The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Selfishness is combated through logical thinking. If thinking regulates itself logically, desires can no longer come up and the body works automatically. We close our eye automatically if a fly approaches it. Spirits of Movement built this reflex into us. What we do automatically is always correct and wise; what we do voluntarily is subject to error. Sprits of Movement also had to learn; they made a lot of mistakes before movements like eye closure became automatic in us and before these movements could be carried out so wisely. Such movements are completely independent of our personal feelings, wishes, etc. That's the way our thinking must become. The right sequences of thoughts must be strung together entirely by themselves; thoughts must not be produced for selfish reasons and purposes. They must proceed from previous ones in a purely logical way. We learn logical thinking from theosophical teachings, when the mighty facts that can all be understood with the intellect, even if one can't see and investigate them oneself, are placed before us and we try to grasp them with our thinking. Thereby we're diverted from lines of thought that only group around our own small lower ego and we're directed towards great, comprehensive ideas. That's the way we work on our astral body.

We're born with certain inclinations that become converted into habits during life. What fit to these habits earlier now becomes a hindrance to progress. All action must become conscious; we should do things on our own and not because of our connections with family, nation, classes or circumstances. Thereby we work on our etheric body.

Worries put pressure on the physical body. We should do our duty, and also against opposition, but we shouldn't worry too much. It's hard to strike the right balance here between concern and standing above it, but too much worry dries out the brain so that it can't take in new thoughts. The greatest man of sorrows or soter was Christ, and as it says in (I Peter 5:7) we should cast all our care on him; for he cares for you. that is, we should give all worries past a certain point to Christ so that He can make our physical body healthy and strong, so that our soul is also healthy.

An independent way of thinking has a purifying effect on the blood. Clear thoughts purify the lymph. Noble feelings purify the bile. Pure, honest intentions ennoble the streams in senses and nerves.

What we meditate on is less important than how we meditate. The further we get, the greater the danger is that bad spirits will try to make nests in us. There's an occult remedy for this. We must imagine a rod with one black and one white snake wound around it. Of course, it's not enough to just stare at this image, but we shouldn't speculate about it very long either, since that would bring us out of our meditation. When we get further, we, as it were, feel that we're divided up into a variety of beings who worked on us previously, but if we surrender ourselves to this feeling too early, it can become an obstacle. For hostile spirits interfere who want to draw out to them and we get into an illusory world instead of the spiritual one. An effective occult remedy for this is to imagine a black cross with seven red roses. New life springs from the dead cross.

It's better to read a book 25 times than to read 5 books 5 times. When we raise ourselves to the hierarchies we are taken hold of, and this leads to egotism if it's not offset by a love for all beings. If we don't develop courage and selflessness we lose our self when we're taken hold of by even the best higher beings. We can dare to make the leap over the abyss if we're filled and permeated by the Christ principle. Spiritual beings take hold of us and use us to work in the world, just as we use our eyes, etc.

When we think about the moon something contracts and hardens in us. We feel the spirit working in us when we look at the sun. Sunrays are the effects of high spirits' deeds.

We must imagine the higher I and get to the point where this I looks upon our ordinary ego like an object that confronts it.

a) Text based on an old typewritten template

You are sitting in the Chamber of Reflection. This symbolic action is meant to indicate to you that you should remember at this moment how man should recognize silently, without any impressions from outside, again and again by immersing himself in his inner being, that he must form a firmly closed personality with decisive feelings, thoughts and impulses of will. Only as such can he find his way as a citizen of our earth planet. You must be a firmly closed ego. The brothers and sisters gathered here will give you some time to think about this and also to decide whether you want to be accepted into our covenant after careful consideration. After a strong hammer blow, if you persevere in your resolution to be accepted, you will answer with a clear yes.

b) Text from an original manuscript by Marie Steiner

You are sitting symbolically in the Chamber of Reflection, this as a sign that at this moment you should take a deep look into your inner being, into the center of your being, for the one who enters the occult path must realize that he must bring forth everything from the deepest center of his own being with regard to his sensations, feelings, opinions and impulses of will. Only the person who thus finds a firm base within himself can be a citizen of our earth planet. In this way the center of his being is firmly connected with the center of his planet and he finds his own development together with the earth mission. In all activities of life, the occult aspirant must draw his impulses from his own free feeling, sensing, thinking and willing. To make this clear to you through a deep look into your inner being and to think carefully once again about whether you want to stick to your decision to be accepted into our community, you sit symbolically in this chamber of reflection. There will be a short time of complete silence around you when you are to discuss these two things with yourselves. Then a long hammer blow will break the silence and if you persevere in your resolution, you will answer my question with a clearly audible yes.

[ 1 ] From the description of Imagination it has become evident how through it the occult student leaves the ground of outer sense experiences. In a much higher degree is this the case with Inspiration. Here representation (image forming) is based much less upon what can be designated an outer stimulus. Man must find strength within himself to make it possible for him to form representations concerning things. He must be inwardly active on a much higher level than in the case of outer cognition. There he simply gives himself over to outer impressions, and these cause the images. This kind of surrender ceases when we come to Inspiration. No eye any longer supplies colours, no ear supplies sounds, and so forth. The whole content of representations must largely be shaped by one's own activity, consequently by purely spirit-soul processes, and the manifestation of the higher world must be impressed upon what man has created by his inner activity. A peculiar contradiction seems to appear in such a description of the world of higher cognition. The individual to a certain extent should be the creator of his own representations yet of course these representations must not be allowed to be his own creation. The processes of the higher world must be expressed through them just as the processes of the lower world are expressed through the perceptions of the eyes, ears, and so forth. But a contradiction is inevitable in the description of this mode of cognition, for this is exactly what the occult student must make his own on the path of Inspiration; he must attain by his inner activity a result that in ordinary life is outwardly compelled.—Why in ordinary life do the images representing the outer world not take their course arbitrarily? Because man has to make his inner imagery conform to the outer objects. All arbitrariness of the “ego” falls away because the objects say: We are that, or that. The objects themselves tell how they shall be thought of; the “ego” has nothing to decide about it. Whoever will not adjust himself to the objects has erroneous thoughts, and he would soon become aware of how little success he would have with them in the world. This necessary attitude of human beings to the things of the outer world can be designated in cognition by the term “selfless.” Man must attain a “selfless” attitude toward things, and the outer world is his instructor in this selflessness. It removes from him all illusions, all fantastic notions, all illogical judgments, all non-objectivity, simply by putting the correct image before his senses.

[ 2 ] If the human being wants to prepare himself for Inspiration, he must so develop his inner nature that this selflessness is his very own, even when nothing outside compels it. He must learn to create inwardly, but in such a way that his “ego” does not in the least way play an arbitrary role in this creative activity. The difficulties to be considered in achieving such selflessness become the more apparent the more consideration is given to what soul powers are especially needed for Inspiration.—The three fundamental powers of soul life are differentiated: Representation (thinking), feeling, and willing. In everyday sensory cognition, representations are stimulated into existence by outer objects, and through these externally stimulated representations the directions taken by feeling and willing are determined. For instance, the human being sees an object; it gives him pleasure, and in consequence he desires the things concerned. Pleasure is rooted in feeling, and through feeling the will is aroused, just as feeling has itself received its stamp from thinking. But the ultimate foundation of thinking, feeling and willing is the external object.—Another instance would be this. A man witnesses an event. It frightens him. He runs away from the scene of the event. Here, too, the outer occurrences are the initial cause; they are perceived through the senses, become representations, the feeling of fear springs up; and the will—expressing itself in running away—is the result. In Inspiration any outer object of this kind falls away. The senses do not come into play for a perception. Therefore they cannot give rise to representations. From this side no influence is exerted upon feeling and willing. Yet it is precisely from these two, as out of a mother substance, that in Inspiration representations inwardly arise and grow. If the mother substance is healthy, true representations will arise; if unhealthy, errors and illusions.

[ 3 ] As certainly as inspirations that originate in healthy feeling and willing can be revelations from a higher world, so certainly do errors, delusions and fantastic notions concerning a higher world spring from confused feeling and willing.

[ 4 ] Occult training therefore undertakes to indicate how the human being may make his feelings and his will impulses productive in a healthy way for Inspiration. As in all matters of occult training, the need here is for an intimate regulating and forming of soul life. First of all certain feelings must be developed which are known only to a slight degree in ordinary life. Some of these feelings will be hinted at here. Among the most important is a heightened sensitiveness to “truth” and “falsehood,” to “right” and “wrong.” Certainly the ordinary human being has similar feelings, but they must be developed by the occult student in a much higher measure. Suppose someone has made a logical error. Another sees this mistake and corrects it. Let it be clear how great is the role of judgment and intellect in such a correction, and how slight the feeling of pleasure in the right and displeasure in the wrong. Surely this is not to claim that the pleasure and corresponding displeasure are non-existent. But the degree to which they are present in ordinary life must be illimitably raised in occult training. Most systematically must the occult student turn his attention to his soul life, and he must bring it about that logical error is a source of pain to him, no less excruciating than physical pain, and conversely, that the “right” gives him real joy and delight. Thus, where another only stirs his intellect, his power of judgment, into motion, the occult student must learn to live through the whole gamut of emotions, from grief to enthusiasm, from afflictive tension to transports of delight in the possession of truth. In fact, he must learn to feel something like hatred against what the “normal” man experiences only in a cold and sober way as “incorrect”; he must enkindle in himself a love of truth that bears a personal character; as personal, as warm, as the lover feels for the beloved.—Certainly much is spoken in our “cultured” circles about the “love of truth” yet what is meant by this is not at all to be compared with what the occult student must go through in quiet, inner soul work toward this end. As a test, he must patiently, over and over again, place before himself this or that “true” thing, this or that “false” one, and devote himself to it, not merely to train his power of judgment for sober discrimination between “true” and “false,” but he must gain an entirely personal relation to it all.—It is absolutely correct that at the beginning of such training the human being can fall into what may be called “oversensitiveness.” An incorrect judgment that he hears in his environment, an inconsistency, and so forth, can cause him almost unbearable pain.—Care must therefore be taken in this respect during training. Otherwise great dangers might indeed result for the student's equilibrium of soul. If care is taken that the character remains steadfast, storms may occur in the soul life and the human being still retain the power to conduct himself toward the outer world with harmonious countenance and bearing. A mistake is made in every case in which the occult student is brought into opposition to the outer world so that he finds it unbearable or wishes to flee from it entirely. The higher world of feeling must not be cultivated at the expense of well-balanced activity and work in the outer world; therefore a strengthening of the power to withstand outer impressions must appear in corresponding measure to the inner lifting of the feeling life. Practical occult training, therefore, directs the human being never to undertake the above-mentioned exercises for developing the feeling world without at the same time developing himself toward an appreciation of the tolerance that life demands from men. He must be able to feel the keenest pain if a person utters an erroneous opinion, and yet at the same time be perfectly tolerant towards this person because the thought in his mind is equally clear that this person is bound to judge in this way, and his opinion must be reckoned with as a fact.—It is, of course, correct that the inner being of the occult scientist will be ever more and more transformed into a twofold life. Ever richer processes come about in his soul in his pilgrimage through life, and a second world becomes continually more independent of what the outer world offers. It is just this twofold existence that will bear fruit in the genuine practice of life. What results from it is quick-witted judgment and unerring certainty of decision. While anyone who stands remote from such schooling must go through long trains of thought, driven hither and thither between resolution and perplexity, the occult scientist will swiftly survey life situations and discern hidden relations concealed from the ordinary view. He then often needs much patience to synchronise with the slow rate at which another person is able to grasp something that for him comes swift as an arrow.

[ 5 ] Thus far we have spoken only of the qualities that must be developed in the feeling life so that Inspiration may occur in the correct way. The next question is: How do the feelings become fruitful so that they are accurately represented for the world of Inspiration? If one wishes to understand what occult science has to offer in answer to this question, acquaintance is necessary with the fact that man's soul life has always a certain treasure of feeling over and above those stimulated by sense perceptions. The human being feels, as it were, far more than things compel him to feel, only in ordinary life this excess is employed in a direction that through occult training must be transformed into another. Take, for instance, a feeling of anxiety or fear. It can be crystal clear that often fear or anxiety is greater than it would be if it were in true proportion to the corresponding outer event. Imagine that the occult student is working energetically on himself with the aim to feel in no instance more fear and anxiety than is justified by the corresponding external events. Now a given amount of fear or anxiety always entails an expenditure of soul force. This soul force is actually lost as a result when fear or anxiety is produced. The student really conserves this soul force when he denies himself fear or anxiety—or other such feelings—and it remains at his disposal for some other purpose. If he repeats such processes often, he will build up an inner treasure of these continually husbanded soul forces, and the occult student will soon find that out of such economies of feeling will arise the germs of those inner images that will bring to expression the revelations of a higher life. Such things cannot be “proved” in the ordinary sense; the occult student can only be advised to do this or that, and if he does so to watch for the indubitable results.

[ 6 ] A careless examination of what has been described might easily make it appear as a contradiction to demand from the one side an enrichment of the feeling world, with feelings of pleasure or pain to be kindled by what otherwise arouses only intellectual judgment, and from the other side to talk in almost the same breath of economy of feeling. This contradiction quickly disappears if it is borne in mind that the economies are to be effected in those feelings aroused by the outer senses. Just what is conserved there appears conversely as an enrichment of spiritual experience, and it is wholly correct that the feelings conserved in this way in the world of sense perception not only become free in the other sphere, but prove creative in that sphere.—They shape the matrix substance for those representations wherein the spiritual world reveals itself.

[ 7 ] But it would not accomplish much to remain at a standstill with only such economies as those indicated above. For greater results, still more is necessary. A far greater treasure still of power to create feeling must be supplied to the soul than is possible in this way alone. For instance, as a test, one must expose oneself to certain outer impressions, and then wholly deny oneself the feelings that “normally” arise as a result. One must, for instance, face an occurrence that “normally” excites the soul, and absolutely and totally forbid oneself the excitation. This can be accomplished either by actually confronting such an experience, or by conjuring it up imaginatively. The imaginative method is even better for a really fruitful occult training. As the student is initiated into Imagination, either before his preparation for Inspiration or simultaneously with it, he should actually be in a position to place an occurrence imaginatively before the soul with the same force as if it were in fact taking place.—If, therefore, in the course of long inner work the student ever again and again subjects himself to things and events, yet denies himself the corresponding “normal” feelings, a fertile ground for Inspiration will be created in his soul.—Just incidentally it might be noted here that he who is describing such training for Inspiration can fully appreciate possible objections against such a description from the standpoint of present-day culture. Not only can objections be made, but people may smile haughtily and say, “Inspiration cannot be pedantically taught; it is a natural gift of genius.” Yes, from the standpoint of modern culture, it may certainly seem almost comical to speak of a process that this culture will not admit to be explainable, but this culture is itself not conscious of how little it is able to think through its own thought processes to the end. Whoever would expect a disciple of this culture to believe that some more highly developed animal had not slowly evolved, but had appeared “suddenly,” would soon hear that a person cultured in the modern sense would not believe in such a “miracle.” Such a belief would be “superstition.” Now in the sphere of soul life, one with such modern education is himself but the victim of crass superstition simply in the style of his own opinions. By the same token, he will not recognise that a more fully developed soul must also have evolved, that it could not have sprung into existence suddenly as a gift of nature. Of course, externally, many a genius appears to have been born suddenly “out of nothing” in some mysterious way; but it appears so only for materialistic superstition; the spiritual scientist knows that the assessment of genius with respect to the life of a man born to this condition as if out of nothing is simply the result of his preparation for Inspiration during an earlier life on earth.—In the theoretical sphere, materialistic superstition is bad, but it is still worse in the practical sphere such as is concerned here. As it assumes that genius in the whole of the future must “fall from heaven,” it does not trouble itself about this “occult nonsense” or “fantastic mysticism” that speaks of preparation for Inspiration. In this way the superstition of the materialists retards the true progress of mankind. It does not see to it that the latent faculties are developed in man.

[ 8 ] In reality, precisely those who call themselves progressives and free-thinkers are often the enemies of true progress. But this, as noted, is but a casual remark, necessary because of the relationship of occult science to present-day culture.

[ 9 ] Now the soul powers that are stored up in the student's inner being by self-denial of “normal” feelings, as indicated above, are riches that would undoubtedly be transformed into Inspirations even if nothing else came to their aid, and the occult student would experience how true thought images arise in his soul, representing experiences in higher worlds. Progress would begin with the simplest experiences of supersensible events, and slowly more complicated and higher ones appear, if the student continued to live inwardly according to the suggested directions.—But in reality such occult training today would be entirely impractical, and nowhere is it carried out where work is undertaken earnestly. For, if the student wished to develop “out of himself” everything that Inspiration can give, he could undoubtedly “spin out” of himself all that has been said here, for example, about the nature of man, human life after death, the evolution of humanity and of the planets, and so forth. But such a student would need an immeasurably long time to do it. It would be, for example, as if a man would spin the whole of geometry out of himself, without regard for what had already been achieved in this realm before him. Certainly, in theory, it is fully possible. To carry it out in practice would be folly. Also, this is not the procedure in occult science, but through a teacher things are handed down that have been acquired for humanity by inspired predecessors. This tradition must for the present provide the basis for individual Inspiration. What is being offered today in literature and lectures out of the realm of occult science can absolutely provide such a basis for Inspiration. There are, for example, the teachings about the various component parts of man (physical body, ether body, astral body, and so forth), the knowledge concerning life after death pending a new incarnation, and everything that has been printed under the title, Cosmic Memory. In other words, it must be held fast at all points that Inspiration is needed for discovering and personally experiencing the higher truths, but not for understanding them. What is communicated in Cosmic Memory cannot at first be discovered without Inspiration. But once communicated, then it can be understood through wholly ordinary logical judgment. No one should assert that things are stated there that cannot be logically grasped without Inspiration. They are found inconceivable, not because of lack of Inspiration, but because they are not given sufficient reflective consideration.—If such communicated truths are received, they awaken Inspiration in the soul through their own strength. If sharing in such Inspiration is desired, however, the effort must be made not to receive this knowledge in a prosaic and matter-of-fact way, but to open oneself to be moved by the upswing of ideas into all possible feeling experiences. Why should this not be possible? Can feeling remain dull when overpowering cosmic occurrences pass before the spirit's gaze—how the Earth has developed out of Moon, Sun, and Saturn, or when the infinite depths of human nature are penetrated by a knowledge of man's ether and astral bodies, and so forth? One might almost say, “How regrettable,” for a person who can contemplate unmoved such edifices of thought. For if he did not regard them prosaically, but lived through all the tensions and relaxations of feeling that they make possible, all climaxes and crises, all progress and retrogression, all catastrophes and dispersions, then indeed would the mother substance be prepared in him for Inspiration itself. Certainly the necessary feeling life in the face of such communications from a higher world can be really unfolded only by exercises like those indicated above. Whoever turns all his feeling forces toward the outer world of sense perception will see narrations from a higher world as “arid concepts,” as “gray theory.” He will never be able to grasp why another finds the communications of occult science heartwarming, while his own heart remains cold to them. He will even say, “But this is only for the intellect; this is intellectual. I would like something for my whole well-being.” But he does not tell himself that it is his own fault if his heart remains cold.

[ 10 ] Many still undervalue the power of what lies already hidden in just these communications from a higher world, and in this connection they overvalue all kinds of other exercises and procedures. “What good is it to me,” they say, “to learn from others what the higher worlds look like? I want to see them for myself.” Such persons mostly lack the patience to concentrate over and over again upon such narrations from higher worlds. If they would do so, they would see what kindling force these “mere stories” have, and how one's own Inspiration is stimulated by hearing an account of the Inspirations of others.—Certainly other exercises must supplement mere “learning” if the student wishes to make rapid progress in the experience of the higher worlds, but no one should under-estimate the great significance precisely of “learning.” In any case no hope can be given that he will make rapid conquests in the higher worlds through any exercises whatever, unless he has at the same time set out to ponder incessantly upon the communications, purely narrative, that have been given from a competent quarter about the events and beings of the higher worlds.—Now that such communications are actually being presented in literature and in lectures, and so forth, and the first indications are also being given for the exercises leading to knowledge of higher worlds (as, for example, such indications as are presented in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment), it has now become possible to learn something of what formerly was communicated only in strictly guarded occult schools. As has been frequently mentioned, it is owing to the special conditions of our time that these things are and must be published. But also, on the other hand, it must be ever again emphasised that while it has thus been made easier to acquire occult knowledge, sure guidance through an experienced occult teacher is not yet to be completely dispensed with.

[ 11 ] Cognition through Inspiration leads men to the experience of processes in the invisible worlds, as, for instance, the evolution of man and that of the earth and its planetary embodiments. But when in these higher worlds not only processes, but being come under consideration, then must Intuition enter in as a mode of cognition. What occurs through such being is discerned through Imagination in pictures; laws and relationships, through Inspiration; if one would come face to face with the beings themselves, Intuition is needed.—How Inspiration becomes articulate in the world of Imaginations, how it permeates the latter as a “spiritual music” and so becomes the means of expression for the beings who are to be known through Intuition, will be explained later. Then also Intuition itself will be dealt with. Here it will merely be pointed out that what is designated as “Intuition” in occult science has nothing to do with the application of the word “intuition” in current popular usage. By this application is meant a more or less uncertain notion in contrast to clear cognition, logically arrived at through intellect or reason. In occult science, Intuition is nothing vague and uncertain, but a lofty mode of cognition, full of the most luminous clarity and the most indubitable certainty.

It is repeatedly emphasized that Theosophy is not something new, not something that has only come to mankind in our time. But it is particularly interesting that even personalities close to us face it in such a way that we may count them among the spirits we can call “Theosophists”. Alongside Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis and Lessing, Goethe appears as one of the most outstanding Theosophists. Some people, however, might object to this, because there is not much evidence of theosophy in Goethe's works that we know of. In Goethe's time, it was not yet possible to spread esoteric truths throughout the world. The “higher truths” were only disseminated in a limited society, for example, the Rosicrucians. No one who was not prepared was admitted into this society. But those who belonged to it spoke of it in all kinds of allusions. Thus Goethe at the most diverse places of his writings. Only those who are equipped with theosophical wisdom can read Goethe correctly. For example, “Faust” cannot be understood without that.

The “Fairy Tale” is Goethe's apocalypse, his revelation, in whose symbolic representation the deepest secrets are contained. That Goethe reveals his theosophical worldview in the “Fairy Tale” can only be understood if one knows the reason for it. Schiller had invited Goethe to collaborate on the “Horen”. Schiller himself had contributed the essay “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” to this journal. It poses the question: How does the person who lives in the everyday arrive at the highest ideals, at a mediation between the supersensible and the sensible? Schiller saw in beauty a descent of the highest wisdom into the sensible. He was able to express in a wonderfully vivid way what seemed to him to be a bridge leading from the sensual to the supersensual. Goethe now says that he cannot express himself in philosophical terms about the highest questions of existence, but he wants to do so in a great picture. At that time he contributed the “Fairytale” to the Horen, in which he attempted to solve these questions in his own way.

Goethe also expressed himself in a thoroughly theosophical sense elsewhere. He had already incorporated his views into “Faust” in his early youth. Between his studies in Leipzig and his stay in Strasbourg, Goethe received an initiation from a personality who was deeply initiated into the secrets of the Rosicrucians. From that time on, he speaks in a mystical, theosophical language. In the first part of “Faust” there is a strange phrase that is put in quotation marks: “the sage speaks”. Goethe was already attached to the theosophical idea that there are beings among us today who are already further along than the rest of humanity, that they are the leaders of people from supersensible spheres, although they are also embodied in the body. They have attained a knowledge that goes far beyond what can be understood with the senses. The passage in question reads:

Only now do I realize what the wise man says:
'The spiritual world is not closed,
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, disciple, unwearied,
Bathe the earthly breast in the morning light!

When you get to know Jacob Böhme, you get to know one of the sources from which Goethe drew his theosophical wisdom. [J. Boehme's “Aurora” is the dawn, the astral world.] We can only understand some of Goethe's work if we grasp it in this sense. In the poem “The Divine”, Goethe speaks of the law that we call karma, and also of those exalted beings:

According to eternal, ironclad
great laws
we must all
complete
our existence

Hail to the unknown,
higher beings
we sense!

If anyone now wants real proof of Goethe's theosophical way of thinking, let them read the poem under “God and the World”, called “Howard's Memorial”. The first line reads:

When Gottheit Camarupa high and lofty

— Kama Rupa is the principle of man, the astral body, as we know it from theosophical teachings. When Goethe spoke intimately to those with whom he was united in the lodge, he spoke of ideal divine beings who shine forth as examples for mankind. This was intended for his close circle, for example, what he says in the poem “Symbolum”:

From the other side
the voices of the spirits are calling you,
the voices of the masters
Do not neglect to practise
the forces of good.

He speaks openly of the masters when he speaks intimately to his fellow masons.

But it is the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily that most profoundly introduces us to his view. In it, we find a depiction of the three realms in which human beings live: the physical, the soul or astral world, and the spiritual world. The symbol for the astral or soul world is water. For Goethe, water always represents the soul. This is the case in his poem about the soul and fate:

Soul of man,
How like thou art to water!
Fate of man,
How like thou art to wind!

He also knew the mental realm that man experiences between two states of embodiment, between death and birth, the Devachan, the realm of the gods. Man strives unceasingly for this realm. He fights here on earth to reach this realm.

The alchemists regarded the chemical processes as a symbol for the striving for this spiritual realm. They call this realm: the realm of the lily. Man is called the lion who fights for this realm, and the lily is the bride of the lion. Goethe also hinted at this in “Faust”:

My father was a dark
man of honor who, in his own way, reflected on nature and its sacred circles
with sincerity, but in a whimsical way;
who, in the company of adepts,
locked himself in the black kitchen
and, according to endless recipes,
he poured together the adverse. Then a red lion, a bold suitor, was married to the lily in the lukewarm bath.

Here Goethe speaks of the marriage of man with the spirit (in the lukewarm bath is in the soul bath. The soul is the water, the red lion is the human being). In the “Fairytale”, Goethe also depicted the three realms: the sensual realm as the one bank; the soul realm as the river; the Devachan — spiritual realm — as the opposite bank, on which the garden of the beautiful lily is located, which symbolically represents the Devachan for the alchemists. Man's entire relationship to the three realms is brought into a symbolically beautiful presentation. We have come over from the spiritual realm and strive back to it. Goethe has a ferryman bring the will-o'-the-wisps from the spiritual realm to the sensual realm. The ferryman can bring everyone across, but not bring them back. We came over without our will, but we cannot go back the same way. We have to work our way back into the spiritual realm.

The will-o'-the-wisps live on gold. They absorb this gold. It penetrates their bodies. But they immediately throw it off in all directions. They want to throw the gold at the ferryman as a reward. But he says that the river cannot tolerate the gold; it would foam up wildly. Gold always represents wisdom. The will-o'-the-wisps are people who seek wisdom but do not unite with its essence, instead regurgitating it undigested. The river represents the soul's life, the sum of human instincts, drives, passions. If the gold of wisdom is carelessly thrown into the river of passions, the soul is disturbed, stirred up.

Goethe always pointed out that man must first undergo catharsis, purification, in order to become ripe for the reception of wisdom. For if wisdom is brought into unpurified passion, the passion becomes fanatical, and people then remain trapped in their lower ego. The ascent of Kama to Manas is dangerous if it is not connected with a sacrifice of the lower self. Regarding this, Goethe says in the “West-Eastern Divan”:

And so long as you do not have this,
this: Die and Become!
If you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

The human being must be willing to sacrifice himself.

The will-o'-the-wisps are still caught in the Ahamkara, in the lower self. Wisdom cannot tolerate this. The soul life must slowly be purified and slowly ascend. In the meadow, the will-o'-the-wisps throw gold around. There they meet the snake. It consumes the pieces of gold. It makes them one with itself. It has the power not to make its ego proud and selfish, not to strive upwards in a vertical, arrogant way, but to move in a horizontal line in the crevices of the rocks and gradually to attain perfection. A temple is depicted, which is located in the crevices of the earth. The snake has already been roaming back and forth through it, groping and sensing that mysterious beings dwell there.

But now the old man comes with the lamp. The snake has become luminous because of the gold. The temple is illuminated by its radiance. The old man's lamp has the property that it only shines where there is already light. There it shines with a very special light. So on the one hand there is the snake that has become luminous because of the gold, and on the other hand there is the man with the lamp, which also shines. The light on both sides makes everything visible in the temple. In the corners are four kings, a golden, a silver, a bronze and a mixed king. The snake could only find these by touching them before, but now they have become visible to it through their own glow. They are the three higher principles of man and the four lower ones. The iron king is Atma, the divine Self; the silver king is Budhi, the love through which man can communicate with all men; and the golden king is Manas, the wisdom that radiates out into the world and that can absorb this radiant wisdom.

When man has acquired wisdom unselfishly, he can see things in their true essence without the veil of Maya. The snake now clearly sees the three higher principles of man. The golden king is Manas, just as the gold everywhere signifies Manas. The four lower principles are represented, symbolized, by the mixed king. In the lower principles, too, Atma, Budhi and Manas have moved into the sphere of appearance, but disharmoniously. Only when it is purified does something develop that cannot exist in disharmony. The temple is the place of initiation, the secret school that only those who bring the light themselves, who are as selfless as the snake, can enter. The temple is to be revealed one day, rising above the river. It is the realm of the future, towards which we are all striving. The secret places of learning shall be led up. Everything that man is shall strive upwards, dissolve in harmony, strive towards the higher principles. What was once taught in the mysteries shall become an obvious secret. The wanderers shall go over and across the river, from the sensual to the supersensible world and back again. All people will be united in harmony.

The old man with the lamp represents where man can already gain knowledge today without having reached the summit of wisdom, namely through the powers of piety, of the mind, the powers of faith. Faith needs light from outside if it is to truly lead to the higher mysteries. The serpent and the old man with the lamp have the powers of the spirit, which already guide [the soul] today and lead into the future. He who already feels these powers today knows this from certain secrets. The old man therefore says that he knows three secrets. But the fourth secret is spoken of in the strangest way. The serpent hisses something in his ear. Then the old man calls out:

The time has come!

The time has come when a great multitude of people will have grasped which is the way. The serpent has said that it is ready to sacrifice itself. It has reached the point where it has recognized that the human being must first die in order to become:

And so long as you do not have this,
this: Die and become!
If you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

To be in the full sense of the word, man can only through love, devotion, sacrifice. The snake is ready for that. This will be revealed when man is ready for this sacrifice. Then the temple will stand by the river. The will-o'-the wisp have not been able to pay off their debt; they had to promise the ferryman to pay it later. The river only takes the fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three onions, three artichokes. The will-o'-the wisp come to the old man's wife and behave very strangely there. They have licked up the gold from the walls. They want to stuff themselves full of wisdom and give it back. The pug dog eats some of the gold and dies, as all living things must perish from it. It cannot absorb the wisdom as the snake absorbs and transforms it, so it has a killing effect. The old woman has to promise the will-o'-the-wisps to pay off her debt to the ferryman.

When the old man comes home with the lamp, he sees what has happened. He tells the old woman to keep her promise, but also to take the dead pug to the beautiful lily because she brings everything dead back to life. The old woman goes to the ferryman with the basket. There she encounters two strange things. She finds the great giant on the way, who has the peculiarity of letting his shadow cross the river in the evening, so that the traveler can then cross the river on his shadow. In addition, the path over is conveyed when the snake arches over at midday. The giant can mediate the transition, but so can the snake when the sun is at its highest, when man elevates his ego to the divine through the shining sun of knowledge. In the solemn moments of life, in the moments of complete selflessness, man unites with the deity.

The giant is the rough physical development that man must go through. He also comes into the realm of the beyond through this; but only in the twilight, when his consciousness is extinguished. But this is a dangerous path, taken by those who develop psychic powers within themselves, who put themselves into a trance state. This transition happens in the twilight of the trance state. Schiller also once wrote about the shadow of the giant. These are the dark forces that lead man over.

When the old woman passes the giant, the giant steals a cabbage head, an onion and an artichoke, so that the old woman only has part of them, which she wants to use to pay off the debt of the will-o'-the-wisps. The number three is therefore no longer complete. What we need and have to weave into our soul life is taken away from us by the twilight forces. There is something dangerous in giving oneself to these. The lower forces must be purified by the soul. Only then can the body ascend when the soul fully absorbs it. Everything that surrounds an inner core in the form of shells is a symbol for the human being's shells. Indian allegory refers to these shells as the leaves of the lotus flower. The human physical nature must be purified in the soul. We have to pay off, surrender the lower principles to the soul life. We have expressed the paying off of the debt in the fact that the river has to be paid off. That is the whole process of karma.

Since the river is not satisfied with the payment of the old woman, she has to dip her hand into the river. After that, she can only feel the hand, but no longer see it. That which is external and sensual to us humans, what is visible about a person, is the body; it must be purified by the soul life. This symbolizes that if a person cannot atone for it in the nature of the plant, he must commit a guilt. Then the actual physical nature of the person becomes invisible. Because the old woman cannot atone for her guilt, she becomes invisible. The I can only be seen in the splendor of the day when it is purified by the soul life. The old woman says: Oh, my hand, which is the most beautiful thing about me. It is precisely that which distinguishes man from the animal, that which shines through him as spirit, becomes invisible if he has not purified it through karma.

The beautiful youth had aspired to the realm of the lily – spirituality – and the beautiful lily had paralyzed him. By this, Goethe means the ancient truth that man must first be purified, must first have undergone catharsis, so that he no longer reaches wisdom through guilt, so that he can absorb the splendor of higher spirituality within himself. The youth had not yet been prepared by the purification. All living things that are not yet ripe are killed by the lily. All dead things that have gone through the “Stirb und Werde” are revived by the lily. Goethe now says that one is ripe for freedom who has first freed himself within. Jakob Böhme also says that man must develop out of the lower principles.

He who does not die before he dies
Will perish if he dies.

Man must first mature, must first be purified before he can enter the realm of the spirit, the lily. In the ancient mysteries, man had to pass through stages of purification before he could become a mystic. The youth must first pass through these stages. They lead him to the lily.

The snake signifies development. We see those who are seeking the new path, all those who are striving towards spirituality, gathered around the lily. But first the temple must rise above the river. All move towards the river, the will-o'-the-wisps in front; they unlock the gate. Selfish wisdom is the bridge to selfless wisdom. Through the self, wisdom leads to selflessness. The snake has sacrificed itself. Now one understands what love is, a sacrifice of the lower self for the good of humanity, full brotherhood.

The entire assembly moves towards the temple. The temple rises above the river. The youth is resurrected. He is endowed with Atma, Budhi and Manas. Atma, in the form of the brazen king, steps before the youth and hands him the sword. It is the highest will, not mixed with the others. Atma should work in man so that the sword is on the left and the right is free. Before that, man works in particularity, the war of all against all. But now, when man is purified, peace will take the place of struggle, the sword on the left for protection, the right free to do good.

The second king represents what is known to us as the second principle, as the Budhi – piety, mind, through which man turns to the Highest in faith. Silver is the symbol of piety. The second king says:

Feed the sheep,

because we are dealing here with the power of the mind. The appearance here is the appearance of beauty. Goethe associated a religious reverence with art. He saw in art the revelation of the divine, the realm of beautiful appearance is the realm of piety. The brazen king signifies – without the lower principles – power, the silver king peace, the golden king wisdom. He says:

Recognize the Supreme.

The youth is the four-principled man who develops into the higher principles. The four principles are paralyzed by the spirit before they have undergone the purifying development. Then the three higher principles work in harmony in man. Then he will be strong and powerful; then he may marry the lily. This is the marriage between the soul and the spirit of man. The soul has always been represented as something feminine; the mystery of the eternal, the immortal, is presented here.

The eternal feminine draws us up.

Goethe used the same image here in the “Fairytale”, when the young man marries the beautiful lily.

Now all that is alive passes over the vaulting bridge from the sacrificed human self. Wayfarers pass over and across. All the kingdoms are now connected in beautiful harmony. The old woman is rejuvenated, as is the old man with the lamp; the old has passed away and everything has become new. The ferryman's small hut is now included in the temple in a silver-plated state as a kind of altar. What unconsciously took man across before now takes him across in the conscious state. The composite king has collapsed. The jack-o'-lanterns licked out the gold, for they are still directed towards the low. The giant now indicates the time. What used to be the sensual principle, what led across in the twilight hour, what is sensual, what belongs to the state of nature, now indicates the evenly passing time. As long as man has not developed the three higher principles, the past and the future are in conflict. The giant can then only work in an inharmonious way. Now time has become something harmonious in this ideal state.

The thought fastens that which fluctuates in a lasting way, which is expressed in the following words:

And that which floats in fluctuating appearance
is fastened with lasting thoughts.

What is seen in the Pythagorean school as the rhythm of the universe, the music of the spheres, the sounding of the planets that move rhythmically around the sun, arises through the realization of the divine thought. For the mystic, a planet was a being of a higher order. This is why Goethe also says:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In the singing of the spheres,
And completes its prescribed journey
With a thunderclap.

That man has the ability within himself to develop to the highest divine, he says in the words:

If the eye were not like the sun,
It could never behold the sun;
If the power of God were not in us,
How could we, being divine, be enraptured?

In the course of these lectures, I have often emphasized that it is quite natural, as a matter of course, that from the point of view of the majority of people today, objections about objections must be raised against spiritual science. But I also emphasized in the lecture I gave here on the question of immortality from the point of view of spiritual science that genuine. Spiritual Science wants nothing to do with what is all too often done in its name, but that it is in complete harmony with natural science. But it is also in complete harmony with what a healthy philosophy has to say. Since this is noteworthy for our consideration today, I would like to emphasize this harmony with philosophical thinking in a few introductory remarks.

What spiritual science always has to assert is not based on philosophical speculation, but on what has been called the inner experience, the inner experience of spiritual facts; it has to assert the independence, the self-contained nature of the human soul — to put it more popularly: that the human being has a spiritual-soul existence that goes beyond the physical-bodily. I said that this is entirely consistent with a healthy philosophy based on scientific principles, because many people, from the way of thinking of our time, perceive such an assertion as the extreme of all unscientificness. It is easy to say from a scientific point of view: How can one speak of the human soul as something independent when physiologists show that everything is dependent on what develops physically in the human being. We see how, when a part of the brain is injured, disturbances occur immediately due to the loss of a part of the brain functions. Must we not be led to the thought that the soul activities lie in the normally behaving nervous system or brain? One can point out how mental abilities grow with the adolescent human being, how in old age, when the external system withers, hardens, mental abilities decrease and so on. On the basis of such observations, many a train of thought could be formed that would have to suggest the idea that spiritual experience basically consists in nothing other than the activity of the nervous system and the rest of the organism. Let us hear what an astute philosopher, Otto Liebmann, whom I have mentioned in my book “Riddles of Philosophy,” has to say about this. He is not one of those who make assertions based on superficial thinking, but rather he states what the facts of the analysis of human thought are capable of providing. He deals with the belief that the human soul exists only in the physical, and says remarkable words, corresponding to a sharp-witted philosophy that coincides with the current state of natural science. In summary, he says: It is by no means certain what Munk and others have established regarding the dependence of mental activity on the brain, because, for example, an injured part of the brain can be replaced by other functions. But if we had reached our goal, then in principle nothing would have changed. That is to say, modern philosophy says that no matter how far one advances in the study of the connection between the soul and the physical, one can only know that one must use certain internal organs in order to think, feel and will. We can draw the parallel that we need certain parts of the brain for the soul, just as we use the hand to grasp. But when we use this hand to grasp, the mechanical action of the hand is added to the soul. We cannot speak of the soul actions of the brain in this way. However, this is only because the investigations of natural science are not complete. As it moves forward to prove the connection between the physical and the soul, it will find that there is a different connection between thinking, feeling, willing and the nervous system than between the hand and grasping. It will find that they are connected in the same way as the imprints that feet make in soft soil are connected to the soil.

What specifically can be found in the brain can be derived from the soul's activity, just as footsteps can be derived from feet on the earth. Just as there could be no connection between walking and footprints without solid ground, so it is with everything that is done in the physical body. Everything that a person thinks and wills leaves an imprint in the nervous system in the physical body; but it does not emerge from it, any more than footprints emerge from the earth. One needs the physical body as a surface for resistance, just as one needs solid earth to walk on. Therefore it is self-evident that one must find imprints. It is a scientifically legitimate endeavor to find them; but it is unscientific to want to extract from the physical what has been impressed by the soul-spiritual. In this respect, Liebmann's assertion is false. The imprint is only the accompanying phenomenon of the soul-spiritual. It is precisely this that natural science will prove in the most eminent sense by its means; it will show how one can follow the traces, but will not want to explain them from within the organism. Natural science is already on this path; today, full-fledged proof of this could be provided. Spiritual science does not dispute any of the facts of natural science; spiritual science fully recognizes natural science. It only rebels against the unwarranted claim of the natural scientists to be doing something that they themselves do not know about — against the despotism of the scientists. This goes even further. One could almost grasp how they are driving individual philosophers into what spiritual science wants to present, following on directly from the example already given by Otto Liebmann. What he says is exemplary in terms of acumen and dissection. He says that someone might say that a hen's egg contains not only egg white and yolk but also a ghost; that it embodies itself, pecks open the shell, runs out and immediately pecks up the scattered grains. One could understand that someone would take this as a joke. But Otto Liebmann certainly does not mean it as a joke. He continues by saying that there is no reason to object to this, except that the preposition “in” must be understood not spatially but metaphysically. Understood in this way, it is quite correct, says Otto Liebmann. The fact is that an astute philosopher must admit: one cannot object to the statement that a chicken egg contains not only yolk and egg white, but also an invisible ghost that materializes. Otto Liebmann does not believe, however, that one should form a worldview immediately after reading a few books, but wants to carefully consider how one sets one's thinking in motion. From the spiritual science lectures, one can see how what Otto Liebmann addresses here as a “ghost” that materializes is present in the human being himself as a supersensible being.

Today I cannot talk about the methods that are used to detach the soul and spiritual from the physical and bodily, and to discover something in thinking of which one knows nothing in ordinary life; likewise to discover something underlying the will and feeling, of which the will and feeling are only an impression. For the spiritual researcher, what Otto Liebmann describes here in theory in regard to the chicken egg can become an inner experience for the human being. Spiritual science will not claim that it can present it ghost-like, for instance in a halo of light, to the physical eye; if it did so, it would be a physical and not a spiritual experience. But it can be realized consciously, just as the experience is mediated by the bodily in everyday life, but only by detaching oneself from the bodily. Otto Liebmann sensed that the bodily is based on a spiritual. Spiritual science proceeds by showing how the spiritual-soul methods lead to developing the consciousness of what Otto Liebmann speaks of. This consciousness can be developed. Just as the outer, sensory world becomes an object for ordinary consciousness, so too, when a person frees their soul and spirit, they become an object themselves: they look at themselves from the outside.

It could be objected that one would then claim to be in harmony with philosophy, but it remains to be seen whether Otto Liebmann would accept these musings or declare them to be just that – musings. But suppose that in the time when the telephone was yet to be discovered, one physicist had spoken to another about it, and the other had said that it was impossible. Does that mean that the telephone as we know it today is not in line with what physics was at that time? This is how it is with spiritual science. With a way of judging as suggested, one would be forced to fight against all human progress from the prejudices of a once adopted point of view.

Man can truly free himself from the physical body. From this point of view, some light will be shed on the mysteries of sleep and death. When man frees himself from the physical body, he enters a state in which he can see through his entire humanity as it is in the physical world. Only now is true self-knowledge possible. Only now do you become an object, like the hydrogen that is otherwise in the water only becomes an object when it is released by the chemist. Now you are able to relate this new insight to states of consciousness that cannot be related to each other in ordinary everyday consciousness: the experience of being awake in relation to the experience of being asleep.

When a person is absorbed in sleep, the spiritual and mental have stepped out of the physical. Otto Liebmann's “ghost” temporarily detaches itself from the physical, and a purely spiritual-soul relationship is established between the state as one gains it through spiritual development and the state of sleep; a relationship as between what I am now experiencing and a memory of what I once experienced. As I look at what I once experienced, so I look at the state of sleep and find that the spiritual and soul-life is outside the physical and bodily from the moment I fall asleep until I wake up. One must connect with it spiritually and mentally. So one overlooks the two parts of human nature, the physical body that has remained in bed and that which has left, just as one overlooks hydrogen and oxygen when they have been separated from water. But even more: one sees that what has remained as corporeality is indeed a duality, namely the physical body and that which prevents it from following its own chemical laws, which makes it a living being; this is the etheric body – the word is not important – a finer body of forces. The word etheric body should not be pressed; it has nothing to do with what is called ether in physics today.

What goes out during sleep, namely the word used for it, can be ridiculed. Let people ridicule. What goes out is the astral, the actual soul body and the I. So we have the fourfold human nature before us: on the one hand the bodily and the etheric, on the other the soul, in which the I-nature is embedded, as it were. In ordinary sleep, the I is not able to produce consciousness because, at the present stage of humanity, it is developing its I-activity in connection with the bodily-physical. You can't walk on air either, and just as little can the I-consciousness develop without the resistance of the bodily-physical; it develops from it. In sleep it does not find this resistance and therefore cannot come to consciousness. It develops a dull consciousness; but this is only a paradoxical expression, since it does not come to consciousness.

Likewise, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, the soul body is continuously active. We could compare it to the way we are active when we think about something that happened some time ago. Its activity is a reverberation of what it has experienced in the etheric and physical body. We can imagine the meaning of this reverberation as follows: We think, feel and want in our waking hours with our etheric body, which offers resistance within the physical body. That is, only the thoughts that reflect the effect of the etheric body resonate. Because we are so active in the etheric body, we imprint the after-effects on it: what we think during the day is impressed on it. But the ether body offers resistance; it has its own inner movements. It is these that constitute the life that permeates the physical body. By forcing into it what is carried out in our thinking, we impose something alien on it; after all, its primary purpose is to convey life. Because of the tensions that arise between the ether body's two activities, the astral body cannot absorb what has been imprinted on it. During sleep, it resonates with what we ourselves have pushed into our ether body during the day; it is like a memory of what we have thought, felt and willed during the day. Thus we can say that the human being cannot develop consciousness in relation to his ego during sleep, but that the astral body resonates with everything that has taken place in us during the day through the activity of the soul. This activity of the astral body cannot come to consciousness either; for if it continued for a long time, it would intensify to such an extent that we would become fully conscious of it every morning, with a clear memory of what had been forced into the astral body. We do not have to visualize all the individual acts we have performed during the day, but rather the activity of thinking, feeling and willing. By exercising these, we give the astral body a structure, a general imprint – not through the individual acts – in which it resonates. Then, in the morning, we have, in the image suggested, we can say, in what we experienced the day before, not in thinking, feeling, willing, something new. We would overlook this if the astral body did not have to develop the urge to return to the physical and ether bodies, that is, to wake up. The highest tension leads us to submerge into the physical body. Otherwise, one should be able to draw out, at least for a very short time, the force that one has to leave behind in the physical body and in what is called the etheric body during sleep. In what can be called the real, spiritual view, one actually revives what can be called the unconscious power of the etheric body, making it flash. One must then wait for the moments when the etheric body also detaches itself during waking life; it is like a blood pulsation: the etheric body is first more intimately connected to the physical body – and then withdraws. By using such moments, one gains consciousness of the etheric body for a brief moment. Then the supersensible consciousness flashes: one is in the spiritual world and can ask questions in it.

We see what an intimate process underlies it. What really happens is like something that flits by. If you want to put it into scientific forms, what remains is like a memory, like a memory of dreams that flit by. Therefore, in spiritual science one does not arrive at success by stringing together conclusion after conclusion on what one already has. It is not a logical recollection, not a thinking, but a growth arises through such fleeting moments. Therefore, the spiritual researcher, when writing down what he gains in this way, cannot proceed as one who describes from memory. He cannot, for instance, claim that a lecture he is giving for the twelfth time will be easier because it is fixed in his memory. If one really wants to be honest, in spiritual science one cannot allow anything to become fixed in one's memory; rather, one must always speak anew out of the inner work of the soul, not out of memory. That is why a lecture is as new the fourteenth or fifteenth time as it was the first time. It is much more a deliberate performance, a continuous active process in the soul that develops activity. Therefore, in the case of an honest spiritual presentation, the person who presents something from direct contact with the spiritual world will try to shape the words anew each time. It is precisely for this reason that only inner, genuine honesty can lead to the presentation of spiritual science. It is said that anyone who wants to lie must have a good memory. The spiritual researcher, on the other hand, must be imbued with honesty to the highest degree. He must not color; then what he says will already correspond to what he does not need to remember in the ordinary way. But the way of remembering of ordinary consciousness cannot be applied. |

Through such insight into the structure of the human being, one sees through the nature of sleep. In Vienna, I described this process as the separation between the physical and etheric bodies on the one hand, and the astral body and the I on the other. This is only to be understood relatively; relationships remain and are established. While the astral body, as it were, resonates in its feeling back, it encounters the ether body in its ordinary experience, and in this way, what it would experience purely is mixed with what happens in ordinary life, and dreams arise. They are chaotic or more or less lawful, even prophetic, mixed with what can happen in ordinary life. If Schopenhauer had not judged merely from the ordinary philosophical point of view, he would not have seen the world merely as will and representation; but he would have seen that the representation can be condensed in itself, that one can soul-spiritual can be consciously experienced in it as spiritual, and that what he sees as will in the human organism pours out into the whole environment and is revealed for the spiritualization of the entire world. In the astral body, that which makes a person more at the end of the day than at the beginning resonates. The same occurs in all of life. To understand this, let us think of a plant and the ripening seed; let us let this image take effect on us. But that remains in the etheric body; the astral body only resonates. But it takes the ether body with it through the gate of death: and now, drawn out of the physical body, the astral body can develop full consciousness together with the ego; it is now suddenly imbued with the life-force of the ether body, and consciousness emerges. But then, when it is so animated – because the etheric body is actually the provider of life for the physical body and cannot serve for more – when the extract is drawn from it, so to speak, what only maintains the life functions is expelled into the rest of the etheric world. Through the spiritually held consciousness, which arises from the impetus of the astral body and the ego on the extract of the ether body, the human being must first struggle until he comes to the use of the new consciousness, in which he spends the time between death and a new birth. During this time, the human being accomplishes a great deal. We can only gain insights into the length of time that passes if we consider the individual human life in the context of all earthly lives. Then we can see what attracted him to the earth, what led him from the spiritual realm to this life; the forces that led the human being down have thus found their conclusion, their goal. Meanwhile, the earth must have changed so much that the person can experience something new. Therefore, it takes centuries for a person to gather his strength to descend into a new life on earth.

In the time between death and a new birth, one must also imagine two alternating states of inner experience. In everyday life we have waking and sleeping; in the time between death and a new birth, there are alternating periods, successive states of inner activity and of isolation from the spiritual environment, where one knows nothing of the spiritual environment but inwardly lives out what one has previously absorbed in it. These experiences are like a mighty inner image arising from within oneself. Then again, one is completely absorbed in the spiritual worlds and incorporated into them.

One can assume a spiritual center in the time between death and a new birth. In the first half, what has newly begun in the last life on earth is processed; in the second half, what is taken up is what makes the spiritual-soul permeate the physical person in a new life on earth.

What is presented as spiritual science only appears to contradict natural science. In the future, spiritual research into the values of human life will advance in the same way as the physical sciences do in their own field. Spiritual science still appears to many to be a fantasy because they shrink from the strict mental work and mental discipline it demands. Many would like to arrive at spiritual science by easier means than are possible. They do not want to take the difficult step, which consists in a further development of consciousness. The progress of chemistry can be utilized without being a chemist; in the same way the results of spiritual research can be appropriated. And even if one cannot engage in spiritual research oneself, one should at least endeavor to cast aside one's prejudices. But many would like to arrive at spiritual science by a more comfortable route than by overcoming their prejudices, and then use it primarily for their own benefit in life. Misunderstanding of spiritual science is the result of such an attitude.

Natural science will increasingly reveal itself not as the source of answers but as a field that poses questions in new ways. The answers will then come from spiritual science – the answer that Faust craves:

Mysterious in broad daylight
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil,
And what she may not reveal to your mind,
You cannot force from her with levers and with screws.

You cannot penetrate its inner workings with levers and screws. You have to illuminate it with the light and power of the soul.

The Old Initiation Centers. The Human Form as the Subject of Meditation.

Yesterday we spoke of the mysterious connection between the earlier evolutionary conditions of our earth and the various world-conceptions of the successive post-Atlantean periods. The remarkable fact emerged that when the Atlantean catastrophe had altered the face of the earth, the holy pre-Vedic Indian culture, in its philosophical conceptions, showed something like a mirror-picture of the events that, in the beginning of the, earth's evolution, took place in that remote past when sun, moon, and earth were still united. What the eye of the spirit beheld at that time was nothing but a spiritually conceived form of what actually existed when our earth stood at the beginning of its evolution.

The second condition of the earth, when the sun had detached itself but earth and moon still formed one body, came to light during the second cultural period, the old Persian, as a philosophic-religious system in the opposition of the light-principle in the sun-aura to the principle of darkness, the opposition of Ormuzd to Ahriman. The third period, the Egyptian-Babylonian-Assyrian, is a spiritual reflection of what took place when earth, sun, and moon had become three bodies. We also pointed out that the trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus reflected the third epoch's astral trinity of sun, earth, and moon.

This separation occurred in the Lemurian time. After this followed the Atlantean time, the fourth evolutionary condition of the earth, in which there prevailed conditions of consciousness entirely different from those of today. Through these different forms of consciousness man lived with the gods, he was acquainted with the gods who were later named Wotan, Balder, Thor, Zeus, Apollo, etc. These were beings whom the Atlantean man could perceive with his clairvoyance. We have a repetition of the Atlantean perception of divine-spiritual beings in the memory of the peoples of the Greco-Latin time, and also among the peoples of northern Europe. It was a memory of the experiences of earlier conditions of consciousness. Be it Wotan or Zeus, be it Mars, Hera, or Athena, all were a memory of the spirit-forms of that old world of gods.

Today we must gradually penetrate a little more into the souls of the ancient Indian, Persian, and Egyptian cultures. If we want to form a true picture of the religious experiences of these ancient cultures, we must bear in mind that, the most important parts of the population among these ancient peoples, including the seers, prophets, and enlightened persons, were successors of men who had already lived in the Atlantean time. Furthermore, it was by no means the case that the whole of Atlantean culture was destroyed immediately after the great catastrophe; on the contrary, what remained was gradually carried over and planted into the new time. We will best understand the souls of the post-Atlantean descendants if we steep ourselves in the soul-life of the last Atlanteans.

In the latter Atlantean time men were different one from another, some having retained a high degree of clairvoyant ability. This faculty did not vanish suddenly, but was still present in many of the men who took part in the great migration from west to east. In others, however, it had already disappeared. There were advanced persons and retarded persons and, in accordance with the whole nature of evolution at that time, we can understand that the least advanced were those who were the most clairvoyant, for in a certain way they had remained stationary and had preserved the old Atlantean character. The most advanced were those who had already achieved a physical perceiving of the world, thus approaching our form of day-consciousness. It was they who, ceased to see the spiritual world clairvoyantly at night, and who during their waking hours saw objects with sharper contours. That little handful of whom we have already spoken, who were led by the greatest initiate (generally known as Manu¹ ) and his pupils deep into Asia and thence fructified the other cultures, just this handful, being composed of the most advanced men of that time, first lost the ancient gift of clairvoyance for the ordinary relationships of life. For them the true day-consciousness, in which we see physical objects sharply contoured, became ever clearer. Their great leader led this group farthest into Asia, so that they could live in isolation; otherwise they would have come too closely in touch with other peoples who still preserved the old clairvoyance. Only because they remained separated from other peoples for a time could they grow into a new type of man. A colony was established in inner Asia, whence the great cultural streams could flow into the most varied peoples.

Northern India was the first country to receive its new cultural current from this center. It has already been pointed out that these little groups of cultural pioneers nowhere found un-populated territory. Earlier still, before their great migration from west to east, there had been other wanderings, and whenever new stretches of land rose from the sea, they were peopled by the wanderers. The persons sent out from this colony in Asia had to mix with other peoples, all of whom were more backward than they who had been led by Manu. Among these other peoples were many persons who had retained the old clairvoyance.

It was not the custom of the initiates to establish colonies as this is done today; they colonized in a different way. They knew that they had to start with the souls of the persons whom they met in the lands that were to be colonized. The emissaries did not impose what they had to say. They reckoned with what they found. A balance was reached that took into account the needs of the old inhabitants. This reckoned with their religious views, which were based on the memory of earlier epochs, and also with the old clairvoyant disposition. So it was natural that only a handful of the most advanced could develop true concepts. The great masses could form only ideas that were a sort of compromise between the old Atlantean and the post-Atlantean attitudes. Therefore, we find in all these countries, in India, in Persia, in Egypt, whenever the different post-Atlantean cultures appeared, religious ideas which for that age are less advanced, less cultivated; which are nothing but a sort of continuation of the old Atlantean ideas.

To understand what kind of conceptions really appeared in these folk-religions we must form a picture of them. We must transport ourselves into the souls of the last Atlantean population. We must bear in mind that in the Atlantean time man was not unconscious at night, but that he could then perceive just as he perceived by day—if we can speak at all of night or day in that time. By day he perceived the first traces of what we today so clearly see as the world of sense-perceptions. By night he was the companion of the divine spiritual beings. He needed no proof of the existence of gods, just as we today need no proof of the existence of minerals. The gods were his companions; he himself was a spiritual being during the night. In his astral body and ego he wandered about the spiritual world. He was himself a spirit and he met beings who were of like nature with himself.

Naturally, man did not meet only these higher spiritual beings. He also met beings lower than those who were later known as Wotan, Zeus, etc. These were the choicest figures, but by no means the only ones. It was like seeing kings and emperors to day. Many do not see them, yet still believe that there are kings and emperors.

In this state, which was common to everyone, man perceived the surrounding objects in a way different from his perception today. This was true even while he was conscious during the day. We must try to understand what this consciousness of the latter Atlanteans was.

We have described how the divine beings became imperceptible to man when he dived down into his physical body in the morning. He saw objects as though they were surrounded by mist. These were the images of his waking day at that time. But these pictures had another remarkable property, which we must grasp clearly. Let us suppose that such a man approached a pond. He did not see the water in the pond so clearly defined as we do today, but when he directed his attention to it he experienced something quite different. In approaching the pond a feeling arose in him, merely through looking at it, that was like a taste of what lay before him physically, without his having to drink the water. Simply through looking at it he would have felt that the water was sweet or salty. It was not at all like our seeing water today. We see only the surface and do not penetrate into the inner qualities. But while a dim clairvoyance still prevailed, the man who approached the pond had no alien feeling toward it. He felt himself as being within the properties of the water; he did not stand over against the object as we do; it was as though he could penetrate into the water.

If we had encountered a block of salt at that time, we would have noticed its taste as we approached it. Today we must lick it before we perceive what was then given through mere sight. Man was, as it were, within the whole, and he perceived things as though they were ensouled. He perceived beings that imparted a salty taste to the block. Everything was ensouled for him; air, earth, water, fire. Everything revealed something to him. He could feel himself into the interior of objects; he experienced their inner essence. Nothing appeared to him as a soulless object in the modern way. Therefore man felt everything with sympathy and antipathy because he saw its inner nature. He felt, he experienced, the inner being of the objects.

Memories of these experiences remained everywhere. The parts of the Indian population encountered by the colonists had such a relation to things. They knew that souls lived in things. They had preserved the ability to see the properties of things. Let us bear in mind this whole relationship of men to things. At that time man could perceive how the water tasted as he approached the pond. There he saw a spiritual being, who gave the water its taste. He could meet this spiritual being during the night if he lay down by the water and fell asleep. By day he saw the material; by night he saw what lived in things. By day he saw stones, plants, and animals, he heard the wind blow and the waters roar; by night he saw within himself, in its true form, what he only sensed by day—the spirits that live in all things. When he said that spirits live in the minerals, in the plants, in the water, in the clouds, in the wind, this was for him no poetic license, no mere fantasy, but something that he could see.

We must live, deeply into these souls in order to understand them. Then we understand what dreadful folly it is when our scholars speak of animism and allege that it is the “folk-imagination” that ensouls and personifies things. There is no such folk-imagination. One who really knows the folk does not speak in this way. Repeatedly we find this singular analogy; just as a child, bumping against a table, strikes the table in revenge because (so say the scholars) it thinks of the table as having a soul, so did the primeval man in his childishness ensoul the objects of nature, such as the trees. This is repeated ad nauseam. Certainly there is imagination here, but it is the imagination of the scholars rather than of the folk. It is the scholars who are dreaming. Those who originally saw everything as ensouled were not dreaming; they only reported what they actually saw.

As a sort of remnant, this kind of perception emerged among the ancient peoples as a memory. But the error in the above analogy is that the child does not see the table as ensouled; he does not yet feel a soul in himself, but regards himself as a lump of wood. Feeling himself soulless, he places himself on the same level as the soulless table that he bangs. The fact is just the opposite of what we read in the learned books. Whether we look at India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, or any other place, we find everywhere the same images that were described above, and into these images was poured the culture that was given out by the old initiates.

In ancient India the Rishis guided the culture. We must try to understand something of what gave the impulse to a form that developed into one of the most important forms of the Indian outlook. We know that in all ages there have been so-called mystery schools, where those who could develop their spiritual faculties learned to see more deeply into the world-all, awakening the slumbering faculties so as to see the spiritual connections of things. From these mystery-places proceeded the spiritual impulses of the various cultures. In order really to understand the initiates, we usually consider them as they were in post-Atlantean times, since their nature at that time is most easily comprehensible. But in Atlantis we could encounter something similar to initiate-schools. In order to understand them thoroughly, let us examine the methods of such an ancient Atlantean initiation-school.

If we go back to those times, we find that the above-described conditions of consciousness prevailed and also that man did not then have his present shape. He had quite a different form.² Let us go back to the first half of the Atlantean period. Man consisted already of physical, etheric, and astral bodies, plus the ego, but the physical body still looked quite different. We might compare it with the bodies of certain sea-animals, transparent, hardly to be seen, although laced with luminous threads in certain directions. It was much softer than today, having as yet no bones. It is true that there was already cartilage in some parts, but in these ancient times the physical body was definitely not of its present form.

The etheric body was a much more important member. The physical body was then more or less the same size as now, but the etheric body was extraordinarily large. This etheric body varied among individuals, but one could perceive four different types. One part of mankind would resemble one type, another part another. These four types may be designated by the names of the apocalyptic beasts: bull, lion, eagle, man. It would not be correct to imagine that these beasts were exactly similar to the present animals, but the impression that they made reminds us of these. The impressions that the etheric bodies made can be understood through the picture of a lion, bull, eagle, or man. We can compare with the bull the portion of mankind that gave the impression of having powerful reproductive forces or an unusual appetite. Another portion lived more in the spiritual; these were the eagle men, who felt less at home in the physical world. Then there were men in whom the etheric body was already similar to the present-day physical body; it was not quite identical, but it was like the human form. However, we must not imagine that each man represented only one type; all four types would show some traces in each person, but one or another would predominate.

Such were the etheric bodies of the Atlantean population. As to the astral body, it was especially powerful but largely undeveloped, while the ego was still wholly outside of man. People were entirely different at that time from today. Naturally, some men matured earlier and assumed the ultimate form before the others, but in the main one can describe the men of that time as we have just done. This was the normal condition of the average man.

It was entirely different with the more advanced persons, with the pupils of the mystery-places, who strove after the initiation of the ancient Atlantis. Let us enter in spirit such a center of initiation and try to picture what the teacher had to give. First, what was this teacher himself?

If one meets an initiate today, there is nothing in his general appearance by which he can be recognized. Few persons would recognize him today. The initiate must live in a physical body, and the physical body has developed a long way; hence it differs from others only in certain inner refinements. At that time, however, the initiate was vastly different from other men. The others still had a more animal-like form; the physical body was small in comparison with the gigantic etheric bodies, forming a clumsy animal-like mass. The initiate differed from these in that his physical body was more similar to the modern formation; his countenance was similar to that of modern man, and he had a forebrain such as that of the average man of today. His brain was highly developed, which was not true of other men at that time. These initiates had their schools, into which they admitted pupils who, having proved themselves mature and sufficiently developed, were selected out of the ordinary run of men by special methods.

We must bear one thing in mind if we wish fully to understand what follows. We must realize that in the course of time the power of man's spiritual members over his physical body has almost completely disappeared. The man of today has a certain degree of control over his body. He can move his arms and legs, pedal on bicycles, and exercise some command over his physiognomy, but this is only a last meager remnant of the mastery over the physical body that obtained in ancient Atlantean times. In those days the thoughts and feelings had a much greater influence over the physical body. If today a person were to concentrate for weeks, months, or even years on a certain thought, only in exceptional cases would this influence more than the etheric body. Seldom would the physical body be influenced by a meditation. If, for example, someone should succeed by this means in making his brain move further forward, thus working even on the bones of his forehead, this would be an astounding achievement. Very, very seldom does this happen today. Extraordinary energy would have to be developed today for a thought to work on the physical body. It is easier to affect the blood-circulation or the breathing, but even this is difficult. Thoughts can work on the etheric body today, and in the next incarnation they will have worked so powerfully as to alter the external physical structure. Man should work today in the knowledge that he is working not for one incarnation but for many incarnations to come. The soul is eternal; it continually returns.

Things were different in the ancient initiation schools. Thinking had such mastery there that it could influence the physical body in a comparatively short time. The pupil of the mysteries could mold his own organization until it resembled the human. One could accept a pupil out of the normal run of men and had only to give him the right impulse. The pupil himself did not have to think; through a sort of suggestion thoughts were implanted in his soul. A definite spiritual form had to stand before his soul, and the pupil had to steep himself in this form. Everywhere the Atlantean initiates gave to their pupils a thought-form, into which the pupils had to immerse themselves over and over again. What kind of picture was this? What did the pupil have to think? What did he meditate on?

We have already pointed to the original condition of the earth, sketching out the whole of evolution and mentioning the light-form in the primeval dust. Had one at that time looked about clairvoyantly, the archetype of the man of, today would have arisen. This grew out of that pollen, out of that primeval atom. Not the form of ancient man or of Atlantean man, but the form of modern man grew out of that atom. And what did the Atlantean initiate do? He placed before the soul of his pupil precisely this archetype that reared itself out of the primeval seed.

The pupil had to meditate on this archetype. The initiate placed before the pupil's gaze the human shape as a thought-form, with all the impulses and feelings that were contained in it. Whether the pupil was of the lion type or of one of the others, he had to hold before himself this picture of what man was to become in post-Atlantean times. He received this thought-picture as an ideal. He had to will the thought, “My physical body must become like this picture.” Through the power of this picture his body was so influenced that it became different from the bodies of other men. Certain parts were transformed, and gradually the most advanced pupils became more similar to the man of today.

Thus we look back on remarkable mysteries, the mysteries of ancient Atlantis. No matter how the various men might be formed, there floated before their souls, as a picture, a thing that was already present as a spiritual picture when the sun was still united with the earth. This picture emerged more and more as the meaning of the earth, as what lies spiritually at the foundation of the earth. This picture did not appear to them as this or that form, as the picture of this or that race; it appeared to them as the universal ideal of mankind.

This is the feeling that the pupil was to develop through this picture: “The highest spiritual beings have willed this picture, through which unity comes into mankind. This picture is the meaning of the earth's evolution; to bring this picture to realization the sun separated itself from the earth and the moon detached itself. Through this man could become man. This is the One who will at last appear as the high ideal of the earth.”

Into this high ideal streamed the feelings that enlivened the pupil in his meditation.

So did things stand about the middle of the Atlantean epoch. We will see later how this picture, which stood before the pupil as the human form, transformed itself into something different, and how this was salvaged after the Atlantean catastrophe. This is what lived again in the Indian initiation-teaching, where it was summed up in the ancient sacred name of Brahm. What the God-head willed as the meaning of the earth was the most sacred thing for the ancient Indian initiate. He spoke of it as Brahma. From this sprang later Zarathustra's teaching and the Egyptian wisdom, both of which will be discussed later. How it transformed itself from Brahma to the Egyptian wisdom we will see tomorrow.

• 1. Echoes of this term were preserved by many peoples: e.g. Menes in Egypt, Manu in India, Minos in Crete, and Manitu in America.
• 2. The genesis of the human form is much discussed in this and succedding chapters. The reader will find Dr. H. Poppelbaum's book Man and Animal (Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1960) to be a helpful companion in this study.

Dear friends,

Pastoral medicine as we think of it here will only be recognized as something from spiritual research that has meaning when humankind once more possesses a common consciousness of a spiritual realm containing positive, active forces. For naturally in an age that has developed materialism, it is inconceivable to the ordinary human being that anyone could have seen something worthy of notice in the spiritual world. But this really happened in the old mysteries. Individuals saw into spiritual realms and found knowledge there that led to valuable cures. And what we still have to say today to round off our studies may perhaps provide a connection to that old mystery wisdom for the medical stream that should now emanate from the Goetheanum.

Indeed this impulse is understood most correctly in its historical connection if what is intended here is thought of as having developed out of the research methods (although, of course, quite different in form) and the artistic healing practices of the old mysteries. Obviously you will have to regard what has been offered in this short course as just a stimulus, as in a certain sense just the first chapter, the beginning of a pastoral medicine that will develop further through the work that is still to be done here by Dr. Wegman and me.

So first I would like to point out how the initiates in the old mysteries described their path of initiation, particularly that path that was pursued at the place where the mysteries were most involved in the secrets of healing. Actually all the mysteries were connected with secrets of healing, but some more than others. They were all connected with them because healing was regarded as related to the entire evolution of human civilization. There were deep reasons for this. People of those ancient times said: When the human being comes down out of spiritual worlds into the physical-earth world through conception and birth, the soul-spiritual entity undergoes a transformation by which it is able to form a physical human body. We have described how this achievement takes place for the first time through the activity of the individual during the first seven years of life. The first body had been given through heredity, the body that in the course of the first seven or eight years is entirely stripped off.

Thus it was conceived very exactly in the ancient mysteries how one came out of spiritual worlds into the world of the physical senses. But there was a universal recognition that a person does not in the first place unite with the physical body in the way that was originally intended by the spiritual powers who direct humanity. It was always believed that through some anomaly of the general evolution the forces that a human being inherits overpower in a certain sense the forces that are brought through the individuality from former earth-lives. This seemed to show a lack of harmony. It was said: If there were complete harmony between soul-and-spirit and physical body in earthly humans, death would not have the form it now has; nor would illness come in the way it now comes. Illness and death were regarded as the symptoms that show that human beings indeed have more to do with the physical-earth world than they were originally meant to. Although today this can no longer be completely understood, still it is an extremely profound idea in which there is very much truth. For the moment one reaches a higher level of consciousness even to a slight degree, one sees at once that death is quite different in character. It appears as a metamorphosis rather than the end of a phase of life.

Therefore for the entire ancient consciousness the education of the human being was related to healing. The entire educational process in very ancient times of human evolution was thought of primarily from a medical point of view. Connected with this was the recognition that the mysteries united the professions of physician and priest, both of whom should be concerned with the healing of human beings on earth. Usually in olden times physician and priest were united in one person. This could only happen out of the old instinctive consciousness; today it would not be possible, at least not as an accepted custom. This recognition of the importance of healing, which was strong even in normally healthy persons, was related for every human being to their knowledge that after the metamorphosis they would undergo through death, they would be guided through their life between death and rebirth on their path to the sun by souls who on earth had been physicians or priests. The first need of every human being after death was to find the sun path—because there they would work out part of what they had to experience between death and rebirth. And these first steps had to be shown to them by a physician or a priest. So it was thought in ancient times. This was included in the deepest mystery wisdom. For us today this wisdom must be regarded differently because the old methods are no longer suitable for us. However, at this present time they can be renewed. Indeed that renewal is to be attempted right here.

When ancient initiates described their initiation they would say that after they had crossed the threshold they were first made acquainted with the activity of the elements. In olden times, “elements” was the name given to what today would be called physical conditions. That is, the solid, which was called “earth”; all fluids, which were called “water”; everything gaseous, which was called “air”; and everything to do with “warmth,” which was ascribed to the warmth ether and which was called an element. Modern physicists deny all this. For them these four elements do not exist. For them there are from sixty to eighty elements, which have qualities. Under certain conditions one is fluid, another solid or gaseous. The condition of warmth belongs to all. What was described as an element in olden times does not exist today. There are now only qualities of things; the qualities have no existence of their own. What today are called elements are actually only “real” in the coarse, tangible physical world. And what in olden times were called elements were understood not as reaching down into tangible matter itself, but only to the intangible, living activity of matter.

It was of no particular importance to an ancient physician whether something was this or that substance with this or that name. Naturally this is important, but it only becomes so after one has first obtained full view of something else, of the living, weaving activity of the substance. Thus one can study a substance in a place where it is exposed to weather conditions. The ancient physicians laid great value on studying a substance while it was being exposed to the weather, to the whole earth process. Also they took care that they did not simply take some substance out of the mineral kingdom if it could be obtained from the plant kingdom. In other words, they looked at the position the substance had in the world process by virtue of its living activity. But to understand that, one needs to accept the concept of the four elements. For then it is of prime importance in what temperature a substance becomes earth, for instance; in what temperature it becomes solid, or fluid, or air. That was the important thing in olden times, to observe what world process must happen so that some substance or other would take on a particular form. That was the first requirement. After that, the substance was examined without restriction. Today one starts out from the substance; formerly one started out from the process. And in fact any substance is only a process suspended at a certain stage. Formerly people were above all concerned with the whole weaving life within the material substance. And so initiates described how they were led to a vision of the weaving life of matter and of how it appeared to them as a fabric woven of the four elements. That was the first experience.

The second description everyone gave, which presented the second step for them, was this: they were led to a place where they could learn to know the “upper and lower gods.” What does that mean? We have already described that, but in a modern way. I told you that if the soul-spiritual entity enters too deeply into the physical and etheric bodies, these bodies overpower the soul-spiritual entity, creating a pathological condition—an aberration of the soul-spiritual entity in the physical-etheric organism. There is, then, this pathological situation, that such people have descended more deeply into the physical organism than they should in ordinary waking life, and down below encounter nonhuman, subnatural activity. For only when we have a normal relation between our soul and spirit and our physical-etheric organism do we live in the natural world. The moment we descend too deeply, too intensely into physical corporeality, we come into relation with the subnatural. We fall to a level at which elemental beings, beings of higher hierarchies at various stages of their development, are all active. We come into relation with those gods who are unfolding their activity below the level of nature.

How would ancient initiates have spoken if they had wanted to use a more neutral expression, veiling the facts so that no one would understand them except other initiates? How could they have implied that they had been led to the lower gods? An ancient initiate would have said: I have learned to know the nature of human illnesses. For that leads to the lower gods.

Now look in the other direction, at the life of the saint: this also, as I have shown you, can be at the borderline between normal and pathological. It can happen that the soul-spiritual entity goes out farther than it should, enhancing the sleep condition. The ancient initiates described their introduction to this state as meeting with the upper gods. Put schematically (see drawing), this corresponds to the facts: nature, subnature, supernature. Visionary life, through the clairvoyant faculty that leads an individual into the spiritual world: the initiate called this “meeting with the upper gods.”

Now when we speak of upper and lower gods someone can very easily entertain the false idea that it concerns rank. You must think of it in this way: if I simply say nature, subnature, supernature, illness, visionary life, then I am tempted to think of the lower gods as being of a lower order. But that is not true. In reality it is like the drawing below.

Imagine we have nature; then above, it leads to a circle; below, it leads to a circle; and what is above joins what is below. If we draw the circle larger and larger, and continue to draw it larger, we finally get a straight line. A piece of circle that continues on, after it has gone into infinity, comes back from the other side. This shows that the terms “upper” and “lower” are not to be understood as signs of rank, but simply as different ways that the gods come to human beings. They have been thought of as working in equal rank with one another, of striving to unite at a point in infinity. Therefore everything in olden times that was either illness or clairvoyance was thought to show that those who gained an understanding of those two human conditions, would then see into the spiritual world. One way to know about the spiritual world was to become well acquainted with illness and with clairvoyance.

When we understand this, we are able to bring into our own modern age what was present in human consciousness in olden times. If we ask what can be identified in modern consciousness with the realm of the lower gods, the answer must be—the Being whom we call the Father when we think of the divine Trinity. The Father belongs in the most eminent sense to subnature. How are we to think about the Father God with truly spiritual comprehension?

Let us consider human beings, first in day-waking consciousness, then in night-sleeping consciousness, and let us compare the two states. We know that in full waking consciousness individuals are living as they have been placed to live within the order of this physical world. Just as the earth has had earlier stages of evolution—Saturn, Sun, Moon—and will undergo further evolution, so must humans themselves be recognized as the result of those earlier evolutionary periods. In this sense they belong in their waking state to the earth; by their nature they stand within the sphere of the earth. In waking condition they stand on a level with nature.

It is not the same when human beings sleep. When we are asleep our physical and etheric bodies lie on the bed, and our astral body and ego are outside them. Let us look at the physical and etheric bodies. Of what do we consist, lying there in our physical and etheric bodies? We have—of course, at a more advanced stage—what we received in the old Saturn evolution and the old Sun evolution. That is now further evolved; we have the further development of our Saturn and Sun existence now during sleep. We do not have our Moon existence in what lies there on the bed. Nature has progressed from Moon existence to Earth existence. And the fact that the sleep condition is essential to us means that nature preserves in the sleeping human being a nature that is now below, a nature that only existed during the Saturn and Sun periods. That is subnature. That lies at the foundation of all beings through the fact that there is a human race. Humans fall during sleep into subnature, and from this fall illnesses appear. That is the realm of the Father God. When we sleep we enter the realm of the Father God, we enter subnature, the realm of the Father.

Human clairvoyance helps illuminate the members of the human being that during sleep are outside the physical and etheric bodies: that is, the ego and astral body. When we become conscious in them, we are in the opposite condition, the opposite pole to illness and have entered the realm of the Spirit with the astral body and ego.

So we can see that the human being is organized on earth in such a way that one is able to go out from nature in two directions, in the direction of subnature to the Father, and in the direction of supernature to the Spirit. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ has been the mediator for both worlds. He is the one who permeates the world of nature, the one who permeates normal human existence. He has always to create harmony between subnature and supernature. Subnature is always kept in balance by the normal course of sleeping and waking. Supernature is kept in balance by those seers who are able to return to their ordinary human life at will. If someone is unable upon waking from sleep to balance what is experienced in subnature, then there is illness in the physical and etheric bodies. If someone is unable to bring back into the full waking state, into the natural course of earth-life, what is experienced clairvoyantly in the realm of the spirit, then there are soul illnesses or spiritual illnesses. This is the other pole.

Let us now consider physical illness. What happens when the healing process starts? The human being is led from the experience of subnature to the experience of nature, from the Father to Christ. For Christ is the spiritual life in nature. That is in reality what the physician does. It is the physician's task to know how a person fallen to subnature is brought back to Christ, after the Father has given the leadership over to Christ the Son. That puts into modern speech what mystery wisdom would express. After initiates have attained a Christ-consciousness here on earth, they are led on the one side to the Father, on the other side to the Spirit. If then they are aware how their path leads from the Father to Christ, they will find all the healing processes on this path.

Here the modern mystery begins, the mystery that creates a great test for real medical science. It is this to which I must point at the conclusion of this pastoral medicine course, so that there shall flow from it what should first of all bestow healing upon physicians. We can assume that they will gradually learn the separate healing measures that we have shown in this course by learning which are the defective organs and then what in outer nature corresponds to them and will work with spiritual power. Thus we introduce spirit as the healing agent into the human body. The physicians will learn how it is done in a given case. This will all build up for them into a complete knowledge. This living knowledge that they attain will be different from the current conventional knowledge. If today you open your pathology text or a medical textbook and study it thoroughly, at the end you are no further along than you were at the beginning. Granted, you have digested the entire contents, but even while you worked at it chapter after chapter, still you were making no progress in your general human attitude. It is the nature of real knowledge that it impels one to grow in one's entire human attitude.

If you take up medicine in this sense and as it was meant in this pastoral medicine course, you will advance step by step. And the result will be nothing less than that you can say to yourselves: Now that I have my medical training behind me, I understand all that transpired at the Mystery of Golgotha, up to the moment when Christ went through the gate of death. You will understand the passage of Christ from the Father to the death on Golgotha. That is the mystery. One may not believe at first that medicine is related to this mystery, but it is. It is so truly related that through your understanding of the processes of healing, you will grasp what happened in the cosmos when the Father sent the Son to undergo the death on Golgotha. You will see in the death on Golgotha not death but the working together of all that happened at the death. That was not a death but the overcoming of death and the healing of all mankind. That is the path of the physician, from Father to Son until the Son dies on Golgotha. All separate pieces of medical knowledge bring one a step further toward the final comprehension of this Mystery.

Pastoral medicine is not only what the pastor and the physician are to practice together, it is what is to be brought together so that first through the physician one part of the Mystery of Golgotha can be really understood. That is the high point, the ultimate achievement of medicine: to comprehend all human illness in such a way that one sees the Mystery of Golgotha up to the death as a tremendous healing process. The pathology of evolving humanity and the therapy, the dying on the cross—these will be seen in their true connection when we have real medicine.

The priest has to follow all that is experienced by human beings when they leave their body and enter the other world, the world of the spirit. Thereby priests become more and more aware of the relation of a human being to the Spirit, to the spiritus sanctus, the Holy Spirit. And their path is that of mediation between the Spirit and the Son, the Christ, of developing theology so it will find the way from Christ to the Spirit, from the Spirit to Christ. A great sum of knowledge and life experience can be acquired on this path along which one has to lead one's fellow humans from the Spirit to Christ, from Christ to the Spirit. Its highest service must be that the successive stages of theology are able to clarify the meaning of Christ's path after the death on Golgotha. For his going through the death on Golgotha was the great healing event. Then the question arises: what faculty does this healing event create in human beings that will help them to enter the spiritual world? Theology must have for its crowning endeavor the comprehension of what is happening to the Christ individuality since He went through the death on Golgotha.

Christ's path to Golgotha: the peak of the physician's path.
Christ's path after Golgotha: the peak of the priest's path.

For many contemporary theologians, the two paths seem to have no connection whatever. There are theologians today who do not want to know anything about the risen Spirit and the further activity of the Christ. But if we speak in the sense of a renewal of the mysteries, then the event of Golgotha, the Mystery of Golgotha belongs to it. And then we can say that the path by which the ancient initiate came to initiation could be described in this way: I was led through the elements to the lower and higher gods. The modern initiate would describe it as follows: I have been led through what dissolves the elements into their active processes—the elements are now the chemical elements, eighty of them, that dissolve when they enter into any process—and I am led further, to the Father below and the Spirit above. I perceive the activity of Christ on both paths.

If you would like to take a summary of this course with you for your esoteric study, then take these words:

I will follow the path
That dissolves the elements into activity,
And leads me down to the Father
Who sends illness to work out karma,
And leads me up to the Spirit
Who guides the erring soul toward freedom.
The Christ leads downward and upward,
Creating Spirit-Man in earth humanity
In harmonious union.

Ich werde gehen den Weg,
Der die Elemente in Geschehen löst
Und mich führt nach unten zum Vater
Der die Krankheit schickt zum Ausgleich des Karma
Und mich führt nach oben zum Geiste
Der die Seele in Irrtum zum Erwerb der Freiheit leitet
Christus führt nach unten und nach oben
Harmonisch Geistesmensch in Erdenmenschen zeugend.

When you have become completely permeated by the content of this brief meditation, you will have taken livingly into your spirit what I wanted to give in this Pastoral Medicine course.

[ 1 ] A kind of mysterious veil hangs over the manner in which spiritual needs were satisfied during the older civilizations by those who sought a deeper religious life and fuller knowledge than the popular religions offered. If we inquire how these needs were satisfied, we find ourselves led into the dim twilight of the Mysteries, and the individual seeking them disappears for a time from our view. We see that the popular religions cannot give him what his heart desires. He acknowledges the existence of the gods, but knows that the ordinary ideas about them do not solve the great problems of existence. He seeks a wisdom that is jealously guarded by a community of Priest-sages. His aspiring soul seeks a refuge in this community. If he is found by the sages to be sufficiently Prepared, he is led up by them, step by step, to higher knowledge in a way that is hidden from the eyes of the Profane, What then happens to him is concealed from the uninitiated. He seems for a time to be entirely remote from earthly life and to be transported into a hidden world.

When he reappears in the light of day, a different, quite transformed person is before us. We see a man who cannot find words sublime enough to express the momentous experience through which he has passed. Not merely metaphorically, but in a most real sense does he seem to have gone through the gate of death and to have awakened to a new and higher life. He is, moreover, quite certain that no one who has not had a similar experience can understand his words.

[ 2 ] This was what happened to those who were initiated into the Mysteries, into that secret wisdom withheld from the people, and which threw light on the greatest problems. This secret religion of the elect existed side by side with the popular religion. Its origin vanishes, as far as history is concerned, into the obscurity in which the origin of peoples is lost. We find this secret religion everywhere among the ancients as far as we know anything concerning them; and we hear their sages speak of the Mysteries with the greatest reverence. What was it that was concealed in them? And what did they unveil to the initiate?

[ 3 ] The enigma becomes still more puzzling when we learn that the ancients looked upon the Mysteries as something dangerous. The way to the secrets of existence led through a world of terrors, and woe to him who tried to gain them unworthily. There was no greater crime than the betrayal of secrets to the uninitiated. The traitor was punished with death and the confiscation of his property. We know that the poet Æschylus was accused of having reproduced on the stage something from the Mysteries. He was only able to escape death by fleeing to the altar of Dionysos and by legally proving that he had never been initiated.

[ 4 ] What the ancients say about these secrets is significant, but at the same time ambiguous. The initiate is convinced that it would be a sin to tell what he knows, and also that it would be sinful for the uninitiated to hear it. Plutarch speaks of the terror of those about to be initiated, and compares their state of mind to preparation for death. A special mode of life had to precede initiation, tending to give the spirit the mastery over sensuality. Fasting, solitude, mortifications and certain exercises for the soul were the means employed. The things to which man clings in ordinary life were to lose all their value for him. The whole trend of his life of sensation and feeling was to be changed.

There can be no doubt as to the purpose of such exercises and tests. The wisdom which was to be offered to the candidate for initiation could only produce the right effect upon his soul if he had previously purified the life of his lower sensations. He was introduced to the life of the spirit. He was to behold a higher world, but he could not enter into relations with that world without previous exercises and trials. These relations were the crucial point.

In order to judge these matters aright it is necessary to gain experience of the intimate facts concerning the life of cognition. We must feel that there are two widely divergent attitudes towards that which the highest knowledge gives. In the first instance, the world surrounding us is the real one. We feel, hear, and see what goes on in it, and because we thus perceive things with our senses, we call them real. And we reflect about events in order to get an insight into their connections. On the other hand, what wells up in our soul is at first not real to us in the same sense. It is merely thoughts and ideas. At the most we see in them only images of sense-reality. They themselves have no reality, for we cannot touch, see, or hear them.

[ 5 ] There is another relation to the world, A person who clings to the kind of reality described above will hardly understand it, but it comes to certain people at a certain moment in their lives. Their whole relation to the world is completely reversed. They then call the images that well up in the spiritual life of their souls truly real, and they assign only a lower kind of reality to what the senses hear, touch, and see. They know that they cannot prove what they say, that they can only relate their new experiences, and that when relating them to others they are in the position of a man who can see and who imparts his visual impressions to one born blind. They venture to impart their inner experiences, trusting that there are others round them whose spiritual eyes, to be sure, are still closed, but whose intelligent comprehension may be aroused through the force of what they hear. For they have faith in humanity and want to give it spiritual sight. They can only lay before it the fruits their spirit has gathered. Whether another sees them depends on his receptivity to what the spiritual eye sees.¹

There is something in man which at first prevents him from seeing with the eyes of the spirit. It is not primarily within his horizon. He is what his senses make him, and his intellect is only the interpreter and judge of them. The senses would ill fulfil their mission if they did not insist upon the truth and infallibility of their evidence. An eye must, from its own point of view, uphold the absolute reality of its perceptions. The eye is right as far as it goes, and is not deprived of its due by the eye of the spirit. The latter only allows us to see the things of sense in a higher light. Nothing seen by the eye of sense is denied, but a new brightness, hitherto unseen, radiates from what is seen. And then we know that what we first saw was only a lower reality. We see that still, but it is immersed in something higher, which is spirit. It is now a question of whether we sense and feel what we see, The person who lives only in the sensations and feelings of the senses will look upon impressions of higher things as a Fata Morgana, or mere Play of fancy. His feelings are focussed only on the things of sense. He 8rasps emptiness when he tries to lay hold of spirit forms. They elude him when he gropes for them. In short, they are thoughts only. He thinks them but does not live in them, They are images, less real to him than fleeting dreams, They rise up like bubbles while he faces his own reality; they disappear before the massive, solidly built reality of which his senses tell him.

It is otherwise with one who has altered his perceptions and feelings with regard to reality. For him that reality has lost its absolute stability and value. His senses and feelings need not become dulled, but they begin to doubt their unconditional authority. They leave room for something else. The world of the spirit begins to animate the space left.

[ 6 ] At this point a possibility comes in which may prove terrible. A man may lose his sensations and feelings of outer reality without finding a new reality opening up before him. He then feels himself as if suspended in the void. He feels bereft of all life. The old values are gone and no new ones have arisen in their place. The world and man no longer exist for him. Now, this is by no means a mere possibility. It happens at one time or another to everyone who seeks higher knowledge. He comes to a point at which the spirit represents all life to him as death. He is then no longer in the world, but under it, in the nether world. He is passing through Hades. Well for him if he sink not! Happy, if a new world open up before him! Either he dies away or he appears to himself transformed. In the latter case he beholds a new sun and a new earth. Out of the fire of the spirit the whole world has been reborn for him.

[ 7 ] It is thus that the initiates describe the effect of the Mysteries upon them. Menippus relates that he journeyed to Babylon in order to be taken to Hades and brought back again by the successors of Zarathustra. He says that he swam across the great water on his wanderings, and that he passed through fire and ice. We hear that the mystics were terrified by a flashing sword, and that blood flowed. We understand this when we know from experience the point of transition from lower to higher knowledge. We ourselves had felt as if all solid matter and things of sense had dissolved into water, and as if the ground were cut away from under our feet. Everything which we had previously felt to be alive had been killed. The spirit had passed through the life of the senses like a sword piercing a warm body; we had seen the blood of sensuality flow.

[ 8 ] But a new life had appeared. We had risen from the nether-world. The orator Aristides relates this: “I thought I touched the god and felt him draw near, and I was then between waking and sleeping. My spirit was so light that no one who is not initiated can describe or understand it.” This new existence is not subject to the laws of lower life. Growth and decay no longer affect it. One may say much about the Eternal, but words of one who has not been through Hades are “mere sound and smoke.” The initiates have a new conception of life and death. Now for the first time do they feel they have the right to speak about immortality. They know that one who speaks of it without having been initiated talks of something which he does not understand. The uninitiated attribute immortality only to something which is subject to the laws of growth and decay. The mystics, however, did not desire merely to gain the conviction that the kernel of life is eternal. According to the view of the Mysteries, such a conviction would be quite valueless, for this view holds that the Eternal as a living reality is not even Present in the uninitiated. If such a person spoke of the Eternal, he would be speaking of something non-existent, It is rather this Eternal itself that the mystics seek., They have first to awaken the Eternal within them, then they can speak of it. Hence the hard saying of Plato is quite real to them, that the uninitiated sinks into the mire,² and that only one who has passed through the mystical life enters eternity. And it is only in this sense that the words in Sophocles’ Fragment can be understood: “Thrice-blessed are the initiated who come to the realm of the shades. They alone have life there. For others there is only misery and hardship.”

[ 9 ] Is one, therefore, not describing dangers when speaking of the Mysteries? Is it not robbing a man of happiness and of a most precious part of his life to lead him to the portals of the nether-world? Terrible is the responsibility incurred by such an act. And yet ought that responsibility to be evaded? These were the questions which the initiate had to put to himself. He was of the opinion that his knowledge bore the same relation to the soul of the people as light does to darkness. But innocent happiness dwells in that darkness, and the mystics were of the opinion that that happiness should not be sacrilegiously interfered with. For what would have happened in the first place if the mystic had betrayed his secret? He would have uttered words and only words. The sensations and feelings which would have evoked the spirit from the words would have been absent. To accomplish what was lacking, preparation, exercises, trials, and a complete change in the life of sense would be necessary. Without this the hearer would have been hurled into emptiness and nothingness. He would have been deprived of what constituted his happiness without receiving anything in exchange. One may also say that nothing could have been taken away from him, for mere words would have changed nothing in his life of feeling. He would only have been able to feel and experience reality through his senses. Nothing but a life-destroying premonition would have been given him. This could only have been construed as a crime.³

The foregoing does not altogether apply to the attainment of spiritual knowledge in our time. Today spiritual knowledge can be conceptually understood, because in more recent times man has acquired a conceptual capacity that formerly was lacking. Nowadays some people can have cognition of the spiritual world through their own exeriences conceptually.

The wisdom of the Mysteries resembles a hothouse plant that must be cultivated and fostered in seclusion. Anyone bringing it into the atmosphere of everyday ideas brings it into air in which it cannot thrive. It withers away to nothing before the caustic verdict of modern science and logic. Let us, therefore, divest ourselves for a time of the education we gained through the microscope and telescope and the habit of thought derived from natural science, and let us cleanse our clumsy hands which have been too much occupied with dissecting and experimenting, in order that we may enter the pure temple of the Mysteries. For this a truly unprejudiced attitude is necessary.

The important point for the mystic is at first the soul mood in which he approaches that which he feels as the highest, as the answers to the riddles of existence. Just in our day, when only gross physical science is recognized as containing truth, it is difficult to believe that in the highest things we depend upon the keynote of the soul. It is true that knowledge thereby becomes an intimate personal concern. But this is what it really is to the mystic. Tell some one the solution of the riddle of the universe! Give it to him ready-made! The mystic will find it to be nothing but empty sound, if the personality does not meet the solution half-way in the right manner. The solution in itself is nothing; it vanishes if the necessary feeling is not kindled at its contact. A divinity may approach you: it is either everything or nothing. Nothing, if you meet it in the frame of mind with which you confront everyday matters; everything, if you are prepared and attuned to the meeting. What the divinity is in itself is a matter that does not affect you; the important point for you is whether it leaves you as it found you or makes a different man of you. But this depends entirely on yourself. You must have been prepared by a special education, by a development of the inmost forces of your personality for the work of kindling and releasing what a divinity is able to kindle and release in you. Everything depends upon the way in which you receive what is offered you.

Plutarch has told us about this education, and of the greeting which the mystic offers the divinity approaching him: “For the god, as it were, greets each one who approaches him with the words, ‘Know thyself!” which is surely no worse than the ordinary greeting, ‘Welcome!” Then we answer the divinity in the words, ‘Thou art” and thus we affirm that the true, primordial, and only adequate greeting for him is to declare that he is. In that existence we really have no part here, for every mortal being, during its existence between birth and death, merely manifests an appearance, a feeble and uncertain image of itself. If we try to grasp it with our understanding, it is like water which, when tightly compressed, runs over merely through the pressure, spoiling what it touches. For the understanding, pursuing a too definite conception of each being that is subject to chance and change, loses its way, now in the origin of the being, now in its destruction, and is unable to apprehend anything lasting or really existing. For, as Heraclitus says, we cannot swim twice in the same wave, neither can we lay hold of a mortal being twice in the same state, for, through the violence and rapidity of movement, it is destroyed and recomposed; it comes into being and again decays; it comes and goes. Therefore, that which is becoming can never attain real existence, because growth neither ceases nor pauses. Change begins in the germ, and forms an embryo; then there appears a child, then a youth, a man, and an old man; the first beginnings and successive ages are continually annulled by the ensuing ones. Hence it is ridiculous to fear the one death, when we have already died in so many ways, and are still dying. For, as Heraclitus says, not only is the death of fire the birth of air, and the death of air the birth of water, but the change may be still more, plainly seen in man. The strong man dies when he becomes old, the youth when he becomes a man, the boy on becoming a youth, and the child on becoming a boy. What existed yesterday dies today, what is here today will die tomorrow. Nothing endures or is a unity, but we become many things, whilst matter plays around one image, one common form. For if we were always the same, how could we take pleasure in things which formerly did not please us, how could we love and hate, admire and blame opposite things, how could we speak differently and give ourselves up to different passions, unless we were endowed with a different shape, form, and different senses? For no one can very well enter a different state without change, and one who is changed is no longer the same; but if he is not the same, he no longer exists and is changed from what he was, becoming someone else. Sense perception only led us astray, because we do not know real being, and mistook for it that which is only an appearance.⁴

[ 11 ] Plutarch repeatedly described himself as an initiate. What he portrays here is a condition of the life of the mystic. The human being achieves a degree of wisdom by means of which his spirit sees through the illusory character of sense life. What the senses regard as being, or reality, is plunged into the stream of becoming; and man is in this respect subject to the same conditions as all else in the world. Before the eyes of his spirit he himself dissolves; his entity is broken up into parts, into fleeting phenomena. Birth and death lose their distinctive meaning and become moments of appearing and disappearing, like any other happenings in the world. The highest cannot be found in the connection between development and decay. It can only be sought in what is really abiding, in what looks back to the past and forward to the future.

To find that which looks backward and forward means a higher stage of cognition. This is the spirit, which is manifesting in and through the physical. It has nothing to do with physical becoming. It does not come into being and again decay as do sense-phenomena. One who lives entirely in the world of sense carries the spirit latent within him. One who has pierced through the illusion of the world of sense has the spirit within him as a manifest reality. The man who attains to this insight has developed a new principle within himself. Something has happened within him similar to what occurs in a plant when it adds a colored blossom to its green leaves. True, the forces causing the flower to grow were already latent in the plant before the blossom appeared, but they only became a reality when this took place. In the same way, divine, spiritual forces are latent in the man who lives merely in his senses, but they only become a manifest reality in the initiate. In this consists the transformation that takes place in the mystic. By his development he has added a new element to the world as it had been. The world of sense made him a sense man, and then left him to himself. Nature had thus fulfilled her mission. What she is able to do with the forces operative in man is exhausted; not so the forces themselves. They lie as though spellbound in the merely natural man and await their release. They cannot release themselves. They vanish into nothingness unless man seizes upon them and develops them, unless he calls into actual being what is latent within him.

Nature evolves from the most imperfect to the perfect. She leads beings, through a long series of stages, from inanimate matter through all living forms up to physical man. Man looks around and finds himself a changeable being with physical reality; but he also senses within himself the forces from which this physical reality arose. These forces are not the changeable, for they have given birth to the factor of change. They are within man as a sign that there is more life within him than he can physically perceive. What can grow out of them is not yet there. Man feels something flash up within him which created everything, including himself; and he feels that it is this which will inspire him to higher creative activity. This something is within him; it existed before his manifestation in the flesh, and will exist afterwards. By means of it he became, but he may lay hold of it and take part in its creative activity.

Such are the feelings that animated the ancient mystic after initiation. He feels the Eternal and the Divine. His activity is to become a part of that divine creative activity. He may say to himself: “I have discovered a higher ego within me, but that ego extends beyond the bounds of my sense existence. It existed before my birth and will exist after my death. This ego has created from all eternity, it will go on creating in all eternity. My physical personality is a creation of this ego. But it has incorporated me within it, it works within me, I am a part of it. What I henceforth create will be higher than the physical. My personality is only a means for this creative power, for this divine that exists within me.” Thus did the mystic experience his birth into the divine.

[ 12 ] The mystic called the power that thus flashed up within him his true spirit, his daimon. He was himself the product of this spirit. It seemed to him as though a new being had entered him and taken possession of his organs, a being standing between his sense personality and the all-ruling cosmic power, the divinity.

The mystic sought this true spirit. He said to himself: “I have become a human being in mighty nature. But nature did not complete her task: this completion I must take in hand myself. Yet I cannot accomplish it in the crude kingdom of nature to which my physical personality belongs. What it is possible. to develop in that realm has already been developed. Therefore I must leave this kingdom and take up the building in the realm of the spirit at the point where nature left off. I must create an atmosphere of life not to be found in outer nature.”

This atmosphere of life was prepared for the mystic in the Mystery temples. There the forces slumbering within him were awakened, there he was changed into a higher creative spirit-nature. This transformation was a delicate process. It could not bear the untempered atmosphere of everyday life. But once completed, its result was that the human being stood as a rock, founded on the Eternal and able to defy all storms. But it was impossible for him to reveal his experiences to any one unprepared to receive them.

[ 13 ] Plutarch says that the Mysteries provided “the deep- est information and interpretation of the true nature of the daimons.” And Cicero tells us that from the Mysteries, “when they are explained and traced back to their meaning, we learn the nature of things rather than that of the gods.”⁵ From such statements we see clearly that for the mystics there were higher revelations about the nature of things than what popular religion was able to impart. Indeed, we see that the daimons, that is, the spiritual beings, and the gods themselves needed explaining. Therefore initiates went back to beings of a higher nature than daimons and gods, and this was characteristic of the essence of the wisdom of the Mysteries.

The people represented the gods and daimons in images borrowed from the world of sense reality. Would not one who had penetrated into the nature of the Eternal doubt the eternal nature of such gods as these? How could the Zeus of popular imagination be eternal since he bore the qualities of a perishable being? One thing was clear to the mystics: that man arrives at a conception of the gods in a different way from the conception of other things. An object belonging to the outer world compels us to form a very definite idea of it. Compared with this our conception of the gods is freer, even somewhat arbitrary. The control by the outer world is absent. Reflection shows us that what we set up as gods cannot be externally verified. This places us in logical uncertainty; we begin to feel that we ourselves are the creators of our gods. Indeed, we ask ourselves: What led us to venture beyond physical reality in our life of conceptions? The mystic was obliged to ask himself such questions; his doubts were justified. “Look at all representations of the gods,” he might think to himself. “dre they not like the beings we meet in the world of sense? Did not man create them for himself by giving or withholding from them, in his thought, some quality belonging to beings of the sense world? The savage lover of the chase creates a heaven in which the gods themselves take part in glorious hunting, and the Greek peopled his Olympus with divine beings whose models were taken from his own surroundings.”

[ 14 ] The philosopher Xenophanes (575-480 B.C.) drew attention to this fact with ruthless logic. We know that the older Greek philosophers were entirely dependent on the wisdom of the Mysteries. We will later prove this in detail, basing it on Heraclitus. What Xenophanes says may without question be taken as the conviction of the mystic. It runs thus:

[ 15 ] “Men, who picture the gods as created in their own human forms, give them human senses, voices, and bodies. But if cattle and lions had hands and knew how to use them like men in painting and working, they would paint the forms of the gods and give shape to their bodies like their own. Horses would create gods in horse-form, and cattle would make gods resembling cattle.”

[ 16 ] Through insight of this kind man may begin to doubt the existence of anything divine, He may reject all mythology and only recognize as reality what is forced upon him by his sense perception. But the mystic did not become a doubter of this kind. He saw that the doubter would be like a plant saying: “My crimson flowers are null and futile, because I am complete within my green leaves. What I may add to them is only adding illusive appearance.” Just as little also could the mystic rest content with gods thus created, the gods of the people. If the plant could think it would understand that the forces which created its green leaves are also intended to create crimson flowers, and it would not rest till it had investigated those forces and come face to face with them. This was the attitude of the mystic toward the gods of the people. He did not repudiate them or say they were futile, but he knew they had been created by man. The same forces, the same divine element, which are at work in nature, are at work in the mystic. They create within him images of the gods. He wishes to see the force that creates the gods; it does not resemble the popular gods; it is of a higher nature. Xenophanes alludes to it thus: [ 17 ] “There is one god greater than all gods and men. His form is not like that of mortals, his thoughts are not their thoughts.”

[ 18 ] This god was also the God of the Mysteries. He might have been called a hidden God, for the human being could never find him with his senses only. Look at outer things around you: you will find nothing Divine. Exert your reason: you may be able to detect the laws by which things appear and disappear, but even your reason will show you nothing divine. Saturate your imagination with religious feeling, and you may be able to create images which you take to be gods; but your intellect will pull them to pieces, for it will prove to you that you created them yourself and borrowed the material from the sense world. As long as you look at outer things simply in your capacity of a reasonable being, you must deny the existence of God; for God is hidden from the senses and from that intellect of yours which explains sense perceptions. God lies hidden, spellbound in the world, and you need his own power to find him. That power you must awaken in yourself.

These are the teachings which were given to the candidate for initiation. And now there began for him the great cosmic drama with which he was closely bound up. The action of the drama meant nothing less than the deliverance of the spellbound god. Where is God? This was the question asked by the soul of the mystic. God is not existent, but nature exists. And in nature he must be found. There he has found an enchanted grave. It was in a higher sense that the mystic understood the words “God is love.” For God has infinitely expanded that love, he has sacrificed himself in infinite love, he has poured himself out, fallen into number in the manifold of nature. Things in nature live and he does not live in them. He slumbers within them. He lives in man, and man can experience his life within himself. If we are to give him existence, we must deliver him by the creative power within us.

The human being now looks into himself. As latent creative power, as yet without existence, the Divine lives in his soul. In the soul is a place where the spellbound god may wake to liberty. The soul is the mother who is able to conceive the god by nature. If the soul be impregnated by nature she will give birth to the divine. God is born from the union of the soul with nature—no longer a hidden, but a manifest god. He has life, perceptible life, moving among men. He is the spirit freed from enchantment, the offspring of the spellbound God. He is not the great God, who was and is and is to come, yet he may be taken, in a certain sense, as his revelation. The Father remains in the unseen; the Son is born to man out of his own soul. Mystical knowledge is thus an actual event in the cosmic process. It is the birth of a divine offspring. It is an event as real as any natural event, only enacted upon a higher plane.

The great secret of the mystic is that he himself creatively delivers his divine offspring, but that he first prepares himself to recognize him. The uninitiated man has no feeling for the father of that god, for that Father slumbers under a spell. The Son appears to be born of a virgin, the soul having seemingly given birth to him without impregnation. All her other children are conceived by the sense world. Here the father may be seen and touched, having the life of sense. The divine Son alone is begotten of the hidden, eternal Father - God himself.

• 1. It was said above that those whose spiritual eyes are opened are able to see into the spiritual world. The conclusion must not on this account be drawn that only one who possesses spiritual sight is able to form an intelligent opinion about the results arrived at by the initiate. Spiritual sight is needed only for research. What is afterwards communicated can be understood by everyone who gives fair play to his reason and preserves an unbiased sense of truth. And such a person may also apply the results of research to life and derive satisfaction from them without himself having spiritual sight.
• 2. “The sinking into the mire” spoken of by Plato must also be interpreted in the sense referred to in the previous note.
• 3. What was said about the impossibility of o imparting the teachings of the Mysteries has reference to the fact that they could not be communicated to those unprepared in the same form in which the initiate experienced them; but they were always communicated to those outside in such a form as was possible for the uninitiated to understand. For instance, the myths gave the old form in order to communicate the content of the Mysteries in a way that was generally comprehensible.
• 4. Plutarch’s Moral Works, On the Inscription EJ at Delphi, pp. 17-18.
• 5. Plutarch: On the Decline of the Oracles; Cicero: On the Nature of the Gods.

then the wonderful words in it:

“She has thought and continues to think; but not as a
human being, but as nature.”

That is to say, Goethe is clear about one thing: spinning a mechanical web of concepts about nature does not provide an understanding of nature. Only such a deeper search in the existence of nature creates knowledge of nature, through which the human soul finds in the depths of this natural existence that which is related to what it can seek out in the depths of its own being when it penetrates into them.

We may now ask: Is such striving, as it can be characterized by Kant, can be characterized by the ideal figure of Goethe's Faust, - is this striving a solitary, a merely individual one, or does it have anything to do with the overall striving of the German national spirit, the German national soul? Even if we consider Kant, the abstract philosopher, who hardly ventured a few miles beyond Königsberg and spent his whole life in abstract thought, we clearly see, especially in the way he worked his way from his earlier world view to his later one, how he, despite his reclusiveness, developed out of everything all that in the German national spirit aspired after certainty, and how, owing to this national spirit, he did not come to a narrowing of the human soul to the sphere of mere human thinking, but was led up to the horizon on which the whole range of ideas and ideals appeared to him, which give man impulses in the course of his human development.

One might say that what was later expressed by the most German of German philosophers, Fichte, already lives in Kant; what has become so dear to the German worldview, especially from the eighteenth century onward, already lives in Kant. This German world view came to value having a view of the world that does not need to be disconcerted by what presents itself to the senses, for the absolute validity of that which is man's duty, love, divine devotion, moral world. overlooks the world and looks at the way in which he is placed in the world, he sees himself surrounded by the field of vision of sensual impressions and what he can divine behind them; but he also sees himself placed in such a way that he world without this second aspect of the world; he sees himself so placed that behind him, in his soul, the divine ideals are at work, which become his duty and deed, and these ideals do not bear the coarse sensual character that the world of external movement and external revelation has. One might say that when the German mind looks at the stiffness and smoothness of natural existence, to speak symbolically, at the mechanical movement in the unfolding of natural processes, it feels the need to recognize: How can we become immersed in that which is so indifferent in nature, that which appears in ideals as a demand, as a duty, as a moral life? How can we become immersed in that which appears as the highest value of life, as a moral ideal? How does the reality of moral ideals relate to the reality of external nature? This is a question that cannot be answered lightly, but which can also be found in tremendous depth, heart-wrenching. And so it was felt in the best German minds at the time when Kant's world view was forming. Sensuality had to be presented in such a way that it was no obstacle to the moral world flowing into the world through human beings. Morality could not be a reality that presents itself indifferently, and against which moral ideas must rebound. When moral ideas from the spiritual world are put into action through human beings, they must not be repelled by the rigid materialistic barrier of the sensory world. This must be taken as a profound insight, then one understands why Kant wants to dethrone ordinary knowledge so that a real source can be thought for the moral idea. Then one understands Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who coined the paradoxical , but which arose from deep German striving: “All sensuality, everything we can see and feel outside and think about the external world, is only the sensualized material of our duty.” The true world is the world of the ruling spirit, which lives itself out as man perceives it in ideas and ideals, and these are the true reality, they are what pulses through the world as a current, what only needs something to which it can apply itself, to illustrate it. Sensuality has no independent existence for Fichte, but is the sensitized material for human fulfillment of duty.

From a philosophy that seeks to validate everything spiritual, that must be sought from a natural disposition towards idealism, such words emerged; and one may find such words one-sided, but that does not matter when such words are made into dogma. But to take them as symptoms of a striving that lives in a people, that is the significant thing; and to recognize that such minds, which create in the sense of such a word, precisely because of the idealistic character of the German national soul, elevate Germanness to the arena of thought. In order to give thought its vitality, human knowledge and striving must go beyond what Cartesius could merely find. And Goethe's Faust, this image of the highest human endeavor, this image that one must first struggle to understand by allowing many German cultural elements to take effect, from what did it emerge? — It is truly not invented, did not come about in such a way that a single person created it out of themselves; rather, it emerged from the legends, from the poetry of the people themselves. Faust lived in the people, and Goethe was still familiar with the “puppet show of Dr. Faust”; and in the simple folk character, he already saw the traits that he only elevated to the arena of thoughts. Nothing is more vivid than Goethe's “Faust” to show how something supreme can emerge from what lives most deeply, most elementarily, most intimately in the simple folk being. One would like to say: not Goethe and Goethe's nature alone created Faust, but that Goethe brought Faust forth like a germ that lay within the German national organism, and gave it its essence, embodied it in such a way that this embodiment corresponds at the same time to the highest striving of the German spirit for the arena of thought. Not the striving of isolated personalities out of their own nature, but precisely when it confronts us in its greatness from the whole nation, it is the result of German idealism.

And how does thought work within this German idealism? One comes to an understanding of how it works precisely by comparing this German idealistic striving of thought with what is also a striving of thought, let us say, for example, in Descartes. In Descartes, thought confines man within the narrowest limits; it works as a mere thought and remains as such confined to the world in which man lives directly with his senses and his mind. Within German idealism, the personality does not merely encounter the thought as it enters the soul, but the thought becomes a mirror image of that which is alive outside the soul, that which vibrates and permeates the universe, that which is spiritual outside of man, that which is above and below the spirit of man, of which nature is the outer revelation and the life of the soul is the inner revelation. Thus, thought becomes an image of the spirit itself; and by rising to the level of thought, the German wants to rise through thought to the living spirit, wants to penetrate into that world that lives behind the veil of nature in such a way that by penetrating this veil, man not only visualizes something, but penetrates with his own life into a life that is related to him. And again, since man is not satisfied with what he can experience in his soul, he seeks to penetrate into what lies behind thinking, feeling and willing, for which these three are outer shells, for which even the thought is only an inner revelation, in which man lives and works, in which he knows himself as in a living being that creates the scene of thoughts within him. And so we can see how, especially in those times when the German mind, seemingly so detached from external reality, from external experience, strove for a world view, this German mind felt itself entirely dominant and weaving within the arena of thought. And there is first of all Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who regards external nature only as an external stimulus to that which he actually wants to seek, to whom, as already mentioned, the whole of the external sense world has become only the sensitized material of our duty; who wants to live only in that which can penetrate from the depths of the world in a mental way and can be directly realized before the human soul. That is the essence of his world view, that only what emerges in a contemplative way from the deepest depths of the soul and announces itself as emerging from the deepest depths of the world is valid for him.

For his successor Schelling, the urge for nature, the Faustian urge, becomes so vivid within him that he considers the knowledge of nature, which only wants to express itself in concepts about nature, as nothing. Only when the human soul comes to regard all of nature as the physiognomy of man, only when nature is regarded in such a way that nature is the physiognomy of the spirit that rules it, only then does one live in true knowledge of nature; but then, by penetrating through the bark, one feels creative in nature. And again, a paradoxical but appropriate word for the essence of Germanness comes from Schelling: To recognize nature is actually to create nature! Admittedly, this is at first a one-sided saying; but a saying that represents a one-sidedness need not remain so; rather, if it is rightly recognized, this creative knowledge of nature will lead the spirit to reflect inwardly, to awaken slumbering powers within itself, which penetrate to the spiritual sources of nature. The source, the germ of that which can be true spiritual science, we can find it precisely within this world picture of German idealism!

In the third of the German idealistic philosophers, in Hegel, who is difficult to understand and who is so far removed from many, this lively character of the scene of the thoughts within German idealism appears in the same way. In our own time, when the abstract is so much decried and mere thought is so little loved, this world-view strikes us as strange. And yet Hegel feels himself closely connected with the Goethean direction of nature towards the spirit. The content of his world-view – what is it if not mere thinking, a progression from one thought to another? With his world-view we are presented with a thought organism; necessity is created for us, so that we stand face to face with a mere thought organism, which we can only create by thinking it, as we would with any other organism through our senses. But behind this presentation of a thought organism there is a consciousness, a certain attitude. This attitude consists in stripping away all sense perceptions, all perceptions of the senses, for a few moments of world-gazing, stripping away everything that one wants and feels as an individual, and surrendering to what as if the thought itself were taking one step after another, — that man then immerses himself in a world that is a thinking world, but no longer his thinking world, so that he no longer says to this world: I think, therefore I am! but: “The spirit of the world thinks in me, and I give myself to the spirit of the world as a theater, so that in what I offer as soul to the all-encompassing spirit of the world, this spirit can develop its thoughts from stage to stage and show me how it bases its thoughts on world-becoming. And the deepest religious impulse is connected with the striving to experience in the soul only what that soul can experience when it surrenders all its own being to the thinking that thinks itself within it. One must also see this Hegelian philosophy, this so idealistic excerpt from the German essence, in such a way that one does not take it as a dogmatics, on which one can swear or not, but as something that, like a symptom of German striving in a certain time, can stand before us. In Hegel's philosophy, the world spirit appears as a mere thinker; but while it is true that much more than mere thinking was needed to shape the world, it is nevertheless true that the path that once led to it, to seek logic, is one which produces in man the attitude towards the living that reigns behind existence and which leads man to the scene not of abstract, intellectual thought, but of living thought, which in the experience of thought has experience of the world.

The three idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, sought to elevate the human spirit to the realm of thought in three different directions: Fichte tried to shine a light into the depths of the human ego and did not say, like Descartes, “I think, therefore I am!” For Fichte, if he had only been able to arrive at Descartes' thought, would have said: “There I find within me a rigid existence, an existence to which I must look. But that is not an ego. I am only an ego if I can secure my own existence myself at any time. Not through the act of thought, not through mere thinking can I arrive at my ego, but through an act of action. That is a continuous creative process. It does not depend on looking at its being; it leaves its previous being; but by having the power to create itself again in the next moment, out of the act of doing, it is constantly being reborn. Fichte does not grasp the thought in its abstract form, but in its immediate life on the scene of the thought itself, where he creates vividly and lives creatively. And Schelling, he tries to recognize nature, and with genuinely German feeling he lives into the secrets of nature, even if, of course, his statements, if you want to take them as dogma, can be presented as fantastic. But he immerses himself in natural processes with his deepest emotions, so that he does not feel merely as a passive observer of nature, as a being that merely looks at nature, but as a being that submerges itself in the plant and creates with the plant in order to understand plant creation. He seeks to rise from created nature to creative nature. He seeks to become as intimate with creative nature as with a human being with whom he is friends. This is an archetypally German trait in the Schellingian nature. Goethe sought to approach nature in a similar way from his point of view, as his Faust expresses it, as to the “bosom of a friend”. There Goethe, to describe how far removed every abstract observer is from a contemplation of nature, there he calls what he, as an external naturalist, is to the earth, his friendship with the earth. So human, so directly alive does the German spirit feel itself in Goethe to the spirit that reigns in nature in the striving to be scientific, in that he wants to raise science itself to the arena of thoughts. And Hegelian logic – abstract, cold, sober thought in Hegel – what becomes of it? When one considers how mere logic often appears to man, and compares this with what prevails in Hegel's idealistic world-view, then one gets the right impression of the world-importance of this Hegelian idealism. In Hegel's work, what appears to be the furthest thing from mysticism, the clear, crystal-clear, one might say, crystal-cold thought itself, is felt and experienced in such a way that although the thought , but that what the soul experiences in terms of thought is direct mystical experience; for what Hegel experiences in terms of thought is a becoming one with the divine world spirit, which itself permeates and lives through the world. Thus, in Hegel, the greatest clarity and conceptual sobriety become the warmest and most vibrant mysticism. This magic is brought about by the way in which the German mind rises from its direct and living idealism to the realm of thought. In doing so, it proves that what matters is not the individual expressions that are arrived at, but the soul foundations from which the human soul seeks a worldview. Hegel is said to be a dry logician. In answer to this it may be said: He who calls Hegel's logic by that name is himself dry and cold. He who is able to approach this logic in the right way can feel how it pulsates out of German idealism; he can feel in the apparently abstract thoughts, which in Hegel's system are so spun out of one another, the most living warmth of soul that is necessary to strip away all individuality and to connect with the divine, so that in Hegel logic and mysticism can no longer be distinguished; that although nothing is nebulous in it, a mystical trait prevails in all its details.

Even in our time, the German mind, even the opponents of German idealism, has endeavored time and again to fathom the fundamental idealism of this German nature in its significance as a riddle. And the best German minds, even those who are opponents of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, if we turn our gaze to them, we still find that the development of Germany consists in absorbing more and more of the basic impulses of this idealism.

How these fundamental impulses can lead to a living experience of the spiritual worlds has often been discussed and will be discussed more often. Attention should only be drawn to how – one might say – German idealism, after it had reached one of its high points in the German world view, then continued to have an effect on German intellectual life as a different impulse. There was a period in this German intellectual life, and it was lived out in minds of the very, very first order until the middle of the 19th century, until the last third of the 19th century, when the view was that such creative work as is expressed, for example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought really takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creativity, was only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, in the sphere of natural science, the same process of thinking can be observed that is expressed in Goethe's Faust. example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creation, is only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, music has a different area; that music is, as it were, the field that does not seek to grasp the highest in man by the detour of a work of fiction such as Faust, but that music is the field in which sensuality must be grasped directly. For example, the contrast between the legend of Don Juan and that of Faust has been cited, with a certain amount of justification after the experiences that could be had within the development of humanity, how mistaken it is to legend on the same level as the Faust legend; it has been asserted that what this other legend, which shows man completely absorbed in sensual experience, can be correspondingly portrayed only within music that directly evokes and seizes sensuality. — The way in which the German does not rise to the scene of thought in the abstract, but in a lively way, has also brought the refutation of this view. In Richard Wagner, we have in modern times the spirit that has triumphed over the merely external, emotional element in music, that has sought to deepen the setting of the thoughts so that the thought itself could take hold of the element that was thought to live only in music. To spiritualize music from the standpoint of the spirit, to show that, was also only possible for German idealism. One can say: Richard Wagner showed that in the most demure element for thought there is nothing that could resist or be opposed to the strength of life that dominates the German spirit. If, through his philosophy and his contemplation of nature, the German has tried to present nature to his soul in such a way that the seemingly mechanical, the seemingly external and rigid loses its mechanical aspect and what would otherwise appear in a formal way comes to life and moves as soulfully and vividly as the human soul itself , on the other hand, the element that flows in the immediate sensual sequence of tones has been allowed to seek its connection, its marriage, with that which leads the human soul to the highest heights and depths in the realm of thoughts, in Wagner's music, which has thus effected an elevation of an artistic-sensual element into a directly spiritual atmosphere.

This aspect of German idealism, which leads to a result that can be characterized as the soul standing on the scene of thought – I wanted to characterize this aspect today with a few strokes. This trait of German idealism, this living comprehension of the otherwise dead thought, is one side, but a remarkable side, of the nature of the German people, and will appear as a remarkable phenomenon to anyone who, I might say, is able to place themselves within the German people in a way that revitalizes thought within themselves. Indeed, the German cannot arrive at the fundamental trait of his people's character other than by penetrating ever deeper into the self-knowledge of the human being. And this the German may, as it seems to me, feel so rightly in our immediate present, where this German essence really has to defend itself in a fight imposed on it, where this German essence must become aware of itself by having to wage a fight, which it feels is due to it from the task that appears to it as a sacred one, entrusted to it by the world forces and world powers themselves. And although today, in a different way than in the times of which we have mainly spoken, the German must fight for his world standing, his world importance, it must still come to life before our soul, for which the German today enters into a world-historical struggle. A future history will have to establish more and more the deeper connection between the German soul, struggling through the course of the world, and the bloody events of the times, which, however, bring us bliss out of pain and suffering. I wanted nothing with today's reflection but to show that the German has no need to speak out of hatred or outrage when he wants to compare his nature with that of other nations. We do not need to point out the nature of the German soul in order to exalt ourselves, but in order to recognize our duties as they have been handed down to us by world history, we may point this out. And we do not need, as unfortunately happens today in the camp of our enemies, to invent all sorts of things that can serve to belittle the opponent, but we can point out the positive that works in the German national substance. We can let the facts speak, and they can tell us that the German does not want to, but must, according to his abilities, which are inspired by the world spirit, his nature, his abilities – without any arrogance – in comparison to the nature of other peoples.

From this point of view, we do not need to fall into what so unfortunately many of our opponents fall into. We look over to the West. We certainly do not need to do as the French do, who, in wanting to characterize German nature in its barbarism, as they think, in its baseness, want to exalt themselves; truly, the French needed, as they believe, a new sophistry to do so. And minds that spoke highly of the German character just before the war, even at famous teaching institutions, can now, as we can see, find the opportunity to advocate the view that, given the nature of his world view, the German cannot help but conquer and , as Boutroux says, to assimilate what is around him; for the German does not want to ascend to the sources of existence in a modest way, as Boutroux thinks, but claims that he is connected to these sources, that he carries the deity within himself and must therefore also carry all other nations within himself. This German world view is certainly profound; but it is not conceived immodestly.

Nor perhaps does the German need what is sought today from the British side when German character is to be characterized. The British, in emphasizing the peculiarities of their own national character, have never taken much interest in penetrating the German national character. When the forties in Germany were passing through a period of development, it seemed to me that the German mind was so fully occupied with the sphere of ideas that the way Hegel's disciples thought was felt by Schelling , who was still alive, and by his students, was felt to be too abstract, too logical, and that on Schelling's side, efforts were made to gain a greater liveliness for the thoughts themselves on the stage of thoughts. Whereas in Hegel one sensed that he allowed one thought to emerge from another through logical rigor, Schelling wanted people to sense the thoughts as active, living things that do not need to be proven in logic, just as what happens from person to person in living interaction cannot be encompassed in logic. He wanted to grasp it in something that is more than logic, wanted to grasp it in a living way, and that is how a great dispute arose on the scene, which the German tries to illuminate with the light he wants to ignite from his living knowledge. The English observed this dispute that arose. A London newspaper wrote what seemed to them a clever article about this dispute, in which it was said: These Germans are actually abstruse visionaries. Many are concerned with the question of who is right: Schelling or Hegel. The truth is only that Hegel is obscure and Schelling even more obscure; and the one who finds this is the one who will most easily come to terms with things—a piece of wisdom that roughly corresponds to the point of view of studying the world not when it is illuminated by the sun but at night, when all cats are black or gray. But anyone who today surveys the British judgment on the necessity of what is happening within the German character will perhaps be reminded of such “deeply understanding” words, especially when these words are used primarily to conceal what is actually taking effect and what one does not want to admit even to oneself. The present-day British really need a new mask to characterize their relationship to the Germans, and the foreign philosophers need a new sophistry to disparage Germany – a new sophistry that they have found since the outbreak of the war.

And the Italians? They also need something to reassure them about their own actions at the present time. Without arrogance, the German may say: it will uplift him within the difficult world situation when he thinks of the duty the world spirit has assigned to him, as he gains self-knowledge and this becomes knowledge of the German essence. What he should do will flow to him as realization from the realization of the German essence. When D'Annunzio spoke his resounding words before the Italian war broke out, he truly did not delve as deeply into Italian national character as he could have. But it is not for us Germans, who have gladly immersed ourselves in what the Roman spirit has created, to believe that d'Annunzio's hollow words really come from the deepest essence of Italian culture; but that they come from the motives that d'Annunzio needs to justify himself. The others needed sophistry, masks, to remove the causes of the war from their own soil, so to speak. The Italian needed something else, a justification that we have already seen emerging in recent years, a strange justification: he needed a new saint, a saint appointed from within the ranks of the profane, “holy egoism”. We see it recurring again and again, and it is to this that we see the representatives of Italian character repeatedly appeal. A new saint was needed to justify what had been done.

Perhaps it will lead the objective, unbiased observer of the German character to a position within today's historical events; because German character does not arise from such sophistry, such masks, nor from the “appointment of a new saint”, but from human nature, from what this human nature allows to be expressed, from what the national spirit of the German people has revealed to the best minds of this people have revealed to this people, but also what these spirits hoped for the people, because that is also a peculiarity of this German nature, which can be described by saying that the German always sought to direct his soul's gaze to what was aroused in him from the scene of thoughts, and from this he also wanted to recognize what hope he could harbor for what his people could achieve.

And today, when we need to develop love, a great deal of love, for what the ancestors of the German character have established within the German national soul and national strength, in order to place ourselves in today's historical events through this love, today, when we need faith in the strength of the present, today when we need confident hope for the success of that which the German character must achieve in the future. Today, we can look at what Germans have always loved, believed, and hoped for in the context of their past, present, and future. And so let us end with the words of a man who is indeed unknown today in the widest circles, but who in lonely thought wanted to fathom the popular and the intellectual of Goethe's Faust in those years of German life in which Germany had not yet produced the German state in its modern form. In those years, which preceded the deeds of the German power, in the sixties, a lonely thinker was concerned with the idea: in imagination, in the life of the soul, in idealism, the German wanted to rise to the highest that can only somehow be sensed by him. He had to develop a strength that must lie in his nature and that gives us hope that this strength will be fruitful, victorious in action. A simple German Faust observer, an observer of poetry that truly shows that German nature holds future forces, is quoted with his words. By pointing to words that Goethe himself, intuitively placing himself in the German future, spoke as a 65-year-old old man, he ties his own words to them and says:

"The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
the primeval secret of eternal forms,
It is familiar with men and with gods,
It will leaf through rocks as through books.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
will never live in the scholarly hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew to the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken her,
She has taken the glass from the hothouse with her.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
A mild light will still pour forth,
From whose reflection of those stars
The late grandchildren will learn to see,
To report in prophetically higher visions
Of God and humanity higher things.»

And the Faust viewer from the sixties continues:

"Let us add the wish that the Master's word, which looks down on us from better stars with a mild light, may come true in its people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and urge, but with God's will, with indestructible strength, and that in those higher accounts of God and humanity, which the poet of Faust expects of the coming centuries, German deed too may no longer be a symbolic shadow, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality, may one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!

We believe that such hopes, expressed by the best of Germans from the deepest German national sentiment, may be fulfilled in our own day, out of the blood and the creative energy of our courageous and active people. We believe that in these difficult days the German can develop to his strength, over which the atmosphere of hatred spreads, still another: that he can vividly grasp to strengthen his strength the love for what has been handed down in spirit and strength, in the life and work of his fathers as a sacred legacy, because he can be convinced that he, by permeating himself with this love for the past, he will find the strength to believe; because in this faith and this love he may find the hope for those fruits that must blossom for the German people out of blood and suffering, but also out of the blessed deed of the present, which the German performs not out of bellicosity but out of devotion to a necessity imposed on him by history. Thus, in the present difficult times, what may support, uplift and guide the German through the difficult struggle in which he finds himself is integrated into German life, German work, German feeling and sentiment: love for the German past, faith in the German present, confident hope for the German future.