The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I showed you threefold man diagrammatically. It is indeed true that in our present life of spirit very little feeling exists for the understanding of man's being as it must be grasped from the standpoint of spiritual science. Nevertheless, we must bestir ourselves to get a clearer understanding of man's being. For it is out of the understanding bound up with threefold man that we are able to master also the most significant conceptions that must be gained concerning the whole of human life, including man's development between death and a new birth.

Today let me just consider in detail this threefold man. Yesterday indeed we saw how first of all we have to point to man's head. In a certain sense this human head is really a kind of independent form of being. You can picture to yourselves the human skeleton and how easily the head can be detached; it can be lifted off like a ball. It is true that in reality the separation between the three members of man's nature is not so simple that we can describe what can thus easily be lifted off like a ball as the head part. Things are not so definitely separated. We have gradually to work ourselves away from the purely diagrammatic away too, from what nature herself suggests, to a living feeling, a living experience And, as you saw, I had yesterday to draw not indeed three circles lying next each other, but one circle for the head, a second circle that overlapped the head, and a third circle that overlapped both the others. So that if we would draw threefold man diagrammatically in accordance with his physical nature, we should have to show him thus: Head part (see circle A in diagram 1; body (oval); and the limb-system; really three balls even if these balls have to be drawn out longwise. With the head part, with what is here shown as the red circle A, is connected the spiritual which is, as you saw yesterday, a young formation (see small yellow circle) This spiritual part of the head is a young spiritual formation whereas the head itself is an old physical formation, a physical form-being. For the head, what is applied to man in general is pre-eminently right; it is not right when applied thus in general but for the head it is right. What with regard to the head, I have shown here as white, spiritual, is outside the head when you are asleep. When you are awake it is united with the head and then for the most part inside the physical head. It is therefore separated most easily from the physical head, going out and coming back inside again.

That is certainly not so as soon as we come to the middle man, the breast man, shall we call him? What is enclosed by the thorax, by the breast cavity, enclosed by the ribs and the backbone, is bound up with the spiritual, and when you sleep the spiritual is not so pronouncedly outside; for this breast man during sleep it remains in close connection with the physical.

And for the third man of the limb-system, to which sex man belongs, there is practically no real separation between the sleeping and waking conditions. One definitely cannot say that the soul-spiritual actually disconnects itself in sleep; it remains more or less united. So that one can well draw this other diagram of waking man saying: when physical man is awake (see a in diagram 1) then the spiritual man would be thus (yellow with circle a) And this would be sleeping man (see b diagram 1); the spiritual remains you see more or less connected with the body, and only this goes outside. From a certain standpoint this would be the actual drawing for the contrast between waking and sleeping man.

Now if you are to understand the important things now to be described, you will only do so by crossing this membering of threefold man with another membering of man that is linked with what I was describing here recently.

And if once more we go over head, breast man, man of the limb system, we can say that in the truest sense man is only breast-man. He it is into whom the Elohim breathed the breath of life. He is the breathing man. The division here is not so simple as in the skeleton; the breathing process through nose and mouth belongs to the breast man. Thus the partition in reality is not so easy, to show diagrammatically as one would wish. However these are the difficulties to be expected in understanding a matter of this kind.

Thus the actual man, man on earth, is in a sense breast-man. And head-man, as physical form, is something that is not man through and through. It cannot be said that it is man all through. It even has in it much that is ahrimanic. In effect, it is organized as it is because certain formative principles are particularly present in it that have remained there since the old Sun—the second stage of earth-evolution. Our head, in all its complicated formation, would not be as it is had it not received its first form in those primeval days of the old Sun-evolution. Thus they are actually old, primeval formative principles today projected into the earth-sphere, and for this reason we must call them ahrimanic. Survivals of old principles are always to be looked upon according to the point of view as either ahrimanic or luciferic. The middle-man, the breast-man is what makes man of the earth, and where the principles of becoming earthly are mainly in play.

Neither is the man of the limb-system wholly man, but is permeated by the luciferic; its formative principles are not yet complete in their development, and will not be so until the earth has reached its Venus stage, or till the Jupiter age is passing over into the Venus age. By the time the Venus age has come these formative principles will be working at their full intensity, in their correct form. (He might say that today they are still developing mere shadows of the real being of this third part of man's nature, the extremities-man.) Thus we presuppose what will only be in existence at the time of Venus, and make an incomplete picture of it in seed form, not letting it go beyond the seed form.

This is how the matter stands when considered cosmically. To look cosmically at our formation, in our heats-forces we are repeating the old Sun-period, in our breast we carry the earth evolution, and in so far as we are extremity man we bear in us the seed of the Venus evolution. This is regarded from the cosmic point of view.

Considered humanly—it is rather different. There we must look upon the human individuality as it progresses from incarnation to incarnation. Then we have to say: what in this incarnation we carry as our head, shows itself to be connected with our previous incarnation; what we now bear in us as breast-man is really only related to our present incarnation; what we have in us as as extremity man will become head in our next incarnation, is already related to our next incarnation. I have said previously: there is something revealing in the head especially in its negative. If you were to take an impression of the physiognomy of your head and consider it, you would recognise in this negative much of what had its origin in your previous incarnation.¹

It is just the other way round with the extremities man. You cannot here take an impression but must proceed differently. Think away in man the head and the breast-system. But imagine all that your hands and legs do now—make a picture of what they do. Here you have to make a kind of map. You see, every time you do anything with your hands this is done at another place. They go around outside, they come into relation with other beings. If you would paint all that your hands and legs do, if you would draw a picture of what your hands and feet, arms and legs do in the course of your life—and this would be a very animated picture!—in this drawing you would discover a complicated map, where you would find revealed what is stored up in you karmically for your next incarnation. In this map you would be able to read a great deal of the karma of your next incarnation. This is of profound significance. As the negative impression of the physiognomy when at rest, reveals in the firm outlines of the drawing, what in the previous incarnation has already happened, so what one can jot down of the movements of arms, hands, legs and feet are extraordinarily instructive about what the man will do in his next incarnation. This is particularly instructive about what he will carry out, where he will go, where his legs will take him. If you simply follow in his track to all the places where his legs will carry him, you could make a map of it. You would get remarkable patterns on which men's secret inclinations are not without their influence. Much of man's secret inclinations are not without their influence. Much of man's secret inclination is expressed in these patterns. These traces that are there are most revealing for what his next incarnation will bring to a man. Now we have been considering this from the human point of view, whereas the other was a cosmic view.

This membering of man that has the present in view signifies, however, a connection with the secrets of the old Mysteries, in which the matter was recognized in a more atavistic way, but where the secrets I have just been disclosing to you were already known. There is a beautiful saga concerning King Solomon about the certainty with which man sets his foot on the place where he is destined to meet his death. The meaning of the saga is that a definite place exists on earth where man will die, and thither man directs his footsteps.² This is connected with the old Mystery-Knowledge.

Now when man is living his ordinary life he has actually only his ordinary consciousness; but as we have seen this man is a highly complicated being. When he is awake, when he has his head, his most recent spiritual member, in his physical head, he knows nothing of this head. You will be right in saying: Thank God we do not know anything of our head for knowing of our head means to have a headache. Men only know about their head when it aches; then they are conscious of having a head, otherwise they are unconscious of it—unconscious to a most remarkable degree, far more so than in the case of any other member of the human physical body. Man may count himself lucky when in normal consciousness he knows nothing of his head. But beneath this consciousness of the head that ordinarily takes notice only of the outer world, that only gets as far as knowing what is around it—beneath this consciousness lies another, a kind of dream consciousness, dream-knowing. Your head, my dear friends, is always dreaming. And while you are conscious of the outer world in the way familiar to you, under the threshold of consciousness, in the subconscious, you are actually perpetually dreaming. And what you are dreaming, if you were able to bring this head dreaming into your consciousness and fully grasp it, would give you a picture, a correct comprehensive picture, of your previous incarnation. For in your head unconsciously, you are dreaming of your former incarnation. That is indeed so. There is always a slight consciousness of your previous incarnation going on, a dreaming consciousness, only it is overpowered by the strong light of of ordinary consciousness.

By the year 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha, the external consciousness had become so strong that gradually this subconsciousness of the previous incarnation was completely extinguished. Before that year, however, man knew a great deal about this dream consciousness of the head. For this reason you find everywhere at the basis of the ancient cultures repeated lives on earth treated as a fact. This is due simply to the sub-consciousness of the head not then having receded so completely into the background as it did in the course of the fourth, but principally the fifth post-Atlantean age. Even in ordinary consciousness very little is known of what is connected in a soul-spiritual way with the thorax and the middleman. It is in itself of a dream nature. This middle, thorax consciousness sometimes pushes up into man's dream consciousness, but only very chaotically and irregularly. If a man is able to breathe regularly, when his heart beat even is when in fact all the functions of man's thorax, his middle part, are in order, the consciousness of this part is not so clear as that of the head; it too in ordinary life runs its course dream fashion. We dream in our feeling, as I have stated here during past years, in feeling we dream of this middle man. But when we bring to light through consciousness, that becomes more clairvoyant, what lies in the feeling, what man experiences only in his feeling, or to put it differently, when man learns to look at what is going on in his thorax, as otherwise he can only look at what is in his head consciousness, then the consciousness of the thorax, the middle-body splits definitely into two parts. One part dreams itself back into the whole time between the previous death and the most recent birth or conception. Therefore while in your head consciousness in a dream way, in deep dreaming, you have unconsciously what was in your previous incarnation, in the dreams of your thorax you have what has meantime been passing since that incarnation up to your present birth. And in the dreams that belong more to the lower part of the thorax you have a definite consciousness of what there will be between your coming death and next earth life. Thus the consciousness concentrated in the breast, which, however, for modern man remains more or less subconscious, is in reality a dream consciousness of both the time before this birth and the time after the next death. For this subconsciousness in the middle man the riddle is solved of what lies between our last earthly death and the following earthly conception, with the exception of or even including what we are now experiencing between birth and death.

Out of the third man, out of the subconsciousness of the extremities man, the tableau of the next incarnation on earth can be developed in what during the whole of life remains strictly subconscious. This can only be brought to the surface when a man is able to draw it up through ceaseless activity in the study and exercises of spiritual science, so that certain moments of sleep-life that otherwise would pass in unconscious sleep, are lifted to the surface and the man then becomes conscious during sleep. What today man has as waking consciousness is really a kind of collateral impulse of his which rays into the head from outside. Behind this consciousness, however, lies another that stretches itself over the former incarnation, over the life of that incarnation to this one, over the life of this incarnation to the next, and then over the next again. But man sleeps away this consciousness.

In the head it is the consciousness of the previous incarnation. In all the organs that principally serve the out-breathing there works a strong consciousness of the life between the previous incarnation and this one. In all the principle functions that serve the in-breathing works a consciousness of the present incarnation up to the next incarnation on earth. And in the limb-system, in all its most secret processes, works a consciousness of the next human incarnation, which remains pre-eminently subconscious.

These states of consciousness have become more less veiled since the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantean period, 747 years before the Mystery of Golgotha. And the cry of our age is for the definite consciousness of the concrete events of cosmic and human evolution to be brought back out of the general chaos of human consciousness.

We must meet all that I have just been developing with another aspect of what is part of the being of man. You see it is really necessary that we should enter into these difficult details, otherwise we cannot arrive at an exact understanding. I should very much welcome it if such knotty points were met not only by a certain passive acceptance, but—and this is so necessary for present day man—that even for these difficult matters a little enthusiasm were aroused, a little keen participation, which is exactly what is so hard in any society today.

Now, you turn your senses outward. There by means of your senses you find the external world spread out as something perceptible. I will draw diagrammatically what lies around us outside as something spread out for the senses. Allow this (see blue in diagram 2) to be what is lying outside. When you direct your eyes, your ears, your sense of smell, or whichever sense you like, to the external world, the inner side of this outside turns towards you, turns towards your senses Thus this is the inner side of the outside (see left of diagram). Suppose you turn your senses here to what I have drawn (see arrows). These are the senses directed towards the outer world and you see what here inside inclines within. Now follows the difficult conception to which, however, I have to come. Everything you look at there presents itself to you from inside. Imagine it must also have an outside. So I will call it up diagrammatically before your souls saying: When you look out thus you see the permanent as the limit of your vision; that is approximately so, only I have drawn it small. But now imagine you could quickly fly out there, fly beyond there and take a peep through from the other side and from the other side see your sense impressions. You could look out thus (see upper arrows in diagram). No, naturally you do not see this but, could you thus look at it, it would be the other aspect. You would have to go outside yourself, you would have to look from the other side at your whole perceptible world. You would see the reverse side of what meets you as color, what meets you as sound, and so on. You would see the reverse of what comes to you as smell, you would receive the smell in your nose from behind. Thus, imagine your view of the world from the other side; imagine the perceptible things spread out like a carpet, and now the carpet viewed from the other side. You see only a little bit of this reverse side, a very little bit indeed. I can only represent this little bit by doing it like this. Imagine now that I am drawing in red what you would see from the other side, so that I can say, one sees the perceptible diagrammatically thus. To one's ordinary view it appears blue; seen from the other side it appears red (but naturally one does not see it.) In what you would see red, is hidden first that is experienced between death and a new birth; secondly, everything described in Occult Science as the evolutions of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth and so forth. Everything hidden from sense perception lies there stored up. There it is, on the other side of the sphere, but you see only a little bit. I can indicate this best by saying: take this small bit of red; this goes over (see below in diagram) and crosses the blue, so that the blue instead of being, as now, in front, is behind. (were I to draw in accordance with reality, I should have to do so in four dimensions, so I can only keep to what is quite diagrammatic.) Thus the senses here are now turned to the blue (left); there they do not turn to the blue but to the red which moreover you do not see. Behind the red, however, there crosses what otherwise would be seen and that is now underneath. And this little bit that crosses the other there, you see continually with your ordinary consciousness. It is indeed your stored up memories. What arises as memory does not arise in accordance with the laws of the outer world of the senses but according to laws suitable to this world that is behind. What is within as your memories is what is suited to the other side (right). As you look within on all your memories you are actually looking at a bit of the world on the other side; the other projects inwards a little and then you see the world from the other side. And if now you could slip through your memories thus received (I spoke of this a week ago,)³ if you could get underneath and see below your memories, look at them from the other aide from down there (see right in diagram), you would see them as your aura, There you would see man as a being with a soul-spiritual aura just as ordinarily you look at the external world of sense perceptions. But as I showed you a week ago this would be hardly pleasant because man on this other side is not yet beautiful.

Thus these are the interesting features of what must work across the other knowledge we have of threefold man. This crossing takes place here in the middle man, the breast-man. You remember the drawing I made a week ago where I had the lemniscates with one loop reversed, turned inside out; I must draw those here I must draw here the breast man with the leminscates described. (see below on left of diagram.) That would coincide with the sphere of memory. So that in his middle part the threefold man has this turnabout where the inner becomes outer and the outer inner. Here you now have in your own small microcosmic memory a tableau, what otherwise you would see as the cosmic tableau—as the great cosmic memory. In your ordinary consciousness you see what you have been collecting since about your third year until now; this is an inner record, a little bit of what is of the same kind as the other record for the whole world-evolution and lies on the other side.

It was not without reason that I once told you that man actually has twelve senses. Most of you know this quite well and I have mentioned it also in the notes at the end of my last book Riddles of the Soul. We must think of the senses in this way: that a number of them are turned towards what is sense-perceptible, whereas others are directed backwards. Below they are directed towards what is turned back. Those directed towards what is perceptible to the senses are: the ego sense, and the senses of thinking, speech, hearing, seeing, taste and smell; they go towards what is sense perceptible. The other senses do not come into man's consciousness because they are first of all directed toward what is within him and then to what in the world is reversed. These are the senses of warmth, life, balance, movement and touch. We can therefore say that for the ordinary consciousness seven senses lie in the light (above in diagram 3) and five in the dark (below). And the five senses lying in the dark are turned to the other side of the cosmos, turned also to the reverse side in man (see diagram 2).

You therefore have a complete parallel between the senses and something else of which we are going to speak. (see diagram 3) Let us suppose we have to note down as senses: hearing, speaking, thinking, the ego-sense, and the senses of warmth, balance, movement, touch, smell, taste, sight; then you will have essentially all of them from ego-sense to sense of smell lying in the light, in what is accessible to the ordinary consciousness (see shading in diagram 3). And all that is turned away from ordinary consciousness, as night turns away from day, belongs to the other senses.

Naturally the boundary is also diagrammatic, there is an overlapping—reality is not always accommodating. But this membering of man according to his senses is so that, even in the diagram, you only need draw in place of the senses the signs of the Zodiac, and you have Ram, Bull, Twins, Cancer, Lion, Virgin, Scales, seven signs for the light side and five for the dark: Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Waterman, Fishes; day, night: night,day, Here you have a perfect parallel between microcosmic man—what is turned towards his senses and what is turned away but really turned towards the senses—and what in the cosmos signifies the change from day to night. In a way the same thing happens to man, as in the cosmic edifice. In the cosmic edifice there is an interchange between day and night, in man there is also the interchange of day and night in his waking and sleeping, even though both may have emancipated themselves from each other for the present cycle of man's consciousness. During the day man is turned towards his day-senses, or we might say to Ram, Bull, Twins, Cancer, Lion, Virgin, Scales, as we might say ego-sense, sense of thinking, speech and so on. Every ego can see that of another man, you can understand the thoughts of another man, you can hear, see, taste, smell—those are day-senses. In the night it is the same with man as when the earth is turned towards the other side; man is turned in the night to his other senses, only these are not yet fully developed. Not until the Venus age will they be so fully developed that they can perceive what is on the other side. They are not yet sufficiently developed to perceive what is towards the other side. This is shrouded by night just as the earth is shrouded when passing by night through the other heavenly bodies, the other pictures of the zodiac. The passage of man through his senses is a perfect parallel with the course—whether you say the course of the sun round the earth or the earth round the sun is immaterial for our purpose; but those things are connected. And with these connections, the wise men of the Old Mysteries were very well acquainted.

In the fourth post-Atlantean period this gradually vanished from consciousness but it must be brought back in spite of the resistance put up against this; it must be reinstated in the cultural life of mankind. For in these concepts that man makes his own there lies what lets us see quite clearly all that is happening now in the social, historical life. So long as you separate the life of nature from that of the spirit, as modern man loves to do, you do not arrive at concepts that can play a part in historical evolution; you are overpowered by the concepts that are working in historical life. Overpowered: There are indeed many instances of this.

Now you will agree that men believe that, shall we say, for two hundred years they have been thinking a tremendous deal. We can gather up what they have been thinking for two hundred years, what they have developed as ideals, what they have talked of still talk of, as great ideals. We can do this from the time of the ideals of the age of enlightenment to that of the great would-be Caesar, Woodrow Wilson. All that is talked of about the various ideals, men have been thinking during these centuries, these last two centuries; this has formed men's thoughts. World history, however, is very little affected by these thoughts, world history has been affected by something quite different, by the thoughts that have been working and weaving in things. And in reality never were the thoughts filling men's heads farther removed from the great cosmic thoughts living in things than at the present time. What for the last hundred and fifty years, shall we say, has prompted man to work for a definite fashioning of the world is not thoughts of freedom, equality, brotherhood, justice, and so on and so forth, it is the thoughts interwoven with the coming of the machine loom. That the machine loom arose in modern development in the second half of the eighteenth century; that this significant invention took the place in mankind's evolution of the old hand-weaving; that from the machine loom came the whole machine civilisation of modern times; in all this there weave the objective thoughts the real thoughts, that have given the world its present form, out of which has arisen the present chaotic catastrophe. Should we wish to write a history of this catastrophe, we have not to turn to the thoughts teeming in human consciousness; we must turn to the objective thoughts of the founding, the invention, of the machine loom up to the development of big industry with its shadow, socialism. for even if these two things, big industry and socialism, appear as opposites they are polaric opposites belonging to one another, and as such inseparable.

We must put our questions to these objective thoughts and observe history in its becoming. Then we find that during the eighteenth century, all through the nineteenth, and especially so far as we have gone in this our twentieth century, men have given themselves up to many illusions. They are given over to illusion in their thoughts; but the objective, historic-cosmic thoughts have completely overwhelmed them. These are weaving in things. And an interest—though terribly one-sided—for these objectively weaving thoughts has really been gradually developed only by those who have built up socialism as a world-conception. That is something tremendously characteristic. If you follow the course of the nineteenth century you will see that the bourgeoisie increasingly loses interest in the great questions of world outlook. These great questions are indeed becoming most distasteful to the bourgeoisie; where possible they relegate them to aesthetics. A perfectly average bourgeois will listen in the theatre to all kinds of discussions about whether there are spiritual beings or not, when there is no need to believe in them, and when it is not a question of the truth of anything. Then the most varied matters can be put forward by Björnsen and people of that ilk. And what concerns the conception of the world is today for the bourgeoisie transferred into the realm of aesthetics, into all manner of dabbling with so-called art. In recent years people have been breaking each others heads over questions concerning conceptions of the world in the sphere of socialism. (I don't look on this as an ideal in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense in a certain way it is so. You know how I have hinted emphatically that I like a little warmth even in the treatment of anthroposophical truths.) The other people have not troubled themselves about this head-breaking but have left those alone who have looked at the world from what is really a very narrow point of view, those who have only seen the world from the aspect of the factory, from the inside of factories, from the inside of printing works, and so on. And it is extremely interesting what kind of world outlook has been produced out of the point of view of the factory—for that is socialism, my dear friends. It is the factory aspect, the aspect of men who know nothing beyond the inside of their factories. And in all that has developed in this sphere, little interest has been really shown by the bourgeoisie with their abstract ideas; the bourgeoisie who even concern themselves with aesthetics in an abstract way to avoid the breaking of heads. Thus in a curious way the bourgeoisie have found themselves between the old completely moribund world-conception bereft of the spiritual that would prefer to relegate all great questions to the realm of aesthetics, and what has newly arisen as socialism. This socialism has so far no concepts at all; it is a system founded entirely on words. This is because as yet it has no view of the world whatever and can only see the factory, and even so only the most external part of the mechanism. Just imagine what it really means when a man has no inner knowledge of the kingdoms of the minerals, the plants, the animals, and only knows of the way in which a certain cock is moved mechanically up or down in a machine, this or that filed or planed, and things of that kind: Socialism is a world-outlook founded on the perception of a purely mechanical world. It is the bit of the world cut out by the socialist—the bit that is mechanical, and on this he builds his concepts.

This has been allowed to arise through men adopting the principle of only troubling themselves about things aesthetically. When the Theosophical Society was first formed it had as its basis principle the mutual love of all mankind. How this was breached: But I have said enough on that point; its easiness equals its fruitlessness. But this also arises from the desire whenever possible to push what has actual content into the realm of what has none. So there could be no genuine interest in the real course of things. Individual people however have found pleasure in the peculiar—we should say conventional—way of considering history.

Now let us take an example of this; let me take whatever example you like from the time of the Caesars; try to learn about this time from the text books, or any books written by the great historical authorities. I fancy you will gain very little knowledge in this way about a certain personality who in the reign of Nero played an important political part (so even under Nero you could have political aspirations!) This personality aroused quite special notice and gained considerable influence on Roman politics under Vespasian and Titus, so much so that it may be said that he was the soul of the Government under these two emperors. Then this personality went over to the other side in the reign of Domitian considering him as a disaster for the Roman Empire. He turned to the other side and a lawsuit was brought against him, a lawsuit that made a great deal of stir in Rome and was of much interest. During this case Domitian changed suddenly from the tyrant into one who did not know how to proceed in the lawsuit and was therefore unable to pass sentence on the man. Then again, as Nero succeeded Domitian, we see this personality actively connected with the Emperor, the Caesar. We watch him creating out of the whole world-conception of that day what was great in politics, and at the same time see how he once more sought to implant for the last time during the Roman Empire into the political events really vast concepts brought down from the cosmos. Strangely enough in no current history book do you find any accurate account of this personality, not even in Seutonius or Tacitus, only in Philostratus. And Philostratus describes him in such a way that one does not know whether he is giving a picture of any Roman or of a real man—he paints the life of Apollonius of Tyana. For it is Apollonius of Tyana of whom I have been speaking as having had so great an influence on politics from the time of Nero to that of Nerva, and especially under Vespasian and Titus; and Philostratus describes him. Bauer the theologian and historian of Tübingen was absolutely astounded that one should thus find nothing about such a personality as Apollonius who played a part of the utmost importance in what is historically represented. Naturally Bauer did not see into the real reason for this; for it is a question of our having in Apollonius a historical personality wielding indeed this great influence but drawing down his principles straight from the cosmos above. That was in the highest degree fatal for the Christianity then arising in Rome. And now I shall ask you to take notice that everything in history is there by grace of the Church. There is nothing in history except what the Church has allowed man to have. Not without justification has an old and by no means foolish man maintained that there was never a Plato nor a Sophocles, but that monks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries wrote their plays—for there is no proof, no strict proof of their existence. Even though the assertion is untenable, is indeed nonsense, nevertheless, as we have often emphasised, all that is conventional history is most uncertain. And we should be quite clear about it. We must indeed bring the present into connection with the past, for we are now coming to a great and pregnant question.

We have once more this time from the modern point of view, referred to threefold man, his connection with cosmic truths and the necessity for all this again to be disclosed. Now, my dear friends, in what has consisted the main activity of the Church, especially since the eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 869? What has been its chief activity? Its chief activity has been to wipe out, to blot out from man's consciousness, what in those ancient times even Christianity still understood as the connection of man with the cosmos, with the great spiritual world. Everything betraying this connection has been suppressed in real alarm. And only because not everything can be suppressed, because Karma is working against this suppression, have such works remained as those of Philostratus. Therefore you can understand when now you bring the present into connection with the past that certain churchman are made terribly uneasy by the growing tendency to foster the connection between what makes roan a cosmic being, this man himself, and his task.

It is important that we do not merely pursue half-asleep what should be the will of the Anthroposophical Movement. We must pursue it as indeed is necessary with our consciousness full of life and force.

With this I have indicated what is to be continued and enlarged upon tomorrow.

• 1. See Lecture Z 104. 12.VIII.1916 The Twelve Senses and the Seven Life-Processes.
• 2. See Lecture Z 243. A Fragment of the Jewish Haggada
• 3. See lecture of 18.VIII.1918; Occult Psychology.

The last time we gathered here I was able to speak to you of the deep foundations underlying the ideas of the Threefold Commonwealth. I was able to carry the lecture far enough for us to see in what sense one may say that we are living at the present time in a definite period of transition. You will not misunderstand that remark, for I have often told you that when I talk of a transition it is not meant in the trivial sense in which people often speak when they talk about living in a period of transition. Naturally as I have often said, every period is a period of transition from what went before to what is to follow. The essential thing is to direct our attention to what is changing. And from that point of view there are more important and less important moments in the great world evolution of mankind. And it is clear that beneath the surface, as it were, of outer events something is happening in our time with respect to enormously important impulses of human evolution. In my last lecture I drew your attention to the fact that one must see into the so-called unconscious, or subconscious, of the human being if one would recognize what is really vitally involved in the transition mankind is undergoing today. Not much in our consciousness today tells us about the evolution of mankind in general, although we are living precisely in that world-age in which a development of the consciousness-soul is normal for the individual. Mankind as a whole, as distinguished from the individual, is in this age passing through a development of inner soul and spiritual forces, and for that reason the development is more in the subconscious. For mankind as a whole we must look for the most important forces of transition in the subconscious; while for the individual, we will find the most important forces today in the tendency to develop complete consciousness. In the individual an instinctive, more naive soul-life is changing more and more to a conscious soul-life; in mankind as a whole, however, an important change is taking place unconsciously, without the individual often being aware of it unless he has deepened his vision by work in spiritual science.

This vital change, this most important happening, is not so easy to describe, for our language has been made fundamentally for the purpose of reproducing outer sense reality in the soul. This makes it difficult for us to describe precisely, or adequately, something that does not belong to sense reality, but to supersense existence. Often one has to make use of comparisons—not abstract ones but such as you are well acquainted with in spiritual science, where one phenomenon of life is placed by the aide of another so that one will throw light on another. If such comparisons are used it must at the same time be made very clear that only flexible thinking, thinking that does not stamp the concepts, the words, into a set shape, in really compatible with the sense of what is presented. If I want to characterize the most important thing that is happening to mankind as a whole at the present moment of world evolution (I have already pointed it out) I must compare it with the experience that an individual has (consciously, however) when he crosses the threshold, as it is called, into the supersense world. You all know from the description I have given of this individual experience in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment that the crossing of the threshold is an event of deepest significance for the human being. On this side of the threshold is the sense world for man's consciousness, and on the other, the supersense world. Truly, on that other side everything is different from things of the sense world here. And man experiences something there that is named by those who went through the same experience in the manner of former ages in the significant words, “passing through the gate of death”. Indeed, he who crosses the threshold has to learn to know death in its reality. He has to become acquainted with death in its meaning for humanity.

Now you know from the description which I have given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds that in this crossing of the threshold the entire soul being of man goes through a transformation—but only, of course, for those times in which one remains consciously in the supersense world. The constitution of soul that one has here in the sense world, that is suited to life, to work and action, in the sense world: one cannot come into the supersense world with that. Here in the sense world our soul forces are as it were melted together, so that we never have the experience in our sense life of these soul forces being separated. Anyone who did not have a certain amount of willing in his soul at the same time that he was thinking, even though in a latent form, would not be really healthy physically. We are not in a position in our sense life to separate these three soul forces one from another, so that really we never develop a pure isolated thought, or a pure isolated feeling, or a pure isolated willing. In our conceptions, feelings, actions, and will, these three soul forces are still interwoven always, mixed up with one another. But as soon as we cross the threshold into the supersense world—that is, as soon as we get our soul to the stage where we are actually surrounded by supersense beings, by supersense deeds of these beings, just as formerly we were surrounded by a world of sense things and sense happenings—then, my friends, then there takes place in our soul an absolute separation of thinking, feeling, and willing. As you hove been able to gather from the description in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, a man must have so schooled himself that he is able then to summon sufficient power to hold together with his ego these three elements of the soul life, thinking, feeling, and willing:—otherwise he would split up into three persons.

Yes, my dear friends, one meets with a significant experience of inner activity when one has crossed the threshold; this finding oneself within in the most enhanced activity of the ego, in the highest manifestation of the ego, for the purpose of holding together the separated soul forces, thinking, feeling, and willing. And that accounts for the fear that a faint- hearted man today feels: fear of actual supersense knowledge, fear before the highest kind of inner soul activity. He would like all of his activity to be of such a kind as is aroused by the outer world and has effect in the outer world. Inner activity is not yet natural to him; more and more it must be developed by him for the future. And so, because at first this development is a task, because it is not actually already inherent, man is afraid, man is cautious about entering the supersense world. Unconsciously he is afraid of himself (if I may so express it) in face of the exertion necessary there to hold the separated soul forces together.

I am picturing this inner experience of the individual in order to have some way by which to characterize for you that which is happening in this age inside the soul life—and you know that one can speak of such a thing—of mankind as a whole. That which I have just described as an individual's experience when crossing the threshold into the supersense world is naturally a fully conscious experience for him, much more so then any conscious experience of his ordinary waking day consciousness. It is a heightened consciousness in which one crosses the threshold and in which one perceives in the supersense world the threefold nature of the human soul being. Something similar to that—but now not consciously—the whole of mankind is going through in the present age as a cosmic historical experience. It is not noticed, this unconscious process that is going on in all mankind, unless one in studying consciously in spiritual science. You know our age is the fifth since the great Atlantean catastrophe which made the configuration of our earth surface as it now exists. We are living in the fifth post-Atlantean period; and in this period mankind must go through in its evolution as a whole something similar to what the crossing of the threshold into the supersense world is for an individual. Mankind as a whole, I said, in its cosmic—or we can say if we like terrestrial—evolution, is crossing a threshold on one side of which, or in other words, for the time preceding which, an entirely different kind of world conception and knowledge was necessary for mankind as a whole than is necessary on the other side, or in other words, for the time afterward.

This process going on in the unconscious of all mankind today is what one must discover through spiritual science. It shows also how necessary spiritual science is to mankind today. For the crossing of this threshold must truly not remain in the unconscious. Men must become aware of it, otherwise they will sleep right through, or at least dream right through, an event that is very important for them. And this fifth post-Atlantean period is the very period in which we should be extending consciousness. But we cannot extend our consciousness of the most vital thing that is happening to mankind in any other way then by rising out of mere sense-science into spiritual science.

If you think about this, my dear friends, you will perhaps remember something that has been said again and again in the course of spiritual scientific, lectures which have been held now for such a long time in Stuttgart.

You remember I have had to emphasize this fact again and again: that Spiritual Science, as it is meant here, is not just something as it were to satisfy an individual's subjective thirst for knowledge. Spiritual Science is something that is connected with the taking up in thought, feeling, and will, of the fundamental impulse of mankind for our time. Therefore activity in spiritual science should not be a mere satisfying of an individual's longing for the newest thing, nor a mere satisfying of his desire, for knowledge. Spiritual Science should be the fulfilling of a certain duty that one has toward mankind as a whole, in order that it shall realize what is going on precisely at this moment in the depths of its evolution.

I showed you when I spoke to you last time that certain individuals who have a degree of external cleverness developed by the scientific training of the present day, are definitely aware of a phenomenon that is present in mankind in this epoch and that corresponds to something in the depths of mankind of which they are not aware. I showed you how such individuals as for example Fritz Mauthner, say that first and foremost in man is his sense perception; and that that is the only true reality of which one can speak. He reflects this reality in its highest form by his creation in art of the beautiful and the sublime. But it does not permit him to arrive at any satisfaction. He wants to penetrate things more deeply. If he tries to penetrate into the being of things through his inner self, then—Mauthner says—he does not arrive at a real contact with the true being of the world, but only comes to dreaming—dreaming which may be pleasing because he imagines it is connected with the central forces of the world, but which nevertheless, so far as knowing is concerned, is after all just dreams, just mysticism. Mysticism then is, for these persons, the second stage of man's inner soul-striving. Then they assert that mysticism is, from their point of view, dream knowledge, they are right, because they deny a supersense knowledge. The third stage, for Fritz Mauthner, is man's struggle to attain knowledge by busying himself with natural laws, historical laws, etc.; and he describes all that as docta ignorantia, on the ground that when we think we know something through science we are not merely dreaming, as in mysticism, but sleeping—sleeping as compared with what would be a real contact with the central forces of the world. Thus persons like Fritz Mauthner think that at the most man has a waking sense perception and can ennoble it through art; that he is doomed to dream when he attempts to connect himself with true reality in religion or mysticism through his inner nature; and that he is doomed to sleep when he believes he is connecting himself with things in any way through science and wisdom.

My dear friends, speaking in an absolute sense, that is all a mistake. But speaking relatively of the special soul-condition that mankind has evolved through the 19th century into the 20th century, speaking quite specifically of this mankind and not of mankind in general, it is a truth. With the means that natural scientific knowledge has made great, by which we have come to such a shipwreck of the social older, with those means the only possible soul life is what Fritz Mauthner has described; that is, the three stages—waking, in sense perception; dreaming, in mysticism; and sleeping, in science.

Such a man as Fritz Mauthner feels the crossing of the threshold by mankind as a whole. Whoever has read his Critique of Speech in which he criticizes not only concepts but speech itself -- or the two thick volumes of his Philosophical Dictionary, or even one or two of the articles in it (it is arranged alphabetically)—that person knows the soul condition he gets into as a result of this very work of Mauthner. I suggest especially—you will perhaps only be grateful for my suggestion from one point of view—that you read the article on “Christianity” in this Dictionary of Philosophy—or the article “Res Publican”, or “Goethe's Wisdom”, or “Immortality”. Everywhere you will have the feeling: first one reads a sentence; in the second sentence what one has just read is modified; in the third the modified statement is again modified; in the fourth one gets back to the first; in the fifth the entire thing is picked up again with all the assertions and modifications included. One undergoes a twisting of one's whole intellectual, rational, and soul system, and it is frightful what one experiences after such a reading. It is a frightful inner soul torture. And if one describes the inner soul torture that a man experiences after such reading—man, that is, who has sufficient courage to admit the final outcome of the present day condition of soul (there are many who have not that courage)—then in the exposing criticism that one would make, and such as I have just made, one will not be censuring Fritz Mauthner, for his very article is a confession that he suffers from the same condition of soul himself. For he says: With human knowledge one can come to nothing else than a kind of “spirit dance” in which one does not discover oneself. He mistakes the lack of knowledge that became necessary in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century for a supposed absolute incapacity for knowledge in all mankind.

What actually is the truth? Something quite different from what Mauthner believes.

In former ages, as you know, in the clairvoyance of Atlantean times, man did not dream in mysticism but had contact through mystic knowledge with reality. Also, he did not merely sleep in wisdom. We realize from what still remains of older wisdom, Plato, for instance—that they knew things to tell mankind. In Aristotle, that is already no longer true. Mankind of former ages did not have just a docta ignorantia; it had a wisdom in which it was connected with the central forces of he world, that are at the same time the central forces of the human being. But these faculties ebbed away. They had to, in order that man might then seek within himself for those strong powers that were previously given him by spiritual beings without any effort on his part. Today we are crossing the threshold, mankind as a whole; and we must develop out of our inner self the power with which to awaken mysticism, which otherwise by its very nature sleeps within us—by our own power to call mysticism from its dreaming to an experience of the spirit; and also by our inner activity, inner force, to raise what is otherwise dead abstract science to actual experience of supersense spiritual reality. Today, my dear friends, this is in our power. We must undertake the necessary training.

And men who are are willing to accept spiritual science will, like Fritz Mauthner, be obliged to experience the tragic soul condition that has been a necessary accompaniment to the evolving of man's inner forces. Men like Mauthner, who do feel such things and yet are not willing to accept spiritual science, will indeed have to despair of all possibility of contact with the central forces of existence which are at the same time the central forces of the human being. Therefore they will have to despair of the possibility of any knowledge of life. My dear friends, if you think earnestly of what I have just said, will you not have to say to yourselves: Man is confronted today in his evolution, through the fact of his unconscious crossing of the threshold, by a mighty test. It is that indeed. For if he will not develop activity of soul, intense activity of soul, then he is condemned to sink into inactivity, passiveness, and thereby into unbelief in existence—at the very least into some degree of uncertainty—when he considers his place in the whole current of world evolution. That is approximately the soul-condition of men of whom Mauthner is a type.

There are many such men in the present day; but Mauthner had sufficient inner courage to acknowledge it in many writings, while others are in the same condition of soul and do not acknowledge it. He finally had sufficient resignation to retire to Southern Bavaria after he had spent his whole life in journalism as a profession; and there he thought out the Critique of Speech, his book of bitter doubt of human knowledge; then afterwards he wrote his Philosophical Dictionary. He has withdrawn, but he still writes all kinds of articles that truly no more than his book tend to lead to a positive, forceful position within human evolution. They always show a kind of despair of the possibility of one's really comprehending existence, because as a matter of fact one cannot comprehend existence through knowledge. He has finally accepted the consequence, he has given in and withdrawn to a profession that to him is equivalent to journalism, and in which one can be a skeptic, a pessimist.

But there are pupils of Fritz Mauthner who have not been so resigned. Let us ask, what will become definitely, what will become of these pupils who subscribe wholeheartedly to Mauthner's conception of life? They will never be able to arrive at a living comprehension of reality at any comprehension that can penetrate reality fruitfully. They are unable to adapt themselves to life when they are placed in it. Fritz Mauthner got out of it. They only comprehend the sense life, and they believe that anything that goes on outside of that is only a dream or sleep. Look at one of these pupils of Mauthner—Gustav Landauer, for instance—noble, upright, but altogether useless or the social life of the present day. He is a real pupil of Fritz Mauthner. It is not enough today merely to judge life from the surface. We are confronted with tasks that can only be master- edit we are willing to go down into the foundations of life. We may not seek thought impulses today for a new social order—as do such men as I have described—out of whet the time has already brought. No we must seek even social impulses out of the age that is dawning, out of the impulses that are just arising, the impulses of spiritual knowledge. Otherwise we will not arrive at real social impulses. Then when they are found, they can be comprehended, like all spiritual scientific knowledge by a healthy human understanding. It is in such a sense that I wanted to speak of the Threefold Commonwealth.

Today it is essential that men learn to speak in all things with deepest earnestness, first for true self knowledge, secondly for true world knowledge.

Consider Spiritual Science, as it is meant here, from the most varied points of view. Certainly the need for self knowledge and the need for world knowledge are emphasized by it, just as in abstract mysticism and in much abstract occultism. But they are spoken of in a different way. And in that way I should like to write the very heart of our time: One can never attain real self knowledge without seeking this self knowledge through world knowledge. Brooding within oneself does not bring self knowledge. World knowledge must first discipline one so that one can then come to self knowledge. Also, one cannot attain world knowledge without making the way through one's self. World knowledge is not possible without self knowledge. The two things seem to contradict each other, perhaps, but this contradiction is living and fruitful. No world knowledge without self knowledge, no self knowledge without world knowledge. It is like the swinging of a pendulum back and forth. Man must seek continually in his life the swing of the pendulum from self experience to world experience, from world experience to self experience. That will give the strength of soul, that inner activity of soul, which becomes today, and in the future will become, ever more and more necessary to all mankind. Because it is so very easy today for men to brood within themselves, out of a certain egoism that is natural in this age of the development of the consciousness-soul; for that reason they have fallen in love with abstractions. They themselves cannot really judge correctly how strong their love is, in this age, for mere abstractions. For that reason it is all-important—in order to cross the threshold which I have described in the right way—that we arouse ourselves from a mere abstraction-necessity, a mere thought-necessity, to fact. From mere abstract knowledge to an experiencing of fact. To a thinking within ourselves that is not mere thoughts but that sinks us into the things, that thinks with the things and events of the world. Only then can we wake to the present.

I will give you an example of what I mean. But first I would say that, you should not interpret what I am going to say as if, when I have to characterize this or that world conception, I wanted also to take a stand against them. I only want to characterize, not criticize. What one calls “the natural scientific world conception”, or thinking orientated in the direction of natural science, has evolved in a way that I have characterized for you from most varied points of view. It has finally reached such an outlook as Mauthner's; and it has expressed itself in other variations. I wonder whether you remember a man whom I mentioned here once years ago in another connection: the man who wanted to describe the difficulty of self knowledge in one of his books called An Analysis of Experience. He wants to describe the external difficulty of self knowledge, and for that purpose gives two instances of his having been thoroughly illusioned with respect to knowledge of his own external self. Once, he says, he was walking up the street and suddenly someone was approaching him (the writer was a professor), and he thought to himself, “What a strange looking school master that is coming toward me! The person was very unattractive to him, he says. Then he noticed what actually had occurred: he cam in front of a show window and found he was facing himself in the glass. On another occasion he got into an onmibus. Opposite the door by which he entered was a mirror. He was extremely tired. He sw the image and said to himself:“What a funny looking tramp that is coming in the opposite door!” It took him a long time to realize that it was himself. There is the tale, and you will be able to judge that after all here is a man to be taken seriously: Ernst Mach, who from a natural researcher became a philosopher. He has various pupils. His world conception is not unlike Mauthner's except that he came less to uncertainty, less to skepticism; he simply believes in the play-quality of thought. The ego itself is merely a myth to him, as also to Mauthner, only Mach is content. One must study Ernst Mach, and then become acquainted with his life and his whole personality. I remember when I saw him for the first time, in the Vienna Academy of Science, where he was giving a special lecture on the Economy of Thinking, in the course of which he explained all thinking as merely an arrangement according to the principle of the smallest amount of force. I was greatly enraged at the time by this presentation of the thought process. Afterwards he elaborated the theory and wrote his books, and they had a great influence over many people. One who knows his life knows that he was undoubtedly a very excellent citizen, obedient to the city he served throughout his teaching career, and in his teachings a typical example of the thinking that has evolved in recent times.

I might name another similar thinker. Mach himself did not teach in Zurich, but a pupil of his, Adler—the same Adler who shot the Austrian minister Stürgkle. But there was even a much more abstract thinker in Zurich, and his world conception was very similar to the philosophy of Mach—Richard Avenarius. I shall not recommend that you read his books; You would throw them away after the second page. They are written in unintelligible language. And the most unintelligible thing for you would be, how it happens that so very many people have wormed their way into Avenarius's books and have formed a world conception out of his philosophy.

You see, these are extreme cases to show you the difference between a logic of mere abstract thoughts and a logic of fact. Avenarius was also in his life a good middle-class citizen, an excellent citizen of the state in the best sense of the word. But such people as Ernst Mach, his pupil Adler, in whom it was even more apparent, and Avenarius—let us take just Mach and Avenarius—they feel nothing of that logic of fact within which they stand through their on actions. For, look you, what became of the world-conception of this Ernst Mach, solid Bourgeois teacher? What became of it? It became the political philosophy of the Bolshevists; it is the world-conception that lies at the bottom of Bolshevism. Only it went through other human temperaments, through other human soul conditions. That is the actual consequence! The consequence according to fact-logic, of what Ernst Mach and Avenarius taught. It was not just by external chance that some gifted young Russians studied with Avenarius and then with Adler in Zurich; and that then this philosophy happened to be carried over into Russia. No, there is an inner spiritual connection there. It can only be grasped by one who does not think about things, but who thinks in things; he then knows that no system of abstract logical consequences leads from Avenarius and Mach to Lenin and Trotsky, but only a very living logic leads from one to the other. Those are the things upon which so much depends today. They are only comprehensible to one who has sufficient earnestness to study fro the inside how things become, how things metamorphose. We have come to a time when inner life is complicated: when anyone can believe, just as Mach and Avenarius did, that he is a law-abiding man who lives only “on the heights in spiritual serenity”, and does not for a moment suspect that his teachings are capable of becoming political dynamite when they are passed on to other minds.

The great call to men today is to develop in themselves a sense for the deeper connections of life. Without that sense we can go no further. If we want to arrive at fruitful social, ideas then we must not search, as Mach and Avenarius did, for the dead ruins of old self-annihilated world-conceptions. We must turn to the new structure, the world-conception that can only be found in Spiritual Science and that alone understands how to ask: That kind of social order must come, since from now on man, as he passes through the world, will be ever more and more threefolded in his inner nature—for that is how he is crossing the threshold. The external social order must also be threefold. Then outer and inner fact will correspond. This threefolding, if one will really examine it earnestly through Spiritual Science, is not something invented; it is something, that has been learnt from listening to the actual inner metamorphosis of mankind as it moves from the present into the future.

Among all the necessities confronting the man of the present day, is this one: that he develop the willingness to concern himself with the spiritual world; that he develop first of all the willingness so to observe himself—that he is able to see the spiritual man that is underneath. The materialism of natural science has not been worthless. It has been significant and useful even in the form of Haeckelism. That is all a test that must be undergone. It classes man with the animals, because with respect to practically everything that it considers important, man appears to be nothing more than a highly developed animal. However, as soon as we begin to consider man in his relation to the world with respect to self knowledge, then at once the thing is different. Then facts which before were of no importance become important, and vice versa. From a certain perspective a new light streams upon the whole being of man. We know it is a fact (and the exceptions only teach more bout the fact) that the animal walks about the earth with his backbone parallel to the earth's surface. Man makes himself erect in the very first period of his life; he places his body, or his backbone, at right angles with the earth's surface, and thereby forms a cross with the earth's surface and also a cross with the position of the animal's backbone. That fact expresses clearly man's relation to the outside world. It is different from the animal's relation. Of course you can read in Haeckel: Man has just as many bones and muscles as the higher animals. But there are other things to he compared which in an intuitive, or, better, an imaginative grasp of various relations between them, demonstrate the common form of the cosmos and the earth; and this manner of comprehension of the human form is more important than counting bones and muscles, more important than what comparative morphology has to say about man.

I could say a great deal in this connection that would show you,that where the old world conception which has ripened such thought-habits in man as have plunged him into his present misfortune—that where this thinking and these thought-habits end, now a new world conception must begin which, for instance, will comprehend the human form. Then it will give a spiritual view of the world that will fructify the independent spiritual member of the social organism. And at a still higher stage one will have a living knowledge of that existence which is always around us, the “open secret”, as Goethe called it. From there one will rise to an “awakening” such as I have described in my books, Human Riddles and Soul Riddles; one will rise beyond mere comprehension of the relation of the human form to the cosmos to the stage that is actual participation in the great rhythmic swing of the cosmos.

You know that man consists of these three members: nerve-sense system, rhythmic system, and metabolic system. He stands within his nerve-system in such a way as to be able to comprehend the relation of his form to the cosmos. With respect to his feelings—his rhythmics or breathings or breast-system—he stands with this rhythm within the rhythm of the whole world. We can only just touch upon this rhythm now from one angle—we could naturally do much more, but we have mentioned it often in the course of these years from the most varied points of view. I will only repeat what I have often said.

Look at our breathing. Normally, we take 18,breathe a minute. That makes about 25,920 breaths a day. So that in a day we breathe in and out alternately 25,920 times. That is the average number of breaths that a man takes. Now you know that the Old Testament puts the age of a patriarch at 70 years. Naturally one can grow older or die younger, but that is the average age of man. How many days of life is that? An average of 25,920 days. Now if you count that huge breath that we take when we enter in the morning with our ego and astral body into our etheric and physical bodies, so that in the morning we breathe in our spiritual psychic being, and in the evening we breathe it out again—if we count that as a a breath that is drawn every day, then our life-day which consists on the average of 71 years, draws 25,920 breathe. In other words, that great spirit that breathes when we are born and when we die, breathes in his life-day which includes our whole human life, the same number of inhalations and exhalations as we do in our day of 24 hours. So we are related with our human breath to that breathing of the the product of his breath in our waking and sleeping life. And the sun—which you can at least suspect to have some relation to our life—men observe how its rising moves back in the Zodiac a certain number of degrees every year, in such a way that if spring comes at a certain place in a certain constellation one year, the next year it shifts back a few degrees. So the rising of the sun circles around the whole ellipse in what is called a Platonic world-year, which consists of 25,920 years. A life-day for and death consists of 25,920 life-years. A life-day for us consists of 25,920 breaths; our life between birth and death consists of 25, 920 life-days; a great sun-year consists of 25,920 of our life-years. Thus we are brought to what is breathed in the whole sun-earth-process through a Platonic world-year. There you see into a world rhythm of which is a part within the cosmos.

Without at least the willingness to gain an active knowledge of man's relation to the cosmos you can attain no knowledge of man. You can comprehend nothing more through the natural science of today—however strangely this sounds—than man's life up to birth. After man is born something enters into his lie that natural science can no longer comprehend. Therefore natural science has to stay dallying in the method it especially loves, embryology. That is especially apparent today in the fact that the entire teaching of evolution is only an elaboration of embryology. All the rest is phantasy. As soon as man begins to live on earth the necessity immediately arises of contemplating him in imaginative and inspired knowledge. For that is the only means by which one can perceive what man experiences at death, and what death is. At the highest stage of knowledge, true Intuition, which you find described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, one attains to that insight into being which is wonderfully indicated in the German language, for one says when a man dies—with a certain fitness—he verwest. (perishes) If today one could still feel something in words, one would truly feel that verwesen means ins Wesen übergehen, ins Wesen hineingehen, mit dem Wesen eine werden. (To go over into being, to go into being, to become one with being) When the language speaks of verwesen it truly is not talking of vergehen (to pass away) [Translator's Note: Although in English one says “pass away”, the German word vergehen which means that, is apparently never used in connection with death; verwesen is the word in common use.] And that mysterious process the deep knowledge of which will create a natural science of the future, the process that is only completed when the human body apparently perishes or is reduced to ashes, is not a destructing; it is a significant constructive part of the event.

Through this kind of consideration I should like to arouse a feeling for the inner connection that lies between what is the dying world-conception and scientific tendency of the old time, and the Spiritual Science that is still in the seed today, really just emerging, in the sense of what it will be in the future. But now the two things are roughly pushed together, and that is the deep tragedy of modern life which we must overcome by inner human power. What I call—one may perhaps be offended by it—the dying bourgeois conception of the world and of life, is at an end; it has brought about its on ruin. What is emerging today as proletarian longing—although still very far from what it will be—has other human foundations. While the bourgeois world-conception is dying in the ether body, what is evolving out of the proletarian world is springing to in the astral body. An extraordinarily significant symbol of the dying world-conception was the egoism of Max Stirner. You will find it described in my book Riddles of Philosophy. We live in an age when we must always try not to judge the thing that is just arising by its outside. However many mistakes it may be making here and there, we must be able to see that the social movement is evolving today among the proletariat out of man's spiritual outlook as the seed of the future. We must be able to see that mankind is passing over a threshold and has to enter into supersense knowledge. And the key that reveals this tendency to one who has supersense—spiritual—knowledge, is precisely the fact that the proletarian world is behaving itself very materialistically indeed, in this or that leader, this or that political boss, fighting against that which it will be someday. It fights against it. It has accepted the bourgeois way of thinking as a final bequest; but it is called in human evolution to cross the threshold consciously, to work its way out of materialistic delusion to real knowledge of the supersensible.

These things that we are considering must be studied by observing their spiritual foundations, so that they do not merely become abstract knowledge but, become an inner impulse for our will. Then we will be able to establish our position within this present social order at the right time and in the right way, with full consciousness.

We shall try today to understand one of the aspects of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic nature. If we are to acquire some idea of this element which plays a real part in man's existence, we must look back to the Moon-evolution of our Earth and consider this Moon-evolution in connection with Earth-evolution proper.

We know that Earth-evolution proper was the outcome of the Sprits of Form having penetrated into the heritage left by the preceding Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. And we know too that these Spirits of Form produced an Earth constituted in such a way that man was able to receive his ego—in other words it became possible for the three principles of man's being which were the heritage of the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions to be permeated by the Ego. The Spirits of Form endowed man with his Ego by a direct inpouring of their own being. As we look up to these Spirits of Form, seeing them as the bringers of the Ego we must also be mindful of the Hierarchy ranking immediately above man—which represents as it were, different stages of the organisation of the Spirits of Form. This other Hierarchy consists of the Spirits of Personality, the Archangeloi and the Angeloi.

Leaving aside for the moment the still higher ranks of Beings, we have to regard as the Creators and Regents of Earth-evolution: the Spirits of Form and their Servers—the Spirits of Personality, the Archangeloi and the Angeloi. Thus there was created an Earth-existence which, as its flower or crowning fruit, brought man with his Ego-nature into being.

When we observe earthly existence today we cannot really discern what its character might have been if the Spirits of Form alone, together with their Servers, had created and ruled over it. For the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic beings penetrate into everything. Thus we have an Earth-existence which, in its onflowing evolution, reveals what can be brought into being and directed by the normally-developed Spirits of Form and their Servers, and in-woven with it everything that proceeds from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences.

If we are clear about this we shall realise that all earthly existence—of man and the other kingdoms alike—would have been different if the Spirits of Form and their Servers had been able to create, to work, and to rule by themselves. What actually lies before us, therefore, is a clouded, falsified picture of Earth-existence, a picture that has been falsified through the working of Lucifer and Ahriman. In connection with many a phenomenon on the Earth we may well ask ourselves: What would this Earth-existence have become if the Luciferic and Ahrimanic falsifications had not taken place—in other words, if only the Spirits of Form and their Servers had been at work?

Among many phenomena that come into consideration, there is, for example, the subject of which I spoke yesterday.¹

I spoke of the evolution of language, which actually takes place more in the subconscious life of man, and I said that there is evidence of a certain law operating. In the development of language within the onflowing stream of Earth existence. I also said that the human-personal element has taken effect in this development and that today man has still not reached the point of perceiving in the sounds of speech, in the sounds of the letters, signs of the development of thoughts. Man has brought the development of thoughts to quite a different stage from that of speech and language.

But just in this connection there is something that can become clear to us when we ask: How would the development of thoughts have proceeded in earthly existence if Luciferic an Ahrimanic influences had not been at work? What would man’s thinking have been, what would his speech have been, if the Spirits of Form and their Servers had been the sole creators and leaders of the Earth?

If no Luciferic or Ahrimanic influence had taken effect in Earth-evolution, speaking and thinking would have been in complete unison. And this unison must be sought for again with a certain objectivity. If speech gradually assumes the character of a sign, the Luciferic-Ahrimanic element will be overcome. But if this Luciferic-Ahrimanic element had not been at work, inner unison, inner harmony between speaking and thinking, would have unfolded in humanity—that is to say, man would have perceived, would have had a living experience of what lies in a sound of speech, in d, t, th, and so on. He has no such experience today. This is evident from the fact that, in essentials at least, when men the whole world over have come to think in a certain way about one thing or another, they do not differ from one another in respect of their concepts, but very much in respect of their words. This one-sided character of thought which does not ever come to expression in speaking, must always be borne in mind for it is something that has already branched away from speech; it would be much more intimately connected with speech if no Luciferic-Ahrimanic influences had invaded Earth-existence. Men would have permeated speech with their feelings; they would have lived in the sound itself but at the same time would have experienced the concept, the idea, within the sound—the concept and the sound would have been experienced as one. That is what the Spirits of Form had originally planned for man. The element of soul which comes into play when, on the one hand, man is given up to his thoughts and ideas, and on the other, when he is given up to speech—this element of soul was not originally intended by the Spirits of Form for man on Earth; what they intended for him had been unison of speaking and thinking—speaking and thinking were to be experienced as one. The breach that exists today between speaking and thinking is to be traced back directly to the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman.

Men have no feeling today for the special quality and character of m, g, and so on; the soul is related with these things in quite a different way from that in which it is related with thinking. The Spirits of Form and the Beings who serve them had intended for man an existence much more strongly based upon Nature-conditions than he was then able to achieve on Earth. The Spirits of Form had intended that man’s speech should be of such a character that it carries thinking itself on its wings, and not a kind of speech from whom the sap of thought has been drained. That is what the Spirits of Form had intended for man. And according to their intentions, differentiation among men was not to be determined by the character of languages on the Earth; differentiation among the nations was intended to be based only upon natural conditions, upon geographical and climatic differences. Man was to have felt himself belonging to a nation through the fact that he felt himself connected with certain powers working in the Nature-foundations underlying his existence.

On the other hand, if the intentions of the Spirits of Form alone had been carried out, it would have been possible when as a member of a nation a man encountered a member of another nation, for him to feel and understand from the very outset what lay within the words. There would still have been different languages. But in respect of the understanding of languages men would not have differed; in experiencing what lay in the single sound, in the single letter, a man would, it is true, have heard the other language, but he would not have heard the word as a mere husk; within the sound, within the word, he would also have heard the thought or the idea; it would have been carried on the wings of the word itself. The reason why a man does not understand a foreign language today is because the ideas do not lie in the words themselves; the words have become divorced from the ideas.

And so a cleft has arisen between speaking and thinking (ideation). The result is that up to now man was unable in Earth-evolution to develop the faculty of meeting other men with a feeling understanding even of an entirely new language. In this connection you must not think of the languages as they are now. The languages themselves would naturally have been quite different; as they have now become, people who live in one language-domain cannot understand those who live in a domain where a different language is spoken. This is because the languages have not developed in the same way that the life of thought has developed. In view of the present development of the languages, therefore, it is impossible to have any such understanding as was originally conceived by the Spirits of Form and which was to have been directed by the Beings who serve them. The Spirits of Form had not, of course, intended that men all over the Earth should be cut to one pattern, as it were by cosmic tailors; the intention was that men should differ among themselves but differ in such a way that they would still have confronted each other with complete understanding over the whole Earth.

Beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi were chosen to direct those groups of men as conceived by the Spirits of Form. The Archangeloi were those Beings who during the Moon-evolution had perfected the development proper to that evolution. And in order that the single individual within such a group of men should also have a guide to act as intermediary between himself as a single personality and the group as a whole—such a guide was to be a Being from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi whose development had proceeded regularly and normally during the Moon-evolution.

It can therefore be said: if things had come about as they were intended by the Spirits of Form, differences among men would have been found all over the Earth, but everywhere they would have been connected as naturally as vegetation, and the plant-world, with the whole earthly environment. Men would have grown together with Nature, but there would not have penetrated into the life of soul the element that separates men according to languages. And there is something else too that would not have come to pass: men would not have attempted to find one science, one form of knowledge, all over the Earth. It is a deep-seated but a purely Luciferic belief today that there can be a uniform science which, comprised in a number of dogmas, must be valid for all mankind on the Earth. This belief has arisen simply because knowledge, conceptual ideation, has separated from speaking and thereby exists on its own.

If the intentions of the Spirits of Form had been ful¬filled, men would have expressed themselves differently about things in the world according to the groups to which they belonged, but in their feeling they would have understood the others, they would have had no dispute with those who expressed themselves differently. Diversity itself would have been the basis of the right form of life on the Earth.

These things were all part of what the Spirits of Form intended, but mankind has no longer the slightest understanding of them. For with surprising forcefulness the belief has taken root that the so-called conceptual life the life of thought, is non-national, in contrast to speaking which must necessarily be national. It was the middle condition that was intended by the Spirits of Form: not separation based upon languages and not union all over the Earth on the basis of some firmly established concept, but diversity of speech together with diversity of ideas. That is what was intended by the Spirits of Form.

In our own domain of spiritual science this must also in a certain respect become an ideal, an actual ideal. But there is a deep-seated unwillingness in man's nature today to recognise this ideal.—I can give you an illustration.

Although it is a long time ago now, you probably know that we were once part of the "Theosophical Society" of which Mrs. Besant was and is to continue to be President. We too—a number of us—were in the habit of attending the Congresses of that Society. Addresses were always given by the different General Secretaries representing the various European Sections. The difference in the languages was brought very clearly into evidence because each of the representatives spoke in his own tongue—with the inevitable consequence that the majority of them were not understood. Nevertheless, with the idea of promoting some measure of mutual understanding, the principle was followed of each representative giving at least a short address in his own language. Perhaps a few who were present on such occasions will remember that for several years I always spoke to the same effect—I do not know whether it was noticed, but year after year I said the same thing—not exactly with the thought, but always with the feeling: Will the real point of it be understood?—What I emphasised was always this: When we come together from the different countries we do not for the purpose of receiving a central Theosophy but in order to lay upon a common altar what it is the task of the various countries to accomplish for Theosophy. I always laid stress upon the individual element which, coming from the different sides, asks only to be laid on a common altar. Year after year I emphasised the same point. The only result was that although what I said was correct, some did not understand and the rest took offence. But it contained an expression of the ideal to which we must aspire: the ideal that cannot be made manifest by attempts to create a uniform system of dogma for the whole world but by working in the direction of enabling the principle of diversity in our Earth-existence to come to expression amid mutual understanding.

The preconceived assumption that there can be only one truth is so deeply rooted in human souls that contradictions are actually suspected when in a lecture-course something is expressed in one way and at another time in a different way. But this is exactly what must be cultivated among us, in order to show that diversity is a sine qua non in any presentation of truth. It is diversity, manifoldness, therefore that must become an ideal—not uniformity.

We have spoken briefly of the normally developed Spirit of Form and the Beings who serve them, and of the character of speaking and thinking which was intended for Earth-evolu¬tion, but we shall understand what lies at the root of these things only when we bear in mind the opposing Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements. If we are to understand these, we must turn our minds away from Earth-evolution; for the Luciferic Ahrimanic element became what it is as a result of the Moon-evolution. As we have often heard, the Luciferic-Ahrimanic element remained stationary at the stage of Moon-evolution and carried over into Earth-evolution what stems from the Moon-evolution. So in the case of this Luciferic-Ahrimanic element we must not speak of the Spirits of Form as the Creators; the Spirits of Form are Creators only in the case of beings suitable for the Earth-evolution. In the case of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings, it is the Spirits of Movement who must be regarded as the Creators, for they are the Creators and Regents of the Moon-evolution, thus being what the Spirits of Form are for the evolution of man and the Spirits of Movement are for the Moon-evolution and therewith for the Ahrimanic-Luciferic evolution as a whole. These Spirits of Movement were Creators during the Moon-evolution by virtue of what they brought into being in con¬junction with the Spirits who were then their Servers: the Spirits of Form as they then were, the Spirits of Personality and the Spirits belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi.

And what was brought into being were the Angeloi—the Angeloi who developed in the regular and normal way on the Moon. Just as in the course of Earth-evolution man is meant to develop the seven principles or members of his constitution the Angeloi were meant to develop their seven principles during the Moon-evolution.

Those Angeloi who during the Moon-evolution duly developed their seven principles, passed over into Earth-evolution and became the Spirits who were to function as the intermediaries between the individual man and the group of men that is guided and led by a single Archangel—again a Being who developed his seven principles during the Moon-evolution. But among these Beings there were some who had only succeeded in developing six or even five of their principles, who had not developed all their seven principles during the Moon-evolution. Hence they were not capable during Earth-evolution of becoming leaders of individual men as Angeloi, or leaders of groups of men as Archangeloi. These spiritual beings who had developed only six or five of their principles are, so to speak, subordinate Hierarchies; other Hierarchies rank above them. When we speak of Ahriman and Lucifer, they are to be regarded as the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings most closely allied to them—beings, therefore, who could not possibly pass in a regular way into the Earth-evolution because this was under the direction of the Spirits of Form; these beings had not reached the stage where they could become helpers of the Spirits of Form, for they were at the stage of the Angeloi. Neither could they have become men. They therefore stood midway between the normally developed Angeloi and men.

Thus in the Earth-evolution we have Man, (see diagram) and above him the Creators—the Spirits of Form—then the Spirits of Personality, the Spirits from the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, the Spirits from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi. These spiritual Beings had developed their seven or nine principles during the Moon-evolution; hence it is not necessary for them to enter into the kind of earthly embodiment created for man by the Spirits of Form; they – the Angeloi, for example—enter into an etheric body only, because they belong to the Hierarchy immediately above man. And in between are the beings for whom progress in simply not possible in these phases of evolution. Because they have not developed their seven principles, they are beings who can say of themselves: Our Creators are the Spirits of Movement, and we are ruled over by certain Spirits of Form, Archai and Archangeloi. Nevertheless, these beings were there, and were not capable of fulfilling the office that should properly have devolved upon them—which was to share in the rulership of the evolution of humanity and also of the other kingdoms of the Earth. In this they could have no share.

And so there were two classes both of Archangeloi and of Angeloi—not to speak for the moment of the other Beings. These beings who had developed normally now shared in the activity which was meant to have taken the course I have described, for example in connection with speaking and thinking.

If this legacy from the evolution directed by the Spirits of Movement had not existed, speaking and thinking would have developed in harmonious unison—as I described just now. And now something came to pass which seems to have little meaning when it is put into words, but it is, in fact, a tremendously significant, momentous cosmic event. There were now in the Spirit-Land—or, speaking in terms of religion—there were now in Heaven: the normally developed Archangeloi, the normally developed Angeloi, and a brood of incompletely developed Beings. And what happened was that the normally developed Archangeloi and Angeloi cast down upon the Earth those beings who had completed, not their full development, but only that of six or five of their principles—cast them down to the Earth from Heaven because no use could be made of them there.

And so, from the beginning onwards an invisible kingdom was mingled with Earth-evolution, the invisible kingdom of Lucifer and Ahriman, who had been cast out of that realm from which man, animals, plants and minerals were ordained to be created and governed. They had been cast out and were now on the Earth; they could not, of course be perceived with earthly senses, but they were there. The normally developed Archangeloi and Angeloi were in Heaven—to use the Biblical expression; retarded beings were wandering about the Earth. It is to this that the words of the Bible refer: “Neither was their place found any more in heaven.”² They were cast down to the Earth.

And now try to think of the actual situation in order that you may avoid erroneous ideas about certain matters.—Men were living on the Earth in a primitive stage of development, as you will find described in "Occult Science", but immediately below and around them, beings were living—we will speak of the very lowest rank of Luciferic beings—beings who on the Moon were the retarded Angeloi and who, instead of now being in the position of rulers, were, to begin with, idle and inactive. But whereas man was only just about to begin to develop his seven principles, whereas he could only hope to develop his seventh principle at the end of the Earth-evolution, or at a correspondingly nearer time his sixth or fifth principle—in these Luciferic beings the development of the sixth or the fifth principle was already complete; it was only the seventh principle that they had not developed.

The situation at the present time is that we are working at the development of what is called "Intellect”. The principle of man’s nature that is only now—in the Fifth Post Atlantean epoch—coming to expression in him for the first time, was far from being developed in the men of Lemuria. At that time the Angeloi who had been cast down had developed, already in the Moon-period, the principle which man is now for the first time in process of developing—already possessed what man was intended to develop only at a much later period of Earth-evolution. It is indeed a fact that even after the Lemurian epoch, in the Atlantean epoch, an important part was played by invisible beings who at that time had developed to a high degree that of which man in the Atlantean epoch had no trace whatever and which he is only now in process of developing, namely, the element of intellect.

And so highly developed Intelligences, Angeloi beings, hovered hither and thither as retarded Spirits during the epochs of Lemuria and Atlantis. These were Spirits at a lofty stage, an exceedingly lofty stage of development. Again, to put it trivially, therefore, we can say: The plan of the Spirits of Form was thwarted. Whereas their intention had been to develop man stage by stage, letting him be guided by Angeloi so that by the time of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch he would be ready to develop intellect which would be in unison with speech and language—this aim was thwarted owing to the fact that invisible Beings lived among men.

We will think, to begin with of the Invisible Luciferic beings, the Luciferic Angeloi. These Luciferic Angeloi-beings penetrated into individual men in an early period of Earth-evolution, took possession of them, as it were. These Angeloi were beings who had been cast down upon the Earth. And so in ancient times there were men who, if they had become what the Spirits of Form had intended, would have been naive, primitive natures—but as things were, Luciferic Angeloi-beings had entered into them, and the result was that they were exceedingly clever, exceedingly astute—to a degree that was not possible in the case of man himself until the fifth or sixth epoch of Earth-evolution. In ancient India there was still some understanding of what the seven Rishis represented; these were men "illuminated by the Luciferic Angeloi-beings. They were men to whom naive and simple people naturally looked up to as standing at very lofty heights. In that time, and during later times too, these Luciferic Angeloi-beings again and again took possession of men, influencing either individuals or groups, they inculcated into humanity the notion of the "internationality" of the world of concepts, of the so-called uniformity of dogma over the whole Earth. Wherever men believe in this uniformity of dogma, wherever they believe that salvation is to be found, not in diversity but in uniformity—there the Luciferic Spirits are at work. They have torn the world of thought and ideation away from the world of speech and languages. Thereby they have evoked the state of things which has made it impossible for the thoughts and ideas to retain their rightful place within the spoken word. And so Luciferic uniformity, Luciferic monism, or the striving for it, came to prevail all over the Earth. Wherever there are fanatics who claim that what they themselves regard as right must forthwith be believed by all men on Earth—these fanatics are possessed by Luciferic Angeloi. What really matters, however is not so much the fact that men are possessed by this false idea of uniformity, but that they shall strive for an understanding of harmonious diversity.

And now the way was smoothed for Spirits other than these Luciferic Angeloi-beings. The Luciferic Angeloi manifested in the form of illumined individuals, especially in ancient India. It was through these chosen men—who, in their states of illumination, gave early expression to a condition not intended for the rest of humanity until a much late time—that the delusion of uniformity of all thinking was spread over the Earth. And thereby the path was smoothed for the other Spirits who belonged to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi. But they were Archangeloi who during the Moon evolution had not developed their seventh but only their sixth principle. They too—because they could not be used as teachers and guides of groups of men divided according to geographical and climatic conditions—had been cast down and were now on the Earth among men. These Archangeloi—they were no longer to be found in Heaven but on the Earth—were sent out by the highest among them to the different folk-groups. And these folk-groups dragged speech down a stage lower. Whereas the Luciferic beings had torn thinking away from speaking, these incompletely developed Archangeloi allowed speech and language to sink a stage lower, so that the languages were as different—well, as different as they actually became on the Earth.

These beings who were retarded Archangeloi and carried out the guidance of groups of men on the Earth in such a way that they split humanity asunder, causing men to hate one another, to isolate themselves from one another—these beings have the Ahrimanic nature. They were highly developed beings but they were not the rightful leaders of peoples, for the simple reason that according to the intentions of the Spirits of Form, this leadership was meant to lie with the normal Archangeloi who have developed all their seven principles. It was especially the beings who had developed only six of their principles who now set themselves in opposition to the legitimate leaders of peoples. It is the Ahrimanic beings who have been the cause of languages sinking a stage lower, to a stage where to begin with men simply do not perceive what concepts, what ideas, are contained in the actual words of language. If the Luciferic Angeloi beings alone had come upon the scene the delusion of uniformity would, it is true, have spread over the Earth; but the several languages would have developed in such a way that if, merely in his mind, a man had overcome the delusion of uniformity, he would have been able still to feel what is contained in the different languages. But once the world of thoughts and ideas had been torn away by the Luciferic Angeloi, it was easy for the Ahrimanic Archangeloi to force speech still another stage downwards, with the result that it was then no longer possible for speech to develop in such a way that the thought or idea could be directly experienced within it.

We have here a picture of the interworking of a threefold principle. When our statue³ has been completed and you look at it, you will see that it gives expression to this threefoldness.—There is an onflowing process of evolution, but it has been falsified: falsified above through the delusion of the uniformity of thoughts, and falsified below through the delusion of the false principle of differentiation—which already is no longer a delusion but actual fact—the splitting up of humanity into so-called nations according to languages.

That is what came to pass in the course of Earth-evolution—it is part and parcel of Earth-evolution. And the result was that, as time went on, there developed the belief that is dominated by the delusion of uniformity, and, on the other side, the splitting into nations. That is what developed. This state of things had reached its peak when the Cosmic Being, Christ, came down to the Earth in the way known to you, inculcating into Earth-evolution an Impulse which we now have to carry into the world which represents the normal evolutionary process. But since Earth-evolution has for a time gone astray in two directions, the Christ-Impulse sets itself the task of creating the counter-impulse—that is to say, to impart greater power to the normally developed Angeloi in order that they may oppose the Luciferic Angeloi who uphold the delusion of uniformity. In the place of the monistic, delusive idea of the uniformity of all knowledge, there now came the Impulse that is implicit in Christianity when rightly conceived: understanding but not obtrusion of one’s own belief, the endeavour to find the truth residing in the nature of other men. Inasmuch as this is implicit in Christianity, the Impulse given by Christ enhances the strength of the normally developed Angeloi. So that for men and for every epoch it can again become an ideal to find on the Earth, wheresoever it may be, truth clothed in an individual form—to find what is true, now not merely through the intellect that has already been driven into delusion by Lucifer, but through souls, through hearts, allowing every man to find in his own way what is true.

The saying that truth resides in every human soul is a profoundly Christian principle, as I have said on other occasions. It is the outcome of a strengthening of the Angeloi, enabling them to gain a victory over the Luciferic Angeloi who want to spread over the whole earth the delusion of the uniformity of dogma as a body of intellectualism which does not admit of diversity of manifoldness of understanding. And on the other side, the power of the normally developed Archangeloi was to be fortified in order that they may gradually defeat those spiritual beings who bring about the differentiation of groups of men through the fact that these groups become infatuated with their own language and are led to separate from each other to the point of fanaticism. The strength of the normally developed Angeloi and Archangeloi was to be enhanced through the Christ-Impulse. What was to come to pass through the Christ-Impulse is not something that exists merely in the thoughts, the minds and the feelings of men; what happens in the Earth as the outcome of the Christ-Impulse transcends the visible and passes into the invisible. Christ is there not for men only, but also for the Angeloi and Archangeloi. For Christ is a Cosmic Being Who, through Jesus of Nazareth, entered into the Earth evolution.

In the middle of Earth-evolution, therefore, a strengthening was given everywhere: the Christ-Impulse entered, enhancing the power of the Angeloi and Archangeloi. This Impulse was powerful and mighty; something entered into Earth-evolution that had never previously been seen or known within it. (see diagram) The principle that had formerly prevailed strove to work as a Nature-principle, and desired that the spiritual guidance of the world should be based on the Jahve-principle. According to this principle it would have been natural for man's thinking and speaking to be in unison.—Our thinking has been detached from the Nature-Principle and has become spiritual; our speech has been detached from the Nature-principle and has taken on the qualities of soul.

Speech has been laid hold of by forces of soul, by the element of emotion and passion pertaining to the life of soul; thinking has been laid hold of entirely by the intellectual element which again pertains to the astral. But it was not meant to have been so; thinking was meant to lie a stage lower and to have been far more of a Nature-process; man was meant to speak and to understand the spoken word at a far higher level. After speaking and thinking had been separated for a while (I take speaking and thinking as examples among others that could be quoted), an Impulse much stronger than the Jahve-impulse was necessary. The nature of the Jahve-impulse was such that it did not yet reckon with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses. But these Impulses were at work nevertheless, until the middle of the Greco-Latin epoch—and then came the Christ-Impulse. This Impulse had necessarily to be stronger, more powerful than the Jahve-impulse then in operation. And this mightier Impulse was not only to lead Earth-evolution onwards along the course it would have taken if there had been no invasion by Lucifer and Ahriman, but to bring it back again into its old tracks until the end. Thus the Christ-Impulse took very powerful hold of Earth-evolution. Because men were at first incapable of understanding it, it worked in ways I have indicated—examples that may be thought of are the Emperor Constantine and the Maid of Orleans.—The influence of the Christ-Impulse is of untold significance.

Earth-evolution continued its course, and speaking figuratively, the following may be said. Suppose thick snow is lying on a railway line. A train comes and ploughs through the snow up to a certain point; but at that point the pile of snow is so high that the progress of the train is checked. Something similar happened in the case of the Christ-Impulse. It entered with tremendous power, strove to lay hold of the Earth, but Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces were there and they reared up like the snow in front of the train. For a time they were overcome—and, of course, will be further overcome if a sufficient number of men allow themselves to be moved by the Christ-Impulse—but for all that the snow-pile was there. And the consequence has been that—precisely in the age of intellectualism—the delusion of the uniformity of knowledge has asserted itself with particular strength. There is clear evidence of something which simply was not there in earlier times. Those conversant with the history of spiritual evolution are well aware that from the eighth or ninth century of the Christian era onwards, this delusion that a single form of truth must be made valid all over the Earth came strongly to the fore. The Luciferic Angeloi reared up once again. They were intent upon victory, intent upon misleading men into believing the delusion that one uniform truth should be held to prevail all over the Earth. And again and again there comes over men this terrible delusion of the monistic nature of dogma.

Later on, when the age of intellectualism had already dawned, came the great resistance emanating from the Ahrimanic Archangeloi—those beings who have brought the delusion of nationalism—a delusion that has now become accomplished fact. This Ahrimanic principle took essential effect in the 19th century, just as the Luciferic principle had done in the 8th/9th century. The earthly bearer of this Ahrimanic principle was Napoleon. Napoleon is the one from whom proceeded that corruption of Europe which led to the idea that the principle of nationalism is all-important, that men must be divided into groups on the basis of the nationalistic principle. Napoleon worked in the service of Ahriman, and that was the starting-point of the state of things that has persisted to this day: the grouping of men according to regions of the Earth strictly enclosed within national boundaries.

This delusion—it is now accomplished fact—is everywhere in evidence today. It is Ahriman on his rounds, it is the influence which strives to evoke the seductive cry that men must shut themselves off in accordance with the principle of nationality, while they clothe their delusion in the slogan: "Freedom of the nations—freedom and equality of the nations!"

This is a trend deeply and intimately bound up with cosmic evolution and it is taking effect in a terrible way at the present time. The spiritual beings who set out to bring falsification into Earth-evolution naturally make use of ideas and concepts which seem to men not to be repre-hensible but, on the contrary, particularly noble; Ahrimanic intentions are adorned in the mask of great and powerful ideals, just as the Luciferic spirit has been masked by the delusion of the uniformity of knowledge, expressed in words which everyone understands because they sound so idealistic: "One truth for all men." But with this slogan, Lucifer creeps into the hearts of men; Ahriman creeps in when the cry goes forth: The peoples must shut themselves off as nationalities living in particular regions on the Earth—and only those groups of men who represent nationalities are of any account.

Just as the first is a seductive call of Lucifer which appears in the guise of an ideal, the second is a seductive call of Ahriman which again appears as an ideal—but a terribly perverted ideal. Spiritual science is called upon to see through the seductive falsity of such calls and to work to the end that mankind shall take the rightful path, the path which after it had been laid down less forcefully through the Jahve-impulse, is now the path of the greater Impulse which came into Earth-evolution: the Christ-Impulse which sweeps away all the Luciferic and Ahrimanic delusions that have crept into the souls and hearts of men.

• 1. Das Reich der Sprache—not translated.
• 2. Revelation, XII,8
• 3. The great statue carved in wood which is to be seen in the Goetheanum.

I shall now continue, in a certain direction, the more elementary considerations recently begun. In the first lecture of this series I drew your attention to the heart's real, inner need of finding, or at least seeking, the paths of the soul to the spiritual world. I spoke of this need meeting man from two directions: from the side of Nature, and from the side of inner experience.

Today we will again place these two aspects of human life before us in a quite elementary way. We shall then see that impulses from the subconscious are really active in all man's striving for knowledge in response to the needs of life, in his artistic aims and religious aspirations.

You can quite easily study the opposition, to which I here refer, in yourselves at any moment.

Take one quite simple fact. You are looking, let us say, at some part of your body—your hand, for example. In so far as the act of cognition itself is concerned you look at your hand exactly as at a crystal, or plant, or any other natural object. But when you look at this part of your body and go through life with this perception, you encounter that seriously disturbing fact which intrudes on all human experience and of which I spoke. You find that what you see will one day be a corpse; external Nature, on receiving it, has not the power to do anything else than destroy it. The moment man has become a corpse within the physical world and has been handed over to the elements in any form, there is no longer any possibility that the human form, which has been impressed on all the substances visible in his body, will be able to maintain itself.

All the forces of Nature which you can make the subject of any scientific study are only able to destroy man, never to build him up. Every unprejudiced study that is not guided by theory but controlled by life itself, leads us to say: We look at Nature around us in so far it is intelligible. (We will not speak, for the present, of what external cognition cannot grasp.) As civilised people of today we feel we have advanced very far indeed, for we have discovered so many laws of Nature. This talk of progress is, indeed, perfectly justified. Nevertheless, it is a fact that all these laws of Nature are, by their mode of operation, only able to destroy man, never to build him up. Human insight is unable, at first, to discover anything in the external world except laws of Nature which destroy man.

Let us now look at our inner life. We experience what we call our psychical life, i.e. our thinking, which can confront us fairly clearly, our feeling, which is less clearly experienced, and our willing, which is quite hidden from us. For, with ordinary consciousness, no one can claim insight into the way an intention—to pick up an object, let us say—works down into this very complicated organism of muscle and nerve in order to move, at length, arms and legs. What it is that here works down into the organism, between the formation of the thought and the perception of the lifted object, is hidden in complete darkness. But an indefinite impulse takes place in us, saying: I will this. So we ascribe will to ourselves and, on surveying our inner life, speak of thinking, feeling and willing.

But there is another side, and this introduces us again—in a certain sense—to what is deeply disturbing. We see that all this soul life of man is submerged whenever he sleeps and arises anew when he wakes. If we want to use a comparison we may well say: The soul life is like a flame which I kindle and extinguish again. But we see more. We see this soul life destroyed when certain organs are destroyed. Moreover, it is dependent on bodily development; being dreamlike in a little child and becoming gradually clearer and clearer, more and more awake. This increase in clarity and awareness goes hand in hand with the development of the body; and when we grow old our soul life becomes weaker again. The life of the soul thus keeps step with the growth and decay of the body. We see it light up and die away.

But, however sure we may be that our soul, though dependent in its manifestations on the physical organism, has its own life, its own existence, this is not all we can say about it. It contains an element man must value above all else in life, for his whole manhood—his human dignity—depends on this. I refer to the moral element.

We cannot deduce moral laws from Nature however far we may explore it. They have to be experienced entirely within the soul; there, too, we must be able to obey them. The conflict and settlement must therefore take place entirely within the soul. And we must regard it as a kind of ideal for the moral life to be able, as human beings, to obey moral principles which are not forced upon us. Yet man cannot become an ‘abstract being’ only obeying laws. The moral life does not begin until emotions, impulses, instincts, passions, outbursts of temperament, etc., are subordinated to the settlement, reached entirely within the soul, between moral laws grasped in a purely spiritual way and the soul itself.

The moment we become truly conscious of our human dignity and feel we cannot be like beings driven by necessity, we rise to a world quite different from the world of Nature.

Now the disturbing element that, as long as there has been human evolution at all, has led men to strive beyond the life immediately visible, really springs from these two laws—however many subconscious and unconscious factors may be involved: We see, on the one hand, man's bodily being, but it belongs to Nature that can only destroy it; and, on the other hand, we are inwardly aware of ourselves as soul beings who light up and fade away, yet are bound up with what is most valuable in us—the moral element.

It can only be ascribed to a fundamental insincerity of our civilisation that people deceive themselves so terribly, turning a blind eye to this direct opposition between outer perception and inner experience. If we understand ourselves, if we refuse to be confined and constricted by the shackles which our education, with a definite aim in view, imposes upon us, if we free ourselves a little from these constraints we say at once: Man! you bear within you your soul life—your thinking, feeling and willing. All this is connected with the moral world which you must value above all else—perhaps with the religious source of all existence on which this moral world itself depends. But where is this inner life of moral adjustments when you sleep?

Of course, one can spin philosophic fantasies or fantastic philosophies about these things. One may then say: Man has a secure basis in his ego (i.e. in his ordinary ego-consciousness). The ego begins to think in St. Augustine, continues through Descartes, and attains a somewhat coquettish expression in Bergsonism today. But every sleep refutes this. For, from the moment we fall asleep to the moment of waking, a certain time elapses; and when, in the waking state, we look back on this interval of time, we do not find the ego qua experience. It was extinguished. And yet it is connected with what is most valuable in our lives—the moral element!

Thus we must say: Our body, whose existence we are rudely forced to admit, is certainly not a product of Nature, which has only the power to destroy and disintegrate it. On the other hand, our own soul life eludes us when we sleep, and is dependent on every rising and falling tide of our bodily life. As soon as we free ourselves a little from the constraints imposed on civilised man by his education today, we see at once that every religious or artistic aspiration—in fact, any higher striving—no matter how many subconscious and unconscious elements be involved, depends, throughout all human evolution, on these antitheses.

Of course, millions and millions of people do not realise this clearly. But is it necessary that what becomes a riddle of life for a man be clearly recognised as such? If people had to live by what they are clear about they would soon die. It is really the contributions to the general mood from unclear, subconscious depths that compose the main stream of our life. We should not say that he alone feels the riddles of life who can formulate them in an intellectually clear way and lay them before us: first riddle, second riddle, etc. Indeed, such people are the shallowest.

Someone may come who has this or that to talk over with us. Perhaps it is some quite ordinary matter. He speaks with a definite aim in view, but is not quite happy about it. He wants something, and yet does not want it; he cannot come to a decision. He is not quite happy about his own thoughts. To what is this due? It comes from the feeling of uncertainty, in the subconscious depths of his being, about the real basis of man's true being and worth. He feels life's riddles because of the polar antithesis I have described.

Thus we can find support neither in the corporeal, nor in the spiritual as we experience it. For the spiritual always reveals itself as something that lights up and dies down, and the body is recognised as coming from Nature which can, however, only destroy it.

So man stands between two riddles. He looks outwards and perceives his physical body, but this is a perpetual riddle to him. He is aware of his psycho-spiritual life, but this, too, is a perpetual riddle. But the greatest riddle is this: If I really experience a moral impulse and have to set my legs in motion to do something towards its realisation, it means—of course—I must move my body. Let us say the impulse is one of goodwill. At first this is really experienced entirely within the soul, i.e. purely psychically. How, now, does this impulse of goodwill shoot down into the body? How does a moral impulse come to move bones by muscles? Ordinary consciousness cannot comprehend this. One may regard such a discussion as theoretical, and say: We leave that to philosophers; they will think about it. Our civilisation usually leaves this question to its thinkers, and then despises—or, at least, values but little—what they say. Well; this satisfies the head only, not the heart. The human heart feels a nervous unrest and finds no joy in life, no firm foundation, no security. With the form man's thinking has taken since the first third of the fifteenth century magnificent results in the domain of external science have been achieved, but nothing has or can be contributed towards a solution of these two riddles—that of man's physical body and that of his psychical life. It is just from a clear insight into these things that Anthroposophy comes forward, saying: True; man's thinking, in the form it has so far actually taken, is powerless in the face of Reality. However much we think, we cannot in the very least influence an external process of nature by our thinking.

Moreover, we cannot, by mere thinking, influence our own ‘will-organism’. To feel deeply the powerlessness of this thinking is to receive the impulse to transcend it.

But one cannot transcend it by spinning fantasies. There is no starting point but thought; you cannot begin to think about the world except by thinking. Our thinking, however, is not fitted for this. So we are unavoidably led by life itself to find—from this starting point in thought—a way by which our thinking may penetrate more deeply into existence—into Reality. This way is only to be found in what is described as meditation—for example, in my book: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.

Today we will only describe this path in bare outline, for we intend to give the skeleton of a whole anthroposophical structure. We will begin again where we began twenty years ago.

Meditation, we may say, consists in experiencing thinking in another way than usual. Today one allows oneself to be stimulated from without; one surrenders to external reality. And in seeing, hearing, grasping, etc., one notices that the reception of external impressions is continued—to a certain extent—in thoughts. One's attitude is passive—one surrenders to the world and the thoughts come. We never get further in this way. We must begin to experience thinking. One does this by taking a thought that is easily comprehended, letting it stay in one's consciousness, and concentrating one's whole consciousness upon it.

Now it does not matter at all what the thought may signify for the external world. The point is simply that we concentrate our consciousness on this one thought, ignoring every other experience. I say it must be a comprehensible thought—a simple thought, that can be ‘seen’ from all sides [überschaubar]. A very, very learned man once asked me how one meditates. I gave him an exceedingly simple thought. I told him it did not matter whether the thought referred to any external reality. I told him to think: Wisdom is in the light. He was to apply the whole force of his soul again and again to the thought: Wisdom is in the light. Whether this be true or false is not the point. It matters just as little whether an object that I set in motion, again and again, by exerting my arm, be of far-reaching importance or a game; I strengthen the muscles of my arm thereby. So, too, we strengthen our thinking when we exert ourselves, again and again, to per-form the above activity, irrespective of what the thought may signify. If we strenuously endeavour, again and again, to make it present in our consciousness and concentrate our whole soul life upon it, we strengthen our soul life just as we strengthen the muscular force of our arm if we apply it again and again to the same action. But we must choose a thought that is easily surveyed; otherwise we are exposed to all possible tricks of our own organisation. People do not believe how strong is the suggestive power of unconscious echoes of past experiences and the like. The moment we entertain a more complicated thought demonic powers approach from all sides, suggesting this or that to our consciousness. One can only be sure that one is living in one's meditation in the full awareness of normal, conscious life, if one really takes a completely surveyable thought that can contain nothing but what one is actually thinking.

If we contrive to meditate in this way, all manner of people may say we are succumbing to auto-suggestion or the like, but they will be talking nonsense. It all turns on our success in holding a ‘transparent’ thought—not one that works in us through sub-conscious impulses in some way or other. By such concentration one strengthens and intensifies his soul life—in so far as this is a life in thought. Of course, it will depend on a man's capacities, as I have often said; in the case of one man it will take a long time, in the case of another it will happen quickly. But, after a certain time, the result will be that he no longer experiences his thinking as in ordinary consciousness. In ordinary consciousness our thoughts stand there powerless; they are ‘just thoughts’. But through such concentration one really comes to experience thoughts as inner being [Sein], just as one experiences the tension of a muscle—the act of reaching out to grasp an object. Thinking becomes a reality in us; we experience, on developing ourselves further and further, a second man within us of whom we knew nothing before.

The moment now arrives when you say to yourself: True, I am this human being who, to begin with, can look at himself externally as one looks at the things of nature; I feel inwardly, but very dimly, the tensions of my muscles, but I do not really know how my thoughts shoot down into them. But after strengthening your thinking in the way described, you feel your strengthened thinking flowing, streaming, pulsating within you; you feel the second man. This is, to begin with, an abstract characterisation. The main thing is that the moment you feel this second man within you, supra-terrestrial things begin to concern you in the way only terrestrial things did before. In this moment, when you feel your thought take on inner life—when you feel its flow as you feel the flow of your breath when you pay heed to it—you become aware of something new in your whole being. Formerly you felt for example: I am standing on my legs. The ground is below and supports me. If it were not there, if the earth did not offer me this support, I would sink into bottomless space. I am standing on something. After you have intensified your thinking and come to feel the second man within, your earthly environment begins to interest you less than before. This only holds, however, for the moments in which you give special attention to the second man. One does not become a dreamer if one advances to these stages of knowledge in a sincere and fully conscious way. One can quite easily return, with all one's wonted skill, to the world of ordinary life. One does not become a visionary and say: Oh! I have learnt to know the spiritual world; the earthly is unreal and of less value. From now on I shall only concern myself with the spiritual world. On a true, spiritual path one does not become like that, but learns to value external life more than ever when one returns to it. Apart from this, the moments in which one transcends external life in the way described and fixes attention on the second man one has discovered cannot be maintained for long. To fix one's attention in this way and with inner sincerity demands great effort, and this can only be sustained for a certain time which is usually not very long.

Now, in turning our attention to the second man, we find at the same time, that we begin to value the spatial environment of the earth as much as what is on the earth itself. We know that the crust of the earth supports us, and the various kingdoms of Nature provide the substances we must eat if our body is to receive through food the repeated stimulus it needs. We know that we are connected with terrestrial Nature in this way. We must go into the garden to pick cabbages, cook and eat them; and we know that we need what is out there in the garden and that it is connected with our ‘first’ or physical man. In just the same way we learn to know what the rays of the sun, the light of the moon and the twinkling of the stars around the earth are to us. Gradually we attain one possible way of thinking of the spatial environment of the earth in relation to our ‘second man’, as we formerly thought of our first (physical) body in relation to its physical environment.

And now we say to ourselves: What you bear within you as muscles, bones, lung, liver, etc., is connected with the cabbage, the pheasant, etc., out there in the world. But the ‘second man’ of whom you have become conscious through strengthening your thinking, is connected with the sun and the moon and all the twinkling stars—with the spatial environment of the earth. We become more familiar with this environment than we usually are with our terrestrial environment—unless we happen to be food-specialists. We really gain a second world which, to begin with, is spatial.

We learn to esteem ourselves inhabitants of the world of stars as we formerly considered ourselves inhabitants of the earth. Hitherto we did not realise that we dwell in the world of stars; for a science which does not go as far to strengthen man's thinking cannot make him conscious of his connection, through a second man, with the spatial environment of the earth—a connection similar to that between his physical body and the physical earth. Such a science does not know this. It engages in calculations; but even the calculations of Astrophysics, etc., only reveal things which do not really concern man at all, or—at most—only satisfy his curiosity. After all, what does it mean to a man, or his inner life, to know how the spiral nebular in Canes venatici may be thought of as having originated, or as still evolving? Moreover, it is not even true! Such things do not really concern us. Man's attitude towards the world of stars is like that of some disembodied spirit towards the earth—if such a spirit be thought of as coming from some region or other to visit the earth, requiring neither ground to stand on, nor nourishment, etc. But, in actual fact, from a mere citizen of the earth man becomes a citizen of the universe when he strengthens his thinking in the above way.

We now become conscious of something quite definite, which can be described in the following way. We say to ourselves: It is good that there are cabbages, corn, etc., out there; they build up our physical body (if I may use this somewhat incorrect expression in accordance with the general, but very superficial, view). I am able to discover a certain connection between my physical body and what is there outside in the various kingdoms of Nature. But with strengthened thinking I begin to discover a similar connection between the ‘second man’ who lives in me and what surrounds me in supra-terrestrial space. At length one comes to say: If I go out at night and only use my ordinary eyes, I see nothing; by day the sunlight from beyond the earth makes all objects visible. To begin with, I know nothing. If I restrict myself to the earth alone, I know: there is a cabbage, there a quartz crystal. I see both by the light of the sun, but on earth I am only interested in the difference between them.

But now I begin to know that I myself, as the second man, am made of that which makes cabbage and crystal visible. It is a most significant leap in consciousness that one takes here—a complete metamorphosis. From this point one says to oneself: If you stand on the earth you see what is physical and connected with your physical man. If you strengthen your thinking the supra-terrestrial spatial world begins to concern you and the second man you have discovered just as the earthly, physical world concerned you before. And, as you ascribe the origin of your physical body to the physical earth, you now ascribe your ‘second existence’ to the cosmic ether through whose activities earthly things become visible. From your own experience you can now speak of having a physical body and an etheric body. You see, merely to systematise and think of man as composed of various members gives no real knowledge. We only attain real insight into these things by regarding the complete metamorphosis of consciousness that results from really discovering such a second man within.

I stretch out my physical arm and my physical hand takes hold of an object. I feel, in a sense, the flowing force in this action. Through strengthening my thought I come to feel that it is inwardly mobile and now induces a kind of ‘touching’ within me—a touching that also takes place in an organism; this is the etheric organism; that finer, super-sensible organism which exists no less than the physical organism, though it is connected with the supra-terrestrial, not the terrestrial.

The moment now arrives when one is obliged to descend another step, if I may put it so. Through such ‘imaginative’ thinking as I have described we come, at first, to feel this inward touching of the second man within us; we come, too, to see this in connection with the far spaces of the universal ether. By this term you are to understand nothing but what I have just spoken of; do not read into it a meaning from some other quarter. Now, however, we must return again to ordinary consciousness if we are to get further.

You see, if we are thinking of man's physical body in the way described, we readily ask how it is really related to its environment. It is doubtless related to our physical, terrestrial environment; but how?

If we take a corpse, which is, indeed, a faithful representation of physical man—even of the living physical man—we see, in sharp contours, liver, spleen, kidney, heart, lung, bones, muscles and nerve strands. These can be drawn; they have sharp contours and resemble in this everything that occurs in solid forms. Yet there is a curious thing about this sharply outlined part of the human organism. Strictly speaking, there is nothing more deceptive than our handbooks of anatomy or physiology, for they lead people to think: there is a liver, there a heart, etc. They see all this in sharp contours and imagine this sharpness to be essential. The human organism is looked upon as a conglomeration of solid things. But it is not so at all. Ten per cent., at most, is solid; the other ninety per cent. is fluid or even gaseous. At least ninety per cent. of man, while he lives, is a column of water.

Thus we can say: In his physical body man belongs, it is true, to the solid earth—to what the ancient thinkers in particular called the ‘earth’. Then we come to what is fluid in man; and even in external science one will never gain a reasonable idea of man until one learns to distinguish the solid man from the fluid man this inner surging and weaving element which really resembles a small ocean.

But what is terrestrial can only really affect man through the solid part of him. For even in external Nature you can see, where the fluid element begins, an inner formative force working with very great uniformity. Take the whole fluid element of our earth—its water; it is a great drop. Wherever water is free to take its own form, it takes that of a drop. The fluid element tends everywhere to be drop-like.

What is earthly—or solid, as we say today—occurs in definite, individual forms, which we can recognise. What is fluid, however, tends always to take on spherical form.

Why is this? Well, if you study a drop, be it small or as large as the earth itself, you find it is an image of the whole universe. Of course, this is wrong according to the ordinary conceptions of today; nevertheless it appears so, to begin with, and we shall soon see that this appearance is justified. The universe really appears to us as a hollow sphere into which we look.

Every drop, whether small or large, appears as a reflection of the universe itself. Whether you take a drop of rain, or the waters of the earth as a whole, the surface gives you a picture of the universe. Thus, as soon as you come to what is fluid, you cannot explain it by earthly forces. If you study closely the enormous efforts that have been made to explain the spherical form of the oceans by terrestrial forces, you will realise how vain such efforts are. The spherical form of the oceans cannot be explained by terrestrial gravitational attraction and the like, but by pressure from without. Here, even in external Nature, we find we must look beyond the terrestrial. And, in doing this, we come to grasp how it is with man himself.

As long as you restrict yourself to the solid part of man, you need not look beyond the terrestrial in understanding his form. The moment you come to his fluid part, you require the second man discovered by strengthened thinking. He works in what is fluid.

We are now back again at what is terrestrial. We find in man a solid constituent; this we can explain with our ordinary thoughts. But we cannot understand the form of his fluid components unless we think of the second man as active within him—the second man whom we contact within ourselves in our strengthened thinking as the human etheric body.

Thus we can say: The physical man works in what is solid, the etheric man in what is fluid. Of course, the etheric man still remains an independent entity, but he works through the fluid medium.

We must now proceed further. Imagine we have actually got so far as to experience inwardly this strengthened thinking and, therefore, the etheric—the second—man. This means, that we are developing great inner force. Now, as you know, one can—with a little effort—not only let oneself be stimulated to think, but can even refrain from all thinking. One can stop thinking; and our physical organisation does this for us when we are tired and fall asleep. But it becomes more difficult to extinguish again, of our own accord, the strengthened thinking which results from meditation and which we have acquired by great effort. It is comparatively easy to extinguish an ordinary, powerless thought; to put away—or ‘suggest away’—the strengthened thinking one has developed demands a stronger force, for one cleaves in a more inward way to what one has thus acquired. If we succeed, however, something special occurs.

You see, our ordinary thinking is stimulated by our environment, or memories of our environment. When you follow a train of thought the world is still there; when you fall asleep the world is still there. But it is out of this very world of visible things that you have raised yourself in your strengthened thinking. You have contacted the supra-terrestrial spatial environment, and now study your relationship to the stars as you formerly studied the relation between the natural objects around you. You have now brought yourself into relation with all this, but can suppress it again. In suppressing it, however, the external world, too, is no longer there—for you have just directed all your interest to this strengthened consciousness. The outer world is not there; and you come to what one can call ‘empty consciousness’. Ordinary consciousness only knows emptiness in sleep, and then in the form of unconsciousness.

What one now attains is just this: one remains fully awake, receiving no outer sense impressions, yet not sleeping—merely ‘waking’. Yet one does not remain merely awake. For now, on exposing one's empty consciousness to the indefinite on all sides, the spiritual world proper enters. One says: the spiritual world approaches me. Whereas previously one only looked out into the supra-terrestrial physical environment—which is really an etheric environment—and saw what is spatial, something new, the actual spiritual world, now approaches through this cosmic space from all sides as from indefinite distances. At first the spiritual approaches you from the outermost part of the cosmos when you traverse the path I have described.

A third thing is now added to the former metamorphosis of consciousness. One now says: I bear with me my physical body (inner circle), my etheric body (blue) which I apprehended in my strengthened thinking, and something more that comes from the undefined—from beyond space. I ask you to notice that I am talking of the world of appearance; we shall see in the course of the next few days how far one is justified in speaking of the etheric as coming from the spatial world, and of what lies beyond us (red) coming from the Undefined. We are no longer conscious of this third component as coming from the spatial world. It streams to us through the cosmic ether and permeates us as a ‘third man’. We have now a right to speak, from our own experience, of a first or physical man, a second or etheric man, and a third or ‘astral man’. (You realise, of course, that you must not be put off by words.) We bear within us an astral or third man, who comes from the spiritual, not merely from the etheric. We can speak of the astral body or astral man.

Now we can go further. I will only indicate this in conclusion so that I can elaborate it tomorrow. We now say to ourselves: I breathe in, use my breath for my inner organisation and breathe out. But is it really true that what people think of as a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen enters and leaves us in breathing?

Well, according to the views of present day civilisation, what enters and leaves is composed of oxygen and nitrogen and some other things. But one who attains ‘empty consciousness’ and then experiences this onrush—as I might call it—of the spiritual through the ether, experiences in the breath he draws something not formed out of the ether alone, but out of the spiritual beyond it. He gradually learns to know the spiritual that plays into man in respiration. He learns to say to himself: You have a physical body; this works into what is solid—that is its medium. You have your etheric body; this works into what is fluid. But, in being a man—not merely a solid man or fluid man, but a man who bears his ‘air man’ within him—your third or astral man can work into what is airy or gaseous. It is through this material substance on the earth that your astral man operates.

Man's fluid organisation with its regular but ever changing life will never be grasped by ordinary thinking. It can only be grasped by strengthened thinking. With ordinary thinking we can only apprehend the definite contours of the physical man. And, since our anatomy and physiology merely take account of the body, they only describe ten per cent of man. But the ‘fluid man’ is in constant movement and never presents a fixed contour. At one moment it is like this, at another, like that—now long, now short. What is in constant movement cannot be grasped with the closed concepts suitable for calculations; you require concepts mobile in themselves—‘pictures’. The etheric man within the fluid man is apprehended in pictures.

The third or astral man who works in the ‘airy’ man, is apprehended not merely in pictures but in yet another way. If you advance further and further in meditation—I am here describing the Western process—you notice, after reaching a certain stage in your exercises, that your breath has become something palpably musical. You experience it as inner music; you feel as if inner music were weaving and surging through you. The third man—who is physically the airy man, spiritually the astral man—is experienced as an inner musical element. In this way you take hold of your breathing.

The oriental meditator did this directly by concentrating on his breathing, making it irregular in order to experience how it lives and weaves in man. He strove to take hold of this third man directly.

Thus we discover the nature of the third man, and are now at the stage when we can say: By deepening and strengthening our insight we learn, at first, to distinguish in man:

the physical body which lives in solid forms on the earth and is also connected with the terrestrial kingdoms,

the fluid man in whom an ever mobile, etheric element lives and which can only be apprehended in images (Bilder)—in moving, plastic images,

the astral man who has his physical copy or image (Abbild) in all that constitutes the stream of inspired air.

This stream enters and takes hold of our inner organisation, expands, works, is transformed and streams out again. That is a wonderful process of becoming. We cannot draw it; we might do so symbolically, at most, but not as it really is. You could no more draw this process than you could draw the tones of a violin. You might do this symbolically; nevertheless you must direct your musical sense to hearing inwardly—i.e. you must attend with your inner, musical ear and not merely listen to the external tones. In this inward way you must hear the weaving of your breath—must hear the human astral body. This is the third man. We apprehend him when we attain to ‘empty consciousness’ and allow this to be filled with ‘inspirations’ from without.

Now language is really cleverer than men, for it comes to us from primeval worlds. There is a deep reason why breathing was once called inspiration. In general, the words of our language say much more than we, in our abstract consciousness, feel them to contain.

These are the considerations that can lead us to the three members of man—the physical, the etheric and the astral bodies—which find expression in the solid, fluid and airy ‘men’ and have their physical counterparts in the forms of the solid man, in the changing shapes of the fluid man and in that which permeates man as an inner music, experienced through feeling. The nervous system is indeed the most beautiful representation of this inner music. It is built from out of the astral body—from out of this inner music; and for this reason it has, at a definite part, the wonderful configuration of the spinal cord with its attached nerve-strands. All this together is a wonderful, musical structure that is continually working upwards into man's head.

A primeval wisdom that was still alive in Ancient Greece, felt the presence of this wonderful instrument in man. For the air assimilated through breathing ascends through the whole spinal cord. The air we breathe in ‘enters’ the cerebro-spinal canal and pulsates upwards towards the brain. This music is actually per-formed, but it remains unconscious; only the upper rebound is in consciousness. This is the lyre of Apollo, the inner musical instrument that the instinctive, primeval wisdom still recognised in man. I have referred to these things before, but it is my present intention to give a resume of what has been developed within our society in the course of twenty-one years.

Tomorrow I shall go further and consider the fourth member of man, the ego organisation proper. I shall then show the connection between these various members of man and his life on earth and beyond it—i.e. his so-called eternal life.

A direct enrichment gained from symbolic seasonal festivals as full of meaning as the Easter festival is that they make our hearts and souls better fitted to penetrate more and more deeply into the riddle of man and his nature. So we will think once again of the Easter legend which gave us an inkling yesterday of its bearing on this riddle, the legend of Kashiapa, the great sage and enlightened pupil of Shakyamuni. With a vast range of vision and after stupendous endeavours, Kashiapa had absorbed all the wisdom of the East, and it was rightly said of him that of those who came after him no-one else was capable, even in the remotest degree, of preserving what he had drawn from Shakyamuni's deep fount of wisdom and—as the last possessor of this primal wisdom—had bestowed upon mankind.

The legend, you will remember, goes on to say that when Kashiapa was on the point of death and felt his entry into Nirvana approaching, he went into a cave in a mountain. There he died in full consciousness, and his body remained immune from decay, hidden from outer humanity and discoverable only by those who through Initiation were able to fathom such secrets. It rested uncorrupted in a cave, mysteriously concealed. Furthermore, it was predicted that a great proclaimer of the primeval wisdom in a new form, the Maitreya Buddha, will appear, and having reached the supreme height of his earthly existence, will go to the cave where rests the corpse of Kashiapa. With his right hand he will touch the corpse, and a miraculous fire coming down from the universe will transport the uncorrupted body of Kashiapa into the spiritual worlds.

The Oriental who understands this wisdom waits for the Maitreya Buddha to appear and perform his deed on the uncorrupted body of Kashiapa. Will these two events come about? Will the Maitreya Buddha appear? Will the uncorrupted remains of Kashiapa then be transported by the miraculous fire from heaven? With true Easter feelings we shall be able to glimpse the profound wisdom contained in this legend if we try to understand the nature of the miraculous fire into which the remains of Kashiapa are to be received.

In the previous lecture we saw how in our epoch the Godhead reveals Himself from two poles: from the macrocosmic fire of lightning and from the microcosmic fire of the blood. We saw that it was the Christ Who proclaimed Himself to Moses in the burning thorn-bush and in thunder and lightning on Sinai; that it was the Christ and no other Power than He Who declared to Moses: “I am the I AM.” Out of the lightning on Sinai He gave the Ten Commandments as a preparation for His coming. Later, He appeared in microcosmic form in Palestine.

In the fire in our blood lives the same God Who had announced Himself in the heavenly fire and Who then, in the Mystery of Palestine, incarnated in a human body in order that His power might permeate the blood where the human fire has its seat. And if we follow the consequences of this event and what it signifies for earth-existence, we shall be able to find the flaming fire into which the remains of Kashiapa will be received.

World-evolution consists in the gradual spiritualisation of all that is material. In the material fire of the burning thorn-bush, and on Sinai, an outer sign of the Divine Power was revealed to Moses; but through the Christ Event this fire was spiritualised. Now, since the Christ Power has penetrated the earth, by what can the flame of the spiritual fire be perceived? By what can it be seen? By eyes of the spirit that have been opened and awakened through the Christ Impulse itself. To the eyes of the spirit this material fire of the thorn-bush is spiritualised. And ever since the Christ Impulse awakened the eyes of the spirit, this fire has worked in a spiritual way upon our world.

When was this fire seen again? It was seen again when the eyes of Saul, illumined by clairvoyance on the road to Damascus, beheld and recognised in the radiance of heavenly fire the One Who had fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha. And so both Moses and Paul beheld the Christ: Moses beheld Him in the material fire in the burning thorn-bush and in the lightning on Sinai, but only inwardly could he be made aware that it was the Christ Who spoke with him. To the enlightened eyes of Paul, Christ revealed Himself from the spiritualised fire. Matter and Spirit are related in the evolution of worlds as the miraculous, material fire of the thorn-bush and of Sinai is related to the glory of the fire from the clouds that shone before Saul who had now become Paul.

Now what were the consequences of this event for the whole evolution of worlds? Let us look back over the great succession of benefactors and saviours of mankind—those great figures who were the outer expressions of the Avatars, the incarnations of the Divine-Spiritual Powers who from epoch to epoch descended from spiritual heights and took human form in order that mankind should be able to find the way back into the spiritual worlds. Such, for example, was Krishna, one of the Avatars of Vishnu. In earlier times man could only find this way by the descent of a Divine Being. But through the Mystery of Golgotha man was endowed with the faculty to draw from his own innermost being the forces that can raise and lead him upwards into the spiritual worlds. Christ descended far more deeply than the other Guiding Spirits, cosmic and human, for not only did He bring heavenly forces into an earthly body, but He spiritualised this earthly body to such a degree that now, out of these earthly forces, men could find the way to the spiritual worlds. The pre-Christian saviours redeemed mankind with Divine forces. Christ redeemed mankind with human forces. These human forces were then made manifest in all their original, pristine power.

What would have happened on the earth if Christ had not appeared? We will ask ourselves this solemn, crucial question. One world-saviour after another might have descended from spiritual worlds, until finally they would have found on the earth below only human beings so entrenched in matter, so immersed in substance, that the pure, divine-spiritual forces would no longer have been able to raise men again out of this corrupted, impure substance. It was with grief and profound sorrow that the Eastern sages looked into the future, concerning which they knew that the Maitreya Buddha will one day appear in order to renew the primal wisdom, but that no disciple will be capable of retaining this wisdom. “If the world continues along this course,” they said, “the Maitreya Buddha will preach to deaf ears; he will not be understood by men wholly engulfed in matter. Moreover, the materiality prevailing on the earth will cause the body of Kashiapa to wither away so that the Maitreya Buddha will not be able to bear his remains into the divine-spiritual heights.”

It was those with the deepest understanding of Eastern wisdom who looked with such sorrow into the future, wondering whether the earth would be capable of receiving the coming Maitreya Buddha with greater understanding and discernment.

It was necessary that a powerful heavenly force should stream into physical matter, and in physical matter should sacrifice itself. This could not be accomplished by a god merely within the mask of a human form; it had to be accomplished by a man in the real sense, a man with human forces, who bore the God within himself. The Mystery of Golgotha had to take place in order that the matter into which man has descended should be made fit, cleansed, purified and hallowed in such a way as to enable the primal wisdom again to be understood. Humanity to-day must be brought to realise what the Mystery of Golgotha actually effected in this respect. What then was the real significance of the Event of Golgotha for mankind? How deeply did it penetrate into man's whole nature and existence?

We will let our mind's eye sweep across twelve centuries—from six hundred years before the event of Golgotha to six hundred years after it—and think of certain experiences that arose in the souls of men during this period. Truly, nothing greater or more significant can come before the discerning human soul than that stupendous occurrence of the gradual enlightenment of the Buddha, as it is preserved in the legend. He comes from a kingly environment. He is not born in a manger among simple shepherds. The emphasis, however, is not to be placed on this, but on the fact that he leaves this kingly environment and then encounters what he had not hitherto encountered: life in its diverse forms and manifestations. He comes upon a child, weak and ailing. Suffering is the child's lot in the existence it has entered through birth. The Buddha feels: birth is suffering. And again with all his sensitivity of soul the Buddha sees one who is diseased. This can be the lot of man when thirst for existence bears him into the earthly world-illness is suffering. The Buddha meets a man decrepit with the infirmities of old age. What is it that life imposes on man so that gradually he loses control of his limbs? Old age is suffering. And then the Buddha sees a corpse. Death stands before him with all the disintegration and destruction of life that are its accompaniment. Death is suffering. And through further observation of life the Buddha is led to the realisation: To be separated from what we love is suffering; to be united with what we do not love is suffering; not to attain that for which we yearn is suffering.

The teaching of suffering rang with power and insistence through human hearts and human breasts. Men without number learned the great truth that freedom from suffering depends upon elimination of the thirst for existence, learned that they must strive to free themselves from earthly, physical existence, to pass beyond earthly incarnations, and that only the elimination of the thirst for existence can lead to redemption and release from suffering. Truly, a sublime goal of human evolution is presented to us here.

And now we will cast our mind's eye over twelve centuries, embracing the whole period from 600 B.C. to 600 A.D. One particular event stands out: in the middle of this period the Mystery of Golgotha took place. We will think of a single feature only from the times of the Buddha: the corpse, and what the Buddha experienced at the sight of it and then taught. Six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha the eyes of countless human souls turn to a Cross of wood on which hangs a corpse. But there issue from this corpse the impulses which permeate life with spirit, which make life victorious over death. This is the very antithesis of what the Buddha experienced at the sight of a corpse.

The Buddha had seen a corpse and had recognised from it the nothingness of life. Men who lived six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha looked up with fervent devotion to the corpse on the Cross. For them it was the token of life, and in their souls dawned the certainty that existence is not suffering, but leads across death into blessedness. Six hundred years after the Event of Golgotha the corpse of Christ Jesus on the Cross became the token of life, of the resurrection of life, the overcoming of death and of all suffering, just as six hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha the corpse was the sign that suffering must be the lot of man driven into the physical world by the thirst for existence. Never was there a greater reversal in the whole course of human evolution.

If, six hundred years before our era, entrance into the physical augured suffering for man, how does the great truth that life is suffering present itself to the soul after the Mystery of Golgotha? How does it present itself to men who look with understanding at the Cross on Golgotha? Is birth, as the Buddha declared, suffering? Those who look with understanding at the Cross on Golgotha, and feel united with it, say to themselves: “Birth, after all, leads men to an earth able from its own elements to provide a raiment for the Christ. Men will gladly tread this earth upon which Christ has walked. Union with Christ kindles in the soul the power to find its way up into the spiritual worlds, brings the realisation that birth is not suffering but the portal to the finding of the Redeemer, Who clothed Himself with the very same earthly substances which compose the bodily sheaths of a human being.”

Is illness suffering? No!—so said those who truly understood the Impulse of Golgotha—no, illness is not suffering. Even if men cannot yet understand what the spiritual life streaming in with Christ is in reality, in the future they will learn to understand it, and they will know that one who lets himself be permeated by the Christ Impulse, into whose innermost being the Christ Power draws, can overcome all illness through the strong healing forces he unfolds from within himself. For Christ is the great Healer of mankind. His Power embraces everything that out of the spiritual can unfold the healing force whereby illness can be overcome. Illness is not suffering. Illness is an opportunity to overcome an obstacle by man unfolding the Christ Power within himself.

Mankind must arrive at a similar understanding about the infirmities of age. The more the feebleness of our limbs: increases, the more we can grow in the spirit, the more we can gain the mastery through the Christ Power indwelling us. Age is not suffering, for with every day that passes we grow into the spiritual world. So too, death is not suffering for it has been conquered in the Resurrection. Death has been conquered through the Event of Golgotha.

Can separation from what we love still be suffering? No! Souls permeated with the Christ Power know that love can forge links from soul to soul transcending all material obstacles, links in the spiritual that cannot be severed; and there is nothing either in the life between birth and death or between death and rebirth to which we cannot spiritually find the way through the Christ Impulse. If we permeate ourselves with the Christ Impulse, permanent separation from what we love is inconceivable. The Christ leads us to union with what we love.

Equally, to be united with what we do not love cannot be suffering because the Christ Impulse received into our souls teaches us to love all things in their due measure. The Christ Impulse shows us the way and, when we find this way, “to be united with what we do not love” can no longer be suffering; for there is nothing that we do not encompass with love. So too, if Christ is with us, “not to attain that for which we yearn” can no longer be suffering, for human feelings and desires are so purified and sublimated through the Christ Impulse that men can yearn only for what is their due. They no longer suffer because of what they are compelled to renounce; for if they must renounce anything, it is for the sake of purification, and the Christ Power enables them to feel it as such. Therefore renunciation is no longer suffering.

What, in essence, does the Event of Golgotha signify? It signifies the gradual elimination of the facts associated by the great Buddha with suffering. There is nothing that affects more deeply cosmic evolution or cosmic existence than the Event of Golgotha. Therefore we can also understand that its influence works on, with positive and momentous consequences for mankind of the future. Christ is the greatest of all the Avatars who have come down to the earth and when such a Being as the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth descends into earthly existence, this marks the beginning of a mysterious and supremely significant process. On a small scale it is the same in the spiritual world as when we sow a grain of corn in the earth; it germinates and blade and ear spring from it, bearing innumerable grains which are replicas of the one grain of corn we laid into the soil. “Everything transient is but a semblance,” and in this multiplication of the grain of corn we can perceive an image, a semblance, of the spiritual world.

When the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished, something happened to the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Through the Power of the indwelling Christ they were multiplied and ever since that time in the spiritual world many, many replicas of the astral body and etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth have been present—with great spiritual consequences.

A human individuality descending from spiritual heights into physical existence is clothed with an etheric body and an astral body. But when something is present in spiritual worlds such as the replicas of the etheric body and astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, a very special occurrence takes place in men whose karma permits it. After the Mystery of Golgotha, when the karma of a particular individuality allowed it, a replica of the etheric body or of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into him. This was so in the case of Augustine, for example, in the early part of our era. When this individuality came down from spiritual heights and clothed himself in an etheric body, a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his own etheric body. This individuality bore his own astral body and ego, but into his etheric body was woven a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth.

And so the sheaths that had enveloped the Divine Man of Palestine were transmitted to other men, whose task it then was to carry forth the influence of this great impulse into the rest of humanity. It was because Augustine remained dependent upon his own ego and his own astral body that he was subject to all the doubt, all the vacillation and error which, since they emanated from these still imperfect members of his being, it was so difficult for him to overcome. All the experiences he endured were due to his mistaken judgment and the errors of his ego. But when he had wrestled through, when his etheric body began to operate, he came upon the forces woven into his etheric body from the replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. And then he became the one who was able to proclaim to the West some of the great Mystery-truths.

There were many whom we recognise as the great bearers of Christianity in the West, whose mission was to spread Christianity during the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, on to the tenth, in whom the great Ideas could light up as examples. These were persons into whose etheric bodies a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth had been woven. That was the reason why there could arise in them the great visions and prototypal Ideas which were then elaborated and given form by the great painters and sculptors.

How did the prototypes for these pictures that still delight us come into being? They came into being when through the inwoven replicas of the hallowed etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth there came to men of the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth centuries of our era great illuminations of the truths of Christianity which made them independent of historical tradition. In addition to the content of Christ's teaching there had been woven into these men a replica of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, and they needed no longer the historical tradition of the facts of Christianity; they knew through inner illumination that the Christ lives, because they bore within them part of the being of Jesus of Nazareth. They knew that Christ lives, just as Paul knew of Christ as living reality when He appeared to him in the spiritualised fire of heaven. Up till then, had Paul allowed himself to be converted by stories of the events in Palestine? No single one of the events of which he could have been told was able to make Saul into Paul; yet it was from Paul that the most powerful impulse for the outer spread of Christianity proceeded—from one who had remained unconvinced by narrations of events on the physical plane, but who became a believer through an occult event taking place in the spiritual world. It is a strange attitude to wish to have Christianity without the factor of spiritual illumination! For without Paul's spiritual illumination Christianity would never have spread through the world. The early spread of Christianity was due to a super-sensible happening. So again, in later times, Christianity was propagated in the same way through those who were able to experience the Christ in inner illumination. It was the Christ of history, too, because they bore within them what had remained from the historical Christ and His sheaths.

In the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries replicas of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth were woven into other human beings when their karma so permitted and they were sufficiently mature. Francis of Assisi, Elisabeth of Thüringen, for example, and others too, bore within them a replica of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Without this knowledge, the lives of Francis of Assisi and Elisabeth of Thüringen are unintelligible to us. Everything that seems so strange to-day in the life of Francis of Assisi is because the ‘I’ was the human ‘I’ of that individuality; but the humility, the devoutness and the fervour we so admire in him are due to the fact that a replica of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his own astral body. And it was so in the case of many other personalities living at that time. When we know this, they become examples for us. How can anyone who really studies the matter understand the life of Elisabeth of Thüringen if he does not know that a replica of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into her? And very many were called in this way by the onworking Christ Power to bear this mighty Impulse forward to posterity.

But there was something else, too, which was preserved for still later times, namely, innumerable replicas of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth. True, his original higher ‘I’ had departed from the three sheaths when the Christ drew into them; but a replica, exalted yet further as a result of the Christ-indwelling, remained present, and this replica of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth was multiplied many times. This replica of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth is present to this day in the spiritual world. Moreover it can be found, together with the glory of the Christ Power and Christ Impulse it bears within it, by men who are sufficiently mature.

Now the outer, physical expression for the ‘I’ is the blood. This is a great mystery; but there have always been men who knew of it and were aware that replicas of the ‘I’ of Jesus of Nazareth are present in the spiritual world. There have always been men whose task it was, through the centuries since the Event of Golgotha, to ensure in secret that humanity gradually matures, so that there may be human beings who are fit to receive the replicas of the ‘I’ of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, just as there were persons who received replicas of his etheric body and astral body. To this end it was necessary to discover the secret of how, in the quietude of a profound mystery, this ‘I’ might be preserved until the appropriate moment in the evolution of the earth and of humanity. With this aim a Brotherhood of Initiates who preserved the secret was founded: the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail. They were the guardians of this secret. This Fellowship has always existed. It is said that its originator took the chalice used by Christ Jesus at the Last Supper and in it caught the blood flowing from the wounds of the Redeemer on the Cross. He gathered the blood, the expression of the ‘I’ in this chalice—the Holy Grail. And the chalice with the blood of the Redeemer, with the secret of the replica of the ‘I’ of Christ-Jesus, was preserved in a holy place, in the Brotherhood of those who through their attainments and their Initiation are the Brothers of the Holy Grail.

The time has come to-day when these secrets may be made known, when through a spiritual life the hearts of men can become mature enough to understand this great Mystery. If souls allow spiritual science to kindle understanding of such secrets they become fit to recognise in that Holy Chalice the Mystery of the Christ-‘I,’ the eternal ‘I’ which every human ‘I’ can become. The secret is a reality—only men must allow themselves to be summoned through spiritual science to understand this, in order that as they contemplate the Holy Grail, the Christ-‘I’ may be received into their being. To this end they must understand and accept what has come to pass as fact, as reality.

But when men are better prepared to receive the Christ Ego, then it will pour in greater and greater fullness into their souls. They will then evolve to the level where stood Christ Jesus, their great Example. Then for the first time they will learn to understand the sense in which Christ Jesus is the Great Example for humanity. And having understood this, men will begin to realise in the innermost core of their being that the certainty of life's eternity springs from the corpse hanging on the wood of the Cross of Golgotha. Those who are inspired and permeated by the Christ-‘I’, the Christians of future time, will understand something else as well—something that hitherto has been known only to those who reached enlightenment. They will understand, not only the Christ Who has passed through death, but the triumphant Christ of the Apocalypse, resurrected in the spiritual fire, the Christ Whose coming has already been predicted. The Easter festival can always be for us a symbol of the Risen One, a link reaching over from Christ on the Cross to the Christ triumphant, risen and glorified, to the One Who lifts all men with Him to the right hand of the Father.

And so the Easter symbol points us to the vista of the whole future of the earth, to the future of the evolution of humanity, and is for us a guarantee that men who are Christ-inspired will be transformed from Saul-men into Paul-men and will behold with increasing clarity a spiritual fire. For it is indeed true that as the Christ was revealed in advance to Moses and to those who were with him, in the material fire of the thorn-bush and of the lightning on Sinai, so He will be revealed to us in a spiritualised fire of the future. He is with us always, until the end of the world, and He will appear in the spiritual fire to those who have allowed their eyes to be enlightened through the Event of Golgotha. Men will behold Him in the spiritual fire. They beheld Him, to begin with, in a different form; they will behold Him for the first time in His true form, in a spiritual fire.

But because the Christ penetrated so deeply into earth-existence—right into the physical bony structure—the power which built His sheaths out of the elements of the earth so purified and hallowed this physical substance that it can never become what in their sorrow the Eastern sages feared: that the Enlightened One of the future, the Maitreya Buddha, would not find on the earth men capable of understanding him because they had sunk so deeply into matter. Christ was led to Golgotha in order that He might lift matter again to spiritual heights, in order that the fire might not be extinguished in matter, but be spiritualised. The primal wisdom will again be intelligible to men when they themselves are spiritualised—the primal wisdom which, in the spiritual world, was the source of their being. And so the Maitreya Buddha will find understanding on the earth—which would not otherwise have been possible—when men have attained deeper insight. We understand far better what we learnt in our youth, when tests in life have matured us, and we can look back upon it all at a later time. Mankind will understand the primal wisdom through being able to look back upon it in the Christ-light streaming from the event of Golgotha.

And now—how can the uncorrupted remains of Kashiapa be rescued, and whither will they be transported? It was said: the Maitreya Buddha will appear, touch these remains with his right hand, and the corpse will be transported in fire. In the fire made manifest to Paul on the road to Damascus we have to see the miraculous, spiritualised fire in which the body of Kashiapa will be enshrined. This fire will rescue for future times all that was great and noble in the past. In the spiritualised fire in which the Christ appeared to Paul, the body of Kashiapa, untouched by corruption, will be saved through the Maitreya Buddha. Thus we shall see the greatness, the splendour and the wisdom of all the past stream into what mankind has become through the Event of Golgotha.

A resurrection of the Earth-Spirit itself, a redemption of humanity—this is what lies before us in the symbol of the Easter bells. To everyone who understood it, this symbol was an inspiration of how through the Easter Mystery man climbs to spiritual heights. It is not without meaning that Faust is called back by the Easter bells from the brink of death to a new life which leads him to the great moment when, blinded and facing death, he cries: “But in my inmost spirit all is light.” Now he can make his way up into the spiritual worlds where the ennobled elements of humanity are in safe keeping.

In the purified spirituality that has poured over the earth and into humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, everything that has existed in the past is rescued, purified, sustained: just as one day, when the Maitreya Buddha appears, the uncorrupted body of Kashiapa, the great sage of the East, will be purified in the miraculous fire, in the Christ-light which was revealed to Paul on the road to Damascus.

[ 1 ] Some questions may have arisen in many souls towards the end of yesterday's lecture about the so-called lowest realm of the hierarchies. And this is only natural, for according to modern ideas, much of what has been said must appear doubtful and inexplicable, but the following lectures will throw light on many points. One thing must be made clear to-day to enable you to gain the proper orientation of mind to deal appropriately with the subject. Someone might ask for instance: ‘Even if through thinking and concentrating over a stone, you really do raise a bewitched spirit out of it, after having set that spirit free, what remains in the stone? Is the being still in it, and what happens to the stone?’ Another may follow me and go through the same process, what comes of it? This question might arise in many minds. As I have said before; some of these questions will be answered in these lectures; but if the understanding of them has to depend only upon such qualifications for thinking as the Earth gives to man, these questions cannot really be grasped at all. For everything is veiled upon earth, everything is covered by Maya, and human thought sees things quite differently from what they are in reality, but it is not the fault of the facts, that these questions remain unanswered. The questions are put in the wrong way, but in time we shall find the standard by which we can put our questions correctly. Things change essentially for us when the whole matter does not remain so veiled in illusion. Upon the earth all things are, so to speak, jumbled together, and through this the thoughts of man are continually led astray. We get a clearer idea of things when we go back into more ancient times. [ 2 ] Just as man passes from one incarnation to another, one metamorphosis to another, so all the beings in the universe pass through reincarnations, from the smallest to the greatest, even such a being as our earth — a planetary being — passes through reincarnation. Our earth did not appear at first as earth; it passed through a different condition. This has always been much spoken of in anthroposophical circles. Just as man in this life is the reincarnation of a previous life, so the earth is also the reincarnation of another planet which was its forerunner. We call that former planet Moon, but we do not mean by it our present moon which is only a part, a residue of the ancient moon, we mean a former condition of the earth, which existed once upon a time and then passed through a spiritual state called Pralaya, in the same way as man passes through a spiritual condition after death. Just as man reincarnates, so this lunar planet is a reincarnation. That which we have characterised as the lunar planetary condition, was the reincarnation of a still earlier planetary condition, which we call Sun. This is not the sun of to-day, but quite a different being; it was the reincarnation of the first planet to which we look back when speaking of incarnations of our Earth, — the very ancient Saturn. Thus we have four successive incarnations; Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth.

[ 3 ] We have also often said that each planetary condition has a special task. What is the task of our earth? It is to make human existence possible for man as man. All the activities of the earth are such that through them man may become an I-being, an Ego being. This was not the case in the former conditions it has passed through. Man has only become human, in the present sense of the word, on earth. The former planetary conditions, which the earth has passed through had a similar task. Other beings became human on those other planets, and now stand at a higher stage than man. Perhaps you will remember in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact that an Egyptian Sage gave to Solon the Greek a remarkable hint regarding the truth of the Mysteries; he told him, that it was a truth of very great importance, that the gods were once men. This was one of those truths which the pupil of the Mysteries had to accept in ancient times, that the gods who to-day are above in the spiritual height, were not always gods, but that they had risen to those heights, and also that they were once men and had once passed through the human stage. A dangerous truth, because as a natural consequence the pupil of the Mysteries drew the inference that he too would become a god some day. It was also possible for man to say to himself: ‘A man can only become a god when he is ripe for it and if he imagines for one moment that he is a god before he is ready for it, he will not be a god, but a fool.’ And. so two roads are open to man; to live in patience, as Dionysius says, till the time of his deification, or else to imagine himself already a god before the time. The one road leads in truth to deification, the other one leads to folly, to madness. [ 4 ] Misunderstandings often arise about the sayings of the ancients, for at the present day one differentiates no longer between the various degrees of divine beings. The Egyptian Sage who spoke of the gods did not mean only one degree of the gods, but he meant the whole sequence of spiritual divine beings. Dionysius the Areopagite and the Western sages have always differentiated between those different degrees of divine spiritual beings. It is the same thing whether to speak of angels or of Dhyan-Chohans, for those who realise the unity of cosmic wisdom knew that these were merely different names for one and the same thing, but in this realm we must also know how to differentiate. The beings, who are the first to be invisible and who stand immediately above man, are called Angels in Christian esotericism, Angeloi, messengers of the divine spirit-world. Those who stand yet one degree higher, therefore two stages higher than man, are called Archangels, Archangeloi, also spirits of fire. Those who stand still higher than the Archangels, when they pass through their normal development, are called the Spirits of Personality, Archai, or Primeval Beginnings. Thus we have three degrees of beings who stand above man. These three degrees of spiritual beings have all passed through the human stage; once they were all men. The beings who are Angels to-day, if one considers it from the point of view of universal time, were human not so very long ago, for they were men upon the old Moon; and just as you, because of earthly conditions, inhabit the earth as men, so did the Angels inhabit the Moon during their human stage. The Archangels passed through their human stage on the Sun, and the Archai, or spirits of personality did the same on ancient Saturn. These beings have risen by degrees from their human stage, they are higher beings to-day, in higher grades of hierarchies than man. If we reckon the sequence of degrees in the kingdoms of the world in a spiritual sense we arrive at the following: On the Earth we have the visible mineral kingdom, the vegetable and animal kingdom, the human kingdom, and then we pass into the invisible, into the kingdom of Angels, the Archangels or Spirits of Fire, the Archai or Spirits of Personality. Whilst these beings in accordance with their own inner nature were progressing and developing, rising from man to divinity, or to messengers of the divine (the correct description of those beings), whilst they were thus rising in their evolution, the conditions of the planet, on which and for the sake of which they lived, gradually changed. If we look back at ancient Saturn on which the Archai or Spirits of Personality passed through their human stage, we find it very different from our earth.

[ 5 ] Yesterday, we spoke of the four elements which we distinguished on earth, as earth, water, air, fire. The three first elements did not exist as yet upon ancient Saturn. Of the four there was only fire, or warmth, on Saturn. The materialistic philosopher of to-day will say: ‘But warmth can only come about, only be perceived by means of external objects; there are warm bodies, warm water etc., but warmth cannot exist of itself.’ That is the materialistic philosopher's belief but it is not true. If you could have observed ancient Saturn with your present-day senses what would you have found?

Let us take it as an hypothesis that you might have flown through universal space to ancient Saturn. You would have seen nothing where the ancient Saturn used to be; one thing only you would have felt and that was warmth.

If you had flown through the body of ancient Saturn, you would have felt as if you had flown through a heated baking oven. You could not have drawn a breath of air, you could not have swum, for there was neither air nor water, you could not have stood, for there was no earth. Your hand could not have touched anything, for there was a mere ball of warmth. The whole of ancient Saturn consisted only of warmth. In its first metamorphosis our earth's existence began as a planet of warmth, and thus you can see how right ancient Herakleitos of Ephesus was when he said: ‘Everything has come from fire.’ Yes, indeed! As the earth is nothing but ancient Saturn transmuted, so everything on earth has been created out of fire. Herakleitos knew of this truth from the ancient Mysteries, and he hints at this when he says that the book in which he wrote of this was dedicated to the Goddess of Ephesus and that he placed it on the altar there, meaning that he was conscious of owing the knowledge of this truth to the Mysteries of Ephesus where the teaching of primeval Saturnian fire was proclaimed in all its purity. You can see now that those beings we call Archai, Primal-Beings or Spirits of Personality, passed through their human stage in quite different conditions from the man of to-day. Man can at present receive into the bodily constitution of his bone and blood system, solids, liquids and gases. The man of Saturn, the Spirit of Personality, had to build his body out of warmth.

[ 6 ] I told you yesterday that warmth has, so to speak, two sides to it. One side is what we can feel inwardly, as inner warmth; we feel that we are either cold or warm without having to touch our surroundings, as in the case when we contact the solid element; but we can also feel warmth outwardly, when we grasp a warm object. The peculiarity of the Saturn evolution is that it gradually passed from this inner warmth, which could be felt only inwardly, to the external warmth, to a warmth which, towards the end of its evolution, became more and more external, more realisable from outside. If you had undertaken your voyage through space during the first stage of the Saturn evolution, you would not have felt any warmth on your skin, but you would have felt yourself warm inside; you would have said, ‘I feel comfortably warm.’ Something resembling what you would call soul's warmth to-day, could have been felt by you if you had made this voyage during the very first stages of ancient Saturn. You can imagine the experience you would have had, if you consider the following: You know that there is a difference for you when you look at something red or at something blue. Red gives a warm feeling; and blue gives you a feeling of cold. Imagine that the feeling, which is liberated in the human soul by the impression of something red, did not exist as yet, but you might have felt something warm and comfortable. Towards the end of the Saturn evolution you would have felt not only inner warmth, but also as if warmth came towards you from outside. The inner warmth would have gradually changed to warmth which was outwardly realised. This is the way Saturn has developed; from an inner soul's warmth it changed to a warmth which was realised outwardly, to that which we call external warmth, or fire. One might say: ‘Just as a child grows up to manhood and has many different experiences so did the Spirits of Personality grow up on ancient Saturn; first they felt themselves inwardly warm, comfortably warm, then gradually they felt this warmth being exteriorised, made real, yes, we might even say incarnated.’ What happened then? If you want to imagine it you must represent it to yourselves thus: At first we have the inner warming process of the globe of Saturn. It is then first possible for the Spirits of Personality to incarnate. Whilst they are incarnating that which we call external warmth is produced. If you had undertaken your voyage during the later stages of Saturn you could have differentiated outer impressions of warmth and also of cold. And if you made a drawing of the self contained bodies of warmth you would find nothing but eggs of warmth clustering on the surface of Saturn, forming its outer crust. If you could have seen it from outside, it would have looked like a blackberry or raspberry. What were these eggs? They were the bodies of the Spirits of Personality, and it was precisely through their inner warmth that the Spirits of Personality built the external warmth of these Saturn eggs. It might be truly said of this condition: The Spirits brooded over the warmth, they actually brought forth the first fire bodies. If we may so express it: within that region of warmth, the external eggs of warmth coagulated from out their inner warmth. Out of universal space the first fire bodies were hatched. The Spirits of Personality, or Archai (they are also called Asuras) were incarnated in these fire bodies. Saturn only consisted of that element of fire.

[ 7 ] During the Saturn evolution it was possible for the Spirits of Personality to transmute external warmth into inner warmth. The process was not stiff or hard, but was one of inner movement. In fact, the Spirits of Personality were continually producing these eggs of warmth and letting them dissolve again. And now we shall be able to imagine the process more exactly. Let us suppose that you made that journey over and over again; you would have noticed that there were times when there was no outer warmth to be felt, only that inner feeling of comfort; then again times when those eggs of warmth appeared. You would have realised something like a breathing of the whole being of ancient Saturn, but it was a breathing of fire. You would have thought: ‘Sometimes I am within this ancient Saturn in such a way that I feel that all external warmth has turned inward, has withdrawn and I experience only that feeling of inner comfort.’ And you would have said: ‘Now Saturn has in-breathed all the warmth.’ And coming back another time and finding all those eggs of warmth you would have said: ‘Now Saturn has breathed out his inner warmth, all is external fire.’ [ 8 ] You must understand that the ancient Holy Rishis gave this idea to their pupils; they transported themselves in spirit back to the times of ancient Saturn, and made their pupils realise how a whole planet was able to produce something that resembled an expansion and contraction in breathing. They evoked in their pupils the conception that fire when it flows out forms countless bodies of warmth and when the fire is sucked in, it becomes the inner Self, an Ego, of the Spirits of Personality. Therefore, they compared the life of this planet to an in and out-breathing, but on ancient Saturn it was only a breathing of fire. Air as yet did not exist.

Now let us suppose that all those Spirits of Personality on ancient Saturn had remained at the stage of their normal evolution and had continually inhaled and exhaled warmth. They would have accomplished their regular Saturn evolution and the consequence would have been that in the course of time all would have been withdrawn again into inner warmth, and Saturn as an external planet of fire would have been received again into the spiritual realms of the World. This might have happened. We should then never have had the Sun, Moon, and Earth conditions, for then all that had been breathed forth would have returned to inner warmth, would have been received again into the spiritual world. I shall now make use of a trivial expression which will make this more comprehensible. It pleased certain of those Spirits of Personality better to draw in again only a part of that exhaled warmth; it pleased them to leave some of it behind, so that when inhaling, some of those Saturn eggs did not disappear completely, but remained. Thus two states or conditions developed gradually on Saturn: inner warmth, and along side of it outer warmth incarnated in the Saturn eggs. Not all of it was drawn in. The Spirits of Personality left some of that out-breathed warmth to take care of itself, as it were; they left it outside. Now why did they do that? They had to do it; if they had not they would never have become men on Saturn. [ 9 ] What does it mean to become men? It means to attain consciousness of self. You cannot do this unless you can differentiate yourself as ‘I’ from what is outside you. Only through this are you an ‘I,’ an ego: there, you say, is the flowering branch, here am I. I differentiate myself as ‘I’ from the objects around me. The Spirits of Personality would have allowed their ‘I’ merely to dream out eternally if they had not left something outside that could offer resistance to them. ‘There is another outside of me, I differentiate myself from the element of warmth which has been made objective.’ The Spirit of Personality, became Egos, attained consciousness of self, through having pushed a part of the Saturn essence outside into an existence of merely outer warmth. They said to themselves: I must allow something to stream out of me, and leave it outside, so that I am able to differentiate myself, so that my self-consciousness may be lit by that external element. Thus they created another kingdom near to them, created a mirrored image of their inner life in that outward life. Thus it came about that when the life of Saturn had run its course, the Spirits of Personality were not in a position to allow Saturn to disappear. This would have happened if they had inhaled all the fire; but they could not breathe in again that which they had exhaled out of themselves. The field which had offered them the possibility of gaining consciousness of self had to be left to itself. [ 10 ] No condition of Pralaya could have arisen for Saturn through the Spirits of Personality alone. Higher spirits had to come into action in order to dissolve Saturn so that a Pralaya, or state of transition, of disappearance and of sleep might take place. Higher spirits, the Thrones, of which we will only give the name at present, had to dissolve all this, so that, as the life of Saturn reached its end, the following process was carried out. The Spirits of Personality had attained self-consciousness, had breathed in again a part of the warmth, had realised the Self as the centre of their being, and left behind them a lower kingdom. Now entered the kingdom of the Thrones and dissolved that which had been left behind, and Saturn entered into a sort of planetary night. Then arose the planetary morning. Everything had to wake up again through laws which we shall learn later. If the whole of Saturn had disappeared through the inbreathing of the whole warmth, there could have been no awakening, for the whole of Saturn would have been taken up into the spiritual world. The Thrones could now for a season dissolve that which the Spirits of Personality had left behind, those eggs of warmth, but they could do so only for a time. These had to be given over as it were to a lower existence for their further development. Through this a planetary morning dawned; the second metamorphosis of Saturn — the Sun condition!

What was it that actually came to life in this new Sun-condition? The Spirits of Personality having now self-consciousness passed to it from ancient Saturn after the planetary condition of sleep; they were no longer required to pass through any similar condition to that which they had already passed through: they had breathed out certain eggs of warmth which had emerged again gradually, and differentiated themselves from the general mass; the consequence was that the Spirits of Personality were bound to that part of themselves which they had formerly left behind. If they had taken everything with them into the spiritual world they would not have been tied to the Sun, they would not have needed to come down again but they had to do so, because they had left behind them a part of their own essence, their own being. They had to concern themselves with it; it drew them downwards into a new planetary existence. [ 11 ] This was the Destiny of Saturn, world-Karma, cosmic Karma. Because the Spirits of Personality on ancient Saturn had not taken everything into themselves, they had prepared that Karma for themselves which obliged them to return. They found down below as an heirloom from ancient Saturn what they themselves had brought to pass. What happened when the Spirits of Personality now took up the Karma which they had created? That happened which I explained yesterday. The warmth divided itself, into light on one side, and into smoke on the other. In the reborn Saturn (the Sun) the eggs of warmth reappeared as gas air, or smoke, as we have called it on one side; and on the other side appeared light, because the warmth returned, so to speak, in a higher condition. Inwardly in the transformed Saturn there was smoke, gas, air, and on the other side light! If traveling through space you had now reached the place where this ancient Sun was, you would have perceived from afar that which had formed itself into light, because behind it was smoke. If not the light itself, you would yet have perceived a shining ball, just a you perceived a ball of warmth on Saturn. You would have encountered a shining ball and if you had come in touch with its surface, if you had penetrated that ball, you would have felt not only warmth but wind, air, gas, streaming from all sides.

Thus your ball of warmth has transformed itself into a shining orb; a sun has come into being. One is fully justified in calling it a sun; the orbs that are suns to-day are now passing through this same process, inwardly they are masses of streaming gas, and on the other side they cause that gas to turn into light; they shed abroad light through space. Thus, light was really first formed in the transmutations of our earth, light appeared then for the first time. In the warmth of ancient Saturn, the Spirits of Personality had first the possibility of becoming human; in the light which now streamed from the Sun those beings of the spiritual hierarchies, whom we call Archangels, or Archangeloi could become human. In fact, if you could have approached the Sun then, not only as a man of to-day but as a clairvoyant man, you would not only have perceived light streaming from it — not light only — but also the actions of the Archangels would have streamed towards you with the light. [ 12 ] But the Archangels had brought with them something in exchange as it were. The ancient Spirits of Personality had found on Saturn, pure warmth. The Archangels, who were first able to become human on the Sun, found there gas or smoke, also. What had they to do in order to secure a footing on the Sun, to establish a dwelling-place there? They formed their own souls, they wove their inner being, their soul-bodies out of warmth into light, and they joined to these soul-bodies the gas that was there, an external body. As you have to-day a body and a soul, so the Archangels as men had an inner life of warmth which rayed forth light, and an outer physical body which consisted of gas and air. As the man of to-day has a body consisting of earth, water, air and fire, so did those Archangels consist of air, and inwardly they consisted of light. The fire element they, of course, brought over with them: for this was the element which developed into smoke and light. The whole of their being consisted of light, warmth or fire and smoke or air. By means of the light they let their shining force stream out into universal space; by means of fire they lived their inner life, they experienced the comfort of warmth. Through the life they led in their gas bodies they lived in the Sun planet itself. They could now differentiate their own body of gas from the general substance of the Sun planet. They jostled against each other, and through this contact developed a kind of consciousness of self. This self-consciousness Archangels could develop further and further only because it pleased the Archangels better, if one may so express it, to dwell in their bodies of gas and smoke, or at any rate to leave them in the general Sun substance. For these Archangels during alternating conditions of the ancient Sun, had inhaled all the gas, all the smoke which was around them, they had taken it into themselves. We have now a process of real breathing. You would have felt those currents of gas on the ancient Sun as a process of breathing. You would have found there certain conditions, when there was an absolute stillness and you would have thought that the Archangels had now breathed in all the gas. Then the Archangels began to breathe it out again, inner currents began to flow and at the same time light came forth. The interchange of conditions on the Sun was as follows: the Archangels inhaled gas and stillness followed, darkness also — it was the Suns night ... They exhaled and the Sun was filled with streams of smoke, at the same time it sent forth its light outwards — it was the Sun's day. Thus there was a process of real breathing of the whole body of the Sun. Exhalation: — the Sun's day, illumination of the surrounding world. Inhalation: — the Sun's night, oncoming darkness in the world. [ 13 ] You have here the description also of the difference between the ancient Sun and the sun of to-day. Our present sun shines always, and darkness is produced only when some object is placed in front of its light. This was different with the ancient Sun. It had in itself the power to produce the interchanges of light and darkness, illumination and obscurity, for that was its process of exhalation and inhalation. Let us now vividly imagine how one would see those happenings externally. [ 14 ] Let us take the condition of exhalation. Light is then shed around, but at the same time the Sun is filled with smoke. These forms and currents of smoke are like regularly recurrent pictures, they are imprinted on the substance of the Sun with every exhalation. That which formerly was only egg-shaped, the eggs of warmth, changed into all sorts of regular images. Quite distinct smoke pictures with an inner life and inner regularity were produced. If I may use the expression: the eggs were hatched. That was really to what this solidifying process might be compared. Just as the chicken comes out of the eggs, so were those eggs of warmth split in two, and regular forms came out of them, figures of smoke which were the densest bodies of the Archangels. They inhabited the Sun in bodies of gas, smoke, and air. Thus they moved about as men on the Sun. We have now the spiritual idea of a fixed star, of a sun world, which is a sun through its own power, which can produce the interchange of day and night by its own power. Like an exhalation and inhalation it produces the interchange of light and darkness. For at that time the Sun was a sort of fixed star. Everything in our universal space that shines of itself sends out into that space together with light the life of spiritual messengers, the Archangels. [ 15 ] What, then, have the primal Archai, the Spirits of Personality, accomplished through their own evolution, what have they established? It is mainly through them that the Sun appeared. While otherwise only a Saturn existence would have appeared in evolution», while otherwise only the Archai, who had filled Saturn with warmth, would have existed, now, because the Archai had surrendered the external eggs of warmth, Saturn was transformed into Sun, on which the Archangels found it possible to pass through their human stage. They were the heralds who announced to the world: ‘The Primal Beginnings or the Spirits of Personality, were our forerunners. As messengers, we proclaim to the universe in rays of light, the former existence of Saturn, of warmth-filled Saturn. We are the messengers, the heralds of the Archai.’ Angel means Messenger, Archai means the Beginnings. The Archangels were nothing else than the heralds of the deeds of the Primal Beginnings or Archai of former times. Therefore, they are called Angels of the Beginnings, ‘Archai-Angels’ which, in English, has become Archangels. These Archangels were the men of the Sun.

Yesterday I tried to give you a picture of a form of Initiation which ought not to exist, according to our valuation of human nature. This Initiation, as we have seen it in Jesuitism, leads to the acquisition of certain occult faculties, but if we bring a cleansed and purified occult vision to bear upon these faculties, they cannot be considered good. It will now be my task to show that the Rosicrucian way is characterised by all that high regard for human nature which we recognise as equally our own. But we must first be clear on certain points.

From explanations given previously in various forms, we know that the Rosicrucian Initiation is essentially a development of the Christian Initiation, so that we can speak of it as a Christian-Rosicrucian Initiation. In earlier lecture-courses the purely Christian Initiation; with its seven degrees, and the Rosicrucian Initiation, also with seven degrees, have been compared. But now we must note that with regard to Initiation the principle of the progress of the human soul must be strictly maintained.

We know that the Rosicrucian Initiation had its proper beginning somewhere about the thirteenth century. At that time it was recognised by those individualities who have to guide the deeper destinies of human evolution as the right Initiation for the more advanced human souls. This shows that the Initiation of the Rose-Cross takes full account of the continuous progress of the human soul and must therefore pay particular attention to the fact that since the thirteenth century the human soul has developed further. Souls which are to be led to Initiation in our day can no longer adopt the standpoint of the thirteenth century. I want especially to point this out because in our time there is such a strong desire to label everything with some mark or other, with some catchword. From this bad habit, and not for any justified reason, our anthroposophical movement has been given a label which could lead gradually to something like a calamity.

It is true that within our movement the principle of Rosicrucianism can be found in all completeness, so that we can penetrate into the sources of Rosicrucianism. So it is that persons who by means of our anthroposophical training penetrate into these sources can properly call themselves Rosicrucians. But it must be emphasised just as strongly that outsiders have no right to designate as Rosicrucian the anthroposophical stream we represent, simply because our movement has been given—consciously or unconsciously—an entirely false label. We are no longer standing where the Rosicrucians stood in the thirteenth century and on through the following centuries, for we take into account the progress of the human soul. Hence the way indicated in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, as the way best adapted for gaining access to the Higher Worlds must not without further explanation be equated with what may be called the Rosicrucian way. Through our movement we can penetrate into true Rosicrucianism, but our movement extends over a far wider domain, for it embraces the whole of Theosophy; hence it should not be labeled Rosicrucian. Our movement must be described simply as the spiritual science of today, the anthroposophical spiritual science of the twentieth century. Outsiders, particularly, will fall—more or less unconsciously—into some kind of misunderstanding if they describe our movement simply as Rosicrucian. But an outstanding achievement of Rosicrucianism since the dawn of modern spiritual life in the thirteenth century has been to establish a rule which must also be ours: the rule that all modern Initiation in the deepest sense of the word must recognise and treasure the independence of the most holy element in man's inner life, his Will-centre, as indicated yesterday. The occult methods there described are designed to overcome and enslave the human will and to set it on a predetermined course; hence a true occultism will rigorously avoid them.

Before characterising Rosicrucianism and present-day Initiation, we must mention a decisively relevant point: the Rosicrucianism of the thirteenth, fourteenth and even of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has again had to be modified for our time. The Rosicrucianism of those earlier centuries could not reckon with a spiritual element which has since entered into human evolution. Without this element today we can no longer understand rightly the fundamentals of all those spiritual streams which arise from the ground of occultism, including therefore any theosophical stream. For reasons we shall see more exactly in the course of these lectures, the teaching of reincarnation and karma, of repeated earth-lives, was excluded for many centuries from the external, exoteric teachings of Christianity. In the thirteenth century the teaching of reincarnation and karma had not yet entered, in the highest sense, into the first stages of Rosicrucian initiation. One could go far, up to the fourth or fifth degree; one could go through what was called the Rosicrucian studium—the acquiring of Imagination, the reading of the occult script, the finding of the philosopher's stone—and one could experience something of what is called the mystical death. One could reach this stage and acquire exceptionally high occult knowledge, but without needing to achieve full clarity concerning the illuminating teachings of reincarnation and karma.

We must be clear that human thinking progresses and now embraces forms of thought which, if only we follow them out logically—and this can easily be done on the external, exoteric level—lead unconditionally to a recognition of repeated earth-lives and so to the idea of karma. The words spoken through the lips of Strader in my second Rosicrucian drama, The Soul's Probation, are absolutely true: namely that a logical thinker today, if he is not to break with everything that the thought-forms of the last century have brought in, must come finally to a recognition of karma and reincarnation.

This is something deeply rooted in present-day spiritual life. Just because this knowledge has been slowly prepared and has these deep roots, it emerges little by little, as though independently, in the West. It is indeed remarkable how the necessity of recognising repeated earth-lives has independently made itself felt—though certainly only by outstanding individual thinkers. We need only call attention to certain facts which are quite forgotten, intentionally or unintentionally, in our present-day literature. Take, for example, what comes out so wonderfully in Lessing's Education of the Human Race. We see how Lessing, that great mind of the eighteenth century who at the zenith of his life gathered up his thoughts and wrote the Education of the Human Race, came as though by inspiration to the thought of repeated earth-lives. So does the idea of repeated earth-lives find its way, as though by inner necessity, into modern life. It has to be taken into consideration, but certainly not in the way that ideas of this kind are considered in our history books or in cultured circles nowadays. For in such cases resort is had to the familiar formula that when a clever man grows old, excuses must be made for him. So it is said that although we may appreciate Lessing in his earlier works, we must allow that in later years, when he came to the idea of repeated earth-lives, he had become somewhat feeble.

In more recent times the idea occurs sporadically. Drossbach, a nineteenth-century psychologist, spoke of it in the only way then possible. Without occultism, simply by observing nature, he tried in his own way as a psychologist to establish the idea of repeated earth-lives. Again, in the middle of the last century, a small society offered a prize for the best essay on the immortality of the soul. This was a remarkable occurrence in German spiritual life, and is very little known. Moreover, the prize went to an essay by Wiedenmann which tried to prove the immortality of the soul in the sense of repeated earth-lives: certainly an imperfect attempt, but it could not be otherwise in the fifties of the last century, when the necessary thought-forms had not developed far enough. One could quote various other instances where the idea of repeated earth-lives springs up, as though in response to a postulate, a demand, of the nineteenth century. Hence in my little book, Reincarnation and Karma, and also in my book, Theosophy, the ideas of repeated earth-lives and of karma could be worked out in relation to the thought-forms of natural science, but with reference to human individuality in contrast to the animal species.

We must, however, be clear on one essential point: there is an immense difference between the way in which Western men have come to this idea simply through thinking, and the way in which it figures in Buddhism, for instance. It is most interesting to see how Lessing came to the idea of repeated earth-lives. The result can of course be compared with the idea of repeated earth-lives in Buddhism, and even given the same name; but the way taken by Lessing is very different and is not generally known. How did he come to this idea?

We can see this quite clearly if we go through the Education of the Human Race. There is no doubt that human evolution gives evidence of progress in the strictest sense. Lessing argued that this progress is an education of humanity by the Divine Powers. God gave into men's hands a first elementary book, the Old Testament. Thereby a certain stage of evolution was achieved. When the human race had gone further, it was given the second elementary book, the New Testament. And then Lessing sees in our time something that goes beyond the New Testament: an independent feeling in the human soul for the true, the good, and the beautiful. This marks for him a third stage in the education of the human race. The thought of the education of mankind by the Divine Powers is worked out in a lofty style.

Lessing then asks himself: What is the one and only way to explain this progress? He cannot explain it otherwise than by allowing every soul to participate in each epoch of human evolution, if human progress is to have any meaning at all. For it would have no meaning if one soul lived only in the epoch of Old Testament civilisation and another soul only in the New Testament epoch. It has meaning only if souls are taken through all the epochs of civilisation and share in all the stages of human education. In other words, if the soul lives through repeated earth-lives, the progressive education of the human race makes good sense. So the idea of repeated earth-lives springs up in Lessing's mind as something that belongs to human destiny.

In a deeper sense the following underlies his thinking. If a soul was incarnated at the time of the Old Testament, it took into itself whatever it could take; when it reappears in a later time it carries the fruits of its previous life into the next life, and the fruits of that life into the one following, and so on. Thus the successive stages of evolution are interlocked. And whatever a soul achieves is achieved not only for itself, but for all mankind. Humanity is a great organism, and for Lessing reincarnation is necessary in order that the whole human race can progress. Thus it is historical evolution, the concern of humanity as a whole, that he takes as his starting-point, and from there he is impelled to a recognition of reincarnation.

It is different if we trace out the same idea in Buddhism. There, a person is concerned merely with himself, with his own psyche. The individual says to himself: I am placed in the world of maya; desire brought me into it, and in the course of repeated incarnations I shall free myself as an individual soul from the necessity of living again on earth. This applies to the single individual; all the attention is centred on him. That is the great difference.

Whether a person looks at the process from within, as in Buddhism, or from without, as Lessing does, his gaze takes in the whole of human evolution. In both cases the same idea emerges, but in the West the path to it is quite different. While the Buddhist limits himself to concern for the individual, the man of the West is concerned with the whole of humanity. He feels himself bound up with all men as a single organism.

What is it that has taught Western man the necessity of realising, above all, that his concern is with all mankind? The reason is that into the sphere of the heart, into his world of feeling, he has received the words of Christ Jesus concerning human brotherhood: that it is beyond all nationality, beyond all racial characteristics, and that humanity is a great organism.

Hence it is interesting to see how Drossbach, although his thinking is still imperfect, because the scientific ideas of the first half of the nineteenth century had not yet produced the corresponding thought-forms, does not take the Buddhistic path, but a universal cosmic one. Drossbach starts from the thoughts of natural science and observes the soul in its cosmic aspect. He cannot think otherwise of the soul than as a seed which goes through an external form and reappears in other external forms, and so is reincarnated. With him, this idea turns into fantasy, for he thinks that the world itself must be transformed, whereas Lessing thought correctly of short periods of time. Wiedenmann, too, in his prize essay, brings the immortality of the soul into logical connection with the question of reincarnation.

So we see that these ideas appear quite sporadically, and it is right that in spite of faulty modes of thinking they should spring up in minds such as these, and in others also. The great evolutionary change which the human soul has undergone from the eighteenth to the twentieth century is such that everyone today who begins the study of world progress must above all assimilate those thought-forms which lead quite naturally to the acceptance and making credible of the ideas of reincarnation and karma. Between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries human thought was not sufficiently advanced to come by itself to a recognition of reincarnation. One has always to start from the stage reached by the most highly developed thought of the period. Today the starting point must be that form of thinking which, on the basis of natural science, regards the idea of repeated earth-lives as logical—which means hypothetically true. So do the times advance.

Without describing the Rosicrucian path in detail today, we will bring out what is essential both to it and to the way of knowledge at the present time. The characteristic of both is that everyone who gives advice and guidance for Initiation will value in the deepest sense the independence and inviolability of the sphere of the human Will. Hence the essential point is that through a special kind of moral and spiritual culture the ordinary interweaving of the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego must be changed. And those directions which are given for the training of the moral feelings, as also those for concentration in thinking, for meditation—all this makes finally for the one goal of loosening the spiritual texture which binds together the physical and etheric bodies, so that the etheric body does not remain so firmly fitted into the physical body as it naturally is. All the exercises strive after this lifting out, this loosening, of the etheric body. Thereby another union between the astral body and the etheric body is brought about. It is because in ordinary life the etheric body and the physical body are so firmly united that the astral body cannot normally feel or experience what is going on in the etheric body. Because the etheric body has its seat within the physical body, our astral body, and our ego perceive only what the physical body brings them from the world and enables them to think of through the instrument of the brain. The etheric body is too deeply embedded in the physical body for it to be experienced in ordinary life as an independent entity, as an independent instrument of cognition, or as an instrument of feeling and willing.

The efforts in concentrated thinking, according to the instructions given nowadays—and given also by the Rosicrucians—the efforts in meditation, the cleansing of the moral feelings: all these finally produce on the etheric body the effect described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. As we use our eyes for seeing and our hands for grasping, so eventually we shall use the etheric body with its organs, but for looking into the spiritual, not the physical, world. The way in which we gather together and concentrate our inner life works for the independence of the etheric body.

It is necessary, however, that we should first permeate ourselves, at least tentatively, with the idea of karma. And we do this when we establish a certain moral equilibrium, a balance of the soul-forces of feeling. A person who cannot to a certain extent grasp the thought that ‘in the long run I myself am to blame for my impulses’, will not be able to make good progress. A certain equanimity and understanding with regard to karma, even if only a purely hypothetical understanding, are necessary as a starting-point. A person who never gets away from his ego, who is so dependent upon his narrowly limited ways of feeling and perception that when things go wrong he always blames others and never himself; a person who is always filled with the idea that the world, or a part of his environment, is against him; a man who never gets beyond the results of applying ordinary thinking to whatever can be learnt from exoteric Theosophy—such a person will find progress particularly difficult. Hence it is well that in order to develop equanimity and calmness of soul we should make ourselves familiar with the idea that when something does not succeed, particularly on the occult path, we must blame not others but ourselves. This does most to help our progress. What helps least is always wanting to lay the blame on the world outside, or always wanting to change our training methods.

Our attitude in such matters is more important than perhaps appears. It is better to test carefully, at all times, how little we have learnt, and to seek the fault in ourselves when progress is not made. It is a quite significant advance when we can make up our minds always to seek the fault in ourselves. Then we shall see that we are making progress not only in farther off things but also in matters of external life. Those who have some experience in this field will always be able to testify that by accepting the blame for their own non-success, they have found something that makes precisely their external life easy and bearable. We shall get on much more easily with our environment when we can truly grasp this fact. We shall rise above much grumbling and hypochondria, above complaining and lamenting, and pursue our way more calmly. For we should reflect that in every true modern Initiation he who gives advice is under the strictest obligation not to penetrate into the innermost sanctuary of the soul. With regard to this most inward part of the soul, therefore, we have from the start to undertake something for ourselves, and we should not complain that we are perhaps not getting the right advice. The advice may be right and yet the results may not be satisfactory, if we fail to make the resolve I have indicated.

This equanimity, this calmness, once we have made our choice—and the choice should come only from a serious resolve—is a good ground for meditation concerned with thoughts and feelings. In everything founded on Rosicrucianism an important point is that in meditation and concentration we are always directed not to dogma but to the universally human. The deviation of which we spoke yesterday takes its start from subject-matter that is first given to the aspirant for holding in his mind. But what if this subject-matter had first to be tested by occult cognition? What if it were not in any way firmly established in advance? We must take our stand on Rosicrucian principles, one of which is that we are not in a position to decide about anything which is supported only by external documents, for example, the accounts of what took place as the Event of Golgotha. We must come to know these things first by the occult path; we may not assume them beforehand. Hence we should start from the universally human, from that which can be justified by every soul.

A glance into the great world, marveling at the revelation of light in the sun, feeling that what our eyes see of light is only the external veil of the light, its external revelation, or, as is said in Christian esotericism, the glory of light, and then yielding oneself up to the thought that behind the external sensible light something quite different is hidden—all this is fundamentally human. To think of, to gaze on, the light spread out through infinite space, and then clearly to feel that in this infinitely extended element of the light something spiritual must live, something which weaves this web of light in space; to concentrate upon these thoughts, to live in them—here we have something universally human, presented not through dogma but through universal feeling. Or again, to perceive the warmth of nature, to feel how through the universe, along with the warmth, something moves in which there is spirit. Then, out of certain relationships in our own organism with the feeling of love, to concentrate on the thought of how warmth can exist spiritually, how it lives pulsing through the world. Then, to sink oneself into what we can learn from intuitions given to us by modern occult teaching. Then to take counsel with those who know something in this realm as to concentrating in the right way upon world thoughts, cosmic thoughts. And further, the ennobling, the cleansing, of moral perceptions, whereby we come to understand that what we feel to be moral is reality. So we rise above the prejudice that these moral feelings are something transitory; we realise that they live on, are stamped into us as moral realities. We learn to feel the responsibility of being placed in the world as conscious beings, together with our moral feelings. All esoteric life is fundamentally directed towards universally human experiences of this kind.

I will now describe how far we can go through exercises which take their start in this way from human nature, if only we devote ourselves to a clear-sighted examination of our own human nature. From this beginning we come to a loosening of the connection between the physical body and the etheric body, and to a new kind of knowledge. We give birth as it were, to a second man within ourselves, so that we are no longer so firmly connected with the physical body as before. And in the finest moments of life we feel the etheric and astral bodies as though enclosed in an external sheath, and thereby know ourselves to be free from the instrument of the physical body. That is what we attain. We shall then be led to see our physical body in its true being, and to recognise how it affects us when we are within it. We become aware of the whole working of the physical body upon us only when we have in a certain sense come out of it, like the snake which after casting its skin can look upon the skin from outside, though feeling it as a part of itself. Through the first stages of Initiation we learn in like manner to feel ourselves free from the physical body, and learn to recognise it. At this moment quite special feelings will steal over us, which may be described as follows. (There are so many different experiences along the path of Initiation that it has not yet been possible to describe them all. In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you will find much on the subject, but there is a great deal more.)

The first experience, open to nearly everyone who turns from ordinary life to pursue the path of knowledge, leads us to say, in accordance with our feeling: ‘This physical body as it is, as it appears to me, has not been formed by myself. Most certainly I have not made this physical body, through which I have been brought to be what I am in the world. Without this body, the Ego which I now regard as my great ideal, would not have arisen within me. I have become what I am only through having kept my physical body riveted upon me.’

At first all this gives rise to something like resentment, bitterness, against the Cosmic Powers. It is easy to say, ‘I will not cherish this resentment.’ But when there arises before us in melancholy majesty a picture of what we have become through being bound up with the physical body, the effect is overwhelming. We feel something like bitter hatred for the Cosmic Powers on this account. But now our occult training must be so far advanced that we overcome this hatred and on a higher level can say with our whole being, with our individuality which has already come down into repeated incarnations, that we ourselves are responsible for what our physical body has become. When we have mastered the bitterness, we experience the perception, already often described: ‘Now I know I am that very thing which appears there as the changed form of my physical being. That I am myself. But because my physical being was crushing me to death, I knew nothing of it.’

We stand here before the significant meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. But if we come so far, if through the strenuousness of our exercises we experience what has just been said, then from out of what is common to human nature we recognise that we are as we are in our present form as the result of preceding incarnations. But we also recognise that we can experience the deepest pain and must work our way out beyond this pain to the overcoming of our present existence. And for every man who is sufficiently far advanced and has experienced these feelings in all their intensity, who has looked upon the Guardian of the Threshold, there arises of necessity an Imaginative picture, a picture not painted by constraint, as in Jesuitism, from passages in the Bible but a picture that each man experiences through having felt, in a general human sense, what he is. Through these experiences he will quite naturally come to know the picture of the Divine Ideal-Man, who like us lived in a physical body, and who like us in this physical body felt all that a physical body can bring about. The Temptation, and the picture of it as presented to us in the synoptic Gospels, the leading of Christ Jesus to the mountain, the promise of all external realities, the desire to cling to these outer realities, the temptation to remain attached to matter: in short, the temptation to remain with the Guardian of the Threshold and not to pass beyond him appears to us in the great Imaginative picture of Christ Jesus standing on the mountain, with the Tempter beside Him—a picture that would have arisen before us even if we had never heard of the Gospels. And then we know that he who wrote the story of the Temptation depicted his own experience of seeing, in the spirit, Christ Jesus and the Tempter. Then we know it is true in the Spirit that the writer of the Gospel has described something that we ourselves can experience even if we knew nothing of the Gospels. Thus we shall be led to a picture which is similar to the picture in the Gospels. We gain for ourselves what stands in the Gospels. Nothing is forced upon us; everything is drawn forth from the depths of our own nature. We proceed from the universally human and bring forth the Gospels afresh through our occult life. We feel ourselves at one with the writers of the Gospels.

Then there arises within us another feeling, a next step along the occult path. We feel how the Tempter has grown into a powerful Being who is behind all the phenomena of the world. Yes, we learn indeed to know the Tempter, but by degrees we learn in a certain way to value him. We learn to say: ‘The world spread out before us, whether it be Maya or something else, has its right to exist; it has revealed something to me.’ Then comes a second feeling, a quite definite one for every person who fulfils the conditions of a Rosicrucian initiation. The feeling arises: ‘We belong to the Spirit Who lives in all things, and with Whom we have to reckon. We cannot in the least comprehend the Spirit if we do not surrender ourselves to it.’ Then fear comes over us. We experience fear such as every real knower must undergo; a feeling for the greatness of the Cosmic Spirit who pervades the world. We are in the presence of this greatness and we feel our own powerlessness. We feel also what we might have become in the course of the earth's history, or in that of the Cosmos. We feel our own impotent existence so far removed from Divine existence. We feel fear in face of the ideal we must come to resemble, and of the magnitude of the effort which should lead us to that ideal. As through esotericism we must feel the whole magnitude of the effort, so must we feel this fear as a struggle we take upon ourselves, a wrestling with the Spirit of the Cosmos. When we feel our own littleness, and the necessary struggle laid upon us to attain our ideal, to become one with that which works and weaves in the world—when we experience this with fear, then only may we lay fear aside and betake ourselves to the path, to the paths which lead us to our ideal. And if we feel this completely and rightly, there comes before us yet another significant Imagination. If we had never read a Gospel, if mankind had never had such an external book, a spiritual picture would rise before our clairvoyant sight.

We are led out into the solitude which stands clearly before the inner eye, and we are brought before the picture of the Ideal Man who in a human body experienced all the immeasurable fears and anguish that we ourselves can taste in this moment. The picture of Christ in Gethsemane stands before us, as He experienced fear to an overwhelmingly intensified degree, the fear that we ourselves must feel on the path of Initiation, the fear that wrung from His brow the Bloody Sweat. That is the picture we encounter at a certain point on our occult path, independently of all external documents. So we have, standing before us like two great pillars on the occult path, the story of the Temptation experienced spiritually, and the scene on the Mount of Olives experienced spiritually. And then we understand the words: Watch and pray, and live in prayer, so that you will never be tempted to remain standing at any one point, but will continually stride forward.

This means that first of all we experience the Gospel; we experience everything so that we could write it down just as the writers of the Gospels have described it. For we do not need to take these two pictures from the Gospel; we can take them out of our own inner consciousness; we can bring them forth out of the Holy of Holies of the soul. No teacher is needed to come and say: ‘You must place before yourself in imagination the Temptation, and the scene on the Mount of Olives.’ We need only bring before ourselves that which can be developed in our consciousness through meditation, purification of our common human feelings, and so on. Then, without constraint from anyone, we call forth the Imaginations which are contained in the Gospels.

In the Jesuit spiritual movement the pupil had the Gospels given to him first, and afterwards he experienced what the Gospels describe. The way we have indicated today shows that when a man has taken the path of the spiritual life, he experiences occultly that which is connected with his own life, and thereby can experience through himself the pictures, the Imaginations, of the Gospels.

Through the meditative exercises that are to lead to imaginative cognition man's whole inner soul life becomes transformed. Likewise, the relations of the human soul to the surrounding world change. Meditation, as meant in the previous lectures here, consists in concentrating all the soul's powers upon a definite, easily grasped complex of ideas. It is important to keep this clearly in mind: it should be an easily envisioned complex of ideas to which the soul-spiritual part of man can give its immediate, undivided attention, in such a way that while the soul rests on this complex of ideas nothing flows into it of soul-impressions that well up from the subconscious or unconscious, or from our memories.

To bring about imaginative knowledge in the right way, it is necessary to confront the whole idea-complex, on which all one's powers of soul in meditating are centered, and view it as one would a mathematical problem, in order that neither emotion-filled thoughts nor impulses of the will play into the meditation. When we concentrate on a mathematical problem we know at every moment that our soul activity remains concentrated on what our mind is focused. We know that nothing emotional, no feelings, no reminiscences of past experiences may be allowed to enter the process of bringing about a solution of the problem. The same soul condition is also necessary for rightly carrying out a meditation.

It is best then if we concentrate on an idea-complex that is completely new, something we are certain we have never thought about before. For if we were simply to choose an idea from our store of memories, we could never be sure what would be playing into the meditation from unconscious impulses or feelings. Therefore, it is especially good to be given advice by an experienced spiritual scientist, because he can see to it that the conceptual content will not have been previously thought of by the person meditating. In this way, the subject of meditation enters his consciousness for the first time, nothing out of memory or instinct plays into it; only the purely soul-spiritual is engaged in meditating.

When such a meditation, which requires only a short time each day, is repeated over and over again, a state of soul is finally brought about that lets man have the definite feeling, “Now I live in an inner activity that is free of the physical body; a different activity from that of thinking, feeling, or exercising my will within the physical body.” What one encounters especially is the definite feeling that one lives in a world separated from one's physical corporeality. Man gradually finds his way into the etheric world. He feels this because the nature of his own physical organism takes on a relative objectivity. Man looks upon it as if from outside, just as he looks ordinarily from within his physical body out upon external objects. But what appears in inward experience if the meditation is successful, is that the thoughts become, as it were, more compact. They not only bear their usual character of abstraction, but in them one experiences something akin to the forces of growth that turned one from a small child to a grown man, or the forces daily active in us when metabolism nourishes our body.

Thinking certainly takes on the character of reality. Just for this reason—that man now feels himself in his thinking the same way he felt himself previously in his processes of growth, or his life processes—this imaginative thinking must be acquired in the manner just described. For if unconscious, or perhaps physical elements had played into meditation, those forces, those realities now experienced in supersensible thinking would also reflect back into man's physical and etheric organisms. There, they would unite with the forces of growth and nutrition; and by persisting with such super-sensible thinking man would alter his physical and etheric organisms. But this cannot in any circumstances be allowed to happen! All activity engaged in for the purpose of achieving imaginative knowledge, all the forces used in this task, must be applied exclusively to man's relationship with his surrounding world, and in no way may they be allowed to interfere with his physical or etheric organism. Both of these must remain wholly unchanged, so that when man achieves the faculty of hovering, as it were, with his thinking in the etheric world, he can look back in this thinking upon his unaltered physical body. It has remained as it was; this etheric thinking has not interfered with it.

With this etheric thinking you feel quite outside your physical body. But you must always be able freely to alternate at will between remaining outside and being completely within your physical organism. A person who has correctly brought about imaginative perception through meditation must be able to be in this etheric thinking one moment—which is experienced inwardly like a growth and nutritional process and felt to be entirely real—and in the next moment, as this thinking disappears, to be able to return into the physical body and see with his eyes as usual, hear with his ears and touch as he did before. At his absolutely free discretion he must always be able to bring about this passing back and forth between being in the physical body and being outside it in the etheric realm. Then a true imaginative thinking is achieved. I shall demonstrate in the second part of the lecture how this imaginative thinking works.

For one who wants to become a spiritual scientist it is necessary that he carry out the most diverse exercises, systematically, for a long time. Through what I have just indicated in principle, one will experience etheric thinking to such a degree that one can test what the spiritual scientist asserts, even though this testing is also possible by the usual healthy human understanding if it is sufficiently impartial and free of prejudice.

If meditation is to bring results in the right way one must support it by certain other soul exercises. Above all, soul qualities such as strength of character, inner truthfulness, a certain equanimity of soul, and especially complete presence of mind must be increasingly developed. It must always be repeated: a presence of mind that permits us to carry out, with the same attitude and disposition of soul as are required in mathematics, the meditative exercises and the exact clairvoyant research that is then undertaken. If such qualities as strength of character, integrity, presence of mind and a certain tranquility of soul have become habitual, then the meditative process, if continually repeated—perhaps for some requiring a few weeks, for others many years, depending on their predisposition—will come to the point of impressing its results into the whole physical and etheric organisms. Then man will really attain an inner activity in imaginative cognition comparable with that called forth in his physical organism when he uses it for perceiving the world through his senses and for thinking.

When man has achieved such imaginative cognition, he is in a position first to view the course of his own life from childhood up to the present moment as a unity, as a tableau in time. It reveals itself as a continuous, inwardly mobile, flow of development. This, however, is not the same as what usually comes into our mind as our store of personal memories. What man has gained through imaginative cognition that now confronts him, is as real as those forces of life and growth that bring forth from the small child's body the whole configuration of his soul, and then, in the further course of development, thinking, and so on. Man now surveys everything that evolves inwardly and represents the development of the etheric organism in the course of life. From what is thus surveyed—and it is much more concrete than the tableau of memories—the recollections that enter ordinary consciousness appear only as a kind of reflection, a surface ripple cast up from processes in the depths of our life. We now penetrate these etheric processes in the depths of our being, which otherwise do not enter consciousness at all, but have in fact formed and shaped out life from birth to the present moment.

These facts, these processes, confront imaginative consciousness. This gives man a true self-knowledge concerning, at the outset, his earthly life. How we can acquire knowledge of life beyond the earth will be shown during the following days. The first step in supersensible perception consists in confronting our own etheric life—the way it was spent from childhood to the present—in its supersensible character. Thereby we learn to understand ourselves rightly for the first time. What is experienced in this way is mirrored in our physical and etheric organisms in such a way that, in what is thus experienced as our own etheric processes, we have something that shows us how the entire etheric cosmos lives in the individual human being—how the outer etheric world, I might call it, reverberates and resounds in man's etheric organism.

Now, one can say that what is thus experienced can be put into verbal, conceptual forms, and out of the imaginative experience of the world in etheric man, a true philosophy can arise. But what is thus experienced remains completely unconscious for ordinary consciousness. Only the small child, in the time before it has learned to speak, lives wholly within this activity into which man enters through imaginative perception. For in learning to speak, as language develops in the soul's life, those forces that then are experienced as abstract thinking separate from the general forces of growth and other life processes. A child does not yet have this faculty of abstract thinking. The metamorphosis of a part of its forces of life and growth into the forces of thinking has not yet occurred. Therefore, in relation to the cosmos, a child is caught up in an activity into which an adult feels himself carried back through imaginative perception; only, a child experiences it unconsciously. The imaginative thinker experiences it fully consciously with clear presence of mind.

For the person who does not achieve imaginative thinking it is impossible to survey what it is that plays between man's etheric organism and the etheric realm in the cosmos. A child cannot perceive it even though it experiences it directly, because it does not yet possess abstract thinking. A person with ordinary consciousness cannot perceive it because he has not deepened his abstract thinking through meditation. When he does this he actually looks consciously upon that interplay of the human etheric organism with the etheric in the cosmos in which the infant still dwells undividedly.

So I should like to make this paradoxical statement: Only he is a true philosopher who, as a mature adult, can become again like a little child in the disposition of his soul, but who has now acquired the faculty of experiencing this soul condition of the small child in a more wakeful state than that of ordinary consciousness; who can lift again into his whole soul life what he was as a small child before he advanced to abstract thinking through speech. What one thus experiences, surveyed in full consciousness, turns one into a philosopher of the modern age. A present-day philosopher lives, fully conscious, in the condition of a little child before it has learned to speak. This is the paradox which, I think, makes it especially clear how the human soul within modern spiritual life will actually lift itself to a real, genuine philosophical disposition of soul.

For complete supersensible perception, it is necessary to widen the meditative exercises so that they can lead to inspiration. For this purpose, the soul must not only practice resting upon a complex of ideas as previously described, but also—in principle, this has also been mentioned already—it must become capable of obliterating the pictures that enter one's consciousness because of or following meditation. As one has brought about the pictures of imaginative perception quite freely and arbitrarily, one now has to be able to eliminate these pictures from consciousness, from the soul life. It requires greater energy to do this than to eliminate from consciousness ideas that have entered either from memory or from ordinary sense perception. One needs more strength to eliminate meditative ideas and imaginative pictures from consciousness than one needs for such ordinary ideas. But this increased power that the soul must bring to bear is necessary for advancing in supersensible perception.

Man attains this power by striving more and more to free his consciousness from these imaginative pictures when they have appeared, and to permit nothing else to enter in. Then there occurs what one may call mere wakefulness, without any content of soul. This condition then leads to inspiration. For when the soul has achieved empty consciousness in this way by means of the powerful force released by the act of freeing itself from the imaginative pictures, the spiritual contents of the cosmos stream into the emptied but awake soul. Then man gradually has before and around him a spiritual cosmos, as in ordinary consciousness he is surrounded by a physical sense cosmos.

What man now experiences in the spiritual cosmos represents itself to him in a manner that points back to what he has experienced in the sense world. There, he has experienced the sun, moon, planets, fixed stars, and the other facts of the physical sense world. Now that he is able to comprehend the spiritual cosmos by means of the emptied consciousness in which he experiences inspiration, the spiritual being of the sun, the moon, the planets and stars is revealed to him. Again, it is necessary that by his free will man should be able to relate what he experiences spiritually as the cosmos to what he experienced through his physical body as physical sense cosmos. He must be able to say, “I now experience something like a spiritual being that manifests itself. I must relate it as `sun-spirit' to what I experience in the physical sense world as physical sun. Similarly, I experience the manifestation of the soul-spirit being of the moon and must be able to relate it to what I experience in the physical sense world as moon; and so on.”

Again, man must be able to move freely to and fro while he is simultaneously in both the spiritual and the physical sense worlds. In his soul life he must be able to move freely between the spiritual revelation of the cosmos and what he is accustomed to experience as physical sense manifestations within earth life. When one thus relates the spiritual element of the sun to its physical counterpart, the spiritual moon element to the physical moon element, and so on, it is a soul process similar to having a new perception and being reminded of what one experienced earlier. Just as one combines what meets one in a new perception with what one has already experienced in order to throw light on both, so, in the truly free, inspired life, one brings together what one experiences as revelations of spiritual beings with what one has experienced in the physical sense world. It is as if the experiences in the spirit brought new inklings of what has been experienced earlier in the sense world through the physical body. One must have absolute presence of mind in order to experience this higher degree of supersensible knowledge, which is something overpowering, in the same quiet state of soul as when a new perception is linked with an old recollection.

Experiencing something through inspiration differs greatly from any imaginative experience a person could have had earlier. With imagination he lives in the etheric world. He feels himself as alive in the etheric world as otherwise he has felt in his physical body. But he feels the etheric world more as a sum of rhythmic processes, a vibrating in the world ether, which, however, he is certainly in a position to interpret in ideas and concepts. Man senses events of a universal nature in the etheric-imaginative experience; he feels supersensible, etheric phenomena. In inspiration he feels not only such supersensible, etheric facts merging into each other, metamorphosing and taking on all manner of possible forms, but now, through inspiration, he senses how in this etheric, billowing world, in this rhythmically undulating world, as if on waves of an etheric world-ocean, real beings are weaving and working. In this way one feels something reminiscent of the sun, moon, planets and the fixed stars, and also of things on the physical earth, for example, the minerals and plants, and all this is bathed in the cosmic ether.

This is the way we experience the astral cosmos. While here in the physical sense world we perceive only the exterior of everything, there we recognize it in its essential, spiritual existence. We also attain a view of the inner nature and form of the human organism, as well as the form of the separate organs, lungs, heart, liver and so on. For we see now that everything that gives form and life to the human organism originates not only in what surrounds us and is active in the physical cosmos, but also proceeds from the spiritual beings within this physical cosmos—as sun-being, moon-being, animal and plant being—permeating with soul and spirit the physical and etheric activity, and working so as to give man's organism life and form. We only comprehend the form and life of the physical organism when we have risen to inspiration.

What is experienced there remains for ordinary consciousness completely concealed. We should be able to perceive it with ordinary consciousness only if we saw not merely with our eyes, heard with our ears and tasted with the organs for tasting, but if the process of breathing in and out were a kind of process of perception—if one could experience the in- and out-streaming of the breath inwardly throughout the whole organism. Because this is so, a certain Oriental school, the school of Yoga, transformed breathing into a process of knowledge, metamorphosed it into a process of perception. By converting the breathing into a conscious, even if half dreamlike way to knowledge, so as to experience in it something like what we experience in seeing and hearing, the Yoga philosophy actually develops a cosmology, an insight into how spiritual beings in the cosmos work into man, and the way he experiences himself as a member of the spiritual cosmos. But such Yoga instructions are not in accord with the form of man's organization which Western humanity of the present time has acquired. Yoga exercises like these were only possible for the human organization in past ages, and what Yogis practice today is fundamentally already decadent.

For a particular 'middle epoch' of earth-humanity's evolution, as I should like to call it, it was appropriate, so to say, for man's organization to make the breathing process into a process of consciousness, of knowledge, through such yoga exercises, and in this way to develop a dreamlike but nevertheless valid cosmology. This knowledge, which led in that epoch to a correct cosmology for the education, in their sense “scientific,” humanity of that age, must be re-attained on a higher level by today's human being with his present composition of body and soul—not in the half dreamlike, half unconscious condition of that time, but with full consciousness as I have explained in speaking about inspiration. If Western man were to carry out yoga exercises he would not leave his physical and etheric organisms undisturbed under any circumstances; he would alter them precisely because he now has a quite different constitution. Elements out of his physical and etheric organisms would enter into his process of cognition, and something non-objective would interfere into the cosmology. Just as one must recapture, as a philosopher, the soul condition of one's earliest childhood, but now in full consciousness, so, in regard to cosmology, one must call up in one's soul life that soul state which was formerly valid for mankind, when it was possible to make use of the yoga system. But one must experience it with a total presence of mind, in full consciousness, in a wakefulness higher than the ordinary one.

So we can say that in this fully awakened state of mind the modern philosopher must again bring about in his soul the childlike soul condition belonging to the single human being, while the modern cosmologist must again bring about that condition of soul which belonged to humanity in a middle epoch of human evolution—and now again in full consciousness. The modern philosopher must bring an individual soul condition, that of the child, into full consciousness, while the modern cosmologist must restore in a fully conscious manner that soul condition present in the cosmologists of an earlier humanity. Consciously to become a child means to be a philosopher. The restoration of the condition of the soul, in which a Yogi lived during a middle period of earth evolution, and its transformation into full consciousness means becoming a cosmologist in the modern sense. In the last portion of this lecture, I would like to describe what it means to be a religious person.

Yesterday, I described how the third level of supersensible knowledge, true intuition, is reached through exercises of the will. You can read about them more specifically in the writings I have mentioned, and they will be further described in more detail in the coming days. Here man is brought into a soul disposition such as existed in a dreamlike soul condition in the humanity that lived as the first, primeval humanity on our earth in the beginning of human evolution. What existed, however, among this primordial humanity was a dreamlike, half unconscious, instinctive intuition.

This intuition must be brought again into full consciousness by a modern person with cognitive faculties for the religious life. The more instinctive intuition of primeval mankind still appears, to be sure, like an echo in some people of the present age, who express what they instinctively perceive in their environment as spiritual forces, with which they live as if in their outer world. These intuitions, which are echoes of the dreamlike intuitions of primeval humanity, can be made use of by such people when they write poetry or create works of art. Original scientific ideas may also stem from such intuitions, and they play a major role in mankind's life of fantasy.

What I am now describing as true, fully conscious intuition, and what is attained in the manner I described yesterday, are two entirely different things. Primitive man had a completely different soul disposition from that of modern man. He lived, as it were, in the whole outer world, in cloud and mist, in stars, sun and moon, in the plant as well as animal kingdoms. He lived in all of it with almost the same intensity as he felt himself living in his own body. It is extremely difficult to make this soul condition of primeval man clear for ordinary consciousness today. But everything that can be recognized by external history points back to such a soul disposition in primeval humanity. It was rooted in the fact that primeval man's bodily conditions were not submerged in the unconscious to the extent they are today. We modern men no longer live with our processes of nutrition and growth, with the processes in our physical organism. Spread out over this experience, which remains entirely in the subconscious, is the more or less conscious soul life of our feeling and willing and the fully conscious soul life of our thinking. But below our direct experiences of thinking, feeling and willing are to be found the actual processes of our human physical organism, and these remain wholly unconscious as far as our ordinary awareness is concerned.

This was fundamentally different in primitive man. As a child he did not experience definite conceptions such as we do. His conceptual life was often almost dreamlike, while his emotional life, although vehement, was even less distinct. The soul's life of feeling resembled bodily pain and pleasure much more than is the case with modern man. By contrast, primitive man felt how he grew in childhood. These processes of growth were felt by him as the life of body and soul. Even as an adult he sensed how food and drink course through the digestive system; how the blood circulates and bears the nutritive juices through the organism. Someone endowed with an organization like that whose development I described yesterday, can still gain an idea today, even though on a lower level, of this bodily experience of primitive man, when he observes how cows, after grazing, lie down, digest and are absorbed in the specific activity of digesting. It is an experience of both body and soul in these creatures that appears simply like the instreaming and inward lighting-up of cosmic processes. The animals experience an inner sense of well-being in digesting, in feeding, in the coursing of nutritive substances through the blood's circulation. You need not be a clairvoyant to be able to tell by the whole external condition and behavior of these animals how they follow their digestion with their animal consciousness.

This is how primitive man, when he entered the development on earth, followed his physical processes that were directly united and formed a unity with his soul processes. Because he could experience his own physical inner being in this way, primeval man could also experience the physical and soul elements of the outer world nearly as intensely as, if I may put it this way, he experienced himself in his lungs, his heart, the processes in his stomach, liver, and so on. In the same way, he felt himself in the flashes of lightning, the rolling thunder, in the ever-changing clouds and in the waning and waxing moon. He lived with the seasons, the phases of the moon, in the same way that he experienced the processes of his digestion. His environment was almost as much an inner world to him as his own inner being. What was experienced inwardly was to him the same as what he experienced in a flowing stream, and so on. The surging waves of the river were to him an inner process in which he participated, in which he immersed himself as he did in his own blood circulation.

Primitive man lived in the outer world in such a way that it appeared to him like his own inner being—as, indeed it actually is. Today this is called animism. But the use of this word gives rise to a complete misunderstanding of the essential nature of his experience, for it supposes that he projected his inner experiences into the outer world. What he actually experienced in the external world was to him an elementary fact of his consciousness, as much a matter of fact as the meaning we ourselves attribute to the phenomena of color and tone. We ought not to assume that primitive man dreamily projected fantasies into the outer world, and that these have been handed down to us as the content of his consciousness. He actually observed these things and to him they were as self-evident as the things we observe today. Sense observation is only a transformed product of primitive man's original way of observing. He actually perceived in the outer world what those beings were accomplishing in the etheric and astral cosmos, who, in creating, maintain the activity of the cosmos. This he perceived, even as though in dreams, in quite a dull way. But he did perceive it, and this perceiving was at the same time the content of his religious consciousness. Primeval man possessed a certain soul disposition in regard to the surrounding world, but this disposition intensified so much that, in the cosmos surrounding him, he beheld simultaneously the spiritual beings with whom he himself as a human being felt related. In his cognition man acquired the relationship to the spiritual beings that came down to us in derivative forms in the content of our religions. For a man of that early time his religious consciousness was only the higher stage of his primitive cognition.

If we wish to establish a new religious consciousness based on true knowledge, we could not do better than return to the soul disposition of primitive mankind, with the difference that it must now be neither dreamlike nor half-conscious. Our soul must be more awake than in ordinary consciousness, as awakened as it must be for the purpose of attaining genuine intuition, as I have already described. To reach genuine intuition we must acquire the ability to emerge consciously with our ego out of our body and immerse our own being within the other spiritual beings of the cosmos, living with them as we live in our physical organism during our life on earth in a physical body. In earth life we are submerged in our physical organism; in true intuitive knowledge we immerse ourselves with our ego in the spiritual beings of the cosmos. We live with them, and thereby bring about a link between our ego and the world to which it truly belongs. For this ego is a spirit being like those others to whom I have just alluded; and through a religious consciousness we acquire a direct relationship to those spirits, among whom we ourselves are counted. Primitive man was endowed only with a dull, instinctive religious consciousness. We must through our own activity bring back that ancient soul disposition and experience it now in full consciousness. Then we shall attain a religious perception, a religion firmly based on knowledge and suitable for modern man.

As we have to recover the soul condition of childhood and immerse ourselves in it in full consciousness if we want to become modern philosophers; as we must recover in our own age the soul condition of humanity of an intermediate epoch—men who were able to make the breathing process into a perceptual process of knowledge in dreamlike fashion—and permeate it with full consciousness if we are able to become cosmologists in the modern sense; so we must also revive in ourselves the soul condition of primeval man as it was in its relation to the outer world, and permeate it with our full consciousness in order to attain a religion based on knowledge in the modern sense of the word.

To experience once again the soul disposition of childhood in full consciousness, is the prerequisite for genuine, modern philosophy. To relive, in full consciousness, in our soul life an earlier intermediate epoch of humanity's evolution, in which the process of breathing could become a process of perception, is the prerequisite for modern cosmology. To revive the soul condition of primeval man—the earliest on this earth, who still lived in direct connection with the gods—to activate it in the present soul mood of modern man and to pervade it with full consciousness, is for modern man the prerequisite for a religion based on knowledge.

We have seen that we must search for a harmony between the processes taking place in and with Man, and the processes that take place in the outer Universe. Let us once again recall briefly the point whither our study of yesterday led us. We said that Man had to be regarded, to begin with, from four points of view. Firstly, from the standpoint of the forces which are responsible for his form; secondly from that which comprises all the forces expressing themselves in the circulation of the blood, lymph, etc., in short the forces of internal motion. (You already know that the formative forces are to a large extent in a state of rest in the fully grown man, whereas the inner motion is in a state of continual flow.) Thirdly, we have the organic forces, and fourthly, the actual metabolism.

To begin with we must consider all that has connection with the formative forces. These are the forces which work outward from within until they reach the outermost periphery, the limits of man's circumference. If we formed a silhouette of man, seen as it were from all sides, we should comprehend and enclose the outermost extremities of the activities resulting from these inner forces, which build from within outwards.

Now it should not be difficult to understand that these forces of formation must be connected with other forces, which, like them, belong to the periphery of man, and are to be discovered there. These latter are the forces having their activities in the senses. The senses of man lie, as you know, upon the periphery. They are of course distributed over it and differentiated, but in order to come into contact with the forces acting in the senses you must look for them at the periphery, and this justifies us in saying that the formative forces must have a connection with the activity of the senses.

We shall perhaps understand this point better if we remember the words that Goethe quotes as having been uttered by one of the old mystics.

“Were the eye not Sun-like in itself,
How could we see the Sun?”

Now it cannot be the light-activity surrounding us all the time that is meant when the eye is said to be sun-like or light-like, for this light-activity can be perceived by the eye only when the eye is completely formed. It cannot therefore be this that is meant, when we are speaking of the building up of the eye. We must imagine this light-activity as something intrinsically different. And it is a fact that we arrive at a certain conception of what underlies this saying, if we follow man during the time between death and a new birth. For during this period his experiences consist in part—but of course, only in part—in a perception of the gradual transformation of the forces within him from the preceding physical life to the new one; and he perceives how the limb-man is transformed in the time between death and a new birth into the head-form. These experiences are no less rich in content than are those experiences we live through in this life, when we watch the gradual quickening of the plants in Spring and their decay in Autumn, etc.

All this building up that goes on in man in the time between death and re-birth is a great wealth of events, a wealth of real happenings which are by no means so easy to grasp as the mere abstract idea of them. All that takes place during this time to effect the transformation of the forces of the limb-man into those of the head for the new incarnation, is extraordinarily manifold. Man himself partakes in the process. He experiences for instance, something akin to the building up of the eye. But he does not experience it in the same manner as he did during the long evolutionary period, when he passed through the various evolutionary stages preceding our Earth, namely, those of Moon, Sun and Saturn. The forces of the Stellar Universe then acted upon him in a different way. This Stellar Universe was also in a different form from what it is now.

It is of great importance to form clear ideas on these matters. If we consider our present perceptions of what is around us, what are they? They are really pictures. Behind these pictures, of course, lies the real world; but it is the world that lies behind these pictures, which actually built up man before he had evolved sufficiently to be able to perceive these pictures. Today we perceive with our eyes the pictures of the surrounding world. Behind these lies that which has built up our eyes. This brings us to the truth: Had not the forces residing behind the picture of the Sun constructed the eye, the eye could not perceive the picture of the Sun.

The saying, you see, has to be modified, for while the perception of light today gives pictures, yet what first built up the organs into the periphery of man were not pictures, but realities. So that when we look around us in this world, what we perceive are really the forces that have built us up—our own formative forces. They have now drawn into us; that which acted from without up to the Earth period, now works from within.

We will retain this thought for our succeeding studies and will now bring together the first and fourth of these forces.

1. Forces of Form.
2. Forces of Inner Movements.
3. Organic Forces.
4. Assimilative, or metabolic forces.

Let us, for the moment, consider the last named. The process of metabolism has already become in some degree irregular; but there are natural causes which still lead Man to hold to a certain regularity in this respect; and you all know that he is inconvenienced if, for some reason or other, he fails in the rhythmic process of assimilation. He can deviate from it within limits, but he always endeavours to return again to a certain rhythm; and you know that this rhythm is one of the first essentials of physical health. It is a rhythm that embraces day and night. Within 24 hours the rhythmic process of metabolism is completed. Twenty-four hours after breakfast you again have an appetite for breakfast. All that is connected with assimilation is connected also with the day's course. I would now ask you to compare the solidity, the firmness of the bodily periphery with the mobility of the forces of assimilation. One can say that no alterations take place in the former, while assimilation repeats itself every 24 hours. A great deal takes place inside your organism, but your periphery remains unchanged. Now try to discover, in the outer world, something corresponding with this inner mobility in relation to firmness, that you find in Man. Look at the Universe of Stars. Note how the constellations move as little as do the particles on the surface of the human periphery. You will find that the constellation of Aries is always at a fixed distance from the constellation of Taurus, just as your two eyes remain at the same distance from one another. But apparently this whole stellar heaven moves; apparently it revolves around the Earth. Well, in respect of this, men are today no longer ignorant, they know that the movement is merely apparent, and ascribe its appearance to a revolution of the Earth upon her own axis.

Many have been the attempts to find proof for this revolution of the Earth on her axis. It was really only during the fifties of the last century that man began to have the right to speak of such a revolution, for it was only then that the pendulum experiments of Foucault showed this turning of the Earth. I will not go into this further today. We have however, in this way, valid proof of this terrestrial process, which repeats itself every 24 hours. It represents, in relation to the fixed constellations, the analogy of the rhythmic course of metabolism in man as compared to the fixed nature of his peripheric form; and here you can find, if you examine thoroughly all the conditions and relationships, exact evidence for the movement of the Earth in the processes of metabolism in man.

In these times we come across various so-called theories of relativity which claim that we cannot really speak of absolute motion. If I look out of the window of a railway carriage and think that the objects outside are moving, in reality it is the train and myself that are moving. Neither however can it be strictly proved that the world outside is not also moving in an opposite direction! All this kind of talk is, as a matter of fact, not of much value. For if one man walks forward and another man stands still in the distance while he approaches him it is, relatively speaking, immaterial whether he says: “I approach him” or “he approaches me”. Looked at in this way there seems to be no difference. Such considerations as this form, as you know, the foundations of the Einstein theories of relativity.

It is all very well—but there is a way whereby one can strictly prove the motion, for the person who remains at rest will not experience fatigue, whereas the one who walks will do so. By means of inner processes the absolute reality of motion can thus be proved; indeed there are no other proofs but the inner processes. Applying this to the Earth, we can truly speak there too of absolute motion, for through Spiritual Science we learn to realise that this motion is the equivalent of the inner motion of metabolism as compared with the fixed form of man. We should not lay so much stress upon the fact that the Earth rotates round its axis and thereby brings about an apparent Solar motion in space, but should instead relate this terrestrial motion to the whole Starry Universe; we should not speak of Sun days, but rather of Star days—which are not synonymous, for the Stellar day is shorter than the Solar day. A correction is always necessary in formulae dealing with the Solar day. Hence we can truly speak of this movement of the Earth on her axis as of something derivable from Man's nature; for as already pointed out, with the revolution considered in its relation to the fixed starry heavens is connected the inner motion of metabolism in Man. To sum up, the relation of metabolism in Man to the forces responsible for the form of Man is the relation of the Earth to the Heaven of Fixed Stars, which latter is represented for us by the Zodiac.

When we look at the Zodiac, it forms for us the outer cosmic representative of our own outer form. When we consider the Earth, we have before us the representative of the assimilative forces within us; and the relation of movement in each case corresponds.

Now it will be a little more difficult to find the relationship between (2) and (3), between Inner Movements and Organic Forces. We can however make the matter comprehensible in the following way. If you consider the movements within the human organism, you will readily conclude that they are something in Man that is in no way so fixed as his outer periphery. They are in motion. But something further is connected with this movement. The movements include that of the blood as well as the nerve-fluid, lymph, etc. We need not give a detailed list of them here, but there are seven of these inner movements. Connected with these movements are the individual organs. The forces of motion have produced, within their courses, these organs; in the latter we must recognise the results of these motions. I have often drawn attention recently to the real truth concerning the human heart. The materialistic view of the world, as I have pointed out, is of opinion that the heart is a kind of pump, forcing the blood through the whole body. But this is not the case; on the contrary, the pulsation of the heart is not the cause but the effect of circulation. Into the living inner motions or movements is inserted the functioning of the organs.

If we try to discover a cosmic equivalent for this, we will find it by observing, on the one hand, the movements of the Planets, especially if we consider their motions in relation to the movements of the moon. You will know—having already had this explanation in previous lectures—the connection between the lunar motion and the phenomena of the tides; and much more besides is connected with this lunar motion. Were we to study the phenomena of Nature more deeply, we should find that not only does light appear as a result of the sunrise, but other—and indeed more material—effects in our Earth-environment are to be connected with the planetary motion. When once this is made the basis of real, genuine study, we shall realise the harmony existing between many phenomena on the Earth and the motions of the planets. We shall study the effects of the planetary influence upon air, water and earth, in the same way as we have to study—in the human body—the influences upon their respective organs of the forces of inner movement existing in the circulation of the blood and in other circulations. In this way we shall discover a certain reciprocal action between the organic activities and the forces of inner movement. Just as we have already observed a correspondence between Earth and the Fixed Stars, so now we shall in fact have before us a similar correspondence between earth, water, air, fire (heat) and the planets—among which we reckon, of course, the Sun.

Thus we arrive at a certain relation between occurrences within the human organism and those taking place outside in the Macrocosm. For the present, however, we need concern ourselves only with the organic forces. How are they built up in the human body? They are built up in such a manner that as we follow the human life during the periods of this building-up process of the organs, we may recognise with a fair degree of accuracy that the process is related to the course of the year as metabolism is related to the course of the day. Observe how this building process takes place in the child, commencing at conception and proceeding until he first ‘sees the light of the world’ as it is beautifully expressed. After this, and especially during the first months after birth, the building-up process proceeds still further; so that, in very fact, we have here to do with a year's course. Then we have another period of about one year to the appearance of the first teeth. Thus, in the building process of the organs we have a yearly course. But this course stands in a similar relation to the forces of inner movement in Man as the varied conditions of the year's activity—Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter—do to the planets. Here again we discover something in Man that has correspondences in the Macrocosm. We cannot study these matters in any other way than by comparing details with each other. All I can do today is to draw your attention to certain facts that bear upon this subject, for were we to examine the connections in detail it would take us too long; but by studying certain relationships in Man during the actual building process of the organs, and seeing them in connection with the forces of inner movement, you can find everywhere analogies of that which takes place in the quarterly changes in the Seasons, as seen in their relationship to the forces of planetary motion. But we must avoid commencing our examination upon the basis of the heart being a pump; on the contrary, the heart must be viewed as a creation of the circulation of the blood. We must, so to speak, insert the heart into a living blood-circulation. The movement of the Sun too must be thought of as similarly inserted into the movements of the Planets. An unbiased examination of the intra-human conditions compels us to speak of a revolution of the Earth on her axis causing an apparent motion of the starry heavens—for this constitutes the equivalent of the movements connected with metabolism in their relations to the human outer form. But we cannot speak of a movement of the Earth around the Sun during the year. We cannot do this, if we understand the inner man which lives in close connection with the Macrocosm; for we must not conceive of that which moves towards the heart, in any other manner than we would the other flows of movement within man. We must therefore recognise that we are concerned not with an elliptical movement of the Earth in the course of the year but rather with a movement which corresponds to the Solar motion. That is, Earth and Sun move together in the course of the year; the one does not circle around the other. The latter opinion is the result of judging appearances; in actuality we have here the motion of both these bodies in space with a certain connection between the two. This is something in the Copernican theory that will have to be substantially corrected. But there is yet another way in which we must conceive the relation of man with macrocosmic nature.

What really is the nature of the process which we observe in the daily movement of metabolism? Only part of this process is carried on in such a way as to be accompanied by the phenomena of our consciousness, another part being accomplished while consciousness is shut off, while the Ego and astral body are separated from the physical and etheric. Now we must especially note the following. Man does not experience in the same way what takes place between awaking and going to sleep and what takes place between going to sleep and awaking. Just consider the relation between the two moments of time—going to sleep and awaking. If you do this with an unprejudiced mind, you will arrive at an unequivocal view of this matter. When you go to sleep, you are, as it were, at the zero of your being; the condition of sleep is not merely one of rest, it is the antithetical condition of the waking state. When you awake, you are, from the standpoint of your life, really in the same relation to yourself and your environment as you are at the moment of going to sleep. The one is the equivalent of the other, the only difference being that of direction. Awaking means passing from sleep to the waking state; falling asleep is the reverse. Apart from direction they are absolutely alike. Therefore if we could indicate the movements of metabolism by a line, then it cannot be a straight line or a circle, for they would not contain the points of awaking and of falling asleep. We must find a line which actually depicts the movements of metabolism, so as to contain these points, and the only one—search as long as you like—is the lemniscate. Here you have the point of awaking in one direction and the point of falling asleep in the other direction. The directions alone are opposite, the two movements being equal as regards life-condition. We can now distinguish in a real way the cycle of day and the cycle of night.

Whither does all this lead? If we have grasped the fact that the motion of the daily metabolism corresponds to the motion of the Earth, we can no longer, with the Earth here (diagram) attribute to any one point a circular motion. On the contrary, we must form the conception that the Earth in actual fact proceeds along her path in such a way as to produce a line like that of the lemniscate. The motion is not a simple revolution, but a more complicated movement; each point of the terrestrial surface describes a lemniscate, which is also the line described by the metabolic process.

We cannot therefore imagine the Earth's movement to consist merely of a turning round the axis, for in reality it is a complicated motion in which every point upon which you stand, describes—actually in order to form the foundation for the movement of your metabolic processes—a lemniscate. It is absolutely necessary to seek in the movements of the outer Universe the equivalent of movements taking place within Man. For only by a study of the changes within physical Man can we arrive at an understanding of the planetary motions exterior to Man. When a man sets his limbs in motion and becomes tired, we cannot go on arguing the point as to whether he is in relative or actual motion! It is out of the question to say: Perhaps the movement is only relative, perhaps the other man whom he is approaching is after all really approaching him! Theories of Relativity no longer hold water, when the inner motion proves that man moves. And it is impossible also to prove the movements in the interior of the Earth, except by means of the inner changes that go on in Man. The movements of metabolism, for example, are the true reflection of that which the Earth executes as motion in space. And again, that which we have termed the organ-building forces, active in the course of the year, are the equivalent of the annual motion of Earth and Sun together. We shall have occasion to speak more specifically of these things later; at the moment I should like to draw your attention once more to our model, where I have pointed out that the Earth moves behind the Sun in a screw-like line, the Earth moving along always with the Sun. And then if we view the line from above, we get a projection of the line and the projection shows a lemniscate.

Now all this will make it clear that we can certainly speak of a daily motion of the Earth around her axis, but by no means of a yearly motion of the Earth around the Sun. For the Earth follows the Sun, describing the same path.

Various other facts show that we have no right to speak of such a revolution. To give one instance, the fact that it was found necessary—I have spoken of this before—simply to suppress one statement of Copernicus. Were the Earth revolving round the Sun, we should of course expect her axis, which owing to its inertia remains parallel, to point in the direction of different fixed stars during this revolution. But it does not! If the Earth revolved round the Sun, the axis could not indicate the direction of the Pole-star, for the point indicated would itself have to revolve round the Polestar; it does not however do this, the axis continually indicates the Pole-star. That line which should be apparent to us and which would correspond to the progressive motion of the Earth in her relation to the Sun, is not to be found.

It is in a spiral, screw-like path that the Earth follows the Sun, boring her way, as it were, into cosmic space.

I have already indicated however that there is another movement which manifests in the phenomena of the precession of the equinoxes—the movement of the point of sunrise at the Spring-equinox through the Zodiac, once in 25,920 years. This also is the equivalent of a certain motion in Man. What can we find within Man corresponding to it? You may be able to come to a conclusion on this point from what I have said above. We have to find a motion equivalent to the relation of the Sun to the Fixed Stars, for the point of sunrise progresses through the complete Zodiac—or fixed stars—once in 25,920 years. The equivalent in Man is the relation between the forces of inner movement and the forces of form; this must therefore also be of long duration. The forces of inner movement in Man must change in some way, so as to alter their position in relation to the periphery of Man.

You will remember what I said about something that has been observable since the period of ancient Greece. I said that the Greeks used the same word for ‘yellow’ and ‘green’, that they really did not see blue in the same way as we do, but actually, as reported by Roman writers, realised and used four colours only in their art, namely yellow, red, black and white. They saw these four living colours. To them the sky was not blue as we see it; it appeared to them as a kind of darkness. Now this is an assertion that can be made in all certainty, and Spiritual Science confirms it. This change in Man has taken place since the time of ancient Greece. When you ponder over the fact that the constitution of the human eye has undergone such a degree of modification since the period of ancient Greece, you can then also conceive of other alterations in the human organism, taking place upon the periphery and occupying still longer periods of time for their accomplishment. Such alterations upon the periphery must of necessity bear a relation to the forces of inner movement, for, of course, they cannot be produced by the digestion or the organic functions. These peripheric modifications correspond, as a matter of fact, to the course of the vernal equinox in the Zodiac, to a period, that is, of 25,920 years. During this period the human race undergoes complete change. We must not make the mistake of thinking that previous to that time humanity appeared as we now see it. Consideration of the circumstances connected with physical existence makes it absurd to use the figures given us by modern geology for the purpose of following human evolution in time, for we can comprise this only in the period of 25,920 years, and part of that is still in the future. When the vernal equinox has come back again to the same place, the alterations that will have taken place in the whole human race are such that the human form will be quite dissimilar to what it is now. I have already told you something derived from other sources of cognition about the future of the human race and about its age. And here we see how the consideration of physical conditions compels a recognition of the same knowledge.

As a result of the above we arrive at the realisation that what we call the ‘movements of the heavenly bodies’ are not quite as simple as present day astronomy would have us believe, but that we enter here into extremely complicated conditions—conditions that can be studied from the standpoint of Man's connection with the Macrocosm. I have already been able to point out to you certain details of the motions of the heavenly bodies, and we shall in course of time learn more and more about them from other sources. You will be able already to see one thing—that man is not wholly dependent upon the Macrocosm. With what lies deep down in the subconscious, with the processes namely of assimilation, he is still in a certain way—but only in a certain way—bound to the Earth's daily revolution around her axis. Nevertheless, he can lift himself out of this connection. How is this? It is possible because man as he now is, built up in accordance with the forces of the periphery and of inner movement, with the forces too of the organs and of the metabolic system, is complete and finished in his dependence on the forces from without; and now he is able, with his complete and finished organisation to sever himself from this connection. In the same sense that we have in waking and sleeping a copy of day and night, having thus in ourselves the inner rhythm of day and night, but not needing to make this inner rhythm correspond with the outer rhythm of day and night (i.e. we need not sleep at night, nor wake during the day), so in a similar way does Man sever his connection with the Macrocosm in other departments of his existence. Upon this is founded the possibility of human free-will. It is not the present formation of Man that is dependent upon the Macrocosm, but his past formation. Man's present experiences are fundamentally a picture or copy of his past adaptation to the Macrocosm, and in this sense we live in the pictures of our past. Within these we are enabled to evolve our freedom, and from them we receive our moral laws, which are independent of the necessity ruling in our nature. It is when we understand clearly how Man and Macrocosm are related to each other that we recognise the possibility of free-will in Man.

Finally we must think over the following. It is clear that in Man the metabolic forces are still, in a certain respect, connected with the rhythm of his daily life. The forces of form have solidified. Now consider the animal instead of Man. Here we shall find a much more complete dependence upon the Macrocosm. Man has grown out of or beyond this dependence. The ancient wisdom therefore spoke of the Zodiac or Animal Circle, not of the Man Circle, as corresponding to the forces of formation. The forces of form manifest themselves in the animal kingdom in a great variety of forms, while in Man they manifest essentially in one form covering the whole human race; but they are the forces of the animal kingdom, and as we evolve beyond them and become Man, we must go out beyond the Zodiac. Beyond the Zodiac lies that upon which we, as human beings, are dependent in a higher sense than we are upon all that exists within the Zodiac, that is, within the circle of the fixed stars. Beyond the Zodiac is that which corresponds to our Ego.

With the astral body—which the animal also possesses—we are fettered to a dependence upon the Macrocosm, and the building up of the astral vehicle takes place in accordance with the will of the Stars. But with our "I" or Ego we transcend this Zodiac.

Here we have the principle upon which we have gained our freedom. Within the Zodiac we cannot sin, any more than can the animals; we begin to sin as soon as we carry our action beyond the Zodiac. This happens when we do that which makes us free from our connection with the Universal forces of formation, when we enter into relationship with regions exterior to the Zodiac or region of fixed stars. And this is the essential content of the human Ego.

You see, we may measure the Universe in so far as it appears to us a visible and temporal thing, we may measure its full extension through space to the outermost fixed stars, and all that takes place by way of movement in time in this starry heaven, and we may consider all this in its relation to Man; but in Man is being fulfilled something that goes on outside this space and outside this time, outside all that takes place in the astral. There beyond, is no ‘necessity of Nature’, but only that has place which is intimately connected with our moral nature and moral actions. Within the Zodiac we are unable to evolve our moral nature; but in so far as we evolve it, we record it into the Macrocosm beyond the Zodiac. All that we do remains and works in the world. The processes taking place within us from the forces of formation to the forces of metabolism, are the result of the past. But the past does not prejudge the whole of the future, it has no power over that future which eventuates from Man himself in his moral actions.

I can only lead you forward in this study step by step. Keep well in mind what I have said today and in my next lecture we will examine the matter from yet another point of view.

I tried yesterday to give certain indications about the constitution of man, and at the end it was possible to show that a really penetrating study of human nature is able to build a bridge between man's external constitution and what it unfolds, through self-consciousness, in his inner life. As a rule no such bridge is built, or only very inadequately built, particularly in the science current today. It became clear to us that in order to build this bridge we must know how man's constitution is to be regarded. We saw that the solid or solid fluid organism—which is the sole object of study today and is alone recognized by modern science as organic in the real sense—we saw that this must be regarded as only one of the organisms in the human constitution; that the existence of a fluid organism, an aeriform organism, and a warmth-organism must also be recognized. This makes it possible for us also to perceive how those members of man's nature which we are accustomed to regard as such, penetrate into this delicately organized constitution. Naturally, up to the warmth-organism itself, everything is to be conceived as physical body. But it is paramountly the etheric body that takes hold of the fluid body, of everything that is fluid in the human organism; in everything aeriform, the astral body is paramountly active, and in the warmth-organism, the Ego. By recognizing this we can as it were remain in the physical but at the same time reach up to the spiritual.

We also studied consciousness at its different levels. As I said yesterday, it is usual to take account only of the consciousness known to us in waking life from the moment of waking to the moment of falling asleep. We perceive the objects around us, reason about these perceptions with our intellect; we also have feelings in connection with these perceptions, and we have our will-impulses. But we experience this whole nexus of consciousness as something which, in its qualities, differs completely from the physical which alone is taken account of by ordinary science. It is not possible, without further ado, to build a bridge from these imponderable, incorporeal experiences in the domain of consciousness to the other objects of perception studied in physiology or physical anatomy. But in regard to consciousness too, we know from ordinary life that in addition to the waking consciousness, there is dream-consciousness, and we heard yesterday that dreams are essentially pictures or symbols of inner organic processes. Something is going on within us all the time, and in our dreams it comes to expression in pictures. I said that we may dream of coiling snakes when we have some intestinal disorder, or we may dream of an excessively hot stove and wake up with palpitations of the heart. The overheated stove symbolized irregular beating of the heart, the snakes symbolized the intestines, and so forth. Dreams point us to our organism; the consciousness of dreamless sleep is, as it were, an experience of nullity, of the void. But I explained that this experience of the void is necessary in order that man shall feel himself connected with his bodily nature. As an Ego he would feel no connection with his body if he did not leave it during sleep and seek for it again on waking. It is through the deprivation undergone between falling asleep and waking that he is able to feel himself united with the body. So from the ordinary consciousness which has really nothing to do with our own essential being beyond the fact that it enables us to have perceptions and ideas, we are led to the dream-consciousness which has to do with actual bodily processes. We are therefore led to the body. And we are led to the body even more strongly when we pass into the consciousness of dreamless sleep. Thus we can say: On the one hand our conception of the life of soul is such that it leads us to the body. And our conception of the bodily constitution, comprising as it does the fluid organism, the aeriform organism, the warmth-organism and thus becoming by degrees more rarefied, leads us to the realm of soul. It is absolutely necessary to take these things into consideration if we are to reach a view of the world that can really satisfy us.

The great question with which we have been concerning ourselves for weeks, the cardinal question in man's conception of the world, is this: How is the moral world-order connected with the physical world-order? As has been said so often, the prevailing world-view—which relies entirely upon natural science for knowledge of the outer physical world and can only resort to earlier religious beliefs when it is a matter of any comprehensive understanding of the life of soul, for in modern psychology there really is no longer any such understanding—this world-view is unable to build a bridge. There, on the one side, is the physical world. According to the modern world view, this is a conglomeration from a primeval nebula, and everything will eventually become a kind of slag-heap in the universe. This is the picture of the evolutionary process presented to us by the science of today, and it is the one and only picture in which a really honest modern scientist can find reality.

Within this picture a moral world-order has no place. It is there on its own. Man receives the moral impulses into himself as impulses of soul. But if the assertions of natural science are true, everything that is astir with life, and finally man himself came out of the primeval nebula and the moral ideals well up in him. And when, as is alleged, the world becomes a slag-heap, this will also be the graveyard of all moral ideals. They will have vanished.—No bridge can possibly be built, and what is worse, modern science cannot, without being inconsistent, admit the existence of morality in the world-order. Only if modern science is inconsistent can it accept the moral world-order as valid. It cannot do so if it is consistent. The root of all this is that the only kind of anatomy in existence is concerned exclusively with the solid organism, and no account is taken of the fact that man also has within him a fluid organism, an aeriform organism, and a warmth-organism. If you picture to yourselves that as well as the solid organism with its configuration into bones, muscles, nerve-fibres and so forth, you also have a fluid organism and an aeriform organism—though these are of course fluctuating and inwardly mobile—and a warmth-organism, if you picture this you will more easily understand what I shall now have to say on the basis of spiritual-scientific observation.

Think of a person whose soul is fired with enthusiasm for a high moral ideal, for the ideal of generosity, of freedom, of goodness, of love, or whatever it may be. He may also feel enthusiasm for examples of the practical expression of these ideals. But nobody can conceive that the enthusiasm which fires the soul penetrates into the bones and muscles as described by modern physiology or anatomy. If you really take counsel with yourself, however, you will find it quite possible to conceive that when one has enthusiasm for a high moral ideal, this enthusiasm has an effect upon the warmth organism.—There, you see, we have come from the realm of soul into the physical!

Taking this as an example, we may say: Moral ideals come to expression in an enhancement of warmth in the warmth-organism. Not only is man warmed in soul through what he experiences in the way of moral ideals, but he becomes organically warmer as well—though this is not so easy to prove with physical instruments. Moral ideals, then, have a stimulating, invigorating effect upon the warmth-organism.

You must think of this as a real and concrete happening: enthusiasm for a moral ideal—stimulation of the warmth-organism. There is more vigorous activity in the warmth-organism when the soul is fired by a moral ideal. Neither does this remain without effect upon the rest of one's constitution. As well as the warmth-organism he also has the air-organism. He inhales and exhales the air; but during the inbreathing and outbreathing process the air is within him. It is of course inwardly in movement, in fluctuation, but equally with the warmth-organism it is an actual air-organism in man. Warmth, quickened by a moral ideal, works in turn upon the air-organism, because warmth pervades the whole human organism, pervades every part of it. The effect upon the air-organism is not that of warming only, for when the warmth, stimulated by the warmth-organism, works upon the air-organism, it imparts to it something that I can only call a source of light. Sources of light, as it were, are imparted to the air-organism, so that moral ideals which have a stimulating effect upon the warmth-organism produce sources of light in the air-organism. To external perception and for ordinary consciousness these sources of light are not in themselves luminous, but they manifest in man's astral body. To begin with, they are curbed—if I may use this expression—through the air that is within man. They are, so to speak, still dark light, in the sense that the seed of a plant is not yet the developed plant. Nevertheless man has a source of light within him through the fact that he can be fired with enthusiasm for moral ideals, for moral impulses.

We also have within us the fluid organism. Warmth, stimulated in the warmth organism by moral ideals, produces in the air-organism what may be called a source of light which remains, to begin with, curbed and hidden. Within the fluid organism—because everything in the human constitution interpenetrates—a process takes place which I said yesterday actually underlies the outer tone conveyed in the air. I said that the air is only the body of the tone, and anyone who regards the essential reality of tone as a matter of vibrations of the air, speaks of tones just as he would speak of a man as having nothing except the outwardly visible physical body. The air with its vibrating waves is nothing but the outer body of the tone. In the human being this tone, this spiritual tone, is not produced in the air-organism through the moral ideal, but in the fluid organism. The sources of tone, therefore, arise in the fluid organism.

We regard the solid organism as the densest of all, as the one that supports and bears all the others. Within it, too, something is produced as in the case of the other organisms. In the solid organism there is produced what we call a seed of life—but it is an etheric, not a physical seed of life such as issues from the female organism at a birth. This etheric seed which lies in the deepest levels of subconsciousness is actually the primal source of tone and, in a certain sense, even the source of light. This is entirely hidden from ordinary consciousness, but it is there within the human being.

Think of all the experiences in your life that came from aspiration for moral ideas—be it that they attracted you merely as ideas, or that you saw them coming to expression in others, or that you felt inwardly satisfied by having put such impulses into practice, by letting your deeds be fired by moral ideals ... all this goes down into the air-organism as a source of light, into the fluid organism as a source of tone, into the solid organism as a source of life.

These processes are withdrawn from the field of man's consciousness but they operate within him nevertheless. They become free when he lays aside his physical body at death. What is thus produced in us through moral ideals, or through the loftiest and purest ideas, does not bear immediate fruit. For during the life between birth and death, moral ideas as such become fruitful only in so far as we remain in the life of ideas, and in so far as we feel a certain satisfaction in moral deeds performed. But this is merely a matter of remembrance, and has nothing to do with what actually penetrates down into the different organisms as the result of enthusiasm for moral ideals.

So we see that our whole constitution, beginning with the warmth-organism, is, in very fact, permeated by moral ideals. And when at death the etheric body, the astral body, and the Ego emerge from the physical body, these higher members of our human nature are filled with all the impressions we have had. Our Ego was living in the warmth-organism when it was quickened by moral ideas. We were living in our air-organism, into which were implanted sources of light which now, after death, go forth into the cosmos together with us. In our fluid organism, tone was kindled which now becomes part of the Music of the Spheres, resounding from us into the cosmos. And we bring life with us when we pass out into the cosmos through the portal of death.

You will now begin to have an inkling of what the life that pervades the universe really is. Where are the sources of life? They lie in that which quickens those moral ideals which fire man with enthusiasm. We come to the point of saying to ourselves that if today we allow ourselves to be inspired by moral ideals, these will carry forth life, tone and light into the universe and will become world-creative. We carry out into the universe world-creative power, and the source of this power is the moral element.

So when we study the whole man we find a bridge between moral ideals and what works as life-giving force in the physical world, even in the chemical sense. For tone works in the chemical sense by assembling substances and dispersing them again. Light in the world has its source in the moral stimuli, in the warmth-organisms of men. Thus we look into the future—new worlds take shape. And as in the case of the plant we must go back to the seed, so in the case of these future worlds that will come into being, we must go back to the seeds which lie in us as moral ideals.

And now think of theoretical ideas in contrast to moral ideals. In the case of theoretical ideas everything is different, no matter how significant these ideas may be, for theoretical ideas produce the very opposite effect to that of stimulus. They cool down the warmth-organism—that is the difference.

Moral ideas, or ideas of a moral-religious character, which fire us with enthusiasm and become impulses for deeds, work as world-creative powers. Theoretical ideas and speculation's have a cooling, subduing effect upon the warmth-organism. Because this is so, they also have a paralyzing effect upon the air-organism and upon the source of light within it; they have a deadening effect upon tone, and an extinguishing effect upon life. In our theoretical ideas the creations of the pre-existing world come to their end. When we formulate theoretical ideas a universe dies in them. Thus do we bear within us the death of a universe and the dawn of a universe.

Here we come to the point where he who is initiated into the secrets of the universe cannot speak, as so many speak today, of the conservation of energy or the conservation of matter. [e.Ed: The law propounded by Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878)]. It is simply not true that matter is conserved forever. Matter dies to the point of nullity, to a zero-point. In our own organism, energy dies to the point of nullity through the fact that we formulate theoretical thoughts. But if we did not do so, if the universe did not continually die in us, we should not be man in the true sense. Because the universe dies in us, we are endowed with self-consciousness and are able to think about the universe. But these thoughts are the corpse of the universe. We become conscious of the universe as a corpse only, and it is this that makes us Man.

A past world dies within us, down to its very matter and energy. It is only because a new universe at once begins to dawn that we do not notice this dying of matter and its immediate rebirth. Through man's theoretical thinking, matter—substantiality—is brought to its end; through his moral thinking, matter and cosmic energy are imbued with new life. Thus what goes on inside the boundary of the human skin is connected with the dying and birth of worlds. This is how the moral order and the natural order are connected. The natural world dies away in man; in the realm of the moral a new natural world comes to birth.

Moral Ideals:

stimulate the warmth-organism.
producing in the air organism—sources of Light.
producing in the fluid organism—sources of Tone.
producing in the solid organism—seeds of Life. (etheric)

Theoretical thoughts:

cool down the warmth organism.
paralyze the sources of Light.
deaden the sources of Tone.
extinguish Life.

Because of unwillingness to consider these things, the ideas of the imperishability of matter and energy were invented. If energy were imperishable and matter were imperishable there would be no moral world-order. But today it is desired to keep this truth concealed and modern thought has every reason to do so, because otherwise it would have to eliminate the moral world-order—which in actual fact it does by speaking of the law of the conservation of matter and energy. If matter is conserved, or energy is conserved, the moral world order is nothing but an illusion, a mirage. We can understand the course of the world's development only if we grasp how out of this ‘illusory’ moral world-order—for so it is when it is grasped in thoughts—new worlds come into being.

Nothing of this can be grasped if we study only the solid component of man's constitution. To understand it we must pass from the solid organism through the fluid and aeriform organisms to the warmth-organism. Man's connection with the universe can be understood only if the physical is traced upwards to that rarefied state wherein the soul can be directly active in the rarefied physical element, as for example in warmth. Then it is possible to find the connection between body and soul.

However many treatises on psychology may be written—if they are based upon what is studied today in anatomy and physiology it will not be possible to find any transition to the life of soul from this solid, or solid-fluid bodily constitution. The life of soul will not be revealed as such. But if the bodily substance is traced back to warmth, a bridge can be built from what exists in the body as warmth to what works from out of the soul into the warmth in the human organism. There is warmth both without and within the human organism. As we have heard, in man's constitution warmth is an organism; the soul, the soul-and-spirit, takes hold of this warmth-organism and by way of the warmth all that becomes active which we inwardly experience as the moral. By the ‘moral’ I do not of course mean what philistines mean by it, but I mean the moral in its totality, that is to say, all those impulses that come to us, for example when we contemplate the majesty of the universe, when we say to ourselves: We are born out of the cosmos and we are responsible for what goes on in the world.—I mean the impulses that come to us when the knowledge yielded by Spiritual Science inspires us to work for the sake of the future. When we regard Spiritual Science itself as a source of the moral, this, more than anything else, can fill us with enthusiasm for the moral, and this enthusiasm, born of spiritual-scientific knowledge, becomes in itself a source of morality in the higher sense. But what is generally called ‘moral’ represents no more than a subordinate sphere of the moral in the universal sense.—All the ideas we evolve about the external world, about Nature in her finished array, are theoretical ideas. No matter with what exactitude we envisage a machine in terms of mathematics and the principles of mechanics, or the universe in the sense of the Copernican system—this is nothing but theoretical thinking, and the ideas thus formulated constitute a force of death within us; a corpse of the universe is within us in the form of thoughts, of ideas.

These matters create deeper and deeper insight into the universe in its totality. There are not two orders, a natural order and a moral order in juxtaposition, but the two are one. This is a truth that must be realized by the man of today. Otherwise he must ever and again be asking himself: How can my moral impulses take effect in a world in which a natural order alone prevails?—This indeed was the terrible problem that weighed upon men in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century: How is it possible to conceive of any transition from the natural world into the moral world, from the moral world into the natural world?—The fact is that nothing can help to solve this perplexing, fateful problem except spiritual-scientific insight into Nature on the one side and Spirit on the other.

With the premises yielded by this knowledge we shall also be able to get to the root of something that is presented as a branch of science today and has already penetrated into the general consciousness of men. Our world-view today is based upon Copernicanism. Until the year 1827 the Copernican conception of the universe which was elaborated by Kepler and then diluted into theory by Newton, was tabooed by the Roman Catholic Church. No orthodox Catholic was allowed to believe it. Since that year the prohibition has been lifted and the Copernican view of the universe has taken root so strongly in the general consciousness that anyone who does not base his own world-view upon it is regarded as a fool.

What is this Copernican picture of the universe?—It is in reality a picture built up purely on the basis of mathematical principles, mathematical-mechanical principles. The rudiments of it began, very gradually, to be unfolded in Greece, [e.Ed: Particularly by Aristarchos of Samos, the Greek astronomer, circa 250 B.C.] where, however, echoes of earlier thought—for example in the Ptolemaic view of the universe—still persisted. And in course of time this developed into the Copernican system that is taught nowadays to every child.

We can look back from this world-conception to ancient times when man's picture of the universe was very different. All that has remained of it are those traditions which in the form in which they exist today—in astrology and the like—are sheer dilettantism. That is what has remained of ancient astronomy, and it has also remained, ossified and paralyzed, in the symbols of certain secret societies, Masonic societies and the like. There is usually complete ignorance of the fact that these things are relics of an ancient astronomy. This ancient astronomy was quite different from that of today, for it was based, not upon mathematical principles but upon ancient clairvoyant vision.

Entirely false ideas prevail today of how an earlier humanity acquired its astronomical-astrological knowledge. This was acquired through an instinctive-clairvoyant vision of the universe. The earliest Post-Atlantean peoples saw the heavenly bodies as spirit forms, spirit entities, whereas we today regard them merely as physical structures. When the ancient peoples spoke of the celestial bodies, of the planets or of the fixed stars, they were speaking of spiritual beings. Today, the sun is pictured as a globe of burning gas which radiates light into the universe. But for the men of ancient times the sun was a living Being and they regarded the sun, which their eyes beheld, simply as the outward manifestation of this Spirit Being at the place where the sun stands in the universe; and it was the same in regard to the other heavenly bodies—they were seen as Spirit Beings. We must think of an age which came to an end long before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, when the sun out yonder in the universe and everything in the stars was conceived of as living spirit reality, living Being. Then came an intermediary period when people no longer had this vision, when they regarded the planets, at any rate, as physical, but still thought of them as pervaded by living souls. In times when it was no longer known how the physical passes over by stages into what is of the soul, how what is of the soul passes over by stages into the physical, how in reality the two are united, men postulated physical existence on the one side and soul existence on the other. They thought of the correspondences between these two realms just as most psychologists today—if they admit the existence of a soul at all—still think, namely that the soul and the physical nature of the man are identical. This, of course, leads thought to absurdity; or there is the so-called ‘psycho-physical parallelism,’ which again is nothing else than a stupid way of formulating something that is not understood.

Then came the age when the heavenly bodies were regarded as physical structures, circling or stationary, attracting or repelling one another in accordance with mathematical laws. To be sure, in every epoch there existed a knowledge—in earlier times a more instinctive knowledge—of how things are in reality. But in the present age this instinctive knowledge no longer suffices; what in earlier times was known instinctively must now be acquired by conscious effort. And if we enquire how those who were able to view the universe in its totality—that is to say, in its physical, psychical and spiritual aspects—if we enquire how these men pictured the sun, we must say: They pictured it first and foremost as a Spirit-Being. Those who were initiated conceived of this Spirit-Being as the source of the moral. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have said that ‘moral intuitions’ are drawn from this source—but drawn from it in the earthly world, for the moral intuitions shine forth from man, from what can live in him as enthusiasm for the moral.

Think of how greatly our responsibility is increased when we realize: If here on the earth there were no soul capable of being with enthusiasm for true and genuine morality, for the spiritual moral order in general, nothing could be contributed towards the progress of our world, towards a new creation; our world would be led towards its death.

This force of light that is on the earth (Diagram VII) rays out into the universe. This is, to begin with, imperceptible to ordinary vision; we do not perceive how human moral impulses in man ray out from the earth into the universe. If a grievous age were to dawn over the earth, an age when millions and millions of men would perish through lack of spirituality—spirituality conceived of here as including the moral, which indeed it does—if there were only a dozen men filled with moral enthusiasm, the earth would still ray out a spiritual, sun-like force! This force rays out only to a certain distance. At this point it mirrors itself, as it were, in itself, so that here (Diagram VIII) there arises the reflection of what radiates from man. And in every epoch the initiates regarded this reflection as the sun. For as I have so often said, there is nothing physical here. Where ordinary astronomy speaks of the existence of an incandescent globe of gas, there is merely the reflection of a spiritual reality in physical appearance.

You see, therefore, how great is the distance separating the Copernican view of the world, and even the old astrology, from what was the inmost secret of Initiation. The best illustration of these things is provided by the fact that in an epoch when great power was vested in the hands of groups of men, who, as they declared, considered that such truths were dangerous for the masses and did not wish them to be communicated, one who was an idealist—the Emperor Julian (called for this reason ‘the Apostate’)—wanted to impart these truths to the world and was then brought to his death by cunning means. There are reasons which induce certain occult societies to withhold vital secrets of world-existence, because by so doing they are able to wield a certain power. If in the days of the Emperor Julian certain occult societies guarded their secrets so strictly that they acquiesced in his murder, it need not surprise us if those who are the custodians of certain secrets today do not reveal them but want to withhold them from the masses in order to enhance their power—it need not surprise us if such people hate to realize that at least the beginnings of such secrets are being unveiled. And now you will understand some of the deeper reasons for the bitter hatred that is leveled against Spiritual Science, against what Spiritual Science feels it a duty to bring to mankind at the present time. But we are living in an age when either earthly civilization will be doomed to perish, or certain secrets will be restored to mankind—truths which hitherto have in a certain way been guarded as secrets, which were once revealed to people through instinctive clairvoyance but must now be reacquired by fully conscious vision, not only of the physical but also of the spiritual that is within the physical.

What was the real aim of Julian the Apostate?—He wished to make clear to the people: ‘You are becoming more and more accustomed to look only at the physical sun; but there is a spiritual Sun of which the physical sun is only the mirror-image!’ In his own way he wished to communicate the Christ-Secret to the world. But in our age it is desired that the connection of Christ, the spiritual Sun, with the physical sun, shall be kept hidden. That is why certain authorities rage most violently of all when we speak of the Christ Mystery in connection with the Sun Mystery. All kinds of calumnies are then spread abroad.—But Spiritual Science is assuredly a matter of importance in the present age, and those alone who regard it as such view it with the earnestness that is its due.