our gaze wanders further and falls upon the youthful figure of a German poet—Novalis. To begin with, we find in his writings a most wonderful and unique resurrection of the Christ-Idea, of which the following may be said. If we steep ourselves in Spiritual Science and with the means it provides, try to understand the coming of the Christ-Impulse into the evolution of humanity, and then turn to Novalis—wherever we look, something seems to spring into life. Inspirations of the greatest grandeur concerning matters of Spiritual Science are to be found everywhere. Inspirations that are like lofty dreams of Science. From Novalis comes something that finds its way into mankind like seed—seed which will spring to life in times to come. Here again is a heralding of Christianity! In spite of all differences, it is again a beginning, just as the work of the Baptist was a beginning. We are drawn irresistibly to the remarkable figure of Novalis, feeling that a stream of living Theosophy goes out from him, inspired by the power of Christianity. We feel that here, too, is a proclamation of Christianity for the future.

Occult investigation finds that in Elijah, in John the Baptist, in Raphael, in Novalis, the same Individuality lived and worked. In Raphael there is a new resurrection of the work of John the Baptist, and it may indeed be said: Raphael himself is able to ensure that his work will not perish when his paintings are no longer to be seen on the walls, just as he was able to prevent other achievements from passing away. Just as he provided for the revival, in a new form, of what it had once been his mission to proclaim, so he will always provide, in incarnations yet to come. Thus does the Individuality bear through eternity what has once been accomplished.

It may be that concrete examples like these, given as illustrations of abstract laws and principles, will do more than the external teachings of Spiritual Science, to render the theosophical conception of human life as intelligible as those things which confront us in the outside world. Deep insight may come to us when, in the light of such concrete examples, we observe processes operating more secretly in the evolution of the human soul. As spiritual research is still a young science, men who have studied Raphael hitherto can naturally know nothing of the power and impulse he bears through the ages. But because the time has come when the idea of the reincarnation of the human being is to dawn, even though nothing concrete is known about it, undefined intuitive feelings may arise here and there. A striking example of this has come again to my mind during the last fortnight. I remembered how Herman Grimm, a most gifted writer on the History of Art and a distinguished student of Raphael, speaks of the painter. Naturally, when Herman Grimm was writing about Raphael, he knew nothing of Spiritual Science and studied only the single life of Raphael. He observed Raphael's fame through the centuries, its decline and subsequent growth, and discerned how, in his creations, Raphael lives on through time. And then there dawned upon Herman Grimm the remarkable thought which he expressed in his work on Raphael (he had wanted to write a volume, but it remained a mere fragment). He says there, expressing an entirely instinctive feeling: When we ponder on the things that will endure in the evolution of mankind, and thus catch a vista of the future, the thought arises that all these things will be lived through again! This is an eloquent indication of how the thought of “re-experience” rises instinctively, like a longing, in the souls of men who observe evolution thoughtfully and sensitively, for the very reason that without such a conception, the rest has no meaning. This is of infinite significance. And when we reflect about these things, an idea that is beautiful and true comes to us of what Spiritual Science will be able to do for the evolution of humanity, and of the enrichment which human life in all its forms will receive through knowledge of the laws on Reincarnation and Karma. But if the life of humanity is to be thus enriched, men will have to learn to observe the Spiritual with the same exactitude with which they observe the Physical; they will have to perceive how repetition in the physical world is a great law of existence, and that recurrence—as in the return of the soul into the body—is also a law governing the return of the fruits of the various lives. Such an experience, however, is always preceded by others—by human longings and hopes, and instinctive knowledge which has been unfolding during recent years. When we think of these things, it seems as though Spiritual Science has been growing and developing without consciousness on the part of human beings, but that they were already dreaming of it, instinctively divining its approach. There are some, however, who have pondered about the spiritual life, and they have indicated what they felt concerning the rhythmic recurrence of phenomena and even concerning the return of the human soul.

It is interesting, here, to speak of a case—which I could multiply a hundredfold—because it is an example of what is alive in all those who have contemplated the picture presented by human evolution and in their life of feeling have discerned the rhythmic recurrence, the rhythmic return of events. I will quote one example, which shows how this thought has taken root, causing something to spring to life in the soul. This writer could not have been a theosophist in the modern sense, for what I am going to refer to is a poem written in the year 1835.³ The writer could have had no knowledge of the vista of human evolution one day to be opened up by Spiritual Science. Yet something rises up in him that is like a dream of the future of humanity—an instinctive perception of recurrent phenomena in human existence. I am speaking of the poet Anastasius Grün, who in the year 1835 published a poem (Schutt) in which he depicts five recurrences of a certain happening, rhythmic repetitions of the spiritual message working in humanity. The poem depicts how on Easter Day, Christ re-visits the Mount of Olives in the Spirit, in order to look again at the places where He had lived and suffered. The poem speaks of five returns, four of which lie in the past, and the fifth in the future. The first occurs in the period after the destruction of Jerusalem. The second, “when Christ beholds the conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders”; as He looks down, Christ sees what is happening in the places He had once known. The third return falls in the period when Islam was spreading its power over Jerusalem; the fourth in the period when humanity, split into countless sects, was quarrelling about the mission of Christ. All this is vividly and graphically described by Grün. Then there opens out the vista of a return of Christ on an Easter Day in the far distant future. Although the picture is dreamlike and Utopian, we cannot fail to discern—apart from the actual content of the poem—something of the blessing experienced by the soul when spiritual knowledge, especially as it has unfolded since the thirteenth century, opens up glimpses of a future when a spiritual culture will spread peace instead of wars and strife. Grün sees the blessings of peace in the culture of times to come and speaks of a future return of Christ to the Mount of Olives on an Easter Day, describing it as it appeared to his imagination. Children are playing on Golgotha; they have been digging in the ground and find a strange thing made of iron, not knowing at all what it can be; it proves, subsequently, to be a sword. And in the mood of exultation which comes upon him, Grün says that there will come a time when the very purpose of such an instrument as a sword will have been forgotten and the sword will be an object of amazement to men. Then he says that the iron will be used as a plough and describes the feeling which the rhythmic return of Christ to the Mount of Olives quickens in him. What has been forgotten and will again be revealed, is a Cross of Stone! It is raised again and Grün says that something happens to the Cross, indicating what part the Cross will play hereafter. In the following verses he describes what feelings arise in him when the children unearth a Cross and set it up for all the world to see—and he speaks, too, of the function and the power of the Cross in mankind:—

Ob sie's auch kennen nicht, doch steht's voll Segen,
Aufrecht in ihrer Brust, in ewigem Reiz.
Es blüht sein Name rings auf allen Wegen,
Denn, was sie nimmer kannten—war ein Kreuz!

Sie sahn den Kampf nicht und sein blutig Zeichen,
Sie sahn den Sieg allein und seinen Kranz!
Sie sahn den Sturm nicht mit den Wetterstreichen,
Sie sahn nur seines Regenbogens Glanz!—

Das Kreuz von Stein, sie stellen's auf im Garten,
Ein rätselhaft ehrwürdig Altertum,
Dran Rosen rings und Blumen aller Arten
Empor sich ranken, kletternd um und um.

So steht das Kreuz inmitten Glanz und Fülle
Auf Golgotha, glorreich, bedeutungschwer:
Verdeckt ist's ganz von seiner Rosen Hülle,
Längst sieht vor Rosen man das Kreuz nicht mehr!

(The following rendering is by “C.F.B.”)

Though yet they knew, or knew it not, full-fraught
With blessing and upreared within their breast
It stands and ceaseless calls, while all around
Its Name lies blazoned upon every path.
For what they knew no longer was—a Cross!
The strife they knew not, nor th'ensanguined Sign;
They saw but victory, and the victor's crown.
'Twas but the Rainbow-Glory filled their soul.
In garden fair they set the Cross of Stone—
Relic of bygone ages, strange, and venerable,
Roses entwine and flowers of every hue
Lay their soft arms about Its Stem.
Thus stands the Cross of Golgotha, resplendent,
Glorious—Its meaning heard to find,
Its form all hidden 'neath a rosy veil!
Men see no more the Cross, for roses there.

• 1. See: Turning Points in Sprirtual History, by Rudolf Steiner.
• 2. See: On the Meaning of Life, by Rudolf Steiner.
• 3. See also: The Art of Recitation and Declamation. Lecture IX. Not yet published in English.

As the last time we were able to meet together here, we put forward certain considerations connected mainly with special experiences,¹ we will turn our attention today to a more general outlook of spiritual science. I should like to start from something which you have all known fundamentally for a long time: that all spiritual-scientific observation is won by acquiring knowledge, not with the help of the instrument of the Physical body, but by liberating the soul and spirit from the physical instrument, so that, as soul and spirit they enter into direct union with the spiritual worlds.

Direct union with the spiritual worlds is broken in ordinary life and knowledge, because we must always employ the instrument of our physical body in the waking state whenever we wish to enter into relationship with the world, and in the sleeping state all our will is concentrated on our connection with the body, so that desire for the body spreads like a cloud in our soul and spirit during sleep, and hinders us in this state, and in ordinary life - from experiencing anything in the spiritual worlds, in which we indeed are.

Now it is essential that anyone occupying himself with spiritual science should recognise exactly the value of spiritual scientific activity as such, and its relation to the personal strivings, which through meditation and concentration of thought, feeling, and will-impulses, or in any other manner, lead man into the spiritual world. We must be clear about this above all for it is a deep and significant truth: that the unity which surrounds us in the ordinary world, does not exist in the same way in the spiritual world. I have already pointed out that this unity is founded within the whole structure of the psycho-spiritual human being. How most people strive again and again after this, asking: What is the unity of the world? How they only find satisfaction when they can lead everything back to one Principle!

As a matter of fact, the external world meets us most eminently as a whole, as a unified formation; and those people who to a certain degree are dominated by the ‘craze’ for unity, arrive at all possible abstractions in thought, while seeking the unitary principle of the world.

Such personalities are typical, they are like an old gentleman who met me one evening, and told me with the intense pleasure of a discoverer: At last he had found a unitary principle by which he could explain all the phenomena in the world. He was of the opinion, in his pleasure, that this unitary principle could be uttered in ten to twelve words, and he was so joyful over the matter, that he said: Now I can explain the whole cosmos. He would explain heaven, earth, and hell out of this unitary principle.

A little while ago, I was forced to recall this episode which occurred many years ago, when someone wrote to me urgently requesting a talk with me, because he had made the acquaintance of a man who was able to bring forward another such completely satisfactory view of the world in five minutes. I need hardly mention that a really earnest spiritual movement can have no time for such talks. But people who are thus possessed by this Unity-Demon, which is at the same time a kind of Easy-going Demon, are especially numerous in our day.

Because of this, we must put first, and take in the deepest sense, what is expressed in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: that as soon as we cross the threshold of the spiritual world, we are really led into a threefold experience. I have especially emphasised in this book, that the soul is as if split into three, and when the soul crosses the threshold of the spiritual world, nothing is left which makes it possible for one to believe in this Unity-demon, this comfort-loving Unity-demon.

Indeed, we feel, as soon as the threshold of the spiritual world is crossed, that we really enter with the whole of our being into three worlds. And we must not lose sight of the fact that after crossing this threshold, we have distinctly the experience of three worlds. In reality, we already belong to three worlds through the whole formation of our physical body. I might say that the co-operation of three worlds, which are relatively strongly independent of one another, is necessary for this wonderful structure ‘man’ which we encounter in the physical world. And if we consider the formation of our head, the formation of everything that belongs to the head, we must, even if we are merely speaking of the physical head, be clear that the formative forces of our head, and also the beings active and creative in these formative forces, belong to suite another world from that of the formative forces of our breast, for instance, and the formative forces of everything belonging to our heart, inclusive of the arms and hands. It is to a certain extent as if the formative forces of these material parts of man belonged to quite another world than the formative forces of his head. And again, the organs of the lower body and the legs belong to quite another world than the two other members we have named.

Now you can ask: What significance has all this? It has a great significance, for fundamentally speaking, in our present cycle of humanity, one only gets the pure, true and real results from spiritual science if the soul and spirit-nature is raised out of the head. So that this (c.f. diagram) is to some extent the clairvoyant aspect of a man, which, seen from the spiritual-scientific point of view has to be so regarded, that the spirit-soul part is here seen to be especially lifted out, and is at the same time, joined to the forces of the cosmos, as if by a spiritual electric attraction.

Thus all the parts a man—the ego and astral body down to the etheric body, must be drawn out. This withdrawal is of course connected with the evolution of the so-called Lotus-flowers. But the forces which set the lotus-flowers in motion lie in this part of the spirit-soul nature of man which is, or can be withdrawn.

The clairvoyance thus attained is a HEAD-CLAIRVOYANCE, and this can be a result of spiritual science in our time, for the revelations of head-clairvoyance are of service to humanity. Of a quite other kind is the clairvoyant results attained by raising the spirit-soul nature of the organ of the heart, arms and hands. This raising or up-lifting of these organs distinguishes itself inwardly and significantly from what takes place through what I might call “HEAD-CLAIRVOYANCE”. The up-lifting of the material heart-organ is brought about more through meditation which is related to the life of will; it is effected through humble surrender to the march of events. Whereas head-clairvoyance is effected more through thoughts, but also through ideas having an imaginative character, tinged with feeling.

It is generally the case that with reference to these two kinds of clairvoyance, the heart—or breast-clairvoyance—develops along with head-clairvoyance in the degree to which it should. Breast-clairvoyance leads more to the development of the will, to a connection with the actions of spiritual beings of the lower hierarchies, such as those incorporated in the various kingdoms of the earth; whereas head-clairvoyance leads more to vision, knowledge, perception in those higher worlds, in the sense that knowledge of these higher powers is necessary for the satisfaction of certain needs of knowledge, which must appear ever more and more in present humanity. The more we approach the future of our evolution on earth, the less will humanity be able to live, without their soul-life drying up, if they do not receive into their cognition the results of this clairvoyance.

Again a third kind of clairvoyance is that which arises, when what we call the spiritual-psychic part of man is loosened, and thus raised out of the rest of his being. Here in the lower part of the diagram I indicate the outward thrusting tendency. Even if the expression is not altogether aesthetic, yet I may perhaps venture to call this kind of clairvoyance, ‘Stomach clairvoyance.’

Whereas head-clairvoyance, for our cycle of humanity, leads in the most eminent sense to the attainment of results independent of man, stomach-clairvoyance leads to results connected especially with What transpires in man himself. That which takes place in man himself must naturally also be an object of investigation. In the sphere of physical investigation, there are also men who occupy themselves with anatomy and physiology. We should not think that this stomach-clairvoyance has not a certain value, in the highest sense of the word. It naturally has a value. But one must realize, that stomach clairvoyance can inform man but little of that which occurs impersonally in cosmic events; but that it informs him essentially about what man is, of what goes on—I might say—inside his skin.

With reference to what is moral and ethical, head-clairvoyance is relatively the most important. Hence I must ever speak of its opposites. Between the two stands breast-clairvoyance; between that of the head and of the stomach. As regards what is ethical, these two can be inwardly quite well distinguished. People who strive to come to a perception of higher worlds, in an impersonal way, as indicated in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, those who are not daunted at traveling this uncomfortable but secure path, will develop something impersonal in themselves, with reference to their clairvoyance, above all they will develop a high interest for objective world-knowledge, for what occurs in the world of cosmic and of historical events.

This head-clairvoyance speaks preferably of man himself, especially in that it draws attention to how he is placed within the process of cosmic and historical development, it notes what man himself is in the entirety of this cosmic process: What arises as head-clairvoyance will always have what I must call a universal scientific character; it will contain information which has importance—I beg you to note this word—for all mankind, not merely for one man or another.

Stomach-clairvoyance will be permeated especially with all kinds of human egoism, and will very easily mislead the clairvoyant in question to occupy himself much with the occult bases of his own destiny, of his personal worth and character. This results as a self-understood tendency from what is called stomach-clairvoyance.

Now a clear distinction has to be made between these two kinds of clairvoyance with reference to their intuitive nature. Whoever strives in the sense of what is given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds to become free in soul and spirit from the perceptive-apparatus of the head, who can thus to a certain extent loosen the spiritual-psychic part of the head from the physical instrument, and is able to place himself with this spiritual-psychic head-part in the spiritual world, will have extreme difficulty in getting beyond shadowy-clairvoyant experiences. Such a passing out from the head is at first bound up with experiences which really have not even the colour, the substantiality of vivid memories, therefore they seem inwardly to be very colourless, and only after one goes ever further and further in the efforts which lie on this path, does the shadowy character of these experiences disappear, and their colourless, shadowy experiences become tinged with colour and sound, for the process carried out is this, that we first move out of our head, and are then really in a world which we have difficulty in perceiving.

For while we gradually and slowly acquire the possibility of living outside our head, these inner forces of life grow stronger, and the consequence is, that the forces streaming in from the whole orbit of the cosmos are drawn together. Picture to yourselves that forces must be drawn together from out the whole orbit of the cosmos—and when we draw together all the forces from the entirety of the orbit of the cosmos, we get that tinging with colour and sound I have mentioned. Think how we might picture this. You have here a surface (a), highly coloured, a spherical surface. Now think of this spherical surface as extended over a larger surface (b.c.). The colour will then become paler—and if we extend it still further, the colour will become ever paler and paler, if we contract this surface, then supposing it to be a pale yellow here (at the extremity,) it would become a strong, saturated yellow, because the colour is then more concentrated.

Now head-clairvoyance confronts the whole cosmos. And, spread out over the whole cosmos is that which man mast first concentrate and unite by means of his life-forces into what he himself is clairvoyantly, as being; so that only by a laborious process of inner development he gradually gives a tinge of colour to the shadowy nature of his experiences. And when for a long, long time he has taken the trouble to experience that general experience which only gives him the sensation of being outside the body; and when he has been aware of this general experience for a long time, and has gained the feeling more and more of a more intense, though not yet a coloured and resounding inner experience, then the regions of the cosmos gradually draw near to this head-clairvoyance.

This is a matter for slow, selfless development. It must be especially stated, that a STUDY OF SPIRITUAL SCIENCE is indispensable to this development. It must be emphasised again and again, that when it is given out, spiritual science, can indeed be understood. It cannot be emphasised often enough that one need not be a clairvoyant to understand spiritual science. One must of course be clairvoyant to arrive at results, but once they are there, one need not be clairvoyant. UNDERSTANDING of spiritual science must precede personal vision. Here one can say: the opposite path is correct to that which is correct in the physical-sensible world. In the physical-sensible world, we first have correct perceptions, then we pass over to a thoughtful consideration of these, and we then form our scientific judgments. This must be reversed in the ascent to the spiritual world. There, we must first develop ideas—we must make every effort to live into spiritual science objectively; otherwise we can never be certain that any observation we make in the spiritual world is interpreted by us in the right sense. Hence knowledge must precede vision, and this is what is so infinitely disagreeable to many; the fact that they have to study spiritual science. Many consider this an incomprehensible demand. For it is relatively easy to have perceptions; but to interpret them aright—for this it is necessary that one enters rightly,—objectively, selflessly—into spiritual science.

Now just the opposite is the case in what we have called: stomach-clairvoyance. In this, we start from that spiritual-psychic principle which first worked on the bodily, physical nature; for spirit lies at the basis of everything that exists in the world. If we have eaten let us say a piece of cabbage—we are mostly vegetarians here—and it is then worked over in our organism, one has then not merely to do with the physical-chemical process, carried out by the stomach with its forces and juices, but behind all these the etheric body, astral body, and ego are active. All these processes have spiritual processes behind them. It would be quite false to believe that any material processes exist which have not a spiritual process behind them. Picture this to yourselves: Suppose you lie down after a more or less opulent mid-day meal, and become clairvoyant, but clairvoyant in such a way, that the spiritual-psychic part of the digestive organs rise up especially out of the organs of digestion. Then, while your stomach and the other organs digest correctly, you live with your spiritual-psychic nature in the spiritual-psychic realm, and whereas you usually remain unconscious of the spiritual process carried out in your etheric body, astral body, and ego, this enters your consciousness if you are clairvoyant and then, because you experience yourself in this spiritual-psychic realm, you can see all this working, constructing, and creating of the spiritual-psychic force during digestion; you see it as it projects itself out into the world, and it appears to you reflected in pictures in the external ether. Then you get the most beautiful clairvoyant forms, because you have not now to draw the colours so much out of the cosmos, but because you have the whole process concentrated within your own skin. So that something wonderful takes place around you in the most glorious most magnificent sequences of colour and form, which need be nothing else than the process of digestion or some other bodily process transpiring in the spiritual organs of man.

This kind of clairvoyance is distinguished from the other, especially through the fact, that whereas the other clairvoyance starts from shadow forms, and only laboriously acquires a tinge of colour and tone, this starts off with the most magnificent grandeur possible. One can equally well express it as a law: if clairvoyance begins with magnificent forms, especially with coloured forms, then it is a clairvoyance that relates to processes which transpire within the personality. I emphasise this, because it can be of value for the investigation of the spiritual world. Just as anatomy and physiology investigate the digestive and other processes, so clairvoyance is also of great value to investigate in this way the spiritual nature standing behind human processes. But it would be bad, if one gave oneself up to any deceptions, if one cherished illusions, and did not interpret things in a right manner.

If one believed that such a clairvoyance, appearing without the necessary preparation, could give more than what takes place in man and is projected into the objective world, if one believed that through such a clairvoyance, one could approach the creative world-powers, the dominant spiritual forces, one would greatly err. Just as little as the riddles of the world can be solved by the investigation of human digestion, just so little can the riddles and secrets of the cosmos be approached by developing this stomach clairvoyance.

Thus you see how much belongs necessarily to our gaining a really right orientation to the world we enter through the freeing of our spiritual-psychic powers. No one need have any aversion to stomach-clairvoyance through the observations which have been made. But each one should be quite clear how such clairvoyance is related to what real spiritual clairvoyance can become, and how one should hold oneself far removed from any over valuation of what is gained through a clairvoyance that can only have a personal content. Only when in things which have a personal content, we look away from what is personal, and observe them in the way the anatomist or physiologist considers, the objects he studies with the help of the microscope, or learns through his investigations,—only then have these things a special value. In any case no religious feelings should be connected with these things even in the remotest degree; they can only be connected with the results of head-clairvoyance. Man becomes ever more correct in regard to the other clairvoyance, the more he fulfills the demand, that it should be dealt with in every case only in an objectively scientific sense, as are the results of anatomy or physiology.

Not everything which is found along the path of clairvoyance, is—I venture to use this radical expression—worthy of veneration; but all is worthy of being learnt. That is what we must keep in mind. I have already said: that for our cycle, it is especially important to incorporate the results of head-clairvoyance with the general spiritual civilisation of man; this is really important. Today, I will mention one side of the matter with reference to this. We are living at a time, in which humanity must prepare gradually to transcend mere philosophical Idealism, and pass on to a true consciousness of the spiritual worlds, of the general spiritual world in which we live just as we live in the physical world.

Now let us start from an experience of head-clairvoyance, which we shall easily understand if we have entered but a little into the things said in the Munich Cycle (footnote, Secrets of the Threshold;) held recently and which were dealt with further in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World. I especially mentioned there, that our thinking undergoes a transformation the moment we make ourselves free; especially when with reference to our thoughts we free ourselves from the physical instrument of the head. I expressed it grotesquely at the time by saying, if we became free in this manner, our thoughts have no longer the character which they have in ordinary, everyday life. In ordinary, everyday life we must have the feeling—unless we are demented—that we are Master of our thought-world, that if we have two thoughts, it is WE OURSELVES who unite or separate these thoughts.

When we remember something, we are conscious: we pass over with our inner life from a present experience to a past experience. We always have the feeling; it is we ourselves who stand behind the web and woof of our thoughts. ... This ceases the moment we make the spiritual psychic principle free in our head, when we develop a thinking freed from the body. On that occasion, I put it as follows, I said: It is as if we put our head in an ant's nest, and a peculiar whirling then arises. This is how thoughts begin to play one into the other. If in ordinary life, we have two thoughts, and unite them, as for example, the thoughts ‘rose’ and ‘red’, we know that we are master in our own thought-world, able to unite the two ideas: the rose is red. This is not the case when we are outside our bodies. Life enters our thoughts, the thought's own life. Each thought becomes a being. One thought runs towards another, the other runs away from it.

So the thought-world acquires a life of its own. Why does it acquire a life of its own? What we experience in the ordinary thoughts of the everyday are only images, shadows of thoughts. You can read this in my book Theosophy. As soon as we develop body free thoughts, each thought becomes like a husk, and an elemental being slips into the husk. The thought is no longer in our power; we put it out, like a feeler, it goes forth into the world, and an elemental being slips into it ... Our thoughts are filled in this way with elemental beings ... and these whirl and struggle in us. So that we can say: If we stretch the spiritual-psychic part of our head into the spiritual world, (it is outside us only, because we are situated within the physical head), if we thus stretch it into the spiritual world, we no longer experience such thoughts as we experience in the physical world, but we experience the LIFE OF BEINGS. We plunge our head just as I have said into an ant's nest—We experience the life of beings.

This is fundamentally the case right up to the highest hierarchies, and if we wish to experience angel, archangel, or even archai, it must be the same, we must live in our thoughts in the way described and in the beings in them. We send our thoughts out, and a being slips in, and is active in them. If we perceive the beings of Venus, or Saturn, it is as I have said, we let our thoughts slip our, and the Venus, and Saturn beings slip in. We ought not to be the least afraid of having thoughts of the Hierarchies in us, but twist accustom ourselves to live with our heads in the higher Hierarchies. We must say to ourselves: Our thinking ceases, and our head becomes the stage for the activities of the higher hierarchies.

Now, in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel thought has been developed up to the purest thought-clarity. In this philosophy is really contained that to which thought could rise at the beginning of the 19th Century. The task of raising thought to this height was then fulfilled. The next task is however that man should go beyond this, and really enter into this whirling, weaving life of thought. We are living at a time when man is called to do this: to perceive the higher Hierarchies. We have to be taken up by the world of the higher Hierarchies, and we must strip off the fear of thus living and weaving in the higher Hierarchies.

The life of the 19th Century was quite filled by this fear, this horror of life in the higher Hierarchies. Human beings carried this so far, they did not know it, but fundamentally they carried it so far, that they prayed: O, my dear Ahriman, guard me lest my life in thought is claimed by the activity and life of the higher Hierarchies; otherwise, some devilish Saturn or Sun-being might enter into them:—You say: Surely no one thought like this in the 19th Century; but I can prove to you that people did think like this.

Ludwig Feuerbach, a philosopher of the 19th Century who especially combated the idea of immortality, opposed all belief in a super-sensible world, because he held this to be the belief of phantastic, mystical dreamers, and considered it harmful for the whole of mankind. Ludwig Feuerbach wrote the following sentences; I beg you to inscribe them particularly well in your souls;

“The active man, busy with the affairs of human life, has no time to think of death, and hence, no need for immortality; if he thinks of death, he only sees in it the warning to arrange wisely his allotted span of life, not to waste precious time on unworthy objects, but to apply it to the fulfillment of the tasks he has set himself to do.”—

“If far from the earth in heaven, on Uranus, or Saturn, or elsewhere, man first found his fulfillment, then there would be no science, or philosophy at all. Instead of what is generally deduced, abstract truths and beings would form the content of our spirit, instead of thoughts, cognitions and ideas, these pure spiritual entities and objects which would then inhabit our head would be our heavenly brothers, Saturn and Uranus-beings would then be the inhabitants of our head. Instead of mathematics, logic metaphysics, we should have in us the most exact likeness of these heavenly inhabitants. These heavenly beings would insert themselves especially between us and the subjects of our knowledge and thought, they would obstruct our vision of every object, and bring about an eternal, complete eclipse of the sun in our spirit.”

The ‘Sun’ for Feuerbach is: his thought.

Thus he has a complete picture of what would happen. He has however such an unholy horror of it, that he prays to the good Ahriman to reserve him from Saturn and Uranus dwellers becoming inhabitants of his head.

“They would be nearer and more closely related to us than thoughts, ideas, and concepts, for they are not purely spiritual or abstract entities like these, but sense-like spiritual beings, beings who merely express the nature of the force of imagination. Our whole spirit would then be but a dream, a vision of a more beautiful future. Therefore those whom the gravity of understanding hinders from floating around on the surface of the unlimited ocean of imagination will realise that in the depths of our spirit, the living light of the Angels and of all similar heavenly beings is extinguished, as in an atmosphere, un breathable by them.”

If these beings then were to enter into our thoughts, our spirit would be a dream—thus writes Feuerbach. He only feels secure when in the region of thoughts, and if the life of the Angels, or other heavenly Entities were to enter these thoughts, he would feel insecure. This is the prayer to Ahriman: that he might guard man from a knowledge of the spiritual worlds. This happened in the forties of the nineteenth century through Ludwig Feuerbach, the enemy of any spiritual view of the world. What does this signify? It signifies nothing else than that the time is ripe for us to raise ourselves to the spiritual worlds; we have but to take in earnest what this man puts before us, we have then found the way into the spiritual worlds. We only need not fight it by a union with Ahriman. Thus you see: It is not the fault of heaven that spiritual science has not penetrated the culture of our time, for it has penetrated the heads of its opponents. Spiritual science wants to enter the world; The fault therefore does not lie with the heavens. The Gods are giving wisdom to man: Spiritual science has come. As human beings under the leadership of Ahriman has resisted it, it is now up to us not to resist any longer, but to have the courage to accept spiritual science, with full, true, earnestness.

One must say this to oneself as regards this development of the 19th Century; One must say: It is as if laid down afore time in the spiritual world, that a spiritual age would come after a materialistic age, and it is for humanity now to open its mind, and its feeling, to receive this spiritual world into itself. That point of view which is so eminent a materialistic view and found in Ludwig Feuerbach, its characteristic, clever, and infinitely philosophically-endowed advocate, is like an attack, a revolt against what is to enter humanity. Spiritual forces come down from above, the forces of understanding, of knowledge have really to rise up from below. The expression which Ludwig Feuerbach discovered for himself is a most characteristic one, that: the solar eclipse of the soul would have to follow, if thoughts ceased to be thoughts, if the beings of Uranus, Venus and Saturn, and so on, played into them ... that is if the higher Hierarchies played into them. A solar-eclipse of the spirit would then take place; these people have an unholy fear of this. This solar eclipse of the spirit is not brought about however by heavenly Beings, who desire especially to bring their light to man. The darkness has been caused by human beings, by their uniting with Ahriman; and because they have spread a cloud of fear around them like an aura, they have sought to bring off their attacks against the penetration of the spiritual world. It is clear from this, that the darkening has proceeded from man, and we must acknowledge that darkness has laid hold of humanity more and more—a darkening of a free knowledge, an opposition to the light of the spirit.

This is something humanity has itself prepared, and one can see how in the course of the 19th Century, a certain love of all short-sighted, inconsequent thoughts appeared, and a love for everything that did not have to be thought out to an end. A preference and sympathy arose for all those things for which man will not have finally to give account. People loved ever less and less an unprejudiced, impartial, knowledge and thinking, and it is therefore not surprising when this love of the nebulous, of the unclear, of the unfinished in thought gradually assumed an ever more morally assailable character in public life. In so far as this character was countenanced, sympathy for the life of thought became dull; and then passed over into a general attitude. Through this an opposing force in chief was installed more especially against a spiritual science which strove for clarity on all sides.

Spiritual science has true sympathy and love above all for consequent, finished, thoughts, not for half-thoughts; it never holds with what is unclear and dark, but must ever reach out to that which spreads light widely, not to that which sends an apparent light into narrow places only. In this connection, we have still to fight our way through many things.

These are points I wished to bring forward in our studies today, in order to show how in the course of the century, thoughts through Ahriman gave occasion for the denial of the spiritual worlds, but how these worlds have themselves worked within the thoughts of him who denied them because—the time had come ‘The time has come’: this saying from Goethe's Fairy Tale is here in its right place.

It must be substantiated in the near future.

• 1. “The Problem of Death in Connection with the Artistic grasp of Life” February 5–7, 1915

In the preceding lectures, I have been calling attention to the fact that there will still be a great deal to say about a certain problem or question, even though it has already been the subject of discussion here from a great variety of viewpoints. That is the question of the alternating states of waking and sleeping in human beings. I have repeatedly spoken in public lectures of how this problem of sleep has occupied a more materialistically oriented science also, and how it is being handled. On several occasions I have referred to some of the various attempts that have been made to solve it. There is the so-called exhaustion theory, which is only one of the many that have been advanced in recent decades. This theory holds that we secrete substances resulting from the wear and tear of work and of our other activities during waking life, and that the sleeping state somehow eliminates these exhaustion products, which are then formed anew in the following period of waking consciousness.

Now we must always take the position that such a theory—I mean, what it describes—does not have to be wrong from the standpoint of spiritual science just because of its purely materialistic origin. The materialistic rightness of this particular theory need not now be gone into at any further length; other theories have been advanced in the same matter, as I have just mentioned. But from the standpoint of spiritual science no question will be raised as to whether such a process can take place, whether exhaustion products are really secreted during day-waking consciousness and destroyed again at night. This actual process will not be brought into question or further discussed. It must be a main concern of spiritual science to examine a problem, to study life's riddles, in a way that really relates the standpoint from which they are studied to the insights that can be gained in a particular age. That will provide the right basis for bringing the right light to bear on facts such as the secretion of exhaustion products. In most of life's problems—indeed, in all of them—the point is to know what questions to ask, to avoid pursuing a mistaken line of questioning.

In the case of the alternation between sleeping and waking the development of a viewpoint from which to study these two human states is all-important. And the proper light can be brought to bear upon certain phenomena of human life only if matters introduced in a very early phase of our spiritual scientific efforts are kept in mind. In the very early days I called attention to the fact that if we want to get an overview of world evolution we have mainly to consider seven stages of consciousness, seven life-conditions and seven form- states. Certain life-questions can be answered simply by considering changes in form; other questions can be illuminated by studying life-metamorphoses. But certain phenomena in life, certain facts of life cannot be illuminated any other way than by rising to a consideration of the various states of consciousness involved.

It is quite natural, in considering the problem of waking and sleeping, to concern ourselves with questions of the difference involved in the two states of consciousness. For we have certainly learned from a great variety of studies that we are here dealing with different states of consciousness, so that the question of consciousness is the all-important one here. We must realize that our most important concern in dealing with this question is to base it on the matter of consciousness. We will have to ask ourselves what the real difference is between the waking and the sleeping states.

And this is what we find: When we are awake—we need only to register what each one of us is conscious of—we look at the world around us and perceive it. And we will be able to say that when we are in the day- waking state, we cannot observe our own inner life as we do our surroundings. I have often called your attention to the fact of what a crude illusion it would be if we were to conceive of the study of anatomy as leading to observation of the inner man. Only what is external in us, though it lies beneath our skin, can be studied by material anatomy; our inner aspect cannot be studied during ordinary waking consciousness. Even what a person comes to know of himself while he is awake is the world's outer aspect, or, more exactly, that aspect of him that belongs to the external world.

But if we now observe the human being from the contrasting aspect of the sleeping state, its essential characteristic, as you can see from the various discussions that have previously taken place here, is that he is observing himself. While we are in that condition, the object of our attention is the human being; our consciousness is occupied with ourselves. If you examine some of the most commonplace phenomena from this standpoint, you will find them readily comprehensible.

Now if what materialistic science states on the subject of sleeping and waking were all that could be said about it, it would seem to contradict an observation I once made here, namely, that an independently wealthy person who hasn't made any particular effort is more often seen to fall asleep at lectures than someone who has been exerting himself at work. This observation would have to be wrong if tiredness were the real cause of sleep. What we have to consider here is that the coupon clipper who listens to a lecture is not focusing his day- waking interest on it, is perhaps not particularly interested in it, may even find it impossible to take an interest in it because he doesn't understand it and is therefore justified in his apathy. He is much more interested in himself. So he withdraws his attention from the lecture to concentrate upon himself. One could, of course, ask: why particularly upon himself? That too can easily be explained. There are certain reasons why the lecture doesn't interest him, and they are usually that he is more interested in other aspects of life than in those under discussion in the lecture, or, at least, in their relevance. But the lecture keeps him from occupying himself with what would otherwise be interesting him. A person who has no interest in hearing a lecture might conceivably prefer to spend the time eating oysters instead of attending the lecture. Perhaps he is more interested in the experience of eating oysters than in that provided by the lecture. But the lecture disturbs him; there is no way for him to eat oysters if he attends it. He behaves as though he wanted to hear it, but it keeps him from eating oysters. Since he can't be eating them, he settles for the only thing available besides the lecture that is disturbing him. The hour ahead is taken up with something that he can only hear, something without interest for him. So he turns his attention to the only other available interest: his own inner being, and enjoys himself! For his falling asleep is self-enjoyment.

You can gather from what we have studied that sleeping consciousness is still at the stage that prevailed in man during the ancient sun period. It is the same consciousness we share with plants. We know both these facts from previous lectures.

Now our sleeping man at the lecture is not in the same state of consciousness in which we would find him if he were enjoying the external world. He is working his way back into sub-consciousness as it were. But that doesn't matter; he enjoys himself anyhow. And his enjoyment comes from his interest in himself. So we must find it understandable that sleep takes over, not as a result of inner weariness but because his interest moves away from the outer scene, the lecture or the concert or whatever, to what does interest him. This is always the fact of the matter if one studies the alternation between sleeping and waking with thoroughness, and in its inner aspect.

When we are awake, we may look upon our condition as one in which we turn our attention outward, to the world around us. We withdraw our interest from our inner life.

The opposite is true of the sleeping state. Attention is directed inward to the self and withdrawn from what lies outside it. Since we have left our bodies during sleep, we actually see them from outside.

We can, as you see, trace the alternation between sleeping and waking to another cause, and say that we live in successive cycles, in one of which our interest is awake to the world outside us, and in the other to our inner world. This alternation between outer and inner is one that belongs every bit as much to our life as the fact that the sun shines on the earth and then goes down, leaving it in darkness, belongs to the earth's life. In the latter case the spatial constellation is the factor involved in the alternation between light and darkness, bringing about the cycle of daytime and nighttime.

Now you can easily see how mistaken it would be to say that the day is the cause of the night, and the night of the day. That would be what I have described to you in preceding lectures as a worm's philosophy. It is simply nonsense to call the day the cause of the night and vice versa; both result from the regular alternation in the spatial relationship between sun and earth. It makes just as little sense to say that sleep is the cause of waking, and waking the cause of sleep. Just as in the earth's case the only thing that makes sense is to say that it undergoes an alternation between day and night because of its position in space, so human life undergoes an alternation between interest for the inner and interest for the outer scene. These conditions have to succeed each other; anything else is out of the question. Life decrees that human beings must focus their attention on their surroundings for awhile, and then turn it inward, just as the sun, descending in the west, has no choice about what its further course will be.

But we enter a realm here where the following must always be kept in mind: The sun has to make a certain period of hours into daytime, and another period into night. But human beings are in a position to vary things and upset routines, like the coupon clipper who sleeps even though he isn't tired, voluntarily turning his attention inward, enjoying himself, really enjoying his body, or like a student cramming for examinations who, to some extent, overcomes his need for normal sleep. Many students sleep very little before examinations. But this brings up the big questions we will be concerning ourselves with, questions about necessity in outer nature, questions about the frequently discussed subject of chance, both in nature and in human life, questions about providence that apply to the entire universe.

As soon as we touch on the sphere of human life we come upon an element that belongs in the field of necessity, something necessary to man if he is to live and have his being in the world. There is much that we will be discussing in regard to this.

What I've been telling you has been said not only—and please note the “not only” as well as a “partly”—to call your attention to the fact that we must try to get a proper perspective on the alternation between sleeping and waking. This means asking what sort of consciousness we have when we are awake. The answer is that the outer world rather than the human being is its object, that we forget ourselves and turn our attention to the surrounding world. Conversely, consciousness in sleep is such that we forget the world outside us and observe ourselves. But we return first to the state of consciousness we had on the sun; the fact that we enjoy ourselves is of secondary importance.

But that is not the only reason why I have referred to this perspective; it was also to call attention to the importance of noting the ways consciousness is related to the world and to the fact that we can come to know the essential nature of certain things only by inquiring into the kind of consciousness involved. It is, for example, quite impossible to know anything of importance about the structure of the hierarchical order of higher spiritual beings unless we concern ourselves with their consciousness. If you go through the various lecture cycles, you will see what trouble was taken to characterize the consciousness of angels, archangels, and so on. For it is essential in any study to give careful thought to what constitutes the right approach. A person might say that he is quite familiar with the hierarchical order: first comes the human being, then the higher rank of angels, then the still higher archangels, then the archai, and so on. He writes them down in ascending order and claims to understand: each hierarchy is one step above the one before it. But if that were all one knew about these beings, one would know as little about the hierarchical order as one knows about the levels of a house from the fact that each higher story is superimposed upon the one below it; one could make a drawing that would fit both cases. What really matters is to note the salient facts in the case under study. We only know something about these higher beings if we are familiar with the state of consciousness in which the various hierarchies live and if we can describe it. This must form the basis of a study of them.

The same thing holds true in the study of human beings. We know very little indeed about our inner being if we can say nothing further on the subject of the sleeping state than that our ego and astral body are outside our physical and etheric bodies. Though that is true, it is a totally abstract pronouncement, since it conveys no more information about the difference between sleeping and waking than one possesses in the case of a full and an empty beer glass; in the one case there is beer in it, and in the other the beer is elsewhere. It is true enough that the ego and the astral body have left the physical and etheric bodies of a sleeping person, but we must be of a will to go on to ever further and more inclusive concrete insights. We try to do this, for example, when we describe the alternation of interest in the two states of consciousness.

I once made you a light red drawing of man, and then a blue one in illustration of my statements to the effect that, for the clairvoyant, the human being is in the hollow part shown in the drawings. If a person falls asleep and possesses a higher consciousness (it can be just the beginning of it; but even then we can really perceive, for we begin by observing ourselves), he sees this hollow part. At such moments we see clearly how mistaken the belief is that we are made of compact matter, that what seems to day-waking consciousness to be substantial is actually empty space. Of course, we must keep in mind that human beings are really outside their bodies during sleep. So they see the empty space surrounded by this aura. They are not in their bodies; they are looking on from outside them, so they see the empty space within the aura. It is a shaped yet hollow space. Looked at from outside, other kinds of spaces are of course filled with something. Therefore a person naturally appears in the shape he has when looked at with day-waking consciousness, but he is seen surrounded by what might be described as an auric cloud, an aura. We don't see him entirely clearly at first, but rather in an auric cloud that we must first penetrate: we see an auric cloud, outlining a shadowy form. It is as though we see the person in a more or less brilliant aura; viewed from outside, the space occupied by his physical form is left empty. I will resort to a trivial comparison to convey an adequate impression of this phenomenon, perceived when we become conscious during sleep. We have all had the experience of going about in a city when it is foggy or misty and have seen how the lights there appeared as though in a rainbow aura, without sharp outlines. This impression of lights like empty spaces in the surrounding fog is an experience everyone has had, and it is very similar to what I have been describing. The area imaginatively perceived is seen as though in a fog or mist, and the physical human beings are the empty dark spaces there inside it.

We may say, then, that we see human beings through an aura when we attain to clairvoyance in our sleep. We became materialists when we learned to look directly at our fellow human beings instead of seeing their auras. That was brought about as a result of luciferic developments that made it possible to begin to see ourselves with day-waking consciousness. And this helps us to understand an important passage in the Old Testament, the one that says that people went about naked prior to the seduction by Lucifer. This is not to be taken as meaning that their state of awareness in their nakedness at all resembled what yours would be if you were to do the same thing now; it means that they previously saw the surrounding aura. So they had no such awareness of the human being as we would have now if people were to run about in the nude, for they perceived human beings spiritually clothed; the aura was the clothing. And when that innocence was lost and human beings were condemned to a materialistic way of life, meaning that they could no longer perceive auras, they saw what they had not seen while the aura was still perceptible, and they began to replace auras with clothing. That is the origin of clothing; garments replaced auras.

And it is actually a good thing in our materialistic age to know that people clothed themselves for no other reason than to emulate their aura with what they wore. That is especially the case with rituals, for everything that is worn on such occasions represents some part of the aura. You can see for yourselves, too, that Mary and Joseph and Mary Magdalene wear quite different garments. One wears a rose-colored dress with a blue mantle, the other a blue robe with a red mantle. Mary Magdalene is often portrayed in a yellow garment by those who were still familiar with the old tradition or who still retained remnants of clairvoyance. An attempt was always made to reproduce the aura of the individual in question, for people were aware that the aura ought to be indicated, ought to find expression in the clothing worn.

An aberration typical of our materialistic age afflicts certain circles who see an ideal in doing away with clothing and who regard the so-called nudity cult as extremely wholesome; materialism can always be counted upon to draw the practical conclusions of its thinking. There is actually a magazine devoted to this cause that calls itself Beauty. A misunderstanding is at the root of this; the magazine believes itself to be serving something other than the crassest, coarsest materialism. But that is all that can be served when reality is seen exclusively in what external, sense-perceptible nature has brought forth.

The wearing of clothes originated as a means of preserving in ordinary life the state of consciousness that sees human beings surrounded by an aura. We should therefore find out where the contemporary tendency to do away with clothing comes from. It comes from a total absence of any imagination in clothing ourselves. No idealism is involved, but rather a lack of any imagination where beauty is concerned. For clothes are intended to beautify the wearer, and to see beauty only in unclothed human beings would, for our time, reveal an instinct for materialism. I intend at a later date to contrast this with the situation existing in Greek civilization. That civilization provides us with the best means of studying this matter in the light of what has just been said.

Now it becomes more and more important for people to learn how various conditions of consciousness provide insights for a study of life. Sleeping and waking are alternations in states of consciousness. But while sleeping and waking bring about sharply marked changes in our state of consciousness, smaller changes occur as well. Day-waking consciousness also has its nuances, some of which tend more toward sleep, others more toward the waking state. We are all aware that there are individuals given to spending a large part of their lives not actually asleep, but drowsing. We say of them that they are “asleep,” meaning that they go through life as though in a dream. You can tell them something, and in no time at all they have forgotten it. We can't call it real dreaming, but things flit by them as though in a dream and are instantly forgotten. This drowsiness is a nuance of consciousness bordering on sleep. But if somebody beats another up, that is a nuance that goes beyond the state of ordinary sleep and doesn't remain just a mental image. Life presents a variety of nuances of consciousness; we could set up a whole scale of them. But they all have their own rightness.

A lot depends on our developing a feeling for these nuances. A person occasionally has such a sense if he is born healthy and grows up in a healthy state. It is important to have a certain sensitivity for how seriously to take this or that in life, how much or how little attention to pay to it, what matters to take a stand on and what to keep to oneself. All this has to do with the asserting of consciousness, and such nuances do indeed exist. And it is very important to know, as we go through life, that life can develop in us the delicate sensitivity that tells us how much consciousness to focus on any particular matter, how strongly to stress something. We really make important progress both in leading a healthy life and in the possibility of contributing to orderly conditions in our environment if we pay attention to how strongly we should focus our consciousness on this or that. The state of consciousness we are in when we are among people and talking with them in an ordinary way about various matters is different from the state of consciousness in which a sense of delicacy forbids our discussing certain other subjects. These are two distinctly differing nuances of consciousness. But the presence of a sense of the fitness of things is simply another state of consciousness, and it is endlessly important in life to have an awareness of such considerations. I'd like to show you at hand of an example that there are indeed individuals who possess understanding for such nuances of consciousness.

Today is the 27th of August, Hegel's birthday, and tomorrow, the 28th, is Goethe's; they follow on one another's heels. Now Hegel wrote an Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences among other works, and a first edition of it was published.^1: This book is noteworthy in a certain respect. There would be absolutely no point in opening it at random and reading this or that page; you could make exactly as much sense out of it as out of Chinese. A statement taken at random from a page of Hegel would convey nothing whatsoever. In a lecture in Berlin last winter I explained how little sense it made to divorce one of Hegel's sentences from its context. For sentences in Hegel's encyclopedia make sense only when one has skipped over everything that poses riddles for the human mind and arrived at the place where Hegel says, “Considered in and of itself, being is the concept,” and so on. If one begins there and exposes oneself to all the rest of it, then and only then does every sentence make sense at the place where it stands; each sentence owes its meaning to its place in the whole.

Well, so Hegel had his encyclopedia published. In the preface to the first edition he explained why he arranged it as he did. When there had to be a second edition, Hegel wrote a preface to that. Now an author can sometimes have quite an experience of life between two editions of a book. For even if one has already become acquainted with one's fellow men, one feels oneself duty bound not to see them entirely in the light in which they sometimes reveal themselves; and besides, one can tell quite a bit about them from the reception the book is given. That was true in Hegel's case also. So then he wrote a preface to the second edition, and there are important passages in it. I am going to read you two such, one the very first sentence; the second, sentences from the second page. The preface to the second edition begins as follows: “The well-disposed reader will find that several sections have been revised and developed in sharper definition. I have taken pains therein to make my presentation a less formal one and to bring abstract concepts closer to the layman's understanding, making them more concrete by using more extensive exoteric annotations.” He was concerned, you see, to explain esoteric matters exoterically. The book continues:

The extreme brevity necessitated by a summarization of material quite sufficiently abstruse to begin with nevertheless leaves this second edition with the same goal as the first, namely, to serve as a preliminary text requiring further exegesis in the form of lectures. The title “encyclopedia” usually presupposes a less rigid adherence to scientific method and a more general structuring. But it lies in the nature of the subject matter that logical aspects must remain the basis of the presentation.

There were all too many occasions and provocations that seemed to require me to clarify my philosophical position with respect to the spiritual and the insipid concerns of contemporary culture, a thing to be undertaken only exoterically and only in a preface; for even if these concerns claim a relationship to philosophy, they do not do so scientifically, which means not at all; they approach it from without, and remain outside it. It is uncongenial and mistaken to involve oneself in a situation so alien to science. All the clarifying and explaining one might do fails to further that insight which can alone form the object of true knowledge. But it may be useful or necessary to comment on various phenomena.

This is proof that Hegel tried to shape the first edition in what was for him an esoteric manner, and that it was only in the second edition that he added what seemed to him exoteric aspects. Our time often possesses no understanding for these exoteric and esoteric elements; it doesn't so easily embark on the course Hegel travelled, who wanted to keep to himself everything originating in his own subjective view of a matter. And it was only after he had built up a complete organismic structure and freed it from any subjective aspects that he was willing to present this objective material in his book; he remained of the opinion that one's own path in achieving an insight was something that should be kept a private matter. In this, he evidenced sensitive feeling for the difference between two states of consciousness: that into which he wanted to enter when addressing the public, and that other developed for communing with himself. And then the world urged him, as the world so often does, in creating undesirable outcomes, to overcome this embarrassment of his for a certain period. For what lay at the bottom of his feeling was embarrassment, impelling him to silence about the way he had arrived at his concepts. As you know, embarrassment usually makes people blush. We would have to say, meaning something spiritual thereby, that Hegel blushed spiritually when he had to write a thing like his preface to the second edition. Here you see one of those nuances of consciousness over which embarrassment extends.

I wanted to demonstrate with an example how nuances of consciousness show up in life, including nuances in actions of the will and in what we do. We need to become ever more fully aware that life really must consist of such nuances, that we have to relate differences in states of consciousness to everything we do. Sleeping and waking involve very marked differences. But there can also be a nuance of consciousness in which we are aware that a matter concerns not just ourselves but the surrounding world as well; another, in which we confront the world with awareness that we must tread gently; and still another in which we know that what we do must be done with ourselves alone, or only in the most intimate circle.

The concepts and ideas we garner from spiritual science really make a difference in life. They teach us to recognize subtle subjective differences, provided we aren't disposed to know them only from the usual standpoint, realizing instead that a serious concern with spiritual science makes us a gift of this capacity for practical tact. But that serious concern with spiritual science must be present. It is of course absent if we project into spiritual science the sensations, desires, and instincts that ordinarily prevail. If that is the case, what is derived from spiritual science amounts to little more than can be garnered from any other indifferent source of learning. I've been speaking of nuances of consciousness and saying that there are nuances within the waking states very close to sleep. But it can happen that a person lacks the inclination to concern himself with certain details and subtleties, as in the case of the coupon clipper in yesterday's lecture. One may enjoy reading books or lecture cycles, but experience a dwindling consciousness at certain places in the text, and drowsiness sets in; the conscientiousness required to overcome such a condition is simply not there to call upon.

That is why I have continued to stress that things should not be made too easy for people desiring to involve themselves with spiritual science. We hear again and again that books should be written in a popular style, that Theosophy is not popular enough.^2: I discern behind such comments a wish for books that people could drowse through in a way they can't with Theosophy. It is vitally necessary to have sufficient interest for objective facts to rid ourselves of certain feelings and sensations we have had in the past; if we allow ourselves to drowse as we confront this or that theme in spiritual science that ought to engage our interest, we would stay awake only in the case of those matters most easily absorbed. And such a lack of objective interest leads to an inevitable development. The coupon cutter feels obligated to listen to the lecture, for lecture-going is part of a proper lifestyle, but he suffers tortures because of his total lack of interest. But he is gradually relieved; he enjoys himself, and sometimes even falls soundly asleep, a condition he doesn't have to guard against unless he starts snoring. All of this is a perfectly natural development.

Now let us picture this process transferred to another kind of consciousness. Let us imagine a person who lacks the needed full interest in the concrete details of spiritual science. He feels that he is listening best when he is not paying attention to details. I have even heard the comment, “Oh, what he is saying isn't the important thing; it's the ‘vibrations,’ ‘the way it's said.’” The lecturer can often discern this type of drowsy listening in the listener's appearance. This is exactly the same situation on the soul level as that of the coupon clipper in external life. For if attention is being given to “vibrations” instead of to what spiritual science is offering, it turns the hearer's interest inward, as happens when the coupon clipper is enjoying himself. It may be that such a person describes himself between lectures as taking an interest in what the lecture offered, and claims interest in this or that theme. But he is really gossiping about his or someone else's previous incarnations. He has, in other words, shifted everything to an interest in himself in an identical internalizing process. We really see the same process here that goes on in the external life of the coupon clipper, who falls asleep at every lecture, in the case of those who feel that details are not important, but who claim an interest in spiritual science they really lack. So they fall asleep as to details, and their interest is transferred to their own personalities.

Things of this sort have to be made clear. If we were to see them clearly, much that happens would not occur.

I would like to see you make a study of the nuance levels of consciousness as I have tried to describe them. The last example given should perhaps not be taken amiss now or at any other time. There is no question that the movement of spiritual science is met with a good deal of sleepiness, while a strong tendency to self-enjoyment gets the upper hand, with the result that spiritual science is used only as a means of indulging in self-enjoyment. But we want to concentrate on nuances of consciousness, for unless we do so we will not be able to achieve an understanding of necessity, chance, and providence.

• 1:. Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, 1770–1831, German philosopher. Published Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in 1817.
• 2:. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).