The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From what has been said about the relation of sleeping to waking in man, and also about the membering of his organism, it can be seen that in sleep he experiences a profound cleavage in his earthly existence. We know that a distinction has to be made between the part of man which is materially perceptible to the senses, his physical body, and the part that can be seen only through Imagination, his etheric or formative forces body. This formative forces body embraces also the living forces which enable a man to grow, underlie his nutritive processes and generally build him up. As we have seen, the formative forces body includes also the whole system of a man's thoughts. Intermingled with his formative forces body and his physical body are two higher members, which we may call the astral body and the Ego-organisation.

In a man's life during the day these four members of his being are in active inner relationship with one another. But when he passes into the sleeping state, his physical and etheric bodies separate from the Ego and astral body. They remain—if one may put it thus—in bed, while the astral and Ego organisations enter a purely spiritual world. So that, from his falling asleep until he wakes, a man's being is split in two—on the one hand there are his physical organisation and the etheric that holds his world of thought; on the other, the Ego and the astral organisation.

I believe someone in the course of these days has voiced the misgiving: If in sleep a man's whole thought-world remains in the etheric organisation, then he must be unable to carry effectively into the sleeping state the thoughts which he can grasp only while he is awake. This shows a certain anxiety lest wishes for one's fellow-men, for example, or thoughts relating to an absent one, should lose all power because they cannot be taken over into the life of sleep. I should like to reply with a picture.

You are not very likely to have heard of anyone who, wanting to shoot at a target, thought he had to throw his gun at it. While still holding the gun he lets the charge do the work, and you cannot say that nothing reaches the target because the gun remains in the man's hands. It is just the same in the case we are considering. The effects of our thinking life when we are awake do not cease during sleep because the thoughts remain in the physical and etheric bodies. It is particularly important with these subtle matters that we should be precise in our thinking—precise to a degree unnecessary in the physical world, where the things themselves provide immediate corrections. From what has been said in these last few days, however, you will see that a much more intimate relation exists between the physical body and the etheric body than between the etheric body and the astral organisation. For throughout the whole of an earthly life the physical body and the etheric remain together, never separating even when, in sleep, the etheric body and the astral body have to part company.

There is a close connection, on the other hand, between the Ego and the astral organisation, for neither do they ever part from one another during life on Earth. But the connection between the astral and the etheric bodies is looser, and it is there that the split can occur. This has a quite definite effect on a man's earthly life, and also on his life beyond the Earth. In our waking state we give life to our senses through our Ego, and through the astral body to our nervous system; and what is brought about in this way we send down into the etheric and physical bodies, as we must do if we are to live in the physical world. Hence, because everything has to be imprinted into the physical body, in order to become manifest in life from birth or conception until death, a materialist supposes that the physical body can make up the whole of a man's being.

This work of incorporating the experiences of earthly existence into the etheric body and the physical body does not proceed, however, without meeting obstacles and hindrances. We are never able to send down straight away into the organs of these bodies our experiences and the thoughts embodied in our nervous system, for anything we absorb from the external physical world is at first in a form moulded by that world. If, for example, we perceive something angular, an experience of this angular quality forms itself in our Ego and our astral body. This cannot be taken up immediately into the etheric body, for the etheric body struggles against absorbing anything experienced in the external world of the senses. Imaginative knowledge alone is able to throw light on this situation. No ordinary sense-observation, no material experiment, no intellectual reflection, will help us to a view of this necessary re-forming, re-shaping, of what we perceive with the senses, so as to fit it for living in the etheric body and physical body in such a way that we can separate from it in sleep. It is only when we are able to observe the actual relation between waking and sleeping in earthly man that we come to realise the continuous conflict that goes on in life. Thus—in the case of the crude example already mentioned—if I have to take my experience of an angular object into my etheric and physical bodies, I must first round off its angles and give the object a form suited to those bodies. It has to be completely transformed.

This transforming of anything having as volatile a life as that of the Ego and astral body themselves, and giving it a plastic form capable of living in the etheric body and of continuing its existence as plastic movement in the physical body—this transformation creates an inner struggle not perceived by ordinary consciousness to-day, but anyone who has Imaginative knowledge can perceive it. Generally it lasts two or three days. We have to sleep on an experience for two or often three nights for it to unite with the other experiences already imprinted in the etheric and physical bodies. The dream-world is an actual expression, but only an outward expression, of this struggle. While a man is dreaming, his Ego and his astral body flow into his etheric and physical bodies and come to a sudden stop—as already explained. This check is an expression of the struggle I am now picturing; it goes on for two or three days. Until the experience has been slept upon more than once, it has not gone sufficiently far down into the etheric body, so that where the connection is loose, as it is between astral body and etheric body, a continuous interweaving is to be seen.

If we have here the etheric body and the astral is there asleep, then on the verge of waking or of going to sleep a continuous struggle takes place, a movement full of life, expressed outwardly in the dream, but signifying inwardly this weaving of experiences into the etheric and physical bodies. It is only when a man has slept on some experience two or three times—perhaps more often—that the experience is united with the memories already bound up with his etheric and physical bodies. The point is that the experience has to be transformed into memory, which is left lying in bed during sleep, for a memory is essentially the expression in thought of the physical and etheric bodies.

For Imaginative cognition, perceiving this is an extraordinarily interesting experience. The very form of its expression is significant. We give our ordinary earthly experiences definite outlines in conformity with natural laws. These laws, however, no longer hold good when the experiences merge with the etheric; everything firmly outlined becomes soft and plastic. Whatever was at rest begins to move; anything angular becomes rounded. Intellectual experience passes over into the experience of the artist.

That is the deeper reason why, in those ancient days when people still had instinctive vision, art was rooted in life in a quite different way from anything we have to-day. Even as late as the Renaissance, in the searching back to earlier art there was still in Raphael and other painters at least a tradition of that conversion of the intellectual into the artistic. For the intellectual loses its form, and takes on the nature of art, directly we rise to the super-sensible. The fact that in art to-day people are so strongly inclined to naturalism, wanting models for all their work, shows that they no longer realise its true nature. Humanity must find its way again into the true realm of art.

Human life as I have described it is thus made up in such a way that it is always possible to say: I am experiencing something which will take three days to flow into the etheric body. A day later, the experience of the previous day will flow in. Hence it takes a man two, three, or even four days to complete this uniting of an experience with the etheric body.

Now when a man passes through the gate of death, the etheric body detaches itself from the physical body—something that never happens during earthly life. And now, when the etheric body is free of the physical, all that has been interwoven into the etheric body is gradually dispersed, and this process lasts for about as long—two, three or four days—as the interweaving did. Imagination, which can judge rightly of these matters, shows how during life the physical body holds together, through its resistance, the experiences that have gradually penetrated into the etheric body. When the physical body is laid aside at death, it can be seen how in the first few days afterwards the memories woven into the etheric body pass out into the universal cosmic ether, and dissolve. And so, for two, three or four days after death, a person experiences this dissolving of his accumulated store of memories. This may be called the laying aside of the etheric body, but it involves an ever-increasing enhancement of the memories; they lose the third dimension and become two-dimensional, entirely picture-like. After the gate of death is passed, the person is faced with the whole tableau of his life, taking its course in vivid pictures for two, three or four days, the time varying with each individual.

But just as a student of botany recognises in a seed the plant that will develop from it, so anyone with Imaginative cognition does not see only at death this passing over of the etheric, of the whole memory system, to the cosmos; he has seen it already in picture form, for as a picture it is always present in human beings. Those who can grasp rightly the interweaving that goes on in the course of three days or more see already, in this incorporation of experiences in the etheric body, a picture of the inward experience that is lived through for three or four days after death. Whereas in earthly existence, before acquiring Imaginative cognition, a man experiences more or less unconsciously this blending of his experiences into the memories held together by the physical body, immediately after death he experiences the reverse process, the unwinding, as it were, of his memories and the passing away of them into the Cosmos. Our treasured thoughts, left behind whenever we fall asleep, unite directly after death with the whole Cosmos. This is what in dying we have to yield up to cosmic existence.

These things must not be grasped only intellectually, but also with heart and soul. For in face of them a man feels that his life is not to be taken egoistically, but that he is placed in the world as a thinking being. He will feel that his thoughts are not something he can preserve, for after his death they will flow out into the Cosmos and will go on working there as active forces. If we have had good thoughts, we surrender them to the Cosmos, and if we have had bad thoughts, we surrender them also. For a man does not exist on earth merely to develop himself as a free being. This he certainly should do, and he can do it precisely if he takes something else into consideration. He is here also as a being on whom the Gods themselves may work, in order to lead the Cosmos on from epoch to epoch. Moreover I would say this: What the Gods are to weave into the Cosmos as thoughts has to be prepared by them through all that can be thought and produced during individual human lives. Here is the nurturing-place where the Gods have to tend the thoughts they need for the continuing evolution of the world—thoughts they then incorporate into the Cosmos as active impulses.

During sleep, a man lives with his Ego and astral organisation outside his physical and etheric bodies. While in this state as a being of soul and spirit, as Ego and astral organisation, he is interwoven with the spiritual forces pervading the whole Cosmos. He is in the world that is, figuratively speaking, outside his skin—the world of which the only impressions he receives in waking life come through his senses. During sleep, therefore, he enters right into the things that in waking life show him only their outer side. But it is only what is experienced by the astral organisation, when outside the physical and etheric bodies, that can be brought back into the thoughts of the etheric body, not what is experienced out there by the Ego. Hence, during the whole of our existence on Earth, the experiences of the Ego in sleep remain subconscious for ordinary consciousness, and even for Imaginative consciousness. They are revealed only to Inspired consciousness, as already described.

So this may be said: In sleep a man gathers up sufficient strength to imprint on the etheric body those experiences that can be put into thoughts. But during his life on Earth he lacks the power to deal with the wishes and desires which during sleep are experienced by the Ego in connection with earthly affairs—for these also are gone over during sleep. In our epoch, therefore, only the part of sleep-life that can be transformed into thoughts, imprinted in thoughts, passes over into the conscious waking life of earthly men; while the sleep-experiences of the Ego lie hidden behind the veil of existence.

Imaginative and Inspired consciousness bring to light here things which can be perfectly well understood by any impartial person with a healthy mind, but in our present civilisation they encounter tremendous prejudice. Even the fact that when the three-dimensional in the physical world is imprinted in the etheric body, it changes from the plastic to a picture form, from three to two dimensions—even to grasp this calls for an unprejudiced approach. Directly we rise to Imagination, we no longer have to do with three dimensions, any more than with four, as a misguided science believes, but with two only. The difficulty of picturing what is then experienced comes from our being accustomed in earthly experience to reckon with three dimensions and to form our concepts accordingly. And so, when we should be finding our way over to two dimensions, we say: “Yes, but two dimensions are included in the three; the two dimensions of a plane can lie in such a way that there might still be a third.”

That, however, is not the point. As soon as we enter the Imaginative world, the third dimension no longer concerns us at all, and the position of a plane is immaterial. On our entering the etheric world of Imagination, the third dimension ceases to have any meaning. Hence—and I add this for mathematicians—all equations for the ether must be transformed so as to correspond with the two-dimensional world.

Now if we would pass on to the world accessible to Inspiration, in which we are as Ego between going to sleep and waking, we come to one dimension only; we then have to do with a one-dimensional world. This transition to a one-dimensional world, taken for granted by the faculty of Inspiration—the faculty, that is, of actually perceiving the spiritual in which we live between going to sleep and waking—this understanding of a world with only one dimension has always been part of Initiation-knowledge.

I have already described how the hidden forces of the Sun—not the forces of the external physical sunlight—are revealed to men of the Jacob Boehme type. These hidden Sun-forces do not spread out three-dimensionally, but are perceived in one dimension only. An older, more instinctive Initiation-knowledge could, and did, come to perceive this through Inspiration, but without a clearly conscious knowledge of what it was. Much that is still handed down in the ancient records of long past epochs of mankind is to be understood only when one knows: This refers to the spiritual world that is one-dimensional, the world we find through Inspiration; as regards our earthly life it refers to the hidden forces of the Sun and Stars. Between going to sleep and waking we do not live in Sun-forces that are outwardly displayed, but in those that are hidden.

These hidden forces of the Sun can, for example, pass through certain kinds of stone which are impenetrable to physically perceptible Sun-forces, and by passing through them become one-dimensional. If anyone has acquired Inspirational vision, then, although he may not perceive the physical light, he can see the hidden Sun-forces penetrating the otherwise opaque stone; thus the stone is permeable for the Sun's hidden forces and also for the forces of Inspiration.

In very ancient periods of human evolution on Earth, such expedients were not needed. But when the old instinctive clairvoyance, which in those days was the basis of Initiation-knowledge, was on the wane, these aids were adopted as a short cut—we might say—to the perception of things no longer perceptible through instinctive Inspiration. People had recourse to such measures in the following way, for example. Imagine a number of stones set up beside one another, with other stones laid across the tops of them. If this is so arranged that on certain occasions the penetrating rays of the Sun fall on the covering stone, then the physical rays of the Sun will be held up by the stone and the hidden rays will pass through.

When anyone trained to it places himself so that he can look into this structure from the side, he will see the spiritual, one-dimensional rays of the Sun shining through and vanishing into the earth. If, when all this was no longer perceived through instinctive clairvoyant powers, a short cut of that kind were taken, it enabled anyone looking from the side into the shadow-zone to perceive the world of spiritual Sun-rays which we experience every night during sleep. Hence in such contrivances, to be met with in this very district, we can see by what means, during a long transitional period, certain wise leaders of mankind tried to penetrate to the hidden forces of the Sun, which a man such as Jacob Boehme could do instinctively through simply beholding earthly things.

Although such collections of stones can be seen to-day in appropriate places, their real significance can be brought out only through what Spiritual Science reveals. Otherwise people are left with a superficial explanation which misses the real point.

Such stones can of course be distributed in the circle so as to show how the spiritual rays of the Sun differ according to particular constellations of the stars.

I have been trying to make clear to you the world in which our Ego lives during sleep. This world is not held together by the inherent forces of the physical and etheric bodies. These bodies, however, are alone responsible for the clear consciousness of earthly man; they are the source of the judgments we form, in accordance with our feelings and our will, on our own actions, our inward experiences and thoughts. Hence, when we are awake, we judge our external life according to the thoughts we have been able to imprint in our physical and etheric bodies. But it is not only a human being himself who has something to say about his experiences; his experiences and actions are the concern of the whole spiritual Cosmos. The Cosmos judges whether an action, a thought or feeling is to be declared good or bad. Between waking and sleeping we are left to form our own opinions about ourselves. As I have sufficiently shown during these lectures, the spiritual content of the Cosmos takes the moral as its natural law, and what the Cosmos has to say about our true nature and our actions is experienced by the Ego during sleep. Inspired cognition shows how the Ego, even during the shortest sleep, experiences over again everything the individual has gone through from his last moment of waking until his present sleep—however long or short this period may be. So a man, in the successive states of waking, sleeping, waking, sleeping, experiences again in sleep whatever he went through during his last waking time, especially where his own activities were concerned.

As far as this is the experience of the Ego, it remains outside ordinary consciousness, but Inspiration can call it up. Then the particular nature of the experience is disclosed, and we find it is gone through in reverse order to our experience by day. Whereas by day you go through your experiences—leaving short sleeps aside—from morning to evening, during the night, in sleep, you live through these experiences backwards—from evening to morning. This is in order that we may experience whatever the spiritual Cosmos has to say about the way we have lived through the day.

During earthly life, however, a man cannot normally call this experience up into consciousness. Yet he must become conscious of it, or his human existence would fall out of connection with cosmic existence. Inspired cognition shows that as soon as a man after death has watched his life-tableau, which, as I have said, lasts two, three, or four days, and as soon as his memories have dissolved into the Cosmos, spreading themselves out there—after this experience, often referred to as the freeing of the etheric body—a time comes when the man is able to look back on his earthly life again, but in a different way.

If we look at those few days after death, we come to a mighty panorama of our life, but at first it embraces daytime experiences alone. In reality, however, a man goes through not only his waking experiences but also those he has had during sleep. When in earthly life you look back on your ordinary memories, you always leave out your periods of sleep, as if your only experiences had been those lived through by day. And so it goes on right back to the time after birth when your memories cease.

In fact it is like this with the panorama that appears during those two or three days after death. Then, later, comes a period when soul and spirit have gained sufficient strength to experience in the spiritual world all that could manifest only unconsciously, in picture form, while we were asleep at night during our life on Earth. It now comes before us as experience. A man then passes through a period—lasting about one-third of his life on Earth, approximately the time normally spent in sleep—when he experiences his nights again, but in a backward direction. So he lives through his last night first, then the night before, and so on right back to the time of his birth and conception.

From other points of view I have described this going back through a quite different world after death in my book, Theosophy, when I was speaking of man, as a being of soul and spirit, passing through the soul-world.

Now when after death a man has gone thus through the soul-world, taking about seven years for it if he has lived twenty-one years, or, if he has lived to sixty, perhaps twenty years—always the length of time he has slept in earthly life—he has then to experience the total effect he has had upon Earth-existence—an existence created by the Gods in order to carry the world, with the help of the human race, a little further on its progress. Up to the end of this backward survey of his nights after death, a man has been gaining knowledge of what he has himself become, of his significance for the Cosmos. He now has to experience how the Earth itself has been affected by his life. This takes a long time—half the time, indeed, between earthly death and a new earthly life. Tomorrow we shall have to speak of this in greater detail.

After going backwards through our nights, we come to our birth; and having arrived there, after this backward journey through the soul-world, we have to find the way back to our previous earthly life. This enables a man to bring over with him that previous life for the shaping of his next life on Earth.

Here we enter the realm of the old Initiation-knowledge (which must be renewed to-day in a way suited to men's present faculties.) The old Initiation-knowledge led people over to religious experience. For Initiation-knowledge is always true knowledge, but of a kind that leads out from the world of the senses into the spiritual, so that the human will is stirred to take a religious form. At the stage of Initiation which leads to the Intuitive-knowledge already described, it has always been recognised as of the utmost importance that when a man goes back to his previous life on Earth, he should meet on the way a being who can become his guide after death.

In a certain region of the Earth a man would say to himself: In my earthly life I must absorb the teaching of the last Bodhisattva to appear on earth. The man may have lived three hundred years after the appearance of this Bodhisattva. But when after death he went back to his previous life on Earth, he arrived at the time when the last Bodhisattva was living on Earth. In the old Initiation-knowledge, this meeting with the last Bodhisattva to appear on the Earth was regarded as enabling the man to make a real contact with his own previous earthly life—which means finding the necessary strength for eternal life, for this can be found only when real contact with the previous earthly life is achieved.

Any possibility of this meeting with the Bodhisattvas, who descend to Earth from certain spiritual regions, ceased at a definite time in human evolution, in world-evolution. And to-day a man would have been unable, when after death he had gone back to his last birth and conception, to go further and make contact with his previous earthly lives. The way to this could be found by a man during the first millennia of earthly evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha, when, in going back, he came to the time of the last Bodhisattva. Today, however, he will find the way only if he makes the journey under the leadership of that Being who united Himself with the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha; if, in other words, he enters into such a relation with the Mystery of Golgotha that Christ can become his guide. For the Christ gathers into Himself all those powers of leadership for life between death and rebirth which used to belong to the Bodhisattvas who appeared on Earth.

Thus the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, with its particular bearing on our experience between death and rebirth, is one of the most important facts in the whole evolution of the Earth. If anyone wishes to learn about the spiritual evolution of the Earth and the place it takes in the spiritual evolution of the Cosmos, and if moreover he wishes to understand what a man goes through in connection with this spiritual evolution of Earth and Cosmos during his life between death and a new birth, then he must give the Mystery of Golgotha its right place in the whole evolution of the world. For people to-day, therefore, a way must be found that will lead attention over from the evolution of man to the evolution of the world, so that the Mystery of Golgotha is seen in all its fundamental significance for the course of events in the evolution of the Earth and in the evolution of man within the earthly.

With these matters, as far as modern Initiation-knowledge can reveal them—matters relating to the later experiences of human beings after death, when they have gone back in memory through their night-experiences—we will deal further tomorrow, in connection with the evolution of the world.

In the course of our present studies I should like it to become increasingly clear that man does not belong to the Earth alone, to Earth-existence alone, but also to the Cosmos, to the world of Stars. Much of what there is to say in this connection I have, as you know, already said. I want now to begin with a brief remark in order that misunderstandings may be avoided.

Anyone who speaks of man's connection with the world of the Stars is probably always liable to be accused of leanings towards the superficial form of Astrology that is so widely pursued nowadays. But if what is said on this subject is rightly understood, the immense difference will at once be apparent between what is meant here and the amateurish interpretations of ancient astrological traditions that are so common today.

When we say that man, between birth and death, is a being connected with the Earth and earthly happenings, what do we mean by this? We mean that man owes his existence between birth and death to the fact that, in the first place, he takes the substances of the Earth into his metabolic system as nourishment and digests them; further, that through his breathing, and through the inner processes connected with his breathing, he is related in still another way to the Earth—that is to say, to the atmosphere surrounding the the Earth. We also say that man perceives the outer things of the Earth by means of his senses, perceives indeed reflections of what is extra-terrestrial—reflections which are, however, of a much more earthly character than is generally supposed. So that in general one can say: Man partakes of earthly existence through his senses, through his rhythmic system, and through his metabolic system, and has within him the continuation of the processes set in operation through this Earth-existence itself.

But equally there takes place in man a continuation of cosmic, extra-terrestrial processes. Only it must not be supposed, when it is said that an influence from the Moon, or Venus, or Mars, is exercised upon man, that this is to be understood merely as if rays of light are sent down from Mars or Venus or the Moon, and permeate him. When, for instance, it is said that man is subject to the influence of the Moon, this must be taken as an analogy of what is meant by saying that man is subject to the influences of the substances of the Earth. When someone passes an apple-tree, let us say, picks an apple and eats it, it can be said that the apple-tree has an influence on him; but we should not construe this so literally as to say that the apple-tree had sent its rays towards him. Or, if you like, when a man passes a meadow where there is an ox, and a week afterwards eats its flesh, we shall not at once form the idea that the ox has exercised an influence upon him. Neither must we picture so literally what is said about the influence upon man of the world of the Stars. The relation of the world of the Stars to man and of man to the world of the Stars is for all that just as much a reality as the relation of the man to the ox he passes in the meadow and the flesh of which he afterwards eats.

Today I have to speak of certain connections which exist between man and the worlds both of Earth-existence and of extra-earthly existence. If we again turn our attention to how man lives in the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, we must first be clear that it is in the waking state that his reciprocal relationship to earthly substances and earthly forces is actually established. During waking life he perceives through his senses; during sleep he does not. Moreover he eats and drinks only when awake—though possibly some people would like to do so in sleep as well! The breathing process and the process that is connected with the breathing, i.e. the circulation of the blood, as well as the other rhythmic processes—these alone continue in man both in the waking and sleeping states. But they differ in the two states. I will speak later of the difference there is between breathing during waking life and breathing during sleep. To begin with we will confine ourselves to the fact that man is related to the outer world during the waking state through his senses and through his metabolism. We will consider this at first in connection only with things that are common knowledge.

Let us then start from the fact that during his waking state man takes foodstuffs into himself from the outside world, inner activity being promoted by the process of digestion. But it must not be forgotten that while, in the waking state, after the food has been taken, inner physical and etheric activity proceeds under the influence of the intaken foodstuffs, this physical and etheric organism of man is permeated by his Ego-organization and astral body.

It is also the case that during the waking state, man's Ego and astral ‘being’ take command of what goes on in the physical and etheric bodies in connection with the process of nourishment. But what thus takes place under the influence of the Ego and astral being does not continue during sleep. During sleep the physical and etheric bodies of man are worked upon by forces that issue, not from the Earth but from the cosmic environment of the Earth—from the world of the Stars.

It might be said—and not in a figurative sense for it has real meaning—that by day man eats the substances of the Earth and by night takes into himself what the Stars and their activities give him. In a certain sense, therefore, man is bound up with the Earth while he is awake and removed from the Earth while he is asleep; heavenly processes take their course in his physical and etheric bodies during sleep.

Materialistic science thinks that when a man is asleep, the substances he has consumed simply activate their own forces in him, whereas in reality, whatever substances a man takes into himself are worked upon during his sleep by the cosmic forces in the environment of the Earth. Suppose, for instance, we consume white of egg—albumen. This albumen is only fettered to the Earth through the fact that during the waking state we are permeated by our soul and spirit—our astral body and Ego. During sleep this albumen is worked upon by the whole planetary system from Moon to Saturn, and by the world of the fixed Stars. And a chemist who wished to study the inner processes taking place in man during sleep would have not only to be versed in earthly chemistry but also in a spiritual chemistry, for the processes then are different from those that take their course during waking life.

The Ego and astral being of man are, as you know, separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep and are not directly related with the world of the Stars; but they are directly related with the Beings of whom the Sun, Moon and Stars are the physical mirror-images—namely, with the Beings of the Hierarchies. Man asleep is a duality; his Ego and astral body—I could equally well say, his spirit and soul—become subject to the spiritual Beings of the higher kingdoms of the Universe. His bodies, the physical and etheric bodies, are subject to the physical reflections, the cosmic-physical mirror-images of these higher Beings.

Aware of himself as an earthly being, man has become more and more a materialistic philistine under the influence of intellectualism. Almost as aptly as the modern age is called the epoch of intellectual and scientific progress, it could be called the epoch of materialistic philistinism. For man is not conscious that he is dependent on anything else than sense-impressions coming from the Earth, the rhythmic processes set going in him by earthly processes, the metabolic processes also occasioned in him by earthly conditions. Hence he does not know his real place in the Universe. The factors in operation here are of tremendous complexity. As soon as the veil that is spread before man in order that he may see only the sense-world and not the spiritual world behind it, is drawn aside, life becomes extraordinarily complex.

It is found to begin with that man is influenced not only by those Beings and their physical reflections, the Stars, which can be directly observed, but that within earthly existence itself, supersensible Beings akin to those of the world of Stars have so to speak set up their abode in the earthly realm.

You know that the people of the Old Testament worshipped Jehovah—who was an actual Being, connected with what manifests in the physical world as Moon. It is of course more or less a figure of speech to say that the Jehovah-Being has his dwelling in the Moon, but at the same time there is reality in the expression. Everything pertaining to this Jehovah-Being is connected with the Moon.

Now there are Beings who ‘scorned’—if I may so express it—to make the journey to the Moon with the Jehovah-beings when the Moon separated from the Earth, and who remained in the earthly realm. So that in a way we can divine the existence of the true Jehovah-beings when we look at the Moon. We can say: that is the outer physical image of everything that participates in a regular way in the World Order in connection with the Being known as Jehovah. But when we learn to know what takes place inside the surface of the Earth—whether in the solid or the watery states—we find beings there who have disdained to make their home on the Moon, and have in an irregular way made the Earth their dwelling-place.

Now the Moon-beings, as I will call them, have helpers. These helpers belong to Mercury and Venus, just as the Moon-beings belong to the Moon. The Venus-beings, the Mercury-beings and the Moon-beings form a kind of trinity. The so-called regular beings of this kind in the Universe belong to these Stars. But both in the solid and the watery constituents of the Earth, we find beings belonging, it is true, to the same category, but—one might say—to a different epoch of time. They are beings who did not share in the Earth's cosmic evolution.

These beings have an influence upon sleeping man just as the regular cosmic beings have; but their influence is pernicious. I must characterize it by saying: when a man goes to sleep, then in the condition between falling asleep and waking, these irregular Moon, Venus and Mercury-beings approach him and set about persuading him that evil is good and good evil. All this takes place in man's unconscious condition, between going to sleep and waking.

It is a shattering experience connected with initiation that beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness things by no means without danger to humanity are encountered. People holding the materialistic view of life have no idea to what man is exposed between going to sleep and waking. He is actually exposed to these beings who persuade him in his sleeping state that good is evil, and evil good. The moral order on Earth is bound up with the human etheric body, and when man sleeps, he leaves his moral achievements behind him on the bed. He does not pass over into the state of sleep armed with his moral qualities.

Natural Science today is everywhere touching the fringe of things which need to be explained by Spiritual Science. You may recently have seen in the newspapers some interesting and thoroughly well-founded statistics. It was stated that criminals in the prisons have been found to have the soundest sleep of all. Really hardened criminals are never tormented during their sleep by bad dreams or the like. This only happens when they dip down again into their etheric bodies, for it is there that the moral qualities lie. It can much more easily happen to one who is striving to be moral, that through the constitution of his etheric body, he carries over something into his astral body and is then tormented by dreams as the result of comparatively trifling moral lapses. But generally speaking it is a fact that man does not carry over at all, or only to a very slight extent, the moral constitution he acquires during earthly existence but is exposed during sleep to the beings just referred to.

These beings are identical with those I have always designated as Ahrimanic. They set themselves the task of keeping man on the Earth by every possible means. You know from the book Occult Science that the Earth will one day pass over into the Jupiter condition. That is what these beings want to prevent. They want to prevent man from developing in a regular way together with the Earth and then passing over into the Jupiter condition in a normal way. They want to preserve the Earth as Earth and mankind for the Earth. Hence these beings work unceasingly and with great intensity to achieve the following.—You must remember that these are things that take place behind the scenes of existence—real processes that have been going on ever since there has been a human race on the Earth.—Man passes into the state of sleep in his Ego-being and astral-being. These Moon, Venus and Mercury-beings who are living unlawfully on the Earth, now endeavor to give man an etheric body composed of the Earth's ether whenever he is asleep. They hardly ever succeed. In rare cases of which I will speak at some later time, they have succeeded; but this hardly ever happens. Still they do not give up the attempt for over and over again it seems to them that their efforts might succeed, that they might surround, permeate a man while he is asleep and has left his etheric body behind, with another etheric body built up from the Earth's ether. That is what these beings desire.

If an Ahrimanic being of this category were actually to succeed in bringing a complete etheric body stage by stage into a man every time he slept, such a man would be able after death, when living in his etheric body, to maintain himself in that body. Otherwise, as you know, the etheric body dissolves in a few days. But a man to whom the above had happened would be able to continue existing in his etheric body and after a time there would arise a race of etheric humanity. That is what is desired from this side of the spiritual world, and then it would be possible by such means to preserve the Earth.

Within the solid and the fluid components of the Earth there are in very truth a host of such beings. Their desire is to make mankind into pure phantoms, etheric phantoms, until the end of the Earth's evolution, so that the normal goal of Earth-evolution could not be attained. And in the night-time these beings by no means lose courage; over and over again they believe that their efforts may succeed.

Now man today has quite a passably good intellect which has developed considerably at the present time when philistinism is on the increase. Man can certainly pride himself upon possessing intellect. But this intellect is not even remotely on a par with the intellect of those higher beings who desire to achieve what I am now describing to you. Let nobody say: ‘These beings must be fearfully stupid.’ They are certainly not stupid. Seeing that they work only upon human beings in sleep, there is nothing to deter them from believing that they might succeed before the end of Earth-evolution in preventing a large portion of the human race from reaching their future destinations—destinations bound up with the Jupiter embodiment of the Earth.

But one who is able to see behind the scenes of physical existence can perceive that these beings do sometimes lose courage, are disappointed. And the disappointments they experience are not experienced in the night, but by day. One sees, for instance, how these Ahrimanic beings suffer disappointments if one comes across them in hospitals.

Now of course the illnesses that befall men have one aspect that calls upon us in all circumstances to do everything we possibly can to heal them. But on the other side we must ask: how do the illnesses suffered by men arise out of the dark sources of natural existence?

Those illnesses which are not the result of external influences but arise out of the inner constitution of man, are connected with the fact that when the Ahrimanic beings have almost succeeded in making a man assume an etheric body that is not his normal one, then, instead of bringing the lawful working of the etheric forces into his physical body and into his own accustomed etheric body on waking, such a man bears into himself causes of illness. Through these causes of illness the true Venus, Mercury and Moon-beings protect themselves against the harmful influences of the irregular beings. Indeed if a man did not at some time or another get this or that illness, he would be liable to the danger of which I have just spoken. In any illness his body breaks down, collapses, in order that there can be ‘sweated out,’ if I may use the expression, whatever irregular etheric processes he has taken into himself through the Ahrimanic influences.

And a further reaction called forth in order to prevent man from falling a victim to this Ahrimanic influence, is the possibility of error. And a third thing is egoism. Man is not fundamentally intended to be ill, to fall a prey to error, or to be egoistic to an exaggerated degree. Egoism as such is again a means of holding man to the evolution proper to the Earth instead of being torn out of it by the Ahrimanic beings. This, then, is one order of beings which can be discovered behind the scenes of ordinary sense-existence.

One can form an idea of another order of beings by knowing that not only Moon, Mercury, and Venus have an influence upon man but that an influence is also exercised from beyond the Sun—from Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

You know from the lectures I gave in the so-called ‘French Course’^NoteNum that the Moon is the physical reflection of those beings who bring man into the physical world. Saturn is the physical reflection of those beings who bear him again out of the physical world. The Moon draws man down to the Earth; Saturn draws him again into the Universe and then into the spiritual world.

Just as the Jehovah-Moon-God has Venus and Mercury-beings as helpers, so Saturn has Jupiter and Mars-beings as helpers in bearing man into the Cosmos and into the spiritual worlds. These influences and the influences connected with the Moon-beings work upon man in exactly the opposite way.

The influences of Moon, Venus, and Mercury upon us are predominant until our 17th or 18th years. Then later on, when we have passed our 20th or 21st year, an influence from Mars, Jupiter and Saturn becomes particularly active; only in later years does this come to the point of leading us out of earthly existence into the spiritual world. The inner constitution of man is, in fact, dependent upon this transition, as one might say, from the inner planets to the outer planets. Until our 17th or 18th years, we are dependent, for instance, upon the major blood-circulation which affects the whole body. Later in life we are dependent upon the minor blood-circulation—but these are matters which must be left for future lectures. At the moment we must pay attention to the fact that just as the irregular beings of Moon, Venus, and Mercury have their habitations in the solid and fluidic components of the Earth, so the irregular beings of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn have the conditions for their existence—or, to speak pictorially, their habitations—in the warmth and in the air surrounding the Earth.

These beings have a great influence upon man during his sleeping state. But their influence works in exactly the opposite direction. The aim of these beings is to make man into a moral automaton—if I may so express it—into a moral automaton of such a nature that in his waking state he would not listen to his own instincts, his desires, or the voice of his blood, but would spurn all this and hearken only to the inspiration of these irregular Mars-, Jupiter-, and Saturn-beings. He would then become a moral automaton, without any prospect of a future state of freedom. That, then, is what these beings desire; and their influence too is strong, exceedingly strong. It is they who every night want to induce man to take the influence of the world of Stars into himself and never again the influence of the Earth. They would fain carry man right away from earthly existence. They desire—and have desired this ever since the human race first arose on the Earth—that man shall spurn the Earth, that he shall not awaken to freedom on the Earth—where alone this is possible. They desire that he shall remain a moral automaton as he was in the preceding metamorphosis of the Earth, in the Old Moon.

And in the middle, between these two hosts, of which the one sets its camp in the element of warmth and that of air, and the other in the elements of earth and of water—between these two opposing cosmic hosts stands Man. Life in his physical body conceals from him the fact that a fierce battle is waged in the Cosmos for possession of his being.

Today man must consciously find his way to such knowledge for it concerns him deeply and essentially. His very existence as a human being is constituted by the fact that forces are everywhere active around him, forces from the spiritual world. It is important for man today to have knowledge of his real position in the Universe.

A time will come when people will be far more justified in holding a poor opinion of our dark, materialistic knowledge compared with what will be known in the future about the spiritual reality behind the physical, than we are justified in saying that the scientific knowledge possessed by the Greeks was puerile, that they were mere children, whereas we have made splendid progress! In philistinism we certainly have made splendid progress and we shall have much more right to criticise when we can speak with full knowledge of this battle that is waging on the Earth for possession of man's being.

There are signs that a knowledge of these things must begin to spread in our time. It is certainly true that what I have told you today about the battle of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings in the Cosmos for the being of man is still hidden from the majority of people in the dark recesses of their inner nature. But these battles are now beginning to send their waves into that realm of existence of which men are clearly conscious. And today, if we are not to lead a sleepy existence in our civilization, we must know how to recognize the first waves that beat in upon us from those regions of the spiritual world which I have just characterized.

These two hosts—the Luciferic in the warmth and airy element of the Earth, the Ahrimanic in the solid and watery—these two hosts send their waves into our cultural life today. The Luciferic hosts are making their influence felt above all in outworn theology. In our cultural life, as an outflow of this Luciferic power, we encounter statements endeavoring to make Christ into a myth. The Christ descended to the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha as a real Being, and that is naturally a truth that cuts right across the intentions of the beings who would like to make man into a moral automaton, without freedom. Therefore: Do away with the reality of Christ. Christ is a myth! You can discover in the literature of the 19th century, how clever and ingenious were the hypotheses of theologians like David Frederic Strauss, Kalthoff and those who merely echoed them, or better said, apish babblers like Arthur Drews! Everywhere the view is advanced that Christ is a mythological figure, a mere picture which has impressed itself upon man's imagination.—There will be many more attacks from these hosts—but this is the first.

The first waves coming from the Ahrimanic host in the solid and watery elements of the Earth press home the opposite view. In this case, Christ is denied and validity allowed only to the ‘simple man of Nazareth,’ to Jesus as the physical personality. Here again is a tit-bit presented by theology!

Making Christ into a myth—a purely Luciferic activity. Making the One who went through the Mystery of Golgotha into a mere man—even if endowed with every possible quality—a purely Ahrimanic activity. This, however, does not succeed at all easily, for the many testimonies and traditions have to be eliminated before producing this ‘simple man of Nazareth.’ Nevertheless this other tit-bit of theology is evidence of the onrush of the Ahrimanic breakers into human culture.

If these things are to be rightly assessed we must be able also to detect them behind the scenes of our ordinary existence on Earth. Otherwise, if men are not willing to turn their attention to what can be said today out of the spiritual world, they will become less and less able to judge such phenomena correctly, and these phenomena will then take effect in the sub-consciousness. It will become increasingly dangerous for men to surrender to the subconscious. Clear, thoughtful observation of what actually exists—a feeling for reality—that is the growing need of humanity.

Perhaps we can trace most definitely where this clear thoughtfulness, this sense of reality, must be applied, when we perceive the increase of such extraordinary phenomena as the theology which on the one hand denies Christ, and on the other hand makes Christ a myth. Such phenomena will become more and more prevalent, and if they are not to lead to corruption, humanity must acquire a clear, unswerving perception of the spiritual influences that are exercised upon the physical world, and particularly upon man himself.

I told you once before of the two men who found a piece of iron bent into a certain shape. The one said: “A good horse-shoe! I will shoe my horse with it.” The other said: “Not at all. It is a magnet and can be used for quite different purposes than shoeing a horse!” “I see nothing like a magnet about it,” said the other man. “You are crazy to say that there are invisible magnetic forces in it. It's a horse-shoe—that's its use!”

This is rather like the people today who are not willing to receive the knowledge that comes from the spiritual world. They want to “shoe horses” with everything in the world—if I may so express myself—because they will not acknowledge the reality of the supersensible forces. They want to shoe horses—not to make anything in which the magnetic forces are put to use. There was once a time—nor does it lie very far behind us—when a piece of iron so shaped would have been used for the shoeing of horses. But today this is no longer possible.

A time will come when in ordinary social life too, men will need what can be communicated from the spiritual world. Of this we must be mindful, and then Anthroposophy will penetrate not only into the intellect—that is of less importance—but above all into the will—and that is of great importance. Upon this we will ponder more and more deeply.

• NoteNum. Printed under the title: Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion. An abbreviated version of ten lectures given by Dr. Steiner in Dornach, 6th-15th September, 1922.

My dear friends,

We will relate what is said today to the previous lesson, partly to preserve the thread, and partly because there are members present who were not here last time. We shall therefore start with a short recapitulation of the last lesson.

We proceeded in thought to the place where the human being - who with normal consciousness can grasp the sense-world, which is the world that surrounds him - can feel himself related to the super-sensible, related to a being which corresponds to his own being. And we want to first develop this sensation before proceeding to the mysteries of the spiritual life, which we will do shortly.

The first sensation should make us aware of how the human being, in his normal condition, lives surrounded by the world of the senses, which however he is not able to identify with his own being. We shall therefore develop this theme. And although the words “Know thyself!” have been enunciated throughout the ages, encouraging man to perform his noblest deeds, still he can find no answers, no satisfaction if, under the influence of “Know thyself”, he only sees what the senses provide - the exterior world. Now, however, he is directed towards something else, something beyond the exterior world.

If with this sensation, which one can have when one gazes out to the depths of cosmic space with the question of his own being in mind, when in thought we approach super-sensible being, which is one with the inner human being, then the corresponding sensation will be given through the words I provided to you the last time:

Where on earth-foundations, color upon color,
Life creative manifests itself;
Where from earthly substance, form on form,
The lifeless world is fashioned;
Where the sentient beings, powerful in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence;
Where you yourself, O Man, derive
Your bodily existence from earth and air and light:

There you do enter, for your own true-being,
Cold, night-enveloped darkness.
In vain you ask of the dumb expanse
What you are, what you were, or will become.
For your own being, this light of day grows dim
To the soul's night, the darkness of the spirit.
Then do you turn your anxious seeking soul
Unto that light that shines out of the darkness.

We can now observe and feel in our souls the beauty, the greatness and the sublimity of the external world, but we also realize that we can never find our own being in this world. For the person who seeks the spirit, it is necessary to repeatedly feel this sensation in his soul. Because by deeply experiencing the sensation that by looking out into the external world we gain no answer to the question of who we are, feeling this sensation again and again gives the soul the impulse and the strength that can carry us into the spiritual world. Yet just as by having this sensation we will be carried up into the spiritual world, we must also bear in mind that the person of normal consciousness in normal life is unprepared to encounter that world, which in reality is the world of his own being.

Therefore on the border between the sense-world and the spiritual world that guardian stands who earnestly warns people against crossing over into the spiritual world unprepared. And it is the case, my dear friends, that we must always keep in mind the fact that the Guardian stands before the [entrance to] the spiritual world for the well-being of unprepared human beings. And we must therefore be quite clear about the necessity for a certain attitude of soul in order to achieve real knowledge and insight.

If such insight were provided to everyone walking down the street it would be terrible for them because they wouldn't be prepared. They would be receiving it without the preparatory attitude of soul. Therefore we must deeply feel the second sensation which over and over again tells us how we must approach the Guardian:

And from the darkness there appears,
In your own likeness manifesting you,
Yet forming you into a deeper parable,
Mightily working, in the cosmic ether,
The solemn spirit-word your heart can hear.

The Spirit-Messenger to you: he who alone
Can lighten up your path.
Before him lie the far-spread fields of sense-existence,
Behind him yawn the depths of the abyss.

And here, before the darkness of the spirit-fields,
Hard by the yawning chasm of existence,
Rings forth the ancient power of his creator-word:
Behold, I am the only gate of knowledge.

Then the Guardian himself speaks while we are still on this side, in the sense-fields. He points to the other side where for us is unmitigated darkness while we are on this side, but which is to become light-filled, which must become light to us through spirit-knowledge, from out of which he speaks who alone is bright. He speaks, indicating the apparent darkness, this maya-darkness:

From the wide expanse of beings in space
Who experience existence in light,
From the tread of time's onward course
Which finds in creating its very activity,
From the depths of the feeling heart
Where in the Self the world is founded:

There resounds in the soul's utterance,
There shines from the spirit's thoughts
Which from divine healing forces
In the cosmic-creative powers
Weave the mighty existential words:
O Man, know thyself!

Whoever can feel deeply enough the words which resound from the Guardian's mouth, if he looks back upon himself, will realize that this looking back, the perception in looking back, constitutes the first stage of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge which is preparatory for the true self-knowledge which reveals spiritual cosmic knowledge of the being which is one with our own humanity. And then the knowledge arises which one can obtain on this side of the threshold of spiritual existence, knowledge which reveals the contamination in our own thinking, feeling and willing in terrible but true images; as three beasts arising from the yawning abyss between the sense-world and the spirit-world.

What we should feel at the abyss of being between the maya, the illusion, and the real world, should appear before our souls as the fourth sensation.

Yet you must beware of the abyss;
Otherwise its beasts will devour
You, if you pass by me in haste.
Your cosmic age has placed them there
In you as enemies of knowledge.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back
The bony head, the scrawny body,
His skin is all a dullish blue;
Your fear of creative spiritual being
Begat the monster in your will;
Knowledge bravery alone will overcome it.

We must be quite clear, my dear friends, that bravery in acquiring knowledge is not present at first in the soul, but cowardice for acquiring knowledge is what dominates. Especially in our time that cowardice is what holds back most people from even approaching an insight into the spiritual world.

Behold the second beast, it bares
Its teeth in a warped face, scornfully it lies,
Yellow with gray spots is its body;
Your hate of spiritual revelation
Begat this weakling in your feeling;
Your burning thirst for knowledge must subdue him.

That is the second thing that we have within us - which plants doubt in our soul, every kind of uncertainty about the spiritual world. It is inherent in feeling, because feeling is weak and cannot rise to enthusiasm. True knowledge must outgrow superficial enthusiasm which trails all kinds of cheap external life. Inner enthusiasm, inner fire which becomes a burning thirst for knowledge; that is what overcomes the second beast.

Behold the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;
Your doubts in the power of spiritual light
Begat this ghost within your thinking;
Your creative knowledge must make it yield.

We must find the courage and the fire to bring activity to our thinking. When we create with ordinary consciousness we create arbitrarily, we create what is not real. When, however, we correctly prepare ourselves for creative thinking, the spiritual world streams into our creative thinking. And then, due to knowledge-bravery, to a burning thirst for knowledge and to creative knowledge, we are truly standing in the spiritual world.

Only When you have overcome all three
Will wings sprout from your soul
To fly the abyss over,
Which separates you from the knowledge fields
To which your heart desires
To consecrate itself in healing.

Such sensations can lead to feeling what we must activate in ourselves in order to enter the spiritual world as genuine, living human beings. In ordinary life it is often the most banal things which cause us to realize that life is serious and not a mere game. But what leads to knowledge does not impress us as much as exterior life does. It is all too easily made a game. And one is convinced that the game is in earnest. But one harms one's self and others greatly by playing at spiritual striving, by not being completely earnest about it.

This earnestness should not be expressed as sentimentality. Humor may be called for with respect to some aspects of life. But the humor must then be serious. When we compare earnestness with mere game-playing, it is not sentimentality, false piety or the rolling of eyes as opposed to games. Rather is it the possibility of really concentrating on spiritual striving and consistently and wholeheartedly living in it.

In order to sense the importance of what I am saying, my dear friends, it would be really good for spiritual striving if all the friends who are sitting here - especially those who have been in the Anthroposophical Society for a long time - to ask themselves the following question: How often have I resolved to undertake some task related to anthroposophical life, and how often have I completely forgotten about it after a short time? Perhaps I would have done it if I had thought about it, but I did not think about it any more. It was extinguished, just as a dream is extinguished.

It is neither meaningless nor unimportant to ask yourselves such a question. And perhaps it would not be unimportant if a large number of our friends were to undertake something in this direction now.

The Christmas Conference [1923] was to be the beginning of true esotericism pouring into the entire anthroposophical worldview stream, supported by the Anthroposophical Society. How often - one can ask - have I forgotten what I found to be quite beautiful during the Christmas Conference and in my thoughts and feelings continued as though the Anthroposophical Society were the same as it was before the Christmas Conference. And if someone says: that is not the case with me, it could be quite important for that person to ask himself: Am I fooling myself to think it is not the case with me? In respect to all anthroposophical activity have I realized that a new phase of the Anthroposophical Society has begun? To ask this question is very significant, for then the correct earnestness enters the soul.

And you see, this is connected to the life-blood of the Anthroposophical Society and therefore to the life-blood of every member who has requested acceptance in the Class; and it is good if it relates to something which exerts a strong influence in life. Therefore it would be good if all those who wish to belong to the Class ask themselves: Isn't there something I can do - now that the Anthroposophical Society has been re-founded - do differently than previously. Couldn't I introduce something new into my life as an anthroposophist? Couldn't I change the way I acted previously by introducing something new?

That would be enormously important, if taken seriously, for every individual who belongs to the Class. For thereby it would be possible for the Class to continue without being burdened by such heavy baggage. For everyone who keeps to the old humdrum routine burdens the progress of the Class. It is perhaps not noticeable, but true nevertheless. In esoteric life there is no possibility of introducing what is so prevalent in life: interpreting lies as truth. If one tries to do this in esoteric life it is not the interpretation which matters, but the truth. In esoteric life only the truth works, nothing else. You may color something because of vanity, but what has been colored makes no impression on the spiritual world. The unvarnished truth is what is effective in the spiritual world.

From all this you can judge how different spiritual realities are - which under the surface of life work today as always - from what everyday life shows, patched up as it is with so many lies. Very little of what passes today between people is true. To continually remind ourselves of this belongs to the beginning of work within the Class. For only with this notion can we find the strength to cooperate here in the Class with what will be unfolded in our souls from lesson to lesson in order that we may find the path to the spiritual world.

For we will only be able to recognize what must be cultivated in our thinking, feeling and willing in order for the three beasts to be defeated: thinking, the thought - phantom; feeling - mockery; willing - the bony crookedness of spirit. For these three beasts are the enemies of knowledge. We see them in the mirror, but as realities from the yawning abyss of being.

And deeply rooted with our humanity is everything which hinders us from real knowledge, firstly in our thinking. Normal human thinking is reflected in the thought-phantom of the first beast, the form of which was described thus:

Behold the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;

It is the image of ordinary human thinking which thinks about things of the outside world and doesn't realize that such thinking is a corpse. Where did the being live whose corpse this ordinary thinking is?

Yes, my dear friends, nowadays - in accordance with contemporary civilization - when thinking from waking in the morning till retiring at night according to the guidance given us in school and in life itself, our thinking is a corpse. It is dead. When did it live, and where?

It lived before we were born; it lived when our souls were in pre-earthly existence. Just as you imagine, dear friends, that the human being lives on the physical earth animated by his soul within and he goes around in this physical body until his death, when the animating soul is invisible to external observation and the corpse is visible - the dead form of the human figure. You must imagine this related to thinking. A living, organic, growing, moving being possessed it before the human being entered into earthly existence. Then it becomes a corpse buried in our own heads, in our brains. And just as if a corpse in the tomb were to declare: I am the man! so declares our thinking when it lies buried in the brain as a corpse and thinks about the external things of the world. It is a corpse. It is perhaps depressing to realize that it is a corpse, but it is true, and esoteric knowledge must hold to the truth.

That is the meaning of the Guardian of the Threshold's words. After he has described the warning of the three beasts, he continues. And the words which resound in our hearts are these:

The third beast's glassy eye,
Is the evil counter-image
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking the spirit-force
which before it's earthly life
Lived in fields of spirit.

I will repeat it:

The third beast's glassy eye,
Is the evil counter-image
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking the spirit-force
which before it's earthly life
Lived in fields of spirit.

Thinking, with which we achieve so much here in the sense-world, for the gods of the cosmos is the corpse of our soul's being. By entering into an earthly existence we have died in thinking during this time on earth. The death of thinking had gradually been preparing itself since the year 333 A.D. The middle of the fourth post-Atlantean period. Before that life had poured into thinking, which was the heritage of pre-earthly existence. The Greeks felt that vitality, as did the Orientals, in that they thought of thinking as being the work of the spirit, of the gods. They knew, in that they thought, that in every thought the god lived. That has been lost. Thinking has become dead. And we must heed the message of the times that reaches us through the Guardian:

Yet you must beware of the abyss;
Otherwise your beasts will consume you
If you hastily pass me by;
Your cosmic age has put them in
You, as enemies of knowledge.

This cosmic age began in the year 333 after Christianity began, after the first third of the fourth century had passed. And now thinking, devoid of the force of life, is clearly present in everything. And the dead thinking of the nineteenth century forced dead materialism to the surface of human civilization.

It is different with feeling. The greatest enemy of humanity, Ahriman, has not yet been able to kill feeling in the same way he killed thinking. Feeling also lives in human beings in the present cosmic age. But man has to a great extent driven this feeling down from full consciousness into the halfway unconscious. Feeling arises in the soul. Who has it in his power, as he has thinking in his power? To whom is it clear what lives in feeling as it is clear to him what lives in thinking?

Take one of the saddest - to the spirit saddest - occurrences of our times, my dear friends. When people think clearly they are citizens of the world, for they well know that thinking makes you human, even when it is dead in the present age.

But people are separated by their feeling into nations, and especially today they let this unconscious feeling dominate in the worst possible way. Because people feel themselves as only belonging to a certain group, all kinds of conflicts arise.

Nevertheless, world karma places us in a certain human group, and it is our feeling that acts as an instrument of world karma when we are placed in this tribe, in that class, in that nation. It is not through thinking that we are so placed. Thinking, if it is not colored by feeling and willing, is the same thinking everywhere. Feeling, however, is graduated according to the different regions of the world. Feeling lies halfway in the unconscious, alive yes, but in the unconscious. Therefore the ahrimanic spirit, unable to exert influence on the living part, uses the opportunity to agitate in the unconscious. And he concentrates this agitation on the confusion between truth and error. All our prejudices based on feeling are colored by ahrimanic influences and impulses.

If we want to enter the spiritual world this feeling must rise up before our souls. We must be able to include feeling in the development of knowledge. Through constant review of our own being, we must be able to know what kind of persons we are as feeling human beings. This is not easy. With thinking it is relatively easy to achieve clarity about ourselves. We don't always do it, but it is still easier to admit: you are not exactly a genius, or you lack clear thinking about this or that. At the most, it is either vanity or opportunism which prevents us from achieving clarity about our thinking.

But with feeling we never really get to the point of observing ourselves in our souls. We are always convinced that the direction of our feeling is the correct one. We must delve most intimately into our souls if we wish to know ourselves as feeling human beings. Only by facing ourselves directly with complete conscientiousness do we lift ourselves up, do we lift ourselves up over the obstacles which the second beast places before us on the path to the spiritual world.

Otherwise, if we do not occasionally practice this self-knowledge as feeling human beings, then we will always develop a mocking countenance with respect to the spiritual world. Because we are not conscious of our ailing feeling capacity, we are also unconscious of being mockers of the spiritual world. We disguise the mockery in all possible forms, but we are still mocking the spiritual world. And it is just those, of whom I spoke previously, who lack earnestness, who are the scoffers. They are sometimes embarrassed to express the mockery even to themselves, but they are still mocking the spiritual world. For how can one lack seriousness regarding the spiritual world, playing games about it, without mocking it. To such as they the Guardian speaks:

The second beast's mocking countenance
Is the evil counter-force of feeling,
Which hollows out its own soul
And creates an empty life
Instead of fullness of spirit
With light from the force of the sun
Before earthly existence.

The first beast is the reflection of our will. The will does not only dream, it does not lie only half in the unconscious; it lies completely in the unconscious.

I have often described to you, my dear friends, how the will lies deep in the unconscious. And deep in the unconscious is where man seeks the paths of his karma, at least for ordinary consciousness. Every step that a person takes in life related to karma is measured. But he knows nothing about it. It is all unconscious. Previous earth-lives work forcefully into his karma. Karma leads us to our life's crises, to our decisions, to our doubts. Here we meet the individual's aberrations, the person who lives only for himself, and seeks only his own way. In thinking: one seeks the path which all men seek. In feeling: one seeks the path which his group seeks. In feeling we recognize if someone is from the north, from the west or the south, from eastern, southern or central Europe. One must concentrate on the will's unconscious impulses in order to see another human being as a single individual, rather than merely a human being in general or a member of a group. This is an act of will - but also deep in the unconscious. The first beast shows the aberrations of the will.

The Guardian reminds us:

The first beast's bony spirit:
The will's evil creative power,
Which would estrange your own body
From the soul's inherent strength
And devote it to the counter-forces,
Which would steal in future time
Cosmic being from the gods.

In our willing work the spiritual powers which want to strip our bodies from us during our earthly existence and therewith take a portion of our souls with it, in order to build an earth which does not continue to develop as Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. Rather the earth is to be sundered from divine intentions and stolen at some point in the future. Together with the earth stolen from the gods, the human being would be united with certain powers which work in his will ... the same will through which he seeks his karma.

The first beast is surely capable of revealing in a mirror-image what is working in the will: bony head, dried-out body with dull blue skin, the crooked back. It is the Ahrimanic spirit, which acts in the will when karma is being sought and which can only be overcome by the courage of knowledge. So the Guardian of the Threshold speaks about this beast as I have just described.

I will read it again:

The first beast's bony spirit:
The will's evil creative power,
Which would estrange your own body
From the soul's inherent strength
And devote it to the counter-forces,
Which would steal in future time
Cosmic being from the gods.

In these words from the Guardian of the Threshold's mouth resound further the warning to the human being seeking knowledge and insight.

Let the following words live most intensively in our souls, my dear friends, and let us listen often to the Guardian's words:

The third beast's glassy eye,
Is the evil counter-image
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking the spirit-force
which before it's earthly life
Lived in fields of spirit.

Once again, you must grasp the concordance in these verses: (The first stanza of this mantram is written on the blackboard)

The third beast's glassy eye,
Is the evil counter-image
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking the spirit-force
which before it's earthly life
Lived in fields of spirit.

At first we feel what each stanza contains.

The second stanza refers to feeling: (The second stanza is written on the blackboard)

The second beast's mocking countenance
Is the evil counter-force ...

[counter-“force”, no longer “part”, but “force”!] ... of feeling,

Which hollows out its own soul
And creates an empty life
Instead of fullness of spirit
With light from the force of the sun
Before earthly existence.

Now we feel first: “denies”, and then “hollows out” and feel the nuance that enters into the verses by “denies” becoming “hollows out”.

The Guardian's words directed to willing:

The first beast's bony spirit:
The will's evil creative power,
Which would estrange your own body
From the soul's inherent strength
And devote it to the counter-forces,
Which would steal in future time
Cosmic being from the gods.

This third stanza is written on the blackboard:

The first beast's bony spirit:
The will's evil creative power,

[Now no longer “image” or “force”, but “power”. You must feel the escalation.]

Which would estrange your own body

[and now you have here the escalation: first the intellectual: “denies”; then instigation in inner life: “hollows out”: then what completely eliminates inner life: “estrange”.]

From the soul's inherent strength
And devote it to the counter-forces,
Which would steal in future time
Cosmic being from the gods.

Note that in all three stanzas the word “evil” echoes. [The word is underlined.] And if you observe and feel the critical points in the escalations and in the difference between thinking, feeling and willing [the words are underlined], and if you correctly sense how all three are united by the always recurring word “evil”, then, my dear friends, each stanza will become a mantram for you, according to its inner meaning. And they can become a guide on the three stages to the spiritual world - that of the third beast, of the second beast and of the first beast. And if you never omit these three concordances and never fail to unite the three by the one decisive word towards an inner soul- then they will become your guide, my dear friends, on the path past the Guardian of the Threshold and into the spiritual world.

We will get to know him better in the following lessons.

The third beast's glassy eye,
Is the evil counter-image
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking the spirit-force
which before it's earthly life
Lived in fields of spirit.

The second beast's mocking countenance
Is the evil counter-force of feeling,
Which hollows out its own soul
And creates an empty life
Instead of fullness of spirit
With light from the force of the sun
Before earthly existence.

The first beast's bony spirit:
The will's evil creative power,
Which would estrange your own body
From the soul's inherent strength
And devote it to the counter-forces,
Which would steal in future time
Cosmic being from the gods.

My dear sisters and brothers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behold the Three

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

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

Experience the head's cosmic form

The Guardian makes this sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard.]

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

Feel the heart's cosmic beat

The Guardian makes this sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard.]

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

Consider the cosmic force of the limbs.

The Guardian of the Threshold makes the other sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard:]

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

Then the Guardian of the Threshold strengthens it again:

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

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

[Written on the blackboard]

The Guardian reminds us:

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

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

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

[Alongside the second sign is written:]

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

[Alongside the third sign is written:]

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

The escalation is:

[The following words are underlined:]

Experience
Sense
Consider

Shape
Beat
Force

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

[Written:]

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

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

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

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

The Guardian's last admonition:

The head's spirit,
You can will it;

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

And willing

(the willing of thoughts)

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

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

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

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

Thus, the Guardian's second admonition is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The escalation is:

[Now the following three words are underlined:]

weave
live
strive.

The other escalation is:

wisdom
glow
virtue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

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

[The lower seal is drawn on the blackboard.]

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the second line in this gesture:

[the middle seal gesture is drawn on the blackboard]

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the third verse in this gesture:

[the upper seal gesture is drawn on the blackboard]

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

I revere the Father

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

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

I love the Son

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

The third gesture means:

I unite with the spirit

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

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

[the Michael-Sign is made]

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

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[the Michael-sign is made]

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

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

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

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

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

*

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

It was something of a surprise when, in the 18th century, German scholars rediscovered the ancient saga of the Nibelungs. In fact, this saga, to which we owe the thoughts of European peoples about their origin, was forgotten for centuries. The Germans' ancient tales of the dawn of their existence were hardly known, hardly known at all, from the 12th to the 18th century. And spirits such as Goethe, who were able to recognize the full significance of such a discovery for the spiritual life of the German people, attributed the greatest importance to the Nibelung saga in particular. Then people realized that what had been extracted from manuscripts of the 12th and 13th centuries were only later versions of an even much older folk tale. In the Eddalieder, these older figures of German legend from prehistoric times were found, which, as it were, fled northward, but then made their way back again – first through scholarship – and in the second half of the 19th century, provided the basis for the truly great renewal of art through the poet and musician Richard Wagner. Richard Wagner sought to bring about the renewal of art by not taking the figures he had express the deepest foundations of human destiny, or who could gain our interest through a special destiny that reaches beyond the everyday, from everyday life, but instead he took the figures of prehistoric times, idealized into the superhuman. He knew full well that the secrets harbored by the human heart and soul cannot be explained by figures or events of everyday life; he knew that myth and legend are precisely the reflection of what takes place in the depths of the human soul. Everyday life already shows us how every person is actually a mystery and contains infinitely more than we can perceive with our ordinary senses and minds. We know that we have an obligation – if we recognize such an ideal obligation – to look at people as such a mystery, never to conclude with our judgment of them. When we allow a person to resonate within us, then their figure indeed grows into the superhuman. We can only depict it by enlarging the features, and enlarging them in the right way, by emphasizing the characteristic without distorting it into caricature. That is the true art of inner human characterization.

Just as Wagner was clear that humanity may one day — though not yet, admittedly — be capable of expressing the very highest through ordinary language, and that one must resort to the elevated element of expression, to music, in order to bring forth the deepest of the soul, so he was also clear that he must rise above everyday life to the mythical. The power, inner feeling and reality that lives in this myth is revealed to us in a surprising way by this renewal of art. It is precisely through Wagner's art that much has been done to deepen this world of legends. Today, too, we will try to penetrate the reality of this seemingly unreal world from the point of view of spiritual science, and you will see that theosophy or spiritual science will have much to say about the deeper core of these legends. For from Nietzsche to the other Wagner interpreters, many have got stuck in the symbolic interpretation of the legend. This is due to the fact that in our time of materialistic thinking it is actually something quite great to recognize in the myth allegorical references to great inner human truths. It is of course impossible for me to cover the whole question of the Siegfried myth with you today; I will only be able to give a few points of view to show how, from the point of view of a deeper spiritual knowledge, this myth gains life and reality.

The figure of Siegfried is known to us primarily from the German version of the Song of the Nibelungs. You know that Siegfried was able to make himself invisible. He was in possession of the Nibelung hoard, the gold that is associated with many things: earthly fortune, but at the same time a curse, a fate. You also know that he became engaged to Brunhilda. This is a trait that is not present in Germanic mythology, but without which Germanic mythology can hardly be understood. They know that by entering into his marriage bond with Kriemhilde, he then acquires Brunhilda for Gunther by means of a deception, namely by appearing in the guise of another, which then becomes his undoing and leads to his death. They know that Siegfried is avenged by his wife at the court of the Huns, at Etzel or Attila.

These are the main features of the Siegfried figure. The traits in the German saga are substantially deepened in the Nordic saga, which tells us something quite different. In the German saga, we find Siegfried in possession of the magic hood that allowed him to make himself invisible. In the Nordic saga, we are introduced to the world of the gods through the figure of Siegfried or Sigurd. This myth of the gods is full of mysteries and secrets. We learn — and I can only hint at the very outermost outlines here — that the gods themselves were forced to give the gold they acquired from the Nibelungs to the giants as payment for a debt they had incurred. A giant in the form of a Lindworm now guards this treasure. It is a significant trait that Siegfried, the offspring of the old gods and, so to speak, related to Wotan himself, is destined in his youth to overcome the Lindworm, the guardian of the gold. This gives him the power by which he attains his might. By bringing a few drops of the blood of the Lindworm to his lips, he is able to understand the language of birds; he is thus able to take a deep look into nature and absorb hidden wisdom. Through this perfection he is able to approach the Valkyrie Brunhilda, who is surrounded by fire and flames, and to become engaged to her, he who has conquered the Nibelungen treasure himself in the fight against the Lindworm.

Siegfried is a type of hero that appears in many of the great epics of the world. He is the slayer of a dragon, he is imbued with the dragon's blood and thereby attains special powers, he acquires the power to make himself invisible and to approach a female figure who can only be penetrated by fire and flames. In the individual phases of descent from the gods, very significant ancient beliefs are hidden, some of which even elude any public discussion because they lead into areas that belong to the very depths of occultism.

Scholarship has often seen in Siegfried the symbol of a solar hero, and in fact in the way that scholarship understands such symbols: the sun as conqueror of the clouds and so on. As I pointed out a fortnight ago, such external symbolism can hardly be appropriate, as has been made clear by Ludwig Laistner's research into the riddle of the Sphinx, which shows that the people do not symbolize in this way. We can only understand the Germanic world of gods and the Siegfried saga if we also assume here that experiences of the gods are expressed in all these relationships.

A fortnight ago we saw that there was something of an experience of higher spiritual and mental worlds in Germanic prehistory and how the development of man has consisted in man's development from the astral vision of prehistoric times, from looking into the spiritual world, to our ordinary everyday views, which look at things with the outer senses. For our Central European ancestors, the time when people could see into the spiritual world was but a distant memory. This world has now been plunged into darkness and gloom, since outer physical vision has become more and more refined in humanity. What still lives today as legend and myth is the remnant of such a higher spiritual perception. The gods are higher experiences, are real figures of the world into which man lives when he has attained higher senses. There is a straight line from the dream to the highest astral-spiritual experiences of the soul. To make this clear to us, let us take a look at the difference between the so-called night and day consciousness. The day consciousness of the normal human being, through which culture has been created, is acquired. It comes about through the soul perceiving the external world through the senses and processing it with the intellect and imagination. But when the soul frees itself from the body at night, the gates of the senses are closed, the soul is within itself, then it lives in a different spiritual environment, but it cannot perceive because it has no senses for it, just as a person who has lost eyes, ears, in fact all senses, could still live, but would perceive nothing of the environment. Once the soul had the ability to see into the world into which the human being descends when he surrenders to sleep. He saw into the spiritual world, and the images of the spiritual world lie in myth and are real experiences. That is why it seemed to people in Central Europe that they had once perceived a light that had now sunk into the darkness of night. There is a light that can illuminate the night, a light that makes it possible to see spiritual and soul entities, those things that are found in mythological legends. This sinking down of astral consciousness is beautifully and powerfully depicted in the figure of Baldur. It is only a fantasy of German scholarship to claim that Baldur is the sun. Baldur is the ancient astral light that looks into the spiritual and soul world, but which died out in the course of evolution when a race arose for whom the spiritual light was immersed in darkness. This race, of which the ancient Germans could truly have said: though the lights shine in the darkness, but the darkness knows not the lights —, is the race of the Nibelungs, the dwellers of Nifelheim. What is meant by this race, for whom the spiritual is dark and only the sensual is light? What has changed with them?

The ancient powers that glowed in space and lived in everything, the powers of love, from which everything emerged, were, as people remembered, the deeper source of life at that time when they could still see into the spiritual world and lived quite differently. In place of love, which ruled everything, elevated all intercourse between beings, led beings to beings and established all relationships between them, selfishness arose with the emergence of the external sense world. A generation that still had insight into the spiritual world now clung to purely external physical things, physical possessions, physical property: the desire to possess some piece of the sensory world. That is the “gold”, the external, physical possession. Even in small circumstances, there was always something reminiscent of it in the German people, of the time when the land still belonged to the whole village community. Those who lived on such property were naturally united; in those days blood still established kinship. Now a different time came. The common property, which at the same time produced a certain sense of community, a common love, was transformed into private property, into the urge and drive to possess. The ancient Germans also went through this development, which almost all peoples went through. Thus they felt the new conditions to be in contrast to the old ones, as if the external had taken the place of the internal, as if in the past one had followed the urge that lived within, love, and now one followed selfishness. Now, too, what brought people together had to be regulated by contracts and legal provisions, instead of by natural degrees of kinship as in the past. A new world order arose, with new gods, corresponding to the outer reality of the senses. Such were our gods of ancient times. But these gods also appeared again in a new form, as it were, as those who extracted the better part, the essence, from the old, like supersensible powers above sensual time.

People appeared to be entangled in sensuality. But he who wanted to be a leader, a guide for humanity, was also an initiate within Germanic prehistory, as he was everywhere else, one who saw deeper into the sources of existence and was able to penetrate to the divine, creative powers. Such an initiate must have overcome what connects man to the sensual, he must be able to attach all his thoughts and desires only to what lasts, to what is behind the sensual things. He must withdraw from the struggles of everyday life. Now every human being is involved in these struggles with desires and everyday ideas. He must overcome all this; otherwise a real, deeper insight into things is not possible. Because this is so little understood today, people cannot grasp what real and true wisdom is. Otherwise, they would also know that before one can ascend to this knowledge, one must first make oneself worthy of it, one must feel that what mind and reason can grasp, what we can think, that these are divine thoughts, according to which the world is built. What matters is not what the initiates know, but how they know it, and they become knowledgeable because they have overcome the lower nature in man. Through this knowledge, which is linked to the transformation of the whole soul, knowledge becomes wisdom.

The nations had different initiates according to their respective character. We understand this when we grasp the meaning of initiation. What exactly is the task of the initiate? Above all, it was the initiates who gave the nations the certainty of the immortality of the human soul. To rise to wisdom means to experience that the soul is reality. One really gets to know it when one looks into the world illuminated by the astral light. There the immortality of the soul proves to be an attribute of the soul. Because the initiate can enter these worlds, in which there is eternal life, already in this existence, he can give an account of the destiny of man before birth and after death. The task of the initiated at all times has been to clarify how the soul is distinguished from the perishable sensual existence. Wherever there is a belief based on deep knowledge and experience, something similar to what is being said again for the first time in modern times by the theosophical or spiritual scientific movement is said. The more man transforms his sensual existence by developing the most diverse virtues and abilities, the more he passes over into another existence, which is everlasting. The Greeks called the soul a bee that flies out, gathers honey and then returns to the hive. That is exactly what the soul does. It flies in the physical world, gathers experiences and brings them back to the spiritual world, where they become its permanent possession. Wherever mystical facts are at hand, the soul has been imagined as something feminine, for example, as the “eternal feminine” in Goethe, the soul that constantly absorbs from the environment and is fertilized by it. On the other hand, the cosmos is male when viewed in relation to the soul. For the soul, every event in its dealings with the external world is a form of fertilization. Therefore, to the person who can see it, the soul's upward striving toward immortality appears as a kind of union, for it connects with its higher nature, which, as it were, comes to meet it when it has worked its way up to this higher level. Thus in Germanic mythology, because bravery was the highest virtue for the Germanic people, the acquisition of immortality appeared, for the warrior falling on the battlefield, in the approach of the Valkyrie; the Valkyrie is nothing other than the immortal human soul. When the warrior has practiced the virtue that leads to immortality, he unites with the Valkyrie; those who did not fall on the battlefield died a death on the straw and had to go down into the realm of Hel, where the spiritual light did not shine.

An initiate is one who has an encounter with the soul during his lifetime. Thus Siegfried is the initiate of Germanic prehistory, who overcomes the lower nature, the dragon, who ascends and acquires the right, like every initiate, to see into the world that people will enter when they pass through the gate of death. Such initiates were always invisible to the physical eye of men; they always had a cloak of invisibility on. It is obvious to everyone that if an initiate like, for example, the Christ Jesus were to appear in any modern city today, he would remain fairly hidden as such. For even if he were not imprisoned, what can only be perceived with the spiritual eye would at least be perceived as something quite outrageous. This is the case with all initiates, including Siegfried. Anyone who strives for a higher knowledge of wisdom must not only overcome the dragon, but also pass through many dangers to a higher consciousness. The flames and fires surrounding the Valkyrie are very real. Before man is able to see into the higher world, the higher nature is always mixed with the lower; it keeps the lower in check and guards what wants to emerge from the lower stormy passions. But when the higher nature stands out, the lower nature is initially left alone. Therefore, those who have not thoroughly strengthened their character beforehand, but who have attained clairvoyant ability and want to ascend into the spiritual world, are often subject to a transformation for the worse. The fire of the passions easily begins to burn. The higher consciousness causes the flames to form, and the initiate must first go through this flames. Here you have the initiation ceremonies of Siegfried. There were such initiates in those days; they were old priest-wise men who combined bravery and wisdom, being kings and priests at the same time. That was the ideal of man that lived in the memory of the ancient German and stood before his soul at the moment when this poem was created like a memory. That has now changed. Valor is no longer subject to initiation and wisdom is assigned to a secular estate; instead of a warrior-hood that was at the same time a priestly knighthood, there is now a priesthood that knows nothing of initiation.

The attainment of this higher consciousness of the initiated priest-wise is shown in the fact that Siegfried, who was already betrothed to the Valkyrie Brunhilda, drinks the potion of forgetfulness, that is, he is placed into the world that no longer knows anything of the old times, and that he acquires Brunhilda for one who is no longer a priest-sage, who has laid aside the one side, courage, that is, that with which the higher soul is acquired. Brunhilda was to be acquired for one who was no longer an ancient offspring of the gods, that is, an initiate.

Thus the evolution of spiritual culture is wonderfully expressed in the saga of Siegfried. The times are past when bravery and the deepest wisdom were combined in the initiates. Union with the Valkyrie is no longer tied to initiation; they are, in a sense, those who fell away from the ancient past and now achieve immortality through bravery. Thus the connection with the old world of the gods was lost; only the sensual life, bound to gold, remained. For such a time — at least this much was clear to mystical thinking in this period — higher consciousness is something dangerous. The initiate who has conquered the dragon has the possibility of uniting with the higher consciousness and allowing himself to be filled by it. The lower nature cannot tempt him, because he has laid it aside. But for him who still has to undergo this and has not overcome the lower nature, the same can be dangerous. This should be made clear to the old Germans. For the union with the Valkyrie has a destructive effect if it is not linked to inner worthiness. She becomes a corrupting power when she acts for herself. Thus Brunhilda acts for herself by having to belong to the man who had not gone through the initiation, to whom she was unlawfully assigned. Therefore, the higher consciousness must have a corrupting effect. This also explains what ultimately brings about Brunhilda's downfall. Brunhilda, the higher consciousness that came from the old gods, must drag the old gods themselves down with her into ruin. The god's offspring was her equal. In ancient times it was right that Valkyries descended upon the warriors because there were initiates among them who, through a victorious life, had earned the right to unite with Brunhilda. This consciousness, the gift of the old gods, which they originally gave to the initiated, had later also come to those who were not initiated, where it could have a destructive, dissolving effect, and then necessarily had to drag down the old world of the gods itself: the twilight of the gods.

It is no mere accident, but the outcome of profound wisdom, that in the German form of the Nibelungenlied, too, where the folk go down to King Etzel's court to meet their doom, the new Christianity also makes its appearance. Christianity shines into the old world, but the world started from love. Symbolically, an ancient love was remembered that had been replaced by the statutes founded in gold. The time of gold has brought it about that the higher consciousness of Brunhilda has had a destructive effect. And the point in time when the old gods sank down is cosmically represented with the time when astral vision gave way to physical vision, which thereby becomes a reflection of the cosmic process.

Love instead of statutes should arise as a new element. Even this is indicated allegorically by myth, and in this fact it emerges even more intimately: when Siegfried was to be betrayed, his wife marked the spot where he could be wounded with a cross. Every initiate is spiritually invulnerable to the earthly sensual, even if his body is torn to pieces. The soul has been living into the higher life. But there is one thing the initiate has not yet been able to achieve. Siegfried remained vulnerable at the point where moral lawfulness, refined into the divine, is to flare up in love. This flaming up of moralizing in love, becoming divine, is the essence of Christianity. This did not yet belong to the initiation of Siegfried. After the twilight of the gods is over, another hero enters among the old fighters, who stands higher than Siegfried, who is invulnerable where Siegfried was still vulnerable. The cross that Kriemhilde can only sketch, the great one has carried on his back. You see what a deep substratum, what a spiritual picture of life is contained in this saga of prehistoric times. The riddle of humanity resounds around us.

You all know that Richard Wagner was not satisfied with the Siegfried figure of the Song of the Nibelungs, but that he went back to the Nordic saga, even though he changed the individual motifs and personalities somewhat. He presents Siegfried as the soul that has passed through initiation through the killing of the Lindworm, as a being that understands the language of birds, that thus sees and hears not only through the gates of the sense world. And in Götterdämmerung, he allows us to see the connection that is symbolized in Brunhilda as the ancient world of the gods, which plunges down into the depths, and from which Christian love then rises, which has taken the place of the ancient world of the gods.

I do not wish to claim that Richard Wagner had these thoughts in an abstract way; but that need not be the case with an artist. One speaks so glibly of the artist's “unconscious” work. That is not a good word. While man thinks in abstract terms, in shadowy images, the artist works in forms. It is a kind of high-flown impudence of the vanity of learning and intellect to call this life and activity in the imagination and in forming “unconscious”. There is something else at the bottom of it. What is art with its creative forming, with its letting in of a higher world? It is deeply significant that it is just through the renewal of myth that a renewal of art has been brought about. If myth is only a symbol for the ordinary person, for the initiate it is spiritual reality, the expression of the experience of a higher spiritual world. It is such a full consciousness that the ordinary bright day consciousness is unable to grasp it. A shadowy reflection of this has remained in myth, and we have something similar when we imagine how an initiate introduced his students to the ancient mysteries, be they Greek, Persian, Egyptian, or those of which a German prehistory tells us. There we have the initiate who has the power to open the eyes of his disciples to this higher world. They gaze into this spiritual world; scenes of a higher experience play out before them, not between people, but between gods. A later time has captured the form of this play of scenes as in a shadow play, and in art. Art is like a dream or like a shadow play as a memory of an earlier clairvoyance and a prophecy for a later clairvoyance of all humanity.

It was a great epoch when the last echoes of those ancient times in German myth were brought out again by Richard Wagner, in order to find the union between art and vision again. Thus the products of Richard Wagner's art have a prophetic significance. They are an eminent and great means of education for our time. They will renew the myth for man through the sound of the music and the superhuman that unfolds before his eyes, and help to awaken the powers of the soul. And the theosophical or spiritual-scientific world view, which is working towards that future of humanity, may regard this art, reborn out of the myth, as a true sister. Thus it is possible, in a way, to gain a further deepening of Richard Wagner's art from spiritual science. The living quality of spiritual penetration, which spiritual science strives for, will have to take the place of the mere abstract scholarship that has taken hold of the old legends and myths. Myth is a portrayal of profound truths, of lofty spiritual experiences, and by awakening consciousness of these spiritual experiences, spiritual research, which is a different kind of research from ordinary research, will also make it possible to understand myth in its depths again. Then the legends of the dawn of humanity will be able to come to life again in their essential core. Men have expressed the truth in the most diverse forms. But only he understands the form of the truth who has a sense for the core and the living source of the truth. To seek the core of this truth is the task of the spiritual-scientific world view, and through this attitude, which constitutes the essential in the spiritual-scientific field, the best of the past spiritual treasures of mankind will be able to come to the surface of today's cultural life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. From Heinrich Laube to Paul Heyse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. The literary struggles in the new empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. The spiritual life of the present

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the reflections that were made here before my departure, and even from the, I would like to say, basic text of the public lectures, it can be seen that the science of initiation is, so to speak, “read” from the meaning of human developmental history, how one must intervene, absolutely must intervene in outer life, in all that is to be known and undertaken in outer life. If we are not able to fully absorb ourselves in this truth today, then we are asleep to the real demands of the time. This sleep with regard to the real demands of the time is indeed the case with most people of the present. We must be clear about the fact that the present poses questions to humanity that cannot be answered otherwise than from the science of initiation. It is not merely a matter of the fact that a Science of Initiation has always existed in the evolution of humanity, that at all times there have been initiates, as it were, into the events and the forces of existence. the point is that there are also such initiates today into the reasons for events and into the forces of existence; but only very few people have a proper idea of how this matter stands in more detail. And actually, people of the present would not want that at all. They actually shrink back from what can be called the necessity of the intervention of initiated science into the consciousness of the time. One can only get an idea of the seriousness of the situation by observing the differentiation of this matter throughout the civilized world. Because things are quite different in the East, they are quite different in the West. And anyone today who believes that they can get by with absolute judgments that are supposed to apply to everything is not living in reality, but is actually living in an abstract world. But it is necessary that things be looked at again and again from different points of view, so that at least some people may be impelled to realize the seriousness of the times.

If we first look at the West, preferably at the world of the English-speaking population, then today public opinion and what flows from public opinion for external events, for events within this English-speaking population is not merely dependent on what - I want to express myself quite decidedly today - the uninitiated dream and hold up as ideals in life. Particularly in the English-speaking population, there is a huge contrast between what appears in public consciousness as ideas and what those who are truly initiated into the events of world history mean behind the scenes of world history.

For if we take the general consciousness as it expresses itself in these parts of the civilized world, in the best endeavors, in the best public publications, we can say that there is a kind of ideal of a certain humanity, of humanity working towards a certain humanity, towards uniting human endeavors under the aspect of humanity, of the establishment of institutions that place themselves in the service of humanity. We want to disregard all the murky, lying waters that abound; we want to see what is best in public life that comes from the uninitiated. This is a certain striving to bring people together from the point of view of humanity. Behind this external striving stands the knowledge of the initiates, the knowledge of the leading initiates. And without the public knowing this, without the public having the opportunity to gain sufficient knowledge of the facts, the judgments and the guiding forces of certain initiated circles flow into public opinion and into the course of events that depends on it, into external action.

Here and there some society or other may arise with fine programs and beautiful ideals. People may be dripping with idealism. But they live with it without knowing it, not only in what they talk about, but there are ways and means of allowing all these things to be penetrated by what one wants to penetrate from a certain side, from the side of the initiates. And so it came about that in the last third of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century – we will stop at these things for the time being and not go back further – well-meaning people who were uninitiated but dreamed of all kinds of beautiful ideals joined together to in societies, but that behind this hustle and bustle are initiates, those initiates who in the eighties - as I said, we don't want to go back further - of the 19th century spoke of the fact that a world war had to come, which above all had to give the southern and eastern European states a completely different face.

If you are able to follow what has been taught and spoken within the circles of initiates in this field, then you know that the things that have poured over the civilized world in the last five years as terrible, dreadful things have been predicted with great certainty. All these things were no secret to the initiates of the English-speaking population, and the following discrepancy runs through all the discussions: on the one hand, beautiful exoteric ideals, the ideal of humanity with the real belief in this ideal of humanity in the most diverse forms on the part of the uninitiated uninitiated; on the other hand, the doctrine, the conscious, strictly held doctrine that everything that is Romanesque, everything that is Central European culture, must disappear from modern civilization, and that what the culture of the English-speaking population is must predominate and achieve world domination.

When these things are said now, they carry much more weight than if they had been said twenty years ago, for the simple reason that twenty years ago one could say to the people who said it: Well, you hear the grass growing. Today one can point out that a large part of what has been said within the circles of the initiated has actually been realized.

I speak as cautiously as possible so as not to deviate in any way from the presentation of the purely factual. But this presentation of the purely factual is something that is extremely uncomfortable for the majority of people in the present day. They would like to cast it off, they do not want to let it approach them. In the present time, there is something so very soul-satisfying about cultivating nationalism in this or that way, about speaking of the League of Nations, about the re-establishment of ancient sacred national institutions, and so on. The fact that we are currently in the midst of a terrible human crisis is something that people today absolutely do not want to know.

Now, with a few words, we have pointed out the discrepancy between what the uninitiated in the West know and what, unbeknownst to them, is throbbing in their decisions. One can only really know how one is integrated as a human being into what is happening if one makes an effort to get to know what is there in the world, if one does not let oneself be driven and pushed, but if one tries to find ways and means that really make freedom of will possible.

And if we look towards the East: throughout the whole of the East there is also this dichotomy between the initiated and the uninitiated. What do the uninitiated say? — These uninitiated people in the East speak in a way similar to Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore is a wonderful idealist of the East, a person who has extraordinarily far-reaching ideals. Everything he expresses outwardly is beautiful. But everything that comes from Tagore is the speech of an uninitiated person. Those who are initiated in the Orient speak differently, or rather, according to the old custom of the Orient: they do not speak at all. They have other ways of bringing what they actually want into effect, into social effect. They want to ensure that world domination is not sought from any particular side, because they are clear about it – they believe they are clear about it – that if there is still any kind of domination on earth, it can only be that of English-American humanity. But they do not want that. Therefore, they actually want to make civilization disappear from the earth. They are, after all, very familiar with the spiritual world and are convinced that humanity will be better off if it withdraws from subsequent earthly incarnations. They therefore want to work to ensure that people avoid the following incarnations. For these initiates of the Orient, the results of Leninism will have nothing frightening about them, because these initiates of the Orient say to themselves: If these institutions of Leninism spread more and more over the earth, it is the surest way to destroy earthly civilization. But this will be to the advantage of precisely those people who, through their previous incarnation, have provided themselves with the opportunity to continue living without the earth.

When such things are spoken of to Europeans, they consider them to be paradoxical. Within the circles of Oriental initiates, these things are spoken of in the same way that a European speaks without understanding of the fact that pea soup tastes different from rice soup; for them, these are realities that need not lie outside the realm of everyday discussion. If we consider the state of the present-day civilized world and really want to understand it, we must not forget that these things, from East and West, have an effect on our present civilization. And in the present time, one can only work for human progress with a complete sense of these influences on the course of human evolution. The outer life as it presents itself, is it an imprint of what people believe exoterically, what people think, who allow themselves to be controlled only by the science of the uninitiated?

For anyone who seriously wants to study this question, I recommend simply choosing a period of eight days in May or June of the year 1914 and reading newspaper articles and books from May or June 1914, and ask himself how much spirit of reality he finds in them, that is, how much knowledge he finds that what sprouted within civilized humanity in August then broke out in this civilized humanity. The uninitiated had never dreamed of such things! Nor do the uninitiated today dream of what is actually going on. But the events of external life are not a reflection of the knowledge of the uninitiated. There is a great discrepancy between what people think and what really happens in life. This discrepancy should be brought home to oneself and the question should be answered appropriately: How much do the uninitiated really know today about life, about what dominates life?

People talk about life. They create theories and ideals and programs, but without knowing life. And when something arises that is shaped out of life, people do not recognize it, they consider it to be a theory or an absurdity or something of the sort. The influences of the West and the East have a completely different meaning for life. This different meaning plays a blatant role in our lives for those who can observe such things. If what is considered theory, program, or social belief in the West were to rule life, nothing would come of it, absolutely nothing. That there is a Western civilization, that Western life can develop institutions at all, does not stem from the fact that Western life has such ideas as Spencer or Darwin or others, more socially minded people have; because in reality nothing can be done with all these exoteric theories and views. That life goes on, that life does not stand still, is due solely to the fact that old traditional instincts live in the English-speaking population and that life is guided by these instincts, not by theories. The theories are only a decoration, through which one speaks fine words about life. What governs life are the instincts that are driven from the unconscious of the soul to the surface. This is something that must be observed and recognized in all seriousness.

And if we go to the East, let us start this East at the Rhine, because very soon life from the Rhine eastwards will become more and more similar to the East. Let us take a look at what is present in the East. First consider it historically: through Germany, through Russia, even through the Near East. If you look at it historically in Germany, you will find something extraordinarily strange. You will find that these Germans had minds like Goethe, like Fichte, like Schelling, like Hegel, like Herder, but that in reality they know nothing about it, that they have had such minds. Within Germany, civilization was the property of a small intellectual aristocracy. This civilization never took root in the broader circles. Goethe remained an unknown figure to broader German circles, even after 1862. I say 1862 because before that, it was very difficult to find Goethe's works in Germany. They were not yet free, and the Cottas made sure that they could not be easily found. Since then they have been free to print. They are read, but they have never penetrated into the real spiritual life of something like a German nation. Therefore, it already begins with the Germans having an instinctive insecurity to the highest degree. Those intensely intervening spiritual powers, which radiate from a Herder, a Goethe, a Fichte, these certain life instincts are confronted by an insecurity of instinct that can be called in the highest degree such, an insecurity of instinct for the reason that in these areas the instincts have not remained conservative. In the West they have remained more conservative. Here they have not remained conservative, but they have not been renewed either, they have not been imbued with what the spiritual substance could have given them.

This is even more noticeable in the actual European East. Just think of the role played by the so-called Orthodox religion in this European East, how it has influenced public institutions, how it has lived an external life and how it has meant nothing, absolutely nothing, to souls. The preservation of this Eastern Orthodoxy, which has long since exhausted its content, means that human souls have been pushed into the uncertainty of life. Anyone who has met Russians in Western Europe was, of course, deeply touched by the peculiar relationship that these people had, on the one hand, to the general human condition and, on the other, to this Orthodox religion. Like souls who fled from the Orthodox religion many centuries ago, who still wore the trappings and memories of this Orthodox religion and who believed that this Orthodox religion could still be something for them, so these people, who could not even imagine how much they had fled from this Orthodox religion, appear to one. This is what characterizes the Russian soul. And so the uncertainty of instinct, of not being inwardly held by instincts, has been poured out on the European East. The peculiarly soft nature that has been poured out on the Russian people is ultimately connected to this uncertainty of instinct.

The whole of Asian humanity can become prey to the European conquerors today, or in the next few decades, because those who are initiated there do not care at all that the general humanity will become prey to the conquerors. For the members of this general humanity will all the more likely acquire a taste for withdrawing from earthly life and leaving the earth for the next incarnation.

We are caught up in these forces. And today it only makes sense to talk about life if one's words are imbued with the awareness that it is precisely the case in life today that one must assume that those forces must be released from human souls that do not go in one direction or the other, but that go towards a real renewal of science and initiation. Therefore, it must be pointed out again and again how the modern human being must steer a course between extreme intellectualism on the one hand and emotionalism on the other.

Our life passes in this conflict between an ever more and more intensifying and overwhelming intellectualism and an emotionalism that seeks the impulses of existence by plunging into the wildest, most animalistic drives of human life. Intellectualism is that aspect of spiritual life that has developed out of what has grown since the 15th century. But this intellectual life is shadowy, this intellectual life is thin, this intellectual life is full of empty phrases. Because this intellectual life is thin and shadowy, the forces that work in this intellectual life are determined not by the truly spiritual, but by the instincts, the drives, the animal in humanity. Today, humanity does not have the strength to use its shadowy intellectual ideas to impel the instincts and thereby spiritualize them. And so, in every moment of his life, the modern man is fundamentally divided with regard to his soul.

Just suppose you are judgmental of your fellow human beings. In that case, you are being intellectualistic. Whenever a person today criticizes his fellow human beings in the present, he becomes intellectualistic. If he is to work together with them in a social community, he becomes emotional; then he becomes so that he lets himself be controlled by animal instincts. Everything that we seek in our life's work, we gradually immerse in the animalistic-instinctive; everything that we seek in our life's judgments, even if it extends to our fellow human beings, we immerse in the intellectualistic. People of the present are not at all aware of this dichotomy in their souls. They do not even notice how they are quite different when they judge their fellow human beings, and then when they are supposed to act together with their fellow human beings.

But the intellectual life is going overboard. The intellectual life strives beyond all realities. The intellectual life is one that, as such, does not really attach any particular importance to earthly conditions. With the intellectual life, it is the case that one works out beautiful moral principles in the midst of a social order in which people are servants, in which they are enslaved. I have mentioned this here several times in the past. Today, I would also like to remind you once again of the inquiry that was launched in England in the mid-19th century into the conditions of coal mine workers, which revealed, among many other problems, that children as young as nine, 11, and 13 were sent down the coal shafts before sunrise were sent down into the coal shafts before sunrise every week, and then were brought up after sunset, so that the poor children never saw sunlight except on Sundays, and so had to develop underground, under conditions that I will spare you the description of; because there too, strange things would be told. But with the coals that were brought to light in this way, people then entertained themselves in mirrored rooms about charity, about universal love of one's fellow man without distinction of race, nation, class, and so on.

This is the extreme of intellectual life. Nowhere do the doors to reality open. One floats with one's intellect beyond humanity. A spirit of reality is only that which, in everything one thinks, knows how what one thinks is connected with what is happening in the world outside. It is the task of spiritual science to awaken this sense of reality in humanity again. It is from such a background that what I recently said in Basel must be publicly repeated more often today: over the centuries, the religious denominations have established a monopoly on everything that can be said about soul and spirit (spirit was abolished in the year 869, after all). People who researched nature externally were not allowed to seek the spirit in nature. And it must be said that, from this point of view, the extremely clever Jesuits, for example, have created the most perfect picture of a world view; when natural scientists become naturalists, there is nothing of spirit in their natural science! If someone takes what a Jesuit writes about nature seriously, then of course he becomes a materialist under the present-day spirit of the age. Today one must distinguish between what is theoretically correct and what is really essential. Theoretically correct is that the Jesuits advocate a spiritual world view. What is really essential is that the Jesuits spread materialism! — It was theoretically correct that Newton, in addition to his mechanistic world view, always doffed his hat when he uttered the word “God”. What is really essential is that the mechanistic materialism of a later time emerged from Newton's mechanistic world view. For it is not what one means theoretically that is decisive, but what lies in the laws of reality. And the intellectualistic world view never provides laws of the world. This intellectualistic world view ultimately leads to complete Luciferianism. It actually Luciferianizes the world.

Alongside this intellectualism, we have emotionalism in the present day, life from the instincts, from the animalistic, in the way I have described it. This instinctual life, this animalistic life, actually dominates public life at the moment when man is inclined to live, when he no longer needs only to judge. One can judge that it is shameful, for example, to treat the people in the mines in such and such a way. One can judge that. But one has mining shares! By cutting the coupons, it is oneself who tortures people in this way, one just does not notice it. This is more than a symbol of life, because that is how our life goes. People think on the one hand and act on the other. But they do not realize the huge discrepancy between the one and the other.

This situation is largely due to people's complacency towards all opportunities that provide us with insights into life. Today, people want to be a “good person” in life without striving to really get to know this life. But you can't really live today without getting to know life.

This world war arose from the fact that the people who were, and in some cases still are, the so-called “rulers” were very far removed from life. Some are still in their places, namely.

But what could more clearly show the complete lack of understanding of people for life, on which so much depends, has arrived in the last decades than those of our culture, of our civilization so clearly speaking “memoirs”, which are now piling up. Every week one, initially from the defeated powers, the others will follow, publishes his memoirs. This shows quite clearly how right was the judgment of the one who said: One would not believe with how little understanding the world is ruled. But the consequences of such assumptions are not readily drawn by the people of the present. For these people of the present, for example, do not want to see that there can be no social feeling and social knowledge without a real knowledge of the world. It is still possible to establish zoology without knowledge of the world, because animals are organized by their physical organization for a specific activity, for a specific functioning. What is characteristic of man is precisely that his organization is open to what he is to take up from knowledge of the world. And so there can be no social knowledge without it being based on knowledge of the world. You can never build a real social science without knowing that everything that man has to strive for through his inner being is a result of the whole evolution, which you can find in my “Occult Science in Outline , up to the present development of the earth, and that everything that the man of the present day absorbs through the social community is a germ for that which is to happen further with the development of the earth.

One cannot understand social life without understanding the world in general. It is impossible for people today to intervene in public life with programs or ideas or ideals without laying a spiritual foundation for this intervention; for what is lacking everywhere is a soul that is moved by what really matters.

We are experiencing strange things. The outstanding German socialist theorist Karl Kautsky has now also written a book: “How the World War Came About”. He begins by discussing the question of guilt. On the first pages, Kautsky makes a remarkable confession. I would like to preface the following. I would like to say that Kautsky is one of those who, in the last few decades, have used every means at their disposal to hammer party doctrine and party discipline into the proletariat, to hammer the doctrine into people's heads that it is not individuals who are responsible for world events, but, for example, capitalism. And so you will not find the word 'capitalists' everywhere, but the word 'capitalism'. With such party doctrines one can agitate, one can found parties, one can find effective hammers for the minds of men, so that such doctrines become creeds. As soon as one is compelled to intervene, I will not say in the work at all, but only to judge reality, the whole doctrine goes out of the window! Now, when Kautsky writes about the guilty parties, what does he do? He would have to leave his whole book unwritten if he wanted to continue his old litanies of capitalism. So what does he do? On the first page, he makes a confession, a strange confession, which I will only quote to you with a few words from his book: “You cannot present capitalism as the only culprit. For capitalism is nothing but an abstraction, which is derived from the observation of numerous individual phenomena and which is an indispensable tool in the quest to explore these in their lawful contexts. But you can't fight an abstraction, except theoretically; but not practically. In practice, we can only fight individual phenomena... certain institutions and persons as the bearers of certain social functions.

Now the socialist theorist is only faced with the fact that he is not even supposed to intervene constructively in social life, but only to judge social life in one respect, and now capitalism is suddenly an abstraction. He only just comes up with it! At the moment when the same Karl Kautsky would take it as an occasion to discuss the realistic idea of threefolding, capitalism would again march up in military organization, not as an abstraction but as something highly real! One does not even notice the difference between what is derived from a real observation of life as a social concept and what is derived from general abstract thinking or even abstract feeling.

Insight is what the modern man must seek as a means of protection against the illusionism into which he must fall through the extreme intellectualism. So today I approached you from a certain side to draw your attention to important things of the present. I will continue to develop and expand these things tomorrow and the day after.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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