The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If, the day before yesterday, we tried to put ourselves in the position of our opponents of the theosophical or spiritual scientific worldview, and if today the latter worldview is to be presented to you in its main forms, , I would ask you not to interpret my task as an attempt to dismantle piece by piece what was built up the day before yesterday, that is, to play a kind of game with concepts; for that would seem frivolous to me. It has already been emphasized that it was not a matter of randomly listing what is said in lightly-worded objections to Theosophy by people who have no good will to familiarize themselves with the content and essence of these worldviews , but it has been emphasized that only those reasons should be put forward that must be regarded as serious, weighty objections and that make it difficult for today's cultured people to approach Theosophy with their innermost convictions, despite their goodwill.

But since those who have heard me give lectures of a theosophical nature before can assume that I am not trying to refute Theosophy, today everything presented should be seen as a kind of refutation of the day before yesterday, and I ask that you bear in mind that I have to strike a different tone than I would for other lectures explaining the theosophical truths. Otherwise, factual evidence was presented to support the Theosophical truths; what will be said today is to be countered more in a logically judgmental way to that of the day before yesterday, from a more abstract point of view, which will appear quite understandable in view of the objections that have been raised, within certain limits, as justified.

In itself, it seems strange to try to present arguments for and against a matter that is claimed to be and must be part of our cultural heritage; strange because it could easily lead to the judgment that a conviction established for one person cannot be assumed for others. The decision is often quite difficult, so that first of all attention must be drawn to the question of the conclusiveness of human reason for or against a matter. Only then is it possible to ask whether so much really depends on the conclusiveness of human reason alone, whether this alone can decide for or against a matter with its reasons, or whether this does not happen in such an immediate way.

Everyone knows that something can be put forward with great acumen until one realizes that the evidence that initially seems so convincing is no longer sufficient when the scope of vision is broadened. Therefore, the question arises as to whether it is the evidence alone that leads people to decide whether to accept or reject something. It might seem easy to judge that a thing is right when the evidence speaks for it and wrong when it speaks against it, but we recognize from cultural history that, over the course of time, people have by no means been decisive in the evidence that could be presented for or against a thing, but it came and still comes down to things that are more decisive than evidence of human reason when it comes to believing that something is true.

This may be illustrated by the following example: This year, for the first time, a so-called freethinker's calendar appeared, in which there is also an argument from an author whose love of truth should be unconditionally recognized; this author says that one should not teach one's children anything that is based on ideas of divine or other transcendental things. The writer of the article in question takes a monistic-materialistic point of view and believes he must speak out against beliefs of a supernatural kind, such as the existence of the soul, God and so on. In doing so, he refers to something that can be said to carry great weight for many thinking people, namely, that children should be taught nothing but what could be developed from their natural human nature; on the other hand, to bring something from supersensible worlds into their development is something alien, because left to themselves, they would come to the sensual world. This makes sense to modern pedagogical people who do not see the child as a sack that can be randomly filled with ideas and so on.

Such views may seem quite natural and appropriate to anyone, and such a presentation will also appear to the reader of the calendar as absolutely flawless evidence. But as difficult as it is to refute the author with all the means of his point of view, the judgment changes when one broadens one's horizons. If, for example, a child were raised on a desert island where one could prevent it from learning the language of people, the question seems quite natural: Should one maintain the principle established earlier and offer the child nothing but what his nature already provides by itself, it would be almost impossible for such a child to learn to speak. It follows that when thinking, all relevant factors must be taken into account.

Great people have always recognized as a fundamental principle the endeavor to keep their thinking free and independent in this direction, to grasp their ideas on the broadest possible horizon. An example of the way such people think, which should apply to thinkers and personalities who are undoubtedly regarded by most as very impartial thinkers, and whom the most enlightened minds of the present are accustomed to recognize as theirs, easy to cite a multitude of examples from experience that demonstrate that human superstition clings to many things that actually exist but are only conceived erroneously; for example, many people believe in spirits that are independent of the physical body. By contrast, it seems obvious to some that one must be bereft of all enlightenment if one does not doubt the existence of such disembodied spirits. Many of those who accuse such believers of crass superstition invoke Lessing as the pioneer of modern thought; we can fully endorse this assessment in the sense that he derived the nature of his thinking from a broad horizon. He says:

We no longer believe in ghosts? Who says so? Or rather, what does that mean? Does it mean something like this: We have finally come so far in our insights that we can prove the impossibility of it; certain irrefutable truths that contradict belief in ghosts have become so common knowledge, are so constantly present even to the meanest man, that anything that argues with them must necessarily appear ridiculous and absurd to him? That cannot be what it means. We do not believe in ghosts now, so it can only mean: in this matter, about which almost as much can be said for as against it, which is not decided and cannot be decided, the currently prevailing way of thinking has given the reasons against it the upper hand; a few have this way , and many seem to want it; these make the noise and set the tone; the majority is silent and indifferent and thinks one way today and another tomorrow, hearing with delight in broad daylight mocking of ghosts and telling of them with horror in the dark of night. What are we to say about a legend of modern thought presented in this way? Does he have a crass superstition if he wants to accept other views and fields of knowledge as logically reasoned arguments, if he expresses his opinion to the effect that these gain or lose weight depending on whether one broadens or narrows one's horizons? In the former case, completely new possibilities immediately arise. It is not the weight of the evidence that has decided the question in favor of the existence of spirits, but the habit of thinking, which is directed to facts that take away the evidence of their existence. So you have to try to convey what leads people to give their views a probative force, a weight.

What matters are our thought habits, and here we will be able to see that there would and actually are apparently weighty reasons against rejecting the etheric body as taught by Theosophy.

Spiritual science tells us that this etheric body permeates the physical body and treats its own and absorbed substances in such a way that the organism can live. The objection was raised that chemical science is capable of producing certain chemical compounds outside of a living organism in the laboratory, and that it is therefore concluded that all of these processes and compounds that can be observed in a living organism are now also caused by the same external forces, and that it is expected that at least the simplest living organisms can be produced in the laboratory at some point. On the basis of these facts and considerations, the concept of the etheric body is therefore considered unscientific; for no one has the right to doubt that science will not be able to produce life phenomena and living things in the future.

All this is not based on reasons and proofs, but on habits of thought. This can be proved historically. In the past, no one doubted the supernatural origin of life, because the alchemists, for example, and all the other scholars of earlier centuries believed that they could produce a whole “homunculus” from the necessary substances in the laboratory; a strange phenomenon! What was necessary for such thinkers – who we should not simply dismiss out of hand as fools, considering that in the future we will not be seen as greater fools for having been short-sighted enough to consider them as such – what was necessary for them to assume so that we would no longer see an insoluble contradiction? We must embrace the idea that life is everywhere, not only limited to living organisms and their possibilities of inheritance, but that it can occur in all suitably combined substances, where one need only assume that life is present - if only given the opportunity to unfold in one way or another. If anything alive comes into being, it cannot be assumed that only what is present in a particular place comes into being, just as flies do not simply arise out of the dirt, which they soon appear on. If we bring together the necessary substances under the appropriate conditions in the laboratory, we can do nothing but provide the opportunity for life to come to them. In doing so, however, we must not limit the concept of life to the living organisms that have crystallized out of the available substances, since life is omnipresent and takes every opportunity to express itself, for example, as a germ in properly arranged substances.

Such a view is unusual for our time, but it cannot be logically dismissed. In a way, it is difficult to arrive at a comprehensive idea of life through the methods of Theosophy; to help you, I would like to start with a point made the day before yesterday to lead you to the concept and acceptance of the etheric body.

It has been said that there is a way to explain waking and sleeping differently than Theosophy does, by stating that the astral body with the ego slips out of the physical body, which remains united with the ether body, and that these latter two parts of the being are then united in the spiritual world during sleep. In contrast to this, it seems perfectly logical when the phenomenon of sleep is presented in such a way that during waking hours in the sensory world, through his intellectual and muscular activity, man accumulates so-called fatigue substances in his organs, which no longer enable him to develop the strength to continue to live while awake. The countervailing forces of the organism then assert themselves, the consciousness of being awake extinguishes, and those forces then restore the organism during sleep, so that it is able to work again with full vigor with all its organs and so on. Many naturalists think that the alternating state of sleeping and waking is based on a self-regulation of the healthy organism, so that it is not necessary to assume that, to explain sleep, a spiritual part separates from the physical-etheric body, removes from it, and both parts unfold a restorative activity - without any actual self-awareness.

Such an objection can be a stumbling block for someone who wants to turn to theosophy, and such an objection should therefore not be underestimated by a conscientious person. But even if we assume that the organism is a self-regulating system in terms of sleeping and waking, that the disturbances caused in the organs by fatigue are compensated for by the restoration of the vital forces, the question must still be raised, and as a matter of principle and fundamental: What can the organism do for its organs during sleep? It must be the result of a special life activity when the eyes, ears, brain, nervous system and other internal organs are endowed with new life force during sleep. But what is the nature of this restoration of organic activity? Is it something like that which is otherwise in the organism, for example, that of the constantly active human lungs, which take care of breathing, since they must also be imbued with the inner organic life with nourishment and organic forces? This inner organic activity, which nourishes the lungs, cannot alone be the cause of the movement; and the absorption of oxygen from the air by the lungs themselves cannot be replaced by this inner nutrition, for it has nothing to do with it. The same applies to the brain and nervous system, which are also supplied and nourished internally. But the internal restoration of the brain and nervous system that occurs during sleep has just as little in common with the sensations and perceptions that flow through our senses and the thoughts that flow through our brain.

Thus, the inner organic activity cannot give anything that makes the senses and brain thinking, feeling organs, otherwise something could be provided by the sleeping person in relation to his soul, just as if one wanted to determine something about the inner nature of oxygen through the inner organic nutrition of the lungs. Therefore, we can rightly say: by supplying its organs with inner organic power, our organism has given nothing that is capable of filling them with their own ideas, and so it has given the lungs nothing at all to supply them with oxygen again and again. Thus, what is felt, what is the content of the soul, comes to man from a completely different source.

Accordingly, it is indisputable to speak of the fact that something absolutely different is present in the waking person than in the sleeping person, just as water (H> O) is present in the form of the separate parts hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O); water cannot be represented if only hydrogen (H) is present without oxygen (O). So we must also supply the sleeping person, who is present without spiritual content, that is, from the outside, which complements him to wakefulness.

Now we must be clear about the fact that even the positivist thinkers such as [Hume] do not claim that what we call “I” can be found in any kind of organic activity. In itself, it always finds only warmth, cold, pleasure, pain, joy, pain, affection, aversion, and so on. The ego thus lives and is bound to such activities; it must draw these into the organism when it wakes up, as oxygen must be brought to hydrogen (O + 2H = H, O) to form water.

With such considerations one remains in agreement with the natural scientific views and methods; other world views, which do not act in this way, are thereby in contradiction with their own facts, with the correctly observed facts of natural science and the methods of the same, which they literally sin against. Theosophy does not pay homage to dualism, just as one will not call a person a dualist who sees in water not an absolute unity but a substance that has formed from hydrogen and oxygen or can be broken down into these two. There is no contradiction between theosophy and natural science; both stand on the firm ground of facts, but it depends on their interpretation.

From this point of view, we are justified in saying that everything that has direct existence in itself must be examined in isolation from the organism, so that we must therefore approach the human spiritual content separately from its physical organism.

This brings us to the justification of what asserts itself as the esoteric method of Theosophy, but which, in accordance with its peculiar nature, must break with the demand of natural science to a certain extent, namely, that spiritual life should be able to be observed at any time and by any person. One can only look at it in its own inherent laws. The spiritual researcher must bring about a process in his own spiritual life that is uninfluenced from the outside, by bringing certain ideas into his observation through meditation, concentration and his will, which alone appear to be suitable for esoteric research. He detaches the soul from its connection with the body, as it were, dissecting the soul and thereby making a process from the inner life of the soul that can be clearly seen and need only be symbolic. [Otherwise, the person is stimulated by external processes, but in order to free the soul from the physical, one uses one's own will to place an idea, preferably symbolic ideas, at the center of one's mental activity in meditation.] The only difference from external knowledge is that the relationships of the mental activity to something else are not taken into account in terms of content. For example, in meditation the thoughts need not depict something that really exists, as the so-called Rosicrucian cross, a black cross framed by seven red roses, does not need to be, but we only ask: What does such an idea do in the soul, what does it contribute to our development? What the thoughts accomplish in our soul is what matters.

When we allow such things to take effect on us, we get to know the activity of the soul in the spiritual world. A state similar to that of sleep occurs for the soul, without, however, consciousness ceasing; the content of this is given to it as a supersensible one, whereby the researcher recognizes the supersensible world in its reality. It could be objected that this is only a subjective process of the soul, but for the real connoisseur of such processes this objection does not apply: for him, these are just as the insights of mathematical truths, such as for example that the sum of the three angles of a plane triangle is always equal to 2 R = 180°, a truth that one recognizes purely within the soul; the fact that others also consider it to be true or not contributes nothing to the knowledge of this mathematical truth; it proves itself in itself. It is just as foolish to say that when someone comes to mental processes through certain exercises, it is only a subjective certainty of their own soul.

When someone begins with exercises of a mental nature, they initially encounter all sorts of pitfalls, errors, and self-deceptions; only these are subjective. Beyond that, after sufficient progress, the certainty arises that one has something objective before one, or rather experiences it within oneself. These are no longer subjective convictions. This would be an objection as if one wanted to say that one should not do mathematics, because it causes difficulties of a subjective nature; nevertheless, something objective can be demonstrated at the end of the path.

But someone might raise yet another objection, namely, that the path to supersensible knowledge cannot be compared to that of mathematical knowledge, because the latter only has a formal value. The realization that 3 x 3 = 9 does not prove that there are 3 x 3 things = 9 things in the world, or that the sum of the three angles in a plane triangle is equal to 180°, would not exist in reality in this way, so there must be no supersensible facts corresponding to the inner-soul processes. Are such facts present or not?

It would have to be shown that not only do we humans think mathematics, but that mathematics itself also works outside of us, as Plato says, for example: “God does geometry!” If we acknowledge this, then the mathematical laws are real and present in the world. So, too, the correctly perceived soul processes must be present outside as real things. Thus, for example, we find only within us what we call an “I” in its inner development and what coincides with our soul content of thoughts, feelings, will and so on. Is it not just something subjective? What guarantees its objectivity? Does it also work and weave in the outside world? Between birth and death, human beings develop in such a way that they remember back to a certain point in their youth. Their memory does not reach back to before this point, although no one would claim that it did not arise until the fourth or fifth year of life; after all, they had already been alive for several years before that. Human consciousness must develop in such a way from that point on that it first had to arise.

But what was in the human being before as ego content? We can answer this: In the first years of childhood, the human being develops the convolutions of his brain, and only when this work is done, when the tool of the intellect has been chiseled out by the individuality, only then does the ego consciousness arise for the human being himself; it corresponds to the tool that is now available and this to the developing ego. Thus, Theosophy shows that everything that is later experienced purely internally was previously worked out by our brain. The child's first life shows that its brain is “I-ized”; what later becomes the content of the soul was previously creatively present in the human being, in the first years as an external aura and later as an internal one.

These processes fulfill what we need to prove, namely externally, what was previously there internally. The following experiment may clarify this: When the spiritual researcher applies all his exercises to himself and places his soul under the influence of the same, he will eventually notice that he awakens with his soul slipping out of the physical-etheric body sheaths - a process that was otherwise only possible by falling asleep. In the first stage, the spiritual researcher experiences independence from his physical body. He then knows that he experiences the following within himself: I perceive a content independently of the organs of my body, but I cannot conceptualize this content because these are bound to the brain, and it is a tormenting inner state for me, which is also taken over into the ordinary bodily consciousness. In terms of the expression of his higher spiritual experiences, man then has something idiotic.

If the required exercises are continued with iron energy, then what has been released in the increasingly independent soul in terms of supersensible experiences goes as a force effect into the physical body and expressed in concepts what was previously experienced only spiritually without the involvement of the brain, just as the child gradually develops its brain to express what it later wants to express as an experience. - So one proceeds in stages. The spiritual and soul essence must have been present from the very first formation of the body, since it is supposed to work from the spiritual world on its further development. And so it works into the physical organization with its forces, which it draws from the stored and processed resources of previous earthly lives.

Thus we see: anyone who wants to arrive at an understanding of the self must necessarily deal with the objections of the doubters in order to recognize their true significance, and he is forced to seek out broader points of view. But no one should lightly condemn those who cannot approach theosophy.

Furthermore, the day before yesterday, important objections were raised in the ethical, moral and religious sense; it was argued that belief in karma, with its rewards and punishments, could make people selfish, and it must be admitted that such narrow views can in some way lead to selfishness. But here I would like to refer to Schopenhauer, when he says:

It is easy to preach morals, but to establish morals is difficult!

The latter means to present those things that lead to moral behavior. If this is possible for Theosophy, then outsiders may say that karma produces egoists, considering that this need only be a transitional state, with the awareness of a sense of poetic justice through different lives on earth. For example, parents want to educate their children properly so that they can support and care for them in their old age. This is selfish, but it does have the effect that such children become proper people, that parents see their hopes fulfilled and experience joy in the children's hard work; thus their selfishness is transformed into an inclination for the unselfish joy of their children's good progress and personal development.

Thus, for example, in a somewhat crude illustration of karma, it is said that a person's good deeds bring reward, while evil deeds result in pain and suffering. If a person acts accordingly, even if he is also influenced by selfishness, the good will have a reciprocal effect on him, and he will gradually become a non-selfish person.

Morality can only be justified by starting from true, egoistic human nature and taking karma into account; this then gradually transforms the egoistic person into a moral, selfless one.

If someone were to raise a different moral objection, namely, that some parents love their children as part of themselves, as heirs to their own qualities, and that it would be unreasonable or even impossible for them to accept or even imagine that a spiritual-soul core that is foreign to them would come down from spiritual worlds to oppose, as it were, their physical parents, we can reply that a deep inner affinity existed which led the child to this particular couple as a consequence of loving relationships of a higher kind that existed even before birth and developed the powers that enabled the spiritual-soul part of the being to reach its parents in particular – powers that developed from earlier earthly lives and also enable further favorable further development only with the body inherited from its parents.

If someone says that by reincarnation man ascribes a kind of self-righteousness to himself, without emphasizing his childship to God, and thus places himself in opposition to the just God, then with a broader horizon one can say: If man feels that the divine power is at work in him, it would be would be downright incomprehensible not to ascribe to oneself a divine essence that must and can be developed ever higher from life to life, because otherwise one commits a sin as soon as one thinks one should deny the spark of God within oneself, when, instead of developing it, one distorts it into a caricature. So the most possible approach to the divine ideal is a sacred religious duty of the theosophist.

We want to take into account all the objections of our opponents, but we also want to note in the pros and cons that this is not easily overcome by proofs and contradictions, but by broadening our horizons in our soul life beyond all narrowness in our culture. This is what Theosophy or spiritual science should bring to people of our culture and then lift them up beyond the mere physical-sensual world.

If someone now attempts to draw on the supersensible world in further developing and closely connecting with laboratory methods for their results and insights, they may apply some of these successfully but fail with others. This would be the same as when doubts arise about certain scientific facts and it is realizes that individual details are not correct in their interpretation and application; but in this way the view gained can, when the various facts are lined up, condense into a justified hypothesis, which is varied, gradually develops better and better and, in its entirety, supported by more frequent confirmation, ultimately becomes a theory. Then we have to say that the objection that some people make, that such hypotheses of supersensible worlds contradict all previous views, is just as weighty as that of a famous Academy of Sciences [in Paris], which wanted to reject the existence of meteorites when they were reported to have fallen, even if the stones themselves were presented.

Thus, in this case from the distant past, as in the present, it is not the facts that need to be corrected, but the perceptions; that is, the horizons of people must expand under the influence of spiritual science in their research and conviction. We are dealing here with a spiritual realm that has its own laws, which are different from those of the material realm, for the latter only show coming into being and passing away. If we emphasize the seemingly trivial fact that the soul processes in the brain work in a certain way like gravity in the material masses, then we can also admit that this gravity, if the earth could sleep, would show itself independently, and furthermore rightly assume that it will outlast matter as an independent force. We can also express those truths in this way:

The things in the vastness of space speak to the human soul;
the soul can hold them in the course of time!
But the human soul lives in knowledge,
unlimited by the vastness of space
and unperturbed by the course of time,
In the realm of eternity
And finds in the spirit realm
The very deepest reason for its own being.

From a soul struggling for knowledge of the world, Goethe spoke the sentence:

Mysterious in the clear light of day
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil.
And what she may not reveal to your spirit,
You cannot force from her with levers and screws.

And much of what has taken place in the field of science since his time would have prompted him to say:... you cannot force that from her with microscopes and telescopes. — The saying does not arise from a lack of knowledge, but from an attitude that does not want to accept only the material. From his youth to his old age, he held fast to what he says in Faust:

The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Up! Bathe, disciple, undeterred
The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

And so he has here, as also expressed in the sentence mentioned earlier, not that man could not penetrate the mystery of existence, but to draw attention to the fact that the human spirit itself, in its development, can do what instruments cannot, that the human spirit is able to ascend from level to level.

What the human spirit can do can only be answered from an understanding of the secrets of our consciousness. Consciousness as it is experienced by people today relates to the other consciousnesses that exist and relate to today's normal consciousness in such a way that they, so to speak, plunge the human being into dark depths, and on the other hand lead him up to the summit of knowledge.

Let us ask ourselves today: Is there only the “normal” consciousness or are there other consciousnesses and thus the possibility of penetrating into the causes of our existence? Today, we will deal with the relationship between consciousnesses from a particular point of view. What the word “clairvoyance” encompasses is something that is unpopular and contested in our present time. People who only recognize normal consciousness will consider everything that has to be said as folly and fantasy.

It is based on nothing more than a lack of knowledge of the nature of human consciousness; it must be said that the common inner ignorance of facts speaks in this way. And it should not go unmentioned that one would wish that what is called 'clairvoyance' in the spiritual sense be known to those who speak of it and who know very little about it and crave it. They imagine something quite wrong under clairvoyance. Therefore, it must be spoken of that clairvoyance, which lies below our normal consciousness and also brings out the human being below normal consciousness. And in comparison, it must be spoken of what clairvoyance is in the spiritual-scientific sense and how it leads beyond normal consciousness. It can only be understood by placing oneself before the soul, which has often been said about the nature of man, about the visible and invisible man.

Spiritual science does not have it as easy as recognizing man as an external science that is tied to sensual matter. It regards only the outer physical part, and then speaks of the physical human body. Within this physical human body, the consciousness of which we will speak in a moment sees the invisible, the supersensible human bodies. Isn't it the case that the ordinary mind could form enough reasons for the existence of these bodies if it would only say the following to itself: I wake up every morning; during the night my normal consciousness is immersed in darkness and gloom. In the morning, entities from the most diverse realms of nature penetrate into the field of vision of consciousness; everything that was there yesterday penetrates back into consciousness.

Now everyone should continue by saying to themselves: If it were not too absurd, what fills the field of consciousness would have to disappear in the evening and arise again in the morning. They should say to themselves: Its existence would have to have disappeared during the night. Spiritual science tells us that the human being still has an astral body, which is the carrier of lust and joy, of urges and desires, etc. For clairvoyant consciousness, the astral body descends when we fall asleep. Why do we have no impressions during the night? Because it is in the spiritual world and because we have no organs for it. Imagine what would happen in the physical body. The eyes disappear; the ears stop hearing; you would have no sound, no color around you. Likewise, you could imagine that the other senses gradually fade away. This is what the astral body is like at night because it has not formed any organs in the course of human development; in the morning it uses the organs of the physical body. Thus we recognize in it one of the invisible links.

Between the astral body and the physical body lies a second link: the etheric body. During the time between birth and death, this is a fighter against the decay of the physical body. And then, when the human physical body is a corpse, it only follows the physical and chemical forces, because the etheric body moves out at death with the astral body. Sleep is separation from the astral body; physical body and etheric body remain in bed at night.

Then we distinguish a fourth element: the “I”, with which the human being can come to self-awareness. Thus, we see the human being as a composite of the physical body and three invisible elements: the etheric body, the astral body and the I.

Only when we consider the human being in its entirety can we form an idea of the stages of consciousness. There is only one thing we must be clear about: how do we look at the limbs? Once the physical body was of a spiritual nature; it has disintegrated, like ice separates from water. And the ether body is, as it were, a little denser spirit, and the astral body is still a little denser, and the I-bearing body is still a little denser spirit. Therefore, we also call the “I” that which is a “divine spark” or “drop”. It is only through the fact that man has gradually developed that he has become an “I-bearer” and awakened to his self-awareness.

If we go back, we find the first formation of the physical body. Then, as it were, as the physical body became denser, the etheric body was set apart. Even later, the astral body was added, and even later the I. Only through this did he - the human being - receive his normal consciousness, through which we perceive external objects.

This consciousness was not always there; it is a product of development. We could go back into the past and we would find that the human being was a being consisting of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. In this very distant past, man did not have today's consciousness; he had a completely different one, a consciousness that is one step lower. We can call this consciousness, in relation to today's, an “image consciousness”. The only way we can study this consciousness is to restore consciousness to a higher degree. In those days, people could not perceive objects in outer space. Imagine that there is some object lying nearby that has a certain taste. Today, a person has to become aware of it through the taste, through the tongue; he perceives from the outside what the object is. The image consciousness cannot perceive such an external object; an image arises, and this image is a symbol of what taste the external object has. Or one approaches an object that would shine for today's consciousness; the image consciousness does not see that; but through a mysterious bond between the soul and the body, an image arises again.

And so we may say that such a consciousness has images that surge up and down, images that are closely related to our present-day ideas, except that they are symbols; our present-day ideas are only photographic images. What the astral body experiences is an awareness of images. Indeed, if today's human being could erase his “self-awareness”, he would disappear into the sea of astral images. He would experience the surging images in the astral body. We can characterize our present-day consciousness by means of a comparison. Imagine a creature that lives in the sea for a certain period of time, so that it only stays at certain depths. It knows the animals and plants that are embedded in the sea, but it never looks at the sky. This is roughly how we have to imagine human consciousness. Man emerges from a sea of astral images, and self-awareness is ignited by the outside world. This could never have developed if he had remained in the sea of the astral; but only by having objects in the external world does self-consciousness ignite.

Thus we have pointed to a certain level of consciousness that lies below our present, ordinary sense of self, from which humanity has developed. If we go further, we would find a person who did not yet have the astral body. And so we could say that image consciousness has developed out of an “ether image consciousness”. If we were to descend further, we would perceive a consciousness that differs essentially from what the modern human being knows as consciousness. But you can get an idea from what has been said today: the ether consciousness is contained in what remains in bed during the night. And our astral consciousness has submerged in the sea of the astral.

Now we do not have to imagine extreme contrasts here, but differences in degree. We do not have to think that the consciousness during sleep is the opposite of our own today; imagine that you also know something similar in our daytime consciousness. When you walk down the street, it may happen that you say to yourself: Didn't I see something just now? — You did not pay attention to it. There you have a lower consciousness. There is only a duller consciousness in what remains in bed. The plant has the consciousness of sleep continually - they are sleeping beings.

And we can descend even further, we can enter the physical body and come to the mineral consciousness. This is the consciousness in which the whole mineral world lives. So we have listed four levels: mineral, plant, animal and human consciousness. Three levels of consciousness therefore lie below our everyday, normal consciousness. These three levels were completed by man in prehistoric times.

Today, people are occasionally able to revive the last remnants of ancient levels of consciousness within themselves. There are also such heirlooms in the physical world, such as the auricles, which are an atavistic remnant; likewise, certain states of consciousness, which are usually called clairvoyant states, are heirlooms from ancient developmental states. However, they are not the true ones in the sense of spiritual science; they are only old heirlooms that sometimes live into our present-day consciousness.

People have two very different types of such inherited traits, which express themselves in very different ways. One is what encompasses the dream world. What a person experiences in a dream are not perceptions that are made in the same way as those experienced by daytime consciousness. They are images of external events. You only need to imagine characteristic dreams. Let us take one as an example: a young man dreams that the vault of heaven has opened up in front of him and a number of shining beings have emerged. He wakes up and sees that the morning sun has shone on the wall through the window. The dream has symbolically expressed this shining of the morning sun in such a way that it allowed the experience to arise in the soul as an image. Here you have an image experience. That is why the dream is an heirloom from the time when man had inner soul experiences that were linked in their form to external objects. For example, if you see a symbol with an ugly color in your astral consciousness, you know that there is a harmful object nearby. The not yet awakened object consciousness does not see the object, but only an image, so that one could arrange one's actions accordingly.

The dream images are only a remnant, but since they have different degrees of approximation, the “dream can sometimes light up that it really corresponds to a real fact that appears symbolically. Let us take the case of a person who dreams of the colony of Kiau-tschau, how he sits in a meeting and is constantly confronted with the name Kiau-tschau. He wakes up and sees that a cat has crept into his room and is meowing. In fact, the dream is such an arbitrarily drawn conception.

If you study the dream in this way, you will see that it is lines of life that have been preserved, but that it mixes lines with the greatest arbitrariness, mixing in certain interests of the day. Such a mixing of interests is, for example, when an important philosopher dreams the following. In his soul lived the poem:

Do you want to roam into the distance,
when the good is so close,
just learn to grasp luck,
because luck is always there.

And he dreams:

Do you want to roam afar?
See, the money is so close.
Just learn to grasp the money,
Because the money is always there.

You see how the dream from the source of the inner imagination deals arbitrarily with what it has experienced – the structure of Goethe's poem, for example.

If we were to follow this, we would have an immersion in an earlier state of consciousness. All our ideas can be symbolized in this way. Imagine you are lying in bed, you press your feet against the lower edge of the bed and release them again. The dream symbolizes: the feet become free and a flight arises. What causes the dream? The fact that what happens does not happen completely when a person sinks into dreamless sleep.

It is now possible that the astral body has already left the physical body and not yet the etheric body; this is particularly the case when waking up and falling asleep. Then the astral experiences are reflected and the dream experiences arise. The dream stands on its own; it is really a last remnant of old, overcome states of consciousness.

It is different with other states of “abnormal consciousness”, which can develop in certain respects in humans. Because they submerge in the astral, so that they give up their full self-awareness in certain respects, completely different states of the subconscious arise than in a normal dream. What must be tuned down is what man calls his 'I', his healthy thinking, to distinguish it precisely from what is in the environment. Every time the actual 'I' of the human being is tuned down, when the human being does not feel: Here I stand —, then it is as if the human being were diving below the surface of the astral sea. Then what can be called the subconscious comes to him.

There are three forms of the subconscious: what is called presentiment, what is called vision and then second sight. These are three different forms of the subconscious. It is natural that when man muffles his ego, he enters into a closer relationship with all the threads that nature connects than he would otherwise. When we raise our usual ego consciousness, then man must be content to see only part of the space; there he is always in such a restricted area, and what effort it costs to pull the connecting threads of nature. In a limited consciousness – that is the work of our 'ego' itself, when we dampen it down, when we dampen down our abilities, when we let our reason fall silent, then we descend into our astral body and this is connected with many intimate threads to what lives in the astral. There the ordinary connections of space and time come to an end. There we dampen down all these concepts.

Because of the completely different concepts of space and time, it can happen, as it does in presentiment, that time is overcome. At the slightest immersion, what might be called “dark feeling” arises; this comes from the currents that run beneath the surface, which one senses gently when one descends into the astral world. If you dive deeper, then, just as it was with the astral consciousness, the experiences form into very specific images and the vision occurs. We are then in the world of causes, in the world of the primal reasons. Then those beings emerge that are invisible to the physical eye. We get to know such entities, and the visions are often the physical expression of beings that are behind the sense world.

Thus we can actually encounter those entities that are there and can also be human souls. This enters our consciousness when we descend. And the actions of these spiritual beings, what they undertake unbound by space and time, we experience in second sight. When we see things far away in second sight, it is a descent into the depths of consciousness.

Today's man cannot dive into the depths of consciousness without taking with him what he has experienced up here. Man has acquired the habit of seeing animals and plants, etcetera, in a very specific way. He takes the way with him and with it he covers, as it were, the beings that come to meet him. They are true beings that appear to him, but they are false images. The fact is that he submerges, that he sees a being that does not appear in its true form, and he covers that with the images he is accustomed to. For example, someone submerges and he thinks he sees the Christ himself. Nevertheless, it is a real being from the spiritual world, but he has endowed it with the image of the Christ himself. And so what he sees is an illusion of a real being. And because people who are not trained clairvoyants cannot know whether they are seeing what they are taking with them or what is the truth, such people can be very sure that they are indulging in the greatest deceptions. Descending is therefore always accompanied by deception after deception.

You can dive even deeper, into the sea of ether, and you also take with you the way of seeing things very definitely. You can perceive powers in this way, but they will be blurred. If you saw them clearly, you would see what could be described as an all-encompassing life. For example, you would see our earth as an all-encompassing living being. But in this world man perceives the images to which he has become accustomed, and sees all kinds of things that have indeed been caused by spiritual entities; but the forms that the lower clairvoyant perceives are in deceptive form. These clairvoyants are what are called the dream walker, for example, where the person in the dream performs actions with the physical body in the dullness of the etheric body.

Likewise, what is called “magnetic sleep consciousness” is to be sought in this sphere, because usually causes of illness underlie it; suppose you have an organ that is diseased, you do not need to know it, something is abnormal about the person, which steers the person towards becoming conscious in the etheric body, especially when another person strokes them, etc., accelerates this process. All kinds of events in the spiritual world appear to him in all kinds of illusions. So we see that one can descend into different states of consciousness. In occult science, they are called the “subconscious”.

All these states of consciousness are not relevant to what is said in esoteric science. Many people are eager to switch off their ordinary daily consciousness and descend. They only want to experience something strange, they want to experience spirits. That human beings are spirits is not proof enough for them; they want to have spirits without physical expression. This is not to say anything against the truth and reality of these spheres; but what would come from such states could never be decisive for spiritual science.

Just as there is a subconscious, there is also a superconscious. This can only be achieved through training in the occult sciences. This includes learning to manage one's ordinary consciousness in the most precise way. It is therefore always emphasized that what spiritual science hears from the spheres can only be grasped with ordinary human understanding. It cannot be expressed strongly enough that Theosophy can be grasped with ordinary human understanding. Only those who are trained clairvoyants can see the true shape of the spiritual world. But when it is related after he has seen it, those who absorb these facts, when they are presented in a sensible, comprehensive way, can understand everything and they can say to themselves: If I do this, I can then check whether all this can be applied to life. One must keep common sense as one's own possession. You have to keep telling people who come to you: Approach the physical world first, apply our minds to these facts and try to understand them.

But who has an unimpaired mind, unclouded by the suggestion of so-called scientific facts! You have to realize that this is no easy task! Never before has the human mind been so limited as it is today. Everyone is satisfied when they can construct a whole edifice of the world from a few pegged-out concepts, and when someone comes along who wants to build the edifice from the sum of spiritual truths, they say that this is folly, fantasy or something even worse.

This must be taken into account. Only unprejudiced thinking can approach the physical world, not judgment clouded by all sorts of suggestions. Today people talk a lot about the “independence of judgment”; they want to be free of authority. They do not accept what they have not examined themselves; but they do not ask themselves whether they are capable of examining everything. What matters is that they want to be independent of any authority and yet are dependent on a great authority: “They say.” This intangible authority has a tyrannical effect on people. Humanity languishes under it, believing itself to be free from all authority. It absorbs everything that is a matter of contemporary judgment; one believes everything that science has established, as if no one cared.

He who stands face to face with the facts of the spiritual world must free himself from this. There he has to use his usual healthy judgment to progress to superconsciousness. Many a person comes and says: I used to see all kinds of things, but now everything has disappeared. Those who understand will say: That is good. You should ascend to the superconscious; to do that, the best transition is to go through a sphere of spiritual darkness. You can expose yourself to danger if you don't want to. When [the person] descends into the subconscious and all the confusing impressions of the astral world come, then perhaps in a certain respect he will come to have premonitions, visions, etc.; he may still see so many black poodles that only pretend to be something. That is not the point of seeing this. He who is not yet mature enough not to have respect for these scraps of the spiritual world is also not mature enough to penetrate into the superconscious. To do this, he must undergo catharsis or purification. Man must be cleansed of all subconsciousness if he wants to ascend into the first sphere of the superconscious. There he also experiences a consciousness of images, but in the same way as he lives in everyday life. To do this, it is necessary to strengthen one's consciousness and throw out everything that is subconscious. And that is a lot! You can see this if you remember that in early childhood, a lot of things penetrate you; you have forgotten them in your sense of self, but they are inscribed in your etheric and astral bodies. Certain childhood impressions would come up and disturb a person every time he or she tries to penetrate into a higher consciousness. In a sense, diving into the spheres of the subconscious is a dressing up of the real facts with images from the real world. Try to register the images of such “clairvoyants”, follow them back to a time when there were no railways or telegraphs, wait and you will not be surprised that railways and telegraphs will play major roles in the “spirit realm”. This is only because the seer takes with him what has been imprinted in the etheric body. Therefore, if you want to penetrate unclouded, it is necessary to throw everything out of your subconscious. You can only acquire it by going through it with complete consciousness, which is provided by the spiritual scientific method. There is what the student has to practice, what he has to experience, absorbed in imagination, and that is pictorial representation, which proceeds according to the rule:

All that is transitory is but a parable.

Thus you will find that in every training session symbols are given such as the rose cross, the serpent staff of Hermes, etc. They have something tremendously significant when a person has to experience certain facts of the outer world inwardly. One forms a symbol that one does not use in the same way as a photographic image of the outer world.

Let me mention here once more, in the form of a dialogue between teacher and student – this dialogue did not take place, but the facts do take place –: Look at a plant; it takes root in the ground and lets stems, leaves and flowers emerge. And now compare the plant with the human being. You call him a higher being. You know that the red blood that makes man a higher being also enables him to develop passions, instincts and desires, but also the soul world, the higher consciousness. The plant has no desires and instincts; it stands there in pure, high chastity. But you see the human being with a higher consciousness; however, he pays for that which is connected with the red blood through passion and desire. And then imagine the high ideal that the human being will become like the plant; he has subdued the desires and purified his red blood.

For man the plant is a model; he forms a picture of how, in time, everything degrading will have died out in man, and his blood will be pure, like the sap in the red rose. Think of this as a symbol in the red rose and apply to it Goethe's saying:

Before you do not have this,
this: Die and become!
Are you only a gloomy guest
On the dark earth!

And when we feel the burgeoning and sprouting in the soul, like the reddened sap in the red rose, we feel that and let the image work on us in inner meditation! And the image has a certain effect: it pushes out everything that fills the subconscious, and we have taken the first step towards the superconscious.

There are countless symbols just as I have described the Rose Cross. The disciple must immerse himself in these and then put them together in the “occult writing”, and in this way he comes, purified and cleansed, to an ether consciousness. Through what we gain from the occult writing, we receive the so-called inspired consciousness in that which is not tied to space and time; but we do not see it clouded by the images of everyday life.

And then there is a higher link of the superconscious: intuition. — In all these spheres of the superconscious, man takes his full “self-awareness” with him. If someone says: You are describing a consciousness in vain, that does not reflect a true world, then let someone who understands it tell them: These things are there so that the forces develop in us that free the astral body, the etheric body, from the physical body, and by doing so, we learn to see into the spiritual world while being fully aware of our ego.

There is no danger associated with this path, nothing can happen to us on it, it is safe if we follow it with patience and perseverance. If you submerge yourself, if you dampen the I, there is a danger; we fall prey to the passions that reside in the astral, and eventually we can lose our minds, while we become more and more understanding as we ascend in superconsciousness. Hence the insistence that the road to superconsciousness lies through day-consciousness. Those who find it too dull and uncomfortable to go through the study of the physical often pay for it with the loss of their reason, which they have sought through their greed.

Thus we see that there are stages that lead up and stages that lead down. The former lead to true clairvoyant states, where the ego is among the actions of spiritual beings [in inspiration] and finally where it is spirit among spirits [in intuition]. Nothing less is achieved than the cleansing of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. There are some things you have to accept; for example, when a person frees his etheric body, he may experience a temporary loss of memory because it is attached to his etheric body. If a person partially draws it out so that he can use it, his memory fades. But it will be amply restored to him later, albeit in a different way. And the qualities and abilities of consciousness are lost for a time; even self-awareness takes on a different form. Like a wanderer who feels lonely, the person walks along. As he penetrates further, the common memory disappears and a certain insight into past things arises.

Those who undertake the right training must have composure and perseverance. They must enter the path with courage and boldness, but it will be rewarded with the great reward of insight into the spiritual world, where the powers lie to become master of the physical world. A time will come when only those who recognize the spiritual forces behind the physical and can make them fruitful will be considered practical people. This leads us into the spiritual world while fully maintaining self-awareness. Not instruments, telescopes and microscopes, which only explain the veil of nature, only the spirit leads into nature.

Mysterious in the bright day

Nature cannot be robbed of the veil.

And what it may not reveal to your mind,

You do not force it out with levers and with screws.

If we want nature to come to meet us, we must go to meet it by developing our consciousness into superconsciousness. Then man will live his way into what Goethe described with the words he put into the mouth of the wise man:

The spirit world is not closed; your mind is closed, your heart is dead! Arise, student, arise,

The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

From these reflections on the segment of human life that is formed by, or associated with, a vocation, you will have seen that it is difficult to explain these things because they bring so much into consideration. We must bear in mind that everything that is brought into a life through the laws of destiny, of karma, depends on many factors, and the very multiplicity of life rests upon just this truth.

A special comment is in order here if, in the word vocation, we subsume individual human elements from a life's destiny. In other words, what is called the vocation of an individual must not be confused with what we designate, in the broadest sense, as his official position. It is obvious that all sorts of confusion would result if we directed our attention to what someone represents in his or her official position and subject this to the point of view of vocational life represented here. The very fact that people frequently have to follow their vocation within an official position causes the most complex external factors to have a bearing on their lives, and other karmic threads may, after a fashion, also weave into their vocational karmas.

To be sure, we are living today in a period that is being slowly transformed, but the things we must mention here relative to vocational karma are by no means the sole determinants in placing a person in this or that position in life. We know that today vocational karma is crossed in many ways by the karma of entire ranks and classes of human beings. The ambition, vanity, and prejudice of an individual, as well as the people around him, have a bearing on the many factors that influence the way he or she occupies a position in life within a group. All of them work into vocational karma from without and render it possible for ahrimanic influences to mingle continually in human activity. Someone in a certain position in life, who, through all sorts of means that are well-known and need not be mentioned, has become, let us say, a minister or councilor of state, does not necessarily have the mission (vocation) to occupy this post. Such a person may hold a high position, yet his or her mission may be that of a clerk, but we need not suppose that for this reason the position cannot be occupied. It is the peculiarity of our time that the materialistic interpretation of the basic assumptions, justifiable as they may be in themselves, has brought forward such a theory of life as that of the “selection of the fittest.” Even Oskar Hertwig, the student of Haeckel⁷⁰ has criticized such an interpretation by pointing out that this age of ours which has produced such a doctrine clearly selects the least fit for the most important positions, and this to an extent that is unparalleled when compared to the total scope of life in other ages. We are not simply deprecating our own times in a pessimistic way and referring to the good old times that are past, but we stand here in the presence of an actual fact. The very people who take pride now in the theory of the selection of the fittest are the ones who in reality yield to the tendency of choosing the least qualified people for the seemingly most important places in life.

This is a bitter truth today. Yet, it would be recognized if the present age were not entirely under the influence of the most far-reaching faith in authority, stupor of opportunism, and dominated by what is called public opinion, which a philosopher of the nineteenth century termed “private foolishness.” To repeat, people would see what is of real importance here if it were not for the immense influence of present public opinion that flows from such muddy sources. We must, therefore, understand that our age has to be educated to a stronger grasp of life through learning to see that we are immersed in one-sidedness, in the selection of the worst. This must come to pass in spite of so-called public opinion and its hero worship of the least qualified people.

Official positions are often filled by Ahriman-Mephistopheles and, as the Faust unfolds, you can see how Mephistopheles attends to his official responsibilities. Faust was able to free himself from Mephistopheles only at the end of his life. He comes now to the King's palace and produces paper money—an invention of extraordinary importance for the last century. But it is Mephistopheles who really invents it. Faust is then guided into the ancient world by Homunculus, who had come into existence through the help of Mephistopheles. He even becomes a commander-in-chief and conducts wars, but in the presentation used by Goethe in this act, we can see that, in reality, Mephistopheles carries on these wars. In the end we see how Faust gradually frees himself from Mephistopheles. Even though Faust, after he has abandoned the professorship he previously held, simply roams about the world without having definite official position; we must say that Mephistopheles stands beside him in the way in which the Mephistophelian force plays into the life of humanity. This is one thing we must pay attention to.

A second fact is equally important. It is extremely difficult to properly investigate what really works in man's nature in the course of karmic evolution. Indeed, we may say that in this area, too, scientific development has arrived at a point where it must be replaced by spiritual scientific observation. It is precisely in dealing with the life of the soul that scientists make the most terrible blunders. Indeed, we observe that there is a perverted scientific school of thought that ventures to confront soul life by trying to observe it in a scientific way, admitting that it is not to be found in consciousness but that much of it rises up into consciousness from the unconscious or subconscious that lies below the threshold. In previous discussions we have presented concrete examples of soul life that really lie in the subconscious and rise up into consciousness like the clouds of smoke that are produced when bits of paper are burned in the region of a solfatara.⁷¹ To be sure, a great deal lies below in the depths of consciousness.

We may say, then, that for a proper understanding of things some psychologists already presume it to be necessary to posit the presence or absence of an obscure, unconscious capacity in the soul. Since, however, they are not yet willing to adjust to a more comprehensive spiritual scientific conception of the world, they can produce only a caricature. A person holding the point of view of scientific psychology looks upon a human life as it has developed. To be sure, it is no longer supposed that what the soul feels and wills, what causes it happiness or unhappiness, joy or pain, depends only on what it has retained in consciousness. The effort is made now to quiz the soul to draw out of it what it has passed through in joy, sorrow, disillusionment in life and other things that have been forgotten. What has been forgotten, however, has not disappeared, so it is said, but has burrowed into the subconscious.

Especially the unsatisfied and subsequently suppressed appetites of an earlier time are said to agitate in the subconscious. Let us take the specific case of a woman in her thirtieth year. When she was sixteen, she fell in love, developing a genuinely erotic passion, which, so this scientific school says, would have led her life astray if she had surrendered to it and if it had been fulfilled. Under the influence of her education and the advice of her elders, however, she suppressed it—swallowed it, to use a trivial expression—down into her soul. She lives on and fourteen years pass. She is perhaps now married in keeping with her position in life. So far as her daily thinking and feeling are concerned, the matter is long forgotten; but what is forgotten has not disappeared. The content of the soul is not exhausted in what it knows, this school of thought would claim, and in the depths of her soul this incident is still present. But in spite of being outwardly happy, this lady suffers from an indefinable tendency toward pessimism, a partial weariness of life, from nervousness or neurasthenia, or something of the kind, and these symptoms are then diagnosed as an expression of her suppressed anxiety about the incident earlier in her life. The effort is then made to introduce this kind of psychology into the science of healing, to cure such souls through questioning. The patients are told that such experiences still reside in the deepest regions of the psyche, apparently forgotten by the upper level of consciousness, and that they must be drawn to the surface. If, under the influence of a skillful interrogator who, according to the views in vogue, must be a psychologist, they are thus brought to the surface, and if the person comes to understand the matter, then things will be better. Actual “cures” are frequently achieved by these means, although in most cases patients only seem to be cured. To what extent they are apparent cures, however, we can explain on some other occasion. This, then, is one example of how scientists try to penetrate the depths of the soul's life.

Another example has to do with a man thirty-five or forty, who is suffering from a certain weariness of life, from a certain vacillation in life. Neither he nor those about him know why, least of all he himself. Someone who deals with such a “science of the soul,” as we have explained, then burrows into the forgotten subterranean soul life of this man and brings to light the fact that the plan he had for his life when he was about sixteen was wrecked. He then had to turn to a different plan, one that was unrelated to the other. Certainly he seems to have been content in what he felt, thought, and willed from one day to another, but this is not the entire life of the soul; the shattered plan of life still continued to be a living force in the deepest crevices of the soul.

In this case, too, the “experts” believe the man can be cured when, through questioning, this shattered plan of life is discovered and the person can come to an understanding of it through his questioner. It is also supposed that there is much in the depth of the soul that the consciousness knows nothing of. In short, the conclusion has been reached that consciousness represents only a small part of what comprises the life of the soul. But what people are now trying to find on the bottom of the soul's life is really some sort of soulless sediment. A theologian recently called it somewhat coarsely—“the bestial slime at the bottom of the soul.” That is to say, disillusionments, suppressed appetites, ruined life plans, “the bestial slime at the bottom of the soul,” all come from the lower depths of the soul life. This refers to everything that is rooted in the life of the flesh, the blood, the animalistic; it does not come from the soul's depths in a conscious way because consciousness would, and actually does, resist all this.

There is certainly some truth in this theory of the “bestial slime at the bottom of the soul.” How often in life do we hear our consciousness say: “I really want only one thing; I would like to experience this or that, which is why I turn to this or that person.” But the slime at the bottom begins to work, and it may be only bestial appetites that are at play, disguised by what the consciousness says. It is further maintained by this “scientific” school that these unconscious regions also harbor everything that is derived from the connection of the individual with race, nation and all sorts of other historical residues that play their roles unconsciously in the soul, while the consciousness itself is behaving quite differently. In view of all that is brewing in the world today, one couldn't even say that these things cannot be confirmed by examples from all over the world. How could one deny that many people today speak of lofty ideals regarding the rights and freedom of a people while all that is really active in their souls is what burrows in the bottom slime, deriving from the connections psychoanalysis seeks to analyze.

Then the theological psychoanalysts—and I do not know how they and the scientific psychoanalysts reason with each other—also include the demonic as part of the subconscious life of the soul—in other words, that which emerges from still greater depths, the utterly irrational, as it is said. The theological psychoanalysts take great satisfaction especially in the thought that unknown demons work in the subconscious soul in order, for example, to change people into gnostics or theosophists. They think that when the soul has been psychoanalyzed, when we have penetrated its deepest regions where the “primeval slime” lies, a demonic teaching such as that of gnosis can be discovered there, or a demonic teaching such as that of psychoanalysis—excuse me, not psychoanalysis, which according to the view of these men and women is not to be found there, but theosophy and other things also mentioned in this connection. Well, I really did not want to enter into a criticism of psychoanalysis, but my purpose in explaining all this is to indicate that something in these psychonanalytical endeavors forces contemporary research into contact with what lies, works and weaves below the conscious part of the soul. Nonetheless, the most perverted findings must result from these endeavors because of the preconceptions of scientists and their unwillingness to take account of spiritual scientific investigations in this field. What they are able to discover in the life of the soul can only be analyzed in the right way with the knowledge that human life proceeds through repeated lives on earth. Yet the psychoanalysts attempt to explain what exists at the bottom of the soul on the basis of a single life on earth, and it is not surprising that the picture they paint is so highly distorted.

One who finds, for example, ruined life plans at the bottom of the soul must first investigate the significance of such a ruin in the total human life that passes through repeated lives on earth. He or she would then perhaps discover that certain aspects of such a total human life are also active in the subconscious and, as a matter of destiny, have actually hindered that particular life plan from coming to fruition. Such an individual would then observe that this ruined life plan in the depths of the soul is destined, not simply to cause illness in this incarnation, but also to be carried through the portal of death as a force in the life between death and a new birth, playing its true role only in the next life on earth. It may, indeed, be a necessity that such a ruined life plan should at first be preserved in the depths of the soul where it may be strengthened and thereby enabled to gain its true form between death and a new birth so that it may take on the shape predestined for it in the next earthly life; this it could not have done in this present earthly life because of other characteristics in the soul's life.

So the “bestial slime at the bottom of the soul”—as I have said, the expression is disagreeable—is there, to be sure; but bear in mind what I have said regarding the relationship between the head and the rest of man's organism. His body is connected with his earthly life—indeed, with his present incarnation in many respects—whereas his head is the result of earlier stages of the evolution of the earth and is connected especially with his preceding incarnations. When you take this into consideration, you will understand that from the rest of the organism, in accord with the role that it plays in the entire karmic connection, much works upward that must possess a different stage of maturity from what comes from the head and nervous system. But one who merely analyzes the slime at the bottom in the psychoanalytic way is utterly misled. He is like a person who wishes to know what kind of grain will grow in a particular soil before grain has been grown there. In analyzing the soil he finds a certain manure with which it has been fertilized. So he says, “Now I know the manure from which the next crop of grain will grow.” The grain does not by any means grow from the manure, in spite of the fact that it must be there! The essential thing is what is planted in this mud at the bottom. This is often predestined to exert its influence through the portal of death into the next development on earth. What is needed is not to investigate the bestial bottom slime, but what is planted in this muddy substance as the seed of the soul.

So-called psychoanalysis makes possible investigations in the very region where present preconceptions are working in a disastrous fashion; we are dealing here with a field from which present thinking tends strongly to take its directions, since it is not content with what conscious experiences give to the soul. The general area in which research ought to be done is no longer in dispute, but because people who cannot understand spiritual science have no true guidelines for their investigations, they burrow aimlessly in the fields assigned them through their official connections or their own agitation. They do this in the most unskillful manner, placing everything in a false position because they do not know better. Their research would yield the proper results only if they were able to follow the true karmic threads, as I have indicated at least suggestively through reference to one thing and another. This psychoanalysis is terribly unsound, especially when it stirs up the region of the elemental. Yet it is of great importance to investigate fine and intimate formations of the threads reaching into the future destiny of a human being. What takes place in a person's conscious life from waking until sleeping reveals little of those forces that continue to work as a karmic stream through various incarnations. What we experience consciously during our waking life belongs largely to the present incarnation. It is well that it is so because we should be industrious in our present incarnation. But much that will be carried through the portal of death as a germ formed from the experiences of our present incarnation—the incidents through which we have passed, the proficiencies achieved—all this plays a significant role in our life from the moment of falling asleep to that of waking, and this often influences our dreams. We must learn, however, to judge the formation of dreams in the right way. When people say that they are reminiscences, this is often true, but they do not act in the stream of our karma in a linear fashion. In fact, they often act in such a way that their significance is the exact opposite of what they are represented to be. I will give you an example from literature in order to bring out clearly what I wish to say.

The aestheticist Theodor Vischer⁷² included in his novel Auch Einer a clever little story that I will introduce here because I am speaking of vocational life in a more comprehensive way, that is, including everything that is connected with one's occupation. So I will give an illustration of this. In Vischer's novel, there is a conversation between a father and his son. They are walking together and, after the father has questioned his son about all sorts of things, the boy says, “Just think, the teacher told us that we should always ask what a person's occupation is because to have a proper occupation is important. In this way it is possible to learn whether or not the person is respectable and whether he has a good soul life.” “I see,” says the father. “Yes, indeed, and after the teacher told us this I had a dream in which I was walking by the lake over there and in my dream I asked the lake what sort of occupation it had, and the lake answered, ‘I have the occupation of being wet.’ ” “Is that so?” says the father.

This is a most clever anecdote and one that reveals that the person who thought it out had much knowledge of life. The father said, “Is that so?” because he naturally did not wish to confuse his son and tell him what a stupid thing the teacher had said. But that father no doubt had his thoughts on the subject. He really should have enlightened his son in a more intelligent way than the teacher had done, and should have said to him, “We should not form our judgments so superficially. It might well be that a person would be wrong as to what a respectable occupation is and might falsely consider a man to be disreputable; he might also be disadvantaged in some way.” In short, the father would have had to correct his son, but in this particular case it was not necessary. The boy was still young, and his dream could still work in a favorable manner on him. This dream worked in his subconscious, but in such a way as to erase the stupidity of the teacher from his soul. Thus, the dream took on a form in the boy's subconscious, which is cleverer than the superficial consciousness, in such a way that a breath of ridicule was spread over the stupidity of the teacher. The lake said its occupation, its vocation, was to be wet. This is something that will work in a wholesome way in expelling the harmful influences of such teaching. Here the dream is a reminiscence that comes the very next night, but it also serves as a corrective in life. In fact, the astral body often works in this way, and we might find, together with the residue remaining in the soul from living experiences, particularly from wrongful instruction, that a corrective is also present in the subconscious forces of the soul. This often produces its influence even in the same incarnation in young people. Above all, however, its influence is carried through the portal of death and continues further. This constitutes a means of self-correction in man, and we must pay attention to this fact.

In mentioning these things I simply wanted to indicate how much there is in a human soul and how this forces its way from one incarnation into the next. We have to do with a whole complex of forces that project from one incarnation into another. Now we must consider what relationship exists between this complex of forces and the human being insofar as his life flows along between birth and death. Here he or she is really an instrument with four strings—physical, etheric, astral bodies, and ego—on which this bow of karmic forces plays its tune. The individual life comes into being according to the measure in which one or the other—the etheric body, the astral body, or the etheric together with the ego—is swept by the bow of karma, if you allow this comparison with a violin. The tones of these four strings of life may interplay in many ways, making it difficult to speak of and decipher, not in mere empty abstractions but in lithic detail, the individual life-melodies of human beings. Thus, it is possible to decipher them only when one is able to see how the bow of karma plays upon the four strings of a human being. However, general points of view come into consideration here, and to these we must turn our attention.

If we observe a human being in those years when, as explained in my brochure Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy, the physical body and especially the etheric body are primarily coming into development, if we observe the development of children from approximately the seventh to the fourteenth years, we shall note that just at this time certain characteristics appear in them that are especially typical of this period. Certain things consolidate themselves in a way, although many things overlap one another so that much that appears during the first seven years can be more thoroughly and profoundly observed only between the seventh and the fourteenth. It will be found that something appears in a more definite way in the developing child that we may call, in a sense, the inner peculiarities that are consolidated through the character and demeanor of the corporeality. This is so, however, only insofar as they come to expression in the posture and gestures of the physical being, and in the entire bearing of his life. I refer to what is there taking solid form; not all, to be sure, but a great part of what causes a human being to be stocky and short, or to have a taller body that causes him or her to walk in a particular way such as with a firm step or a dancing gait, to mention radical contrasts. As I have said, not all, but a great part of what thus appears in the developing child is derived from karma and is the effect of the vocation of his preceding incarnation. Mistakes are often made when no attention is paid to what I have just said; that is, when, to appear clever, an effort is made to determine what a child's vocation will be from his manner and bearing. He would thus, however, mistakenly be given a vocation similar to that of his previous incarnation, and this would be detrimental to the child.

When this period of a child's life ends, or even before that time because, as I have said, things overlap one another, then the astral body manifests itself in a special way by working back on what had been developed previously. If one realizes this and has derived it from spiritual science, it can then be observed also on the physical plane. In accordance with other karmic forces, the astral body works back in such a way that it transforms what had resulted from the purely vocational karma during the seventh to the fourteenth years. In other words, two antagonistic forces struggle with each other in the child. One group of forces gives him form; these come more from the etheric body. The other group, coming more from the astral body, works against these and in part paralyzes them, so that he is compelled to transform what has been forced upon him by the vocational karma of his previous incarnation. In other words, we may say that the etheric body works in a formative way; that is, what is manifested as the bearing of the physical body, as one's carriage, is derived from the etheric body. The astral body works in a transforming way. Through the interplay of these two forces, which are really in bitter conflict with each other, much comes to expression that has to do with the working of vocational karma.

This now works together with other karmic currents, however, since we must also consider the physical body. With it, what comes primarily into consideration during the first period of life is how the human being has placed himself in the world by means of his karma. Even the kind of physical body we have depends upon this since, by reason of our karma, we place ourselves in a certain family in a specific nation. Thus, we receive a definitely formed body, but this is not all. Just think how much depends on the course of our life and on the situation into which we have entered by placing ourselves in a certain family. By that fact alone the basis is given for much in our life. As a matter of fact, during the first seven years in which the physical body is especially developing, forces are active in it—or we had better say around it—that are derived not from our vocation and all that was related to it in our previous incarnation, but from the way in which we have lived with others in previous incarnations. By this I mean how we stood in this or that relationship with this or that person during a preceding incarnation, not in any particular part of our life—this belongs to another field—but throughout our entire lifetime. Our souls work on this because they are profoundly affected by the relationships we had with human beings, and we bear with us what evolves from this process through the portal of death. Because of these forces, we bring it about that we place ourselves again in a certain particular family and situation in life. So we may say that what actually places our physical body here, in a sense, and works through it, also determines our situation in life. This continues to work further, of course, through the following lives, and meets its counterbalancing force through the ego. The ego works in a dissolving way upon life situations, but it also works in conflict with what is already determined in them. We may, therefore, say: Physical body, creative of the life situation; ego, transformative of the life situation. Through the united action of these two in this struggle, another current of karma takes hold of life since two forces are omnipresent in an individual: those that tend to keep him in a particular situation, and those that tend to disengage him from it.

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That is to say, 1 and 4 work in a primary way upon one another, as do 2 and 3; but all four also work in the most manifold ways upon each other. The way we enter into relationships with new human beings during our life according to our karma depends upon the connection of 1 and 4 with each other. But this is to be traced back, in turn, to our relationships in earlier lives. The way we find our relationships in our daily work, our vocation, is connected with 2 and 3 and their reciprocal action upon each other.

I ask that you reflect upon all this for the present. We shall continue this study.

• 70. Oskar Hertwig (1849–1922) was an anatomist who served as the director of the Anatomical-Biological Institute in Berlin from 1888 through 1921. His book Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie [The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance] appeared in 1916.
• 71. Solfatara is the vulcanic sulfurgas well near Pozzuoli.
• 72. Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–87) spelled his last name with a V, not an F, and Steiner stresses that fact in his lecture.

Yesterday I tried to draw the line between those sensory experiences which belong to the upper man, constituting man's essential soul life, and those which are more connected with the lower man, the content of which stands in much the same relationship to human consciousness as external experiences proper, only that these experiences take place within man. We have seen that the ego-sense, the sense of thought, the word-sense, the sense of hearing, the sense of warmth and the sense of sight are all experiences of the former kind, and that we then plunge into two regions in which man's inner experiences resemble external experiences so far as his consciousness is concerned; these two regions are, first, the senses of taste and smell, and then the other four, the inner senses proper.

You see at once how difficult it is to make do with the rough and ready terms which are suitable enough for descriptions of the external world, but quite inadequate directly one comes to consider the being of man and the structure of the world within him.

But at all events, if we are quite clear about this distinction between the upper and the lower man, both of which in a certain way are representative of the world-process, we shall also be well aware that there is a cleavage in our experience, that our relationship to the one pole of our experience is utterly different from our relationship to the other. Unless we grasp this division of the human being thoroughly we shall never reach full clarity about the most important problem of the present and of the near future, the problem of the relationship of the moral world, within which we live with our higher nature, within which we have responsibility, to that other world with which we are also connected, the world of natural necessity.

We know that in recent centuries, since the middle of the fifteenth century, human progress has consisted predominantly in the development of ideas about natural necessity. Humanity has paid less attention in recent centuries to the other pole of human experience. Anyone who is at all able to read the signs of the times, anyone who knows how to recognise the task of the times, is quite clear that there is a deep cleft between what is called moral necessity and what is called natural necessity.

This cleavage has arisen primarily because a great many of those who believe themselves to represent the spiritual life of to-day distinguish between a certain sphere of experience that can be grasped by science, by knowledge, and another sphere that is said to be grasped only by faith. And you know that in certain quarters only what can be brought under strict natural law is acknowledged to be really scientific; and another kind of certitude is postulated for all that falls within the sphere of the moral life, a certitude which only claims to be the certitude of faith. There are circumstantial theories as to the necessary distinction that has to be made between real scientific certainty and the certitude of belief.

All these distinctions, these theories, have come about because to-day we have very little historical consciousness; we pay very little attention to the conditions under which our present soul-content came into being. I have often given the classic example of this. I have often told you that to-day, when philosophers speak of the distinction between body and soul, they think they are using a concept which derives from original observation, whereas what they think about body and soul is merely the result of the decision of the eighth Æcumenical Council of 869, which raised to the status of dogma the doctrine that man must not be regarded as consisting of body, soul and spirit but of body and soul only, although some spiritual characteristics may be ascribed to the soul.

In the centuries that followed, this dogma became more and more firmly established. The Schoolmen in particular were steeped in it. And when modern philosophy developed out of Scholasticism, people thought that now they were forming their judgments from experience. But they were only judging according to their usual habits, through the centuries-old custom of assuming man to consist of body and soul.

This is the classic example of many situations in which present-day humanity believes that it forms an unprejudiced judgment, whereas the judgment it utters is nothing but the result of an historical event. One comes to a really sound judgment—and then not without difficulty—only by the survey of ever wider and wider historical epochs.

For example, the man who knows nothing but the scientific thought of the present time quite naturally thinks it the only valid kind of thought, and is incapable of thinking that there could be any other kind of knowledge. The man who, as well as being familiar with the scientific opinion of the present time—which has hardened somewhat since the middle of the fifteenth century—also knows a little of what was accepted in the early Middle Ages, right back to the fourth century, will form his judgments about the relations of man with the world somewhat as the Neo-Scholastics do. But at most he will be able to form opinions about man's relation to intellectuality; he will not be able to form any opinion about his relation to spirituality. For he does not know that if we go back earlier than, say, Aristotle, who died in 322 B.C., we have to see ourselves in a very different spiritual configuration from the one at present prevailing, in order to get any sort of understanding as to how the men of that time thought. To try to understand Plato or Heraclitus or Thales with a constitution of soul such as we have at the present day is an utter impossibility. We do not even understand Aristotle. And anyone who is at all familiar with the discussions that have taken place in modern times about the Aristotelian philosophy knows that amidst all the waging of wordy warfare which still goes on in connection with Aristotle countless misconceptions have arisen, simply because men have not reckoned with the fact that the moment we go back to Plato, for example, who was Aristotle's teacher, we need an entirely different spiritual constitution. For if one approaches Aristotle in a forward direction, from the direction of Plato, one judges his logic differently from the way one does if one merely looks back upon it with the spiritual make-up resulting from present-day culture.

Even when Aristotle was compiling his logic, which is certainly pretty abstract, very much intellectualised, he still had at least an external knowledge, even if not personal vision—there was certainly very little of that left in Aristotle—but he was still clearly aware that at one time it had been possible to see into the spiritual world, even if only in an instinctive way. And for him the rules of logic were the last utterance from above, from the spiritual world, if I may put it so. For Aristotle, accordingly, what he established as the laws or principles of logic were, so to say, shadows which had been cast down from the spiritual world—the world that was still a world of experience, a fact of consciousness, for Plato.

The enormous differences that obtain between different epochs of humanity is a thing that is usually overlooked. Let us take the years from the death of Aristotle, 322 B.C., to the Council of Nicea, A.D. 325; there you have a period which it is very difficult to get to know, because the Church took care to destroy all documents that might have given a more or less accurate picture of the state of soul of those three pre-Christian and three post-Christian centuries.

You have only to recall how often reference is made to-day to the Gnosis. But how do people know about the Gnosis? They know it through the writings of its opponents. Except for a very few texts, and those very far from representative ones, the whole of the Gnostic literature has been wiped out, and all we have are quotations from it in the works of its opponents, in works which are intended to refute it. We know about as much of the Gnosis as we should know of Anthroposophy if we were to make its acquaintance through the writings of Pius X. Nevertheless, out of this superficial knowledge people do hold forth about the Gnosis.

But the Gnosis was an essential element in the spiritual life of the centuries that I have just mentioned, To-day, of course, we cannot go back to it. But at that particular period it was an extremely important element in European development.

How can one really describe it? You see, one could not have spoken of it five hundred years earlier in the way it was spoken of in the fourth century A.D. For at that time there was still an instinctive clairvoyance, an ancient clairvoyance, there was knowledge of a super-sensible world, and one had to speak in a descriptive way out of this knowledge. The real spiritual world was always present in consciousness and was always behind such portrayals of it. Then that condition ceased.

It is a marked feature of Aristotle, for example, that this super-sensible world was for him only a tradition. He may have known something of it, but, as I have already said, in the main it was tradition for him. But the concepts which he received from the spiritual world still carried the impress of that world, an impress which was lost only in the third and fourth centuries A.D.

In Augustine we find no trace of the Gnosis; by his time it had quite disappeared. Thus we may say that the Gnosis is in its essence the abstract residuum of an earlier spiritual knowledge; it consists of naked concepts. What lived in it was a body of abstractions. We can see this already in Philo. And one can see abstractions in the ideas of the real Gnostics, too, but their teachings were abstractions of a spiritual world that had once been seen. By the fourth century A.D. things had come to the point when men no longer knew what to make of the ideas that formed the content of the Gnosis. Hence arose the dispute between Arius and Athanasius, which cannot really be reduced to a formula. The argument as to whether the Son is of the same nature and being as the Father, or of a different nature and being, is carried on in a realm in which the real content of the old ideas has been lost. The argument takes its course no longer with ideas, but merely with words.

All this formed the transition to the pure intellectualism which was to develop more and more, reaching western humanity just in the middle of the fifteenth century. By the time this intellectualism emerged, logic was something quite different from what it had been for Aristotle. For him, logic was, so to say, the residue of spiritual knowledge. He had made a compilation of what in earlier times had been experienced out of the spiritual world. By the middle of the fifteenth century the last scrap of consciousness of this spiritual world had vanished, and only the intellectual element remained; but now this intellectual element appears not as the residue of a spiritual world, but as an abstraction from the sense-world. What for Aristotle was a gift from the world above, was now taken to be an abstraction from the world below. And it was in essentials with

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If you take what I said yesterday about the ego-sense, the thought-sense, the word-sense and so on, you will come to the conclusion that in what we now experience through these senses in our ordinary human consciousness we are actually only dealing with pictures; otherwise there could not be those perpetual discussions which result inevitably from the characteristics of the present time. Indeed, a real understanding of the essential soul-life has for the time being been lost. An example of this is the way in which Brentano's attempt to write a psychology, a theory of the soul, failed ... something which he tried to do in all sincerity. Other people of course write psychologies, because they are less honest, less candid ... but he wanted in perfect candour to write a psychology that would be worth while, and he achieved nothing of any intrinsic value, because this could only have come from spiritual science, which he repudiated. Hence his psychology remained truncated, since he achieved so little of what he was really striving for. This failure of Brentano's psychology is an historic fact of profound significance. For the jugglery with all sorts of concepts and ideas that our psychological science pursues to-day was of course for Brentano something quite empty.

But now what we have here (see diagram) as the soul-life which is the outcome of the six upper senses, from the ego-sense to the sense of sight, all this was at one time filled with spiritual life. If we turn our gaze back to ancient times in Europe, back as far as Plato, all that afterwards became more and more devoid of spirituality, more and more intellectualised, was then filled with spirituality. We find there all that had been given to humanity in its evolution in a still more ancient time, in the time when the Orient had taken the lead as regards human civilisation; then men possessed a civilisation which was devoted to this soul-life, this true soul-life. So that we can say:

All these senses furnish experiences which nourish the spiritual life, when spiritual life is present in the soul. And what humanity developed in this respect was developed within the ancient eastern culture. And you understand that culture best when you understand it in the light of what I have just told you.

But all this has, so to say, receded into the background of evolution. The life of the soul then lost its spirituality, it became intellectualised, and that, as I said, began in the fourth century B.C. Aristotle's compilation of abstract logic was the first milestone on the path of this despiritualisation of human soul-life, and the development of the Gnosis brought about its complete descent.

Now we still have the other man:

And now a civilisation began that was based essentially upon the senses just enumerated. Even if you do not at first admit it, nevertheless it is so. For take the scientific spirit that emerged, the scientific spirit that tries to apply mathematics to everything. Mathematics, as I explained to you yesterday, comes from the senses of movement and of balance. Thus even the most spiritual things discovered by modern science come from the lower man. But modern scientists work above all with the sense of touch. You can make interesting studies to-day if you go into the sphere of physiology.

Of course, people talk about seeing, or about the eye, or about the sense of sight; but one who sees through these things knows that all the concepts that are used are somehow conjured from the sense of touch to the sense of sight. People work with things that are borrowed, smuggled in, from the sense of touch. People do not notice it, but in describing the sense of sight they make use of categories, of ideas, with which one grasps the sense of touch. What to-day is called sight in scientific circles is really only a somewhat complicated touching; and categories, concepts such as tasting or smelling, are sometimes brought in to help. We can see everywhere at work the way of grasping external phenomena which lies behind modern ideas. For modern anatomy and physiology have already discovered—or at any rate have a well-founded hypothesis—that modern thinking really has its roots in the sense of smell, in that thinking is bound up with the brain—thus not at all with the higher senses, but with a metamorphosis of the sense of smell. This characteristic attitude of ours in our grasp of the outer world is quite different from the relationship that Plato had. It is not a product of the higher senses, it is a product of the sense of smell, if I may put it so. I mean that to-day our perfection as man does not come from our having developed the higher senses, but from our having created for ourselves a modified, metamorphosed dog's muzzle.

This peculiar way of relating ourselves to the outer world is quite different from the way which befits a spiritual epoch. Now if we have to designate as oriental culture what was first revealed through the higher senses in ancient times, then what I have just depicted, in the midst of which we are now living, must be called the essence of western culture. This western culture is in essentials derived from the lower man.

I must again and again emphasise that there is no question of appraisal in what I am now saying; it is merely a statement of the course of history. I am certainly not trying to point out that the upper man is estimable and the lower man less estimable. The one is an absorption into the world, the other is not. And it does not help to introduce sympathy and antipathy, for then one does not reach objective knowledge. Anyone who wishes to understand what is contained in the Veda culture, the Yoga culture, must start from an understanding of these things, and must take this direction (see diagram, upper man). And whoever wishes to understand what is really to be found in its first beginnings, what has to be more and more developed for certain kinds of human relationships, what indeed in the nineteenth century has already reached a certain climax, has to know that it is particularly the lower man that is trying to emerge there, and that this emergence of the lower man is especially characteristic of the Anglo-American nature, of western culture.

A spirit specially representative of the rise of this culture is Lord Bacon of Verulam. In his Novum Organum, for instance, he makes statements—statements very easily misunderstood—that at bottom can have meaning only for superficial people. And yet what he says is extraordinarily characteristic. Bacon is in a certain respect both ill-informed and foolish, for as soon as he begins to speak of ancient cultures he talks nonsense; he knows nothing about them. That he is superficial can be demonstrated from his own writings. For instance, where he speaks about warmth—he is an empiricist—he gathers together everything that can be said about warmth, but one sees that he gets it all from notes of experiments. What he has to say about warmth, he did not find out for himself, but it has been pieced together by a clerk, a copyist, for it is a frightfully careless piece of work. Nevertheless Bacon is a milestone in modern evolution. One may dismiss his personality as of no interest, but yet through all his ineptitude and through all the rubbish that he again and again gives out, something continually gets through that is characteristic of the emergence of a culture that corresponds with what I have described here (see diagram, lower man). And humanity will not be able to emerge from the poverty of soul in which it is now living if it does not grasp that—for reasons which previous lectures will have made sufficiently clear—it was possible to live with the culture of the upper man, but it will not be possible to live with the culture of the lower man. For after all, man brings his soul with him into each new incarnation, a soul which has unconscious memories of earlier lives on earth. Man is ever and again urged towards what he has outlived. To-day he often does not know what it is that he is being driven towards. This urge consists in a vague longing; it is sometimes quite indefinable, but it is there. And it is there above all because one comes gradually to regard what belongs to this sphere (see diagram, lower man) as something objective, since it can be grasped in terms of laws. All that exists of a more traditional nature, and belongs to this sphere (see diagram, upper man) has, as regards its real nature, faded away into belief. And although people are at a loss how to attribute real existence to this moral content of the soul, and turn to faith as the only support for knowing anything about it, nevertheless they try to cling to it.

But, my dear friends, it is not possible for humanity nowadays to go on living with this cleavage in the soul. One can still argue that the evangelical antithesis, the opposition between faith and knowledge which has been elaborated particularly in the evangelical denominations, can be maintained as a theory; but it cannot be applied to life, one cannot live by it. Life itself gives the lie to such an antithesis. The way must be found to assimilate morality with that to which we ascribe real being, otherwise we shall always come to the point of saying: Natural necessity provides us with ideas about the beginning and the end of the earth; but when the end decreed by the scientists has arrived, what is to become of everything to which we ascribe human worth, of all that man attains inwardly, morally ... as to what is to become of that, how it is to be rescued from the perishing earth, all this has to be left to faith!

And it is interesting to note that it is just from this standpoint that Anthroposophy is attacked. Perhaps at this point I may be allowed to mention this attack, because it is typical; it does not emanate from one person, but from a number of people. They find that Anthroposophy claims to have a content of knowledge, and thus can be treated like scientific knowledge. Simpletons say of course that its content cannot be compared with scientific knowledge, that it is something else—well, that is self-evident, there is no need to mention it; but it can be treated in the same way as natural scientific knowledge. Many people also say that one cannot prove it. Those people have never made themselves acquainted with the nature of logical proof. But the main point is that people say that the things of which Anthroposophy treats ought not to be the objects of knowledge, for this would deprive them of their essential character. They must be objects of faith. For it is only in the fact that we know nothing of God, of eternal life, but only believe in these things, that their true value lies. And indeed such knowledge is assailed on the ground that it will undermine the religious character of these truths; for their sacredness is said to lie in the very fact that in them we believe something about which we know nothing. The very expression of our trust lies in our ignorance. I should very much like to know how men would get on with such a concept of trust in everyday life, if they had to have the same trust in those about whom they knew nothing as in those of whom they knew something ... at that rate one should no longer trust the divine spiritual powers when one gets to know them! Thus the essence of religion is supposed to consist in the fact that one does not know it, for the holiness of religious truths suffers injury when one converts those truths into knowledge.

That is what it comes to. If one pays any attention to the worthless scribbling that goes on, then every week one sees in print things that are reduced to nonsense if one analyses them into their original elementary constituents. To-day one must not ignore these things. I must again and again stress this, and I do not hesitate to repeat myself. For instance, when a respectable newspaper in Wurttemburg publishes an essay on Anthroposophy by a university lecturer who writes, “This Anthroposophy maintains that there is a spiritual world in which the spiritual beings move about like tables and chairs in physical space,” when a university don to-day is able to write such a sentence, we must leave no stone unturned to discredit him; he is impossible: nonsense in responsible quarters must not be allowed to pass. It is only when anyone is drunk that he sees tables and chairs move, and then only subjectively. And since Professor T. would neither admit that he was drunk when he wrote his authoritative article, nor that he was a spiritualist—for tables and chairs do move for spiritualists, even if not of themselves—then one is justified in saying that here we have an example of the most thoughtless nonsense. And by having written such nonsense, the Professor undermines confidence in all his knowledge.

To-day we must make it our bounden duty to treat such things with the utmost severity. And we shall become more and more entangled in the forces of decadence if we do not maintain this severity. We meet with utterly incredible things to-day, and the most incredible things get by, since we perpetually find excuse after excuse for the trickeries that are committed in so-called authoritative circles. To-day it is absolutely necessary to lay stress upon the importance of reaching clear ideas, full of content, in every sphere. And if one does this, then the doctrine of the separation between knowledge and faith cannot be maintained, for then it would be reduced to what I have just now pointed out.

But this distinction between knowledge and belief is something that has been brought about only in the course of history. It has come about partly for reasons which I have already mentioned, partly on account of something else. Above all, the following must be taken into consideration. To begin with, there is what came about in western Christianity in the first Christian centuries through the fusing of the Gnosis with the monotheistic Gospel teaching, and then there is the fusing of Christianity with the Aristotelianism that arose in the time of the Schoolmen—certainly in a highly intelligent way, but nevertheless merely as historical recollection. And this doctrine, the doctrine of the uniform origin of both body and soul through birth or conception, is a thoroughly Aristotelian doctrine. With the casting off of the old spirituality, with the emergence of pure intellectuality, Aristotle had already been divested of the notion of pre-existence, the notion of the life of the human soul before birth, before conception. This denial of the doctrine of pre-existence is not Christian; it is Aristotelian. It first became a dogmatic fetter through the introduction of Aristotelianism into Christian theology.

But at this point an important question arises—a question which can be answered to some extent from the substance of the lectures I have given here in recent weeks. If you remember much of what I have lately been saying, you will have come to the conclusion that the materialism of the nineteenth century is in a certain sense not wholly unjustified (I have repeatedly stressed this). Why! Because what confronts us in the human being, in so far as he is a physical-material being, is an image, a reproduction, of his spiritual evolution since his last death. What develops here between birth and death is not in fact the pure soul-spiritual; it is the soul-physical, a copy. Out of man's experiences between birth and death there is no possibility of acquiring a scientific conception of life after death. There is nothing which offers a possible proof of immortality, if one looks merely at the life between birth and death.

But traditional Christianity does look only at this life between birth and death, for it regards the soul as well as the body as having been created at the time of birth or conception. This viewpoint makes it impossible to acquire knowledge about life after death. Unless one accepts the existence of life before birth, knowledge of which can, as you know, be acquired, one can never obtain knowledge of life after death. Hence the cleavage between knowledge and belief as regards the question of immortality arises from the dogma which denies the life before birth. It was because men wanted to drop the knowledge of pre-natal life that it became necessary to postulate a special certitude of faith. For if, whilst denying pre-natal life, one still wishes to speak of a life after death, then one cannot speak of it as scientific knowledge.

You see how systematically ordered the dogmatic structure is. Its purpose is to spread darkness among mankind about spiritual science. How can that be done? On the one hand by attacking the doctrine of life before birth ... then there can be no knowledge about life after death, then men have to believe it on the basis of dogma. The fight for belief in dogma is waged by fighting against knowledge of life before birth.

The way dogma has developed since the fourth century A.D., and the way modern scientific notions have developed without interruption out of dogma—it is all extraordinarily systematic! For all these scientific ideas can be traced back to their origin in dogma, only they are now applied to the observation of external nature, and it can be shown how thereby the way has been paved for man's dependence upon mere belief. Because man will have some relationship to immortality, he is deprived of his knowledge—for he has been deprived of it—and then he is open to dogmatic belief. Then dogmatic belief can seek out its kingdom.

This is at the same time a social question, a question relevant to the evolution of humanity, a question that has to be clearly faced to-day. And it is the crucial test, not only of the value of modern culture, but also of the value of the modern scientific spirit, and of humanity's prospects of recovering the strength to rise, to climb up again.

In these two final lectures I shall try to deal with as many as possible of the questions before us. In a preliminary outline, such as has been offered in this series, the main purpose is to learn more accurately, in the way that can be given by Spiritual Science, the path taken within the human organism by substances external to man, and also their counter-effects. If we have a complete bird's eye view, as it were, of the way in which any substance operates, we have at the same time an indication of its therapeutic value, and can use our own judgment. To use individual judgment is far better than to keep to prescriptions which say that is for this and the other for that. On this occasion, I shall again start from something apparently remote, in order to reach something very near to us all. Among the written questions put to me, one continually reappears, and it must, of course, be of interest to you all—the question of heredity in general. Both in judging healthy—or at least relatively healthy—persons and the sick, it plays an extremely important part.

In the materialistic biology of the present day this heredity is only studied in a very abstract manner. Certainly it is not studied in such a way as to provide much practical use in life. But if we give it earnest and careful study, we shall find it remarkable (at least to the exoteric student, whereas the esoterist knows it as an obvious law) that all that mankind needs to know about the world and its relations, reveals itself somewhere in an externally visible form. There is always something that reveals externally those secret but—for mankind—most effective forces of nature. And if we investigate heredity we must keep that very specially in mind for on the other hand all the factors associated with heredity are continually confused and concealed by illusions, so that sound judgment becomes most difficult. If a judgment is formed on a question of heredity, there are always other phenomena to which it does not apply. For indeed, the facts of heredity are wrapped in the most powerful illusions which spring from the character of its law. But the very nature of this law implies that its regularity does not always become obvious. The manifestations of heredity follow a pattern of law, but one very hard to regulate. Just as the horizontal position of the arms of a balance depends on a special law, but is upset by adding to the weight of one side or the other, so that the law is difficult to regulate—so is it also, we may say, with the operation of heredity. It is a similar to that of the horizontal tendency of the scales; but it is sealed through a wide range of varying manifestations. This is due to the fact that always in heredity different elements, male and female, play their parts. The male always transmits what man owes to earthly existence, what he owes to earth-forces; whereas the female organism is more apt to transmit the cosmic influence from beyond the earth. We might express this difference as follows. Earth makes continual demands on the man; the earth organises his forces. Earth is the cause from which the male sexuality originates. On woman the heavens, as it were, make continual demands; they cause her shape, and prevail in all the internal processes of her organisation. This contrast may remind you of something already touched upon in these discussions. Now there follows this result; suppose a female being comes into existence through conception, and develops; it is inclined to become more and more attuned to the extra-terrestrial processes, to be taken up as it were by the heavens. If a male being develops it becomes more and more inclined to be taken hold of by the earth. Thus heavens and earth actually co-operate, for neither acts exclusively nor on one sex alone, but in the female the arm of the scale rises towards the heavens and in the male it inclines to the terrestrial. It is a strict law but is subject to variation, and hence arises the following result. In woman, the organism includes internal tendencies which wage permanent contest with the terrestrial elements. But the strange thing is that this only holds good with regard to her own individual organism, and not in the terms of life and the seed. This contest between cosmic and telluric forces is restricted in woman to all the processes apart from the formation of the ovule, that is to say from the organs which serve the functions of reproduction. Thus woman continually withdraws her organisation from the inherent forces of reproduction; the organs surrounding the reproductive tract are continually kept back. And we might say that there is a tendency to transmit through the male what is contained in the reproductive forces and can therefore be inherited. In woman there is a tendency to withdraw from this heredity—and concurrently in her own oogenous powers there is the stronger tendency of inheritance.

So we must ask how the human community can counteract the destructive forces of heredity? For we know, do we not, that heredity finds no barrier between the spiritual and the physical. For instance, in families subject to mental disorders, these may alternate in successive generations with diabetes; there is thus a metamorphosis which swings to and fro. Therefore it is a matter of immense urgency to find out how to shield mankind from the ravages of heredity. The chief preventative measure is first and foremost to do everything to preserve and improve the health of women, for in that case, the extra-telluric influence is drawn more actively into our earth process, and those processes which work continuously to transmit the harmful influences of heredity through the germ, can be combatted through the maternal organism. Thus a community which gives thought and care to the health of their women, wages war against the harmful influence which springs from the earth-forces in heredity, by means of an appeal to the forces proceeding from outside the earth, and acting as a counterbalance. For these cosmic celestial forces have, as it were, their earthly accumulator solely in the organism of a woman. This is most important, and holds good for all forces of telluric and cosmic origin; it is universally true. It becomes conspicuously evident in the case of hæmophiliacs, of so-called “bleeders.” It would be well if there were less vague talk about heredity, and more study where concrete facts point unmistakably to its operation. Observe this as shown among “bleeders.” You will find a striking phenomenon, known to you all, and illustrating what I have just pointed out. In the family descent among hæmophiliacs bleeding itself only appears in males, but the transmission of the illness occurs only through females. A woman whose father was a hæmophiliac, though she does not exhibit the disease herself, is liable to bequeath it to her male descendants. She gets it because she is part of the family. The males, however, become bleeders. But if these marry women free from hæmophiliac descent, the disease is not transmitted.

If you analyse the aforesaid facts, you will find a striking concrete expression of my statements, and indeed the facts of hæmophilia are far clearer proofs than all the recent experiments by Weismann, etc., of what happens in heredity. And they are also important for the general judgment of the human bodily organisation; this organisation must be to some degree estimated in the light of that which is apt to influence it.

What is the actual basis of hæmophilia? This can in fact be detected by superficial consideration. The blood does not coagulate properly, so that the slightest external scratch or prick may cause the hæmophiliac to bleed to death; they may die from attacks of nose bleeding, or the extraction of a tooth, for what would lead to coagulation in other persons does not do so in the case of a hæmophiliac. So the blood of these persons must possess some constituent or quality, which counteracts the power of coagulation. If this quality exists in too potent a degree, it is not neutralised by the external forces which begin to work from outside when the blood coagulates. For coagulation of the blood is caused by forces working from outside. If the blood possesses a quality which does not allow these external forces to prevail, there is an excessive tendency to fluidity of the blood.

It is easy to detect that a strong tendency to excessive fluidity is connected with the whole formation of the human ego. And not superficially but deeply, and with that which manifests in the human ego as will, not with that which manifests as “Ideation.” The constitutional tendency to excessive fluidity in the human blood is associated with all that either strengthens or debilitates the human will. And there is a fine historical example which proves that certain of nature's secrets are accessible to a proper interpretation. Both history and science are aware of the Engadine case; you will probably know it—the case of those two young girls of the Engadine district who have furnished us with a light on some profound—and medically helpful—aspects of human nature. Both of these young women came of hæmophiliac stock, and both formed and kept the steadfast and courageous resolution to refrain from marriage. So they have their place in history as personal champions of the fight against hereditary hæmophilia.

Of course we must lay stress on the real core of this case. It is certainly not peculiar to all the girls in hæmophiliac families to withdraw in this way from propagation. For such a course of action a strong subjective will must be developed; just the kind of strong subjective will that operates in the ego, and not in the astral body. Such a peculiar will power must have distinguished both of those young women. They must have both had something in their egos, in their power of will, that was connected in some manner with the forces operative in bleeders. If such forces are augmented in a conscious way, this could be done more easily in such cases than in persons who are non-bleeders. A just estimate of this interaction leads us to look into the specific forces and properties of the blood and their interplay with the extra-human world. And in studying those properties of blood that are associated with the conscious will, we can learn something of the general connection between the human will and the forces external to man. Certain of these external forces have a particular inner kinship with the forces of the human will, a kinship based on the course of evolution for the very last to be separated out in the natural realm, has been all that is connected with the conscious will of mankind. That is the latest precipitation to emerge in the realm of nature.

Let us now study something in external nature which is among the creations by which nature framed mankind, and which shows by its inherent qualities its association with that formative process of humanity. A substance of that description has long been a subject of study, and there are great difficulties in surveying the results because it is hard to make the forces preserved by atavistic medicine into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries active still in the intellectual modern man. The substance thus studied was antimony and all that is linked with it. Antimony is a most remarkable substance; it has attracted the most profound attention from all who have had much to do with it, including the legendary Basilius Valentinus. Certain attributes of this substance will reveal the peculiar manner in which it is interwoven with the whole process of nature. Consider, for example, what is perhaps the least of antimony's attributes: its extraordinary affinity to other metals and other non-metallic substances, so that it often appears in combination with other substances, especially with sulphur compounds. Now we have already touched on the specific operation of sulphur in this respect and antimony tends to appear together with the sulphur compounds of other substances. This inclination of antimony shows how it is interwoven in the nature-process. Yet another quality is even more significant. Whenever possible, it forms sheafs of needle-shaped crystals. That is, its urge is along a straight line, outwards and away from the earth. Whenever antimony collects longitudinally, we behold the lines along which the forces of crystallisation are directed from outer space to the earth. For the formative forces in crystallisation which generally work in more regular patterns, produce in antimony the spear-shaped and sheaflike structures. In this way antimony reveals how it is inserted into the whole of nature. The characteristics of the smelting process also indicate antimony as revealing—or betraying—the forces of crystallisation. By means of the smelting process we can obtain antimony in a delicately fibrous form.

Then there is this further quality: if antimony is exposed to temperatures it can oxidize—burn in a peculiar manner. The white smoke that forms from it reveals a certain kinship to cold bodies and attaches itself to them. The well-known “flowers” of antimony produce something in which the force of crystallisation as it were discharges itself in contact with other bodies.

And the most remarkable of all antimonial properties, is its peculiar form of resistance to all the forces which I have grouped together as sub-terrestrial, in a certain sense; those forces that play through electricity and magnetism. Suppose that we treat antimony with electrolysis, bring it to the cathode, and touch the antimonial deposit on the cathode with a metal point—the antimony produces tiny explosions. This active resistance of antimony to electric processes—if the substance is given a little stimulus—is most characteristic and distinctive, revealing its real position in the whole process of nature, no other substance reveals its interactions so emphatically.

We can only interpret the lessons so graphically presented by that substance, on the supposition that the forces present in nature are working throughout, are in fact ubiquitous; and that if certain substances show their operation to a marked degree, it is because the forces are especially concentrated in those substances. What operates in antimony is present throughout nature; the antimonising power—if we may coin the term—is everywhere. It has also a regulative action in man, so that in normal conditions human beings draw the antimonising force from the extra-telluric sphere. That is to say, mankind draws from the cosmos what in concentrated form is manifested as antimony. In normal conditions man does not have recourse to the antimonising force as present on earth and in its specific concentrated form, but turns towards the external, extra-telluric antimonial force. So we must obviously ask: What is the extra-telluric form of this antimonising force?

Speaking in terms of the planets, it is the co-operation of Mercury, Venus and the Moon. If these three do not operate separately but together their action is not specifically of the nature of mercury, copper or silver; but is comparable with the action of antimony in the earth. And of course this can be and must be investigated, by observing and registering the effects of such constellations upon man—constellations, that is to say, in which the three forces of Moon, Mercury and Venus neutralise each other, through the aspects of opposition or square. If all three are in such an aspect of neutralisation, there is the precise interaction which in the case of antimony is laid hold of by the earth. In all the antimony in and on the earth, the same force is exerted from our planet itself, as is exerted by these three planetary bodies upon the earth.

Here it is necessary to warn against a mistake. The constitution the earth is such as to make it erroneous to refer piecemeal, so to speak, to such substances as antimony. All the antimony on the earth is a unity in the earth's structure, just as all the earth's stores of silver or of gold are unities. If you remove separate lumps of antimony from the earth, you are simply extracting or amputating a part of that antimonial body which is incorporated into the earth. We have now attempted to delineate all the perceptible effect of antimonial action: and here, as everywhere in nature, actions meet counteractions. This oscillation between action and reaction, is just what gives rise to bodily form.

Let us then look for those forces which act counter to the antimonial forces. They reveal themselves if we are able to detect that the antimonial forces act on man at the moment in which something presses outwards which is regulated while within him. It is these antimonial forces which are operative in the coagulation of the blood. Wherever the consistency of the bloodstream shows a tendency to coagulate the antimonising force is active. Wherever the blood tends to withdraw from coagulation the counteracting forces are at work. So that hæmophiliacs manifest the forces antagonistic to antimony curiously enough. And these anti-antimonising forces are identical with those for which I should like to coin the term “albuminising forces,” the albumen forming forces, which work in such a health-giving way—that they promote the formation of albumen. For, let us emphasise once more: the forces that hinder coagulation are the albuminising forces.

Thus we arrive at some knowledge of the relationships between the antimonising and albuminising forces in the human organism. In my belief, careful study of the interplay of these two processes would reap very important harvests of knowledge as regards disease and its cure. For what are the processes which form albumen—the albuminising processes? They are those by virtue of which all that is plastic and formative in nature is incorporated into the human or the animal organism, in order to supply its actual substance. And the antimonising forces are those which, working from the outside, so to speak, take the part of the artist, the sculptor, giving the substance which builds the organs its form.

Thus the antimonial forces have a certain kinship to the internal organising forces of the organs. Please take as a concrete example, one organ, the alimentary canal. It is of course internally organised. You are able to follow up its inner structure, without considering the purpose it serves, or the manner in which food stuffs are carried along it and worked upon. It is possible, that is to say, to separate in the abstract the internal processes of the organ and those that take place in working upon the substance introduced from outside. This is an important separation, for the processes are indeed different. In the organ itself, the antimonising force works in man. For man is actually antimony, if we disregard all the ingredients brought into him from the external world. Man himself is antimony. But the internal organic formative force must not be overloaded with the antimonising force in the normal course of life, for the effect would be excessively stimulating, in fact a form of poisoning. But, if strong stimulation is necessary, we may supply antimony to the organism—which normally must not be supplied. The effect of antimony owing to these peculiar properties, varies greatly according as it is applied from within or without. If it is administered from within it is necessary to dilute it so far as to make it absorbed by the upper bodily sphere of man. If you are thus able to introduce antimony into the upper sphere, it will have an amazing stimulant effect on disturbed organ formations and internal organic processes. Thus very fine potencies of antimony can be most useful in certain forms of typhus or typhoid.

In the other case the effect is somewhat different, and is achieved by using lower potencies of antimony externally, in ointments, salves, and so forth. There may be occasions when it is desirable to have recourse to higher potencies in external application; but as a general rule, external application will have their beneficial effect in lower potencies.

This remedial substance is an extremely useful remedy in many different directions. It is at work within the law of polarity just referred to, yet shows constant slight oscillations. Thence arises a rule that should not be disregarded. Antimony should be administered internally by preference, in the treatment of individuals of very strong will power, and externally by preference, in treating persons of weaker will. Here is a first line of differentiation. Antimony represents, within the mineral realm, a substance with an inner kinship to the human will; that is to say, as the human will becomes more conscious, it feels more inclined to call forth the counter-effects to antimonial action. Human will has a destructive effect on all the forces previously described, constituting the characteristic operation of antimony. On the other hand, all that builds up the human constitution under the influence of thought and especially of unconscious thought—including the still unconscious thought forces at work in the child—all these are supported by the antimonial forces; antimony is, as it were, their ally. Thus if antimony is introduced, by any route, into the human organism and is thus able to exert its own properties, it forms a strong phantom (scaffolding or network) within the body. The internal organic forces are thus stimulated, and there is nothing left for co-operation with the substances brought into the human organism. There follow fits of vomiting and diarrhœa—showing that the effect is confined to the organs, instead of including their surroundings. The same is true in the counteracting process. You will be able to counter injurious effects of antimony in yourself by the methods instinctively employed by people when they want to keep their own circulatory and rhythmic processes regular. They drink coffee, through which the rhythmic processes are made even and harmonious. Please note that I am stating a fact; I make no recommendation here, for it may be very harmful in other ways, to relieve the ego of the task of regulating these human rhythms. If man is not strong enough in his soul to regulate his rhythmic processes, then coffee can bring about a certain harmony. And so in cases of antimonial poisoning coffee acts in some degree an antidote, restoring the rhythms between the working of the inner organic forces and their surrounding. For there is a regular interplay through rhythm. Indeed the real reason for drinking coffee, is to establish a continuous regulation of rhythm between our internal organs and what is happening in their vicinity to the food-stuffs we have consumed.

From this point we are led to inquire into the albuminising processes. These are reinforced—that is to say, all those processes are reinforced that lie on the other side of the dividing line, where there is no longer the inner organising force of the organs, but where they unfold their external digestive activity. All the mechanical processes of the movement of the intestines, and of the other digestive activities, are closely interwoven with the albuminising forces, which are virtually the formative forces of albumen, i.e., the complementary polar opposites of the antimonising forces.

Now I must once more refer to something already dealt with. That is the instructive object of study—or subject, if you like—the shell formation of the oyster. To a somewhat less degree the same occurs in the calcareous secretion in the egg. What is the key to these phenomena? What precisely is an oyster shell and egg shell? It is a product that the oyster or the essential substance of the egg must eject, because were it retained it would kill them. This shell formation is necessary for the preservation of life. And so, when eating oysters, we consume that life process which is manifested externally in the formation of the shells. (I put the facts to you in these simple terms; if I sought to impress current science, more intricate and technical terms would of course be necessary.) In eating the oyster we eat this albuminising process, a process which is the antithesis to the antimonising process. Through its absorption we promote and stimulate all that leads in man to typhoid manifestations. The consumption of oysters is an extraordinarily interesting operation. It activates the formative force, that is the albuminising force, within the human abdomen. This relieves the head, drawing certain forces downwards, so that after eating oysters man feels much less burdened by the forces which tend to work in his head. Oysters empty the head, in a sense. And we have need of developing the albuminising forces continually, for we cannot let our head continually be charged with formative forces. But the habitual epicure in oysters exaggerates this, and strives at all costs for an empty head. By so doing, he increases the possibility of a downward eruption of certain forces towards the abdomen, as I have already described, that is to say he promotes the tendency in the lower organic sphere to diarrhœa and typhoid. And as you will readily perceive, such a condition demands antimonial treatment. There would be good results in stimulating the forces to which appeal must be made, if the typhlitic tendency is to be combated in its innermost stronghold, by administration of antimony externally and internally at the same time; especially rubbing with antimonial ointment and simultaneously taking by the mouth antimony in high potency. These would be mutually regulated and thus react beneficially on the typhlitic tendency.

Such are treatments that attempt to realise man within his whole universal surroundings. The significance of such a method is shown if you investigate man's relationships and reactions to such manifestations in nature as arise from a certain defensive resistance to the direct telluric forces. Plants are able to defend themselves against these direct telluric forces; they store up much of their formative power for their seasons of blossom and seed. Our most frequent type of plant structure, of which most edible plants are examples, is based on the employment of a definite amount of telluric power for the formation of the plant itself. If, however, the plant has a defensive attitude to these telluric forces, it becomes exposed to the extra-telluric forces, when the final processes of fructification and seed-formation ensue; and thus the plant becomes something with an urge to contemplate the world from the same point of vantage as the higher beings of the realms above the vegetable. The plant shows an urge to perceive. But the plant has no specialised structures for that purpose: it remains a plant, and yet it has the urge to develop something analogous to the formation of the human eye. But no eye can develop, in what is, after all, neither a human nor an animal body but the body of a plant. And so the plant becomes a deadly nightshade, Atropa Belladonna. I have tried to show by means of pictures what takes place in the emergence of the fruit of belladonna. That plant has already in its roots the force culminating in the growth of its black berries, and with this it becomes akin to all that urges in the human organism towards moulding the form and beyond. It urges towards things only possible in the sensory sphere, lifting man out of the world of his organisation into the sphere of the senses. A process of extraordinary interest occurs, if small potentised quantities of belladonna are administered. This is because it bears a striking resemblance to the process of awakening from sleep which is still interwoven with dreams. In such an awakening, interspersed with dreams, the process is within the limits of normality. In awakening, when perception has not yet begun but when sense perception is still inwardly potentised to the permeation of the consciousness with dreams, there is actually always a kind of deadly nightshade activity in man. And belladonna poisoning consists in the provocation of this same process that occurs when in awaking dreams still hold their sway; but the process called forth in man by belladonna poison is made lasting, not taken up into consciousness, but the transition phenomena remain. This is the interesting point, that the processes which are caused in man by toxic action, are of such a nature that at the right tempo they are part of the whole human organisation.

As I have already described, the birth of the belladonna means a frantic and excessive urge towards becoming man. And further it might be said that the awakening from sleep in man has something of the nature of an urge towards atropa belladonna: but an urge held in leash and tuned down: confined to the moment of waking. Now suppose you wish to relieve the body of the internal albuminising processes, influencing the organism so that the too powerful albuminising is retarded and the bodily event, so to speak, deflected towards the soul, so that the bodily processes become hallucinations—then give potentised doses of belladonna. Thus you will lift something into the soul, something of which you wish to relieve the body. This is the essence of what we meet in the usual macroscopic operation of belladonna—although here again full of perplexities and illusions, as I have already pointed out. Of course, if you give the human being a shock that prevents the normal passage over from the state of awakening to that of full waking consciousness, and makes permanent the transitional state—well, you kill him. For man is always in danger of death during that brief transition of awakening—but we awake so rapidly that we escape that peril. Such are the interesting inter-actions between what is accepted as normal, and is sound in measure and tempo, and what becomes anti-normal as soon as it exceeds that measure and tempo.

It seems to me that these were the processes that the physicians of old time sought ever and again to pursue. If they spoke of the creation of the Homunculus, they did so because their surviving clairvoyant faculties revealed something resembling the phantom of antimony. For there appeared to them, in the forming process which they carried out in their laboratory when antimony unfolded its forces, something projected into it by their own nature, which fights against the power of antimony as albuminising force. That appeared to them as a definite force. That which normally remains concealed within the human organism, they projected externally, and thus they beheld the Homunculus, who appeared during the various metamorphoses of antimony. What appeared in the interplay of these processes and metamorphoses they saw as the Homunculus.

We must emphasize again and again that the anthroposophical world-conception fosters a consciousness of the common source of art, religion and science. During ancient periods of evolution these three were not separated; they existed in unity. The Mysteries which fostered that unity were a kind of combination art institute, church and school. For what they offered was not a one-sided sole dependence upon language. The words uttered by the initiate as both cognition and spiritual revelation were supported and illustrated by sacred rituals unfolding, before listening spectators, in mighty pictures.

Thus alongside the enunciation of earthly knowledge, religious rituals imaged forth what could be divined and perceived as events and facts of the super-sensible worlds. Religion and cognition were one. Moreover, the beautiful, the artistic, had its place within the Mysteries; ritual and image, acting together, produced a high art. In other terms, the religiously-oriented rituals which fired man's will and the knowledge-bearing words which illumined him inwardly had, both, a strong ally in the beautiful, the artistic. Thus consciousness of the brotherly unity of religion, science and art must today be ever-present in anthroposophical world-research; an interlinkage brought about not artificially, but in a self-evident, natural way.

Modern intellectualistic-materialistic science tries to grasp the world in thoughts. As a result, certain ideas give conceptual form to the phenomena of nature and its creatures. We translate natural laws into thoughts. During the recent materialistic age it was characteristic of those preoccupied with cognition that they gradually lost artistic sensibility. Acceptance of modern science means yielding to dead thoughts and looking for them in nature. Natural history, that proud achievement of our science, consists of dead thoughts, corpses of what constituted our soul before we descended from super-sensible into sensory existence.

Anyone looking at the corpse of a human being can see by his form that he could not have achieved this state through any mere laws of nature as we know them; he had first to die. A living person became a corpse by dying. Similarly anyone with real cognition knows that his thoughts are corpses of that vital soul-being within which he lived before incarnation. Our earth-thoughts are actually corpses of our pre-earthly soul-life. And they are abstract precisely because they are corpses. As people during the last few centuries became more and more enamored of abstractions, of these thoughts which insinuated themselves into practical life, they came more and more to resemble them in their higher soul-life. Especially people with a scientific education. This estranged them from art. The more one surrenders to purely abstract thoughts, dead thoughts, the more one becomes a stranger to art. For art desires and is centered on the living.

A soul seriously occupied with anthroposophical cognition enters the opposite state. Whereas intellectuality approaches everything from the standpoint of logic, and tries to explain even the arts according to logical rules, in anthroposophical thinking there arises at a certain moment a great longing for art. For this different type of cognition leads to a realization that thoughts are not the whole living reality; something else is needed. Since the entire soul life now remains living instead of being killed by dead thoughts, one comes to need to experience the world artistically. For if one lives in abstract dead thoughts, art is only a luxury formed out of man's dreams and illusions; an addition to life. But—to repeat—the anthroposophical method of knowledge brings one to a realization that thoughts are not the living reality; they are dead gestures which merely point to that reality; and at a certain stage one feels that, to attain reality, one must begin to create; must pass over to art. Ideas alone simply cannot present the world in its rich full content. Thus Anthroposophy prepares the soul for artistic feeling and creating.

Abstract thoughts deaden artistic phantasy. Becoming more and more logical, one takes to writing commentaries on works of art. This is a terrible product of a materialistic age: scholars write commentaries on art. But these academic explanations, Faust commentaries, Hamlet commentaries, learned descriptions of the art of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, are coffins in which genuine artistic feeling, living art, lie buried. If one picks up a Faust or Hamlet commentary, it is like touching a corpse. Abstract thoughts have murdered the work of art.

Anthroposophy, on the other hand, tries to approach art out of the living spirit—as I did in speaking of Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. I did not write a commentary, I let the living lead me into the living. During an inartistic age there appear many scholarly treatises on art, works on aesthetics. They are non-art, counter-art. Savants may reply: To take hold of the world artistically is to move away from reality; it is not scientific; if reality is to be seized, phantasy has to be suppressed, imagination eliminated; one must confine oneself to the logical. This may be demanded. But consider: If reality, if nature herself were an artist, then it would be of no avail to demand that everything be grasped solely through logic; something vital in it would elude logical understanding. And nature is indeed an artist; a truth discovered by anthroposophical cognition at a certain point in its development. Therefore, in order to grasp nature, especially the highest in nature, man's physical form, one must cease to live exclusively in ideas and begin to “think” in pictures. No anatomy, no physiology, can ever grasp the physical human being in his forms. Understanding is achieved only by living cognition that has been given wings by artistic feeling.

Thus it was inevitable that the idea to build a Goetheanum flowed over into artistic creation. Anthroposophical ideas flowered into artistic forms. The same ideas manifested in a different manner. This is the way true art always develops in the world. Goethe who was able to feel artistically has coined the following beautiful words: “Art a manifestation of secret laws of nature which, without it, would remain forever hidden.” He felt what anthroposophists must feel. If one has attained to a cognitional comprehension of the world, there arises a vital need not just to continue forming ideas but to create artistically in sculpture, painting, music, poetry.

But then an unfortunate thing may happen. If one tries, as I tried in my four Mystery dramas, to present what cannot be expressed in ideas concerning the essential nature of man, there spring up sympathetic but not fully comprehending people who try to explain everything in ideas, who write commentaries. This—I repeat—is an appalling thing. It happens because the deadening element of abstract thought is often carried even into the anthroposophical movement. Actually, within this movement there should be a continual quickening of abstract thoughts. What can no longer be experienced intellectually can be enjoyed through living dramatic characters as they move before and confront us. Beholding them we let them act upon us as real figures instead of trying to explain them abstractly. Genuine Anthroposophy leads, inevitably, at a certain point, into art because, far from thought-killing, it inspires us; permits the artistic spring in the human soul to gush forth.

Then one is not tempted to form ideas symbolically or allegorically, but to let all ideas flow to a certain point and to follow the purely artistic form. Thus the Goetheanum architecture rose completely idea-less (if I may use that odd expression) as a result of feeling the forms out of the spirit. It should be seen, not explained. When I had the honor of conducting guests through the Goetheanum, I usually made introductory remarks something like this: “You naturally expect me to explain the building, but this is uncongenial. During the next half hour, while guiding you, I must do something I very much dislike, for the Goetheanum is here to be seen, not explained.” This I emphasized over and over, for the edifice standing there should live as image, not in abstract deadening thoughts. Explanations being unavoidable, I tried to make mine not abstract but imbued with the feelings embodied in the building's own forms, pictures, colors. One can be spiritual in forms, colors, tones, as well as words. Indeed, only then does one experience the really artistic. For here in our sense world art is always an influx of the super-sensible. We can perceive this truth in any work of art which presents itself in forms having their origin in human nature.

Take the art of architecture which, to a large degree, today serves utilitarian purposes. To understand architectural forms, one must feel the human form itself artistically. This is necessarily accompanied by a feeling that man has foresaken the spiritual worlds to which he rightfully belongs. A bear in its fur or a dog in its pelt shows itself well cared for by the universe; one senses a totality. If, on the other hand, one looks artistically at man, one realizes that, seen merely from the viewpoint of the senses, he lacks something. He has not received from the universe what the well-coated bear and dog received. In sense appearance he stands, as it were, naked to the world. The need is to see, by means of a purely artistic approach, man's physical body clothed by an imaginative-spiritual sheath.

Today, in architecture, this reality does not manifest clearly. But take the pinnacle reached by architecture when it created protective covers for the dead. As noted earlier, the monuments erected above graves at the starting point of architecture had great meaning. Primeval instinctive clairvoyance perceived that, after forsaking its physical body, its earthly prison, the naked soul shrinks from being released into cosmic space without first being enveloped by those forms by which it wants to be received. People held that the soul must not simply be turned loose into the chaotically interacting weather currents; they would tear it apart. The soul desires to expand into the universe through regular spatial forms. For this reason it must be surrounded by tomb-architecture. It cannot find its bearings in the storms of weather and wind which rush toward it; only in the artistic forms of the monument above the grave. Here paths into the cosmic reaches are formed. An enveloping sheath such as man, unlike plants and animals, never receives through sensory-natural elements, is given the soul out of the super-sensible.

Thus one can say: Originally architecture expressed the manner in which man wants to be received by the cosmos, In a house the forms should be similarly artistic. The planes, the lines: why are they there? Because the soul wishes to look out into space in those directions, and to be protected from inrushing light. If one considers the relation of the soul to the spatial universe, if one recognizes how that universe welcomes the soul of man, one arrives at the right architectural forms.

Fine architecture has a counterpart. When man leaves his physical body at death, his soul spreads into spatial forms. Architecture strives to reveal this relation of man to visible cosmic space. At birth he possesses an unconscious memory of his own pre-earthly existence. Modern man's consciousness retains nothing of this. But in unconscious feeling, especially when naively artistic, the down-plunging soul knows that previously it was quite different. And now it does not wish to be as it finds itself on dipping down into the body. It longs to be as it was before.

This desire shows up in primitive people. Because they feel artistically how they would prefer to live in their body, they first decorate and then clothe themselves, the colors of their garments displaying how they would—while in the body—present their souls. Corporeality does not suffice them, through color they would place themselves in the world in a way that harmonizes with what they feel themselves as souls. Whoever views with artistic sense the colorful clothes of primitive people sees a manifestation of the soul in space; and in like manner, in architectural forms, the disappearing of the soul into space. Here we have the impulses at work in two arts: architecture and costuming.

This art of costuming merges with the other arts. It is not without meaning that in ages with more artistic feeling than ours, say the Italian Renaissance, painters gave Mary Magdalene a color of gown different from that of Mary. Compare the yellow so often used in the robes of Mary Magdalene with the blue and red in those of Mary, and you see the soul-difference perceived by a painter living wholly in his medium.

We who love to dress grey in grey simply show the world the deceased image of our soul. In our age we not only think abstractly, we dress abstractly. And (this is said parenthetically) if we do not dress abstractly, then we show in the way we combine colors how little we retain the living thinking of the realms through which we passed before descending to earth. If we do not dress abstractly, we dress without taste. In our civilization it is precisely the artistic element that needs improvement. Man must again place himself vitally-artistically into the world: must perceive the whole cosmic being and life artistically. It will not suffice to use the well-known apparatus of research institutes for determining the angle of a face and measuring abstractly racial peculiarities; we must recognize the form through a sensitive qualitative immersion in the human being.

Then in a marvelous way we shall recognize in the human head, in its arching of forehead and crown, a copy—not just as allegory but inward reality—of the heavenly dome dynamically overarching us. An image of the universe is shaped by forehead and upper head. Similarly, an image of our experience in circling the sun, in turning round it with our planet in a horizontal circling, this participation in cosmic movement is felt artistically in the formation of nose and eyes. Imagine: the repose of the fixed stars shows in the tranquil vault of brow and upper head; planetary circling in the mobile gaze of the eye, and in what is inwardly experienced through nose and smell. As for the mouth and chin of man, we have here an image of what leads deeply into his inner nature. The mouth with the chin represents the whole human being as he lives with his soul in his body. To repeat, the human head mirrors the universe artistically. In forehead and the arching crown of the head we see the still vault of the heavens; in eye, nose and upper lip, planetary movement; in mouth and chin, a resting within oneself.

If all this is beheld as living image, it does not remain in the head as abstraction. If we really feel what I have just described, then a certain sensation arises and we say to ourselves: you were quite a clever man who had pretty ideas, but now, suddenly, your head becomes empty; you cannot think at all; you feel the true significance of forehead, crown, eye, nose, upper lip, mouth, lower lip, even while thoughts forsake you. Now the rest of man becomes active. Arms and fingers begin to act as tools of thinking. But thoughts live in forms. It is thus that a sculptor comes into being.

If a person would become a sculptor, his head must cease to think. It is the most dreadful thing for a sculptor to think with his head. It is nonsense; impossible. The head must be able to rest, to remain empty; arms and hands must begin to shape the world in images. Especially if the human image is to be recreated, the form must stream out of the fingers. Then one begins to understand why the Greeks with their splendid artistry formed the upper part of Athene's head by raising a helmet which is actually part of that head. Her helmet gives expression to the shaping force of the reposing universe. And one understands how, in the extraordinary shaping of the nose, in the way the nose joins the forehead in Greek profiles, in the whole structure, the Greeks expressed a participation in circling cosmic motion.

Oh, it is glorious to feel, in the artistic presentation of a Greek head, how the Greeks became sculptors. It is thus a spiritual sensing and beholding of the world, rather than cerebral thinking, which leads to art, and which receives an impulse from Anthroposophy. For the latter says to itself: There is something in the world which cannot be tackled by thought; to enter it at all you must start to become an artist. Then materialistic-intellectualistic scholarship appears like a man who walks around things externally and describes them logically, but still only skirts them from outside, whereas the anthroposophical way of thinking demands that he immerse himself in the not-himself, and recreate, with living formative force, what the cosmos created first.

Thus gradually one realizes the following: If as anthroposophist you acquire a real understanding of the physical body which falls away from cosmic space-forms to become a corpse, if you acquire an understanding of the way the soul wishes to be received by spatial forms after death, you become an architect. If you understand the soul's intention of placing itself into space with the unconscious memories of pre-earthly life, then you become an artist of costuming: the other pole from the architectural.

One becomes a sculptor if one feels one's way livingly into the human form as it is shaped by and emerges from the cosmos. If one understands the physical body in all its aspects one becomes, artistically, an architect. If one really grasps the etheric or formative-force body (as it is called in Anthroposophy) in its inner vitality, in its living and weaving, in the way it arches the forehead, models the nose, lets the mouth recede, one becomes a sculptor. The sculptor does nothing more nor less than imitate the form of the etheric body.

If now one looks at soul-life in all its weaving and living, then the manifold world of color becomes a universe; then one gradually acquaints oneself with an “astral” experience of the world. What manifests in color becomes a revelation of the realm of soul.

Let us look at the greenness of plants. We cannot consider this color a subjective experience, cannot think of vibrations as causing the colors, the way a physicist does, for if we do so we lose the plant. These are abstractions. In truth we cannot imagine the plants in a living way without the green. The plant produces the green out of itself. But how? Embedded in it are dead earth-substances thoroughly enlivened. In the plant are iron, carbon, silicic acid, all kinds of earth-substances found, also, in minerals. But in the plant they are woven through and through with life. In observing how life works its way through dead particles to create thereby the plant image, we recognize green as the dead image of life. Everywhere that we look into green surroundings we perceive, not life itself, but its image. In other words, we perceive plants through the fact that they contain dead substances; this is why they are green. That color is the dead image of life ruling on earth. Green is thus a kind of cosmic word proclaiming how life weaves and has its being in plants.

Now look at man. The color which comes closest to a healthy human flesh color is that of fresh peach blossoms in spring. No other color in nature so resembles this skin color, this flush. The inner health of man comes to expression in this peach-blossom-like color; and in it we can learn to apprehend the vital health of man when properly endowed by soul. If the flesh color tends toward green, he is sickly; his soul cannot find right access to his physical body. On the other hand, if the soul in egotistical fashion takes hold of the physical body too strongly, as in the case of a miser, the human being becomes pallid, whitish; also if the soul experiences fear. Between whitish and greenish tones lies the healthy vital peach-blossom flesh-tint. And just as we sense in green the dead image of life, so we can feel in the peach-blossom color of the healthy human being the living image of the soul.

Now the world of color comes to life. The living, through the dead, creates the picture green. The soul forms its own image on the human skin in the peach-blossom-like shade.

Let us look further. The sun appears whitish, and we feel that this whitish color is closely related to light. If we wake in pitch darkness, we know that this is not an environment in which we can fully experience our ego. For that we need light between us and objects; need light between us and the wall, for instance, to allow the wall to act on us from the distance. Then our sense of self is kindled. To repeat: if we wake in light, in what has a relation to white, we feel our ego; if we wake in darkness, in what is related to black, we feel strange in the world. Though I say “light,” I could just as well take another sense impression. You may find a certain contradiction because those born blind never see light. But the important matter is not whether or not we see light directly; it is how we are organized. Even if born blind, man is organized for the light, and the hindrance to ego energy present in the blind is so through absence of light. White is akin to light. If we experience light-resembling white in such a way that we feel how it kindles the ego in space by endowing it with inner strength, then we may express living, not abstract, thought by saying: White is the soul-appearance of spirit.

Now let us take black. When our spirit encounters darkness on waking, we feel paralyzed, deadened. Black is felt as the spiritual image of death.

Imagine living in colors. You experience the world as color and light if you experience green as the dead image of life; peach-blossom color, human flesh-color, as the living image of the soul; white as the soul-image of spirit; black as the spiritual image of death. In saying this I describe a circle. For just note what I said: Green, dead image of the living—it stops at “living.” Peach-blossom color, flesh-color, living image of the soul—it stops at “soul.” White, soul-image of the spirit—having started with soul I rise to the spirit. Black, spiritual image of death—I start with spirit and rise to death; but have at the same time returned, since green was the dead image of life. Returning to what is dead I close the circle. If I drew it on a blackboard you would see that this living weaving in color (in the next lecture I shall speak of blue) becomes a real artistic experience of the astral element in the world.

If one has this artistic experience, if death, life, soul and spirit show forth, as it were, in the wheel of life as one passes from the dead back to the dead through life, soul, spirit; if death, life, soul and spirit appear through light and color as described, then one realizes that one cannot remain in three-dimensional space, one must adopt the plane surface; solve the riddle of space on the plane; lose the space concept.

Just, as sculptors, we abandoned head thinking, so now we lose the concept of space. When everything wants to change into light and color we become painters. The very source of painting opens up. With great inner joy we lay one color alongside another. Colors become revelations of life, death, soul, spirit. By overcoming dead thought we attain to the point where we no longer feel impelled to speak in words, no longer to think in ideas, no longer to mould in forms, but use color and light to represent life and death, spirit and soul, as they have their being in the universe.

In this way Anthroposophy stimulates creation; instead of weaning us away from life as does abstract, idealistic-empirical cognition, it gives us back to life.

But so far we have remained outside man, considering his surface: his healthy peach-blossom tones, his pale-whitish color when his spirit plunges too deeply into the physical body, and his greenish shade when, because of sickness, his soul cannot fill that body. We have remained on the surface.

If we now enter man's inner nature, we find something set against the external world-configuration: a marvelous harmony between the breath rhythm and blood rhythm. The rhythm of breathing—a normal human being breathes eighteen times per minute—is transferred to man's nerves, becomes motion. Physiology knows very little about this process. The rhythm of breathing is contained, in a delicate psycho-spiritual manner, in the nerve system.

As for the blood rhythm, it originates in the metabolic system. In a normal adult, four pulse beats correspond to one breath rhythm; seventy-two pulse beats per minute. What lives in the blood, that is, the ego, the sunlike nature in man, plays upon the breathing system and, through it, upon the nervous system. If one looks into the human eye, one finds there some extremely fine ramifications of blood vessels. Here the blood pulsation meets the currents of the visual nerve spread through the eye. A marvelously artistic process takes place when the blood circulation plays upon a visual nerve that moves four times more slowly.

Now look at the spinal cord, its nerves extending in all directions, observe the blood vessels, and become aware of an inward playing of the whole sun-implanted blood system upon the earth-given nervous system. The Greeks with their artistic natures were aware of this interrelation. They saw the sun-like in man, the playing of the blood system upon the nervous system, as the God Apollo; and the spinal cord with its wonderful ramification of strings, upon which the sun principle plays, as Apollo's lyre.

Just as we meet architecture, sculpture, the art of costuming and painting when we approach man from the external world, so we meet music, rhythm, beat, when we approach the inner man and trace the marvelous artistic forming and stirring which take place between blood and nerve system.

Compared to external music, that performed between blood and nerve system in the human organism is of far greater sublimity. And when it is metamorphosed into poetry, one can feel how, in the word, this inward music is again released outward. Take the Greek hexameter with its initial three long syllables followed by a caesura, and how the blood places the four syllable lengths into the breath. To scan the first half of an hexameter line properly is to indicate how our blood meets, impinges on, the nervous system.

In relation to declamation and recitation, we must try to solve the riddle of the divine artist in man. I shall consider this more explicitly in the next lecture. But, having studied man's nature from without through architecture, sculpture and painting, we now penetrate into his inner nature and arrive at the arts of music and poetry; a living comprehension of world and man passes over into artistic feeling and the stimulus to artistic creation.

If at this point man feels that here on earth he does not fulfil what lies in his archetype, with its abode in the heavens, then there arises in him an artistic longing for some outer image of that archetype. Whereupon he can gain the power to become an instrument for bringing to expression the true relation of man to the world by becoming a eurythmist. The eurythmist says: All the movements which I ordinarily carry out here on earth do less then justice to the mobile archetype of man. To present the ideal human archetype I must begin by finding a way to insert myself into its motions. These motions, through which man endeavors to imitate in space the movements of his heavenly archetype, constitute eurythmy. Therefore it is not just mimicry, nor mere dancing, but stands midway between. Mimic art is chiefly a support for the spoken word. If the need is to express something for which words do not suffice, man supplements word with gesture; thus arises mimic art. It expresses the insufficiency of the words standing alone. Mimic art is indicative gesture.

The art of dancing arises when language is forgotten altogether, when the will manifests so strongly it forces the soul to surrender and follow the movement-suggesting body. The art of the dance is sweeping ecstatic gesture.

We may say: mimic art is indicative gesture; art of dance, sweeping ecstatic gesture. Between the two stands the visible speech of eurythmy which is neither indicative nor sweeping but expressive gesture, just as the word itself is expressive gesture. For a word is really a gesture in air. When we form a word, our mouth presses the air into a certain invisible gesture, imbued with thought, which, by causing vibrations, bejcomes audible. Whoever is able with sensory-supersensory vision to observe what is formed by the speaking mouth sees, in air, the invisible gestures being made there as words. If one imitates these gestures with the whole body, one has eurythmy, an expressive visible gesture. Eurythmy is the transformation of an air gesture into a visible expressive gesture of the limbs.

I shall touch on all this in my coming lecture on Anthroposophy and poetry. Today I wished chiefly to indicate how anthroposophical, in contrast to intellectualistic-materialistic, knowledge does not kill with its thoughts; does not turn a person into a commentator on art who thereby buries it, but, rather, causes an artistic spring, a fountain of phantasy, to well up. Turns him into an enjoyer or creator of art; verifies what must be emphasized over and over again, namely, that art, religion and science are sisters who once upon a time became estranged, but who must again enter into a sisterly relationship if man is to function as a complete human being. Thus scholars will cease haughtily to acknowledge a work of art only if they can write a commentary on it and otherwise reject it, but will say: What I interpret as thought engenders a need to fashion it artistically by means of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry.

Goethe's saying that art is a kind of knowledge is true, because all other forms of knowledge, taken together, do not constitute a complete world knowledge. Art—creativity—must be added to what is known abstractly if we are to attain to world knowledge. This union of art and science will produce a religious mood. Because our Dornach building strove for this balance, friends of nationalities other than German petitioned to call it the “Goetheanum,” for it was Goethe who said:

Who possesses science and art
Possesses religion as well;
Who possesses the first two not,
O grant him religion.

For if true art and true science flow together livingly, the result is a religious life. Conversely religion, far from denying science or art, must strive toward both with all possible energy and vitality.

We have seen how out of the Mysteries has grown that which has bound the consciousness of man so closely to the universe that this bond found expression in the annual round of festivals, and we have seen especially how the Festival of Easter has evolved out of the principle of Initiation. From all that has been said, you must have been struck by the great importance of the part played by the Mysteries in the development of mankind.

Everything spiritual that passed through the world in ancient times, by which men were able to develop, did in fact have its rise out of the whole life and content of the Mysteries (Mysterienwesen). Making use of a modern expression, one might say: the Mysteries had a great deal of power in respect of the guidance of all spiritual life.

Now humanity was ordained from the beginning to develop freedom. That this might develop, it was necessary that the life of the Mysteries should decline, so for a long time men were not so closely associated with the powerful guidance coming from the Mysteries and were left more to themselves.

It is very certain we cannot yet say that the time has come when men have attained true inner freedom, that they are now sufficiently ripe to pass on to the next age following the one in which freedom has been gained. Truly we are unable to say this. All the same, there are a sufficient number who have gone through incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was less apparent than formerly; and if to-day the seed of their passage through these incarnations has not yet germinated, still it is there—it is implanted in the souls of men. And as an age is now approaching which will be again an age of greater spirituality, men must begin to develop what in their present state of dullness they have not yet developed. Without appreciation, without reverence and true knowledge, a spiritual life is really not possible. We make a right use of these festival seasons when we employ them to develop, and to some small extent to implant in our souls, this feeling of appreciation and reverence for what is spiritual that has evolved in the course of human history; when we endeavour to learn as intimately as possible how and why external historical events point to spiritual facts, and carry over what is spiritual from one age into another. This is mainly possible because men come again and again into earthly existence in recurring earthly lives, and therefore carry with them into later epochs what they had experienced in earlier ones. Men are the most important factors in the further development of human history. In every age they live in a definite surrounding or atmosphere (Umgebung), and one of the most important of these was that of the Mysteries. Thus one of the most important agents in human progress is the power to carry over what was experienced in the Mysteries and to live this again, whether it be in the Mysteries themselves, where it works into humanity at large, or simply as cognition or knowledge. To-day this must be in some form of conscious knowledge (Erkennen), for the true life of the Mysteries (Mysterienwesen) has withdrawn more or less from the external life of to-day and must come forth into it again.

We are here constrained to say: It is indeed the case that if that impulse which went forth from the Christmas session here at the GStheanum really enters into the life of the Anthroposophical Society, this society, by pressing onwards to ever greater depths of knowledge, can provide the foundation of a further “living content of the Mysteries” (Mysterienwesen). This must be nurtured consciously within the Anthroposophical Society. For this society has experienced an event that can be utilized in evolution in the same way as a similar event was once utilized: the burning of the temple at Ephesus. Both there and here a great wrong lies at the root of what was done. Things present, however, different aspects on different levels, and what at one level is a dreadful wrong, may be used in accordance with human freedom in such a way that real human progress can be achieved through it.

If we are to enter into such matters with understanding we must grasp them, as I have already said, in as intimate a way as possible. We must study the special way in which the spiritual things of the world were cultivated in the Mysteries. I indicated in the last lecture how out of the spiritual observation of the constellations of the sun and moon, as practised in the Mysteries, the fixing of the annual festival of Easter was determined; further, that the other planets were regarded from the point of view of the moon. I said that according to what was experienced in the observation of the other planets a man was guided at his descent from pre-earthly to earthly existence, that his luminous etheric body was constructed in accordance with what was then seen.

Now if anyone desires to gain some comprehension of how through the forces of the moon—or rather through the spiritual observations by the moon—these etheric forces are transmitted to man, this can be done, as we have tried to do, from observation of the cosmos itself, where it is inscribed, where it exists as fact.

But it is most important that the human interest, which throughout the ages has been felt in these truths, should be permitted to influence the soul. Never did the souls and minds of men take so much interest in the descent of the soul from pre-earthly existence, never was so intimate an interest felt in the last stage of this descent, in man's clothing of himself with the etheric body, as in the Mysteries of Ephesus.

In the Mysteries of Ephesus the whole ritual practised by the goddess of Ephesus, who is named esoterically Artemis, was really directed towards participating in the spiritual blending and interweaving of life in the ether of the universe—in the cosmic ether.

We can venture to say that, when those taking part in the Mystery of Ephesus approached the image of the goddess, an enhancement of perception occurred which amounted to hearing, and what was heard might be given in the words of the goddess somewhat as follows: “I rejoice in all that is fruitful within the wide-spreading universal ether.” This expression of inward joy on the part of the goddess exercised a very profound influence on all growing, blossoming life in the universal ether. And feelings inwardly connected with this springing life breathed like a magic sigh through the spiritual atmosphere of the sacred precincts of the temple of Ephesus.

All the arrangements at this centre of the Mysteries were so directed as to enable people to say: Nowhere but at Ephesus is there so close a union with the growth of living plants, with this sprouting and springing of the being of plants from the earth. This led to the fact that within those Mysteries especially clear instructions were given concerning those secrets of the moon of which I spoke in the last lecture, and which were for the special purpose of bringing an understanding of such things to the souls of those who were adherents of the Ephesian Mysteries.

To feel himself as a light-form was an individual experience to each of these Ephesian pupils and initiates, for it was a real and living fact to them that their light-forms came to them through the moon. The instruction they received was somewhat as follows:

Those able to let the instructions they received in the places of consecration work on them were entirely taken up with this self-construction out of Sunlight that came to them, though changed, by way of the moon. They then heard as if coming to them from the sun the tones: J O A.

They knew that these tones, J O A, stimulated their ego and their astral body. J O equalled the I (ego) and astral body, and they perceived the approach of the Etheric-Light-Body in the A, forming together J O A. When these tones vibrated within the pupil for initiation he was conscious of his ego, of his astral body and etheric body.

Then it was as if there rang forth from the earth (for the man was now entered into cosmic conditions) something which enforced the J O A, making of it eh v, J_ehO_vA. It was the forces of the earth that revealed themselves in the eh v.

The pupil now felt his whole human being in the J_ehO_vA. He felt a premonition of the physical body as it was first on earth in the consonants which accompanied the vocalization, which in the J O A indicated the ego, the astral body, and the etheric body. It was the experiencing of himself in the J_ehO_vA that enabled the pupil of the Ephesian Mysteries to experience the final steps in his descent from the spiritual world. At the same time the consciousness of the J O A was such that he felt himself to be in the light, that he was this tone, J O A. He was then a Man: a resounding (Klingendes) ego, a resounding astral body, within the luminous, shining etheric body. Man was then tone in light. This is the cosmic man.

Thus man is capable of accepting (aufzunehmen) that which he sees out in the cosmos, in the same way as here on earth he accepts the things he sees with his eyes when he looks out to his physical surroundings on the earth. The pupil of the Ephesian Mysteries really felt when he bore the J O A within him as if transported to the Moon-sphere. He shared in what was observed from the point of view of the moon. At that time the human being was still a universal being (Mensch im allgemeinen). It first became man and woman at its descent to earth. But man then felt he was transported to the realms of pre-earthly existence, though aware of the approach of what was earthly. This transporting of themselves into the Moon-sphere was, to the Ephesian pupils, an act of the greatest possible intimacy. They then bore within their hearts and within their souls all the things they had experienced and which sounded in their ears somewhat as follows:

Thou Being, offspring of worlds, who in thy Light-form art strengthened by the Sun under the Moon's control,

Thou art endowed by Mars with his creative resonance, with Mercury's swinging movement of thy limbs ;

Enlightened by the rays of Jupiter's wisdom, And by the love-bearing beauty of Venus,

And Saturn's age-old spiritual inwardness consecrates thee to life in space, to growth in time!

Consciousness of this filled each pupil of Ephesus. He realised that this consciousness which pulsated through him was of the greatest consequence to his humanity.

One can say: this was something which enabled a pupil belonging to the Ephesian Mysteries to feel himself most truly man. To put it trivially—when these words sounded in his ears he felt a consciousness dawn in him that connected him, through the powers of his etheric body, with the whole planetary system:

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,
Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen
Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit
Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

This is expressed most pregnantly in the following words spoken to the etheric body by the universe:

“Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt, Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt.”

The man now consciously felt himself within the power of the moonlight.

“Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen.”

Here the resonance, which has something creative in it, comes to him from Mars. And that which imparts power to his limbs, that enables him to become a being of movement, comes from Mercury:

“Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen.”

From Jupiter illumination comes to him:

“Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit.”

And from Venus there comes:

“Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit.”

In order that Saturn can gather together all that completes man inwardly and outwardly, preparing him for his descent to earth, clothing him with his physical body and enabling this physically clothed being, who bears God within him, to carry on his life on earth:

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit
Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!

From all I have described you can gather that the spiritual life at Ephesus was inwardly bright and full of colour. And this inwardly bright and colourful life contained precisely all that is summed up in the thoughts of Easter, all that the consciousness of man was able to grasp as his own intrinsic worth in the whole cosmos, the whole universe.

Many of those wanderers to whom I alluded in the last lecture, who passed from Mystery to Mystery in order that they might gather the full sum of those influences that came from the Mysteries—many of these wanderers have given us the assurance: that nowhere had the Sphere-harmonies resounded so clearly, so inwardly, as they sounded at Ephesus, because of the perception they had of things as seen from the aspect of the moon. In no other place had the astral light of the world appeared so luminous as when perceived in the light of the sun flooded by the softly glimmering light of the moon—and spiritualized by this astral light as man is ensouled by it—in no other place had they been able to perceive this, or at least not with the same joyousness and inward artistic acceptance.

All this was associated with the temple which later went up in flames through criminal or crazy folly. Initiates of these Ephesian Mysteries were incarnated, as I informed you at the Christmas meeting, in Aristotle and Alexander the Great. These individuals came in touch at that time with what could still be traced of the Mysteries of Samothrace.

Now an external, apparently chance event is sometimes of great importance in the evolution of the world. Some considerable time ago I informed you that the time of the burning of the temple at Ephesus coincided with the birth of Alexander the Great. But other things also took place through this burning of the temple. Oh, how manifold and tremendous are the things that have happened in the course of centuries to those who belonged to this Temple! How much of spiritual light and wisdom has passed through these Temple Halls! And all that passed within these halls was recorded in the world-ether while the flames burst forth from out the Temple. So that one can say: the continuous Easter festival at Ephesus, enclosed as it was within the Temple Halls, has been inscribed ever since on the vast dome of the universe in respect of this dome's ether-nature, though perhaps in letters that are not perceptible to all.

And so has it been with many things. Much of the wisdom of humanity was in ancient times enclosed within Temple walls. It has escaped from these walls, has been inscribed on the universal ether, and henceforth is immediately visible there to those who have risen to real imaginative knowledge.

This imaginative knowledge is to a certain extent the interpretation of the secrets of the stars. What once was Temple-wisdom has been inscribed on the universal ether, and can thence be read by those possessing Imagination.

This can be put in a different way; yet it is the same in whatever way it is put. One can say: I go forth into the night, and gaze on the starry heavens, allowing the impression they make to sink into me. And if the necessary faculties have been acquired, that which is contained in the grouping of the constellations, in the movements of the planets, is transformed into a mighty script. And when this cosmic script is read, something emerges from it of a similar kind to what I described in the last lecture concerning the Secrets of the Moon. These things can absolutely be read in the script of the firmament by those to whom the stars are not merely objects for mathematical calculations but when they are letters in a cosmic script. Something further might here be added for the elucidation of this matter.

At the very time the Mysteries of the Kabiri arose in Samothrace, and the older Mysteries were declining, something emerged through the influence of these Kabiri Mysteries which for Alexander and Aristotle were like a remembrance of the earlier times they had passed through together in a certain century at Ephesus. (Samothrace was not a Mystery-establishment of remembrance, nor was it a place for work where development was practised; as a matter of fact the life of the Mysteries was in general decline at the time of Alexander.) In this remembrance they heard again the sound of the word J O A. Once more there sounded within them:

Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt,

Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt,

Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen

Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen,

Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit

Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit,

Dass Saturns weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit

Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe.

In this remembrance—in this historical remembrance of things long past—there lay a certain power for the creation of something new. From that moment a power went forth for the creation of something new—a very remarkable new thing which has attracted very little attention from mankind. You must try to understand how this new creation which proceeded from Alexander and Aristotle was really brought about.

Take some well-known poetic work, or any other work—the most beautiful you can find—take for instance a German translation of the “Bhagavad Gita,” GSthe's “Faust,” or the “Iphigeneia,” anything on which you set a high value, and think of its rich and mighty content, that of GSthe's “Faust,” for example. By what means is this rich content communicated to you, my dear friends? Let us take it that it is communicated to you as is done in the case of the majority of men: that at some time of your life you read GSthe's “Faust.” What came to you on this occasion on the physical plane? What was on the paper? Nothing was on the paper but certain combinations of a b c d e f, etc. These combinations were the only means by which the mighty content of “Faust” was passed on to you. When you know the Alphabet there is nothing on the printed page that is not comprised in its 26 letters. But the rich content of the “Faust” is conjured from the paper in a magic way by means of these letters. It is clear to the eye that the repetition of a b c is wearisome; it is the most abstract thing imaginable. Yet this abstract thing, rightly combined, gives you the complete “Faust”!

And now, when that cosmic world-tone of the moon was heard again—the tone in which Aristotle or Alexander were versed—the meaning of the fire of Ephesus became clear, they knew how this fire had borne out into the far spaces of the world-ether the secret of Ephesus—and there now arose in Aristotle the inspiration to establish (zu begründen) the Cosmic-script. Only this world-script could not be built on the foundation of a b c d e f; but just as ordinary script was founded on letters, the world-script was founded on thoughts. In this way letters of the world-script came into being.

When I write down the following list, the words are just as abstract as a b c d e:

You have here a few ideas. Learn to accomplish with these ideas which were first propounded to Alexander by Aristotle—learn to do with these ideas what you have learnt to do with abed; you then learn how from Being, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Space, Time, Place, Having, Doing, Suffering, to read the Cosmos.

In the age of abstraction something extraordinary occurred in the schools of logic. Only suppose, if in certain schools concern was not with teaching people to read, but with compiling books in which every possible combinations of a b c d had to be learnt—a c, a b, b e, and so on—but not so as to learn by this to make use of the letter in a way that could bring any rich content to their souls, this would be to do exactly the same as the world has done to the logic of Aristotle. In his logic what were called categories were put forward; they were learnt by heart, but people did not know how to make use of them. This is similar to learning the a b c by heart without knowing how to use it.

Reading in the script of the universe can be traced back to something as simple as the learning of a b c is to the content of “Faust.”

In fact, what has been put forward by Anthroposophy, and can continue to be put forward, is arrived at from these ideas in the same way as the reading of “Faust” is arrived at by means of letters. For all the secrets of the physical and the spiritual world are contained, as a world-alphabet, within these simple concepts.

You have to realize that in the course of the world's development it happened, that as opposed to the earlier direct perception of which the events at Ephesus were still the most characteristic example, something arose which had its beginning at the time of Alexander, and continued to evolve more especially during the Middle Ages, something most profoundly hidden and esoteric.

Most profoundly esoteric is the thought living in these ten simple conceptions. We must learn really to live more and more in them; we must strive to experience them in our souls, when these have a richly organized spirit-filled content, as vividly as we experience the a b c.

Thus we see, how in these ten concepts whose inner illumination and source of power has once more to be discovered, was comprised something which like a mighty instinctive revelation of wisdom endured through thousands of years. And it will one day come to pass that what seems actually to have been laid within a grave—that is, the Wisdom of the world—will once more emerge and find the Light of the world, men will learn to read in the cosmos once more, and the resurrection of that which has been kept in concealment during the interval of human evolution between the two spiritual epochs, will again be experienced.

Our purpose, my dear friends, is to reveal to mankind that which has been hidden. I can therefore say, as on other occasions: Anthroposophy is a Christmas event, and in all its acts it is also an Easter event, a resurrection experience that is connected with a burial. And it is important that we should feel, especially at this Easter Assembly, the solemn sanctity—if I may so express it—of our Anthroposophical aspirations, in that we have some perception of being able to go to-day to a Spiritual Being who stands near us, perhaps immediately beyond the threshold, and to Whom we can say: Ah! at that time humanity was blessed by a divine spiritual revelation, which shone with exceptional clarity at Ephesus, but now all that lies buried. How can I again bring forth what thus lies buried! Yet we can believe that what once has been can somewhere be found again—can be found in the grave where it was hidden.

Then a Being will answer us, as on a similar occasion this same Being answered once before: “That which ye seek is no longer here, it is in your hearts, if only ye will open them to receive it in the right way.”

Anthroposophy already dwells in the hearts of men. These men have only to open their hearts to it in the right way. Then we shall experience in full sunlight, not in the old-time instinctive way, our return to that Wisdom which lived in, and illumined the Mysteries.

These are the things, my dear friends, which I desired to bring before you at this Easter season. For to fill ourselves with that which like a sacred breath can inflame the heart of everyone who holds to Anthroposophy, and can bear us with it into the spiritual world, is an impulse which is closely associated with the Christmas Impulse given at Dornach. This impulse must not remain something that can be thought out; it cannot stop at intellectuality; it must be an impulse coming from the heart, not dry or insipid—not sentimental, but in accordance with its whole nature it must be a very solemn one.

In the same way as the flames at Ephesus were used by Aristotle to fire his heart anew, and after they had streamed up into the outer ether they had brought to him again the secrets which he was then able to grasp in their primal significance ... as the fire at Ephesus could be used in this way, it is laid upon us, and we shall soon be able to carry out the demand (I say this in all humility), it is laid upon us to use that which as the aim and purpose of Anthroposophy was carried up into the ether along with the flames of the GStheanum for the further carrying out of this purpose.

What is to be the outcome of this, my dear friends? The outcome is to be that we receive a new impulse from the GStheanum. At the annual commemoration of the sad event which falls at Christmas time, the time in which this misfortune overtook us, we must receive a fresh impulse from the GStheanum. And why? Because we should feel what formerly was more or less an earthly concern, founded and constructed as a thing of earth, has been borne up by the flames into the wide spaces of the cosmos. Because this misfortune has come upon us we ought to be able to say in recognizing the results of this misfortune: We now realize that we should not have carried this out as a merely earthly concern (Erdensache) but as one appertaining to the whole far-reaching etheric world in which the Spirit dwells: then what happened to the GStheanum becomes something that concerns the wide ether in which dwells the spirit-filled wisdom of the universe. It has been carried out far into the beyond, and we must fill ourselves with the impulses of the GStheanum that comes to us from out the cosmos.

Let us take this as we will, let us take it as an image. But the image contains a profound truth. And this profound truth can be expressed in simple words when we say: The activities (Wirken) of Anthroposophy have been permeated with an esoteric tendency since the time of the Christmas impulse, 1923. This esoteric impulse or tendency exists, for though the earthly part through the co-operation of physical fire streamed out into space as astral light ... this impulse works back again into the Anthroposophical movement if only we are in a position to receive it.

When we are able to do this we are aware of a most important factor in all that lives in Anthroposophy. This important factor or part (Glied) is the Easter-feeling (Osterstimmung), that Anthroposophical feeling that can never be persuaded that the spirit can possibly die, but that, when owing to the world it has to die, it rises eternally anew. Anthroposophy must hold to the spirit that from eternal foundations ever rises again.

Let us take this to our hearts as an Easter thought, an Easter feeling. We will then take with us from this place of meeting, when we take our way into other walks of life, something which will give us courage and power to carry on our work.

Our thoughts, feelings and desires move in two directions and lead us to two ideas of what is constantly around us, the transitory, and what man longs for, the eternal, about which he hopes for enlightenment, which he seeks to unravel because it appears to him as the riddle of life.

The truth that man seeks has been the same at all times; but people are not always the same; and so, at all times, depending on the development of humanity, the answers to the questions about truth have been given differently. The school of thought that wants to give us the answer to the question about the eternal in a way that is appropriate today is called the theosophical one. It has come to fruition in the last four decades.

What people usually understand by knowledge is connected with place and time; and the one who accepts this is the perishable human being. But the deeper core of human nature does not recognize through the senses. It recognizes that which has validity everywhere and at all times. Religions want to give people knowledge of that which is not bound to place and time. And the purpose of religion is to establish the connection between the human and the eternal. Theosophy is the realization of this inner man, of his essential core. Theosophy is not the realization of something other than what is around us, but only of another part of it. Suppose a blind man had been happily operated on in this room. The same objects are still there as before, but now with completely different revelations for him. In a similar way, through Theosophy, man learns about the same things as before – about people, plants, animals and minerals – but he learns different characteristics about them. Just as the operation is there to make the same object visible to the eye of the blind, so Theosophy is there to point out a different aspect of things, to show him new spiritual and psychological characteristics of things. They appear to him in other, more intimate relationships to people and to the whole of the rest of the world. In this way, the human being is uplifted, and the objects take on a new meaning for him. Theosophy is a knowledge of the immortal part in man. What the immortal essence of man is, what the essence of the God-man is, we can gauge from the words of Goethe:

If the eye were not sun-like,
How could the sun behold it.
If the power of God did not lie in us,
How could we be enraptured by the Divine.

The eye must meet the sunbeam; likewise, the inner strength of the soul must meet the flowing strength of the Godhead. The mystics have expressed this in their own way; for example, Angelus Silesius, with the words:

If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not in you, you will still remain eternally lost.

The realization through the eternal core of our being is a different kind of knowledge than that gained through our senses and mind. We therefore distinguish different kinds of human nature, depending on whether the human being is eternal or perishable. Usually, man is perceived as a very unified being. You can see the human being with your eyes, he is perceptible to your senses like a mineral. But even if the anatomist cuts up the corpse, he only experiences what he can see with his eyes and touch with his hands. The human being he observes is no different from inanimate nature on the outside. Physical and chemical processes also take place in his body. This human being is the same as the minerals; somewhat more complicated, but the same as the rest of the physical world in itself.

But this is not the whole of man, but only the very first part of man. Thus there is a difference between the other physical bodies and the human body. If we copy a human being and cut off the hand of this imitation, it remains a hand; if we cut it off the real human being, it withers; my hand only has the possibility of existing with me. Without me, it is no longer a hand. A doctor will object: “That's quite natural, because there is no blood circulating in it anymore.” But the question is: Why does my hand need blood and the other doesn't?

And so we come to the second link of the human being; the whole body is a living thing, unlike the crystal. Such beings, from which a piece is taken and yet remains the same, are called “living beings”. We humans also have this life body, which holds the individual parts together; and we call this life body the ether body. For the theosophist, it is just as real as the physical body. And just as we have the physical body in common with all minerals, we have the etheric body in common with all plants. Man is a plant; he grows and reproduces, for these qualities are dependent on the etheric body.

Even more essential than this is the third link. In the same space as the physical body and the etheric body, there is a sum of pleasure and pain - a sum of instincts and drives, thoughts and perceptions that can be cut through just as easily as the physical and etheric bodies. For centuries, this third body has been called the astral body. We have it in common with all animals. Man is thus a being that unites all three kingdoms of nature - minerals, plants, animals - within himself. Goethe recognized this, and Schiller documented it with the most beautiful words in his first letter to Goethe:

For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your mind and noted the path you have mapped out with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it in the most difficult way, from which every weaker force will guard itself. You take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the explanatory ground for the individual. [Letter of August 23, 1794]

A naturalist from the beginning of the nineteenth century, Lorenz Oken, calls the human being an extract harmonized from all the properties of the animal kingdom. Paracelsus, the great physician of the Middle Ages, says: What is spread out in individual letters is united in the human being; one must spell out the whole of nature, then one can put oneself together like a human being.

Thus we have minerals, plants, animals in the physical body, etheric body and astral body in man according to his threefold nature.

Subtle natures recognize a fourth; so Jean Paul, who says of himself: As a young boy, I once stood in front of a barn. Then suddenly a completely new thought came to me: You are a self, and it felt like I had looked into the past of my being.

When we name things, we find that each thing has its own special name, as a table, chair, bench, a name with which everyone can identify the subject. Only humans have a name that they can pronounce only for themselves; can give themselves. The deep spirits of religion always develop this feeling. That is why the Jews called the unpronounceable name of God, Yahweh, I. I cannot grasp my I from the outside, only from the deepest inside. In my inner being, God announces himself in my soul. This I holds everything else together, and the work of the I on the other three bodies is world development. The I dominates all animal nature within itself and ennobles it.

When Darwin once came to an area where man-eaters lived, he told them that it was not good to eat people. He was told in reply how he could know that. Since he had never tasted human flesh, he could not judge whether it was good or bad. By “good” and “bad”, the savage understood only the pleasant and unpleasant. The knowledge that eating people is improper has developed through the work of the I on the astral body. In the beginning, the desires are raw, but the I refines them by plowing through the astral body - the body of desires - in such a way that it is made into the creature of its own I. I then no longer follow my instincts, but what my I - my duties - prescribe to me. We call such an astral body, which is completely transformed, the fifth link Manas. Today's man has partially reached this stage. When he has worked through the entire astral body, he becomes ripe to also work through his etheric body. If he succeeds in doing this, he has reached the sixth stage, Budhi, and can finally work on the physical body from the Budhi plan. When he has mastered the physical body, his whole being - Atma - is awakened in him.

Thus we have the human being in its sevenfold nature: four lower limbs and finally three higher ones, which the human being develops himself. The astral body is also partly the result of the work of the ego.

What happens when a person dies? Here we have the physical body before us. Death and sleep have been compared; but sleep is something else, a state in which a person is temporarily not at all what he actually is. What makes the sleeping person different from the ordinary one? The physical and chemical processes - digestion and the other life processes - take place just as they do when we are awake; pleasure and pain are forgotten. If we prick the sleeping person, they do not feel it until they wake up. In the sleeping person, the physical and etheric bodies - or life body - are in front of you. The astral body, the body of desire, is not present, otherwise the sleeper would also feel pleasure and suffering. The I with the astral body is gone. Sleep is therefore a release of the astral body - the body of desire. Sleep is initially interrupted by dreams. But dreams are not like waking experiences. We distinguish three types of dreams:

First: memories of everyday life, reminiscences. Second: perceptions from the environment, but in a special way. We may see the lamp, but not how it is placed. The ticking of a clock next to our bed may sound like the clatter of horses in the dream - expressed symbolically. Secondly, the dream is a creator of symbols. For example, a farmer's wife dreams that she is walking from the village to town, entering the church to listen to the sermon. The pastor in the pulpit raises his hands. His hands transform into wings. Suddenly, instead of speaking, he begins to crow, just as the rooster outside has crowed. This is the figurative way in which dreams work and create. The astral body is the great symbolizer, it transforms the crowing of the cock into a symbolic image.

Thirdly, the nature of dreams is characterized by remnants of the experiences of the astral body when it is released from the physical body and dwells in another world - the astral world. Dreams can be developed, instead of being chaotic, they can be induced with great regularity.

Death: When a person dies, something else happens; not only does the astral body detach itself, but it also takes the ether body with it. The sleeping person is alive, but the dead person is no longer alive because he has lost the ether body - the life body. After some time, the ether body is given to the rest of the ether world. Then only the astral body with the ego remains. It consists of two parts: what has not been worked through and what the person has already worked into it. Everything that is lent from the outside must be given up after death; and the animalistic is given up in the Kamaloka period - astral world. In this world the task is set to cast off the cover, which one has not cultivated; then one still possesses what one has purely worked out of one's ego.

Kamaloka is followed by Devachan, the place where all that is divine lives, namely the ego and what it has deified of its astral body. There the human being becomes mature to return to this earth again, and what he needs here, he must take on in the new life. He ennobles his astral body more and more in the new life. He can only do this if he gets a new ether body. This re-taking of the lower limbs leads to reincarnation. What a person has worked into his astral body is eternal; what he must discard is transitory, namely, what he has not yet plowed through. When he has worked through his entire astral body, he must also - at a higher level - work through his etheric body. We call such a person a chela.

The Wisdom Teaching differentiates between the mere cultural man and the chela. In ancient Greece, there were schools where not only the great culture was taught, but also chelas - initiates - were formed. One required of such a person that he had undergone a catharsis - purification, cleansing. Only then are the Budhi and the Christ awakened. The difference between the civilized man and the chela is as follows in death: When a chela dies, his etheric body no longer dissolves in the world ether, but as much of it remains as the I has worked into it. The chela will find his etheric body again afterwards to occupy it upon re-embodiment; while the civilized man gets a new one.

What religions prescribe, for example, has an effect on the etheric body: true piety. Letting inner wisdom take effect preserves the etheric body. Books that offer inner wisdom include: [“The Book of Divine Consolation”]; sentences from “The Imitation of Christ”; in the “New Testament”, the Gospel of John contains awakening sentences from the thirteenth chapter onwards that awaken the inner being, eternal power within man. In “Light on the Path” – written by Mabel Collins – every sentence is awakening. The following four sentences are particularly strengthening etheric power:

Before the eye can see, it must wean itself from tears.
Before the ear can hear, its sensitivity must fade.
Before the voice can speak before the masters, it must unlearn woundedness.
And before the soul can stand before them, the blood of its heart must moisten its feet.

Another means is the seeking of worldly truths. Knowledge and wisdom have an effect on the astral body. - Delving into the works of beauty - Raphael's Madonnas. Allowing beauty to flow into oneself has an effect on the astral body. The chela transforms this work into a conscious one. When the chela has worked through his etheric body, he then has to work on getting his physical body under his control.

By working on my astral body, I become a nobler person - wiser and better - and as such I can urge others to ennoble themselves. This is an effect from person to person; the good and wise person will exert a more beneficial influence than the opposite. The etheric body has its ability not only in the physical world, but also in the world of thought. Through imagination, through thoughts, one can influence others. I can send the thoughts of my soul to others. Speaking and admonishing are working in the physical world. Likewise, effects can be practiced in the supersensible world to the extent that the etheric body is worked through and dormant forces are awakened. By pursuing the thoughts into the tool, one makes the forces of the physical body supermundane. This ideal is Atma - or as the Christian says: communion with the Father.

Those who work on themselves in this way reach into the eternal. The stone disintegrates and is absorbed by the earth; the plant also gives its physical body to the earth and its etheric body to the cosmic ether. Like the mineral, man gives his physical body to physical matter, and like the plant, he gives his etheric body to the cosmic ether.

The astral body gradually dissolves in the Kamaloka, but not what has been worked through. Something remains. Man makes himself immortal through what he has worked into his body; he creates a core of his being.

The physical body is broader than the astral body; it does not have such a part that is bad. Take, for example, a thigh bone. It is not a compact mass, but - when viewed under a microscope - a wonderful framework that no engineer could construct. No beam is stronger than it needs to be. No architect could build something like this - it is constructed out in the cosmos. The human heart, with all its fibers, the entire physical body, is such a product of divine order.

The astral body is constantly attacking the physical body. The heart is good. Now the astral body – the body of desire – comes along with wine, tea and other stimulants and disturbs its normal beat. It takes a long time for the astral body to become as wise as the physical body. But then it can work on its etheric body. When the etheric body is also wise, the physical body is worked on; in the future it will strengthen the physical body. But who is working in the physical body today? The Godhead; it is working on the limbs of human nature, on which man does not yet work himself. Let us go back to the example of the cut-off hand. The hand can only exist on the body; removed from it, it withers. Likewise, if I were to be lifted just a few miles above the earth, I would wither away like the severed hand. From this it follows that as a physical human being I am bound to the place where I am placed. Just as I cannot consider the hand by itself, I cannot consider the human being without the earth. Man is not a body in itself, but a part of the whole earth organism. He can only exist with the properties that the earth offers. For example, he could not exist at a temperature of two hundred degrees Celsius. Just as our organism is enlivened by the soul, so is the whole earth organism enlivened by the earth soul.

The 'spirit of the earth' in Goethe's 'Faust' is not a phrase, but truth. Those who awaken the etheric body within themselves can associate with higher spirits, like Goethe, to whom the earth spirit reveals itself:

In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
Waving to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life
Thus I create at the whirling loom of time
And work the living garment of divinity.

The physical body is a link in the planetary organism. The etheric body is a link in the planetary ether. In the etheric spirit lives the spirit, which is called Budhi or, in Christian terms, 'son'; in the physical body lives the 'father spirit'. Through the astral body, through the etheric body and the physical body we come to God. The 'spirit' is astral, which, when it is well purified, we call the 'Holy Spirit'. In the etheric body we have union with the Son. In the physical body we find the Father-Spirit, the Spirit of planetary life.

All religions are based on such truths. Theosophy wants to awaken these truths. The theosophical worldview wants to give the seeking souls points of reference. Man has arisen from the eternal. If he can do nothing about brain molecules, he can do a lot about his thoughts; and we conquer the lower natures by bringing them closer to the divine.

Man must develop various abilities in the succession of the ages. In ancient India, that to which only the chela can look back is enclosed in the poetry of the “Veda”. In European regions, similar to the Veda, sacred knowledge was laid down by the Druids - holy men, great teachers. The “Edda” is the same as Veda.

In Buddha, the same wisdom teachings appear in a different way. Buddha becomes Wotan in the Germanic: 'Boda' becomes 'Wota', 'Wota' becomes 'Wotan'. Thus we have the same key to German mythology. In the Hebrew secret doctrine we have the 'I' - the 'Jao' - 'Jehovah'. In Christianity, the Christ.

Eternity is taught by the Spirits of Wisdom.

Later there came a time when the physical world was conquered [...]. This conquest of the physical world has caused the spiritual world to recede. This is why Theosophy is now stepping in to replace the rampant materialism with something spiritual. In the past, the various religions taught according to the needs of the individual peoples. Today, materialism has enveloped the entire globe; therefore, the spiritual must also embrace the whole world. Mankind on earth must become a spiritual whole. This is the goal of Theosophy. Just as people understand each other everywhere in the material world, just as a check passes through the whole globe as a common currency, truth and wisdom should become common currencies everywhere. That people everywhere learn to understand each other and exchange their thoughts as a cheque is exchanged for money, that is our goal – and that is why the call for brotherhood among people is the first that the Theosophical Society makes. The last few centuries have conquered temporal goods. Culture has added layers to the earth's crust that bear witness to its evolutionary process. Only in the uppermost layers do we find human remains. Millions of years further on, and everything we are working on now will also form a layer around the globe and provide a uniform cultural history. Theosophy works for the future, in which not only the material, but also the eternal, the immortal, will embrace the whole universe. That is why it places such great value on the core of brotherhood.

In the same way that people understand each other in material terms, they will also understand each other in spiritual terms in the future, when they awaken the eternal, because the eternal is revealed in the soul. Through the eternal that is within us, the eternal is first revealed – and from the transient to the eternal, that is the path prescribed for us by theosophy.

Dear friends,

Yesterday we examined the human constitution as far as it can be seen in human beings themselves or in connection with their immediate environment. Now we must go out beyond humanity. For everywhere humanity stands in some relation to the forces in the universe, and one can only understand these various relations if one explores the immense diversity of the universe itself.

Just think, dear friends, how manifold the forces in the universe are! Look at a growing plant, for instance. Follow the growth of its stem upward from the earth's surface, and the growth of its root downward. Right there are two opposite tendencies within the plant: a striving upward and a striving downward. And if today we were far enough along in scientific research—so often used for less important matters—to use it for such a thing as the growth of a stem upward and the growth of a root downward, we would find the connections in the universe that would then finally explain the totality: humanity and the world, microcosm and macrocosm. For we would find that everything connected with the stem's upward growth has some relation to the unfolding of the sun's forces in the course of the day, in the course of the year, even beyond the year. And we would find that everything connected with the root's downward growth has some relation to the moon's forces and the moon's changes. If therefore we look at a plant properly, we already come to see through its form a relation between sun and moon. We have, so to speak, to extract the simple image of a plant from the whole universe, from all the forces in the universe.

Someone who is really observant will never see the root other than striving downward into the earth and at the same time rounding itself. The root rounding itself into the earth—that is the picture of the root that one must have, the rounding form pushing into the ground. (Plate V, left) We must see the stem differently as it unfolds in an upward direction. Someone who combines sensitivity with observation will have the definite feeling that the stem strives to stream out as a line. The root wants to unfold in a rounding, circular direction; the stem wants to unfold in a linear direction. That is the archetypal form of the plant. And in the linear striving upward we must see the presence of sun forces on the earth. In the root's striving toward roundness we must see the presence of moon forces on the earth.

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Now let us look further. We think of the sun as being at a great height and of the plant as streaming to reach it. But the plant does more than just reach upward; it reaches out in width, it creates peripheries. And we find within its upward striving that something else is active, at first just at its top in the blossoms we find the forces of Venus working with the sun forces. Then as blossoms unfold below, as leaves come, moving inward from the periphery, we find the forces of Mercury working. On the one hand if we want to understand the structure of the plant as it pushes toward the Sun, we must see that the sun forces are helped by the forces of Venus and Mercury.

On the other hand we must realize that these forces alone would not be able to form the plant. With them alone, the plant-being would in a certain sense only attain a compact, solid form. For it to unfold as one sees it, for instance, in the most extreme example in a tree, there are forces working everywhere counter to the Venus and Mercury forces: namely, the forces of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Thus in addition to the basic polarity of sun activity and moon activity, there is also the activity of all the other planets in the universe. (Plate V, left)

In the plant you have the entire planetary system in front of you. It is right there on the earth. And perhaps it is not so ridiculous that a scholar—a half or three-quarters scholar as Paracelsus¹¹ was—made such a statement as this: “When you eat a plant you're eating the entire planetary system. For all those forces are contained in it.” Paracelsus said it like this: With the plant you eat the whole heaven.” The world is indeed formed in such manifold variety that one does have in one's immediate environment the forces of the entire macrocosm—in growth, in structure, in the disposition of all living things.

Now let us get back to the human being. We showed yesterday that one can go from the area of lung breathing to a higher area where there is a finer inhalation. And we discovered that this finer inhalation carries karmic streams in from the past. We can go still further. If we have working into the human being what I would like for the moment to call a refined breath stream, (Plate V, right) we can say the following: If one would unfold only what lies in the astral body and ego, one would never reach the sun, with the human constitution as it is at the present time. When one is in the ego and astral body during sleep, one does not reach the sun sphere. There is only darkness. If one were to live in the astral body and ego without any connection to the etheric and physical bodies, one would not come to the sun. How, then, does this happen?

Let us consider first what the situation is when the astral body and ego approach the etheric body. In clairvoyance one can bring this condition about fairly easily, by strengthening thinking—strengthening it by very thorough, energetic meditation. Then it is easy to come to this condition; it is the beginning of initiation. One slips down into the etheric body but is not yet able to take hold of the physical body; one remains in the etheric body. In this condition it is possible to think very, very well. One sees nothing, hears nothing, but one can think very well. Thinking is not in the least extinguished, but seeing, hearing, and the other sense activities are suppressed. At first, thinking remains the same, except that one can think more than previously. One can think such thoughts as we are expressing here, for instance thoughts about the macrocosm. Thinking becomes wider. One knows clearly: “now I am in the etheric world.” Thus when one is in the etheric body, one is truly in the world ether. One has the clear experience of this: “I am in the spiritual world out of which the sense world comes.” But one is not able to differentiate between spiritual world and sense world, one is beyond a differentiated sense world. The sun no longer shines, the stars no longer shine, there is no moonlight. There is no longer a clear distinction between the kingdoms of nature on the earth. A person only has that faculty when down in the physical body in normal life or in a higher stage of initiation. But in exchange for the blurring of the contours of the sense world, there is a general spirituality, the weaving life of the spirit.

If one goes further, if one takes conscious hold of the physical body and begins to live in the organs, the perceptions that had become dim or had vanished begin to emerge again (with the exception of earthly forms) as spirit entities. Where earlier in ordinary consciousness one had seen the sun and then it had become dark, foggy, but had still been within the general weaving spirituality, now there appear beings of the second hierarchy. Now one can differentiate in the spiritual world. Moon and stars appear again, but in their spiritual aspect: they are now spiritual colonies—they can be called that, or something similar. Now one understands how in ordinary everyday consciousness humankind sees the sun, for instance, in its physical form, and the same with other things, but when someone has entered consciously into a physical body, and has actually taken hold of it in its spiritual dimension, the sun is seen as a spiritual being, and the same with the whole world. Now we know that with each sun ray shining down upon us during the day, spirit is also entering us. Through every sense experience spirit is entering us. We have therefore to regard the higher, finer breathing as a breathing that is continuously impregnated by spirit. And we perceive that the sun is living in every sense perception that streams into us. It is indeed the spirit of the sun, or the spirits of the sun. The sun is present in every sense perception. In our finer breathing the sun force, the sun life is streaming straight into us.

So you see the relation humanity has to the sun. When a ray of light streams into your eye, the sun spirit is streaming in with that ray of light. The spirit of the sun is the substance of the finer breathing. With our sense perceptions we breathe in the manifold ingredients of the spiritual sun. You have there an important view of the human being from one direction. As one unfolds in an etheric body, (Plate V, yellow) one develops in the etheric body thinking—the thoughts of the universe. These thoughts of the universe in which one finds oneself when living consciously in an etheric body are at first devoid of warmth or cold, devoid of tone. They are a kind of vague feeling in which one's feeling of self merges with one's feeling of the macrocosm. But if now one takes hold of the physical body, one enters into the spirit of the sense perceptions. And the thoughts are infused from various sides: through the eyes, the sun essence—thought—that is breathed in is infused with color; through the ear, thought is tinted with tone; through the organ of warmth, thought is tinted with warmth or cold. There you have the cosmic relation of thought to sense perception. Thought must be understood as preceding the sense experience; then the sense experience comes through infusion, tinted by the sun.

Humankind simply does not realize that the sun-being streams into us with every sense perception. And on the path of the sun, past karma streams in too. It is by no means a childish image to think of the sun as a receptacle of past karma. If we understand the human head properly, we must say the spiritual sun rays stream in invisibly and are transformed as they stream in into something physical, which then appears as merely a physical attribute in the world of color, tone, warmth. And at the same time, on the path of these sun rays that slip in through the senses into the nerves, karma enters into us. That is one side of the human being.

Now let us look at the other side. Karma goes out at that place in the organism where the lymph is, the place where everything is alive and active that has not yet been drawn into the blood. There we find outgoing karma. What are the paths of outgoing karma? To know that, we must acquaint ourselves through spiritual science with the moon forces.

And now if we gradually come from the etheric world to which we have become accustomed and take hold of the physical body in its periphery, the area of the senses, then all the life streaming in from the sun and bringing our past karma with it appears to be bringing reproach, and to be doing much to disturb us. But far more important than the disturbing elements in our karma is this knowledge, this insight that we can attain. It is by virtue of our past that we have become what we now are. The life of our inner being is enriched by the perception of the sun entering on the paths of the senses and nerves. If we can separate ourselves from our karma and concentrate on the instreaming forces of the spiritual sun, we will experience an infinite happiness as we receive them. We will wish that the sun element were in us perpetually; we cannot help longing for it. The sun element enters into us lovingly if we wish it; it is what we know in physical life in a weaker form as our active human love. This is the interplay of sun activity with the human inner world, the loving penetration of the sun into humans and into everything that wants to sprout and grow and thrive in humans. The living sun rays enter lovingly. Here love is not merely a soul-spiritual force: it is the force that calls everything physical to germinate and sprout and grow, everything that can be beneficial to humans in every way when they value it. This is the force of which a human being is aware through direct outer vision.

Now if one takes hold of the physical body in the other direction, in the direction of the forces that develop the lymph and prepare it for entering into the blood, one becomes aware of the activity of the moon. This is of quite a different character. On the one hand we can say the spiritual sun is active in the way we have indicated; on the other hand the moon is active. When we work to grasp the process of the lymph-blood formation inwardly, we find we are entering into the activity of the moon. And we have the constant feeling that the moon wants to take something away from us, to lift something out of us. With the sun we had the feeling that it wants continually to give us something. With the moon we have the feeling that it wants continually to take something out of us. And if we are not alert while we are observing the moon's activity, when we have consciously taken hold of the physical body and are engrossed in the lymph-blood formation, if we are not absolutely alert and in complete control of our vision, suddenly the continuity is broken and standing there before us is a spiritual being similar to ourselves but distorted, almost a caricature of ourselves, a being we have brought to birth. We would miss this emanation if we were not alert. But it does not seem particularly strange to us as it separates from us and confronts us. It is hardly more than an enhanced view of ourselves in a mirror. When we look at ourselves in an ordinary mirror, that is the physical world. When we see ourselves reflected in the etheric world by the moon forces, that is a higher kind of mirroring.

Let us review the whole process. There is nothing particularly amazing about it. But it shows us that we are indeed connected with the universe. That the moon is continually separating forces from us, which then it makes independent, forces that were living in us and that then go out into the spiritual world, streaming out into the macrocosm, constantly carrying images out of us into the macrocosm. But now think how it could be if such an image, which the moon forces are continually producing in humanity and which then they want to take out of us to carry into the distances of the world, if such an image were held back in the human body and kept there. And not merely an image, an abstraction, but a form permeated by forces.

How could such a form be retained in the human being? We have the moon forces continually striving to pull and draw the human image out. How could this form be held back? It can remain in humans if the sun forces are brought in deeply enough from another side. Then the form remains in the human being; then an embryonic life begins. Fructification consists of nothing else than that the sun forces are drawn down to where the moon forces are active in the lymph. Thereby the image that would otherwise go out takes hold of physical matter in the human body. What otherwise is a mere image now takes on physical form. For this to happen, sun forces combine with moon forces in the lymph system of the human organism. (Plate V)

Let us look at the other side. We can also investigate the moon forces higher up: then we find that the opposite happens. Then the human being is not formed again in the human body, but the sun macrocosm is given form in the human. Now we have a different view of the macrocosm. When the embryo is formed, a physical world arises within the human being that must come out. When on the other hand the moon forces activate their desire nature—they want to capture and draw down the sun forces—then the spirit in the universe comes into being within the human. The spirit of the universe is engendered, a spiritual embryo. Then the possibility is given for forming what must come in from the spiritual world, what has been in the spiritual world up to the time of a new earth-life and now comes in as spirit embryo. Then, the union of the two takes place in the human being.

If we explore these things, we come to see that they are completely interwoven. Then we have the true explanation of the human being's relation to the universe.

Now help comes from every direction. The sun activity that is uniting here with the moon activity has the help of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. What, then, are the tasks of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn? Recall, dear friends, what I said yesterday. When the sun forces are going in, first they must stop for the light; second, they must stop for the macrocosmic chemism; third, they must stop for the life. The Saturn forces bring about the stop for the light, the Jupiter forces in their wisdom bring about the stop for the world chemism, the Mars forces the stop for the life. There you have in detail the drawing-in of the sun forces modified by the forces of the so-called outer planets.

From the opposite direction you have the moon forces modified. When they work alone in their full strength, they bring about the formation of the embryo, that is, the physical formation. When they are less strong, they do not enter into physical matter but stay in the direction of the spirit, combining with the Venus forces of soul love. They can be still weaker—when they unite with what comes from the other side, the forces of Mercury, the divine messenger, who in ordinary everyday earth-life leads the lower forces up to the higher.

Look at the two diagrams, right and left. (Plate V) If we look out at the plant world spread as it is around us, we find the sun, moon, and stars everywhere. If we look within the human being, the sun, moon, and stars are there too, in exact correspondence. When something within is not in order, there is some trouble in the inner collaboration of sun, moon, and stars. If we as therapists want to restore it to order again, we must search in outer nature for a corresponding Saturn activity, for instance, that will work therapeutically on an unhealthy moon activity—and so forth. It is all out there. You see people will begin to have confidence in medicine again when they see that in the inner constitution the human being comprises the whole world. This is the knowledge we would like to bring to medicine again, knowledge it once had. The world will only have its trust in medicine restored when these things are once again understood.

But now let us look at the other side. Look first at the moon activity in human beings. See how it is striving continually to draw the human element out, to carry it into the universe. Let the picture stand before us—the human being striving to get out, wanting to be carried into the universe. This must not be presented to humanity as an abstraction, this shattering secret, but in picture form—the moon working continually to lift human beings out of themselves, to show them their relation to the macrocosm. The human being comes into earth-life as an embryo within another human being. But when this moon activity is enhanced by Venus and Mercury activity, then the human being is born not physically, but spiritually. If we add to the physical birth what we can invoke of Mercury and Venus activity, we bring about a spiritual birth. The human being is then born spiritually, outside, in the universe. We baptize the human being.

The working of the physical sun is always present in human beings. We can add to that perception a consciousness that the spiritual sun also is active in us, that on the paths of the physical-etheric sunlight, the light rays, chemical rays and life rays, the spirit is also pouring in. Spirit enters humans by way of the same paths that the physical-etheric sun activity enters: through the senses. In the same way that human beings perceive in everyday physical life the physical-etheric activity of the sun, we enable them to perceive the soul-spiritual activity of the sun. We give them communion.

Going out from the communion, we find on the one hand what is related to the help the sun is given: the darkening that relates to the light, the constant nearness of death to life. We go to the outer planets that are connected with the sun, and we add to the communion at the proper moment the anointing.

Or we go into human beings, and before they have any thought of the macrocosm, we hold them fast in their inner life, wanting not merely to give them their place as human beings in the macrocosm, but wanting to plant the macrocosm in them—in picture form, so that it becomes a seed developing in them. We give them confirmation.

If individuals receiving the sacraments live in them with full consciousness, they will be continually healed by them—healed of the universal illness to which they succumb, or are in constant danger of succumbing in statu nascendi simply by reason of their having incarnated in the physical material world. This is the priest's task.

It can also happen that an individual is by nature continually in statu nascendi of wanting to be free in the spiritual world, wanting to get out of the physical world, yet is obliged to remain in it during earth-life. And this causes in the organism not a state of unspirituality but a state of superspirituality, that is, illness. Medical measures must be prescribed, the opposite pole to the sacraments, when illness appears. This is the physician's task.

Thus we see on the one side the spiritual healing of the priest, and on the other side the priestly attitude of the physician, the physical healer. If we recognize how their tasks can be coordinated, we have grasped the significant connection between pastoral work and medical work. Then pastoral medicine is not just a theory, but embraces the working together of human beings.

• 11. Paracelsus (1493–1541). Swiss physician and alchemist.

Dear attendees!

You have requested that I speak about the Gospel of John in its context with the other three Gospels in this series. That is to say: you have come to the conclusion that the way of thinking of the theosophical worldview encompasses much that can contribute to our understanding of Christianity. These lectures will show that this is the case and that the Gospels, especially the Gospel of John, have a special mission to people in our time. They will show in particular how Christianity has gradually developed from distant periods of time, how it has a long future ahead of it, and how Theosophy, through the insights it is called to reveal, opens up another area for research on the Gospels.

Indeed, when we consider the attitude of the leaders of the modern spiritual movement towards the Gospels, we cannot characterize it as anything other than increasingly hostile. This could also be explained if no other sources than those known so far had appeared.

What then do the Gospels have to offer to the person who approaches them? They are supposed to give him an illumination, an explanation of the great event that has taken place in the development of mankind: the Christ-event. But if the modern man approaches the Gospels for this purpose, he will not find a satisfactory account of this event. Instead of one account, he finds four, and finds differences and contradictions in the gospels. For example, Matthew and Luke tell [the childhood story of Jesus in different ways].

And so people say: that doesn't match, that can't be right; and so our present-day criticism tries to show that [a gap in the transcript].

It is well known how, under the influence of the view just stated, the authority of the Gospels is gradually waning, and how people increasingly believe that they can extract some kind of common basis from the four Gospels, and how, in certain radical circles, they are even inclined to reject the whole thing. The gospel that speaks most deeply to our hearts has fared particularly badly. It is said that in the first three gospels, a historical core can be found. But the Gospel of John is so different from the others that it must be believed to have been written much later and is without significance. In other circles, the Synoptics are attributed a certain historical significance, but it is thought that the Gospel of John is a kind of hymn through which the first Christians wanted to express their faith in Christ.

On the surface, we could pose a historical question: Did the people of the first centuries of Christianity have the Gospels in their hands, did they really study them? The answer is: the Gospels were not read or studied as widely as they have been in the last few centuries, not even in the Middle Ages. It was only with the invention of printing that it became possible for everyone to read the words of the Gospel.

If we go back to earlier centuries, we find that only a few people had access to the Gospels, and that these few were the most learned and knowledgeable people: the leaders and teachers. But these, oddly enough, took no offense at the contradictions that arose between the individual Gospels. And if we want to describe the prevailing sentiment that these differences caused, it was a deep gratitude that there were not just one document, but four. It was only when the gospel became more popular that the contradictions were found; only then did people understand how to take offense at them.

Could it be that in the first centuries after Christ, these learned and highly developed connoisseurs of Christianity had so little insight, reason and understanding that they would be grateful for the contradictions? No, it cannot be so. There must be another explanation for this significant fact.

If we try to look into the souls of the first confessors of Christianity, we must find that they felt that the Christ mystery was something that man cannot readily understand, and so they told each other that it was good that four narrators described what they understood of the same. If, for example, we photograph this lectern from this side, someone can also photograph it from the opposite side; you have two photographs of it. In the same way, you can photograph the lectern from the other two sides. So you have four pictures of the lectern. Those who put together a complete picture from these four pictures can say that they know what the lectern looks like.

In this way, four personalities have described the great Christ event to us, and one must take these four pictures together. In this way, one can gradually elevate oneself to a complete understanding of the event.

Now the question arises: How can there be four different records? What does each gospel want to say about the great Christ event? Each gospel starts from the premise that this event cannot be grasped with external knowledge, and that it is necessary to look at it from the point of view of an initiate, of one who has been initiated. Each gospel is written from the point of view of the seer.

Now in pre-Christian times there were four types of initiation, four types of seership. And only by bearing in mind that there were four types of initiation can one understand that each Gospel was written on the basis of a particular initiation.

What then is an initiate? He is a man whose powers of knowledge are not limited to the outer world, and who has developed his spiritual organs to such an extent that he can see into the spiritual worlds.

Now, we can only develop in a person what is present in him in the form of abilities. We distinguish three basic powers in man: the power of thinking, the power of feeling, and the power of willing. In ordinary human life, these three powers are developed only to a certain degree. In an initiate, they were greatly expanded through the so-called mysteries. However, since it was found that in one and the same person all three powers could only be developed equally to a certain degree, those to be initiated were divided into three classes, depending on their abilities, in which only one of the three powers was particularly developed. Thus it was said in the Egyptian, Persian and Greek mysteries: We train certain people in such a way that the power of thinking becomes particularly strong / gap in the transcript] to the point of seership [gap in the transcript] in other people, the power of will [gap in the transcript].

Thus in ancient times there were three groups of initiates:

the initiates of thinking – the “sages”,
the initiates of feeling – the “therapists” or “healers”,
the initiates of will – the “magicians”.

These initiations were one-sided, but precisely because of that, an initiate could develop the highest powers in his field by renouncing the other powers. The wise man had a broad view of the world, he could explore the spiritual world and knew its laws; the therapist healed people; not through external means, but with the help of his spiritual and psychic powers; and the magician ruled the physical world and knew its laws.

To connect these three categories of initiates, a fourth category was formed. These were those in whom the personality was not so highly developed, but in whom all three powers worked together in harmony: the harmonious people. When something important had to be decided, one always listened to them.

There is a deep secret here. What was the opinion of those who had come less far in terms of the individual powers? In the ancient mystery schools it was known that everything can be found in nature. The wasps have long since invented paper, because their nest is real paper. So the wasp contains the wisdom that man later achieved. There is also wisdom in man, and that is how he becomes master over the forces of nature. But there is more of the divine in the less initiated than in the more initiated. The initiated “man” was the fourth class of initiates.

These four categories of initiates are found in the four Gospels. Each initiate can now explore the great fact from a certain point of view: the sage - John - from one side of the Christ event; the magician - Mark - from another side; and the healer - Luke - from yet another side. The harmonious man Matthew has an overview of the whole. Wisdom extends far beyond, high above everything that man can achieve. That is why John's symbol is the eagle, flying high above earthly events. And the healer, what powers does this person want to develop? Not external means, but [he worked] as a psychic healer [developing] the powers of self-sacrificing love. A person becomes a healer to the extent that he sheds selfishness and is able to sacrifice himself for others: the ability to sacrifice is the essence of the healer in the psychic realm. When a person is developed to the point of giving everything for another, he is a healer. Thus the Evangelist Luke. Hence the tradition that the Gospel of Luke was written by a physician. Hence the symbol of Luke: the sacrificial bull, that is, the personality of the self-sacrificing human being. Finally, the magician strives to develop the powers of will, according to the Evangelist Mark; his symbol is the lion. Therefore, the lion is added to the writer of the Gospel of Mark. Where these three powers work together in harmony, there we have the human being. The human being is added to the Gospel of Matthew as a symbol.

That is why the followers of Christianity were so grateful that there were four gospels.

What is the Christ event? It is the confluence of all previous philosophies and religious movements of humankind. In Palestine, all earlier movements of humankind came together; and depending on the type of initiation of one or the other evangelist, they found expression in the Gospels.

What were the main currents of spiritual life in the pre-Christian era? First of all, there was a current that had reached a powerful development and conclusion shortly before Christ: the ancient wisdom of the holy rishis in India. They taught a wisdom that existed before our physical world was present: the primal tradition of human tradition, the ancient memory of a wisdom from which the world flowed. According to this “ancient wisdom,” the rishis said to themselves: What lives in me is only a symbol of the ancient wisdom that has created these images out of itself; everything we see is only an image of ancient wisdom, of primeval spirituality, a looking back at the divine world; the outer world is only an illusion, maya; human beings are called upon to descend into the physical world.

From this cultural movement, one could learn to sacrifice the sensual and give everything to gain wisdom. In the person of Gautama Buddha, six centuries before Christ, this spiritual movement found its culmination and conclusion. What Buddha could give to humanity was to be incorporated into the Palestine event, in order to flow on from there. This is described in the Gospel of the Healer, the Gospel of Luke.

In the ancient – not historical – Persian culture, we find a completely opposite cultural current, represented by Zarathustra or Zoroaster. This is best understood in the following way: the Indian said, “Illusion is the outer world.” Zarathustra pointed out to people that this world is not worthless. “This world, he said, is the outer expression of a spirit. Look up at the sun, for example. The warmth that flows from the sun is its physical reality. The sun is the benefactress of the whole earth. But as the human being stands before us and behind him stands the spirit, the aura, so behind the body of the sun stands the solar aura, the great aura, the great spirit, Ahura-Mazdao, Ormuzd. Behind everything physical is the spirit of the sun. The physical is therefore not an illusion, not Maya, but an expression of the divine. The task of man is nothing more than to unravel the spiritual from this physical.>

“I will speak,” said Zarathustra, “of that which is supreme in the world, and no longer shall the evil forces have power to proclaim untruth. I will speak of him who is everywhere in the world, of Ahura-Mazdao will I speak. He who does not listen to my words will experience evil when the cycle of earth development] is fulfilled.

This school of thought, which one should work with joy on the physical plane, has been incorporated into Christianity and continues to flow there. It contains a whole cosmology and is described by Mark.

The third current that has flowed into Christianity is the one that was prepared by the ancient Hebrew people. What, then, is the ancient Hebrew people's share of the whole culture? What did these people have to give?

Just as individuals grow, so do nations through a gradual and continuous development. The four elements of the human being have come into being in a very complicated way. When the child leaves the mother's womb, only its physical birth takes place. But not all of its bodies are ready. Up to the age of seven, it is, so to speak, enclosed in its etheric womb. At the change of teeth, that is, in the seventh year, its etheric birth takes place. At fourteen, when the etheric body is fully formed, the astral birth takes place, and only after the astral body has reached full maturity at twenty-one does the fourth body, the ego, emerge. - In the same way, the evolution of individual peoples takes place.

Thus we distinguish three great periods among the Hebrews: the first from Abraham to David; the second from David to the Babylonian captivity; and the third from the latter period to the time of Jesus, when the ego emerged, as it does at the age of twenty-one in an individual human being. Jesus inherited his physical body from this people, which is described in detail in the Gospel of Matthew.

Those who have a complete knowledge and understanding of Christianity also know the pre-Christian spiritual currents that Christianity has absorbed and the results of which it contains. Buddha did not cease to be effective when he died in ancient India six hundred years before our era, and so Zarathustra was also willing to let his share of development flow into Christianity.

Each gospel corresponds to a side of the human being. Thus Matthew mainly describes the physical side of the Christ event, Mark the etheric, Luke the astral, and John the side that falls under the ego.

John's Gospel is a great study of the spiritual human being; arising from the deepest initiation, this gospel is like a sun above the other gospels, the great message of the spiritual human being to humanity. Luke's Gospel is a mighty portrayal of the life of man in the world of the senses - in the world of feeling - in sacrificial service; Mark's Gospel is a tremendous cosmology; and Matthew's Gospel is a philosophy of history.

Thus the four gospels flow together, and so Buddha and Zarathustra and ancient Hebraism and ancient Egypt come to reappear in Christianity. And so it is precisely from Theosophy that we will glean what external research has lost: the truth of the gospels. Theosophy is here to reconquer the Gospels and show us that Christianity is not at the end, but at the beginning of its journey. Theosophy will be an instrument to bring the hidden treasures of Christianity back into the light.