The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear Friends,

Yesterday we made a general survey of some of the various forms of mysticism. We saw how the mystic, and especially the mystic of modern Christian times, is one who sets out to tread the occult path and undertakes in the first place, in preparation for the same, to overcome and transcend his personal everyday ego-consciousness.

We had to show also from examples we brought forward, how it is possible for such a mystic to miss the road. Having done his best to extinguish ordinary consciousness, then in the moment when a super-sensible experience ought to emerge in its place, it may well be that he enters into a region which excludes the possibility of all experience whatsoever. We saw how this has actually happened in the case of eminent mystics. We found that one very distinguished mystic spoke of the goal she had in view as a “marriage” and a “union.” At the same time we had to describe this marriage or union as inevitably involving a loss of self. The mystic is estranged from himself, he no longer possesses himself, but passes over—as it were in a kind of higher sleep—into a completely different element.

Herein lies the cause why mysticism, generally speaking, although it can be a path to occultism, does not attain to the consciousness that is without an object. For the moment the mystic leaves the objects of this world, he loses also consciousness itself, and another state intervenes, a kind of intoxication; he loses himself and so cannot attain to what we named as the third element of occult experience—that higher consciousness which possesses not one of all the objects consciousness ordinarily possesses and yet still is a consciousness.

I want now today to show you how the occultist on the other hand contrives to make, as it were, the leap out of ordinary consciousness and yet not lose himself but still retain something within which he himself can live. Let us first ask ourselves the question: How is it that the fact that in the case of the majority of mystics, the most thorough investigation can discover no inner compelling reason why they should go out of themselves. No such inner need is present.

It would be quite easy, in the case of the mystics of whom we spoke yesterday, to point to external grounds that induced them to overstep the bounds of their own personality. In Saint Francis of Assisi, for instance, there is evidence of inherited clairvoyant, visionary states; and in the case of the various women mystics we cited, it was the personality—I say expressly, the personality—of Jesus Himself, Whom they regarded as a Bridegroom. Had it not been for the Christian tradition that worked upon them as a stimulus from without, they would never have arrived at their mystical state. In the case of all the mystics whom we studied yesterday, there was this external stimulus, but there was no inward compelling cause that moved them to overstep the bounds of self. Such an inward compelling cause is present in the case of the true aspirant after occultism. We may picture it to ourselves in the following way.

Imagine that someone sets out to meditate upon his ego, that strange and mysterious member of man's nature, the very centre of his consciousness He will note in the first place how it is the ego that holds his life together on the earth. If you study your life, you will quickly discover that your external substantial body has very little to do with your continued existence on this earth. Natural science can tell you that the substance of the body is completely renewed in the course of seven or eight years; so that there will certainly not be many of you who can claim to have today anything at all of the bodily substance you had as children: all of you will have to admit that your body has changed its substance completely and fundamentally in the course of your life. It has, indeed, become an entirely new body. The permanent element in your life is therefore most certainly not to be found in the substance of the body. And if you now turn from the external substance of the body and cast your eye over your inner life of soul, over your thinking, feeling and willing, there too you cannot fail to notice how much change has come about. Look back over the years of your life and try to recall the thoughts—still more, the feelings and will impulses—that held sway in you when you were young. You have only to compare them with those of a later time of life to see at once what fundamental changes go on in your inner life of soul. It would not, however, occur to anyone in his senses to speak of himself as being a different ego from what he was ten, twenty or thirty years ago, or as many years ago as he can remember. The moment a man did have to admit to himself that, let us say, from three or four years of age up to seventeen he was one ego, but that since he was seventeen years of age he had been another ego,—in that moment his being would be torn asunder; he would be, as we say, no longer in his right mind. Our ego, which is the centre point of our consciousness, must be assumed to be something that is permanent throughout the course of earthly life. And yet, if we stop to think it over, we soon discover that even this assumption concerning the ego is not after all quite correct. When you speak to your fellowman of yourself, you say “ I ”; and you mean by “ I ” that which has held your consciousness together during the course of your earthly life. This is the fundamental feeling men have about the I or ego, and it has led a number of philosophers to regard the I as something which can be taken as a starting-point for any statement about the nature of the human being. In all modern philosophy we find again and again this inclination to take the ego as the starting-point. From Fichte to Bergson—to go no further back in time—you will find that philosophy is continually given this orientation. Remarkable and significant results have come to light from such considerations. Nevertheless, when one comes to reflect more deeply, quite another thought suddenly thrusts itself forward. It is this. We are constantly speaking of our ego and we are persuaded that this ego is something that persists and is permanent for the whole of earthly life; but do we really know this ego? Could we give any description or definition of it? Careful reflection will show us that the ego is not after all so permanent as we thought. Life itself contradicts the philosophers who speak of an enduring ego and think they can have knowledge of it. Every night when man goes to sleep, the “permanent” ego is disproved. For when man is asleep it is extinguished. So that when we speak of our ego in this way, we are in error. We contemplate our life, forgetting that we are omitting entirely what happens to our ego during sleep! This ego, of which we know that it belongs to us,—in the night we know nothing of it at all. Therefore, when we think of our ego, we have to make the picture not of a continuous, but of an interrupted line.

How can such a thing be? How can it be that ego-consciousness is continually being broken? The explanation is that when we speak of the ego we mean really no more than the thought or idea of the ego. And since all ideas sink down in sleep into the darkness of unconsciousness, so does also the thought of the ego. The very fact that it sinks away with all our world of ideas should demonstrate to us that in the ego as we conceive it we have merely a picture or image of that of which we mean to speak when we say “ I.”

We shall not, therefore, be able to find in the ego the occult starting-point for which we are looking. For the ego is only there for us, to begin with, as a picture. It is, however, a picture of a unique kind, the study of which can bring us to a very interesting result. For how in any case do pictures and ideas come into the soul? Through the fact that man has around him objects. If you examine carefully the ideas with which your consciousness is filled, you will find they are aroused by external objects, they are all—originally—pictures of external objects. Herein lies the source of our life of ideation; we owe it to the stimulation of external objects. If the objects were not there we should never have ideas of them. With the idea of the I, however, it is different. In this respect the picture we have of the I is unique. In the world outside, look where you will, you can find no object to arouse it. This it is that distinguishes the idea of the I from all other ideas, We can point to no object that is the origin of it. Whatever it is that lives in the idea of the I and clothes itself in the words “ I am,” we cannot—find it anywhere in the whole wide compass of external life.

We are obliged, therefore, to admit that behind the idea of the I lies something totally unknown, something that is nowhere to be found in the external world in so far as this is open to man's perception. A strange and a marvellous thing, this I of ours! If we could lay hold of it inside us, as Bergson and others think we can, if it were possible to grasp more of it than the mere picture or idea, then we would be able to say that we had—not perhaps very much, but something of an earthly reality that is not given from without. But we cannot catch it, we cannot reach it!

There is, however, one thing we can know of this ego, one thing that can serve as a fulcrum, like the fulcrum Archimedes called for long ago, that he might unhinge the Earth. One thing we can discover when we focus our attention upon the I. Among all the multitude of questions and riddles that present themselves to us when we turn our thought to the outer world, there is one particular question that calls loudly for an answer, and it is the question which every aspirant after occultism must face if he would make the leap out of consciousness. He must ask himself: “In all the wide realm of earthly experience, do you see nothing at all of which you can say that it brings to expression the innermost part of your own being? Do you find nowhere anything in which your ego is expressed?”

To search for such an expression in our inner life will only lead to disappointment. There we simply enter into our transitory and fleeting ideas, and we can never be sure of finding anything to lead us beyond this world of temporal ideas. In any case we can never hope to get free of our personality—the very thing we must do as occultists—so long as we are gazing perpetually into it! In the external world outside us on the other hand, there are only the experiences of man on Earth. Any expression of what corresponds to the I in man must needs be an external expression. The I itself we cannot reach; but when we look around us, we do find something that is an expression—and for the moment, the one and only expression—for our I. It is the human form or figure.

We have here reached a difficult point in our consideration, but we must find the way to master it. In the first place let me ask you to understand the term “human form” as indicating the form of man as we meet with it in the external world You will, I think, not have any difficulty in following me when I say that as a plant is in its outward form the expression of its nature and being, as a crystal is formed in such a way as to correspond with its inner being, and as an animal too has a form that corresponds with its inner being, so must the human form correspond with the nature and being of man. And since from out the whole range of our earthly experiences we gather together our being in our I, the human form must needs be an expression of the human I. In other words, in all the vast realm of our experience there is this one thing—the human form or figure—which is an expression of the human being. It sounds a trivial thing to say, but it is in reality one of the most important utterances that can be made, and one upon which we do well to ponder and meditate.

The occultist must now go further. Of the ego he can say that he expresses it when he says “ I,” but he cannot say that he has it, that it is “there” for perception. What he has, what is there, is the idea of the ego. The human form, on the other hand, seems to be there. And so the occultist finds himself in a strange and puzzling situation. He meets at every turn the human form, the expression of the human ego, while the ego itself still eludes him.

There is here only one possible course for the occultist to follow. And it is this. He must clearly understand that it is no different with the human form than it is with a human ego. If the human form be always there, then it does not correspond to the ego that is not always there. We are faced with the necessity of coming somehow to understand that the human form—which apparently we encounter every minute of our life—is not there, has no existence among earthly objects. It is exceedingly important to arrive at a perception that the form of man is possessed of a peculiar quality, and one in which it very nearly resembles the idea of the ego. For the human form too in its external aspect deceives us, it lies to us. That is what the occultist comes to realise,—that the human form lies to him, pretending to be an expression of man's being, claiming to be there as plain reality, when all the time man's being remains hidden.

As you will see, we should be coming no nearer the goal we have set before us—namely, a “consciousness that has no object and is yet a consciousness”—if we set about acquiring a consciousness of the human form, since the human form is after all an external object! This means that the human form as we meet it in life cannot be what we are looking for as an expression of the ego.

Now the occultist must of course know that he cannot live in ideas and conclusions that are taken from the world outside, the experiences to which he has now to penetrate cannot be received from without; for what comes to him from without goes to make up his Earth consciousness, and this he wants to transcend. When the occultist looks at the human form, what he has to do is to experience something in it that leads him out beyond Earth consciousness.

Is it possible to experience in the human form something that leads us out beyond all Earth consciousness? Yes, it is possible. Let us look first at the human countenance and observe the impression it makes upon us. If we want to attain a true perception of the human countenance, we must not be so foolish as to cling to our accustomed ideas of it. For we have here to enter upon a profound experience that will lead at last to the startling conclusion that the human countenance is not as it should be. We learn to see how the human countenance and all that belongs to it—indeed the whole of the upper part of man—has undergone change in course of time through the working of pride in the soul of man,—pride and haughtiness and presumption.

This is the first experience we have to meet, when we begin to overstep the bounds of ordinary consciousness. We enter right down into a deep and original feeling of the soul where we say: “You lie to me, you human countenance and human head! Through pride and presumption you have given yourself a form you should not have. As I look at the whole upper part of man, I begin to see through your appearance; when I behold how pride and presumption have made their impress on man throughout many incarnations, then I begin to perceive an original human countenance that is quite different from you.” Thus, looking at the upper part of man, we perceive how through pride and presumption man has changed his original form.

A further observation has then to be made, and this time it concerns the remaining parts of the human figure. Here again, when the deepest and original perceptions of the soul are aroused, we have the impression that the human form is lying to us. The remaining parts of it—these too, no less than the head, ought to be different from what they are. Again we have to discover and eliminate some interfering influence in order to come to the original; and here it is passionate longing and desire. Changed in form and figure has man become,—above through pride and presumption, below through desire. If desire were not aflame within him, then the lower part of his organism would have a different form.

These two experiences are fundamental, upon them we must build. They are experiences that it is possible to have and that can lead one to pronounce two judgments,—that man is too proud and that man is too full of longing and desire. They are definite inner experiences in consciousness and they force themselves upon one if one looks at the human being with the soul's deepest powers of perception. But what about their origin? Have they been aroused by any object in the whole wide world of Earth life? They are, as we have seen, only present when man begins to feel the imperfection of his own form, when he feels that his form had originally a different plan and character and has become changed through the working of pride and desire. It is not, therefore, any external object that has occasioned these experiences. Yet they are experiences that can make their appearance in human consciousness, that can be there simply through the fact that man lives his life on Earth together with his environment.

We have here made a discovery of extraordinary importance, namely, that it is possible to come to an inner judgment, an inner experience, that has no object. And this inner experience has the following result. The occult student conceives a dislike for his human form. He says to it: “You are false.” He withdraws from it,—not like the mystics of whom we spoke yesterday, who, when they withdraw themselves, retain nothing of the experiences of Earth. No, the occultist steps forth out of ordinary experience and takes something with him; what he takes is a judgment about the human form. It is a judgment to which, in fact, expression has been given by man again and again in countless different ways.

What has here been described is, so to speak, the first elementary perception that stands at the beginning of occult consciousness,—if it is genuine occult consciousness and not mere mystical experience. At the very beginning stands a judgment about the human being. The human form as such has been extinguished; not so, however, all inner experience. There remains a judgment concerning man, which says to him: “It is Earth life that has made you as you are; the form in which we see you now refers us back to another and altogether different form.”

In order to see quite clearly that we have here to do with the dawning of a “consciousness without object,” it will be necessary for us to study a little more closely this human form or figure. For when we showed how the occult student makes this leap out of himself, retaining only a kind of judgmatic feeling about the human form—finding fault with the one half for being too proud and with the other half for being too full of desire—we were speaking of an inner experience that is rather indefinite. As a matter of fact it is one which leads on, as we shall see later, to the highest regions of spiritual experience; as yet, however, it is undefined.

To come to greater definiteness, let us now study the human form in some detail. Speaking in scientific language, let us dissect the human form! When we try to do so, we are at once struck by the remarkable fact that the human form divides up of itself quite naturally into various members, We shall see clearly what these members are when we enquire how man came to receive his present form. We shall find that the truths which are drawn from the deep wells of occultism give us a complete picture of the memberment of the human form, show us how the human form has been put together.

The first thing about the human form that arrests our attention, the first thing in his form that makes man, is what I laid stress on in the opening words of these lectures,—the fact that it is upright. Man is a being who walks upright. That is the first important thing about him,—so to speak, the first member of his form—his upright posture.

It will perhaps seem to you as though there were something arbitrary about the way I am dissecting the form of man. But if you follow closely and carefully, you will see that it is not really so at all; the fact is, the essential being of man, as described for us in occult knowledge, is reflected in his form or figure.

The second thing that makes man man and that will also be readily recognised as essential to the human form, is the fact that he is so constituted as to enable him to be a speaking being. Sound can be born in him. Consider how essential a characteristic this is. In general, man is organised in an upward direction, and in particular he is so organised that his speech organs, beginning from the heart and larynx, go upwards,—up to the face. Study the human being from this aspect and you will find that all the forms of the limbs are so arranged as to suit the creation and the moulding and forming of spoken sound. Thus we can say, the second important factor in the ordering of the members of the human form is that they are ordered and disposed with a view to speech.

The third thing that we have to regard as important for the form of man is the fact that it is symmetrical. Inevitably one feels that the human form would lose something of its real nature if it were not symmetrical. That then is the third essential, that the limbs and members are symmetrically disposed. As we know, there are exceptions, but the quality of symmetry is essential.

The fourth thing that comes into consideration manifests in the following way. If you will observe attentively these three first members of man's form—upright posture, speaking, symmetry—you will see that they are all directed outwards. The fact that man holds himself upright is something that places him into the external world. Speech is again something that obviously relates him to the external world. Finally, the symmetry of his form gives him a certain balance in space. Now we come to a different aspect. We come to the fact that man has an inside. From the purely physical point of view man has organs that are enclosed within his skin. We may, therefore, say that man has as the fourth member of his form the fact of enclosure within the skin, so that the organs on which the inner functions depend are inside and are protected from the external world. Enclosure or isolation within the skin is thus something that properly belongs to the human form.

To find the fifth member of the human form, you must give your attention to the fact that within it, in the parts that are shut away from the outside, we find organs, active inner organs. All that lives and works inside man—that is the fifth thing we have to note. That there is movement and life within him can convince us that man as he stands before us in his form is not dependent merely on the external world, but is dependent on his own inner man as well he has within him as it were a centre for all the weaving of his life and being. Contrast, for example, with the members we have already described, such a thing as the circulation of the blood. There you have a process that takes its course entirely inside man, it is something completely isolated from the world outside. Thus we have as fourth member the fact of enclosure or isolation, and as fifth, the inside of man that is so enclosed.

But now there is something further we have to observe about this inside of the human form. Looked at from the purely physical aspect, it is a duality. There are, first of all, organs like the lungs and heart, which owe their form to a compromise, for they receive an influence also from without. Even the heart, by reason of its connection with the lungs, has to be adapted to outside conditions. The air from outside enters into man through the lungs and is by this means brought into contact with the inner organs. Then we have, on the other hand, organs which show by their form that they are adapted solely and entirely to the inside of the body. These are the organs of the abdomen. They owe their very shape and form to the fact that they are inside man. It is quite possible to imagine that the stomach, intestines, liver or spleen, if they were differently formed, could still be in connection with the heart and lungs and in some way or other fulfil their right and proper functions. When once the external world has found entrance into the lungs, then all the inner organs can assume their own several forms. They are determined entirely from within. So that we may say we have, as sixth, a member of the human which we may call the true inside of man in the bodily sense. It is important to realise that here we have a member of the human form which has no connection with the outside world.

We have now come to a boundary in the human form, where the outward direction begins to work again, where once more we find something that has strong relation to the outside world. Consider the shape of man's foot. If it were not formed for the ground, if it had not a sole, man would not be able to walk. If his foot, for example, ended in a point, he would be continually falling down. Thus, as we follow the human form downwards, we come again to organs that are adapted to external conditions. At the same time we note that the feet, and also the legs, help to give man his distinctively human form. If man were a fish, or if he were a creature that flies in the air, these organs would have to be formed quite differently; as it is, their form expresses the fact that man is a being who stands and walks upon the earth. All the organs from the hips downwards are shaped with this end in view,—that man shall be a being able to work and stand and walk upon the earth. So that we may say, in the hips we have, as seventh member, a condition of balance What is above the place of balance is either given an outward direction in its form, or as we have seen, turned inwards; what is below is formed in a downward direction. In the hips you have a point of equilibrium between these tendencies. Of all that comes below the hips, we may say that it is adapted to earthly conditions.

Then we have as eighth member organs that are entirely orientated with a view to conditions outside the human being,—the organs of reproduction. Continuing further, a little reflection will enable you to see that for man to walk in the way that is proper to him, the thigh must be separate from the leg, there must be the bend between them. And so he has, joined on to the thigh, the knee, making it possible for him to adapt himself in his walk to earthly conditions. For it is earthly conditions that determine altogether the lower part of the figure of man. Then we have the leg and, separated again from it, the foot. Perhaps you will say, what about the hands? We shall see in the next lecture why the hands are left out in this connection.

And now I will ask you to follow this list we have made of the members of man's form.

1. Upright posture.
2. Orientation to the utterance of Sound.
3. Symmetry.
4. Enclosure within itself.
5. The Interior of man that is so enclosed.
6. The Interior of man in bodily aspect, having no connection with the outside world.
7. Balance.
8. Organs of Reproduction.
9. Thigh.
10. Knee.
11. Leg.
12. Feet.

As I said before, it might at first sight appear arbitrary to show the human form divided in this way into twelve members. But everything man requires in his form in order for him to be man on earth is really comprised in these twelve members (I will explain tomorrow how it is with the hands), and in such a way that each member has a certain independence, each member is separate from the others. One could even imagine that each one of them, while remaining still in connection with the others, might assume quite another form from the form it actually has. It is perfectly possible in each single case to imagine other shapes or forms for the several members; but that the whole human figure stands before us as the result of the conjunction of twelve such members, is a fact that cannot be disregarded.

When you reflect upon the whole meaning and intention of man's existence upon Earth, you cannot leave out of account that he has a form and figure membered in this particular way, so that when we come to study his form we must inevitably think of it as divisible into twelve parts or members. These twelve members have always been regarded in occultism as of the deepest possible significance. We are bound to take them into consideration if we would understand the meaning of the form and figure of man in its relation to his being. Occultism has always known of them, and for reasons which will become clear to us in the course of these lectures, as we continue our study of man in the light of occultism, philosophy and theosophy, the twelve members have received twelve specific designations.

What we gave as the first member has been called “Ram” (Aries) and is denoted by the Sign ♈.

The second is named “Bull” (Taurus) and symbolised with the Sign ♉.

Symmetry is called “Twins” (Gemini) and is denoted with the Sign ♊.

What we described as the quality of enclosure within itself is given the Sign ♋ and called “Crab” (Cancer).

What we described as the interior, the life that is so enclosed, is called “Lion” (Leo) and symbolised with the Sign ♌.

The inner parts of man, that in bodily aspect have no connection at all with the outside world and point to the threefold character of man's nature, themselves typifying complete isolation from the outside world, are called “Virgin” (Virgo) and denoted with the Sign ♍.

Then we come to the condition of balance and there, no explanation will be needed for giving the name of “Scales” (Libra) ♎.

The organs of reproduction, which have once more the direction outwards, are denoted by the expression “Scorpion” (Scorpio) and symbolised with the Sign ♏.

The Thigh is called “Archer” (Sagittarius) and has the Sign ♐. The knees, the “Goat” (Capricorn), are symbolised with the Sign ♑.

The leg below the knee is “Waterman” (Aquarius) and has the Sign ♒.

Finally, the feet are termed “Fishes” (Pisces) and have the Sign ♓.

For the moment, I ask you to see in these Signs no more than signs and signatures for the various members that go to make the complete human form. Please regard them as nothing else than a means of distinguishing the several members of the human form. You know very well that these Signs belong to habits of mind and thought that are of great antiquity, and in particular that they play a part in astrology. I want you, however, to connect nothing else with them now than the fact that with their help we are able to study the human form and see how it lends itself naturally to division into twelve members. If it should seem that we are giving rather strange names and signs to these members of the human form, it is really only as it is with the sounds of human speech, where we cannot by any means always quickly recognise the meaning from the sound, or, shall we say, as it is with the letters of the alphabet, of which we are often quite unable to say at once why they designate this or that sound. All we have done is to find an expression for the twelve-membered figure of man and, for convenience of further reference, give these members names which have here and there found their way out of occultism into general use.

1. Upright posture ♈.
2. Orientation to the utterance of Sound ♉.
3. Symmetry ♊.
4. Enclosure within itself ♋.
5. The Interior of man that is so enclosed ♌.
6. The Interior of man that in bodily aspect has no connection with the outside world ♍.
7. Balance ♎.
8. Organs of Reproduction ♏.
9. Thigh ♐.
10. Knee ♑.
11. Leg ♒.
12. Feet ♓.

Anthroposophy, when properly understood, will guide us back more and more into that immediate life from which a materialistic way of thinking, quite paradoxically, estranges us.

We have said this frequently, here and at other places, at many different occasions, and always in order to characterize the mission of our anthroposophical movement. The above statement will make a strange impression on many of our contemporaries, for they are of the opinion that true life, or what they call life, is to be sought elsewhere than in what anthroposophy has to give; and they are also of the opinion that anthroposophy is least qualified to show them how to lead a practical everyday existence. Such is not the case. Anthroposophy will help us in all ways, great and small! Its teaching, when thoroughly assimilated, will enable those who are engaged in public or other matters to solve the problems of the day in the way in which they should be solved if mankind is to lead a complete life. The many disorders and unhealthy conditions of our age which are now being approached, from one standpoint or another, in a more or less amateurish manner, could, if our contemporaries were to permeate themselves with anthroposophical truths, be successfully handled. I just wanted to touch on this issue, it will not be the focus of our contemplation today.

Today it will be more the emotional aspect of anthroposophy with which I ask you to occupy your thoughts. It will be noticed how to a deeper, feeling permeated comprehension of life, a time like the present must seem to be abstruse, uninteresting, matter-of-fact and theoretical. When Christmas, Easter or Whitsuntide approaches, we can see how certain outward forms and external ceremonies are adhered to But there is very little left of what our forefathers felt to be alive in their very souls—that deep current of feeling penetrating into the soul which was peculiar to our forefathers with regard to the relationship of mankind to the whole cosmos and its divine foundations. This feeling was particularly alive at the time of such festivals. Then it was something tangible for the soul, for then it received impressions different from those gained during the rest of the year.

No true conception is formed today of that which filled the souls of our ancestors when the days grew shorter, the end of the year approached and the birthday of Christ Jesus was about to be celebrated; or when, at the festival of the resurrection of Christ Jesus, the snow was slowly melting, and what the earth had hidden appeared once more on the surface. It would seem indeed that our life were concrete. In reality the feelings of our contemporaries have become abstract, matter-of-fact and empty. People pass through the streets, and hardly feel more about Christmas than that it is a time for giving and receiving presents. Should they have any other feeling, there is little connection between it and that deep feeling which absorbed our forefathers at that time of the year. Mankind has lost its true relationship with life. To show how to regain this relationship is one aspect of the mission of anthroposophical spiritual science.

One who only grasps with his mind and understanding what is usually called the anthroposophical conception of the world has understood only the very least part of anthroposophy. It is only understood by him who realizes that the whole of man’s feelings and emotions must be altered when anthroposophy lives itself into the heart and soul. What was abstract for a certain time, and even forgotten in its significance—the true meaning of our festivals—will again penetrate into our souls when the intimate connection of the whole surrounding world with man is realized again, as it may be through a spiritual perception.

The deeper meaning of the Christmas festival has often engaged our attention at this time. Today, we shall look at it from another aspect. This can only be done if at first we make quite clear to ourselves what impression anthroposophical thoughts and ideas produce on our feelings, how they really have the power of making out of a human being something quite different from what he is at present, something through which he will again know what it is to have an immediate experience of the pulsation of the spiritual life of nature—actually to feel the warmth which passed through creation, animating every being. When a man looks today at the starry sky with the help of the abstruse science of astronomy, he sees it inhabited by abstruse material worlds. But these celestial bodies will again appear to him as the bodies of souls and spirits; space will once more appear to him permeated by spirit and soul. He will experience the whole cosmos as filled with warmth, and have the feeling that he has when reclining on the bosom of a friend; though of course experiencing the spirit of the cosmos is much more majestic and sublime.

We know that we have to seek in man alone such a soul as we are cognizant of in man—an individual soul, which, so to say, lives in a single body. The soul of the other creatures which surround us, we must seek in another way and in a different form. The animals which live in our midst also have souls, but we shall look in vain for them here on the physical plane. The animal-ego, which we name a “group ego”, is to be found on the astral plane; and a whole group of related animals, for example the lion-group, the tiger-group, the cat-group, all separate groups of related forms, have each of them a common soul, a common ego. The separation by space here on earth makes no difference; every lion belongs to the same lion-ego, whether one lion is here in a zoo, and another in Africa. The spiritual scientist can find the animal ego on the astral plane; and there these group-egos are individual personalities, just as your personality here on the physical plane is individual. As your ten fingers belong to your individual personality, so does every lion belong to the group-ego of the lions. If we could become acquainted with the individual group-egos on the astral plane, we would find that wisdom is their most conspicuous characteristic, although to us here on earth separate animals may not appear very wise. Nobody ought to judge the characteristics of the group-ego, of animal individuality on the astral plane, on the basis of the characteristics of the separate animals here on earth. Just as little as your ten fingers show the characteristics of an individual ego, just so little does the single animal show the characteristics of the group-ego.

These group-egos act very sagaciously, and are wiser than you imagine; for what you know here as the achievements of animals are brought about by these group-egos. They live in the atmosphere surrounding our earth, they are to be found round about us. If you follow the flight of birds as they migrate at the approach of autumn from the north-east to the south-west, and at the approach of spring return once more from the south-west to the north-east, you might ask yourself: who guides their flight so wisely? In your search for the individual directors and rulers you will come, as a student of spiritual science, to the group-egos of the different genera or species. The astral ego, which is just as much an ego on the astral plane as the human ego is here, lives in every animal community. The group souls or personalities or astral egos, who have their individual members here on the physical plane, are much wiser than the egos of mankind on the physical plane; everything which is so wisely organized in the animal-world is the manifested wisdom of the group-egos of animals. We walk differently through the world if we know that at every pace forward, we step through beings whose deeds we are able to see.

Now let us look at the plant kingdom: the egos of this plant world are to be found in a still higher world than the one in which the group-egos of the animals live. The egos of plants (there are actually very few of them) are to be found in the spirit-world or Devachan; each one of the plant-egos embraces many, very many, of the individual plants which are found here on earth in such great variety. If we should seek the place where these plant-egos are to be found in space, we would come to the center of the earth. All plant-egos are united at the center of the earth.

It would reflect a rather primitive mental life if, when considering the spirit of the egos, you were to ask: Is there room enough for all these different egos? In the spirit everything in-terpenetrates. He who does not understand this comes to the point of view expressed just now in a book which is particularly recommended to theosophists. This book certainly speaks of spiritual worlds, but speaks about them by using arguments such as: If in the course of a thousand years thirty billion people had lived whose souls are now in the atmospheric surroundings of the earth, then there would be such a great number of souls, that there would scarcely be room for them all in the earth’s periphery.—This book is well intentioned, but it is extremely trivial. (“Unknown Powers,” by C. Flammarion.)

We have to seek the plant-egos in the center of the earth, because the earth itself as a planet is a complete organism. In the same relation in which the hairs of your head art to your organism, so are the plants to the organism of our earth. These plants are not independent beings but are members of the earth organism.

Feelings of pleasure and pain in plants are the pleasure and pain of the earth’s organism; we need only recall what you were told a few weeks ago about pleasure and pain in the plant-kingdom. He who is able to observe these things knows that if you injure a plant in the part above the earth, the injury is not connected with a feeling of pain in our earth organism. On the contrary, it gives a pleasant feeling to the earth, in the same way in which the cow suckling her calf gets and bestows a pleasurable sensation. Thus the green of the plant which springs out of the earth, even though fixed, may be compared with the milk of the animal organism. And when in autumn the reaper cuts the grain with his scythe, it is more than an abstract occurrence to one who understands how to transform anthroposophical ideas into feelings of the soul. The reaping calls forth a breath of joy which goes over the whole field, and the mowing of the grass fills the field with pleasurable sensations.

Thus we learn to feel with the earth organism as we feel on the bosom of a friend. We feel pain with the earth when we understand that as soon as we tear out the plants by their roots, the earth feels pain. It ought not to be objected here that under certain conditions it might be better to transplant a whole plant with roots rather than to pick its blossoms. Such an objection is not relevant here. If a person begins to get grey hair, and in order to remain younger looking pulls out the first grey hairs, does the action hurt the less?

Thus we learn to feel with nature around us; more and more we learn to experience nature as permeated by soul and spirit. When we enter a quarry and watch the men breaking stones, this act remains with us as something concrete, not abstract, if we deepen our anthroposophical ideas on the subject into feelings of the soul. Then we do not only see the stones flying out of the rocks—not even if a rock were blasted would it seem abstract to us. On the contrary, we learn to feel what nature, permeated by soul and spirit, is feeling outside us. If we have a glass of water before us and throw into it some salt or a lump of sugar, and watch how the salt or sugar dissolves, this arouses the feeling that there is soul in it. If we would know what kind of a soul is contained therein we must not bring forward ordinary analogies. It would be very easy to believe that when the quarry-man breaks off the stone, his action causes nature to feel pain, but in reality the exact opposite is the case. What is called division into fragments in the mineral kingdom gives nature the greatest joy, an internal sensation of well-being. There is also an internal sensation of well-being when we dissolve a piece of sugar or salt in water. Feelings of pleasure flow through the water during the dissolving of the mineral bodies. It is different under different circumstances.

We can call to mind the primeval age on earth—that time when our earth was a fiery-fluid body with every mineral and metal dissolved in it. It was not possible for our earth to remain in such a state, it had to become the place on which we live, the solid body on which we can walk about. The metals and minerals had to solidify out of the liquid element; it was necessary for them to harden, to pull themselves together. Everything that was dissolved in the liquid element had to congeal and become crystallized. A similar process to what can be observed with salt dissolved in a glass of water: let the water evaporate and you will be able to see the salt crystals as firm particles. If you follow the feelings which are brought into action by such happenings you will see that pain can be felt even in the apparently dense mineral kingdom. Everything which appears to us as demolition and breaking into fragments gives a feeling of pleasure to the earth; whereas consolidation, compression, crystallization give a feeling of pain. The minerals and rocks of the planet on which we live have been formed under conditions of pain. And this has, more or less, been the case during the hardening of the earth’s crust.

If we look into the future development of our earth, we must imagine that what is firm and solid will become more and more flexible and liquid, until at last the earth changes into that which is called the “astral earth.” Thus the earth matter will have become rarer and rarer; so that we, in the first half of our earth’s evolution, must regard the elements of the mineral kingdom as that which, under the influence of pain and suffering, has formed the solid stage for our existence. Towards the end of the earth’s evolution there will be more peaceful feelings, the whole earth will be full of feelings of joy; it will change into a heavenly planet, which, in the cosmos, will be astral.

When the initiated talk about these things, deep mysteries lie hidden in their words. They express themselves in such a way that their words have several levels of meaning, because they contain so much. St. Paul, who was an initiate, spoke with words which always had several hidden meanings. The further we advance in the comprehension of the cosmos, of the spirit worlds, the better we shall understand these expressions of St. Paul and their hidden meaning. St. Paul knew that the earth suffered during the time it was becoming firm, and that it is longing for its release into a spiritual, heavenly state: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together, waiting for the adoption.” (Romans viii, 22) By these words the initiate Paul referred to the pain accompanying the formation of the hard minerals whereon we stand and move.

So long as we only consider Anthroposophy as a system of thought we do not understand it rightly. It is the characteristic mark of Anthroposophy, that ideas must change into feelings, and we become different beings when, at every step, we feel and are conscious of all that we see about us. Those who really understood the esoteric teaching of Christianity were also of this opinion. You can follow the Christian writers as far as the eighteenth century and discover many who had sympathy with all the pleasure and all the pain of living nature. In their writings they use words which are for mankind today but empty sounds, or at the most allegories or pictures, whereas to those who understand them they are truths: “You shall not alone think upon nature, but you shall perceive it and taste it and feel it!”

They meant that when the reaper cuts the grain, we should taste the feeling that passes over the field during this action.

When we see the man in the quarry breaking off the stone, we should enjoy with nature her sensation of well-being. When we notice a deposit of earth where a river flows into the sea, we should at the same time learn to feel the pain which accompanies the deposition of earth.

Thus we can begin to experience nature completely permeated by soul. Our souls will then gain the power of growing out of their confinement. Feeling streams into the world in which we live, and we become one with the whole of nature. When we become one with it, piece by piece, we will also feel the spirituality and soul-nature of the great yearly occurrences. In the spring, when the days gradually become longer and longer, and more light falls on the earth; when out of her womb the plants, whose seeds were in the earth, spring up, and when everything is once more clothed in green, then we feel that not only what we see—as the shimmering green- is coming forth, but we feel as well that something akin to soul activity is taking place.

When winter draws near, the days grow shorter, less light falls on our earth, the plants retire to their winter sleep, and the green changes, we too experience a similar feeling to that which we have at night when we fall asleep. On the other hand, the awakening of external nature in the spring draws from us its corresponding feeling, for these events are no allegory, but realities. We feel the changes in nature, and also the changes in the soul and spirit of nature. In the latter half of the summer we feel how everything seems to decline, how the soul of our earth approaches sleep.—Then in the evening, when we ourselves fee1 sleepy, we have a real example before us of the living process which we have often described. Gradually, the astral body with the ego withdraws from the physical and etheric body, frees itself, and floats as it were into its own, its very own original world. If a man could do today, in the present condition of the evolution of humanity, what he will be able to do in the future, a spiritual consciousness would light up when the astral body lifts itself out of the etheric and physical bodies; spiritual forces and a spirit world would surround the body; man would simply leave his physical body in order that he might enter into another form of existence. This, in fact, he does today too, but he knows nothing about it in his present stage of development.

The same thing also occurs to our earth. The astral body of our earth changes during the year. (The changes are not the same in the two opposite hemispheres, but this does not concern us today). The astral body of our earth is occupied with the external natural existence of our earth during the time in which plants and life generally spring up out of the earth. When plants grow, it is the astral body that looks after everything that grows and flourishes on the earth. In the autumn, when a kind of sleepiness comes over the earth, this astral body returns to its spiritual activity.

Those who are able to really feel this earth-process know that during the height of the sun—from spring right into autumn -in everything which grows and increases out of doors, they must see the outer revelation of the spirit of the earth. But when autumn approaches they are directly in contact with the liberated astral body of the earth; when the days are shortest, that is, when the outer physical life approaches nearest to sleep, then the spiritual life awakens. What is this “spiritual life” of the earth? Who is the “spirit of the earth?”

This “spirit of the earth” described Himself as such when He spoke these words: “He that eateth My bread, treadeth Me with feet”; and when He made reference to that which the earth brings forth as true nourishment for man and said, “This is My body!” and again when He was referring to that which flows as the sap of life and said, “This is My blood!” In these sayings He described the earth itself as His organism.

This was quite different in pre-Christian times—different from what it is in the Christian era at a definite moment of the earth’s evolution. During the short days when the sacred mysteries of the ancients were being observed, those who were initiated turned with their whole soul towards the sun; at midnight on the day which we know as Christmas Day, those about to be initiated into the sacred mysteries were advanced so far that they were able to see the sun at the midnight hour. They were then promoted to being clairvoyant. We today cannot see the sun at the midnight hour because it is then at the other side of the earth; but the physical earth presents no obstacle to the seer, he can see the sun. He sees it in its spiritual essence. When the seers saw the sun at the midnight hour in the holy mysteries they saw the sun’s sovereign ruler—the Christ. Those saw Him who were able to come into contact with Him, but at that time still in the sun.

The flowing of blood from His wounds on Golgotha was an event fraught with meaning for the whole of the earth’s evolution. Nobody understands that event who has not the power of understanding that Christianity is built upon a mystical fact. If someone with clairvoyant sight could have watched the development of the earth from a distant planet for some thousands of years, he would not only have seen the physical body, but the astral body of our earth as well. This astral body of the earth would have emanated definite lights, definite colors and definite forms during those thousands of years. In one moment this was changed.

Other forms appeared, other lights and colours shone forth -and this moment was when the blood flowed out of the wounds of our Saviour at Golgotha. This was not only a human, but a cosmic event. Through it the Christ-Ego, which up to this time could only be discovered in the sun, passed to the earth. It linked itself with the earth, and in the spirit of the earth we find the Christ-Ego, the sun ego. The initiate is henceforth able to see in Christ himself the sun-spirit which formerly, at the time of Christmas, was only to be seen at the midnight hour on the sun in the holy places of the ancients.

Christian consciousness, not only the consciousness of the ordinary Christian, but the consciousness of the Christian initiate, lies in the living feeling of union with the spirit of Christ. This takes place every year when the days are becoming shorter and the physical earth is beginning to fall asleep. It is then possible for us to come into direct connection with the spirit of the earth. Therefore, to place the birth of our Savior in the time of the shortest days and the longest nights was not the outcome of an arbitrary decision, but the result of initiation. Bound up with the shortening of the days and the lengthening of the nights, we see something infinitely spiritual, and we feel at the same time that in this event there is a living soul—the highest soul which we are able to feel in the earth’s evolution.

When the first Christians uttered the name of Christ, they did not express any doctrine or any particular mode of thought. It would have seemed quite impossible for them to call anyone a Christian who believed only the words which Christ Jesus spoke as a Christian teacher. It cannot be denied that these doctrines are also to be found in other religious beliefs, and no one wishes to regard them as something singular. Today, however, for the first time in history, par-ticularly in the educated classes, special stress is laid on the fact that the teaching of Christ Jesus is in harmony with other religious beliefs. It is quite true that it is difficult to find a single precept which had not already been taught before; but this has nothing to do with the matter. Not by doctrine alone is the Christian made one with Christ. He is not a Christian who believes in the doctrine, but he is a Christian who believes in the Christ-Spirit. In order to be a Christian we must have the feeling of union with Him, the feeling of union with the Christ who actually dwells on earth. Simply to avow the teaching of Christ is not preaching Christianity. To preach Christianity means to be able to see in Christ the Spirit Whom we have just characterized as the regent of the sun; Who in the moment when the blood flowed out of His wounds on Golgotha, transferred His work to the earth and through this act drew the earth into the work of the sun.

On this account those who were the first to preach Christianity laid very great stress on proclaiming the person of Christ Jesus, and very little stress on His words: “We have seen Him when He was with us on the holy mount.” They attached great value to the fact that He was there—that they saw Him. “We have placed our hands in His wounds.” They valued the fact that they had touched Him. What was felt at the time was that the whole of the future evolution of mankind on earth proceeds from this historical event. On this account the disciples said: “We value the fact that we were with Him on the holy mount; but we also think it a great thing that the words of the prophets have been fulfilled in Him—those words inspired by very truth and wisdom.” What the prophets foretold has been fulfilled. By “prophets” was then meant initiates, men who could predict the Christ, because they had seen Him at the midnight hour at Christmas time in the Holy Mysteries. The first disciples considered the event on Golgotha as a fulfillment of that which has always been known; and a rapid and total change took place in the feelings and thoughts of the initiated.

If we look into the time before the Christian era, and even let our thoughts wander further to a more remote time, we find that all love and affection is bound up with the tic of blood relationships. In the Jewish race, out of which Christ Himself issued, we see love only between those who are kinsfolk—we see that those love one another in whom the same blood flows; even earlier than this, love always rested on the natural foundation of a common blood-relationship. Spiritual love, which is independent of flesh and blood, was first introduced on earth by Christ. On this depends the fulfillment of the saying: “Who forsaketh not father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, cannot be My disciple.” He who makes love conditional upon the natural foundation of blood-relationship, is not according to this sense a Christian. Spiritual love, which as a great fraternal bond will permeate all mankind, is the result of Christianity.

Christianity teaches mankind how to acquire the most perfect freedom and inner cohesiveness. The ‘Psalmist said, “I remember the days of old and ponder times long past”. To look back upon one’s first ancestors was a persistent experience of the olden times. The men of old could feel the blood of their ancestors flowing through their veins, and felt that their ego was connected with the ego of their ancestors. If it were desired to really feel this connection, even amongst the old Jewish people, it was customary to utter the name of Abraham; he who uttered this name felt that some of the blood which descended from Abraham flowed through his veins. When he wished to express his highest nature the Jew said: “I am one with Abraham!” After the death of his body, his soul returned into Abraham’s bosom—this has a deep, a very deep meaning. At that time man was not in possession of the self-dependence which first entered his consciousness through Christ Jesus. The conscious understanding of the “I am” was awakened by Christ Jesus. At that time they could not have felt the whole divinity of the inner divine being of man. They felt “I am,” but they connected it with their ancestors; they felt it in the common blood which flowed through their veins since the time of Abraham. Then Christ Jesus came and with Him the consciousness that there is something older and more independent in mankind. The “I am” is not only to be sought in what is common to a nation, but is something in the individual personality, which therefore must again seek love with its own personality, beyond itself. The ego which is today confined in you, cut off from everything outside itself, seeks spiritual love beyond itself.

This ego does not feel itself one with the father who was in Abraham, but with the spiritual Father of the world: “I and My Father are one!” A more profound saying than this—although this is the most impressive—because it appeals more to the understanding, is the one in which Christ made it clear to mankind that they are not expressing the utmost when they say, “I existed before in Abraham.” He points out that the “I am” is of older date, emanating from God Himself:

“Before Abraham was, I Am.” In this way does the saying appear in the original—which usually is so expressed that nobody quite understands what it means—“before Abraham was born, I am.” The “I am,” the innermost spiritual being, which everyone has within him, existed before Abraham.

One who understands this saying penetrates deeply into the essence of Christian intuition and life, and understands why Christ also refers to it in the words: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world!” Therefore we also ought to feel the true hidden meaning of the expression in the Christmas hymn, which tells us every year anew at Christmas the original secret of the existence beyond time of the “I am.” The hymn is not sung as a reminder, “Today we remember that Christ was born”, rather we sing every time: “Christ is born in us today!” For this event is eternal, and that which once took place in Palestine can happen anew every Christmas night for those who have the power of transforming the teaching into feelings and experiences.

Anthroposophy will help mankind really to feel and understand again what is meant when we celebrate such a festival. Its mission is not to teach an abstract doctrine, an abstract theory, but to lead man back into fuller life—to make this life appear not as something abstract but as something which is filled with soul. We feel this soul when we go into the quarry and watch the stones being split off; when we see the migration of birds; when we see the scythe going through the grain; when the sun rises and sets. And the more profound the events we contemplate, the deeper do we feel their soul nature. At the great turning-points of the year we feel the most important soul events. What is most important for us is that we shall again learn to feel at those great turning-points of the year which are marked out in our festivals.

Thus our festivals will again become like a living breath permeating the soul of man; at the time of such festivals man will again become familiar with the whole weaving and working of the full soul and spirit nature. The anthroposophist must for the present act as a pioneer with regard to what these festivals may once more become when mankind understands their spirit anew—understands anew what is called “the festival spirit.” It will belong to those forces which will once more lead man out into the cosmos, when anthroposophists at such festivals feel and realize something of the feelings and sensations of nature, and remember at these important moments what Anthroposophy is able to restore to mankind through its teachings. Anthroposophy will then become a living factor in the soul, and will be genuine “life-wisdom”, vitaesophia. Anthroposophy can accomplish this best when the world-soul comes down amongst us, and is united with us in an especially intimate manner at the festival of the birth of Christ.

When the physical body is discussed most people have a very unclear, confused idea of what it actually is. In point of fact what we have before us is not just the physical body but a combination of the physical body with higher forces. A piece of rock crystal is also physical but in its very nature this is something quite different from the human eye or heart, which are also physical. The eye and heart are parts of the physical body, but they are intermixed with man's higher members and through this, something is brought about which is completely different from other aspects of the physical. In water we find oxygen and hydrogen but they look quite different from when we see them separated. Then we are aware of their difference. In water we have before us a mixture of both. What meets us in the physical body of man is also a mixture comprised of the physical, etheric and astral bodies.

The physical human eye is similar to a camera, for, as with the camera, there appears within it a picture of the surrounding world. Only when one abstracts from the physical eye everything that is not to be found in the camera, does one discover what is the specific nature of the physical eye. So too one must abstract from the entire physical body everything that is not purely physical: only then does one have what in occultism is called the physical body. In itself it can neither live, think nor feel. There then remains a very wisely ordered, extremely complicated automaton, a purely physical apparatus. This, alone, was all there was of human existence at the Old Saturn stage. At that time the eyes were present only as little cameras. What was produced as [a] picture of the surrounding world came to the consciousness of a Deva being. In the middle of the Saturn evolution the so-called Asuras (the Archai) were sufficiently advanced to make use of the apparatus. At that time they were at the human stage. They made use of the automata and the pictures they produced. The Asuras themselves were not within the apparatus but outside and only made use of the pictures as we make use of photographic apparatus in order to take pictures of a landscape. Thus the physical body of man was at that time an architectural structure of a physical apparatus operated from outside. This is the first stage of human existence.

The second stage of development was the permeation of this physical apparatus with the etheric body. It then became a living organism. That also found expression in the configuration of the body. The automaton was built up out of a fairly firm undifferentiated mass, similar to what today is a jelly-like substance, like a soft crystal.⁴⁰ In the second Round of evolution in the Old Sun existence, the physical automaton was imbued with the etheric body. In this Round the solar plexus developed. It is so called because still today only rudiments of the organ are present. It fashions a nervous system into the physical apparatus. In the case of the plant something similar is present. That is the second stage.

But these stages are not final; evolution gradually progresses. Even today the solar plexus is an active agent in certain animals which have not developed a spinal cord. All invertebrate animals are single forms from left behind stages of what was laid down earlier. It was only on the Earth that man cast out from himself the vertebrate animals. In earlier times his organism was still somewhat similar to that of the crab at the present day. Man has progressed beyond that earlier stage whereas the crab has remained stationary. It is an astonishing fact that the whole inner formation of the crab has a certain similarity to the human brain. There is actually a similarity between the internal formation of the crab and the human brain. Like the human brain the crab too is enclosed in a hard shell. After man had developed a spine and had metamorphosed the upper vertebrae, he cast off the hard shell. The crab has not developed further. It has adapted itself to its environment by means of a hard shell that it had to have and which serves the same purpose as does the protective covering of the whole body in man.

The third stage is that in which the whole is transformed by the astral body working within it. This organic transformation is connected with the development of the heart and the circulation of the blood. The heart of the fish has remained stationary at a halfway stage.⁴¹ The development of the heart is proportionate to the degree in which there is an increase in the inner warmth of the body; this signifies nothing other than a drawing of the astral into the body.

The spinal cord with the brain is the organ of the ego. This is surrounded by the threefold protective sheath of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. After the organ of the ego (spinal cord and brain) had been prepared, the ego laid itself in the bed made ready for it, and spinal cord and brain appear as organs in the service of the ego.

The four-fold man is put together in this way. It is the Pythagorean square.

1. The spinal cord and brain are the organ of the ego.
2. The warm blood and the heart are the organ of Kama (astral body).
3. The Solar plexus is the organ of the etheric body.
4. The actual physical body is the complicated physical apparatus.

Thus has the four-fold being of man been constructed.

In occultism what we have now described is again called a spiral (Wirbel), something that builds from outside inwards and unites with what builds up from within. Physical body, etheric and astral bodies have built up the human being. Then the ego makes itself felt and this builds from within outwards. These are the four constituents of man. Here we find in the outer an imprint of the four-fold man. All further development is of such a nature that the human being, starting from this point of the ego, consciously experiences what previously he went through unconsciously.

Today, in order to realise that this is so, one must in the first place investigate what took place when our ego was being developed. In order to do this we must, as it were, take up our position under a certain organ. This is most aptly expressed in the Buddha legend. It says in the legend that Buddha remained seated under the Bodhi tree until he attained illumination in order to rise to higher stages, to Nirvana. For this Buddha had to place himself under the brain, under the organ of consciousness. That means the paths he had previously traversed unconsciously he had to traverse again consciously. Under the large brain there lies, more towards the back of the head, the small, tree shaped brain (the cerebellum). Under this brain Buddha placed himself. The cerebellum is the Bodhi tree. This shows how what is said in such profound legends is actually taken from human evolution.

Everything that is now known only by means of anatomy was at that time known in quite another way. The occult investigator made his researches with the help of the Kundalini light. The pupil was prepared for this in the following way. He came to a Master. If the latter found him trustworthy he received as instruction, not actually a teaching—today it has become different, today man must find his way by means of intellect and concepts—but the Master spoke somewhat as follows: ‘Every day for about six weeks you must spend several hours in meditation and give yourself up to some sentence of eternal value, completely sinking yourself into it.’ At present man cannot do this because life in modern civilisation makes too many demands on him. At that time the pupil meditated six to ten hours daily. He cannot do this nowadays without withdrawing from the whole life around him. At that time however the pupil required hardly any time for external needs. He found his nourishment in outer nature. He therefore made use of his time for meditation, perhaps uninterruptedly for ten hours. By this means he very soon progressed so far that he brought his body, which at that time was less dense, into such a condition that the Kundalini light was awakened within him. This is for the inner being what sunlight is for the outer world. Actually we do not see external objects, but reflected sunlight. The moment when, with the help of the Kundalini light, we can illuminate the soul, it becomes as visible as an object shone upon by the sun. So for the yoga pupil the whole inner body gradually became illuminated. All ancient anatomies were seen from within, through inner illumination. Thus the (Indian) monks, who clothed their experiences in legends, spoke of what they had perceived through the Kundalini light.

Now we must ask ourselves how the different parts of the human body are worked upon. In regard to what belongs to the brain and spinal cord, man first works consciously on the physical plane through the human ego [Gap in the text ...] He has at present no influence on anything else. He has for instance no influence on the circulation of the blood. Such things are developed by degrees. Here other beings co-operate, Deva beings, so that all creatures having a blood circulation are dependent on Deva forces for its regulation. The astral body is permeated and worked upon by different Deva forces. The lowest work on the astral body. Higher forces work on the etheric body and still higher Devas on the physical body, the most perfected body possessed by man. The astral body is strikingly less perfect than the physical body. The physical heart is indeed very clever; the stupid one is the astral body, that directs into the heart all kinds of heart poisons. The most perfect part of man is the physical body, less perfect is the etheric body and still less perfect is the astral body. What is only in its beginnings, the ‘baby’ in man, is the ego Organisation. This is the four-fold man, which contains the ego as the temple contains the statue of a god.

The whole development of human culture is nothing other than the working of the ego into the astral body, the education of the astral body. Man enters into life filled with desires, impulses and passions. In so far as he masters these impulses, desires and passions, he is working his ego into the astral body. When the Sixth Root-race, the Sixth Epoch, has reached its conclusion, the ego will have completely worked into the astral body. Until then the astral body will continue to be dependent on the support of the Deva forces. As long as the ego has not permeated the entire astral body, so long must the Deva forces support the work.

The second stage of development, which follows that of the cultural, is the development of the esoteric pupil. He works the ego into the etheric body. Through this the Deva forces are gradually released by the work of his own ego. Then he also gradually begins to see into himself.

We can now ask: what is the significance of the astral body, for what purpose does man have an astral body? It is to give him the possibility, by way of his desires, to do what otherwise he would not have done, and to betake himself to the physical plane. For before man can acquire objective knowledge on the physical plane he must direct to it his wishes and desires. Without these he would have been unable to develop an objective observation of the world or a sense of duty and morality. Only after a gradual transformation of his desires can these be changed into duties and ideals. Man can only pursue this path by means of the driving, organising power of the astral body.

The etheric body is the bearer of thoughts. What is thought within man, is etheric outside, just as what is desire within him, is astral outside. But it is only when pure thinking begins that etheric substance is radiated into the astral impulses. As long as thinking is not yet pure thinking we have astral substance surrounding the etheric form. So thought-forms, as they are called, are made out of a kernel of etheric substance surrounded by astral substance. Along the paths of the nerves stream the so-called abstract thoughts, which however are in reality the most concrete, for they are etheric forces. As soon as man even begins to think, he is already working the ego into his etheric body. When a man dies it becomes clear that the physical body has nothing to do with the ego. Every connection between the physical body and the ego is broken off after death. Previously this connection took place indirectly through the other bodies. When these are no longer there the corpse has no further relation to the ego. Then the outer Deva forces receive it and it is again absorbed into the physical environment. The word ‘verwesen’ (decay) does not mean only a passing away, but a return to the ‘Wesen’ (being) out of which the body came forth. This is what may be said in respect of the physical body. The Dutch word ‘Lichaam’ does not mean ‘Leichnam’ (corpse) but the physical body which has to be carried about.

The etheric body is to a great extent in a similar situation to the physical body. It is taken up in the same way by the Devas and then again dissolved into general circulation. But there remains from the etheric body what the human being himself has worked into it and this does not dissolve. It is this which later, at the time of reincarnation, forms a central point, around which what is to be added is crystallised. This small part of the etheric body remains present in the case of everyone. In the same way there remains from the astral body as much as the human being has worked into it. Only during the last third of the Sixth Root-Race will the entire astral body be retained by all people of normal development.

Thus development begins by man's working consciously on his astral body. The task of the Chela, the occult pupil, consists further in the transformation of his etheric body. The stage of chelahood is completed when after death the entire etheric body remains intact. The sojourn in Devachan is necessary in order to make possible a renewal of the forces of the etheric body. The small portion of the etheric body which to begin with man carries into Devachan can grow into the complete etheric body, because the necessary conditions are created there.

This makes comprehensible the varying length of the sojourn in Devachan. When the human being stands at the beginning of his development and has transformed but very little of his etheric body he can only remain in Devachan for quite a short time. The part of the etheric body that is lacking must be replaced for him by the external Devas. When he develops further he sojourns for a progressively longer time in Devachan; thus the time that he spends there increases in proportion to his own development. People, however, who are more advanced sometimes reincarnate earlier for other reasons, for instance, because they are needed in the world.

When the Chela dies, the entire etheric body is present. Thus at this stage the Chela can renounce Devachan because the etheric body has been completely worked through. Then, after quite a short time, re-birth takes place. He waits at first in the astral world, as in a place of transition, until he receives a definite mission from his Master. Then he can again take possession of his etheric body in order to reincarnate once more.

Until this stage is reached a duality is necessary for evolution, i.e. that which man is unable to develop inwardly for himself is built into him from outside. Help must be brought to him from without. Thus in Devachan the etheric body is once more made complete by external Deva powers. The Physical Plane and Devachan are polar opposites. Between them lies Kamaloka, a place of transition, a transitional stage, an intermediary condition that causes the human being to be connected with what he has worked into his astral body. The astral body leads man on to the Physical Plane, where he directs his attention outwards. Here desires are cultivated by contact with external things. When a person dies his craving for outer objects does not immediately cease, although he no longer has organs bringing him into connection with them. The desire remains but the organs are lacking. In Kamaloka he must break himself from this longing for the outer-world. Kamaloka does not actually belong to normal development; it is only a stage where habits must be relinquished. It is because man can no longer satisfy his wishes, because he no longer has organs for the physical world, that Kamaloka comes about.

When someone commits suicide he has identified his ego with the physical body. For this reason the longing for the physical body is all the more intense. It seems to him that he is like a hollow tree, like someone who has lost his ego. He then has a continual thirst for himself.

When a man is put to death by violence he is in a similar situation. In the case of someone who meets a violent death he continues seeking for his physical body until the time when he would otherwise have died. This seeking can bring about harmful reactions. In such a case it can happen that a man who meets his end by violence is filled with a terrible rage against those who have caused his death. Then in the murdered man the blow is changed into a counter blow. Thus from the astral world, the souls of Russians executed for political reasons fought against their own countrymen on the side of the Japanese. This happened in the Russo-Japanese war; it is however not a general rule.

• 40. In Marie Steiner's notes: ‘formed out of an undifferentiated gelatinous mass like a mineral protoplasm’.
• 41. Fish have a heart with two compartments consisting of atrium and ventricle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because one has to consider the supersensible human being as the core of the human being, it is quite natural that the knowledge of the supersensible human being is human self-knowledge. However, with this human self-knowledge you face a very strange paradox. On the one side, you face the necessity of understanding the human being as a supersensible being; on the other side, any usual cognitive ability is bound to the sensory appearance. What he grasps with his reason is also bound to the sensory appearance. One could say without thinking, self-knowledge demands the view of the human being with cognitive abilities that are far away from his consciousness at first. In so far as the human being becomes aware of himself as a supersensible being, he has to acknowledge in a certain sense that everything that he performs in life arises from his supersensible being. On the other side, one could say, everything that appears in his consciousness appears sensorily “veiled” in a somewhat improper sense. Hence, one misunderstands spiritual-scientific research and speaking about the supersensible so easily and so often. Since the today's considerations will show that one cannot approach the true nature of the human being with the usual abilities of the everyday consciousness. Yes, one has even to say that that kind of knowledge which has developed so greatly on scientific basis rather misleads concerning the self-knowledge than to lead this self-knowledge in the right way. Since just if the well-schooled scientific way of thinking approaches the human self-knowledge, one notices that it can fail too easily. We want to take an example as starting point.

In the very interesting booklet The Subconscious Self and Its Relation to Education and Health by Louis Waldstein (1853-1915) is talk of various things that also strike the scientist if he gets to know the human life in its development in the different relations. We have spoken in a former talk about the revelations of the unconscious, of the subconscious. The example that I want to bring in is that of a naturalist, and the way in which he speaks about that is completely scientific. The author of this booklet wants to point to a certain place how this subconscious being plays a peculiar, vague role. Waldstein chooses the following example. He says, I stood before the shop-window of a bookstore. Because I am a naturalist, I just looked at a book about mollusks. At this moment when I saw this book, I started smiling to myself, and I was surprised why I did this, because a book about mollusks has nothing humorous.—He continues: I closed my eyes to investigate what maybe proceeded in my surroundings. When I turned the view away from the book, I heard the tones of a barrel organ quite soft in the distance. It played the melody of a song that one played when I danced my first quadrille. At that time, I did not care with which sympathies or antipathies I met this melody; since I was occupied very much to make my dance steps well arranged. At that time, I was not at all especially careful on what entered half my consciousness musically. Still the fact that I must smile standing before the book about mollusks after decades proves that the impression, which at that time that melody had done still, has continuing effects; and if I had not closed my eyes, but had been content with the astonishment, I would not have known then why I smiled standing before the book.

One realises how mysteriously such things have continuing effects in the subsoil of the soul life, how much generally exists in the human being that comes up only quite fantastically in the consciousness; one realises how difficult it is to get to real self-knowledge. Since to which danger do you expose yourself, if you want to practise introspection? To the danger that you have to deal with all possible completely blurred subconscious things which you have maybe taken up decades ago which have a lasting effect which work only in the deepest subsoil of the soul like a mood that comes up then and nuances what you now observe in yourself.

Waldstein and others bring in numerous such examples. You find those also in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Such examples are very suitable to be rather careful about introspection. Since even some people believe to get with introspection also to a real knowledge of the human being. Some people also believe while bringing up such memories from their subconsciousness that they do all possible clairvoyant discoveries.

Now one has to be careful also in another respect. You can realise, for example, that some who claim to figure this or that out by their supersensible knowledge of their inside express this supersensible knowledge in pictures which are got, for example, from telegraphs or railways or as the case may be. From it, one would see that the supersensible with its pictures had just to wait to appear, until the railways were invented. Someone who does not approach the supersensible research uncritically will also be able to know easily how frivolously one proceeds in this field now and again, and how it is really soothing that thorough scientific thinking points to the fact that such contents which somebody regards as revelation of higher worlds sometimes are nothing but what the person concerned has taken up once in any blurred way at a younger age

• what he regards, however, as a revelation what did not come to his consciousness at that time

• what changed in multiple way

• what he does not recognise again,

• what now, which has come about in supersensible way.

In my book I have pointed out that, actually, everything works on the human being and that sometimes in something that the one regards as an inspiration is nothing but the transformation of a shop sign at which he did not properly look when passing by in the street, but which penetrated only into his subconscious.

With it, one points to an area of human life that one has to consider rather carefully and rather critically just by somebody who seriously wants to expand his research to the supersensible world. However, on the other side, all these memories, these subconscious images point to something else, it is as it were the side effect of something quite different. There I have to return more exactly to something that I have already mentioned here in the course of these talks: the relation between memory and the usual mental pictures. A very usual kind of thinking that has played a big role also in science, in particular in psychology, is that the human being has experiences while facing the outside world. These experiences evoke mental pictures in him. Now he has these mental pictures. After some time he “remembers.” Now one imagines this process very often in such a way, as if these mental pictures, which he had once and which he has somewhere in the subsoil of the soul, come up again as recollections in his consciousness. One thinks very often, more or less consciously or subconsciously, that that which appears in the recollection is nothing but the same mental picture which one had once, and which was down there anyhow and comes up again in the consciousness. However, someone who knows to practise real observation in this field has to regard this way of thinking as something rather childish and dilettantish.

Since if we face an outer phenomenon if we have an experience of the smallest or biggest kind, which evokes perception and mental pictures by the perception in us, this “activity”—I want to call it provisionally so—is accompanied by another activity of which we do not become aware usually. This activity is yet another one; it accompanies the conscious imagining activity and causes something in us that leads to memory. However, you have to observe properly. The most trivial observation in this area is that if you consider the difference of imagining, which can be completely easy, and memorising. Remember only what the young people who have to “cram” for an exam have to do, so that they have not only the mental picture, but also keep it in mind. There quite weird performances are carried out sometimes. Think of the play, which takes place between the human hands and the head if anybody has to cram something. Of course, that is only an outer sign of what I mean. But in truth it is in such a way that during the imagining activity another activity is still there which does not get to our consciousness and exercises an effect on our organism which consists of something quite different than of forming mental pictures. Later if we remember that again which we have imagined once, this mental picture completely originates anew. It originates as it were from the “sign,” from the “engram”—if I am allowed to use this expression—which that activity can exercise which accompanies the imagining activity on our organism. As we face the object of the outside world and form, inwards directed, our mental picture, we face our organs while remembering.

What happens there what is different from our imagining as the outer object is different from our mental picture is changed into the mental picture anew. Somebody who is able to observe the organisation of the human mind and its effectiveness knows that that which forms as a mental picture appears and disappears, while it is imagined. If anything is reminded, the mental picture has not slept down there and appears again, but from something quite different that happens below in the organism the mental picture is anew formed. What I want to show there is that we have to see something in that accompanying activity, which goes along with it, actually, in the subsoil of our conscious life and is connected with something that always emerges with the memories from our subconscious. As well as everything that appears in the world has its concomitants which appear like the caricature of the real now and again, is that which I have mentioned from the writing by Waldstein also such a concomitant of the quite normal regular way how the human being works in the memories. I would like to say, what proceeds subconsciously, so that the human being has a memory, appears in such things if it overflows or if anything remains indistinct or blurred like the sounds of a barrel organ that still generate an effect making Waldstein smile. That which is there rather conceals the things than that it explains them. Since the point is that it is a very normal activity, which is very necessary for the human being, namely that which forms the basis of the human memory. This is something that accompanies our whole conscious life perpetually, but we do not turn our attention upon this accompanying activity in the usual life. The accompanying activity is due to our organisation.

It is a kind of touchstone of the real supersensible research to consider such a thing like this accompanying activity forming memory. Since that which normally works in the subconscious can be changed into something conscious on the first level at first. Changing something unconscious into something conscious is one of the capacities that lead to the real investigation of the supersensible. What remains usually subconscious must be brought up in the consciousness. Thereby it already becomes different. The exercises, which I have described in my book, which one has to go through to put the soul in such a condition that it can face the supersensible, consist of many things. However, one can illustrate something elementary showing that this first elementary is related to a quite normal activity which remains, however, usually subconscious. One has to carry out the activity consciously which is carried out there unconsciously, but quite normally to form the memory. For that, it is necessary that you are able to refrain from that activity which causes the usual mental pictures bound to the senses. You must be able to withdraw as it were from this imagining. However, you are not able to do this if you cannot replace it with another kind of imagining. You attain this, while you focus on self-developed mental pictures that are easily understandable.

I say "easily understandable" mental pictures; this is exceptionally important. Self-chosen, self-developed, easily understandable mental pictures must be because just any subconscious, everything about which one cannot know to which blurred perception it is due must be removed. However, you never are sure—one sees this from this example—that this blurred, subconscious weaving of the soul life is blanked out if you do not focus on a mental picture which you can really figure out at the moment where you yourself have formed it, so that you know, any part of this mental picture has arisen from your immediate will which you have unfolded at this moment. “Self-chosen” does not mean of course “self-made;” you can get such mental pictures from an experienced spiritual researcher, and he is able to know best of all how they can be adapted to the individuality of the human being concerned. However, it matters that you intermingle the mental picture with the thoughts and experience in the soul that you have nothing in the soul but this mental picture. It also matters that these mental pictures occupy our consciousness if possible in very versatile way so that this mental picture is present in every atom, I would like to say. This is particularly fulfilled if you take such mental pictures in your consciousness that stimulate you to make the thoughts versatile.

A growing plant, for example, is a good mental picture; not staring at something resting, but at something that is in motion or that has any relations to each other. Thereby we are protected that our consciousness becomes idle while staring at the mental picture. Since it matters for the investigation of the supersensible world that everything that is done as preparation has to be done completely consciously from start to finish that in no way the consciousness is anyhow darkened. Hence, it belongs to the first requirements of the future spiritual researcher that he eliminates everything from that soul activity which should lead him to spiritual research—of course, not from the remaining life—that can decrease the consciousness anyhow. It is particularly important that in this living in easily understandable mental pictures, in this “meditating,” nothing prevails in the consciousness that may darken it. It is the first requirement that anything dreamy, all thoughts, arising from the inside, which one likes, are eliminated from the preparations of spiritual-scientific research. Furthermore, everything has to disappear that could anyhow darken the consciousness of percipience. What you want to aim at must not deal anyhow, for example, with staring a luminous point by which one could get to a certain hypnotic condition, or with that which some people even feel as a rather nice preparation: looking at a “crystal ball” and the like. The opposite of all suggestive or hypnotic conditions you have to exercise if you prepare yourself for spiritual research. You can learn from that: if you often hear from people who are also “followers” of spiritual science and say that you have to lose yourself if possible eliminating the own being to a dreamy “devotion,” then it is that “spiritual science” which may cause a lot of ease which does not at all lead, however, to the investigation of the supersensible world.

I have to draw attention sometimes to such things; since even people who want to be serious critics of spiritual research confuse it with its opposite. Even a critic (Max Dessoir, 1867-1947, German philosopher) who has made a great stir confuses this spiritual research with its opposite, and he describes them in Beyond the Soul (1917), with those phenomena which belong by no means to the spiritual world according to the methods of spiritual research. However, it is strange that just this critic brings in an example of his own soul life that he continued speaking for a while when he held a lecture and then only realised that he had continued speaking without his thoughts having gone along. You can be quite sure that such a lecturer has not understood any trace of that which I mean here with spiritual research.

Of course, you have to develop that further what I have given now, but it matters to emphasise the essentials. The essentials and important of that what you experience internally this way is the following:

While you evoke such mental pictures more and more in your soul and mind how the soul is active different than with the outer percipience, the big, important fact manifests itself to you from a certain point on that you are now inside such a soul activity which remains usually unaware and leads in the usual life to the formation of memory. You have pushed one level down as it were what you experience, otherwise, in the imagining. You have not considered what you experience, otherwise, in the imagining, and you have considered what accompanies this imagining else. You have pushed your whole ego-consciousness one level down where, otherwise, this is done what leads to memory, and you get to know this way what takes place usually perpetually below in the soul what you do not consider in the usual consciousness. I have repeatedly shown also here what the fact depends on that the human being is able to form memories. Everybody knows what it means to the human being if his memory power is disturbed pathologically for a time. You get to know a level of soul experience which represents something subconscious to the usual life, and which still cannot be denied, because it is there in its effects which, however, is a particular experience if you settle in that which you have woken by meditating.

This experience is a shaking one for someone who generally has a feeling of such things. You experience that you have reached that level where memory lives that you have approached something in your being that proceeds, otherwise, rather unconsciously that normally never enters even approximately in your consciousness by its nature. This memory-forming force is related to the formative force in us in a way. Since while the force of growth is far away from the usual imagining, it is near by the memory-forming force. Always something immediately grows together that is, otherwise, separated: the force of growth and the memory-forming force to a compound thing which you have in yourself and which you get to know this way. We carry this perpetually in ourselves.

The usual consciousness does not suspect at all that the same force which accompanies the human being as force of growth, as formative force is—increased and refined—the same to which you appeal if you form memories. However, it is something compound. If you get to know the thing, it presents itself as something compound. Since you learn to distinguish that which is combined as force of growth and as memory-forming force; it is as it were a duality that co-operates as a unity. While you dwell on the thing, you discover: what you bring up as memory is, actually, subconscious knowledge, a deeper level of consciousness in which our usual ego does not live. However, this consciousness penetrates the force of growth.

The force of growth and the memory-forming force face each other closer than our conscious knowledge and the outer physical world. However, our conscious knowledge of the outer physical world is more distant from each other; we cannot build the bridge from the one to the other. That which we want to get from there, which we bring to mind by meditations, carries its own object in itself, but it is something that is related to our knowledge. We learn to figure a duality out. However, this duality appears, the further you advance in your soul life, very clear to the beholding consciousness. You behold the force of growth this way. You behold it—to use a good old quotation of Troxler (Ignaz Paul Vital T., 1780-1866, Swiss physician and philosopher)—as the true human corporeality compared with the physical corporeality. In our usual consciousness, we perceive the physical corporeality. This subconsciousness perceives this corporeality in us.

Do not misunderstand me, I have called this corporeality the body of formative forces in the magazine Das Reich. I called it the “etheric body” previously. Because certain people take exception to expressions, I have tried to come closer with the term to that which it concerns and I have called that which is closest to the physical body and accompanies our whole life as formative- forces the “body of formative forces.” One can call that which does not live in our usual consciousness which is always closer to this body of formative forces, and to which one gets by meditation the “astral body” for certain reasons; but one can also call it the “soul,” which works a level deeper than the usual consciousness.

As the chemist separates a compound substance into the different elements, or as the physicist splits the white sunlight into different colours, we have the nature of the human being divided into the physical body that one perceives with the outer senses, into the body of formative forces that is the first supersensible member of the human being, and into the astral body or soul that subconsciously knows about the work of the body of formative forces, but shines in the usual consciousness only in the memory pictures . From all that the real ego is separated which swims on this triple human being, which knows nothing about that which the soul knows about the bodily, which separates, however, from the soul and which then forms the usual consciousness, and which is spiritual. The fact that this ego-being must be separated as a particular member from the other members turns out only if you advance further with the recommended exercises. I have described how one puts self-formed, clear mental pictures into the soul. It is advantageous if one takes versatile mental pictures and tries to feel, to experience what can be just experienced resting in such mental pictures.

These are two things. The one is that you become aware that there is such a weaving and living in the human being as it is similar to the memory formation. The other is what you experience if you look internally at this experience. It is as if you proceed in such a way that you form the mental pictures on one side, the thinking on the other side, which becomes memory then. This is a particular experience. Someone who goes through it who trains himself as spiritual researcher in the real sense knows that this is a particular experience. Since an element stops from a certain moment on prevailing in this soul life, which, otherwise, is significant always for our soul life: the spatial element. If you reflect that in the usual consciousness almost only spatial images are available, then you realise how much the usual consciousness is dependent on space. This experience, which attaches itself to such mental pictures, as I have developed, causes gradually to know yourself lifted out of space and being in only temporal processes. This is like a significant progress of the human soul life: to know yourself in the tides of time, because this causes to figure the stream of time out really. I said, the whole results in recognising the relationship of the memory power with the forces of growth. You are put just in this.

Something else is still important. I said, it is a double: to have these mental pictures—and to pay particular attention on what you experience there, how you really experience the mental pictures becoming versatile, the living in time, since then you are with your ego in this imagining life.

You are not only in an imagining life, but also generally in a life, which is mixed with the real forces working in time. Then you have got at an ego-experience that is completely different from the usual ego-experience. Someone who knows the usual ego-experience by appropriate introspection knows how narrowly it is bound to the human corporeality, and I have described last time to which elements of the corporeality the ego is bound at first: that it concerns equilibrium relationships, so spatial relations. However, you cannot stay at this experience, but you properly get into the course of time.

Very few people regard anyhow what I have indicated now. Thus, some philosophers assume that our ego is that ego which remains in any experience from birth to death. However, this weird concept of the permanent usual ego as Bergson (Henri B., 1850-1941) designed it can be easily disproved. Every dreamless sleep disproves this assertion. This is why one is not able to build up something on the usual ego-experience if one wants to recognise the human being. However, one carries the ego--experience into the course of time.

If one carries the ego into the course of time if to the other experience of the mental subconscious and the memory-forming body this new ego-experience appears, then it does not count any more that every sleep interrupts this ego-experience, but then something else counts. Then turns out that with our ego-idea also the following is associated.

I have shown last time from which vague feeling this ego-idea appears. It has to be inspired as it were. It is not there in the dreamless sleep. How is it inspired? It is inspired when we approach our corporeality with our soul again. Our corporeality stimulates our ego in the usual consciousness from without. We collide in the usual consciousness with our body; this stimulates our ego-idea. This ego-idea must not be considered as something permanent. However, with that which I have portrayed as new ego-experience the situation is quite different. This lives in the tides of time, it is lifted out from space. This is just inspired, while the human being inspires the experience at one moment in time and not with the spatial collision with his corporeality, but in the collision with the experience of another moment in time. This ego-experience about which I have spoken now is identical with the fact that if I wake I collide in mysterious way with that moment in time at which I have fallen asleep. This forms the basis of the new ego-experience that we experience ourselves at different, at consecutive moments in time that we bridge the time, even if it is discontinuous if sleep disturbs it.

These are the essentials of this ego-experience. Because we immerse the ego in the soul, as far as this is related with the conditions of growth, thereby we immerse the ego itself in the conditions of growth. We advance to that in the ego, which accompanies us from birth to death; we penetrate into the continual stream of ego-experience. What philosophy only concludes else about which one only judges, this is experienced. One defends himself even against the fact that Eduard von Hartmann talks of the fact that if one wants to observe a feeling it is disturbed and changes.

If Eduard von Hartmann notices this, he just wants to exclude that the ego can live in this stream of time. He wants to prove just with it that for the ego-experience the stream of time gets lost to him. However, it does not get lost, but is just gained with it. Yes, someone who can practise introspection spiritual-scientifically knows that the ego-experience that is there at this moment interrelates with former moments in time.

Do not take it as tomfoolery or as boast, if I tell an own experience which seems to be very simple if it is experienced which shook me again recently. I finished a book in 1894 in which I pointed out wholly philosophically that the human thinking is already something spiritual: my Philosophy of Freedom. At that time, I was a young man of 33 years. Now recently the necessity has arisen to work through this book again, to go through everything again that penetrated my soul at that time and to observe at the same time how the ego-experiences of today relate to the quite same ego--experiences of those days.

If you succeed in realising how something similar appears in time while experiencing again and encountering the revived experiences as usually at awakening, then you can just realise with such an example how the ego is inspired exactly the same way as in the corporeality at awakening, while it meets something of it again that existed in the stream of time. Someone who cannot observe this does not imagine at all what he experiences if he does not have the ego in the stream of space, but if he is forced to think it according to the mental pictures in the Philosophy of Freedom that many people regard as “abstractions.” I call them the most concrete, most living mental pictures because the Philosophy of Freedom develops nothing but living concepts. This is the ego-experience due to the interrelation of the one moment in time with the other moment in time. There begins that what you can pictorially call the transition to the inner musical experience of the world. It is, as if you interrelate a tone of a melody to the other tones of the melody if not only this originates that the tone shakes the air as it were, experiences itself in space, but if a tone interrelates with the other tone. It is impossible actually to look different at the inner weaving and living of this highest member of the human being from to proceed to such a musical experience of the one moment of time through the other.

The whole human being is thereby divided into (1) the physical body, (2) the body of formative forces working in the memory, which spiritualises the body of formative forces like a subconscious knowledge, (3) the actual soul or astral body, and (4) the ego. Then we have tried to look at the supersensible, and with it you have the complete human being. With it, you also have the suggestion how you have to experience, so that you can directly behold the permanent in the human being. There is no interpretation or philosophical analysis of the usual ego useful; you have to carry this ego into another sphere, you have to experience it anew on quite different conditions. That ego which you experience this way is an ego that is independent from the spatial corporeality at the same time, and it can gradually perceive, while you continue your exercises, that in the tides of time which lives in the human being only temporally, not spatially.

If I am allowed to insert something for those who know of such things: one has pointed out in the present philosophy that one does not approach the soul if one wants to grasp it substantially, but only if one grasps it as a passage through a process. In particular, Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920, German psychologist and philosopher) pointed to that. However, Wundt pointed to the fact abstractly that one does not approach the soul if one considers it as a substance, but that one has to observe it in the living process.

However, it does not concern to visualise it only in the mental process by abstractions but to submerge with the own ego in the mental process and to experience it. Then one can gradually pursue this mental process also beyond those times in which it is busy in the spatial-physical. If you have learnt to let collide the experience of one moment in time with the other moment, then you can also gradually develop the ability in yourself to let collide the inner experience of the ego generally with the stream of time where the spatial-bodily-has only originated in the stream of heredity. Then the stream of time extends beyond the spatial-bodily, then you behold in the stream of time in which the ego weaves in the life before birth and in the life after death.

To somebody who experiences that which I have described now in principle something occurs internally that one can compare with the experience, which probably Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) might have had when he stood at the beginning of the modern scientific way of thinking and asserted this. The human beings up to Giordano Bruno looked at the cosmic space, saw the blue firmament and regarded it as a real border of space. It was significant that in Giordano Bruno's soul the idea appeared first: there is really nothing at all; only our view, only the conditions of our sense perception cause that we see a blue bowl there; in truth it extends to infinity, the blue firmament is only a border of our view. This also applies to the temporal. Birth or conception and death become the borders of the temporal firmament at which we look which our sense. What we regard as our world in which we live with our ego, with our supersensible human being, this is beyond this temporal firmament beyond death on one side, beyond birth or conception on the other side. Today we face this great leap forward of the human knowledge where in similar way as centuries ago the spatial illusion was removed the illusion is now removed that birth and death are borders beyond which one cannot get.

You have to do this leap. Then it opens the view of the real life of your supersensible being. However, you have to consider particularly: someone who wants to become a spiritual researcher as I have described here has to pursue with the highest critical introspection always what could keep him from coming objectively into this spiritual world. He can be very easily kept from it. It is advantageous not to use mental pictures for meditation, which evoke feelings and emotions. Somebody who uses mental pictures, which excite him very strongly, can deceive himself very easily. Hence, you should avoid for the preparation that religious impulses are brought in the exercises. Strange to say—it will be fine with some people—those mental pictures are the very best which touch us the least concerning our emotional life. If you become engrossed in geometry in such versatile mental pictures where the figures can accept different forms, or in such mental pictures, as I have shown them in the Philosophy of Freedom, then that furthers us in this field. With it, I do not want to say that spiritual-scientific research is not concerned with the religious life. However, it concerns that one gets to that religious internalization and deepening for which just spiritual science can also be the preparation best of all because one does not take it as starting point, but proceeds with very unemotional and incurious mental pictures on the way of research, and if you are in the spiritual world, the view which can already be a mighty help just for the religious deepening comes to you from this spiritual world. Thus, you have to use particular mental pictures, which are not associated with the griefs and concerns of human life and which you can easily understand. However, these never are the mental pictures, which excite us easily, because there everything imaginable appears from the subconscious in the soul. One has to exclude this subconscious above all.

You really penetrate into a spiritual experience this way where you can find that being in the human being only which lives in the freedom of will which lives in the immortal soul being. Every human being bears it in himself. However, you can recognise it only in such ways as I have described.

In the next talk, I want to go on talking from this point about the important questions of the human soul life: about the freedom of will and about the immortality of the soul. I want to show how one advances from the supersensible human being to a real conception of the life of this supersensible human being, of the life in the real perpetuity, and the life in the freedom of will. People have argued so much about freedom of will and immortality because one did not want to get involved with creating the necessary preparations first to enter the field of human experience which you have to enter if you want to gain a view of that from which only freedom of will originates, and in which only that rests which goes through births and deaths in the human being. You have to recognise first how in the human life the temporal runs during this life on earth. Then you also find the ways to get beyond this life on earth.

Such research can become fertile for the most important, most practical fields of life, for example, for education. One does not at all consider this field from the temporal experience of the soul, although one wants to make modern ideas fertile for it today. Someone who can look from one time of human experience to another finds a metamorphosing life in the soul life. He finds, for example: if he has grown old and looks back at former times and then at more distant times, and if he looks not only outwardly, but experiences it internally, then he notices how the inner mental object changes what originates from an object of the soul life at a moment in time.

One notices: what works in the childhood mainly as will what is expressed as wish works in the later life in the experience of life, works in the thinking. What we have later as fifty years old humans as experience of life is a transformed will life of our childhood. As the petal of the plant is a transformed green leaf in the sense of the Goethean metamorphosis outwardly, but as the leaf does not remain green, but becomes red with the rose, that changes which is wish with the child into experiences of life in the later age. And vice versa: what the child thinks changes into willpower in the later life. If you know this coherence, you can imagine how you can work on the child!

If you fulfil every senseless wish of a child and induce it that it atomises its will in all directions, then you make it relatively idiotic early in later age because the atomised will cannot change into experience of life which expresses itself in a quiet life of thought later.—This metamorphosis of the inner life manifests itself to spiritual beholding as usually spatial relations manifest themselves. One also learns to recognise that one has to try to lead the thoughts of the child, so that it does not become a limp, weak human being later, but takes up such mental pictures that lead to a certain willpower. Someone who possibly believes that by suggestion of the will the will, and by suggestion of the life of thought the thoughts are strengthened is on a quite wrong track; he does not know the weaving and living of the supersensible human being. Here is a point—and we could bring in countless ones—where real penetrating into the reality of existence leads immediately to life praxis. Somebody who wants to stop at the outer reality resembles a person who has a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron before himself and says about it, this is a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron. However, another says to him, this is a magnet. The former means, I see nothing of it, I see a horseshoe only, and I want to shoe my horse with it.—He does not see the magnet. What can the other do who can add the invisible to reality!

Thus, the world is interspersed with something invisible. However, everywhere reality is fulfilled with a stream of existence that one only recognises if one gets a relation of the supersensible in the human being to the supersensible in the surrounding existence. The fact that many things make a particularly unreal impression in our time is due to the fact that the human beings believe to face the stream of reality immediately. This should be “a scientific view.” However, they do not realise what lives in the depths of reality. Hence, they cannot acknowledge that which weaves in the human life as something real. Someone who has a recognising sense for that which goes forward in the present who can compare subtler, more intimate events to the catastrophic events which have now become the human misfortune is reminded very much of how necessary it is just in our time that understanding of the supersensible relation of the human being to the world gains ground again in humanity. If you ask yourself how it has happened, actually, that this understanding is not there, then you can characterise it in the following way.

It is not there. Today people are regarded as especially clever, and those who are far away from reality are clever in certain respect. I can call a book in which, actually, from start to finish no tone of reality is included, and which contains the knowledge of the whole world, nevertheless, strictly speaking from its point of view, because it is a dictionary, a philosophical one: that by Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923, German author) which is an idol of knowledge not so much of the experts but of numerous laymen or—if I am not allowed to say this—“journalists.” However, someone who approaches this book with sense of reality can get a peculiar feeling. Start reading any article, read it to the end: you have turned around in a circle.

It is, as if you have looked at something that blinded you; then you turn around and look again. However, you get to nothing at all. You ask yourself with every article why it is written, actually? It is to everybody with sense of reality a torture to read this pretentious book. Nevertheless, it is a very clever book. I could praise the astuteness, the cleverness of this book; but a book has come about which reminds you with every article of the good Munchausen who wanted to pull himself out of a swamp on his own shock of hair. This book is also typical for many things that are thought in the present and are done for a long time, and what removes the human beings from reality, from the supersensible. However, in this supersensible the spiritual, the real is flowing. Why did the human being diverge from reality?

Nothing can face the real Christianity and the real piety more understanding than spiritual science. However, take the reality that is often associated with the development of the last two millennia, there you get stuck into the idea: you have to search the spirit beyond outer nature, have to consider the outer nature as something that you must avoid if you want to get to the spirit. Go back to the older centuries, and you realise that one withdraws from the outer nature and her secrets; one looks for other ways and does not look for the spirit that is spread out in nature. Then natural sciences came; other necessities appeared to the human consciousness concerning the concept of nature. However, the former centuries had made sure not to see the spirit in nature; one wanted to find it apart nature. Now she faced the human beings and she was divested of spirit. Now one investigated that nature which one had divested of spirit. This takes place since four to five centuries. Because one saw everything approaching the human being from this spirit-divested nature with a certain necessity, the human being was also divested of spirit. The spirit-divested nature became the vampire of the human spirit. Nature entered in science and her facts became irrefutable. I have often said that the human beings have to admire the results of natural sciences; but nature must not be considered as spirit-divested, otherwise, it becomes the vampire, and one can no longer find what lives in the human being as spirit. Then you find what the barrel organ plays. That which the barrel organ plays is below in the organic. There one grasps the organic life only, one side of life only, not the other side that we have taken as starting point today that already has the supersensible stream in the memory.

When we are engaged in the study of one or other of the Gospels and trying to explain it, it would doubtless be best to leave the other Gospels altogether out of account. By this means it would be possible to reach the purest and best understanding of the prevailing tone of each. But it is obvious that such an approach could lead to misunderstandings, unless a ray of light were thrown upon it from one of the other Gospels. And precisely what we called yesterday the “greatest monologue in world history” can easily be misunderstood if someone were to consult in a superficial and not too accurate manner what had, for example, to be said in connection with the similar passage in the Matthew Gospel in the lectures I gave in Bern.¹ Indeed, an objection made from such a standpoint would really in a deeper logical sense be the same as if the statement were made that a man once stood on this platform and on his left was a bouquet of roses. Then another statement would be made that a man once stood on this platform and on his right was a bouquet of roses, and a man who had not been present proceeded to object, saying that there must be a mistake since one time the bouquet of roses was on the right and the other time on the left. It all depends on where the observer in question was standing, for both statements can be correct. So it is with the Gospels, where we are not concerned simply with an abstract biography of Christ Jesus, but with a rich world of external and occult facts that are presented in them.

In order to picture to ourselves this viewpoint let us now consider again what we called yesterday the “greatest monologue in world history,” the soliloquy of the God. We must recognize that the whole episode was especially concerned with the relationship between Christ Jesus and His closest disciples. And we must include in such a study most particularly what was said yesterday, that the spirit of Elijah, after it had been freed from the physical body of John the Baptist, was actually active as a kind of group soul of the disciples. What happened then cannot just be related in a simple external way since it took place in a much more complicated manner. To a certain extent there was a deep and inner connection between the soul of the Christ and the souls of the Twelve. Everything that took place within the soul of Christ was made up of processes of significance for that time, rich and manifold processes. But all that took place in the soul of Christ took place again in a kind of reflected image, a reflection in the souls of the disciples, but divided into twelve parts. In this way each of the Twelve experienced, as in a reflected image, a part of what happened in the soul of Christ Jesus; but each of the Twelve experienced it somewhat differently. What took place within the soul of Christ Jesus was like a harmony, a great symphony, reflected in the souls of each of the Twelve, in much the same way as twelve instruments can give forth a harmony. So any event that concerns one or more of the disciples in particular may be described from two sides. It is possible to describe how the event in question appeared within the soul of Christ, as, for example, in the case of the great world-historical monologue of Christ Jesus. It is possible to describe how it was experienced within His soul, and then it appears as it was described yesterday. But it also takes place in a certain reflected image in the soul of Peter. Peter has the same soul experience. But, whereas in the case of Christ Jesus it encompasses the whole of mankind, Peter's identical experience encompasses only a twelfth part of all mankind, a twelfth, a single zodiacal sign of the entire Christ spirit. For this reason it must be pictured differently when it concerns Christ Jesus Himself.

It must be spoken of in this way if we are to describe it in the sense of the Mark Gospel, for most remarkable things are described in it, and especially what is presented as having taken place within the soul of Christ Jesus Himself. By contrast the Matthew Gospel pictures more what has reference to the soul of Peter, and what Christ Jesus added to explain what took place within Peter's soul. If you read the Gospel carefully, you will notice how in the Matthew Gospel certain words have been added which give us the picture as perceived from the side of Peter. Otherwise, why should the words have been added, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for flesh and blood have not revealed it to you but my Father in the heavens.” (Matt. 16:17)? In other words the soul of Peter felt something of what the soul of Christ had been feeling. But while Peter's soul felt that his master was Christ, this should be understood as meaning that Peter was for a time raised upward to an experience in his higher “I,” and that he was overwhelmed by this experience and then fell back, as it were, afterward. Nevertheless it was possible for him to penetrate through to a knowledge which, with a different aim and purpose, came about within the soul of Christ. Because Peter was able to do this, there followed the handing over of the power of the keys mentioned in the Matthew Gospel (Matt. 16:19), about which we spoke in our interpretation of that Gospel. By contrast, in speaking of the Mark Gospel we have emphasized, forcefully and simply, those words that indicate that the event, quite apart from what happened within Peter, took place at the same time and in a parallel manner as the monologue of God.

This is how we must look at these things, enabling us to feel how Christ Jesus deals with His own, how He leads them on from stage to stage, and how after the spirit of Elijah-John had passed over into them He could lead them more deeply than He could earlier into the comprehension of spiritual secrets. And one of our first impressions is that it is significant that the passage we discussed at the end of our last lecture, the monologue of the God, should be closely followed by the so-called Transfiguration or Transformation scene. That is also a significant element in the dramatic composition of the Mark Gospel. In order to shed light on the Transfiguration we need to point out a few facts that are related to many things necessary for the understanding of the picture presented in the Gospels. Let us begin by referring to one of these.

You can read often in the Mark Gospel, as well as in the other Gospels, how Christ Jesus speaks of how the Son of Man must suffer many things, that He would be set upon by the scribes and high priests, that He would be put to death and after three days would be raised. You will notice how up to a certain point the apostles are unable to understand at first what is meant by the suffering, death and raising of the Son of Man, how they experience a real difficulty particularly in understanding this passage (Mark 9:31-32). Why are we confronted with this peculiar fact? Why is it precisely with reference to the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha itself that the apostles experience these difficulties? What then is the Mystery of Golgotha? We have already spoken of this. It is nothing else but the drawing forth of initiation from the depths of the mysteries onto the plane of world history. Of course there is a crucial difference between the average initiation and the Mystery of Golgotha. This difference consists in the following.

All those who were initiated into the mysteries of the various peoples had in a certain sense experienced the same thing. An initiate was made to suffer, and one could say that he was apparently dead for three days, during which his spirit remained in the spiritual worlds outside his body. Then his spirit was brought back into his body in such a way that the spirit in his body could remember what it had undergone in the spiritual world, and could then appear as a messenger, proclaiming the secrets of the spiritual world. Thus we can say that initiation is a journey into death, though in such a death the spirit is not separated entirely from the body, but only for a limited time. Initiation involves remaining outside the physical body and returning into it, thereby becoming a messenger for the secrets of the divine world. It took place after careful preparation, and after the candidate had reached a condition where his soul forces were so concentrated within him that he could live without using the instrument of his physical body. Then after these three and a half days he had to unite himself again with his physical body. We may say that the initiate passed through this by withdrawing into a higher world unconnected with ordinary historical events.

Although the Mystery of Golgotha was, to outward appearance, similar, it differed in its inner nature. The events that occurred during the period when the Christ dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth had actually resulted in the genuine physical death of the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. The spirit of Christ remained for three days outside the physical body but it then returned. And now it was not in the physical body but in the concentrated etheric body, concentrated in such a way that it was possible for the disciples to perceive it, as described in the Gospels—with the consequence that Christ could walk and become visible also after the event of Golgotha. Thereby initiation, which formerly took place in the depths of the mysteries, hidden from external eyes, was presented as a historical event, a unique event, before all mankind. Through this, initiation was, in a sense, lifted out of the mysteries; it had been accomplished by the one Christ before the eyes of everyone. And precisely with this event the ancient world came to an end and the new era began.

From the picture that has been given you of the prophets you have seen that the prophetic spirit, and what was given by this prophetic spirit to the ancient Hebrew people, differed from the spirit of initiation prevalent among other peoples. These other peoples had their initiates, who were initiated in the manner we have just described. This was not the case with the ancient Hebrew people. With them it was not a question of initiation of the same kind as among the other peoples. Here we have to do with an elemental emergence of the spirit within the bodies of those who appeared as prophets; something resembling “geniuses of spirituality” appeared. To enable this to happen we see that in the middle prophetic period souls appear in the ancient Hebrew people who in earlier incarnations had been initiates among the other peoples, so that they experience everything they give to the ancient Hebrew people as a memory of what they themselves had received in their initiation. For this reason spiritual life did not shine into the ancient Hebrew people in the same way as it did into other peoples. In the case of these other peoples it occurred through an act, through initiation, whereas in the case of the Old Testament people it came by virtue of the gifts that had been implanted in those who worked actively as prophets among the people. Through the activity of their prophets the Hebrew people were made ready to experience that unique initiation which was no longer that of a human individuality but of a cosmic individuality, if, indeed one may speak of an initiation at all in this case, which is no longer correct. Through this the Hebrew people were prepared to receive something that was to take the place of the old initiation: they were made ready to view the Mystery of Golgotha in the right way. But one consequence of this was that the apostles, who belonged to the Old Testament people, had at first no understanding of the words that characterize initiation. Christ Jesus spoke about initiation when He expressed himself in such terms as hastening toward death, remaining in the grave for three days and being raised from the dead. This is a description of initiation. If He had described it in a different way they would have understood Him. But because such a way of speaking of initiation was foreign to the Old Testament people the Twelve could not at first understand His description. So it is quite correctly pointed out to us that the disciples were astonished and did not know to what He was referring when He spoke of the suffering and death and raising of the Son of Man.

Such things are therefore entirely in accord with the spiritual content of the events as they are historically presented. When the ancient initiate experienced his initiation it is true that he was in a higher world while he was outside his body; he was not in the ordinary sense-perceptible world. We may say that while he was outside his body he was at one with the realities of a higher plane. While he was free of his body in the spiritual world, returning later to his body, what had he experienced? It was memory. He had to speak in such a way that he could say, “I remember my experiences when I was free of my body, in the same way as in ordinary life one can remember what one experienced yesterday or the day before.” He could bear witness to them. As far as these initiates are concerned it did not amount to much more than that they bore in their souls the secrets of the spiritual worlds in the same way that the human soul retains in memory what it experienced yesterday. And as the soul is united with what it retains as memory, so the initiates were united with the secrets of the spiritual world that they carried within themselves.

What was the reason for this? It was because before the Mystery of Golgotha human souls on earth were not adapted to allowing the kingdoms of the heavens, the super-sensible worlds, to penetrate into the ego. They could not approach the true ego, could not unite themselves with it. Only if a man could see beyond himself or could glimpse the divine by means of the clairvoyance that existed in those ancient times, if, as I might put it, he dreamt himself away or were freed from his ego through initiation, could he enter the super-sensible worlds. But within the ego there was no comprehension, no understanding of the higher worlds. This is how it was in those ancient times. Before the Mystery of Golgotha man could not unite himself with the spiritual worlds even by making use of all the forces pertaining to his ego.

The secret that was to be revealed to the people through the baptism of John was that the time had now come near when the kingdoms of heaven were to shine right into the ego; they were to approach the ego, the earthly ego. In truth it has been indicated all through the ages how what man could experience as his soul element could not in ancient times enter the super-sensible worlds. In ancient times there was something like a disharmony between the way in which the true home of man, the spiritual world, was experienced, and that which, if we wish to describe the old soul nature as “ego,” was active in the inner being of man. This human inner self was separated from the spiritual world, and only in exceptional conditions could it be united with it. And when all the might of what was later to become the ego and to live within man, when all the power and the impulses of the ego filled him, for example through initiation, or through remembering the experience of initiation in a former incarnation in a later one—when the power and might of the ego prematurely penetrated into his bodily nature, what happened then? It has always been pointed out that in the pre-Christian era the ego force, too powerful for the human bodily nature, could find its proper place in the body, and broke through what was destined for the ego.

For this reason those human beings who bear within themselves more of the super-sensible world, bearing within themselves in pre-Christian times something of what would in a later age become the ego, such persons split apart their human bodily constitution with this ego force because this force is too strong for the pre-Christian era. This is clearly alluded to, for example, in the case of certain individualities during a particular incarnation who possess this ego force in themselves, but this ego can remain within them only because the body is in some way wounded, or vulnerable, wounded and having a vulnerable spot. It is in this spot that the individuality is exposed to danger from his surroundings more than in any other part of his body. We need only recall the vulnerability of Achilles' heel, of Siegfried and Oedipus whose bodies are split asunder by the force of the ego. These examples of wounds demonstrate to us how only a damaged body is compatible with the greatness of the ego, and the superhuman ego force that is within it.

Perhaps the significance of what I am trying to place before our souls could be grasped better if I formulate it in a different way. Let us suppose that someone in pre-Christian times were to be filled, not necessarily consciously, with all those impulses and forces that later on will penetrate the ego, and that these forces which I might call a superego force, a superhuman force, were to dive down into his body. He would have to break apart his body and not perceive it as it was when it had its weak ego, its weak inner self, within it. A man of olden times would necessarily have seen it differently if he possessed within himself the whole power of the ego, enabling him to rise up out of his body. He would have seen the body as it actually was, broken under the influence of the superego. He would have seen it with every kind of wound imaginable because in ancient times only a weak ego, a weak inner self, penetrated the body so slightly that it could remain whole.

What I have just said was indeed stated by the prophets. The passage (Zechariah 12:10) is so formulated that it runs approximately as follows, “A man who unites in himself the full force of egohood and is confronted with the human body, sees it wounded, pierced through with holes. For the higher ego force which in ancient times could not yet live within the inner self, pierces through, penetrates and makes holes in the body.” This is an impulse that runs through the evolution and development of mankind for the reason that as a result of the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in pre- Christian times only a portion of the ego could be bestowed on man. And because the body is adapted only to the smaller portion and not to the whole force of the ego, it is worn down. It was not because this took place in the pre-Christian era but because in the case of Christ Jesus the full power of the ego entered all at once, and entered with the utmost strength into His bodily being, that this body had to appear not only with a single wound, as was the case with so many human individualities who carried a superego, but with five wounds. These were necessary because the Christ-Being, that is, the full ego of man, projected far beyond the bodily form appropriate for those times. It was for this reason that the cross had to be erected on the physical plane of world history, that cross that bore the body of Christ, a human body such as that of man would be if for a moment the whole of man's nature, a large part of which has been lost through the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman, were to live within one single human being.

It is a profound mystery that is given to us by occult science in the picture of the Mystery of Golgotha. Anyone who understands the true nature of the human being and of humanity, and the nature of the earthly ego and its relation to the form of the human body, knows that when the human body is entirely penetrated by the earthly ego such a penetration would be abnormal for the ordinary man as he walks about on earth. But when a man goes out of himself and sees himself from outside and is able to ask the question, “How would this body be if the totality of egohood were to enter into it?” then his answer must be that it would be pierced by five wounds. The form of the cross on Golgotha with Christ upon it with His wounds is derived from the nature of man and from the very being of the earth itself. From our study of the nature of man it is possible for the picture of the Mystery of Golgotha to arise for us out of our own knowledge. Strange as it may seem, it is actually possible to see how the cross is raised on Golgotha, how the crucifixion takes place, and to perceive directly the truth of this historical event, and all this without the use of clairvoyance when such a vision would be natural. Because of the Mystery of Golgotha it is possible for the human intellect to approach so closely to this mystery that if it is used with sufficient sharpness and subtlety it can be transformed into an imagination, into a picture that then contains the truth. If we understand the nature of Christ and His relation to the human bodily form, our imagination can be guided in this way in such a manner that the picture of Golgotha itself arises for us. The older Christian painters were often guided in this way. Even though they were not perhaps in all cases clairvoyant, their knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha was so powerful that it impelled them so far that they were able to picture it in such a way that they could paint it. It was just at this great turning point of human evolution that the understanding of the being of Christ, in other words, the primal ego of man, emerged out of clairvoyance and rose up into the ego-soul of man.

It is possible to see the Mystery of Golgotha through clairvoyance outside the body. By what means? If while within the body a relationship has been established to the Mystery of Golgotha, it is possible also today to perceive it in the higher worlds, and in so doing to receive a full confirmation of the truth of this great nodal point in the evolution of mankind. It is, however, also possible to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha, and the words I have just spoken ought to make this understanding possible. It is, of course, necessary to reflect and meditate on them for a long time. If anyone should feel it difficult to grasp what has just been said, such a feeling is perfectly justifiable, for it goes without saying that anything that can lead the human soul to a full understanding of the highest and most significant event that has ever happened on earth is bound to be difficult. In a certain way the disciples had to be led toward this understanding; and of all those who had to be led gradually to a new understanding of the evolution of mankind, Peter, James, and John proved to be the most suitable.

It is good for us to picture to ourselves from as many sides as we can the significant epoch that began at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore it was especially helpful that you were able to hear this morning how Hegel² envisaged this turning point of time. We need everything that human understanding can contribute if we are to grasp the significance of what entered into human evolution at that time, something that had been maturing during the preceding centuries and took place about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, thereafter slowly preparing and conditioning the further evolution of humanity. It manifested itself in various parts of the earth and we can trace it not only in Palestine where the Mystery of Golgotha itself occurred, but in other parts of the earth where the Mystery of Golgotha did not occur. If we proceed in the right way we can trace how as a result of the Mystery of Golgotha mankind descended and then reascended, and was uplifted as the Mystery of Golgotha spread throughout the Western world. In particular we can trace the descent of mankind, and this indeed is especially interesting.

Let us consider once again the land of Greece, and picture to ourselves what happened there half a millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha. In the East, where Krishna appeared, people were in a certain way ahead of their time in the period when the old clairvoyance was dying out. Indeed, there was something remarkable about the culture of ancient India. During the time immediately following the Atlantean age with the great cultural flowering of the first post-Atlantean epoch, the human soul still had the possibility of seeing into the spiritual world in the purest manner. In the case of the Rishis this faculty was accompanied by the wonderful ability to present what they had seen in such a way that it could influence later ages. Then when the clairvoyance disappeared, what they had given could be preserved in such significant revelations as those given out by Krishna; although the true clairvoyance already had been extinguished by the end of the third epoch. But what had been perceived in this earlier age was preserved in wonderful words through Krishna and his pupils, with the result that what at an earlier time had been seen could now be expressed in writing. So what happened further west, for example in Greece, never happened in India at all.

If we perceive correctly the Indian world we may say that the old clairvoyance died out, and because it died out some men, among whom Krishna was the most important, wrote down in wonderful words what had formerly been seen. This, then, appears in the Vedas, in the word; and anyone who immerses himself in the word experiences an echo of it in his soul. But this is quite different from what came forth, for example, in Socrates or other philosophers. What may be called Western intellect, Western power of judgment, never appears in Indian souls. Nor can there be found one example in India of what we today speak of in the fullest sense as the inborn power of the ego. As a result just as the old clairvoyance was dying out there came an urge toward Yoga, a new means of ascending into the spiritual worlds through training as a compensation for the loss of natural clairvoyance. Yoga therefore became an artificial clairvoyance, and the philosophy of Yoga appeared without a time interval, such as that during which, in Greece, for example, a rational philosophy appeared. Nothing of this appeared in India; an interim phase was totally lacking. If we take up the Vedanta philosophy of Vyasa we may say that it is not distinguished for its ideas and intellect as are the teachings of the Western world conceptions, but it appears to have been brought down from higher worlds though expressed in human speech. What is remarkable about it is that it was not achieved through human thinking, nor is it thought out like the characteristic teachings of Socrates and Plato. It was, indeed, the product of clairvoyant perception.

It is difficult to come to a clear idea about such matters. Nevertheless, there is a possibility even at the present time to experience the difference between these two kinds of philosophy. Take up any book on philosophy, any presentation of some Western philosophical system. How has anything that can be regarded as a serious philosophy been achieved? If you could see into the workroom of anyone who can be regarded today as a serious philosopher you would see how it is through the power of logical thinking and logical judgment that such systems are created, and each is built up step by step. But those who work out their philosophies in this way are quite unable to understand that their kind of conceptual weaving can also to a certain extent be perceived clairvoyantly, that a clairvoyant can see it in front of him through his clairvoyance. If therefore, instead of passing through all the individual stages of thought we were to survey clairvoyantly, in one fell swoop so to speak, a number of philosophical theses that have been woven together by the sweat of one's brow, concept by concept, then we shall experience much difficulty in making ourselves understood. Yet the concepts of the Vedanta philosophy are concepts of this kind, and they were seen clairvoyantly. They were not acquired by the sweat of the brow, like the concepts of European philosophers, but were brought down clairvoyantly. They are just the last remnants of the ancient clairvoyance, diluted into abstract concepts. Or else they are the first fragile conquests of Yoga in the super-sensible worlds.

Those people who lived more to the West went through different experiences. There we see remarkable and important inner events in the evolution of mankind. Let us take the case of a remarkable philosopher of the sixth century before the Christian era, Pherecydes of Syros.³ He was indeed a remarkable philosopher, though present-day philosophers do not count him even as a philosopher at all. There are books on philosophy which actually say—I will quote a few words verbatim—that all he gives are childish symbols, childish descriptions. So does a man today speak who imagines himself to be greatly superior to those ancient philosophers. He calls these notions “childish and ingenious.” Nevertheless, half a millennium before the Christian era a remarkable thinker emerged in Syros. Certainly he describes things differently from other thinkers, who were later to be called philosophers. For example, Pherecydes says, “Underlying everything visible in the world is a trinity: Chronos, Zeus and Chthon. From Chronos comes the airy, the fiery and the watery element. Ophioneus, a kind of serpent being, comes into conflict with all that stems from these three powers.” Even if we have no clairvoyance but only some imagination it is possible to see in front of us everything that he describes. Chronos is put forward not merely as abstract passing time but as a real being in a perceptible form. It is the same with Zeus, the limitless ether, as a living self-perpetuating being; while Chthon, who draws down to earth what once was heavenly, draws together into the planet earth all that is woven in space, in order to make earthly existence possible. All this happens on earth. Then a kind of serpent being interferes, and introduces, so to speak, a hostile element. If we examine what this remarkable Pherecydes of Syros describes, it can easily be understood without the aid of spiritual research. He is a last straggler endowed with the clairvoyance of earlier times. He sees behind the sense world to the real causes, and these he describes with the aid of his clairvoyance. Naturally this does not at all please those who prefer to juggle concepts. He sees the living weaving of the good gods and how hostile powers interfere in their work; and all this he describes from the viewpoint of a clairvoyant. He sees how the elements are born out of Chronos, out of Time seen as a real being.

So we have in this philosopher Pherecydes of Syros a man who still sees into the world with his soul, gazing into the world disclosed by clairvoyant consciousness, and describing it; and we are able to follow his description. Thus he stands before us in the Western world as late as the sixth century, B.C. while Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander and Heraclitus,⁴ who are almost his contemporaries, stand there in a quite different manner. Here two worlds actually come together. But how does it appear within the souls of these men? The old clairvoyance has been extinguished, paralyzed in them, and at most all that is left is a longing for the spiritual worlds. What, then, do they experience in place of the living vision that the sage of Syros still possessed, a man who could still look into the world of primal causes? This world has closed to them; they can no longer see into it. It is as if this world wished to close itself to them, as if it was still half present for them but nevertheless eluded them, with the result that they replace the old clairvoyance with abstract concepts that belong to the ego. This is how it appears in the souls of these men. Indeed within these Western souls there was a very remarkable condition of soul at that time. It is moving in the direction of intellect and judgment, which are precisely the characteristics of the ego. We see this within individual souls, as, for instance, in Heraclitus who still describes the living weaving fire as the cause of everything, with, we could say, a last trace of true clairvoyant vision. Thales spoke of water, but he did not mean physical, material water any more than Heraclitus meant physical material fire. But it remains something from the elemental world, which they can still half see through while at the same time it half eludes them, so that all they can give out are abstract concepts. In looking into these souls we can understand how something of the soul mood of these men can still echo into our own time.

If only our contemporaries were not so prone to skim thoughtlessly over so much that is of value! It is so easy to skim lightly over a passage in Nietzsche that can profoundly move us, take possession of us and shake our souls. The passage occurs in his posthumous work Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, where he describes Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras and Empedocles. Right at the beginning of this work there is a passage where, if we truly enter into it, we can see that Nietzsche perceived something of what these first lonely Greek thinkers experienced in their souls. Look up the passage in Nietzsche where he says, “How must it have been with the souls of those heroes of philosophy who had to make the transition from the period of living vision (of which Nietzsche knew nothing but that he was able to sense) to an age when what had formerly been alive in their souls was superseded by dry, abstract, prosaic concepts; when ‘being,’ that cold, abstract, prosaic notion, appeared, as a ‘concept,’ replacing the full aliveness of clairvoyant consciousness?” And Neitzsche feels, “It is as if our blood would freeze in our veins when we cross over from the realm of life into the world of concepts in Thales or Heraclitus who use such concepts as ‘being’ and ‘becoming,’ so that we pass from the warm realm of becoming over into the icy region of ‘concepts.’ ”

We must transport ourselves in feeling into the age in which these men were living, and how they stood when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching. We must enter into their being in such a way that we can perceive how there is still within them a dim echo of former times, yet how they must content themselves with the power of abstract judgment that lives in the human ego, a power that was unnecessary in earlier times. And whereas in later eras the world of concepts became richer and richer, in the first period when the world of concepts was coming closer the Greek philosophers could grasp nothing but the most simple of them. How they tormented themselves with such concepts as abstract “being,” especially the philosophers of the Eleatic school! But it was in this way that the present-day abstract qualities of the ego were prepared.

Let us now think of a soul which is rooted in the West, prepared for the mission of the West, and yet bears within itself the powerful echo of ancient clairvoyance. In India these echoes have long since died away, but they are still present in the West. The soul has the impulse to enter the elemental world, but it is prevented by its consciousness. A mood such as that of the Buddha could not arise in such souls. The Buddha mood would have said, “We are brought into the world of suffering. Let us free ourselves from it.” But Western souls wanted to take hold of what was ahead of them. They could not go back into what lay behind them. But in the world in front of them they could find only cold, icy concepts. Consider such a soul as Pherecydes of Syros who was the last to be able to see into the elemental world. Now let us think of one of the other souls who cannot see how the elements are born in a living way out of Chronos. It is unable to see how Ophioneus, the serpent-being, enters into conflict with the higher gods, but it is able to glimpse that something is at work in the physical material world. It cannot see through to Chronos, but it sees the imprint of Chronos in the world of sense, in fire, water, air and earth. It is not able to see how the higher gods are opposed by the lower gods, and how Lucifer, the serpent-god, rebels; but it does see how harmony and disharmony, friendship and enmity prevail. It sees love and hate as abstract concepts, and fire, water, air, and earth as abstract elements. The soul beholds all that still at that time penetrated into it, but what had been seen earlier by contemporaries is now hidden.

Let us think of such a soul still standing within the livingness of the earlier era, but unable to see into the spiritual world, able only to grasp its external counterpart, a soul which because of its special mission found that what had previously brought bliss to human beings was hidden from it. Yet this soul has nothing from the new world of the ego save a few concepts to which it feels obliged to cling. What we have before us is the soul of Empedocles. If we wish to comprehend the inner being of such a soul, then it is the soul of Empedocles that stands before us. Empedocles is almost a contemporary of the sage of Syros; he lives scarcely two-thirds of a century later. But his soul is constituted quite differently. It had the task of crossing the Rubicon that separated the old clairvoyance from the abstract comprehension of the ego. We see here two worlds suddenly clashing with one another. Here we see the dawning of the ego and how it advances toward its fulfillment. We see the souls of the ancient Greek philosophers who were the first to be condemned to take up what we now call intellect and logic; and we see at the same time how their souls were emptied of the old revelations. Into these souls the new impulse, the impulse of Golgotha, had to be poured.

Thus were their souls constituted when the new impulse was born. But they had to yearn for a new fulfillment; without such a yearning they could not understand it. In Indian thinking there is scarcely any transition comparable with what we find in the lonely Greek thinkers. Therefore Indian philosophy which had just made its transition to the teaching of Yoga hardly offers any possibility of discovering the transition to the Mystery of Golgotha. Greek philosophy was prepared in such a way that it thirsted for the Mystery of Golgotha. Consider the Gnosis, and how it longed in its philosophy for the Mystery of Golgotha. The philosophy of the Mystery of Golgotha rests on a Greek foundation because the best of the Greek souls longed to receive into themselves the impulse of Golgotha.

In order to understand what happened in mankind's evolution we must have good will. We might then be able to perceive something that might be described as a call, and an answering call from the very soil of the earth. If we look at Greece and then further toward Sicily and look into such souls, among whom Empedocles is one of the most outstanding, then we become aware of an astonishing kind of appeal. How can we characterize this for ourselves? What are such souls saying? If we look into the soul of Empedocles we hear something like this, “I know of initiation through history. From history I know that the super-sensible world entered into human souls through initiation. Initiation can no longer come alive in us. Now we are living in a different phase of evolution, and we have need of a new impulse that reaches into the ego. Tell me, Impulse, where are you, you who are to take the place of the initiation of the past that we are no longer able to experience, whose task is to place before the new ego the same mystery that was once contained within the old clairvoyance?”

To this appeal there came in answer the cry from Golgotha, “By obeying the gods and not human beings I was permitted to bring down the mysteries and set them before all mankind, so that what could hitherto be found only in the depths of the mysteries might now be bestowed on all mankind.”

What was born in Greek souls in southern Europe comes to us as a request from the Western world for a new solution of the world riddle. And as the answer, an answer that can be understood only in the West, comes the great monologue of the God, of which we spoke at the conclusion of yesterday's lecture, and of which we shall speak again tomorrow.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner gave his cycle on the Matthew Gospel in Bern in September, 1910. The last edition of this cycle in English was published in London by Rudolf Steiner Press in 1965. The question about the handing over of the power of the keys was discussed in Lectures 11 and 12.
• 2. The lecture given by Michael Bauer was entitled “How did Hegel see the great Turning-Point in Time?” Among Hegel's more important works was his Philosophy of History.
• 3. Pherecydes of Syros, 6th century B.C. Only fragments of his cosmogony have been preserved. For this reason and the “unphilosophical” nature of these fragments his name does not even appear in most histories of philosophy.
• 4. Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes (c. 636–546 B.C.; c. 611–547 B.C.; 6th century B.C.) were all from Miletus in Asia Minor and are regarded as the first true philosophers, Thales being, as Aristotle called him, the Father of Philosophy.
  
  Heraclitus of Ephesus, c. 535–c. 475 B.C. Rudolf Steiner who discusses him at length in Christianity as Mystical Fact calls him an initiate priest as well as a philosopher.
  
  Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1844–1900. German philosopher, author of The Birth of Tragedy, and Thus Spake Zarathustra.
  
  Parmenides of Elea, born about 514 B.C., who held that true change was impossible and all apparent change was illusory.
  
  Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, c. 500–428 B.C. Philosopher who is credited with founding the study of philosophy in Athens.

We have been dealing with the various force currents that shape the human organism and give it form in a manner enabling us to comprehend it. If we really learn to know these formative forces, we must perceive that they could not function otherwise, that our heart, our eyes, inevitably had to become exactly what they are. We have traced the sense image of ourselves back to those super-sensible currents that flow back and forth in different directions, from above downward, from right to left, from the back forward, and so forth. At this point someone may try to catch me out by objecting that while dealing with the currents I had failed to explain a certain significant phenomenon in the human organism, that in addition to the asymmetrical organs (heart, liver, stomach, etc.) there are those that are arranged symmetrically. You might say that my description could at a pinch be accepted if the whole organism were laid out asymmetrically, but not in connection with the symmetrical organs. This objection, however, can be cleared away, too, as follows.

We have learned that the physical and etheric bodies stream from left to right and from right to left respectively, that is, in the plane in which the human being is formed symmetrically. Spiritual science teaches us that the physical body is an ancient entity, stemming from the old Saturn, while the germs of the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego were prepared on the old Sun, the old Moon, and the Earth respectively. In its first appearance on Saturn the physical body was asymmetrical, conditioned by a current corresponding to the one active today from left to right, and the first germ of the etheric body was also asymmetrical, with a current from right to left. Thence development proceeds; the physical body is further formed on the old Sun, the old Moon, and so on. Had this not occurred, the physical body would have remained lopsided, asymmetrical. As it actually happened, however, the further development of the physical body and of the other members continued on the old Moon and on the Earth, during which something occurred that altered the whole previous development and brought about a turnabout, so to speak, a reversal of the direction. If the physical body were to be formed, not into a lopsided but into a symmetrical structure, the Saturn current running from left to right had to be opposed by one running from right to left. How was this brought about? By the separation of the old Sun from the old Moon. The Sun forces, which hitherto had worked on the physical body from within, acted henceforth from without, that is, from the opposite direction. The physical body, as it was constituted up to the time of the old Moon, was then influenced by the Sun from without.

The etheric body experienced a similar transformation. You might ask why it is that this other side of the physical body, the result of Sun forces acting from without, is not much smaller, in a sense stunted, in comparison with the first, the older portion? It is because those beings that left the Moon and passed over with the Sun could develop stronger influences from their new sphere of action, owing precisely to this separation that meant a higher development for them. They had a more difficult task than the Saturn beings, for they had to counteract what was already developed in one direction. This condition obstructed the whole process of formation, so they had to become more powerful if they were to fulfill their task. This, in turn, necessitated their acting from the Sun during the Moon period, whereby their influence was intensified. In this way these younger but more powerful currents—from right to left—balanced the weaker ones—from left to right—and the physical body became a symmetrical structure.

We will now examine more closely some important details of the effects of those force currents, remembering that the sentient body sends its forces into the human organism from the front backward, but that the emanations of the sentient soul run forward from the back. Given the existence of the physical and etheric bodies and the general background, we ask in what manner these forces proceed to build the human organism?

By being dammed up, stopped by the physical body, the backward-flowing currents of the sentient body could now bore into the human organism and build divers organs into what was already there. At the same time the sentient soul works in the organism from the back toward the front. The currents of the sentient body are dammed by the physical organism and bore their way in. In this way they are obstructed by the physical body, so they really had to bore holes, as it were.

In front (cf. sketch) we have the currents of the sentient body boring their way in. They form the sense organs. In the rear the formative forces are active that build the brain over them; this gives us the diagram of the human head seen in profile. The openings represent the eyes, ears, organs of smell, etc., and the brain is superimposed behind and above them. If spiritual science tells the truth, it is clear that the human head could not possibly appear different from the way it actually does. If a human head were ever to come into being at all it would have to look as it does. It does look that way, and that is evidence proffered by the world of outer phenomena itself.

In that connection there is another point to mention. The work of the sentient body proceeds inward, that of the sentient soul outward, or at least, it has that tendency. As a matter of fact, it is obstructed before emerging; it remains in the physical body of the brain and emerges only at those points where previously the sentient body had, so to speak, bored the holes for the sense organs in the front of the physical body. What we find, then, is that a part of our inner life flows outward as sentient soul.

The intellectual soul would not be capable of this. It is completely dammed up within, and no currents come to meet it from the opposite side. That is why human thinking takes place wholly within. Objects don't think for us; they don't show us the thoughts from without, nor bring them to us. That is the great secret of the relation of human thought to the outer world. With our sense organs we can perceive outer objects, and if these organs are healthy they do not err. The mind, on the other hand, which cannot directly contact objects, is the first inner member of the human being that can err, because its activity is completely dammed up within the brain and does not emerge. From this it follows that our thoughts about the outer world cannot be correct without an inner tendency to permit right thoughts to arise within us. What the outer world can give us is correct sense perception but not right thoughts. Thought is subject to error, and the power of right thinking is something we must have within ourselves.

For the thinker this fact alone points to an earlier, prehistoric existence of man. It is incumbent upon him to form right thoughts concerning the wisdom of the outside world, but his thoughts cannot emerge or come in contact with what he perceives. Nevertheless, that wisdom must be within him as well as without; it must permeate him just as it does what surrounds him. The two currents, therefore, belong together, though they are now separated.

At some time, however, they must have been united. That was before the human ego had begun to dam up the currents within us, at a time when it still received the wisdom of the world directly. There was a time when the currents of the mental soul were not held up but flowed out, and that was the time when man directly envisioned the wisdom of the world. What is now relegated to the brain as thinking was once in contact with the outer world, like our sense perception, so that man could look at his thoughts. That was a form of clairvoyance, though not a conscious one irradiated by the ego. Man must have passed through earlier stages in which he possessed a dim clairvoyance, and again it is the human physical organization itself that shows us that in bygone times he was differently constituted.

Something important for practical life follows from the foregoing. In all cases involving the sense world, sense perception (apart from illusions) can be taken as truth, for there the human being is in direct contact with the outer world. But concerning all that is within him, his knowledge is limited to what he acquires by thinking. Now, the separation that exists between our intellectual soul and the objects in space, and that makes it possible for our thinking about those objects to err, does not apply to the ego. When the ego streams into us it is within us, and it is natural that we should have a voice in its activity. The meeting of the intellectual soul and the ego is what produces the purest thinking, the thinking that is directed inward. This form of thinking, having itself as the object, cannot be exposed to error in the same way as can the other kind, which is occupied with outer objects and roves about in an endeavor to form judgments by observing them. The only thing they can yield is sense perception. What we must do is meet them with concepts, as though holding up their mirrored reflection to them. Thinking is herein free from error only in so far as it is attracted to the tendency to truth. Out of a right tendency to truth we must let concepts of things, thoughts about things, rise up in us.

In the first instance we can form a judgment only of such things in the outer world as are encountered by the senses. The senses themselves cannot judge what is beyond their reach; no such judgment can be arrived at from the physical plane. If the intellectual soul nevertheless does just that, unless it be guided by the inner tendency to truth, it must inevitably fall into all sorts of errors.

To clarify these conditions by an illustration, let us turn to the various doctrines of the descent of man. Here we distinguish between two kinds of ancestors. You are familiar with one of them from theosophical research, which tells us of the different forms we passed through in former periods, such as the Lemurian. That is disclosed by spiritual science. We have seen how wonderfully comprehensible everything perceived by the senses becomes when we have made this teaching our very own, and it will reveal more and more.

In contrast, we will now consider material research, the materialistic doctrine of descent, the crux of which is the so-called biogenetic law. According to this, man in his germinal states passes through all forms recalling animal stages, thereby repeating, in a sense, the various forms of the whole animal kingdom. At the time when this doctrine was rampant the conclusion was drawn that man really passed through these forms that thus appear in the germ state. In itself that is not erroneous because in prehistoric times man actually did develop through such forms. Fortunately, as we can say in view of the materialistic doctrine of the descent, the foresight of the gods kept this fact secret until such time as the opinions regarding it could be corrected by spiritual science. The development of man before he became outwardly perceptible on the physical plane could not have been observed. It was shrouded by the gods and withdrawn from observation, otherwise people would have evolved even wilder theories regarding it than they do now. The facts are there, but they are frequently misinterpreted because the senses that speak the truth cannot perceive them. In reasoning, however, the power of the intellectual soul becomes active, and this cannot reach what is imperceptible to the senses. In reality, the facts referred to prove the exact opposite of what people try to infer from them. Here we have a striking example of the way the power of judgment can plunge into a sea of errors when its approach to external matters is purely by way of the mind.

What is shown by the fact that on a certain plane man resembled a fish? Precisely that he never was a fish; indeed, that he had no use for the fish nature, that he had to expel it before entering upon his human existence, because it in no way pertained to him. This he did in turn with all the animal forms, because they were not of his nature. He could not have become a human being if he had ever appeared on earth in one of those animal forms. He had to discard these in order to become what he did. The fact that in the germ the human being resembles a fish is the very proof that never in his whole line of descent was he like a fish or any other animal form. He had to expel all these forms because they were inadequate and he therefore must never resemble them. He had to slough off these forms, eject them. They are images he never resembled. All these forms of germinal life show shapes he never bore. Thus we can find out precisely through embryology how prehistoric man never looked. He cannot be descended from something he had expelled. To infer that he passed through these forms would be the same as to imagine that the father is descended from the son. The father is not descended from the son, nor the son from himself, but the son is descended from the father.

That is one of the cases in which the mind has proved wholly incapable of thinking the facts of reality through to the end. It has exactly reversed the order of development. Certainly these pictures of the remote past are extraordinarily important, because they show us how we never looked. But that is something that can be learned even more readily in another way, namely, through realms that lie open in the sense world, that are not hidden from us. There we have all those forms—fishes and so forth—and they can be properly studied with the ordinary means of human observation. As long as men restricted themselves to observing outer objects with the senses, and did not occupy their minds with matters concealed from sense perception, they avoided arriving at false conclusions; they were rightly guided by their natural sense of truth. They would look, for instance, at a monkey and doubtless experience the queer sensation that every normal human being would have, a certain sense of embarrassment. This judgment expressed through feeling means that the monkey is really a retarded being, having remained behind in the evolution of man. This feeling is nearer the truth than is the later judgment of the erring mind because it embodies the realization that the monkey is a being that dropped out of the human current, that had to be divided off from man if the latter was to achieve his goal. The moment our fallible mind approached this fact it inverted it; instead of realizing that the monkey was eliminated from the evolutionary human current it concluded that the monkey was the starting point of human descent.

Here the error comes to light. In judging external things accessible to the senses we should never forget that they are built up from within, through the agency of spiritual currents. Suppose we are observing those parts of the human being that are accessible to perception proper, or we observe part of another person that the eye can see—his face, for example. In studying this face we must not imagine it as having been built up from without. On the contrary, we must realize the need to distinguish between two currents flowing into each other, the current of the sentient body running backward from the front, and that of the sentient soul running forward from the rear. In so far as we perceive the human countenance by means of the senses, the sense image is true. That is given us by sense perception and we will not go astray there. But now the human mind joins in, at first subconsciously, and is at once misled. It regards the human countenance as something merely fashioned from without, whereas in reality, this fashioning occurred from within, through the agency of the sentient soul. What you see is not really outer body; it is the outer image of the sentient soul.

Disabuse your mind of the notion that the human face might be outer body, and you will see that in truth, it is the image of the soul. A fundamentally false interpretation results from reasoning in a way that ignores the true nature of the countenance as being the outer image of the sentient soul acting outward. Every explanation of the human countenance based solely on physical forces is wrong. It must be explained through the soul itself, the visible through the invisible. The deeper we penetrate into theosophy the more we will see in it a great school for learning to think. The chaotic thinking that today dominates all circles, particularly science, finds no shelter in theosophy, which is therefore able to interpret life correctly.

This ability to interpret phenomena correctly will further stand us in good stead when, in the course of our investigations, we come to phenomena that lead us out of the region of individual anthroposophy into the realm of the anthroposophy that concerns the whole of mankind.

Returning once more to the sense of sound and the sense of visualization, let us ask ourselves which of these came into being first in the course of human development? Did man learn first to understand words or to perceive and understand the conceptions that came to him? This question can be answered by observing the child, who first learns to talk and only later to perceive thoughts. Speech is the premise of thought perception because the sense of sound is the premise of the sense of visualization. The child learns to talk because he can hear, can listen to something that the sense of sound perceives. Speech itself is at first mere imitation, and the child imitates long before he has any idea of visualization whatever. First the sense of sound develops, and then, by means of this, the sense of visualization. The sense of sound is the instrumentality for perceiving not only tones but also what we call sounds.

The next question is how it came about that at one time in the course of his development man achieved the ability to perceive sounds and, as a result, to acquire speech? How was he endowed with speech? If he was to learn to speak, not just to hear, it was necessary not only that an outer perception should penetrate, but that a certain current within him should flow in the same direction as that taken by the currents of the sentient soul when they press forward from the rear. It had to be something acting in the same direction. That was the way in which speech had to originate, and this faculty had to appear before the sense of visualization, before man was able to sense the conception contained in the words themselves. Men had first to learn to utter sounds and to live in the consciousness of them before they could combine conceptions with them. What at first permeated the sounds they uttered was sentience.

This development had to take place at a time when the transposition of the circulatory system had already occurred, for animals cannot speak. The ego had to be acting downward from above with the blood system in a vertical position. As yet, however, man had no sense of visualization, consequently no visualizations. It follows that he could not have acquired speech through the agency of his own ego, but rather, he received it from another ego that we can compare with the group ego of animals. In this sense speech is a gift of the gods. It was infused into the ego before the latter itself was capable of developing it. The human ego did not yet possess the organs needed to give the impulse for bringing about speech, but the group ego worked from above into the physical, etheric and astral bodies, and as it encountered an opposing current, a sort of whorl came into being at the point of contact. A straight line drawn through the center of the larynx would indicate the direction of the current employed by the speech-giving spirits, and the larynx itself represents the physical substance, the dam, that resulted from the encounter of the two currents. That accounts for the peculiar shape of the human larynx.

It was under the influence, then, of a group soul that man had to develop speech. In what manner do group souls operate on earth? In animals the current of the group soul passes through the spinal cord horizontally, and these force currents are in continual motion. The force currents running downward from above move constantly around the earth, as they did around the old Moon. They don't remain in one spot but move around the earth retaining their vertical direction of influence. If men were to learn to speak under the influence of a group soul, they could not remain in one place, they had to migrate. They had to move toward the group soul. Never could they have learned to speak if they had remained in one spot.

What direction, then, would men have to take if they were to learn to speak? We know that the etheric currents flow from right to left and the physical ones from left to right, and this is the case not only in man but on the earth as well. Now, where are the group souls that endow man with speech? Let us look at the earth in its peculiar development. Man learned to speak at a time when his outer structure was already complete. Strong currents were therefore needed because the larynx had first to be transformed from a soft substance that in no way resembled a larynx. This called for special conditions on earth. Suppose we stand facing east. There flow in us from left to right the currents connected with the formation of the physical body. This current exists outside us as well; it was present during the formation of the earth. Running from north to south are those strong currents that produce solid physical matter. From the other direction, from the south, flow the etheric currents that lack the tendency to solidify the earth. This explains the lopsidedness, the lack of symmetry on the earth. In the northern hemisphere we find the great continents, in the southern, the vast oceans; the tendency of the earth was asymmetrical.

From the south the current acts that is of the same nature as the one that runs from right to left in man, but while the current from back to front streams outward, the one from front to back originates in the sentient body and enters the sentient soul. With all this in mind we understand why the attainment of speech called for a current passing outward from within; this current had to encounter a group soul current in order that the two could be dammed up in man's own organism. Man had to move toward a current that could act upon his astral element. He could therefore go neither toward the north nor toward the south, but had to take a direction at right angles to these. It was latitudinally that man had to proceed when he was acquiring speech, that is, from east to west. At that time he inhabited ancient Lemuria, where today we have the ocean lying between Asia and Africa. Thence, in order to learn to speak, he migrated westward into old Atlantis, to meet the group soul that was to engender speech in him. There he had to develop the organism suitable for speech, and thus it was in old Atlantis that he learned to speak.

The next step was to develop the sense of visualization by means of the speech man had acquired, but in order to do this he could not continue in the same direction. He had to proceed in a way that would cause the same current to act from the opposite direction. Recall here what was said in the last lecture concerning the origin of sound and of visualization. Sound comes into being when we subconsciously convert a melody into a harmony, ignore the fundamentals themselves, and mentally hear only the harmony produced by the harmonics (overtones); visualization arises when we push back and disregard this harmony of the harmonics as well. So, if we are to develop the sense of visualization, we must destroy on the one hand what we had built up on the other. We must face about and proceed in the opposite direction. One element of speech has to be suppressed, the harmonics must be pushed back, if we are to develop visualization. The old Atlanteans had to face about and migrate eastward; by doing this they were able effectively to develop the sense of visualization. This could not have been accomplished if they had continued westward. It was the tragic fate of the American aborigines to migrate in the wrong direction. They could not hold their ground, but had to yield to those who had migrated properly and returned to them only later.

In this way a great deal becomes clear. When we know the secret of those currents that fashion man and the earth we can understand the organization of the earth, the distribution of oceans and continents, the migrations of men. Anthroposophy leads us into that life through which the outer world becomes transparent and comprehensible.

Evolution proceeds. Humanity was not destined to stop at visualizations but to achieve concepts as well, and in order to accomplish this it had to ascend from mere visualizations to the soul life proper. After the sense of visualization, the sense of concepts had to be developed, and again a new direction had to be taken. In order to gain the life of visualizations, humanity—or as much of it as comes into consideration—moved eastward, but pure concepts could be acquired only by returning in a westward direction. We could similarly present the migrations of peoples in the four post-Atlantean periods from an anthroposophical viewpoint, and you would see a wondrous interplay of spiritual forces at work upon the whole shaping of man, and of what comes to expression in forming the earth.

But this is not the end. We have dealt with the currents running downward from above, forward from the rear, etc., but in a sense we now appear to have reached a dead end. Spiritual science, however, discloses higher forces holding sway above the capacity for visualization and forming concepts, that is, the imaginative, the inspirative, and the intuitive senses. We have learned that as a rule these stream inward, but in clairvoyants, outward. All these currents must operate too, and for that purpose must develop the necessary organs. So we ask how they do this? How do they live and operate in the physical human being?

In order to answer this question we will first consider a force possessed only by the human being, not by animals: the inner soul force of memory. Animal memory is a pure figment of the scientists' imagination. Animals have no memory; they merely manifest symptoms to be explained by the same principle as those of human memory. In order to produce human memory, the main position of animals would have to be raised to the vertical, so that the ego could stream in. Since their principal position is horizontal, they can have no ego. But in certain animals the forward part of the body is in the same position as that of the human being, hence it can act intelligently, although this intelligence is not permeated by an ego.

This is the beginning of a vast region of misconceptions. When an animal manifests a capacity similar to that of memory and acts intelligently, nothing more is proved by these facts than that a being can be guided by an intelligence without being intelligent itself. Phenomena resembling memory can appear in the animal world, but not memory itself.

In memory we see something special, something quite different from what we find in mere intelligent thinking, for example, or in visualization. The essence of memory lies in the retention of a visualization we have had; it is still present after the act of perception has passed. The repetition of an action previously performed is not memory. A clock would in that case be endowed with memory, for it does today exactly what it did yesterday. If memory is to come about, the ego must seize a conception and retain it.

If the ego is to seize a conception in this way, an organ must be formed for the purpose, and this is accomplished as follows. Out of its own essence the ego must engender special currents and must pour and bore these into the various horizontal currents already active minus the ego. The ego must overcome currents. When a current appears running inward from without, the ego must be able to produce within itself a counter-current.

That the ego was originally not capable of this we learned when studying the origin of speech; then the group ego had to co-operate. But when the soul life proper commences, beyond visualization, when a higher faculty such as memory is to be developed, the ego must activate new currents independently, currents that bore into others already there. Of this process the ego is clearly aware. In developing the senses up to and including visualization, this activity of the ego is not required, but when a higher activity is to be brought about, the ego must oppose the currents already functioning. This becomes manifest through the addition of a fourth phenomenon to the three currents at right angles to each other in space. This boring in of the ego becomes perceptible in the consciousness of time, and that is why memory is linked with temporal conceptions. We do not follow time in any spatial direction, but into the past. The direction of the past is bored into the directions of space. That is what occurs in all that the ego develops out of itself. Through spiritual science we can even indicate the current that comes into play when the ego evolves memory. It runs from left to right, and when habits are developed by the ego, the currents run from left to right as well. The ego bores its way into the opposing currents, those that were formed without the ego. Here the law is exemplified that tells us that the higher activities of the soul always have currents running in the opposite direction from that of the next lower activity.

To gain inner contact with the ego, the intellectual soul had to develop up to the ego plane. Now we ascend to the consciousness soul. When this functions consciously its active current runs in the opposite direction from that of the intellectual soul, which is still able to function subconsciously. Under certain earthly conditions the following law in human evolution can be proved. Learning to read is an intelligent activity, but one that does not necessarily proceed from the consciousness soul. The idea of learning to read and write occurred to men before the consciousness soul was developed. Reading by means of the intellectual soul had its inception in the Greco-Latin epoch. Then followed the ascendancy of the consciousness soul, and the direction of the current had to be reversed. Arithmetic could only develop with the consciousness soul. The European peoples read and write from left to right, but they figure from right to left, as in adding. It will be seen from this how the currents of the intellectual soul and of the consciousness soul overlap, and we can actually understand the nature of the European peoples by pondering the matter.

But there have been other peoples with other missions. They were advance guards, so to speak, and their task was to develop, or at least prepare, the feature of the intellectual soul that the European peoples, who had postponed their cultural development, did not evolve until after the consciousness soul had become active. Those were the Semitic peoples, who write from right to left. They were the peoples who were to prepare in advance the later period of the consciousness soul.

In such considerations we find the means for comprehending all cultural phenomena on earth. We shall learn to know everything of that sort, down to the letter formations of the various languages. The reason why peoples write from top to bottom, from right to left or from left to right follows from an understanding of the underlying spiritual facts. It is the mission of spiritual science to see that light dawns in the minds of men, and that the obscure becomes clear.

I said yesterday that we would study the human being regarding his connection with his super-sensible nature in order to direct our attention today from this viewpoint to pathological and therapeutic phenomena. Yesterday we described the physical body in such a way that we concluded that a truly physical activity in the human being is present only in the head. If we study the physical body properly, then we will naturally have to ascend to where we can also study the etheric body properly and concretely. For if one looks deeply into the human being, one finds that an isolated activity of the physical body is present only in the head. In the rest of the members of the human organism, there rs a more undifferentiated interaction of the physical body with the higher, with the super-sensible members of man's being.

The super-sensible members are able to function as such in the head through thinking, feeling, and willing, because they first leave their imprints—that is, the etheric, astral, and ego imprints. These are present as imprints, as pictures, you could say, of the super-sensible members. The physical body alone has as yet no imprint in the head; it only creates one for itself during a lifetime. Hence its effect in the head is purely physical. In the other members within human nature there is no purely physical activity.

Now some of you did not understand when I said yesterday, “The ego creates an imprint.” This statement can be understood properly only if not interpreted too physically, in the ordinary sense. Certainly the imprint created by the ego when it alone remains free—as in the metabolic-limb man—cannot be investigated by comparing it to a plaster cast. The imprint created by the ego is a very mobile one. You can study it better when you walk than when you stand still. The imprint created by the ego is an imprint in a system of forces manifested in walking and in holding oneself erect. The physical imprint of the ego is in all this. You therefore should not look for the ego's imprint in something that can be compared with a fixed image; rather we have to do here with an imprint in a system of forces.

This is ultimately true also in the human head, but there the system of forces is a different one. I pointed out yesterday that the ego imprints itself in the warmth conditions of the head. It does this in accordance with the way the head is differentiated and permeated by warmth in its various organs. This imprint of the ego is also an imprint in a system of forces, only, in this case, in a system of warmth forces. Thus the ego creates its imprints in the most varied ways. Where it remains free from the cooperation of other activities in the human organism, it creates a pure imprint, you could even say a mechanical imprint of forces. Thus in relation to the metabolic-limb man, the ego creates an imprint in a system of balancing and dynamic forces. One must bear this in mind, for the human being is really a different being depending on whether he is standing, walking, or even swimming.

Unfortunately, not nearly enough attention is paid to this. There is a great deal that, from the viewpoint of spiritual science, receives too little attention. It is usually modern science's evasions regarding these matters that show us very plainly where it encounters facts it cannot interpret. Just to offer an example, I will present an issue that will be addressed in the course of our lectures. I have looked into a bit of the relevant literature regarding this point, and almost everywhere it is stated that the amount of nitrogen inhaled does not differ appreciably from the amount exhaled. You can find this assertion almost everywhere, but numerical data demonstrate that actually more nitrogen is exhaled than inhaled. Materialism can make nothing of this difference and therefore ignores it. It wipes it out with a single gesture. Such things often occur in modern scientific efforts. As I said, today I will simply pose this issue, and return to it later.

Now I wish to deal with man's etheric body. It is, of course, quite natural that this etheric body is not studied in its differentiations by a merely physical science. However, if you have the conviction that this etheric body exists, you will have to ask, “What would it be like if one studied the physical body in such a way that the stomach, heart, liver, etc., were all regarded as merging into one another?” Yet this is how the etheric body is regarded when it is presented as a generality, as a slightly differentiated misty cloud. It must really be studied, and we will see today that a conception to which we were introduced in the last course from a different viewpoint is essential for this study. Today, however, we will speak of this from a more spiritual scientific viewpoint.

If we study the ether in general (of which the human etheric body is a part, being a specially differentiated portion of it), we find that it is not undifferentiated but that it arises out of four kinds of ether: warmth ether, light ether, chemical ether, and life ether. Light ether is a term that is formed, of course, from the standpoint of one who sees. For those who see, the aspect of this ether that is connected with light is its pre-eminent effect, but there are other effects that we leave out of account because the majority of human beings can see. If the majority of humanity were blind, this ether would naturally be given a different name, because other aspects of it would manifest more strongly to the blind.

The chemical ether works chiefly in the so-called chemical part of the spectrum, and when we speak of the chemical ether, we must not think of the forces working in chemical syntheses but of forces that are their polar opposite inwardly. The etheric forces are always diametrically opposed to the forces working in physical substances. Thus when a chemical synthesis takes place, the etheric forces work analytically. Analytic forces are present everywhere within the synthetic forces. And when we conduct a chemical analysis, a spiritual scientist must consider the matter in this way. Let us say we are breaking down a substance chemically (I will sketch this for you). The etheric body remains behind, denser than before, for the etheric forces are working synthetically, just as when the soul-spiritual aspect remains behind when a person dies. One who conducts a chemical analysis with his spiritual eye perceives a spectre of the chemical substance that remains behind in a thickened, more condensed form after the substances have separated. I mention this only to point out to you that when you consider the forces of chemical ether, you do not merely have to do with chemical forces, the synthetic and analytic forces, but always with their polar opposition.

Finally there is the life ether, a special kind of ether that is really the life-giving element in all organic beings.

Life ether
Chemical ether

Light ether
Warmth ether

This ether is an entity present everywhere in the universe and not, of course, directly accessible as such to physical perception. In this respect scientists have become more honest today than formerly, because they see that one cannot build up theories about ether from merely physical observations. They have since come to say, on the basis of relativity, that there is no ether, that the world must be explained without ether. This means that they became honest, and agreed with Einstein that the ether cannot be reached by physical observations, but they also assumed that this is impossible through other methods of study. Because ether has been lost to perception, they have simply tossed it out.

We must understand that when something super-sensible has made an imprint in the physical, sense-perceptible world, what appears there as imprint becomes permeable to the super-sensible element concerned. Thus you see the ether, the universal ether, creates its imprint in the watery element of the human head. This watery content of the brain must not be regarded as undifferentiated water, because inwardly it is just as thoroughly organized as solid bodies are. To regard the human in the same way as we draw him is really a most peculiar way of studying the human being. If we draw him with the liver and stomach, this drawing reveals only a silhouette of what is woven into the fluid and gaseous elements as solid element; we are actually drawing only what is in there as little granules and that is not quite ten percent of the whole human body. In reality, of course, the human being is just as much a water-, air- and warmth-organization, if we are studying him physically. The water—and by this I mean the fluid element—is just as organized in the human being as the solid. But we never draw this aspect when we make anatomical or physiological sketches. This watery content of the human being is, as substance, in a constant state of dissolution and renewal. It can be grasped in its form, so to speak, only in a moment, but it does nevertheless have a form.

In this watery part of the human head we find the imprint of the etheric. Thus, if I draw it schematically, I have to represent the physical activity that is specially developed at the back of the head like this (see drawing, light hatching). Of course, this element streams through the whole organism. The remaining portion would represent what is watery (yellow). This is thoroughly oranized so that it is an imprint of the etheric nature.

The imprint is always permeable in this way. The eye is permeable to light because, studied in its essential nature, it is a creation of the light in Goethe's sense. That the eye was born from the light is not only a picture but a deep wisdom. Indeed, we can study embryologically how the eyes are organized within from outside, and it is because they are organized by the light that they are permeable to it. It is due to its watery organization that the human head is, in its entirety, permeable to the etheric, because it is an imprint from out of the ether.

Thus we can say that here the etheric can pass through the head (see drawing, red arrow) without being stopped or disturbed in its passage in any way and can penetrate into the rest of the human
organism.

This can certainly be observed by the methods of spiritual science, but we must modify it a little. That is to say, this part of the human head is permeable only to warmth and light ether. Thus only the warmth ether and the light ether can work on the human head from outside. The warmth ether acts on the human head not through direct radiation of heat but because we are in a region with a particular climate. We cannot determine the effect of the warmth ether on the human head by asking whether a person sweats or not. Its effect depends on whether an individual lives in the equatorial zone, the temperate zone, or the frigid zone. The connection between the warmth ether and the human head thus goes much deeper than the outer connections due merely to exposure to outside warmth radiations.

The influence of the light ether on the human organism must be regarded in a similar way, in so far as we confine ourselves to physiology (considered from the psychological viewpoint it would be different, but we won't go into that now). The influence of the light ether, however, is much more penetrating than that of mere light, so that its effect penetrates through the etheric imprint in the human head and organizes the entire human being.

As I have said, then, the organization of the human head is permeable only to warmth and light ether. This is only approximately true, however. The human head is somewhat permeable to chemical ether and life ether also, but we can ignore that here because the result is nevertheless that both ethers are repelled by the human head organization. They are repelled; but as a result, they permeate the human organism. Simply because the human being lives on the earth as a human being, he is is inwardly filled with life and chemical ether.

The effect of the warmth and light ethers radiates in from all sides (see drawing, downward arrows). The effect of the chemical and life ethers radiates up through the metabolic-limb system toward the instreaming warmth and light ethers (upward arrows). Just as man's head is scrupulously organized so that as far as possible only traces of the chemical and life ethers are allowed to enter, so the metabolic-limb organism sucks in the life ether and chemical ether from the earth element.

These two kinds of ethers meet in the human being, and he is organized in such a way that his organization is a regulated process of keeping them apart: on the one hand life ether and chemical ether, streaming from below upward, and on the other hand warmth ether and light ether, streaming from above downward.

It is an aspect of the human organism that light and warmth ether may not enter organically into the lower organization except by streaming in from above. In the same way the other element may stream in only from below. Thus light and warmth ether must stream in from outside, life and chemical ether from below. These two streams are brought into cooperation in the human being by means of his organization, and their cooperation must be absolutely maintained if he is to remain in a normal condition.

We can reach an understanding of this cooperation if we try to observe clearly undernourished individuals. If we study such individuals carefully, we receive an impression, an imaginative impression. We can easily rise to this once our attention has been drawn, ever so slightly, to the fact that there is such a thing as imaginative knowledge. Nothing calls forth imaginations so easily as the contemplation of pathological conditions in human beings.

On looking at an undernourished individual, we see that his metabolic organization—and therefore what takes place in metabolism—binds the ether. It does not release the ether. Let us say you are observing the stomach or liver of an undernourished person. You will find that they retain the life and chemical ethers; they bind them rather than releasing them. Thus there is a deficient upward current of life and chemical ether in the undernourished individual. Hence the light and warmth ethers press down from above, and, in consequence, the organism takes on a character similar to that previously produced by the light and warmth ether in the head. These transform the entire organism, causing it to resemble the head organization too strongly. The human being becomes almost entirely head through being undernourished. He metamorphoses into a head man, and this is what is especially significant in the study of undernourishment.

Let us now study a person suffering from the opposite condition. We only encounter these conditions under special circumstances, and one must be able to observe them in the right way. You will naturally ask, “What is the opposite of undernourishment?” For the spiritual investigator, the opposite of undernourishment is in one case what is called softening of the brain. Just as undernourishment is due to the human being becoming permeated by what should properly be only in the head, by what should remain only in the upper organism, so, in softening of the brain, the head is permeated by forces that should only be in the abdomen, by something that does not belong in the brain but only in the abdomen, exercising its organizing activity only there. What the organism receives in the process of digestion is worked through too quickly, so that it is not sufficiently restrained before it passes through the gate by which it enters the head. Moreover, because too much is poured into the head, too much is eaten. We can also study these processes in their later stages. This is what is significant, to be able to make a mental picture of the consequences in those realms about which we are now speaking.

What happens when these processes, which are quite normal in origin—processes like eating, digesting, working through the food in the abdomen, passing it on to the head, etc.—continue beyond the limit normally set by man's organization. In the undernourished person, because of the irregularity arising below, and in the over-nourished person, because of the irregularity above, there results an abnormal cooperation between the two kinds of ether. The ethers do not cooperate as they are supposed to in the human organism. And we get the following results when the ether acting from outside cooperates in the wrong way with the ether streaming upward from within. Every ether that works from outside and does not stop at the right place but permeates the human more strongly than it should is poison for the organism; it has a poisonous effect. Thus we can say that if the ether is not held up at the right place, it is poisonous for the human organization. It must encounter the ether streaming up from within in the right way.

Again, if we look at the other kind of ether that works from within, we find that its excessive action has an overall softening effect on the human being. While in the opposite case the poisonous effect makes the human being etherically rigid, this other effect makes him dissolve. Too much life is poured out over him, and too much of the chemical pole. He cannot subsist, and he grows soft. These are two polar effects: the poisonous effect and the softening effect.

If you regard the human being in this way, you are led to ask, “What is a human being really?” In so far as he is physical, he is an organic being who keeps apart, in the proper way, the two kinds of ether and lets them cooperate in the right way. The entire human organization is constituted so as to allow the two kinds of ether to cooperate in the right way.

We are now able to understand better my statement that the human being is thoroughly organized. Indeed, it is obvious that he is inwardly differentiated—which is to say, organized—with respect to water, to air, and to warmth. He is also differentiated with regard to the ethers, but this differentiation is a fluctuating one. It is a continual occurrence, a continual interplay between light and warmth ethers on the one hand, pressing centripetally from above downward, and life and chemical ethers on the other hand, pressing centrifugally from below upward. By this means the etheric configuration of the human being is formed. It is actually a transformation of the vortex formed by the mutual impact of these two kinds of ether. The shape that you encounter must be understood then, as a cooperation between these two kinds of ether.

In order to form mental pictures of the human being in health and illness, it is quite important to begin from the less noticeable processes such as under- and over-nourishment. I am referring to organic over-nourishment, because a person does not become over-nourished merely because he stuffs himself daily. An individual who has an unusually good digestion requires much less in order to be over-nourished than if he had ruined his digestive process and were unable to work through things. Thus we must try to proceed from what is presented to us when we can observe these incipient processes that are still entirely in the range of normal.

Indeed, it must also be said that if we were not able to become ill, we could not be human beings. The state of illness is only a continuation beyond the appropriate degree of processes that we need, that we must certainly have in us. In the state of health, the processes leading to illness and the healing processes are properly balanced. We are endangered not only when the processes tending to illness assert themselves, but also when the healing processes overstep the mark. Hence, in initiating a healing process, we must be careful not to proceed too intensely or we may overshoot the mark. We may drive out the illness, but it may, on reaching its null-point, swing over in the other direction.

This strikes us especially strongly when we encounter the therapeutic perceptions in more ancient human civilizations that were still instinctive. I believe that anyone who occupies himself with this theme will conclude that in ancient civilizations there was a wonderful therapeutic perception derived from human instincts. This perception was not yet able to be penetrated with consciousness, but it existed nevertheless. One can still encounter it in an impressive, but decadent stage in primitive peoples today.

It is not so long ago that a sensation concerning such issues could be made by the somewhat dilettantish rummaging about of individuals who, in the domains of their specialty, were actually exceptionally learned. A battle broke out between the Jena scholars and the Berlin scholars over Pithecanthropos erectos. The well-known Virchow took exception to Haeckel, claiming that Pithecanthropos, who was discovered by Dubois, showed clear signs of healing processes, processes of bone healing, that to modern physicians could suggest that the process had been introduced artificially. This was one of Virchow's main contentions, and he concluded from this that Pithecanthropos erectos was healed by a physician, and that therefore there must already have been physicians at that time. Since Virchow was part of the university that had introduced external methods of healing, he now concluded that the Pithecanthropos could not be the connecting link to a time when the human being was not there yet; he must actually have been a human being. (It could also be that a real doctor could have cured an ape, but that possibility was not taken into consideration.) The other side was just rummaging around in the issue with similar dilettantism, expressing only a general feeling, and they said that with animals a natural form of healing also appears without the intervention of man, one that appears to be the same as the healing found in the Pithecanthropos. I only wish to indicate by this what unclear concepts prevail today. A great deal was written about this issue in the early 1890's, so that we can see from such a scholarly battle how such things can appear today.

We can see that already in the instinctive conceptions of a primitive humanity we find what could be called an instinctive therapy. And this instinctive therapy called forth a most significant principle: that the art of healing should not be communicated to irresponsible people, because in doing so one would at the same time necessarily communicate the art of making someone ill. This was an underlying principle of primeval medicine, which maintained strong moral restraints, and it is one of the principles that indicates why things are kept shrouded in a kind of mystery in learned circles.

The point is that the processes producing illness are only further stages of those that must be present in the healthy human being. If we could not become ill, we could neither think nor feel. Everything that lives in the soul in feeling and thinking is organically a system of forces that produces illness when it exceeds its proper measure. The other important thing to bear in mind is that an actual physical process occurs only in one part of the human head. This physical process that takes place in the human head is a necessary concomitant of human ego-experience. If this process is disturbed, that is, if a vital process overpowers this purely physical process in the human being, the ego is weakened in consciousness in a certain way. And all circumstances when a person gets outside of himself, e.g., becomes feeble-minded, or something similar, is partly due to, and must be recognized from, what takes place in the human being as purely physical process in the head. Of course, other organic causes may be present in addition.

This purely physical process, which originates in the human head and radiates from there through the whole organism, overcomes the organism at the moment of death. This moment is always present, at least in the human head, proceeding from the head as center. It is inhibited, however, by the vitalizing process from the rest of the organism. In fact, the human being bears these death-bringing forces continually within himself and he could not be an ego without them. The human being as a physical being on earth could only hope to be immortal if he were to renounce his ego-consciousness. I may mention that certain very delicate powers of observation are required to verify this statement outwardly. Nevertheless, it will be very fruitful if dissertations can be written about the rejuvenating treatments that rely for their influence on working against the soul-spiritual constitution of the human being. Of course nothing should be said against such rejuvenating treatments; they may be regarded satisfactorily as the human being's longing to extend his later life by a few years, though the cost may be that in exchange he becomes a bit feebleminded.

However, these processes that really exist are simply overlooked—like the excess of exhaled nitrogen compared with what is inhaled, for example. These things must be fully taken into account in order to study the processes of illness and healing adequately. The more one enters into these finer elements of the human organization, the more one comes to know the processes that manifest as processes of illness but that are nothing other than a cruder form of these more delicate processes. As I said, this is merely a transformation of these more delicate processes into cruder ones. It must be added, however, that the ego opposes for as long as possible what works in the human being as physical process, what permeates him as physical process. The ego is bound to this work of opposition, to this reacting effect. The ego works against this as long as this physical process does not become too strong. This physical process is the process of dying always going on in the human organism and that finally manifests as death. When this physical process hypertrophies so that it can no longer be controlled by the ego, the ego must separate from the physical body. Then, of course, something else may occur, which is that an excessive physical activity emerges somewhere in the body, dragging the other aspect with it into an earlier stage of life. Thus we can say that the human ego is intimately related to death.

Ego = Death

You can study the ego best by studying death—not, however, in that general and nebulous way in which people conceive of death, as happens with so many things. People conceive of death today as one might picture the destruction of a machine. They conceive of death simply as something coming to an end; they do not picture the real process. Therefore they conceive of the death of a human being as the destruction of a machine. We must arrive at concrete facts. Death is not the cessation of life, but for the human being it is as I have explained it here. For animals, death is something totally different. People who regard death in animals the same as in humans are like the people who, finding that a razor blade and a knife are both knives, begin to cut their meat with a razor blade, because after all a knife is a knife. With these people, death is death. But death is a totally different matter in human beings, as I have shown. With animals, not having to take into account an ego but only an astral body, death is something totally different, arising from an effect in the astral body that is constituted totally differently.

Illness is when the death-bringing forces are weakened, are, in a sense, suppressed in the normal organism. Just as death is connected with the ego, so illness is incorporated into the astral body of the human being.

Astral body = Illness

What has to do with the processes of illness is located in the astral body. What the astral body commits is impressed into the etheric body, and hence illness appears in its imprint in the etheric body, though it is not the etheric body that has to do directly with illness. I have just described to you the imprint of the irregular inter penetration and interworking of the two kinds of ethers. Nevertheless, such irregular action is itself merely an effect of the astral body stamping itself into the etheric body. When the etheric body is perceived more closely, one is led to the astral body. Let us carry this further.

Next we have that which works against disease as its polar opposite—namely, health.

Etheric body = Health

We will not stop to define health now, but you can even see by analogy that health is related to the etheric body as illness is to the astral body and death to the ego. This becomes ever clearer and clearer on spiritual investigation. To heal, to restore health, means to be able to create in the etheric body counterreactions to the processes that produce illness and that proceed from the astral body. One must work from the etheric body in order to paralyze the forces of the astral body, which are the processes producing illness.

Then there is a fourth factor. This is, in a certain way, the polar opposite of death. I must point out first that we can perceive death entering the human being concretely when his whole inner organization has become so physical that no nutritive process, no really effective nutritive process, can be introduced anymore. This is death from old age. Death from old age is actually the inability of the organism to absorb substance. Usually this phenomenon cannot be fully observed because ordinarily the human being dies of other causes before it sets in, rather than of this bodily demise in its pure form. But it is really a failure of nutrition. Thus the polar opposite of death is nutrition, and we can relate the nutrition in the human being to the physical body.

Physical body = Nutrition

These things work back again: the process of nutrition taking place in the physical body works back again on the etheric body and as a result also has something to do with the healing processes. This action on the etheric body then works back as a reaction on what proceeds from the astral body.

What I have just described can be observed in life directly, but we can verify it from the other side. If we take what is known to us already from spiritual science, we have to draw a line here:

Ego = Death
Astral body = Illness

Etheric body = Health
Physical body = Nutrition

for the separation in sleep of the ego and astral body from the physical and etheric bodies is only complete for the head and breathing organizations. The ego and astral body remain in the metabolic and circulatory man. It is not quite accurate to say that the ego and astral body depart. It is expressed correctly only if one says that in sleep the ego and astral body leave the physical and etheric bodies of the head organization, but penetrate them even more in the metabolic and circulatory organizations. I have often referred to this before. It is in fact a transposition. This phenomenon is parallel to the alternation of day and night on the earth. For the entire earth does not pass through day and then night at the same time. Rather, day and night transpose themselves according to the conditions. It is just the same with human sleeping and waking. In the waking state the physical and etheric bodies of the head and respiratory organism are intimately bound to the ego and astral body, and in sleep the physical and etheric bodies of the metabolic and circulatory organizations are much more intimately bound to ego and astral body than in waking. This is a transposition, an actual rhythmic process that takes place in sleeping and waking.

It can be said that in sleep, at least in man's upper organization, the astral body and the ego depart. Observation may reveal, however, that the astral body and ego are grasping the head and breathing organisms too firmly. They seize hold too strongly, the stral body doing so because of its illness-producing forces. Then one may have to work on the person so that this astral body is driven out of the head and breathing organizations again, separating them in a certain way so that the normal relationship returns. We can observe this happening when we administer very small quantities of phosphorus and sulfur. Small doses of phosphorus and sulfur have the effect of throwing out the astral body, which has stablished itself too strongly in the physical and etheric bodies. Sulfur works more on the astral body, phosphorus more on the ego. The ego, however, because it organizes the astral body throughout, actually acts in concert with it. Here you can see directly what happens to the human being when a pathological condition appears that is characterized outwardly by an additional symptom—too strong a tendency to sleep. Thus if one has to deal with an illness-complex including, among other symptoms, a tendency to fall into states of dulled consciousness, one must work with phosphorus and sulfur in the way I have described.

The other condition may also arise, in which the seat of the trouble is in the metabolic and circulatory organisms. This consists of the astral body and ego acting too little on the physical body. Then one has to say to these members, “Please, gentlemen, get moving a bit more. You need to become more active in this person.” In such a case you will have to use preparations of arsenic that are not too strongly diluted. They help the astral body enter into the physical organism.

I am now pointing you to a way in which we are forced to acquire a concrete perception of the human being. If the astral body is too active inwardly, having too strong an effect on the physical body, we must use sulfur and phosphorus; if its effect is too weak, having become too lazy and thus allowing the etheric body to prevail since there are insufficient forces of resistance against what works from below, then we must resort to arsenic as a remedy. The effect of arsenic and that of phosphorus and sulfur are polar opposites. One may now be in a position to realize that it is not sufficient merely to regulate one pole or the other, because an irregularity in one part of the human being immediately induces a counterreaction, and this continues as an irregularity of an opposite kind in another part. An irregularity in the upper part of the human being will manifest very soon in his lower part. This harmony of two irregularities is one of the most fascinating studies of clinical observation. It is an irregular interplay in which the two activities do not work together: when the lower force is too strong the upper is too weak, and when the upper is too weak it calls forth too strong an activity below. These things are not only polar opposites in regard to position and direction but also, of course, in regard to intensity. This interplay is most complicated in the human being. When this is understood, we come to realize the necessity to restore the balance between the two by the use of the forces at man's disposal. One can assist these forces by the effect of antimony. I believe antimony is almost entirely neglected today by ordinary medicine, but it acts in a way that was known in earlier times. This is no longer quite intelligible to people today. The very strong effects of antimony are essentially transferred directly into the inner aspect of the human being. There they produce a kind of balancing point.

It is extraordinarily interesting to observe the opposite effects in the human being of phosphorus, arsenic, and antimony. What in the outer world comes to a certain state of rest in a substance manifests its true nature when it unfolds its activity in the human being. Only then can one see what is still living in it. Regarding it from outside, one sees only what has condensed out of a process of becoming. Looking at arsenic outwardly, one really sees the end of a process in the outer world whose beginning is seen within the human being. Therefore one never really knows something as substance when it is observed in the outer world without knowing at the same time what it does within the human organism.

There is a chemistry, but there is also an “anti-chemistry.” Chemistry itself is like looking at a being that has a front and a back merely from one side, from behind. If a being has two sides, we must look at the front too: only by considering both aspects together do we gain an impression of the entire being. If we have only deduced what lives in a substance by looking at it from behind, then we must approach it also from in front, from the point of view of its effect in the human organism.

One must study “anti-chemistry” as well as chemistry. Only when these two work together will a knowledge emerge of what underlies all substances.

In which the Attempt is made to form a Conception of the Ego-Body or Thought-Body

[ 1 ] The feeling of being outside our physical body is stronger during experiences within the astral body than during those within the elemental body. In the case of the elemental body we feel ourselves outside the region in which the physical body exists, and yet we feel connected with the latter body. In the astral body we feel the physical body itself as something outside our own being. On passing into the elemental body we feel something like an expansion of our own being; but in identifying our consciousness with the astral body it is as though we made a jump into another being. And we feel a world of spiritual beings sending their activities into that being. We feel ourselves in some way or other connected with or related to these beings. And by degrees we learn to know how these beings are mutually connected. To our human consciousness the world widens out in the direction of the spiritual. We behold spiritual beings, for example, who bring about the succession of epochs in the development of mankind so that we realise that the different characters of the different epochs are, as it were, stamped upon them by real spiritual entities. These are the Spirits of Time or Primordial Powers (Archai). We learn to know other beings, whose psychic life is such that their thoughts are at the same time active forces of nature. We are led to understand that only to physical perception do the forces of nature appear to be constituted as physical perception imagines them to be. That in fact everywhere, where a force of nature is acting, the thought of some being is expressing itself just as a human soul finds expression in the movement of a hand. All this is not as though man by the aid of any theory is able in thought to place living beings at the back of nature's processes; when we realise ourselves in our astral body we enter into quite as concrete and real a relation to those beings as that between human individuals in the physical world. Among the spirits into whose realm we thus penetrate we discover a series of gradations, and we may thus speak of a world of higher hierarchies. Those beings whose thoughts manifest themselves to physical perception as forces of nature we may call Spirits of Form.

[ 2 ] Experience in that world assumes that we feel our physical being as something outside us, in the same way as in physical existence we look upon a plant as a thing outside ourselves. We shall feel this state of being outside all that in ordinary life must be felt as the whole compass of our own being, as a very painful one, so long as it is not accompanied by a certain other experience. If the inner work of the soul has been energetically carried on and has led to a proper deepening and strengthening of the life of our soul, it is not necessary that this pain should be very pronounced. For a slow and gradual entrance into that second experience may be accomplished simultaneously with our entrance into the astral body as our natural vehicle.

[ 3 ] This second experience will consist in obtaining the capacity for considering all that, which before filled and was connected with our own soul, as a kind of recollection, so that we stand in the same relation to our own former ego as we do to our recollections in the physical world. Only through such an experience do we attain to full consciousness of ourselves as truly living with our own real being in a world quite different from that of the senses. We now possess the knowledge that that which we carry about with us and have hitherto considered as our ego is something different from what we really are. We are now able to stand opposite to ourselves, and we may form an idea concerning that which now confronts our own soul and of which it formerly said, “That is myself.” Now the soul no longer says, “That is myself,” but, “ I am carrying that something about with me.” Just as the ego in ordinary life feels independent of its own recollections, so our newly-found ego feels itself independent of our former ego. It feels that it belongs to a world of purely spiritual beings. And as this experience—a real experience: no mere theory—comes to us, so we realise what that really is which we hitherto considered as our ego. It presents itself as a web of recollections, produced by the physical, the elemental, and the astral bodies in the same way as an image is produced by a mirror. Just as little as a man identifies himself with his reflected picture, so little does the soul, experiencing itself in the spiritual world, identify itself with that which it experiences of itself in the world of the senses. The comparison with the reflected image is, of course, to be taken merely as a comparison.

For the reflected image vanishes when we change our position with regard to the mirror. The web woven of recollections and representing what we in the physical world consider as our own being, has a greater degree of independence than the image in the mirror. It has in a certain way a being of its own. And yet to the real being of the soul it is only like a picture of our real self. The real being of the soul feels that this picture is needed for the manifestation of its real self. This real being knows that it is something different, but also that it would never have attained to any real knowledge of itself if it had not at first realised itself as its own image within that world, which, after its ascent into the spiritual world, becomes an outer world.

[ 4 ] The web of recollection which we now regard as our former ego may be called the “ego—body” or “thought—body.” The word “body” must in this connection be taken in a wider sense than that which is usually called a “body.” By “body ” is here meant all that we experience as belonging to us and of which we do not say, “We are it,” but, “We possess it.”

Only when clairvoyant consciousness has arrived at the point where it experiences, as a sum of recollections, that which it formerly considered to be itself, does it become possible to acquire real experience of what is hidden behind the phenomenon of death. For then we have arrived at a truly real world in which we feel ourselves as beings who are able to retain, as though in a memory, what has been experienced in the world of the senses. This sum total of experiences in the physical world needs—in order to continue its existence—a being who is able to retain it in the same way in which the ordinary ego retains its recollections. Supersensible knowledge discloses that man has an existence within the world of spiritual beings, and that it is he himself who keeps within him his physical existence as a recollection. The question what after death will become of all that I now am, receives the following answer from clairvoyant investigation: “You will continue to be yourself just to that extent to which you realise that self to be a spiritual being amongst other spiritual beings.”

[ 5 ] We realise the nature of these spiritual beings and amongst them our own nature. And this knowledge is direct experience. Through it we know that spiritual beings, and with them our own soul, have an existence of which the physical existence is but a passing manifestation. If to ordinary consciousness it appears—as shown in the First Meditation—that the body belongs to a world whose real part in it is proved by its dissolution therein after death, clairvoyant observation teaches us that the real human ego belongs to a world to which it is attached by bonds quite different from those which connect the body with the laws of nature. The bonds which attach the ego to the spiritual beings of the supersensible world are not touched in their innermost character either by birth or by death. In physical existence these bonds only show themselves in a special way. That which appears in this world is the expression of realities of a supersensible nature. Now as man as such is a supersensible being, and also appears so to supersensible observation, so the bonds between souls in the supersensible world are not affected by death. And that anxious question which comes before the ordinary consciousness of the soul in this primitive form: “ Shall I meet again after death those with whom I know I have been connected during physical existence?” must, by any real investigator, who is entitled to form a judgment based upon experience, be emphatically answered in the affirmative.

[ 6 ] Everything that has been said of the being of the soul experiencing itself as a spiritual reality within the world of other spiritual beings, may be seen and confirmed if we strengthen the life of our soul in the way mentioned before. And it is possible to make this easier and to help oneself along by the development of special feelings. In ordinary life in the physical world we take up such a position to all that we feel to be our fate, as to feel sympathy or antipathy for different occurrences. A self—observer, who is able to remain quite unbiased, must admit that these sympathies and antipathies are some of the strongest that man is able to feel. Ordinary reflection upon the fact that everything in life is a result of necessity, and that we have to bear our fate, may certainly take us a long way towards a deliberate attitude of mind in life. But in order to be able to grasp something of the real being of man still more is required. The reflection described will do excellent service in the life of our soul. We may, however, often find that those sympathies and antipathies of the kind mentioned, which we have been able to discard, have only disappeared from our immediate consciousness. They have retired into the deeper strata of human nature and manifest themselves as a certain mood of the soul or as a feeling of slackness or some other such sensation in the body. Real imperturbability with regard to fate is only acquired when we behave in this matter in just the same way as in the repeated concentrated surrender to thoughts or feelings for the purpose of strengthening the soul in general. A reflection only leading to intellectual understanding is not sufficient. It is necessary to live intensely with such a reflection, and to continue in it for a certain period of time while keeping away all experiences appertaining to the senses or other recollections of ordinary life. Through such exercises we arrive at a certain fundamental attitude of mind towards fate. It is possible radically to do away with sympathies and antipathies in this respect and finally to consider everything that happens to us quite as unconcernedly as an observer watches water falling over a mountainside and splashing down beneath. It is not meant that in this way we ought to arrive at facing our own fate without any feelings whatever. One who becomes indifferent to anything that happens to him is surely on no profitable track. We certainly do not remain indifferent to the outer world with regard to things not touching our own soul as part of our fate. We look upon things happening before our eyes with pleasure or with pain. Indifference to life should not be sought, when we strive after supersensible knowledge, but transformation of the direct interest that the ego takes in its own fate. It is quite possible that by such transformation the vividness of the life of feeling is strengthened and not weakened. In ordinary life tears are shed over many things that happen to our own soul in the way of fate. We are, however, able to win our way to a standpoint where the unfortunate fate of others awakens in our soul the same keen interest and feeling as are induced by our own unhappy experiences. It is easier to arrive at such a standpoint with regard to misfortunes that fate brings us than, for example, with regard to our mental capacities. It is not so easy, after all, to experience as great a joy when you discover a capacity in another, as when you discover that you possess that capacity yourself. When self—observation strives to penetrate into the depths of the soul, much selfish satisfaction with many things which we can do ourselves may be discovered. An intense, repeated meditative union with the thought, that in many instances it is quite indifferent to the course of human life whether we ourselves or others are able to do certain things, may carry us a long way towards true imperturbability with regard to that which we feel to be the innermost working of fate in our own lives. Such inner reinforcement of the life of our soul, by steeping it in thought, when rightly done, can never lead to a mere blunting of our feeling for our own capacities. Instead they are transformed and we realise the necessity of behaving in accordance with these capacities.

[ 7 ] And here we have already indicated the direction taken by this strengthening of the life of the soul by thought. We learn to realise something in ourselves which appears to the soul as a second being within it. This becomes especially manifest, when we connect with it thoughts which show how in ordinary life we bring about this or that event in our destiny. We are able to see that this or that would not have happened to us, if we had not behaved in a certain way at an earlier period in our life. What happens to us to—day is truly in many ways the result of what we did yesterday. We may now, with the intention of carrying our soul's experience further than some point at which we have arrived, look back upon our past experience. We may then search out all that shows how we ourselves have prepared our later destinies. We may try in so doing to go back so far as to reach that point where the consciousness awakens in the child, which enables it later in life to remember what it has experienced. If we set about this retrospect in such a way that we combine with it an attitude of mind which eliminates the usual selfish sympathies and antipathies with regard to occurrences in our own destiny, then, having reached in memory the above—mentioned point in our childhood, we face ourselves in such a way as to be able to say: At that time the possibility of feeling ourselves in ourselves and of conscious work upon the life of our soul first presented itself; but this ego of ours was there before, and it, although not working consciously within us, has brought us our capacity for knowledge as well as everything we now know. The attitude towards our own destiny just described brings about what no intellectual reflection is able to produce. We learn to look at the events of destiny with equanimity; we meet them with an unprejudiced mind; but we see in the being who brings these happenings upon us our own self. And when we look upon ourselves in this way, we find that the conditions of our own destiny, already given us at birth, are connected with our own self. We win our way to the conviction that just as we have worked upon ourselves since the awakening of our consciousness, so we had already been working before our present consciousness awoke. Now such a working of ourselves up to the realisation of a higher ego—being within the ordinary ego leads us not only to admit that our thoughts have brought us to a theoretical statement of the existence of such a higher ego, but also makes us realise as a power within ourselves the living activity of this ego in all its reality and feel the ordinary ego as a creation of the other. This feeling is, in fact, the first step towards beholding the spiritual being of the soul. And if it leads to nothing, it is because we rest satisfied with the beginning only. This beginning may be a scarcely perceptible dull sensation. It may remain so perhaps for a long time. But if we strongly and energetically pursue the course which has led us up to this beginning, we shall at last arrive at beholding the soul as a spiritual being. And having brought ourselves thus far we shall easily understand why some one, without any experience in these matters, may say that in believing we see such things we have only created an imaginative picture of a higher ego through auto—suggestion. But one who has had the experience knows that such an objection can only be derived from lack of this very experience. For those who seriously go through this development acquire at the same time the capacity to distinguish between realities and the pictures of their own imagination. The inner activities and experiences which are necessary during such a pilgrimage of the soul, if it is a right one, make us practise the greatest circumspection towards ourselves with regard to imagination and reality. When we systematically strive to attain the experience of ourselves in the higher ego as spiritual beings, we shall consider as the principal experience that which is described at the beginning of this meditation and look upon the rest as a help to the soul on its pilgrimage.

With this course I hope to supplement last year's course, so that it will really complement it and result, at the end, in the crystallization of a variety of views on therapeutics. I will try to look from another vantage point at the human being who is ill and needs to be healed. By studying these matters from another angle we will not merely gain fresh viewpoints, but at the same time we will extend the subject matter of our studies. This time I would like to show how the constitution of the human being—physical body, etheric body, and so on, with which you as anthroposophists are all familiar—is active in the processes of becoming ill and healing. Last time I had to confine myself more to describing the outer manifestation of the inner human being. This time I will try to show how the different members of man are influenced by substances outside the human being. I will try to show what these substances really are that can be used as remedies, and to show how a remedy can be effective by influencing the human organism in a different way from the merely material.

At this point in my introduction, however, I must make the following presupposition. Last time we spoke here, we dealt with the same subject, considering from different aspects the use of substances—and in general what is physical—as remedies. But as soon as we have to go further and consider the higher members of human nature, the super-sensible members of the human being, we can no longer speak about substances in the same way. We often do so for the sake of brevity, but throughout this presentation we must bear in mind a fundamental fact: we must be quite clear that we cannot proceed from what is material in the way customary in current science if we really wish to understand man's relation to his environment and what happens to him in health and illness. We must begin from processes, not substances, from events in progress, not finished products. And when we speak about substance, we must picture that the substance appearing in the outer world to our senses is nothing more than a process come to rest.

Let us say we are looking at siliceous earth. We call it a substance. But we have not grasped what is essential if we merely form a mental picture of this so-called object with certain borders. We grasp what is essential only if we take into account the very comprehensive process that exists as an individual process taking place in the entire universe. This process then crystallizes out, as it were; it comes to rest, attains a kind of equilibrium, manifesting then as what we behold as siliceous earth (sandstone). It is essential to focus our attention on the interaction between processes within the human being and processes that unfold outside in the universe, for both in health and illness the human being stands in continuous interaction with the universe.

I would like to present to you in an introductory way something that can lead us to some thoughts about this interaction. We will then be able to begin tomorrow on our actual subject matter. First we must try to grasp man's essential nature by means of an anthroposophical spiritual science. I have often spoken of the threefold nature of the human being. Today I will at first express myself schematically, directing attention to the way this threefold nature is concentrated spatially within the human being. When we distinguish the nerve-sense system, we know that it is chiefly concentrated in the head but that it nevertheless extends throughout the human being. Only in his head is the human being first and foremost a nerve-sense being, but on the other hand the entire human being is also “head,” though less “head” in the remainder of his organism than in the head itself. Thus we can think of what we call the “nerve-sense man” as localized in the head.

If we are to make these thoughts of the threefold nature of the human being fruitful for our present purpose, we must then think of the “rhythmic man” (which encompasses the breathing and circulation) as twofold, one member tending more toward the respiratory system and the other more toward the circulatory system. Inserting itself into the circulatory system is then everything involved in connecting the “limb man” with that of the “metabolic man.”

In studying the human head, we are looking at the member of the human organism that corresponds primarily to the nerve-sense man. The organization of the head differs essentially from that of man's other members. This is also the case with regard to the higher members of the human being. If we study the human head from the viewpoint of spiritual science, we see this head as a kind of imprint—one might say a kind of extrusion—of the ego, astral body, and etheric body.

We must then still consider the physical body in its relation to the head. This physical body is present in the head in a different way, you could say, from the physical element that is an imprint of the ego, astral body, and etheric body. At this point let me emphasize the higher aspect of this by pointing out that the human head, as it manifests itself at first in the human embryo, is not shaped merely by the forces of the parental organism; cosmic forces are at work in the human head. Cosmic forces are working into the human being. In the forces we call etheric, the parental organism is active to a high degree, but even in the etheric, cosmic forces are acting out of the soul-spiritual life before birth, or rather before conception. What was living in the spiritual world before conception continues to work, especially in the astral body and the ego; it continues its work, forming the human head. The ego conveys its imprint onto the human head, and the astral and etheric bodies both convey their physical imprints. The physical body alone, which of course we receive only on earth, is not an imprint but a prime agent (ein Primär Wirksames).

Thus I can say—sketching this schematically—that the form of the human head is an imprint of the ego. The ego organizes itself within the head in a definite way. At first it organizes itself primarily by differentiating the warmth conditions within the head. The astral body's influence is more remote, its organizing principle is contained in the gaseous, airy processes that permeate the head (see drawing). Then the etheric body imprints itself, and finally we have what is the physical body for the head—a physical process, a real physical process (see drawing, hatching). I will indicate this by pointing to the bony portion of the back of the skull if the eyes are here (see drawing). But the physical forces concentrated here extend over the whole head. Here, in this physical part of the human head formation, is a real, primary physical process. It is not an expression of anything else, but is present as a process carried out in itself.

In this physical head process, however, we really have a duality, a cooperation of two processes. It is a cooperation of two processes that can be understood only if the spiritual investigator studies them in relation to certain other processes taking place outside in the universe. Look outside in the universe at the process in the ancient rocks that finds expression in slate-formation, especially out of siliceous earth. There you have a process diametrically opposed to the physical process at work in the formation of the head. We see here an important connection between the human being and his environment. This process that unfolds in the mineralizing process is also present within the human head. Today it is almost clear to geologists that every process of slate-formation, every mineralizing process in which silica takes part, is connected with what one may call the “de-vegetabilization of vegetable substance” (Entvegetabilisierung). In slate-formation we must see a plant world that has become mineral. And in trying to understand this kind of de-vegetabilization of the vegetable kingdom, which is especially significant in the earth's slate-formation, we learn to grasp the polar process at work in a different way in the human head.

Another process cooperates with this process, however, and this other process must also be sought outside in the world. We must look for it in limestone rocks, for example. Today it is almost a geological truth for outer science that chalk formations are essentially the result of a process of earth formation that we might call the “de-animalization process of animal substance” (Entanimalisierung). It is the opposite process to animal evolution. Again the polar opposite process to this is at work within us. If we ascribe to silica and calcium—which are processes come to rest—a role in the formation of the physical human head, we must realize that something that plays a very significant part outside in the cosmos, at least in the entire nature of our earth, thereby works upon this physical human head formation. At the same time we are able, by way of preparation in orienting, to understand that when we look at silica or silicon, we see its essential kinship to the process taking place in the physical head (when I speak of silica here, I mean the arrested process); when we look at the process of chalk-formation that has come to rest in limestone, we see that it has something to do with its polar opposite, with the other force that cooperates polarically in the human physical head.

In the human head, these processes that we can find around us today stand in connection with other processes not to be found on the earth but seen only in imprint, the head being an imprint of the etheric body, astral body, and ego. Regarding these members of human nature we have to do with arrested processes that are not directly earth processes. Only what I have described when speaking about the actual physical head is really an earth process in the human being. The other processes are not actual earth processes, although we will find their connection with the earth processes, as you will see.

We will now pass on to consider the second member of the human organism, in order to have a kind of overview. In trying to localize it in space, we may call it roughly the chest system. It is the member in the human organism essentially comprising the rhythmic man, and we will divide it schematically into a system of respiratory rhythm and a system of circulatory rhythm. Examining this second member of man's being as a whole, we must say that everything I have designated here (see drawing) as the organization of respiratory rhythm in the widest sense is mainly an imprint of the ego and astral body. Just as the head is an imprint of the ego, astral body, and etheric body, so the respiratory rhythm is an imprint of the ego and astral body. It has something primarily active in itself, (see drawing, hatching), with the cooperation of physical body and etheric body.

In the human head only the physical body is active in itself; as we have seen, there even the etheric body is an imprint. In the system of respiratory rhythm, the prime agent is constituted by the interpenetration and cooperation of the physical and etheric bodies, and only the ego and astral body provide the imprint. This applies essentially also to the system of the circulatory rhythm, but to a lesser degree, for the entire metabolic organism inserts itself into the circulatory system. Thus in the circulation, the characteristics of the metabolic-limb system already begin to be evident. The limbs then, with everything that projects into them as metabolism—with the exception of the actual circulation—are in essence an imprint of the ego and a cooperation of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies (see drawing).

Thus, if we study the chest man we find as its imprint-organization only what is related to the ego and astral body, and we find that its primary organization is not merely physical but is the physical permeated by the etheric. This is more strongly the case with the respiratory rhythm, whereas in the case of the circulatory organism, another element from the metabolic system inserts itself.

You see, then, that the different members of the human being interact in different ways. Corresponding to the various physical members that we can call “head system,” “chest system,” and “limb system,” there are different interactions of the members that spiritual science calls physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. The human head, regarded as a process, is essentially physical body, for what is not physical body there is an imprint of the ego, astral body, and etheric body. The middle realm of the human being is essentially a cooperation between physical body and etheric body, for what is not physical body and etheric body is an imprint of the ego and astral body. And the metabolic-limb man is entirely an interplay of physical, etheric, and astral bodies and an imprint only of the ego. The chest man and the metabolic-limb man overlap more, however. (See drawing on page 7.)

Now we must focus our attention on the part played in the middle system by the process working in the organization of the physical head, and which we had to regard as a process having come to rest in siliceous earth. The curious thing is that this process of siliceous earth formation works more strongly and extensively in the middle system. In the head it works more delicately. Here in the middle system it works more strongly, more extensively, and in a more differentiated way. And it works most strongly in the metabolic-limb man. In focusing our attention on the process we found connected with siliceous earth, we find that it works most strongly where it has to come to the help of the ego, where it has to support the action of the independent ego that has only its imprint in the physical metabolic system. This silica-producing process works most strongly where it has to support the action of the ego on the metabolic-limb man. It works less strongly where it merely has to help the astral body; and it works least strongly of all where it needs to help only the etheric body, i.e., in the head.

We might put this the other way around. Regarding this process which we consider as arrested in silica, we can say that in the human head organization it works most strongly as substance and least strongly as force. Here, where it works least strongly as force, it works most strongly as it approaches the point where it comes to rest in substance. If we regard silica as the substance lying before us, we have to say that its action is strongest in the head. If we regard it as the outward indication of a process, we have to say that its weakest action is in the head. Where the activity as substance is strongest, the dynamic activity is weakest. In the middle system, the two activities of silica as substance and as force are approximately balanced. Regarding the metabolic-limb system, the dynamic action gets the upper hand. We have here the weakest action as substance and the strongest as force. Thus the silica-producing process actually organizes the entire human being through and through. Now that we have inquired into the relationship between the physical organization of the head and the outer environment that has a reciprocal relationship with the human being, we may inquire into the reciprocal relationship of the middle system to the outer environment, insofar as the organization of respiratory rhythm is concerned.

If the spiritual investigator studying the human head really wishes to understand it, he must turn his gaze to two processes at work in the formation of the earth: not only that which forms silica or silicic acid but also the limestone-forming process. We will examine this more closely later.

The organization for the rhythmic respiratory system is less external, less peripheral, lying more toward the inside of the human body. And insofar as it consists of a cooperation, primarily a cooperation of the physical and etheric as they interweave themselves with the imprints of the ego and astral, it does not point us directly to something in the environment, to a process that exists already in nature and that we can encounter there. If we are looking for a characteristic process in the outer world to correspond with this whole interaction, we must first create it ourselves. If we burn plant substances and obtain plant ash, then the process manifested in the burning and production of ash, and in the settling of the ash, is related to the breathing process in a way akin to the relationship of the silica process to the processes that unfold physically in the head. And if we want to make effective use of the part of the process of ash-formation having its correlate in the rhythmical breathing process, we cannot, of course, introduce it directly into the breath—in the human organism we can never do that—but we must introduce it through the opposite pole, so to speak.

If I sketch it here, this would be the rhythmic breathing process, and this the rhythmic circulatory process (see drawing). In the rhythmic breathing process, plant ashes represent the processes that are effective for our purpose. But we must make the plant-ash process effective in the opposite pole, in the rhythmic circulatory organism, proceeding indirectly by way of the metabolism (see drawing). We must incorporate this plant ash, that is the forces into the circulatory rhythm in order that they may call forth their polar counter-activity in the rhythmic breathing process.

Perceiving these relationships, we come to realize how extremely important they are for an understanding of the human organism. Just as we saw that the process confronting us in silica-formation has something to do with the entire human being, so now—applying this to the process by which plant ash is formed—we gain a mental picture of the middle system of the human being. Once again, this is seen to consist of two members, possessing a rhythm of breathing and a rhythm of circulation. When we focus our attention on the upper part, the rhythm of breathing, we see that the structure of the organs concerned is essentially determined by a process that is the polar opposite of the process revealed to us when plant substance is burned and ash is obtained. To a certain extent a struggle is taking place in the rhythmic process of breathing—a continual struggle against the process of plant-ash formation. But this struggle does not take place without its opposite penetrating the organism and provoking this process in the organism.

As human beings we live on the earth where there are silica processes and limestone processes. We would not be human beings if these processes permeated us. We are human beings through bearing within us the polar opposites of these processes. We are able to oppose the silica-formation process because we bear the opposite pole within us; we are able to oppose the limestone-formation process because we bear its polar opposite within us. It is chiefly owing to our head formation that we bear these poles within us, but the entire organism is also concerned, as I have described it in our breathing process, for example. Through our breathing rhythm we carry on the struggle against the plant-ash process; in ourselves we bear its opposite pole. If we focus our attention on these things it will not appear strange that a blow calls forth a counterblow, to express myself somewhat crudely. It is quite clear that if I intensify the silica-forming process in the organism, the countereffect will be modified; likewise, if I introduce into the organism the product of a combustion process, the ountereffect will be produced.

The important question thus arises of how we are to gain control of this action and reaction. This is what I mean when I am always saying, characterizing it abstractly, that we must first know what the processes are within the human organism, even into the ego, and what the processes are taking place outside the human organism. These processes are differentiated, both within and outside, but they are related to each other as polar opposites. The moment that anything that should be outside my skin, according to its nature, comes to be inside it—or the moment anything acts from outside inward that should not do so (this may happen by means of only a gentle pressure) an inner counter-reaction arises. In that moment I have the task of producing such an inner counter- reaction. For example, if I find that, instead of the normal process opposing silica there is too intense a tendency to this process, I have to regulate this from outside by administering the appropriate substance and thereby inducing the counter-reaction. The counter-reaction will then occur by itself.

This is what enables us gradually to perceive and understand the interaction between the human being and his environment. To be able to gain insight into the different gradations of the ego's influence in the human being, you must realize that the ego, when it wishes to act through the limbs and metabolism, is chiefly assisted by what is contained in the silica-forming process regarded as force, and that in the silica-forming process in the human head the action as substance is strongest. Thus its action as force in the head must assist the ego with diminished intensity. Now if we focus on the relationship of the human ego to the metabolic-limb system, we find the origin of human egoism in this relationship. The sexual system is indeed a part of this system of human egoism. And the ego primarily penetrates the human being with egoism indirectly through the sexual system. If you understand this, you will be able to see that there is a kind of contrast between the way the ego uses silica to work on the human being from the limb system and the way the ego works from the human head by means of silica. One could say that in the head it works without egoism. When this is studied by spiritual scientific investigation, it is possible to see this differentiation.

If I were to represent this remarkable activity schematically, I would have to say the following: Considering the ego as a real element of man's organization, what it does from the limb system by means of silica (see drawing, red) is essentially to encompass the human being, blending everything present in the human being in the fluids into an undifferentiated unity, so that it forms an undifferentiated, uniform whole. Then, in what is really the same process but now regarded in its activity as a force, we find the least intensive silica-forming tendency, and this works in the opposite way (yellow); it differentiates and radiates outward. From below upward the human being is held together and undifferentiated by means of silica. From above downward he is differentiated into separate components. This means that in relation to the human being the forces working organically in the head become differentiated for their work on the individual organs. In a sense they are stimulated by the silica-process belonging exclusively to the head organism to work in the appropriate way in the various organs—heart, liver, and so on. There we encounter the process which, when acting from below upward, mixes everything together in the human being, whereas when it works from above downward its action works to mold separate organs, regulating the organization through the individual organs.

We need to gain a clear conception of the results of these two tendencies in the human being—the blending tendency on the one hand and the tendency to differentiate the various organs on the other (the synthesizing-organizing activity in contrast to the differentiating-organizing activity). If we gain a clear conception of the way these two can act irregularly in a particular person, we will gradually learn to treat a person on the basis of this when something is the matter with him. We will see how to do this in the lectures that follow.

But we must be extraordinarily cautious in our investigations along these lines. For example, what does contemporary natural science do when it investigates the human organism? It says, for example, that the human organism contains silica, fluorine, magnesium, calcium. It states that silica is in the hair, in the blood, in the urine. Let us consider two of these points, that silica is in the hair and in the urine. For materialistic science, it is simply a matter of investigating the hair and finding silica in it and investigating the urine and finding silica there. But the essential thing is not in the least that here or there this or that substance is found. That silica is found in hair is not at all essential; what is important is that it is there in order to be active from there. We have hair for a purpose; there are forces that proceed from our hair back to the organism, very delicate forces. The most delicate forces proceed from the hair back into the organism. But silica is present in urine because it is superfluous. It is not needed and is therefore excreted. It is of no importance whether silica is in the urine, for it is inactive. There we find the silica that should not be within the human organism and that does not have the least significance within the organism.

It is the same when we investigate any substance whatsoever, magnesium, for example. If there were no magnesium in our teeth, they could not be teeth, because in the magnesium process forces are active that play a most important part in building up the teeth. You have learned that from Professor Römer's lecture. Materialistic science, however, tells us that magnesium is also in milk. But the magnesium in milk has no significance. Milk owes its existence as milk to the fact that it is strong enough to eliminate the magnesium that is there. Magnesium as such has no place in milk. Of course, we can find it by analysis, but the milk-forming process can only take place by being able to expel the magnesium forces. We only learn something about this peculiar contrast between the processes at work in building up teeth and in producing milk when we know that magnesium is an essential constituent in the tooth-forming process, belonging to this process dynamically. In the process of milk-production it is like the fifth wheel of a cart and is eliminated.

It is similar with fluorine, for example. We cannot understand the entire process of the development of the teeth without knowing that fluorine is an essential constituent of tooth enamel. It is also present in the urine, but as an excretory process, having no significance there. Fluorine is present in urine because the organism is strong enough to eliminate it since it cannot make use of it.

Merely physical investigation as to whether something or other is somewhere or other determines nothing essential. One must always know whether a substance is justifiably present in a particular part as an active constituent, or whether it is merely there because it has been thrown out. This is the essential aspect, and it is essential for us to acquire concepts like these if we are to understand the human being—and other organic beings—in conditions of health or illness.

In order to speak more popularly, of course, it is necessary to do without the help of these concepts, because in our age there is so little general cultivation of finer, more differentiated concepts. One is therefore compelled to speak more in abstractions, which then are not comprehensible. In combatting materialism, one is very frequently not comprehensible. We need to descend into those domains that the scientist is supposed to understand, and where he has facts before him that he can investigate; then we are brought by spiritual science to be able to show that ideas deriving from analyzing a substance by means of physical-chemical science and saying: “This and this are in that and that,” can lead to nothing but errors.

This is what I wished to present to you today as an introduction. We will continue our studies tomorrow.