The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I do not teach, I only relate my experiences in higher realms; for an occultist there are no dogmas. The basic tenets of different religions are partial truths that view one truth from different points of view. Just as one gets different views of the surroundings from different heights when climbing a mountain and only when one has reached the summit does one get an overview of the whole area, so one only gets the whole truth when one has reached the top of spiritual development. The exoteric religions give only part of the truth, as far as the human brain can grasp it. The esoteric teachings of the great world religions, including Christianity, indicate one of the paths to the pinnacle of truth. The Christian doctrine was never meant to be anything other than an impulse for the future development of humanity. In the early centuries of Christianity, what had already become exoteric in the older religions and philosophical systems was given as esoteric teaching.

I do not propose here to give a history of Christianity, only to speak of the esoteric teaching that underlay exoteric Christianity for centuries and still exists today. Christian esotericism can be traced back to Dionysius, the friend and collaborator of Paul, who ran an esoteric school in Athens where instruction was only given orally. The writings of Pseudo-Dionysius contain only exoteric teachings. The Mysteries of Jesus, in which the Master Jesus appeared as a hierophant and in which the Christian initiation took place, remained in existence for centuries, guided and animated by him.

The Christian mysteries were mainly intended to develop the inner life of feeling, while the ancient mysteries were mainly based on the development of knowledge and wisdom. Through the development of the inner life of feeling, the Christian mysteries achieved a direct vision of the higher worlds. To do this, certain feelings had to be developed in the disciple.

First: Christian humility. The disciple had to become clearly aware that his existence is dependent on the lower realms. Just as the plant arises from the earth, the animal feeds on the plant, so man is dependent for his material development on animal, plant and inorganic substances. The disciple had to bow down in humility to the animal, plant and mineral and say to each of them: “I thank you for making my existence possible.” When this feeling of Christian humility came alive in him, a state of consciousness arose in him that is symbolically represented by Christ washing the feet of the twelve apostles, as described by John (chapter 13).

Secondly, he had to learn to remain steadfast in the midst of suffering, pain and bitterness of life. When this feeling comes to clarity, it reveals itself as the state of consciousness of scourging. If one felt like being washed by water during the first show, a sharp pain occurred during the second show, which cut through the physical, etheric and astral bodies.

Thirdly, in order for these inner feelings to become even stronger, the disciple had to imagine that the dearest and holiest thing he possessed was covered with mockery and scorn. Without faltering, he had to see the truth he loved dragged through the mud. If these feelings were genuine and true, coupled with inner strength of soul, then this manifested as a sharp pain in the head, symbolized by the crown of thorns.

Fourth, the disciple had to realize that his body was not his ego, that his body is an external thing that he carries, just as he carries other things. To do this, he had to feel the pain of others as his own pain. He had to see his body as an instrument with which he could serve others. He was not allowed to flee from the world, but to carry his body as a powerful instrument to carry the suffering of the world. This was symbolized - seen as an astral vision - in the carrying of the cross and in the crucifixion. With strong meditation on this, the stigmata appeared, the blood stains on the right side of the chest, on the hands and feet.

Fifthly, mystical death occurred by itself: the sensory world sinks into a bottomless abyss, impenetrable darkness envelops the disciple. There is soundless silence around him, a terrible coldness overcomes him, an impenetrable veil hides the whole world. From the depths of nothingness, the dark side of life rises up; he experiences everything that has sunk to the bottom of life, he goes to hell. This is symbolized by the tearing of the curtain in the temple; the spiritual world behind the world of appearances emerges. He now knows what heaven is; this is the mystical death.

Sixthly, there is the burial. We cannot separate our material body from the earth on which we live. Because we can walk on the earth, we succumb to the illusion that we are independent of the earth. We cannot separate ourselves from the earth, from our fellow human beings, from the other planets, to which we are connected with our finer bodies. The entombment was the symbol of this: our body was laid in the body of the earth.

Seventh, resurrection and ascension symbolize feeling without mediation by the material body, the union with the higher spiritual world.

In this way, Christian esotericism passes through all human feelings and is entirely built on the development of emotional life as the necessary counterpart to the ancient mysteries, which aimed at the development of the mind. The principle of initiation also undergoes a development. As long as man lives in the world of the senses, he is connected to all realms of nature through the material body; the etheric body holds the material body together; the astral body is shared with the animal world; it is the seat of passions and desires. The fourth link of the human being is the crown of creation. He alone possesses the “I”, the “Ich-bim, the unspeakable name of God. ‘I’ can only be said to oneself. It is the [divine] spark, a ”drop of the divine substance.

In the pre-Christian initiation, the etheric body was separated from the material body for three and a half days, which otherwise only happens at death; one was dead and not dead. The etheric body, united with the astral body and the ego, underwent the initiation. The high event made a lasting impression on the etheric body. The astral body was transformed through meditation and concentration and made suitable for transmitting the impression of the etheric body to the physical brain through clairvoyance.

The Christian initiation proceeds in a different way. The great power of the emotional world imprinted a whole range of human feelings on the etheric body without causing a state of lethargy or separation from the material body. It was, so to speak, a natural sleep in which consciousness remained awake, a kind of apparent death. In the Christian esoteric school, the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John was used as a meditation book. The Gospel of John had to be experienced; especially the first chapter up to the fourteenth verse. The Logos meditation awakens a special power, a power that one has to experience, that one cannot grasp with the mind, a power that completely transforms the soul.

Was reincarnation a Christian doctrine? In the esoteric school reincarnation was always taught, as Peter, James and John testify, but exoterically it was no longer taught. Mankind had to go through an incarnation without the knowledge of reincarnation. The dark side of this soon became apparent in the absolute value placed on this one life in the face of heaven and hell and eternal torment. But this was a necessary point of passage in the evolution of mankind, in which we descended to our deepest level.

Christian esotericism has a powerful foundation, of which only a weak ray penetrates into the outside world through the works of Christian mystics, Meister Eckhart, [Johannes] Tauler and Jakob Böhme. Tauler and his work “The Layman and the Unknown from the Oberland” give only a weak glimpse of the secret teachings of Christian esotericism.

When we begin an esoteric life through our meditation, we must resolve to move something new into the center of our life, something that wasn't there till now but that will now become the main thing. The success that our exercises will have will depend on the intensity of this resolve. One can take the exercises that one gets as something that's added to everyday life, so that one does them like some other ordinary work. But one will then notice that the progress one makes isn't especially great. The resolve that an esoteric should make is to connect everything he runs into in ordinary life with his esoteric life, to really feel that this is the center from which he directs all of his other life, from which something is constantly flowing into this life.

For what are we supposed to accomplish with our meditations? If we do them in the right way we're supposed to develop a strong force, a force that uses the words of the meditation as an instrument with which we gradually create spiritual organs in our astral body with which we'll perceive the surrounding spiritual world. The impressions that we make in the mass of our astral body only gradually become permanent, for we can compare our astral body with an elastic mass that becomes imprinted but then returns to its previous shape after awhile. We make these impressions during sleep when our ego and astral body have left the etheric and physical bodies. The stronger and more intensively we do our meditations, the more intensive the impressions in the astral body become, until they remain and the organs we call lotus flowers develop from them. This process is described in the verse that comes to us from the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings:

But we can only really use these organs when they've become so strong that they can be imprinted from the astral into the etheric body. It's only when the etheric body has received a copy that the portals before which the Cherub with the flame of the whirling sword, stands open for us.

We've heard that our physical and etheric bodies couldn't live for a second without an ego and an astral body and that therefore when these two leave the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, higher kinds of beings enter them, beings who are of the same nature as our I and astral body, but who stand much higher. An archangel replaces our astral body, and a spirit of personality, our I. We meet these high spiritual beings when we've developed our astral organs, and esotericism calls this tremendous event that's so sacred to us the “meeting with the higher self.”

We should look towards this moment with feelings of highest devotion, with a being intensively permeated by its sacredness. If we don't do our meditation with this attitude of really genuine humility, then the spiritual world won't reveal itself to us in its true form, but all kinds of fantastic formations will appear to us, and the moral result will be a ruinous price. It's a good deed that the world into which we would like to press prepared by a school that rightfully exists, is closed by the Cherub with the fiery sword as long as we're insufficiently prepared. The guardian of Paradise stands exactly at the place where we slide over into deep sleep, where we lose consciousness. If we didn't lose it here we would see him. But a glance into the world of archangels would destroy us, since we're not up to it.

Now, why is this archangel who enters our etheric body called our higher self? Why do we try to become united with him? Here we must touch upon a secret that concerns the human being. The man that we see walking around on earth today is really a maya, he is incomplete. There was a time in the ancient Lemurian epoch when only a single pair of human beings remained on earth, that was strong enough to ensoul animal-like formations. The other men had gone to various planets, and so present men originate from this primal pair. The Bible' story about Adam and Eve is right, even though it's presented in the form of an allegorical tale. Now Lucifer overpowered these first human beings and permeated their astral bodies with his influences. This made the later Ahrimanic influences possible and everything that helped men to live in the physical sense world. Thereby the spirit behind matter disappeared for him ever more, and the latter became an unpenetrable cover for him. If man had only remained under the influence of the divine spiritual beings who created him, he wouldn't have become free, but he always would have recognized spiritual things behind matter. Now, these guiding creators didn't want the whole etheric body to be permeated by Luciferic influences. So they held one part of Adam's etheric body back in spiritual worlds. And this part of the etheric body is the higher self with which we should reunite ourself and with which we're a whole human being. An esoteric should tell himself: This higher being that really belongs to me is waiting over there to become reunited with me, and in my meditation I should strive to go to him with all fervor, should form myself into a chalice that takes in this higher element. Paul, who was an initiate in these things, uses exactly the right expressions when he speaks of the old and the new Adam. This union of the etheric body that remained behind with a human being happened for the first time when the Luke Jesus was born. This Jesus boy received Adam's etheric body. The high, guiding creator beings had held back the capacity of individual thinking and speech for men with this part of the etheric body. It's true that a man thinks, but it's no thinking that he produces himself individually—instead he takes some of the divine thinking substance that streams through the world. Man has no individual language either, for high spiritual beings gave groups of men a common language. Men are supposed to acquire their own thinking and language through a reunion with their higher etheric body. Since the ability to speak lies in the etheric body, one can understand the legend that tells us that the Jesus boy didn't have to learn to speak, but that after his birth he spoke to his mother in a language that she understood. Through the connection of Adam's etheric body with a physical human body again, it became subject to the law of number and multiplication that applies to every spiritual thing that descends into matter. Just as a seed that's laid in the earth produces an ear with many kernels, so Jesus' body was the soil for Adam's etheric body, the through-station for multiplication, and it's these multiplied etheric bodies that are waiting for us. When we're immersed in our meditation so that the whole outer world disappears for us, we'll then get the feeling that we're dying, and then united with our higher self we're resurrected. That's why for the more recent esoteric schools that exist rightfully, the cross is the symbol for resurrection to this new life. It's not a birth that's taken to be the starting point of this life, but a death, the death of Christ on the cross of Golgotha, and the symbol for this life is the holy blood that flowed forth. That's why we have the dead plant, the dried wood with the live, red roses sprouting from it united in the rose cross. And in our meditation we should feel that we're born from God, as it says in our main guiding-verse, that's supposed to be the guiding verse of our esoteric life, and that we die in Christ as we let the force of our meditation become a light in us that radiates into higher world; and our higher self comes to meet this warmth, these rays—thereby it unites with us as the Holy spirit in which we come back to life again:

Two sayings are given to pupils in Rosicrucian schools to support them in their meditations: Beware of drowning in your esoteric striving. Beware of burning in the fire of your own ego.

There's an outer and an inner way to strive towards the spiritual.

Everything around us is like a veil, like a cover before the spiritual that we must punch through to get to the spiritual behind it. But in which direction? This cover surrounds us on all sides, above below front back right and left. And inwardly, everything that we experience as joy, pain, etc., is like a veil, like fog that conceals the spiritual in us, and this spiritual is the same one that we find when we break through the outer cover.

So that mankind can evolve further and get into the spiritual there's always men from time to time who're more advanced than is permitted by the momentary stage of human development, and who have things to tell us about states of human evolution that reach far into the future. Such advanced beings must exist to lead men further. John, the writer of the Apocalypse, was such a man. When he wanted to write a revelation of the future, he told himself: If I write this book out of the whole surroundings in which I'm living here and now it'll be influenced by the self that's in my body, since I'm connected with everything around and in me. I must free myself from all of this. He had to place himself on something like a rock that served him as a firm support, on which he didn't wobble and wasn't influenced by anything that surged around and in him. And he moved himself to the evening to 9-30-395, to Patmos Island, as the sun had already disappeared under the horizon, though its effect could still be felt, and as the moon and stars appeared. The Virgin constellation was there in the western sky, irradiated by the last gleam of the sun that had set, with the moon under it. This picture is reproduced in one of the seals—the virgin with the radiating sun and the moon under her feet. Thus, all of these seals were produced out of deep mystical connections.

John broke through the cover that surrounds us in this one direction—that of Virgo. There are 12 of these signs. Seven of them are good—the ones reproduced in the seals; the other five are more or less dangerous. Just as John chose this particular point in time and space to become completely separated from himself and all temporal things around him, so a Rosicrucian pupil must acquire a firm foundation in himself. The best way to do this is to let theosophical teachings work on us. Our astral body and thereby our etheric body become expanded by listening to theosophical ideas. This is the effect on anyone who hears anything about theosophy But the effect on those who are inclined towards theosophy is different than on those who aren't. The former feel the etheric body's expansion and fill it up with theosophical teachings, by accepting them. The other feel an emptiness in their etheric body through its expansion because they don't accept these ideas and so don't fill the expansion. Then doubt and skepticism arise through this emptiness. Whereas with the first men, it's like a pouring of oneself into the universe, which they can't let go too far, for they'll get a feeling of hollowness, of not feeling at home in these widths of space, like a fish that's taken out of water and can't live in air, because its organs haven't adapted themselves to this changed element. When a theosophist devotes himself to the teachings and his astral body expands evermore, he loses himself in this unfamiliar element One must avoid drowning here. And this is possible if one studies theosophy seriously, takes it in, elaborates it, and grasps it with feeling, not just with thinking and will, but permeates it completely with feeling. One can only do this with great earnestness. One must gain a firm support within oneself—like John when he wanted to write the Apocalypse and he transported himself to Patmos Island at sundown of Sept. 30, 395.

The configuration of the sun, Virgo and moon on that evening can be checked astronomically, and this was done. From this materialistic science draws the conclusion: Therefore the Apocalypse was written at that time. And then we're told that science has ascertained this. That's the way science ascertains things.

On the inner path one finds all the joys and sorrows, pains and blissfulness that live in us. But all of this is attached to our lower, perishable ego This whole desire world surrounds us like a fog that covers the spiritual for us. It keeps us from seeing and noticing the spiritual. We must break through it to get to the spiritual. There are forces that approach an esoteric pupil to make this fog even denser. The fog gets even denser if we don't resist it. We must burn it to avoid burning in the fire of our passions. If we don't overcome this fog, if we don't resist its becoming ever denser through Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, we're prisoners, as occultists say. There actually are men today who are born with great capacities and reach certain stages very quickly, but are then completely wrapped up in such a fog by the adversarial powers that they can't get out. One calls this occult imprisonment.

Our desire world consists entirely of egoism. And we can only overcome this egoism in deep humility. Which thought can lead us to an over-coming of egoism? The thought that we already spoke about yesterday in the exoteric lecture, the thought that we killed Christ. We're murderers, yes, that's what we are. We can transform this fact, but only if we let Paul's words live and become truth in us, “Not I, but Christ in me.” We shouldn't kill the divine in us through egoism, through our life of desires, etc., we should let Christ live in us. We should begin to carry out this easy and yet so difficult thing in us with shivering earnestness.

We arose from the divine: Ex Deo nascimur. We should take all suffering upon us willingly and patiently with the thought that we killed Christ; we should devote ourselves to him completely and die in him: In Christo morimur. Then we'll be reborn, reawakened through the Holy Spirit: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus. This verse sounds different exoterically than esoterically, but the difference is in only one word that's left out in the esoteric version. As we leave this word out and don't speak this word in shy reverence for what this word expresses, our feeling goes out to what is left unspoken in shy reverence.

Ex Deo nascimur
In … morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

This tells us that man arose from the spiritual; that he was originally contained in the spirit:

In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
The eyes of sense,
That through them I may see
The lights of bodies.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
Reason and sensation
And feeling and will,
That through them I may perceive bodies
And act upon them.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
And I will incorporate into my spirit
The super-sensible eyes
That through them I may behold the light of spirits.
And I will imprint in my spirit
Wisdom and power and love,
So that through me the spirits may act
And I become a self-conscious organ
Of their deeds.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.

Aries:

How brightly his eyes are blinking;
In his head there stumbles his thinking,
By pleasures of brooding consumed.
Mid storms his fine memories following,
In wonderful images wallowing
That on branches of knowledge once bloomed,
Through mystical fever-nights loomed.

Die Augen leuchten ihm helle,
Im Kopfe stolpert sein Denken,
Vom Glück des Sinnens ganz berauscht.
Im Sturme folgt es der Erinnerung
Des wunderbaren Traumes,
Der Blüte des Erkenntnisbaumes,
In mystisch schwüler Nacht erlebt.

Taurus:

Soon spooks through his whirring brain,
In fooling somnambulem mood,
By heart-felt enjoyment pursued,
A ghostly and galloping train,
A vision, with clarity showing
How out of the cosmos, stridently crowing,
A chorus of spirits wail in refrain.

Schon spukt im wirren Hirne,
Possierlich grüblerisch verträumt,
Vom Herzen aus mit Wohlgefühl begleitet
Im Traumgaloppe geisterwärts,
Gewichtig Schauen, kühn erspähend,
Wie aus dem Kosmos, deutlich krähend,
Ein Geisterchor sich offenbaret.

Gemini:

The Ego resplendent is sailing away
From a thinking based on mere physical clay,
On spiritual wings upborne,
Is kicked by a greatly superior scorn
From the path of ennobled living,
And cosmic ethereal striving,—
Is ousted with little delay.

Entrissen fühlt das helle Ich
Dem Denken sich, das physisch nur
Und drum vom hohen Geistestrieb
Mit einem Seelentritte mächtig
Vom Pfade edlen Strebens
Und kosmisch hohen Lebens
Wird kühnlich weggeschmissen.

Cancer:

Outside the mere body already unfolding,
By spiritual messengers properly led,
By spiritual love conveniently fed,
By wise tomfoolery starkly sped,
Is the tenebrous soul's beholding:
In the wide and infinite expanses
Of cosmical spirit it swims and dances.

Ganz aus dem Leibe fühlt sich schon,
Durch Geistesboten recht geführt,
Durch Geistesliebe wohlgepflegt,
Von weiser Torheit stark gestossen,
Der Seele dunkles Schauen
In den weiten Geistesauen
Ganz kosmisch geistgenährt.

Leo:

What sounds so tremendously gripping,
So pregnant with spirit but void of ideas,
With love universal so splendidly dripping,
That keenly his high heart hears?
Advanced to the grade of the Lion,
There is fine new regalia to try on,
—Up the steep path of knowledge he's tripping.

Was wirkt so mächtig wundersam
Gedankenlos und geistesträchtig,
Von Weltenliebe prächtig triefe>
In kühnem Herzen ihm so ahnungsvoll?
Er ist zum Löwengrade
Auf dem steilen Wissenspfade
Ja klärlich nun schon vorgedrungen.

Virgo:

And now to receive he is really prepared,
From cosmical thinking worthily wise,
From cosmical love with the universe shared,
From zig-zag lightning of spirit skies,
From the region of the hierarchies,
The initiation of his soul,
Deep, undivided, whole.

Nun muss er auch empfangen
Aus Weltgedanken würdevoll,
Aus Weltenliebe gnadereich,
Mit zuckendem Geistesblitz,
Aus der hierarch sehen
Region Die hohe Seelen-Initiation,
Ganz ungeteilt und tief.

Libra:

He lives in harmony already,
The spheric music round him playing;
He feels within his heart unsteady
The world-truth wildly swaying;
He feels inside him cosmic Scales
On which the spirits well are weighing
World problems packed in bales.

Erlebt nun schon in Harmonie
Mit aller Weltenklarheit.
Empfinden kann in seinem Herzen er
Die Schwungkraft aller Wahrheit.
In sich fühlt er die Weltenwaage,
Auf der des Daseins Rätselfrage
Von Geistern abgewogen steht.

Scorpio:

Soon come the scissors snicker snack—
“My spirit's trial,” (so he thinks)
“Explains this pricking of my back.”
“These pricks attack the soul that stinks,”
Replies with smirk a quite non-wiseman,
A mystically undersize-man,
Who at the Mystery just winks.

Da zwickt und zwackt es ihn.
“Des Geistes Prüfung, ” findet er,
“Scheint mir dies Prickeln in dem Leibe.”
“Der Stich, der trifft ihn sicher!”
So grinst verständig jetzt ein Ungelehrter,
Ein ganzlich mystisch Unverkehrter—
Den Mysterien ganz frech entgegen.

Sagittarius:

But he was in world-midnight seeing
How Homer, Socrates and Goethe too
Within his ego's deepest being
Their sharp soul-arrows shot—(at who?).
And their quite undiminished center
By karma into him did enter,
In him into still grander being grew.

Er aber hat in Weltennacht erkannt,
Wie doch Homer und Sokrates, Goethe aush,
In seines Iches Wesensgründen
Die schärfsten Seelenpfeile schossen,—
Und ihre unverfälschte Menschenwesenheit
Verkörpert wie mit Selbstverständlichkeit
In ihm zu neuer Daseinsgrösse sich.

Capricorn:

“And so you feel old Homer's genius move
Most strongly in your conscious reach?"
"Oh, no! such things I do not love,"
Thus spake with pointed speech
The Initiate. "I never for Maya strove;
Old Homer in my present incarnation
Would rest his mind in mystic meditation."

“Erfühlst du denn Homers Genie
In deinem Denken stark sich regen?”
“ O, regt es sich, ich liebt es nicht,“
So sprach mit spitzer Rede
Der Eingeweihte, “ das wäre Maja-Streben.
Homer will in meinem gegenwärt'gen
Leben All sein Genie im Mystenschlafe pflegen!

Aquarius:

“O mystic transformed Socrates, I seek
In vain a trace in you of that great Greek.
He was as wise as you are egoistic.”
“Cease slandering,” (replied the Mystic).
“That man knows most, who knows he naught doth know,”
Said Socrates. And I know nothing, so
I stand securely on Socratic peak.

Dir fehlt, o mystisch umgeformter Sokrates,
Vom klügsten Griechen jede Spur.
Dazu bist du so eitel, wie er weise war.
“ Erdrücke Lasterrede!”, sagt der Myste,
“ Nichts zu wissen, liebte ich als dieser Mann ...
Und da ich jetzo gar nichts weiss und kann,
Erfühl ich dieses Leben ganz sokratisch-mystisch.”

Pisces:

“And which of Goethe's sunbeams then doth lurk
Within you, is at present showing
Your soul the path to riper fruits of knowing?”
The Seer then grasps his sharpest quirk—
“No! Goethe's light, too bright, does but confuse!
Preferring then to dream his art, I choose
The depth of sleep in which to do my work!”

Und welcher Sonnenstrahl von Goethe,
Als Bote führt er deine Seele
Zum Reifen hoher Wissenstriebe?”
Der Seher greift zum schärfsten Redepfeile.
“ Es schuf,” so sagt er, “Goethe viel zu helle.
Drum träum ich Goethes hohe Kunst, und wähle
Des Schlafes Tiefen mir zum Arbeitsfeld.”

Week 12

The splendor of Nature's beauty
Lures me out of my soul depths
To liberate for cosmic flight
The divine forces
Of my own existence.—
To abandon myself,
Yet trusting
And seeking myself alone
In cosmic light,
And cosmic warmth.

Let us survey a few cosmological facts. Evolution is focused on the development of states of consciousness. The present state of consciousness is one stage – it is the fourth. It has been preceded by three and will be followed by three. We are now in the waking state.

The seer, looking back into the past, finds that this was preceded by a dream state; somewhat lighter than in our more highly developed animals; and duller, but more comprehensive than present-day man can imagine. This consciousness included the plant world. Man could then see life flowing through the plants, germinating, sprouting. It is something that we still find in some mediums: a duller but more comprehensive state of consciousness.

Before that, we find a state that we can call sleep trance; it is even duller and even more comprehensive; the entities were able to see not only life, but also directly pain and joy; today we can only see the gestures of it. The dream state symbolized pain and joy through form, just as dreams still symbolize today. Everything was expressed in symbolic forms in those days, and our present-day symbolizing is an atavism of the earlier state of consciousness. Even the sleep trance, this dreamless sleep consciousness, can still be studied in mediums today.

The third state of consciousness – looking backwards – is the deep trance; it is also called the induced trance. It is very rare today, but can be achieved in pathological states, and then the medium constructs chains of worlds.

So we have come to know four states of consciousness: deep trance, dreamless sleep, the dream state and waking daytime consciousness. Man has gone through these four states. What has been achieved at each stage must be summarized and passed on to the next in the bud.

This gathering together is called Pralaya, the unfolding is called Manvantara; the state of consciousness itself is called a planet.

The next state that awaits us is the psychic state, which is similar to the previous one and is associated with an expansion, but at the same time a maintenance of the waking state of consciousness. The consciousness now advances in stages: the expansion occurs, but with an alert daytime consciousness. This is the development of the clairvoyant. All the theosophical teachings come from this expanded state of daytime consciousness. This psychic state of consciousness now grants the clairvoyant insight into the beautiful life stream that can be seen flowing through all plants; it can be seen when you subtract the plant, it can best be compared to the color of a peach blossom and can also be seen in humans, only - clouded by Kama.

The next super-physical consciousness extends to all sensations, to pain and feelings. The clairvoyant learns to see them when he can see the astral body – and also the lower mental world.

The highest spiritual state of consciousness provides insight into the higher mental world and extends to the planets.

Thus, all further development is based on seven states of consciousness.

Each state of consciousness has seven life stages to go through. These are also called the seven kingdoms. They are: the first, the second, the third elementary kingdom, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom.

The physical body has already passed through the seven stages, the astral body will only penetrate them in the next round.

The passage through a realm is called a round.

Each state of life must again pass through seven states of form.

Between each state of life and the next there is another small pralaya.

The form states are designated as arupa (the actually still formless, only striving for development), rupa, astral, physical, plastic, intellectual, archetypal. The seventh state is the result of the six preceding ones; after the chela has been able to form himself plastically and intellectually, he creates, as it were, the skeleton to which the following can attach themselves, which in turn has to shoot out of the germ. It is the archetype.

Beyond the spiritual state of consciousness is the mastery; the spiritual state of consciousness is the highest that the chela can reach, in which he can see over all the others. After that, the mastery begins for him.

Our present physical state would shine for the clairvoyant in a color that most resembles a beautiful green; the astral state in a bright yellow; the rupa-form state in orange; the arupa-form state in rose red. The color tones of the future phases are blue, indigo, violet.

In the esoteric language, the preceding planets are called the “moon” and the sun.

The state of consciousness that man reached on the moon gave a result, as did the previous one; the first state of consciousness gave the deepest result.

The mystic finds within himself what he saw spread around him; what is now our inner life was once all around us; what our life with the world is now will later be our inner life; we have to assimilate everything. Our entire outer nature will fade away, but it will become inner life. What is spread out is called evolution, what is gathered together is called 'involution.

Thus, the mystic will find the earlier stages of expansion within himself when he delves into himself. The result of these earlier stages is ego-consciousness; the earth has the task of developing this ego-consciousness - Ahamkara the Indian calls it.

The ability to perceive is linked to the third state of consciousness, that of dream sleep; the mystic experiences it again, swimming directly in the stream of life, and he experiences it to an increased degree, since he transfers his present day consciousness to that state. The Indian calls this state Chita, the mystic language calls it “the waters, the sea of life”; Suso, Ruysbroek, Böhme - speak of a “merging in the heavenly tincture,” of a “tasting of life” - through direct insight into earlier states, which are found again in the depths of consciousness. It is a wandering back in time, not in space.

If you go back even further, you will find a state of consciousness that is only known to the chela who has maintained the continuity of consciousness even through sleep. The laws of nature are the only thing you can grasp from this state of consciousness. Today they are present in the rudimentary manas; manas is what is left of it. The chela perceives thoughts in a state of deep sleep – devachan. This state is created by raising the dreamless sleep to consciousness. The Indian calls it

The last state of consciousness, in which everything that can be seen in the rounds and planetary development is experienced, is deification or union with God, in fact: union with the primal creative power of a cosmos. “Mokscha” is what the Indian calls it. The chela only reaches it immediately before adeptness. What flashes up in man is not only the perception of thoughts, but also of the ‘I’. It is a merging with humanity; it is the realization: Budhi. That teaching, which has flowed out of the conscious seeing of Budhi, is therefore called ‘Esoteric Buddhism’.

We have thus become acquainted with the states of consciousness just described under the names: Ahamkara, Chita, Jujuksha or Manas, Mokscha or Budhi.

Through Ahamkara, man becomes aware of himself.

Through Chita, he becomes aware of the expressions of the beings around him.

Through manas, he becomes aware of the inner life of beings.

Through budhi, of the essence of the beings around him.

This continuous thread of development, which takes the states of consciousness through 343 stages, we call the Pitri.

As the starting point of yesterday's discussion we took the alternation in our daily life that consists of waking and sleeping, and we pointed out that during sleep man's astral body and ego, as we term them, are out in space, while his physical and etheric bodies remain in bed. And at the same time we had to emphasize the fact that the principles remaining in bed could not continue to exist were it not for the entrance of a divine-spiritual astrality and a divine-spiritual ego. In other words, this alternation in the conditions of everyday human life means that at falling asleep man—with his human ego and human astral body—abandons his physical and etheric bodies, but that in their stead there enter divine-spiritual astral beings and divine spiritual ego beings. In the waking state, on the other hand, he himself fills out his physical and etheric bodies with his own astral body and ego.

That was one of our two points of departure yesterday. The other was the result of what we have gleaned from a comprehensive survey of our entire human evolution through the former embodiments of our Earth—through Saturn, Sun, and Moon. We also discussed certain details of this survey, and we found that as regards the progress of our planet earth a severance set in with the Moon evolution: certain beings who required baser, inferior substances, so to speak, for their further development divided off with the old Moon, while higher beings of a more spiritual nature detached themselves as an older form of the sun evolution. Next, we saw the two parts reunited later on, together passing through a world devachan or pralaya, and thus achieving their development. Then this Earth evolution proceeded in such a way that a repetition of the separation of the sun occurred, leaving for a time earth-plus-moon as a coarser, denser body, and the sun as a special, more rarefied body, dwelling place of higher, loftier beings. We learned further that if the earth had remained united with the moon substance it would inevitably have become barren and hard, and all living things would have died—or, more accurately, mummified. The moon, together with all that it embraces today, had to be cast out of the Earth evolution at a given time. The result was a rejuvenating process in the evolving human being. We saw that the lofty beings, who found the conditions for their advancement on the sun, could not influence human substances and beings until the moon had been sloughed off, but that then they could act upon them again with rejuvenating effect. This means that human evolution proper could not have commenced until after the separation of moon and earth. The sundering of the moon is of enormous importance for the whole of evolution, and today we will study it more closely. First, however, we shall show how our two starting points in yesterday's lecture merge, so to speak.

We observe a man as he stands before us in his daytime state: a being consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. But when clairvoyant consciousness observes him during sleep at night—his physical and etheric bodies in bed—higher beings are seen to enter this physical and etheric body. And who are these beings? Precisely those whose field of action we described as being on the sun. That is by no means impossible: only one who imagines all spirit as physical, and who fain would apply everything physical to his conception of spiritual beings—only such a person could doubt that solar beings, dwelling on the sun, can enter a man's physical and etheric bodies at night. For beings so exalted as to inhabit the sun, no such spatial conditions exist as obtain for beings of the physical world. Such beings can very well inhabit the sun and yet send their forces down into human physical bodies at night.

We can put it this way, then: During the day the human being is awake—that is, he inhabits his physical and etheric bodies; at night he is asleep—that is, he is outside his physical and etheric bodies. During the night the Gods or other extra-terrestrial beings watch over man's physical and etheric bodies. That is expressed half figuratively, yet it is entirely pertinent. Thus we know whence come the beings who must enter our physical and etheric bodies at night, and this links up our two points. But we shall presently see that these beings are not only important for our life at night, but are gradually gaining in significance for our daytime life as well. First, however, we must consider a few other matters if we are clearly to understand the whole import of the moon's withdrawal from Earth evolution. Today we will occupy ourselves with the genesis of other beings that surround us.

Turning back once more to Saturn, we can say that it consisted exclusively of human beings. There was no animal, plant, or mineral kingdom. The whole sphere was composed of the earliest human germs in much the same form as a blackberry is made up of tiny individual berries; and everything that pertained to Saturn surrounded it and acted upon it from the environment. If we now ask, Whence came that which gave man this first impulse, on old Saturn, for his physical body, we can say in a certain sense that it derived from two sources. In the first instance, higher spiritual beings poured forth their own substance: a momentous sacrifice occurred on old Saturn, and the beings that achieved it are called Thrones in the sense of Christian esotericism. Human thinking or even human clairvoyance may scarcely presume to contemplate the august evolution the Thrones had to undergo before being able to sacrifice that which could form the germinal indication of the human physical body.

Let us try to understand in some degree what such a sacrifice means. If today you contemplate the human being—the being with which you are best acquainted—it will occur to you that he demands certain things of the world, and gives it certain things. Goethe summarized this very beautifully in the words, “Human life runs its course in the metamorphosis between receiving and giving.”¹ Man derives not only bodily nourishment but mental sustenance from the outer world; and in this way he grows and receives what he needs for his own development. But through this process he also develops the capacity for giving, in turn, what he has brought to maturity in the way of ideas and feeling, and ultimately, of love. By his taking something from the world and giving something else to his surroundings, his capacities keep constantly increasing: he becomes sensible and intelligent, able to develop concepts which he can sacrifice to the common life of humanity. He develops feelings and sensations that are transformed into love; and by offering these he stimulates his fellow creatures. We need only call to mind what a vitalizing effect love can have on our fellow beings—how one who is really able to pour forth love upon his fellow men can quicken and comfort and elevate them through his love alone.

Now man has attained to the virtue of sacrifice. But no matter how great a capacity for sacrifice we may acquire, it is slight when compared with that of the Thrones. Evolution, however, consists in constantly increasing this capacity for sacrifice, until finally a being is able to sacrifice his own substance and essence, as it were, experiencing as highest blessedness the giving of all he had developed as matter and substance. There are august beings that rise to higher planes of existence by sacrificing their own substance.—A materialistic soul will naturally object: When beings reach the point of sacrificing their own substance, how can they then rise to a higher plane? They would be sacrificing themselves, and nothing would be left of them! Thus speaks the materialistic soul, incapable of understanding that there is a spiritual existence, that such a being continues to exist though sacrificing what he had gradually received into himself. On Saturn the Thrones were on a plane where they were able to pour forth the substantiality they had acquired during their previous development; and thereby they themselves rose to a higher stage of evolution. And that which flowed from the Thrones—analogous, in a way, to what the spider secretes for weaving its web—was primarily the basis for the formation of the human physical body.

Then the Thrones were joined by another kind of beings, ranking lower than Thrones, whom we call the Spirits of Personality, or the Principalities—Archai in Christian esotericism. These Spirits of Personality worked over, as it were, what had flowed from the Thrones; and through the collaboration of these two kinds of beings the first inception of the human physical body came into being. This work continued over a long period of time. Then, as mentioned yesterday, a cosmic night, or world devachan, intervened, and there came about the second embodiment of the earth, the Sun phase. Human beings emerged again, and other spiritual beings appeared on the scene: the Spirits of Fire, or Archangels, as they are known in Christian esotericism, and the Spirits of Wisdom, or Kyriotetes. These were mainly concerned with the further development of what reappeared as the human physical body. Now it was the turn of the Kyriotetes—the Dominions, or Spirits of Wisdom—to sacrifice their substantiality; and what we call the etheric body flowed into the physical body. This etheric body was then worked upon by the Spirits of Fire, or Archangels, in collaboration with the Spirits of Personality; and thereby man became a being of the rank of a plant. We may say that on Saturn the human being had the status of a mineral, for our minerals have only a physical body, and so had the man of Saturn; hence he lived a mineral existence. On the Sun he had the status of a plant, for he had a physical and an etheric body.

Now we come to a concept which we must make our own as an especially important one if we are to understand evolution in its entirety. Here I always like to draw attention to the existence in the cosmos of something that corresponds to a certain daily commonplace—a source of anxiety and annoyance to parents—namely, that some children flunk, do not arrive at the goal of their class, and must repeat the work. Certain beings do not reach the goal of a given cosmic grade; and in this sense certain Spirits of Personality, who should have reached their goal on Saturn, lagged behind: they had not done all that was necessary for raising man to the grade of a mineral, which would have brought him to perfection in that,particular evolutionary stage. Such beings must then make up during the next grade what they had previously neglected.

Now, in what way could these retarded Spirits of Personality work during the Sun existence? They could not create a being such as man was due to become on the Sun, a being with physical body and etheric body: that called for the Spirits of Fire. Nor could they create on the Sun anything beyond what they had done on Saturn, namely, a potential physical body of mineral grade. So during the Sun period their influence brought about the genesis of beings one grade lower. These beings now constituted a lower kingdom, inferior to the human kingdom; and they are the ancestors of our present animals. While our present human kingdom had already attained to the plant status on the Sun, our present animal kingdom was at that time on a level with mineral beings, having the physical body only. In this way the animal kingdom, in its first indications, was added to the human kingdom.

So if we ask, what being among all those that surround us has passed through the longest development, the answer is, man. And the other beings arose because the forces of development associated with human existence withheld what in a different stage might have become man, allowing it to become a lower being at a later stage. Had the retarded Spirits of Personality performed their task on Saturn instead of on the Sun, the animal kingdom would not have come into being.

In like manner—I need only sketch this—the Moon evolution showed the following: Man progressed upward by reason of having received an astral body from certain beings we call Angels and from other higher spirits, the Spirits of Motion, or Dynamis in Christian terminology. This gave man the rank of an animal during the Moon existence, while most of those beings who, during the Sun existence, had appeared as a second kingdom now arrived at the status of plants on the Moon. These were the precursors of our animals. And to these were added—again through retarded spiritual beings, as explained—those beings that belong to our present plant kingdom. On the Sun there was as yet no plant kingdom, but only a human and an animal kingdom: the plant kingdom was added on the Moon. A mineral kingdom, such as today constitutes the solid foundation upon which all else stands, had not yet come into existence on the Moon.—In this way the kingdoms evolved one after another, with the human kingdom, highest of these, as the first one. Something in the nature of an outcast, something of the human kingdom that remained behind, is the animal kingdom; and what lagged one step farther still became the plant kingdom.

When the old Moon evolution was accomplished, that of the Earth commenced; and in connection with the latter we described the splitting off of the sun and moon. During this period all the germs of the former kingdoms reappeared: the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and finally—when the moon, as to its substance, was still united with the earth—the mineral kingdom. The appearance of the mineral kingdom as the solid foundation was what caused the hardening and desiccation that rendered the earth so barren; for the mineral kingdom that surrounds us today is nothing but what was sloughed off by the higher kingdoms. I have drawn attention in the past to the fact that you need only consider thoughtfully what modern science recognizes, and you will be able to imagine how the mineral kingdom was gradually ejected. Consider that coal, a mineral product proper, is taken out of the earth. What was this coal long, long ago? Trees that grew on the earth, plants that perished and petrified and became minerals. What you now dig out as coal was once a quantity of plants, hence it is a product that was first discarded: originally there were plant beings where now there is coal.

You can now readily imagine that everything else forming the solid foundation of our earth is also matter that was cast off by the higher kingdoms. Think, for example of certain mineral products that even today remain the secretions of animal beings, such as the shells of snails and mussels. Formerly nothing of a mineral nature existed: only in the course of time has it come about through elimination. Not until the earth evolution was in progress did the mineral kingdom join the others; and the reason for its formation was that beings like those on Saturn were still present and active on the earth. It was only through the activity of the Spirits of Personality that the mineral kingdom came into being; in fact, those beings are active in all the higher stages. Yet if evolution had proceeded in this manner there would have been so many mineral influences, so much hardening and densification, that gradually the whole earth would have become a desert waste.

This brings us to an important moment in the evolution of our earth. We visualize the sun as having split off, and we think of those beings who are now spiritual beings on the sun as having withdrawn as well, along with the finest substances. We behold the earth with its increasing desolation, becoming ever denser as mineral; and we see as well the growing desiccation of the forms it harbors—even the human forms. Already at that time a certain change came over the conditions under which human beings lived; and an illustration from the growth of the plant will clarify what then confronted men as well.

From the insignificant seed the plant sprouts forth in the spring, unfolds into blossom and fruit, and withers again during autumn. All that gladdens the eye in spring and summer disappears in the fall, and outwardly, physically, only an unpretentious remnant remains. But if you imagined that during winter nothing of the real being of the plant persisted, or if you looked for it only in the physical seed, you would not comprehend the plant. True, as constituted today the plant consists of physical body and etheric body, but observed clairvoyantly its upper part is seen to be surrounded by an astral being, as by a border; and this astral being is animated by a force that streams to earth from the sun, from the spiritual element of the sun. For clairvoyant consciousness every blossom is surrounded as though by a cloud, and this cloud breathes the life that is exchanged between sun and earth. While the plants are sprouting and burgeoning during spring and summer, something of the sun being approaches and hovers over the surface of the plant; and with the coming of autumn the astral being withdraws and unites with the life of the sun. It can be put this way: In spring the plant astrality seeks its physical plant body on the earth and embodies itself—not in it, but at least around it; and in the fall it returns to the sun, leaving behind the seed as a sort of pledge that it will find its way back to its physical expression.

Similarly, a sort of exchange took place between the physical human beings and the sun beings, although the human forms were still primitive and simple. And there was a time when the sun spirits surrounded human bodies with astrality, just as today the plant astrality hovers over plants from spring to fall. We can therefore say that during certain epochs the astral principle of man united, to a certain extent, with his physical body on earth, that it then withdrew to the sun, and again returned; and only the seed was left behind in the physical principle. But the earth kept on hardening; and then something of great importance occurred, something I shall ask you to keep well in mind. While formerly, when the sun had first withdrawn from the earth, it was still possible for the astral beings to reunite with the physical body when they returned after the separation, the earth, which the descending beings sought to occupy, had now become so hard under the ever increasing influence of the moon that they could no longer use it.

That is a more accurate description of what I characterized yesterday somewhat abstractly. I had said: The sun forces had lost the power of forming the substances on earth; but expressing it more concretely one can say: The substances dried up, and the beings no longer found suitable bodies. This resulted in the desolation of the earth, and human souls wanting to descend again realized that the bodies were no longer suitable. They had to abandon them to their fate, and only the strongest bodies could prevail through this period of desolation. The latter reached its climax at the time when the moon was about to withdraw from the earth. The souls who during that time yearned to be human souls were unable to make use of such bodies, with the result that only a handful of people still inhabited the earth. This desolation appeared to forecast a gradual extinction of life on the earth, and the situation is described quite accurately by saying that when the moon withdrew, only very few human beings had survived these conditions: there were very few cases in which a union had come about between souls craving embodiment and the physical forms with which they wished to unite.

Now I must describe these conditions more in detail. Let us go back once more to the point in time at which the Moon evolution had run its course and the Earth re-emerged from the womb of the cosmos. It did not come into being as did the old Saturn, for what here appeared comprised within it the after-effects of all that had occurred previously; nor was it physical matter only that was connected with it, but also all the beings who had been active before. The fact that the Thrones united with Saturn means that they remained connected with the entire evolution; and they came forward again when the Earth emerged once more from the obscurity of the cosmic womb. In like manner there appeared again the Spirits of Personality, the Spirits of Motion, and so on, as well as the germs of human beings, animals, and plants, for all this was contained in the earth.

Our physical science sets up hypotheses that are pure fancy. In connection with cosmogony, for example, a theory is proffered to the effect that once there was a great cosmic fog reaching out past Saturn. Now, a cosmic nebula of that kind, consisting of mere mists and vapors, is a fantastic conception: there never was any such thing. If one had been able to see only with external, physical eyes, something of the sort could indeed have been perceived: a vast fog mass would have been visible. But this fog mass contained something that physical eyes could not have seen, namely, all the beings associated with this evolution. The fact that later all this became organized and formed was not brought about by a mere rotary motion, but rather, because of the needs of those beings that were linked with it all. You will arrive at a sensible view of these matters only after you have completely emancipated yourselves from all that represents the official view of today, from what is inoculated in our children from the beginning of their school days. The children are told that in olden times only childish views and conceptions prevailed: those misguided ancient Indians believed in a Brahma who filled out all cosmic space! And queer people such as the old Persians believed in Ormuzd, the good God, and Ahriman, who opposed him! Worse yet: the old Greeks, who had a lot of divinities—Zeus, Pallas Athene, and so forth! We know today, of course—so the children are told—that all those beings originated in popular imagination and childish conceptions. Think of the old Germanic Gods—Wotan, Thor—we've long since known them for mythological figures; nowadays we know that such Gods had nothing to do with the development of the world. No: In the beginning there was a primeval fog in space, and it began to rotate. It cast a sphere out of its mass and kept on rotating. In time a second sphere split off, then a third, and so on.

As a matter of fact, these conceptions are but the form of a modern, physico-Copernican mythology which in time will be supplanted by some other mythology; but the earlier mythologies have one point of superiority over the present form: they come nearer the truth than do the later ones which have extracted merely what is abstract and pertains wholly to outward matter. We should ever keep in mind how easy it is to present, for the children's benefit, this most plausible way for a cosmic system to come into being. You take a drop of oil, cut a little card into the shape of a disk, insert this horizontally into the drop, stick a pin through the disk from above, and place it in water, where it floats. Now you begin to turn the whole thing, explaining, “just the way the cosmic fog once revolved”. First the oil drop flattens out, then a smaller drop is thrown off, then a second and a third, while a big drop remains in the middle—and lo, a little cosmic system has come into being! Then it is quite easy to explain plausibly that what here appeared on a small scale is analogous to what took place on a large scale. But people who perform this experiment forget one thing—something which in other circumstances may be a very good thing to forget: themselves. They forget that they are doing the turning. The whole analogy could have validity only if some worthy professor deigned to add something like the following: Just as I stand here and turn the pin, so there is a gigantic professor somewhere out there, seeing to it that the whole comes into rotation and that the planets split off, as did the drops of oil on a small scale.—In that case it might pass.

We know that there is no giant professor out there twirling the pin, but that beings of all ranks are there, and that it is these spiritual beings who attract appropriate matter to themselves. The beings that needed certain conditions for their life drew to themselves the requisite matter when they proceeded to the sun, appropriated it, and fashioned a sphere of action by means of their spiritual forces; and other beings took for themselves of the earth substance. That which acts right into the tiniest particle of matter—into the atom, if we chose to call it that—is spirit. It is erroneous to ascribe any sort of activity to mere matter. Men will learn what takes place in the smallest confines only when they understand that spirit acts throughout the greatest spaces. And by this is not meant spirit in general, of which people say, “in general, matter simply contains spirit”—a universal or primordial spirit. That sort of thing opens the way for concocting almost anything. No, we must learn to know the spirits in their concrete reality, in detail, and in their various vital requirements.

Now I will supplement a point we touched upon yesterday: the separation of the sun from the earth-plus-moon, and the subsequent division of the moon and the earth. In its main outline that is a correct picture, but it must be completed. Before the sun could withdraw, it became necessary for certain beings to segregate special fields of action for themselves, and these spheres figure today as the outer planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. It can therefore be said that universal matter, which contained sun and moon, comprised Saturn, Jupiter, and so forth, as well; and certain beings withdrew from the beginning with these heavenly bodies, beings requiring for their life precisely what these planets could offer. Then the sun split off, together with the highest beings, and what remained was earth-plus-moon. This evolution proceeded until the moon was cast out in the manner described.—But of the beings who had gone with the sun, not all were able to keep pace with the sun development. Speaking figuratively—it is difficult to find words in our prosaic language, hence it is occasionally necessary to use images—we can say that when the sun withdrew, certain beings believed they would be able to travel with the sun; but in reality only the most exalted beings could accomplish this, and the rest had to withdraw later. And the fact that the latter created special spheres for themselves accounts for the genesis of Venus and Mercury. So the separation of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars occurred before the division of sun and earth, while later Venus and Mercury split off from the sun, and finally the moon from the earth.

There we have a spiritual picture of this evolution. We have comprehended the development of our solar system to the extent of visualizing the various beings dwelling on the different heavenly bodies. With this in mind we can now answer the question, What happened to those spirit-astral beings who wished to descend as human beings, but found hardened bodies they could not enter? Not all of these beings could unite with the sun spirits for lack of sufficient maturity, and so the following occurred: Those beings who had to abandon the bodies on earth withdrew temporarily to Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. While down below, the earth was becoming desolate, producing only bodies incapable of harboring human soul beings, we find the souls betaking themselves to these planetary worlds, there to await the time when they should again be able to find appropriate human bodies. Only very few, only the most tenacious human bodies, were capable of receiving souls in order to preserve life during the moon crisis. The other souls ascended to other cosmic bodies.

Then the moon was cast out of the earth, and in consequence the sun forces were enabled once again to work upon human forms. The human form received a new impetus and once more became soft, pliable, plastic; and the souls who had waited on Saturn, Jupiter, and so forth, could now occupy these pliant human bodies. While formerly they had been compelled to quit the earth, they now gradually returned—after the expulsion of the moon—and populated the rejuvenated human bodies. So the casting out of the moon was followed by a period in which more and more new bodies kept emerging. During the moon crisis the number of human beings extant was very small. These never lacked descendants; but when the souls came down they could make no use of the bodies, and they left them to perish. The human race was headed for extinction; but after the rejuvenation had set in the descendants of those human beings who had survived the moon crisis were again able to receive the souls from Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. The earth was gradually peopled with souls.—Now you will understand what a significant, deeply incisive event this exit of the moon was: really everything was changed by it.

Let us return once more to the development preceding the moon's withdrawal. We found that man must be designated the first-born of our creation, for he came into being on Saturn. On the Sun was added the animal kingdom, on the Moon, the plant kingdom, and on the Earth, the mineral kingdom. But now, beginning with the splitting off of the moon, matters assume a different aspect. Had the moon not withdrawn, everything on the earth would have perished: first the human beings, then the animals, and finally the plants; and the earth would have become mummified. But it was rescued from this fate by the withdrawal of the moon: everything revived and experienced a recovery.

How did this regeneration come about? The lowest kingdom, the mineral, required the least aid; the plant kingdom, though in a way withered, could also revive rapidly; and the animal kingdom as well was able gradually to resume its upward development in certain respects. The human forms took longest to come into their own, to be able to receive the souls flowing toward them out of the highest regions of the world. The world development is thus reversed after the moon's withdrawal: while originally the human kingdom was the first to come into being, followed by the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms in this order, it is now the mineral kingdom that is first capable of exploiting the revivifying forces. This is followed by the plant kingdom, then by the animal and the human kingdoms, each in turn developing upward to its highest forms. After the moon's withdrawal the entire plan of evolution appears in reverse; and the beings that had been able to wait longest, so to speak, to unite their spirit with matter, these are the ones who, after the moon's departure, ascended to a more spiritual sphere in the highest sense of the word. Those whose spiritual development stopped earlier remained behind in a less perfect stage.

After the exit of the moon those who had remained behind reappeared first, and you will readily understand the reason for this. Consider a human soul, or any soul-endowed being, that had previously been unwilling to incarnate because of the condition of solidification. Such a soul might have reflected—again expressed in our human language—Shall I incarnate now or shall I wait still longer?—Let us assume that the moon had not been gone very long, and that consequently all substance was still very hard; but the being desiring to incarnate is impatient, descends whether or no, and makes the best of an inadequately developed body. This means that it must remain at a lower level. Another being reflects, I would better wait longer, remaining in cosmic space until such time as the earth shall have further lightened and rarefied its physical being.—Such a being, by awaiting a later point in time, succeeds in physically molding the being in which it embodies, making it into its own image.

All the beings that incarnated too soon came to a standstill on a lower plane, while those who were willing to wait advanced to a higher one. Our higher animals stopped at the animal level because they did not wait long enough after the secession of the moon: they put up with whatever bodies they could find. Those descending somewhat later could form the bodies only into those of the lower human races, which were dying out or about to do so. Then came a point in time that was just right for the union of souls and bodies, and this period produced what was capable of genuine human development.

What we have, then, is desolation on earth up to the moon's withdrawal, after this a regeneration of earthly conditions, and from then on the reappearance of those beings who had left the earth because it had too far deteriorated for their purposes. And this refers not only to those who develop the higher human beings but also to others who descended for quite different reasons. Here again it is a matter of awaiting the right moment to enable such a being to enter a body on the earth. Going back to the time of ancient India, we find human beings in a very high stage of development. Just as the souls descending from Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter sought their bodies, so more exalted beings sought bodies of a higher type in order to carry on their activity in man's inner nature. Consider the great and holy teachers of the ancient Indians, the Rishis: a portion of their being they placed at the disposal of certain higher beings who took up their dwelling there. But other higher beings said, No, we shall wait until other beings appear down there, beings who themselves are undergoing a higher development. We have no desire to descend yet: we will remain above until men have reached a greater inner maturity; then we will descend, for at present we would find the inner nature of man ill prepared to receive us.

Then, during the Persian cultural epoch, certain higher beings said to themselves, Now we can descend into man's inner nature as it has thus far developed. And again in Egyptian times this occurred in the same way. But the loftiest one among the sun beings still waited. He sent His forces down to the holy Rishis from without; and when these gazed up to the Being they called Vishva Karman they said, He is beyond our sphere. He waited, for He knew that the inner nature of man was not sufficiently prepared to receive Him. Then came the Persian epoch in which Zarathustra gazed up to the sun and saw there Ahura Mazdao; but still this exalted Being did not descend to the earthly sphere.

There followed the Egyptian epoch and the civilization of that people which had waited longest. And there appeared the man who had waited longest and had already developed his inner nature through many incarnations. Then the Sun Being gazed down and beheld the inner nature of this man who lived in Jesus of Nazareth and who had perfected his inner nature. The loftiest of the sun beings gazed down and said, As the lower beings once descended to build up bodies, so I now descend to occupy the inner nature of this man who has waited longest.—Beings of a high order, to be sure, had united with men in the past; but the one who had waited longest—he it was who received into himself the Christ: he was so far advanced at the Baptism in the Jordan that the Spirit Who hitherto had remained in cosmic spheres could now descend and unite with his inner nature. Ever since the Baptism the Christ had dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, because the individuality that permeated Jesus of Nazareth had attained, through many incarnations, to the degree of maturity which enabled it to receive this lofty Spirit in its own spirit-permeated body.

This Christ Spirit had always existed; but after the withdrawal of the moon it was necessary that all beings attain to a certain degree of maturity. First there gradually emerged the lowest beings, those who in respect of their spiritual principle had been least able to wait; then progressively the higher ones. And when man had achieved an ever higher development of his inner nature, and the time had come when Jesus of Nazareth had attained to the stage that enabled Him to receive the Christ, then he who enjoyed the gift of higher vision could say:

I saw the Spirit descending upon him.

And what could He say, He upon Whom the Spirit had descended, if He voiced what now lived within Him? It was the same Being the Rishis knew as Vishva Karman. What would Vishva Karman have had to say of Himself—not if the Rishis had spoken, but if He Himself had spoken? This lofty Sun Spirit, active in light as spirit, would have had to say, I am the light of the world. What would Ahura Mazdao have had to say of Himself? I am the light of the world. And what did the same Spirit say when a human being had become ripe to receive Him into Himself? How does that which heretofore had dwelt in cosmic space, on the sun, now speak out of a human being? What does it now say from within a human being? I am the light of the world.

The utterance of heavenly choirs—innermost self-revelation of the leading cosmic Spirit—we hear intoned again out of the inner being of a man when the Being Itself had come to dwell in a human principle. Inevitably there sound forth from Jesus of Nazareth, when the Christ is within him, the words:

I am the Light of the World.

• 1. Das menschliche Leben verfliesst in der Metamorphose zwischen Nehmen and Geben.

Yesterday we endeavored to place before our minds from a certain point of view the world-historical position that existed at the moment in time when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. We tried to do this by presenting the picture of two significant leaders of mankind, the Buddha and Socrates, both of whom lived several centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha. In doing this we remarked that the Buddha represented something like the significant conclusion of one stream of evolution. There Buddha stands in the fifth or sixth century before the Mystery of Golgotha proclaiming what has since then been recognized as a deeply significant teaching. The revelation of Benares, that in a certain way encompasses and renews all that had been able to flow into human souls during thousands of years, was proclaimed in the only way it could be half a millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha. We can see even more clearly how far the Buddha represented the great conclusion of one cosmic stream when we place before our minds his great predecessor who recedes far back into the twilight of human evolution: Krishna,¹ who in quite a different sense appears to us as the final moment of a revelation thousands of years old. Krishna can be placed several centuries before the Buddha, but that is not the issue here. The main point is that the more we allow the being of Krishna and the being of the Buddha to affect us, the more clearly do we recognize that in Krishna what was later to be proclaimed by the Buddha appears in an even brighter light, whereas with Buddha, as we wish to demonstrate in a moment, in a certain way it comes to an end.

The name “Krishna” embraces something that for many thousands of years has shone into the spiritual development of mankind. If we immerse ourselves in all that is meant by the proclamation of Krishna, we look up into the sublime heights of human spiritual evolution, instilling the feeling within us that nothing can possibly surpass, nothing can enhance what is contained in, what resounds from Krishna's revelation. What resounds from this revelation of Krishna is a kind of climax; in saying this we are attributing to the person of Krishna what also was revealed by others before him. For it is indeed true that everything that had been given out gradually for thousands of years before his time by those who were given the task of becoming the bearers of knowledge was renewed, summed up and brought to a conclusion in the revelations of Krishna to his people. If we take into consideration how Krishna speaks about the divine spiritual worlds and the relation of these worlds to mankind, and about the course of cosmic events, and if we also consider the spirituality to which we ourselves must rise if we wish to penetrate the deeper meaning of the teaching of Krishna, then we may say that only one event in the whole subsequent development of humanity can in even a slight degree be compared with it. We may say of the revelation of Krishna that it is in a certain sense an occult teaching. Why occult? It is occult for the simple reason that few people can achieve the inner capacity to ascend to those spiritual heights where understanding can be gained. There is no need to keep secret what Krishna revealed in an external way, to lock it up in a safe, so that it stays “occult”; it remains occult for no other reason than that too few people rise to the heights to which they must rise if they are to understand it. However widely such revelations as those of Krishna are disseminated among the people and put into their hands, they still remain occult. For they can be brought out of the realm of the occult not by disseminating them among the people, but only when there are souls who can rise high enough to be able to unite with them. It is true that such revelations hover above us at a certain spiritual height, yet they speak to us as if from a high point of spirituality. Anyone who simply picks up the words that are contained in such revelations should by no means believe he understands them, not even if he is a learned man of the twentieth century. It is entirely comprehensible that it is widely asserted today that there is no occult teaching. This is understandable because those who say such things do indeed possess the words, and with them think they have everything. But it is in the very nature of occult teaching that they do not understand what they possess.

Earlier I said that there is just one thing that can be compared with the teaching of Krishna, and indeed what we associate with the name “Krishna” can be compared with what may remind us of three later names which are in a certain sense closely connected with us—though in the case of these three the method, conceptual and philosophical, is quite different. I am referring to everything that in recent years has been linked to the names of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel,² and the teachings of these men have a slight resemblance to other ”occult teachings” of mankind. For though we can undoubtedly acquire the writings of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, it cannot be denied that in the widest sense of the words they have remained occult teaching. Truly they have remained occult to this day. There are very few people who wish to achieve any kind of relation to what these three men have written. From a certain kind of what I may call philosophical courtesy, there is today in certain circles some talk about Hegel again; and if something is said like what I have just said myself, then the reply is made that after all there really are some people who busy themselves with Hegel. However, if one listens to what these people say and what they contribute to the understanding of Hegel, then we are all the more compelled to the view that for these people Hegel has remained an occult teaching. What shines out towards us from the East from Krishna appears again in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in an abstract conceptual way, and it is not easy to notice the similarity; indeed, it requires a special constitution of soul to be able to do so. I should like to speak candidly about this and state clearly what is required.

When a man of today who believes he has enjoyed not an average but a superior education takes up a philosophical work by Fichte or Hegel he believes he is reading something concerned only with the development of advanced concepts. Most people will agree that it is difficult really to warm up to it, if, for example, they turn to Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and read for the first time about being, nonbeing, becoming, existence, and the like. We have probably heard it said that in this work a man has cooked up a collection of highly abstract concepts, beautiful enough, no doubt, but providing nothing capable of kindling warmth in heart or soul. I have known many people who after three or four pages of this particular work have promptly closed the book. But they are not at all prepared to admit that perhaps the guilt lies in themselves that they do not warm up and have avoided the struggles that have to be endured in going from hell to heaven. This they do not willingly admit. Yet it is possible by means of these so-called “abstract concepts” to experience a veritable life-struggle, and to feel not only a living warmth but the whole range of feeling from the most extreme cold to the highest soul-warmth. Then one can come to feel that these things are written not in simply abstract concepts but in the heart's blood.

We may compare what radiates over to us from Krishna with what is regarded as the newest evolutionary phase of the human ascent toward the spiritual heights. Yet there is a significant difference. What we meet with in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, these most mature thinkers of Christianity, we meet with in a pre-Christian era, in the form it had to take then, in Krishna. For what is Krishna's revelation? It is something that can never again be repeated, whose greatness of its kind and in its own way can never be surpassed. If we have an understanding for such things we may have a conception, an idea of the strength of that spiritual light that shines over to us, if we let such things affect us as are connected with the culture from which Krishna emerged. If we do this, if we allow words like the following to influence us (to take a few examples from the Bhagavad Gita) where Krishna indicates in words his real being, we arrive at thoughts, feelings and emotions that will be characterized later. Thus in the tenth canto Krishna speaks as follows:

I am the spirit of creation, its beginning, its center and its end. Among all beings I am always the noblest of all that has come into being; among spiritual beings I am Vishnu, I am the sun among the stars; among the lights I am the moon; among the elements I am fire; among the mountains I am the lofty Meru; among the water I am the great cosmic sea, among the rivers I am the Ganges, among the multitude of trees I am Ashvattha; in the true sense of the word I am the ruler of men and of all the beings that live; among the serpents I am the one that is eternal, the very ground of existence itself!

Let us take another example from the same culture, which we find in the Vedas. The Devas were gathered around the throne of the Almighty, and in deep reverence they ask who he himself is. Then the Almighty, that is to say the cosmic god in the old Indian sense, answered:

If there were another than I, I would describe myself through him. I have been from all eternity and through all eternity I shall be. I am the primal cause of everything, of all that is in West, in East, in North and South; I am the cause of all that is in the heights above and in the depths below. I am all, I am more ancient than anything that is. I am the ruler of rulers, I am the truth itself. I am revelation itself, and the cause of revelation. I am knowledge, I am piety, I am the law. I am almighty!

And when, as the ancient document records, it was asked what was the cause of all things, the answer was given:

The cause of the world, it is fire; it is the sun and it is also the moon. It is also this pure Brahman and this water and this highest of all creatures. All moments and all weeks and all months and all centuries and all millennia and all millions of years have proceeded from him, have emerged from his radiant personality which no one can comprehend, neither above nor below nor in the circumference, nor in the center, here where we stand!

Such words sound over to us from very ancient times, and we surrender ourselves to them. If we approach these words without preconceptions, how do we feel in relation to them? Certain things are said in the words; we have seen that Krishna says something about himself. And things are said about the cosmic God and about cosmic origins. From the tone of these thoughts, as they sound forth through these words, things are said that could never have been expressed in a greater or more significant way. And one knows that they never could have been spoken in a greater or more significant manner. That is to say, something was placed into human evolution that must stand just as it is and be accepted as it is since it has come to a conclusion. And wherever people in later times have thought about such things, and may perhaps have believed in accordance with methods employed in these later times that one thing or another could have been expressed in clearer concepts or could have been modified in one way or another, they have nevertheless been unable to say it better. They have never done so. Indeed if anyone wished to say something better about precisely these things, it would be sheer presumption.

Let us first consider the passage of the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna, so to speak, characterizes his own nature. What is he really characterizing? His way of speaking is truly remarkable. He says of his nature that he is the spirit of all that has come into being, that he is among the heavenly spirits Vishnu, among the stars the sun, among the lights the moon, among the elements the fire, and so on. If we wish to paraphrase this and compress it into a formula we can say that Krishna points to himself as the essence, the entity of all things. He is this entity in such a way that it represents always the purest, the most divine kind of nature. Hence, according to this passage, if we penetrate beyond the actual things and seek to find behind them the nature of their true being, we arrive at the being of Krishna. If we take a number of plants of the same species and look for the entity of this species, which is not in itself visible but comes to expression in the single plant forms, and ask what lies behind them as their essence, the answer is: Krishna! But we must not think of this being as identical with any single plant but must think of him as the highest and purest element in the form. Thus we have not only what the essence is, but this essence in its highest, noblest, purest form.

So of what is Krishna actually speaking? Of nothing else but what a man can recognize as his own essence when he sinks into himself; not his being as it appears to him in ordinary life, but something that lies behind man and the human soul as they manifest themselves in life. He speaks of the human essence that is within us because the true human essence is at one with the universe. This is by no means a knowledge that works egotistically within Krishna. It is something in Krishna that wishes to point to the highest in man, something that may perceive itself as identical and at one with what lives as being in all things.

Just as we speak today for our own age, so Krishna spoke to his own age of what he had in mind for his culture. If today we look into our own being we first of all glimpse the ego as you will find it pictured in the book Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.³ We distinguish the ordinary ego from the higher, super-sensible ego which does not appear in the world of sense. This super-sensible ego appears in such a manner that it is not only in us but is at the same time poured out over the being of all things. So when we speak of our higher ego, the higher being dwelling in man, we do not speak of what a man says when he says in his customary manner “I am,” although in our language it has the same sound. In Krishna's mouth it would not have had the same sound. He is speaking of the nature of the human soul as it would have been interpreted in that day, in the same way as we today speak of the ego.

How did it come about that Krishna expresses something that is so similar to what we express when we speak of the highest of which we have knowledge? This was possible because the culture out of which Krishna emerged was preceded for thousands of years by a clairvoyant culture, because human beings were accustomed to rising to clairvoyant vision when they looked into the being of things. And we can understand a language such as resounds here to us from the Bhagavad Gita when we look upon it as the close of the old clairvoyant view of the world, when we recognize that when a man in those ancient times passed into the intermediate state between sleeping and waking that was at that time common to all human beings he was not placed among things in such a way that they were “here” and he was outside them, as is the case in ordinary sense perception. He felt himself poured out over all things, felt himself in all beings and at one with them. It was with the best of things that he felt himself to be at one, and his best was in all things. And if you do not start out from an abstract feeling and an abstract perception in the way customary with men of the present time but rather start out from the old way of feeling and perception as we have just characterized them, then you will understand such words as resound over to us from Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. If then you ask how men with the old clairvoyance perceived themselves, you will understand them and realize that in the same way that a man, when his etheric body is freed through spiritual scientific training, feels himself spread and poured out into what lives in everything, so did the man of former times experience this as a natural condition, although not in the same way as would now be the case as a result of spiritual scientific training. Ancient men felt themselves to be inside things, and this condition came about by itself without their volition. And when these revelations were shaped into forms and what had been seen was expressed in beautiful, wonderful words, then something appeared like, for example, these revelations of Krishna. For this reason it could also be said that Krishna spoke to his fellowmen in this way, “I wish to proclaim in words what the best of us have perceived when they were in the super-sensible worlds and how the best of us have perceived their relationship to the world. In future times such men as these will no longer be found, and you yourselves cannot be as your ancestors were. I wish to put into words what these ancestors perceived, so that it will endure, because humanity can no longer possess this as a natural condition.”

Thus something which had belonged to mankind for thousands of years was brought in words such as were possible at that time in the form of the revelations of Krishna so that mankind in subsequent ages might possess this revelation of what they were no longer able to perceive for themselves.

Other sayings can also be interpreted in a similar manner. Let us suppose that at a period when Krishna was giving his revelations a pupil had stood before his initiate teacher and asked him, “What lies behind the things which my eyes see, can you, my initiated teacher tell me?” The initiated teacher might well have answered, “Behind those things which are now seen by your external, material eyes, lies the spiritual, the super-sensible. But in former times men could still see the super-sensible while they were in their normal condition. They were able to look into the nearest super-sensible world, the etheric world that borders on our material world. Here in this world is to be found the cause of everything that is material, and these men of old were able to see what this cause is. In our time I can do no more than express in words what could in earlier times be seen, ‘It is fire, it is the sun!’ But not the sun as it now appears, for what can now be seen by the eye was precisely what for ancient clairvoyants could least of all be seen. The white fiery globe of the sun was darkness for them, while the effects of the sun were spread over all space. The radiations of the sun's aura in many-colored light pictures flowed in and out of each other, coming forth from each other, in such a way that when they merged into things they became immediately creative light. It is the sun, it is also the moon (though this too was seen in a different manner), for pure Brahman is altogether in it.”

What is pure Brahman? When we breathe in the air and breathe it out again the materialistic person believes he is only inhaling oxygen. But that is a delusion; with every breath we inhale and exhale spirit. The spirit that lives in the air we breathe penetrates into us and goes out from us again. And when an old clairvoyant saw that, he did not, like the materialist, believe that he was breathing in oxygen. That is a materialistic prejudice. The clairvoyant of ancient times was aware that the etheric element of the spirit, Brahman, from whom all life comes, was being inhaled. In the same way that today we believe that life comes from the oxygen in the air, so did ancient man know that life comes from Brahman; and in that he takes up Brahman, he lives. The purest Brahman is the source of our life.

And of what nature are the conceptual heights to which this very ancient, this ether-like, light-like wisdom aspires? Today people believe they are able to think with great subtlety. But when we see how people jumble up everything in a higgledy-piggledy way as soon as they try to explain something, then we lose all respect for the thinking of today, especially for its logical thinking. At this point I really must engage in a short discussion that may seem abstract. I shall make it as short as possible.

Let us suppose that we encounter an animal that has a mane and is yellow; then we call this animal a lion. Now we begin to ask, “What is a lion?” The answer, “A beast of prey.” Next we ask, “What is a beast of prey?” Answer, “A mammal.” We ask further, “What is a mammal?” Answer, “A living creature.” And so we continue describing one thing through another. Most people believe they are being very lucid when they go on asking ever more questions in the same way as they asked about the lion, the mammal and so on. And people often ask similar questions about spiritual matters, even about the highest spiritual things, in just the same way as they ask what a lion is, what a beast of prey is, and the rest. And at the end of lectures, when slips of paper are handed in with questions, questions such as these are asked countless numbers of times, for example, “What is God?” “How did the world begin?” “How will the world end?” There are many people who have no wish to know anything at all beyond these questions. They ask them in just the same way as they ask, “What is a lion?” and so on.

People think that what is valid for everyday life must also be equally valid for the highest things. They do not take into consideration that it is just the highest things that are of such a nature that we cannot ask such questions about them. If we proceed from one thing to another, from the lion to the beast of prey and so on, we must eventually come to something that cannot be described in this way, when there is no longer any sense in asking, what is this? For in this kind of questioning a predicate is sought for the subject. But when we reach the highest being, this being can be comprehended only through itself. From a logical point of view it is absolutely meaningless to ask the question, “What is God?” Everything can be led upward to the highest, but to the highest no predicate can be added, for the answer would have to be: God is ..., and God would then have to be described in terms of something higher. So the question itself would involve the strangest contradiction possible.

The fact that this question is still invariably asked today shows how highly exalted Krishna was when he appeared in a very early epoch and spoke as follows, “The Devas gather around the throne of the Almighty, and in deep devotion ask who He Himself is. Then He answers, ‘If there were anyone else other than I myself, I should describe myself through him.’ ” But this He does not do; He does not describe Himself through another. So we also, as we could say, like the Devas, are led in devotion and humility to this ancient and holy culture, and admire its grandiose logical elevation which it did not achieve through thinking but through the old clairvoyance. In those times people knew at once that when they reached the causes then questioning must cease. The causes must be perceived. At this point we stand in admiration in front of what has come down to us from those very ancient times, as though the spirits who transmitted it to us wished to say to us, “The times have gone when men could see directly into the spiritual worlds, nor will they be able to do so in the future. But we wish to record what we can aspire to, something that at one time was granted to human clairvoyance.”

So we find recorded in the Bhagavad Gita and in the Vedas all those things that were brought together by Krishna as in a kind of conclusion. Such things cannot be surpassed, though they will be perceived again when clairvoyance is renewed. But they will never be perceived through those faculties that have been attained by men in subsequent times. For this reason it is always correct to say that if we remain within the realm of contemporary culture, an external culture whose content is determined by sense perception, we shall never again attain to that ancient sacred revelation which found its conclusion in Krishna unless it is attained through a trained clairvoyance. But through its own evolution through spiritual science the soul can again raise itself and attain it again. What was at one time given to man in a normal way, if I can express myself in this way, is not now given to mankind in ordinary life and cannot be attained by him under natural conditions. It is for this reason that these truths came down to us. When there are thinkers like Fichte, Schelling and Hegel who reached the highest possible purity in their thinking, then we can meet with these things again, not indeed as life-filled as they were nor with the direct personal impact of Krishna, but in the form of ideas—though never in the way in which they were understood in the time of the old clairvoyance. And, as I have often stated, it was a spiritual necessity that the old clairvoyance should slowly and gradually die out in the post-Atlantean era.

If we look back to the ancient Indian civilization, the first post-Atlantean cultural period, we may say that no records are extant from this epoch, for at that time men still could see into the spiritual world. Only through the Akasha Chronicle can there be rediscovered what was then revealed to mankind. It was a lofty revelation. But then mankind sank down lower and lower. In the old Persian epoch, the second post-Atlantean cultural period, though the revelations still continued they had lost their original purity. They were still less pure in the third cultural period, that of ancient Egypt. If we wish to visualize what were the real conditions of the time we must bear in mind that as far as the first cultural epochs are concerned no records exist, and this is true for all the peoples of that age, whether or not a cultural epoch has been called after them. If we speak of the ancient Indian culture we are referring to a culture from which nothing has come down to us in writing. It is just the same with the primeval Persian culture. Written records exist only from the Egyptian-Babylonian-Chaldean culture, which belongs to the third cultural period. But during the period of the unfolding of the primeval Persian culture within Indian culture there was a second Indian period, running parallel to the old Persian. And yet a third period began in India contemporary with the Egyptian-BabylonianChaldean culture, and it was during this period that the first written records began to be kept. These first records date from the latter part of this third culture. Such records are, for example, those contained in the Vedas, which then penetrated into external life. It is these records which also speak of Krishna.

So no one should believe when he speaks of written records that they go back to the first Indian cultural epoch. Everything contained in the documents are records first written down in the third period of ancient India, for the reason that precisely in the third period the old clairvoyance was dying out more and more. These are the records assembled around the person of Krishna. Thus ancient India tells us something that can be externally investigated. If we examine things fundamentally, everything agrees with what can be discovered in the external documents. As the third world age came to an end and men lost what they had originally possessed, Krishna appeared on the scene to preserve what otherwise would have been lost.

When tradition says that Krishna appeared in the third world-age, what age is meant by this? This age is what we call the Egypto-Chaldean cultural epoch. The Indian-Oriental teaching of Krishna accords perfectly with what we have been characterizing. When the old clairvoyance and all its treasures were on the point of being lost, then Krishna appeared and revealed them so that they could be preserved into later times. Thus Krishna is the conclusion of something great and powerful. And everything that has been said here over the years agrees entirely with what is given also in the oriental documents if we read them rightly. It is pure nonsense to talk in this context of “occidental” and “oriental,” because this is only a matter of language, of vocabulary. What is important is that we speak with a full understanding of that which we proclaim. And the more you go into what has been given out over the years, the more you will see that it is in complete agreement with all the documents of the Orient.

So Krishna stands there as a conclusion. Then, a few centuries later, comes the Buddha. In what sense is the Buddha, if we may so express it, the other pole of this conclusion? In what relation does the Buddha stand to Krishna?

Let us place before our souls what we have just spoken of as characteristic of Krishna: great powerful clairvoyant revelations of primordial ages, couched in such words that men of future times will be able to understand and feel and sense in them the ancient clairvoyance of humanity. Krishna's revelation, as he stands before us, is something that men can accept and can say to each other that herein is contained the wisdom of the spiritual world that lies behind the sense world, the world of causes and spiritual facts. This wisdom is expressed in great powerful words in Krishna's revelations. If we immerse ourselves in the Vedas, in all that we can sum up in conclusion as the revelation of Krishna, then we may say that this is the world in which man is at home, the world which lies behind what our eyes can see, our ears hear, our hands grasp, and so on. Yes, the human soul belongs to the world revealed by Krishna.

How could the human soul itself feel in the course of subsequent centuries? It could perceive how these marvelous revelations of an older time spoke about the true, spiritual, celestial home of mankind. It could then look into all that surrounded it. It saw with eyes, heard with ears, grasped things with the sense of touch; it could think with the intellect about things, the intellect that never penetrates into the spiritual element proclaimed in the revelation of Krishna. And the soul could say to itself, “There is an ancient holy teaching from times past which tells of a world, our spiritual home which lies all around us, around that world which is all that we now recognize. We no longer live in that spiritual home, we have been expelled from that world of which Krishna spoke so magnificently.”

Then comes the Buddha. How does he speak of the marvels of the world spoken of by Krishna to human souls which could perceive only what eyes can see and ears hear? He says, “Certainly you live in the world of the senses. The yearning that drives you from incarnation to incarnation has led you into this world. But I am telling you of that path which can lead you out of this world and into that world of which Krishna spoke. I am telling you about the path through which you will be redeemed from the world that is not the world of Krishna.” Buddha's teaching in these later centuries resounds like a kind of nostalgia for the world of Krishna. In this respect the Buddha seems to us like the last successor of Krishna, as Krishna's successor who had to come. And if the Buddha himself had spoken of Krishna, how would he have been able to speak about him? He would have said something like this, “I have come to proclaim to you again the greater one who was my predecessor. Turn your mind backward to the Krishna who was greater than I, and you will see what you can attain if you leave this world which is not your true spiritual home. I will show you the path by which you can redeem yourselves from the world of sense. I lead you back to Krishna.”

The Buddha could have spoken in this way, but he did not use these exact words. Nevertheless he did say them in a somewhat different form when he said, “In the world in which you live there is suffering, there is suffering, there is suffering. Birth is suffering. Age is suffering. Illness is suffering. Death is suffering. To be apart from that which one loves is suffering. To be bound to that which one does not love is suffering. The longing for that which one loves but may not attain is suffering.” And so he gave his Eightfold Path. It was a teaching that did not go beyond that of Krishna because in fact it was the same teaching as the one given by Krishna. “I have come after him who is greater than I, and I will show you the way back to him who is greater than I.” These are the world-historical tones that ring forth to us from the land of the Ganges.

Now let us go a little further toward the West, and place once more before our souls the figure of the Baptist, and remember the words that the Buddha could have spoken, “I have come after Krishna who is greater than I; and I will show you the way back to him, away from the world bereft of the divine of which Krishna spoke. Turn your minds backward!”

Now consider the figure of the Baptist. How did he speak, how did he express his views? How did he express the facts he had received from the spiritual world? He too pointed to another, but he did not say, as the Buddha could have said, “I have come after him.” On the contrary he said, “After me there will come one greater than I.” (Mark 1:7.) This is what the Baptist said. Nor did he say, “Here in the world is suffering, and I wish to lead you to something that is not of this world.” No, he said, “Change your way of thinking. Do not continue to look backward, but look forward. When He comes who is greater than I the time will be fulfilled. Then the divine world will enter into the world of suffering. And what was lost of the revelations of past times will enter in a new way into human souls.” (Matt. 5:2.)

So the successor of Krishna is the Buddha, and John the Baptist is the forerunner of Christ Jesus. Thus everything is reversed. We are faced with the six hundred years that elapsed between these two events, and we have before us the two comets, with their nuclei: the one comet pointing backward with Krishna as nucleus together with the one who leads men backward, the Buddha. Then we have the other comet pointing forward, with Christ as its nucleus together with him who stands before us as the forerunner. If, in the best sense, you recognize the Buddha as the successor of Krishna, and John the Baptist as the forerunner of Christ Jesus, then this formula expresses in the simplest way what took place in human evolution around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is in this way that we should look at things, and then we can understand them.

All this has no bearing on any religious confession, nor should it be linked with any particular religion. These are facts of world history. No one who understands them in their innermost depths can present them or will ever present them in a different way. Do such statements impair in any way any revelation ever given to mankind? It is curious that it is sometimes said that we assign in some way a higher place to Christianity than to other religions. Do such words as “higher” or “deeper” have any meaning in this context? Are not such words as “higher” or “lower,” “larger,” or “smaller” the most abstract words we can use? Are we praising Krishna any less than do those who put him higher than Christ? We refrain from using such words as “higher” or “less high,” and wish only to characterize these matters in accordance with the truth. It is not a matter of whether we place Christianity higher or lower, but whether we characterize in the right way what belongs to Krishna. Look up all that has been said about Krishna, and ask yourselves whether anyone else has ever said anything about Krishna “higher” than what has been presented here. Everything else is idle talk. But truth comes to light when there begins to be active that feeling for truth that goes to the essence of things.

Here when we are characterizing the simplest and grandest of the Gospels we have the opportunity of studying the whole position of the Christ as a cosmic and earthly being. It was therefore necessary to go into the greatness of what came to its conclusion centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, in which the new morning-glow of the future of humanity dawned.

• 1. Krishna is usually regarded as a mythical figure, and a member of the Hindu pantheon, one of the earthly avatars, or incarnations of the god Vishnu. He appeared as the charioteer in the Hindu poem the Bhagavad Gita, in which he is endowed with divine attributes. Rudolf Steiner does not date his incarnation exactly, but gives it as occurring in the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch, which lasted from approximately 3000 B.C. to 747 B.C.
• 2. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 1762–1814. German idealist philosopher.
  
  Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 1775–1854. German idealist philosopher.
  
  Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline referred to by Steiner appeared in 1817.
• 3. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, originally written in 1904 and published in the magazine Luzifer-Gnosis, has appeared in many editions in English, including the latest which appeared from Anthroposophic Press in 1984.

Privately printed for the members of the College of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. No one is considered competent to pass judgment upon these writings who has not acquired the prerequisite knowledge demanded by this school, either through the school itself or in a manner approved by it. Opinions expressed by other persons will be disregarded; the authors of the writings in question will engage in no discussion regarding them.

This lecture was given at Basel in December of 1918, and is included in Volume 187 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961. It is lecture 1 of 8 from the lecture series: How Can Humanity Find the Christ Again? It was published in German as, Wie Kann die Menschheit den Christus Wiederfinden? Das Dreifache Schnattendasein Unserer Zeit und das Neue Christus-licht. It has been translated from notes unrevised by the lecturer, by Olin D. Wannamaker.

Like two mighty pillars of the spirit have the two annual festivals, the festivals of Christmas and Easter, been set by the Christian cosmic feeling within the course of the year, which should be a symbol of the course of man's life. We may say that in the conception of Christmas and the conception of Easter there stand before the human soul those two spiritual pillars upon which are inscribed the two great mysteries of man's physical existence which he must look upon very differently from the way in which he views other events in the course of his physical life. It is true that a super-sensible element is projected into this physical life—through sense observation, through intellectual judgments, through the content of feeling and will. But this super-sensible element is in other cases clearly manifest as such—for instance, when the Christian cosmic feeling undertakes to symbolize it in the festival of Pentecost. In the Christmas conception, however, and that of Easter, attention is drawn to those two events occurring within the course of the physical life which are in their external appearance purely physical but which—in contrast with all other physical events—do not immediately manifest themselves as physical events. We can look upon the physical life of man as we look upon nature; we can thus look upon the external side of the physical life, the external manifestation of the spiritual. But we can never view with our physical vision the two boundary experiences of the course of human life—not even the external aspect, the external manifestation—without being brought face to face, even through our physical vision, with the tremendous riddle, the element of mystery, in these two events. They are the events of birth and death. And in the life of Christ Jesus stand these two events of man's physical life—and likewise in the Christmas and Easter conceptions, reminding us of them—confronting the responsive Christian heart.

In the thought of Christmas and the thought of Easter, the soul of man wills to look upon the two great mysteries. And, as it thus looks, it finds in this contemplation strength filled with light for man's thought, content filled with power for the will, an upright lift of the whole man, from whatever situation he needs this upright lift. As they thus confront us, these two pillars of the spirit—the thought of Christmas and the thought of Easter—they possess an eternal worth.

But, in the course of man's evolution, his capacities of conception have approached in manifold ways the great Christmas thought and the great Easter thought. During the earliest times of the evolution of Christianity, when the Event of Golgotha had penetrated with shattering effect into human emotions, men gradually found their way to the view of the Redeemer dying on Golgotha, as they came during the earliest Christian centuries to feel in the Crucified One hanging on the cross the thought of Redemption, and gradually formed for themselves the great and powerful imagination of the Christ dying on the cross. But in the later times, especially since the modern age began, Christian feeling—adapting itself to the materialism rising in human evolution—has turned to the picture of the childlike element entering the world in the newborn Jesus.

We can certainly say that a sensitive feeling will find in the way in which the Christian sentiment of Europe has turned during recent centuries to the Christmas manger something of a materialistic Christianity. The craving—this is not said in a bad sense—to caress the infant Jesus has become trivial in the course of the centuries. And many a song about the infant Jesus felt in our day to be beautiful—or charming, as many express it—will not seem to us to possess a deep enough seriousness in the presence of these more serious times.

But the Easter thought and the Christmas thought, my dear friends, are two eternal pillars, eternal memorial pillars, of the human heart. And we can truly say that our age of new spiritual revelations will cast a new light upon the Christmas thought; that the Christmas thought will gradually come to be felt in a new form and in a glorious way. It will be our task to hear in the present world events the call to a renovation of many an old conception, a call to a new revelation of the spirit. It will be our task to understand how a new conception of Christmas, for the strengthening and uplifting of the human soul, is working its way up through the present course of world events.

The birth and death of the human being, no matter how we may analyze them, how intensely we may look at them, manifest themselves as events which play their role directly upon the physical plane, and in which the spiritual is so dominant that no one who earnestly reflects upon things could deny that these two events, these earthly events of human life, give evidence as they work upon the human being that man is the citizen of a spiritual world. No vision of the natural world can ever succeed—in the midst of what can be perceived by the senses, understood by the intellect—in finding in birth and death anything other than events in which the intervention of the spirit is manifested directly in the physical. Only these two events manifest themselves thus to the human heart.

As to the Christmas event also, the event of birth, the human and Christian heart must have an ever deepening sense of mystery. We can say that men have seldom risen to the level whence they could, in the true sense, direct their look to the mysterious nature of birth. Very seldom, indeed, but then in concepts that speak to the utmost depths of the human heart.

So it is, my dear friends, in the conception associated with the spiritual life of Switzerland of the fifteenth century, with Nicholas von der Flue. It is related of him—and he himself related this—that, before his birth, before he could breathe the outer air, he had beheld his own human form, that which he would wear after his birth should have occurred and his life should have begun its course. And he had beheld before his birth the ceremony of his own christening, the persons who were present at the christening and who shared in his earliest experiences. With the exception of one elderly person who was then present and whom he did not know, he recognized the others because he had already seen them before he beheld the light of the world.

However we may view this narration, we shall not be able to escape the impression that it points in a way to the mystery of human birth, which confronts world history so magnificently symbolized in the Christmas conception. In the story of Nicholas von der Flue we shall find the suggestion that there is connected with our entrance into the physical life something which is concealed from the every-day view of humanity only by a very thin partition wall; by a wall which can be broken through when such a karmic situation exists as was present in the case of Nicholas von der Flue. Such a startling allusion to the mystery of birth and of Christmas still meets us here and there; but we must say that humanity has as yet become very little aware of the fact that birth and death, the two boundary pillars of human life facing us in the midst of the physical world, reveal themselves even in their physical manifestation as spiritual events, such as could never occur within the mere course of nature; as events in which, on the contrary, spiritual divine Powers intervene, as is evident in the very fact that both these boundary experiences of the course of human life must still remain mysteries, even in their physical manifestation.

The new revelation of the Christ now leads us to contemplate the course of man's life—so we may safely say—as Christ wills that we should contemplate it in the twentieth century. Let us recall today, as we desire to enter deeply into the thought of Christmas, a saying reported to have been uttered by Christ Jesus which can rightly lead us to the Christmas conception. The saying runs thus: “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” “Except ye become as little children”—this is truly not an exhortation to strip away all the mystery character of the Christmas conception, and to drag it down to the triviality of “dear little Jesus,” as many folk songs and artistic songs have done—but the folk songs less than the artistic—in the course of the materialistic evolution of Christianity. This very saying—“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven”—impels us to look upward to mighty impulses surging through the stream of human evolution. And in our own present time, when all that is taking place in the world surely does not give occasion for lapsing into trivial conceptions of Christmas, when the human heart is filled with so much that is painful, when this human heart must reflect upon so many millions of human beings who have met their death in the last few years, must reflect upon countless multitudes who hunger for food,—in this time surely nothing is fitting for us save to behold the mighty thoughts within world history which impel humanity in its onward course, thoughts to which we can be guided by the saying, “Except ye shall become as little children,” which we can supplement by this other saying: “Unless you live your life in the light of this thought, you cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

My dear friends, the very moment when the human being enters into the world as a child he withdraws from the world of spirit. For what occurs in the physical world, the procreation and growth of his physical body, is only the ensheathing of that event which cannot be described otherwise than by saying that man in his deepest being withdraws from the spiritual world. Man is born out of the spirit into a body. When the Rosicrucian said: “Ex deo nascimur,” he meant the human being to the extent that he enters the physical world. For that which constitutes the sheaths around the human being, which renders him a physical totality here on the earthly globe, is what is indicated by the saying: Ex deo nascimur. If we look at the centre of the human being, at the inner midmost entity, we must say that man journeys out of the spirit into the physical world. Through that which occurs in the physical world, that upon which he has looked down from the land of the spirit before his conception or his birth, he is enveloped in his physical body, in order that he may experience in his physical body things which cannot be experienced except in such a body. But, in his centre-most being, man comes out of the spiritual world. And he is of such a nature that in his earliest years—to the eyes of those who will to see things as they are in the world, who are not blinded by the illusion of materialism—he is of such a nature, this human being, that he reveals even in his earliest years how he has come out of the spirit. What we experience in connection with the child is of such a character, for those who possess insight, as to reveal to one's feeling the after effects of experiences in the spiritual world.

It is to this mystery that such narrations as that associated with the name of Nicholas von der Flue are intended to allude. A trivial view, strongly influenced by a materialistic mode of thinking, declares in its simplicity that the human being gradually develops his ego in the course of his life from birth to death; that this ego becomes more and more powerful and mighty, more and more distinctly manifest. This is a naive way of thinking, my dear friends. For, if we look upon the true ego of man, upon that which comes into a physical sheathing at the birth of the human being out of the spiritual world, we then express ourselves very differently about man's whole physical evolution. That is, we then know that, as the human being progressively develops in the physical body, the true ego actually vanishes out of the physical form, that it becomes less and less manifest; and that what develops here in the physical world between birth and death is only a mirrored reflection of spiritual occurrences, a dead reflection of a higher life. The right form of expression would be to declare that the entire fullness of the being of man gradually disappears into the body, becoming continually less and less manifest. As the human being lives his physical life here upon the earth, he gradually loses himself in his body, to find himself again in the spirit after death. So does one who knows the facts express himself. But one who is ignorant of the facts declares that the child is incomplete, and that the ego little by little develops to an ever greater perfection, growing out of the undefined subconscious levels of man's existence. He who knows what is beheld by the spiritual seeker must express himself in just this realm otherwise than is done by the sense-consciousness of our age, enmeshed in external illusions, still always materialistic in the trend of its sentiments.

Thus man enters the world as a spiritual being. His bodily nature, while he is a child, is still undefined; it has as yet laid small claim to the spiritual nature, which enters the physical existence as if there falling asleep—but appearing to us so little filled with content only because we can perceive this spiritual being, in ordinary physical life, just as little as we can perceive the sleeping ego and astral body when they are separated from the physical and etheric bodies. But the fact that we do not perceive a being does not make it less perfect. This is what the human being has to acquire by means of his physical body—that he entombs himself more and more in the physical body for the purpose of achieving by means of this burial in the body capacities which can be acquired only in this way, only through the fact that the spirit and soul being for a time loses itself in the physical existence. In order that we may always remember our spiritual origin, that we may grow strong in the thought that we have journeyed out of the spirit into the physical world—it is for this reason that the Christmas conception stands there like a mighty pillar of light amid the Christian cosmic feeling. This thought, as a Christmas thought, must grow ever stronger in the future spiritual evolution of humanity. Then will the Christmas conception become powerful again for humanity; then will mankind once more approach the Christmas festival in such a way as to draw forces for the physical life out of the Christmas conception, which can remind us in the right way of our spiritual origin. Seldom can this Christmas thought be so powerful at the present time as it will then be in human hearts. For it is a strange fact, but rooted in the very laws of spiritual existence, that what comes to light in the world—bearing mankind forward, helpful to mankind—does not at once appear in its ultimate form: that it first appears, as it were, tumultuously, as if prematurely brought forth by unlawful spirits in world evolution. We understand the historic evolution of humanity in its true meaning only when we know that truths are not to be understood only as they first appear oftentimes in world history, but that we must consider in relation to truths the right moment for their entrance into human evolution in their true light.

Among many kinds of thoughts which have entered into the evolution of modern humanity—certainly inspired by the Christ impulse, but at first in a premature form—is the conception of the equality of mankind before God and the world, the equality of all men, a thought profoundly Christian but capable of an ever increasing profundity. But we should not place this thought before men's hearts in such a generalization as that given to it by the French Revolution, when it first appeared tumultuously in human evolution. We must be aware of the fact that this life of man from birth to death is involved in a process of evolution, and that the primary impulses working upon it are distributed in time. Let us reflect about the human being as he enters into the sensible existence: he enters life filled with the impulse of the equality of the human nature in all men. We sense the child nature with the greatest intensity when we see a child permeated through his whole being by the conception of the equality of all men. Nothing which creates inequality among men, nothing that so organizes men that they feel themselves different from other men—nothing of all this enters at first into the child's nature. All this is imparted to the human being in the course of the physical life. Inequality is created by the physical existence; out of the spirit human beings come forth equal before the world and God and before other human beings. Thus does the mystery of the child declare.

And to this mystery of the child the Christmas conception is united, which is to find its deeper meaning in the new Christian revelation. For this new Christian revelation will take into account the new Trinity: the human being, as he directly represents humanity; the Ahrimanic; and the Luciferic. And, as it comes to be known how the human being is placed in the world in a relationship of balance between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, it will be understood also what this human being really is in the external physical existence.

Most of all must understanding come about, Christian understanding, in reference to a certain aspect of human life. Clearly will Christian thought proclaim in future what has already been affirmed by certain spirits since the middle of the nineteenth century, though in stammering accents and never quite distinctly. When we grasp the fact that the thought of equality enters the world in the child, but that forces of inequality later develop in man, as if from the fact of his having been born, forces that do not seem to belong to this earth, then just in regard to the conception of equality another profound mystery faces us. To see into this mystery, and through seeing into it to gain a true conception of man, will belong from the present time onward among the weighty and essential needs in the future evolution of the life of the soul. This is the depressing problem that faces man: Truly, human beings grow to be unlike, even though they are not so in childhood, by reason of something that is born within them, that is in the blood: their varied gifts and capacities.

The question of gifts and capacities, which cause so many inequalities among men, faces us in connection with the thought of Christmas. And the Christmas festival of the future will always admonish men most earnestly, reminding them of the origin of that which differentiates them so widely over the earth, the origin of their gifts, capacities, talents, even the gift of genius. They will have to inquire about the origin of these. And a true balance within the physical existence will be attained only when the human being can point rightly to the origin of the capacities which differentiate him from other men. The light of Christmas, or the Christmas candles, must give to evolving humanity an explanation of these capacities; it must answer the profound question: Do individual human beings suffer injustice between birth and death under the ordering of the universe? What is the truth about faculties and gifts?

Now, my dear friends, many things will be seen in a different light when humanity shall have been permeated by the new Christian feeling. Most particularly will it be understood why the Old Testament occult conception possessed a special insight into the nature of the prophetic gift. What were the prophets who appear in the Old Testament? They were personalities who had been sanctified by Jahve; they were those personalities who were permitted to employ in the right way special spiritual gifts reaching far above those of ordinary man. Jahve had first to sanctify their capacities, which are born in men as if by reason of their blood. And we know that Jahve works on human beings between their falling asleep and awakening We know that Jahve does not work within the conscious life. Every true believer of the Old Testament said within his heart: That which differentiates men as regards their capacities and gifts, which rises to the level of genius in the nature of the prophet, is born, indeed, with the person, but it is not used by him for a good purpose unless he can sink down in sleep into that realm in which Jahve guides his soul impulses, and transforms from the spiritual world gifts which are otherwise only physical, inherent in the body.

We point here to a profound mystery of the Old Testament conception. The Old Testament view, including that in regard to the nature of the prophet, must disappear. New conceptions must, for the redemption of humanity, enter into the cosmic historic evolution. That which the ancient Hebrew believed was sanctified by Jahve in the unconscious state of sleep the human being must become capable of sanctifying in the modern age while he is awake, in a state of clear consciousness. But he can do this only if he knows, on the one hand, that all natural gifts, capacities, talents, even genius, are Luciferic endowments, and work in the world Luciferically. unless they are sanctified and permeated by all that can enter into the world as the impulse of the Christ. We touch upon a tremendously important mystery of the evolution of modern humanity when we grasp the central kernel of the Christmas conception, and call attention to the fact that the Christ must be so understood and so felt by men in their hearts that they stand as New Testament human beings before the Christ and say: “In addition to the inclination of the child, his aspiration, toward equality, I have been endowed with various capacities and talents. But they can lead permanently to good results, to the welfare of humanity, only provided these gifts, these talents, are dedicated to the service of Christ Jesus; only if the human being strives to permeate his whole nature with the Christ, in order that human gifts, talents, genius may be freed from the grasp of Lucifer.”

The heart permeated by the Christ takes away from Lucifer what works otherwise Luciferically in man's physical existence. This thought must powerfully influence the future evolution of the human soul. This is the New Christmas thought, the new annunciation of the influence of the Christ in our souls, bringing about the transformation of the Luciferic—which does not enter into us because we journey out of the spirit, but is to be found in us because we are clothed in a blood-permeated physical body which bestows upon us capacities derived from the line of heredity. Within the Luciferic stream, within that which works in the stream of heredity, do these characteristics appear, but they are to be conquered and mastered during the physical life by that which the human being can feel in connection with the Christ impulse, not through Jahve inspiration in sleep, but through the fruition of man's experiences in full consciousness.

“Direct yourself, O Christian, to the Christmas thought”—thus does the new Christianity speak—“and lay there upon the altar set up for Christmas every differentiation you have received as a human being from your blood, and sanctify your capacities, sanctify your gifts, sanctify even your genius as you behold it illuminated by the light which comes from the Christmas tree.”

The new annunciation of the spirit must speak a new language, and we must not be dumb and unheeding toward the new revelation of the spirit which speaks to us in this deeply serious age in which we live. When we are sensitive to such thoughts, we are living with the power with which man ought to live in this time in order to discharge the great duties which are to be assigned to humanity in this very age. The full gravity of the Christmas thought must be experienced: that in our day there must enter into the waking consciousness of humanity what the Christ willed to say to men when he uttered the words: “Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” The thought of equality which the child manifests, if we look upon him in the right way, is not convicted of falsehood by reason of these words, for that Child whose birth we commemorate on Christmas eve, proclaims to human beings in the course of their evolution through the history of the world—revealing ever new thoughts—clearly and distinctly, that the differentiating gifts we possess must be placed within the light of the Christ who ensouled this Child; that all which these differentiating gifts bring about within us human beings must be placed upon the altar of this Child.

You may now ask under the inspiration of the Christmas thought: “How may I experience the Christ impulse within my own soul?” Alas, this thought is often a heavy burden in men's hearts.

Now, my dear friends, that which we may call the Christ impulse does not become rooted in our souls in a moment, forthwith and tempestuously. And in different ages it takes root differently in man. In our day man must take into himself in full clear waking consciousness such cosmic thoughts as have been stammeringly imparted by spiritual knowledge as guided by Anthroposophy, to which we belong. As these thoughts are proclaimed to him—provided he truly understands them—they can awaken within him the assurance that the new revelation, the new Christ impulse of our age, truly enters into him on the wings of these thoughts. And such a person will sense the new impulse if only he pays heed to it.

Make the endeavour, in the sense we intend, in living reality as is appropriate to our age, to take into yourselves the spiritual thoughts of the guidance of the world; seek to take them into yourselves, not as mere teaching, not merely as theory—-seek so to imbibe them that they will move your souls to their very depths, warming, illuminating, permeating them—that you shall bear them livingly within you. Seek to feel these thoughts so intensely that they shall become to you something which seems to pass through your body into your soul and to change your very body. Seek to strip away from these thoughts all abstractions, anything theoretical. Endeavour to discover for yourself that these thoughts are such as constitute a true nourishment of the soul. Seek to discover for yourself that, with these thoughts, not merely thoughts alone enter your souls, but spiritual life coming from the spiritual world.

Enter into the most intimate inner union with these thoughts, and you will observe three things. You will observe that these thoughts gradually eliminate something from within you, which appears so clearly in human hearts in our age of the consciousness soul: that these thoughts, however they may be expressed, eliminate self-seeking from the human soul. When you begin to notice that these thoughts kill egoism, destroy the force of self-seeking, you have then, my dear friends, sensed the Christ-permeated character of spiritual thought guided by Anthroposophy.

In the second place, when you observe that, in the moment when untruthfulness approaches you anywhere in the world, no matter whether you yourself are tempted to be too careless about truth or whether untruthfulness approaches you from another direction—if you observe that in the moment when untruthfulness enters the sphere of your life, an impulse makes itself felt by you, warning you, pointing to the truth, an impulse which will not permit untruth to enter your life, always admonishing you and impelling you to hold fast to truth, then do you sense, in contrast with the life of the present day, so strongly inclined toward mere appearance, the living impulse of the Christ. No one will find it easy to lie in the presence of spiritual thoughts guided by Anthroposophy, or to lack all feeling for mere appearance and untruth. A sign pointing your way to the sense of truth—apart from all other knowledge—you will feel in the thoughts of the new revelation of the Christ. When, my dear friends, you shall have reached the point where you do not strive for a mere theoretical understanding of spiritual science, as this is sought in relation to any other science, but when you have reached the stage where the thoughts so penetrate you that you say to yourself: “When these thoughts become intimately united with my soul, it is as if a Power of conscience stood beside me admonishing me, pointing me toward truth,”—then will you have found the Christ impulse in the second form.

In the third place, when you feel that something streams from these thoughts which works even into your body, but especially into the soul, overcoming sickness, making the human being well and vital, when you sense the rejuvenating, refreshing power of these thoughts, the adversary of illness, then will you have sensed the third part of the Christ impulse in these thoughts. For this is the goal toward which humanity strives through the new wisdom, in the new spirit—to find in the spirit itself the power to overcome self-seeking: to overcome self-seeking through love, the mere appearance of life through truth, the force of illness through health-giving thoughts which bring us into immediate unison with the harmonies of the universe, because they flow from the harmonies of the universe.

Not all that has been indicated can at present be attained, for man bears within him an ancient heritage. It is a mere lack of understanding when such a back-stairs politician as Christian Science twists into a caricature the thought of the healing power of the spirit. Yet, even though our ancient heritage renders it impossible for thought to become sufficiently potent at present to achieve what the human being craves thus to achieve—perhaps, from a self-seeking motive—nevertheless thought possesses healing power. In such things human thinking is always perverted. Some one who understands these things may say to you that certain thoughts give health, and the person who hears this may at a certain time be affected by this or that illness. Indeed, my dear friends, the fact that we cannot at present be relieved of all illnesses by the mere power of thought is due to an ancient heritage. But are you able to say what illnesses would have overtaken you if you had not possessed the thoughts? Could you say that your life would have been passed in its present degree of health if you had not possessed these thoughts? In the case of a person who has applied himself to spiritual science guided by Anthroposophy and who dies at the age of 45 years, can you prove that, without these thoughts, he would not have died at 42 or 40 years of age? Human beings tend always to think from the wrong direction when they deal with these thoughts. They direct their attention to what cannot be bestowed upon them, by reason of their karma, but do not pay attention to what is bestowed upon them by reason of their karma. But if, in spite of everything contradictory in the external physical world, you direct your look with the power of inner confidence which you have gained through intimate familiarity with the thoughts of spiritual science, you then come to feel the healing power, a healing power which penetrates even into the physical body, refreshing, rejuvenating—the third element, which the Christ as the Healer brings with his never ceasing revelations into the human soul.

We have desired to enter more deeply, my dear friends, into the thought of Christmas, which is so closely bound up with the mystery of human birth. What is revealed to us today out of the spirit as the continuing extension of the Christmas thought we desired to bring in brief outline before our minds. We can feel that it gives strength and support to our lives. We can feel that it places us amid the impulses of cosmic evolution, no matter what may befall, so that we can feel ourselves in unison with these divine impulses in the evolution of the world; that we can understand them, and can draw power for our will from this understanding, and light for our life of thought. Man is evolving; it would be wrong to deny this evolution. The only right course is to go forward with this evolution.

Moreover, Christ has declared: “I am with you always even to the end of the world.” This is not a phrase; it is truth. Christ has revealed Himself not only in the Gospels; Christ is with us; Christ reveals Himself continually. We must have ears to harken to what He is ever newly revealing in the modern age. Weakness will overcome us if we have no faith in these new revelations; but strength shall be ours if we have such faith.

Strength will come to us if we have faith in the new revelations, even should they speak to us from life's seemingly contradictory suffering and misfortune. With our own souls we pass through repeated earth lives during which our destiny comes to fulfilment. Even this thought, which empowers us to sense the spiritual behind the external physical life, we can realize only when we take into ourselves in the truly Christian sense the revelations following one upon another. The Christian—the true Christian—when he stands before the candles on the Christmas tree, should begin to work with the strengthening thoughts which can come to him today from the new cosmic revelation, to give power to his will, illumination to his life of thought. And his feeling should be such that the power and the light of this thought may enable him in the course of the Christian year to draw close to that other thought which admonishes of the mystery of death—the Easter thought, which brings the final experience of the earthly life of man before our souls as a spiritual experience. For we shall sense the Christ more and more if we are able to place our own existence in the right relation with His existence. The medieval Rosicrucian, uniting his thought with Christianity, declared: Ex deo nascimur; in Christo morimur; per spiritum sanctum reviviscinius. Out of the Divine have we been born as we contemplate ourselves as human beings here on the earthly globe. In Christ we die. In the Holy Spirit we shall be again awakened. This actually pertains to our life, our human life. If we turn our look away from our life to the life of Christ, then what is represented in our life is a mirrored reflection. Out of the Divine are we born; in Christ we die; in the Holy Spirit we shall again be awakened. This saying, which is true of our first-born Brother, the Christ living in our midst, we can so affirm that we shall feel it to be the Christ-truth raying forth from Him and mirrored in our human nature: Out of the Spirit was He begotten—as this is represented in the Gospel of Luke in the symbol of the descending dove—out of the Spirit was He begotten; in the human body He died; in the Divine will He rise again.

Truths which are eternal we can take into ourselves in the right way only when we see them in their contemporary reflection—not made into something absolute, made abstract in a single form. And if we feel ourselves as human beings, not only in an abstract sense but human beings existing actually at a certain time when it is our duty to act and to think in harmony with this time, then shall we seek to understand the Christ, who is with us always even to the end of the world, in His contemporary language as He teaches us and gives us light regarding the Christmas thought, filling us with the power of the Christmas thought. We shall desire to take this Christ into ourselves in His new language. For the Christ must become intimately related to us. Then shall we be enabled to fulfil in ourselves the true mission of Christ on the earthly globe and beyond death. The human being in each epoch must take the Christ into himself in his own way. This has been the feeling of human beings when they have looked in the right way at the two great pillars of the spirit: at the Christmas thought and the Easter thought. Thus did the profound German mystic, the Silesian, Angelus Silesius, contemplating the Christmas thought, declare:

Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.

And, contemplating the Easter thought, he said:

The cross of Golgotha must be upraised in thee
Ere from thy sin its power shall make thee free.

Truly the Christ must live within us, since we are not human beings in an absolute sense, but human beings of a definite epoch. The Christ must be born within us according to the sound of His words in our epoch. We must seek to bring the Christ to birth within us, for our strengthening, for our illumination, as He has remained with us until now, as He will remain with mankind throughout all ages even to the end of earthly time, as He wills now to be born in our souls. That is, if we seek to experience the birth of Christ within us in our epoch, as this event becomes a light and a power in our souls—the eternal power and eternal life entering into time—we then behold in the true way the historic birth of Christ in Bethlehem and its counterpart in our own souls.

Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.

As He creates the impulse in our hearts today to look upon His birth—His birth in human events, His birth in our own souls—so do we deepen the Christmas thought within us. And then we look away to that night of consecration which we ought to feel coming to pass within us for the strengthening and illumination of human beings for the endurance of many evils and sorrows which they have had to live through and will yet have to live through.

“My Kingdom,” said Christ, “is not of this world.” It is a saying which challenges us, if we look upon His birth in the right way, to find within ourselves the path to the Kingdom where He abides to give us strength, where He abides to give us light amid our darkness and helplessness through the impulses coming from the world of which He himself spoke, of which His appearance on Christmas will always be a manifestation. “My Kingdom is not of this world.” But He has brought that Kingdom into this world, so that we may always find strength, comfort, confidence, and hope out of this Kingdom in all the circumstances of life, if we only will come to Him, taking His words to heart—such words as these:

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Today, I shall have to turn to a seemingly more remote topic that will fit in, however, with yesterday's and tomorrow's subjects. I have frequently mentioned that when the evolution of humanity is surveyed, people proceed too much from the premise that the general condition of human soul life has basically remained the same ever since any human development can be traced historically or in prehistory. However, this assumption simply does not correspond to the facts. It is difficult, of course, to ascertain what the successive metamorphoses of human soul evolution were like if one is merely in a position to study the facts recorded in historical documents. If, on the other hand, one is able to look back further than these facts allow, then even the historical traditions present themselves in a different light. It then becomes evident that the human soul condition was not always what it is today or what it was in the ages still discernible by external means.

Above all, people believe the following: Human beings utilize something like geometry, like arithmetic, which, as we know, is mainly the theory of counting. Furthermore, they master the art of weighing, of determining weights of given objects. People then consider what measuring and measures represent and contemplate the way one counts and weighs things today. Then people think: Surely, in the age when, according to modern, prevalent opinion, human beings were still completely childlike, they were incapable of measuring, counting, and calculating anything. But ever since human beings were capable of that, these matters have been carried out approximately in the same way we execute them nowadays.

This is not the case at all, and even though it will lead us into a more remote subject, as I said, we must acquire a more exact idea of measures, numbers, and weights before we go into the historical considerations about mankind. Even according to external historical tradition the views concerning numbers prevailing in the Pythagorean School differed somewhat from those of today. As all of you realize, the Pythagoreans connected certain ideas with the numbers one, two, three, four, and so no. They linked quite definite conceptions with an even and an odd number. In short, they spoke about numbers in a certain qualitative sense, not merely in a quantitative one.

When the underlying reason for this is considered from the standpoint of spiritual science, we arrive at the realization that the Pythagorean School, which as yet was still a kind of esoteric school, represented basically only the last vestige of a much more ancient wisdom of numbers, going back to primordial times of which only the traditions have been preserved. And what is handed down to us concerning a science of numbers by Pythagoras is in fact already a decline from a much older teaching of numbers. When these matters are pursued further with the methods of spiritual science, we arrive by way of measure, number, and weight at concepts essentially different from those we possess today. As I said, even though it might create difficulties for some of you, we must make it somewhat clear to ourselves how these concepts of measuring, counting, and weighing are constituted today.

Measuring—how do we measure? We can only have one measure and it must be assumed in some manner. We cannot claim that this measure on which we base everything, such as the metric measure today, is somehow determined absolutely. It is determined as a certain segment of the northern quadrant of the earth's meridian that passes through Paris, and this segment, the ten millionth part, is not even exactly contained in that original prototype meter located in Paris. It is assumed, however, and we say that we proceed from a certain measure. With it, we then measure other lengths or surface areas by forming a square measure out of the unit of length. Yet, the figures arrived at concerning the object being measured refer to something completely arbitrary that was at one time assumed. It is important to make it clear to ourselves that we actually take an arbitrary measure as the basis, hence, that we always arrive only at a relation of some object to this arbitrarily assumed measure when we measure an object.

It is somewhat different in the case of numbers. In the abstract manner of our life today, we count, 1, 2, 3; we do this when counting apples or people, horses or chairs. To the object that is to be determined by the number it matters not what we designate as 1. We apply our peculiar way of counting to all things we count off, which, as a unit, represent an integrated totality.

Please note that in measuring we proceed from an arbitrary measure and we then relate everything to this arbitrary unit of measure. This unit of measure is something, so to speak; it exists. It is even conceivable, as it were, almost like a thing, an object. The unit of numbers cannot be pictured in this way. The unit of number is a completely abstract concept applicable to anything. No matter whether we count years or people or stars, we are led into total abstraction, into something that cannot stand for any particular reality since it could stand for all realities. When we take the arithmetic unit as the basis, the minute objective element still retained in measuring is lost to us.

When weighing something, we do not see the whole extent of what we take as the basis of weighing. There, the whole matter escapes us even more than in the case of numbers. When we count chairs, for example, and we say, “one,” “two,” “three,” we are at least finished when we come to the third chair that stands before us as a unit. In the case of a scale, on the other hand, we place a weight on one side of the scales—a weight in itself is nothing if it is not subject to earth's gravity, as we say—and the object we weigh is equal to the weight of the weights. Here, however, we are no longer by ourselves; basically, the whole earth is involved. Our point of reference here lies somehow completely beyond the realm we oversee. We enter into a complete abstraction when we say that something weighs five kilograms. Just think what you actually picture when you say that something weighs five kilograms. You place a five kilogram weight on a scale, but this weight by itself is really nothing! We are not dealing with a property of the thing itself. When I say, “one chair,” this one is at least integrated in the chair. The five kilograms, on the other hand, must relate themselves to the earth. You merely deal with something that relates to something else the whole extent of which you do not see at all, namely, the whole body of the earth. And when weighing the other object on the scale, which is to weigh five kilograms, again, you have something that escapes you completely, belonging again to a totality that is even less than an abstraction.

Let us proceed from numbers. In former times, and here we actually go back as far as the second post-Atlantean epoch, all thinking concerning numbers was dealt with in a significantly different manner from the way we treat it today in the outside world. People then really had concepts of 1, 2, and 3. For us, 2 is nothing but the presence of two units of 1; 3 is the presence of three, 4 that of four units of 1. Thus we continue counting by always adding 1 more. hence repeating the same act of thinking. We can repeat it indefinitely.

This was not the case in the second post-Atlantean epoch. Back then, people sensed the same difference between, let's say, two and three that we today feel only between different objects. In the number 3, one sensed a significantly different element from that in the number 2. Not only was it the addition of one unit; rather, one sensed something integrated in the 3, something where three things relate to one another. The 2 had an open element, something where two things lie indifferently side by side. People recalled this indifference in lying side by side when they said “two.” They did not sense this in the number 3, but only something that belongs together, where each thing relates to all the others. Concerning 2, a person could imagine that one thing escapes to the left, the other to the right. The 3 could not be pictured that way; instead, it was felt that if one unit would disappear, the remaining two would no longer be what they had been, for then, they would exist indifferently beside each other. The 3 combined the 2 in a totality, so to speak; it made them a whole. The form of arithmetic we have today, our elementary counting, this repetition of the same act, did not exist at all in those former times. Only now, through spiritual science, we are once again directed in a certain sense to the qualitative element of numbers.

I can illustrate this with an example long since familiar to you so that you will realize that it is necessary to add not only 1 to 1, and so on, but to delve into the reality of existence with the numbers. In order to give you at least a very elementary idea of this matter, let me outline the following. In my book, Theosophy,¹ the individual members of the human being are described:

1. Physical Body
2. Ether Body
3. Astral Body
4. Sentient Soul
5. Intellectual or Mind Soul
6. Consciousness Soul
7. Spirit Self
8. Life Spirit
9. Spirit Man

To list the members of the human being side by side like this, however, signifies counting them off abstractly one after the other; it means that we do not delve into reality. Because these nine do not exist, we cannot count them like that at all: “1. physical body, 2. ether body, 3. astral body, 4. sentient soul.” You cannot count like that when you wish to comprehend the human organization and observe human beings today in their reality. In fact, it must be put like this: The physical body is delimited as an integrated whole, so is the etheric body. Pass on to the third member, on the other hand, it is not something self-enclosed. In the case of the actual human being, we cannot just add the sentient soul to the astral body. Instead, these two, the astral body and the sentient soul, must definitely be combined and thereby, passing from one to two to three in reality, we can, as it were, count off realistically, not merely finding in the 3 the simple addition of 1.

What develops in us as the “astral body” and the “sentient soul,” which interact with each other, is simply a third element, abstractly speaking, but by passing in reality to this third element, a third unit can no longer merely be added to the first two. Instead, we must realize that this third element is in itself different from the first two.

Then, the fourth member is counted off, which is actually the fifth, and again, in the modern human being, we must basically add together the sixth and seventh. Thus, we arrive at the way they are actually listed in my Theosophy: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. We have seven actual components, which, when they are abstractly counted off, are nine:

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Based on reality, we learn to say: By proceeding according to their inherent rules, one thing is not indifferent to the others. Just because this is the third member (see above, 3), it is something different. Certainly, due to our customary abstract thinking about numbers, we have to illustrate this a little, for this older way of thinking about numbers is foreign to ordinary consciousness. In ancient times, on the other hand, in the first and second period of the post-Atlantean epoch, it would not have occurred to anybody to imagine an indifferent addition in progressing from one number to the next. Instead, people experienced something when they passed from, say, 2 to 3, just as we experience something here when we pass from 2 to 3 (see above list). Today you can barely sense it in this example, but not yet in the number itself. In those former times people could sense it in the numbers themselves. They spoke of numbers in reference to their mutual relationships. Anything that existed in twos, for example, was felt to have a quality of openness towards the world, of not being closed off. Something existing in threes, as an actual three, was something closed off. You might now say that depending on what is counted a distinction has to be made. When you count, one man, one woman, one child, man and woman are equal to a duality, hence not closed off to the world; the child closes this duality off, forms a totality. When you count apples, on the other hand, we can indeed not say that three apples are more closed off than two. It was true that external matters were merely sensed in this way, but the number itself was experienced quite differently.

You might recall that certain aboriginal tribes still use their ten fingers to count, comparing to them the amount of objects present in their surroundings. So we could say that if we have three apples here, this is equal to three fingers.

For 1, 2, 3, however, these primitive people would not have said—naturally in the words of their own language—“thumb,” “index finger,” and “middle finger.” Although the objects they counted off in the outside world remained undefined, what represented those objects inwardly was very clearly defined, for the three fingers differ from one another. Well, mankind has now advanced so splendidly in the fifth period of the post-Atlantean epoch—basically, it was already like this in the fourth period—that we no longer need to count by means of our fingers. Instead, we say, “one, two, three.” The genius of language is not taken into consideration anymore. For if you would listen to what is contained in the words, purely based on feeling you would say: “Eins, entzwei” (“one, in two—cut in two.”)^T1 It is still retained in the language, and when you say: “Drei” (“three”), and you are sensitive to the sounds, you have something closed off. Three: when pictured correctly, three things can only be imagined as lying in a circle, connected to each other; two: into two (entzwei); three: self-enclosed, the genius of language still retains that.

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Well, as I said, we have “advanced so far” that we can abstractly add one unit to another. Then we feel that this is 2, that is 1; in case of 3, one more has been added, and so on. Yet, why is it that we can count in the first place? In reality, we don't accomplish it any differently from primitive peoples. Only they did it with their five physical fingers. We, too, count with the fingers, but with those of our etheric body, and we no longer know it. It takes place in our subconscious, and we leave that out of consideration. We actually count by means of the etheric body; in reality, a number is still nothing but a comparison with what is contained within us. The whole of arithmetic is in us; we brought it to birth within us through our astral body. It actually emerges from our astral body, our ten fingers being merely replicas of the astral and etheric. These two are only utilized by the external finger, whereas, when we do sums, we express in the etheric body what brings about the inspiration of numbers in the astral body; then we count by means of the etheric body, with which we think in the first place.

Therefore, we can say that, outwardly, counting is something quite abstract for us today; inwardly, the reason we count is connected with the fact that we are counted in the first place, for we are counted out of universal being and are structured according to numbers. It is most interesting to trace the various methods of counting among the different folk groups in the world—according to the number 10, the decimal system, or the number 12—and how this relates to their different etheric and astral constitutions. Numbers are inborn into us, woven into us out of the cosmic totality. Outwardly, numbers are gradually becoming a matter of indifference to us; within us, this is not the case. Within ourselves, each number has its own definite quality. Just try and imagine that you could eliminate numbers from the universe and then see what things formed in numbers would look like if one thing were merely added to the other. Imagine the appearance of your hand, if the thumb were here, and the next finger would be added as the same unit and then the next, and so on. You would have five thumbs on your hand and five on the other! This would then correspond to abstract counting.

The spirits of the universe do not count like that. They create forms according to numbers, and they do it in the manner formerly connected with numbers during the first and even the second period of the post-Atlantean epoch. The development of abstract numbers out of the quite concrete concept of the element and quality of numbers is something that only evolved in the course of humanity's evolution. We have to realize that it has profound significance that the tradition handed down to us from the ancient mysteries relates that the gods fashioned man according to numbers. The saying that the world abounds in numbers implies that everything is fashioned according to numbers and that the human being, too, is formed on the basis of numbers. Hence, the modern way of counting did not exist in those ancient times; on the other hand, an imaginative thinking in the qualities of numbers did exist.

As I said, this leads us back to an age of long ago, namely, the first and second post-Atlantean periods, the ancient Indian and Persian eras, in which our present form of counting was not at all possible. In those times people connected something entirely different from two times one with the number 2. And likewise they associated something other than two plus one with three. As you can see, the human soul constitution has indeed changed considerably in the course of time.

Turning now to the somewhat later period of time, the third period of the post-Atlantean epoch, we find that the measure was something quite different. Today, we measure on the basis of an assumed and arbitrary unit of measurement. Even in the third post-Atlantean period, for example, people did not really refer to such an arbitrary unit of measure. In measuring, they had in mind something quite pictorial. What they focused on may perhaps become clear to you from the following. Here, for instance, we see one column, there is another one (see sketch below); we look at these two columns. If we experience things abstractly, we say that the second column is twice as high as the first one; we measure it by the first one.

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That, however, is a very abstract conception. Picturing it concretely, we can interpret it in approximately the following manner: When we evoke a feeling for the column on the left, we experience it to be weak in comparison to the one on the right. We feel that it must grow, and when it grows and grows and reaches this point up here (pointing to the taller column), it has become something special. It has put so much energy into this growth that it now possesses a strength such that its two parts are both equally strong. You can sense something qualitative there. You can go further and say: I have a structure here; I measure it against the other one and thus arrive at the symmetry; the concept of the measure expands for me, entering into the picture.

In this way, we gradually come to the idea that measure actually has to do with something that is still sensed dimly when we speak of moderation^T2 in which case we are not thinking of measuring something. For example, when a person consumes only a certain quantity of some food, we might designate that as being moderate (maessig) without having measured the amount. We classify something else as immoderate (unmaessig). We are not measuring anything here, we make no comparison, measuring the stomach with what enters it, and so on. We don't measure the piece of meat and then eat it; we do not measure it against the size of the person. Instead, we refer to a quality when we speak of a moderate or immoderate intake of food. We arrive at something that is not so very different from what we term a measure today but it does show us that we refer to something abstract today when we speak of measure, namely, “the unit of measure contained in a certain quantity,” whereas formerly people defined it as something that was qualitatively connected with objects.

Above all, people sensed the measured symmetry of each member of man in relation to the totality of the human being without thinking at that point of a unit. One thing has remained from this, namely, that it seems abhorrent to us if, as artists, we are supposed to measure anything; for, if an artist actually has to take measurements so that the nose, for example, does not turn out to be too long or too short, this is not considered artistic. But we consider the work artistic when we see that the thing has the proper size for an organism. Therefore, we do not deal with an abstract process here but with something related to the pictorial element.

Finally, consider the unit of measure that still plays a certain role today, namely the so-called golden mean or golden section. It is not connected with measurements but only with a qualitative element. The smaller element is to the medium-sized one as the medium-sized one is to the whole. The smaller element may be any size, but it must always be to the medium-sized one as the medium-sized one is to the whole. We do not have a measurement in mind but something that reveals a certain interrelationship when we look at it. Yet, we speak of the harmonious measure that comes to expression in the golden mean. We cannot base the golden mean on any kind of unit of measure in the abstract sense as we do otherwise. Therefore, as we examine the various periods of humanity's evolution in regard to measuring, we find that in the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Roman age, this vivid awareness of measure and symmetry gradually transformed itself into abstract measuring. This was actually not the case until the fourth post-Atlantean period. In the third period people experienced the relationships of measure, the proportions, much more the way we only experience the golden mean. Likewise, as we go back into ancient times, our abstract counting can be traced back to an experience of the inner quality of numbers.

In the case of weight, human beings are already far removed from what existed in the first post-Atlantean period as an experience of weight. You need only recall a well-known phenomenon that most of you have experienced in observing an athlete who lifts a heavy weight with the inscription, “200 kilograms”; he tries and tries to lift it, sweating all the while, and you almost perspire with him. Then, when he's let you sweat long enough, he suddenly lifts it up and carries it off. The whole thing really has no absolute weight; that has only been feigned. You feel the weight because of the abstract inscription “200 kilograms.” The experience of weight is something we are deprived of nowadays. Therefore, it is one of the most profound experiences when, in regard to natural phenomena, the experience of absolute weight appears in clairvoyant consciousness, as is indeed the case.

It is really true that in the first post-Atlantean epoch, designated as the ancient Indian epoch, a human being still experienced something of weight relationships within himself. I have pointed out many times that our brain actually floats in the cerebral fluid and therefore—according to the well known law whereby a floating body seemingly becomes lighter by the amount of the weight of water it displaces—loses a considerable amount of its weight. Otherwise, the brain would crush the blood vessels lying underneath. The brain floats in the cerebral fluid, but people in their abstract awareness no longer notice this today; neither are they aware of any other relationships within themselves. We no longer experience weight, pay it no attention. There is a major difference between experiencing one's weight at age twelve, and when one is, say five times that age. Most people have forgotten, however, how heavy they appeared to themselves at age twelve, and therefore they cannot very well make the comparison. But let's assume that according to the scales you have the same weight at two ages. Yet this does not matter; what matters is the experience of the weight. This experience of weight that for people today is present only in regard to the earth, was something absolute during the first postAtlantean epoch.

Today, we experience only a remnant of that in art but there in a very pronounced manner. I need only call your attention to the following. Let us assume that I draw two figures. According to my view, this is really something unclear and unresolved, something that should not be. Two objects like that side by side induce me to draw a third one. But I can shape the third object only in such a way that it appears larger, in a sense, holding the other two together. Then I have the feeling that the three are floating in air and can mutually support each other.

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When a painter nowadays draws three angels who are, after all, not viewed in connection with gravity, and he is concerned with composition, he distributes them in space in such a manner that they support each other, that one is borne by the other. Artistically, it would be the worst thing simply to draw three angels side by side on a canvas; such a painter would have no true artistic feeling. One must have a feeling for the weight of each one, how one thing carries the other. In artistic feelings, a slight touch has remained of what was mainly experienced inwardly by people in the post-Atlantean age as producing weight, as giving him weight.

The experience of weight, number, and measure developed during the first three post-Atlantean periods according to the way human beings experienced themselves within the cosmos. And based on what had shaped them from out of the cosmos, the other matters were judged, namely, what they produced. When people observed what their astral body pushed into the etheric body, they had to tell themselves that the astral body counts, counts in a differentiating way thus forming the etheric body. Numbers are found between astral and etheric body and they are something alive and active within us.

Something else is located between etheric body and physical body. Through the inner relationships something is formed out of the etheric body that we can then behold. Basically, even our organism is structured according to the golden mean: the forehead is to a certain other part of the head as that in turn is to the whole length of the head, and so on. All this is imprinted by the etheric body into our physical body out of the cosmos and its relationships. Contained within us, measure and symmetry represent the transition from the etheric to the physical body. Finally, in the transition from the ego to the astral body lives what can be inwardly experienced as weight. I have often pointed out that the ego was actually born in the course of human evolution. The people of the ancient Indian period did not yet experience such an ego. They did, however, experience within themselves something causing weight, the condition of possessing form; hence, they sensed this heaviness, this downward pull, as well as their buoyancy, their ascent. They sensed within themselves what is overcome when the child changes from a being that crawls on all fours to one that walks. The people in ancient India did not experience their ego, but they did sense that they were fettered by the Ahrimanic forces to the earth, that they were weighted down by them, and that, on the other hand, they were borne upwards, lifted up by the Luciferic forces. All this, they experienced as their position of equilibrium. If we were to study the ancient terms for the ego we would find that the above experience was contained in the formulation of the words themselves. Just as the words were fitted together in the verbs according to their inner configuration, so the ancient words for the ego contained the balance between floating and falling.

Weight, which isn't abstract anymore, for we confront something completely unknown; number, something quite abstract, for it is totally unrelated to what is being counted; measure, which has become increasingly abstract for us—these abstract conceptions of ours are actually projected from our inner being to the outside. Something that has very real significance within the human being since he is fashioned according to measure, number, and weight is transferred by him to the indifferent external things. In this process of abstraction the human being dehumanizes himself. It is therefore possible to say that mankind's evolution tends in the direction of losing the inner experiences of weight, number, and measure, retaining only a slight touch of them in the artistic realm. We no longer experience them in such a manner that we sense ourselves as having been formed out of the cosmos according to weight, number, and measure.

The geometry we have when we compare congruent and similar figures, when we say that an ellipse is generated by a point so moving that its distance from a fixed point divided by its distance from a fixed line is a positive constant, is something abstract. There, we basically measure the distances and find that their sum is always equal to the large axis of the ellipse. Even if it was not pictured in any way, the ellipse was nevertheless experienced by people in the third post-Atlantean period in this peculiar relationship of two different quantities. In the relationship of one to the other they already sensed the elliptic element, just as they sensed the circle during the same age. And in the same way the nature of numbers was experienced. Humanity evolved in this way from concrete experience to something abstract, developing geometry out of the ancient experience of measure, arithmetic out of the former experience of numbers, and having completely lost the ancient experience of weight and thus having utterly dehumanized themselves, human beings developed only external observation out of it.

All this slowly prepared the way for the increasing abstractness of inner human experience, a development that culminated in the nineteenth century. Thus, the human being became lost to his own conception. He can no longer comprehend himself; he no longer has any idea that he produces geometry because he has been formed according to measure out of the cosmos, that he counts through his very nature. He is surprised when the so-called savages use their fingers in order to compare external objects with them. He has forgotten that he has been fashioned according to numbers out of the cosmos. He does not know that in this regard he, too, always remains a “savage,” that his etheric body had imprinted the numbers into his astral body in accordance with the inner qualities of the numbers themselves so that he could later experience the numbers also outside himself. In the course of humanity's evolution, geometry, arithmetic, and the science of weight and weighing have all moved into the abstract domain and have contributed to the fact that the human being could henceforth only devote himself to a science and a form of scientific research that observes these matters externally.

What do we do when we are involved in scientific research today? We measure, count, and weigh. Nowadays, you can indeed read of strange definitions of existence. We already have thinkers who state that existence, being, is that which is measurable. Yet, they naturally refer only to measuring with an arbitrary unit of measure. It is odd that existence is traced back to something actually based on arbitrariness. Therefore, the human being dwells in something that has been completely detached, excluded from him and in regard to which he has utterly lost the connection with himself. Due to such influences, the human being has lost himself in modern knowledge; something I have emphasized from a number of viewpoints, particularly during this lecture course.

As I have often said, the human being has been lost in our perception of ourselves as merely the last step in the evolution of the animals. In society we have lost sight of the human being, for though we have invented extremely sophisticated machines, we are unable to integrate the significance of the people operating these machines into our social processes. We must learn to penetrate mankind's evolution; above all we must observe in this way how the process of man's intellectualization has come about. Just think how different people's frame of mind was in the first post-Atlantean period when they continuously experienced a changing equilibrium in placing one leg in front of the other. They always felt themselves become heavy, sensed a falling and floating. Picture how different it was when human beings felt that numbers permeate their own form, that they are built up according to measures. Think of how different that was from superficial measuring, counting, and weighing, leaving out the human being altogether. As I already indicated, at most it is possible for a person with a more sensitive awareness for language to gain some insight into the nature of numbers by means of what is in fact contained in the numerals, the words naming the numbers; or, from an artistic viewpoint, it is possible to sense that this, for example, in the sketch below is feasible:

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but that this is impossible in this connection:

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Such a person then has just a touch of the feeling for the inner condition of weight, the inner balance. If, by means of a line, I can follow some relationship in the other object, I have them balancing each other. However, if I sketch a protrusion over here, on the object on the right of second sketch, where there cannot be one, then I have no feeling for this balance. See how mankind has struggled to produce the external proportions out of its inner being, so to say, the outer appearance in contrast to the inward experience. Take a look at the painting by Raphael—it is actually true of all of Raphael's paintings but especially obvious in this one—depicting the “Marriage of Mary and Joseph,”² and see how the figures are positioned and painted in such a way that they support each other and that the viewer thus loses the feeling that anything exerts a downward pull. In particular, however, when ancient painters drew some flying creature, study how that was motivated, how you can clearly discern from this figure that it is not pulled down by weight but, rather, supports itself somehow by means of the relationship to other elements in the painting.

So, here we have the transition from the experience of the inner weighting to the external determination of weight: thus, here we have the course of mankind in the post-Atlantean epoch from inward experience to intellectualism, this struggling ascent to the intellect where everything experienced in our concepts is divorced from the human being; where we no longer experience the tearing in the word entzweien, (“to fall out with each other”; literally: “tearing in two”) when we say Zwei (“two”).

All this comes about slowly. When this term is employed further, when we say, zweifeln, “to doubt,” we sense the derivation from entzweien. After all, one who doubts something implies: Perhaps this is correct, perhaps it is not. It is open in both directions, the feeling of entzweien is inherent in the conceptual act. It is also already contained in the word for the number 2, zwei. Three—there you cannot experience this in the same manner when you apply it to something. Apply it to a judgment, where you have the major premise, the minor premise and the conclusion: a triad, a matter enclosed within itself. Take the syllogism about the most famous logical personality, the one about Gaius Julius Caesar:

All men are mortal;
Gaius is a man;
therefore Gaius is mortal

It all belongs together, the major and minor premise and the conclusion. However, if you take merely the first two, the matter remains open.

Hereby, I only wished to indicate to you what mankind's path to abstraction was like and how, in fact, by losing himself, man brought the intellect into his evolution.

We shall continue with this tomorrow. Today's subject was intended only as an episode, but you will see how it will fit in with further considerations.

• 1 . Rudolf Steiner: Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1973. RSE 592.
• T1. Translator's note: In the original German, Rudolf Steiner's example is quite clear. This is the reason the German words were retained and the English translation given in parenthesis.
• T2. Translator's note: In German, this example is immediately clear. Mass means “measure;” maessig and massvoll mean “moderate.”
• 2 . “Il Sposalizio”, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano. Raphael, 1483–1520, Italian painter.